Dire Question: Can the speed of light be beaten?

[fatty_ashy]

I know this might sound silly to some of you, but I must ask this question.
Imagine a REALLY large ship, say...about the size of Jupiter? Let's call this Ship A. Now imagine another ship inside ship A called Ship B.
If ship A moves at..say..60% the speed of light, and Ship B moves at 60% the speed of light too in the ship. Taking time dilation into account, the total speed of ship B adds up to more than the speed of light relative to an observer on earth!
I find this very disturbing but I cannot find anything wrong with it. Can somebody provide insight?

[Noah]

No, I do not believe that this would be a way to beat it. Because as an object with mass approaches the speed of light, it (in theory) gains mass, thus requiring more and more fuel, and by the time you were close to the speed of light you would have to convert all the mass in the universe to energy.

Now there is possibly a way to beat the 186,000mps "speed limit" of light. I have been reading the book "Faster Than The Speed of Light", which explains in part the Varying Speed of Light (VSL) theory. One possibility in it is that if strings ("lines" of energy flowing through the universe) exist, the "local" speed limit would be much higher than the "normal" speed of light, thus you could travel faster than 186,000mps in that local area without breaking the speed of light and not run into time dilation problems.

This same theory can work in reverse also. One version also says that inside the event horizon of a black hole, the "local" speed of light is zero. This means that it would be an impassable wall since nothing could travel faster than zero (since it still says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, which in this case would be zero.)

Sorry for getting a little off the original topic, but I thought this is interesting.

Noah

[fatty_ashy]

It WAS really interesting. Thanks a lot Noah!

[dgeake]

It has been beaten:

http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/0....ap/index.html

Or so someone thinks. ;-)

[Tormod]

dgeake,

someone pointed out in an earlier post that the experiment mentioned in the CNN article is an illusion. Check out this thread for more info.

Tormod

[!@#$]

Easy (almost intuitive) proof: use a ray of light instead of the second ship (B). Would it go faster than the speed of light?
No.
Answer yourself:
What actually happens? (What would the wavelength be for an observer on the ship A and for an observer "on earth"?)
Mac

[!@#$]

Sorry, forgot to give you a very useful link: http://www.lightandmatter.com/area1book6.html
that you could use to make this matter (...and light!) more clear.
Mac

[Tormod]

Mac,

welcome to our forums! Thanks for posting the link, that is a very interesting site. It should be of interest to many of our users.

Tormod