Why Achieving Light-speed Requires Infinite Energy: Matter-waves

all your life and your future you've experienced the universe through the lens of Newtonian physics that is to say everything behaves exactly as you'd expect them as a kid that's made it difficult to comprehend that there was a speed limit I mean just go faster right what's stopping you in order to answer this question unfortunately I'm gonna have to completely change the way you view the universe in order to interpret why we can't travel light speed let's create an analogous situation so we can have an alternate way of thinking about this imagine this scenario why can't I jump from the earth to the moon here we run into the same issues for travelling light speed for starters you simply do not possess enough energy or strength to be able to jump from the earth to the moon it just cannot happen full stop secondly even if you did have the strength or energy to do such a thing the forces from such a jump would cause your body to rip apart or explode now keeping these two issues in mind let's rethink how we see the universe what you're looking at is the absolute basic concept of everything an excitation or vibration in a field everything you can possibly think of every interaction and reaction can be explained by what we call this standard model this model describes the existence and interactions of tiny almost infinitesimal small entities called elementary particles now we call them particles but the truth is it's better to think of them as quantum fields each elementary particle has its own corresponding field that exists everywhere in space-time and the particles themselves are excitations in these fields in most places in the universe these fields are not excited and thus there are no particles but there's nothing stopping these fields from being excited if given the opportunity up close particles appear as a vibration or some sort of etheral entity but from far away it appears to have a defined shape or boundary and so it's easy to think of these excitations as particles this is the wave particle duality of the universe everything can be described as either a wave or a particle for most things it makes sense and is easier to describe them as particle it's only in certain strange instances we're thinking of them as a wave is necessary now quantum field theory is absolutely fascinating and I plan to break it down in the future when I'm more confident in it but for now what you must internalize is that all matter and energy can be thought of as excitations or quantized vibrations and quantum fields so now when considering this fact why can't we travel the speed of light the first reason we can't jump to the moon is also the same reason we can't go Lightspeed it takes too much energy or force to be feasible here's something you've probably never considered let's say you playfully push your friend away from you it took a force it took energy to push them but why what was resisting your push some of you may already know the answer is something called inertia it takes energy to move mass but again I ask why what forces resisting your push that requires you to exert energy to simply move mass when you jump back into the quantum world and we look at a singular particle what's holding it in place what stops a particle from simply going faster and faster and never slowing down this is where the infamous Higgs field you may have heard of comes into play remember all particles exist within a field throughout all of time and space and excitations in one field can induce excitations in another the Higgs field is strange because unlike the other fields this field has vibrations and excitations almost everywhere within it and since fields can interact with each other interacting with this vibrating soupy Higgs field creates what we could infer as inertia or resistance is two changes in motion and moving now not all mass comes from moving through this soup but this interaction with the Higgs field is necessary for localizing most elementary particles I'll explain what that means more later because of the existence of mass and thus the localization of particles we can change a particles momentum now an interesting thing about all things in the universe is we all have an intrinsic momentum that is to say everything wants to move nothing stops moving you may look at something sitting on a table nearby and think hey he's standing still he doesn't want to go anywhere but in reality he wants to go straight down with gravity but the table is stopping him not to mention he's already traveling with the earth so relative to everything everything is moving or wants to move so when I say a particle is interacting with the soup of the Higgs field that doesn't mean it slows down its velocity or anything that just means it doesn't change its momentum or in other words the Higgs field couples with particles to conserve their momentum it's a really weird concept that doesn't exist with Newtonian physics but due to this conservation of momentum changing somethings momentum requires energy but again why if we accept that everything is moving and everything behaves like a wave in some manner then we can imagine even if it's not a perfect conceptual interpretation that everything is moving through space as a wave a waves energy is based off its frequency higher frequencies have smaller wavelengths and more energy now if we imagine that matter particles or waves then a guy named Louis de Broglie realized that this theoretical wavelength of a particle moving through space is inversely proportional to its momentum so as its momentum increases its wavelength decreases or more relevantly the more the wavelength decreases the more the momentum increases and this is the key because as matter travels faster and faster due to relativity space begins to shrink along the axis of momentum this causes the wave lengths to appear shorter and shorter to an outside observer eventually the wavelength would have to reach zero at light speed due to the complete compression of space in that frame of reference and of course dividing by zero is impossible or some like to say infinity so in order to reach light speed our mass will need infinite momentum or infinite energy to reach that state of momentum and this is of course impossible the second reason we can't jump to the moon or travel Lightspeed is because the forces would simply rip us apart now we already know it's impossible to go the speed of light but here's a fun thing to think about earlier I asked what keeps a particle in one place what allows it to change momentum and we learned that this was the result of the Higgs field and lets us localize particles however the photon and the gluon fields don't interact with the Higgs field at least not like the others that is to say there is no reason for their motion to change or slow down so given to their own devices gluons and photons are always moving with the most momentum that they can possess now light interacts with other fields so it can slow down when passing through some other kind of medium we see this with refraction but in a vacuum where the Higgs field is the only excited quantum field there's nothing to affect its motion so it simply travels as fast as a can which just so happens to be 300,000 kilometers a second why that speed that we don't know it just is photons and gluons are force carriers and they're responsible for keeping atoms held together so if we imagine we were traveling at the speed of light electrons interacting with protons would not be able to send photons to the protons in front of them and quarks inside hadrian's would also be unable to send gluons between themselves so if you could go light speed the forces holding your atoms together would stop working of course as we mentioned earlier relativity means you're accelerated frame of reference will be compressed into a two-dimensional plane so there's no distance to travel between electron proton and quark but now you've got issues of multiple protons being sight other protons and the Pauli principle it's interesting to think about but also impossible and unnecessary now let's recap everything into a nice condensed summary everything in the universe has an intrinsic momentum that means it wants or has to move everything can be described by some sort of a wavefunction waves moving through space have wavelengths shorter wavelengths mean greater energy and momentum space contraction due to relativity means the wavelengths of our wave functions contract and relativistic speeds at light speed this means we would have infinite momentum or require infinite energy [Music] you

Channel: But Why?

Views: 235,012

Keywords: light speed, speed of light, light, speed, quantum, physics, quantum physics, higgs field, field theory, QFT, duality, wave, particle

Id: u3YWlvqePc8

Length: 8min 42sec (522 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2020