Me too.
When CH waxes so poetically about the grains of sand on a beach and includes ballistics tables with bullets traveling the speed of light in the same post, it's just very special.
Never mind that bullets (or particles with mass) can't travel the speed of light (speaking of ignoring the well-established laws of physics), it's just so very very special.
For some reason it reminds me of Christmas turkey.
In early grade school kids learn to read. Later they read to learn. Some are more successful at both than others. You, apparently, were not one of the more successful students.
Contrary to what you claim, I clearly stated that to achieve the theoretical maximum speed of light in a perfect vacuum a particle would have to be without mass.
https://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbt...s/12235938/re-bullet-weight#Post12235938"In a perfect vacuum (a massless and therefore gravityless environment) than exists even in outer space, the theoretical maximum speed of light is a bit higher than through earth's atmosphere but the particles must be without mass (and therefore without energy) to achieve it."
An omission on my part - that should have read "In a
more perfect vacuum...", but you get the idea. Maybe. In any case, you can go back a reread it. As many times as necessary.
Scientific experiments have succeeded in accelerating massful particles to speeds very close to light-speed in a perfect vacuum and much faster than light travels in air, where it is about 90km/s slower, or water, where it is about 25% slower.
For example, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) has accelerated protons,
which have mass, to 299,792,447 meters per second. That is 99.9999991% or just 11 meters per second shy of the speed of light in a perfect vacuum.
Those speeds were actually rather slow compared to those achieved by the LEP (Large Electron-Positron Collider). The LEP has accelerated electrons and positrons,
both of which have mass, to 299,792,457.9964 meters per second. That is 99.9999999988% or just 0.0036 meters per second slower than the theoretical speed of light in a perfect vacuum.
Granted, 99.9999999988% is not the same as 100%, but frankly, I don't care. For our purposes here it is close enough and then some.
There is nothing preventing a projectile or bullet from travelling at these speeds in a perfect vacuum except for the very separate problem of accelerating the projectiles to those speeds. The acceleration problem is irrelevant to what energy a projectile would carry if accelerated to those speeds.
One other thing. An object's velocity is relative to a fixed position. As the universe expands, many galaxies going in different directions are separating at combined speeds greater than the speed of light in a vacuum. From our perspective on earth, and in a Newtonian sense, that means many galaxies are speeding away from us at speeds greater than light speed. And the last I knew, all galaxies had a great deal of mass.
