h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A word on science, the future, and the my article "Time Dilation"

Posted Jul 5, 2000

It seems that some people have almost taken offense at the postulate of an absolute lightspeed and assorted effects. (See various forom threads about my article on time dilation and relativity.) I don't know why this is, but I will tell you what I think.

When I wrote the article I said that relativity was experimentally proven. I did NOT say that it was God's absolute truth and impossible to refute. Those of you who are in no higher fields of science may remember your science history lessons from high school. I remember at least one item of significance: no scientific discovery is absolute. As long as you don't know everything about a phenonema, the possiblity always exists that what you do know is not the total truth.

I said that relativity was proven. But anything that was proven at one point in the amount of knowledge about the event, may be disproven or altered at a point of further knowledge about the event. That's not to say that there are no universal absolutes, only that without absolute knowledge you cannot tell if something is. All we can do is propose theories that seem to hold everything together until more data can be gathered.

If scientists have found a way to accelerate subatomic particles, or even photons themselves, past the commonly-accepted speed of light, then I think that's fantastic. I never greatly liked the concept of an unbreakable cosmic "speed limit" anyway. I wrote the article simply to explain in common language what we do know of it.

However, I should point out that quantum physics has given us many examples of events in the subatomic world that still seem, and may truly be, impossible or have no measurable effect in the superatomic world. Quantum tunneling and virtual matter, for example. Just because we can tunnel a photon through matter four times faster that it would travel through a vacuum doesn't neccessarily mean that human wormholes are just around the corner. But, the knowledge may be invaluable to future experimentation that could produce such an effect.

Have you ever heard the phrase "No matter where you go, there you are"? To me this means that you cannot know the future until it comes to pass. Whether the speed of light is forever impossible to overcome in the conventional world, or if we will discover a way to warp entire planets across the void in mere milliseconds, at this point in time it is impossible to say. Only the continuing advancement of scientific discovery and application will tell us for sure.

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Latest reply: Jul 5, 2000