How is it possible NOT to go faster than the speed of light?

[AHUGECAT]

In Albert Einstein's ground breaking paper titled "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," Einstein concluded that nothing is faster than light moving through a vacuum - a speed of 186,000 miles per second. This implies light is always the same, no matter what.

If this is true, then that means if we were able to measure the time it takes light to reach a certain object, then the time it takes to reach the object will change depending on the speed of the origin of the light and the object that it is intended to reach if you assume the two entities always remain in the same relative location in relation to each other.

So this means that we can measure our precise velocity not in relation to the sun, not in relation to other planets, but in relation to light. How is it NOT possible to go faster than the speed of light?

It is therefore possible to go faster than the speed of light through a vacuum.

[LaCosaNostra90]

You went from red to green faster than the speed of light

ur welcome

[jonagik]

Do u even reference frame?

[stosman05]

Let's face it you are not ever going to go faster than Mach so you probably best not worry to much about light speed.

[jonagik]

Let's face it you are not ever going to go faster than Mach so you probably best not worry to much about light speed.

mach in a vacuum is zero

[GrimTheDTackle]

So far over my head

[Domina8r]

cant go faster, but there will be ways to shorten the distance between two points.

[hoober]

thread about science


use miles

[Soflogator528]

it's obviously possible brah, do you even physics?

[AHUGECAT]

Do u even reference frame?

Pretend there is nothing in space. You have a static observer that is not moving (although you can't say he's not moving because you have nothing to compare it to) and a flashlight. The observer shoots the flashlight away at half the speed of light, and the flashlight is pointed towards the observer. If the flashlight turned on, would the light shining out of the flashlight be half the speed of light, or the speed of light? What if the observer went in the direction of the light 3/4 the speed of light? Would they exceed the speed of light? That's the best way I can describe it.

[mommaofobama]

Light moves at a constant speed, regardless of the speed of the observer. Take the following scenario:

You and I are standing together. A supernova occurs. The moment it occurs, I take off away from it at half the speed of light. Now regular logic would dictate that you should see it before me, but with light, we both see it at the same time.

speed is distance over time. v=d/t.

Since the light's speed is constant, and it had to travel a longer distance to reach me, you see me as moving slower through time while I see you as moving faster.

Pretty cool.

Since light travels at a constant speed, it would be impossible to travel faster than light, since that would mean moving slower than 0 through time.

[hoober]

it's obviously possible brah, do you even physics?

Everything, by nature of simply existing, is "moving" at the speed of light (which really has nothing to do with light: more on that later). Yes, that does include you.
Our understanding of the universe is that the way that we perceive space and time as separate things is, to be frank, wrong. They aren't separate: the universe is made of "spacetime," all one word. A year and a lightyear describe different things in our day to day lives, but from a physicist's point of view, they're actually the exact same thing (depending on what kind of physics you're doing).
In our day to day lives, we define motion as a distance traveled over some amount of time. However, if distances and intervals of time are the exact same thing, that suddenly becomes completely meaningless. "I traveled one foot for every foot that I traveled" is an absolutely absurd statement!
The way it works is that everything in the universe travels through spacetime at some speed which I'll call "c" for the sake of brevity. Remember, motion in spacetime is meaningless, so it makes sense that nothing could be "faster" or "slower" through spacetime than anything else. Everybody and everything travels at one foot per foot, that's just... how it works.
Obviously, though, things do seem to have different speeds. The reason that happens is that time and space are orthogonal, which is sort of a fancy term for "at right angles to each other." North and east, for example, are orthogonal: you can travel as far as you want directly to the north, but it's not going to affect where you are in terms of east/west at all.
Just like how you can travel north without traveling east, you can travel through time without it affecting where you are in space. Conversely, you can travel through space without it affecting where you are in time.
You're (presumably) sitting in your chair right now, which means you're not traveling through space at all. Since you have to travel through spacetime at c (speed of light), though, that means all of your motion is through time.
By the way, this is why time dilation happens: something that's moving very fast relative to you is moving through space, but since they can only travel through spacetime at c, they have to be moving more slowly through time to compensate (from your point of view).
Light, on the other hand, doesn't travel through time at all. The reason it doesn't is somewhat complicated, but it has to do with the fact that it has no mass.
Something that isn't moving that has mass can have energy: that's what E = mc2 means. Light has no mass, but it does have energy. If we plug the mass of light into E=mc2, we get 0, which makes no sense because light has energy. Hence, light can never be stationary.
Not only that, but light can never be stationary from anybody's perspective. Since, like everything else, it travels at c through spacetime, that means all of its "spacetime speed" must be through space, and none of it is through time.
So, light travels at c. Not at all by coincidence, you'll often hear c referred to as the "speed of light in a vacuum." Really, though, it's the speed that everything travels at, and it happens to be the speed that light travels through space at because it has no mass.
edit: By the way, this also covers the common ELI5 question of why nothing can ever travel faster than light, and why things with mass cannot travel at the speed of light. Since everything moves through spacetime at c, nothing can ever exceed it (and no, traveling backwards in time would not fix that). Also, things with mass can always be "stationary" from someone's perspective (like their own), so they always have to move through time at least a little bit, meaning they can never travel through space as fast as light does. They'd have to travel through spacetime faster than c to do that, which, again, is not possible.

from reddit
no negs plx

[C-Winger]

In Albert Einstein's ground breaking paper titled "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," Einstein concluded that nothing is faster than light moving through a vacuum - a speed of 186,000 miles per second. This implies light is always the same, no matter what.

If this is true, then that means if we were able to measure the time it takes light to reach a certain object, then the time it takes to reach the object will change depending on the speed of the origin of the light and the object that it is intended to reach if you assume the two entities always remain in the same relative location in relation to each other.

