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The Fastest Man Alive sped off with the hearts of comic book fans right from his debut in 1940. The Flash possess "super-speed," which includes the ability to run and move extremely fast, use superhuman reflexes and seemingly violates certain laws of physics.Since DC Comics introduced the scarlet speedster in Flash Comics #1, four men have run rings around evil while calling themselves the Flash, one of the most beloved characters in the history of comic books.

The first Flash, Jay Garrick, used his superhuman speed to battle crooks and Nazi agents alongside the Justice Society of America until declining interest in superhero comics led to the end of the Golden Age of comics and the cancellation of the Flash in 1949.In 1956, lightning struck again. A new Flash was born when a bolt of lightning struck Barry Allen's lab, bathing the police scientist in electrified chemicals. Gifted with the same superhuman speed and reflexes as his childhood hero, Jay Garrick, Allen donned red tights and the iconic lightning symbol to lead the charge against villainy in the Silver Age of superhero comics.

A product of post-war optimism, Barry Allen's career as the scarlet speedster was that of a larger than life do-gooder. He fought aliens and time travelers - even inventing his own time machine, the Cosmic Treadmil, to keep up. He taught his similarly gifted nephew Wally West the ropes of heroism and found time to form the Justice League with fellow comic legends Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. And he always did it with a grin and a corny joke.

All that ended with the 1985 miniseries, "Crisis on Infinite Earths." When Barry realized that the universe was about to be destroyed by the nefarious Anti-Monitor's anti-matter cannon, the Flash literally ran himself to death to stop the weapon from firing. Barry's heroic sacrifice saved the day and bought the rest of the heroes the time they needed to finish the job. One of the greatest heroes of the DC universe had met with its greatest death.

After Barry's fall, Wally took up the baton. He initially met with mixed results: still an arrogant kid, he often misused his powers and after winning millions in the lottery became a womanizing playboy to rival the likes of Bruce Wayne. But, over the next twenty years, readers watched Wally gradually mature into a devoted husband, a loving father and an earnest hero.

Just as he finally emerged from the shadow of his uncle's legacy, history seemed to repeat itself. In the 2006 miniseries, "Infinite Crisis," Wally appeared to sacrifice himself in order to stop a deranged Superboy's deadly rampage. The disappearance left fans joking that the publisher could not have a major event without the death of a Flash.

It turns out that might be true. A reluctant Bart Allen - who in a quirk of convoluted comic continuity was Barry's grandson from the future - took up the mantle as the fourth Flash in an all-too-brief run that ended with his tragic murder. Wally, who was revealed to have been secretly retired, returned to service to bring the murderers to justice.

Now, with the upcoming series "Final Crisis" being touted as "the day evil won," Barry Allen, one of the greatest heroes in the DC universe, has returned to fight it... To be continued. By David Hinckley

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Warp Six,

Mister Sulu!

That's only 392 times

the speed of light...

Image Via The Business Insider

NASA An artist's conception of what warp speed might look like to a space traveler.

For as long as humans have looked up to the skies, space has fascinated us, and astronomers and philosophers alike have asked the most fundamental questions while staring at the stars. What are we doing here, anyway? How did the universe begin, and are there other, parallel universes that mirror ours? Is there life out there in other galaxies, and what would it be like to travel there?

Onboard the starship Enterprise, you're hanging out with the crew members, enjoying a game of poker. You're traveling at impulse speed during a leisurely deep-space exploration, and everyone has some downtime. But wait -- all of a sudden, the ship receives an urgent message from a Federation admiral, informing the crew of an outbreak of war in the Neutral Zone. The Enterprise is ordered to report to the situation as soon as possible. The area in question is about 20 light years (117 trillion kilometers) away, but this is no problem in the "Star Trek" universe. The captain adjusts the ship's warp drive appropriately, and you settle in for warp speed. Traveling faster than the speed of light, you should arrive to your destination in just a few minutes.

