While attending a party at a private home in New Hampshire last weekend, presidential candidate Wesley Clark, a retired four-star general and former NATO commander, went a bit off message when he decided to offer up his thoughts on the work of Albert Einstein: "I still believe in E=mc², but I can't believe that in all of human history, we'll never ever be able to go beyond the speed of light to reach where we want to go," said Clark, as reported online by Wired magazine. "I happen to believe that mankind can do it. I've argued with physicists about it, I've argued with best friends about it. I just have to believe it. It's my only faith-based initiative."
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Clark's comments apparently drew laughter and applause at the gathering–and derision from the media. The original article had this lead: "Wesley Clark: Rhodes scholar, four-star general, NATO commander, time-travel fanatic?" (Wired later substituted the subtler phrase "futurist" for "time-travel fanatic.") The Drudge Report also picked up the time-travel angle with the header "Gen. Clark Explores Possibility of Time Travel." Two problems here: One, Clark wasn't commenting directly on time travel, althoug–-as Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity points out–time would seem to slow down for an astronaut in a spaceship that was approaching the speed of light. As this analysis from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory describes the phenomenon: "Say you were 15 years old when you left Earth in a spacecraft traveling at about 99.5% of the speed of light (which is much faster than we can achieve now) and celebrated only five birthdays during your space voyage. When you get home at the age of 20, you would find that all your classmates were 65 years old, retired, and enjoying their grandchildren!"
The other problem here is mocking Clark for merely raising the possibility of FTL travel. To find out what an actual physicist thought of his comment, I E-mailed Marc Millis, founder of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, now on hold because of a lack of funding. His thoughts: "I am quite surprised to see this subject brought up on the Presidential campaign trail! Debating the faster-than-light question can be quite useful to physics . . . . Yes, faster-than-light still appears to be impossible, although numerous contrasting articles appear in respectable scientific journals. By asking such `what-ifs,' deeper assessments of what we know and what we don't know are coming to light. And, how useful would it be if it turns out to be possible? Well, the implications are astronomical, literally." Tomorrow, with the help of Millis, I will investigate ways in which interstellar travel might be possible.
