speed of light and gravity

First i appoliogize is this has been posted before, i searched but couldnt find anything relevant, i havent really mastered the search engine yet either.

Anyway, i have a question, something thats always puzzled me, as it seems to contradict itself..

We have always been told by the scientists that we will probably never get to another solar system as it will take so long to get their at the speeds we can travel at with our technology .. and they ruled out faster than light travel, which is the bit that puzzles me.

apparently humans cannot travel faster than the speed of light due to the forces exerted by gravity pulling us apart.

the think that puzzles me is, well, their is no gravity in the depths of space exept for the bits that hold planets and stars in place .

is it a case of severe over speculation by scientists or is their some fact to this, as im led to believe nothing exept light, and maybe some protons have ever went that fast ?

Originally posted by boaby_phet
We have always been told by the scientists that we will probably never get to another solar system as it will take so long to get their at the speeds we can travel at with our technology .. and they ruled out faster than light travel, which is the bit that puzzles me.

Scientists lack in imagination when it comes to think about new inovative ways outside the box. If they ever say 'never' based on the actual sience you can be sure they just made a fault. You can not extrapolate from the knowledge now to in all time. A mistake they so much like to to despide of the fact that in history its well shown that famous scientist were simple wrong with theyr 'never' exclusion.
However with the corrent sience it is indeed impossible to travel faster than light especially for an object with a rest mass.

Originally posted by boaby_phet
apparently humans cannot travel faster than the speed of light due to the forces exerted by gravity pulling us apart.

? No has nothing to do with gravity forces. It has to do with inertia. A mass resists accerleration and you have to aplay an according force to Newtons law: F =m * a (simplified formula).
And the mass is growing to infinite when you get close to light speed according to Einstein which means you need to aplay an infinity force to accelerate further. But with full controll of the force you aplay you also have full controll of the acceleration therfeore you can keep it within humans comfortable levels: 1g. But the time you need to accelerate to lightspeed with this acceleration then takes about half a year or year.
However if you are close to lightspeed time and distance doesnt really matters so much anymore at least for the astronauts. So teh astronauts can travel to the stars very well. Just that the earth alters big times in the meantime!

Originally posted by boaby_phet
is it a case of severe over speculation by scientists or is their some fact to this, as im led to believe nothing exept light, and maybe some protons have ever went that fast ?

Einstein introduced this concept that nothing can go faster than light and it is all based on his theorie. Now this theorie is confirmed very well over the time so it's the valid/accepted one in our time. But that doesnt mean its proven complete and fault free and there are no alternatives. (and thats why you never may do a never exclusion!)
Still foreaxample is a big gap to close between einsteins relativity theorie and the quantum mechanics. It's all always in development.

The speciality about light is that it's particle are photons with a rest mass of zero. That it has no initial mass allows the light to travel with the maximum physical speed -> lightspeed.

protos have mass and charge and you can accelerate them very very close to light speed but not to exact light speed.

So back to imagination:
Now matter and this laws and everything is bound to this physical universe/reality. But what when someone finds a way to sneek out of this material universe and take a short cut? That's stuff that happens in the quantum world..now if someone can bring this two worlds together..who knows what is suddently possible. Never say never. We just started!

Originally posted by g210b
Scientists lack in imagination when it comes to think about new inovative ways outside the box.

OMG that's quite a statement. If scientists were thinking inside the box, you'd still be using quills to write instead of the spiffy computer you just used to type that nonsense. There wouldn't be space exploration. And we'd still think the Earth is flat.

If they ever say 'never' based on the actual sience you can be sure they just made a fault.

I am a scientist and I'm saying that you'll never get a university degree in physics. Please prove me wrong.

Photons travel at the speed of light because they are not "particles" in the sense that electrons, protons, etc are "particles". A photon is simply an amount of energy (the potential to do work) frantically looking for something to do.

This question has often cropped up and actually although the OP shows a basic lack of knowledge of physics, they obviously have a questing mind, which is pre requisite for any budding physicist.

Firstly my advice to the OP.

Buy the following books, you will find them interesting....

Stephen Hawking 'A Brief History of Time'
Carl Sagan 'Cosmos'
Michio Kaku 'Hyperspace'
Michio Kaku 'Parallel Worlds'
Craig Callender 'Physics Meets Philosophy at the Planck Scale: Contemporary Theories in Quantum Gravity'

Secondly I would like to state that nothing in the universe has a value of zero. In other words when a law states that something has a zero chance of happening, you can pretty much state that that law is in itself incorrect.

The universe is wondrous and wonder full place, that can only be described by our ultimate imaginations.

There are no bounds by which the universe can exist, other than the constraints we put upon it.

Simply put... faster than light travel is ABSOLUTLY NOT IMPOSSIBLE!!

All the best,

NeoN HaZe.

[edit on 30-1-2008 by Neon Haze]

Relax. Didn't want to sound offending. It's just my experiences.
I know that Scientists made a lot possible and there is nothing wrong with. (Often with a little help of a random ..isn't it!? )
I like physics and you might figure from my answers here that I am not totaly clueless in this topic.
I work together with people that are in physics and therefore I know a little how they think. I often have some nice discutations with them. As long as I stay in their known framework its all cool but as soon as I do a step outside well they are not willing to follow. ..thats where the limiting starts. I say there can be a lot more discovered if they don't clamp on actual theories that strong. There is always news to discover but usualy not inside the already known. Maybe I simple discutate with the worng persons all the time!?

It's generally assumed gravity is a fact. It's not. It's a theory, invented by Newton and barely three centuries old.

