Why Can't Anything Travel Faster than Light?

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

Time stops at the speed of light? Kind of sounds like bullshit considering the fact that even light has a speed limit..

@OP

Isn't it because photons have no mass? Idk lol

Edit:

Also, light isn't the fastest everywhere, I remember reading electrons can beat photons under water.. So time stops underwater when you reach the speed of electrons? Get outta here! Lol

[pocaracas]

Time stops at the speed of light? Kind of sounds like bullshit considering the fact that even light has a speed limit..

@OP

Isn't it because photons have no mass? Idk lol

Edit:

Also, light isn't the fastest everywhere, I remember reading electrons can beat photons under water.. So time stops underwater when you reach the speed of electrons? Get outta here! Lol

In some material medium, photons bounce around, that's why they are seen as "going slower". The denser the medium, the more they bounce, the "slower" they move.

[Alex K]

Time stops at the speed of light? Kind of sounds like bullshit considering the fact that even light has a speed limit..

@OP

Isn't it because photons have no mass? Idk lol

Edit:

Also, light isn't the fastest everywhere, I remember reading electrons can beat photons under water.. So time stops underwater when you reach the speed of electrons? Get outta here! Lol

Nope, the stuff about time dilation applies to the value of lightspeed in the vacuum, the fact that light can effectively be slower in materials because it interacts with the medium doesn't figure into that calculation.

[Alex K]

Basically, yeah. The abovementioned fact that the speed of light is always the same has as a direct consequence that your time would have to stand still if you're going at the speed of light.

That just means that photons don't age as they traverse the Universe...
Teletransport, the ultimate in anti-aging creams!

Yes, there's no notion of time passing "from the vantage point of a photon", it's not possible to define properly...

[ReptilianPeon]

"Why Can't Anything Travel Faster than Light?"

Certain things can travel faster than light. The speed of light is really the speed of information. Shadows can one example of something that can travel fast than light, if I remember rightly. There was one one other thing that can travel faster but I can't remember it right now.

EDIT: virtual particles can travel faster than light. That was it.

[pocaracas]

Lucky Luke, the man that fires faster than his own shadow:


Nope, shadows don't go faster than light.

[Rhondazvous]

The same way Oprah does as she approaches the end of the cake shipment.

Whether this response is to my post above or Rhondavous's above that does not matter. It works either way.

Alex may be the expert around here, but my boy Stimbo takes the cake in quite another way.

[Rhondazvous]

btw it's not customary any more to call it relativistic mass, usually people simply talk about the energy of the moving object E, and instead of "relativistic mass", it's just E/c^2

(putting on ye old thinking cap)

So if e = m then they will always be equal and never enough e to make v > c. As to why c is the magic number, vorlon has the best answer.

Possible tie in: Only gamma rays have enough energy to transform energy into matter, and that matter is quickly transformed back into energy when the electron/positron pairs collide, so as v approached c and produces e which is transformed back into m the energy lost in this transformation slows it down.

Practical application: You weigh more when you exercise (move) so to lose weight, stand still..

[Rhondazvous]

Doesn't time stand still at the speed of light.
Maybe photons can't travel any faster because they would go backwards in time stopping them from going any faster.

Basically, yeah. The abovementioned fact that the speed of light is always the same has as a direct consequence that your time would have to stand still if you're going at the speed of light.

Doesn't that create a paradox or at least an infinite loop? If time stands still at c then v = 0. which means m is not traveling at c so time doesn't stand still meaning that m is traveling at c where time stands still and v = 0, ad infinitum.

BTW, is this what happens when my Windows screen freezes?

[vorlon13]

maybe it's important photons don't experience time ?

it would be a 'mechanism' whereby a given photon would be able to actualize in a manner consistent with the state/nature of the universe


to clarify:

very soon after the big bang, the universe isn't very big, therefore we have a constraint on the existence on photons existing with a wavelength exceeding the size of the universe

These days, the frequency of such a photon is so ridiculously low as to not be a concern*, but in the early moments of the universe, the population of wavelengths 'permitted' for photons would have been 1) highly constrained and 2) rapidly changing to permit longer and longer wavelengths, this would alter the evolution of the Big Bang over what would be expected for a universe that at all times 'allowed' photons of all wavelengths


* it is also accepted that processes that generate photons via heat invariably produce more and more longer wavelength photons as they heat up (if they heat up) and the temperature merely constrains the highest energy (and shortest wavelength) photons emitted, (I think this is the 'violet catastrophe thing)

but looking at that the other way, how do we avoid an object of a temperature of anything greater than absolute zero from emitting an 'infinite' number of vanishingly weak (and enormously long wavelength) photons ? Well, those infinite numbers are constrained by the diameter of the universe, wavelengths exceeding whatever multi-billion light year length of the diameter of the universe there is, photons are still constrained 'somehow' from being created with wavelengths longer than that. By being 'immune' to time, the incipient photon can 'sense' the current diameter of the universe and either be nipped in the bud or emitted as the size of the universe allows.