IF you could travel faster than light, would time cease or

[Tap Banister]

Greetings everyone, I asked my professor about this, recently. I had always heard that if you could gain the impossible amount of energy necessary to run beyond the speed of light, you would travel backwards in time. But he however, told me something that I have never heard before.

He said, "If you were simply breaking the laws of nature to run that fast with just the speed produced by that energy, time would no longer exist; because going faster than light, in that way, is the same as accomplishing a nonsense task like drawing a squarclelangle. At those speeds, there is no such thing as time, you would be a being beyond time."

He did note that FTL was not necessarily impossible, but doing it in that way wasn't even a thing that made sense. It was like asking a question in a made up language. He is an incredible-awesome professor, but is he right about this? Your answers would be greatly cherished.

 

[Orodruin]

Yes, he is right. The question is a nonsense question within special relativity. It is like asking for what you should do when the traffic light shows blue (well, if you take SR into account you should probably slow down, but this is not the point here). It is a question which breaks the fundamental principles of the theory. Asking what a theory predicts when its fundamental assumptions are violated is just nonsensical.

 

[Tap Banister]

Thank you for the clarification.

A friend had also told me that it would lead to me looking like I'm time traveling from a bystander's perspective, which kind of to made sense to me, but when I thought about how time would appear to me in the act; that's when it started making less sense.

I appreciate your knowledge

 

[SammyS]

This thread reminded me of the following limerick.

There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day,
In a relative way,
And returned home the previous night.

A. H. Reginald Buller,
Emeritus Professor of Botany, University of Manitoba.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

 

[houlahound]

Well there is quantum tunnelling...

 

[Orodruin]

Well there is quantum tunnelling...

Which has essentially nothing to do with this topic.