How many of you can look in the mirror and say, "Yes, I understand Special Relativity."

>>I have begun to doubt the physics community more and more the last few weeks, which is as long as I've been involved in physics.<<

Oh, well, naturally your few weeks trumps all of the years of study of the CENTURIES of work in the field, doesn't it?

>>Look at it this way. When we open our eyes, the only reason we see matter is because it is illuminated. Therefore, that automatically explains that light is faster than anything else in the world.<<

Does it? Or does it just mean that everything we see is slower than light? What makes you so sure there can't be something faster than light that we can't see? I can't, for example, see neutrinos. I don't visually encounter them. But they are there, passing right through me and you and everything else right now. How do I know they can't be travelling faster than light? I can't see them. I can't even detect them without some pretty sophisticated equipment. They don't directly interact with light. I have to watch them interact with other forms of matter to even know they are there.

All your statement shows is that light is faster than anything we can see. Well fine, but how do you know that's everything there is? Einsteins' theories go far beyond that and show that there is not only nothing faster than light but no way anything can ever GET faster than light, and that nothing with mass can ever get TO the speed of light, whether we can see it or not. And only once I know that can I say that neutrinos can neither travel faster than light nor at light speed, since they do have mass.

No, not really. It's just coincidence that light travels "at the speed of light".

If the photon had a very tiny rest mass, the world would still look about the same.
Until a decade ago, we thought that neutrinos were massless, but it turns out they're not.
It could turn out that photons also travel at very slightly less than the "speed of light".

The importance of the speed of light is that it is the connection between space and time in the spacetime metric of locally Lorentz subspaces.

" It's not so much about the speed of light. Einstein probably thought that was a trivial number"
That's such an obvious troll!

"A couple of you seem to get most of it"
And a patronising one to boot!

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