Apporaching C from gravity/electromagnetic force?

[GrandMasterK]

What would be the issue with this? Same old get close to C then stop increasing in speed?

 

I'm not entirely sure how magnets get their charge and how much they can handle and how big of a chunk of metal you'd need to get it to pull another peice of metal at it at C.

 

However, gravity for example. I don't know the formula but lets say you have a super heavy planet, or just a sphere made the heaviest stuff we got. I'd imagine it would have to be galaxies and galaxies wide just to be massive enough to suck you in like bat out of hell (light speed). So what happens? Your not pushing your being pulled, what happens when you get close to C or on C?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

It requires even more force to accelerate you as you're pulled by gravity. Same problem as before--the gravity won't be able to pull you to c.

[Klaynos]

The faster you go the more energy is required to speed you up for the same increase. As you approach c the ammount of energy required to do this approaches infinity, no massive object in the universe could provide enough gravitaional potential energy...

[[Tycho?]]

Dont think of c as a speed limit; things dont go faster and faster and suddenly become unable to get any faster than c. Instead, its the faster you go, the more difficult it becomes to go faster. This is because as your relative velocity grows to a signifigant fraction of c, you will start to get a noticable relativistic mass.

 

Analogy time:

You are rolling a rock along a flat surface for some reason. It's a big rock, so you have to push really really hard just go get it moving. You keep pushing harder and you get it rolling. You keep pushing and you get it going faster and faster. If you got this rock going close to c you would start to notice that the rock seemed to be getting heavier, and it becomes very hard just go get it moving a little bit faster. The closer to c the harder it becomes to speed it up. At very close to c you would be pushing and pushing and pushing and all you would get is a very very tiny increase in speed. Closer you get, the harder it gets. Which is why you can never actually reach c, it would take an infinite amount of energy to do so.

[computerages]

no massive object in the universe could provide enough gravitaional potential energy...

 

How about a block hole? If light also can't escape from the gravational attractive forces of a black hole, then would not it be possible to reach c once you get closer to such a hole?

[Klaynos]

How about a block hole? If light also can't escape from the gravational attractive forces of a black hole, then would not it be possible to reach c once you get closer to such a hole?

 

Nope... I can't remember the exact reasoning or numbers, I just recall this being the case...

[GrandMasterK]

Well if that's the way the universe wants to play this game it's messing with the wrong crowd. There's got to be a way to defy the universe and create and destroy energy. The fact that the energy in the universe has existed forever is just as ridiculous as energy being created from nothing and being turned into nothing once more. There's no method for determining how old particles are eh? And what about virtual particles, those are supposed to pop in and out of existence. Oh we'll find a way to cover distance faster than the speed of light, I just need to get some lunch first.

[Templar]

The fact that the energy in the universe has existed forever is just as ridiculous as energy being created from nothing and being turned into nothing once more.

 

-The gravitation field has negative energy, which should balance the energy you observe as matter & EM waves.

-Virtual particles do not violate conservation of energy.

-If SR holds to be correct, there's no way a mass can reach c. SR says, energy you need to give a mass to make it go at speed of light is infinite, ie impossible.

Massless particles on the other hand are allow to go at c only. Since there's no experiemental proof that SR is wrong, this thread is speculation entirely.

 

How about a block hole? If light also can't escape from the gravational attractive forces of a black hole, then would not it be possible to reach c once you get closer to such a hole?

 

How can the fact that light cannot escape beyond it's event horizon mean massive objects near black holes should reach c?

[5614]

To be precise SR does not say that nothing can travel faster than light, it says that nothing can be accelerated to the speed of light. If something were created which at its creation was travelling faster than c this would not violate relativity. However much theory and many experiments have gone into this and whilst it is theoretically possible in reality no such particle actually exists.

 

Also there are things other than SR which require c to be a constant.

 

How about a block hole? If light also can't escape from the gravational attractive forces of a black hole, then would not it be possible to reach c once you get closer to such a hole?

We all know that light can't escape a black hole. However this isn't actually true. A process known as Hawking Radiation is basically saying that black holes evaporate slowly and they do this by emitting particles or energy, possibly in the form of light, so in that sense light can escape a black hole.

 

However putting that aside the reason light gets sucked into a black hole is to do with the effect that the black hole has on space-time. Nothing to do with the speed of gravity at all.