Every great discovery needs a back story. I mean, if you don't know about Isaac Newton's apple, you'll probably want to stop reading, long words may be inbound. My back-story's pretty much the story of my life right now, I was sitting around drawing. To be precise, drawing concept art for a sci-fi comic called Paladin, or Destiny... not sure yet.
Quite happily drawing away, I started dreaming up the science behind the fictional universe, how things would work. I started browsing around for info on the real theories behind faster than light (FTL) travel, FTL communication, 'sub-space' and assorted other sci-fi 'facts' that are so overused they're clichéd. As far as science fictions go, there's two main types. The ones that tell you what things do, but don't care how, after all, it's fiction, and there's the types that have wild ideas and give them explanations. These usually feature some form of pure fiction, such as Star Trek's Dilithium, not to be confused with real dilithium, that the rest of the science is built upon.
I wanted to have my 'science' built on logic, so that even though it is pure fiction, with only our current knowledge of the way the universe works, it could be possible.
This naturally brought me to the limitation we have with light-speed, and how things tend to get rather heavy (sorry, tend to increase in mass) as they approach the speed of light. My first plan to get around this way to investigate a way to communicate FTL, and I looked into Tachyon. They're theoretical particles that travel faster than light, and seeing as they travel faster than light, it's logical to assume they have no mass. The next step, is wave-particle duality, which is a widely accepted fact within physics that states particles (such as our Tachyon) share properties with waves (such as electromagnetic radiation that we use to communicate with today). So, assuming Tachyon's exist (and there is a logical reason as do why I believe they do, but I'm trying to keep this relatively short) we will in the future find some way of creating and/or influencing them, which will allow for waves to be sent faster than light, and therefore, FTL communication.
Now, with this technological achievement a logical step for the human race, how would they turn that into a way to move mass faster than light? This is where mass in special relativity becomes a problem, as it's theorised through special relativity that as an object's speed approaches the speed of light, it's mass increases exponentially toward infinity. A conflicting, but less well-known, theory is what I consider more likely. Matter itself cannot change one physical property (mass) as a result of a change in a completely unrelated property (speed). Instead, as speed increases, the fabric universe that matter currently inhabits stretches around it, giving the appearance of it's mass increasing.
That's the basic building-blocks, I'll end it here in an attempt to keep this post slightly shorter than War and Peace.
