Who decided that nobody could go faster than the speed of light?

Question

Just wondering. Saw a show about UFOs & someone said, "well they traveled 40 yrs at 99% of the speed of light," & I'm thinking how do you know that? Maybe they went thru a portal or something. Or maybe they are in a spirit realm, only visible to the human eye occasionally.

After all, our eyes only see about 20% of the light spectrum, & our ears hear even less. We don't see microwaves or radiowaves or xrays, etc.

Just wondering what we look like to such a higher level of intelligent life, amoeba?

Answer 1

Nobody decided, it's just a fact, travel faster than the speed of light is impossible.

Answer 2

It was Hendrik Lorentz who took James Maxwell's equations describing electomagnetism, and came up with formulas describing relativistic time and space dilation. These formulas contain a mathematical term which can only be evaluated if the velocity is smaller than the speed of light. Based on this, only objects with no mass can travel at the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster.

Einstein later took these formulas and extended them to include mass, and deriving the famous equation E=mc^2

Answer 3

Or maybe they're a figment of some confused peoples' imaginations.  If they did exist they'd probably use hyperspace.  It would be a much more prudent move for a technologically advance civilization.

Answer 4

"Under the special theory of relativity, a particle (that has mass) with subluminal velocity needs infinite energy to accelerate to the speed of light, although special relativity does not forbid the existence of particles that travel faster than light at all times (see tachyon)." - Wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than...

Answer 5

No one decided it was true, it is believed to be true.  It was theorized and then math calculations by Albert Einstein in his Special and General Theory of Relativity show that as things get closer to the speed of light they get smaller and time slows to a stop.  There is no proof that anyone can say for sure just math calculations that support the theory.

Answer 6

Most of those possibilities you list have been long discarded by reputable science as simply impossible fiction.  Others, like the 20% of the light spectrum, which is totally incorrect by the way, are irrelevent.  If you look up the EM spectrum, of which light is a small part (about 0.00000000000300% based on wavelengths), I think you'll find just how tiny the light spectrum is.  [See source.]  But given that, the human eyeball, if well, can see all (100%) of the visible light spectrum, which is why they call it "visible."

Although there are objects in the sky that are unidentifiable, that does not make them extraterrestrial.  It simply means observers were unable to identify them.  I know of no scientifically verifiable sighting of a UFO that was positively identified as ET in origin.  After all these years of looking, one has to wonder why that is.

One of the fundamental axioms of physics is that the laws of physics are truly universal...they apply everywhere in the universe...can't get much more "universal" than the universe.  Therefore, the ET's if they exist are also bound by the speed of light limit that nature imposes on us.

If your ET's traveled at 99% light speed for 40 years, before they got to Earth, then their point of origin is about 39.6 light years away.  They could come from any direction in an area of a = 2pi r^2; where r = 39.6 ly.  But as they took 39.6 ly to get here and if we assume they drove straight to Pittsburg, then they came from the rim of that area.  And that area is a1 = 2pi (r^2 - (r - 1)^2) = 2pi [r^2 - r^2 + 2r - 1] ~ 2pi (2r - 1) = 2*3.141569*(2*39.6-1) = 491.3413916 square light years the UFO might come from.  This assumes a "rim" that is 1 ly wide.

Our Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 ly in diameter.  Therefore, its area A = 2pi R^2 = 2*3.14569*(50E3)^2 = 15,728,450,000 ly^2  This means, the UFO creatures would have to originate from about a1/A = 491.34/15.73E9 = 0.0000031% of our own galaxy.  As there are about 1 billion stars and stellar systems with the possibility of planets in any given galaxy, that means our space farers would have had to come from one of 31 systems if each one had planets.

Now we are getting down to the nitty gritty.  How many of these 31 possibilities might have intelligent life that exceeds our own in technology.  I submit...none...why, because these 31 systems have been formed in about the same timeframe as our own.  

That results because the ages of the stellar systems are inversely proportional to their distances from the center of the Milky Way.  That is to say, the oldest stellar systems are near the center, while the youngest are out on the galactic rim.  

Thus, our Sun, and its neighboring stars are about the same age; so they have identical evolutionary periods.  As the laws of evolution depend on universal laws of physics and chemistry, there is no reason to suspect the rates of evolution on the 37 stellar systems would differ significantly from our own.  Thus, these 37 neighboring stars are unlikely to spawn more evolved species than we are simply because they've been around for about the same time...4 to 6 billion years.  

Bottom line, more technology advanced life forms, life forms that could go 99% of light speed, are unlikely to be found within 39.6 ly of Earth.  UFOs make for fun scifi, but there it ends...they are not science.

Nor are worm holes science.  Although WAG speculate their existance, worm holes have never been validated or observed.  Further, the amount of energy needed to create one is beyond today's science and science we can imagine over thousands of years.  In fact, tearing space to create a worm hole would take nearly as much energy as there is in the entire universe...just to give you a feel for how unlikely controlled worm hole travel might be.  Again, this is fun scifi, but that's all it is.

Answer 7

The universe decided that an object with mass could not attain the speed of light.  It's a physical property of this universe.  Things (with mass) cannot be accelerated to the speed of light (or beyond) under any circumstances. That's because as an object is accelerated and its velocity approaches that of light, the energy used to increase its velocity is converted into mass. The more energy that is added to the object in an attempt to push it to the speed of light, the more mass it gains. "Mass gain" prevents further acceleration of the object and precludes it ever reaching the speed of light.

Any show about UFO's is speculation, since there is no conclusive evidence that aliens and their spacecraft exist.  So if you wish to speculate that aliens came from a star system ~40 light years away, they would have to travel for 40 years at 99% of the speed of light.

The electromagnetic spectrum spans 20 or more orders of magnitude.  Our eyes see less than an order of magnitude, actually less than an octave (400-700nm is considered visible).  

Probably depends on who's looking.  Someone looking at a colony of ants might think of them as simple pests.  Another person might recognize the complexity of their physical structure, behavior, society, etc.

Answer 8

Einstein's theory of relativity. The old boy was pretty smart, people are still fing out that his theories can be proven.

How about this? At the speed of light, what happens when you turn on your head lights or would you even need them.

Good Luck

Kota

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Answer 9

well its impossible to go faster than the speed of light because mass increases exponentially the faster you go. at light speed it becomes infinite.

M=M0/(sqrt(1-(v^2/c^2)))

and that show is wrong. molecular bonds cant hold at 99% the speed of light, they break at 2%. since the ship is made of ionic or metallic bonds it would be fine, but any life forms are undoubtedly made of molecular bonds.

Answer 10

This was decided by a whole bunch of people (it must be in the billions by now) who misinterpreted the work of Einstein and Lorentz.  The statement, "We cannot accelerate something to the speed of light relative to ourselves." is not, repeat, not, the same as, nor does it even imply that "Nothing can exceed the speed of light."

Scientists used to believe that nothing could exceed the speed of sound, based on similar thought experiments.