Historical research guide · 0425 · 2004
A Novel View of Spacetime Permitting Faster-Than-Light Travel
Gregory V. Meholic
In one minute
Gregory Meholic, a propulsion engineer at The Aerospace Corporation, asks a question hiding in plain sight inside special relativity. The equations are symmetrical about the speed of light: they describe motion below it and, just as consistently, motion above it. Meholic takes that symmetry literally and proposes a tri-space universe — three independent spacetimes, one subluminal, one luminal, one superluminal, each with its own physical laws built on the same constant c. In that picture a given absolute energy state can correspond to as many as three velocities, one in each realm. His proposal for faster-than-light travel follows from it: not accelerating through the light barrier, which relativity forbids, but exchanging energy and mass at the quark level or below so that a particle crosses into the superluminal continuum, traverses the distance there, and returns. He argues the same construction offers a fresh angle on cosmic expansion, the zero-point field, dark matter and the origin of inertia.
Connection
Chapter 4 is about getting somewhere without moving through local space, and this paper is one of the clean statements of the alternative route: instead of bending the metric around a ship, change which spacetime the ship is in. Chapter 13 cares because Meholic reaches for the same four unexplained quantities the rest of the site converges on — expansion, the zero-point field, dark matter and inertia — and asks a single geometry to account for all of them.
From the source
The governing mathematics of special relativity describe a symmetrical continuum that supports not just one but three independent spacetimes, each with a unique set of physical laws founded on the speed of light: the subluminal, where speed is below light speed, the luminal, where it equals light speed, and the superluminal, where it exceeds light speed. Meholic calls the whole a tri-space universe.Abstract
Relativistic symmetry illustrates that there can be up to three velocities, one for each spacetime, for a given absolute energy state — so energy does not pick out a single speed, and the same energy is compatible with a subluminal, a luminal and a superluminal solution.Abstract
Mass and energy have similar characteristics in each of the three spacetimes, and that similarity is what may permit faster-than-light travel: a quantum transformation and exchange of energy and mass, at the quark level or beyond, between the subluminal and superluminal realms.Abstract
The proposed method is called trans-space travel, and it is explicitly not acceleration through the light barrier. A particle would traverse sublight space by travelling through the superlight continuum, without incurring the penalties of special relativity or of causal relations — the distance is crossed elsewhere, not faster.Abstract
The motivation is unification rather than propulsion alone. Meholic argues that recent discoveries across many disciplines support a driving need for a new science to explain the apparent relationship between phenomena at cosmological scales and those at the quantum, subatomic level, while still supporting the classical mechanics of motion, electromagnetism and relativity.Abstract, opening
The construction is offered as a different perspective on four quantities that current models leave open — universal expansion, the zero-point field, dark matter and the source of inertia — and it is on those four that the model can be tested, since a tri-space account of inertia or of expansion must eventually differ measurably from the standard one.Abstract, closing sentence
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1649686How to cite it
Gregory V. Meholic (2004) A Novel View of Spacetime Permitting Faster-Than-Light Travel doi:10.1063/1.1649686