Why and how is the speed. of light constant?
Where does it get extra kinetic energy from? And how does it lose it? How does the light know how fast I am going and then adjust accordingly to go faster?
Why and how is the speed. of light constant? Where does it get extra kinetic energy from? And how does it lose it?
questions like these become so much less vexing once you take the simulation pill fren
the frick are you talking about
We don't know. As far as I know. That was one of Einstein's things. He said if you allow me to set the speed of light to be constant in every reference frame and make it so nothing can go faster than light then I can tell you how gravity works. Einstein didn't say why light is constant though or why you can't go faster than light. Light doesn't know how fast you're going, it's just that if you try to go as fast as light you increase in mass and time slows down right up to the point where time stops. I think it would be better if light was infinitely fast really, then we wouldn't have any issues with long distance communication in space. Even though light is insanely fast it still takes millions of years to go even a tiny fraction of the distance across the universe
uhm.. GR doesnt need SR
Isn't that backwards?
No but it isn't strictly true either. SR can be constructed solely from a single assumption, that c is fixed. GR assumes that and a few other things too.
Yeah so SR doesn't need GR. So it was backwards.
>if light was infinitely fast
everything would happen immediately.
not good
What would not be good about it?
>increase in mass
This doesn’t happen, anon. I know the equation you’re referring to but it does not correspond with the mass increasing.
I should have said relativistic mass
Remember, the speed of light is a constant but not a limit.
light does not have any mass, so it does not gain or lose kinetic energy in the way that an object with mass does. Instead, light carries energy in the form of its frequency or wavelength
wtf does light travel through in space?
how would you see if it didn't?
Well you can use Maxwell's Equations to show the speed of light is a constant in all reference frames, but all that does is move the question to why are those equations true. Answer to that is QED but again, new questions.
Stop thinking of it as "speed" amd think of it as "rate of induction", that helped me understand spacetime a lot better via "speed of light perspective".
light slows down in some materials, its not constant
it doesnt slow down it collides more often
nope it slows down.
we would see different speeds for each photon if it was due to collisions.
It isn't, speed of light in glass is only 200k km/s
so are you saying the photons travel at slower than light speed?
No, they travel at speed of light. Light is slower outside of vacuum.
>In exotic materials like Bose–Einstein condensates near absolute zero, the effective speed of light may be only a few metres per second. However, this represents absorption and re-radiation delay between atoms, as do all slower-than-c speeds in material substances. As an extreme example of light "slowing" in matter, two independent teams of physicists claimed to bring light to a "complete standstill" by passing it through a Bose–Einstein condensate of the element rubidium. The popular description of light being "stopped" in these experiments refers only to light being stored in the excited states of atoms, then re-emitted at an arbitrarily later time, as stimulated by a second laser pulse. During the time it had "stopped", it had ceased to be light. This type of behaviour is generally microscopically true of all transparent media which "slow" the speed of light.
Well yes, you can learn that this is true by going to an ocean and diving in.
no I mean photons always travel at light speed, when they exist.
no they don't, I fricking hate popsci drivel so much it's unreal
so between them being emitted and them being absorbed, they don't travel at light speed?
>light speed
what the frick does this even mean? Everything has speed it has at any reference frame, and it's not constant, there's no magic here
>what the frick does this even mean?
299,792,458 meters per second
yes this is not the speed of light inside of glass