Let's consider an object, capable of seeing, can travel faster than the speed of light (299792458 m/s).
First of all, if you put this things down on a paper and use the formula of Time Dilation, it'll simply yield nothing, as if you put v>c, the denominator part becomes a complex number which has no explanations (I might be wrong).
However, as I read somewhere, travelling faster then the speed of light would eventually make you travel to the past. This is why:
When an object travels faster then the speed of light, it'll bypass all the photons, and would be reaching at the destination before any photon does. So, for seeing, that object needs to stop; as if that object continues to travel faster than the speed of light, it wouldn't see anything. Once, the object stop, it would start reaching photons from the moment in the past, hence seeing the past.
An object can't see a past that has already happened.
It's just that the object is receiving a light that is getting delayed. We observe this daily when we look at the sky.
The stars and galaxies we see during the night-sky; they all are the past. It might be possible that the moment we are seeing it, they don't even existing.
As those stars and galaxies are much farther away from us, many light years away, so the light from them becomes old, and reach us, hence we see them as they were suppose to look earlier in the past.
This brings me:
"The farther you look in the Universe, the more back in time you'd see"
You are right that travelling faster than the speed of light would make you see the past, but not in the sense that you would travel back in time. As you said, you would just receive photons that were emitted in the past by distant sources. However, this does not mean that you can change the past or create paradoxes. You would still be moving forward in your own proper time, and you would not be able to interact with anything that is causally disconnected from you. In fact, according to special relativity, travelling faster than the speed of light would also make you see the future, but again not in the sense that you would travel forward in time. You would just receive photons that were emitted in the future by nearby sources. This is because travelling faster than the speed of light would reverse the order of events in some reference frames, and make some events appear to happen before their causes. This is one of the reasons why travelling faster than the speed of light is considered to be impossible or inconsistent with causality and relativity.
Lyudmil Antonov,
Yes Right. You would still be seeing the future However, a Future that got delayed because you reached the destination before the photon does.
Travelling faster than the speed of light would make you see the "delayed future".
- Badges
- Science topic