Is it a bit of a case of astrophysicists having to admit that there’s much more that they don’t know than they do know?
If I had 9 concurrent lives, one would certainly be spent in sheds with telescopes. Last week, at the tender age of [21+], I had the great fortune to be in a very low-light density area of SW England, and spent some time with blokes with sheds, seeing Jupiter and Mars (which are both still clearly visible in the sky! To the naked eye! I was psyched! If I’ve noticed them before, I’ve thought they were stars), and the International Space Station. Even saw four moons around Jupiter, and its stripes.
But a question has been foxing me. I don’t understand much of it, but … why can’t we travel at or beyond the speed of light? I’m told, perhaps wrongly, that mass increases to infinity as you approach the speed of light. So why doesn’t each and every photon create a black hole? Is the speed of light by reference to a fixed point in space, or relative (which doesn’t seem to make sense to me)? If it’s by reference to a fixed point, what is the fabric / framework that forms that reference?
I’ll never, presumably, NEED to know the answers, but naively I ask, is this stuff really true, or just guesswork?
Yours, Lost in Space
