Why Does light have a speed limit.?

[Mentz114]

why is it exactly that nothing with mass can travel at 'c' ?

could it be that we just have never found anything that travels faster than the speed of light in a vacuum?

how did einstein come to this conclusion?

Can you work out what the universe would be like if we could send out a beam of light, and then catch up with it ? This is one thought that drove Einstein towards special relativity.

Another obvious point is that if there were no upper limit on the speed of information, we could not experience the passage of time because everything would happen at once.

M

 

[shamrock5585]

Can you work out what the universe would be like if we could send out a beam of light, and then catch up with it ? This is one thought that drove Einstein towards special relativity.

Another obvious point is that if there were no upper limit on the speed of information, we could not experience the passage of time because everything would happen at once.

M

yes it would be pretty weird if we could send light and catch up with it to observe yourself, but if a person "could" ever do it you would have to accelerate damn fast to do it in a reasonable distance which would kill any human from the amount of force due to acceleration...

with information being sent that fast doesn't mean everything would happen all at once, it just means that if you sent a message it would be received almost instantaneously... but no matter how fast something is moving it would still take time even if something could travel faster than light... for it to happen even instantaneously the message would have to be sent at an infinite speed to give a value of time change to be zero... this is obviously impossible...

I like mathmans reasoning... I am wondering why does an object increase mass when traveling faster... it would have more energy traveling faster... and energy and mass are one and the same... so would it just increase relativistic mass when traveling faster? is it possible to measure relativistic mass?

if it travels faster and faster aquiring more and more energy/mass to reach the finite speed of light how does the mass get to infinity when approaching the speed of light?

 

[mathman]

why would the mass be infinite? i remember einstein saying that the faster something travels the more mass it acquires... but why is this? how does that work?

If you are willing to accept special relativity, then the mass becoming infinite is simply a consequence of the Lorentz tranformation.

 

[shamrock5585]

ok so this brings up another question... if i have a pot of water covered at a very low temperature and i keep heating it up, adding energy, to get it to an extremely high temperature... would it weigh more? the center of gravity of the whole system is stationary relative to me the observer... but the particles of water are heating up moving faster and faster, gaining relativistic mass/energy. so the amount of energy divided by c^2 would be a small number but would the pot as a whole actually weigh more?

 

[LongOne]

ok so this brings up another question... if i have a pot of water covered at a very low temperature and i keep heating it up, adding energy, to get it to an extremely high temperature... would it weigh more? the center of gravity of the whole system is stationary relative to me the observer... but the particles of water are heating up moving faster and faster, gaining relativistic mass/energy. so the amount of energy divided by c^2 would be a small number but would the pot as a whole actually weigh more?

Up until recently, I thought not. But I read from an authority within just the last few days that a compressed spring, which has stored energy, will actually weight more than before it was compressed, although the delta is infintestimally small. Same should hold for hotter water.

 

[Fredrik]

It would. One way to think about this is to consider a ball bouncing between the front and rear wall of a box that's accelerating. The ball will cause some resistance to the acceleration because it will hit the rear wall a bit harder than it will hit the front wall.

 

[Green Zach]

Krom. I like the way you think. please continue. I too have my own theories behind how a lot of things work including why the speed of light is limited and i think a lot of people that are smart enough to do as well because thought experiments are fun but unfortunately i don't think anyone has proven why there is a speed light is limited to but we know there is one so at least we are on the right track.

 

[LongOne]

WRT to this question and others, primarily what is the physical mechanism for gravity, I discovered a series of papers by Tom Ostoma and Mike Trushyk, published in the '90's, that sets forth a theory that, to me, really make sense. These papers are available at www.arxiv.org;[/URL] you can search under Ostoma as the author's name.

The fundamental philosophy is that their "Electromagnetic Quantum Gravity" requires two new particles, the masseon and the graviton (new only because it hasn't actually been seen yet). These particles, in combination with the vacuum fluctions (virtual particles coming in and out of existence), explain inertia, gravity, the speed of light, and many other phenomena. I'm not able to fully asses the math from these papers, but the idea really makes sense. You will have to ignore several misstatements and confusing sentences, though, but the meaning comes through.

The most comprehensive paper, beside the one on "Cellulator Automota" is "[FONT="Arial"][SIZE="3"][SIZE="3"]ELECTRO MAGNETIC QUANTUM GRAVITY
On the Quantum Principle of Equivalence,
Quantum Inertia, and the Meaning of Mass
"
This paper is about 150 pages long, but there are others, also under his name, that summarize the ideas.

I haven't yet been able to ascertain whether others have tended to prove or disprove the author's ideas; so far, it seems to me, that the physics community has sort of ignored it, but I'm not through searching yet.

However, for someone interested in these questions, these papers certainly offer ONE explanation that makes sense.

Happy Reading!