darkuser Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Light in a vacuum travels at approximately 186,000
> miles per second, but a popular misconception is
> that, according to Einstein’s special theory of
> relativity, nothing in the universe can travel
> faster than this speed
>
> I'm afraid i only know the popular conceptions of
> things and therefore the misconceptions. Somebody
> explain this to me. Why is it a misconception?
> thx
>
> Dar

Brian Greene. 2004. The Fabric of the Cosmos New York: Alfred Knopf

p. 496-97 (Ch. 3 note 5) Special relativity shows that no material object can eve attain light speed: the faster a material object travels, the harder we’d have to push it to further increase its speed. Just shy of light speed, we’d have to give the object an essentially infinitely hard push for it to go any faster, and that is something we can’t ever do.


P 116-117 When special relativity says that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, the ‘nothing’ refers to familiar matter or energy. But the case at hand [BOM quantum entanglement, the idea that if you know the spin of one of a pair of photons from a particle decay, you instantaneously know what the spin of the other one is, even if they are quite separated], because it doesn’t appear that any matter or energy is traveling between the two photons, and so there isn’t anything whose speed we are led to measure. Nevertheless, there is a way to learn whether we have run headlong into a conflict with special relativity. A feature common to matter and energy is that when traveling from place to place they can transmit information. Photos traveling form a broadcast station to your radio carry information. So, in any situation where something—even something unidentified—is purported to have traveled faster than light speed, a litmus test to ask is whether it has, or at least could have, transmitted information. If the answer is no, the standard reasoning goes, then nothing has exceeded light speed, and special relativity remains unchallenged. In practice, this is the test that physicists often employ in determining whether some subtle process has violated the laws of special relativity (non has ever survived this test)
%%%%

To deal with the above quantum entanglement The following from Murray Gell-Mann. 1994. The Quark and the Jaguar NY: W.H. Freeman Co. PP.172-173. Bertlemann is a mathematician who always wears one pink and one green sock. If you see just one of his feet and spot a green sock, you know immediately that his other foot sports a pink sock. Yet no signal propagated from one foot to the other. Likewise no signal passes from on photon to the other in the experiment that confirms quantum mechanics. No action at a distance takes place.. . The false report that measuring one of the photons immediately affects the other leads to all sorts of unfortunate conclusions. First of all, the alleged effect, being instantaneous, would violate the requirement of relativity theory that no signal—no physical effect—can travel faster than the speed of light. If a signal were to do so, it would appear to observers in some states of motion that the signal was traveling backward in time. Hence the limerick:
There was a young lady named Bright
Who could travel much faster than light.
She set out one day, in a relative way,
And returned the previous night.

Next, certain writers have claimed acceptability in quantum mechanics for alleged “paranormal” phenomena, like precognition, in which the results of chance processes are supposed to be known in advance to “psychic” individuals. Needless to say, such phenomena would be just as upsetting in quantum mechanics as in classical physics; if genuine, they would require a complete revamping of the laws of nature as we know them
Bernard