Question: Will The Speed of Light ever be obtained by Man .....?

( Back )

Answer #1:

I feel we will reach the speed of light, as in this day and age, people are thinking outside the box more than in the 70's and 80's and even before that. Back then, they thought there was a huge bomb blast that kept us inside a shelter for over 20 years, now look at us. If there is a bomb, we are going to go disengage it before it blows our asses up.

Answer #2:

Sorry,

Nothing that has mass can travel at the speed of light.

Science has advanced not just in doing the incredible, but also in determining what is possible, and what is not (and why).

Answer #3:

As your speed increases towards the speed of light, your mass would increase exponentially. Therefore, it would require an infinite amount of energy for any body which has mass to reach the speed of light, so unfortunately it is not reachable.

We never had a hard theory explaining why flight didn't work, we just couldn't work out how it did, whereas with the speed of light, there is a solid body of physics research explaining why it is impossible.

Answer #4:

While a physical theory can never be proven (only disproven), Einsteins relativity tells us that as the velocity of a particle (with mass) increases to the speed of light its mass increases to infinity, and its length decreases to zero.

At the speed of light mass becomes infinite, and length becomes 0, both physical impossibilities, which demonstrates that no particle with mass can ever attain light speed.

This doesn't mean that FTL travel is totally impossible. There are various loopholes that allow the slim possibility of traveling to a point quicker than it would take light to reach it.

Wormholes are the classic example. Instead of traveling through normal space to the destination a much shorter path is taken, meaning that the destination could be reached quicker than it would take light traveling the normal path.

Relativity does not prevent space itself from expanding at a rate faster than light. So another possibility would be to compress the space ahead of a ship, and expand the space behind the ship. The ship is inside a bubble of normal space, and the universe is moved around the bubble in order for the ship to reach its destination. This effectively means that space travel would be possible without the relativistic effects such as time dilation that would so hinder ordinary space travel.

Answer #5:

Educated, brilliant people think about light speed, relativity, and all that is related continually. While there have been a few fringe thoughts based on very little science and a lot of hope, no legitimate theories for reaching light speed have ever been proposed.

No, the speed of light will never be obtained...period. The light speed barrier is not the same as the sound barrier. Before we had the technology to do it, no one really worked out the science of the sound barrier to properly validate the guess. It was just assumed to exist, unfortunately by people who sometimes professed to be experts in the field. But they weren't.

When we finally had the technology to exceed sound speed, i.e., jet and rocket propulsion, the aeronautics world began to study the sound barrier in earnest. They rightly concluded it could be busted as Chuck Yeager and others finally did.

The light barrier, on the other hand, has been studied and tested by a large body of people using the lastest theories and test equipment. The results are always the same, light speed cannot be reached. This conclusion can be validated in labs where particles are brought up to but not quite reaching slight speed. And the reason for these failures is clear.

L(v) = sqrt(1 - (v/c)^2) is called the Lorentz Transform; it is a critical factor in relativity equations. Upon examining it, we can see L(v) --> 0 as v --> c; where v is the speed of your spaceship and c is light speed in a vacuum. And here's why we cannot reach light speed.

M = m/L(v) is relativistic mass and m is rest mass. Rest mass is just the mass you and I see day to day. Relativistic mass is the apparent mass of rest mass that is going at speeds approaching light speed. As you can clearly see, when v = c and L(c) = 0, we have M = m/L(c) = m/0 ----> infinity. That is, relativistic mass approaches infinity when v ---> c.

Now couple that relativistic effect with F = Ma and a = F/M we can see that a --> 0 as M ---> infinity. And what does that have to do with not reaching light speed...everything. For a > 0 so that your spaceship continues to accelerate towards light speed, you'd need a = F/M > 0 so as M ---> infinity, F must also ---> infinity. And there you have it, we cannot and will not ever reach light speed because we'd need a nearly infinite force to continue accelerating up to light speed.

Scifi is fun reading, but a large portion of it is mostly if not entirely fi and very little sci.





** Powered by Yahoo Answers