Time, distance, etc.

I’m not a scientist, so dumb down your answers, if you choose to humor me with your genius:

I heard you can’t exceed the speed of light because something happens. Is this still the belief? If you can’t exceed it, can you match it? Why is light such an arbiter of such things in the world of physics? Light is not such a big deal if you’re blind, so what happens if a blind person tries to exceed the speed of light? I know, I know, light exists independent of it’s corner stone to vision (i.e. vision came to light, light didn’t come to vision) but the question highlights the first question of why light is such an arbiter of speed. To hell with light. Let’s come up with something faster. We come up with 10 other dimensions to make string theory work. What happens when we blow light away?

If light tries, but fails to escape from a black hole, is it still in there, not moving, but pulling at the end of a gravitational leash trying to get out? Or is it going back against itself, or in another direction (toward the center), and if so, at what speed is it moving? Could light in a black hole be pulled back toward the center at a speed greater than the speed of light? If so, does that mean gravity itself has speed?

Or does light stop in a black hole just like it does when it hits a brick wall? Or does it even stop then? Isn’t it just reflected, or does it absorb, turn into heat and die or change form?

I was reading about Andrameda coming at us a 217,000 miles per hour and it won’t be here for millions (billions?) of years. And it’s close! This whole lightspeed/universe size thing is really hard for me to wrap my brain around. Do physists just understand it conceptually, for working purposes, like Congress understands $500 billion dollars, or do they actually “get” how big it really is? I mean, you can’t count that high, so. . .?

Yeah, I know: I need to go back to school and pay attention this time. But hey, I’m just asking.

For something to travel at the speed of light, it has to become light.

Light taken in by a Black Hole is no longer light, but particles that are no longer in motion.

amasci.com

Electricity is a mysterious incomprehensible entity which is invisible AND visible BOTH AT THE SAME TIME. Also, it’s both matter and energy. It’s a type of low-frequency radio wave which is made of protons. It is a mysterious force which looks like blue-white fire, and yet cannot be seen. It moves forward at the speed of light… yet it vibrates in the AC cord without flowing forwards at all. It’s totally weightless, yet it has a small weight. When electricity flows through a light bulb’s filament, it gets changed entirely into light. Yet no electricity is ever used up by the light bulb, and every bit of it flows out of the filament and back down the other wire. College textbooks are full of electricity, yet they have no electric charge! Electricity is a class of phenomena which can be stored in batteries! If you want to measure a quantity of electricity, what units should you use? Why Volts of electricity, of course. And also Coulombs of electricity, Amperes, Watts, and Joules, all at the same time. Yet “electricity” is a class of phenomena; it’s a type of event. Since we can’t have an AMOUNT of an event, we can’t really measure the quantity of electricity at all… right?
Heh heh.

The word “electricity” has contradictory meanings, and I’m trying to show what happens when we accept more than one meaning.

I think I can understand the second sentance. Kind of like a energy-to-mass thing? Light-to-particles?

But I don’t understand why the first sentance has to be true. On one ground, why must something become light to move at the same speed or faster? A bullet doesn’t have to become a car to go just as fast or faster.

On another ground, even if that were true because light is not a particle (like cars and bullets), are there other non-particles? And if so, how fast can they go and what stops them from going as fast or faster than light?

I guess my difficulty is more mundane: I always have the sneaking suspicion that man percieves things to be a certain way because of bias. And light, playing such an important role in who we are, may be setting standards for our physics that aren’t necessarily empirically or objectively true. It just seems suspicious that “we” happened upon a “thing” and a “speed” which dictates what is time, what is max speed, what is mass, what is energy, etc. Kind of people who find God, it seems a little too convenient.

Whenever anyone says “This is a premise we must accept” I want to know “why” before proceeding further. I understand why a premise must be accepted before and argument goes forward and that is great. But I’d feel more comfortable about our progress in physics if I knew there were some physicists out there who were challenging the basic premises that every one else has agreed upon. And I’d don’t mean lay people like my, or whacko physists who can’t make their own case. I mean real-deal, serious people who fully understand the premise and why others have accepted it, but who continue to keep up the pressure. And to clarify, I don’t mean keeping up the pressure on other physists (gadflies); I mean pressure on the premise itself. Study.

If every one is going forward from the premise hoping that they will find out if it happens to be wrong whilst on their forward journey, then I think there will be some great delays. Not that that can’t happen, it does. But I think it would be a quicker, surer way if the community left a few smart folks behind to keep attacking the premise.

Thanks. I need to put that in my pipe and smoke it for a while.

A bullet doesn’t break any threshold of physics.

The negative inference from that is that light does break thresholds of physics? So, the idea that you can’t match or exceed the speed of light, being a threshold of physics, may itself be breakable?

Okay, maybe not breaking, but not being able to go beyond. The limit of physics.

As velocity increases, so does mass. At the speed of light mass would become infinite, which is impossible, thus nothing can move faster than light. Well, not normally…

Light doesn’t have mass, so it’s not really being pulled by a black hole. A black hole warps space, and inside the event horizon space curves back upon itself. Essentially the light is still moving but the space it’s moving thru is essentially not a part of the Universe any longer, for all intents and purposes.

I don’t recall that line in Phaedo. :confused:

How about a soul? If there is one, how fast can it go? I’m thinking about that astral projection stuff. If there is a soul, and if it can travel without matter, where can it go, when, how long does it take to get there, and can it come back from the past or the future and tell us what’s up?

Can it be light, or electricity?

No, I believe that line comes from Weird Science. :laughing:

You would have to define what you think a soul is to discuss it properly.

What about a mind: Yours can speed to any real place without travelling outside of your head. Thought has no speed restrictions at all, but never really moves at all. Could it be that the mind/soul is already everything and everywhere reality/matter is?

