The speed of light?

What limits the speed of light to it’s current value?

The Light State Troopers.

I hear there’s a bill in the works to increase c by 10mph.

Assuming that you wanted the scientific answer, not the facetious one (although they were funny), it’s limited by Maxwell’s Equations, which govern electromagnetic phenomena, such as EM waves (aka light), and by the values of the constants epsilon[sub]0[/sub] and mu[sub]0[/sub] , which determine the strengths of the electric and magnetic forces, and which show up in those equations.
Another way of looking at it is that the speed of light is the fundamental speed, and everything else is, in a sense, in terms of it, so that if it were faster, everything else would be, too, so we wouldn’t know the difference.

Yeah, but why is it constant at it’s (the speed of light’s) particular value.

This is one of those questions we don’t know enough to ask. If there is a specific reason why it is the exact value it is rather than another, there’s no way in our current understanding to find that reason. Chronos is correct, of course, that the speed follows from Maxwell’s equations, but that just passes the source off to other unexplained constants. So it just comes down to, “Because the universe is built that way.”

I would like to believe that someday we’ll find out more about why the universe happened to come together in this particular way. But we need to study the problem for a few more years first.

Side note #1: Maybe the Superconducting Supercollider, which was discontinued when Congress decided it was too expensive, could have helped move physics to the level that could ask these sorts of questions.

Side note #2: Knowing why the speed of light has it’s specific value could be the key to getting around the speed limit. Asimov, in Fantastic Voyage II, wrote about scientists that found that Planck’s constant and the speed of light were related on a fundamental level. They found that they could reduce h to increase c for a small region of space. So the spaceship would shrink, but it could go as fast as it wanted.

Clearly, that’s just science fiction, but that sort of thing might fit with future theories, once we get to the point of being able to state a reason for the value of a fundamental constant. Right now, we can’t do that.

Easy. Nature of the universe. After a certain amount of ‘why’ questions thats always the answer.

The constant C also seems t work for other messenger particles such as bosons and gluons.

Science doesn’t answer “why” questions.

Why are pi, e, and planck’s constant the numbers they are? No one really knows, It’s Just The Way It Is.

Well the only answers i’ve gotten are that’s the way it is. I don’t condider that a valid answer. The truth is this question is one that never has been answered. However my dad has discovered an answer to this which is quite brilliant utilizing string theory. His idea also ties inflation, the matter/anti-matter problem, why things other than photons can’t approach the speed of light limit and the principle of least action into one explanation. I’m really dying to tell you guys this, but I can’t. You see he hasn’t notorized his documents yet so someone could steal his idea’s for their own. Once notorized i’ll see if I can post it here. There are only 50-100 people in the world that could mathmatically prove this and my dad will soon start his search for a worthy partner for the challenge. Mathamatically proven this is essentially a TOE. It will probably take 5-10 years to prove , but is an instant Nobel prize.

A little backround on my dad: Considered the most brillant student to attend MIT (by MIT) since Richard Feynmann. Got his Phd in Nuclear Physics/Nuclear Engineering in 6 months. Most researched Phd thesis in MIT history. His thermonuclear models have made Nuclear reactors safer and Nuclear weapons (the US’s) way more powerful. And it doesn’t stop there. He created software that programed CDC machines flawlessly (in the 1980’s) in 15 minutes, where as before it took over ten hours. It goes on and on… But the funny thing is i’ve never heard him brag about these things. He has also had a lot of bad luck in the past but that’s ENOUGH I guess.

-Mike

:::sigh:::

Too bad it doesn’t run in the family…

Alright, so that wasn’t very nice on my part, but you were asking for it :rolleyes:

I hear ya Zor.

I agree with Silo’s assessment: “That’s the way it is” is not an answer.

Without any background in the area, and no reason for anyone to respect my opinion, here it is: I suspect that both time and space come in quantified chunks. The fastest that anything can move is one space unit per one time unit. That’s the speed of light.

I’ve got a whole spin-off theory revolving around this that seems to mesh with the Lorentz equations and explains why time slows with velocity, but again, while I’m pretty sharp in some parts of life, in physics I’m relatively limited.

Why does one have the value that it does? The question is meaningless. If a person asks why the speed of light is 3*10[sup]8[/sup] meters/second, then what they’re really asking is why are the meter and the second defined the way that they are. Silo, your dad might have a theory of why the speed of light is a fixed, constant value, but if he’s claiming to have a theory that explains why it has the particular value that it does, then no offense, but he’s a crackpot. Relative to what is he going to define its speed? The speed of light is the only fundamental speed in all of physics. It sounds to me like your father isn’t a professional physicist, or he wouldn’t be trying to establish priority by notarization, he’d be publishing in one of the accepted refereed journals-- that’s the path followed by the other few hundred folks that you mentioned who work in superstring theory. And why, if you’re so close to a person so qualified to answer your question, are you posting it to us?

*His explanation does not say why the speed of light is measured to a particular value. It does say why it is a constant, why it is the Universal speed limit and why only photons can travel it.

*He solves million/billion dollar technical problems. There is not a lot of money to make being a professional physicist and that is why he does not do it for a living.

*He could publish his work in a journal, but that would be giving candy to unqualified babies. Sorry but you don’t understand on how high a level my dad is. He really has
some thing here and that is not the way to go. Seriously.

*I was just curious what you all would say. Is that wrong?

Silo, not to rain on your parade, but we have no reason to believe a word you say. Give us a few names (your dad’s would be nice) and if we can verify that your dad is, in fact, a top-flight physicist, we’ll give your comments to that effect some weight. Not until then.

Name huh? his is Dr. Robert Masterson.

Anything with no (rest) mass travels at the speed of light, not just photons.

Agreed.