Originally Posted by
Mirdesoux
Speed of light exceeded...Huh.
My friend said that if a marshmallow would've hit the earth going slightly faster than the speed of light, it's impact on earth would create an explosion of about ~26 hydrogen bombs.
Yeah, a freakin' marshmallow.
But, the OP's article and the marshmallow intrigues me, I've always figured that anything going faster than the speed of light would turn into light, because it'd be going so fast it's molecules would disintegrate something like that.
Originally Posted by
BlakMuffin
I'm not sure if your friend has a freakin' Ph.D in physics or whatever but what you said about the object turning into light is kind of strange. That's because no object can exceed its max velocity, unless you create a shitload of negative energy around it so that you can literally move the fabric of time-space around you and fluctuate it so you literally propelled by the universe in a way. This is really the only chance we have at moving at the speed of light, and it's not even literally us moving at the speed of light. We're staying still, we're just moving the entire universe around us.
He is actually probably right, mass can't move at that speed, so if it approaches lightspeed, it'll probably spagetthify, turn into long strings of energy, of which the easiest would be light, since most others require a medium.
Also, why would an object have a maximum velocity? There was one they assumed to be true and that was the speed of light. Individual speed maxima do not exist, I think you mean terminal velocity. That refers to something with a certain amount of forces working on it, the terminal velocity is when all forces cancel out, so the object stops accelerating.
Also, a marshmallow ( assuming it's 10 grams) will have slightly less than half of the power of the most powerful hydrogen bomb ever made when it hits the earth at light speed.