"Nothing travels faster than light in a vacuum" isn't that the gist of it?

On this idea a great deal of discoveries and advancements have been made, either directly from it's presumed truth, or some inference one way or another.

My question is this: Why light? Why is it so important that photons alone are the fastest things out there? Which brings me to a second question, for what reason was it such a disturbing event when evidence was presented that suggested that tachyons, not light, travels faster through a vacuum?
Certainly our methods of measurement are more advanced now and likely more reliable, so why did Planck or Einstein seemingly choose some really fast energy and declare "There, thats the limit. If anything goes faster than that, the sun will destroy us with huge scoops of raisins"

Im sure i could more eloquently state my question with more pertinent and educated points of question, but a quantum scientist, I am not.

I hope ive made my question clear enough to at least encourage some of you to ask clarifying questions of your own, because this has always puzzled me to no end.

Thanks.

7/26/2012 4:12:05 AM

7/26/2012 5:25:00 AM

i think light is the fastest thing we have the ability to perceive anything faster than light cannot be seen thus must not exist is the presumption that current science makes. Even our sensors themselves all transmit their signal slower than the speed of light thus cannot detect anything faster.

until we find a new form of energy that travels faster then light and a method in wich to perceive it then we are SOL.

All of our sensory organs sense energy that travel at light speed or less.

The *spark* that gives us consciousness & what we refer to as a soul may be in this new dimension of energy in which we have no way to perceive which is why it cannot be explained.

... ok so puff puff pass right?

[Edited on July 26, 2012 at 8:08 AM. Reason : .]

7/26/2012 8:07:02 AM

IIRC any particle that has no mass travels at the speed of light. Light/photons is just the most noticible of those particles so that's what we named the speed after.

[Edited on July 26, 2012 at 10:06 AM. Reason : But I took 1 physics class so what do I know]

7/26/2012 10:05:39 AM

I would start by reading this page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light) and then asking the inevitable questions about Relativity that will arise.

Quote :

"...for what reason was it such a disturbing event when evidence was presented that suggested that tachyons, not light, travels faster through a vacuum? "

First off, it was neutrinos. Tachyons are still relegated to the domain of science fiction last I checked.
Faster-than-light neutrinos would violate the observationally-proven principles of relativity and violate causality. The speed of light barrier wasn't chosen arbitrarily.

More educational background:
http://www.youtube.com/user/minutephysics/videos

[Edited on July 26, 2012 at 12:16 PM. Reason : can't type]

7/26/2012 12:16:08 PM

There's nothing specifically special about light that makes its speed in a vaccuum special. It's the actual speed, itself, that is "special". But no one wants to walk around saying "3 times 10^6 meters per second" or whatever, so we just say "speed of light." it would be more accurate to say "the speed of electromagnetic waves", but that's just not as much fun. So, we say "light".

Quote :

"Certainly our methods of measurement are more advanced now and likely more reliable, so why did Planck or Einstein seemingly choose some really fast energy and declare "There, thats the limit. If anything goes faster than that, the sun will destroy us with huge scoops of raisins""

They didn't really just go out pick a random number. There are several experiments that gave rise to the idea, and Einstein built upon those experiments with relativity.


Mostly, though, this artificial "speed limit" is a product of the math used to explain and describe relativity. It may in fact be possible to move faster than the speed of light, but then the equations of motion for things at such speeds would likely be radically different than the ones we know today.

Put more simply, the speed of light is the speed at which our understanding of "how shit works" breaks down. In relativistic equations, at that speed, you are dividing by zero; go any faster, and you are taking the square root of a negative number. It's akin to the singularity of a black hole. We have no freakin clue what's going on at that point. We can describe everything up until right before that point, but at that point, we have no idea. Another example would be the big bang; we think we understand everything that happened at an infinitessimally small time period after the big bang, and we can mostly explain everything that has happened since, but at the time of the big bang and before (if time even existed "then"), we don't know. So it is with the speed of light.

7/26/2012 12:25:20 PM

also:

7/26/2012 1:58:27 PM

sheldon?

7/26/2012 2:20:05 PM