starship-design: crossing the light speed barrier?

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@efn.org>]

Kevin Houston writes:
 > What if a ship, going just below light speed, could cause each 
 > of it's subatomic particles to tunnel in the same direction and 
 > at the same time.  Wouldn't the ship be traveling faster than 
 > the speed of light?  Firing retro rockets at that point, would 
 > cause the ship to travel even faster, and when we re-emerged 
 > from the tunneling, we would find ourselves going just a bit 
 > higher than light speed.

If quantum tunnelling really worked that way, we'd already have
FTL.  Even if quantum tunnelling really takes zero time (hmm, I
don't think so) it's obvious that it can't be repeated frequently 
enough to move a particle FTL.  Quantum tunnelling is really a
result of nonlocality.  Sometimes you just happen to be able to
observe a particle outside a potential barrier because its wave
function extends through the barrier; the particle does not move
through the barrier in the sense of instantaneous translation, it 
just always happened to have a small probability of being outside 
rather than inside.

Note that to the ship itself, c is just as far away as it always
has been no matter how fast some other observer considers the
ship to be going.  So the potential barrier the ship would have
to tunnel through is infinitely high, and the probability it
could tunnel from a state where it's going slower than c to one
where it's going faster than c is still zero.

We may as well allow the infinite improbability drive.  Anyone
got a really hot cup of tea?