If nothing is faster than light than how?

Question

is it possible that a light cannot escape a black hole. And if its true that a Black holes gravity is what traps light does that mean that light has mass? And theoretically if light has mass than can man someday find technology(beyond solar cells duh) that will harness lights mass

Answer 1

Congratulations sir, you are a genius.

Answer 2

Light has no mass, your misunderstanding is that gravity works only on objects containing mass.

Gravity isn't actually a pulling force that produces weight, this is only how we percieve gravity from our limited point of view.

In actuallity, gravity is the resultant bend in spacetime that matter, and energy create. Think of all of spacetime as to thin layers of plastiwrap, that are set together. When there is nothing there the plastiwrap is completely flat, and undisturbed, much as spacetime would be without any matter. Now take a large marble and put them in between the sheets, when you draw the sheets tight together again there is a space created around the large marble and a little ways around it, the plastic wrap is bent. That is a disturbance that is not terribly unlike the disturbance that an amount of matter creates in space time. The more matter, the greater the bend/disturbance.

Gravity is our perception of that bending of space time, the bending of the plastiwrap if you will. That disurbance bends the fabric of reality, and as such is not limited to mass, but can also affect energy as well. As such, even light must fight the pull of gravity, and can be overcome when the gravity reaches the level of a black hole.


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Answer 3

Any massive body, such as a black hole or a star or even a planet, creates a gravity well by warping or curving spacetime around it. So, even though light photons do not have any mass, their paths may take them into the gravity well of a black hole from which there is nothing with sufficient escape velocity to get away.

Answer 4

Light doesn't have mass, but light is actually energy. because it is energy, eloctromagnetic forces can pull it towards matter but light itself doesn't have mass. A black hole actually just creates an incredible vortex that is in effect sucking energy, so the light goes to the black hole. I am saying only what I believe is true so I don't know how much help this will be.

Answer 5

You have some interesting opinions here. Probably because your question deals with quantum physics, and not a lot of people understand it. For example, light is composed of photons which individually have no mass, but do contain energy. It is also true that in the vacuum of space they move at a constant rate of speed which we call the speed of light. They do not "slow down" in vacuum, black hole or no. We do harness the energy in photons now. It is also untrue that nothing moves faster than the speed of light. When the big bang occurred, space itself moved at up to 50 times the speed of light in the process of expanding. We still have much to learn, but the learning is always fun.

Answer 6

Light responds to gravity not because it has mass but because gravity warps spacetime.

At the event horizon of a black hole, the escape velocity is c (speed of light) and time comes to a complete stop.

Answer 7

Light, in our frame of reference, never gets sucked into a black hole. It gets nearer, and nearer. And if we could "see" it, we'd see that it never gets to the "event horizon", but slowly creeps towards it, taking an infinite amount of time. Since it takes an infinite amoutn of time, it obviously never reaches us.

Everything else that hits the event horizon freezes there from our POV as well. However, to the light, and the object, or whatever is falling into the hole, it just feels a huge shearing force.

And we can already "harness" light's mass. It's just that it's really, really light (hoho pun!) and doesn't do much.

Go look up a "light sail".

Answer 8

Light has a very minute amount of mass, and if you concentrate it enough, you can move things and provide propulsion. The mass of light is so minute however that it would not be practical to try and harness it for the purpose of power production. But anything's possible

Answer 9

Light creates a reaction within the solar cell. Wouldn't the light you see actually be light reflected off of particles? If the particle is white, it reflects all of the light. If the particle is black like a black hole, than it absorbs all of the light. This is why black shirts in sunlight get hotter than light-colored shirts.