Welcome to Gaia! ::

Ok. BWAHAHAHA! rofl




First, lay off the drugs.

Second. Depending upon who you ask, light has no mass. Light travels at the maximum possible speed with no drag on the universe and no requirements for acceleration. As soon as it is capable of going anywhere unfettered, it simply travels at the maximum possible speed.

You can slow light down by putting matter in its way, but aside from that it is top speed and straight forward.

Matter cannot travel as fast, since unlike light it has the property of inertia. Object at rest tends to stay at rest and all that. So to get it to move anywhere, you gotta smack it. Applying force makes it go. To get matter to move as fast as not matter light, it would take an infinite amount of energy. As long as matter has mass, it will produce something of a dimensional drag on the universe and always require more and more energy to travel faster and faster.

As for the question involving the two ships, if one ship assumes itself to be holding still it can observe the other ship to have a velocity of 200,000mps relative to it. Relative speed and actual speed are separate concepts, however.

Erm...The reduced speed of light in a material in an average phenomenon. Light still travels at the 'speed of light,' but the photons are absorbed by the electrons in the material, exciting them, and are then reemitted when the electrons relax back to the ground states. So while the photons always travel at the speed of light, the interaction time delays their propagation from one region of the material to another. If we look at the average speed over a distance that contains numerous particles it's less than the free-space speed of light. So the notion that light literaly 'slows down' in a material is actually a wrong - Maxwell's equations in a material are actually approximations and the freespace Maxwell equations technically always work. LilianGreene is correct.



Now back to what the OP said:

First, I encourage you to lay off the drugs. Lots of people like them and some say they feel like they're enlightened while stoned, but I really don't think one can have actual intellegent thoughts while not lucid.

I'd like to first address your example. In your reference frame the objects relative velocities WOULD be 200,000. However, that's not the velocity of any single object - this is what's restricted via this speed limit. If you were to accelerate and join one of the objects (that is boost yourself to a reference frame in which one of them is at rest with respect to you), the other object will not appear to be going 200,000.

This probably seems strange because you're used to adding velocities together - if you throw a ball at 50 mph and run away from it at 20 mph, you expect to see it traveling away from you at 70 mph. This assume that you measure time the same way in both of your reference frames but that the distance from you to some reference point is different in both frames. This is formalized in the Galillean coordinate transformations. These are valid for slow speeds.

If two reference frames are moving relative to each other at a speed comparable to the speed of light, we're forced to use the Lorentz transformations. These show that time is not measured the same way for two difference inertial observers (which leads to many mind ******** for newcomers to relativity). For small speeds, we can expand these transformations in a Taylor series and recover the Galillean transformations.

I hope this helps.

No. That's the very base of all relativity. You'd expect that should happen, but due to time dilation, each ship would observe the other moving at a reduced speed that the sum of their two relative velocities. The maximum speed you could ever observe something moving at is the speed of light.