Is it possible to achieve the speed of light

One such technique is a warp drive. Other researchers have looked at the possibility of wormholes, holes in the fabric of spacetime that would provide links or shortcuts for interstellar travelers to reach disparate parts of the universe. Though wormholes have been theorized, none has ever been discovered.

Scientists think this might be because they might blip in and out of existence thanks to a quirk of quantum physics, or they might be too small. One researcher quoted in a article is skeptical that traveling via wormhole will ever be possible. Even if we could create a ship that could travel closer to the speed of light or tinker with the laws of physics, it would still take a really long time leaving the solar system to reach a potentially habitable exoplanet, such as those in the TRAPPIST-1 system , which is 40 light years away.

Humans entering a wormhole might meet a similar fate — the gravity involved might rip us apart. Last year, famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking and investor Yuri Milner launched a contest called Breakthrough Starshot. But the tests will cause humans to travel faster than ever before. If Hawking and Milner get their way, we could send sophisticated robots to Alpha Centauri within a generation.

To get humans there will likely take a bit longer. Sumio Iijima is a Japanese physicist and inventor and the first scientist to clearly describe the formation. When scientists developed the theory of light back in the 19th century, it came with a special puzzle: their theory seemed to show that every observer should measure the same speed for light, about , miles per second.

But that means if you try to chase a beam of light, no matter how fast you move, the light beam will still fly away from you at , miles per second. But their famous Michelson-Morley experiment found no change at all. The speed of light seemed to be the same regardless of whether they measured it in the same direction the earth was moving, or in some other direction — a rare example of a non-discovery that turned out to be more important than a discovery!

Instead of trying to explain away this bizarreness, Albert Einstein embraced it. He built an entire theory, called special relativity , around the idea that the speed of light is the same for everyone who measures it, no matter how fast they are moving in relation to the light. And out of special relativity popped a cosmic speed limit: nothing could ever exceed the speed of light. Relativity is a cornerstone of all of modern physics, and we have no reason to doubt it — no one has ever observed an object moving faster than light.

Try filling a greasy frying pan with water and then put a drop of soap into the pan. The grease will fly away to the sides of the pan. Alcubierre showed that by a suitable distribution of matter, you can shrink space in front of your spaceship and stretch it behind the spaceship, creating a small bubble around the ship that moves as fast as you like. The culprit: a faulty cable connection in the GPS system used to time the neutrinos along their journey.

That killjoy Einstein wins again. As Hollywood screenwriter Zack Stentz Thor, a. As any object with mass accelerates — like a proton in the LHC — it gains energy, always needing just a little bit more energy to accelerate even further. The LHC, the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator we have, boosts protons as close to the speed of light as we can get, but they never quite hit the mark.

For all practical intents and purposes, the speed of light is an insurmountable threshold. But physicists would never make any progress at all if they threw in the towel quite that easily, and nobody thinks Einstein will have the final word in perpetuity. Many scientists are happy to consider the possibility of violations of relativistic principles, even if none have yet been experimentally confirmed.

One of the earliest proposed possibilities for FTL travel involved a hypothetical particle called a tachyon , capable of tunnelling past the speed of light barrier. This turned out to be more of a mathematical artifact rather than an actual physical particle. However, another reason for all the OPERA-tic excitement was that back in , physicists proposed that some high-energy neutrinos might really be tachyons , capable of interacting with an as-yet-known field, giving them just enough of an energy boost to break through the barrier.

Such tachyon-like neutrinos would supersede photons as the fastest particles in the universe.