Faster Than Light Quotes & Sayings

The brain's auditory cortex, for instance, processes an audio signal from your ear faster than a visual signal is processed in the visual cortex. The difference is around 40 milliseconds, which is not much, but enough to justify using a gun for starting a race, instead of a light flash. The faster audio processing speed means that sprint runners react more quickly to a bang than to a flash of light. — Jean Paul Zogby

There was a young lady of Wight Who travelled much faster than light. She departed one day, In a relative way, And arrived on the previous night. The point is that the theory of relativity says that there is no unique measure of time that all observers will agree on. — Stephen Hawking

I believe modern SF needs to at least be aware of the singularity, if only so that it can dismiss it intelligently (or work around it). But I suspect the singularity is like faster-than-light travel for the IT generation. We may hope for it, and the rules don't forbid it, but we don't know how to do it yet (and it may not be possible). — Charles Stross

We sometimes hear of things that can travel faster than light. Something called 'the speed of thought' is occasionally proffered. This is an exceptionally silly notion especially since the speed of impulses through the neutrons in our brain is about the same as the speed of a donkey cart. — Carl Sagan

Accelerating to speeds faster than light was, of course, impossible. General relativity had made that clear enough back in the twentieth century. However, since then a number of ways of circumventing the speed limit had turned up; by now, there were at least six different known methods of moving mass or information from A to B without going through c. — Charles Stross

There was a young lady named Bright, Whose speed was far faster than light; She set out one day In a relative way, And returned on the previous night. — Arthur Henry Reginald Buller

So we have progressed to the point where we can move politicians around faster than light. I'm not sure I see the advantage. — Jack McDevitt

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in tie and exist in two places at once. — Margaret Atwood

When it came to time travel, science and science fiction and fantasy had flip-flopped. Nobody was going to create a machine that traveled to the future or the past. Time machines might be accepted in science fiction as an enabling device to get the story moving, but they're like faster-than-light space ships-- neither one is going to happen any time soon, not with any technology we know how to implement.
The guys who had it figured were the fantasists, Dennis. The Finneys and the Mathesons and the Ellisons and the Serlings. No machines and no advanced physics, at least not most of the time. Just an overpowering desire. Just need and longing and pain and regret and the right talisman or the right surroundings. Put the right person in the right place, and perhaps with the right objects, and the potential for time travel is there. — Tony Rabig

Often, beyond the next turning, footfalls of a herd galloping across stone were heard, or further in the distance, with reassuring grunts, a wild boar could be seen, trotting with steady stride along the edge of the road with her sow and a whole procession of young in tow. And then one's heart beat faster upon advancing a little into the subtle light: one might have said that the path had suddenly become wild, thick with grass, its dark paving-slabs engulfed by nettles, blackthorn and sloe, so that it mingled up time past rather than crossing country-side, and perhaps it was going to issue forth, in the chiaroscuro of thicket smelling of moistened down and fresh grass, into one of those glades where animals spoke to men. — Julien Gracq

Travel at faster than the speed of light certainly can have dramatic implications that are difficult to understand, such as time travel. — Lisa Randall

Our community of rebels, of humble truth seekers, wants to turn our culture around. We don't despise our country. We don't desire failure. We desire light, a beacon to show the world that our wealth need not show the way to more rapid destruction, but can be leveraged to heal more acres, more backyards, more communities faster than any civilization on the right path has ever done it. — Joel Salatin

MASS INCREASES

The final paradox of relativity is the increase in mass due to motion. Mass increase has been observed experimentally in particle accelerators, with increases as great as 3000% for particles traveling at over 99.9% the speed of light. How can the mass of an object get bigger just because it's moving?

Intuitive explanation. As we saw in Chapter 2, mass means inertia - i.e., resistance to acceleration. If you push something and it doesn't respond much, then by definition it has a large mass or inertia. Now we just saw that pushing on something that is traveling at close to the speed of light has little effect on its speed because the underlying fields are already moving almost as fast as they can. Thus its resistance to acceleration has become greater and this means its mass has increased. Mass increase is just another way of saying that fields can't propagate faster than c. — Rodney A. Brooks

The Grateful Dead are faster than light drive. — Ken Kesey

The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles
kingons, or possibly queons
that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed. — Terry Pratchett

