Spacetime Shockwave

[ydoaPs]

I was watching "Star Trek: First Contact", and i got to thinking at the part where they are caught in the "tempporal wake."

 

it got me thinking about wakes made by air. as you approach the speed of sound, you experience violent diamond-shaped shockwaves. such shockwave have destroyed several aircraft, which lead to the beleif in the "sound barrier."

 

perhaps such a thing would happen in space. could time dilation, space contraction, and mass gain be considered drag? maybe going at such high speeds could cause fluctuations in the surrounding spacetime.

 

as one hits the "sound barrier", one experiences a "sonic boom." assuming that we could one day get around not being able to accelerate to the speed of light, would one that reaches c experience an electromagnetic flash?

 

i must not be the first person to travel down this line of thinking, for in star trek, there is a flash when a ship reaches "warp speed." also, they must have thought of the shockwaves too, because i remember an episode of star trek where a ship was passing the "light barrier" and experiences violent shaking. i think that if such waves occur, they would do more than shake the vessel. perhaps instead of being drag, the tiem dilation, ect. is the waves.

 

is it possible, or did i fry my brain again. too much star trek, or is there such a thing as too much star trek. that is a different topic.

[Sayonara]

I would have thought that matter within space that was expanding or contracting would expand/contract with it. Temporal disturbances I am not so sure about

 

As far as the ship shaking in ST:FC goes, I think that was probably supposed to be due to the engines.

[Sorcerer]

Well, considering most of the space occupied by atoms is the elctromagnetic (weak?) force I think that all that expands when space expands is the space between the particles (eg. electron and nucleus).... this would lead to atoms being unable to exist at some point of expansion because the weak force doesn't have a large enough range of influence to capture electrons..... I think the strong force would be lost first, so perhaps hydrogen will survive the longest.

 

I'm not sure what your point on the expansion/contraction of space has to do with the original post though.

 

I think too much star trek.

 

assuming that we could one day get around not being able to accelerate to the speed of light

 

Bad assumption, not wasting my brain speculating.

[ydoaPs]

Bad assumption' date=' not wasting my brain speculating.[/quote']

if the entire world were like you, supersonic flight wouldn't exist. for that matter, powered flight itself wouldn't exist. hell, the majority of science wouldn't exist.

 

i think the shaking i was talking about was in enterprise. the temporal wake just started the thought process.

[[Tycho?]]

Well, no. Nobody ever thought the sound barrier was actually a barrier for anything but a plane. They could shoot bullets and rockets faster than the speed of sound no problem, and were doing so long before building aircraft capapble of such a feat were possible. Its that air flow changes at that speed, which had a tendancy to wreck airplanes.

 

There is no theoretical restrictions on traveling faster than sound. There is however, and extremely large theoretical restriction on travelling at c, such a rediculously large restriction that hypothosizing about it is decidedly tricky, because of all the wierd stuff that would happen, ie the object having infinite mass.

 

The only barrier for the sound... barrier was an engineering one. For c, well, there are lots.

[Aeschylus]

Try Cherenokov radiation:

 

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/CherenkovRadiation.html

[swansont]

Well' date=' considering most of the space occupied by atoms is the elctromagnetic (weak?) force I think that all that expands when space expands is the space between the particles (eg. electron and nucleus)....

[/quote']

 

That's given by the electromagnetic force, which hasn't been changing. The measured limits on the fine structure constant changing are quite small.

[ydoaPs]

could the "shockwaves" be gravity waves?

[Ophiolite]

Bad assumption' date=' not wasting my brain speculating[/quote']

 

if the entire world were like you' date=' supersonic flight wouldn't exist. for that matter, powered flight itself wouldn't exist. hell, the majority of science wouldn't exist.

.[/quote']I think Sorcerer intended you to understand that he would not waste his brain on this specific piece of speculation, not that speculation in general was bad, or that speculation about FTL travel was bad. Mind you, I could be wrong, I'm just speculating. My brain's already wasted.