The Large Hadron Collider can accelerate protons to 99.9999991% the speed of light. Why can’t we reach 100%?
In: Physics
Because the faster a massive particle moves through space, the slower it moves through time. At 100% of the speed of light (relative to the observer), it would stop moving through time entirely (again, relative to the observer). At least that is one of the interpretations that you can have when you ignore the rules of math that tell you not to do calculations with infinity in them.
The simple answer is, because to do so, a particle with mass requires infinite energy. It is impossible, per definition, for an object with mass to go lightspeed. Now, we have found some theoretical workarounds, but even the most plausible approaches require particles which don’t violate any known laws of physics, but for whose existance there is currently no proof.
Each increase in speed requires more energy than the last. As you approach the speed of light, the amount of energy required to speed something up even a tiny bit more approaches infinity, and since there’s no way to get an infinite amount of energy we cannot reach the speed of light.
The speed of light is basically what we consider the speed of “causality” – meaning AT the precise moment anything with mass hits the speed of light , it will be simultaneously at it destination, and every point in between and will not have increased its speed.
A thing reaching an acceleration equal to light speed is what happens at the event horizon at a black hole.
E =MC^2 shows that we’d need more energy than exists to propel any mass to that speed.
The closer something gets to moving the speed of light, the more energy it takes to go any faster.
To speed up an object with mass, you need energy.
The closer you get the object to the speed of light, the more energy you need.
To get an object with mass to the speed of light, you will need to convert all its mass into energy.
For this reason, nothing with mass can get to the speed of f light.
Light can, because it has no mass.
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.
The more massive something is, the harder it is to accelerate it. Light speed is the “speed limit” of the universe because it is how fast things WITHOUT mass – e.g. light – move. Therefore as long as protons have mass, even a little bit, they will never go QUITE as fast as true light.
The faster you go the more energy is required to keep going faster and it isnt linear. You need increasingly more and more energy the closer you get to LS.
We can get pretty freaken close though.
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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