Quizzes & Puzzles2 mins ago
Why Can't We Travel Faster Than Light?
144 Answers
....because we are already travelling through spacetime at the speed of light, there is only one speed in spacetime.
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Answers
// As you speed up mass increases ... //This isn't true, although is a common misconceptio
14:59 Wed 01st Nov 2023
Clare - //
Except you aren't making any point at all.
It's an admirable strategy, I'll grant you, but it's based on nothing - even, as I noted, the explicit examples you gave are entirely wrong, let alone irrelevant - and requires no understanding at all of the material in question. "What if you turn out to be wrong in future?" is always a possible question, and therefore is -- without justification -- always a vacuous question. //
I am happy to concede that my examples may not have hit the spot.
However, my point, and it is a point I believe remains.
Let me ask you a simple question -
Do you know everything the future holds, and what will happen to mankind a million years from now?
I mean, obviously, not. But it's also a question that has no particular relevance.
Suppose you were to roll a fair, standard, six-sided die, and asked me what the next fifty rolls would be. I couldn't answer you with certainty. But I could tell you all of the 6^50 possible sequences (at least in principle -- in practice the list would be too large to fit inside Earth), and I could also tell you a few things that will definitely never happen, eg that you will never roll a seven.
This example represents the opposite extreme to, say, your bee example -- with apologies for bringing it up again, but I do have a point. In that case, the evidence of our senses tell us from the off that the "prediction" that bees can't fly is manifestly wrong, so that the theory is obviously wrong. In the dice scenario, the theory is immutable: it is in the nature of all dice with the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6 that you can never roll a seven, and we don't need to gather continual evidence to confirm this (and, indeed, anyone who did claim to have rolled a 7 would be either lying or using a non-standard dice).
The point is that the nature of the statement, "the speed of light is the fastest possible speed and cannot be exceeded" is far closer to the dice situation than you seem to realise. I am not going to say that it's exactly equivalent, but it's at this point a statement about the fundamental nature of the universe. Anything that measurably exceeds the speed of light* by even the tiniest fraction would break that fundamental understanding, and break it in a way that is, at this point, almost as inconceivable about getting that seven.
*See another comment later.
TCL, I'll be happy to answer that in another thread -- I'll need to refresh my own memory on it. But a short answer is that the speed of light is really the speed of "information", and no information is transmitted in an entanglement experiment.
That paragraph alone makes little sense, I know, but I promise to try and expand on it later.
// Anything that measurably exceeds the speed of light* by even the tiniest fraction would break that fundamental understanding ...//
To be more precise on this asterisk, for anybody who cares...
The nature of the speed of light limit isn't so much that nothing can exceed it, but nothing can cross it. Things travelling slower than the speed of light are doomed to always travel slower, but likewise anything that travelled faster than light would always travel faster. There are other reasons to believe that "tachyons" (look it up on wikipedia) aren't physical, but still, at least at this level it's fun to remember that the maths says that you travel either always at c, or always less than c, or always greater than c.
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I have taken all of it on board, thank you Clare.
However, I remain unmoved from my original position - we can only know what we know now, and on the basis of what we know, we can make potential predicitions, with increasing sophistication and complexity as our knowledge increases." - the sign of a moron, someone of such arrogance he can dismiss a 100 years of legends! never known such arrogance from a "music" journo!
