From what I understand (correct me if I'm wrong. I'm by no means a physicist) the universe itself is expanding beyond the speed of light. But anything within the universe is supposedly unable to reach speeds beyond light speed...I think.
From what I understand (correct me if I'm wrong. I'm by no means a physicist) the universe itself is expanding beyond the speed of light. But anything within the universe is supposedly unable to reach speeds beyond light speed...I think.
No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power. — P.J. O'Rourke
Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. — Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)
The universal expansion rate is nowhere near the speed of light (yet). Contemporary physicists argue that someday it will be, though, and at that point when we look up on a clear night we'll see very few spots (our solar system). Personally, I believe they have made a mistake, as I think the conclusion they came to is unreasonable. Sure, the universe might be expanding at an increasingly increasing rate, but someday the old concept of gravity and other physical constraints will have to hold back its acceleration. I believe that this is like the age-old "where is the center of the universe?" argument. Until we changed our perspective to a birds-eye view, we were convinced it was the sun. I'm more than sure that a perspective change will amount to the same revolution with this concept - after all, there's no physical reason that the universe isn't already expanding at such a rate, if our theory was true and it has had 14.8 billion years to expand after the first energy release (which was undoubtedly its fastest boost).
Nevertheless, this isn't the first experiment of its kind. Light waves fed into an acceleration track will exit it before they even enter. The data back then was disregarded as erroneous, but there had to be some explanation for that which we did not understand back then.
Also Einstein's theory only played to mass-based particles not being able to travel faster than light. It had nothing to do with light itself, as until very recently it was still a possibility that light itself can travel faster than the standard speed of light itself.
Last edited by Quarterquack; 09-28-2011 at 02:39 PM.
Ellipses go here.
Theoretical physics is like medicine, everyone pretends to know the answers but really it's more about making educated guesses and hoping for the best.
Respect my lack of authority.
Yes..I'm just going by some things I have read. An article about metric expansion, for example. from what I read, space itself is expanding, making it possible for 2 really distant objects to be moving away from each other at speeds exceeding light. I'm sure there are people here better educated than me that could explain it much better, but that's how I interpret it.
No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power. — P.J. O'Rourke
Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. — Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)
I was 100% sure that ringhunter would definitely comment with a paragraph or more, and I wasn't wrong.
<3Originally Posted by ringhunter
Last edited by A; 09-28-2011 at 03:18 PM. Reason: time travel
I knew about this story two weeks before the author wrote it, which is proof in itself.
Originally Posted by OlegL
bullshit
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