So this means that we can measure our precise velocity not in relation to the sun, not in relation to other planets, but in relation to light. How is it NOT possible to go faster than the speed of light?

It is therefore possible to go faster than the speed of light through a vacuum.

Is it just me or did none of that make sense?

[InnocentMiscer]

mach in a vacuum is zero

Mach 1 is the speed of sound through air at 20 degrees at sea level pressure.

[AHUGECAT]

it's obviously possible brah, do you even physics?

Doesn't work. Light as a waveis known as the "ether" or "luminiferos ether" theory, proposed on the 1800s. Ether was postulated to the all-prevading medium of propagation of electromagnetic waves. The ether theory fell out of favor due to a total lack of ability to detect it in anyway.

However they went back to it and reworked it and renamed it the Higgs Field theory. Both the ether and Higgs theories postulate the existence of an all-pervading medium or field. In the Higgs theory there are particles called Higgs-Bosons and perhaps other types, and like the ether theory, the vacuum of space is not really empty. Higgs particles have not been detected so far. I cannot be bothered writing anything more about the Higgs theory considering that it is only a hypothesis.

Water is liquid (H2O) so it has very different properties. What happens with liquid would not happen with a wave.

[AHUGECAT]

Is it just me or did none of that make sense?

THIS IS A REPOST: Pretend there is nothing in space. You have a static observer that is not moving (although you can't say he's not moving because you have nothing to compare it to) and a flashlight. The observer shoots the flashlight away at half the speed of light, and the flashlight is pointed towards the observer. If the flashlight turned on, would the light shining out of the flashlight be half the speed of light, or the speed of light? What if the observer went in the direction of the light 3/4 the speed of light? Would they exceed the speed of light? That's the best way I can describe it.

[Apocc]

Do you even time dilation?

You can either travel through time, or through space. The higher your spatical velocity, the lower your time velocity, i.e. you age slower compared to everything else.

[Soflogator528]

Doesn't work. Light as a waveis known as the "ether" or "luminiferos ether" theory, proposed on the 1800s. Ether was postulated to the all-prevading medium of propagation of electromagnetic waves. The ether theory fell out of favor due to a total lack of ability to detect it in anyway.

However they went back to it and reworked it and renamed it the Higgs Field theory. Both the ether and Higgs theories postulate the existence of an all-pervading medium or field. In the Higgs theory there are particles called Higgs-Bosons and perhaps other types, and like the ether theory, the vacuum of space is not really empty. Higgs particles have not been detected so far. I cannot be bothered writing anything more about the Higgs theory considering that it is only a hypothesis.

Water is liquid (H2O) so it has very different properties. What happens with liquid would not happen with a wave.

Yeah ok but what about this einstein

[C-Winger]

Pretend there is nothing in space. You have a static observer that is not moving (although you can't say he's not moving because you have nothing to compare it to) and a flashlight. The observer shoots the flashlight away at half the speed of light, and the flashlight is pointed towards the observer. If the flashlight turned on, would the light shining out of the flashlight be half the speed of light, or the speed of light? What if the observer went in the direction of the light 3/4 the speed of light? Would they exceed the speed of light? That's the best way I can describe it.

Ooooh, the ol' speeding car with headlights on question.

Like everyone has said, light is constant. You don't add or subtract the speed of the light's origin to c.

[mommaofobama]

the time it takes to reach the object will change depending on the speed of the origin of the light and the object that it is intended to reach if you assume the two entities always remain in the same relative location in relation to each other.

So this means that we can measure our precise velocity not in relation to the sun, not in relation to other planets, but in relation to light. How is it NOT possible to go faster than the speed of light?

It is therefore possible to go faster than the speed of light through a vacuum.

No. The time it takes for light to reach a certain object is always the same, regardless of the speed of the object and the light source.

[AHUGECAT]

Do you even time dilation?

You can either travel through time, or through space. The higher your spatical velocity, the lower your time velocity, i.e. you age slower compared to everything else.

Impossible to travel through time. E=MC^2

[IndianChief616]

Doesn't work. Light as a waveis known as the "ether" or "luminiferos ether" theory, proposed on the 1800s. Ether was postulated to the all-prevading medium of propagation of electromagnetic waves. The ether theory fell out of favor due to a total lack of ability to detect it in anyway.

However they went back to it and reworked it and renamed it the Higgs Field theory. Both the ether and Higgs theories postulate the existence of an all-pervading medium or field. In the Higgs theory there are particles called Higgs-Bosons and perhaps other types, and like the ether theory, the vacuum of space is not really empty. Higgs particles have not been detected so far. I cannot be bothered writing anything more about the Higgs theory considering that it is only a hypothesis.

Water is liquid (H2O) so it has very different properties. What happens with liquid would not happen with a wave.

This, and anything with mass cannot travel faster than light speed... however, particles without mass could, like neutrinos... but there is also a TON we dont know because a huge number (maybe 95%) of space is dark matter/energy which we know nothing about.

[hoober]

Impossible to travel through time. E=MC^2

ehm what


we travel right now through time
otherwise..
yeah
ehm
do i really need to explain?

[Apocc]

Impossible to travel through time. E=MC^2

lol ok OP.

[AHUGECAT]

Please do not call me Einstein. Although I am Jewish, and my major is physics, it would be a dishonor for me to be compared to him. Maybe in 10 years after I do extensive research.12-14 hours of research per day.

[Ken-O]

Yeah ok but what about this einstein

v =/= w

speed =/= angular speed

[shortythree]

Time Travel

[AHUGECAT]

ehm what


we travel right now through time
otherwise..
yeah
ehm
do i really need to explain?

I mean time travel, like you going from the year 2014 to 2144 instantaneously (for either observers or you).

[ADHDave]

but who was relativity

[Triceptops]

in.