CONTENTS Page 4 Faster Than Light The Fantasy Page 6 The Universe is Big Page 8 What Is Light Page 10 We Must Go Faster Page 12 Faster Than Light The Reality Page 14 Quantum Entanglement Page 16 Let’s Talk about Space and Time Page 18 Wormholes Page 20 Black Holes and White Holes Page 22 Warp Drives Page 24 Exotic Matter Page 26 Faster Than Light The Future Page 28 Time Travel Page 30 Where Would You Go Page 31 Glossary Page 32 Index Words that appear like this can be found in the glossary on page 31
Faster-than-Light the Fantasy You’re the captain of the fastest spacecraft in the galaxy but you and your crew need to get to a faraway planet right away What do you do Power the engines Engage the main thrusters And for goodness sake put your seatbelt on because you’re about to zoom through space faster than light itself But wait could this actually be possible in real life It happens all the time in movies and books You might have heard it called warp speed or hyperspace travel The idea is that we can cover enormous distances by traveling quicker than the fastest thing in the universe light 4
SCI-FI SPACECRAFT Imagine if just like in Star Wars all it took was the press of a button for your spacecraft to reach incredible speeds The stars would hurtle past in a blur In science fiction spacecraft come in all shapes and sizes The Doctor’s spacecraft looks like a police box and travels by disappearing and reappearing somewhere else Science fiction spaceships might even go into warp gates which propel them through space really fast Then they reappear at another warp gate in a completely different star system But all of this seems like a lot of effort right Why would anyone need to go so fast 5
