Scientists worried that the plane would disintegrate, or the human body wouldn't survive. Before Chuck Yeager became the first person to travel faster than the speed of sound in 1947, many experts questioned whether it could be done. He compared it to crossing the sound barrier. "It's very suggestive that the whole game is different once you go faster than light," Hill said.ĭespite the singularity, Hill is not ready to accept that the speed of light is an insurmountable wall. Hill and Cox's equations suggest, for example, that as a spaceship traveling at super-light speeds accelerated faster and faster, it would lose more and more mass, until at infinite velocity, its mass became zero. In some ways, the hidden world beyond the speed of light looks to be a strange one indeed. The laws of physics in these two realms could turn out to be quite different. In effect, the singularity divides the universe into two: a world where everything moves slower than the speed of light, and a world where everything moves faster. "The theory we've come up with is simply for velocities greater than the speed of light." "The actual business of going through the speed of light is not defined," Hill told LiveScience. Here, both sets of equations break down into mathematical singularities, where physical properties can't be defined. Interestingly, neither the original Einstein equations, nor the new, extended theory can describe massive objects moving at the speed of light itself.
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