> In all this excitement hopefully we don’t forget the horde of luddites that’s the modern physics community that couldn’t imagine the possibility of faster than light travel
There's a kind of funny example of that involving Kip Thorne, or rather Kip Thorne's students. He ran into his friend Carl Sagan at some event--I think it was something like they arrived at the airport at the same time for some conference they were both attending and ended up sharing a cab [1].
At the time Sagan was writing his novel "Contact", needed FTL travel in it, and was hand waving away how that would be done. Sagan was aware the one of Thorne's pet peeves was science fiction that hand waved away things like that without at least trying to come up with something that might be plausible or at least wasn't known to be impossible.
Sagan carefully broached the subject of "Contact" and that he was hand waving FTL in it, and asked if Thorne could come up with some justification for Sagan's FTL. That set Thorne onto researching wormholes for travel and he found solutions that didn't appear to be definitely physically impossible. Thorne wrote a guide to wormhole travel for Sagan to use to make "Contact" less hand-wavy.
Thorne then put a problem on the final exam for Caltech's Ph 236, General Relativity, that set up the conditions for a pair of connected wormholes and asked the students to calculate what would happen.
Most students got that you would get a pair of connected wormholes, but Thorne was disappointed that none of the students had noticed that this seems to give a way for FTL travel.
[1] I'm going by memories of reading drafts of a book Thorne was working on 40 years ago so details are a little fuzzy. He was writing a book for the general public that was going to be about contemporary physicists. Each chapter was going to feature an interview by Thorne of a contemporary physicist and an explanation of their work. Thorne had his notes, interviews, and draft chapters on his account at the VAX of the Caltech High Energy Physics department, and it was world readable so was widely read by the other people with accounts on the machine. It's too bad it never came out. My recollection was it looked like it was going to be very interesting.
There's a kind of funny example of that involving Kip Thorne, or rather Kip Thorne's students. He ran into his friend Carl Sagan at some event--I think it was something like they arrived at the airport at the same time for some conference they were both attending and ended up sharing a cab [1].
At the time Sagan was writing his novel "Contact", needed FTL travel in it, and was hand waving away how that would be done. Sagan was aware the one of Thorne's pet peeves was science fiction that hand waved away things like that without at least trying to come up with something that might be plausible or at least wasn't known to be impossible.
Sagan carefully broached the subject of "Contact" and that he was hand waving FTL in it, and asked if Thorne could come up with some justification for Sagan's FTL. That set Thorne onto researching wormholes for travel and he found solutions that didn't appear to be definitely physically impossible. Thorne wrote a guide to wormhole travel for Sagan to use to make "Contact" less hand-wavy.
Thorne then put a problem on the final exam for Caltech's Ph 236, General Relativity, that set up the conditions for a pair of connected wormholes and asked the students to calculate what would happen.
Most students got that you would get a pair of connected wormholes, but Thorne was disappointed that none of the students had noticed that this seems to give a way for FTL travel.
[1] I'm going by memories of reading drafts of a book Thorne was working on 40 years ago so details are a little fuzzy. He was writing a book for the general public that was going to be about contemporary physicists. Each chapter was going to feature an interview by Thorne of a contemporary physicist and an explanation of their work. Thorne had his notes, interviews, and draft chapters on his account at the VAX of the Caltech High Energy Physics department, and it was world readable so was widely read by the other people with accounts on the machine. It's too bad it never came out. My recollection was it looked like it was going to be very interesting.