While we haven't quite answered these questions yet, we at least have science fiction like "Star Trek" to test the human imagination. Everything from H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" to "Star Trek" to Joss Whedon's "Firefly" series has touched on the possibilities of time travel, teleportation and, of course, warp speed. But how does something like warp speed fit into reality and our universe? Is warp speed just a wacky science fiction device, or is it theoretically possible? How does it work in the "Star Trek" universe? For everything on warp speed, infinity and beyond, read on.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images
"Star Trek" had William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk, but whatever were they going to do about intergalactic space travel?

Newton's Third Law of Motion
When the writers of "Star Trek" sat down to plan the series, they found themselves confronted with a few problems. They were essentially creating a space opera, a subgenre of science fiction that takes place in space and covers the span of several galaxies and millions of light years. The "Star Wars" films are another example of the space opera subgenre. As the "opera" part of the name suggests, a show like "Star Trek" isn't meant to be slow or ordinary -- when people think of the series, they probably think of melodramatic plots involving aliens, space travel and action-packed laser fights.

So the creator of the series, Gene Roddenberry, and the other writers had to find a way to move the show's characters around the universe in a timely, dramatic fashion. At the same time, they wanted to do their best to stick to the laws of physics. The biggest problem was that even if a starship could travel at the speed of light, the time to go from one galaxy to another could still take hundreds, maybe thousands of years. A journey from the Earth to the center of our galaxy, for example, would take about 25,000 years if you were to travel just under the speed of light. This, of course, wouldn't make very exciting television.

The invention of warp speed solved the opera part of the problem, since it allowed the Enterprise to go much faster than the speed of light. But what was the explanation? How could they explain an object traveling faster than the speed of light, something Einstein proved impossible in his Special Theory of Relativity?

Eliot J. Schechter/Getty Images

When this shuttle makes its way into orbit, it will travel at about 17,000 miles per hour. Humans can withstand this velocity in this type of shuttle, but if the shuttle even attempted to approach the speed of light, the effect would prove fatal to astronauts.

The first obstacle the writers had to confront is much simpler than you'd think. One of the most important things you need to know before understanding warp speed is actually one of the oldest tricks in the physics book, Newton's Third Law of Motion. You've probably heard it before -- this law states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It simply means that for every interaction between two objects, a pair of forces is working on both of them. For instance, if you roll one billiard ball straight into another one that's at rest, they will both exert an equal force on each other. The moving ball will hit the ball at rest and push it away, but it will also be pushed back by the latter.

You feel this law come into play every time you accelerate in a car or fly in an airplane. As the vehicle speeds up and moves forward, you feel pressure on your seat. The seat is pushing on you, but you're also exerting a force against the seat.

So what does this have to do with "Star Trek" and the Enterprise? Even if it were possible to accelerate to something like half the speed of light, such intense acceleration would kill a person by smashing him against his seat. Even though he'd be pushing back with an equal and opposite force, his mass compared to the starship is just too small -- the same kind of thing happens when a mosquito hits your windshield and splatters. So how can the Enterprise possibly go faster than the speed of light without killing the members on board?

Einstein, Relativity
and the Space-time Continuum

In order to sidestep the issue of Newton's Third Law of Motion and the impossibility of matter traveling faster than the speed of light, we can look to Einstein and the relationship between space and time. Taken together, space, consisting of three dimensions (up-down, left-right, and forward-backward) and time are all part of what's called the space-time continuum.

It's important to understand Einstein's work on the space-time continuum and how it relates to the Enterprise traveling through space. In his Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein states two postulates:

The speed of light (about 300,000,000 meters per second) is the same for all observers, whether or not they're moving.

Anyone moving at a constant speed should observe the same physical laws.

Via Mnemonics

Putting these two ideas together, Einstein realized that space and time are relative -- an object in motion actually experiences time at a slower rate than one at rest. Although this may seem absurd to us, we travel incredibly slow when compared to the speed of light, so we don't notice the hands on our watches ticking slower when we're running or traveling on an airplane. Scientists have actually proved this phenomenon by sending atomic clocks up with high-speed rocket ships. They returned to Earth slightly behind the clocks on the ground.

