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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I want you to forget about speed for a minute. Lets talk about time. Look at your clock or a watch, its moving forward. You are traveling through time! Pretty cool huh. Well this weird thing happens with time, it turns out time is not just kinda weird, its super weird. You and I see time the same way, things are happening at the same speed and such, but when you start moving faster (ok we’re back to speed a little), time starts moving slower. There is a relationship between speed and time. More speed, less time.
Yeah, but you’re gonna say, no, I live here, time doesn’t move slower, and you’d be mostly right. This isn’t noticeable to us because for it to start to be really noticeable you need to be going a lot faster, like on a spaceship.
Now the faster you travel, the slower time goes. Think of it like a line or curve on a graph, the faster you go, the line edges slower in time…it gets slower, and slower, and you keep going. But what happens when you go so fast, that time goes to 0 on our graph? You go so fast, you hit a point where you aren’t traveling through time anymore? Fucking weird right? I’m telling you, that there is some point where something can go so fast that time stops for it? Yes. Thats is what is happening.
That speed, turns out, is the speed of light. You hit a wall, you can’t go any faster since there is no where left in the time graph to go, you’re at 0 it ends there.
This is how you should think of it from an easy standpoint, the better explanations are far more complex and far more accurate (and in fact there are multiple versions such as one from particle physics that is quite accurate, but explained completely differently!), but this is a good way to conceive one method of seeing it
As I understand it, it’s not so much that light is the fastest thing, but that it travels instantaneously… to itself.
It’s all about special relativity. The faster something moves in relation to you, the slower time goes for that object in relation to your time. So if you watch something is moving at .9c (c is the speed of light) for an hour, it will only be half an hour for that object. If you watch it go .99c for an hour, it will only experience 1 minute. If you watch it go .999c, it will only experience 1 second. And so on. (These numbers are wrong, btw, and just used to make an easy example. The math is not that easy to do so I skipped it.)
The closer you get to light speed, the less time YOU experience while travelling. The rest of the universe sees you take centuries to travel across the galaxy at .99999c, but you only age a week.
So what happens when you hit 1c? Well, you can’t, because you have rest mass (which is a whole other thing). But if you did? You wouldn’t experience any time at all. You would be at your destination immediately (to you).
And since velocity is simple (distance/time), if you travel any distance but take no time to do that, your velocity is infinite.
And since you can’t go faster than infinitely fast, and (to you) infinitely fast LOOKS LIKE light speed to everyone else, that’s the limit.
As I understand it, it’s not so much that light is the fastest thing, but that it travels instantaneously… to itself.
It’s all about special relativity. The faster something moves in relation to you, the slower time goes for that object in relation to your time. So if you watch something is moving at .9c (c is the speed of light) for an hour, it will only be half an hour for that object. If you watch it go .99c for an hour, it will only experience 1 minute. If you watch it go .999c, it will only experience 1 second. And so on. (These numbers are wrong, btw, and just used to make an easy example. The math is not that easy to do so I skipped it.)
The closer you get to light speed, the less time YOU experience while travelling. The rest of the universe sees you take centuries to travel across the galaxy at .99999c, but you only age a week.
So what happens when you hit 1c? Well, you can’t, because you have rest mass (which is a whole other thing). But if you did? You wouldn’t experience any time at all. You would be at your destination immediately (to you).
And since velocity is simple (distance/time), if you travel any distance but take no time to do that, your velocity is infinite.
And since you can’t go faster than infinitely fast, and (to you) infinitely fast LOOKS LIKE light speed to everyone else, that’s the limit.
As I understand it, it’s not so much that light is the fastest thing, but that it travels instantaneously… to itself.
It’s all about special relativity. The faster something moves in relation to you, the slower time goes for that object in relation to your time. So if you watch something is moving at .9c (c is the speed of light) for an hour, it will only be half an hour for that object. If you watch it go .99c for an hour, it will only experience 1 minute. If you watch it go .999c, it will only experience 1 second. And so on. (These numbers are wrong, btw, and just used to make an easy example. The math is not that easy to do so I skipped it.)
The closer you get to light speed, the less time YOU experience while travelling. The rest of the universe sees you take centuries to travel across the galaxy at .99999c, but you only age a week.
