Twilight's Science Thread (Also Q&A)

There’s no “known” way to go faster than light… That being said, there are a few tricks that may make it possible.

In the Copenhagen (“classic”) interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, particles do this weird thing where they’re kind of in this nebulous cloud of probability, and sometimes they “collapse” to existing at a single point. It’s instant, maybe you could harness it for FTL, but probably not.

Now, imagine reality is a painting. There’s this canvas that everything is painted on called “spacetime”. You can bend it and stuff. Normally, only in certain ways, but if you have exotic matter, you can bend it in cool ways, too, like making a “wormhole”, which is sort of like a shortcut tunnel through spacetime, so you can travel to places very far away, travelling through this wormhole, where they’re much closer. It’s like having a door in your house that opens to China, as opposed to having to take a plane. Those are a bit far-fetched and if they existed, could cause all kinds of crazy paradoxes.

In fact, because of how relativity works, anything where you can go faster than light can end up being used as a time machine and causing paradoxes – like going back in time and killing your old self before they ever build the time machine. Nonsensical stuff.

Maybe. One point I’m poking at researching is the possibility that the Alcubierre Drive (through some fancy details) may get around the problem and allow faster-than-light travel without paradoxes, which makes it seem a lot more likely to be possible.

The Alcubierre Drive is named after Miguel Alcubierre who first published a paper describing it in 1994. At the time, the idea was something you would need more than all the mass-energy in the universe to create… And get that in negative form, too. No, not anti-matter, we know anti-matter exists and it’s well understood, we mean negative energy. Weird thing. But maybe the universe allows it – after all, that’s what Dark Energy is.

Over the next years/decades, lots of people talked about it, and they figured out ways to get that mass-energy requirement down to any low number you can think of. Problem is, it still requires negative mass. Maybe. Current scientific investigations of it say “maybe not?”. Ultimately I’d like to research more about it.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – Clarke’s third law. On that basis, I think it’s possible, but we just have yet to understand the physics to make it happen. That’s what I want to fix.

There’s a big, important trick here, though; you’re still not going faster than light. That’s plain impossible. You’re just stretching space around so that that star that used to be a quadrillion km away is now only several million km away because you’ve warped the spacetime in-between here and there. So you’re effectively cheating space.

…Or to be more precise, the 100 km in front of your spacecraft gets shrunken down to a few meters, then you pass those few meters, then repeat continuously. (Not technically accurate, but it gets the idea across well enough. Maybe a more accurate way to put it is you’re running your trip in fast-forward so it doesn’t take as long for you, or the people back on Earth).

I mean, I could go into the details of it and stuff, and I’d love to if people are interested, but that would definitely go in the forums, not here. It’d essentially be a condensed course in Special and General Relativity…

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_{Can I get a science badge for this/if I do this? Or a Twi-like waifu IRL?}

 
I dunno… I could describe relativity from start to end if people are interested… There’s plenty of online resources for it, but I don’t know about an entire course that just covers all the basics and also provides some depth, which is the kind of thing I could do >.>
 
…With ponies.  

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But, that aside, FTL stuff.
 

 
And to give a feel for what’s relevant to this thread, I’ve actually made a whole blog (that I haven’t touched in awhile) about science in the show. I’ve covered topics like, most recently, Winter Wrap-Up, three different theories on how Celestia and Luna “raise” the sun and moon, with this being my favorite, and doing psychological science evaluations on a few of the ponies, Equestrian Airships, How ponies hold things with hooves, Twilight Sparkle’s Power (in Watts) as of season 1, and a few other things like the size of the ponies.  

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So, yeah, pony science away. Or even non-pony science.