Science Forums 2

[paultrr]

There are two types of faster than light motion encountered in modern theory:

1.) True tachyon like motion that is backwards in time.

2.) Faster than light effects out of GR like wormholes, warp drives, etc. Their motion while providing a shortcut that allows faster travel are not really backwards in time. The arrow of time still is forward for these types of paths. From the perspective of a normal C frame they do tend to beat a photon. But they do so by the means of a shorter path.

He can correct me here. However, I assume he was refering to the first.

An interesting aspect in all this is found in something Hawking mentions in his books, "The Universe in a Nutshell". In that book Hawking mentions all those quantum wavefunction predictions and how ever set of them does contain FTL states. The normal assumption is these states are simply an artifact of the math involved. However, some of the more recent quantum based theory tends to assume these states possible exist in higher dimensions. Rather making the leap that perhaps the math has been telling us something all along. The problem here is that tachyon fields from what we can tell in our spacetime would tend to hyper inflate. Another words they would be unstable. So if any of these odd type of states are real one could also assume they must be simular to the second class mentioned above.

The real problem is none of these possible states have any direct way offered to measure them. A few of us who have looked at solutions like those Alcubierre once proposed have noted something of a signature such a field would have. That signature turns out to be simular to that of Hawking radiation in the form of very high blue shifted particles. A simular signature has always been known from theory for real tachyon particles if they could exist in our spacetime.