Whats with light?

Question

i have been told my entire life that it is impossible to exceed the speed of light. i have always found this ignorant and close minded.

my real question is. if a black hole and pull light into it. does that not mean there is a force stronger than the speed of light. and if there is a force stronger than the speed of light. why is it impossible to surpass this speed

Answer 1

Don't listen to people when they say you can't travel faster then the speed of light. You can. You can always get faster at something. Humans don't know how but one day they will. It took them a very long time to go Mach1 right? Now look, the F-35 can go Mach 3!! Sooner or later light speed or "Warp Drive" will happen. What you see in Star Trek is very real. One day we will go Warp 9 or 9 times the speed of light. It might take another thousand years but it WILL happen.

Answer 2

We come to that conclusion because there is plenty of scientific evidence supporting it. If you understood special relativity, you would know why its impossible to exceed the speed of light.

A black hole can pull light in because it bends the space around it, which causes the light to bend along with it (and therefore, travel in the direction of the center of gravity--the singularity).

It has been mathematically proven that there is not enough energy in the universe for matter to exceed the speed of light.

Answer 3

You shouldn't be referring to a cardinal tenet of physics, that nothing can exceed the speed of light in a vacuum, as "ignorant and closed minded", when you are so ignorant as to equate gravitational "force" with "speed".

Answer 4

there are some theoretical particles, that are so highly charged, that the minium speed they could achieve is the speed of light. these theoretical particles are known as "tachyons". none of these particles have been discovered, but they just might exist. after all, the universe is infinite which gives way to an infite amount of possible speed as long as it doesn't go beyond the speed of the universe's expansion. after all, speed is not necissarily a finite number. like anything in the universe, it can grow... and can expand with the universe.

so far, it is in theory impossible to surpass this speed because our entire view of the universe is based on the fundemental law that light speed is the fastest speed in which the universe can allow without being warped to the point of it being completely destroyed.

heres some information on tachyons:

A hypothetical particle that travels faster than the speed of light (and therefore also travels back in time). The existence of tachyons is allowed by the equations of Einstein's special theory of relativity. However, although searches have been carried out for tachyons, the results have so far proved negative.

Tachyons were first proposed in pre-relativistic times by the physicist Arnold Sommerfeld and named in the 1967 by Gerald Feinberg from the Greek tachys meaning "swift." By extension of this terminology, particles that travel slower than light are called tardyons (or bradyons in more modern usage) and particles, such as photons, that travel exactly at the speed of light are called luxons. The existence of tachyons is allowed by the mathematics of special relativity, one of the basic equations of which is

E = m /√(1 - v^2/c^2)

where E is the mass-energy of a particle, m its rest mass, and v its velocity, and is the speed of light. This shows that for tardyons (particles of ordinary matter), E increases as v increases and becomes infinite when v = c, thus preventing an initially slower-than-light particle from being accelerated up to the speed of light and beyond. What about a particle for which v is always greater than c? In this case, v2/c2 > 1, so that the denominator in the equation above is an imaginary number – the square root of a negative real number. If m has a real value, E is imaginary, which is hard for physicists to swallow because E is a measurable quantity. If m takes an imaginary value, however, then (because one imaginary number divided by another is real), E is real. Tachyons are allowed, therefore, providing (a) they never cross the light barrier and (b) they have an imaginary rest mass (which is physically more acceptable since the rest mass of an object that never stops is not directly measurable).

Bizarrely, tachyons would slow down if they gained energy, and accelerate if they lost energy. This leads to a problem in the case of charged tachyons because charged particles that move faster than the speed of light in the surrounding medium give off energy in the form of Cerenkov radiation. Charged tachyons would continuously lose energy, even in a vacuum, through Cerenkov emission. This would cause them to gain speed, thus lose energy at even greater rate, thus accelerate even more, and so on, leading to a runaway reaction and the release of an arbitrarily large amount of energy.

Time paradox

More worryingly, as the physicist Gregory Benford and his colleagues first pointed out, tachyons seem to lead to a time paradox because of their ability to send messages into the past. Suppose Alice on Earth and Boole on a planet circling around Sirius can communicate using what has been called a tachyon "antitelephone." They agree in advance that when Boole receives a message from Alice, he will reply immediately. Alice promises to send a message to Boole at noon her time, if and only if she has not received a message from Boole by 10 a.m. The snag is that both messages, being superluminal, travel back in time. If Alice sends her message at noon, Boole's reply could not reach her before 10 a.m. "Then," as Benford and colleagues wrote in their 1970 paper called The Tachyonic Antitelephone, "the exchange of messages will take place if and only if it does not take place..."

Perhaps not surprisingly, despite numerous searches, no tachyon detection has so far been confirmed. The same is true of another hypothetical faster-than-light particle called a dybbuk (Hebrew for a "roving spirit"), which would have imaginary mass, energy, and momentum. Dybbuks, proposed by Raymond Fox of the Israel Institute of Technology, are so strange that some of their odd properties cancel out to an observer yet, interestingly, they avoid the causality problem of tachyons.

Answer 5

Stronger than the speed of light doesn't mean faster than the speed of light.

Mass means gravity.  The more mass, the stronger the gravity and the higher the escape velocity from that object.

The escape velocity from the moon is 2.38 km/sec.

The escape velocity from the Earth (more massive) is 11.186 km/sec.

The escape velocity from a black hole at it's "event horizon" is the speed of light.  Not even light travels fast enough to escape the black hole.

The speed of light is the speed of all electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, in free space.

It is one of the fundamentals of Einstein's special relativity.

Answer 6

What gravity really does (whether it's the gravity of the earth or the gravity of a black hole) is cause things to increase in energy when they fall toward it; and decrease in energy when they move away from it.

For massive things (rocks), this increase in energy is manifest as a greater speed.  Rocks speed up as they approch the earth (or a black hole), and slow down as they recede from the earth (or from a black hole).  But still they don't increase infinitely in speed.  Our "old" (pre-relativity) formula for energy said that as you add more energy the rock's speed increases without limit.  The "new" formula says that as you add more energy ther rock's speed approaches (but never exceeds) the speed "c" (speed of light).

For massless things (like light), the increase in energy is manifest as a change in wavelength rather than speed.  As light approaches the earth or a black hole, its wavelength shrinks and it becomes more energetic and intense but it does NOT go any faster.  As light recedes from the earth or a black hole, its wavelength gets longer and the light gets dimmer, but it does NOT go any slower.

When they say that light can't escape from a black hole, it doesn't mean that the light shone outward will slow down, stop, and turn and fall back down.  It means that the black hole's gravity will sap the light's energy, making its wavelength infinitely long and driving its intensity to zero.

The speed "c" is a fundamental limit because of the relationship between space and time.  Think of it as a "conversion factor" that tells how space is related to time.  It says that if you travel through space a certain distance (say, 186,000 miles), you MUST also travel through time a certain minimum distance (say, 1 second).  Because space and time are interwoven in this way, you can't get around that limit.

Answer 7

It may well be ignorant and close minded.

However, I could also say that believing "2+2=4" is close minded.  Why can't it equal 5? ...or 9,354?

The answer is quite simple:  We base our scientific assumptions on the evidence we see around us.  Perhaps you should study physics and get a better grasp of why Einstien put forth the idea that the speed of light could not be exceeded.

Answer 8

A black hole has no effect on the speed of light.  It does effect the energy that light carries, however.  A black hole will stretch the wavelength of light, stealing its energy and returning it to the black hole.  Not by slowing it down and pulling it back in, but by bleeding off its energy.

Answer 9

for something to travel faster than the speed of light its mass would have to expand greater than our universe.