C
carn
Guest
No its not written in stone. Its just confirmed by hundreds or maybe thousands of experiments. Dont know whether that is as good as written in stone.I don’t see why it is written in stone that an object can’t travel faster than the speed of light.
Its a matter of constant speed of light. Think it this way:Just because Einstein said this doesn’t mean it is true. He did not have the technology we have today.
A throws a ball while on a moving train in direction of the train travelling. A measures from his point of view the speed of the ball to be 1 km/s. (Forget about friction for the time being.)
B observes the train with A moving relative to himself with a speed of 0.1 km/s. What speed will the ball have from Bs point of view?
Roughly 0.1+1=1.1 km/s, after all it moves faster than the train in the same direction.
Now all experiments show, that the speed of light is constant independent of relative mesurement position.
So next A emits a beam of light in direction of train movement. A measures the speed to be 300000 km/s.
What speed wil B measure?
Our instinct tells us, B will measure the light beam to have a speed of 0.0001+300000=300000.0001 km/s.But thats not what all experiments show. All experiments show, that B will measure the speed of the light beam to be the exactly same 300000 km/s.
What does that mean?
Simply adding the speeds to determine the speed the speed B will observe is wrong. The mathematical formula that transforms the speed that A measures into the speed that B measures must confirm one condition: What moves with speed 300000 km/s from As point of view, must move with the same speed from Bs point of view.
The rest is simple mathematics.
And shows that everything with a mass, will have its mass increased if approaching the speed of light, with the mass being infinite in case of reaching speed of light. Since the only known method to accelerate anything, is applying a force and the force is f=mass*a, the necessary force to accelerate is also increasing towards infinity when approaching the speed of light.
As moving through shortcuts would not require moving faster than light, shortcuts would allow getting somewhere faster than light, which travels along the normal route. But nobody has a good idea, how to create such shortcuts. The only somewhat serious speculation i heard of, was done by some crazy nasa guys and they suggested, that if you could create a black hole of 2-3 times sun mass in a few hundred meter distance to your spaceship, you could create such ashortcut, that somehow travels with you arond, allowing to reach far star systems in short time. Problem is, without the means to create such black holes, we cannot know.I’m curious as to what this means to say if we wanted to open a portal from here to mars or the moon. I wonder if that type of “stargage” like travel is possible.