How to travel faster than light?
Of course, everyone who has even the slightest acquaintance with science -- fact or fiction -- knows that what the crew of the Enterprise do every Wednesday night is scientifically impossible. You can't travel faster than light -- Einstein says so.
There is a perfectly good reason for this (although it isn't spelled out as often as it might be). As an object increases in speed, it's mass increases. This is not merely theoretical, it has been observed in particle accelerators like that at CERN: speed up an electron and it's mass increases. As it approaches light speed (186,000 miles per second) it's mass approaches being infinitely large. Just to keep its speed, it would thus need all the energy in the universe to propel it.
However, there is one possibility quivering on the horizon that just might make starships feasible and it is Clarke who has identified and named it.
The SHARP Drive is the fictional drive that propels his third millennia spaceships across the immense distances between stars. Clarke coined the terms SHARP from the initial letters of the four physicists who he jointly credits with originating the concepts and discoveries that make the drive possible Sakharov, Haisch, Alfonso Rueda, and Hal Puthoff.
Andrei Sakharov is the distinguished Russian physicist who first suggested that space is not empty but is full of energy, the so-called 'zero-point field'. This suggestion was taken up by astrophysicist Bernhard Haisch of Lockheed's Research Laboratories and physicists Alfonso Rueda, a professor at California State University at Long Beach, and Harold Puthoff of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin.
Yes, AUSTIN! See the rest at:
http://www.alternativescience.com/sharp_drive.htm