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Could we send electric data across time?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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No. The universal speed limit, the speed of light, is also the limit at which information or data can be transmitted.
What a coincidence! /s
That's actually not as obvious as it might sound. The thing is, as far as we know, light seems to have no mass¹. No mass means no inertia. So, if it accelerates at all, it should immediately be at infinite speed. But for some reason, it actually doesn't go faster than what we typically call the speed of light. And we assume, that's the case, because that's actually the speed of causality.
So, it's reversed. It's not that light is just the fastest thing and as a consequence of that, nothing can be transmitted faster. No, it's actually that there appears to be a genuine universal speed limit and light would be going faster, if it could.
¹) Light is still affected by gravity, e.g. can't escape from black holes. We do assume that gravity is just a 'bend in spacetime' because of that, meaning even any massless thing are affected by it, but yeah, we're still struggling to understand what mass actually is then.
Don't worry, they'll fix that on the next patch. The programmers were lazy so put an arbitrary speed limit thinking nobody would find out.
"300 m/s ought to be enough for anybody"
Photons are massless and along with other massless particles are known as Luxons because they always travel at the speed of light. But notice that the speed of light varies depending on the medium that light is crossing. (Eg 300,000 m/s in a vacuum . 200,000 m/s in glass)
So you could certainly transmit data faster than light through glass by simply transmitting it in a vacuum. But there’s little practical use except perhaps gravity wave detectors.
There are a class of particles that always travel slower than light (unless you accelerate them with infinite energy) and also a theoretical and controversial class of particles that travel at infinite speed and would require infinite energy to slow them to light speed. (If they did exist no means has ever been postulated to detect them)