Science Forums 2

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Your teacher put the matter in rather loose terms, actually, leading to a contradiction. If you were on a bus going the speed of light you would not be able to walk forward on the bus. So long as the bus was going as fast as light and you with it, no time would be elapsing for you.

Neither could you be travelling any faster, but you could be travelling slightly less fast. The odd thing is that, to you, the same bus would be travelling as fast as light and no less. This is not easy to understand, but at least it doesn't lead to a contradiction. It can be worked out with the Lorentz coordinate transformations; space-time has this rather odd geometry. At low velocities the principle of relativity is almost exactly as Galileo had put it and had been used by Newton etc. Maxwell's equations and the Michelson-Morley results showed that it can't be right for velocities approaching that of electromagnetic wave propagation.