[Shark Bait (Stu)]

I have been listening to reports and reading articles about recent events at CERN's LHC.

Quote: At full power, trillions of protons will race around the LHC accelerator ring 11 245 times a second, travelling at 99.9999991% the speed of light. Two beams of protons will each travel at a maximum energy of 7 TeV (tera-electronvolt), corresponding to head-to-head collisions of 14 TeV. Altogether some 600 million collisions will take place every second.

So......

If two cars have a head on collision and they are both travelling at 100km/h, the combined speed of the impact is going to be 200km/h.

If two protons collide, travelling at 99.9999991% the speed of light they will NOT have a combined impact velocity that is faster than the speed of light. I have trouble visualising this as it seems to defy logic.

Science states that any object (or sub-atomic particle) cannot reach the speed of light as they have mass.

Any thoughts that can help make this clear would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
Stu.