The bells of joyful news have begun ringing-- after quite the hiatus, the EM drive has returned! Researchers from China’s space agency have released a video through state media in which they show what appears to be a fully functioning EM drive.

For those who are unfamiliar to the EM drive, here’s the crash course. An EM drive, also known as a radio frequency resonant cavity thruster, is theorized to be able to generate thrust without the need of a propellant. The thrust is of the electromagnetic world that is produced from bouncing microwaves back and forth inside a cavity.

Think of it like this -- a person is sitting inside of a box and they are faced with a task to make the box move. They do so by pushing out the walls and moving around inside of the box. Also, to top it all off, the total momentum generated by the drive increases as it moves.

If an EM drive is to enter our current world of reality, it would be revolutionary, to say the least. Faster space travel and cheaper spaceflight costs would be guaranteed.

China announcing such a great feat has raised some eyebrows. Before the release of the video, there were two breakthroughs in the world of the EM drive. The first was a peer-reviewed NASA paper claiming the very real possibility of the successful operatives of such a machine... at the very least hypothetically. The second was China claiming that the operatives of the EM drive one hundred percent possible.

However, after the release of the NASA peer-reviewed paper, it was deemed skeptical. However awesome the possibility of an EM drive in our current world, there is a downside... the EM drive goes against Newton’s third law of motion which is why many are skeptical towards the NASA peer-reviewed paper and of China releasing the video.

Newton’s third law of motion that states that to everything there is an equal and opposite reaction which, in our Universe, based off of that law, is impossible to generate without a propellant.

Brice Cassenti, advanced expert of propulsions of the University of Connecticut explained why an EM drive is to raise eyebrows: “Action and reaction is a direct result of the conservation of momentum, the violation of such a basic law as the conservation of momentum would invalidate much of the basis for all of physics as we know it.”

As lovely as it sounds, the likelihood of this EM drive being the one to revolutionize physics as a whole and create a whole new era of space travel is highly improbable. Also, some such as Yahoo news (as though they’re entirely credible...) wrongly describe the EM drive as a warp drive.

A warp drive is a faster-than-light spacecraft propulsion system that is oftenly used in Sci-Fi works such as Star Trek. Common sense deems the likelihood of a warp drive basically impossible. The reason being is that the speed of light is the “speed limit” of our Universe, as Neil Degrasse Tyson put it. Also, reference the theory of relativity to further confirm how improbable it is to travel faster than the speed of light. Sorry, folks.

Technology such as an EM drive, currently seems worlds away. As a result, unfortunately, our space traveling adventures are currently situated in the current, classic rocket propulsion technology. But, shed no tears-- new tech is being developed as your eyes scan the lines of this article.

For example, depending on how Earth and Mars align, one trip of SpaceX’s Interplanetary Transport System could be shortened to a mere 80 days. Elon Musk, CEO and founder of SpaceX, believes in and strives to shorten the trip down to 30 days.

If you were driving at the speed of light and turned on your headlights, what would happen? Watch and learn in the video below:

Lovers of slow motion video may have been impressed by the time-bending antics of video producers like The Slow Mo Guys or even tried slow motion recording themselves using a consumer-grade high-speed camera or smartphone. However, no camera on the market comes anywhere close to the latest device built at Lunch University which manages to capture over five trillion (5,000,000,000,000) frames in one second.

At this speed it’s possible to capture the movement of ‘light in flight’: In the video below you can actually see the progress of a pulse of light as it passes through water in bottle.

Please welcome to the stage a master illusionist. An energy beam that stabs out of galaxy M87 like a toothpick in a cocktail olive is pulling off the ultimate magic trick: seeming to move faster than the speed of light.

Almost five times faster, in fact, as measured by the Hubble Space Telescope. This feat was first observed in 1995 in galaxy M87,  and has been seen in many other galaxies since. It might have you questioning your entire reality. Nothing can break the cosmic speed limit, right? You can’t just flaunt the laws of physics… can you?

If you want to just enjoy the illusion from your seat in the audience, stop reading. Otherwise, I welcome you backstage for a look at how the trick works – and how it’s helping astronomers to understand the fate of entire galaxies.

We’ve known about the jet of plasma shooting from the core of M87 since 1918, when astronomer Heber Curtis saw a ray of light connected to the galaxy. To be visible from so far away, it had to be huge – about 6000 light years long.

As modern astronomers now know, pretty much all galaxies have a central black hole that periodically draws in stars and gas clouds. When gas begins to swirl down the drain, it heats up and magnetic fields focus some of it into jets of hot plasma. These jets shoot out at velocities near to – but not faster than – the speed of light.

If you were to aim a telescope into the sky towards M87, you would see that this lance of plasma is askew. Instead of pointing exactly into our line of sight, it’s angled a bit to the right.

To understand the illusion, picture a single glowing blob of plasma starting at the base of this path and emitting a ray of light, both of which travel towards Earth. Now wait 10 years. In that time, the blob has moved closer at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light. That gives the rays emitted from that later position a few light years’ head start on the way to us.

If you compare the first and second images from Earth’s perspective, it looks like the blob has just moved across the sky to the right. But because the second position is also closer to us, its light has had less far to travel than it appears. That means it seems to have arrived there faster than it actually did – as if the blob spent those 10 years travelling at ludicrous speed.

The jet from M87 is more than just a curiosity, says Eileen Meyer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

All over the universe, outflows of energy from massive black holes can stop or start the formation of stars throughout galaxies. But it’s unclear how these outflows work and how much energy they contain.

By appearing to move faster than light, jets such as the M87 one change visibly over just a few years, which is unusual for distant objects like galaxies. That allows astronomers to make precise estimates of how fast the plasma is moving and thus how powerful the process is.

M87 is special because it is relatively close compared to other galaxies, making it easy to study. In 1999, astronomers used Hubble pictures of the jet taken over four years to see that plasma ripple outwards. In 2013, Meyer lengthened that to 13 years of images, which seemed to show that the plasma might also be moving in corkscrew-like spirals – as if it wasn’t complicated enough.

Fresh results from Meyer, now being prepared for publication, extend that baseline again to a total of more than two decades and may offer new surprises. “Over 20 years, you know, things go bump in the night,” she says.

And although the faster-than-light effect is old hat to her, she still stops to appreciate it sometimes. Most things we see travelling across the sky, such as planets and comets, are close to us. But M87 is tens of millions of light years away. 

The speed of light is widely known to be the absolute pinnacle of movement. When Albert Einstein first entwined mass and energy in his Theory of Relativity, it basically established the Universe’s speed limit at 299,792 kilometers per second (186,282 miles per second).

According to Einstein, nothing in the Universe that has mass could either match, or move faster than, light.

But that doesn’t mean that nothing can move faster than light. In truth, physicists have discovered a number of phenomena that have the ability to match, and actually beat (in specific respects), the speed of light. And there are several theoretical models that posit specific ways that the speed of light could be surpassed.

To be clear, these things don’t prove General Relativity wrong (at all). But they do help reveal just how complex our universe really is, and they show that very few things in physics can really be boiled down to one simple phrase.

In his presentation on Big Think, physicist Michio Kaku said that “If I have two electrons close together, they can vibrate in unison, according to the quantum theory…if I jiggle one electron, the other electron ‘senses’ this vibration instantly, faster than the speed of light. Einstein thought that this therefore disproved the quantum theory, since nothing can go faster than light.”

Einstein himself referred to it as “spooky action at a distance,” though it is actually known as quantum entanglement. It’s a rather complicated bit of physics, but this video by Veritasium breaks down how it all works in rather simple terms.

However, saying that this information transfer “breaks” the speed of light is, perhaps, a bit of a cheat. You see, the information does actually go faster than light…but it’s not really traveling through space faster. To break this down a bit, say that you have a two friends. One if wearing a blue shirt and one is wearing pink. You know this, but you don’t know which is wearing which. Suddenly, you run into one of them, and you see they are wearing a blue shirt. When you see this, then you will know instantaneously (re. faster than the speed of light) that the other person is wearing pink.

As Kaku notes, “Information does go faster than light, but Einstein has the last laugh. This is because the information that breaks the light barrier is random, and hence useless.” It can’t be used to send any other information than that.

Like the sonic boom, a luminal boom happens when something accelerates to a point that it breaks the light barrier. As spectacular as it seems, in truth, this phenomenon happens everyday inside nuclear reactors.

Known as Cherenkov radiation, this blue glow is caused when the core of a reactor is submerged in water, where light moves at a reduced speed, while the electrons generated by the reactor move past the speed of light. This creates a sort of shock wave of light.

As the aforementioned may indicate, the key to all of this is the medium which light (and other substances) are moving through.  In a vacuum, light is far faster. But in ice and other mediums, light goes a lot slower. Thus, Einstein’s theories are still intact.

As Jessica Orwig notes, “Cherenkov radiation glows because the core of the Advanced Test Reactor [a nuclear reactor] is submerged in water to keep it cool. In water, light travels at 75 % the speed it would in the vacuum of outer space, but the electrons created by the reaction inside of the core travel through the water faster than the light does.

Particles, like these electrons, that surpass the speed of light in water, or some other medium such as glass, create a shock wave similar to the shock wave from a sonic boom.”

If popular science fiction is to be believed, travelling through the stars will heavily rely on ships being able to move faster than light. Indeed, if you were working strictly with Einstein’s theory of special relativity, your dreams of interstellar travel would stay firmly planted on solid ground.

Thankfully, Einstein’s general theory of relativity opened another possibility by weaving together space and time. As Kaku notes, “the only viable way of breaking the light barrier [for humanity and the like] may be through general relativity and the warping of spacetime.”

This is done through what are called wormholes, which are tears in the fabric of spacetime that would allow one to “pass through” to whole other regions in the Universe. The biggest problem with this idea is the energy that it would take to hold that wormhole open…and of course, all of the hazards that would come with diving into it…and also, we have no evidence that they actually exist or are anything but hypothetical and theoretical models.

But if they do exist, they would allow one to travel from A to B faster than light. It’s related to the basic principles of the warp drive proposed by Miguel Alcubierre (note: the drive probably can’t ever work, but you can read about all of that here).

Einstein’s theory says that nothing “with mass” could pass the speed of light, so it’s reasonable to consider that other things that don’t have mass could potentially achieve this feat. One such thing is simply empty space.

To clarify, relativity says that objects cannot travel faster than the speed of light through spacetime. It doesn’t, however, have anything to say about spacetime itself. And in fact, spacetime is expanding and pushing matter apart faster than the speed of light; however, matter is not really traveling through spacetime….spacetime is pushing it.

In this respect, every portion of space is expanding and stretching. It’s not even that the edges are flying outwards, but that spacetime itself—the area between galaxies, stars, planets, you and I—is stretching. And it is doing so faster than the speed of light.