reactormag.com
Five Books That Just Said To Hell With the Speed-of-Light Barrier
Books
reading recommendations
Five Books That Just Said To Hell With the Speed-of-Light Barrier
Relativity, Schmelativity. Einstein was probably wrong, anyway.
By James Davis Nicoll
|
Published on September 8, 2025
Comment
0
Share New
Share
The speed of light is a vexing plot impediment for any SF author who wants their characters to zip off to another star system and come back without finding a much-transformed world when they return home. No surprise that this bold assertion on The Association for Space Propulsion Development site caught my eye.
These experimental data (VERIFIED SEVERAL TIMES) demonstrate that the thrust of a PNN propulsion spaceship can be incredibly increased OVER TIME with the same power used, inevitably exceeding the speed of light.
This courageous proposal raises many questions, such as why nobody has ever suggested circumventing the light-speed barrier simply by going very, very fast. After all, the only impediments are some trifling engineering details, which the ASPD is working on, and the laws of physics.
In fact, people have proposed this before. Take these five examples.
“Space Rats of the CCC” by Harry Harrison (1974)
The focus of Harrison’s story is the process by which candidates are transformed from raw recruits into stalwarts of the Cosmic Camel Corps—or more often, into dismembered corpses. Nevertheless, the means by which faster-than-light travel was attained is explained so clearly I will eschew my usual chronological approach to place the Harrison first:
When the inventor, Patsy Kelly, was asked how ships could move at seven times the speed of light when the limiting velocity of matter, according to Einstein, was the speed of light, he responded in his droll Goidelic way, with a shrug, “Well—sure and I guess Einstein was wrong.”
To be fair, if we noticed phenomena that could not fit into the standard model, some new model would be required. The obvious historical examples are the matter of Mercury’s precession and the invariance of the speed of light, both of which presented seemingly insurmountable challenges to Newtonian physics. That doesn’t seem to be quite how Kelly managed the trick, though.
The Skylark of Space by E.E. “Doc” Smith (1928)
Focused as it is on super-science, industrial espionage, kidnapping, and breakneck adventure in deepest space, Skylark does not have room for a detailed explanation as to how the speed of light could be exceeded. In fact, there’s no explanation at all, only the observation that it has been.
“Three hundred and fifty million miles. Halfway out of the solar system. That means a constant acceleration of about one light.”
“Nothing can go that fast, Mart. E equals M C squared.”
“Einstein’s Theory is still a theory. This distance is an observed fact.”
“And theories are modified to fit facts. Hokay.”
It’s hard to argue with observation, although it is a bit of pity that there’s no room to detail what model should supersede Einstein’s.
I am inexplicably reminded of Edgar Rice Burrough’s repost concerning certain inconsistencies between Mars as astronomers thought it to be and ERB’s Barsoom, that the scientists only had remote observation to go on, while ERB’s John Carter had actually been to Mars.
Islands in Space: The Challenge of the Planetoids by Dandridge M. Cole & Donald W. Cox (1964)
Although this non-fiction text focuses primarily on asteroids, and the case for exploring and exploiting them, as well as suggestions as to how this might be done, in Chapter 17 (“By Planetoid to the Stars”), the authors do touch briefly on that whole thing with the light-speed barrier, about which the authors appear quite skeptical. Maybe the consistent results from decades of experiments are misleading!
If relativity has been found to be correct in all these cases, then it would seem that it must really be a universal law of nature. But again, we call on P.W. Bridgman—“Experience is determined only by experience. This practically means that we must give up the demand that all nature be embraced in any formula, either simple or complicated.”
And now we note a certain basic similarity in all the tests of the relativity theory. They all involve objects, particles, or radiation, moving at high speed with respect to an accelerating, decelerating, or otherwise perturbing, external electromagnetic, or gravitational field. We come now to the significant point that the high-speed rocket is not accelerated by an external field! The mechanism of rocket acceleration is fundamentally different in character from any of the phenomena which have been used to check relativity! We cannot assume that the simple formula which holds in one natural realm will hold in this fundamentally new domain.
However, as they point out, relativity is only an issue for people who want to make round trips. Your Nearly as Fast as Light voyageur need never concern themselves with the phenomenon, provided they never return.
While some may find Cole and Cox’s case against Einstein somewhat short of compelling, I do recommend the text. Readers will find there, in their original form, many of the proposals for space development to be found in more recent space advocacy books.
Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein (1957)
Whereas Heinlein dabbled in relativity in his 1956 Time for the Stars, his ambitions for Citizen—which is a spy novel, a Norton-style Free Trader novel, a barracks drama, and a boardroom drama all in one—left no room for Einsteinian flourishes. Instead, Citizen’s starships exceed the speed of light through the simple expedient of brute force and purely Newtonian acceleration1:
But a ship which speeds up by a kilometer per second each second will take three and one half standard days to reach speed of light.
Exactly why Einstein’s model does not apply is left to the reader’s imagination, as is how exactly one accelerates a starship at a kilometer per second cheaply enough (or at all) for interstellar trade to be reasonable. The plot requires that this be possible, so it is.
Heinlein fans may be interested to know that Citizen is slated for an animated adaptation under director Jay Oliva, with a script by Luke Lieberman.
Orbitsville by Bob Shaw (1975)
Vance Garamond’s life would actually be better if the flickerwing starships Vance pilots were relativistic, as that would allow him to use the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction to escape space oligarch Elizabeth Lindstrom’s wrath for having inadvertently allowed Linstrom’s child to fall to his death. As it is, Vance can only flee through space, not time, and there is nowhere in space where Lindstrom’s influence will not eventually reach.
And why does Einstein not apply?
(W)hen a body of appreciable mass and gravitic field reached speeds approaching .2c it entered new frames of reference. Once a ship crossed the threshold velocity it created its own portable universe in which different rules applied, and it appeared that the great universal constant was not the speed of light.
I suspect that “appreciable” is a load-bearing term in that exposition.
The go very very fast approach to superluminal flight is so obvious, the examples above are only a very small sample. Why, I didn’t even mention Beckman’s classic Einstein Plus Two! Undoubtedly, I may have overlooked your favourite examples. Extol their virtues in comments below.[end-mark]
Heinlein had dabbled in relativity-skepticism before, in Farmer in the Sky.“Mr. Ortega, admitting that you can’t pass the speed of light, what would happen if the Star Rover got up close to the speed of light—and then the Captain suddenly stepped the drive up to about six g and held it there?”“Why, it would—No, let’s put it this way—” He broke off and grinned; it made him look real young.“See here, kid, don’t ask me questions like that. I’m an engineer with hairy ears, not a mathematical physicist.” He looked thoughtful and added, “Truthfully, I don’t know what would happen, but I would sure give a pretty to find out. Maybe we would find out what the square root of minus one looks like—from the inside.” ︎The post Five Books That Just Said To Hell With the Speed-of-Light Barrier appeared first on Reactor.
New Posts (Home)
ChatBox
Popular Posts 
Game Zone
Top PodCasts
