The Large Hadron Collider can accelerate protons to 99.9999991% the speed of light. Why can’t we reach 100%?
In: Physics
The faster something is going, the more energy it takes to accelerate it even more.
I don’t know the real costs involved, so these are just toy example numbers, but imagine:
* you turn on the LHC. It uses electricity to speed up protons.
* you spend 1000 euros of electricity to bring the proton from stationary to 50% of the speed of light (c).
* you spend another 1000 euros to bring the proton up another 25%, so 75% of c.
* then another 1000 euros to go up another 12.5% to 87.5% of c.
* then another 1000 euros to go up 6.25% to 93.75% of c
* and you can repeat this, spending 1000 euros to get half of the remaining way to c, but never quite reahing c
There is a lot more to it than that (like maybe higher speeds take more energy to maintain, so the cost of each step might increase. Or maybe the highest speed depends on how large a collider you build, etc etc).
However, I think that example gives the basic feel of it.
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