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According to the theory of relativity this would violate causality, leading to logical paradoxes such as the grandfather paradox. [1] Tachyons would exhibit the unusual property of increasing in speed as their energy decreases, and would require infinite energy to slow to the speed of light.
The Maxwell wave theory, however, does not account for all properties of light. The Maxwell theory predicts that the energy of a light wave depends only on its intensity, not on its frequency; nevertheless, several independent types of experiments show that the energy imparted by light to atoms depends only on the light's frequency, not on its ...
In such a theory, its speed would depend on its frequency, and the invariant speed c of special relativity would then be the upper limit of the speed of light in vacuum. [32] No variation of the speed of light with frequency has been observed in rigorous testing, putting stringent limits on the mass of the photon. [59]
The breaking of rotation and boost invariance causes direction dependence in the theory as well as unconventional energy dependence that introduces novel effects, including Lorentz-violating neutrino oscillations and modifications to the dispersion relations of different particle species, which naturally could make particles move faster than light.
This equation holds for a body or system, such as one or more particles, with total energy E, invariant mass m 0, and momentum of magnitude p; the constant c is the speed of light. It assumes the special relativity case of flat spacetime [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] and that the particles are free.
The formula defines the energy E of a particle in its rest frame as the product of mass (m) with the speed of light squared (c 2). Because the speed of light is a large number in everyday units (approximately 300 000 km/s or 186 000 mi/s), the formula implies that a small amount of mass corresponds to an enormous amount of energy.
For a particle whose velocity is small relative to the speed of light (i.e., nonrelativistic), the total power that the particle radiates (when considered as a point charge) can be calculated by the Larmor formula: = (˙) = = = = where ˙ or is the proper acceleration, is the charge, and is the speed of light. [2]
The speed of light in vacuum is defined to be exactly 299 792 458 m/s (approximately 186,282 miles per second). The fixed value of the speed of light in SI units results from the fact that the metre is now defined in terms of the speed of light. All forms of electromagnetic radiation move at exactly this same speed in vacuum.