ThoseDeafMutes
Member
Jarmel said:So I read the OP and I have a question. Why is light the fastest thing in existence?
Read the thread.
Jarmel said:So I read the OP and I have a question. Why is light the fastest thing in existence?
Jarmel said:So I read the OP and I have a question. Why is light the fastest thing in existence?
StuBurns said:Here's a fun little video some of you might enjoy:
http://www.tenthdimension.com/medialinks.php
It's an attempt to explain a possible manner in which ten dimensions may exist in layman's terms.
ThoseDeafMutes said:Read the thread.
Nope. His point was that a particle's velocity vector can have many directions but only one magnitude (the speed of light). Whether any of the components are negative is irrelevant because the magnitude is computed as the square root of the sum of squares, per Pythagoras. In fact, his explanation makes no effort to explain why you can't go backwards in time, only why you can't go faster than light.Torquill said:Based on his Zero sum explanation of space time speed, you could go faster than light in space if your time speed component went into the negative.
So you could go faster than light but you'd be going back in time?
OliveJuice said:What you actually wanted was an easy to understand explanation of how we understand our universe through general relativity, which the simple explanation you posted takes about 10 paragraphs (at least half the article) to go through.
I was giving the most simple and direct answer to the title of the thread: Why nothing can travel faster than light.
I personally think it is a simple explanation, since laymans (who?) know that any object that moves requires energy.
Agreed. I remember reading somewhere about a quiz with an illustration of a man running who drops a ball. The three choices were the ball going behind the man, the ball moving with the man, and the ball moving in front of the man. I think they all received an equal amount of votes, indicating something seriously wrong with our education system.Flachmatuch said:I also disagree with this. Newton's first law is pretty awesome and actually a lot of people find it completely unintuitive. I don't think "laymen" do in general understand it very well.
It's not absorbing light, it's just not emitting it because light doesn't travel fast enough to break away from the gravitational pull of the black hole.ColonialRaptor said:Just to ad a bit of fuel to the fire here but I've always thought this and wondered why scientists have never seemed to mention this idea when they talk about light, speed of light, super density and super energy requirements for going faster than the speed of light, maybe I'm just over imaginative and uneducated but...
Whatever a black hole is... Whatever is happening there, something there has to be moving faster than the speed of light because it is so heavy that it sucks light in... You see what I'm saying? Light is the fastest thing right? If it's the fastest thing then it should be able to outrun anything yeah? But if a black hole absorbs light... Then whatever is in that hole is sucking light in faster than the speed of light, right?
Your entire explanation is kind of missing the point as your spatial velocity in your frame of reference is always zero - you can't move away from yourself. Your relative velocity to other objects is meaningless - in your own world you're always motionless.ThoseDeafMutes said:It doesn't matter what number you multiply zero by, you will never get a non-zero number, regardless of what Big Boss would have you believe. So if you have zero velocity through time (at C) then no amount of time passing will help you move.
What you're asking is essentially if you get exceptionally close to C, then what happens when a beam of light shines from it. The answer is it moves at the speed of light away from you. But as mentioned before, this comes with heavy length contraction / time dilation to make sure you always measure it as that. When you slow down, the length contraction / time dilation eases up, but you still measure it as escaping from you at the exact same speed as when you were going fast.
It isn't.Divvy said:I have a question. Suppose in this hypothetical scenario, you have a sort of pendulum.
On the end of this pendulum is a ball. But halfway in between the point of origin and the end is another ball.
Suppose you could swing the pendulum so fast that the interior ball was moving at the speed of light. Would this not mean that the ball at the end of the pendulum would be moving faster than the speed of light. What is the explanation for how this is possible?
actually i do, but limited human reasoning will deem it unreasonable.Dreams-Visions said:We don't. We assume human reason can lead to intelligent ideas that we can test...and the sum total of all the tests (whether it takes days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, or Milena for said tests to run their course) lead us to truth.
It's worked fairly well so far.
Got something better to go by?
The question doesn't make sense. You can't build a pendulum with zero mass, so you can't get it to the speed of light.Divvy said:That doesn't really help.
That's quite simple. Mass particle could never reach speed of light since it'd have infinite momentum. Assuming that the inner object moves with the speed close to speed of light, the outer still wouldn't hit or exceed speed of light since velocities do not add up linearly.Divvy said:I have a question. Suppose in this hypothetical scenario, you have a sort of pendulum.
On the end of this pendulum is a ball. But halfway in between the point of origin and the end is another ball.
