Remember when skeptics said it was impossible to break the lightspeed barrier?

Something that has puzzled me for a long time is this:

If matter increases as it approaches the speed of light then why does the matter of light remain the same although it itself is travelling at light speed.

Surely instead of trying to travel at the speed of light engineers/scientists should be looking at encompassing light as there method of propulsion. "Going with the flow" so to speak.

[edit on 22-3-2008 by thesaint]

It's not matter that increases, but mass. And photons have no mass.

reply to post by midtown5dw

WHERE HAVE ALL YOU PEOPLE BEEN FOR THE LAST DECADE ? ASLEEP !
listed below are just a few of the things you ALL might like to know have been proven without doubt , due to the discovery of certain elements way back in 1976 !
time travel has been proven possible. FACT !
antigravity aircraft are being made ! FACT !
travel 100's lightyears in an instant with no loss of time ..PROVEN FACT !
NASA developing warp drive is a reality -initially needed for exploration... FACT!
cure for aids -cancer-alzheimers etc.... found FACT !
TELEPORTING PROVEN ... FACT !
AS MUCH FREE ENERGY THE WORLD WOULD EVER NEED ....FACT !
MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS ...FACT PROVEN !
THERE IS INTELLIGENT LIFE ALL OVER THE KNOWN UNIVERSE ..... FACT !
GROW FOOD IN DESERT WITHOUT WATER .... FACT !
TELEPATHY ..... PROVEN WITHOUT DOUBT.. FACT...!
NO NEED FOR ANY "DRUG" MEDICINES... FACT !
ABILITY TO GREATLY INCREASE LIFESPAN PROVEN... FACT!
LIFE NOT SPREAD BY COMETS PROVEN.....FACT!
LIFE SPREAD BY STARDUST ....PROVEN...FACT !
PERFECT RECALL (MEMORY) PROVEN FACT !
REACTIVATED DORMANT CELLS ... REGAIN YOUTH...PROVEN FACT!

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[edit on 29-3-2008 by lightoflife]

[edit on 29-3-2008 by lightoflife]

I still say that it's either impossible, or that our knowledge of causality is flawed (which honestly wouldn't surprise me). Faster than light travel necessarily implies time travel, regardless of how it's done.

The method outlined in the OP isn't even a true faster than light method anyway. At no point does the ship exceed the local speed of light. That anti mass technique is common in science fiction.

The trouble, of course, is that anti mass is extremely speculative at best. Antimatter, sadly, has regular mass. Dark energy apparently has properties similar to anti gravity, but it increases proportionally with distance, which makes it useless on anything smaller than an intergalactic scale. Dark matter has regular mass.

Originally posted by thesaint
Something that has puzzled me for a long time is this:

If matter increases as it approaches the speed of light then why does the matter of light remain the same although it itself is travelling at light speed.

Surely instead of trying to travel at the speed of light engineers/scientists should be looking at encompassing light as there method of propulsion. "Going with the flow" so to speak.

[edit on 22-3-2008 by thesaint]

Nothing with mass travels at the speed of light. And, by the same equations, nothing traveling faster than the speed of light can travel any slower than it.

Photons have zero mass, but they do have a nonzero momentum, proportional to their energy.


Try to think of it this way: everything travels at the same speed through spacetime. Things that are traveling very fast in space travel slower in time, relative to an observer. Photons, which travel at the speed of light, do not really experience time. to them, their origin and destination are the same place, and they are at both simultaneously.

A key point is that this is true from all reference frames. Light is always observed traveling at the same velocity, but everything else is determined by your reference frame. Apparent simultaneity, distance, velocity, and time are distorted by relativistic effects. Light, however, is constant.

Of course there is speed higher than the speed of light. The photon itself travels with this higher speed. The speed of light is determined by the time light needs to get from point A to point B. However, the photons are not moving in a line , they are moving on a sinus oscilaton. This is why we have the "wavelenght" of the light. If we do the maths , we see that actually the photons are moving faster than what we consider speed of light.

Also , we are not sure on what the photons are. The mystery is that it has zero rest mass.


E=MCC
and also
E=[(Plank Cosntant)*C]/wavelenght

One single photon carryes 4×10^-19 Joules.

