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Re: starship-design: FTL Navigation



Ben Franchuk writes:
 > Steve VanDevender wrote:
 > > 
 > > Ben Franchuk writes:
 > > How do the electrons know they're in a wire travelling at 0.75 c?
 > > 
 > > Particles (including electrons) that have been accelerated to within the
 > > tiniest fraction of c don't behave any differently at speed than they do
 > > at rest.  Electronics (and people) on a relativistic spacecraft won't
 > > behave any differently than they do here on Earth, at whatever speed the
 > > spacecraft travels.
 > 
 > I have yet to hear of bulk matter being accelerated to high speeds?

So?  Matter's made of the same particles they routinely whiz around in
particle accelerators.  And a number of astrophysical phenomena do
involve substantial amounts of matter travelling at high fractions of
c, which behave as expected.

If the laws of physics were to change with velocity as you think they do,
then it would be possible to determine what speed an object is
travelling at without reference to any external objects.

 > The other problem is acceleration. 1 G is 10 meters/second. light speed is
 > 3x10^9? meters/second. That is 3x10^8 seconds to get to light speed.
 > That is 9 1/2 years. 

No, 1 ga is 9.8 m/s^2, while c is 2.99792458 m/s.  One year of
acceleration at 1 ga (both measured in the frame of the object being
accelerated) brings the object up to 77% of c as measured by a
non-accelerating object that was at rest when the acceleration started.