FASTER THEN LIGHT (FTL)

(how to break the speed of light without breaking the law)

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Lightspeed barrier: SR, intro

Just about everyone who's studied the subject knows that special relativity
forbids the acceleration of a particle up to and beyond lightspeed relative to
an observer. This is supposed to be because the inertial mass of the particle
increases with speed, with the increase becoming significant as the speed
becomes "relativistic". As the object's speed approaches c (says the argument),
the mass of the object tends to infinity, so it would take an infinite amount of
energy to take a particle all the way up to lightspeed. Actually, when you look
at the initial postulates of SR, they pretty much presuppose that FTL travel
doesn't happen.

That's the argument, anyway.

But because SR introduces so many redefinitions, it is actually possible to

break the famous "lightspeed barrier" in Newtonian terms without explicitly
breaking any SR laws, and to invoke gravitational or acceleration "distortion"
effects as an explanation of how a hypothetical FTL object needn't overtake its
own wavefront.
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EASY STUFF:

(1): Playing galactic hopscotch, and travelling between multiple inertial frames
provides a way of achieving (Newtonian) FTL with respect to your startpoint.
When multiple intermediate frames are involved, SR helpfully responds by
reinterpreting (Newtonian) FTL speeds as being subluminal. To generate those
intermediate frames, all you have to do is accelerate (the SR derivation didn't
claim validity for accelerating frames, remember?).

(2): "Newtonian" FTL ... - if we didn't know any better, and just slammed our
foot down on the accelerator and broke lightspeed, would the folks back home
ever know about it? Apparently not, because the "naughty bit" of our journey
would again be obscured behind an event horizon. So does (observerspace) SR just
describe a lightspeed barrier to observability, rather than what really happens?
Is the lightspeed barrier purely an "observerspace" thing? Of course, under GR,
acceleration is equivalent to the effect of a gravitational field ...

(3): Gravitational freefall into a black hole - is an example of "legal" FTL

travel. However, (a) SR ignores gravity, and (b) the FTL part of a particle's
fall allegedly can't be seen by a distant observer anyway. So there's still no
direct SR contradiction.

(4): Particle accelerators (on the other hand) are a perfect example of the sort
of closed-path observerspace situation that the SR lightspeed limit is likely to
be valid for - our last hypothetical example could probably not be brought about
using a solar sail and a home-based particle beam. But it's hardly surprising
that "dumb" particles never achieve FTL with respect to the coils that are
accelerating them, because at recessional lightspeed, you wouldn't necessarily
expect the accelerating signal to be able to catch up with the particle to make
it go any faster (think about it).

(5): Propulsion systems - some types are definitely subject to an SR-type upper
limit. Others may not be.
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MORE ADVANCED STUFF:

(6): Time-dilation factors and length-contractions further complicate FTL

problems under SR. It seems that some SR effects aren't testable, as a matter of
principle, unless you introduce those illegal accelerations again.
(7): Spectral shift arguments under SR predict an infinite forward blueshift for
an object travelling at lightspeed, which seems to rule out any higher relative
speeds. However, because SR contracts distances (at lightspeed) to zero, this
maximum displacement per unit time, when calculated using non-contracted
distances, actually corresponds to an infinite speed in Newtonian terms. End of
problem - it seems that "speed" under SR isn't necessarily the same as "speed"
under Newtonian mechanics.

(8): Probe chain theory - is the logical consequence of any theory that includes
velocity addition formulae. The formula says that it's possible to view an
object receding with any speed whatsoever, as long as the light passes through
enough intermediate inertial frames for the recession velocity between pairs of
adjacent frames to be less than c. That means that FTL signaling (in one sense)
ought to be possible, because the probe chain provides an accelerating path for
the signal. Most physicists won't like this, but it appears to be an inescapable
consequence of the SR math - so hey, don't blame me, guys, this is a side effect
of your theory. I'm just the bearer of bad news - this situation ought to have
been sorted out decades ago. See also the "magic window" problem. * 9: Who said
space has to be flat? - As the SR flat-space assumption fails for acceleration
and gravitation, and also seems to fail in multi-body inertial systems, and in
two-body inertial systems when you consider the gravitational effects of kinetic
energy at high speeds, then why should we believe that it holds for any
situation where v>0?

Conclusions

The SR lightspeed barrier limits the recession speed that an observer can
directly induce in a particle, and it limits the speeds achievable in a single
simple explosion, but it doesn't seem to limit the speeds that a particle can
accelerate to, provided that the particle itself is providing the energy. FTL
might still not be practical - if you get hit in the eye by a bit of grit
travelling at 300,000 km/s, it could ruin your whole day - but the current
arguments against it seem to evaporate when you stick them under a microscope.
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What was all the fuss about? Summing up

So, we find that the SR lightspeed barrier, in the sense that it is usually
portrayed, might not really exist other than in an observerspace projection. It
might just be an arbitrary "mapping" artifact with no physical existence beyond
an individual observer's situation, like the Earth's horizon.

The "infinite mass" argument is an observer-effect, particle accelerator

arguments don't necessarily apply to situations where objects have their own
propulsion systems, the SR description is compatible with "deduced" FTL
recession hidden behind an event horizon, and the sort of behavior this gives is
already accepted by mainstream physics, as happening when something falls into a
black hole, and FTL Newtonian approach velocities also seem to map to subluminal
velocities under SR, there's no contradiction there, either.

Gravitational and acceleration arguments seem to say that FTL is legal, but are
outside SR's jurisdiction, and SR ignores gravitational effects that occur under
GR, despite the fact that GR is supposed to reduce to SR for constant-velocity
motion. Given that kinetic energy (under GR) has gravitational effects, there's
no way you can guarantee that any GR inertial system can be described in a flat-
space theory. Reinterpreting Lorentz shift as gravitational destroys the SR
propagation model, and means that there are lightspeed gradients between
components of inertial systems.

It only appears impossible for a particle to be emitted at >c, because the

coupling-efficiency of applied radiation drops to zero for c-receding objects. A
conventional rocket can't expel gases at FTL speeds (relative to itself), but
that doesn't necessarily mean that by continuing to expel gases at subluminal
speeds (relative to itself), it can't eventually achieve a speed relative to its
start-point that is significantly higher than the speed of the expelled
propellant.

In short, the SR lightspeed barrier is based on a flat propagation model that

has no convincing evidence in its favor, that fails in almost every situation
that it is applied to, and which (if we accept the equivalence principles of GR)
can't be correct, anyway.

That's not to say that there might not be other factors that would make faster-
than-light travel impractical, but you won't find those other factors by
studying SR

So, we might not be able to achieve useful FTL travel after all, but if we do
manage it, at least we'll be able to use a probe chain get a message back to the
folks at home.

Black hole bungee - jumping, anyone?

'Treason never prospers'; And, aye, there's a reason For if it doth prosper,
none dare call it treason ...

old English proverb, Anon

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Notes

Some of the terms used have slightly different meanings on different pages. The
language of physics is still quite crude in a number of ways, and doesn't always
have different words for similar things (for instance, most physicists are happy
to talk about "the Doppler formula", but don't have words to distinguish between
the different variants, which is why I had to make up the eDoppler/oDoppler
terminology). I once sat down and tried to see how many definitions there were
for "mass", and ended up with about fifty, some of which normally coincided,
some of which didn't.