What does this mean for the Captain Kirk and his team? The closer an object gets to the speed of light, that object actually experiences time at a significantly slower rate. If the Enterprise were traveling safely at close to the speed of light to the center of our galaxy from Earth, it would take 25,000 years of Earth time. For the crew, however, the trip would probably only take 10 years.

Although that timeframe might be possible for the individuals onboard, we're presented with yet another problem -- a Federation attempting to run an intergalactic civilization would run into some problems if it took 50,000 years for a starship to hit the center of our galaxy and come back.
So the Enterprise has to avoid the speed of light in order to keep the passengers onboard in synch with Federation time. At the same time, it also must reach speeds faster than that of light in order to move around the universe in an efficient manner. Unfortunately, as Einstein states in his Special Theory of Relativity, nothing is faster than the speed of light. Space travel therefore would be impossible if we're looking at the special relativity.

According to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, matter bends the fabric of space and time. The distortion of the space-time continuum even affects the behavior of light.

That's why we need to look at Einstein's later theory, the General Theory of Relativity, which describes how gravity affects the shape of space and flow of time. Imagine a stretched-out sheet. If you place a bowling ball in the middle of the sheet, the sheet will warp as the weight of the ball pushes down on it. If you place a baseball on the same sheet, it will roll towards the bowling ball. This is a simple design, and space doesn't act like a two-dimension bed sheet, but it can be applied to something like our solar system -- more massive objects like our sun can warp space and affect the orbits of the surrounding planets. The planets don't fall into the sun, of course, because of the high speeds at which they travel.

Warp Drive

The ability to manipulate space is the most important concept in regard to warp speed. If the Enterprise could warp the space-time continuum by expanding the area behind it and contracting the area in front, the crew could avoid going the speed of light. As long as it creates its own gravitational field, the starship could travel locally at very slow velocities, therefore avoiding the pitfalls of Newton's Third Law of Motion and keeping clocks in sync with its launch site and destination. The ship isn't really traveling at a "speed," per se -- it's more like it's pulling its destination toward it while pushing its starting point back.

A warp bubble surrounding a starship, which protects the ship and crew members as space and time distorts.

Because the ideas behind Einstein's General Theory of Relativity are complex and still open to interpretation, this leaves the possibilities wide open for science fiction writers. We may not know how to bend space and time with our current technology, but a fictional civilization set in the future may be completely capable of inventing such a device with the right imagination.

In the "Star Trek" universe, warp speed is accomplished through the use of a warp drive. The warp drive is powered by matter-antimatter reactions, which are regulated by a substance called dilithium. This reaction creates highly-energetic plasma known as electro-plasma, a type of matter with its own magnetic field, which reacts with the starship'swarp coils. The warp coils are typically enclosed in what the "Star Trek" writers call a warp nacelle. The whole package creates a "warp field" or "bubble" around the Enterprise, allowing the ship and its crew to remain safe while space manipulates around them.

Sometime between the first television series ("Star Trek: The Original Series") and the second ("Star Trek: The Next Generation"), the writers decided to assign a limit to warp speed -- using a scale of Warp-1 to Warp-10, the Enterprise wasn't allowed to travel just anywhere at anytime, seeing as that would make plotting too easy. In the show, Warp-10 became an impossible maximum speed, an infinity in which the starship would be at all points in the universe at the same time. Warp-9.6, according to the "Next Generation" technical manual, is the highest attainable speed allowed -- it's set at 1,909 times the speed of light. Although there are some inconsistencies, the following list the different speeds in the "Star Trek" universe:

Warp Factor	Number of times the speed of light
1	1
2	10
3	39
4	102
5	215
6	392
7	656
8	1,024
9	1,516
9.6	1,909
	infinity

Problems with Warp Speed

A visualization of a warp field. The ship rests within a bubble of normal space.

Les Bossinas/NASA

An artist's rendition of a spaceship traveling at warp speed. So Einstein helped the "Star Trek" writers manipulate space in a science fictional universe, but is it actually possible to build a spaceship that could propel people across vast galaxies in a relatively short period of time?

