【Sea and River Night Talk】Has it surpassed the speed of light?
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Is using a long enough pipe filled with steel balls, with another steel ball inserted at one end such that a ball drops from the other end instantly as a means of transmitting information, faster than the speed of light?
It’s kind of interesting. The speed of force propagation is the speed of light. . . The speed of light should still be faster.
At this moment, it’s just a feeling; it’s much slower than the speed of light. The balls can theoretically be compressed; the more there are, the greater the cumulative compression. There’s also the expansion of the pipes and friction to consider, and it’s uncertain whether another ball will be able to fall.
What if all these balls are completely rigid?
This mistaken perception is actually not surprising; when Newton developed classical mechanics, he also believed that the effect of gravity was instantaneous. This view stemmed from the limitations of experimental conditions and theories at that time. It was not until Einstein developed the theory of relativity that he arrived at an important conclusion: the speed of light is the fastest rate at which information can be transmitted in our universe. Regarding the hypothetical experiments on \"gravity exceeding the speed of light,\" there are three such experiments: the water droplet experiment, the steel ball experiment, and yet another steel ball experiment. None of these three experiments can be carried out in reality, as humans and the Earth are utterly insignificant on a scale of light-years. It is precisely because experiments cannot be conducted that proponents of this theory believe that force acts instantaneously; as a result, there is no upper limit to speed in the universe. As long as there is an energy connection between objects, they can sense each other’s changes simultaneously, and concepts such as speed and time do not exist. However, the above assumption is actually a fallacy that mixes classical mechanics with quantum mechanics. Just as Newton’s laws of motion are virtually infallible for explaining macroscopic phenomena at low speeds, relativity must be used when dealing with motions at speeds approaching the speed of light; in fact, Newton’s laws of motion are an approximation of relativity at low speeds.