"Lightspeed" is another extremely slippery word.

In these pages, "faster than light" or "FTL" is used in the sense that it us
usually used in "spaceship" questions, where what you actually want to know is
how quickly one can travel between two agreed coordinates (such as two cities,
or planets). In this context, expressing the velocity in terms of a redefined
distance isn't particularly helpful, and neither is redefining speeds in terms
of the deduced local value of c in the moving observer's frame. I'm not
suggesting that a spaceship can overtake its own lightsignal, because I'm not
accepting the (unverified) SR assumption that lightspeed is anything other than
locally constant.
 (1): Galactic Hopscotch
(island - hopping taken to extremes)
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Playing galactic hopscotch

Let's suppose that a galaxy is receding from you at 0.6 lightspeed, and a second
galaxy is receding from you at 0.6c in the opposite direction. The combined
(Newtonian) recession velocity is 1.2c. Can a spaceship leave one galaxy and
reach the other?

Let's try it. A spaceship leaves galaxy A at 0.9c and heads blindly in the
direction of the other. After a lot of time, it decelerates a bit, and finds
itself at the mid-point of the two galaxies, with each receding at the same
speed of 0.6c. With the engines off, it is now sitting "stationary", with the
two galaxies A and B each receding at 0.6c in opposite directions, just like we
were in the first paragraph. So far it hasn't broken lightspeed, and everything
is legal.

Now comes the fun bit.

Since it has managed to get to its present position from its home galaxy (A), it
must be able to get back again - after all, this only requires it to travel for
a long enough time at less than lightspeed.
No problem.

However, there is no real difference between firing up the engines to go home,

and expending the same amount of fuel to go on to galaxy B. A and B are now
equally reachable. In fact, if the ship's crew spin the ship around enough
times, while they try to make up their minds, and forgot to make adequate notes
on their outward journey, they might lose track of which galaxy, A or B, they
actually came from!

So, let's suppose that by accident or design, the crew end up heading for B.
Eventually, they get there. They have now managed to accelerate (in two stages)
up to a Newtonian speed of 1.2c with respect to their home planet, again,
without breaking any SR laws.

How did they do that?

Well, basically, the problem is one of definitions.

If an object is receding at a certain Newtonian speed, then the (directly -

observed) recession speed under SR has a particular value. However, the moment
that light from a receding object is passed via a third intermediate frame, SR
chooses to reinterpret the total velocity as being less than the sum of the two
halves - the "supposed" velocity of the object actually depends on the
characteristics of the light-path (see SR velocity-addition formula, magic
window problem).

So - an object (or inertial frame) can be receding at up to 2c, and you can
still reach it, simply by going via a third intermediate object (or inertial
frame), which is used as a sort of staging post. In fact, the test particle can
have any recession velocity whatsoever, provided that it uses enough
intermediate frames. There's actually no upper limit at all. Any combination of
velocities that are each less than c add together (under SR) to a total velocity
that is also less than c, so with enough intermediate frames, SR can take any
recession velocity whatsoever and redefine it as being conveniently less than
lightspeed.

So - what constitutes an intermediate frame?

Well, if you want to send a light-signal, it could be a physical object (see

probe chains), but if you were sending a physical object, the intermediate
inertial frames could be supplied by the object itself, simply by turning the
engine on and off to create inertial "coasting phases" between bursts of
acceleration.

The next logical step is to conclude that even the coasting phases are
unnecessary - all the ship would have to do is leave the engines on.
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How the heck can this possibly make sense?

Special relativity is based on the assumption of flat space and observed

reality. Any object receding at greater than c can't be directly observed within
flat space, and therefore can't (normally) exist within the theory. A
hypothetical object receding at greater than c couldn't be hit by a ballistic
object launched by the observer at less than lightspeed, so (since an object
can't be accelerated by the observer to greater than c), the logical assumption
is that speeds >c aren't achievable.

The critical weaknesses in this argument concerns acceleration. Einstein's SR is

purely "ballistic", and deals with constant velocity intervals between pairs of
inertial frames. It Doesn't Do Acceleration (remember this, it's critical).

If you wanted to be shot out of the mouth of a Jules Verne -type cannon at >c
then you'd probably be disappointed, but if you were launched in a rocket at
less than c, and kept accelerating then special relativity would obligingly keep
reinterpreting your final velocity as being less than c, whatever its value in
Newtonian terms.

The velocity-addition formula is SR's greatest get-out clause.

Just put your foot on the accelerator and keep it there.

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Notes: the SR lightspeed limit does not hold across multiple frames.

"Ballistic" arguments have traditionally been a weak point for physics theories.
The aeronautical equivalent would be saying that it is impossible to construct a
simple craft capable of flying from London to New York, because in order to
complete the journey, the initial speed of the craft (when launched from a gun)
would have to be so fast that it would burn up in the atmosphere. You can get
around the argument by deciding to continually apply thrust, instead of
expending all your energy in one initial blast.

Another ballistic argument once "proved" that it was impossible to launch a

payload into space with a liquid-fuelled rocket, because the fuel tanks, etc.,
would always be too heavy to get the rocket all the way up. That line of
reasoning evaporated when someone thought of launching rockets from the top of
other rockets (multi-stage launchers like the Saturn V).
 (2): What happens if you try it?
(in which a craft breaks the lightspeed barrier,
and the folks back home are none the wiser)
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What the heck, full speed ahead?

The last section showed how the SR velocity-addition formula allows an object to
achieve a Newtonian recession speed greater than c relative to its start
position, provided that it undergoes acceleration and that the accelerative
force doesn't originate from its startpoint.

How is this explained? Quite simply. According to SR, you can't just add two
velocities together using standard addition, you have to use a special velocity
addition formula. When an object recedes at 0.5c, SR says that its directly -
observed frequency is multiplied by a factor of 0.577... If it recedes at
lightspeed, the frequency drops to zero. But if a signal is fed through two
stages, each with a recession velocity of 0.5c, then the observed frequency of
the furthest object (receding at lightspeed) only drops to (0.577..)², or
0.3333', rather than zero (which you'd normally expect for lightspeed recession
under SR). The standard SR rules simply don't work the same way when
intermediate frames are concerned - an object with a particular supposed
recession speed could be "legal" or "illegal", simply depending on whether or
not you looked at it through a moving sheet of glass (the "magic window"
argument). That's difficult to reconcile with SR's model of simple flat space
whose light-carrying properties are unaffected by the presence of objects with
constant relative motion - it implies that there is a much more subtle set of
effects in action than the simple SR lightspeed limit would have us believe.

The SR velocity-addition formula simply takes the way that composite shifts
deviate from the SR shift law, and works backwards to generate a new velocity
value that would generate the same result, were the object being directly
observed, instead. When you multiply two f'/f shifts that are each greater than
zero, the result is (obviously) still greater than zero. So, under SR, when you
multiply to shifts each caused by a recession velocity less than c, the combined
f'/f shift also never reaches zero (as it would be expected to at recessional
lightspeed), and the resulting SR velocity is therefore deemed to be less than
lightspeed as a matter of principle. Where the SR velocity/shift law fails for
composite shifts, SR simply redefines the velocity from the shift value so that
it doesn't fail.

