• Question: what else is faster then the speed of light ??

    Asked by jonochau to Hannah, Ian, Jono, Mark on 26 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Hannah Brotherton

      Hannah Brotherton answered on 26 Jun 2013:


      Hi jonochau,
      So speed of light is 299 792 458 m / s, but Albert Einstein and others believed another particle called the tachyons could travel faster than this (jeeez, that’s pretty fast 😛 ). However, this is all theoretical because if tachyons were all around us, it would make our atmosphere very very unstable. So, they think this particle could exist but not here on earth. Also the scientist figured out it would take an infinite (thats everything and more) amount of energy to try and slow a tachyon down – :S

      So nothing that we know travels faster than the speed of light……or is there

      Scientist think light has traveled differently in the past and will change again. That means light could travel faster than itself right now. But again they can’t prove this until it happens.

      😀 So a lot of work for scientists to do

    • Photo: Ian Wilson

      Ian Wilson answered on 26 Jun 2013:


      Hi jonochau,

      As Hannah says, tachyons have been suggested but nobody has actually managed to prove their existence yet. A couple of years ago a group said that they had results showing that neutrinos (tiiiinyyy parts of an atom) were capable of travelling faster than light and that they had evidence. But they admitted that they weren’t sure they’d believe it until someone else confirmed it! So we can’t really count them yet either…

      There is something called Quantum Entanglement that apparently shows photons (light particles) moving faster than light but I really don’t understand it to be able to explain it! The website I found basically said that you need to be a physics genius to have any hope of understanding it lol!

      Ooh but there is a group of scientists trying to work out how to make particles travel faster than light. They’re trying to bend space-time, which will make time move more slowly somewhere and faster somewhere else :S I don’t know quite how possible this is but they’re playing around with it – check out this page in my blog to read a bit more about it: http://sciencegremlin.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/research-into-travelling-at-warp-speeds-engage/

      So…basically, we think that it might be possible for something to travel faster than light, but we haven’t discovered what it is yet for sure!

      Hope that helps a bit!

      Ian

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