It can look dumb, but I always had this question as a kid, what physical principles would prevent this?
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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My mistake, that's why sound travels at the speed of light.
It's just not useful to talk about this at the level of the standard model. We are interested in the bulk behaviour of condensed matter, the fact of the matter is that you will not be able to tell that the other end of the stick has been touched until the pressure wave reaches the end. It doesn't matter if individual force carriers are moving at the speed of light because they are not moving in a single straight line. You are interested in the net velocity.
Wikipedia isn't a textbook. Don't overcomplicate shit and mislead people because you've spent a few hours browsing particle physics articles stoned.
I very explicitly said the whole thing is slower than the speed of light (much slower even) and even pointed out why: at the most basic of levels, the way charged particles push each other without contact is the electromagnetic force, meaning photons, but the actual particles still have to move and unlike photons they do have mass so the result is way slower than the speed of light.
To disprove the idea that a push on a solid object can travel faster than the speed of light (which is what the OP put forward), pointing out that at its most basic level the whole thing relies on actually photons which travel at the speed of light, will do it.
There was never any lower limit specified in my response because there is no need to go into that to disprove a theory about the upper limit being beyond a certain point. (Which makes that ironic statement of yours about the speed of sound-waves quite peculiar as it is mathematically and logically unrelated to what I wrote)
Going down into the complexity of the actual process, whilst interesting, isn't going to answer the OPs question in an accessible and reasonably short manner using language that most people can understand.
LOL!
Reduced to name calling.
Good try, shame you don't have the chops (as the way you express yourself gave away very early on)
I don't know why you are pretending to have physics knowledge when you very obviously do not have an education in it. What do you get out of pretending to be an expert on the internet? There's no reward for it.