Why have we ruled out the possibility of finding something faster when we’ve only scratched the surface of space exploration and understanding?
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It isn’t ruled out. But current theories cannot be based on unkowns or hypotheticals, and so far light is by far the fastest thing we can observe. Also there is good proof of the “speed of causality” which is the same as the speed of light, c. There is a lot of math and many years of experiments that re-enforce the idea that c is the speed limit of our universe
It isn’t ruled out. But current theories cannot be based on unkowns or hypotheticals, and so far light is by far the fastest thing we can observe. Also there is good proof of the “speed of causality” which is the same as the speed of light, c. There is a lot of math and many years of experiments that re-enforce the idea that c is the speed limit of our universe
Light isn’t the fastest thing. It is one of the fastest things. It moves at the speed that things go when nothing’s slowing them down at all. The real name for this speed is *celerity*.
Is it possible that something could somehow go faster? Yes, I suppose, but it really doesn’t seem like it. We don’t need to know what the composition of dirt on some distant planet is to figure out it’s almost certainly made of baryonic matter – the same elements that almost everything else we see is made of.
The rules of our universe seem pretty consistent about this sort of thing. We’re always happy to be surprised, but it’s not looking likely.
Light isn’t the fastest thing. It is one of the fastest things. It moves at the speed that things go when nothing’s slowing them down at all. The real name for this speed is *celerity*.
Is it possible that something could somehow go faster? Yes, I suppose, but it really doesn’t seem like it. We don’t need to know what the composition of dirt on some distant planet is to figure out it’s almost certainly made of baryonic matter – the same elements that almost everything else we see is made of.
The rules of our universe seem pretty consistent about this sort of thing. We’re always happy to be surprised, but it’s not looking likely.
Photon is the particle of light. It has no mass. Nothing can travel faster than something that has no mass — within space.
Photon is the particle of light. It has no mass. Nothing can travel faster than something that has no mass — within space.
If you draw a straight line on a sphere there is some maximum length this line can be. Why is that? It is just the geometry we choose. The speed of light is the same thing but less intuitive, it is the fastest speed possible due to the geometry of our universe. If we had a different geometry this speed could be different.
It is also worth noting that anything without mass travels at c in a vacuum so this isnt something only special about light.
As for could there be something faster? No, not really. You would have to invalidate so much evidenced backed theory to make that work and there is no reason to believe that it is at all possible in our universe.
Light isn’t the fastest thing. It is one of the fastest things. It moves at the speed that things go when nothing’s slowing them down at all. The real name for this speed is *celerity*.
Is it possible that something could somehow go faster? Yes, I suppose, but it really doesn’t seem like it. We don’t need to know what the composition of dirt on some distant planet is to figure out it’s almost certainly made of baryonic matter – the same elements that almost everything else we see is made of.
The rules of our universe seem pretty consistent about this sort of thing. We’re always happy to be surprised, but it’s not looking likely.
Photon is the particle of light. It has no mass. Nothing can travel faster than something that has no mass — within space.
For something to go faster than light, it would have to go backwards in time.
Space and time are linked according to our best model for the universe. The faster something moves, the slower time passes for it relative to everything else. When we take 2 very accurate watches and send one to space to orbit the Earth for a while, it will be behind the one left back on earth. Time stops entirely for something traveling the speed of light. Light takes 1.3 seconds to travel from the earth to the moon from our standpoint, but from the light’s standpoint the trip happened in an instant. Any faster than that and it’ll move backwards in time.
It may be possible to go backwards in time for all we know but that seems highly unlikely. Causality starts to break down if that were allowed to happen.
What if I said “If I see someone on the moon light a green light, I’ll send a faster than light signal for him to light a red one.” while the moon light operator has instructions to keep it green unless instructed to turn it red. If the message gets there faster than light then it goes backwards in time to before I actually send it. Meaning when I look at the moon it’ll already have a red light. But if it has a red light already I’d never send the instruction to turn it red, meaning it should have stayed green. Which is it? Maybe such an event would create it’s own fork into two separate universes, one for each outcome. It seems much more likely that it just can’t happen.
It could very well be that our best model for the universe is missing some key piece of information that allows faster than light travel. I don’t think it’s fair to say the possibility is ruled out completely. Someone would have to put forth a new model of the universe that fits all the observations better though. Since our current model has withstood a lot of tests for a while now, that doesn’t seem likely.
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