This remapping is, of course, totally arbitrary, and lets us bring any
superluminal velocity down to less than c without changing what the object is
really doing. It's a way of imposing a lightspeed barrier on paper by redefining
any composite shift to be less than c, provided that a signal can cross the
intervening distance, courtesy of an intervening "carrier frame" (see probe
chains). So although SR says that nothing can travel faster than lightspeed, it
also says that every velocity greater than c can be re-interpreted as being less
than c, provided that there is are enough intermediate frames for a signal to
pass through.

That's why that galaxy-hopping example worked. We know that the total velocity
is 1.2c, but SR decides to call it 0.88..c instead, so that it doesn't break the
notional SR lightspeed limit when the ship crosses from frame A to frame B. The
ship's own 2-stage acceleration provides the intermediate frame necessary to
justify the application of the velocity-addition formula. (NB: this value was
calculated under SR from two instantaneous velocity-changes each of 0.6c, the
total figure reduces further when more intermediate frames are involved)

So, is the SR c-barrier a pointless fiction?

Not quite. To understand what's going on, you have to remember that SR is a
theory that describes observerspace, that is, it describes phenomena as they
appear to happen. The addition of the extra frames does make the object seem to
be receding at a slower speed, if speed is judged from the SR shift formula, so
under SR, that speed reduction is deemed to be genuine. Now, if we suppose that
the spaceship in our last example accelerates smoothly up to 1.2c without taking
a mid-flight break, then what would the back-home observer see? Let's try an
alternative interpretation of the observed phenomena:

- They see the ship to be progressively time-dilated as it approached recession

lightspeed, and as the ship is seen to approach the point in space at which c-
recession would actually be achieved (the "c-point"), the ship's clock appears
to be ticking so slowly that it effectively seems to stop. In our hypothetical
situation, the ship would actually whizz pass this space-coordinate at midnight,
ship-time, an indicator light would come on in the ship's cabin, and the crew
would have a bloody good party to celebrate. Back home, though, the ship would
never be seen to pass the c-point coordinate, and would eventually seem to be
hanging in space, ridiculously redshifted, always gaining on the coordinate but
never quite reaching it, the hands on the clock never quite reaching the twelve
o'clock position. The party would never be seen to happen, and the home
astronomers might sorrowfully conclude that the unfortunate traveler’s fate was
to be frozen there until the end of time.

Nothing that happened to the ship after it crossed the-point would ever be seen
to happen, back home.

"See?", one of the astronomers might shout angrily at the others, "I told you
that FTL travel was impossible!"
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Conclusions:

Because SR is an observerspace theory, what it actually says is that lightspeed

recession can never be observed to happen, i.e., that this phenomenon can never
happen within observerspace. Our example described the ship happily accelerating
beyond c, but everything that happened after the ship reached c-recession was
shielded from the home observer by an event horizon, so the home astronomers saw
exactly the same things that they expected under SR, even though something else
was "really" happening. The fact that SR forbids FTL recession isn't
automatically evidence that such behavior can't happen. The observed classes of
effects are the same, either way.

This talk of event horizons may have raised some eyebrows. Aren't event horizons
strictly a "black hole" thing, i.e. a gravitational effect?

Yes and no. Read on ...

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Notes: the SR lightspeed barrier fails for situations involving accelerations.

The observed-clock-stopping of the ship assumes, of course, that the ship isn't
being observed through any intermediate frames. If the ship's crew threw a
series of champagne-glasses out of the window as it accelerated, then if you
looked at the ship through this expanding trail of garbage (or through the
ship's exhaust plume), then the same SR velocity-addition law that made us
suspect that this hypothetical FTL behavior was possible in the first place
would also conspire to make the ship visible beyond the c-point, and to redefine
this "visible" velocity to less than c. Which would mean that the ship's
behavior wasn't illegal after all (!).

It turns out that the ship's recession velocity is only illegal if you can't see
it, and if you can't see it, then it isn't dealt with by SR. It seems that
whenever you try to break the SR law, SR either ignores your existence or
forgives you completely.
 (3): Using gravitational gradients to break lightspeed
(in which a ship's crew decides to jump into a black hole, just for fun)
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Using existing gravitational gradients.

In the last section, we described the observed effects of a hypothetical object

smoothly accelerating up to a speed greater than c, and appearing (to the home
observers) never to actually reach lightspeed. Although we showed that this sort
of acceleration could be consistent with the observed effects predicted by SR,
we didn't make any attempt to explain how the acceleration was achieved. It
certainly couldn't be achieved by the use of a solar sail and a home-based
laser, because this acceleration would still suffer a decrease in efficiency at
relativistically - significant velocities.

So - is there any known force that might be capable of generating this sort of
acceleration?

Yup. It's called gravity.

Let's repeat the last hypothetical experiment, but this time, the ship isn't
powered by some "magical" engine, but is simply falling directly away from the
observers, into a black hole.

As the ship drifts towards the hole, it picks up speed, slowly at first, and
then as it comes more under the influence of the hole's gravitational field,
more and more quickly. The ship undergoes a smooth acceleration away from the
observer, as before, and once again, the home observers see the ship to be
progressively more time-dilated as it accelerates (and falls into the hole's
gravitational well).

Again, the ship's journey has been calculated so that the recession velocity
ought to hit lightspeed at exactly midnight (ship's time), and the relevant
space-coordinate where this is expected to happen has been marked out on the
map. This c-point is the point at which the escape velocity of the gravitational
field equals that of light - in other words, it lies at a distance from the
centre of the hole corresponding to the hole's Schwarzchild radius - the c-point
is at the hole's event horizon.

Again, the (not terribly bright) crew celebrate the chiming of midnight on the
ship's chronometer with the popping of champagne corks, and a radio message
broadcast back home, "We did it!".

Again, the home-based astronomers monitor the ship approaching the c-point, and
see the ship's clock grinding to a halt as its hands approach the twelve o'clock
position. Again, they never see the wild party, they never get the jubilant
message, and they never see the craft ever reaching the coordinates that signal
its achievement of recessional lightspeed. The craft appears frozen in time and
space, hovering impossibly at the event horizon, with its signal (corresponding
to the last few seconds before midnight), stretched out to infinity.

In both the "gravitational" and "powered acceleration" cases, the ship is never
seen to reach lightspeed. However, in the "gravitational" case, this observed
effect (of the ship hanging forever at the edge of the black hole event horizon)
is considered to be an artificial illusion. Nobody (says the current prevailing
wisdom) would actually be dumb enough to believe that the craft is really stuck
at the event horizon, would they? Surely anyone with a brain would realize that
there's no reason for the craft not to continue its fall, and that the stopped
clock is simply an observer-related effect caused by the properties of signals
leaving the craft?

Perhaps. However, the treatment of the observed clock-stopping as "real" in a

way that goes beyond the observerspace definition of the word, is exactly how
most SR people treat the first example.
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Conclusions:

The first "fantasy" example of a ship accelerating up to and beyond lightspeed

has a near equivalent in the behavior of an object free falling into a black
hole. In both cases, an event horizon prevents the observer from seeing any
hypothetical FTL behavior that would be expected to occur beyond the c-point.

