Monday, August 11, 2014

Speed of light- Foundation of Relativity of high speeds

From the invention of the vehicle,human is making his efforts to achieve the great speeds.He wants to move faster and faster. He built supersonic airplanes , rockets etc. to fulfill his desires. In his passion towards speed he attempted to speed up the particles at very high speeds.He thought he can speed the particles at whichever speed he wants. But Einstein had made an objection. He said NO, nothing can move faster than light. He made his conclusions on the basis of experiment done by Michelson-Morley.He postulated two ideas regarding speed of light which are the foundation of relativity theory.

  1. Speed of light is constant ( 299,792,485 m/s ) in every frame of reference and in every direction.
  2. All laws of physics must be same in all inertial frame of reference.
He suggested that concept of speed of light is somehow different from the speed of other particles in  Newtonian mechanics.Its velocity doesn't attach with source's velocity like we see in sound waves in classical mechanics. ( Do not relate it with relativistic Doppler's Effect) We should make an intuition  with the example.


Suppose there is a star, 5 light years ( lt. yr.) away from us. Take a hypothetical case (don't care about Keppler's and all other laws), in which a planet is swirling around the star ( fig 01), with a time period of  1 yr. with speed half of speed of light i.e. c/2 (c= 1 lt. yr. /yr., this notation will make our life easier)
                                                                            Fig 01


suppose current situation is like this,(fig 02)
                                                                             Fig 02

Speed of planet at this moment is c/2.Suppose it follow classical aspects of  speed  then the speed of light emerging from planet will be (c-c/2=c/2) means it will take 5/(c/2)=10 yrs. to reach us. Now after 1/2 yr. planet will be at situation( fig 03)
                                                                              Fig 03

But now light emerges with speed (c+c/2=1.5c) means now it will take 5/1.5c=10/3=3.33 yrs. It is less than time we calculated in previous situation. What it means actually. It means we see planet moving faster when it'll be at point B.You can visualize this phenomenon in following gif.


 But from our observations, i mean NASA and other space research center's  observations we can conclude that it is not actually happens. Einstien was right with his postulates.

In 1964, scientist named W. Bertozzi,tried to speed up the electrons to the extreme level. He had given energy  continuously  to electrons. But observed that at the low speeds he was able to speed up the electrons but as it approaches to light speed electrons started to converge their speeds to light speed c. No matter how much energy he gave to electrons he was not able to speed up electrons but the kinetic energy only.( fig 04) .Now you should start to believe on Eisntein.This can  give a solid prove for Einstein's Postulates and relativity. 

 Fig 04

I have another example to consolidate your belief on Einstein's Postulate , also on relativity consequently. There is a particle named "neutral pion". It is a short lived particle, being produced in particle accelerator, which decays in two gamma photons. Gamma rays are electromagnetic waves which travels with speed of light. Its speed is supposed to be constant, by Einstein postulate, in every frame of reference,means these should be decayed with speed c no matter pion is moving or not. But it was observed that  gamma ray  decays at speed c regardless pion is moving or not. This is a solid proof of relativity theories.

But here the queston is why can't anything achieve the speed of light? We try to get our answer from Relativity theory. From the theory we know that if a particle is moving with velocity 'v' with respect to a frame the it's mass will be increased by factor 'y'.
 If particle has rest is M0 then the mass after getting velocity 'v' will be,suppose M,

From the formula we can see, if  v tends to c then 'y' will become infinite, means particle's mass will become infinite. Infinite mass will need infinite energy to speed up it, so in W. Bertozzi's as electrons approaches light speed they need infinite energy to make their speed increase and this is not possible, infinite energy has no physical sense, we can't make electrons to travel at speed of light.

Here comes another question, why light is able to travel at its speed c ?actually if light is made up of photons which travel at light speed. So why their mass doesn't go infinity??...............This is because photon's rest mass is zero. Their mass doesn't goes infinity. So on their relativistic mass equation there is no effect of 'y'.

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