In article
<245dc78b-28e6-46be-9865-5acf8d51c5c5@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Rodney <rodneyjkelly@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> For last two years, I have been working on a theory for faster
>than light travel, and I have hit a brick wall. The theory is stupidly
>simple, so someone should have thought of it by now, but I can't find
>it mentioned anywhere in the scientific litterateur. At this point,
>the only way that this theory could be wrong is if Einstein was
>mistaken. This I think is unlikely.
>The theory is as follows;
>
> As an object with mass is accelerated, it's mass increases. The
>more an object is accelerated, the more mass it gains. This fact has
>been proven in particle accelerator experiments. I would argue that
>what is being seen is caused by another mechanism. An object is
>accelerated though the exchange of force carrying partials, or
>photons. As an object is accelerated, it begins to experience time
>dilation. This slows an objects ability to exchange photons, which
>become phase shifted from those from the accelerator
I think this is where you went wrong --- that is, it's where your
theory starts to disagree with experiment and observation. It's not
*just* that particles get harder to accelerate as they near the
speed of light. As you say, that could be explained by saying that
it's harder to interact with fast-moving particles. The thing is,
fast-moving particles *also* have more momentum and more kinetic
energy than you'd expect from Newtonian mechanics. For example, if
you hit a target with a particle going 85% of light speed, a certain
amount of energy and momentum will get transferred to the target.
If the particle's going 96% c., then it packs *twice as much* KE
and momentum. If it's going 99%, then twice as much again. If it's
going 99.999% of lightspeed, it has a whole lot of energy and
momentum, many times more than it had at 99.0% of lightspeed.
If the difficulty accelerating were simply photon interactions,
you'd expect the fast-moving particle to have *less* effect on the
target, possibly slipping all the way through and not slowing down
much at all. But that's not what happens. You can pack as much kinetic
energy as you want into an electron and its speed approaches, but does
not reach, light speed, and when it hits something all that kinetic
energy does come back out --- so it's clear that the KE was really "in"
the particle. This is what people mean when they say a particle's mass
increases as it goes faster, but many people say it's misleading to think
of the mass as actually increasing...
> In the above example, the atom is being accelerated by an external
>force, the accelerator. If instead of an atom, the object was some
>form of rocket, with it's own engines. Then the object would be acted
>on by an internal force. [and could eventually reach the speed of light]
This is an idea people often have when learning about special relativity,
but I think it would take too long for me to explain why it wouldn't work
that way. There are some non-intuitive consequences of relativity, and
this is one of them: You can accelerate at 1G forever and never quite
reach lightspeed.
I think you might enjoy reading a book on the history of science
that covers the time leading up to when relativity was proposed as
a theory, the late 1800s and early 1900s. People were trying to
understand the behavior of light, but were having to come up with
increasingly complex, bizarre theories in order to explain their
experiments. Special relativity is pretty bizarre in ways, but it's
a lot simpler and more straightforward than some of the "aether"
theories. On top of that, Einstein cleverly showed that, if you
assume certain reasonable things are true (physics is the same in all
reference frames, speed of light the same in all reference frames ---
see the Michaelson-Morely experiment) then something *like* SR,
including its new notions of space and time, must be true. Reading
about the alternative theories that were proposed, and reading about
the ideas and experiments that disprove them, is a good way to get a
handle on relativity itself.
--
Wim Lewis <wiml@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Seattle, WA, USA. PGP keyID 27F772C1
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