In the case of a black hole, the unseen FTL behavior is considered to be a

genuine effect, and the lightspeed barrier is considered to be an illusory by-
product of the event horizon (the mathematical surface around a black hole at
which infalling matter is expected to achieve lightspeed relative to a distant
outside universe).

In the case of "powered acceleration", the same behavior is interpreted

differently, the clock-stopping is considered to be "real", and the acceleration
to superluminal velocities is therefore deemed "really" not to happen. However,
there seems to be no real reason why the same "black hole" logic can't also be
applied to the SR lightspeed barrier.

But surely we know that the lightspeed barrier is genuine where gravity is not a
factor? Don't particle accelerator experiments show this?

This is dealt with in the next section ...

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Notes: The SR lightspeed barrier doesn't apply when gravitation (warpage of

space) is a factor.

1. The black hole example is an obvious case of objects having FTL velocities in
modern cosmology. Another is the case of Hubble recession, where the
"natural" recession speed of objects increases with distance, and has no
upper limit other than the extent of the universe (this is the reason why the
two galaxies in the "galaxy-hopping" example were allowed to have FTL
recession velocities in the first place). Both examples involve the
distortion of space, either through explicit gravitation (black hole) or
large-scale curvature (Hubble recession&shift), so the SR "flat-space" model
is incapable of dealing with them, just as it wasn't able to properly cope
with the acceleration example (acceleration warps space, too). According to
the (non-standard) DMS model, even constant-velocity motion warps space, with
the Lorentz correction under SR producing an approximation of the effect. And
since SR predicts the kinetic energy of an object becoming significant at
relativistic speeds, then according to GR, this energy has a gravitational
effect. If the effect is the Lorentz effect, then the SR flatspace model is
wrong, and there's velocity-dependent curvature (gravitational effects). If
it isn't the Lorentz effect, then the SR shift formula just isn't accurate at
speeds approaching c. It's a good rule of thumb that whenever you come across
an example where you'd expect FTL behavior to occur, SR has a good excuse to
stop working.

2. Under gravitational freefall, the ship can achieve FTL with respect to an
external observer, but it doesn't overtake its own lightsignal.
 (4): Particle accelerator behavior
(if something runs away faster than a speeding bullet,
you can't shoot it)
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Particle accelerators

The SR argument for mass-dilation in particle accelerators seems to go something

like this:

1. In the frame of the particle accelerator, the accelerating signal travels at

c, so it can't catch up with a particle that is already receding at
lightspeed. If the particle's resistance to the force of the beam is taken as
a measure of its inertial mass, then the fact that the particle is unaffected
by the beam would tend to lead to the conclusion that the particle has
infinite mass.

2. In the frame of the particle, the beam is also supposed to travel at c, so it

does catch up with the particle (under SR, the beam is always supposed to
travel with fixed speed relative to any given observer). This apparently-
paradoxical result actually generates the same final result, because the
particle (under SR) will see the accelerator coils to be receding at
lightspeed, and therefore to be "clock stopped" (through inertial mass
dilation), so the particle again has zero interaction with the beam, but this
time the zero energy of interaction is reasoned to be caused by the "zero"
frequency of the current in the coil, rather than because of propagation
factors.

So, under SR, the deduced behavior of the beam is different for different
observers, but the final observed effects are consistent in each case. This
sleight-of-hand is both a weakness and a strength of SR - it provides a way of
allowing any observer to reason that lightspeed is everywhere constant with
reference to their own frame, at the expense of postulating an additional shift
mechanism that is supposed to be separate from propagation factors as a matter
of principle, but whose separate existence is (by the same principle) always
going to be experimentally unverifiable if the theory is correct.

As the accelerator result can be arrived at by either a Lorentz shift or by a

purely propagation effect, or indeed by a range of intermediate solutions, or by
a propagation effect that includes the Lorentz shift as a gravitational
distortion effect, this behavior can't be taken as ironclad evidence that SR's
predictions in other related areas are necessarily going to be correct when
taken out of their (flat-space, observerspace) context. The DMS model discussed
elsewhere on this site (for instance) also generates a similar effect in
particle accelerators, but doesn't preclude FTL travel in the wider sense of the
word. A similar situation occurs with a range of gravitational theories.

In other words, SR supports one unverifiable assumption (global lightspeed

constancy for all observers) by introducing a second (separation of motion
shifts into propagation and Lorentz components), and then hedges those
assumptions with a range of other techniques (like clock synchronization
methods) whose purpose is to make sure that certain other interlinked properties
of the theory are also unverifiable.
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Conclusions

Particle accelerators do provide a special case situation where the "infinite

inertial mass at recessional lightspeed" argument appears to hold. However, this
effect can be calculated from straightforward propagation arguments, i.e. you
wouldn't necessarily expect an EM pulse to be able to transfer energy to a
particle that it wasn't supposed to be able to catch up with, so the observed
mass of the particle when receding at lightspeed would normally be expected to
appear to be infinite in this class of test, in a wide range of models, simply
because of propagation issues. In the case of force applied by the observer,
you'd expect observerspace arguments to hold.

In other cases, the effect is less clear-cut. You can't just extrapolate the
particle accelerator results to different classes of experiment, and assume that
you'll get the same behavior.

Those particle accelerator tests don't tell us whether this upper limit also
applies to situations where it isn't the observer that is supplying the
accelerating force, e.g. particle anchored to distant object by long rubber
band, particle fitted with own propulsion unit, particle attracted to distant
gravitational body. In the last of these cases (gravitational acceleration), we
don't believe that the SR limit holds, and GR's equivalence principle between
gravitational and non-gravitational acceleration effects rather implies that
this breakdown may bleed through to the other "acceleration" cases, too (there
may be other complicating factors).

We have little evidence that the c-limit is a practical upper bound in anything
other than purely observerspace situations (force applied from observer's
frame), and we still don't know whether the lightspeed upper limit applies to
craft with simple rocket motors.
_________________________________________________________________

Notes: The SR lightspeed barrier might not apply outside particle-accelerator

-type situations.

In order to evaluate whether the inertial mass is increasing in a wider sense,

resistance to applied acceleration isn't terribly useful. Resistance to applied
relative deceleration (i.e. electromagnetic braking efficiency) might be a more
meaningful test. I haven't heard of anyone carrying out this sort of test, but I
haven't (yet) looked terribly hard. Rumblings from particle accelerator people
that SR mass-dilation is an "old-fashioned" idea are interesting - it implies
that there may be classes of particle accelerator tests that produce non-SR
results in this area. Could this data deal with blueshift/deceleration stuff,
the region where SR and Doppler diverge? Will try to get someone to talk ...
 (5): Propulsion systems

Hypothetical "inertial drives" (aka "gravity drives"), which work by generating

a gravitational gradient in a particular direction, and allowing the craft to
"free-fall" in that direction, are allegedly not subject to a lightspeed limit
under GR. Unfortunately, most of them depend on "exotic matter", which we have
no reason to believe exists. Inertial drives based on DST's may also be
possible, but are probably subject to the same high-speed efficiency drop that
affects particle accelerators. Conventional propulsion units don't seem to be
affected.
a) "Exotic matter" inertial drives:

"Exotic matter" drives are dealt with rather well in "The Renaissance of General
Relativity" by Clifford M.Will (Published in "The New Physics", ed. Paul
Davies). Exotic matter is a purely-hypothetical form of matter with negative
gravity (there are reasons to suppose that it doesn't exist). What is
interesting about the subject (in this context) is that a hypothetical gravity
drive constructed from a combination of "exotic" and "normal" matter would
(allegedly, under GR) not be affected by the lightspeed limit (M. Alcubierre
published another variation on the ematter drive a couple of years ago). I'm
really not convinced about this "exotic matter" stuff, but there are other
possible ways of constructing inertial drives, and if GR officially puts no
upper limit on the speeds attainable by an ematter drive, there's a faint chance
that this might also apply to the other categories.

b) DST inertial drives:

DST's will be dealt with in a future document.

