[Roger -Dot- Lee(Admin)]

Originally posted by Avian
Nothing without mass can travel faster than light either (such as light itself - electromagnetic radiation).

OK, I'll buy that. Stipulated.

Of course, with anything in science, the more information you get, the more questions get raised.

Boy, you ain't whistlin' Dixie here.

There are a few interesting things about the cosmic microwave background radiation that are even more amazing. By looking very, very closely at the variations in the sky, some amazing theories have developed as to how the early Universe formed.

Yes. I'm going through web sites now that are doing a dandy job of explaining it, though there are a couple that are putting out information that's making the speed limit of light easy to swallow by comparison (IE that "The Big Bang didn't happen as a single explosion in one place but was the simultaneous appearance of all matter everywhere." Huh? I find that even harder to believe).

Combine this with the other separate tons of evidence that points to a big bang (expanding universe, age of stars, etc), and you can start to see why it is the defacto theory of how our universe was created.

Indeed. The more I read on it, the more it makes sense. Of course that still doesn't answer WHY we can't go faster than light (an issue that I have with that theory I'll address shortly, as you touched on my biggest problem with it below).

No molecules here. Just light. Don't confuse particle radiation (electrons, neutrons, etc.) with electromagnetic radiation (a fancy word for light). We're talking about the leftover "glow" of the big bang.

OK, I think we've hit on my first bit of misunderstanding. I was always under the impression that matter and energy were interchangable. IE you could make matter from energy (see linear accellerators for an example) and energy from matter (go buy a firecracker for an example of this).

Speed of light: fact or fiction?
Rest assured, it is, by all measures of our current understanding of physics.

I'm sure it is. I know that I have enough trouble getting from sitting to walking, let alone up to 186,000 miles/second (in a vacuum).

But WHY?

Einstein's equation that describes this states that the faster you go, the more your mass increases, therefore requiring even more energy to accelerate you to a faster speed.

And herein lies my single biggest problem with the whole thing. This, in my world view, violates the laws of conservation of matter. HOW can one's mass increase simply by virtue of it's velocity?

Let's go with a scenario that illustrates my understanding. Maybe if you see it, you can understand where I'm coming from and why I have problems with this theory (and I'll freely admit that it's more than likely my understanding that's flawed rather than the theory):

I hop on a plane with a gold brick. 1 lb of pure 24 karat gold. I land in Wichita and pick you up, and we both hop on another plane to San Diego. While enroute, I hand you the gold brick (which is now more massive due to our velocity). Suddenly this 1 lb brick is worth more since it has more mass? When we hit San Diego, do you hand Jim a 1 lb gold brick? Or is it 1 lb plus whatever mass we picked up when I handed the brick to you over New Mexico?

See what I'm saying? It's a direct violation of the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of matter (unless the thrust that was being emitted by the jet engines magically makes it's way into the gold bar).

WHAT am I missing here?

As you get close to the speed of light, your mass increases to a huge amount, until finally, it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate you to beyond the speed of light.

See the above scenario, but instead of heading southwest, we go northeast, and instead of a cruise speed of 550 kts, we accellerate to close to the speed of light (taking the scenic route, of course). Does the gold bar grow that much? And what happens to the mass as we slow down? Granted, said 1 lb gold bar might actually have a mass of 1 lb + [insert appropriate formula here], but what happens when we land? Does it shrink? Where does the mass that has been accumulating go?

I think one part of my problem is that I'm not using the same definition of mass as everyone else is. Is that not how much something weighs? The sum of the molecular weights in our 1 lb bar of gold or our 140 some-odd lb toothless redneck from the Wilds of North Georgia? How can this be changed? It violates the laws of conservation of matter and energy.

I've GOT to be missing something. Something fundimental.

That, of course, cannot be done. Humans hate limits, and have, of course, theorized several fanciful and convoluted ways that perhaps we could get around this. But none really hold any water.

Yeah, no kidding. I've never liked limits of any kind. But when someone tells me that this or that is physically impossible, I'm reminded of one of the top physicists of the late 1800s who stated that no object would ever be able to break the speed of sound and continue flying. His name escapes me at the moment. Col. Charles (Chuck) Yeager proved him categorically wrong, and the Concorde (and it's Russian counterpart) have proven that wrong.

Expensive, but wrong.

Could new theories develop that would somehow disprove this? You could say yes, and of course, that's but much of modern physics would probably fall with it. And much of moden physics works pretty well. Could we discover a whole new branch of physics, like we did with quantum physics, that would take hold in special circumstances or something? Who knows?

The second scenario would be my best guess. After reading many sites on some of the new discoveries (www.gsfc.nasa.gov is any astro-geek's friend) that have been made over the last umpty years, it'd be more likely that another branch that takes hold at higher relative energies would take effect.

I'd like to take this opportunity to mention how much research and incredible rigorous work goes into these "theories."

Oh boy, you know it. For a while before I married Mrs.Lee, I dated a research scientist at one of the major labs up in the Chicago area (something about developing a microbe that could eat plutonium and poop lead or something along those lines). She showed me the level of investigation that has to go into a theory before any real scientist would even CONSIDER publishing it, simply because there are hundreds of other scientists out there that WILL pour over the data, duplicate the research, and cackle with glee upon being able to disprove a theory (a process that takes almost as much time and energy to prove the same theory).

A scientific theory is not like a theory you or I may have typing on this board - it has an entirely different meaning. If you think the current U.S. presidential election is nasty, you should see what even the most frivoslous proposal in science goes through. Like the theory of gravity, and the theory of biological evolution, Einstein's Theory of Relativity have planets full of rigorous and objective evidence along multiple lines over millions of years in some cases, by upwards of millions of people, in their favor. Every serious attempt to explain them away has failed. Like the rejection of notions of a flat earth, and that the stars are pinpricks in the curtain of heaven, humans have benefited greatly through the scientific method.

Never said I didn't, and I certainly didn't mean to infer that. I know full well that, given the option of a room full of physicists vs. a VERY amateur quasi-protogeek behind a Mac in North Georgia, I wouldn't stand much of a chance...except maybe to get a lesson or two (if in nothing more than humility, and maybe physics).

The objective and extremely rigorous review by thousands if not millions of scientists from all over the world through various generations is our only hope against delf-delusion. And boy oh boy, do we love to delude ourselves in many things.

I live in Georgia, and before that, Northern California. I've seen self delusion on MANY different scales, from MANY different people. Some of it is honest, some of it is just silly.

The scientific method has given us so much - longer lives, a method of feeding ourselves and the millions around us; it has also taken us to those tiny pinpricks in the heavens. It's enemy, and therefore our enemy as a species, is ignorance and fear.

Right. Which is why I don't mind asking these questions at risk of making myself look like a fool. Had I done this in college (instead of viewing life from the bottom of a beer bottle), I might have a different understanding of the way things are. Alas...

Roger