Where did the Light Speed Limit come from? It was not an act of congress or even a supreme court decision that created the light speed limit. The United Nations had nothing to do with it. You will not find the Light Speed Limit posted anywhere in the Universe. If you could find it, there would be nobody to enforce it.

The Light Speed Limit is a property of creation. As with all physical laws, it has a purpose but no real reason why to it. Physical laws are arbitrary. Nothing requires a universe to have laws at all. In fact, the Universe having laws is counter intuitive. Why the Universe has laws is outside the topic of this series and an idea better suited to stand up philosophy. That is not what I am doing right now.

Properties of the Universe are different from laws in that laws govern the behavior of the Universe while properties, shaped by the laws of the Universe, describe the nature of the Universe. When you are studying for your driving test, you will have a list of laws to cover; however, you will not find a road map in those laws. Laws will still define the sharpness of curves and the placement of stop signs along the roads. A turn can only be made so sharp at any given speed. Traffic signs, lights and even the lines on the pavement help to control traffic flow with the help of the law. Without laws, all the signs on the roads would have no meaning to drivers, passengers and pedestrians. Laws effect ths properties of the roads. The properties are not the laws themselves.

Now that I’ve gone off course and wasted space, I can address the reason why the theory says that there is a light speed limit. It all relates to something called relativity. You are seated, maybe standing, on top of a ball of rock spinning on its axis and moving around many other things in space. Could you tell? That is relativity. From your perspective, you are stationary and the Universe is moving around you. Nothing that you can sense is permitted to interfere with this view of reality because this is a property of the Universe. In fact, all possible points of view, concerning the motion of the Universe must be considered equally valid because we have no way of measuring absolute motion. Everybody is right even though nobody agrees.

What if you are sitting in the USS Speed Demon and you reach the speed of light? All of the lights would go out. Actually, the light in the room would not be able to move faster than anything else in the room, including your eyes, so the light would never be able to reach your eyes. Suddenly, you would know that you were moving at the speed of light. That violates relativity. OOPS; that cannot happen. Either light does not move at a fixed velocity or something has to happen at the speed of light to prevent you from knowing that you have reached the speed of light.

We live in the computer era so we know that there is a fixed velocity to light. It takes time to bounce a signal off of a satellite. Wires inside of a computer can only be so long or electricity, moving at light’s speed through a wire, would take too long to reach its destination. Light has a definite speed to it.

There is one problem with the USS Speed Demon. Relativity requires a fixed rate of translation. You can feel it if your car speeds up or slows down, as a result of inertia. This does not violate Relativity. The model does not work if you are accelerating to Light Speed. Luckily for us, the model does work at the speed of light because the lights would still go out.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.