However, on a brief examination it seems that although DST's do seem to have a

lot of nice properties, I'd guess that an ability to avoid "particle
accelerator" syndrome isn't likely to be one of them. I doubt that a
hypothetical DST engine would be capable of taking you past (or even up to)
environmental lightspeed, although it might be useful for braking. I might well
be wrong on this one, though.

c) Remote-powered drives

One of the smart ideas that has become popular recently is the idea of building
a very small, very low-mass probe, fitting it with a lightweight "solar sail",
and then accelerating it up to god-knows-what speed by beaming energy at the
sail from a remote site. The BIG advantage of this method is that you
effectively leave your engine at home - a probe weighing a few pounds (plus
sail) would then be able to get the full benefit of a particle-
beam/laser/whatever apparatus weighing possibly several hundred tons, with
having to bring it along. Not only is (almost) all the utilizable power going
into accelerating the payload (plus sail), but you get to keep the engine! Thus
a single "driver" could be situated at a handy site, close to its fuel supply,
and reused over and over again on a succession of lightweight probes.

Unfortunately, this (or any other remote-powered drive system) would seem to be
limited by the lightspeed barrier. <sudden thought> ...unless you stacked a
chain of them, and powered the whole chain by a single "fixed" driver? Hmmm...

For the purpose of this exercise, I’m not classing "nuclear bomb" drives (where
you throw a nuclear device out of the back of the craft, and ride the shockwave,
then repeat the exercise indefinitely) as "remote powered", but as
"conventional" (technically, the initial blast is "remote", the rest aren't).

d) Conventional propulsion systems

This one is the big surprise.

It seems that your common-or-garden sacrificial-propellant rocket motor might

not necessarily be governed by the SR lightspeed limit.
Let's suppose that you take a lump of matter, divide it into two halves, and set
off a nuclear explosion (or something), causing the two halves to fly away from
each other at 0.5c. Then you take one of the two pieces (travelling at 0.25c wrt
the immediate environment), and repeat the exercise, blowing it apart so that
the two pieces (quarters) again recede at 0.5c to each other. One piece is now
stationary wrt the immediate environs, the other (according to Newtonian
mechanics) is travelling at half lightspeed. Now keep repeating the exercise
with the "fast" piece. Under Newtonian laws, this (terribly inefficient) method
of propulsion would end up accelerating a tiny part of the total mass up to and
beyond lightspeed.

Interestingly, this Newtonian simplification doesn't seem to be quite illegal -

the fact that we aren't trying to achieve lightspeed in a single step means that
the usual SR prohibition of FTL behavior doesn't hold - all those intermediate
steps mean that the final (deduced, superluminal) velocity is helpfully
reinterpreted by the SR velocity-addition law as being less than c, provided
that the separation velocity of each division is also less than c (which it is).
A signal could still be passed along the expanding chain of "propellant" pieces,
from end to end, even if the two ends had a Newtonian recession velocity greater
than c, so in that sense, the speed of light hasn't been exceeded, and the
situation appears SR-legal.

SR prohibits the separation-velocity caused by any single explosion being

greater than lightspeed and it appears to predict a loss in propulsive
efficiency per explosion, compared to the Newtonian model. It also prohibits the
home-based observer from being able to directly observe the lightspeed barrier
being broken - to them, each explosion would have a progressively smaller
result, until, close to lightspeed, the observed effect of each explosion would
be minimal, and the interval between explosion would eventually become so long,
that the explosion that would be expected to take the payload past lightspeed
would never be seen to happen. But we've already shown that this sort of
observed behavior doesn't necessarily mean that the payload wouldn't be happily
accelerating past recession lightspeed, unobserved - it could be reinterpreted
as the effect of a non-SR light-propagation model on an accelerating object (see
black hole example). We just don't know. A second observer, in front of the
accelerating payload might see a rather different result. *note

Unlike inertial drives, the characteristics of two pieces immediately prior to

an explosion, measured within their initial frame, are supposedly independent of
the motion of the background (frame-invariance), and the acceleration forces on
each half, and the final speeds ought therefore to be symmetrical about the
initial center of the piece. According to current theory, both the payload and
the propellant pieces would be similarly mass-dilated before an explosion, which
leads us to expect that both pieces would fly off at identical speeds relative
to the "rest frame" that they had just before to the explosion. There are some
problems with this, because the two pieces would be expected to have different
amounts of mass-dilation after the explosion, depending on their relative
velocities to the environment, but accepting this seems to lead to a breaking of
the principle of the equivalence of inertial frames, so the effect _might_ be
another observer-specific thang.

Under Einstein's definitions, the SR model fails when applied to smooth

acceleration (except as a rule-of-thumb approximation where the amount of
acceleration is minimal), and when the acceleration is taken in a series of
quantified steps (e.g. explosions), the SR velocity-addition formula cuts in to
make sure that any Newtonian superluminal velocity that _might_ be presumed to
occur is quickly redefined away as being subluminal, as a matter of principle.
Either way, Newtonian FTL does not seem to be prohibited, except as the result
of a _single_ explosion, whose separation speed would then be limited by the
speed of radiation in that frame (c).
________________________________________________________________________________
Notes: While an SR-type lightspeed barrier might affect some types of
propulsion, others might be immune.

For an explanation of indirect viewing and the significance of the SR velocity-

addition formula's reduction of summed velocities that would normally equal >c
to less than that of light, see the section on probe chains.
 (6): Time-dilation issues
(in which special relativity manages to predict exactly the same sort of
observed t-d effects as Newtonian FTL, but with a different interpretation)
________________________________________________________________________________

Time-dilation

Let's try describing the event horizon argument of section 2 in another way.

A manned spaceship equipped with a rocket pack theoretically capable of taking

it up to superluminal speeds according to Newtonian mechanics is launched, and
the stay-at-home observer sees the object ageing more and more slowly, and
finally grinding almost to a halt at the c-point. How do we tell if the clock
slowing is just an illusion?

Let’s consider the situation from the pilot's viewpoint.

The "naive" Newtonian prediction: The ship leaves earth and fires up its
engines, expending so much energy that it reaches a superluminal speed. It then
crosses a distance of one lightyear in less than a year. This is verified by the
ship's log, and observations made en-route.

