<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by jrich</i>
<br />I'm a little unclear on your position as to whether infalling matter can exceed lightspeed. Will the elysium medium always prevent it by essentially becoming infinitely dense to ordinary matter near lightspeed, or is elysium of sufficiently low density except perhaps near large masses to allow movement of ordinary matter at FTL speeds through it?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">The situation is somewhat analogous to attempting to exceed the speed of sound through propeller propulsion alone. We simply can't make air molecules move fast enough to do that. But other means of propulsion, such as jets, can easily help us break the sound barrier.
When matter moves through elysium, part of that movement is ballistic, and that part can be accelerated by very fast forces such as gravity to indefinitely high speeds. However, part of the movement consists of electrons circling nuclei by propagation through elysium, and the propagation speed of electrons is definitely limited by the speed of light (the wave speed of elysium). If a nucleus attempts to go faster, its electrons can't keep up and will all end up trailing the nucleus, with the attractive forces on the nucleus from the electrons then all acting in the same direction to slow the forward progress of the nucleus. That is the "drag" that keeps the nucleus from exceeding the speed of light.
In the future, we may learn how to collapse matter to super-dense states not presently achievable -- far denser than atomic nuclei or any quantum particle. If we built a shield of such super-dense material and enclosed ordinary matter inside it, the shield would be oblivious to the elysium outside (which could not penetrate the shield), and the elysium inside would be at rest with respect to the ordinary matter inside. A spacecraft built on this design could reach indefinitely high speeds.
It's just a matter of engineering details -- and another factor of a million or so in our ability to detect and manipulate "fundamental" entities.
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">If the latter, why do we not see such phenomena? Or do we?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Spacecraft are very small masses compared to planets or stars. We have detected a few instances of Cerenkov raduation from stellar-sized objects. But we are still a long way from being able to detect it from spacecraft-sized objects. (Cerenkov radiation is what happens when something exceeds the speed of light, analogous to a sonic boom.)
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Also, is Cindy really your niece?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">I can't really tell because she has not listed a last name. But there has been no previous communication between me and a relative of that name interested in physics. -|Tom|-
