The Large Hadron Collider can accelerate protons to 99.9999991% the speed of light. Why can’t we reach 100%?
In: Physics
So think of bicycles. You can cycle at a decent speed just fine, but to go faster, you need to peddle harder. And the faster you go, the harder you need to peddle, but the increase is not equal. To go twice as fast, you need to peddle more than twice as hard.
The same for cars. The engine needs to work much harder the faster it goes. Every bit of speed increase takes much more power than the last bit.
With particles, the amount of extra power it would take to go from 99.999999% of the speed of light to 100% would literally be infinite.
And since infinite power is more power than the entire universe contains, we can’t get particles to go that fast.
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