Originally posted by Wedge009
Ah, it's just physics. I mean, I've liked sciency stuff since I was a kid, but I don't see it as a viable career path for me.
But I think a lot of it is just theory. Apparently time slows to a stop near the speed of light too. There was an experiment a few months ago where something was appeared to travel faster than light... but I forgot what they did exactly.
Light is very interesting... I mean, I think there's supposed to be evidence of light being made up of both rays (EM radiation) and particles (photons).
Definitely not a career path. More like the path to eternal lack of a life. That's why I'm doing it - Must get into the quantum computing research group!
Well if you think about Einstein's thought experiment where you're sitting on a beam of light and travelling away from something it all makes sense. If the fastest information can travel is the speed of light, the faster we go the longer it takes for that information to get to us. So everything not in your frame of reference seems to slow down.
The experiment was shooting a laser into this ultra optically dense exotic gas stuff and the gas would basically recreate the laser at the other side before the shot light physically got there. I forget all the details. Could have some interesting networking applications.
Light is a wave and particles at the SAME time. It makes sense after spending 3 hours thinking about it.
redfox: There's no defined upper limit. You could theoretically exceed the speed of light. The closer you get to c the more mass you gain the harder for you to actually get to c. i.e it gets increasingly difficult to accelerate every time. Since you can't travel faster than c it'll get infinitely more difficult because you'll gain infinitely
more mass. Think of it like this. KE= 0.5mv^2. v < c. But if we had infinite energy we can gain infinite velocity. But the inequality must hold. So where does that energy go? m!
Yes, things have been propelled to near light speed and been observed to gain mass. You could do stuff like that to electrons, neutrons, protons ... electrons can actually travel at almost 0.9c.
P.S Law isn't exactly my idea of a career either. Nobody likes lawyers
[Edited by steampunk on 06-16-2001 at 11:33]