Quote:
Originally Posted by sjastro
This is not true with SR. If one plots the Lorentz factor 1/sqrt(1-(v2/c2)) against velocity v, an asymptote is found at the line v=c. In this case an infinite Lorentz factor tells us that particle velocity cannot reach or exceed the speed of light c.
Regards
Steven
http://users.westconnect.com.au/~sjastro/small |
True, but here in lies the problem. The reason why a particle (except for the photon) cannot reach the speed of light is because of the infinities which crop up. This is why I've been arguing that SR (and even GR, in some respects) is not self consistent and has problems. However, and it may come as a surprise to some, SR doesn't preclude particles traveling faster than the speed of light. People misunderstand what Einstein said, and many scientist misquote him. He originally said that no material object can travel
at the speed of light. There are solutions for particles in SR to travel faster than light, but never as slow as light speed. Same problems happen for them when approaching c as occur for those particles which travel slower than c. You'll know them as tachyons. Now, they haven't detected them, but then again there's a lot of things even stranger than tachyons which physicists have said exist but have never detected. Super symmetric particles and the Higgs Boson, for example.
The reason why the fudge factors are looked at in the light that they are is because they take what should be reworked theories and make them palatable by hiding the mistakes made which create the infinities in the first place. Sure, they look good and work well, however they leave a nagging feeling that maybe you should try and get things right in the first place. So far as the cosmological constant is concerned, the jury is still far from giving a verdict on this. It's all been predicated on the observations of about half a dozen distant supernovae, far from being a statistically significant sample. But it's a start. If it works out, great, but then I think we should leave it for awhile until we can say definitively whether it's a fact of life or not. In so far as 1/2 spin numbers goes, it's one area where SR and quantum mechanics have come together rather well. But that is only one application where it actually works. It doesn't mean, then, that it'll work in every other case it's applied. Also, it wasn't so much as a fudge factor than it was a solution which appeared ad hoc, but in actual fact elegantly and self consistently predicted and observationally proved a characteristic of elementary particles. It's not often something like that happens.