different light most certainly does not have different speed
i owe you two an apology
danielost and
Xclusiv8; we were both partly right. light does travel at different speeds, but it isn't dependant on wavelength. light moves slower when it's moving through air, water, glass, etc.
When passing through a transparent or translucent material medium, like glass or air, light will have a slower speed than in a vacuum; the ratio of c to the observed phase velocity is called the refractive index of the medium. In general relativity, a gravitational potential can affect the speed of distant light in a vacuum, but locally light in a vacuum will always pass an observer at a rate of c.
sorry for the confusion on my part.
Basically, it involves "stretching" space time, so you aren't really moving faster than light, but when you "stretch" the space behind you and "compress" the space in front of you, traveling below light speed would be relatively equivalent to traveling faster than lightspeed through "unstretched" space.
i remember similar articles, and it's funny becuase i was thinking about another part of them and one concept led me to something related to this thread. i will return to it momentarily.
linear FTL travel and artificial wormholes are claimed possible by some theorists, but IIRC both involve negative energy. negative energy is theoretically possible, but no one's come up with any ideas on how to harvest it. basically, when you've got vacuous space, it has a
net rest energy of 0. i made 'net' bold for a reason: that net is the result of quantum phenomenon with negative and positive energy cancelling each other out.
the funny thing about negative energy, according to our current theoretical models anyway, is that it has imaginary mass. this is what made me think of the OP.
energy cannot exist without mass. but what if the mass were in such a form that we could not perceive or otherwise understand it. let's just say the current physical models were right (or right enough), and it's possible for an object or entity to have negative energy and imaginary mass. the first time i learned about imaginary numbers was in algebra when we studied quadradic equations. they occured when you tried to find the points a curve crosses the X axis when it doesn't actually cross.
"dark matter" is a very generic term: basically it's any type of subatomic matter we heaven't measured yet. it was originally called dark because we can't see it with refracted or emitted photons. that could happen for lots of reasons, and if you loot at theoretical types of dark matter, some seems pretty mundane, and some explanations for it are a lot more grandiose. we thought of it because we realized that according to our best physical models there should be a lot more matter in our hubble volume than we can see.
some postulations amount to particles in our universe we simply can't observe. other marginal theories question the amount of matter there should be. but the ones that interest me suggest parallel universes. these hypotheses would also explain the weakness of gravity - which has been the thorn in the side of attempts at theories of everything - by saying that gravity acts across more than 3 spatial dimensions.
bear in mind that these postulations are purely theoretical. the math is sound, we just don't know if it soundly describes anything real. also bear in mind that i'm not a physicist and i'm trying to remember this all off the top of my head. still, if both they and i are at least accurate enough, who's to say 'ascention' isn't possible via controlled transmutation into bodies made of imaginary (extra-dimensional?) mass and negative energy? such beings might possibly have extrordinary powers in our universe, and if they were our future we'd have to do it at least in part by self-conscious genetic manipulation (or at least an increadibly thorough scan of the body and brain, presuming that'd 'capture' everything about you).
i'll leave theological speculation as to what it could mean to those more qualified than i.
