20. The faster you move, the heavier you get – Einstein discovered this with his theory of special relativity. As an object picks up speed it gains kinetic energy, which causes its mass to increase, as described by his famous E=mc2 equation. At the speeds humans travel at the change in mass goes unnoticed, but as an object comes close to the speed of light the effect is undeniable.
Particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider propelling protons at almost the speed of light, for instance, need to take their increased mass into account. One consequence of this is that no object can travel at the speed of light – the faster it gets, the more mass it acquires and the more energy it needs. In other words, you’d need infinite energy to push it to light speed.
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