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Could we travel faster than light? Researchers show how Einstein's own theories could lead to travel at speeds previously thought impossible
Applied mathematicians have extended Einstein's theory of special relativity to work beyond the speed of light.
Einstein's famous theory holds that nothing could move faster than light, but academics at the University of Adelaide, Australia, have developed new formulas to describe travel beyond this limit.
The theory of special relativity was published in 1905 and explains how motion and speed is always relative to the observer's frame of reference.
The theory connects measurements of the same physical incident viewed from these different points in a way that depends on the relative velocity of observers.
As well as this, relativity introduced the concept of time dilation, which suggests that the faster you travel the more time seems to slow.
However, special relativity breaks down if two observers relative velocity - the difference between their respective speeds - approaches the speed of light.
According to the mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc2, an object travelling at c would have infinite mass and would therefore require an infinite amount of energy to reach c.
Now Professor Jim Hill and Dr Barry Cox in the University's School of Mathematical Sciences have developed a new way to extend Einstein's sums to understand how faster than light movement can be possible.
Professor Hill said: 'Since the introduction of special relativity there has been much speculation as to whether or not it might be possible to travel faster than the speed of light, noting that there is no substantial evidence to suggest that this is presently feasible with any existing transportation mechanisms.
How is it possible? This 3D graph shows the relationship between three different velocities: v, u and U, where v is the velocity of a second observer measured by a first observer, u is the velocity of a moving particle measured by the second observer, and U is the relative velocity of the particle to the first observer
'About this time last year, experiments at CERN, the European centre for particle physics in Switzerland, suggested that perhaps neutrinos could be accelerated just a very small amount faster than the speed of light.
'At this point we started to think about how to deal with the issues from both a mathematical and physical perspective.
'Questions have since been raised over the experimental results but we were already well on our way to successfully formulating a theory of special relativity, applicable to relative velocities in excess of the speed of light.
'Our approach is a natural and logical extension of the Einstein Theory of Special Relativity, and produces anticipated formulae without the need for imaginary numbers or complicated physics.'
Their formulas extend special relativity to a situation where the relative velocity can be infinite, and can be used to describe motion at speeds faster than light.
However, neither Einstein's equations nor the new theory can describe objects moving at the speed of light itself.
'We are mathematicians, not physicists, so we've approached this problem from a theoretical mathematical perspective,' said Dr Cox.
'Should it, however, be proven that motion faster than light is possible, then that would be game changing.
'Our paper doesn't try and explain how this could be achieved, just how equations of motion might operate in such regimes.'
Their ground breaking research has been published in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society A.
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