The "modern" SR prediction: The ship leaves earth and fires up its engines,
expending enough energy to bring it up to superluminal speeds in a Newtonian
model. However, we "know" that mass-dilation becomes significant at high speeds,
so we can deduce that the speed never actually reaches c, and the journey
therefore takes more than a year. However, the mass-dilation effect also slows
the ship's chronometers (and all biological processes) by the same amount, with
the result that the journey appears to take less than a year, ship-time.
However, the uncomfortable fact is that while SR is supposed to make FTL travel
impossible, the pilot onboard the ship simply doesn't see the c-limit operating,
and the ship's crew think that they've traveled to their destination at an FTL
velocity, as planned.

In the second example, how do we persuade the crew that they are wrong?

This is where SR pulls another trick. Because the shipboard observers see their
journey to take so little time that it must have taken place at FTL speeds, and
because their own time-dilation can't be considered to be real in their frame,
SR alters the only remaining parameter. It alters the length of the journey.
"There!", says the onboard theoretician to a skeptical crew, "The journey didn't
take less than a year due to our travelling at FTL speeds, or to time-dilation -
it took less than a year because the entire outside universe contracted along
our direction of motion. So when we passed all those marker beacons at 1000km
intervals, they weren't really 1000km apart - they were closer together. And
when we saw the entire outside universe -- stars, planets, etc -- whizzing past
at more than 300,000 km/s, those weren't _real_ km, because they were moving!
It's just that the entire outside universe sneakily conspired to make it look as
if we were travelling at more than c - we weren't really. It was all an
illusion!"

At this point, the theorist would probably be thrown out of the airlock without
a suit.

As the theoretician is bundled into the airlock, he makes one last plea for
understanding.

"I can prove it!" If we turn the ship around and head back for home, the fact
that we've been moving relative to our environment will mean that our
chronometers will show less time to have elapsed than the ones back on earth.

The captain thinks. "But shouldn't _we_ see _their_ chronometers to be slow?"

"No - because they weren't really moving - we were!" *

<The airlock bolt is drawn back.>

"Look, ok, I know that that contradicts SR, but the difference is because of
environmental factors - we are interacting differently with our environment"

"You mean, gravitationally? Because I thought gravitation or privileged frames

invalidated SR..."

<click>

"No - wait! It's possible to set up a symmetrical experiment with two ships, so
that the environmental factors cancel out!"

"And then, does one clock end up slower than the other?"

"Actually no, there's an extra 'relative acceleration' blueshift that cancels

out the timelag when the two ships turn round. In a symmetrical test, both sets
of clocks agree at the end of the experiment." **

<click>

"And I suppose that extra blueshift isn't compatible with the SR model, but it's
deduced to happen every time we accelerate towards something? And there's no way
we can head home to check out your claim without accelerating towards it and
invalidating SR anyway? So we just have to take your word that this SR effect
exists, because you say there's no real way to verify it without violating the
SR rules? And the human race abandoned the idea of FTL travel for a century,
because people _believed_ this stuff?"

"Er..."

<clikWHOOOOSHHHHHHH>
________________________________________________________________________________

Notes

a) Not a particularly credible argument under SR, which denies the existence of
absolute motion. Still, it crops up in at least one textbook on SR.
Apparently, this "extra SR" acceleration blueshift formula is given in MTW's
"Gravitation", even though it's incompatible with the basic SR model. I haven't
been able to check this, though, because nobody in the UK has the book in stock
- it's currently between reprintings (23-03-96).
 (7) Spectral shifts
(redshifts aren't a problem,
blueshifts require a bit more head-scratching)
________________________________________________________________________________

Redshifts

As we've seen clock-stopping at recessional lightspeed is a feature of a range

of propagation models, some of which seem to allow FTL behavior. It's not unique
to flat-space SR (see event horizons). Irrespective of how much redshift you see
in a receding object, SR will always deem the velocity to be less than c.
________________________________________________________________________________

Blueshifts

It is natural to assume that an object approaching at lightspeed rides its own

wavefront, and therefore appears to have an infinitely short wavelength. This is
a feature of the SR propagation model, and seems at first sight to be an
unavoidable consequence of the theory. A further increase in speed would
therefore be expected to result in the object overtaking its own light, with the
corresponding "tachyonic" difficulties.

However, let's now go back to that last "spaceship" example, where a ship
managed to cross a one light-year distance in less than a year of ship's time,
without violating SR (although it appeared to the "ignorant" ship's crew that
they'd broken the lightspeed barrier). That example was justified (under SR) by
a contraction of the spaceship's path, and a redefinition of the ship's speed to
less than c. Wouldn't this "Newtonian" FTL lead to the object overtaking its own
wavefront, and wouldn't the fact that the ship is approaching its destination at
greater than Newtonian c, ship-time, lead to the light that's coming from the
destination and hitting the front of the ship being blueshifted to infinity?

Weirdly enough, it doesn't. Although the ship crosses the set distance in less
than a year, ship-time, the blueshift of the oncoming radiation isn't infinite,
because it is now predicted from the deduced SR distance traversed per unit
time, which is, of course less than c due to the notional path-contraction. If
"speed" is defined using the ship's time and the environment's rulers, then the
object's destination can approach at any speed whatsoever, and (under SR) the
blueshift will always be finite. The "SR speed" of the object is always
helpfully redefined as being less than lightspeed.

How about the way that the destination sees the approaching ship?

If the above effect is symmetrical (which it should be under SR), then the
blueshift seen on the approaching ship again doesn't reach infinity until the
ship is again travelling at an "infinite speed", with distance instead measured
by the ship's rulers, and time measured in the background frame.

The notion that "moving rulers contract along their direction of motion" would
have you believe that the approaching ship's rulers are shorter when it's speed
is greater, and that this new notional "infinite speed" therefore occurs when
the ship is travelling at Newtonian lightspeed, and that Newtonian lightspeed is
therefore the limit at which an approaching ship has an infinite blueshift.
Unfortunately for this idea, SR rulers don't just contract along their length
when they move, they also contract or lengthen according to whether they are
approaching or receding from an observer, by an amount inversely proportional to
the Doppler shift on the object (NB: not a lot of people know this).

note 1:

The fact that the usual SR descriptions deal only with the special-case
transverse behavior of rulers ought now to be making your stomach curl up into a
little knot, because the Doppler effect is stronger than the Lorentz one, and
although the Lorentz formula predicts that an approaching end-on ruler is
contracted to zero length, this infinite contraction is calculated after the
Doppler length-effect. And guess what? The SR "Doppler length" of a ruler
approaching at lightspeed (before you apply the Lorentz contraction), is
infinite.

note 2:

After applying the Lorentz contraction to this infinite length, it's merely
almost infinite <grin>, so again, because the infinite blueshift doesn't happen
until the ship speed is infinite using the ship's approaching rulers to measure
distance, the SR "lightspeed" is (yet again) equivalent to infinite speed
measured with Newtonian distances. This is as it should be, because if Newtonian
FTL approach velocities are legal for one observer, they should be legal for
both.

