The Speed of Light

First of all, I'd like to recommend that everyone take a few minutes to check out Bryan "Formerly of Roxy Music" Ferry's quietly pained take on Bob Dylan's "Positively 4th Street", the bright spot amongst Ferry's unfortunately uninspiring and misleadingly-titled 2007 release "Dylanesque":

You got a lotta nerve, to say you wanna click this link

(I would also recommend that you look at anything else besides the video while the song is playing, because it's about as dull as anyone could possibly make a video. I can literally sum it up in two words: "Girl, walking". My don't I feel acerbic right now).

I would also like to invite everyone to consider the following interesting series of facts, taken from The Elegant Universe:

1) Every object in the universe is traveling at the speed of light.

2) Most of this speed is taken up in the fourth dimension (time), which explains why most objects appear to be traveling at much slower speeds when we look at them.

3) The more of this cumulative energy you expend on moving through space, the less energy there is to spend on moving through time. What this means is that the faster an object moves through space, the slower time goes for that object.

4) Objects traveling at the maximum speed through space (and only photons can do this) travel at the minimum speed through time, which is none at all. In other words, for a photon, time stands still. Any photon bouncing around the universe is exactly as old now as it ever was.

I hope you get the gist of this-- it's such a simple idea, but hard to phrase clearly. Pretty staggering, no? One of my co-workers, ever the practical girl, asked if this couldn't be the universe's ultimate youth-preserving treatment. All you would have to do is travel at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, and stretch out your life considerably.

Of course, once I explained that speed also increases your density we discarded the idea as impractical. (This is another great side note: the faster an object goes, the greater its density. Any object which could travel at the speed of light would become infinitely dense, thereby requiring an infinite amount of energy to move at that speed. The only reason photons can get around this weight restriction is that they are massless particles [which by itself is more than enough to blow my mind]. It doesn't matter how many times over their mass is multiplied, it's still zero, and so the intrepid photon can haul its quantum ass faster than any second-rate speed demon, Speedy Gonzales, the Flash, and Neal Cassady included).