The U.S.S. ACCELERATOR has been accelerating at one gee for 45 days 7 hours, and 13 minutes -- 3.914 * 106 seconds -- since its departure from the Inner Solar System.
CAPTAIN: Lefty! Do we have the latest measurements? How close are we now to the speed of light?
LIEUTENANT: Sir! We're still as far from the speed of light as ever, sir.
CAPTAIN: But how can that be possible? By my own calculations, we should be up to 13% of the speed of light by now.
LIEUTENANT: 12.94% of the speed of light, to be precise, sir. But the measurements are unambiguous. We are still 2.998 hundred thousand kilometers per second away from the speed of light.
CAPTAIN: Okay, so we've gained 200 kilometers per second on the speed of light, then?
LIEUTENANT: No sir, it's always been 2.998 hundred thousand kilometers per second. Three hundred thousand kilometers per second is only the three-figure approximation. And just to be clear, sir, 2.998 is the four-figure approximation.
CAPTAIN: I can't take this! How the hay are we to surpass the speed of light if we can't even flipping approach it? Increase acceleration to five gee! Commence the increase within the hour!
LIEUTENANT: Yes sir. [LIEUTENANT saluted and departed.]
Five minutes later, INTERCOM: Prepare for the Elephant! Five-gee acceleration to commence in fifty minutes. It's expected to be an extended period of high-gee acceleration.
CAPTAIN grumbled to himself, even as he followed the preparation protocol for the extended period of horizontal immobility, intravenous feeding, and the robotic compression-relaxation substitute for actual physical exercise. "The Elephant" was the code-word for how it would feel when accelerating at high gee.
It had been 50 days of extreme discomfort, delirium, lying motionless with the elephant on top of him, resistant to all pleas to end the acceleration until now. CAPTAIN was determined to make sure he got closer to the speed of light, even if it killed him. But finally, he tapped his robots to gradually decrease the acceleration to one gee. It took another few hours before he could contact Lefty about how fast they were flying, and -- more to the point -- how much closer they were to the speed of light.
LIEUTENANT had recovered faster and better from the ordeal than CAPTAIN had, and was able to speak without computational aid.
LIEUTENANT: Sir, we are now traveling 66.35% of the speed of light.
CAPTAIN didn't have it in him to work it through himself. "But what about the speed of light? How much closer are we?"
LIEUTENANT: Sir, I hate to break it to you, but we are no closer to the speed of light. Still 2.998 hundred thousand kilometers per second away.
CAPTAIN looked Lefty over, but Lefty seemed honest and above-board. His lieutenant didn't seemed surprised in the least. "You're not surprised," CAPTAIN said.
LIEUTENANT: No, sir.
CAPTAIN: You expected this to happen.
LIEUTENANT: Yes sir.
CAPTAIN: But you never told me.
LIEUTENANT: Sir, you needed to learn it for yourself. It doesn't matter who measures the speed of light, or how fast he's going. He will always get the same quantity, c = 2.998 hundred thousand kilometers per second. In general, sir, someone already skeptical or dismissive of the notion that one can't surpass the speed of light will dismiss outright the notion that the speed of light is the same in all frames.
CAPTAIN: How would they ever get that idea in the first place?
LIEUTENANT: Ultimately, sir, it's based on electrodynamics although there was the history of failed attempts to detect the earth's own motion by measuring different speeds for light depending on the direction. Electrodynamics led several scientists before Albert Einstein, to produce the Lorentz Transform. Woldemar Voigt gave us a version as far back as 1887, eighteen years before Einstein's 1905 paper.
CAPTAIN: Apparently, my course in electrodynamics skipped or glossed over its connection with special relativity. Lefty, I can tell you are itching to give a lecture on electrodynamics and relativity. I think that I'm up to standing in front of a white-board now, so let's go for it.
LIEUTENANT: Gladly, sir!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Lorentz_transformat...
299,792,458 m/s: It's not just a good idea, it's the law!
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Comments
Tau Zero
Poul Anderson SF book, which goes into detail on Lorentz transformation. Hence the title
Drive system
I want their drive system. Being able to run day after day at one gee would pretty much give us the Solar System.
*
hmm . . . yes, but I'd settle for the power supply.
T
And they'd save money on artificial gravity plating
If there even could be such a thing.
Having gravity or something like it does a body well...