Just as in the earlier "redshift" examples, any degree of observed blueshift is

always interpreted by the special theory as evidence of motion at less than
lightspeed.
________________________________________________________________________________

Conclusions

One reason why SR is so successful in asserting that objects never travel faster
than light is that no matter what amount of shift an approaching or receding
object has, whether the observed frequency of radiation is shifted to ~zero or
~infinity, in fact, no matter what data you collect, SR usually has a way of
interpreting that data as proof that a velocity is subluminal. There simply
isn't any shift value that SR wouldn't map to a velocity less than lightspeed.
That makes the idea of a lightspeed limit slightly difficult to disprove

 Under SR, there is no lower limit to the amount of time needed to cross a
given Newtonian distance. Any object seen to cross a particular region of
space in a finite time is automatically assigned a speed less than c, no
matter how short the time-value.
 Under SR, there is no amount of observed shift in an object that isn't mapped
to a velocity less than c.
 Under SR, there is no amount of kinetic energy for an object that isn't
mapped to a velocity less than c.
 Under SR, objects can recede with any velocity without generating evidence
that they are receding at >c, because a recession redshift can't make the
observed frequency drop below zero.
 Under SR, objects can approach with any Newtonian velocity, and their shift
is still finite, and their velocity is mapped to less than c.

So although SR places a notional upper limit of c on an object's journey through

its environment, in terms of contracted distances, when you re-express this in
terms of conventional distances, the upper limit comes out not as c, but as
infinity.

Confused yet?

The problem is that SR has been so busy reinterpreting speeds, lengths,

distances, times and masses, that there's nothing left for us to look at to see
whether the SR "velocity" parameter actually corresponds to anything in real
life.

Ironically for a theory that's founded on the principle of pure observation,

"relative velocity", the one parameter that's agreed on for all observers under
SR, ceases to have any physically-observable meaning, because the hypothetical
ruler-contraction effect means that you can no longer use "known distance /
measured time" as an agreed definition, even when you cancel out any expected
timelag effects. In order to find that original velocity, you are supposed to
take the SR redefinitions on trust.

Just think - for decades, people have been reciting that "you can't go faster
than lightspeed" argument, thinking that it actually means something deep and
meaningful, when it actually translates (in agreed-distance terms), to: "You
can't travel faster than infinity".

Kick back your chair, put you feet up, look out of the window and savor the
truth of that second statement for a few minutes. It's a beautiful, world, isn't
it?
________________________________________________________________________________

Notes

a) You may find it difficult to find a mention of the Doppler ruler-effect

outside these pages. It does show up in the occasional mainstream paper.
There's a brief mention of it in "Invisibility of the Lorentz contraction"
(can't remember the author or date right now). There's another run-through on
the relevant DMS page, but using a different Doppler formula and propagation
model.
b) b) The Doppler ruler-effect is a sadly neglected topic, not because it's
difficult, or unconventional, but simply because most SR discussions are
normally limited to the effects of purely transverse motion, where (under the
SR model), the Doppler length-changes don't apply. As a result, most
physicists seem not to know anything about it.

Here's how it works - suppose that a train of length l is receding from you, and
you see the rear of the train to be at position x. The equivalent position of
the front of the train is going to be x+l, but the light from it won't have
reached you yet. Because the light from the front of the train has an additional
time-lag, its viewed position is always slightly more out-of-date than that of
the back of the train, and because the train is moving away from you, this extra
out-of-dateness (differential timelag) makes the front of the train appear to be
closer than x+1, and the train appears contracted as a result. If the train is
approaching, then the rear of the train would be showing an older position than
the front, and would appear to be further back along the track than you would
therwise expect. As a result, the approaching train appears lengthened.

For an extreme example, consider a 1m long ruler approaching the observer, end-
on, from a marker point 1 light-year distant, according to special relativity
(which uses the Doppler version of the formula). If the ruler is travelling at
(illegal) lightspeed, then SR models the ruler as riding its own wavefront. In
this case, a point at the front of the ruler appears to the observer to pass
from a distant marker-beacon to the observer's position in zero time, because it
will arrive at the same moment that it is seen to leave (the events of it
passing the startpoint and reaching the finish-point appear to be simultaneous)

However, because the ruler is travelling at finite speed, the front and rear of
the ruler don't appear to pass the start-point at the same moment - the rear
passes slightly later. As a result, the observer sees the front of the ruler
reaching them before the end of the ruler is seen to pass the start-point, and
the ruler therefore appears to cover the entire one-lightyear distance. For a
ruler approaching at lightspeed, end-on, it's observed length (before you invoke
Lorentz contraction) is effectively infinite.

Easy stuff, but not often taught.

 (8): "Probe Chain" theory
(the SR flat-space model can fail in an inertial system
comprising of more than two objects)
(and not a lot of people know that, either)
________________________________________________________________________________

Probe chain: Physical interpretation of the SR velocity-addition formula

If an object accelerated to an "illegal" recession velocity, you wouldn't

normally be able to see the c-breaking event happen if you observed the object
directly, and yet under SR, the ship's acceleration through a series of
intermediate frames means that the ship's recession speed is supposed to be
subluminal, and the ship therefore _ought_ to be visible at it's higher
(Newtonian) velocity.

Can any events that occur beyond the c-point be observed by a home-based
observer or not? How can the ship have two velocities? What is really going on?

The answer comes when we decide how the ship is to be observed. If we choose to
view it directly through the vacuum of space, then (under SR), the notionally-
FTL portion of the ship's journey ought to be hidden by an event horizon. But if
we choose to view the ship through the haze of its own exhaust fumes, then we
see something different. The ship now really does appear to be travelling at
less than c, in the sense that the event horizon isn't there any more. Light
(under simple SR) somehow finds it easier to travel along the expanding exhaust
trail than it does across empty space.

Now the signal isn't attempting to leave the ship and cross over to an observer
leaving at lightspeed - it's instead travelling through the expanding gas, which
produces a near-continuum of intermediate inertial frames between the receding
ship and observer.

If the exhaust plume is dense enough for any ray of light to be able to cross
the distance by "leapfrogging" between particles that are always receding from
each other at less than lightspeed, then the shift incurred by each individual
frame transition will always be too weak to bring the frequency quite to zero.
Therefore, if the ship is viewed through a series of intermediate frames where
the individual frame transitions are all less than c, then the signal will
always be able to get through, and the result is what you would have expected if
the recession shift had been less than c.

That's the effect that the SR velocity addition formula documents - the
existence of intermediate inertial frames removes the original quantified
velocity "step" assumed by SR, and replaces it with two or more steps that don't
lie on a straight line. By adding the intermediate frames, we are taking a
velocity differential and replacing it with a series of consecutive velocity
differentials that mark out an approximation of an acceleration curve. A signal
sent through these intermediate frames therefore passes through an approximation
of an acceleration curve, which, of course, represents a warping of the
properties of space under GR.

relative velocity along the path of a light-beam

[missing diagram]

So we can have a completely inertial system, with a number of relay probes

travelling at fixed (intermediate) speeds to one another, and the composite
signal path isn't flat, but travels along the approximation of a curve,
generated by all of the individual nominally-flat frame transitions. Most people
don't realize that the SR flat-space postulate can fail in inertial systems
comprising of more than two objects, but there it is - add enough straight lines
together, and you've got an approximation of a curve.
________________________________________________________________________________
 Probe chains: simple velocity differentials

Let's suppose that the spaceship in the section 2 example accelerates up to and
beyond "Newtonian c", so that it would be expected to be hidden by an event
horizon. How would the crew ever get a message back home to say that they'd
broken the Newtonian lightspeed barrier?

