possible ftl travel methods

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5 Faster-Than-Light Travel Methods and Their Plausibility

Science tells us that it is impossible for an object to travel at light speed, let alone faster than that. But so many of our favorite science-fiction movies, games, and TV shows rely on faster-than-light travel to craft their interplanetary adventures.

Let’s take a look at five means of FTL found in sci-fi that don’t break the rules of relativity and examine how plausible they are based on the science behind them.

1. Hyperdrive

Popularized by Star Wars and used extensively in fiction, a hyperdrive enables a spaceship to travel at FTL speeds by entering another dimension known as “hyperspace.” The spaceship isn’t actually traveling faster than the speed of light, but rather is making use of hyperspace as a shortcut, and the hyperdrive is the mechanism that shunts the spaceship into and out of this parallel dimension.

Specific coordinates within hyperspace have corresponding coordinates in normal space, but the distance between those two points will be shorter in hyperspace, allowing for a faster journey. Before making a “hyperspace jump,” calculations must be made to find the matching coordinates between hyperspace and normal space in order to know when and where to exit hyperspace at the desired normal space destination.

Is it plausible?

Physicist Bukrhard Heim proposed a theory in 1977 that FTL travel may be possible by using magnetic fields to enter higher-dimensional space. The theory uses a mathematical model that calls upon six or more dimensions in an attempt to resolve incompatibilities between quantum mechanics and general relativity, but Heim’s ideas have not been accepted in mainstream science. Still, the fact that a theoretical physicist devoted a large portion of his life in pursuit of a theory that could lead to a means of space travel lends the concept of hyperspace a little more credibility than if it were simply the fancy of a sci-fi writer.

2. Jump Drive

Seen in such works as Battlestar Galactica , a jump drive allows for instantaneous teleportation between two points. Similar to a hyperdrive, coordinates must be calculated to ensure a safe jump; the longer the desired travel distance, the more complex the calculation. In theory, there is no limit to how far a jump can take a ship, but an incorrect calculation may result in a catastrophic collision with a planet or space debris.

The Dune universe’s FTL, based on the fictional “Holtzman effect,” can also be considered a jump drive.

Master of hard sci-fi Isaac Asimov was the first to suggest the idea of a jump drive in the Foundation series, which lends some credibility to the idea. However, most fiction doesn’t clearly explain the principles of physics that allow for this teleportation, making it impossible to claim a jump drive as plausible. However, if it functions by opening a wormhole…

3. Wormholes

A wormhole, as seen in the Stargate franchise, allows for near-instantaneous travel across vast distances. Wormholes may be naturally-occurring or man-made, but are almost always temporary and serve as tunnels through spacetime.

Imagine our universe as a piece of paper, and an ant walking on that piece of paper as a spaceship. If the ant wants to walk from one end of that piece of paper to the other, the fastest way to do so would be to travel in a straight line. But paper, like space, bends. If you bend the paper into a U shape, the ant’s journey goes largely undisturbed – it still has to traverse the same distance along that line. However, in 3D space, the two ends of the paper are very close to each other now. Cut off a piece of a drinking straw and let the ant use it as a bridge or tunnel between the two ends of the paper, and the journey is suddenly much shorter.

While we have never directly observed any evidence for one, wormholes are theoretically possible. Albert Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen first discovered wormholes in 1935 as solutions to equations within Einstein’s general theory of relativity – the math says they can exist.

Since then, other scientists, including Stephen Hawking, have argued that it may be possible to traverse a wormhole, under the right circumstances. The debate surrounding wormholes isn’t about their plausibility, but rather how they may be created and sustained.

4. Slipstream

The concept of slipstream can be found in such works as Star Trek , Doctor Who , and the Halo video game franchise, but there is no widely-agreed upon definition of what slipstream is or how it works beyond it being a means of FTL. We’ll consider the slipstream seen in Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda , where it is “not the best way to travel faster than light, it’s just the only way,” as per the show’s protagonist.

Slipstream is a form of interdimensional highway in which ships ride a series of slipstream “strings” – the unseen connections between all objects in the universe. These strings are in constant flux and form a tangled mess of intersections and divergent paths. Any time a pilot reaches a fork in the road, he has to guess which is the correct path to take to continue along toward his desired destination. Before the pilot makes that decision, both paths are simultaneously the correct and incorrect route, and it is the act of choosing a path that forces one to be correct and the other to be incorrect – if this made you think of Shrödinger’s cat, that does seem to be the basis for this concept. A computer selects the “correct” path 50% of the time, but due to intuition, a human picks the correct path 99.9% of the time.

There are no mainstream scientific theories that support this idea of slipstream. Reading the “lore” of this means of FTL evokes fantastical interpretations of string theory, quantum entanglement, and other concepts in modern physics, but the ideas are supported only through their internal consistency rather than actual fact, much like a well-explained magic system that allows fictional wizards to cast spells.

5. Warp Drive

Popularized by Star Trek , a warp drive distorts space around a ship while leaving the ship itself inside a “bubble” of normal space. The space in front of the ship is contracted, while the space behind it is expanded, and the ship “rides” the distortion wave at FTL speeds. Technically, it is not the ship that is moving, but rather space itself, which is how we avoid breaking any laws of physics.

Imagine a surfer slowly paddling back to shore. When a wave comes, it will lower the water level in front of him and raise the water level behind him, and he can ride the downward slope all the way to shore. Relative to the wave, the surfer isn’t moving – he’s staying between the crest and the trough, and it is instead the wave that is moving.

Surfing doesn’t quite work like that, but it’s a simplification that we can all visualize. In a similar manner to how a wave will distort water to propel a surfer, a warp drive will distort space to propel a ship.

In 1994, the Alcubierre drive was proposed as a theoretical means of FTL travel and is based on a mathematical solution to equations within Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Just like a warp drive, the Alcubierre drive would contract space in front of a spaceship and expand space behind it.

NASA has been actively researching this technology since 2012 , and the lead researcher even worked with a 3D artist to develop a model of what a warp-capable ship might look like . As far as real-life FTL goes, warp is the current front-runner to becoming reality.

As far as real-life FTL travel goes, the fictional favorites can be found in Star Trek and Stargate : the warp drive, and wormholes. Both are theoretically possible; however, both require further scientific breakthroughs before practical testing can begin. In either case, we need to discover “exotic matter” – hypothetical particles with negative mass – to get these mechanisms to work. “Element zero” from the Mass Effect series, the rare material that is essential to FTL travel in that universe, doesn’t quite fit the description, but the lore is at least scientifically sound in suggesting that some new, rare form of matter is required to make this technological leap.

The good news is that scientists don’t believe this is a matter of if, but rather when. There will be a time in the future when a stately, bald man in uniform will sit back in a command chair and relay the order, “Engage.”

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Warp drives: Physicists investigate faster-than-light space travel

The closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri. It is about 4.25 light-years away, or about 25 trillion miles (40 trillion kilometers). The fastest ever spacecraft, the now- in-space Parker Solar Probe will reach a top speed of 450,000 mph. It would take just 20 seconds to go from Los Angeles to New York City at that speed, but it would take the solar probe about 6,633 years to reach Earth’s nearest neighboring solar system.

If humanity ever wants to travel easily between stars, people will need to go faster than light. But so far, faster-than-light travel is possible only in science fiction.

In Issac Asimov’s Foundation series , humanity can travel from planet to planet, star to star or across the universe using jump drives. As a kid, I read as many of those stories as I could get my hands on. I am now a theoretical physicist and study nanotechnology, but I am still fascinated by the ways humanity could one day travel in space.

Some characters – like the astronauts in the movies “Interstellar” and “Thor” – use wormholes to travel between solar systems in seconds. Another approach – familiar to “Star Trek” fans – is warp drive technology. Warp drives are theoretically possible if still far-fetched technology. Two recent papers made headlines in March when researchers claimed to have overcome one of the many challenges that stand between the theory of warp drives and reality.

But how do these theoretical warp drives really work? And will humans be making the jump to warp speed anytime soon?

Compression and expansion

Physicists’ current understanding of spacetime comes from Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity . General relativity states that space and time are fused and that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. General relativity also describes how mass and energy warp spacetime – hefty objects like stars and black holes curve spacetime around them. This curvature is what you feel as gravity and why many spacefaring heroes worry about “getting stuck in” or “falling into” a gravity well. Early science fiction writers John Campbell and Asimov saw this warping as a way to skirt the speed limit.

What if a starship could compress space in front of it while expanding spacetime behind it? “Star Trek” took this idea and named it the warp drive.

