TheThunderBringer
boopaloop!

Spend less time being intellectual and more time making awesome quotes.

Leptons. Stuff like neutrinos and the odd electron and positron.

I can tell soutern accents from northern accents, and I hear enough midwestern to tell if someone is speaking in that accent too. Dunno if you've seen this, but if you want to know what listening to American English sounds like if you don't know the words, it's like this --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZXcRqFmFa8

If the heat death pans out, light is one of the only things that will be around.

Possibly, but don't count on it. It's also fairly likely that he's gonna answer but be wrong (because chemists frequently think they know physics, only to be crazy wrong).

I only speak Swedish and English.

Yes, the light will never vanish (assuming ideal space with no dust or particles to absorb it), but it will grow fainter with distance, so after a while, it's going to be impossible to see (because it's so thinly spread out). It's easy to over-complicate the answer to this question a lot with quantum mechanics and stuff, but I think this answer should do.

and they taste yummy~

Because there is no viable argument against it.

Speed (in some frame of reference) is sort of a measure of your rotation in space-time. When you are standing still, you move only in time; when you move near the speed of light, you move mostly in space (and very little in time). The reason you can't move faster than the speed of light because you can't more than -only- move in space.

As for why the speed of light is the speed of light, it's just a physical constant. Like the mass of an electron.

As for why light only travels at the speed of light, it's because they have no mass. All massless particles move at the speed of light.

Question 1

No. In fact, you can't travel -at- the speed of light, only very close to it.

Question 2

Because all frames of reference in relativity are equal. What this means is that speed is always measured relative to something. What relativity does is distort space-time in different frames of reference. So an outside observer will see a spaceship that travels at 99% the speed of light, and a light beam next to it traveling at 100% the speed of light, and the person in the ship will observe light next to it traveling also at 100% the speed of light.

Question 3

First of all, you can't travel at the speed of light, only very near it. And at relativistic speeds, you can't add velocities like you do normally. If you run at 1 m/s back and forth relative to the ship, an external observer will see much smaller speed changes.

Yeah. I myself, just finished reading The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Susskind.

Going to the library tomorrow to get another book I spotted last time I was there. Can't remember what it was called, but I'll know when I see it again.