Why nothing can travel faster than light?
 |
 |
| Why nothing can travel faster than light? |
But the question is this that why speed more than this can't be achieved? Who is gonna stop us from sending a particle with speed greater than the speed of light? Because the speed of any object is nothing but kinetic energy possessed by it and with enough amount of energy or fuel we can increase its kinetic energy to such level that it may get speed faster than light. But is it really possible? And if not then why?
 |
| Why nothing can travel faster than light? |
The answer to this question is easy to understand. But first, understand that what happens to an object when we give it the energy to speed up. Is the energy just increase its speed or something else too? In general or in our daily life it seems that the whole energy just goes to speed the object up. But it is wrong same energy is used to increase the inertial mass of object too, but in our daily life experience, it increases by a very small amount which is just negligible.
But you can raise a question that mass can't increase as it always remains constant. It can't be created nor be destroyed. But this is not the whole truth. Actually conservation of mass energy states that in a closed system, total sum of the mass and energy remains constant. Which implies that in a closed system energy can manifest itself as mass too and vice versa. Thus in a closed system individual value of these two can change but sum total will always remain constant. But one thing you must take note of is this that when i am saying mass it doesn't mean i am talking about Matter. The amount of the matter will remain same irrespective of speed but the mass will increase. If you want to know the difference between Mass and Matter, then please check out special article i have posted about it. Thus when we increase the speed of the object, the kinetic energy increases which in turn increases the total energy possessed by the object. Now this increased energy will manifest itself as the inertial mass of the object and it would thus create more inertia for change in state of motion. If this inertial mass thing is still not clear to you then i will create a new post completely explaining this and will explain there how matter and inertial mass are different.
Why nothing can travel faster than light? (According to Einstein)
 |
| Why nothing can travel faster than light? |
Thus according to Einstein, the inertial mass of the object keep increasing as it keeps increasing its speed. Now as the speed increase so is inertial mass and thus to further increase its speed more energy is required as it has got more inertia i.e. resistence to change state of motion and it keeps going this way. Now as the speed of an object approaches the speed of light the inertial mass of the object approaches towards infinity. Thus it requires an infinite amount of energy to speed it up further. Thus the law of nature itself stops any object to travel faster than the speed of light.
 |
| Why nothing can travel faster than light? |
But how can then light travel with this speed? The answer is simple that light has zero mass. Light is made up of photons and photons have zero mass. Thus on traveling with even such a huge velocity the photons still remain massless.
Do you know that world's fastest car till now is Hennessey Venom F5, which has a speed of approximately 484 Km/hour, which is just 0.00004484591% of the speed of light.
Thanks for reading our post Why nothing can travel faster than light? Hope you gain your knowledge about this topic and you learn an interesting topic about the science facts.
This blog everyday science is a place where we offer you fascinating and mind boggling science facts and theories, make you learn deep and complex concepts of science easily and shower you with captivating and astounding knowledge of science you need daily.
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon