Quote (doomchaser @ Jul 24 2013 11:47am)
soo all the hype about neutrinos
It was just that, hype. Nothing else. If you had read the actual journal articles written about the dodgy experiment, you would have seen that the people preforming the experiment were getting puzzling results they were pretty sure where wrong, and were basically asking for outside help tracking down the problem. Of course the media had a field day and got all kinds of people to believe particles can move faster than light. How did I (and huge numbers of other people) know it was BS from day one? Because the experiment was using special relativity to calculate the distance the neutrinos traveled. If special relativity is wrong, then you can't use it to discredit special relativity!
Quote (doomchaser @ Jul 24 2013 11:47am)
is that this equation is flawed in some way?
There is 0 evidence it is flawed, it matches every observation ever made. This is good evidence that it is either correct or at most is missing a piece which in every case we have ever measured, cancels out (but might not cancel out in some future case, if that ever happens, this missing piece will need to be inserted).
Quote (doomchaser @ Jul 24 2013 11:47am)
I don't think we know for sure yet this is the right and full equation.
As I said above, it is probably not complete, but it works perfectly at the energy scale we currently work with. In the future at much higher scales, it might have to be modified (and this goes for most physical laws). It is pointless to speculate what might have to be changed until we reach those energy scales and find out. But for the current scales it is 100% correct.
This is a very important point. If tomorrow someone figures out how to increase the energy scale of experiments 100 fold, and it is discovered that this equation must be changed:
the current version of this equation will still be correct for the energy scales we use now! Furthermore the new and improved version
MUST cancel down to the current equation for the current energy levels we work with. This point is often overlooked by the people who cry "we don't know all the laws yet". This is why modifying the laws of physics is so hard, you must modify them in a way where they give new results at new energy levels, but the old results at the old energy level. This is not easy to do.
Quote (doomchaser @ Jul 24 2013 11:47am)
What friction is making the speed of light a constant? And can the force of the friction change to where we would get a different rate of speed from light?
Friction is a word we use when working with gross macroscopic systems to describe huge numbers of very simple microscopic interactions. There is no such thing as friction on the microscopic scale (instead we just deal with the very simple interactions themselves).
Quote (doomchaser @ Jul 24 2013 11:47am)
But when you add math too it seems so much more legit.
If you play with that equation you will find that the closer you bring v to 1 (that is light speed), the energy required increases dramatically. Also if you try the reverse and just plugin any finite amount of energy into the equation, you will find it will produce a v that is less than 1, no matter how much energy you start with. This is why a particle with a rest mass can not be accelerate to the speed of light with a finite amount of energy. Crudely put, accelerating a particle adds to its mass, this added mass requires even more energy to accelerate. This process gets worse and worse, each time you accelerate it more, it becomes harder and harder to accelerate. Eventually you will consume any amount of energy you have and not reach the goal of light speed. You can however get extremely close. The LHC accelerates protons to about v = 0.999999991 (or 99.9999991% light speed).
This post was edited by Azrad on Jul 24 2013 01:59pm