It's generally assumed gravity is a universal law. It's not. The prominences on the sun don't obey it. Neptune scoffs at it. The stars repudiate it. Galaxies ignore it. Its jurisdiction is pretty much limited to Newton's falling apple at the surface of the Earth. Even there the constant of gravitation refuses to be constant and wiggles around like a plasma in a magnetic field.
Newton said, "Gravity steers the universe." Heraclitus said, "The thunderbolt steers the universe." Who're ya gonna believe? Newton knew nothing about electricity. Heraclitus knew nothing about gravity. Newton had seen lightning, and Heraclitus had seen falling apples. But neither thought it was something that needed to be explained.

Because he didn't have a theory that enabled him to imagine the possibility, Heraclitus was unable to send a space probe to Mars. What electrical possibility was Newton unable to achieve because he didn' have a theory that enabled him to imagine it? Newton not only didn't explain electricity, his theory of gravity didn't allow him even to perceive it. And to this day astronomers have not been explaining it or even perceiving it. They talk about a "rain" of ions on Europa and a "wind" of charged particles from the sun. But moving charged particles are better known as an electrical current.

Except for the surfaces of half a dozen planets and moons, all we see of the universe is electrical: filaments and jets, accelerated and accelerating ions, synchrotron radiation and bremsstrahlung, polarized emissions, magnetic fields, Birkeland braids, Peratt instabilities, inverse linear force relationships, ...and that "wind" and "rain" buffeting the planets accompanied by radio "noise" typical of double layers. The electrical nature of those phenomena goes unperceived for want of a theory that will make it "make sense", that will make it sensible.

It's not that a theory doesn't exist. Electrical plasma physics (EPP) has been developing for over a century. It's properties and principles have been discovered and described by such illustrious experimenters as Birkeland, Langmuir, and Alfven. EPP is to be distinguished from magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), which also uses the term "plasma". What MHD means by that term is not electrically active assemblages of charged particles but masses of hot air. It's MHD that brought us the meteorological image of the solarsystem. EPP flips the switch to turn on the light of (electrical) understanding.

Unfortunately, EPP is widely ignored. It's not mentioned in standard textbooks. The training of most physicists leaves them unaware that many of the words they use are euphemisms for (and obfuscations of) electrical currents. For people wedded to a mechanistic view of the cosmos, EPP is frightening. Electrically active plasmas behave as though they were alive. They self- organize into complex forms that twist and turn and change states. They're mathematically messy. They're anarchic.

But they're conceptually elegant. The theory of gravity is surprised by each new discovery of space probes and space telescopes. Each surprise has to be patched with another ad hoc excuse. EPP accounts for the many surprising features of the cosmos with a single coherent theory. It can often point to a lab demonstration or to a computer simulation that mimics the newly discovered form. What EPP may lack in mathematical elegance is more than made up for in generality.

The Age of Gravitational Mechanics has achieved many impressive feats: It's taken people to the Moon. It's sent a robot to Mars. It's put satellites into orbit around Venus and Jupiter and Eros. It's put SOHO into orbit around nothing more than a mathematical point. It's also discovered the data and collected the facts that require a new, larger theory to explain them. So the time has come to question the relevance of the cogs-and-wheels theory of gravity from the gas-light era. It's time to plug in to an electrical cosmos with an electrical theory.

Ask a physicist how gravity actually works, or how mass 'bends' space, and they will be pretty much stumped. The EM force is 10^39 orders of magnitude stronger, and gravity is likely a left over aspect of that which arrises from atom geometry and other factors.

well, thats my opinion on the matter.

And no, i'm not going to get into an argument with it you over it Buddha, this is my first and last comment on this particular thread, i have already discussed my opinions on gravity with you elsewhere.

[edit on 30-1-2008 by ZeuZZ]

Originally posted by Neon Haze

Simply put... faster than light travel is ABSOLUTLY NOT IMPOSSIBLE!!

(maybe just one extra comment)

Not entirely true if you account for special dimensional assumptions in the very fabric of spacetime that puts that constraint on speed in the first place.

Warp Drive: A New Approach - Journal of interdisciplinary sciences, 2008

Certain classes of higher dimensional models suggest that the Casimir Effect is a candidate for the cosmological constant. In this paper we demonstrate that a sufficiently advanced civilization could, in principal, manipulate the radius of the extra dimension to locally adjust the value of the cosmological constant. This adjustment could be tuned to generate an expansion/contraction of spacetime around a spacecraft creating an exotic form of field-propulsion. Due to the fact that spacetime expansion itself is not restricted by relativity, a faster-than-light 'warp drive' could be created. Calculations of the energy requirements of such a drive are performed and an 'ultimate' speed limit, based on the Planckian limits on the size of the extra dimensions is found.

I started a similar thread elsewhere on this subject; www.abovetopsecret.com...

thanks for the thought food gents.!

your quite correct in the fact i do not know much about physics, i have basic understanding and only done physics as a standard grade, but the subject of physics itself i love thinking about. It always starts with me hearing or reading a new fact, or theory, then thinking, "hey, how can that be possible when theirs a theory that condradicts it?!"

my understanding was that it was the force of gravity that stopped matter traveling faster than light. I now know more about it, and im gonna think about it alot more! (dam ATS, all it does is make me think!)

Zeuzz, i liked what you said alot, makes alot of sence, and you talk about Electrical plasma physics , i have been reading about electric universe ect, and to me it all makes alot of scence.. (ive always had this assumption that everything comes down to electricity and once humans harness its full potential we will be able to do anything!

thanks again