General Question Thread

[counter-strike rocks]

(Sorry CS Rocks, but this thread isn't going to get any traffic. You need to set it up nicer, so I edited it for you. It was a fairly good idea though.)

-CaptainBaconMan

Use this thread to ask random, general, or specific questions. Or come in to answer them for people. Anything from life problems, to tech stuff.  

[Radiosquid]

Oooh! I have question that I was pondering this morning. So, me and my friend were playing Fallout 3. When my friend started get irradiated from drinking the water, he complained and said that all the fallout should have dissipated by 30 years. Is this correct?  

[CaptainBaconMan]

No, the fallout in the air, yes, even less than that actually, but the ground, and enclosed areas can stay irradiated for a very, very long time.  

[Radiosquid]

I have another question! Why is it theoretically impossible to move faster than the speed of light?  

[counter-strike rocks]

cus light is so damn fast

EDIT: i was just kidding -_-  

[CaptainBaconMan]

That's technically not true. using speed as a relative term, a rephrase is needed. It is theoretically (actually) impossible to have a higher velocity than light. This is because light is pure energy, and although does have characteristics of particles (i.e. light being referred to as photons instead of energy waves) it has no mass, and we still don't understand a lot of things about it, and I need to look into it more but light is created by some sort of energy release in chemical reactions and fusion and blabity blah blah.


Anyways. You are made up of particles that have mass, and light is the fastest thing in the universe. The faster an object goes, the more energy it takes to move said object to a higher velocity, so, if light is the fastest thing in the universe, then the closer you get to that velocity, the more energy it takes to increase it, so, according to that logic, and the math behind it, it takes an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light, let alone surpass it.


But, that being said, it is theoretically possible to go 'faster' than the speed of light by passing through a singularity, i.e. a wormhole, or a rip in the space/time continuum. There are no evidence that these exist physically, but we have every sign to believe they are possible, and a lot of people think that blackholes have so much gravity that their warp on space/time is enough to rip a hole in it.  

[Radiosquid]

Alright, next question. What exactly IS space time? I hear it used all the freakin' time, but never in any way that would suggest what it is, besides something incredibly important that holds the universe together.  

[CaptainBaconMan]

Lol, looks like you need theoretical physics 101.

The space/time continuum, as a human representation of space and time, is downgraded to illustrate a point and to be easier to understand. We show time as the third dimension and space as the second to show people how things work.
Example:


Without dumbing it down, space/time is basically the fabric that makes up our universe without human interpretation. Time, is actually a physical dimension, we just experience it in a tunnel fashion.

Lol, sorry it's really hard for me to explain this stuff. This article can probably explain it better.

Space/Time  

[Radiosquid]

That's the lamest article ever. Hehe. You accidentally just linked to the pic in the post... at least I think it was an accident.  

[CaptainBaconMan]

Oh s**t, yeah it was an accident, I fixed it, check it again.  

[Radiosquid]

Thanks for your help. I'm asking because I'm doing an independent research paper on why it's impossible to travel faster than the speed of light... for my Literature class. My teacher said we could pick anything at all, and I always wondered why we couldn't go faster than light. It always seemed like just some arbitrary boundary.  

[CaptainBaconMan]

It is arbitrary, you should do a report on how it is possible, using a singularity.