If you are your reality thoughts, i.e. making your soul your thoughts, then what is thought is also soul in this definition.

I think therefore i am. I can control what i think therefore i can control who, what and where i am in reality. I can think i am anything and anywhere instantly that really exists, so maybe just like the charge of the electron i am everything in reality, everywhere in reality, but the only time that exists in reality is now.

I am not Hitler’s non-esistant brother who lives in the purple upside down world where my feet are two heads and my farts are as as hot as the sun.

This, the past and the future, no longer or do not yet exist in reality, time remains independant, the when i am can only be in the now.

I guess to keep this in the “Natural Sciences” I’d have to say the soul was some kind of electricity. Not really a “spark of life” since it might exist beyond life. In that light (no pun intended) then all you said makes perfect sense. I just wish I could “master” the essence of it and make it real for me when I wanted it to be and control it. But then again, if I could, maybe I’d be God and that might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

I have to go think some more.

Nothing can move faster than the speed of light beacuse its relative mass would increase to infinity or you could say you would need infinte energy to accelerate a particle(with a finite rest mass) to the speed of light. Basically the faster you go the heavier you get and the harder it is to go faster.

Although I have heard that the universe can(is?) expanding faster than the speed of light. But if you view this as an increasing amount of space between to distance stars the stars themselves aren’t traveling faster than the speed of light.

Due to space explanding faster than the speed of light light emmited from distant stars will never reach us thus we can’t see all of the universe.

Is a good question. I only came to the answer a year ago or so. First you have to understand that light is an electromagnetic wave. What thios means is that electric charges or magnets, that have electric/magnetic fields, produce the waves. So say i have a very powerful electromagnet with an on off switch sitting in space and another magnet along way away. Now if I switch on the magnet it takes some time for the Electromagnetic field to reach the distant magnet and pull it. The speed of this field is the speed of light. Now say my electromagnet could move faster than the speed of light. If this happened then the electromagnet could reach the distant magnet before its field does. This is nonsense.

To see why more clearly you have to understand one of the postulates of relativity which says if we say the electromagnet is moving with a constant speed v and the distant magnet is stationary we can just aswell say that the elctromagnet is stationary and the magnet is moving at v as the relative speed would still be the same(this idea goes all the way back to galileo). So now with the magnet moving towards the electromagnet and its field it will be pulled by the field way before it reachs the electromagnet. Thus there is a direct contrdiction in assuming that anything with a field can go faster than the speed of light.

The correct treatment of this would involve the speed of light being constant in all frames. So while the speed of light must be constant space and time are relative ie different observes measure time and space differently depending on there speed.

Interestingly though there are theories for particles moving faster than light…look them up!

Now this is philosophy to me.

Perhaps we are dream characters in the great dream- God’s dream. Maybe we are all fragments of god’s thoughts, and therefore all part of god. Perhaps God is reality, or all aspects of reality/multiple realities. Perhaps God isn’t a greater being, but a greater being.

I want to thank you all for you input. This shit fasinates me. I don’t understand it very well and it takes alot of concentration for me to keep my spastic brain on track, especially when sometimes I’m into it and sometimes I’m not. But I am keeping up with the thread. Thanks again.

I agree with the first statement but the second one is harder to agree to, because we just don’t know. If a black hole were truly a singularity, this would be the case.

There is the theoretical particle called a Tachyon, which exceeds the speed of light. I believe that in doing so, it actually digresses backwards in time. Accordingly if there were such a particle, our only evidence of such would be the trail of photons that it left behind. So if there were such a particle, we would never know because its evidence is the light we already see.

The speed of light never changes and when it does, it ceases to be light.

This is the BIG question. Per general relativity, gravity is simply a bend in space-time due to the density of an object. A black hole is an extremely dense star that has collapsed in on itself. Meaning that all matter moving near it will have its path bent towards the structure, including light.

The question is what does collapsed mean? Many have supposed a singularity, meaning that M=d/V becomes, M=(infinity)/0. Einstein struggled with this, as do many because what happens to the lost information? Matter cannot just disappear. Stephen Hawking has pretty much made it his life’s goal to uncover this truth. Hawking suggests a singularity, and then suggests his termed "Hawking Radiation as the matter being released back into the universe. The amount of Hawking Radiation is not near enough to account for the lost matter.

So where is all of this “lost information” disappearing to? My belief is that if we add another dimension perpendicular to time, what would previously have been an infinite density, becomes spread out through this dimension. I’ve got a few more thoughts on that but it is off topic.

i wrote this in another thread:

Unifying the four forces may show positive and negative charge is everything, like 0 and 1 is everything built from a binary code.

Look at electricity, the positive/charge running to the negative/earth at the speed of light, in frictionless space gravity will accelerate particles toward each other up to the speed of light just like the charge to earth.
Particles with mass would build up speed, and particles without mass would be gravitated instantly to the speed of light.

All four forces may be just electricity, one energy which could be everything, even the energy we think with, if there is only one fundamental energy (50-50 odds) and we are our thoughts, existing with completely individual mind/bodies, but using a fundamental energy making all individuals the same one.

The individual brain is controlling the person but what is a person if not the electricity of thought, the electricity being controlled by the neuron.
The one being controlled by the individual. The one may only exist as the many, and the many may only exist as the one.

The suggested idea of Hawking Radiation doesn’t sit well with me. How can something escape the event horizion of a black hole, seriously? If Hawking Radiation exists, I believe it’s actually something like the matter that barely missed the event horizion and is flung outward, spiriling about. Like something traveling really fast at an angle, but not quite pulled all the way into the BH by it’s gravity.