speed of light? in simple terms please why do people think the speed of light is the fastest anything can go?

Question

what is it about light that makes people think nothing goes faster then it. what about time what speed does time travel at .
please explain this at about a grade 4 level i really dont know any thing about how people came up with this idea of light being the fastest.

Answer 1

It takes one second for you to see my camera's flash go off, if you are 186,000 miles away. (if you could see such a small flash from so far away!) When you first see the yellow ball of the sun in the morning peek from behind a mountain, it was actually in that spot 8 minutes ago. In fact, every thing you see the sun do, it actually did 8 minutes ago, because that's how long it took that image to arrive at your eyeball. The next time your at a calm lake, throw a good sized rock as far out as you can. When the rock hits the water, it causes waves. Lets say that splash is the sun and where you are on the shore is your eye. The waves caused by the rock is the ''image'' (light waves) traveling through space. When the first wave reaches you, that is the image arriving at your eyes. Before that wave reached you ,you couldn't see the image because the waves were still traveling and had yet to greet you!

P.S. No one said light is the fastest thing, it's just the fastest thing we know about (so far!).

Answer 2

Time doesn't travel at any speed. Time is a measurement that involves entropy in a system. It's complicated, so I won't try to explain that here.

The theory concerning the speed of light is that nothing that travels at a speed less than it can reach that speed. The amount of energy required to accelerate an object as it's speed reaches the speed of light becomes so great that it would take an infinite amount of it to make it possible. That's why it is supposed that an object traveling at speeds under light can't reach the speed of light, because there wouldn't be enough energy to make it possible. However, it doesn't say that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Things could travel faster, but they'd have to be and remain faster, they couldn't ever slow down to the speed of light or decelerate below the speed of light.

Light has a constant speed which never changes (which is why it's called the 'constant' and has the value 'c' in the equation E = mc²). It's approximately 186,282.397 miles per second or exactly 299,792,458 metres per second.

Answer 3

Some time after the theories of relativity, it was asked who understood it, it happens that very few scientists could understand it. The same is probably true today and yet information is disseminated systematically.

Upset about not being able to go faster than light? I understand. But don't despair, space bends. When light passes through strong gravity space bends. I am sure there is a way around it. It is good that you discovered this in your life. I use visual skills in my mind to work on these problems. I was not able to visualize very well when I was little. The key was modeling things. Running refrigerators in my mind or anything that you know how it works. When you get good at this you can x-ray something with your mind.

By the way, light is miserably slow. By the time it takes light to go from San Francisco to New York a computer processor in my laptop and execute almost 2500 instructions.

Answer 4

Light is a form of radiant energy. This is energy that can travel through a vacuum without anything to carry it. Light, radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, and gamma rays are all radiant energy.

Back in the 19th century, a physicist by the name of Maxwell was trying to look at the nature of electricity and magnetism. People by this time realized that electricity and magnetism were related, but didn't know how.

Maxwell sat down and calculated how electric fields worked, and how they spread through space. He also looked at how magnetic fields worked, and how they spread through space.

Once he got these worked out, he tried to see how a magnetic field and an electric field interacted, and he found out something really interesting: radiant energy (including light) spread at a constant rate, which was related to electric and magnetic fields. In other words, he found that in order to have light, there had to be something producing a changing electric and magnetic field, and that the speed at which it moved was fixed at 186, 232 miles per second.

This was an amazing result, and many physicists wondered if the speed of light was constant everywhere, or just in our little part of the Universe. Two physicists, Michelson and Morley, did an experiment that showed that it should be the same everywhere.

Einstein took this and incorporated it as one of the postulates of his Special Theory of Relativity: the speed of light is constant, regardless of where you are, and how fast you are going. He then proceeded to explain the consequence of this postulate, and made a number of changes to Newton's Laws of Motion.

Later, a physicist name Lorenz took Einstein's worked, and figured out what would happen if you could go the speed of light. He found that (1) your mass would become infinite; (2) your length would go to zero; (3) it would take an infinite amount of energy to do this, and (4) it would take an infinite amount of time to do it. Clearly, this could not happen.

What about time? How does it spread, you ask. Well the speed of time is unity : 1 second per second. This is because it is another dimension like length or width.

We can see length, and we can perceive time. They are both dimensions, and we use different senses to measure them.

Scientists think that they understand the nature of light, time, and space to such an extent that they are confident that nothing can travel faster than light, and that no material object (on made of mass) can ever achieve the speed of light. Nothing they have ever observed leads them to believe that there model is wrong, so no tinkering is needed.

Answer 5

Without treating you like an Einstein, here is my simple way of explaining it:

As speed increases, time slows down.
As speed approaches the speed of light, time approaches 0.
Time doesn't run backward. The speed of light is the limit.

(With keeping it in simple terms)

You are asking a very complicated physics question and asking for a very simple answer. It is a very hard thing to explain, and probably one that a fourth grader couldn't comprehend.

Want an idea to blow your mind? How about this:

You have a missile that can go 50% of the speed of light. (.5 x c)
You have an rocket that can go 90% of the speed of light (.9 x c)
You fly in the rocket with the missile attached and run it up to full speed, thenfire the missile. It ends up going 95% the speed of light (.95 x c.) It can't go faster.


You have a twin, and you both have on identical watches set to the identical time. Your twin boards the rocket (with the missile) and travels at 90% of the speed of light for a few years, then returns to Earth. You check your watches. Your twin's watch lags yours.

This is because time slows as you approach the speed of light.

Answer 6

Because it's the fastest thing that we can relate to. We all know what light is. Photons which possibly do travel faster than light just aren't something we have much experience with.

You can get into a debate about the Theory of Relativity, varying speeds of light, etc. But to an average person, light itself is the fastest thing we care to imagine.

Answer 7

The speed of light is the speed of time; all of us are moving at the speed of light through the four dimensional combination of space and time, called "spacetime" logically enough.

This is really hard to visualize unless you take one of our three space dimensions out of the picture (say, up and down) and replace that dimension with time. Now that you've simplified a 4D image to 3D, it's a lot easier to visualize.

As we experience time passing, we are flowing "upwards" at the speed of light. Normally, we move around in space much slower then the speed of light, so we don't notice funny "relativistic" distortions. But if we did go very fast, our "world line", which is the path we trace through space and time, would get angled and then strange things would happen (clocks would run differently, for example, and you would become more massive). These effects combine such that it would take an infinite amount of energy for an object with any mass at all to reach the speed of light.

Light, however, has no mass, so it always travels at the speed of light. The reasons for this are complicated, but it has been shown to arise out of the fundamental properties of space-time.

Answer 8

Einstein theorized that the speed of light, or "c" is the fastest possible velocity in the universe regardless of reference frame. He articulated this as part of the Theory of Special Relativity. The idea that "c" is the fastest speed and is independent of reference frame has since been proven many times by experiment.

Answer 9

no matter how fast we go, the speed of light always measures the same because as we go really fast, time slows down for those going faster. So if we almost go the speed of light, our time is traveling so slow that the measured speed of light for us still remains the same. We're still trying to figure all this out btw.

Answer 10

What?? People think the speed of light is fast because it is. (I'd tell you the speed, but it's over 4th grade level.) I never heard of a specific law stating light is "the fastest thing." Are you saying that you believe in "time traveling"? You're on your own on that one. Don't think "time travel" exists except in fantasy movies.