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Comment by nickolai | Hacker News Reader

> Practical implications?

Print out 90% of physics articles from the century. Get big trash can. Put printout in trash can.

Of course i'm exaggerating, but if the story is true, this is going to be big.

Speed of light is the main block for things like time travel and a hard limit on communication speed.

It doesn't matter that it is only 0.0025%, what matters is that it can be done(if it is confirmed). As a(very poor) analogy, the first CPUs were probably about 0.0025% the speed of the modern ones, yet look where we are today, in no small part thanks to them. The point is, if true, this may well open a whole new realm in physics, and who knows what we will find there.

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This is it in a nut shell. While the ramifications are hard to predict at this moment, they are huge. E=mc^2 prob won't effect practical physics that we deal with on a daily basis. but as far theoretical physics the impact is enormous. time space fabric warping, wormholes (existence, creation and artificial stabilization), how fast the universe is speeding apart, our calculations for where things are in our solar system and beyond and a whole host of other things physics relies on the formula to calculate.

what i am most excited for is the possibility to travel faster than the speed of light. conventional theory dictated that the more mass you have the more fuel you would need to break the lightspeed barrier, however the closer you approach the speed of light the more fuel you would need therefore increasing your mass infinitely putting you in a perpetual null loop. but if that equation changes and we know that there are particles that travel faster than light speed limit we may have to re-examine this theorem. Especially with new power sources being discovered on the atomic and quantum levels. The splitting of those bonds if harnessed yield promising potential. Not to mention the existence of antimatter which releases catastrophic amounts of energy when in contact with matter. We can't seem to find any right now so were limited with how much we can make which is a miniscule amount. Limits the production seem to be on a physics level as opposed to a technological one. But who knows if the speed of light is up for discussion almost anything can be in a table.

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