Why was the speed of light chosen as the only constant in the universe.?

Question

This in response to some answers.
JLynes. Steven Hawking stated that time would reverse when the universe began collaping in on itself, is this not a seious blunder?
Andrew..The slowing of time does not detract from it's constancy, I made no claim of it's invariability.
davidosterberg 1..Try doing some creative thinking.
-"Slave"-..Once again, the speed of light is not attainable.
Uncle Al.. The time you talk about is an artifact, it was invented to help man organize his day. Real Time began with the big bang, these are two entirely different things.
lunatic..You are correct about my mathematical skills but how can you claim that time is not a real thing? It may be intangible but it certainly is real.
russ m..anyone who says he could be from the future can't be taken seriously.
dighalbank..Sorry that half of my question is unclear.
Robert B..I am not disputing time dilation at high speeds I think I have a good understanding of it but you have steer clear of man made clocks.

Answer 1

Because Einstein found out that there were a number of interesting results, if you developed a theory (relativity) using the _assumption_ that the speed of light was constant.

Scientific experiments confirmed that those interesting things happened. An atomic clock slows down if you fly it around the Earth on a satellite. A particle accelerated in a "particle accelerator" gets heavier. And of course, E=mcsquared.

Why did Einstein make that assumption? Because he was a genius. Why do scientists today accept that assumption? Because the sometimes startling predictions of special relativity have always been found to be experimentally true. And a lot of effort has gone into finding a situation where it isn't. Nobodies managed to do that.

Answer 2

The speed of light, as someone said earlier, was observed to be constant for all observers regardless of their speed. Classic mechanics could not explain this since it demands for the vectorial addition of velocities, in order to explain it Lorentz deviced some transformations which kept the observed constant speed of light invariant, Einstein later exploided this concept and created what we know today as the theory of relativity. However, note that this is not the only constant, for example you also have Planck's constant, which relates to the quantity of energy in a particle.

Answer 3

The speed of light is not a constant; it depends on the medium in which its travelling . It the medium is quasi homogeneous then the speed of light would be unvariable. Since our Universe is not really homogeneous Pressure of space would vary as an inverse distance function( an hyperbolic function)
The proof of this was in the Fizeau experiment where he proved that speed of light did vary depending on the medium.
Today we measure an index of refraction which indicates the relative speeds of light.
Per my own understanding it , that if we postulate the smaller and denser a mass is the faster it travels, appears to be logical alternative to understand why light travels that fast.
Since light was the primordial mass of the universe ,it would follow that it is the fastest moving mass of the Universe.
The volume of light is constant and so is its radius.The only thing that changes is time in space.Therefore if time changes, then the velocity of Light particle varies accordingly.
In local space where we live the speed of light changes are so minute that it is almost impossible to observe. when light moves in a gravity field it either increase in speed or decreases,depeding whether its moving toward or away from the gravitational mass.So we can say that the speed of light as measured relative to the earth can be estimated as constant.
Time is a conserved quantity in space if its lost in in one frame of reference frame it reappears in another frame of reference. A good example is in collision; the loss of time in the motion of a larger mass is equal to the gain in in time in the smaller mass. Delta T1 =delta T2=time is conserved.!
So the conservations laws also apply to time.

Answer 4

So the reason for your question was to get some answers and then show how the people that took the time to answer didn't get it right (you discredited everyone that answered).
Very clever - the Socratic method hasn't been used much in the past few decades, its nice to see its return (as pompous as that can seem to the unenlightened).
And I expect you to critique or belittle my answer as well.
Enjoy.

Answer 5

The constant speed of light wasn't "chosen," it was observed by experiment and continues to be so. We don't choose things in science, we report the results of experiment. It is also not the only constant; we have also have G, h-bar, the electron charge, the Cabibbo Angle, etc., just for starters.

Answer 6

one) the cost of sunshine is defined by the cost of concept based on a planets 'DNA-Band'. The quickest velocity is known. __ From right here to Pleiades, (4 hundred easy years away) it takes the Pleiadians 7 minutes, yet purely an instantaneous to Hyper-bounce into our solar.

Answer 7

So the reason for your question was to get some answers and then show how the people that took the time to answer didn't get it right (you discredited everyone that answered).
Very clever - the Socratic method hasn't been used much in the past few decades, its nice to see its return (as pompous as that can seem to the unenlightened).
And I expect you to critique or belittle my answer as well.
Enjoy.

Answer 8

the speed of light isn't the only constant.

it was picked, cause it was part of a radical new view on things regarding SPACETIME. theoretically combining space and time as to be just two sides of the same medal.

just this view on things for the first time explained mercury's perihelion shift in its orbit, along with thousands of other things later on.
practically it replaced newtons absolute time.

Answer 9

Because the Photon was the most consistant in frequency to measure at the time.

Answer 10

wasnt 'chosen'--was discovered by einstein.