My ship the Athena accelerated at 1.22 gee
https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/4779/this-quintessenc...
and decelerated at the same rate on the trip home,
which I figured a crew could get used to;
only to find the human race killed off
by a pandemic when they got home
several months (50 years Earth time) later.
And last-men-on-Earth hijinks n' hilarity ensued.
~hugs, Veronica
Well shit, I guess it really CAN happen here..,
.
Two Remote Possibilities
... neither of which you'd want anywhere near your household. (Referring to the preposterous notion that some kid might discover something in the household goods enabling one to surpass the speed of light.)
1. Once the ACCELERATOR is going fast enough, it sweeps out interstellar matter, fuses the deuterium, and expels the rest out the back.
2. An idea presented in a mediocre SF novel written by an actual physicist. His idea transfromed antimatter drives from something impossible in my mind to something merely improbable in the extreme. Antimatter is manufactured on Mercury using solar energy. (I won't say how it's stored, although the method of using it suggests something similar for storage.) Matter-antimatter annihilates behind the spacecraft. Gargantuan magnetic fields curve forward-moving charged pions around to backward-moving -- backward-moving pions remain backward-moving. The resulting current exerts the forward force on the spacecraft.
-- Daphne Xu
I don't remember where I
I don't remember where I heard it or read it, but I remember a physicist saying that matter and antimatter don't explode, but just sort of fizzle out. Not saying he was right, as it seems that physics have come a long way since him.
Hugs!
Rosemary
Fizzling out
It fizzles out like a gamma ray flash bulb. It emits gamma photons with energy equal to e=mc^2. If it's in space, I guess you can call it a fizzle. If there is any matter around, it is, at the very least, vaporized. It ends up emitting light in much the same way that a hydrogen bomb emits light.
The initial gamma burst is absorbed by the air (which is opaque to gamma radiation.) That air emits photons, that are in turn absorbed by the next layer -- out in an expanding sphere until the energy is low enough to emit visible and UV light, which continues on.
I'll admit...
... I don't really know what would happen if a gram of antimatter hit ordinary matter. (It doesn't matter what kind. They all have atomic nuclei made of protons and neutrons, and an antiproton will annihilate a neutron just as well as a proton.) But I wouldn't care to be anywhere near 2*1014 Joules of energy -- about 50 kilotons of TNT -- released. Each annihilation produces a star of pions. I know what happens to them in vacuum, but I don't know how much they and their descendants scatter off of other matter to produce an explosion or other damage.
-- Daphne Xu
Yawn
EOM
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
Bright day and night
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/672472-there-was-a-young-la...
Arthur Henry Reginald Buller > Quotes > Quotable Quote
“There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She started one day
In a relative way,
And returned on the previous night.”
I've actually arrived the previous night on one trip
Of course that didn't involve any esotheric physics, only the date line (mmm, dates (salivating)).
Daphne, "thank you" for reminding me how much physics I've forgotten. Not that I ever really was a physicist, only an electrophysical engineer. However, that was before I started meddling in the black arts (also known as business administration).
Addendum
I just remembered that my master thesis ties in with the story title. I did it on a compact electron accelerator
Return to the Light Side?
Interested in returning to physics? ;-}
What energies did you consider in your master's thesis? Did you have to consider radiation?
-- Daphne Xu
Not that many MeVs
As I said it was compact. Considering the low energies wastage was not a big problem. Certainly you had to be careful when in use but no induced radiation in ferrous material. Which is one reason for using it in radiation therapy as opposed to radioactive isotopes. Also, with careful calibration of energies you can pinpoint and minimise the tissue volume where energy is dissipated.
As for physics that ship was torpedoed a long time ago, possibly using equipment I had been projecet engineer for.
*
SR and GR
Special and General Relativity
Very strange
The Lorentz transforms do not tell you about velocity or time *here* - in your own frame of reference. They tell you about velocity and time *over there* - in the other guy's frame of reference.
Right *here*, nothing ever changes. (Regardless of where *here* is.) (Yes, even if *here* is *over there*).
Sounds like the Captain might be close to getting it.
T
The problem with Relativity is not that it is hard to understand.
Rather, it is hard to believe.
Arauragh
Reading this in the morning with only 1/2 a cup of coffee consumed. Made the mistake of clicking the Wiki link.
Brain thoroughly scrambled now.
Thanks... I think.
