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Could one use gravity to travel at speeds in excess of the speed of light? Even if the mass of the ship increases as it approaches the speed of light, wouldnt that only increase the gravitational attraction, thus accelerating the craft even faster past the speed of light? And back into time?
Question Date: 2010-04-13
Answer 1:

Define "travel", but the answer is "not really, or not relative to the traveler anyway".

Gravity can slow down the rate at which time passes, but in no theories of gravity that have ever been tested has gravity been able to actually reverse the passage of time, nor is gravity able to bore a hole into the fabric of time and output somewhere else, to our knowledge. Now, as I said above, there are no theories that have been supported by any hard data that reconcile Einstein's classical gravitation with quantum mechanics - and nobody has ever even seen the event horizon of a black hole, let alone seen what is going on inside of one (according to Einstein's theory, you CAN'T see what is going on inside without going in yourself - and then never coming out).



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