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Old 10-21-2009, 08:56 PM   #19 (permalink)
Pharmacist
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Quote:
Originally Posted by speedoflife View Post
Physics FTW. Air resistance is a force. Any force that acts upon an object will cause it to accelerate. In this particular case, air resistance does actually slow the car down. The faster the car goes, the greater the force against the car. Without friction/air resistance/restrictive forces, anything with a force acting upon it will accelerate infinitely. [sigma]F=ma (net force=mass x acceleration) With one force and a constant mass, something would accelerate forever to an infinite speed.
Actually technically that's old school newtonian physics. In modern physics, relativity applies. What you said is true at lower speeds. However, as speed approaches the speed of light, newtonian physics ceases to be accurate and relativistic physics takes over. The energy required to accelerate an object of mass to speeds approaching the speed of light approaches infinity. An object with mass can never achieve the speed of light. Only an object with zero mass (i.e. a photon) can travel at the speed of light. And so far, there is no evidence that any object regardless of mass can travel faster than the speed of light. So infinite speed is a theoretical impossibility, at least according to what scientists think.
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