What happens if you travel faster than light speed?

Question

Back when I was at school they taught that nothing could travel faster than light. (Einstein) But I always maintained that if you could you would actually be traveling back in time. (unlike the scenario of coming back to earth in the future (Earth future) if you left the planet and traveled at close to the speed of light an came back. It would be the reverse.

What are your thoughts?

What do you think would happen at faster than light speeds?

Answer 1

Interestingly enough, the equations involved rule out an object accelerating to a point where it exceeds the speed of light, but they do not rule out objects that NEVER go slower than light.  The speed of light would still be a barrier from the other side.  Hypothetical particles that do this are called tachyons.

It is also worth mentioning that one conceptualization of antimatter is just as matter that is travelling backwards in time.  This plays an important part in Hawking's theory about how black holes might 'evaporate' and eventually explode by losing mass.  So again, even moving backwards in time is not necessarily excluded in modern theory.

But an important thing to note in both of these analyses is that contradictions of the type portrayed in science-fiction movies do not seem to occur.  If a future you were to travel into the present, we might see it as a person suddenly turning into antimatter and remaining in that state until it - at a future date - turned back into matter.

I find that it's often better in such analyses to stop thinking of time as a 'thing you are moving through' but rather as an expression of rate of change.  In this way, an object approaching the speed of light doesn't 'move through time slower', it loses more and more of it's ability to effect a change in itself and its surrounds.

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

i just don't think its possible. time may be controlled by a certain speed but I don't think that indicates that you could ever travel back in time. of course, that's just the way I see it now. who knows... but think about it, if time invention was invented sometime in the future and they went back in the past, wouldn't we of known it already? or would they be traveling back in time to something else other than the state of reality we've known for so long.

Answer 3

Scientists say that you would be converted into energy if you travel faster than light.

Although we cannot travel at the pace of light physically, there is one thing in all of us that can really travel faster.....our thoughts and imaginations.....

I like to share a poem in this subject which goes like this:

"There was a girl named Miss Bright

Who could travel much faster than Light

She departed one day in an Einsteinian way

And came back in the previous night."

Enjoy yourself with all the brightness of light.Thanks.

Answer 4

There once was a lady named Bright

Who could travel far faster than light.

She set off one day

In a relative way...

Then returned the previous night.

Answer 5

If this was possible, which its not, some might say that you would create unbalanced forces and something big would happen, but i believe that traveling faster than the speed of light would only make a leaf fall off a couple tree's(i don't think much would change). But most of all I have no belief that time could ever reverse, because if you were to stab someone today and kill them, once there heartbeat is gone for good, there is no bringing them back to life. There is no redoing a mistake, You should learn from your mistakes, and move on, don't dream of moving back time, because its second to impossible. The only way I could ever believe in time travel was if you proved it to me.

You have an open mind though.

Answer 6

God is able to travel faster than light speed

As to what happens,

You get where your going faster

Answer 7

You can't go faster than the speed of light, its theoretically impossible, so there are no theories about going faster than the speed of light.

Answer 8

it wouldnt be dark because some light would already be there...you would travel back in time at faster than light speed...but it would be really slow until you got a lot faster than light speed...good question

Answer 9

It would be dark when you got there until the light caught up to you.

I don't know.

My grandpa wrote to Einstein once about the theory of conservation of mass and he got a letter back, which he sold for, like, five thousand bucks.

Then, he used it to fix up his awesome old Mustang.

Which got smashed up by a driver who fell asleep at the wheel.

So, in my family, Einstein leaves you worse off than you were before.

Bad Einstein!  BAD!!!!

Answer 10

reaching the speed of light is impossible.

i know what you man that the logic is that the faster you go the slower you age compared to slower moving people, so if you could go fast enough it would go into reverse. but in another sense that doesn't make any sense at all.

it helps to think about it not like you go fast so time slows down for you. but instead the faster you go, the faster you move through space and time as well.

in order for time to reverse there needs to be unmoving. you need to go slower than stopped, which doesn't exist. you need for you and all of your particles and parts to retrace exactly every motion they had previously taken, and that's just to reverse yourself. to go back in time in a back to the future sense you would need to reverse everything else in the universe as well. and putting energy of speed into yourself cannot accomplish that. but for moving yourself through time it can because it only carries you, you put energy in your ship and it carried you faster through time. just like it does through space.

if it was possible to achieve the speed of light you would get where you are going instantaneously, which is impossible for objects of mass. to go even faster than light would mean, if it were possible, that you would have to arrive before you left, which is consistent with going faster than light being impossible.

some scientists talk about warping space/time in such as way that you could curl it around so that you could go back in time, but personally i really don't think that is possible.

Answer 11

When something travels at the speed of light time compresses. There is no evidence that time travel to the past is possible. Once you get past the speed of light, which is apparently possible by the quantum entaglement theory, time compresses to Zero, and does not go into negative numbers.