Travelling at the speed of light?

So, what exactly would it be to travel at the speed of light? As far as I know, nothing in the universe can travel as fast as light other than light itself. First off, why is this. Seems kind of weird that light would be faster than anything else.

Second, do you think that there would be a flash when you pass the threshold for the speed of light as there is a sonic boom when you pass the speed of sound? What causes the sonic boom when you break the sound barrier and what do you think it would be like to be travelling at the speed of light if it were possible?

Third, as far as I can tell, getting up to the speed of light without crushing yourself would be kinda hard according to my very quick and possibly incorrect calcultions. If you were to take a year to achive the speed of light, about 300 million meters per second, you would experience roughly the same Gs as you would in a car going from 0-60 in 3 seconds flat. You would experience that for a year. Sound right? Anybody mind double checking that?

I am really fascinated by light and its speed but know very little about it. If anybody has any articles to throw at me or any interesting facts, feel free to direct me to them or tell me! Any particularly good site on physics that you know of? I find this stuff pretty interesting...

I used to be Into this stuff, supposedly light may well be a vibration from another dimension ( i think the 10th and 23rd were significant), but other than that it would be impossible to reach the speed of light, so some scientis have totally stopped light, it was opaque but I can't tell you much more.

Best person to explain the mechanics of it would be the man himself.

IIRC, as an object accelerates, time slows and mass increases... once the object reaches light speed (c) its mass would be pretty close to infinite, which is why we establish c as the limit. The time as percieved by the object would slow to nearly stop.

To get around the speed limit, contemporary scientists surmise that we would have to exit our current 3+1 dimensions into another (various theories give us ten or more dimensions, most of which are painfully small), thereby shortcutting around the barrier by jumping out of the pond, as it were, and back in at another point.

The science of singularities and the physics of black holes is an exciting area of study right now because the astronomers and physicists are shattering the paradigms almost as fast as they are established.

Some of my favorite news sites for physics: PhysLink Science Daily Physics.org

you beat me in replying to that one sir...
actually this topic or something was going to be my post in science section today!!

what better topic to discuss in this Einstein week!!!
wait till i come back with more!!!

Einstein's world

Hehehe... you didn't think I was going to let this one get by, did you?

3x10(8)m/sec=speed of light. OK... then objects of huge stellar mass explode, there's usually a burst of neutrinos that pre-empt the visible light emanating from it.

Remember this, too: gravity will BEND light.

For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, google is your friend. Check out the sites D1 listed above, or better yet, swing by a good bookstore and grab some books and do some REAL reading.

Anybody wanna take on net-gain chemical reactions? AKA cold fusion?

Thanks for all the reading guys! I'll get to it! I am not going to form a full opinion right now, but I'm wondering how it is that Einsetein thinks that as soon as you get to the speed of light you have "stopped" time and surpassing it makes you travel through time. What happened to sound and everything else that does not run the same speed of light? Anyways, I will read everything and get back to you guys. Thanks for getting me started on the reading!

While the majority of Einstein's work was established through thought-experiments, he followed up with solid mathematical proof. The thing with sound and other percieved insurmountable barriers is the nature of the medium... Sound travels at different speeds in different materials, as does light.

Perfect vacuum blocks sound completely, as sound is the result of sudden movements of matter. However, find an extremely dense material and it is unlikely you will be able to get anything to travel through it as a medium than the speed that sound travels through it.

Light travels through space-time as a medium... nothing material can travel through that medium faster than the speed of light.

Of course, Relativity is still considered only a theorum, someone may find a proof that changes the entire equation, as Einstein did to Newton before him-- Newtonian physics works on a macro scale, but relativity and quantum physics are at this point more accurate than Newton's ideas of gravity and motion.

Ok i'm very interested in the phenomenon of black holes... If light was the fastest thing in the universe then why can't it escape a black hole? Or is that a totally different subject?

Gravity.


Light has mass, though very very little mass. Anything that has mass is affected by gravity. Blackholes are thought to be caused by dead stars that implode, meaning extremely dense balls of heavy elements. Very massive, so a lot of gravity is generated. As things get pulled in, it gets larger and creates more gravity. It gets to the point that even light can't escape, hence the name 'black' hole.