🚀 go-pugleaf

Grant Schoep wrote:
> 
>   Hell, many though the sound barrior could be never be broken, even though
> they new light traveled faster then sound.

This has been gone over many times - the fear over the "sound barrier"
was that it was physically impossible to design a craft that could
withstand faster than sound flight, or that the air would not "permit" a
physical body to travel faster than the speed of sound.  The speed of
light was a well-known phenomenon by that time.

> Aren't there sometype of particles
> that are beleived to travel faster then light? I could easily be wrong,
> but I thought there was something out there. Anyone know?

The existence of particles that travel faster than the speed of light,
called tachyons, has been surmised but, for obvious reasons, never
proven.  The general thought is that because the speed of light is
asymptotic, it cannot be attained from either side; thus tachyons are
forever doomed to travel faster than light.  The only particles that
seem to be able to travel at the speed of light are photons, because
they have effectively zero mass.  Of course, there is no known way to
slow down or speed up a photon.

This is entirely consistent mathematically:  Things slower than light
can never reach or exceed the speed of light; things faster than light
can never reach or go below the speed of light, and light itself can
never speed up or slow down.  (I'm not talking about the speed of light
in various mediums here; that's a different kind of phenomenon.)

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