It is theoretically possible to warp spacetime itself, so you're not actually moving faster than the speed of light, but it's actually space that's moving. — Elon Musk

No other evil we know is faster than Rumor, thriving on speed and becoming stronger by running. Small and timid at first, then borne on a light air, she flits over ground while hiding her head on a cloud-top. — Virgil

Science offers no brief for the telekinetic powers of Darth Vader and hardly any greater justification for the faster-than-light travel that makes his empire possible. And yet what is 'Star Wars' if not pure quill SF? — Paul Di Filippo

Quantum entanglement allows you to send information faster than light, which upset Einstein. But Einstein has the last laugh. The information you send on quantum entanglement is random, useless information. So Einsein still has the last laugh. — Michio Kaku

Love is the most powerful force on this world. You can't touch it but feel it. You can bind together the whole world with it, you can win the war with it. It is faster than light, sharper than laser knife. It is softer than puffer candy but can melt your heart. — Debasish Mridha

No one has a clue how to build a conscious machine, at all. We have less clue about how to do that than we have about build a faster-than-light spaceship. — Stuart J. Russell

Normally gravity would crush the throat of the wormhole, destroying the astronauts trying to reach the other side. That is one reason that faster-than-light travel through a wormhole is not possible. But the repulsive force of negative energy or negative mass could conceivably keep the throat open sufficiently long to allow astronauts a clear passage. In other words, negative mass or energy is essential for both the Alcubierre drive and the wormhole solution. — Michio Kaku

Our job is obvious: we need to get out of the way, shine a light, and empower a new generation to teach itself and to go further and faster than any generation ever has. — Seth Godin

Thought the mind can justify itself faster than the speed of light, it can be stopped through the act of writing. — Byron Katie

Common sense tells us that the world is flat, that the sun goes around the earth, that heavy bodies always fall faster than light bodies, that boats made of iron will sink. — Stuart Chase

If there's a story I absolutely cannot tell without faster-than-light travel, then I am quite prepared to accept it - even though I don't personally believe it is possible. — Alastair Reynolds

If we can somehow control the probability of certain improbable events, then anything, including faster-than-light travel, and even time travel, is possible. Reaching the distant stars in seconds is highly unlikely, but when one can control quantum probabilities at will, then even the impossible may become commonplace. — Michio Kaku

That's the problem today. It ain't the kids' faults. It's the parents who don't trust 'em enough to teach 'em to fend for their own. Now I ain't never been the best shooter, never raised me a prize steer, and there were a hundred guys around here who could fix a roof faster than I could change a light bulb. But the point is I learned how to do lots of different things that parents don't teach kids anymore." "My — Dan Padavona

Light travels faster than sound. Isn't that why people appear bright before you hear them speak? — Steven Wright

Technologies that may be realized in centuries or millennium include: warp drive, traveling faster than the speed of light, parallel universes; are there other parallel dimensions and parallel realities? Time travel that we mentioned and going to the stars. — Michio Kaku

I believe that the Big-Bang Theory and the Evolution Theory, as well as Einstein's Special Relativity Theory which does not allow for the existence of faster-than-light (superluminal) phenomena, all have flaws in them and must be replaced by new theories that can give Mankind a more concise view of our Universe. But the fact is exceptional discoveries and theories that challenge official science have been ignored by the Establishment for decades. — Takaaki Musha

A big heavy phrase is easier to handle if it comes at the end, when your work assembling the overarching phrase is done and nothing else is on you mind. (It's another version of the advice to prefer right-branching trees over left-branching and center-embedded ones.) Light-before-heavy is one of the oldest principles in linguistics, having been discovered in the fourth century BCE by the Sanskrit grammarian Panini. It often guides the intuitions of writers when they have to choose an order for items in a list, as in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle; and Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! — Steven Pinker

A beam of light takes about two million years to reach from us to the Andromeda nebula. But my thought covers this distance in a few seconds. Perhaps some day some intermediate form of body and mind may permit us to say that we actually can travel faster than light. — Ragnar Frisch

One morning as I closed the cyclone-fence gate / to begin a slow drift / down to the cookhouse on foot / (because my truck wheels were glued / in deep mud once again), / I walked straight into / the waiting non-arms of a snake, / its tan beaded-bag skin / studded with black diamonds.
Up it coiled to speak to me a eye level. / Imagine! that sleek finger / rising out of the land's palm / and coiling faster than a Hindu rope. / The thrill of a bull snake / startled in the morning / when the mesas lie pooled / in a custard of light / kept me bright than ball lightning all day.
Praise leapt first to mind / before flight or danger, / praise that knows no half-truth, and pardons all. — Diane Ackerman