Physicist Miguel Alcubierre has suggested the use of so-called "exotic matter," a theoretical type of matter with negative energy. If it could be found or created, the exotic matter would do the job of repelling space and time and creating the gravitational field.

Unfortunately, that's as far as it goes for possible fuel sources -- there are more problems than solutions when it comes to the concept of powering warp speed. Even if the Enterprise were to travel at sublight speeds, known as impulse drive to "Star Trek" fans, the amount of fuel and energy needed to travel quickly through space would be too much for a single starship. The impulse drive of the Enterprise is powered by nuclear fusion, the same kind of reaction that lights up the sun and creates huge explosions from certain nuclear bombs.

According to Dr. Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and author of "The Physics of Star Trek," if Captain Kirk wanted to travel at half the speed of light (150,000 kilometers per second), the starship would need to burn 81 times its mass in hydrogen, the fuel used for nuclear fusion. The technical manual for "Star Trek: The Next Generation" lists the Enterprise as more than 4 million metric tons in weight, so the ship would need more than 300 million metric tons of hydrogen just to move forward. Of course, to slow down to a stop, the starship would need yet another 300 million metric tons of fuel, and a potential trip across galaxies would need 6,642 times the mass of the "Enterprise."

Some people have proposed a system in which a device gathers hydrogen as the starship travels, foregoing the necessity to store huge amounts of fuel, but Krauss suggests this device would have to be about 25 miles wide to capture anything worth using. Even though hydrogen is the most abundant element in the galaxy, there's only about one atom of hydrogen for every cubic square inch.

Making the warp drive work would be another thing. The warp drive in "Star Trek" gets its power by reacting matter with antimatter -- the result is complete annihilation and the release of pure energy. Since antimatter isn't very common throughout our universe, the Federation would have to produce it, something we can do today at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois.

Again, the problem turns out to be a issue of the amount of fuel necessary to power a warp drive. Kruass notes that Fermilab is capable of producing 50 billion antiprotons in one hour -- enough to produce 1/1000 of a watt. You would need 100,000 Fermilabs to power a single light bulb. Producing enough antiprotons to bend the space-time continuum looks near impossible as far as our current technology goes.

Although there's little chance during this century of humans developing a spaceship that could bend space and travel to distant galaxies faster than the speed of light, this hasn't stopped scientists and fans of the series alike to think about the potential. As recent as November 2007, the British Interplanetary Society brought together several physicists for a conference called "Faster Than Light: Breaking the Interstellar Distance Barrier" [source: Guardian].

Click here for large image

The Science of "Star Trek"

As far as science fiction goes, "Star Trek" is well regarded by its fans for sticking to relatively plausible physics. Although no one's come up with a starship that would travel at warp speed, no one's disproved the possibility of such a feat. "Star Trek" has also looked at other big concepts throughout the series, including the notion of time travel through black holes or wormholes. The writers also get several nit-picky details correct, such as the fact that there is no sound in space. While George Lucas includes laser blasts and explosions throughout his "Star Wars" series in order to keep things dramatic, "Star Trek" kept a bit closer to reality by not including sound effects in space.

The Reality of Warp Drive

How far off are we from working warp drives? Check out this Discovery.com
Interview with Dr. Richard Obousy about the possibility of real warp drives.

Via How Stuff Works

Speed-of-light experiments give baffling results at Cern

By Jason PalmerScience and technology reporter, BBC News

The neutrinos are fired deep under the Italian Apennines at Gran Sasso

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have confounded physicists because subatomic particles seem to have beaten the speed of light.
Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away in Italy seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.
The result - which threatens to upend a century of physics - were put online for scrutiny by other scientists.
In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims.
They will be discussing the result in detail in a conference at Cern on Friday afternoon, which can be viewed online.
"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.
"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News.
"When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'"Caught speeding?
The speed of light is the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.
Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.
But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.
Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.
The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.
In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up 60 billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance - a tiny fractional change, but a consistent one.
The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.
But the group understands that what are known as "systematic errors" could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit, and that has motivated them to publish their measurements.
"My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved," Dr Ereditato said.But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy. And of course, the consequences can be very serious."

Via BBC News