Fortunately, I don't have anything cerebral to do today.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
This story is a clear explanation
Of why I switched from a chem/physics course to English. That and the fact that I was spending the time I was supposed to be catching up on labs (there's never enough time in the scheduled lab period) browsing in the biggest library I had ever seen looking for gems like translations of Icelandic sagas and collections of Lord Dunsany stories. I figured my life priorities were obvious.
Admit it.
Admit it, both of you. You enjoyed having your mind challenged.
-- Daphne Xu
... get the Captaincy ... ?
What I can't figure is out is how the Captain got his position... All I can come up with is:
a) a bribe in excess of the cost of the ship
b) really, really juicy blackmail on the World's Head of State
c) he is so bad, that it's worth losing the ship and crew both, just so he doesn't come back
d) he invented (how !?!) a drive system that can sustain 5g acceleration on the whole ship for 50+ days
Currently, our best ion (plasma type) thruster can do about 5.3 Newtons. It would take two of them to hold a 1 kg mass against Earth's gravity ... https://www.space.com/38444-mars-thruster-design-breaks-reco.... Never mind the mass of the thruster itself, and then the power supply ...
Maybe everyone on the USS
Maybe everyone on the USS Accelerator was a telephone sanitizer. Since everyone is now using a mobile phone that they find a really neat idea, the telephone sanitizers aren't needed like they once were, and the world is just getting rid of excess people. Did the story say he sits in a bath for the entire flight with his rubber duckie? I don't remember seeing that, but maybe I just missed it.
Hugs!
Rosemary
Meeting the Challenge
I said that reaching 1% of c would be a major technological challenge -- and I meant humans, of course. In the future, they've met that challenge and a whole lot more. I gave my own ideas for the type of power that might be used, really little more than guesswork.
I was assuming major technological advances, but no new fundamental discoveries in physics -- at least ones that could be used on a macroscopic body.
I can imagine that the Captain might persist a few more times, and even get up to 99% of the speed of light. There would be a severe limit, though, of the ability to plow through or sweep away interstellar material. But if they managed that, they just might discover that instead of being 2.9979 hundred thousand kilometers per second away from the speed of light, they were 2.9978 of them away. If the discovery were unambiguously verified, that would be a time of Hallelujah, break-out-the-champagne, Nobel-prize-winning, discovery of new physics.
It would mean that, yes, you could approach the speed of light. It would signal new physics, and make it likely that we could surpass the speed of light.
Just as would a verified discovery of faster-than-light neutrinos.
As for the Captain getting his rank? I think that there are more important qualities in a captain than understanding fundamental physics. Relying on the expertise of subordinates. He probably made it through the space version of the US Air Force Academy.
-- Daphne Xu
Haven't calculated mankind's impossibles
"Magic is just science that we don't understand yet." ― Arthur C. Clarke. To discourage those who might try and destroy a known theorem (scientific fact) any attempt is labeled impossible. The scientific facts are built on "known laws of physics" and or other fields of study. Had mankind been content with believing in impossible I think we would still be living on a flat earth not daring to get too close to the edge least we fall off. If all the planets don't orbit earth I'm not going to dispute it because I am not an astronomer.
Daphne, your knowledge is beyond question. But sorry hon, I never delved that deep into physics. Instant travel has been in my dreams as long as I can remember. Long before I started reading SF. If whoever or whatever is supplying those dreams ever cares to hand me blueprints and schematic you'll be one of the first to know. Maybe I'm mixing mortal and spiritual? I do know impossible has never worked for me, improbable maybe.
Hugs Daphne
Barb
Life is a gift, treasure it.
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
Wonderful!
One of the best expositions of special relativity that I have seen. Thank you.
Thank you!
Thank you!
-- Daphne Xu
Elephant in the room indeed
This is a crazy little story, with an ignorant Captain trying to get his ship up to the speed of light.
If I remember the thought experiments talk about on NOVA about a ship trying to reach the speed of light, the faster it traveled the heavier it became. Until it reached a point where the engines couldn't push the heavier weight any faster. Thereby never reaching the speed of light, but falling just shy.
It's always amazing how someone says something can't be done until some unsuspecting person comes up with a way for it to be done. Look at everything invented to date.
Look at fiber optics. Once lasers were gizmos played around with in labs. Now they are used for many things.
Now suppose someone figured out how to take a physical object and convert it to light, much like electrical signals are multiplexed to and from light. Imagine they could build something like that into the ship the Captain was commanding. Then once the ship, people, and everything else was changed, they'd be traveling at the speed of light. Because they'd be nothing but light.
