What is light? What is it made out of? And why can’t anything travel faster than light?
In: Physics
No one really knows. Scientists have created the idea of photons to explain light, and it seems to work out mathematically and conceptually, so we all understand light as these photon particles.
Photons are tiny particles of light. Imagine them as tiny, invisible balls that make up light. Just like how you have lots of tiny Lego bricks to build something big, many photons together make up the light you see.
Light is a special kind of energy that helps us see things. It travels very fast and can come from different sources, like the sun or a flashlight. When you turn on a light, you’re seeing lots and lots of these tiny photon balls zooming around and bouncing off things, which helps your eyes see the world around you.
Its not that anything can’t move faster than light, it’s simply that light moves at maximum velocity. Other things like gravitational waves do so too, light just was the first and easiest thing to be observed doing this so light speed was named after it.
The reason for that is that it weighs nothing, as it weighs nothing even the lightest touch propels it infinetly strong and it has to move at maximum speed.
On the same note the speed of sound is simply the speed of matter interaction or how fast material can push itself, that is why the speed of sound in water is faster as it almost can’t be compressed.
Those are some big questions there. The simplest one to answer is probably the third one. It’s not that nothing can travel faster than light, as such. It’s more like there is a universal speed limit, and light happens to be able to travel at that limit. We just refer to it as the speed of light because that’s the most common thing that can reach it.
As for what light is and what it’s made from, it’s discrete packets of energy. It’s made from an electric and a magnetic field which both wobble together, but at right angles to each other. When electric fields fluctuate, they create magnetic fields. And when magnetic fields fluctuate, they create electric fields. And if the conditions are right, these fields can support each other and travel through space. It’s a bit like how the roof of the Wembley stadium is held up by the arch, but the arch would fall over without the tension provided by the roof.
To confuse things a bit more, theoretically, there are things that travel faster than light.
Tachyons are subatomic particles that travel faster than light. In theory, they are traveling back in time. And tachyons would have as much problem slowing down to the speed of light as we do accelerate to the speed of light.
Quantum Physics a total mind fuk.
1. Light is pure energy, it is the left side of the e = mc2 equation
2. As far as we know it is fundamental, light is as low as it goes… as far as we know…
3. Einstein tells us that the faster matter goes, the more energy it takes to make it go even faster, exponentially, with an asymptote at the speed of light requiring infinite energy to go faster. The only reason light can go at the speed of light is that it is massless
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