Why aren't we able to travel at light speed?

The absolute cosmic speed limit is the speed of light in a vacuum. Nothing can exceed the speed of 3 x 10^8 metres per second (more accurately 299,792,458 m/s or 1,079,252,848.8 km/h).

According to physics, as we get closer to light speed, we'll need to contribute more and more energy to get an item to move. To achieve the speed of light, you'd require an endless quantity of energy, which is unattainable!

Why aren't we able to travel at light speed?

Have you noticed that you've grown in size while you in a flight or train?

Perhaps you've heard that an item moving at the speed of light acquires infinite mass. However, this isn't entirely accurate.

Although the item does not develop physical mass, it behaves as if it has.

For example, If a person weighing 70 kilograms travelled at half the speed of light, they would appear to weigh 92 kilograms. They'd act as if they weighed 177 kilograms if they travelled at 90% of the speed of light.

So, how can light particles move at the speed of light if the matter can't? Photons, which are massless particles, do not require energy to travel, hence light is made up of them.

Why can't photons travel faster than the speed of light if moving light particles requires no effort?

It is because of time dilation. As you get closer to the speed of light, time slows down and eventually ceases.

There is no such thing as time for a photon; everything happens instantly. Attempting to make a photon go faster than the speed of light is like bringing your automobile to a halt and attempting to travel slower. It's unimaginable!

We are constantly affected by time dilation in our daily lives, but the consequences are so subtle that we are unaware of them.

"Moving clocks run slow," according to Einstein's theory of relativity. That is, if you toss your clock off a cliff, the time it displays will be slightly behind that of a clock that was not thrown off.

This is true of all mechanical and biological clocks. At such high speeds, you really age slower, but you'd have to travel very quickly to see much of a change.

For example, someone who has spent six months on the International Space Station has aged 0.005 seconds slower than someone who has spent the same amount of time on Earth.

The International Space Station (ISS) orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes, although this is still just 0.003% of the speed of light. For your buddies on Earth, decades would have passed if you travelled at 98 percent the speed of light for just a few minutes.

A person approaching you at light speed would seem blue if we could see what was going on because the light waves that bounce off them and into your eye have been crushed and compressed together, shortening the wavelength. This phenomenon is referred to as a blueshift.

In the same manner, if the person was moving away from you, the light waves would be stretched, lengthening the wavelength and making them seem red, which is known as redshift. Everything in front of them would be squeezed together into a fuzzy tunnel, with the outer ring of the tunnel appearing red and the inner blue for someone travelling at light speed.

Science Storm