Re: RE: Re: Re: starship-design: RE: Bugs again

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@efn.org>]

KellySt@aol.com writes:
 > >Actually, I also remember Isaac Kuo making the very good point
 > >that the structure of spacetime for an FTL particle would be so
 > >weird that hardly any of the usual laws of physics would imply,
 > >and that not even atoms could hold together since electromagnetic 
 > >forces wouldn't propagate isotropically.
 > 
 > I seem to remember similar arguments by physicists "proving" that quantum
 > mechanics and black holes were impossible.

The "warp bubble" approaches to FTL at least try to answer that
concern; an object moves in a "bubble" of normal spacetime where
the laws of physics work.  If you claim that individual subatomic
particles can move FTL, though, they're going to have several
major problems with interacting with the slower-than-light
universe, and extended collections of particles are going to have
problems holding together.

Mostly this reminds me why we are not allowing FTL -- there are
no theories of FTL that are even close to being experimentally
demonstrated, so how are we supposed to design an FTL spacecraft
around completely unknown properties?  We could argue about FTL
for a long time, but that's not going to get us anywhere.