CNN iReport

The Speed of Light Inconstant!

One day, I heard during my science class that there was an article about a University of Toronto professor who believed that the speed of light (v) was not constant <http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/10/991005114024.htm>! My interest in this was immediately perked up. She briefly showed us the article, and I paid careful attention to what was represented there. The professor believed that light had traveled much faster than now, but that was almost all the information represented there that interested me. So, from what I knew, I began to formulate a plan to report this somehow to the world.

The answer came after several projects at school concerning the speed of light: during summer vacation, I visited the CNN tower in the US. My solution was the CNN iReport. The problem was, I did not know what it was called after I returned to my home. I spent the time trying to remember digging up all I know (which is very limited, as I am only 13 years old! Ha! A 13-year-old destroying one of the greatest and most important laws of science...) and began to create a “Letter to the Editor” for my English project on this matter. Now, after finding the site, I immediately created an account, and began to get to work on this report. Now that I ponder this, I wonder if I should have created a paper of this: but I don't have the experience, and this is easier anyway. And so, the report.

Is the speed of light constant? The obvious answer: Duh! Of course it is! Why wouldn'tt it be 299,792,458 m/s? Well, the answer is no. Diffraction is the easiest way to prove the speed of light inconstant. One of the most known examples of diffraction is the bending of the pencil in a cup of water.  Why does it bend? The diffraction occurs because of the change in the speed of light as it hits the water. This alone would be enough to prove the report correct, but there’s a complication: scientists measured v in a vacuum chamber. Vacuum chambers, having no atoms inside whatsoever to slow down the speed of light, was considered a perfect place to measure the speed of light as it is. Wrong.

For a long time, I have been fascinated by black holes. These dead stars which have so much gravity it pulls everything towards it and hides it beyond its event horizon had puzzled me, and had been too much for me to understand (as it had quantum mechanics, etc.). Key point: Why can’t we see them? Why are they “black holes”? The common answer is gravity. “The gravity is so strong, light cannot escape.” Oh, OK. Gravity traps the light. Then, I actually thought about that statement. What in the universe does gravity do to actually trap light!?

A long while back, I had found a handy book I recommend to everyone interested in science: Thinking Physics is GEDANKEN Physics by Lewis Carroll Epstein. In it, I learned about spacetime. Apparently, spacetime pretty much limits the speed of your travel through space and time. The faster you move through space, the less through time, and vise versa. This is a major concept which scientists use to prove that nothing can go beyond the speed of light, and the reason time seems to slow when you’re doing sports, though not always; it depends on what your mind is focusing on, but that’s beside the point. The amount of speed to go any faster is too great: you’d be stuck in time (ignoring all facts about increased weight the faster you go.) This is already enough to prove going faster than light impossible, not that anyone would be able to achieve this in our, or any, generation. Then, why is it that the “Theory of Relativity” (which the book makes a note about it being a law now: I don’t know whether it’s a theory or a law, but I frankly don’t care...) allows something to go faster than the speed of light? The reason being, it’s like (I’m using the book’s example here) trying to reach the horizon (the speed of light), and then going past into the horizon (representation of speed faster than light). This shows that something, if anything, going past the speed of light exists, it can not and will not be able to go “back” to being slower than the speed of light. But this proposed another question to me: Why can’t something going faster than the speed of light slow down to a standstill, unless it’s in another dimentional state of some sort?

Also in the book, it talks about gravity. The one thing you can never get away from no matter what you try. It’s everywhere. It’s where you are, the earth is, the open space, and (of course) present where a black hole is. Gravity, in a sense, is “emitted” from all mass in the universe, and the gravity reaches everywhere in the universe. This is what they call “Universal Gravity”. Even your finger is attracted to the other, though they are both too small and have too little gravity to do anything other than make you imagine the attraction. This may seem irrelevant, but what comes with gravity is something which the book called “Einsteins Dilemma”, which went like this: “Which of the following statements are correct? The speed of light in free space a) is always constant b) is slower in some places than others - the speed of light, therefore, is not always constant.” The answer was, “it seems almost blasphemous to say it”, b. Therefore, Einstein can pretty much be considered the brainchild of this whole idea. Everyone give him an applause!

So, why is the speed of light inconstant? Einstein had to find a way to clear this, as he had “at first made a bid deal out of saying the speed of light was constant”, so he created the SPECIAL (caps from the book) theory of relativity, which only applied to areas where there is little or no gravity. But, if I may interrupt Einstein here, does it not make sense to apply this theory anywhere and anytime? Universal gravity states that gravity exists everywhere in the universe, so this would prove impossible to actually be even a theory: it can’t work. The GENERAL (again caps from the book) theory of relativity says that if you go a respectable fraction of the speed of light, you time travel. Why is this?

