Saturday 22 March 2014

Why objects cannot exceed the Speed of Light

In my view, the Speed of Light is NOT constant. What the experiments to prove it show, is that there is a flaw in the way the speed is measured. For example, when accelerating electrons in a cyclotron, it's found that Newton's laws of motion don't apply because the electron gains mass or rather momentum and interferes with Newton's laws of motion which assumes constant mass.

What the experimenters don't tell us is how the electron gains mass it's just that it does according to the formula E = mc2 i.e. as the electron is accelerated, it's final kinetic energy is predictable but the speed is not. Hence it's assumed that the mass has increased and I don't doubt that.

You have to consider the mechanism by which the electron is being accelerated i.e. by being attracted and pushed by electric fields. The carriers of an electric field are photons and I believe that the electron is absorbing these photons from the electric field; it's not that kinetic energy is being converted to mass. It's better to talk about it in terms of momentum (p).

If the electron is accelerated for some time, it gains a certain amount of momentum as predicted by classical mechanics. However, when the speed is measured, it's found to be much lower than that predicted by classical mechanics because the mass has increased.

My explanation for this mass gain is that as the electron gathers speed it absorbs the photons of the electric field because the relative velocity of the electron is closer to that of the photons. The reason why the electron doesn't absorb photons at lower speeds is because the photons have escape velocity. But as that escape velocity is reduced as the electron gathers speed, it loses that escape velocity and becomes entrapped by the electrons.

This implies that photons are particles with very small mass but if enough of them are entrapped in the electron, then they become part of the electron's mass or at least its momentum. There's no such thing as conversion. The question that should be asked now is what happens to the mass of the electrons when you reduce their speed? Do they retain their higher mass or do the entrapped photons regain their freedom by regaining their escape velocity. Remember, photons don't regain their speed, it's just the relative velocity of the electrons fall.

So, the scientists at Cern, Switzerland should measure the mass of the electrons before and after the experiment and they should find that they are identical. This would mean that as the electrons decelerate, they would emit the photons they entrapped.