Why can't we go faster than the speed of light??

Question

can anybody give a scientific reason please.

Why cant the light barrier be broken an if we do what would happen??

Answer 1

wanna b a tachyon, baby???

Answer 2

you need to understand that light weighs zero mass....

in order to move the speed of light...you would need to weigh zero mass...if you where to move at the speed of light....your body mass would kill you

nobody could ever reach the speed of light, and nothing can go faster because nothing could weigh less then zero mass!

Answer 3

well for your information we can, atleast i can cuz im magical!! =)

Answer 4

Let's assume that your engines are powered by tapping into some external energy source, so you don't have to worry about carrying fuel. As you get going faster and faster in your starship, you are putting more and more energy into the ship by speeding it up, so the ship keeps getting heavier. (Again, I should really be saying "massier" not "heavier" since there is no gravity in space.) By the time you reach 90 percent of the speed of light, the ship has so much energy in it that it actually has about twice the mass as the ship has at rest. It gets harder and harder to propel with the engines, because it's so heavy. As you get closer to the speed of light, you begin to get diminishing returns — the more energy the ship has, the heavier it gets, so the more energy that must be put into it to speed it up just a little bit, the heavier it gets, and so on.

The effect is even worse than you might think because of what is going on inside the ship. After all, everything inside the ship, including you, is speeding up, getting more and more energy, and getting heavier and heavier. In fact, you and all the machines on the ship are getting pretty sluggish. Your watch, for instance, which used to weigh about half an ounce, now weighs about forty tons. And the spring inside your watch really hasn't gotten any stronger, so the watch has slowed way down so that it only ticks once an hour. Not only has your watch slowed down, but the biological clock inside your head has also slowed down. You don't notice this because your neurons are getting heavier, and your thoughts are slowed down by exactly the same amount as the watch. As far as you are concerned, your watch is just ticking along at the same rate as before. (Physicists call this "relativistic time contraction.") The other thing that is slowed down is all of the machinery that is powering your engines (the dilithium crystals are getting heavier and slower, too). So your ship is getting heavier, your engines are getting sluggish, and the closer you get to the speed of light, the worse it gets. It just gets harder and harder and harder, and no matter how hard you try, you just can't quite get over the light barrier. And that's why you can't go faster than the speed of light.

Answer 5

Because it would take like an infinite amount of energy to push the object when reaching that speed.

Answer 6

Because we would probably emplode.

Answer 7

Because we are not electromagnetic radiation.

Answer 8

Dude cuz we only got 2 feet and thats the way the creator chose to do do us

Answer 9

Give it time and we will.

Answer 10

The speed os light is calculate by the time a light molocule leaves the sun and hits an object like the earth for example... It takes a molicule aprox 8min to get to earth from the source the sun.... Why would you want to go any faster?

Answer 11

we are not smart enough

Answer 12

It's a law of physics (like gravity).  There is mathematical proof that basically shows that as matter approaches faster and faster speeds, it needs greater amounts of energy to keep accelerating.  Eventually it requires an infinite amount of energy to accelerate past the speed of light and since energy cannot be created you can't have infinite energy.  There is however evidence to suggest that during the big bang, space itself was actually expanding faster than the speed of light which is possible since space is not matter or energy.

Answer 13

Because GOD does not want our bodies to disintegrate

Answer 14

bonnie tyler can!!!!!!!!! or sorry that was night!!!!!!

Answer 15

Be kind of hard to change directions in order to avoid colliding with something at that speed.

Answer 16

you seen the price of oil

Answer 17

It is because that would take a shitload of energy, if we even had the technology. Then we are not even sure if a human could survive a journey like that...

Answer 18

Theoretically you would need a lot of energy to accelerate up to the speed of light.

Physicists are taught that nothing is faster than the speed of light and that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant.

But if there were something faster than the speed of light then how would we know? How could we detect of measure it?

Don't get me wrong I don't believe that it is possible to go faster than the speed of light, but I at least would consider the possibility.

Answer 19

Einstein got it right with  E=m*c^2.

It says as you go faster energy starts to convert to matter. When you actually reach the speed of light 100% of all extra energy you use converts directly to matter. Basicly it a real quick way to ruin your diet.

Answer 20

I think it is because as you go faster your mass increases and you need more energy to accelerate,   Unless you are only a particle of light,  then nothing that has mass can go that fast without breaking apart into little bits and the only energy to propel those bits would be light itself.  Something like that, I think.  

Why, are you late for work?

Answer 21

if you could go faster than the speed of light when you got to your destination it would still be dark as no light would have reached it yet, thus you would not be able to see anything  so there would be no point going..........

