Physicist wants to test Hyperdrive Propulsion in Large Hadron Collider
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted Oct 11th 2009 12:14AM
posted Oct 11th 2009 12:14AM
How come news can never come out of the Large Hadron Collider that doesn't remind us of our planet's impending SciFi Techno-Apocalypse(tm)? When not busy being called a doomsday machine, being bedeviled by hackers and Chuck Norris (yuck!), or just plain failing, the facility could be used to test "hyperdrive" spacecraft propulsion. Seriously! And you know what that means -- someone is planning on escaping the planet, and fast. A physicist named Franklin Felber has been musing over a little known German paper from the 1920s ("The Foundations of Physics" by David Hilbert) which states, in part, that under certain conditions a stationary mass should repel a relativistic particle. If this is true, Felber, concludes, then shouldn't a relativistic particle repel a stationary mass? According to MIT's Technology Review, the LHC would be the perfect place to test this idea: Felber could "set up a test mass next to the beam line and measure the forces on it as the particles whiz past." The experiment could be run in tandem with the collider's other work -- and who knows? Mankind may soon be on its way to the stars at near-light speeds. Let's just hope we figure this out before the robots take over.
[Via Technology Review]
[Via Technology Review]
Sweet Jesus!
Yes, Jesus was a sweetie.
he turned lemons into life.
The B-52's > Jesus.
@luggage
I nearly fell out of my chair! An actual on topic meaningful comment AND it started a real thread of discussion AND on engadget
incredible
~Many Gamma Rays Around It! Van Allen Belt Surrounds It! This Is The Space Age!~
~She Drove A Plymouth Satellite! Faster Than The Speed Of Light!~
~53 Miles West Of Venus!~
~Hallucinating Pluto, Yeah, Yeah!~
~Baby, Baby, Bounce It Off Your Satellite, Yeah!~
I'm sure He finds it laughable as well....
Lowest ranked? Wow, I had no idea engadget readers were all major bible thumpers.
P.s. Are religious people even allowed to discuss science, or is it considered blasphemy?
So...who wants to be first in jumping through a star?
i would rather jump into a star then die in my bed..
Why are they still talking relativistic speeds, every astronomer knows that relativistic travelling at light speed even if made possible is pretty much useless unless you don't plant to go further then Mars, Titan etc.
We don't measure distances between stars in light years for nothing, the distances are so vast light speed is just slow and the added relativistic effects aren't to be underestimated either.
If we say build a sleeper ship because we detected a possible habitable planet around a star 25ly from here.
It would take 25 years to get there from the crews perspective, many more from earth's perspective, so much more it's likely we would send out a more advanced non relativistic ship say 20 years after the light speed one launched and still get there years before the sleeper ship ever does. (twin paradox)
Light speed relativistic travel is a waste of time except for near light speed interplanetary travel, but not interstellar, the whole problem with interstellar distances and relativity means we need to find a way around moving relativistically to get anywhere in space.
(on a side note, it would be boring to look out the window too, no stars whizzing past star trek like or such, just a infinitely small and bright light dead ahead and nothing but black in the side view and rear mirror.
@G, for interstellar travel it would change nothing about the inherent problems of traveling near or at the speed of light relativistically, your still using relativistic motion, just a different propulsion method.
@futurepastshow, while I agree this is not hyperdrive, I don't agree with the impossibility, in fact most serious research into propulsion for interstellar travel is looking in directions like alcubierre drive (kinda like the warp bubble in star trek) and something that from a tv show watcher's perspective could well be called hyperdrive is being researched. Any method that can make you not have to you use relativistic motion (causing time dilation and other side effects which pretty much makes the usefulness of it zilch for interstellar travel.) is of interest because we already know normal ways of moving are useless with interstellar travel regardless if we can move at lightspeed or not.
The Alcubierre drive is what you could for all intents and purposes call warp drive.
It doesn't look like startrek's drive, it doesn't use the sci fi lingo, but it is a bubble of space surrounding the spaceship insulating it from relativistic effecs such as the joy killing time dilation, it also means there's is no (slow) speed of light limit the bubble is a mini universe in essence, the normal universal constants do not have to apply to that bubble of space.
In effect the spaceship doesn't move at all relative to it's space (the bubble) thus no dilation or speed limit.
What is moving is one bubble of space within this huge bubble of space we call the universe.
There's no speed limit because we would be in control of the constants of this mini universe.
The problem with the alcubierre drive theory is the same as with all other interstellar travel idea's scientists have come up with so far:
It needs near infinite energy, same as relativistic lightspeed travel it would need about the complete output of energy that our sun emits during it's complete lifetime lol.
So before we go anywhere we would really need to find a better source of energy, an infinite one, and all of those are just in theory or even hypothesis phase right now. (zero point vacuum energy for example.)
Fusion won't do it, the sun is the biggest fusion reactor we got around and as said we'd need the output of it's entire lifespan.
If we had infinite power output capability a lot would quite fast become possible.
Bending space to avoid relativistic travel, alcubierre drive, wormholes.
It's all possible in Einsteins universe, provided you got the energy.
A well point being is that all research to go light speed with relativistic motion is a waste of time if we want to send humans into space.
The trick is circumventing relativistic motion.
Do you take the fun out of life often?
It is just for fun. No need to get all technical!
What's funny is Luggage has it completely backwards. 25LY means ppl on earth will observe the trip as taking 25 years. Those traveling the speed of light will observe NO passage of time (assuming they really are traveling the speed of light). If they just get really close to light speed, like 99%, then they'll experience a little time passage but not much. That 25LY trip won't take long at all, for the ppl on the ship at least. Look up the time dilation formula before trying that again, Luggage.
