Re: Here's one for Bob (hope it makes your head spin)

JF Mezei wrote:
david20@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Travelling there faster than light is a physical law problem.


I see people breaking the law every day, they go faster than the speed limits :-)

Seriously, I fully understand that a particle accelerator would not be able to accelerate a particle to faster than speed of light. The propulsion is based on a static item (the magnets or whatever) which remain at speed 0 whilst they accelerate the particle. First, the energy that is transfered from the static item to the particle may not be able to travel faster than light, and second, there is the theory it will require an infinite amount of energy.

HOWEVER, if you are on a self propelled ship, going 1km/h below the speed of light, is there really something stopping you from increasing throttle to go to 1 km/h above speed of light ?

YES! According to Einstein's Theory, the effective mass of the ship will increase so that giving the ship more energy will not significantly increase the speed (velocity) up to or greater than the speed of light.

m[effective mass] = m[mass at rest]/sqrt(1 - (v/c)**2)

where v is the apparent velocity, c is the speed of light, sqrt is the square root, and "**2" means squared. The main result of trying to go faster is that it gets "heavier". The effective mass goes infinite for
all objects with non-zero rest mass as they approach the speed of light. [Photons have zero rest mass; they can 'travel' at the speed of light.]

So far, there have been no non-quantum (i.e. macroscopic world - things
the size of space ships as opposed to sub-atomic particles) contradictions to this part of Einstein's theory.

In the case of a self propelled ship, The water you would eject from a H2 O2 engine would be going at a slow speed relative to the ship, just enough to accelerate the ship a little bit more. Furthermore, the water would be at relatively the same energy level as the ship and thus, if it takes a huge amount of energy to accelerate the ship by 1 km/h, accelerating the water from the ship would also generate a huge amount of energy.

Joe
Ph. D. in Physics
University of Colorado, 1969
.

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