Why things don’t go faster than light
By John N. Hait
Special to the Saipan Tribune
Light has been shown to travel at the universal speed limit. But why is there a speed limit at all? Why does light travel at that speed, but other things cannot?
By the middle of the 20th century, the work of Newton, Young, Faraday, Maxwell, Planck, Einstein, de Broglie and many others had solidly established that everything in the universe is made of some kind of resonant field. Light is the simplest of all field structures because it oscillates (wiggles) in a straight line (without counting the effects of gravity.)
Thus, its internal energy, made of perpendicular electric and magnetic fields, interact with each other as they overlay one on top of the other. Being “force fields” they force each other in a straight line like an inch-worm moving one wavelength at a time…an inch-worm that inches along at 11,784,960,000 inches per second. (The speed-of-light in inches/sec.)
When fields overlap, they interact with each other at this constant speed called “c”, (or possibly a touch faster.) They never slow down. They never speed up. They are always moving, and always moving at c.
If the overlapping fields wavelength-match and are in-phase (they both start at the same time and end at the same time) they will force themselves forward in a straight line. If they are not in-phase, then they will be diverted to the side. It’s like stepping on one of those little plastic ketchup packages you get at McDonalds with two feet. If you step on both sides at once, the ketchup will spurt straight forward. But if one foot is farther forward than the other, then it will spurt to one side.
That’s what happens in atomic structure. Each wavelength-long encounter spurts the energy in a certain direction depending on the timed arrival of energy at each field-overlapping point. Then this internal energy circulates around like a dog chasing his tail. When his teeth catch his tail, it locks all that spurting ketchup into a circle.
If three or more field wavelengths overlap, then their diversions will be in 3D. So they become locked in a continually circulating ball.
All atoms circulate in this spherical resonance. That’s how something made of light-speed energy is actually able to stand still, simply because it circulates in a ball. You might say that atoms are always “having a ball.”
If we throw the ball, its circulating energy moves forward, then backwards, then forward again as it circulates along the flight path, simply because, internally, it’s moving in a circle. It’s like a gecko who has grabbed onto the rim of a bicycle tire. As the bicycle travels along, he moves forward with the bike on one half of his trip around the wheel (a little faster than the bike itself.) and a little slower around the wheel on the other half. (Just like he also moves up and down on his rolling merry-go-round.)
Field activity operates at the fixed speed, c, as it travels around the atom. Consequently, because it must “back up” for part of its journey, while moving forward for the other half of its trip, it can never catch-up-with the forward half, what it lost on the backwards half. Light though, doesn’t move in a circle, but moves in a straight line at that same speed of its internal field interaction.
And that’s why atoms, or anything else that circulates, are unable to match the speed of light with its linear flow. Therefore, because all fields interact at the constant speed, c, no matter how they move, they can never exceed the speed with which they interact internally. Just as a bicycle cannot move faster than its fastest internal component, no real object, made of ordinary matter, is able to travel at warp-speed.
And that’s why the speed of light is also the universal speed limit. © 2004 by CoolScience
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