@Luggage, you assume that they want to go somewhere many light years away using this. It takes a few years to get to Mars but going at near light speeds would cut that time down drastically.
Regardless Mike, sending people to explore would take so long, it wouldn't benefit us on Earth. The only people who would know about it in a 25 year period would be the travellers. The only way to make large distance travel feasible is to have a faster than light ship with an even faster communication back to Earth.
OHHHHHH Luggage got served!!!!!!
Not a penny for socialized medicine, but trillions for wormhole research!
It all depends on perspective, relativity biting again ;)
Nah its not meant to take the fun out of anything if it did for you then my apologies for that.
Too me the challenge of overcoming said problems seems to be the fun bit.
@Mike
Actually no I did not have it backwards with time dilation look up the formula and look up the twin paradox, the twin on earth is older at the end then the one who travveled at light sped.
The faster you go the slower time moves for you, hence from your perspective time outside the ship will seem to move faster.
@jmood
If you read my comment thoroughly I exactly said that, apart from interplanetary travel simple light speed is more or less useless, I even mentioned it be great to have for things like going to Mars myself.
Correction: (in general for my comment and partly for mike)
yes I made a mistake with my sleepy head at the time and only now notice it when reading back. But it's not backwards, for the people on earth a longer time passes then for the ones on the spaceship, thats correct. My specific numbers I used for my example are wrong though.
I am a scientist at heart so have no problem admitting my mistake.
Same star 25 ly away will take 25 years to reach at light speed from the perspective of people back home.
For the people on the ship the same trip will take:
For the speed I took 0,9999c (because 1c will freeze time and even closer to c just becomes ridiculously short for the crew as at lightspeed time=0.)
Why Einstein said lightspeed is impossible, any number of 9s after the decimal, perhaps but not 1c.
The lorentz factor of 0,9999c becomes 0,0141 which results in 0,3535 years for the crew.
So for long distances the argument still holds despite my mistake in the intitial comment.
The odds that we will run into very long distances to reach the nearest habitable planet (ours is getting kinda full.) in the future are large.
With a very close star like the 25 ly example it's already bad for the crew/passengers.
you only travel a good 4 months but your relatives back home aged 25 years.
@Luggage
Remember the bit about an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters with an infinite amount of time will come up with the complete works of Shakespeare?
Well, hello! It would happen instantly. Your definition of infinite is too small.
This all reminds me of Ender's Game and the other books in that series. Man kind started colonizing other planets with near lightspeed ships, knowing full well that their relatives on Earth would probably be dead by the time they got to the new planet. I'd still volunteer to be colonist either way...
uhh Engadget you might think its funny calling it doomsday machine(and it was at first).....but theirs stupid people out their and if you keep repeating something they will start to believe it(kinda like MWDs in iraq)
Yeah! There sure weren't any meapons of wass destruction!
Definitely some stupid people out "their"
Yep they found no WMDs in Iraq at all... WMD doesn't means a lot more than just world wide capable nukes btw.
OMG !!! My head's already spinnin... :O Unfortunately, such a huge machine will always suffer from its share of breakdowns ....
...Bonnie Tyler? Total Eclipse of the Large Hadron Collider? What??
the irony, im sorry its just funny
"Theirs stupid people out their"? Well, maybe knowledge of physics does not highly correlate with good spelling and good grammar, but, I agree with you, there's stupid people out there.
Ahem, "are"
Lol @ seriousam7
Lol... gotta love english!
BTW, we pretty much all sound the same when we speak another language. Thinking about it, this probably explains the smiles I sometimes get.
Ooops! I have descended into colloquial usage!
you gents really need to check your spelling... starts??? on our way to the starts??? wazzat??
but nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so how will this be any different?
They're talking about accelerating to a "good fraction of the speed of light". That's still infinitely faster than any existing propulsion method.
Actually light speed is not the limit if we are talking about the particles. There are particles that travels through time.
Big Bang theory:The original expansion of the Universe happened faster than the speed of light.Nothing can go faster than the speed of light? But the whole Universe has, All at once.
theoritical limit proposed by einstien's theories. There is no proof that we can not go faster. There are particles that go faster than light, we just cant find them at slower than light speeds currently.
But yes, hyperdrive, about time.
Particles that travel through time? Pshhhtt, I've got a canoe that travels through time.
(And I just traveled here from the year 1984 to say that!)
But seriously, the statements "tachyons are permitted under relativity" and "There are particles that go faster than light" are _not_the_same_ at all. We've no empirical evidence for or against the actual presence of tachyons, so please don't go about claiming they exist.
@Benson: the whole purpose of the LHC is to find out whether various kinds of exotic particles exist or not so we will just have to wait nad see :)
Look up the Tachyon. That is a theoretical partical that does superluminal speeds.
"Mankind may soon be on its way to the starts at near-light speeds. Let's just hope we figure this out before the robots take over."
If you make a run for it, the robots will just follow you.
That reminds me- the BSG tele-movie is suppose to come out within a month or two; Frackin-A!
It seems like it would be easier to just let the robots figure it out. If they get us in the end anyway, why do all this work now?
Mmmmm, little sexy black holes. Just super!
on the creepiness scale.. that was waaay up there.
Considering the avatar, I just felt a very strong contraction... o_O
To the "Starts" we go!!..hehe