Originally featured in The Salty Fish Bowl - July 2010
It seems I may have been a little hasty in the conclusions drawn from February’s Meanderings*, though I’m sure it’s due to some facet of Murphy’s Law, and no fault of my own. Whatever the cause, I have since learned that there are reasons to doubt the durability of my previous assertion that travelling at the speed of light is a “theoretical impossibility”. Case in point; Cerenkov Radiation.
Cerenkov Radiation (named for Russian scientist Pavel Alekseyevich Cerenkov) occurs when a charged particle passes through any given medium faster than light itself, producing a wake of electromagnetic radiation, which scientists can use to determine the speed and mass of said particle. It’s also to blame for the eerie blue glow you can find deep in a nuclear reactor’s core, were you to venture in and look around.
To learn how we can apply this to our own lives we’ll have to do a little math, or rather I’ll do a little math and let you know how it turns out.
C is the speed of light in a vacuum (299,792,458 meters per second to be as exact as necessary), but light doesn’t always travel so fast. Sometimes it has to work a little. Like most anything else, light is affected by the medium through which it travels, so when it goes through something like water, or (conceivably) jell-o, it slows down. In fact, when hurtling through water, light only travels at 0.75C. With this in mind, to travel at the speed of light we need merely build a submersible that can reach roughly 437,062,438,700 knots. This could, in effect, make us time travellers (just not the kind to go back and kill Barjavel’s grandfather), allowing us to relativistically meander into the future. Confused? Allow me to quote myself;
“The Theory of Relativity has shown…that the faster an object moves, the slower time moves for said object, in relation to other objects moving at different speeds.”*
In layman’s terms, if we spent 15 years aboard our submersible we would actually disembark 22.6778 years in the future. The possibilities for practical application of a superluminal submersible are virtually limitless;
Don’t want to be around for your kid’s “terrible twos”? Just hop aboard the HMS Leap Year for only 0.6614 years and skip ahead to the “easy threesies” (that’s a thing, right?).
Trying desperately to hang on to your youth a little longer (relative to those around you)? Forget costly surgery. Book a 6.6144 year cruise aboard the SS Time Delay to skip a whole decade, and leave everybody wondering if you’ve really had work done.
Afraid of what’s to come in 2012? All aboard the Yellow Submarine, and experience whatever cataclysm befalls us 1.5118 times faster than those who choose to tough it out (results may vary).
Of course to achieve any of this we’re going to need cooperation, and some major technological advancements, from numerous currently unrelated fields. Somehow we have to get the people at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, the National Underwater and Marine Agency, and Carnival Cruise Lines (endorsement cheques can be sent to The Runaway Typewriter c/o The Salty Fish Bowl) together in a room with a stack of pizzas. Let me get the ball rolling by suggesting that once we’ve achieved the means of propelling a seagoing vessel superluminally, we should try to use the radiation it produces to power it in turn, creating a perpetual motion time machine. Physicists present and future, it’s in your court.
*Salty Fish Bowl #18
