First of all, I understand the question and I think I have a reasonable explanation for it all. But I will save that for later. For now, let me address a few things...
There are many examples of things that travel faster than light. The scissor example is but one. They're all kind of contrived, especially the quantum examples, but here's another for you guys. You have a flashlight that shoots a straight beam (it could very well be a laser but I wanted to make the example simple). Now, put it in a circular room and spin it. You will see a dot on the wall and it will be moving. How fast will it be moving? Well, that depends on the radius of the room, doesn't it? Well, make the room arbitrarily big. What happens? You can make the dot move arbitrarily fast - faster than the speed of light, even. How about that? Can anyone explain that?
Like I said, I can explain it but I will save that til I see some more conjectures...
Oh, and while I'm at it, let me address something someone said:
Quote:
Originally posted by CSflim
"Froce is speed x mass" - Oh dear god!
Newton's law do not hold for things with very large mass, or for things at very high speed. Light travels at very high speed. As such, you cannot use Newton's laws to try to explain it (even if you manage to state said laws correctly).
Light is massless, but it still has a momenteum, or impart a force. If light had a mass, it would not be able to travel at light speed!
This can only be understood by modern physics. This is why newtonian physics is reffered to as "classical" physics.
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First, I can't believe you didn't state the obvious. Force is
not the product of speed and mass, that's momentum...
Secondly, light has no
rest mass but, since light is never at rest, this is not a problem. However, I would tend to agree that light has no mass only because of the definition of mass: the measure of inertia. It's hard to talk about the inertia of something that
moves at a constant speed regardless of your frame of reference!