Study Shows How The Universe Would Look if You Broke The Speed of Light, And It's Weird

Light goes faster than anything else. There is a rule of physics woven into Einstein's theory of relativity. The closer something goes, the harder it is to see time.

You run into issues of time reversing when you go faster still.

Researchers from the University of Warsaw in Poland and the National University of Singapore have pushed the limits of relativity in order to come up with a system that doesn't run afoul of existing physics.

They came up with an extension of special relativity that combines three time dimensions with a single space dimensions, as opposed to the three spatial dimensions and one time dimensions that we're all used to.

The idea that objects might be able to go faster than light without breaking our current laws of physics is supported by this new study.

"Observers moving in relation to the described physical systems with speeds greater than the speed of light should be subject to it," says physicist Andrzej Dragan.

Einstein's special theory of relativity can't be reconciled into a single overarching theory because the two branches of physics can't be seen in the same way.

Particles can't be modeled as point-like objects under this framework.

We would need to look at the kinds of field theories that underpin quantum physics to make sense of what observers might see.

Superluminal objects would look like a bubble through space, similar to a wave through a field. The high-speed object would experience multiple timelines.

Even so, the speed of light in a vacuum would remain constant even for those observers going faster than it, which preserves one of Einstein's fundamental principles.

The new definition preserves Einstein's postulate that the speed of light in vacuum is the same for everyone.

It doesn't seem like an extravagant idea.

The researchers acknowledge that the switch to a 1+3 space-time model raises some new questions. Extending the theory of special relativity to include faster-than-light frames of reference is suggested by them.

Borrowing from quantum field theory is a way of predicting how physical fields are going to interact with each other.

The Universe's particles would have special properties if the physicists are correct.

One of the questions raised by the research is whether or not we would ever be able to observe this behavior, but answering that is going to take a lot more time and a lot more scientists.

Physicist Krzysztof Turzyski from the University of Warsaw says that the discovery of a new fundamental particle is a feat worthy of the prize.

We hope to apply our results to better understand the phenomenon of symmetry breaking in the Standard Model, especially in the early Universe.

The research was published in two different books.