So what happens when you hit 1c? Well, you can’t, because you have rest mass (which is a whole other thing). But if you did? You wouldn’t experience any time at all. You would be at your destination immediately (to you).
And since velocity is simple (distance/time), if you travel any distance but take no time to do that, your velocity is infinite.
And since you can’t go faster than infinitely fast, and (to you) infinitely fast LOOKS LIKE light speed to everyone else, that’s the limit.
Imagine yourself moving faster then light. What would you see? What would you expect to see?
Imagine yourself moving faster then light. What would you see? What would you expect to see?
Imagine yourself moving faster then light. What would you see? What would you expect to see?
From my understanding, it’s not that the speed of light is the fastest speed. It’s the only speed you can go when you have no mass but are still a particle in this universe. So other particles that we have observed that are “massless” also go the speed of light. It’s why it’s known as the “universal constant”. Also, it is the fastest speed at which objects can have influence over one another. Gravity’s effects are also felt at the universal constant, which is why if the sun were to suddenly disappear, we wouldn’t know about it for 8 minutes-ish because light and gravity would still be felt in that time (takes light 8-ish minutes to get from the sun to earth).
As for the the second part, we have observations from all sorts of experiments over the centuries. Those observations have helped us craft a set of equations that have been incredibly reliable in making predictions on how objects behave in the universe (here on earth but also out in the universe that we can observe with telescopes and whatnot). A lot of these equations have also helped up in getting up into space and helped use send probes and satellites. There is still a possibility that our understand is off, so there COULD be something out there that go faster than the universal constant. We just haven’t seen or heard of anything like that. To approach that speed, you need increasingly more and more velocity, to the point where you need a an infinite amount (if you have mass). And, as I said before, massless objects and effects go at the universal constant. It’s been pretty reliably documented.
From my understanding, it’s not that the speed of light is the fastest speed. It’s the only speed you can go when you have no mass but are still a particle in this universe. So other particles that we have observed that are “massless” also go the speed of light. It’s why it’s known as the “universal constant”. Also, it is the fastest speed at which objects can have influence over one another. Gravity’s effects are also felt at the universal constant, which is why if the sun were to suddenly disappear, we wouldn’t know about it for 8 minutes-ish because light and gravity would still be felt in that time (takes light 8-ish minutes to get from the sun to earth).
As for the the second part, we have observations from all sorts of experiments over the centuries. Those observations have helped us craft a set of equations that have been incredibly reliable in making predictions on how objects behave in the universe (here on earth but also out in the universe that we can observe with telescopes and whatnot). A lot of these equations have also helped up in getting up into space and helped use send probes and satellites. There is still a possibility that our understand is off, so there COULD be something out there that go faster than the universal constant. We just haven’t seen or heard of anything like that. To approach that speed, you need increasingly more and more velocity, to the point where you need a an infinite amount (if you have mass). And, as I said before, massless objects and effects go at the universal constant. It’s been pretty reliably documented.
From my understanding, it’s not that the speed of light is the fastest speed. It’s the only speed you can go when you have no mass but are still a particle in this universe. So other particles that we have observed that are “massless” also go the speed of light. It’s why it’s known as the “universal constant”. Also, it is the fastest speed at which objects can have influence over one another. Gravity’s effects are also felt at the universal constant, which is why if the sun were to suddenly disappear, we wouldn’t know about it for 8 minutes-ish because light and gravity would still be felt in that time (takes light 8-ish minutes to get from the sun to earth).
As for the the second part, we have observations from all sorts of experiments over the centuries. Those observations have helped us craft a set of equations that have been incredibly reliable in making predictions on how objects behave in the universe (here on earth but also out in the universe that we can observe with telescopes and whatnot). A lot of these equations have also helped up in getting up into space and helped use send probes and satellites. There is still a possibility that our understand is off, so there COULD be something out there that go faster than the universal constant. We just haven’t seen or heard of anything like that. To approach that speed, you need increasingly more and more velocity, to the point where you need a an infinite amount (if you have mass). And, as I said before, massless objects and effects go at the universal constant. It’s been pretty reliably documented.
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