• Question: could we make a spaceship that's faster than light?

    Asked by 576urak39 to Jayne on 9 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Jayne Ede

      Jayne Ede answered on 9 Nov 2017:


      That would be crazy awesome. Albert Einstein thought a lot about the speed of light – for example, what would a beam of light look like if you were travelling alongside it at the same speed. He found out that the faster something goes, the more mass it has and the more energy is required to move it. So if we wanted to make it move really really fast, it would need to have loads of energy behind it… But how would we carry that much fuel – it would weigh loads and then we’d need even more energy to move it… To move something at the speed of light we’d need infinite energy!

      Some scientists in 2011 got extremely excited when they thought they had seen a tiny, tiny particle, much smaller than an atom, go faster than the speed of light. This was very exciting, so they asked what other scientists thought could be allowing such a thing to happen – it turns out their equipment wasn’t working properly! The particles didn’t go faster than the speed of light after all.
      https://www.wired.com/2012/06/neutrinos-cant-beat-light/

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