Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
<shrug> One man's theory is another man's application, and vice versa.
What are the unacknowledged assumptions behind c as the maximum speed of light, for example?
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The assumption that if, no matter how hard you try, nothing you see ever goes faster than the speed of light, then that's the maximum. And that's still the case, over 100 years after Einstein came up with special relativity to describe what they saw before that. There are many ways we create stuff that gets up to or near the speed of light, without going over. Included in that are particles in accelerators, that just keep getting heavier as you add energy rather than go faster than the speed of light, in agreement with special relativity. The universe is a big place with all kinds of stupendously energetic processes taking place in it. If none of them produce anything that moves faster than the speed of light, you have to start thinking that that's the limit. It's not just a matter of no imagination.