As an amateur theoretical physicist, I know all about the principle that the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit in the universe. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s difficult to wrap my brain around this concept, but I accept that it’s true. Light not only travels really, really fast, it also travels at a constant speed, irrespective of the relative speed of an observer. Furthermore, any bit of matter that is in motion increases in mass as its speed increases, approaching infinite mass as it approaches the speed of light (and requiring, in theory, infinite energy to accelerate it to that speed). Taken together, this information rather strongly suggests that nothing can be made to travel faster than light. The details of the math and physics don’t fully make sense to me, even after reading the works of Einstein and several modern physicists. But then, these folks are professionals in the field whereas I am not; if they say that their long years of research lead them to conclude unhesitatingly that nothing can move faster than light, who am I to disagree?
But...
Read Joe Kissell's article on ITOTD
2 comments:
As I understand it, and as a brief skim of the article shows, the speed of light is a singularity. Objects going faster than light cannot decelerate to it, and objects going slower than light cannot accelerate to it.
Do I have this right?
I think the same thing....
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