Faster than Light and the Third Postulate of Special Relativity

Abstract

Through a very simple conceptual analysis and with the aid of a few numerical examples, it becomes evident that the possibility of traveling at speeds greater than that of electromagnetic waves (hereafter identified as Faster Than Light or simply FTL travels) or the simple instantaneous transmission of information generates temporal paradoxes. Since such paradoxes and potential causality violations would imply the impossibility of FTL travel, it would be necessary to consider as an alternative the proposition of a privileged system that would inevitably lead to an absolute metric for both time and spatial dimensions.

The existence of a privileged reference system was originally proposed by Lorentz and Poincaré, in which the deformations of lengths and times between Inertial Systems (IS) are real, and the speed of light is only apparently constant as a result of these instrumental alterations [1,2].

This privileged system maintains the "superfluous" nature of the existence of a supporting medium intended to describe the reality of each IS. However, it compels us to assume the existence of a fundamental framework through which both waves and particles would propagate.