If you were riding a bicycle at night and turned on the spotlight under the handlebars to see better in front of you, how fast would the light go?
Theoretically the overall speed of light should add up to its standard speed of 299,792,458 meters per second – the famous c of physics equations – with the average speed of your bicycle ride, which on average is 30 km/h. Right?
No. This is one of the most common mistakes that people who are not very expert in science make or who deny on social media, after over a century, Einstein’s Special Relativity and all the physics that has developed since its formulation. However, there are several people who want to explain this issue better and it is these people we are addressing in writing this article.
To understand the fallacy of the above reasoning, remember old Albert’s old mantra: “Nothing can exceed the speed of light.” Not even light itself, which allows the universe to have a limiting speed for all the physical phenomena that occur within it.
Furthermore, light propagates independently of the speed of its source, since their speeds relative to that of light cannot be added.
Often this error arises from the fact that light is expected to behave like normal matter, when this is not the case, given that light has a dual nature, that of a wave-particle. We shouldn’t even make the mistake of attributing it to Einstein the discovery of the constant speed of light.
The first who discovered that light had a constant speed, capable of reaching any direction without the help of a carrier that could transport it, were physicists Albert Abraham Michelson and Edward W. Morley, in their respective experiments of 1881 and 1887, which they helped demolish the theory of the ether.
The aether was supposed to be this carrier that, permeating the entire universe, helped light to reach incredible speeds, but Michelson and Morley’s expressants only demonstrated that it was a baroque element of a theory that did not explain the strange behavior of light.
It was thanks to these two experiments that Einstein developed the theories of Special Relativity and General Relativity, appropriating the discoveries of other physicists to elaborate them and discover new secrets of the universesuch as the fact that nothing could reach or exceed the speed of light.
However, would it be possible in theory to achieve 1% of the luminal speed? According to some experts, perhaps yes, but as we state in this article it is a truly difficult challenge to face.