Scientists are intent on testing [our] theories to the breaking point. They do not trust what is intuitively obvious. That the Earth is flat was once obvious. That heavy bodies fall faster than light ones was once obvious. That blood-sucking leeches cure most diseases was once obvious. That some people are naturally and by divine decree slaves was once obvious. That there is such a place as the centre of the Universe, and that the Earth sits in that exalted spot was once obvious. That there is an absolute standard of rest was once obvious. The truth may be puzzling or counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held beliefs. Experiment is how we get a handle on it. — Carl Sagan

We all are originally sinners as Adam and in Adam, his leprosy cleaving faster to us than Naaman's did to Gahazai, so that even the infant, before it has seen the light of the world, has this blemish inherent in its unborn members. — John Wycliffe

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. — Douglas Adams

Banishing zero also solves the infinity problems in general relativity. If you imagine a black hole as a string, no longer do objects fall through a rip in the fabric of space-time. Instead, a particle loop approaching a black-hole loop stretches out and touches the black hole. The two loops tremble, tear, and form one loop: a slightly more massive black hole. (Some theorists believe that the act of merging a particle to a black hole creates bizarre particles such as tachyons: particles with imaginary mass that travel backward in time and move faster than light. Such particles might be admissable in certain versions of string theory.) — Charles Seife

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak. — Alan Dundes

Is that what happened to Mercier?" "No - not quite. In so far as I understood Sukhoi's work, it appeared that the zero-mass state would be very difficult to realise physically. As it neared the zero-mass state, the vacuum would be inclined to flip to the other side. Sukhoi called it a tunnelling phenomenon." Clavain raised an eyebrow. "The other side?" "The quantum-vacuum state in which matter has imaginary inertial mass. By imaginary I mean in the purely mathematical sense, in the sense that the square root of minus one is an imaginary number. Of course, you immediately see what that would imply." "You're talking about tachyonic matter," Clavain said. "Matter travelling faster than light. — Alastair Reynolds

I look forward to the invention of faster-than-light travel. What I'm not looking forward to is the long wait in the dark once I arrive at my destination. — Marc Beland

There's been a greater awareness among people, especially geeks, that the laws of physics don't allow that much wiggle room in terms of things like faster-than-light travel, time travel, sending people to other planets. It's harder than we were aware a few decades ago. I think there used to be this widespread imagination, this idea that we'd eventually just hop in a rocket and go to Mars. — Charlie Jane Anders

Our hardware is likely to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like our hardware. Our hardware is evolving at the speed of light, while we are still the product, for the most part, of unskilled labor. But there is another argument against the need to implant computing devices, be they glass or goo. It's a very simple one, so simple that some have difficulty grasping it. It has to do with a certain archaic distinction we still tend to make, a distinction between computing and "the world." Between, if you like, the virtual and the real. I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn't. — William Gibson

The problem here is that a civilization that is 1,000 light years away doesn't know we exist. They don't know that we have radio telescopes here on Earth because they see Earth as it was 1,000 years ago. Nothing can travel faster than light, so however good their instruments they can't see in affect the future. So there is no particular reason they should be sending us messages at this time. — Paul Davies

Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear to be bright until you hear them speak. — Brian Williams

The camera is not only an extension of the eye but of the brain. It can see sharper, farther, nearer, slower, faster than the eye. It can see by invisible light. It can see in the past, present, and future. Instead of using the camera only to reproduce objects, I wanted to use it to make what is invisible to the eye - visible. — Wynn Bullock

We live in a world defined by its boundaries: You cannot travel faster than the speed of light. You must and will die. You cannot escape these boundaries. But the miracle and hope of human consciousness is that we can still conceive of boundlessness. — Esther Earl

To tell you the truth the only thing I feel, Peter, is that you're going about this all wrong. You're following the most natural roads, and for that reason you've ended up in particularly unnatural places. You're exploring alibis, gathering clues, looking for motives. But it seems to me that, in this particular case the usual terms of your art have lost their meaning, the same way that the concept of time changes meaning at speeds faster than light ... — Arkady Strugatsky

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. — Terry Pratchett

And I feel faster than the speeding light. — Madonna Ciccone

Humanity's first faster-than-light spacecraft crashed into Pluto and vaporised a significant portion of it. Oops.

