No, we have succeded in accelerating particles to 99.9% the speed of light, but can not go any faster. Special Relativity states that nothing can go faster than C and this is true still today.

GhostFace wrote:No, we have succeded in accelerating particles to 99.9% the speed of light, but can not go any faster.

That's what I always thought, but I was told by Steve over in the thread on evolution ( when I said that matter could not originate in an absolute vacuum, and that therefore there is no way for matter to 'appear' in surroundings where no matter previously existed, thus making the dawn of existence unexplainable by everyone, be they atheists or theists ) that something called the Casimir effect made it possible for matter to 'appear', and when I read up on the Casimir effect, I read that it required the Theory of Special Relativity to be violated for it happen.

Einstein's equations of special relativity have an implicit assumption of homogeneity. Space is assumed to be the same everywhere. In the case of the Casimir vacuum, this assumption is clearly violated. Inside the Casimir vacuum, we have homogeneous space, and outside it, we have homogeneous space as well. Inside the Casimir vacuum, the equations of special relativity will apply with the increased value of the speed of light. Outside it, the equations of special relativity will apply with the normal 'c'. However, when considering two frames of reference, one inside the vacuum, and one outside, the equations of special relativity can no longer be applied, since the assumption of homogeneity has been broken. In other words, the Casimir effect breaks up space into distinct homogeneous regions, each of which obey the special relativity laws separately.

While this may technically qualify as 'faster-than-light', that is only true relative to two disconnected regions of space. It is unclear whether (and unlikely that) a Casimir vacuum is stable under quantum mechanics, and whether non-trivial communication is possible between two such regions.

I still don't believe that something can come from true nothing, and these experiments are all freak edge of the envelope occurences that are probably useless for understanding how, at some point in time, something did have to appear from true nothing, and if it didn't, it wasn't nothing, and we are back to square one again.

Thinking Physics is very humbling.

GhostFace wrote:No, we have succeded in accelerating particles to 99.9% the speed of light, but can not go any faster. Special Relativity states that nothing can go faster than C and this is true still today.

It's an enduring myth that light speed is a constant. Shine it through things and it goes slower. Shine it through a crystal or something supercooled & it will travel the same speed as a cyclist. I read in New Scientist that it can even be halted altogether.

I can never quite accept anything suggested about the beginning of time. "It popped into being when the conditions were right, kinda like a snowflake" was how I used to accept it (and move on to other worthy subjects in life) but "conditions" implies a physical environment, and a time line. It doesn't quite make sense.

Try thinking about the same problem but accept the reality a singularity, by which I mean time and space being part of the same fabric - Einstein's idea not mine. Then "event" doesn't quite have the same meaning, and allows a thing to exist where previously there was none, as the word "previously" means "time", which is the same thing as space, or matter. At the edge, there is no first, or before and thus no nothing.

I can just about accept this, and can move on to more pressing concerns.

It certainly makes more sense than "a magic goblin made it!". so will have to do for the moment

If entangled particle effects can predate their own interactions, then they give a basis for matter appearing out of 'nothing'.

knowing that mass is equal to energy has huge implications, wheather it has to do with the dual nature of photons, or providing our increasing demand for power with an energy source capable of surpassing it.