Re: starship-design: FTL and Special Relativity

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@efn.org>]

Ben Franchuk writes:
 > SR -  speed limited by mass increase of the ship.

"Relativistic mass increase" is a misnomer.  It's hard to get an object
up to a high fraction of c because the amount of energy needed to reach
a velocity goes to infinity as the velocity approaches c, not because
the object gets more massive as it approaches c.  If you're the pilot of
a high-velocity rocket, you don't see the fuel efficiency decrease as
you go faster nor do you measure your rocket or anything else on board
getting heavier.

For a very lucid explanation of all this, see the section "Dialog: Use
and Abuse of the Concept of Mass" in chapter 8 of _Spacetime Physics_.

 > AD -  time does not slow down.
 >    -  speed limited to about .7C before the ships mass starts to decay.

Both of these are in direct contradiction to experimental observation;
moving objects _do_ show slower rates of time lapse and mass neither
increases or decreases with velocity.