Everything mentioned above leads to this: spacetime curvature through gravity. This is also known as the “Einstein’s Telescope” <http://www.einsteinstelescope.com/>. Einstein again more-or-less helps us here by providing an explanation for this. He defines gravity as a concept where not only can we picture it as us falling to the floor, but the floor rising to us! He says that there is no difference, and so, exactly the same. This leads to what the book calls “time warp”. If what Einstein said about artificial gravity is true, it means that light is effected by gravity in some way which bends the light. (The coming example is credited to Thinking Physics once more.) The speed of a rocket between one and two seconds, say, is accelerating. Slowing down the speed of light considerably to make this demonstration easier to understand, a source of light is sending pulses from the back of this long rocket to the front. Now, if, say, light travels constantly, two flashes of light from second 1 and second 2 should stay the same distance apart the whole time its on its way up the rocket. Say, on section three, the first flash hits the top. The second flash is still on its way to the top, but all this while, the rocket continues to accelerate. Eventually, the light reaches the top. Now, if observing the diagram of this situation from the book which I cannot find on the Internet (so if you have the chance, read the book please!), the two flashes of light, starting one second apart, end three seconds apart! If this representation of artificial gravity is true, real gravity should have the same effect. And so, gravity makes time slow down. More gravity, less passage through time. This, in effect, increases your speed through space much faster, though it may not be noticeable to anyone unless it is very large-scale. Now, because mass could be considered the source of all gravity, wherever mass is, there’s gravity.

This answers the question on how gravity effectively “traps” light. If you have enough gravity to actually stop time, you have zero speed, and so, the black hole, which is believed to have enough gravity to actually stop light in its tracks. Though this sounds contradictory to the spacetime concept, it can be easily clarified as not contradictory by saying gravity does not follow the space-time concept: it warps spacetime. It deforms it. It bends it. And so, anything in the spacetime curvature is inevitably caught in this effect as well, which effectively destroys the purpose of the vacuum chamber in which v was measured.

To answer the question on why you can not trespass the boundary of the speed of light is simple: you can. You merely can’t go faster. You can slow down, but not faster: at least not now. The amount of energy and speed to accomplish it is beyond imagining. One method is diving into a black hole, but they are too far away to even get a light year close to it by any methods we have now; even attempting to reaching a black hole is ridiculous, not that anyone would want to.

Time travel had been a fantasy ever since the nineteen-hundreds, and many worthy attempts in achieving this had ended in failure every single time. People deemed it impossible. But it is, in fact, possible though spacetime and spacetime curvature. If you’d ever experienced time flying by as you play a basketball game, or time stretching as you wait for something, you had experienced some effects of spacetime. Everyone constantly time travels. Some faster, some slower, but all do. The extent of this is almost unfelt though, as how you experience the time travel depends on what your mind is focusing on: if you’re distracted by the space portion of the scale, you almost pay no attention to the time portion, which results in time whipping by without you knowing. Then, there are those who sit in the audience of a basketball game, and while those on the basketball field move around and focus on the game, if you’re bored enough, you feel as if the game is lasting forever. This is because you are traveling slower through time than the players. When you are bored, you have nothing much to think about, and so, you can feel your passage through spacetime much easier than others. This is why all tense, bored, or such moments seem long, while those with action, movement, and such seem so short. The only problem is, the extent of time travel is just that: no future or past travel. The scale is made so that no matter how your speed through spacetime is, you eventually balance out. The earth itself is constantly moving, and so, even if you did move during the entire time you lived, it would have to have been so fast, you outpace time itself. This is what clocks journeying with astronomers slightly experience. It travels faster than the ones on earth. This does not mean that if you go so fast around the earth, you’d be in the future, but that spacetime allows passage of people differently depending on their speed.

I have recently learned that no statement or idea is accepted by scientists unless it is able to be proven. The most effective way to prove this would be to measure the speed of light on a different body of mass with different gravity, but this is a bit too much to ask, so a very simple way to test this is by using only your fingers and the world around you. If you take your thumb and forefinger of each hand, pinch them together, and put the points of your fingers next to each other so that you have a small opening in the center of your fingers and your thumbs, you have just made an instrument by which you can see spacetime curvature at work. If you put this shape of hands up to your eyes and move it ever so slightly in any direction while looking at a distant object, the object seems to warp. Not working? Focus more on the edges of your fingers without actually looking at them. The closer to the finger the object is, the more warped it is. The gravity of your fingers alone is enough to warp spacetime; imagine what a planet can do! Astronomers see much more stars this way than they should see without “gravitational lensing” of the distant heavens. The measurements and calculations of how much spacetime is warped for the amount of gravity I shall leave to others to find out.

And so, to answer the question, the speed of light through passage of any space is-

Indeterminable.

Why, after all this explanation, is it undefined, rather than inconstant? Because it is our journey through spacetime, and the existence of gravity which prevents this. The only way to effectively measure the actual speed of light, if it really is constant, would be if you escape ALL gravity, and have light to measure. This is absolutely impossible. Anything you bring - anything at all - would have its own gravity. There is no place in this universe as far as anyone knows which has absolute zero gravity, unless the law of universal gravity is mistaken, which I don’t belive it is. And so recapping, gravity warps spacetime, and in doing so speeds up/slows down anything caught in the effect in terms of their passage through space and time, and so, effectively bends light similarly to diffraction, only the light is passing through spacetime curvature, and not a narrow aperture.