Suppose you could swing the pendulum so fast that the interior ball was moving at the speed of light. Would this not mean that the ball at the end of the pendulum would be moving faster than the speed of light. What is the explanation for how this is possible?
szaromir said:That's quite simple. Mass particle could never reach speed of light since it'd have infinite momentum. Assuming that the inner object moves with the speed close to speed of light, the outer still wouldn't hit or exceed speed of light since velocities do not add up linearly.
Essentially, yeah. The sticking point is that the "arrow of time" is strictly a one-way phenomenon as far as we know.Torquill said:Based on his Zero sum explanation of space time speed, you could go faster than light in space if your time speed component went into the negative.
So you could go faster than light but you'd be going back in time?
I'm open to anything you can actually support with evidence.WAWAZA said:actually i do, but limited human reasoning will deem it unreasonable. knowing that people are slaves to reason, most will declare it null.
Soneet said:I'm gonna join the group that says the OP's quoted explanation sucks. Read it all (+OP comments, before and after), never was the light link explained (why it is max speed). I got far better logic from the simple 1 line explanations by other posters after this story. I don't even get the part about "if you move faster, your time goes slower"...!??
Look up Schwarzshild radius, it'll give you some basic insight into black holes. It's nothing like you suggest. Basically black holes have sufficient mass density that they create field strong enough not to allow any object escape it unless it has infinite momentum.ColonialRaptor said:Jeez... Thanks for the black hole explanation stuff guys. Perhaps a black hole is different as well, perhaps it just slows down the light and time so as to not allow it to escape... That's how I understand it as well, but isn't that a factor of something with mass going the speed of light? Perhaps black holes are created by the phenomenon of mass reaching or passing the speed of light...
It still baffles me and gravity still doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me as it is while we think about the spin of the earth and it's rotation around the sun... What about the movement of our solar system in this galaxy, and this galaxy in the universe, I mean - for all we know, before we add any speed through man made forces we could already be moving at 1/2 speed of light away from the centre of the universe and not even know it... Because everything around us is moving in conjunction with us... You know what I mean?
Do you mean quantum tunelling? It has finite velocity and while some experiments seemed to show its FTL, these results are easily explained by the uncertainty principle - basically the time can't be measured accurately enough to determine the speed of the tunneling.I don't know exact details about this but what about the part of the atoms that teleport from one side of the atom to the other visibly during observation?
Light is affected by gravity and light carries energy without mass. You can't really obtain the energy from the lowest vacuum level even if in theory it has infinite energy, so your suggestion isn't really feasible. We have problems with economical conversion of the Sun radiation into energy, if we could achieve just that our energy problems would be solved.Also, if light has no mass and this is what allows it to travel at the speed of light because it is light so it is not affected by gravity so it essentially "glides free" what then allows light to carry energy? And in this case, there is light all around us all the time every where (almost), shouldn't this be the best and cleanest energy source available?
There's no evidence of the existence of wormholes, or white holes, or monopoles.Black-Wind said:Wait, is there no such thing as wormholes?
Because I always understood it as "the fastest way to get from point A to point B would be a wormhole".
The fastest way to get to that conclusion would be a wormhole... explain yourself.StuBurns said:There's no evidence of the existence of wormholes, or white holes, or monopoles.
Black-Wind said:Wait, is there no such thing as wormholes?
Because I always understood it as "the fastest way to get from point A to point B would be a wormhole".
Black-Wind said:Wait, is there no such thing as wormholes?
Because I always understood it as "the fastest way to get from point A to point B would be a wormhole".
Black-Wind said:Wait, is there no such thing as wormholes?
Because I always understood it as "the fastest way to get from point A to point B would be a wormhole".
Sure you can. For a sufficiently large black hole, you wouldn't even notice as you cross the event horizon. You'd have passed the point of no return, but it's not much different than the point in space right outside it.StuBurns said:You can't see out of a black hole.
I still don't think so, I tried to do some research about it yesterday and it seemed to point to me being right, that the light shift would be pretty much complete and there'd be no visible light. There doesn't seem to be anything clearly saying either way though.Slavik81 said:Sure you can. For a sufficiently large black hole, you wouldn't even notice as you cross the event horizon. You'd have passed the point of no return, but it's not much different than the point in space right outside it.
Of course, to an outside observer, you'd move increasingly slowly the closer you got to the event horizon. They'd never quite see you reach it, but as you approached it they'd watch you disintegrate.
