Eli5: Why is light that fastest possible thing?

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If we know the exact speed of light then it’s clearly not infinite. If that’s the cause, what is preventing us from sending something faster then the speed of light( ignoring our current technology limitations).

In: Physics

11 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

That’s not truly the causal link, but that may help you to figure what others altready explained:

1) An object moving faster in the space experience time slower respect an observer that is moving slower in the space.
To simplify, assume that you’re standing (slower observer) and your lil bro (faster object) is running arround you.
After a time that for you is <5> minutes, your lil bro will have experienced a time of <5 less a tiny tiny part> minutes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nonsymmetric_velocity_time_dilation.gif

In the case of you and you lil bro the speed difference is so small that so is the difference of time experienced, and you will both say that it’s been 5 mins (Consider how small is the difference of your speed: a commercial airplane can fly at 250m/s, the speed of light in the vacuum is 299792458m/s).
Now imagine that your lil bro turns into superman, and he can run at half of the speed of light!
In that case, after a time that for you is 5 minutes, he will have experienced a time of approximately 4 mins and 15 secs.

Moving at 95% of the speed of light he will have experienced a time of 1 min and 34 secs.
At 99% of the speed of light he will have experienced a time of 42 secons!
And the closer he go to the speed of light, the slower the time passes for him. 99,9%, 99,99% and so on, traveling, with any increase of speed, more space in a slower time.

Assuming that somehow he can reach the speed of light, he will experience the time completely frozen: from his point of view the time does not flow. That mean that from his point of view he occupy every part of his path together, in the same time.

At this point we can easily figure out why he cannot go over that 🙂