Why? and the speed of light (Page 2): Then you do not understand science. Theories are not "absolutes" - ever. They are merely the most accepted version of reality (or the explanation...

f8lee Loc: New Mexico

bob7fred wrote:

I like the way theories become absolutes.

Then you do not understand science.

Theories are not "absolutes" - ever. They are merely the most accepted version of reality (or the explanation thereof) that can be altered when new experimental data disproves them. That's it. It's not rocket science (as it were) - it is a way of rational thinking and processing data.

As already mentioned, both Quantum and Relativity theories have been shown to be accurate to many decimal places of precision. But if tomorrow some physicist in east Podunk creates a theory of light travel that incorporates dark matter and can be experimentally proven to 20 decimal places of precision by various independent scientists around the world (and perhaps even on Mars!) then Einstein will go down.

But no matter what, in the world of science, the word "theory" has a specific meaning. THis is also why the creationists who like to bray that "evolutionary theory" is "just a theory" are clueless as to what that term means in the scientific realm.

Bob Smith Loc: Banjarmasin

E=MC squared

Dannj

Bob Smith wrote:

E=MC squared

Is that M x Csquared ?

or

Is it (M x C) squared ?

I’ve never gotten the hang of it🥴

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Yes, it is frustrating, but scientifically and mathematically, it is impossible.

There is something that can exceed the speed of light. Take a guess - I'll post the answer later (if I remember to come back here)

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Dannj wrote:

Is that M x Csquared ?

or

Is it (M x C) squared ?

I’ve never gotten the hang of it🥴

The first one. The speed of light squared, which turns out to be a pretty big number. : )

Dannj

jerryc41 wrote:

The first one. The speed of light squared, which turns out to be a pretty big number. : )

Too big for my calculator🤪

f8lee Loc: New Mexico

jerryc41 wrote:

Yes, it is frustrating, but scientifically and mathematically, it is impossible.

There is something that can exceed the speed of light. Take a guess - I'll post the answer later (if I remember to come back here)

You might be referring to tachyons.

Dannj

jerryc41 wrote:

Yes, it is frustrating, but scientifically and mathematically, it is impossible.

There is something that can exceed the speed of light. Take a guess - I'll post the answer later (if I remember to come back here)

The time it takes for my wife to remind me that I haven’t _________
(fill in the blank).

sippyjug104 Loc: Missouri

I approached the speed of light when I ran from my Better Half when she found out that I had bought more camera gear. I may not have ran faster yet I was darn close to it..!

calfilm Loc: Southern California

If you are flying a rocket ship faster than the speed of light what happens when you turn on
the headlights ?

f8lee Loc: New Mexico

calfilm wrote:

If you are flying a rocket ship faster than the speed of light what happens when you turn on
the headlights ?

Well, as you no doubt know, you cannot fly "faster" than the speed of light - but if you had a ship that could fly at 99% light speed and turned on the headlights, the photons from those would still not exceed the speed of light.

Schoee Loc: Europe

Wallen wrote:

That do not make sense to me as it is against the ... (show quote)

It is not against the laws of physics. It is just that for most situations we use an approximation that assumes mass is constant and so forth. This works fine for throwing a ball or even supersonic jets but for really high speeds you need to use the more complicated theory. Speeds such as that achieved by particles in the large hadron collider are an example. Your everyday classical physics does not work then.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

jerryc41 wrote:

... The speed of light squared, which turns out to be a pretty big number. : )

The speed of light squared is only a big number in the units you normally use to measure speed. The speed of light is 1 in units of the speed of light. Just like the length of a year is a large number if expressed in seconds, but not a large number when expressed in years. And it could be a small number when expressed in millenia or geological eons.

I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine one furlong per fortnight in terms of miles per hour or cm per second. And while you're about it, what is one mile per gallon in units of inverse acres?

As far as the speed of light being a constant, it wasn't until 1905, when Einstein proposed a theory in which the speed of light was a constant. Since the theory has been experimentally verified, it is taken as an absolute, but in Science, that will only be an absolute until a new theory comes along that explains things that Einstein's theory can't.

In Science, theories are only good until Experiments disprove them.

jackm1943 Loc: Omaha, Nebraska

jerryc41 wrote:

Yes, it is frustrating, but scientifically and mathematically, it is impossible.

There is something that can exceed the speed of light. Take a guess - I'll post the answer later (if I remember to come back here)

Space itself is expanding faster than the speed of light.

f8lee Loc: New Mexico

Schoee wrote:

It is not against the laws of physics. It is just that for most situations we use an approximation that assumes mass is constant and so forth. This works fine for throwing a ball or even supersonic jets but for really high speeds you need to use the more complicated theory. Speeds such as that achieved by particles in the large hadron collider are an example. Your everyday classical physics does not work then.

Not only is it not against the laws of physics, it is the law of physics.

The thing is, what we all learned in school is classical (Newtonian) physics, which, as you point out works for the speeds we can comprehend from daily experience. But as I said earlier, one of the proofs that relativity theory is correct was taking two atomic clocks with identical time, putting one on a supersonic jet that circumnavigated the planet, and noting the time differential was what relativity equations predicted (tiny fractions of a second, to be sure, but Mach 1 is not all that fast all things considered). That is how science works - you predict something and do an experiment to see if what you predicted happened.