The Large Hadron Collider can accelerate protons to 99.9999991% the speed of light. Why can’t we reach 100%?
In: Physics
Because it would require an infinite amount of energy, because we are accelerating things that have mass.
Think about it a little bit like the square cube law. If you increase the size of a square, The corresponding cube is not just a little bigger. It’s a lot bigger. Squared versus cubed.
Translating energy into momentum is pretty similar. The thing you’re pushing has inertia and mass. In order to increase its speed you need to overcome those things, which means that however much energy you put into the system the increase in speed will be less. If a particle is traveling at one for example, and you want it to be traveling at two, You can’t just put in one extra energy. You need to put in more than that. Because some of it will be lost in overcoming the existing mass.
Okay, now think about light. The reason that light is so fast is because it doesn’t have mass. It has the exact opposite problem. In fact. Any amount of energy that you put into light is so much greater than its mass that it can’t help but go as fast as possible.
Which is why the amount of energy you would need to put into something in order to make it go as fast as light is infinite. It’s not anything magical about the speed of light, it’s that light has no Mass.
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