Hi Bill S not back I see much what I thought would happen has
However I saw this
Is the complication of changing from relative motion to absolute motion another reason why it is not possible to accelerate from one to the other?
You have all the building blocks with QFT to solve this and it's all about energy .. so lets do it.
Lets take a zero mass item like a photon you know it has energy and you once worked out it must have
GR stress energy. What you did not specifically do is work out from an energy perspective they are exactly
the same and opposite and cancel out to zero.
What we need is the concept of negative energy (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_energy)
Lets write the generic formula for any body to spacetime
E total = E kinetic - E gravity + E rest mass
So a zero rest mass object has zero total energy from our spacetime frame and always will
When a photon is born it instantly goes to the speed of light,and exists as a positive and negative energy.
Then lets say you absorb it via your skin sure you feel the positive energy as heat, but you didn't feel that
you also gained it's negative gravitational energy you just got a little heavier. Your net gain of energy to
spacetime was zero.
Just for kicks try a stationary black hole and you should see it has an energy of zero, the rest mass and the
gravitational energy cancel
If an object has an E rest value no amount of kinetic energy can remove it because as you make the object
move faster it's gravity energy increases so the first two terms always cancel out due to conservation of energy.
Now whats special in QFT is only a zero total mass object can move at the speed of light. Why well because rest
mass (E rest) is a "structure" or "resonance" in the field. The field has to communicate that "structure" with
the movement. The field communication speed is why objects really do shorten up in the direction of motion.
The complicated part is the first classical tendency is to have the "structure" communicate it's movement
forward to the field but that is classical physics thinking again. You have a resonance in the field and that
resonance is everywhere in the field and there is a non zero probability that it will appear in any point in the
universe. Fortunately we most often see the most likely answer which agrees with our classical physics motion.
Entanglement and quantum tunneling are manifestations of the true nature of the movement when that classical
physics breaks down.
So in this simple layman scheme we have zero mass objects as waves in the field and things with rest mass
as more complicated resonances that have to be transmitted.
It's a bit of a simplification for clarity but if you really want to follow it Matt Strassler has the details on
"class 0" and "class 1" waves which is there technical names.http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-an...tion-of-motion/So the short answer is class 1 waves can't move at speed of light and only class 1 waves can describe rest mass.http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-an...les-are-quanta/And so we conclude: The particles of nature are quanta of relativistic quantum fields. The massless ones are quanta of waves in fields that satisfy a Class 0 equation. The ones with mass correspond to fields with a Class 1 equation. There are many more details to investigate. But this fact is among the most fundamental properties of our world.
See your gut feel that there had to be a solid difference was justified and it is
wave type we don't discuss
this stuff on layman forums but you are well beyond that now.
Go any deeper Bill S and you get an honorary degree
