Pink Poogle Toy Forum

Theoretically, there are three basic speeds:

Slower than the speed of light.
The speed of light.
Faster than the speed of light.


The SoL barrier works both directions. Whichever of one those three speeds anything is, it will always be. Most everything we're familiar with, of course, is in the first category, and light is obviously (not to mention tautologically) in the second.

Tachyons at least used to be classed in the 3rd category, and if they aren't I'm not sure how they were mis-timed all those years. (Seems relatively easy, with the right equipment: start light and a tachyon on a race, and if the tachyon gets there first, it's faster than light.)

Nope.
The speed of light is not a constant, light has been slowed to as little as thirty miles per hour (i think it was thirty was certainly rather low by comparison)
Cant remember where it was done, but it was in liquid...
Yeah, awful memory, Phospherous comes to mind, but im not certain.

Sure thing. E=MC^2 implies that energy & mass are related, that the amount of energy in a body is equivalent to the mass of that body multiplied by a constant (in this case, the speed of light in a vacuum, squared). So following on from this implication, energy can turn into mass & mass can turn into energy. In effect, mass is only a different type of energy. This was important in the development of the atomic bomb; through measurement of the mass of atomic nuclei & comparing that with the equivalent mass of the individual sub-atomic particles that make up the recipe for that atom (protons & neutrons), you find a difference. This difference is the "binding energy" for that nucleus. The presence of this energy shows that not only is it possible to release energy through the fusion of nucei but also release energy through the fission of nuclei (what happens in the atomic bomb). You can also estimate the amount of energy that will be released in the reaction. It's this release of energy, occuring in a chain reaction, that results in the destructive power of the atomic bomb.

For the second point, special relativity throws up the fact that anything possessing mass cannot ever reach the speed of light (& hence, cannot ever go beyond it unless you cheat with warp drives & wormholes. But in the sense of using a rocket or other mechanical means to go faster & faster you can't get up to the speed-limit) & that no matter how fast you're going, the speed of light will always be measured at the same value. This is quite different from how we normally think of things. If you're on the motorway & all the cars are going at the same speed, you'll measure the relative speed of car in front of you as 0. If a car was approaching you in the opposite direction at the same speed you're going, you'd measure its relative speed as twice your own (your own speed plus its approaching speed). What the constancy of the speed of light says is, in effect, if you were travelling at say 99.999999% of the speed of light & shined a torch in front of you as you went, you'd still measure the speed of the light as the speed of light in the vacuum. Which is quite a mind-melter

From the equational standpoint this isn't strictly related to E=MC^2 but a different set of equations which modify the traditional, intuitive equations of motion (such as speed=distance/time) to this new understanding that the speed of light is always a constant, no matter what way you look at it from. A main difference that these equations have from the old ones is something called the "gamma-factor", where the gamma is the Greek letter gamma. This factor looks like this;

1 / squareroot[1 - v^2/c^2]

Where v is your velocity measured in your own frame of reference & c is the speed of light in the vacuum. Now set your velocity equal to the speed of light & something strange happens; the squareroot factor goes to squareroot[0], which is 0, & the factor altogether becomes 1 divided by 0, which is infinity. That can't happen in "real life", so we see that your velocity can only ever approach the speed of light (we call this asymptotic behaviour) but never actually reach it. So anybody with mass is stuck crawling around at speeds less than light-speed forever

Or atleast arbitrarily close to SOL.
Ramjet engines and suchforth.

Tachyons were believed to be FTL due to their ability to escape a black hole (which purportedly draws everything in)
This theory has however been revised due to some evidence, that basicly tells us that antie-matter (protons, etc etc) are unaffected by convential gravity as we know it, and for some reason, some particles alter to an anti, state when drawn into a blackhole.

Why? Dont remember (im seeing a pattern here) but if i can find the book (A case of finding it rather than remember what its called, as i know it by its cover)

Similar to the whole Big-Bang debacle.
Turns out it wasnt that afterall. (probably muliple big bangs as it happens)