In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican theoretical physicist, showed that compressing spacetime in front of the spaceship while expanding it behind was mathematically possible within the laws of General Relativity . So, what does that mean? Imagine the distance between two points is 33 feet (10 meters). If you are standing at point A and can travel one meter per second, it would take 10 seconds to get to point B. However, let’s say you could somehow compress the space between you and point B so that the interval is now just one meter. Then, moving through spacetime at your maximum speed of one meter per second, you would be able to reach point B in about one second. In theory, this approach does not contradict the laws of relativity since you are not moving faster than light in the space around you. Alcubierre showed that the warp drive from “Star Trek” was in fact theoretically possible.

Proxima Centauri here we come, right? Unfortunately, Alcubierre’s method of compressing spacetime had one problem: it requires negative energy or negative mass.

A negative energy problem

Alcubierre’s warp drive would work by creating a bubble of flat spacetime around the spaceship and curving spacetime around that bubble to reduce distances. The warp drive would require either negative mass – a theorized type of matter – or a ring of negative energy density to work. Physicists have never observed negative mass, so that leaves negative energy as the only option.

To create negative energy, a warp drive would use a huge amount of mass to create an imbalance between particles and antiparticles. For example, if an electron and an antielectron appear near the warp drive, one of the particles would get trapped by the mass and this results in an imbalance. This imbalance results in negative energy density. Alcubierre’s warp drive would use this negative energy to create the spacetime bubble.

But for a warp drive to generate enough negative energy, you would need a lot of matter. Alcubierre estimated that a warp drive with a 100-meter bubble would require the mass of the entire visible universe .

In 1999, physicist Chris Van Den Broeck showed that expanding the volume inside the bubble but keeping the surface area constant would reduce the energy requirements significantly , to just about the mass of the Sun. A significant improvement, but still far beyond all practical possibilities.

A sci-fi future?

Two recent papers – one by Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire and another by Erik Lentz – provide solutions that seem to bring warp drives closer to reality.

Bobrick and Martire realized that by modifying spacetime within the bubble in a certain way, they could remove the need to use negative energy. This solution, though, does not produce a warp drive that can go faster than light.

Independently, Lentz also proposed a solution that does not require negative energy. He used a different geometric approach to solve the equations of general relativity, and by doing so, he found that a warp drive wouldn’t need to use negative energy. Lentz’s solution would allow the bubble to travel faster than the speed of light.

It is essential to point out that these exciting developments are mathematical models. As a physicist, I won’t fully trust models until we have experimental proof. Yet, the science of warp drives is coming into view. As a science fiction fan, I welcome all this innovative thinking. In the words of Captain Picard , things are only impossible until they are not.

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Breaking the Warp Barrier for Faster-Than-Light Travel: New Theoretical Hyper-Fast Solitons Discovered

By University of Göttingen March 11, 2021

Artistic impression of different spacecraft designs considering theoretical shapes of different kinds of “warp bubbles.” Credit: E Lentz

Astrophysicist at Göttingen University discovers new theoretical hyper-fast soliton solutions.

If travel to distant stars within an individual’s lifetime is going to be possible, a means of faster-than-light propulsion will have to be found. To date, even recent research about superluminal (faster-than-light) transport based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity would require vast amounts of hypothetical particles and states of matter that have “exotic” physical properties such as negative energy density. This type of matter either cannot currently be found or cannot be manufactured in viable quantities. In contrast, new research carried out at the University of Göttingen gets around this problem by constructing a new class of hyper-fast ‘solitons’ using sources with only positive energies that can enable travel at any speed. This reignites debate about the possibility of faster-than-light travel based on conventional physics. The research is published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

The author of the paper, Dr. Erik Lentz, analyzed existing research and discovered gaps in previous ‘warp drive’ studies. Lentz noticed that there existed yet-to-be explored configurations of space-time curvature organized into ‘solitons’ that have the potential to solve the puzzle while being physically viable. A soliton – in this context also informally referred to as a ‘warp bubble’ – is a compact wave that maintains its shape and moves at constant velocity. Lentz derived the Einstein equations for unexplored soliton configurations (where the space-time metric’s shift vector components obey a hyperbolic relation), finding that the altered space-time geometries could be formed in a way that worked even with conventional energy sources. In essence, the new method uses the very structure of space and time arranged in a soliton to provide a solution to faster-than-light travel, which – unlike other research – would only need sources with positive energy densities. No “exotic” negative energy densities needed.

Image to show how long it would take different types of spacecraft to travel from our solar system to Proxima Centauri (the nearest known star). Currently, the only option would be to use a chemical rocket meaning a journey time of over 50,000 years. Credit: E Lentz

If sufficient energy could be generated, the equations used in this research would allow space travel to Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, and back to Earth in years instead of decades or millennia. That means an individual could travel there and back within their lifetime. In comparison, the current rocket technology would take more than 50,000 years for a one-way journey. In addition, the solitons (warp bubbles) were configured to contain a region with minimal tidal forces such that the passing of time inside the soliton matches the time outside: an ideal environment for a spacecraft. This means there would not be the complications of the so-called “twin paradox” whereby one twin traveling near the speed of light would age much more slowly than the other twin who stayed on Earth: in fact, according to the recent equations both twins would be the same age when reunited.

“This work has moved the problem of faster-than-light travel one step away from theoretical research in fundamental physics and closer to engineering. The next step is to figure out how to bring down the astronomical amount of energy needed to within the range of today’s technologies, such as a large modern nuclear fission power plant. Then we can talk about building the first prototypes,” says Lentz.

Currently, the amount of energy required for this new type of space propulsion drive is still immense. Lentz explains, “The energy required for this drive traveling at light speed encompassing a spacecraft of 100 meters in radius is on the order of hundreds of times of the mass of the planet Jupiter . The energy savings would need to be drastic, of approximately 30 orders of magnitude to be in range of modern nuclear fission reactors.” He goes on to say: “Fortunately, several energy-saving mechanisms have been proposed in earlier research that can potentially lower the energy required by nearly 60 orders of magnitude.” Lentz is currently in the early-stages of determining if these methods can be modified, or if new mechanisms are needed to bring the energy required down to what is currently possible.

Reference: “Breaking the warp barrier: hyper-fast solitons in Einstein–Maxwell- plasma theory” by Erik W Lentz, 9 March 2021, Classical and Quantum Gravity . DOI: 10.1088/1361-6382/abe692

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22 comments on "breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel: new theoretical hyper-fast solitons discovered".

“Sufficient Energy” This already exist in the form of Element 115. If the Unauthorized Black Projects are ever revealed, word on the grapevine says its actually instantaneous. Lets go to Alpha Centaur i.

If we had that kind of energy on earth, everyone would know.

If only because that much energy in one place would have as much gravity as Jupiter.

Proposed mechanism is a propagation of a distortion of spacetime of a particular form. Thus it is ultimately very much like propagation of gravitational waves. However gravitational waves propagate with speed of light. Therefore I don’t see how it may be possible.

“Take us Out… Chekov”

The biggest form of untapped energy is at rest and stable energy. We only think of energy in it’s transitions. If we would convert the energy of stable space it is limitless.

Useful work of any kind has always, not only by man but by nature as well, only been accomplishable by exploiting an energy gradient (i.e. harnessing the movement of energy from where it is plentiful to where it is scarce). That’s what entropy is.

Find a way around that and we won’t *need* warp drives, we can simply create anything and everything we could ever want from nothing, forever.

You mean element 151…

IDK. I think it is about TIME… to find a horse of a different color. The protocols heron defined have “designed” a wonderful “horseshoe” (RELATIVELY speaking) and are busy trying to fit it to an elephant just because it’s in the ROOM: where time and space are limited… TIME to leave the womb… er… ROOM. Which is to say: Star Trekking is a fantasy, a phantasm and a FICTION devised inside a “boxy” Universe, whose PHYSICS seem to conform to the BIAS of Mortality (TIME is the limiting factor). It engenders HASTE in seeking a solution: We are “on the run”, desperately looking for a way to boldly go where no HUMAN has gone before. Good LUCK with that. Back to the Horseshoe, in want of a “NAIL”. As DANTE writ above the GATES of Hell: “Abandon ye all HOPE who enter here:” Where strayeth the MIND the FEET will follow. But it’s not about Feet, or Miles or Light Years. SINGULARITIES ALL: Infinite acceleration = Infinite ENTROPY. One is effectively DEAD in the water, while the proverbial WORM in the HOLE has a feast. It’s about standing still in the STREAM of Time, while SPACE flows on around ONE: A STREAM where the banks are in motion as well. It’s about being IN the FIELD and NOT UNDER IT. No need for flesh-liquifying SPEED. Think about it… In the meantime, ring up ACME Fireworks Inc. Ask for the “Wile E Coyote” Package. Next stop: Alpha CENTAURI… now passing URANUS on the way out of here. WARP NINE MISTER WARF. MAKE IT SO. Walk the World Round and wind up where you started from. FEET again. It is the ultimate Circular Argument of Intent in a two-dimensional UNIVERSE, OUTSIDE of TIME. The FABRIC of a DREAM…

A very small craft might be fitted with a very high power drive. A craft of 100m radius is mentioned. Eventually we will miniaturize the craft.

I totally agree with you because no way would time ever change no matter how much energy is used in traveling. The most important aspect of this research as I’m working on is understanding hot and cold. Gravity and acceleration of planet and stars to then making a mechanism that can trick the universe into believing the mechanism behavior is indeed faster heavier or lighter then what would be expected for such a device on Earth. Artificial takes new meaning with my studies and I wish you all the best likewise.

Warp drive or not we are not ready until we are one we will never understand we will never be welcomed to intelligent beyond earth I believe ther are watching.

At the present time nothing is faster than light, but there is! It’s always been here watch! The Sun’s light takes about 8 minutes to arrive to earth. If I (THINK) about the sun to earth I have beat the light travel. Human thought is faster than light. Just for thought. Now let’s get down to business. WARP DRIVE can be achieved. Anti-gravity is negative energy. Loaded in darkness of space. What u need in space is large amounts of gravity to pull or accelerate. Warp Drive is a push pull in a sense. A laser SCOPE can achieve this. Space/time bends light as u know, riding on a laser beam moving to a point of reference (sun) gives u the positive gravity neccessary inside the bubble to move. In theory the light is behind you. Still within einstein’s theory.more to say later see ya

The illustration atop this page is an excellent example of WHY artists impressions are NOT useful is the discussion of science.

Put most simply : there is no data, yet there IS an illustration… of SOMETHING, that means nothing. What is there to learn from this?

We Warp Drive manufacturing, our fission-annihilation antigravity propulsion accelerate to lightspeed, but by nuclear annihilation reaction generate high-density time-space, so from outside observation, we traveling on higher speed. The best is to travel outside of the galactic disk for maximum speed. To understand advanced physic is necessary to first understand the Theory of Relativity. Sped of light is constant only in the frame, outside dependant on the speed of time.

Chris m exactly..rest energy would be the best for getting us out of this area..it’s the ink pen vs pencil problem.spend tons of cash on writing with a pen or use a pencil for $.05.we already have the oxygen thing worked out..I say we just jump on in and figure it out as we go haha

Why not look into the idea like the Enterprise u already have this ISS up there why not try to buid a space hanger to build the ship like the Enterprise in it we have the technology to do it and while ship was getting built u cold work on the warp drive engines to power it this is the 21st century we should be thinking on lines like that im not saying theres vulcans or klingonns out there but with a ship like that we might get to see if we are alone in this galaxy or not

This would also allow for sub-light speed as well with I am assuming lesser energy requirements. Works be with losing for just to get around the solar system faster

How do we stop this spaceship?

by “breaking” the warp bubble in advance by a few nano seconds. lowering the space ship to sub light speeds temporarily.

Just traveling at light speed would be an accomplishment, yet no one talks about sailing on waves of gravity which would take much less energy. Even though warp speed is faster, we should probably walk before we run.

faster than light propulsion and anti-gravity

https://pronewsreport.com/2021/05/31/antigravity-flying-saucer-for-solar-system-exploration/

Antimatter for Antigravity and Faster than Light Propulsion

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The idea that characters can fly from planet to planet, or star to star, defying current science and technology, is central to science fiction. Although some of these ideas predated the space age, after the 1950s, fictional depictions of space travel needed to suggest conceivable ways to cross interstellar distances to seem plausible. Some authors suggested faster-than-light drives, hyper drives, jump drives, worm holes, and black holes.

Scientific understanding of light speed as an absolute natural limit derives from Albert Einstein’s publications on special relativity in 1905, confirmed by his work on general relativity in 1916. In classical physics, speed has no limits. But relativistic theory shows that mass increases with acceleration until mass becomes infinite at light speed. Yet author E. E. “Doc” Smith imagined spaceships traveling faster than the speed of light in his “Skylark of Space” stories. Smith’s cover story appeared in the same issue of Amazing Stories in 1928 that included Philip Francis Nowlan’s first short story about Anthony (later “Buck”) Rogers.

Within a couple of decades, the fictional idea of faster-than-light travel made intuitive sense to a public familiar with recent supersonic flights. In 1947, Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound aboard the Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis . Writers extrapolated supersonic speeds into the idea of spacecraft traveling at multiples of the speed of light. Frank Hampson’s British comic Dan Dare offered one of the earliest uses of faster-than-light travel. In 1955, he introduced interstellar travel in “The Man from Nowhere” trilogy. The technology was inherently alien, however, and faster-than-light travel was not featured regularly afterward. Forbidden Planet (1956) was the first film to depict a fictional faster-than-light spaceship created by humans. From the exterior, the C-57D ship was an undifferentiated flying saucer. After a loudspeaker announcement, however, the crew stood in “DC stations” that held them immobile while the ship slowed. By the mid-1960s, however, as both the United States and the Soviet Union made regular human spaceflights, science fiction audiences became more intuitively aware of the time that it took to travel in space.

The U.S.S. Enterprise created for Star Trek (NBC, 1966-69) represented a major leap forward. Walters “Matt” Jefferies, a WWII flight engineer and private pilot, used “aircraft logic” to design a vehicle with components that visually communicated their purpose. With the two engine nacelles, Jefferies effectively invented warp drives, fictional engines that could propel the ship at multiples of the speed of light. As seen in Star Trek: First Contact (1996), the first flight of Zephram Cochran’s warp-capable Phoenix demonstrated the mark of a culture that was ready to participate in interstellar civilization. Jefferies’ design raised the bar for imagined vehicles. After Star Trek, undifferentiated flying saucers and flame-spewing pointed rockets largely disappeared from fictional depictions. Instead, imagined propulsion that bent space-time or traversed alternate dimensions become more prevalent.

Rather than just having the vehicles fly faster, some science fiction suggested traveling through or outside of normal four-dimensional space (including time), either by jumping within ordinary space, utilizing hyperspace, or exploiting natural or artificial shortcuts through space. Beginning in the 1940s, Isaac Asimov included jump drives in the short stories that later became his Foundation (1951) series of novels. Because fictional jump drives turn long flights into direct hops, allowing ships to disappear from one place and reappear in another, they facilitate storytelling without interrupting it. The reimagined Battlestar Galactica (2003) uses the same kind of travel but calls the mechanisms “FTL drives.”

A production model of the Millennium Falcon was on display at the Museum in 1998-99 as a part of the "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth".

The Star Wars universe postulates a hyperdrive, a computer-guided system that allows spacecraft to enter hyperspace at faster-than-light speeds and navigate to a successful exit at a distant destination. Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) reveals that the extensive navigational maps and rapid calculating ability of the Millennium Falcon ’s hyperdrive computer are actually the downloaded memories of L3-37, a spirited and female-identified droid pilot.

The two-season program Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (NBC, 1979-1981) showed interstellar travel being accomplished using stargates. Four lights arranged in a diamond in space showed that the stargate had opened, offering access to hyperspace. A similar concept had a more physical presence in J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5 (Syndicated & TNT, 1993-1998). In that show, external “jumpgates” shown using computer-generated imaging provided a physical infrastructure for generating stable vortices to hyperspace.

The idea of artificial space-time vortices as conduits drew power from speculation published in technical and popular literature. Speculation about wormholes must be distinguished, however, from black holes, which are real astronomical phenomena. Stories involving black holes often include time dilation. Einstein’s theories—including special and general relativity—explain that a person travelling near a massive gravitational field experiences time more slowly. The plot of director Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) employed time differences for dramatic purposes and also represented a giant leap in visual effects. To create the effect of the rapidly spinning black hole, theoretical astrophysicist Kip Thorne assisted the Interstellar production team. The resulting black hole appeared as a three-dimensional, spherical, hole in spacetime, drawing in all of the light around it. When the Event Horizon Telescope project imaged a real black hole in 2019, that image demonstrated how close to reality Interstellar ’s fictional imagination had come.

This explanation of the various aspects of a black hole shows the recent three-dimensional visualization.

