• Question: Is there any logic at all the the ideology of hyperspace and travelling at the speed of light (as seen in star wars) or is all of it completely fictional and implausible in your opinion

    Asked by anon-252780 to Marios on 4 May 2020.
    • Photo: Marios Kalomenopoulos

      Marios Kalomenopoulos answered on 4 May 2020:

      Hi!

      I think most of it is science-fiction, especially what is related with the hyperspace travelling. From what we know from physics – special relativity – that we have checked, no spaceship can travel with the speed of light or faster.

      But even if we could travel with light speed, it would take us a long time to reach even our closest star (Alpha Centauri A). It would take us at least 4 years, and it would need us to travel at light speed the whole time!

      There is a theoretical loophole however, and these are the wormholes, which could connect different points in space, like tunnels! But BEWARE, these are just ideas and have never been observed and we really don’t know how they would work in reality. It’s “science fiction”, that actual scientists are working on!

      For further physics topics related to Star Wars, I really like the small articles in the “Physics Special Topics” journal, that is run by students of Leicester University. You can find them here:
      –
      https://www108.lamp.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/pst/search/search?simpleQuery=Star+wars&searchField=query
      –
      Maybe these are a bit more advanced than the general articles you can find online, but I think they’re more interesting since they saw the basic steps a physicists would do to check “Star Wars” science. You can always skip the equations if you like, and try to go through the physics arguments!
      –
      I hope this helps! 🙂
      –
      Let me know, if anything is not clear.

Comments

  • Photo: Greg

    Greg commented on :

    This might be one for the string theorists! I am not one but here goes. My understanding of ‘hyperspace’ in the science fiction sense is that it is some extra dimension you can hop into that somehow allows you to travel faster. There are as yet uverified theories that predict extra dimensions beyond our own that are not visible because our universe is a sub-space of it or because they are rolled up very small (there’s no need for a dimension to be infinite!)
    –
    So I guess the idea of hyperspace is not ridiculous, but I don’t know how or if it would help you move faster. Any string theorists around….?

  • Photo: Scott

    Scott commented on :

    There has actually been a lot of work on warp drives from Star Trek! These are based on known relativity science, rather than made-up ‘hyperspace’ science from Star Wars 🙂 There are people working in NASA on technology called an ‘Alcubierre Warp Drive’. It’s not been made yet and has the slightly difficult problem of needing enough energy to destroy the planet Jupiter, but it could conceivably get us moving faster than light!