Time and Speed of Light. All objects in our universe are constrained to go no faster than the speed of light. The only particles capable of achieving light speed are massless particles, like light itself. Anything with even a tiny amount of mass will find it impossible to achieve light speed. That’s because the faster you go the more massive you become, and at light speed your mass becomes infinite, which would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate.
But the speed of light isn’t just an expression of how fast objects can travel. It’s an expression of how fast objects can influence each other. Every single interaction in the universe, whether it’s your sibling hitting you or a’s shock wave blasting through a gas cloud, is limited to the speed of light. The speed of light is actually the speed of causality – the fastest possible way that one cause can create an effect, and the fastest possible way that events can influence each other.
At first glance, tachyons wouldn’t cause much trouble. You could fly out in a rocket ship, and on Earth, I could beam tachyon messages to you. If you were looking back at me through a telescope, those tachyons would reach you before the photons carrying the image of me sending the message arrived in your telescope. That’s a little weird but doesn’t necessarily violate anything about physics.The problem is that with tachyons, you could start to construct some truly weird scenarios.
Suppose that signal back to me contained instructions to destroy my transmitter. The only way to destroy the transmitter is through the reception of your signal, but the only way to get your message is for me to first send mine. If I get my signal out, then my transmitter was destroyed in the past. But if the transmitter was destroyed, I can’t get the signal out.
This is just one of many common time-travel paradoxes brought about by traveling faster than light. This doesn’t rule out the existence of tachyons explicitly, but it does signal that they likely don’t exist. It seems impossible for us to travel backwards into the past or send signals into our own past: Everything in our universe not only travels no faster than the speed light, but also always in the direction of the future.
PaulMattSutter Very interesting!!
Holiday Holiday Latest News, Holiday Holiday Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: ABC7Chicago - 🏆 284. / 63 Read more »