Although writers have been imagining travel to space-based destinations for hundreds of years, the use of faster-than-light travel as a narrative device remains relatively young. As the sound barrier disappeared and the space age dawned, writers began imagining ways for interstellar travelers to cross the immensity of space. More important, audiences came to expect plausible explanations of faster-than-light travel to consider the stories credible.

Dr. Margaret A. Weitekamp is the Chair of the Museum’s Space History Department and author of “Ahead, Warp Factor Three, Mr. Sulu”: Imagining Interstellar Faster-Than-Light Travel in Space Science Fiction.” The Journal of Popular Culture 52 (2019), 1036-57.

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10 Sci-Fi Faster-Than-Light Systems

Albert Einstein may have proven faster-than-light travel to be impossible, but the rules of physics certainly haven't stopped sci-fi creators from inventing plausible-sounding ways to travel to the stars. Here are the 10 most awesome systems of faster-tha

Albert Einstein may have proven faster-than-light travel to be impossible, but if I were grading his papers I'd simply say, "Try harder." The rules of physics certainly haven't stopped sci-fi creators from inventing plausible-sounding (or infinitely improbable) ways to travel to the stars. Here, then, are the 10 most awesome systems of faster-than-light travel in sci-fi.

Found in: Star Trek

Warp drive is surely the most famous way to get your butt to a distant star. But, as with anything related to Star Trek, there's not a simple explanation. The basic story is that if you combine matter and antimatter fused with some dilithium, you can create a subspace bubble that exists outside the normal fabric of space–time. With warp plasma spewing out of a ship's nacelles you can now propel yourself faster than light to varying degrees (the famous "warp factor" you'll often hear Starfleet captains shouting about).

Maintaining a warp drive ain't easy, which is why every iteration of Star Trek had an (awesome) chief engineer and a set with a big blue glowy thing. For that reason alone it is at the top of the list.

Found in: Star Wars

There is no clearer distinction between the Stars ( Trek and Wars ) than in the way they present technology. Star Trek will beat you into submission with its technobabble until you finally relent and decide that this all must make sense. Team Lucas, on the other hand, will marvel you with whiz-bang wonderment until you accept that this galaxy far, far away runs on magic.

The Millennium Falcon and other ships travel across enormous distances using hyperdrive, which is a system maintained—if you follow Chewbacca's model—by banging on the ship's interior plating until, finally, you go fast. If one looks under the hood (i.e., reads some of the expanded universe books), you'll learn that hyperdrive technology involves collecting gamma radiation, fusing it in a hyperdrive motivator, and maintaining a stable corridor of space with a null quantum field generator. It also makes all the white stars go streaky—a total freakout for 1977.

Plausibility Factor: An 8 also, for two reasons. One, it is important to maintain detente between the Star Trek and Star Wars camps. Two, we'd like to point to the work of Mark G. Millis, a NASA alum and founder of the Tau Zero Foundation who has written extensively on the possibility of "forms of propulsion where the fundamental properties of matter and spacetime are used to create propulsive forces anywhere in space without having to carry and expel a reaction mass."

The Infinite Improbability Drive

Found in: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

It's what's beating within Zaphod Beeblebrox's commandeered ship Heart of Gold. The Infinite Improbability Drive is one of the more purely mathematical systems of faster-than-light travel, making quantum calculations determining the least likely point in space and then suddenly sending you there. Hitchhiker's author Douglas Adams is a little vague as to whether this is a propulsion or teleportation system, but, then again, quantum mechanics is a little vague, too. (In the radio and TV version it looked like a running shoe.)

Adams said he came up with the infinite improbability drive after he'd written himself into a corner. Any rescue he devised seemed improbable, so he therefore decided to pick the most improbable.

Plausibility Factor: N/A. You really want to debate the plausibility of something called the Infinite Improbability Drive? Adams's outrageous creation doesn't deserve to be confined to a 1 to 10 scale.

Found in: Battlestar Galactica (new continuity)

While the mechanics of Battlestar 's FTL "jumps" are left somewhat to the imagination, its tactile nature is a perfect example of why BSG is so awesome. Deriving its power from rare tylium ore, the FTL drive can essentially pick you up and plop you down at any point in space, provided you have advanced tracking facilities and the time to plot your course. Indeed, the Cylons—being machines—had better computers and therefore could get the jump, if you will, on the Colonials. In cases of extreme emergency, one could make a "blind jump"—basically slamming the Go button, asteroids and space debris be damned—but you need to be as gutsy as Michelle Forbes's Admiral Cain to do such a thing.

Most of the time a jump is preceded by a "spooling-up," in which the camera angle gets all funky and distorted, oftentimes causing noobs to get sick. Also, using the FTL too much can give your ship metal fatigue.

Plausibility Factor: The science seems suspect, but major points for adding in all the difficulty of upkeep. Let's give it a 5.

Found in: Doctor Who

The BBC may not have been a big-budget operation when it created Doctor Who, but it recognized that space and time were irrevocably connected. So the jumping vessel, the TARDIS, didn't just set you down somewhere—it set you down somewhen.

(Also, the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than the outside—but that's a different article.)

The Time and Relative Dimension in Space machines used by the Time Lords don't all look like an antiquated police box (the one on the show has a faulty chameleon circuit.) The ships are actually grown, drawing their power from an artificial singularity known as the Eye of Harmony. They are technically alive, and in one episode, the consciousness of the TARDIS entered a humanoid. Yeah, we're getting into some weird territory here.

Plausibility Factor: Very low. But we'll give it a 2 because it integrates time and space and, well, we used to watch a lot of public television.

Holtzman Drive

Found in: Dune

If you want to travel far out, you have to get far out. Frank Herbert's Dune books make great use of the Holtzman Effect, a grouping of scientific phenomena that can, among other things, fold space itself. That's right—why travel off to a distant star when you can make that distant star come to you? (Kinda.)

What's neat is that the Spacing Guild doesn't need just the advanced technology of a Holtzman drive, but also a pilot who is hopped up on the Spice Melange and can navigate through patterns in foldspace. In this world, then, the designated driver is the one who's the highest. In David Lynch's film version (which many purists reject), a giant space slug shoots squiggly things at a glowing gold box to initiate the drive. Cinema!

Plausibility Factor: This is all rather heavy, but it is hard not to salute Herbert for thinking of a solution from an unusual point of view. Let's go with a 4.

Found in: Farscape

Some people name their cars and even talk to them. The Farscape universe takes the next logical step: There are a whole group of biomechanoid ships called Leviathans. They have personalities and thoughts and will adapt and grow to fit the need of their crew.

One of their killer apps is something the Builders gave them called Starbursts. It is the ability to travel at superluminal speeds in cases of extreme urgency. It is essentially a fight-or-flight mechanism, but heavy on the flight. Using a Starburst will not only tucker out a Leviathan, but also wipe all of its navigational data for a spell.

Plausibility Factor: The awesome factor for Starbursts is high. But considering I can't even get one of those automated vacuum cleaners to work, I think we're a long way from this. Let's say 3.

Kearny-Fuchida Drives

Found in: BattleTech

According to the mythos of the BattleTech tabletop/computer/video games, novels, comics, and anime shows, the principles behind faster-than-light travel will be discovered at Stanford University in just six years. (Get ready, people!)

About a century later, further work will be done on the theories of Drs. Thomas Kearny and Takayoshi Fuchida to create hyperspace energy fields using large, superconductive masses of titanium and germanium. Sounds easy enough, but the system needs huge amounts of energy, so solar sails are used for time-consuming power-ups from stars. (And there are fewer and fewer full service stations!) Furthermore, unlike with other systems, you just can't jump anywhere—gravitational pull can make "reentry" unstable, so coordinates must be far above a star's ecliptic path. Use of the K-F Drive also does a number on the subatomic particles of the effected region.

Plausibility Factor: For the very fact that using the drives causes so much trauma, let's give this one a 6.

Conjoiner Drives

Found in: Revelation Space

A mysterious defense system preventing the development of faster-than-light travel is one of the key arcs in Alastair Reynolds's fantastic (and ongoing) Revelation Space books. The Earth-descendant peoples (some more mechanically augmented than others) travel in ships called Light Huggers that, as the name suggests, travel at nearly the speed of light.

What makes the Light Huggers so cool (specifically the Nostalgia for Infinity, a ship at the heart of many adventures) is how the relativistic fields create a Tarantino-esque storytelling timeline, even if individual characters just think they are traveling in a straight line.

Light Huggers derive their power from Conjoiner Drives that contain a tiny wormhole reaching back in time and drawing power from quark–gluon plasma created by the big bang. Only a certain number of these wormholes exist, so the technology cannot be replicated—no one remembers how to build them or where they came from.