That's from their perspective, though. From your perspective, none of that happens and you can live out an entire, perfectly normal life inside the event horizon of the black hole. You could even have entire generations of people living and dying entirely within the black hole before they're pulled too close to the center and are destroyed.
StuBurns said:There's no evidence of the existence of wormholes, or white holes, or monopoles.
weekend_warrior said:Wormholes are, at best, a very very far fetched hypothetical idea. And even so, traveling through a wormhole still wouldn't require you to exceed the speed of light since they bend space in such a way as to bring to very far distances much closer.
Darklord said:Isn't that based off what Einstein said about how the universe bends? I still believe that while traveling faster than light is impossible there is some way to travel in some manner that would beat light. Bending space. Tachyon drive. Something. People will find a way.
Thats exactly how it was explained to me in some vid I saw (Maybe that was it?)The Shadow said:Ever watch "Event Horizon"? The way they describe wormholes explains how you could get from point A to point B that seemingly looks like you're going faster than light but really, you're not.
A piece of paper is the universe. Draw a dot at one end. That's you. Draw another dot at the other end, that's your destination. Draw a line between them. That's the distance between you and your destination. You can not go the speed of light or exceed it.
Now, fold the paper so that the destination dot and the you dot touch. That's a wormhole. You didn't do any traveling so you never exceeded c.
Four, five, six or more spatial dimenions are well within our comprehension. They just look really, really weird, and they're not easy to explain.Mr. Robot said:All this dimension, space/time travel, space warping stuff is fascinating to me, but by reading some posts, i notice that some people get confused when talking about time.
I dont know how to put it, but i always have related "a dimension" to a "spatial freedom"
Can anybody correct me if i am wrong here?
but let's say that hypothetically:
a 1D being could only move forward/backward
a 2D being could move forward/backward/up/down
a 3D being could move any of our directions
any dimension beyond that, is out of our comprehension... right?
now when we talk about time as a dimension, we now are refering to the conventional dimensions (the ones i explained before) as a group of dimensions, thus making us 2D beings with the axes being space/time
and thats why time isn't considered a conventional dimension since it would still apply to the 1D and 2D conventioanl dimensions.
Right?
Zzoram said:Because I have an interest in the future of humanity, particularly if we'll be able to spread across the stars to ensure our species (or whatever our progency evolve into) never goes extinct, or if we'll go extinct on our home planet.
If we are the only intelligent life in the universe, I want to make sure intelligent life never goes extinct by spreading out so we don't have all our eggs in one basket.
StuBurns said:I still don't think so, I tried to do some research about it yesterday and it seemed to point to me being right, that the light shift would be pretty much complete and there'd be no visible light. There doesn't seem to be anything clearly saying either way though.
Halycon said:When it comes to explaining abstract physics, analogies like dots on a paper or balls on a rubber sheet are at best handy fictions that are not really representative of the underlying mechanics of the universe. You should always take those things with a tub of salt.
Ohhhhh!! Dude!!Orayn said:Four, five, six or more spatial dimenions are well within our comprehension. They just look really, really weird, and they're not easy to explain.
To answer your question, I'd like to bring up what's commonly called "the arrow of time." Everything that exists in the three dimensions we know and love is constantly advancing along a fourth axis, which is not a spatial one. (Picture it as a little number that that increases.) The speed at which we make progress in the "time" direction depends on how fast we're moving in the other three, just like how any vector in 3-space is the sum of its components.
Because light is energy and has no weight.SoulPlaya said:OK, I'm trying to understand why we need infinite energy to go as fast as light for things with mass.
E=ymc^2
y=(1-(v^2/C^2))^-1/2
If we were going at the speed of light, then y=0. 0 x mc^2 is 0, so E=0. In this case, zero represents infinite energy, or all the energy in the universe. Is this right?
Ok I'm gonna break the time theory some more. Again the way time is used in these examples posted is so broken it's hilarious that they do all this science and math but forget that time is something made up by humans.
No. Say you could watch something move that quick if it existed. You'd be standing at normal time and they'd be orbiting earth. Sure you could watch them zip by over and over but no one's time travelling. They just travelled faster than you. They aren't going to end up in the future somewhere. And time is going to pass by based on a clock still. 5 minutes passed by for you and even tho they flew around the planet 50 times "breaking" time, when they land it's still only 5 minutes that passed.NotTarts said:I know it's impossible to travel at the speed of light, but what would happen if you did? Would time pass by an infinite amount?