starship-design: Has anyone heard of this?

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@efn.org>]

Connor writes:
 > "I think that at suitable energies, the debroglie wavelength of the
 > ship can be made so short that its probability of interaction is very
 > low - you could fly through a planet in the same way that a gamma ray
 > passes through matter without interacting very much. "
 > 
 > I was talking about the feasability of near light speed travel (with
 > respect to interstellar dust and debris) when he brings this up.

Who's "he" here?

That's really hilarious.  There are so many things wrong with that idea.
The two biggest problems are that the ship is so much bigger than a
photon or other elementary particle that even if you were to consider it
to be a single particle and calculate its DeBroglie wavelength, it would
already be vanishingly small (and quantum wavelength isn't why particles
interact with each other or not), and that gamma rays are actually
pretty good at interacting with matter.