Plausibility Factor: Alastair Reynolds had a career as an astronomer in the European Space Agency prior to writing books. He talks a good game, so I'll give him a 5 and say he's on to something.

Found in: DC Comics

We haven't talked that much about wormholes. And that's fine with me. In most science fiction wormholes are just stumbled upon—it seems to be an easy fix to fill in plot holes.

However, wormholes are plentiful in sci-fi, so they deserve their nod. But if I'm gonna wimp out and travel this way, I'm ignoring everything from the titular Stargates to the Taelonian Portals of Earth: Final Conflict and going to take a boom tube.

First seen in Jack Kirby's tripped-out New Gods books, the boom tube was a wormhole that "stemmed from the waves of the mind" and could zap you from places like Apokolips and New Genesis to Earth. This has since been altered to something far less fanciful—boom tubes are currently powered by a "mother box." Recently, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman used one to fight Granny Goodness and the Female Furies and rescue Kara Zor-El from Darkseid. Hey, you asked.

Plausibility Factor: I'm going with a 7. Every article you read about how faster-than-light travel is impossible contains an asterisk that says "unless we somehow discover wormholes." Scientists seem to think that wormholes aren't the craziest idea in the multiverse, so I'm holding out hope that I'll make it Proxima Centauri after all.

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March 9, 2021

Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel

by University of Göttingen

If travel to distant stars within an individual's lifetime is going to be possible, a means of faster-than-light propulsion will have to be found. To date, even recent research about superluminal (faster-than-light) transport based on Einstein's theory of general relativity would require vast amounts of hypothetical particles and states of matter that have 'exotic' physical properties such as negative energy density. This type of matter either cannot currently be found or cannot be manufactured in viable quantities. In contrast, new research carried out at the University of Göttingen gets around this problem by constructing a new class of hyper-fast 'solitons' using sources with only positive energies that can enable travel at any speed. This reignites debate about the possibility of faster-than-light travel based on conventional physics. The research is published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity .

The author of the paper, Dr. Erik Lentz, analyzed existing research and discovered gaps in previous 'warp drive' studies. Lentz noticed that there existed yet-to-be explored configurations of space-time curvature organized into 'solitons' that have the potential to solve the puzzle while being physically viable. A soliton—in this context also informally referred to as a 'warp bubble'—is a compact wave that maintains its shape and moves at constant velocity. Lentz derived the Einstein equations for unexplored soliton configurations (where the space-time metric's shift vector components obey a hyperbolic relation), finding that the altered space-time geometries could be formed in a way that worked even with conventional energy sources. In essence, the new method uses the very structure of space and time arranged in a soliton to provide a solution to faster-than-light travel , which—unlike other research—would only need sources with positive energy densities. No exotic negative energy densities needed.

If sufficient energy could be generated, the equations used in this research would allow space travel to Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, and back to Earth in years instead of decades or millennia. That means an individual could travel there and back within their lifetime. In comparison, the current rocket technology would take more than 50,000 years for a one-way journey. In addition, the solitons (warp bubbles) were configured to contain a region with minimal tidal forces such that the passing of time inside the soliton matches the time outside: an ideal environment for a spacecraft. This means there would not be the complications of the so-called 'twin paradox' whereby one twin traveling near the speed of light would age much more slowly than the other twin who stayed on Earth: in fact, according to the recent equations both twins would be the same age when reunited.

"This work has moved the problem of faster-than-light travel one step away from theoretical research in fundamental physics and closer to engineering. The next step is to figure out how to bring down the astronomical amount of energy needed to within the range of today's technologies, such as a large modern nuclear fission power plant. Then we can talk about building the first prototypes," says Lentz.

Currently, the amount of energy required for this new type of space propulsion drive is still immense. Lentz explains, "The energy required for this drive traveling at light speed encompassing a spacecraft of 100 meters in radius is on the order of hundreds of times of the mass of the planet Jupiter. The energy savings would need to be drastic, of approximately 30 orders of magnitude to be in range of modern nuclear fission reactors." He goes on to say: "Fortunately, several energy-saving mechanisms have been proposed in earlier research that can potentially lower the energy required by nearly 60 orders of magnitude." Lentz is currently in the early-stages of determining if these methods can be modified, or if new mechanisms are needed to bring the energy required down to what is currently possible.

Provided by University of Göttingen

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[Physics FAQ] - [Copyright]

By Philip Gibbs, 1997, 1998.

It might be thought that special relativity provides a short negative answer to this question.  In actual fact, there are many trivial ways in which things can be going faster than light (FTL) in a sense, and there may be other more genuine possibilities.  On the other hand, there are also good reasons to believe that real FTL travel and communication will always be unachievable.  This article is not a full answer to the question (which no doubt will continue to be discussed in the newsgroups for the foreseeable future), but it does cover some of the more common points that are repeatedly made.

It is sometimes objected that "they said no-one would ever go faster than sound and they were wrong.  Now they say no-one will ever go faster than light..."   Actually it is probably not true that anybody said it was impossible to go faster than sound.  It was known that rifle bullets go faster than sound long before an aircraft did.  The truth is that some engineers once said that controlled flight faster than sound might be impossible, and they were wrong about that.  FTL travel is a very different matter.  It was inevitable that someone would one day succeed in flying faster than sound, once technology got around the problems.  It is not inevitable that one day technology will enable us to go faster than light.  Relativity has a lot to say about this.  If FTL travel or FTL communication were possible, then causality would probably be violated and some very strange situations would arise.

First we will cover the trivial ways in which things can go FTL.  These points are mentioned not because they are interesting, but because they come up time and time again when FTL is being discussed, and so they are necessary to deal with.  Then we will think about what we mean by non-trivial FTL travel/communication and examine some of the arguments against it.  Finally, we will look at some of the more serious proposals for real FTL.  Many of these things are discussed in more detail elsewhere in the FAQ and hyper-links are provided.  The sections are numbered so that they can be referred to individually.

Trivial FTL Travel

1. cherenkov effect.

One way to go faster than light is to make the light slow down!  Light in vacuum travels at a speed c which is a universal constant (see the FAQ entry Is the speed of light constant? ), but in a dense medium such as water or glass, light slows down to c/n where n is the refractive index of the medium (1.0003 for air, 1.4 for water).  It is certainly possible for particles to travel through air or water faster than light travels in that medium, and Cherenkov radiation is produced as a result.  See the FAQ entry Is there an equivalent of the sonic boom for light? .

When we discuss moving faster than light, we are really talking about exceeding the speed of light in vacuum c (299,792,458 m/s).  The Cherenkov effect is thus not considered to be a real example of FTL travel.

2. Third-Party Observers

If a rocket A is travelling away from me at 0.6c in a westerly direction, and another B is travelling away from me at 0.6c in an easterly direction, then the total distance between A and B as seen in my frame of reference is increasing at 1.2c .  An apparent relative speed greater than c can be observed by a third person in this way.

But this is not what is normally meant by relative speeds.  The true speed of rocket A relative to rocket B is the speed at which an observer in rocket B observes his distance from A to be increasing.  The two speeds must be added using the relativistic formula for addition of velocities.  (See the FAQ entry How do You Add Velocities in Special Relativity? )  In this case the relative speed is actually about 0.88c , so this is not an example of FTL travel.

3. Shadows and Light Spots

Think about how fast a shadow can move.  If you project the shadow of your finger using a nearby lamp onto a distant wall and then wag your finger, the shadow will move much faster than your finger.  If your finger moves parallel to the wall, the shadow's speed will be multiplied by a factor D/d where d is the distance from the lamp to your finger, and D is the distance from the lamp to the wall.  The speed can even be much faster than this if the wall is at an angle to your finger's motion.  If the wall is very far away, the movement of the shadow will be delayed because of the time it takes light to get there, but the shadow's speed is still increased by the same ratio.  The speed of a shadow is therefore not restricted to be less than the speed of light.

This behaviour of a shadow is all about the arrival of successive "pieces of light" (photons, if you will) at a screen.  It is really no different to the faster-than-light speed of a spot on the Moon's surface caused by a laser that has been aimed at that surface and is being waved around on Earth.  Given that the distance to the Moon is 385,000 km, try working out the speed of that spot if you wave the laser at a gentle speed.  You might also like to think about a water wave arriving obliquely at a long straight beach.  How fast can the point at which the wave is breaking travel along the beach?

This sort of thing turns up in Nature; for example, the beam of light from a pulsar can sweep across a dust cloud.  A bright explosion emits an expanding spherical shell of light or other radiation.  When this shell intersects a surface, it creates a circle of light which expands faster than light.  A natural example of this has been observed when an electromagnetic pulse from a lightning flash hits an upper layer of the atmosphere.

