Questions tagged [faster-than-light]
"Faster-than-light", also known as superluminal velocities, refers to any sort of travel at a speed greater than the speed of light. Prohibited in mainstream physics due to the Special theory of relativity.
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Is it possible for information to be transmitted faster than light by using a rigid pole?
Is it possible for information (like 1 and 0s) to be transmitted faster than light?
For instance, take a rigid pole of several AU in length. Now say you have a person on each end, and one of them ...
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If I run along the aisle of a bus traveling at (almost) the speed of light, can I travel faster than the speed of light?
Let's say I fire a bus through space at (almost) the speed of light in vacuum. If I'm inside the bus (sitting on the back seat) and I run up the aisle of the bus toward the front, does that mean I'm ...
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Can space expand with unlimited speed?
According to this article on the European Space Agency web site just after the Big Bang and before inflation the currently observable universe was the size of a coin. One millionth of a second later ...
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Why is the observable universe so big?
The observable universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old. But yet it is 80 billion light years across. Isn't this a contradiction?
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(Almost) double light speed
Let's say we have $2$ particles facing each other and each traveling (almost) at speed of light.
Let's say I'm sitting on #$1$ particle so in my point of view #$2$ particle's speed is (almost) $c+c=...
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The choice of measurement basis on one half of an entangled state affects the other half. Can this be used to communicate faster than light?
It is often stated, particularly in popular physics articles and videos about quantum entanglement, that if one measures a particle A that is entangled with some other particle B, then this ...
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If I am travelling on a car at around 60 km/h, and I shine a light, does that mean that the light is travelling faster than the speed of light?
The title says it all.
If I was on a bus at 60 km/h, and I started walking on the bus at a steady pace of 5 km/h, then I'd technically be moving at 65 km/h, right?
So my son posed me an interesting ...
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Does the collapse of the wave function happen immediately everywhere?
It is usually taught that when we measure some measurable value the wave function collapses immediately everywhere. This idea sounds like a simplification of some more complicated mechanism.
Are ...
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How does faster than light travel violate causality?
Let's say I have two planets that are one hundred thousand lightyears away from each other. I and my immortal friend on the other planet want to communicate, with a strong laser and a tachyon ...
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Rotate a long bar in space and get close to (or even beyond) the speed of light $c$
Imagine a bar
spinning like a helicopter propeller,
At $\omega$ rad/s because the extremes of the bar goes at speed
$$V = \omega * r$$
then we can reach near $c$ (speed of light)
applying some ...
Hernan Eche
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Is it really possible to break the speed of light by flicking your wrist with a laser pointer?
Minutephysics has a popular YouTube video called "How to break the speed of light". In the video it states that if you flick your wrist while pointing a laser that reaches the moon, that the spot of ...
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Extended Rigid Bodies in Special Relativity
I was reading Landau & Lifshitz's Classical Theory of Fields and I noticed that they mention that an extended rigid body isn't "relativistically correct".
For example, if you consider a rigid ...
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Will free-fall object into black hole exceed speed of light $c$ before hitting black hole surface?
In Newtonian mechanics, if we throw an object in against direction of gravity with speed $v$ and it achieve max height of $h$. Now if we allow object to fall from that height $h$, it will eventually ...
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Will an object always fall at an infinite speed in a black hole? [duplicate]
Most of you if not everybody will agree that the stronger the gravitational pull, the faster an object will fall. For example, on a planet with 50 times the gravity of Earth, any object will hit the ...
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Superluminal neutrinos
I was quite surprised to read this all over the news today:
Elusive, nearly massive subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe ...
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