If you travel faster than light, what happens?

[BlueIce]

You will become a "Jumper" that can teleport anywhere and travel to the past and future.

[ethraax]

Well if you are driving in a car faster than the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, then the light will probably 'follow' you behind. The faster you go, the faster the line of light behind you. Kinda like a jet going faster than the speed of sound, the faster it is, the longer you'll have to wait for the sound to catch up. The faster a car drives after the speed of light, the longer the 'stream' of light behind it. That's kinda my theory.

That wouldn't happen.

Light acts weird. It's not at all like sound, although both travel fast. Light always moves away from you at the same speed - the speed of light - no matter how fast you're going.

If you stand still and shine a light, it travels just as fast as if you go 500mph and shine that light. EXACTLY as fast.

It's all relativity. You see, in Einsteinian physics (most commonly accepted by scientists today), there is no absolute time. There's no absolute space. There is only absolute space-time.

Imagine for a second that we're in a 2d world. This is just because we can more easily imagine the third dimension as time than we can the fourth dimension as time. You would have a "block" of space-time. The thickness is time.

Now we all move at the same speed all the time. We move, as humans, at exactly the speed of light. Always. Most of the time, our velocity is aimed more at the time dimension. Thus, as you speed up, you travel through time slower. Since the speed at which the light moves away from you (or in this case, velocity, since you're talking about it moving backwards) is a function of TIME, as time slows down, the speed seems to speed up. Thus, no matter how fast we travel, we always percieve light moving away from us to be moving at the same speed -- the speed of light.

On and while we're on the subject that is why people tote around time travel and moving faster than the speed of light. As you move towards the speed of light, time slows to a stop. So they assume that as you move faster, time goes backwards. Personally I think it's ridiculous, although a neat idea -- it has long been known that time is an "arrow", it only goes one way.

/end wall of text

[cicciux]

If you travel faster than light you probably won't get good signal in you cell phone (or wouldn't get it at all), and most likely wouldn't be wasting your time talking about it in a forum... :P

[koyut]

Unless you are in a highly configured and equipped for Speed of Light vehicle you will die.

[Smith6612]

Now, all we need to do is build the ship that Space Ball 1 uses to go Ludicrous speed and we'll be all set to go :P

[rockee]

Q. If you travel faster than the speed of light, what happens?

A. You would start to go round in ever decreasing circles until you eventually disappeared up your own rear black hole.

Well here goes - see yaaaaaa - ouch!

[shaunak]

Nothing in this UNIVERSE can travel faster than 2.99*10^8m/s.
END OF STORY.

NO solid proof has been established to say otherwise. Incuding those german dudes.

[IonCannon218]

Q. If you travel faster than the speed of light, what happens?

A. You would start to go round in ever decreasing circles until you eventually disappeared up your own rear black hole.

Well here goes - see yaaaaaa - ouch!

No, you're wrong. ;)

Today, my physics teacher said that if anything goes faster than the speed of light (NOTHING DOES! PERIOD.), the object will go back in time.

[ArunG]

To understand this phenomena you should first be able to understand Einsteins explanation of special relativity for this ,The easiest way to understand Einstein's explanation understand the simple equation that you have probably seen before: e = mc2. Inorder to understand this equation, let's consider a similar equation, one for converting between square inches and square feet. If i is the number of square inches and f is the number of square feet, then we can write the equation: I =144 f . The 144 comes from squaring the number of inches per foot (122 = 144). writing the same equation would be i = c2f, where c in this case is equal to 12 inches per foot. Depending on what units we use, this equation can be used to convert any measure of area to any other measure of area; just the constant c will be different. For example, the same equation can be used for converting square yards to square meters, where c is 0.9144, the number of yards per meter. The c2 is just the conversion constant.

The reason why these area equations work is that square feet and square inches are different ways of measuring the same thing, namely area. What Einstein realized, to everyone one's surprise, was that energy and mass are also just two different ways of measuring the same thing. It turns out that just a little bit of mass is equal to a whole lot of energy, so in the equation, the conversion constant is very large. For example, if we measure mass in kilograms and energy in joules, the equation can be written like this: e = 90,000,000,000,000,000 m. This means, for example, that a charged-up battery (which contains about one million joules of energy) weighs about 0.0000000001 grams morethan a battery that has been discharged.

If we work with different units, the conversion constant will be different. For instance, if we measure mass in tons, and energy in BTUs, then c will be 93,856,000,000,000,000. (It happens to work out that the conversion constant in a particular set of units is always the speed of light in those units, but that is another story.) If we measure both energy and mass in what physicists call "the natural units" (in which c = 1), we would write the equation: e = m, which makes it easier to understand; it just means that energy and mass are the same thing.

It doesn't matter whether the energy is electrical energy, chemical energy, or even atomic energy. It all weighs the same amount per unit of energy. In fact, the equation even works with something physicists called "kinetic" energy, that is, the energy something has when it is moving. For example, when I throw a baseball, I put energy into the baseball by pushing it with my arm. According to Einstein's equation, the baseball actually gets heavier when I throw it. (A physicist might get picky here and distinguish between something getting heavier and something gaining mass, but I'm not going to try. The point is that the ball becomes harder to throw.) The faster I throw the baseball, the heavier it gets. Using Einstein's equation, e = mc2, I calculate that if I could throw a baseball one hundred miles an hour (which I can't, but a good pitcher can), then the baseball actually gets heavier by 0.000000000002 grams — which is not much.

Now consider in a starship case, Let's assume that your engines are powered by tapping into some external energy source, so you don't have to worry about carrying fuel. As you get going faster and faster in your starship, you are putting more and more energy into the ship by speeding it up, so the ship keeps getting heavier. (Again, I should really be saying "massier" not "heavier" since there is no gravity in space.) By the time you reach 90 percent of the speed of light, the ship has so much energy in it that it actually has about twice the mass as the ship has at rest. It gets harder and harder to propel with the engines, because it's so heavy. As you get closer to the speed of light, you begin to get diminishing returns — the more energy the ship has, the heavier it gets, so the more energy that must be put into it to speed it up just a little bit, the heavier it gets, and so on.

The effect is even worse than you might think because of what is going on inside the ship. After all, everything inside the ship, including you, is speeding up, getting more and more energy, and getting heavier and heavier. In fact, you and all the machines on the ship are getting pretty sluggish. Your watch, for instance, which used to weigh about half an ounce, now weighs about forty tons. And the spring inside your watch really hasn't gotten any stronger, so the watch has slowed way down so that it only ticks once an hour. Not only has your watch slowed down, but the biological clock inside your head has also slowed down. You don't notice this because your neurons are getting heavier, and your thoughts are slowed down by exactly the same amount as the watch. As far as you are concerned, your watch is just ticking along at the same rate as before. (Physicists call this "relativistic time contraction.") The other thing that is slowed down is all of the machinery that is powering your engines (the dilithium crystals are getting heavier and slower, too). So your ship is getting heavier, your engines are getting sluggish, and the closer you get to the speed of light, the worse it gets. It just gets harder and harder and harder, and no matter how hard you try, you just can't quite get over the light barrier. And that's why you can't go faster than the speed of light.

Courtesy : How Things Are: A Science Tool-Kit for the Mind

[khopcraft77]

Good question. It isn't actually possible, but it is fun to pretend it is (and my friend believes fully that it is in fact possible). Going faster than the speed of light, I think it would pretty much just be teleportation.