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The answer is no. The pole would bend/wobble and the effect at the other end would still be delayed. The reason is that the force which binds the atoms of the pole together - the Electro-Magnetic force - needs to be transmitted from one end of the pole to the other. The transmitter of the EM-force is light, and thus the signal cannot travel faster than the ...

57

The information about the pushes will be received on the other end with the speed of sound in the substance of the pole. For any real material it is much slower than the speed of light (for a steel rod it would be about 1000 m/s).

53

One of the results of special relativity is that a particle moving at the speed of light does not experience time, and thus is unable to make any measurements. In particular, it cannot measure the velocity of another particle passing it. So, strictly speaking, your question is undefined. Particle #1 does not have a "point of view," so to speak. (More ...

47

If I was on a bus at 60 km/h, and I started walking on the bus at a steady pace of 5 km/h, then I'd technically be moving at 65 km/h, right? Not exactly right. You would be correct if the Galilean transformation correctly described the relationship between moving frames of reference but, it doesn't. Instead, the empirical evidence is that the ...

44

The photons move at the speed of light in a straight line from the laser to the moon and back. The spot on the moon can move faster than light. There is no law against that. The spot is not a physical object, just an image. When you turn your wrist nothing happens to the photons which are already on the way to the moon - they continue on the same trajectory. ...

39

Last (?) Edit: The "problem" is solved: it was mainly a problem in the timing chain, due to a badly screwed optical fibre. A high level description of the problem is given here and a more detailed explanation of the investigation is here. List of possible systematic biases I thought it might be a good idea to list the possible systematic biases which could ...

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There are quite a few common misconceptions about the expansion of the universe, even among professional physicists. I will try to clarify a few of these issues; for more information, I highly recommend the article "Expanding Confusion: common misconceptions of cosmological horizons and the superluminal expansion of the Universe" from Tamara M. Davis and ...

35

The thing about the speed of light $c$ is that it's not just a number associated with a certain type of particle. While we could talk about the mass of the proton, and there would be no problem assuming non-protons had greater or lesser masses, the value $c$ is an entirely different beast. $c$ is an intrinsic property of spacetime itself, not of the ...

34

This question implicitly refers to the visible universe, but we should state that explicitly, as otherwise the question doesn't make any sense. It may seem like we shouldn't be able to see more than 13.7 billion light-years (13.7 giga-light-years, or glyrs) away, but that reasoning omits the expansion of spacetime according to General Relativity. A photon ...

26

If (and that's a big if) tomorrow we had a $70\sigma$ detection in a repeatable experiment of a particle that travelled faster than $c$, then one of several things would be true. 1) We would be forced to conclude that $c$ is not, in fact, the limiting speed of information transfer; everything based on this assumption would have to be scrapped (pretty much ...

26

does it mean that at a blackhole, an object will fall at an infinite speed because of the infinitely strong gravitational pull of the blackhole? No. Actually, defining exactly what you mean by the speed an object falls into a black hole is a tricky problem. In relativity you generally find that different observers observe different things. But we can ...

25

In the case of relativity, "information" refers to a signal that enforces causality. That is, if event A causes event B, then some signal must travel from A to B. Otherwise, how would B "know" that A had occurred. Some examples: Light (signal) from a candle (A) hits your eye (B), causing you to see it. Electricity (signal) flows from a connected switch ...

25

Cute question! For a neutrino with mass $m$ and energy $E\gg m$, we have $v=1-\epsilon$, where $\epsilon\approx (1/2)(m/E)^2$ (in units with $c=1$). IceCube has detected neutrinos with energies on the order of 1 PeV, but that's exceptional. For neutrinos with mass 0.1 eV and an energy of 1 PeV, we have $\epsilon\sim10^{-32}$. The time of flight for ...

23

(There's a couple of these questions kicking around, but I didn't see anyone give the "two boosted copies" answer. Generically, I'd say that's the right answer, since it gives an actual causality violation.) In your scenario, the two planets remain a hundred thousand light years apart. The fact is, you won't get any actual causality violations with FTL that ...