Or someone could just develop a jump gate or warp drive.
Others have feelings too.
Imagine
"Imagine they could build something like that into the ship the Captain was commanding. Then once the ship, people, and everything else was changed, they'd be traveling at the speed of light. Because they'd be nothing but light."
I can imagine that. In fact, it's one of the stories I began 20+/- years ago and stalled upon. In fact, my imagination leads me to conclude that I wouldn't wish to be anywhere near such a transporter. Rather than being converted to light (differs how from being "blown to atoms"?) or being reduced to essential information to be converted and transported, I prefer to remain alive.
It's perhaps a useless exercise in the face of laymen, but I was trying my best to illustrate a fundamental difference between various claims of impossibilities, and fight the dissing of scientific and technical competence, or even what should be common-sense intelligence. Reaching one percent of the speed of light is a huge technical challenge for normal-sized objects (and should be reserved for unmanned spacecraft for now). Reaching the speed of light is a completely different story.
"They said a four-minute-mile was impossible, but it happened." Sure, but a one-minute mile won't happen, and definitely a runner won't be able to outrace a Boeing 737 that's taking off. (These are both huge technical challenges. I think that the analog to reaching the speed of light is something like a runner moving away from "distance = speed * time".)
"Aeronautics has proven that the bumblebee can't fly." Urban legend.
A question appeared on Quora: "Could our understanding of quantum physics and relativity be as laughable in a few centuries as the flat Earth model is today?"
A couple parts of an answer: "I believe that Isaac Asimov wrote something that addresses the issue, something along the lines of, `The earth is flat' is wrong. `The earth is a sphere' is wrong. The notion that they’re both equally wrong is wronger than both put together." "Here’s something that scares me. A few centuries from now, or even sooner, we might be in a dark age, where scientific knowledge has been lost. Caricatured versions of 20th-Century science might be presented and ridiculed."
Relativity and quantum theory overthrew classical (Newtonian) mechanics. Quantum theory overthrew classical electrodynamics. Intermediate classical mechanics and electrodynamics are standard parts of the physics and engineering undergraduate curriculum. Advanced electrodynamics (mechanics not so much) is a standard post-graduate physics class. Neither are ridiculed, nor should they be.
It doesn't matter how non-relativistic quantum mechanics is overturned, it's still quite accurate and useful for chemistry and electrical engineering, among other things. The only way it could be ridiculed is if science itself is lost, except as caricatured description.
-- Daphne Xu
Lorentz
Simple explanation: the faster an object goes, the more massive (objectively) it becomes, therefore the more force is needed to accelerate it, culminating in infinite mass (therefore infinite force) as lightspeed is approached. The factor is 'tau', (now given gamma as a symbol, but sod modernity), which is 1 divided by the square root of [1 minus (v squared/C squared)]
By coincidence, yesterday I read a clever little story in which Einstein dies in WWI and science continues along quantum mechanic lines. A solar sail-powered starship sets off to Alpha Centauri expecting to accelerate past lightspeed... and then the pilot starts wondering why the frequency of messages from his wife is getting out of kilter.
Fortunately
Fortunately, special relativity's discovery wasn't limited to Einstein. Special relativity would have been discovered without him. (Also, most of the work was done before WWI began.)
"the pilot starts wondering why the frequency of messages from his wife is getting out of kilter." The section mentioning Voigt's 1887 presentation of the Lorentz Transformation in the Wikipedia article mentions that the Doppler effect motivated Voigt's presentation, and this thing about his wife's messages seems to resemble the Doppler effect.
Unfortunately, that "simple explanation" requires explaining *why* a faster object becomes more massive -- and specifically approaches infinite mass as speed approaches light. That fact is absent from Newtonian physics, and is also absent from layman's folk physics. The fact slips in when one applies electrodynamics and Newtonian physics to accelerate a charged particle -- nothing is simple about that. Absolutely nothing.
Newtonian physics and layman's folk physics provide a rather obvious reason why it's impossible for a solar sail to accelerate the ship past the speed of light. Once it reaches the speed of light, light isn't hitting it any further to accelerate it.
-- Daphne Xu
uhhhhh
This kinda went faaaaaaaar over my head. This is a bit too much math for my cabbit brain x.x
I know who I am, I am me, and I like me ^^
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