How can the mass of something be zero , while still affected by gravity ? ( see black holes ) and still have momentum? I have the feeling we miss something about photons..

Sceptics? What sceptics?

It is impossible to 'break the light barrier'.

You can accelerate something up to very nearly the speed of light but you can't reach it and therefore can't get past it unless you can do so without reaching it. As far as I am aware, no acceptable theoretical basis for this kind of transition has ever been put forward.

TheRedneck, your idea that an object might be travelling at the speed of light relative to one frame of reference but would not seem infinitely massive to an observer in a different frame of reference is tantalizing on the face of it, but actually amounts, if you think about it for a minute, to the basic proposition re-stated: nothing massive can reach the speed of light. This is because the velocity of anything can only be determined relative to a frame of reference, and (this is one of the first things they teach you when you study relativity) no frame of reference is privileged over any other frame. If you do the mathematics, you will find it works out the same way -- I remember that from the days when I could still do the maths! Sadly, those days are now gone...

Empirical evidence also bears this out, since no objects of infinite mass have ever been spotted flying by us; nor could any such object coexist with the universe, since the latter would be destroyed by the effects of the object's infinite gravitation.

To the person (sorry, I've forgotten your handle) whose post just above mine speaks of photons travelling faster than light because they oscillate as well as move in a linear direction, I have to say that you've got wave-particle duality a little confused. See light as a wave and you see oscillation; see light as a particle and it's just a lightspeed bullet. You can't combine the two ways of looking at it; they are intrinsically separate.

Addressing the OP, proposing that there was once a time when 'sceptics said it was impossible to break the lightspeed barrier' presupposes that this 'barrier' has now been 'broken'. It hasn't. No-one has ever seen a photon travelling faster than light.

This isn't about believers and sceptics, really; it's science, based on empirical evidence. There can no belief involved, and therefore no possibility of 'scepticism'; it's just the way things are. You may choose to disbelieve the science, but then it's you that's the 'sceptic' -- though I'm not sure if scepticism is the right name for someone who insists on disbelieving evidence that is plain to see.

I'm confused. How can light have no mass? Isn't mass how much matter there is? That's what they've taught in every science class I've ever taken. So woudn't a massless thing have no matter at all? And if there's no matter how can there be anything? I'm not saying I don't believe it. It's widely accepted among scientists so I figure it must be true, but I just can't figure out how and I'm sure Einstein must have if it's widely accepted as true. Also if there's no matter how can it be pulled into a black hole?

And then how can time be a physical thing? What if everything stood still except for time? All the matter, energy, antimatter, dark matter, everything but time in the universe just stood still for say, 1000s of years and just started where it left off. It wouldn't seem any different to anybody in the universe. Yet this whole spacetime thing makes it sound like time is a physical thing. If time is physical then would it be possible to stop time but keep everything else going and then what would you call the passage of 'time' that is measured in such a world for the purposes of being able to schedule things and be aware of when(for lack of a better term) certain things such as the rising of the sun will happen?

reply to post by mdiinican


If the photons are there simultaneously, then they either haven't moved (from our perspective) at all or they are moving so fast we can't detect it.

And how can something be simultaneously here and at its point of origin and yet still take a measurable amount of time to arrive?

Lightspeed is NOT constant, as it has been slowed down in several experiments, last reported in Scientifc American if I remember correctly.



[edit on 16-1-2009 by apacheman]

My solution is simple.

You CAN NOT go faster than the FASTEST thing in the galaxy.

Example.

If you used some type of anti-matter/gravity device to reduce the wait of a ship down to a fraction above nothing and could propel it by light with no loss due to drag/efficiency then it's top speed would be light speed minus nominal mass/drag.

If you want to go faster than light you have to have something that IS faster than light.

I believe we will go faster than light when/if we find something faster than light. Period. From what I understand (poorly) Einstein set the speed of light as a limit for practical reasons, kinda like chopping off that infinite set of numbers when using Pi for an equation.

Now wormholes etc. would allow you to travel greater distances than light could cover in the same amount of time, but you would not be traveling faster.

We are meddling in powers we have no understanding of here ATS...that I am sure of...