These are all examples of "things" that seem to be moving faster than light.  In reality, no object or signal is moving faster that light here.  For a more prosaic example, imagine squirting water from a garden hose at a fence, and moving your aim from one end of the fence to the other.  The intersection point of water stream and fence moves quickly, but of course no thing or signal is really moving along the fence.  A succession of water molecules strikes the fence, but their speed of travel has nothing to do with how quickly you move the hose.  It is a kind of optical illusion for us to think that the wet spot advancing along the fence is a moving object or signal.  The ban in relativity against faster-than-light travel actually concerns the speed of signals (which includes material objects and waves): in a vacuum, no signal is allowed to move faster than light moves in its vicinity.  Neither a moving shadow, nor a laser spot, nor a wet spot on a fence, constitute a signal that is being sent from the initial position of those spots to the final position.  Since these moving spots don't constitute a signal, they are all allowed to move faster than light.  This is not really what we mean by faster-than-light travel, although it shows how difficult it is to define what we really do mean by faster-than-light travel.  See also the FAQ The Superluminal Scissors .

4. Rigid Bodies

If you have a long rigid stick and you hit one end, wouldn't the other end have to move immediately?  Would this not provide a means of FTL communication?

Well, it would if there were such things as perfectly rigid bodies.  In practice the effect of hitting one end of the stick propagates along it at the speed of sound in the material; this speed depends on the stick's elasticity and density.  Relativity places an absolute limit on material rigidity in such a way that the speed of sound in the material will not be greater than c .

The same principle applies if you hold a long string or rod vertically in a gravitational field and let go of the top end.  The point at which you let go will start to move immediately, but the lower end cannot move until the effect has propagated down the length.  That speed of propagation depends on the nature of the material and the strength of the gravitational field.

It is difficult to formulate a general theory of elastic materials in relativity, but the general principle can be illustrated with newtonian mechanics.  The equation for longitudinal motion in an ideal elastic body can be derived from Hooke's law.  In terms of the mass per unit length p and Young's modulus of elasticity Y , the longitudinal displacement X satisfies a wave equation (see for example Goldstein's "Classical Mechanics"):

Plane wave solutions travel at the speed of sound s where s 2 = Y/p .  This wave equation does not allow any causal effect to propagate faster than s .  Relativity therefore imposes a limit on elasticity: Y < pc 2 .  In practice, no known material comes anywhere near this limit.  Note that even if the speed of sound is near c , the matter does not necessarily move at relativistic speeds.  But how can we know that no material can possibly exceed this limit?  The answer is that all materials are made of particles whose interaction are governed by the standard model of particle physics, and no influence faster than light can propagate in that model (see the section on Quantum Field Theory below).

So although there is no such thing as a rigid body, there is such a thing as rigid body motion; but this is another example in the same category as the shadows and light spots described above which do not give FTL communication.  (See also the FAQ articles The Superluminal Scissors and The Rigid Rotating Disk in Relativity ).

5. Phase, Group, and Signal Velocities

Look at this wave equation:

This has solutions of the form:

These solutions are sine waves propagating with a speed

But this is faster than light, so is this the equation for a tachyon field?  (See the paragraph on tachyons below ).  No, it is the usual relativistic equation for an ordinary particle with mass!

Superluminal speeds such as this present no problem once we recognise three types of speed associated with wave motion: phase velocity , group velocity , and signal velocity .  Phase velocity is the velocity of waves that have well-defined wavelengths, and it often varies as a function of this wavelength.  We can combine ("superpose") waves of different wavelengths to build a wave packet , a blob of some specified extent over which the wave disturbance is not small.  This packet does not have a well-defined wavelength, and because it usually spreads out as it travels, it doesn't have a well-defined velocity either; but it does have representative velocity, and this is called its group velocity, which will usually be less than c .  Each of the packet's constituent wave trains travels with its own individual phase velocity, which in some instances will be greater than c .  But it is only possible to send information with such a wave packet at the group velocity (the velocity of the blob), so the phase velocity is yet another example of a speed faster than light that cannot carry a message.

In some situations, we can build a fairly exotic wave packet whose group velocity is greater than c .  Does this then constitute an example of information being sent at a speed faster than light?  It turns out that for these packets, information does not travel at the group velocity; instead, it travels at the signal velocity , which has to do with the time of arrival of the initial rise of the wave front as it reaches its destination.  You might not now be surprised to learn that the signal velocity turns out always to be less than c .

6. Superluminal Galaxies

If something is coming towards you at nearly the speed of light and you measure its apparent speed without taking into account the diminishing time it takes light to reach you from the object, you can get an answer that is faster than light.  This is an optical illusion, and is not due to the object's moving at FTL.  See the FAQ Apparent Superluminal Velocity of Galaxies .

7. Relativistic Rocket

A controller based on Earth is monitoring a space ship moving away at a speed 0.8c .  According to the theory of relativity, he will observe a time dilation that slows the ship's clocks by a factor of 5/3, even after he has taken into account the Doppler shift of signals coming from the space ship.  If he works out the distance moved by the ship divided by the time elapsed as measured by the onboard clocks, he will get an answer of 4/3 c .  He infers from this that the ship's occupants determine themselves to be traversing the distances between stars at speeds greater than the speed of light when measured with their clocks.  From the point of view of the occupants their clocks undergo no slowing; rather, they maintain that it is the distance between the stars which has contracted by a factor of 5/3.  So they also agree that they are covering the known distances between stars at 4/3 c .

This is a real effect which in principle could be used by space travellers to cover very large distances in their lifetimes.  If they accelerate at a constant acceleration equal to the acceleration due to gravity on Earth, they would not only have a perfect artificial gravity on their ship, but would also be able to cross the galaxy in only about 12 years of their own "proper time": that is, they would age 12 years during the journey.  See the FAQ What are the Equations for the Relativistic Rocket?

Nevertheless, this is not true FTL travel.  The effective speed calculated used the distance in one reference frame and the time in another.  This is no way to calculate a speed.  Only the occupants of the ship benefit from this effective speed.  The controller will not measure them to be travelling large distances in his own lifetime.

8. Speed of Gravity

Some people have argued that the speed of gravity in a gravitationally bound system is much greater than c or even infinite.  In fact, gravitational effects and gravitational waves travel at the speed of light c .  See the articles Does Gravity Travel at the Speed of Light? and What is Gravitational Radiation? for the explanation.

9. EPR Paradox

In 1935 Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen published a thought experiment that seemed to produce a paradox in quantum mechanics, as well as demonstrating that it was incomplete.  Their argument used the fact that there can be an apparent instantaneous interaction in the measurement of two separated particles that have been prepared in a certain "entangled" manner.  Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance".  It has been shown by Eberhard that no information can be passed using this effect; so there is no FTL communication, but the paradox is still very controversial.  See the FAQ article The EPR Paradox and Bell's Inequality for more details.

10. Virtual Photons

In quantum field theory forces are mediated by "virtual particles".  The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle allows these virtual particles to move faster than light.  But virtual particles are not called "virtual" for nothing.  They are only part of a convenient mathematical notation, and once again, no real FTL travel or communication is possible.  See the FAQ Virtual Particles .

11. Quantum Tunnelling

Quantum Tunnelling is the quantum mechanical effect that permits a particle to pass through a barrier when it does not have enough energy to do so classically.  You can do a calculation of the time it takes a particle to tunnel through such a barrier.  The answer you get can come out less than the time it takes light to cover the distance at speed c .  Does this provide a means of FTL communication? Ref: T. E. Hartman, J. Appl. Phys. 33 , 3427 (1962).

The answer must surely be "No!"—otherwise our understanding of QED is very suspect.  Yet a group of physicists have performed experiments that seem to suggest that FTL communication by quantum tunneling is possible.  They claim to have transmitted Mozart's 40th Symphony through a barrier 11.4cm wide at a speed of 4.7 c .  Their interpretation is, of course, very controversial.  Most physicists say this is a quantum effect where no information can actually be passed at FTL speeds.  If the effect is real it is difficult to see why it should not be possible to transmit signals into the past by placing the apparatus in a fast-moving frame of reference. Refs: W. Heitmann and G. Nimtz, Phys. Lett. A196 , 154 (1994); A. Enders and G. Nimtz, Phys. Rev. E48 , 632 (1993).

Terence Tao has pointed out that apparent FTL transmission of an audio signal over such a short distance is not very impressive.  The signal takes less than 0.4 ns to travel the 11.4 cm at light speed, but it is quite easy to anticipate an audio signal ahead of time by up to 1000 ns simply by extrapolating the signal waveform.  Although this is not what is being done in the above experiments, it does illustrate that the experimenters will need to use a much higher frequency random signal, or transmit over much larger distances, if they are to demonstrate FTL information transfer convincingly.

The likely conclusion is that there is no real FTL communication taking place, and that the effect is another manifestation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

12. Casimir Effect

The Casimir Effect describes the fact that a very small but measurable force exists between two uncharged conducting plates when they are very close together.  It is due to the existence of vacuum energy (see the FAQ article on the Casimir Effect ).  A surprising calculation by Scharnhorst suggests that photons travelling across the gap between the plates in the Casimir Effect must go faster than c by a very very small amount (at best 1 part in 10 24 for a 1 nanometre gap.) It has been suggested that in certain cosmological situations, such as in the vicinity of cosmic strings if they exist, the effect could be much more pronounced.  Even so, further theoretical investigations have shown that, once again, there is no possibility of FTL communication using this effect. Refs: K. Scharnhorst, Physics Letters B236 , 354 (1990) S. Ben-Menahem, Physics Letters B250 , 133 (1990) Andrew Gould (Princeton, Inst. Advanced Study). IASSNS-AST-90-25 Barton & Scharnhorst, J. Phys. A26 , 2037 (1993).

13. Expansion of the Universe

According to Hubble's Law, two galaxies that are a distance D apart are moving away from each other at a speed HD , where H is Hubble's constant.  So this interpretation of Hubble's Law implies that two galaxies separated by a distance greater than c/H must be moving away from each other faster than light.  Actually, the modern viewpoint describes this situation differently: general relativity takes the galaxies as being at rest relative to one another, while the space between them is expanding.  In that sense, the galaxies are not moving away from each other faster than light; they are not moving away from each other at all!  This change of viewpoint is not arbitrary; rather, it's in accord with the different but very fruitful view of the universe that general relativity provides.  So the distance between two objects can be increasing faster than light because of the expansion of the universe, but this does not mean, in fact, that their relative speed is faster than light.

As was mentioned above, in special relativity it is possible for two objects to be moving apart by speeds up to twice the speed of light as measured by an observer in a third frame of reference.  In general relativity even this limit can be surpassed, but it will not then be possible to observe both objects at the same time.  Again, this is not real faster-than-light travel; it will not help anyone to travel across the galaxy faster than light.  All that is happening is that the distance between two objects is increasing faster when taken in some cosmological reference frame.

14. The Moon revolves round my head faster than light!

Stand up in a clear space and spin round.  It is not too difficult to turn at one revolution each two seconds.  Suppose the Moon is on the horizon.  How fast is it spinning round your head?  It is about 385,000 km away, so the answer is 1.21 million km/s, which is more than four times the speed of light!  It might sound ridiculous to say that the Moon is going round your head when really it is you who is turning, but according to general relativity all co-ordinate systems are equally valid, including rotating ones.  So isn't the Moon going faster than light?

What it comes down to is the fact that velocities in different places cannot be compared directly in general relativity.  Notice that the Moon is not overtaking any light in its own locality.  The speed of the Moon can only be compared to the speeds of other objects in its own locality.  Indeed, the concept of speed is not a very useful one in general relativity, and this makes it difficult to define what "faster than light" means.  Even the statement that "the speed of light is constant" is open to interpretation in general relativity.  Einstein himself, on page 76 of his book "Relativity: the Special and the General Theory", wrote that the statement cannot claim unlimited validity.  When there is no absolute definition of time and distance it is not so clear how speeds should be determined.

Nevertheless, the modern interpretation is that the speed of light is constant in general relativity and this statement is a tautology given that standard units of distance and time are tied together using the speed of light.  The Moon is given to be moving slower than light because it remains within the "future light cone" propagating from its position at any instant.

Relativity Arguments Against FTL Travel

15. what does "faster than light" mean.

The cases given so far only demonstrate how difficult it is to pin down exactly what we mean by FTL travel or communication.  If we do not include things such as moving shadows, then what exactly do we mean by FTL?

In relativity there is no such thing as absolute velocity, only relative velocity; but there is a clear distinction between "world lines" that are "timelike", "lightlike", and "spacelike".  By "world line" we mean a curve traced out in the four dimensions of space-time.  Such a curve is the set of all events that make up the history of a particle.  If a world line is spacelike then it describes something moving faster than light.  So there is a clear meaning of what is meant by a "faster-than-light" speed which does not depend on the existence of third-party observers.

But what do we mean by an "object" if we don't want to include shadows?  We could define an object to be anything that carries energy, charge, spin, or information; or perhaps just that it must be made of atoms, but there are technical problems in each case.  In general relativity energy cannot be localised, so we had better avoid using energy in our definition.  Charge and spin can be localised, but not every object need have charge or spin.  Using the concept of information is better but tricky to define, and sending information faster than light is really just FTL communication—not FTL travel.  Another difficulty is knowing whether an object seen at A is the same as the one that was earlier seen at B when we claim that it has travelled across the gap faster than light.  Could it not be a duplicate?  It could even be argued that FTL communication makes FTL travel possible, because you can send the blueprint for an object FTL as advance information, and then reconstruct the object—although not everyone would accept such teleportation as FTL travel.

The problems of specifying just what we mean by FTL are more difficult in general relativity.  A valid form of FTL travel may mean distorting space-time (e.g. making a worm hole) to get from A to B without going on a spacelike curve locally.  There is a distinction between going faster than light locally and getting from A to B faster than light globally .  When a gravitational lens bends the light coming from a distant galaxy asymmetrically, the light coming round the galaxy on one side reaches us later than light that left at the same time and went round the other side.  We must avoid a definition of FTL travel that says a particle going from A to B gets there before light that has made the same journey along a lightlike geodesic.  This makes it very difficult, perhaps impossible, to define global FTL travel unambiguously.

If you were expecting me to finish this section with a precise definition of what is meant by FTL travel and FTL communication, I am afraid I must disappoint you!  The above difficulties are insurmountable.  Nonetheless, you will probably recognise the real thing when confronted with it now that I have given some examples of what would not be FTL travel.

16. The Infinite-Energy Argument

When Einstein wrote down his postulates for special relativity, he did not include the statement that you cannot travel faster than light.  There is a misconception that it is possible to derive it as a consequence of the postulates he did give.  Incidentally, it was Henri Poincare who said "Perhaps we must construct a new mechanics [...] in which the speed of light would become an impassable limit."  That was in an address to the International Congress of Arts and Science in 1904—before Einstein announced special relativity in 1905.

It is a consequence of relativity that the energy of a particle of rest mass m moving with speed v is given by

As the speed approaches the speed of light, the particle's energy approaches infinity.  Hence it should be impossible to accelerate an object with rest mass to the speed of light; also, particles with zero rest mass must always move at exactly the speed of light, since otherwise they would have no energy.  This is sometimes called the "light speed barrier", but it is very different from the "sound speed barrier".  As an aircraft approaches the speed of sound it starts to feel pressure waves which indicate that it is moving close to the speed of sound, and before the existence and effects of these waves were well understood, they destroyed several aircraft in the mid 20th century; hence the old name of sound "barrier".  In fact, with more thrust and the right aerodynamics, an aircraft can certainly pass through the sound barrier.

The situation is different for light.  As the light speed barrier is approached (in a perfect vacuum) there are no such waves according to relativity (destructive or otherwise).  Moving at 0.999 c is just like standing still with everything rushing past you at −0.999 c .  Particles are routinely pushed to these speeds and beyond in accelerators, so the theory is well established.  Trying to attain the speed of light in this way is a matter of chasing something that is forever just out of your reach.

This explains why it is not possible to exceed the speed of light by ordinary mechanical means.  But it does not in itself rule out FTL travel.  It is really just one way in which things cannot be made to go faster than light, rather than a proof that there is no way to do so.  Particles are known to decay instantly into other particles which fly off at high speed.  It is not necessary to think in terms of the particles' having been accelerated, so how could we say that they could not go faster than light?  What about the possibility of particles that might always have been moving faster than light, and which might be used to send information if they can be detected without ever slowing down to less than the speed of light?  Even if such "tachyons" don't exist (and we don't believe that they do exist), there may be ways of moving matter from A to B faster than light is able to travel from A to B by the usual route, but without anything having to go at a FTL speed locally.  See the paragraph on tachyons below .

