Is there anything that can travel faster than light?

Question

forgive my ignorance,but here's the thing i was just thinking about.Say there was a a very very long tube in space and it was filled with balls from one end to the other,then force was used at one end.The ball at the other end would exit the tube,right.So would it travel faster than light,if there was enough distance.if the distance of the tube was longer than light could travel? I hope that made some sense.iF it did not make sense please be kind.

Answer 1

yes usian bolt

Answer 2

I am kind :)

No the only way is light... there is nothing that travels more fast...

In this sens whichyou are mentioning.. the only clue is .. that we are having the sunlight.. of 8 minutes ago...so still there is time in between....

Answer 3

This is mechanical motion, and it travels at the speed of sound at the most, much slower than the speed of light.

Even if you had a solid steel bar very long, and you tapped on end with a hammer, the outer end would not move until the shock wave moved down the rod, and that moves at the speed of sound.

"if the distance of the tube was longer than light could travel" makes no sense.

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Answer 4

You are mistaken. Given such a tube, a force at one end would not be applied instantaneously to all balls in the tube. It would take time for the force to propagate through the tube.

Answer 5

It was shown that sub-atomic particles could be accelerated

beyond the speed of light,in a super collider.

this was an experiment to research Einsteins theory of relativity

Answer 6

My sisters mouth.

Answer 7

Darkness, because where ever light goes, darkness was there first. :P

Answer 8

To this date, nothing can travel at "light speed", and I do mean, nothing. When doing physics problems, I remember using 3.0x10^8, but light itself actually travels slightly slower at 2.99x10^8

Answer 9

no, that would not travel faster than light. the force of your hand pushing the ball would compress it slightly until it reached the next ball and then it would decompress and the next ball would compress. like sound waves in the air. the compression and decompression waves would travel at whatever the speed of sound in that material was. even if you somehow managed to make a frictionless environment with incompressible balls, it still wouldn't work. because the energy from your hand would only travel through those balls at the speed of light, and that's a maximum. it would travel slower.

there are a few things that can travel faster than light though.

1. anything. particles can be represented by a cloud of probability, we don't know exactly where they are in that cloud. particles can "tunnel" through barriers instantly. so if a barrier intersects that "cloud of probability" we have for a particle, a particle can tunnel from one side of that barrier, to the other. most wouldn't consider this travel, i don't because it happens over unimaginably short distances. but its just an example.

2. photons. while photons travel at c, it is possible to speed them up. scientists have sped up a beam of light to 300c, i think in a chamber filled with some sort of cesium gas. whats cool about that is, since things that travel faster than light travel back in time relative to us, the beam of light left the chamber of cesium before it entered it.

3. information, under the right circumstances. information is never supposed to travel faster than c, but this can be violated by entangled particles. particle pairs are called entangled particles, the properties of one depend on the other. lets say you have 2 particles that you haven't observed and you put them in boxes and ship on a light year away. now according to quantum mechanics, those particles aren't in states like "possibly an electron" or anything like that. they are in a mixed state (ask a question about schrodingers cat). they are literally every state possible. once you observe them, the wave function collapses and that particles becomes lets say an electron with a +1/2 spin. that other particle that's a light year away HAS to be a positron with a -1/2 spin. so it should have taken a year for the other particle to react to you observing one, but it did it instantly. so information traveled faster than light.

4. tachyons. now these, well to be honest most likely don't exist. 99.99999% sure they don't exist. but i thought id share. tachyons are hypothetical particles with an imaginary mass. not imaginary like you'd think, well kinda. an imaginary number is the square root of a negative number. that's impossible, so its called imaginary and represented by the letter i. so a tachyon would have a mass of like i eV. since it has an imaginary mass, the LOWER limit to its speed would be c. so it can travel infinitely fast, but cant go slower than the speed of light.