A Novel View of Spacetime Permitting Faster-Than-Light Travel
Gregory V. Meholic
Summary and citation · read the original at the source
In one page
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.
Why it matters hereChapter 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.
What it claims
01The 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
Published and peer-reviewed02Relativistic 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
Published and peer-reviewed03Mass 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
What to watch04The 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
What to watch05The 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
What to watch06The 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
What to watch
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1649686WHAT THIS IS. A conference paper: presented at the Space Technology and Applications International Forum, STAIF 2004, in Albuquerque, and published as AIP Conference Proceedings volume 699, pages 1160 to 1167, on 4 February 2004. The author is Gregory V. Meholic, a propulsion engineer at The Aerospace Corporation. LICENCE AND TEXT. The Crossref record carries no licence, OpenAlex and Unpaywall both report the paper closed with no repository copy, and the publisher’s server answers automated requests with a 403, so this page carries no reproduced text and does not reprint the abstract. SOURCE FOR THE CLAIMS. The author’s own abstract was recovered in full from the OpenAlex record for this DOI and read there; the summary and the claims below are written from it, and every locator names the abstract rather than a section of the full paper. A MATURITY NOTE. This is a theoretical proposal published in the breakthrough-propulsion literature, not a measurement and not an engineering design with parameters and a first test, so the sheet is filed at what-to-watch and the claims say plainly which parts are the standard algebra of special relativity and which are the author’s new construction. RELATED WORK IN THIS LIBRARY. Meholic later co-authored, with H. David Froning and Glen A. Robertson, the 2010 paper on unlabored system motion by specially conditioned electromagnetic fields, which is in the library as an unfilled skeleton and so is not linked below.
How to cite it
Gregory V. Meholic (2004) A Novel View of Spacetime Permitting Faster-Than-Light Travel. doi:10.1063/1.1649686
Where it sits in the curriculum
The metric, warp drives and wormholesThe unified pictureInertial mass reduction and transmedium craft