DarkRange55
Enlightened
- Oct 15, 2023
- 1,699
The technology behind the science-fiction stories is the part that interests me the most – I like stories that are based on relatively realistic science.
I wanted to write a science fiction story where humanity was attacked by some alien species. Humanity then constructs something that alters the speed of light, but the propagation of the alteration is only at the speed of light. Humanity points a region or altered space straight from our sun to where the enemy's home planet will be when the region of alteration reaches the distance of that planet. This basically builds a light tunnel in which years the sun's output into the mouth of the tunnel accumulates in an "optical boom" as it rushes faster than light to reach the region of alteration and adds to the accumulating light. This accumulating light arrives at the alien's home planet just as the planet's orbit takes it into the region of alteration, frying the enemy's home world... and humanity is saved... I (physicists) do not know if it is possible to alter the speed of light, but if it is, my hunch is that the alteration cannot propagate faster than the current speed of light, in which case the story is based upon plausible physics.
For the optical boom, one would need a region with a refractive index of less than one surrounded by noon region of even lower refractive index to act as a waveguide. If one had a core region the refractive index of 0.2 surrounded by a region with an index refraction of 0.1, you would get total internal reflection guiding the light much like an optical fiber.
The last problem I resolved was how to keep the space-time distortion generator pointing at the target as it orbits the sun - it would simply use a mirror to reflect light into the mouth of the distortion field core.
If it orbited the sun at Mercury's orbit, the orbital velocity is so slow compared to the speed of light that the optical fiber guiding effect would still guide the light with a factor of a few million to spare. And a few dozen years of Mercury strength sunlight arriving in a fraction of a second as an optical boom would certainly do a number on an enemy planet!
I wanted to write a science fiction story where humanity was attacked by some alien species. Humanity then constructs something that alters the speed of light, but the propagation of the alteration is only at the speed of light. Humanity points a region or altered space straight from our sun to where the enemy's home planet will be when the region of alteration reaches the distance of that planet. This basically builds a light tunnel in which years the sun's output into the mouth of the tunnel accumulates in an "optical boom" as it rushes faster than light to reach the region of alteration and adds to the accumulating light. This accumulating light arrives at the alien's home planet just as the planet's orbit takes it into the region of alteration, frying the enemy's home world... and humanity is saved... I (physicists) do not know if it is possible to alter the speed of light, but if it is, my hunch is that the alteration cannot propagate faster than the current speed of light, in which case the story is based upon plausible physics.
For the optical boom, one would need a region with a refractive index of less than one surrounded by noon region of even lower refractive index to act as a waveguide. If one had a core region the refractive index of 0.2 surrounded by a region with an index refraction of 0.1, you would get total internal reflection guiding the light much like an optical fiber.
The last problem I resolved was how to keep the space-time distortion generator pointing at the target as it orbits the sun - it would simply use a mirror to reflect light into the mouth of the distortion field core.
If it orbited the sun at Mercury's orbit, the orbital velocity is so slow compared to the speed of light that the optical fiber guiding effect would still guide the light with a factor of a few million to spare. And a few dozen years of Mercury strength sunlight arriving in a fraction of a second as an optical boom would certainly do a number on an enemy planet!
