![]() Everything would appear to happen instantaneously. For instance, if you were a photon, time would have no meaning to you. Einstein saw that life as a photon would be quite bizarre. One of the methods Einstein used to help formulate his theory of special relativity was to visualize what the universe would look like from the perspective of a photon. There isn’t enough energy in the entire universe to propel just a single electron to the speed of light. Thanks to this inconvenient truth, if you wanted to accelerate a single electron to ‘light speed’, you would need an infinite amount energy due to the electron becoming infinitely heavy. ![]() In short, the faster you go, the heavier you get. This is because the particles themselves get more massive in proportion to the increased velocity. The closer to the speed of light you get a particle, the more energy is required to go faster. Particles that have mass require energy to accelerate them. Those constants, along with the speed of light, were set in place when our universe was created at the moment of the big bang. Wondering why light doesn’t travel at a different speed is like wondering why gravity isn’t reversed or what it would be like if our universe only had 2 spatial dimensions instead of 3 (4 if you include time). Why isn’t the speed of light slower or faster than 186,282 miles per second? It’s because that exact speed is a fundamental constant of our universe. ![]() They’re free to move at the fastest possible speed – their own “light” speed. Since photons don’t interact with the Higgs field, it means they aren’t bound by any speed limit. Photons move through, but do not interact at all with the Higgs field. Different particles interact with the Higgs field with different strengths, which is why some particles are heavier (have more mass) than others. As a result of this interaction, particles acquire their mass. We perceive photons (light) traveling at this speed because they are massless, or have no ‘weight’ (but they do have kinetic energy, more on that in a bit).Įvery particle in our universe (including photons) move or ‘swim’ through what scientists call “the Higgs field”. The speed of light, (or the speed of a photon) in a near-perfect vacuum is exactly 186,282 miles per second. So why can’t anything go faster than the speed of light?īefore we can dive into that, we have to know what the speed of light actually is, what it means, and clear up some common misconceptions regarding this “ universal speed limit“. An example of this would be a bullet hitting a target before the trigger was even pulled.Īccelerating to light speed or exceeding it would also violate certain fundamental energy conditions. For the layman, that means cause and effect. He claimed that traveling faster than the speed of light would violate the causality principle. Einstein once called the speed of light “The Universe’s speed limit”.
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