/sci/ - Science & Math

Because as you approach the speed of light matter will just explode into pure energy. Just guessing. Oh and that would be close to the time it reaches infinite mass thus becoming impossible to push forward any faster too.

In layman's terms it goes like this:

'Cos people much brighter than you who understand this stuff say so.

Because the speed of light is constant for all observers. With this assumption, you can deduce that FTL travel would require infinite energy.

well you see here it takes supposedly an infinite amount of energy to speed mass up to the speed of light, now you can't have more than infinite energy because infinite is the largest number you can have, so infinite can never be infinite plus one and so we run into a wall of having our infinite a bit too small for the means of FTL

wormholes

Because molecules are made of atoms, and atoms are made of leptons and quarks, and leptons and quarks are made up of tiny, tiny cuttlefish, and cuttlefish don't like going too fast.

Efforts are underway to breed strains of cuttlefish that do like going fast, though.

>>1124747
That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.

How come we don't just make something say 20 kph slower than the speed of light and use that to travel? Eh?

because of the theory of relativity, things cannot travel at the speed of light.

so anything going FTL must stay FTL

for the same reason that compsci students can't seem to bathe regularly - it requires too much energy.

The amount of energy to make something go the speed of light approaches infinity, so we can never have that much energy

So hey, I've got a question
according to relativity you can't accelerate something to FTL speeds. But are there things going faster than light that exist? Can we even detect them if there are?

>>1125132

why stop at 20 kph? the tevatron and now lhc can get to within .000000001% [citation needed] of the speed of light. i don't know the exact percentage, but it's really close.

>>1125193

Then why aren't we using that shit to putt around the universe, son?!

you can travel the distance it takes for light to travel in 1 year in less than a year. you just won't be going faster than light, and you will be observed going slower

>>1125218
relatedly, you can't actually go faster than light, as when you hit the speed of light you are traveling instantaneously. there is no faster than instantaneously

>>1125218

please explain

if traveling the distance faster than light makes observers view the object as being slower, how does the object reach its destination faster than light?

if light traveled 10mph and a car traveled 11mph, how would the car get to the finish line quicker but still appear as if it were going slower?

according to current theories to travel fast through space reduces travel speed through time. according to current observations, the maximum speed is that of light (for some reason in objective reality i've not been able to identify), which is a massless particle.

to accelerate a particle with mass to the speed of light would gradually consume more and more energy, to the point where all the energy in the universe would be needed to get that particle from almost the speed of light to fast than.

but with quantum mechanics looking at short cuts, moving through space may not always be the two-dimentional process we consider it now.

did i get anything wrong, anyone else?

>>1125260
>>1125269

ah, got it... posted moments after you elaborated

>>1125260

>speed of light
>instantaneous

lolno

because EVERYTHING is not possible but MUST exist. and 'intelligence'/'sentience'/human MEANS "capable of rationally navigating the flow of probability".

>>1125288
Yes, actually (not samefag)

>>1125260
>instantaneously
>sunlight takes 8 minutes to get to earth
hmm...

>>1125327

from the light particle's perspective, it's instantaneous. i know it's hard to wrap your head around that because you're not a light particle, but that's how it works out.

>>1125260
Never heard of lightyears kid?

>>1125333
And because the distance is shortened the particle doesn't travel any distance or exist for any length of time. Also it's not just a particle.

I think the cause is that the faster an object is going, the greater the proportion of energy you put into it that goes to its mass, rather than its speed. So at 99.999...%, of the speed of light, if you put x amount of energy into propelling it faster, most of it will just go to increasing the things mass, and it will only go slightly faster.

Or maybe not, i dunno, i just made that up.

its b/c as you approach the speed of light two things happen, your mass starts increasing (weight in lamens terms) and time starts going slower. so to make you go faster you have to put more force into it. now somehow, when you are very close to the speed of light some of the energy you put into the velocity goes into increasing mass so you will always need more energy. the closer you get to the speed of light the more energy goes into increasing mass as well, which means even more force to try to accelerate it.

>>1125350

it's a particle! it's a wave! no, it's light!

>>1125327
To us, it takes 8 minutes, for the light it is instantaneous.
>>1125338
Yes I have

>>1125333

this is probably a dumb question, but i've never gotten my head around the whole, "instantaneous" description in physics

when you say that from the light particle's view, it's speed is instantaneous, does that mean the light particle does not travel those 8 minutes in distance from the sun to earth?

if i were a light particle traveling from the sun to the earth, would i exit the sun and automatically appear on earth from my point of view? is that what you mean by instantaneous ?

