Comments on: What If Light Had No Speed Limit?

By: Brian Koberlein

Brian Koberlein — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 13:42:06 +0000

I’d love to hear where you’re getting that from.

By: Will dawson

Will dawson — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 01:48:09 +0000

If light were about 2% less, there would be no carbon; if it were much faster, there would be no oxygen.

By: NXTangl

NXTangl — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 16:11:34 +0000

Light's maximum speed is implied by special relativity as an inherent consequence of the universe's metric signature--anything going faster would have an imaginary four-momentum, and the four-momentum of light is zero. (That's because when taking the magnitude of a four-vector, you take the square root of the square of the time component minus the sum of the squares of the space components.) A further consequence of this is that the angle between two four-momenta is taken on a unit hyperbola rather than a unit circle. The Orthogonalverse (found here) allows for infinite speed of light but this has consequences: easy time travel, kinetic energy going down as velocity increases, electric fields that reverse their attraction and repulsion properties regularly as distance increases, stars that leave rainbow trails across the sky...

By: Eric Newberry.

Eric Newberry. — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 19:53:55 +0000

If we know black holes can trap light. Then it must be that the gravity is stronger and controls light’s speed. What if that light approached that field with compliment Would this force not increase the photon as it crosses the event horizon?

By: Stephen Syputa

Stephen Syputa — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 23:43:28 +0000

“Koberlein’s Dreams” — Great title for a book —
with apologies to Alan Lightman

By: Rossen Kolarov

Rossen Kolarov — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 05:44:18 +0000

Quote: “…Since the wavelength of light determines its color, that would also mean it has no color.” This is inaccurately. The wavelength doesn’t determine the color. The frequency (f) determines it. When the light goes through different media (air,water, glass, etc.) its wavelength changes, but its color doesn’t. The wavelength (L) changes at same rate as the speed (c), i.e. f=c/L remains unchanged. So just f determines the color. If we use quantum viewpoint the result is same. The energy of photons (E) determines our feeling of color. But E=h.f, i.e. again the f determines the color.

By: geckzilla

geckzilla — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 21:14:50 +0000

I don’t suppose our nifty GPS satellites would be able to do their jobs anymore, but hey, at least our online video games would no longer have network lag. I can’t help feeling a little claustrophobic at the idea of infinite light speed.

By: Amir

Amir — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 17:33:36 +0000

There is a sense of causality that is lost if there is no universal speed limit (of light and every other phenomenon).

In our universe, if you know the distribution of matter and energy in a certain region at one point in time, you can predict with certainty what part of it will be like in a later time. Even taking quantum mechanics into account, it’s possible to predict probabilities for what will happen in the inside of the region.

If there was no speed limit (like in Newtonian mechanics), it’s possible that an infinitely fast, or arbitrarily fast, rock is approaching your system and will hit it just after the specified initial conditions. There is no way to make even probabilistic predictions under these circumstances. The same goes for an infinitely fast beam of intense light, such as a gamma ray burst.

One may even ask how this stronger form of causality wasn’t suggested before Einstein.

P.S. In computer algorithms for cellular automata, this kind of guarantee of causality is used to parallelize computation and in other interesting ways.

By: Arturo Gutierrez

Arturo Gutierrez — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 16:51:58 +0000

I’m a bit confused. You say that Einstein’s theory of relativity depends on the speed of light. So far so good. But then if we change light’s speed relativity gets all messed up? I was under the impression that Einstein used light’s speed in his equations only because that’s the most common thing that travels at the speed limit of the universe, not because relativity was connected to light per se.
Am I correct? Because otherwise it makes it seem as if relativity hinges on the physical properties of photons, such as their speed. Which is a… weird thought.

By: Elver S.S.

Elver S.S. — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 16:46:04 +0000

Good what-if read Dr. Koberlein. If there are no supernovae, would stars larger than 1.4 solar masses (i might have the number wrong) just collapse into a blackhole when they ran out of fuel?

.elver