Why does it take an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light?

Question

Is there friction or any kind of resistance in space? Please, serious answers only.

Answer 1

Let's break this down:

To accelerate an object to a higher speed, you need a force.

The acceleration caused by the force is inversely proportional to the mass of the object, by F=ma

As an object accelerates, and it's velocity increases, it aquires more kinetic energy, and thus more mass by, KE=1/2mv^2 and E=mc^2

As the velocity approaches c, the speed of light, the mass grows unbounded to infinity, requiring an infinite amount of force exerted over an infinite amount of time.

Anything that obeys the laws that pertain to matter will take an infinite amount of time to reach the speed of light.

Answer 2

Yes there is friction actually because of dust particles, debri from old planets, gases and more that's just drifting around in space.

We mainly just can't reach the speed of light because we don't have that kind of technology. The ship would weigh too much and would need too much energy-providing substances on board, which would slow it down. It doesn't take an "infinite" amount per se. Just more than we're capable of designing right now. We have jets that can go 4 times the speed of sound, so we'll be able to reach the speed of light someday...

Just think about people in the middle ages when it used to take a year to go from Spain to India by ship. They would've never dreamed that you can fly there in a matter of hours now. So I'm sure although we think the speed of light is impossible now, people a couple hundred or thousand years in the future will wonder why we couldn't figure it out and why it took so long. Right? lol!

Quick response to Dan: Vaccuums and space aren't the same thing. There's no friction in a vaccuum because everything would be moving at the same speed you are, but there is friction in space because stuff is moving in all sorts of directions. If a planet or star explodes or something, the dust and debri just keeps flying because there's nothing to stop it (except other dust and debri). That's why it's so dangerous for astronauts to leave the ship. A piece of debri or rock could be moving at hundreds of miles an hour and pierce right through their sealed suits. Just so you know :-)

Answer 3

This is due to Special Relativity, a theory that was put forth by Einstein around 1902, I think. Special Relativity is a mathematical construct from the recent observation (at that time) that the speed of light is the same in all frames of reference. If you are on a train going 60 miles per hour and another train passes you going 80 miles an hour, then the passing train is going 20 mph relative to you, right? But when you shine your train's headlight ahead into the darkness, it leaves your train at exactly the speed of light, and it also leaves the other train's headlight at exactly the speed of light, and anyone on the ground will also measure the light from your headlight at exactly the speed of light, (not the speed of light plus 60mph, in other words, as you might expect.) This is rather screwy, as you might be gathering at this point. If you do the mathematics of what all this means, it ends up meaning that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, and anything attempting to accellerate to the speed of light will instead accumulate infinite mass, as well as infinitely slowed time, and it will also flatten into a pancake!
When this theory was first published, it was thought to be so screwball that few if any notable scientists of the day would believe it. But it has been tested over and over and it is the truth about how our universe is constructed, so we are forced to believe it by the facts, however reluctantly. (Please don't confuse the picture with the facts; have you ever heard that?)Einstein won the Nobel Prize in physics, for his studies of the photoelectric effect of semiconductors, which was a practical piece that everyone could agree was useful and helpful to the modern world. He did NOT win the Nobel Prize for relativity, because that was felt to be just too wacko. And then there is General Relativity that he published a few years later.....talk about wacko!.....that was REALLY wacko!....(but also true).

Answer 4

Because only something with no mass can ever attain an infinite amount of energy by its own standards: all of its mass would have to be converted to energy. It's the only way to explain massless particles like photons and gravitons; they aren't really particles at all, just bundles of moving energy.

There is no friction in a vaccuum, i.e. space.

I wish you all the best.

Answer 5

The answer has nothing to do with friction or technology.

For an object to accelerate, force must be applied (energy must be given to it). acceleration = force / mass (Newtons second law)

According to Einstein's equation E=mc^2, energy is interchangeable with mass.

It follows that an accelerated body is given energy, which then gains mass, which then requires more energy to accelerate, which increases the bodies' mass even more. (The applicable equation here is: mass = mass / sqrt(1 - velocity^2 / speed_of_light^2) )

Lather, rinse, repeat. Until you get very close to the speed of light, and your rocketship has the mass of a large star...that is if you have enough fuel. =)

Answer 6

spce has stuff in it, for example, light could push on the front of a space craft and slow it down. but of course this would be an extremely small amount of force. but say over millions of years it would be big.

and i'm sure there are alot of particles, cosmic rays and that kinda stuff that could cause some kind of resistance. however small it would still be there.

Answer 7

Because that the mass that you are accelerating becomes heavier and heavier, so that it becomes increasingly more difficult to make it go faster. At the speed of light, the mass of any object with a non-zero rest mass would be infinite. (N.B.: photons have zero rest mass, so they can go at the speed of light.)

Answer 8

it does not take infinite volume of ability .it takes a tremendous volume ability it is virtually somewhat not a threat for us . so we call it as infinite ability . yet sub atomic debris like neutrons and protons ought to easily accept a speed close to to the speed of sunshine considering the fact that their plenty are somewhat negligible and photon are literally not massless yet they have negligible mass