Jun 24, 2008
Celeritas
When I chose to blog about technology as well as physics, I did not realize that physics was quite an unpopular subject for bloggers and web 2.0 enthusiasts. Most probably since noone is interested in boring physics classes. Even in school I was least interested in Physics lessons, primarily because my school lessons focussed on the focal length of lenses and how mirrors reflected each other. Then atlast, I came across Einstein’s theories which intrigued me and made me look at physics with new and renewed interest.
I had discussed about tachyons in one of my earlier posts. Tachyons are theoritical particles which could move at a speed faster than light. However, these particles merely exist in theory because it is impossible for any particle to exceed the speed of light. If a particle were to exceed the speed of light, then it would in fact be able to fly back in time, since it would have arrived before it arrived it had left. But, there is no way any body could exceed the speed of light since, it simply would not be allowed. Let us assume there was an engine which could possibly accelerate to light speeds (299,792,458 miles per second) But after reaching the speed of light, it simply would stop accelerating anymore. So now, the engine is pushing out energy and the body is not moving any faster. Where does the energy go? It gets converted to mass and the mass of the body starts growing to gigantic proportions, but still the body would not move any faster.
The example The speed of light which nothing can overtake is represented by a c which stands for ‘Celeritas‘, which is the latin word for swiftness. This post would really need a more elaborate explanation under the shadow of the all encompassing E = MC² which you could watch out for. or rather not.



