• Question: Will we ever be able to travel at the speed of light or is it impossible?

    Asked by gigi123 to David, Helen, Ian, rhysphillips on 23 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: David Corne

      David Corne answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      Things that have mass have a real problem with light-speed – as we get close to it, mass increases, so much that you would turn into a black hole before you got to the speed of light. This is not something you can fix afterwards by visiting the doctor. However, from one point of view, you can be completely described by *information* – I could write down all your ingredients, and how they are put together, on lots and lots of DVDs – I may not be able to get it exactly right, but right enough. Then, I could beam a description of you from A to B using radio waves (or something else in the spectrum), and a special machine could reconstruct you at the other end. Technically, you will then have travelled from A to B at the speed of light.

    • Photo: Rhys Phillips

      Rhys Phillips answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      I don’t know – unlikely to happen any time soon but perhaps in a long long time when technology has advanced further it *may* be possible.

    • Photo: Ian van der Linde

      Ian van der Linde answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      No person can travel at the speed of light because the mass of an object increases the faster it travels. The energy required to make the object go faster and faster increases too because heavier things are harder to move. Eventually, when we came close to the speed of light, the mass of the object would approach infinity, as would the energy required to make it go any faster. If somebody finds a way to short-circuit this law, we could design a vehicle that can travel at the speed of light, and Jeremy Clarkson will review it on Top Gear.

    • Photo: Helen Fletcher

      Helen Fletcher answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      I do not believe that we will ever be able to travel at the speed of light but we could possibly reach speeds close to it. As an object’s speed increases so too does it’s mass which ultimately means that more energy is required to further increase it’s speed, when travelling at extreme speeds time actually slows down so if you sent your identical twin into space for a number of years and they travelled at high speed, they would come back younger than you.

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