Is it possible to achieve the speed of light via a Russian Doll like system of vehicles accelerating ...?

Question

What if a series of trains or vehicles fit into each other like a Russian doll, accelerating one after another so that the more inside the train, the more speed. Would not the speeds add to each other, eventually hitting the speed of light? Or is this not possible?

Answer 1

No. The design of the vehicle does not matter, it is the old e=mc^2.

As you accelerate, your vehicle gains mass, until, as you get closer to the speed of light, the mass gain approaches infinity, and it then takes an infinitely powerful push to overcome this infinite resistance.

In the case of the nested doll ships, if we use the external (larger ships), to begin the journey, you would find yourself in the strange position of continually needing greater power from ever smaller engines.

Answer 2

According to Einstein's theories on relativity. what happens at the speed of light is a relative phenomena. According to relativity as one approaches the speed of light, mass increases and time slows down.

One thought is that the only reason why our universe is only 14 billion years old, is because any objects beyond this distance is accelerating away from us at a speed greater than the speed of light. Does this mean that the speed of light can be exceeded or that these distant object transform into matter? Not likely!

It is thought that these distant objects are basically riding on the coat tails of cosmic expansion and are only traveling faster than the speed of light relative to us and our position.

Reasoning this out, as long as the dolls are within the same spacetime, it would not be likely to exceed the speed of light - The time required to launch each new doll would take an ever increasing period of time to launch - therefore, No.

(Caveat: recent research suggests that it may be possible to exceed light speed on a quantum level.)

Answer 3

What happens is the closer to lightspeed an object travels, the larger it gets and it starts to acquire more mass- which slows it down. Its not possible to reach lightspeed with current technology.

Back in the 1970's and 1980's a series of experiments were done to detect the theoritical partical known as a taycheon. This particals SLOWEST speed was the speed of light- none were ever detected

Answer 4

You are falling into the trap of linear addition of velocities: if you are on a train moving at velocity v1 and throw a ball forward at velocity (with respect to you) of v2, an outside observer would observe the ball velocity at v1 + v2. That is reasonable, but not correct. According to the special theory of relativity, the summation of the velocities is given by

v =(v1 + v2)/(1 + v1*v2/c^2) where c = velocity of light.

So lets say your trains got up to a velocity of .9*c and the next inside train adds another .1*c to that. The total velocity of the inner train will be

(.9*c + .1*c)/(1 + .09) = .917*c;

Your linear addition would predict 1.0*c

No matter how many trains there were, you would never reach c.

Answer 5

<>Each train/vehicle would have to be CAPABLE of accelerating faster than the one before it. If it could not, it would not be able to go any faster.