There might have been a time when every schoolchild could have told you at what speed light travels. Alas, that's no longer the case, but I'm sure there's "an App for that" so they'd be able to find out.
The speed is 186,000 miles every second (that's about 300,000 kilometers for those that have now eschewed imperial measures). This speed is a "constant", helpfully given the letter 'c', and applies to all "massless particles". How can something that is called a particle have no mass? Never mind...
| Astronomical Unit! |
Anyway, it's pretty bloody fast. But what you must remember is that this velocity only applies to light travelling in a vacuum. It slows down significantly when moving through something like glass, to a measly 200,000 kps but only about 100 kps slower when going through air, a difference to vacuum speed so small as to be largely immeasurable. To get these things into measures that are easier to cope with, a distance has been invented called an Astronomical Unit, or AU. An AU is c. 150 million kms (the distance between the Earth and the Sun). Light will travel 157 AUs every Earth Day. The next nearest star to our Solar System is Alpha Centauri, which is 243,000 AUs away. To make this more simple to cope with, there's another measure called a Light Year; that's the distance light will travel in a year (in a vacuum). Alpha Centauri is 4.25 Light Years from your house.
We have, us humans, made some things go quite fast. The Space Shuttle, for example, went at almost 30,000 kph (in the near vacuum that is the first bit of space above our atmosphere) and did so with people inside it. Assuming that that speed could be maintained, the Shuttle would travel about 250 million kms in a year - so that'd be to our Sun and then most of the way back again. To reach Alpha Centauri at that speed would take about 36,000 years so it's pretty much off NASA's agenda at the moment. But wouldn't it be lovely if we could somehow get up to close to the speed of light and then visit our near neighbour in four or five years? And there'd be another fifty of so stars within 15 years travelling time too. Some of those might even have a planet or two that might, at a stretch, have some unicellular organic goo on them, and of whom we could ask to be taken to their leader - probably some bigger, multicellular goo.
To throw all of this up into the air, some cone-headed physicists at Cern seem to have sent some neutrinos to somewhere in Italy (obviously the holiday destination of choice for sub-atomic particles) and they arrived there quicker than light would have done. Now as Einstein was of the opinion that nothing can travel faster than light, this incident might bring into question his relativity stuff. So off go all the brilliant physicists trying to establish whether this has really happened and, if it has, what it might all mean.
| Physics Star Prof Cox with Ordinary Star |
| Some Really Complicated Shit about the Alpha Centauri Trinary System |
What if it were possible to travel faster than light? OK, at the moment this appears to be the preserve of the massless, but Cox is not dismissing the curious events at Cern and has even posited the potential for stuff to move about in different dimensions and that might explain the anomaly. I prefer to deal only with the dimensions I know about. Just the standard three. So, in our 3-D universe, if it's possible to beat the speed of light by even a tiny bit, then it'll probably be possible to beat it by lots? Maybe one hundred times better? We could be at Alpha Centauri Space Station Central in a fortnight, once we've worked out how to become massless, of course, something that Kate Moss almost managed at one time so we shouldn't give up on it.
That's fine when considering distances in AUs and Light Years, but as this inter-stellar travel would more than likely be the preserve of astronauts and Richard Branson, how would light-speed travel impact on us here on Earth?
All this fuss over the HS2 trains would be redundant for a start. Instead of having to spend £33bn and ruining some upper middle class twits' gardens to make it possible to travel to Birmingham from London fifteen minutes quicker, we could save that money because you could get there in 0.0005 seconds! Actually, it might take longer than that as you wouldn't be travelling in a vacuum (well, possibly a cultural vacuum once you reached Birmingham) and then there's the tricky issue of needing to factor in acceleration from a standing position and deceleration back to being still again. Anyway, it couldn't be more than a couple of minutes...probably.
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| Super-Luminal Transporter Tube |
Instead of the railtracks and all the infrastructure of motorways and airports, I imagine there'll just be a load of tubes everywhere (and I don't mean like the London Underground). There'd have to be tubes because travelling at super-luminal velocities could be very messy in the event that you hit something and they've been using sort of tubes at Cern, so that makes sense. The tubes would have some kind of anthro-accelerator at critical points to launch us off to our destinations. Holiday travel would be so quick that we wouldn't need to take as long a period off work, thus boosting the economy. By the time we'd mastered sending humans along the tubes, we'd have already got goods moving super-luminally, providing huge reductions in carbon emissions from aircraft, ocean freighters and trucks. The benefits are boundless.
Cameron should call an immediate halt to everything else and start up the Minsitry of Super-Luminal Movement, with Prof Cox in charge and divert any money that might be left in the Treasury to this important initiative. He should also sack Steve Hilton straight away for not thinking this shit up ages ago in one of his idiotic "Blue-Sky-Thinkeries".
A big "Well Done" to the pointy-heads at Cern, then. World, Galactic and Universal problems solved by whooshing tiny little things to to Italy from France. Sarkozy will be pleased too, I suppose, as he's marginally bigger than a neutrino. Bless.
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