Things You Thought You Knew – Faster Than Light

What It Covers

Neil deGrasse Tyson explains three physics concepts: how dimensions work from two-dimensional planes to four-dimensional time, whether faster-than-light travel via tachyons is possible, and how isotopes like carbon-14 enable dating of organic materials.

Key Questions Answered

• •Dimensional Surgery: A four-dimensional being could perform surgery on humans without cutting skin, just as three-dimensional surgeons could operate on two-dimensional creatures by accessing organs from above the plane, bypassing their outer boundary entirely while the patient remains intact.
• •World Lines and Meeting Coordinates: To meet someone requires both spatial location and time coordinates intersecting—your world line. A truck passing through your previous location ten minutes later means world lines missed, explaining why video conferencing only requires time synchronization, not spatial convergence.
• •Tachyon Properties: Hypothetical particles existing beyond light speed would travel backwards in time, with light speed as their minimum velocity requiring infinite energy to slow down, mirroring how objects on our side need infinite energy to reach light speed from below.
• •Carbon-14 Dating Mechanism: Living organisms maintain constant carbon-14 levels from cosmic rays and food intake. Upon death, ingestion stops and carbon-14 decays with a 5,700-year half-life, enabling precise dating across human history from cave dwellers to recent centuries by measuring remaining isotope ratios.