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From: nyts@dorsai.org (New York Theosophical Society)
Subject: Re: Is This True?
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Date: Mon, 7 Aug 1995 14:26:35 GMT
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Alf the Poet (alf@epix.net) wrote:
: I had heard somewhere, several years ago, that relativity allowed for the 
: possibility that there could be "entities" for whom the speed of light is 
: impossibly _slow_.  I'm not a physicist, but if this is the case I'd be 
: interested in learning more about it.

	Given: No matter what your current speed is, the speed of light, 
as measured from your own point of view, is the same.  To the best of our 
current ability to do so, this has been proven; any theory supplanting 
this will also have to explain why the current experiments work.

	Everything else is logical extrapolation.  Avoiding the 
mathematics (which, to a mathematical mind, actually simplifies things, 
but the English explanation is more widely understandable), it means that 
a mass cannot be accelerated to exactly the speed of light.  Since we 
currently have no means of accelerating a mass beyond a certain point 
without , at some juncture, reaching that point, it means that you cannot 
accelerate an object past the speed of light, either.  But let's say an 
object somehow started out moving past the speed of light.  In order for 
the speed of light to be the same, as measured from the point of view of 
that object, it would have to be moving backwards in time.  In addition, 
it could not move at precisely the speed of light, either, so that it 
could not be decelerated past the speed of light.

	The behaviors of such an object are predictable; whether or not 
such an object exists is unknown, although it is a fun mental exercise.

	Bart Lidofsky

