Will space ship defeat light speed
Over the years, people have developed very clever schemes to try and circumvent this last limit. Theoretically, they’ve introduced tachyons as hypothetical particles that could exceed the speed of light, but tachyons are required to have imaginary masses, and do not physically exist. Within General Relativity, sufficiently warped space could create alternative, shortened pathways over what light must traverse, but our physical Universe has no known wormholes. And while quantum entanglement can create “spooky” action at a distance, no information is ever transmitted faster than light.
But there is one way to beat the speed of light: enter any medium other than a perfect vacuum. Here’s the physics of how it works.
Light is nothing more than an electromagnetic wave, with in-phase oscillating fields.
Light is nothing more than an electromagnetic[+]
AND1MU / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Light, you have to remember, is an electromagnetic wave. Sure, it also behaves as a particle, but when we’re talking about its propagation speed, it’s far more useful to think of it not only as a wave, but as a wave of oscillating, in-phase electric and magnetic fields. When it travels through the vacuum of space, there’s nothing to restrict those fields from traveling with the amplitude they’d naturally choose, defined by the wave’s energy, frequency, and wavelength. (Which are all relat
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