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Albert Einstein charted a course through a no-man's land, and then proceeded to follow it to the bitter end. But what were the implications and conclusions that had to be drawn if physicists wre to accept Einstein's very practical viewpoint and his basic postulate that the velocity of light remained constant under all circumstances? Among other things like the theory that showed that, no matter how much energy one gave to a particle, one could not accelerate it to a speed greater than the speed of light. It also showed that the mass of the particle was a measure of its internal energy, thereby giving a clue to the possibility of abstaining nuclear energy; it also provided the basic equations for describing the motion of highly energetic particles; and led to the prediction and production of antimatter. It also predicted (which has since been proven experimentally) that clocks, while moving quickly, run slower than identical clocks at rest. This is known as Time Dilation. Time dilation governs all processes in the moving frame of reference. Biological processes proceed at the same rates as measured by clocks at the same velocity (otherwise one could tell time was slowing down because they would move incredibly fast). Therefore, if the clocks in a moving frame run more slowly (by the point of view of a stationary frame), then people at high velocities will age more slowly than people at rest. If it were possible to accelerate yourself to the speed of light you would see the entire history of the Universe unfold before you in an instant. In essence a photon is frozen in time. The problem is, to accelerate even a feather to the speed of light is impossible because relativity says, as your speed increases, so does your mass. At light speed, the feather would weigh more than the Universe itself. All this must seem like science fiction to some, but relativity has help up to every test thrown up against it. Relativity, no matter how strange, is fact. If you play with the mathematical equations you get all kinds of strange mathematically correct things like antimatter, time travel, and tachyons (particles that move backward in time by going faster than light). To me there seems to be something vaguely eerie and distorted about this whole concept. Certainly this is not the view of time, space, and dimension to which we are accustomed in our everyday experience. It was a mind-wrenching concept to physicists themselves when Einstein first introduced it at the beginning of this century. All of the theories were based on the simple conclusion that the speed of light is a cosmic speed limit, and it is immaterial; so an object with mass could never reach or exceed it. Why does an object's mass increase, but not the speed, when near the critical limit, c? Easy. In electron-accelerating experiments conducted in the world's biggest suppercollider laboratory, as an electron approaches the speed of light, no matter how much more energy was pumped into it, its mass, but not speed, increased. Remembering that matter and energy are simply two forms of the same thing, , we can then think of the electron as a simple mass-energy system. We can see at the beginning of the acceleration, at low velocities, the mass part of the mass-energy total is very small, with the power far exceeding the mass. As we accelerate the electron to greater velocities, the power is lessened and the mass of the electron increases. At a critical limit, all energy applied is converted into mass. In other words, the constantly increasing amount of energy is transformed into matter, thus adding mass. In order to accelerate an electron to the speed of light it would require all of the energy in the universe, so it needs infinite energy. It would then have more mass than the universe, so it would have infinite mass. Infinite mass would result in infinite inertia. I have been reading many books and articles on relativity for many years and I still don't all of its ramifications. Einstein's theories are still uncovering more and more mind-boggling things every year as physicists continue to sift through the intensely complicated math legacy Dr. Albert Einstein left to us. |
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