22

They are probaby talking about supernovae, like how SN1987A was first detected by neutrinos before the light arrived. In that case neutrinos and photons are both produced in the core of the supernovae explosion, but they have dense clouds of gas to get through before they get to empty space and travel freely to us. Since the neutrinos are weakly interacting ...

22

It's not possible to communicate faster than light using entangled states. All you get out of entanglement is a correlation between the values of two measurements.; the entanglement doesn't allow you to influence the value measured at another location in a non-causal way. In other words, the correlation only becomes evident after combining the results from ...

21

Is this even remotely possible? Well... "possible," yes, but kind of like how tunneling through a brick wall is "possible": while you can't definitively prove it impossible, you'd feel pretty safe saying "this will never happen." Relativity is really well-tested, and it's really hard to conceive of a way that neutrinos could travel faster than ...

21

No. Relative to Earth your bus will have (almost) zero length, so moving from back to the front of the bus will contribute nothing to your speed relative to Earth.

21

Imagine a rock on a rope. As you rotate the rope faster and faster, you need to pull stronger and stronger to provide centripetal force that keeps the stone on the orbit. The increasing tension in the rope would eventually break the it. The very same thing would happen with bar (just replace the rock with the bar's center of mass). And naturally, all of this ...

20

Before I answer, a couple caveats: As Adam said, the universe isn't going to start behaving any differently because we discovered something. Right now it seems much more likely (even by admission of the experimenters) that it's just a mistake somewhere in the analysis, not an actual case of superluminal motion. Anyway: if the discovery turns out to be ...

20

Shine a flashlight on a wall. Rotate the flashlight so the illuminated spot moves. Q: How fast does the spot move? A: It depends how far away the wall is. Q: How fast can the spot possibly move? A: There is no limit. Put the wall far enough away, and the spot can move with any speed. Q: What is moving across the wall? A: Nothing. The light that makes up ...

18

To answer this kind of question properly, it's important to clarify the foundational issues of why SR forbids superluminal speeds and what kind of superluminal speeds it forbids. There are several independent arguments of this kind that tell us several different things. Superluminal transmission of information would violate causality, since it would allow ...

18

You have a few longer answers which were already updated, but here is a concise statement of the situation in mid-2014: An independent measurement by the ICARUS collaboration, also using neutrinos traveling from CERN to Gran Sasso but using independent detector and timing hardware, found detection times "compatible with the simultaneous arrival of all ...

18

The internet is a collection of physical machines connected by copper-polyethylene signal wires, which carry signals at $0.7c$–$0.8c$, optical fibers, which carry signals at $0.6c$–$0.7c$, and occasionally radio links, which propagate in air at approximately $c$. Ironically, radio links are generally the slowest way to send long messages, because of the way ...

17

I read somewhere that $E=mc^2$ shows that if something was to travel faster than the speed of light then they would have infinite mass and would have used infinite energy. Nope, not true. For a couple of reasons, but first, let me explain what $E = mc^2$ means in modern-day physics. The equation $E = mc^2$ itself only applies to an object that is at ...

16

There is a real object with relativistic speed of surface - millisecond pulsar. The swiftest spinning pulsar currently known, spinning 716 times a second. Surface speed of such pulsar with radius 16 km is about $7*10^7$ m/s or 24% speed of light. It is calculated that pulsars would break apart if they spun at a rate of more than 1500 rotations per ...

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You should tell your son that this very question was asked by, explored by, and eventually answered by the some of the brightest physicists of the 19th century. Eventually two scientists named Michelson and Morley came up with an experiment to measure this effect, and were amazed to discover that it didn't exist! Rather: Light travelled at exactly the same ...

16

The answer is simple: Maxwell's equations. Maxwell published his electromagnetic theory in the 1860s. This generated a huge schism in physics. Maxwell's electromagnetism was in direct conflict with Newtonian mechanics. There is no allowance in Maxwell's electrodynamics for the speed of the emitter or the speed of the receiver. The speed of light is constant ...

16

A tachyon is a particle with an imaginary rest mass. This however does not mean it "travels" faster than light, nor that there's any conflict between their existence and the special theory of relativity. The main idea here is that the typical intuition we have about particles -- them being billiard ball-like objects -- utterly fails in the quantum world. It ...

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