I was reading a story in the Washington Post this morning on Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and came across this line:
Did the author really mean to write that? Are nuclei really moving at 99.95 times the speed of light? Or did the reporter mean to say 99.95 percent the speed of light? If it’s the former, I guess I’m fundamentally confused about physics.
Yes, it sounds to me like your correspondent got it wrong. Accelerators routinely produce particle speeds approaching the speed of light but this sounds like warp 2 or something. (“Scotty! I need more power!”)
“non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem”
– William of Ockham
A recent Analog SF magazine tongue-in-cheekedly suggested that a good way to develop FTL drive would be to make 186,282 MPS the speed limit on some stretch of highway, because somebody would be certain to exceed it!!
And by its very nature, we could never discover it (because it would not be able to interact with subluminal particles). Thus we can properly toss tachyons in that circular file labelled “Occam’s razor”.