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Asked by morac to Jo on 19 Jun 2010 in Categories: General.
Question: Is there anything faster than the speed of light?
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Joanna Buckley answered on 19 Jun 2010:
Albert would say no.
According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, published in 1905, nothing can exceed the speed of light (c). It’s a constant so it remains the same wherever you are. If you’ve heard of the Large Hadron Collider (the LHC – Prof Brian Cox who’s on the telly works there) then they have accelerated sub-atomic particles to well over 99 per cent of the speed of light which is about 300,000 kilometres per second or 186,000 miles per second!
If you have mass, it is impossible to travel faster than light, as it requires infinite energy to move an infinite bit of matter. So humans, for example, have a mass. You’d be able to accellerate yourself, to just under the speed of light but not over it. I don’t know why you’d want to do this, morac, but if you do, be sure to get in touch as It’d be cool to see what happens! 🙂
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Comments
Mark commented on :
Jo has it spot on – travelling faster than the speed of light isn’t allowed since it causes all sorts of problems not least of which is that you’d be travelling backwards in time – so you could go back and substitute Rob Green before the USA game …
Jo commented on :
What, with Calamity James?! I don’t know who’s worse! 🙂
Mark commented on :
Another comment I forgot is that here we are talking about the speed travelled in a vaccuum – when light travels through a material eg water/glass then it is slowed down and it is slowed down more than for instance electrons – so electrons travel faster than light does through materials and this causes a blue glow of radiation – Cherenkov radiation to occur. This is the blue glow you see when you look into a nuclear reactor – see the pictures here : they’re quite pretty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
subzero96 commented on :
Alex.C
subzero96 commented on :
He Wishes
chardo commented on :
I saw a stephen hawking science thing that said time travel to the future would be possible if we went at 99% of the speed of light, because time would slow down to compensate for never reaching the speed of light.
firdos1111 commented on :
Albert would say no.
According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, published in 1905, nothing can exceed the speed of light (c). It’s a constant so it remains the same wherever you are. If you’ve heard of the Large Hadron Collider (the LHC – Prof Brian Cox who’s on the telly works there) then they have accelerated sub-atomic particles to well over 99 per cent of the speed of light which is about 300,000 kilometres per second or 186,000 miles per second!
If you have mass, it is impossible to travel faster than light, as it requires infinite energy to move an infinite bit of matter. So humans, for example, have a mass. You’d be able to accellerate yourself, to just under the speed of light but not over it. I don’t know why you’d want to do this, morac, but if you do, be sure to get in touch as It’d be cool to see what happens!
hehehehehheheheheheheheh i was born smart