17. Quantum Field Theory

Except for gravity, all physical phenomena are observed to comply with the "Standard Model" of particle physics.  The Standard Model is a relativistic quantum field theory which incorporates the nuclear and electromagnetic forces as well as all the observed particles.  In this theory, any pair of operators corresponding to physical observables at space-time events separated by a spacelike interval "commute" (i.e. their order can be reversed).  In principle, this implies that effects cannot propagate faster than light in the standard model, and it can be regarded as the quantum field theory equivalent of the infinite energy argument.

But no completely rigorous proofs of anything exist in the quantum field theory of the Standard Model, since no one has yet succeeded in showing that the theory is completely self consistent; and in fact, most likely it is not!  In any case, there is no guarantee that there are not other undiscovered particles and forces that disobey the no-FTL rule.  Nor is there any generalisation that takes gravity and general relativity into account.  Many physicists working on quantum gravity doubt that such simplistic expressions of causality and locality will be generalised.  All told, there is no guarantee that light speed will be meaningful as a speed limit in a more complete theory that might arise in the future.

18. Grandfather Paradox

A better argument against FTL travel is the Grandfather Paradox.  In special relativity, a particle moving FTL in one frame of reference will be travelling back in time in another.  FTL travel or communication should therefore also give the possibility of travelling back in time or sending messages into the past.  If such time travel is possible, you would be able to go back in time and change the course of history by killing your own grandfather.  This is a very strong argument against FTL travel, but it leaves open the perhaps-unlikely possibility that we may be able to make limited journeys at FTL speed that did not allow us to come back.  Or it may be that time travel is possible and causality breaks down in some consistent fashion when FTL travel is achieved.  That is not very likely either, but if we are discussing FTL then we had better keep an open mind.

Conversely, if we could travel back in time we might also claim the ability to travel FTL, because we can go back in time and then travel at a slow speed to arrive somewhere before light got there by the usual route.  See the FAQ article on Time Travel for more on this subject.

Open Possibilities for FTL Travel

In this last section I give a few of the speculative but serious suggestions for possible faster-than-light travel.  These are not the kinds of thing usually included in the FAQ because they raise more questions than answers.  They are included merely to make the point that serious research is being done in this direction.  Only a brief introduction to each topic is given; more information can be found all over the Internet (and should, like almost everything on the Internet, be taken with a huge grain of salt!).

19. Tachyons

Tachyons are hypothetical particles that travel faster than light locally.  Their mass must take on imaginary values (i.e. to do with the square root of −1) to be able to do so, but they have real-valued energy and momentum.  Sometimes people imagine that such FTL particles would be impossible to detect, but there is no reason to think so.  Shadows and spotlights suffice to show that there is no logic in this suggestion, because they can certainly go FTL and still be seen.

No tachyons have definitely been found and most physicists doubt their existence.  There has been a claim that experiments to measure neutrino mass in tritium beta decay indicated that the neutrinos were tachyonic. ; while this is very doubtful, it is not entirely ruled out.  Tachyon theories have problems because, apart from the possibility of causality violations, they destabilise the vacuum.  It may be possible to get around such difficulties—but then we would not be able to use tachyons for the kind of FTL communication that we would like.

The truth is that most physicists consider tachyons to be a sign of pathological behaviour in field theories, and the interest in them among the wider public stems mostly from the fact that they are used so often in science fiction.  See the FAQ article on Tachyons .

20. Worm Holes

A famous proposition for global FTL travel is to use "worm holes".  Worm holes are shortcuts through space-time from one place in the universe to another which would permit you to go from one end to the other in a shorter time than it would take light passing by the usual route.  Worm holes are a feature of classical general relativity, but to create them you have to change the topology of space-time.  That might be possible within a theory of quantum gravity.

To keep a worm hole open, regions of negative energy would be needed.  Misner and Thorne have suggested using the Casimir Effect on a grand scale to generate the negative energy, while Visser has proposed a solution involving cosmic strings.  These are very speculative ideas which may simply not be possible.  Exotic matter with negative energy may not exist in the form required.

Thorne has found that if worm holes can be created, then they can be used to construct closed timelike loops in space-time which would imply the possibility of time travel.  It has been suggested that the "multiverse" interpretation of quantum mechanics (many universes co-existing) gets you out of trouble by allowing time to evolve differently if you succeed in going back to a previous time.  But multiverses are entirely out of keeping with the Ockham's Razor approach to doing science, and constitute more of a popular interpretation of quantum mechanics than a serious physical theory.  Hawking says that worm holes would simply be unstable and therefore unusable.  The subject remains a fertile area for thought experiments that help clarify what is and what is not possible according to known and suggested laws of physics. Refs: W. G. Morris and K. S. Thorne, American Journal of Physics 56 , 395–412 (1988) W. G. Morris, K. S. Thorne, and U. Yurtsever, Phys. Rev. Letters 61 , 1446–9 (1988) Matt Visser, Physical Review D39 , 3182–4 (1989) See also "Black Holes and Time Warps", Kip Thorne, Norton & co. (1994) For an explanation of the multiverse see "The Fabric of Reality" David Deutsch, Penguin Press.

21. Warp Drives

A "warp drive" such as used in the Star Trek science fiction series would be a mechanism for warping space-time in such a way that an object could move faster than light.  Miguel Alcubierre made himself famous by working out a space-time geometry which describes such a warp drive.  The warp in space-time makes it possible for an object to go FTL while remaining on a timelike curve.  The main catch is the same one that may stop us making large worm holes.  To make such a warp, you would need exotic matter with negative energy density.  Even if such exotic matter can exist, it is not clear how it could be deployed to make the warp drive work. Ref.   M. Alcubierre, Classical and Quantum Gravity, 11 , L73–L77, (1994). Ref.   S. Finazzi, S. Liberati, C. Barcel�, Semiclassical instability of dynamical warp drives at arxiv.org.

• To begin with, it is rather difficult to define exactly what is really meant by FTL travel and FTL communication.  Many things such as shadows can go FTL, but not in a useful way that can carry information.
• There are several serious possibilities for real FTL which have been proposed in the scientific literature, but these always come with technical difficulties.
• The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle tends to stop the use of apparent FTL quantum effects for sending information or matter.
• In general relativity there are potential means of FTL travel, but they may be impossible to make work.  It is thought highly unlikely that engineers will be building space ships with FTL drives in the foreseeable future, if ever, but it is curious that theoretical physics as we presently understand it seems to leave the door open to the possibility.
• FTL travel of the sort science fiction writers would like is almost certainly impossible.  For physicists the interesting question is "why is it impossible and what can we learn from that?"

Stellaris FTL changes are in the warp pipes

Congestion ahead

Paradox is packing everyone onto the space-highway, and reworking how FTL travel works in their galactic 4X game, Stellaris . While you can currently choose either Warp, Hyperdrive or Wormholes as your space empire's means of travel, Paradox have decided that having asymmetrical movement methods - while "an interesting idea on paper" - creates too many problems for features they'd like to implement. Once the Cherryh update hits, every player will start with Hyperdrive technology only. That means every player will (with a few exceptions) be limited to travelling via pre-determined space lanes, which constitutes a major change to the game's core systems. One of those X's does stand for (shudder) Xploration, after all.

Paradox sound like they have solid reasons behind making the changes. In their weekly dev diary post, they highlight how Warp and Wormhole travel allow players to easily circumvent static defences. Once everyone is limited to hyperdrive lanes, empires should have the ability to 'lock down' their borders by placing defensive systems at the natural choke points that those lanes create.

The new system also allows Paradox to introduce 'Galactic Terrain': "systems with environmental effects and hazards that have profound tactical and strategic effects on ships and empires." While they're keen to stress that they're only on the first iteration of the idea, some of the examples they give include black holes that increase emergency FTL drive spin-up time, pulsars that nullify shields and nebulas that block sensors from other systems. That last one will be a tasty way of setting up ambushes, or hiding the extent of your military power.

For people who still prefer the less limiting form of movement that Warp offers, Paradox are increasing the customisability of how those lanes are generated - so you can make a hyper-interconnected galaxy should you choose. The other forms of travel haven't vanished from the game entirely, however. The mid-game technology 'Psi Jump Drives' will remain in a tweaked form, which will let you make occasional Warp style jumps - but those might leave you stranded and vulnerable. You'll also come across natural wormholes, which might connect one side of the galaxy to another. In addition to those, I'm most excited by the introduction of Mass Effect style relays - each galaxy will start with an existing network of 'Gateways' built by ancient aliens, which can be used once you've researched the right mid-game technology.

On their next blog post, Paradox say, they'll talk about the planned rework of the "wargoal" system that's made possible by the FTL changes. There's no release date for the Cherryh update yet, so there's still time to get a few games in with the existing mechanics if you want to.

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