Pluto's status as a planet had been a matter of contention since the early twenty-first century and had come close to starting the fourth world war at the beginning of the twenty-second century. Making it even smaller did absolutely nothing to help the situation, and humanity came five minutes, and one hasty phone call, from another world war. — L.G. Estrella

I am imagination; I am faster than light. I am creative spirit; I am always in flight. — Debasish Mridha

Throughout these lectures I have delighted in showing you that the price of gaining such an accurate theory has been the erosion of our common sense. We must accept some very bizarre behavior: the amplification and suppression of probabilities, light reflecting from all parts of a mirror, light travelling in paths other than a straight line, photons going faster or slower than the conventional speed of light, electrons going backwards in time, photons suddenly disintegrating into a positron-electron pair, and so on. That we must do, in order to appreciate what Nature is really doing underneath nearly all the phenomena we see in the world. — Richard Feynman

Before we left, Grandmother talked a lot about the arctic night we would fly through. 'Isn't it a mystical word, "arctic"? Pure and quite hard. And meridians. Isn't that pretty? We're going to fly along them, faster than the light can follow us ... Time won't be able to catch us. — Tove Jansson

Wanna know what a bullet feels like, Warren? A real one? It's not like in the comics ... I think you need to. Feel it ... It's not going to make a neat little hole. First - it'll obliterate your internal organs. Your lung will collapse, feels like drowning ... When it finally hits your spine, it'll blow your central nervous system- ... I'm talking. The pain will be unbearable, but you won't be able to move ... A bullet usually travels faster than this, of course. But the dying? It seems like it takes forever. Something, isn't it? One tiny piece of metal destroys everything. It ripped her insides out ... It took her light away. From me. From the world ... And now the one person who should be here is gone - and a waste like you gets to live. A tiny piece of metal. Can you feel it now? — Joss Whedon

We have entered the Age of Light. The ages of steam and coal are long gone. With oil clinging to power, light is emerging as our deus ex machine. Light goes where nothing else can, gets there faster than anything else could, and brings back the images. If there are limits to light, other than its cosmic speed limit, we have not tested them. If there is a final answer to the question "What is light?" we have not found it. — Bruce Watson

Put me on a train with no windows where nighttime lasts forever and a speed-mad engineer with a mechanical heart high balls a coal-black engine through time tunnels like a bullet leaving a gun where the speed of darkness is faster than the speed of light. — D.B. Cox

It is scandalous the way some scientists accept uncritically some of the most ridiculous speculations, such as the plurality of worlds, the opinion that spacetime has more than 4 dimensions, that particles can move faster than light, or that human life can be prolonged indefinitely. — Mario Bunge

To understand this better, we need to know that the cycle of zero to 16% partial reflection by two surfaces repeats more quickly for blue light than for red light. Thus at certain thicknesses, one or the other or both colors are strongly reflected, while at other thicknesses, reflections of both colors is cancelled out (see Fig. 18). The cycles of reflection repeat at different rates because the stopwatch hand turns around faster when it times a blue photon than it does when timing a red photon. In fact, that's the only difference between a red photon and a blue photon (or a photon of any other color, including radio waves, X-rays, and so on)-the speed of the stopwatch hand. — Richard Feynman

It is impossible to travel faster than light, and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off. — Woody Allen

Boss: I just heard that light travels faster than sound. I'm wondering if I should shout when I speak, just so my lips appear to sync-up with my words. — Scott Adams

In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe ... We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time. — Lawrence M. Krauss

As I spun higher and faster and even more replete with every possible happiness, a great slamming sound rolled across me and I opened my eyes in a small dark room with no windows and a very hard concrete floor and walls and no idea of where it was or how I got there. A single small light burned above the door, and I was lying on the floor in the dim glow it cast. The happiness was gone, all of it, and nothing welled up to replace it other than a sense that wherever I might be, nobody had in mind restoring either my joy or my freedom. — Jeff Lindsay

[Psi waves travel far and wide
Faster than the speed of light
Limitless is their domain
Time does not their rate detain.] — Marcha A. Fox