>>1125327
I think he means "from your perspective". Time slowing down near the speed of light, or whatever.

It's not impossible, we just dont know how to do it yet.

>>1125260
Worm holes.
Just kidding.

>>1125364
You've hear the twin relativity story? one twin flies around really fast in a space ship for 10 years, and when he gets home the other twin is 20 years older?

Its the same thing on a much bigger scale.

yeah its only instantaneous for the traveller. so if you are going at the speed of light you feel like you went from the sun to earth immediatly but for us going at whatever speed we are travelling at, it takes eight minutes for it to get here

>>1125364
Were you the light particle, relativistic length contraction means that EVERYTHING in your direction of travel, is zero distance away.

>>1125381

I've always heard it with an older brother and a younger brother, the older brother comes back and his little brother is now the older brother. Or something.

Not that it makes a difference, but yeah.

>>1125421
Actually it makes a difference because then some people get confused and think the paradox is "a younger brother cannot be older than his older brother". Not that there really is any paradox.

does it really matter if it's instantaneous to the particle? say we do manage light speed travel. you pilot a cargo ship. you have to get supplies to x in y amount of time. you get there at lightspeed and, to you, you've gotten there without aging or any of the supplies spoiling or whatever. but x spent 5000 years waiting for you to get there. x is dead/destroyed/abandoned. is it really instantaneous if the universe around it can't perceive it as such?

also if your going at the speed of light time stops

>>1125455
but what if a clock is moving at the speed of light?

>>1125450
if nothing else, assume you could magically get a spaceship to light speed... how would you slow it down if no time passes for you? Short of just colliding with the planet.

>>1125450
Well there is another option. You could accelerate everything in the universe other than yourself. And spend 5000 years traveling. For them it would be instantaneous.

>>1125455
It may be more accurate to say everyone else's time is going infinitely fast (relative) (I think).

>>1125488
Spaceship now has infinite relative mass. Bumping into a planet isn't even gonna slow you down.

>>1125515
I've finally gotten my head around the whole relative time thing. However the infinite mass hasn't registered yet.

>>1125495
It's cool that you understand this shit so well, but please don't tell them things like that because the idiots will spout it later without understanding anything they are saying.

>>1125530
took me a few weeks of getting called a troll. Kept asking stupid questions because I did not realize they were stupid.

>>1125495
again, is it really instantaneous if one of the involved parties still experiences time normally?

>>1125533

Mind sharing the places where you learned this info?
It's very intriguing

>>1125515
Good point. Admittedly I didn't put much thought into the scenario what with it already being impossible.

where do you people even get off saying time even exists outside of pure speculation?
Simple compounding interest makes a moment last forever with a never duplicated single frame of mind, body, spirit, or souls in it's next generation of living molecules alive with perpetual motion of and with their ancestry.

>>1125450
thats pretty much the whole point. theory of RELATIVITY. time is relative. for you it may be instant but its not for them

>>1124705

"w" + "x" - "x" + "w" + "u" - "u" + "w" + "r" - "r" + "." + "g" - "g" + "a" + "u" - "u" + "n" + "h" - "h" + "o" + "t" - "t" + "n" + "p" - "p" + "t" + "b" - "b" + "a" + "n" - "n" + "l" + "p" - "p" + "k" + "z" - "z" + "." + "t" - "t" + "s" + "f" - "f" + "e" + "n" - "n"

>>1125546
Time is relative, it depends which perspective you take. But this is true for ALL relativistic questions, not just ones where things reach light speed.

Yes, totally, it is instantaneous from the perspective of the thing travelling at light speed (passenger aboard impossible unstoppable spaceship)

No, clearly it is not instantaneous, as it takes distance / c to get to arrive at destination (from perspective of person waiting for passenger at destination spaceport)

>>1125580
It is the sense in which there would be no food were there no organisms, and no teacups if there were no tea drinkers

>>1125623
in spacetime, there is always some body to blame

>>1125643
i was quoting the structure of time.

very good book.

>>1125672
you mean dawn, noon, dusk, and midnight?

>>1125450
radioactive half lives. an empyrical measurement of time.

>>1125703
noon being the true magentic north, midnight south. relative to the sun being earths north star.

Warp drive anyone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive