Umm.. as a half joke I plan to do my grad project on FTL Travel theories.. so,.. can somone recommend a good theory to look at it?

'Hyperspace', a couple years old, but interesting book talks about warping space to travel FTL. Star Trek used a similar idea but that doesn't make it less viable of a concept. Of course, there are no hypotheses currently that I know of for how to warp space. :roll:

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I think there are but it takes something called "Strange Matter". I'll have to look through my collection of PM and PS for it.. -Colt

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The two main methods are wormholes (which involve exotic geometry, but no faster than light velocities)
http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~visser/030527-12.html
http://mist.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw39.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/future-00d.html
http://www.orionsarm.com/tech/wormho...d_physics.html

and Alcubierre drive as used on Star Trek
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw81.html

which violates simultanety and would cause problems with causality, unless relativity is wrong;
http://www.orionsarm.com/intro/ftl-paradoxes.html
http://www.orionsarm.com/intro/ftl-i.html
which is why we don't use it in OA;
but who knows what tomorrow may bring.

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One thing that always bothers me is that some scientists will refuse to look at the fact that there might be more than three laws or that they might be bent slightly. -Colt

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I don't see much benefit from doing a half-joke grad project. There are so many good but unanswered questions out there, it seems a pity to waste the opportunity to investigate one of them. Have you ever seen Bahcall and Ostriker's 1997 book Unsolved Problems in Astrophysics? Some notable areas of fruitful investigation include "Large scale structure in the Universe, The morphological evolution of galaxies, Particle dark matter, In and around neutron stars, The centers of elliptical galaxies, Accretion flows around black holes, Gamma-ray bursts, the list goes on.

And if you don't think straightforward, standard model stuff can be enjoyable and put forward with a sense of utter hilarity, you've got to read Leon Lederman's The God Particle, a book which I cannot recommend highly enough.

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Well, it's got to be approved by English 12 teacher. So... Besides, umm.. I could do that.. well, it's up in the air

Even if this is at a pre-University level, something a little more well-grounded might be a better idea. I know your English teacher won't be able to fully understand what you're writing about, but that's even more reason to stay mainstream.

Point.. I could go into the neutron star specifically, we barely even touched that in astronomy\physics.. I'll try and do both, one for fun I guess

That could work. What are you thinking about doing with an NS? An overview-type-thing with formation, etc?

Any special conditions for your FTL travel? Otherwise it's pretty easy (alright maybe not easy but it's been done) to travel FTL: shoot a high energy electron (I think it's electron not sure tho) through glass (or some other transparent material). The particle would travel faster than light and result in some more... lights?

Can't do it in space though...

Do tachyons actually exist?

It may have been referenced in this thread with the sites, but revisiting Miguel Alcubierre's warp bubble concept. He mentions that there are problems with it, but you might explore them and how to solve them, if at all possible. A man named Mitch Pfenning (and a college classmate of mine) wrote a dissertation about why the Alcubierre warp bubble wouldn't work in the conception he had originally. The physics is a bit abstruse but a fun starting-off point.

If you want to talk to Mitch personally, he used to be at Tufts University. I spoke to him in his first year or two in 1997 when he was there. He may still be there for all I know. SUre you could google him, and Alcubierre too, who was, last I checked in Wales.

From what I understand, nobody really knows. Special Relativity doesn't preclude their existence but it doesn't predict them either. They are supposed to be a theoretical particle that always resides on the other side of the speed of light barrier. Neat to think about but how would we ever detect them?

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you might want to read a book called 'Time Travel in Einstein's Universe' by J. Richard Gott. You might pull some ideas from it (assuming you've not read it).

If you decide to write about neutron stars, you might want to mention the late Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg, which includes a plausible description of life on the surface of a NS. Forward was not a gifted writer in terms of pure prose, but he filled his stories with valid science and sometimes-astonishing ideas.

One means of FTL travel I've seen used in SF is to convert your ship to tachyons and go flitting around the universe at FTL speeds and then convert it back to "tardyons" at the other end. The problem with using tachyons as a means of FTL travel is that tachyons are superluminal with respect to every other particle, including other tachyons. Convert your ship to tachyons and the constituent particles immediately scatter at superluminal speeds and you don't have a ship to reconstitute!

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