A Visitor's Comments:

Chicago, 8-MAR-1996

Greetings. I thought you might be interested in knowing of a few innaccurate(sic) statements made on your page 'ETERNAL LIGHT'

1) There are no objects which reach the speed of light and disappear. Special Relativity predicts that with increased velocity, mass also increases by an amount sqrt(1/1-(v/c)^2) times the rest mass. It would therefore take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate any object to the speed of light; surely you can accept that this will not happen. I do believe that the radiation from an object moving away from an observer, the speed of which is approaching the speed of light, would be redshifted to such an extent that it would be undetectable by our standards of technology.(Thank you for clarifying the difference.) Also, the kinetic energy of any large object in our universe would come from the so-called 'big bang' and so, if anything, distant objects, though moving at speeds comparable to the speed of light, can only be slowing down from their gravitational coupling with other objects in the universe.

2) To say that atoms consist basically of light is to take artistic license with what scientists actually believe. Atoms consist of electrons (fundamental particles) and nucleons (composite particles, made of protons and neutrons, which are in turn comprised of quark combinations) and these particles interact with each other via the attractive electomagnetic force between oppositely charged particles. Quantum Electrodynamics states that the force carrier in electromagnetism is the photon (though in this case, a virtual photon(off mass-shell)) which exist only for such times as allowed by the energy-time uncertainty principle. These virtual photons are spread out through all space and charged particles (nucleons and electrons) are the sources. Therefore, light is not harnessed into specific shapes in any sense of the word. The rock has a rest mass, and so is certainly not moving at the speed of light (see above).

3) Finally, though we don't understand why light has the actual propagation speed that it does (i.e. 3 times 10 to the eighth power meters per second), we understand the consequences of light moving at this one particular velocity very well. We have devoted a great deal of time thinking about this and, so far, have not run into any experimental results which contradict what we beleive (sic) to be true; it's not a slippery concept at all.

That you have been misinformed is completely understandable, as writers of popular science and philosophy (I assume this was the source of your information), including the likes of Stephen Hawking, tend to blur the line between science and artistic interpretation in order to make their writings more popular, and hence, more profitable. I just thought you might want to know. Charles

Somehow, for me anyway, an 'artistic' model of the universe is more comforting. I guess you could call that 'comfort physics.'

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