But it IS FUN!!

TL;DR, Mass creates gravity, not the other way around, so messing with gravity won't do a damn thing. You may as well say "why not build bigger, more powerful rocket engines?" to which the answer is, "not gonna cut it."

now if you're talking about the slightly different concept of bending spacetime in funky ways around a spaceship, then that's been thought of decades ago, by Alcubierre. Also: there's a serious chance it's impossible due to a plethora of reasons, one of which is that it requires more energy than the combined total of all the mass and energy in the universe combined.

Anti-gravity may or may not exist, depending on the nature of gravity, which remains unclear. You'd need to change the mass of massive particles to exactly zero to get them to travel at the speed of light (it may well be the case that massless particles can ONLY travel at the speed of light), which may or may not be possible depending on the nature of what mass is, which remains unclear.

To get massive particles to travel faster than the speed of light, you would have to reduce their mass BELOW zero, which again, may or may not be possible.

I’ve been thinking about anti-gravity recently and I have question I hope someone can answer. The orbit of earth is what if not anti-gravity? Satellites are in constant free fall because? I don’t understand the principles of anti-gravity but if meteors and even the moon can be held in this constant free fall, then can’t scientists use that understanding of how continuous free falling works, to make some sort of field/bubble around the craft that’s free falling so it always keeps falling like going down hill so there’s no need for fuel to push because it’s always falling.

And then you can direct in that field/bubble where you want to ‘fall’ up, down sideways etc. Is that scientifically possible?

Originally posted by andre18
I’ve been thinking about anti-gravity recently and I have question I hope someone can answer. The orbit of earth is what if not anti-gravity? Satellites are in constant free fall because? I don’t understand the principles of anti-gravity but if meteors and even the moon can be held in this constant free fall, then can’t scientists use that understanding of how continuous free falling works, to make some sort of field/bubble around the craft that’s free falling so it always keeps falling like going down hill so there’s no need for fuel to push because it’s always falling.

And then you can direct in that field/bubble where you want to ‘fall’ up, down sideways etc. Is that scientifically possible?

DRAWN OUT SIGH.

Nobody ever taught you this stuff? Orbits work like this: Objects have inertia. It takes force to change their speed and direction. An orbit is a special case where an object is traveling at speed in one direction, while being pulled in a different direction by the gravity of a second object. Gravity bends the object's path. if the object isn't traveling too fast, it's path will bend all the way around the second object.

All this has only to do with regular gravity and mass, antigravity doesn't enter into it at all.

Things keep going in space because there's very little to slow them down. The rarefied gas filling the solar system, while denser than the interstellar medium, is pretty much hard vacuum.

Free fall means that the something is accelerating in the direction of gravity at the rate of the acceleration of gravity. this is only possible in an orbit, or when actually falling. An orbit is an interesting case because the object in free fall doesn't actually get any closer to the center of mass of the source of the gravitational pull, but is still accelerating towards it. Energy is released when an object actually falls. no energy is released when an object is in orbital free fall, because the object doesn't change it's distance from the source's center of mass.

There isn't some precise speed that needs to be maintained to stay in orbit; by various properties of angular momentum higher speeds will make an object take a higher orbit, and lower speeds will make for a lower orbit. Orbits need not be circular, and can indeed take on all manner of elliptical shape. Nor do orbits need to be on one plane; an orbit can have a degree of precession.

All this was worked out to a very good degree of accuracy about 400 years ago.

Originally posted by apacheman
reply to post by mdiinican

 

If the photons are there simultaneously, then they either haven't moved (from our perspective) at all or they are moving so fast we can't detect it.

And how can something be simultaneously here and at its point of origin and yet still take a measurable amount of time to arrive?

As mdiinican wrote, photons are at their points of origin and destination "simultaneously" from their own perspective.

