The presence of matter and energy in space tells spacetime how to curve, and that curved spacetime tells matter and energy how to move. subjecting the idea to some of the most stringent constraints ever obtained by humanity. But the big prize still remained: to incorporate gravitation into the equation.Ĭountless scientific tests of Einstein's general theory of relativity have been performed. The opposition made it no less true, however. This idea was revolutionary when Einstein proposed it, with many professional physicists (wrongfully) resisting it for decades. But the speed of light itself never changes through the vacuum of space. If you and the source move away from one another, the light's wavelength gets redshifted if you mutually move towards one another, the wavelength gets blueshifted. No matter who you are, where you are, how quickly or in what direction you travel through the Universe, you will always observe all light waves traveling through space at that same universal speed limit: the speed of light in a vacuum. This taught us something incredibly important: the velocity of light is independent of any relative motion through space. The speed of light was the same no matter which direction the interferometer was oriented, including with, perpendicular to, or against the Earth's motion through space. compared with what was expected if Galilean relativity were true (bottom, dotted). ![]() The Michelson interferometer (top) showed a negligible shift in light patterns (bottom, solid) as. ![]() But if that's true, then how come we can see objects in our Universe, which began with a Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago, that are up to 46 billion light-years away? That's at the heart of Robert Lipinski's question, which asks: If you have mass, you can only approach (but never reach) that speed if you travel through a medium instead of a vacuum, you can only travel slower than that ultimate cosmic limit. That fundamental speed, 299,792,458 m/s, is the speed at which all massless particles must travel through the vacuum of space. One of the fundamental rules we all learn in physics - set forth by Einstein more than 100 years ago - is that there's an ultimate speed limit that everything in the Universe must obey: the speed of light. However, that doesn't mean that galaxies are actually moving through the Universe at speeds faster than light the fabric of space itself is continuously changing in properties. The fabric of expanding space means that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it appears to.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |