On speed

First, I have to disappoint all you addicts: this isn't one about drugs, but about the concept of moving between A and B within a certain amount of time. A few days ago, i was sitting in a bus, and as i am one of those people who prefer not to stare fellow citizens in their faces, it was my duty to keep the bus window semi-opaque with my moist breath, so to protect my travelling friends from the gaze of whoever was standing on the bus stop.

Needless to say that this task didn't ask much of my attention. Therefore, i began wondering about the concept of speed. Basically, we (i, at least) take speed for granted. We walk, drive, travel by several other means, and in the process mostly we don't think about the walk or ride or flight itself, but about what will happen to us once we've reached our destination. And that is a pity. Speed is a remarkable thing.

Remarkable, because i just discovered that speed can only exist in two very distict states, which are: no speed at all, or the speed of light. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to go between those two speeds. And we use these two states every day! Don't let highway patrol get you!

"But how can this be?", you might be asking now. I'll try to explain. As i said, the theory got to me while being on my way home on some bus, and i just now decided to post it, so i had to backward engineer it and regrettably some of the - very sound - theory is lost.

It begins like this: If one wants to walk, he has first to move his leg. But before he can move his leg, he must move a muscle in that leg. However, before the muscle moves, he has to send (i.e. move) a signal from his brain to his leg muscle that tells it to move. To make up this signal, some chemicals in his brain must move, et cetera. Conclusion is that everything that moves, does so because it is being moved by something that is ALREADY moving. Nothing moves by itself.

Imagine a car, driving from C to D (it has driven a lot between A and B, so i decided it was time for a change). Somewhere halfway it encounters a rabbit, and its driver decides to brake, even though he has some very serious business to do in D, and he's already late. To do so, the wheels of the car should slow down, but this can only happen if the driver begins to move his foot. only actually he can't do that. To start movement - to accelerate - a reaction mass is required, moving the other way. But as nothing moves by itself and the reaction mass isn't already moving, the two masses could never reach a speed other than zero. Acceleration is impossible!!

Having concluded that nothing can move by itself, and that acceleration is impossible once we've reached a speed of absolute zero, we can only look around us and say: "But everything IS moving nonetheless. How do we explain that?" Simple. Once we look closer at things (but science doesn't yet have the tools to do so), we could only discover that everything does indeed always move. As the only discrete measure of non-zero speed is the speed of light (this one is proven), it can only be that everything moves with the speed of light, only not all the time. It's more or less like a neon light. When the gass inside the tube is touched by a tiny bit of electric energy, it leaps (without intermediate states) into a light-emitting state, until it lacks the energy to do so and returns to its 'dark' state.

When we move, we move with the speed of light during a very short frame of time, and thus over a very small distance. Then we idle for a while, and move again. The energy stored in petrol tanks, candy bars et cetera, gives us the ability to alter our speed-state. The more energy applied, the longer the speed of light states become.

Now the only thing we need to do is to try to maintain this enlighted state a little longer, so that we can cross the Atlantic in a fraction of a second, or to get ourselves a speeding ticket that even Bill Gates couldn't afford.