The solution should now be fairly obvious.

The captain of the ship ensures that when the ship sets out, it is stocked-up
with a supply of numbered communication satellites, each programmed to receive
information received from one of its immediate neighbors, and pass it along to
the other, so that the string of satellites forms a chain along which data can
be sent, in either direction.

As the ship accelerates, the crew carefully drops the sequence of satellites out
of the back of the craft, one by one (being careful not to damage them with the
ship's engines), so that the satellites chain marks out a sequence of inertial
frames that each have a recession velocity to one another. The key feature of
this chain is that although a signal sent along the chain is going to be
redshifted, the redshift never reaches infinity, and a signal can therefore be
passed along the chain in either direction, even when the two ends of the chain
have a Newtonian recession velocity greater than lightspeed. The ship and
homebase can therefore still stay in contact, although they would still hear the
signals coming from each other to be extremely s.. l.. o.. w.. As the individual
probes are separating in space at constant velocity, and feel no acceleration
forces, a signal effectively has the same properties as it passes along the
chain as if it was passing along a gravitational gradient, causing the probe
separation. The remaining recession redshift would therefore appear similar to a
gravitational redshift.

Actually, since the shift is "red", the effect is more like a Hubble shift.
Anyhow, probe chains seem to give a legal way of sending signals between objects
with FTL separation velocities, and therefore also seem to provide a way of
sending nominally-FTL signals across any region of space. You just piggyback the
light signal through a messenger-object that's going in the right direction, and
it gets there faster. I actually thought that the final probe-chain principle
would turn out to be a lot more complicated than that, but there you go.
 SR Problems: the "Magic Window" problem
(velocity-addition formula, non-flatness of space)
________________________________________________________________________________

The "Magic Window"

Intro:

SR's claim to validity is based on the assumption that space is uniformly flat
and that signal propagation times are wholly unaffected by relative motion. In
order to generate the right results from this propagation model, SR uses an
additional Lorentz redshift to pull the "propagation" shift figures into line.
Under SR, the Lorentz shift is deduced to occur at the affected object, and is
not supposed to be a signal-propagation effect.

The "window" problem below shows that an object with a fixed recession velocity
can have its SR redshift reduced simply by being observed through an intervening
sheet of glass with an intermediate velocity. SR's workaround to this situation
is to say that the object's deduced recession velocity is partly dependent on
the motion of the intervening glass, according to a special "velocity addition
formula" that is used for calculating composite shifts. The new (hypothetical)
velocity value is then supposed to be used with the normal SR shift formula.

This workaround (in its current form) is not compatible with the SR propagation
model.

Example:

A directly observed object recedes from the observer at 0.8c. It's observed
shift is therefore, under SR,

f'/f = root( (1- 0.8) / (1+ 0.8) )

= root( 0.2/1.8 )

= root(0.11111')

= 0.33333'

Now, this time we are going to look at the object again, but through a thin pane
of glass, our "magic window". This "window" is between the observer and the
object, and creates an intermediate frame between the other them. The observer
and the object are effectively both receding from the window at 0.4c.

We can now combine the two shifts that a light signal picks up travelling from
the object to the window, and then from the window to the observer. Each of
these redshifts is given by the formula:

f'/f = root( (1- 0.4) / (1+ 0.4) )

= root( 0.6/1.4 )

= root(0.42857...)

= 0.65465...

Once the signal has picked up two of these shifts and reached the final
observer, the total shift on the observed signal is:

f'/f = 0.65465... * 0.65465...

= 0.42857...

In other words, there is less of a redshift when the signal travels via a third
intermediate frame, than when there is a direct path.
Possible SR interpretations:

1. The speed and energy of of the signal is somehow "stepped up" by its passage
through the intermediate physical frame provided by the "moving" pane of
glass. This sounds promising, but such a mechanism is illegal under SR, which
assumes that propagation times are unaffected by relative motion.
2. The amount of Lorentz shift on the observed object is being changed by the
altered topology of the experiment. This is difficult to reconcile with the
idea of the Lorentz shifts being purely a product of relative velocity, as
the path taken by the signal would also be a factor. The observer can still
"peek" around the edge of the glass pane and see the original amount of shift
in the object, and if a lightbeam is split, with one half sent through the
window and one sent directly, both signals would have different Lorentz
shifts. This difference would mean that Lorentz shifts are partly path-
dependent, so that Lorentz shift couldn't be totally separated from
propagation effects.
3. Motion in the glass reducing both the Lorentz shift and the propagation shift
on the object.

By choosing to deliberately reinterpret the deduced recession velocity of the

object to a different value when it is indirectly observed, special relativity
plumps for option (3).

This workaround reduces both the predicted propagation shift and Lorentz shift
of the receding object in the above example. For the "propagation" shift of an
object viewed along a straight-line signal path to be reduced when the glass is
moving, the motion of the glass must (by definition) be affecting the properties
of that signal path, contra SR.

The SR velocity-addition formula is therefore not compatible with the SR

propagation model, even though it is used to calculate composite shifts under
the theory. For SR to be self-consistent, the velocity-addition formula would
have to be replaced with a different formula that preserved the SR propagation
shift component, and instead affected only the Lorentz component of an
indirectly observed object.

This mistake isn't necessarily fatal to SR, as an alternative correction formula

based around "option 2" is probably possible. However, since the inconsistency
is fairly obvious, you'd expect an amended correction to already be in place.

The fact that it isn't raises questions as to how accurately SR has been
assessed to date.
________________________________________________________________________________

Notes:

1. DMS produces the same class of effect. However, DMS uses interpretation [1],
and so, doesn't have a problem with the result. Under DMS, the step-up in
energy of the light-signal is caused by the "moving" window "dragging" the
signal along in its direction of motion, as an inertial/gravitational
distortion effect. A similar mechanism probably exists under GR
2. The SR velocity-addition law for composite shifts is vtotal = (v1+v2) / (1+
(v1*v2)/c^2). This formula is supposed to provide the user with an
"equivalent" velocity of an indirectly-observed object.
3. Under the SR velocity addition law, the sum of two recession velocities of
0.4c is not 0.8c, but 0.689655...c. This new pseudo-velocity can then be
"plugged into" the standard SR shift formula to give exactly the same final
(less redshifted) shift result that we calculated above from using the two
smaller velocities. That's its purpose. The existence of this formula
documents the existence of the "window" effect in SR. It's given on page 39
of Einstein's 'Relativity' book.
4. While two two arguments above produce the same numerical results when two
equal velocities are summed, they don't when the two velocities are unequal
and neither velocity is c, so unless I'm mistaken, the standard SR addition
 formula has some terms missing. Most examples only use equally matched
velocities, so the issue doesn't normally come up.
5. The arguments given on this page can be used as a foundation for "probe
chain" arguments. These lead to a reinterpretation of the nature of the SR
lightspeed barrier.