Answer 22

Because we just can't

I wish we could though, I wanna be able to get into bed before the lights go off just Like Muhammad Ali

Answer 23

Because measured speed is relative to time and time is not a constant.  You can FEEL like you're going faster than the speed of light, but you actually wouldn't be.

Time would be speeding up and you'd be going into the future, making it so more time is actually passing by. If more time is passing by than you think, then you wouldn't be traveling as fast as you think.

Speed is about increasing distance in shorter time, right?  If time starts speeding up as you approach light speed, your speed can't get higher even if you try to go faster.  Einstein nearly proved this but it's hard to test.

Answer 24

hang on you dummy just let me run up the road and i will be back to answer this before you have written it

Answer 25

read this chef4ranch http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2000/07/2... humans are capable of everything they really want.

Answer 26

Einstein proved in his theory of special relativity that the mass of an object depends on its speed in accordance with the equation  M=Mo divided by the square root of (1-Vsquared/Csquared)

where Mo = the rest mass of the object

V= velocity of the object

C= the speed of light.

(look up Special Relativity to verify this)

So as the object's velocity V approaches the speed of light C, (1-Vsquared/Csquared)  gets closer to zero and hence its mass M becomes infinite. The only way an object can travel at the speed of light is if it doesn't possess any mass at all.

Answer 27

andrew gave the only (completely) correct answer i have seen

remember that energy=mass (einsteins equation E=Mc^2). now by that equation, you can see that it takes a very large amount of energy to create a small amount of mass. for example, the entire energy released in the atomic bomb dropped on nagasaki was less than the energy contained in a gram of mass (to put that into perspective, a piece of paper has a mass of atleast 60 grams).

now imagine your in space and you throw a tennis ball. your putting energy into that tennis ball. now because of conservation of energy, that energy has to go somewhere. its not just leaving the ball, because we would detect that. so it has to be staying in that tennis ball, adding to the total energy of that ball. since energy is mass, its adding to the total mass of the ball also.

at speeds were used to it doesnt matter, breaking the sound barrier in a jet probably adds maybe a few grams of mass to the jet. not too noticeable. but when you go faster it is. the mass of an object accelerating towards the speed of light increases exponentially. at the speed of light pretty much everything about the object becomes infinite. its mass becomes infinite, its energy, the energy needed to move it, and its gravity. now i assume you realize that since we live in a universe with finite mass, it is impossible to have infinite mass. even if the universe did have infinite mass, there would be no way for us to harness an infinite amount of energy without an infinite amount of time, and an infinite amount of energy to reach that energy.

the increase in mass is governed by the equation: M0=M/(sqrt(1-(v^2/c^2))). if thats too confusing (because its pretty confusing) ill write it out. relative mass equals rest mass divided by the square root of the quantity one minus the objects velocity squared over the speed of light squared.

remember, in that equation

M0= relative mass (the increased mass, this is what becomes infinite)

M= rest mass

v= the objects velocity

c= the speed of light.

notice that in that equation if v = c then that part of the denominator becomes one, meaning the entire denominator becomes zero. if you divide something by 0 you get infinity, which is why you cant travel at light speed. also notice that if the velocity is 0 then the denominator becomes simply one. meaning that the equation simplifies to M0=M, or relative mass equals rest mass.

hope that helped

Answer 28

It follows from Einstein's theory of relativity, which starts from the assumption that the speed of light is constant to all observers. Although this seems on the face of it a ludicrous proposition and is quite counter-intuitive, all the experimental tests of relativity so far show that it's right, in that it accurately describes how the universe works. Not bad for a 100-year-old theory.

However, one day there may be an experiment that fails to confirm it, in which case there may be a loophole and we may be able to travel faster than light. This is how science progresses. But we shouldn't hold our breath...

Answer 29

Faster-than-light (also superluminal or FTL) communications and travel refer to the propagation of information or matter faster than the speed of light. Science-fiction-style space travel, dubbed "True" FTL, in which matter exceeds the speed of light in its own frame of reference, defies known physics.

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).

On the other hand, what some physicists refer to as "apparent" or "effective" FTL[1][2][3][4] is the hypothesis that unusually distorted regions of spacetime might permit matter to reach distant locations faster than what it would take light in the "normal" route (though still moving subluminally through the distorted region).

Apparent FTL is not excluded by general relativity. Examples of apparent FTL proposals are the Alcubierre drive and the traversable wormhole, although the physical plausibility of these solutions is uncertain.

Outside of mainstream physics, others (often without traditional physics training) have speculated on mechanisms that might allow FTL travel to be achieved, often relying on new conjectures of physics of their own invention, but their ideas have not gained significant acceptance in the physics research community. Fictional depictions of superluminal travel and the mechanisms of achieving it are also a staple of the science fiction genre.

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