StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Academia Nut wrote:And us, the energy requirements for velocity do have an asymptote around c, which is to say that the requirements go to infinity on both sides of c while being finite everywhere else.

Kinda. If v is greater than c, you get imaginary numbers for your energy, which so far as I know makes no physical sense at all (nor is it necessarily possible).

And as I understand it, discarding GR for a second, the fact that nothing can hit c comes directly from Einstein's postulates and the Lorentz transformation. If these are accepted, it's not that hard to show how you must modify your kinetic energy and momentum expressions to account for objects moving at high speeds; these give you results approaching infinity for any particle with mass (massless particles, like photons, must travel at c according to these same relations).

Well, technically its imaginary numbers for energy or imaginary numbers for mass, either of which we have no idea how that would actually work out if it worked at all. But yeah, going fast is covered by STR and considering the fact that we've confirmed experimentally that mass increase, time dialation, and such all occur in particle accelerators means that the only way to replace STR is with something that is really close to it except for a few little places.