The reason that nothing can travel faster than light through spacetime is that light, in transit, is merely an amount of energy; the potential to do work. It is not a "thing" at all. So, essentially, the speed of light (energy) is the top speed at which any event can happen.

reply to post by mdiinican


Thanks for explaining it all, now i get it......i'm such as dumb ass lol

Originally posted by midtown5dw
So i had this thought, i know way am i a rocket scientist or nor do i know much about quantum physics, So feel free to correct me. we all know that mass gets heavier and heavier the closer it gets to reaching lightspeed. If Anti-gravity exists, (which i believe quantum theory supports) the issue with excellerating mass past the speed of light might not be so hard after all. If we can manipulate the gravity around a space craft, wouldnt you be able to mask the crafts mass by affecting the gravitational force around it??


Please this has been on my mind for sometime. someone plz comment,

and sorry for my spelling, i was about to leave work and was in a hurry.

One other thing I have heard in quantum mechanics/physics is, as mass accelerates it vibrates, as it vibrates the particles move farther and farther apart which actually causes the mass to become less dense and decreases the "weight" of the mass by the vibrations causing it to be dispersed over a larger area of space.

Originally posted by DarthoriousOne other thing I have heard in quantum mechanics/physics is, as mass accelerates it vibrates, as it vibrates the particles move farther and farther apart which actually causes the mass to become less dense and decreases the "weight" of the mass by the vibrations causing it to be dispersed over a larger area of space.

What? Your description sounds kind of like what happens to a gas as it is heated up, but otherwise I can't make sense of it. Got any links to reputable sources for what you're saying?

That experiment nullifies Einstein's theory.
But makes sense as everyone understands gravity.

After all, what is anti gravity... its gravity going in the opposite direction.
So its gravity as well.

So far as we know, gravity is 32 feet per second per second.
If your space craft went that fast you could calculate when you would
reach the speed of light.

Are Newton's Laws not Laws any more just because Einstein's Theory says so.

As far as Energy goes, it comes from the atmosphere.
Watch any nuclear explosion.
The nuclear explosion is an hot match that set off the air.
Energy is only in the gases of the atmosphere.

The atmosphere also contains the secret to gravity or anti gravity.

ED: The shield you talk about has been suggested in the
Tesla UFO mechanism in that an electron cloud surounding
the craft shields it from the momentum of the universe and
allows the control over it.


[edit on 1/16/2009 by TeslaandLyne]

Originally posted by midtown5dw
we all know that mass gets heavier and heavier the closer it gets to reaching lightspeed.

The flaw starts here. This is not correct. Mass does not get "heavier" the faster you go. Sorry but it was bad math out of the gate.

Originally posted by lightoflife
reply to post by midtown5dw

 

WHERE HAVE ALL YOU PEOPLE BEEN FOR THE LAST DECADE ? ASLEEP !
listed below are just a few of the things you ALL might like to know have been proven without doubt , due to the discovery of certain elements way back in 1976 !
time travel has been proven possible. FACT !
antigravity aircraft are being made ! FACT !
travel 100's lightyears in an instant with no loss of time ..PROVEN FACT !
NASA developing warp drive is a reality -initially needed for exploration... FACT!
cure for aids -cancer-alzheimers etc.... found FACT !
TELEPORTING PROVEN ... FACT !
AS MUCH FREE ENERGY THE WORLD WOULD EVER NEED ....FACT !
MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS ...FACT PROVEN !
THERE IS INTELLIGENT LIFE ALL OVER THE KNOWN UNIVERSE ..... FACT !
GROW FOOD IN DESERT WITHOUT WATER .... FACT !
TELEPATHY ..... PROVEN WITHOUT DOUBT.. FACT...!
NO NEED FOR ANY "DRUG" MEDICINES... FACT !
ABILITY TO GREATLY INCREASE LIFESPAN PROVEN... FACT!
LIFE NOT SPREAD BY COMETS PROVEN.....FACT!
LIFE SPREAD BY STARDUST ....PROVEN...FACT !
PERFECT RECALL (MEMORY) PROVEN FACT !
REACTIVATED DORMANT CELLS ... REGAIN YOUTH...PROVEN FACT!

I do not buy one word of this post. Anyone have anything closer to proof than an hour and a half of someone saying so?

reply to post by Intothepitwego


I don't know. I gave him a star for effort.
Perhaps one or two I agree with.
The 'Occult" or hidden science (from Tesla) of the Illuminati may
have developed anything we know nothing about.

I'm about to look at that movie he linked.