If something travels at light speed, they experience no time change relative to slower objects, correct? Perhaps you could consider c to be equivalent to a "time speed" of zero, and other, less energetic things have a higher "time speed". From this perspective, there's nothing special about c. Doesn't really answer the question though.
this is interesting, but first i should point out that light isn't more energetic than slower-moving things. the energy of a photon of visible light is about 4x10^(-19) joules, or about 2.5 electronvolts (eV). the mass of quarks is sometimes given in units of eV/c^2, which allows you to determine its energy simply by crossing out the c^2 (via E=Mc^2), and the mass of up quarks (the least massive kind) is between 1.5 and 4
mega electronvolts.
but you do raise an interesting point, something i ponder once years ago. "time speed" as you call it, and space speed (velocity) do seem to be mutually exclusive. in other words, the faster through space you go, the slower through time you go. i wonder if that means, if you could stand completely still (relative to what i don't know), would time dialate to infinity? in other words, would you "see" all time (assuming you were immortal) if you could "stop" in space?
but i think you'd run up to the same problem there. just as it's impossible to accelerate to the speed of light, it might be impossible to decelerate to zero velocity.
however, this does remind me, when danielost mentioned that Einstein was wrong -- he didn't have the right reason, but Einstein may well have been wrong/incomplete. photons have been experimentally shown to have a rest mass above zero, and general/special relativity assume photons have zero mass. of course, this doesn't mean they're wrong... they assumed photons have zero mass while at the speed of light, not while at rest--so it could mean that if you could somehow slow down a photon it'd have mass, but that it doesn't while it's in movement.
Matter and energy are diretly realted to eachother by light (c), which oddly enough is the only medium for energy (radition) aside from kinetic energy
problem: c isn't light. c is a constant defined as the speed of light in a vacuum (and the speed of propogation in changes to a gravitational field). light itself is mass-energy, and c is a velocity.
also, "light" (photons) isn't the only media for energy. photons only mediate EM forces. the nuclear weak force is mediated by bosons, the strong force by gluons, and gravity (hypothetically) by gravitons (and what i'd like to know is who decided to name all these elementary particles "-ons" ... well, i guess quarks have a different-sounding name).
but...
I would assume (this is rather nonscientific, btw) that there must be a relationship between all energies (kinetic and radiation) and would guess this relation involves c. C being limiting in the universe could be as simple as rearranging the equations so that the relationship between all energies and matter would be c . Most likely c would be the approachable limit as Mass decreases to nothing.
your assumption is pretty much the holy grail of physics--unification. quoth wikipedia:
"Grand Unification, grand unified theory, or GUT is one of several very similar unified field theories or models in physics that predicts that at extremely high energies (above 1014 GeV), the electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear forces are fused into a single unified field.
Thus far, physicists have been able to merge electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force into the electroweak force, and work is being done to merge electroweak and quantum chromodynamics into a QCD-electroweak interaction sometimes called the electrostrong force. Beyond grand unification, there is also speculation that it may be possible to merge gravity with the other three gauge symmetries into a theory of everything."
...
the assumption itself, that everything in the universe can be summed up and rearranged in an equation, might not be true. have you ever heard of
Gödel's incompleteness theorems? basically he proved using formal logic (which itself is very similar to math) that mathematic systems cannot make sense and describe everything at the same time. by 'make sense' i mean remain consistent.
even Stephen Hawkings was persuaded by Gödel's theories and no longer believes a theory of everything is possible, not in a finite number of equations anyway. wikip's closing paragraph on the article on the theory of everything is interesting in these regards:
"No physical theory to date is believed to be precisely accurate. Instead, physics has proceeded by a series of "successive approximations" allowing more and more accurate predictions over a wider and wider range of phenomena. Some physicists believe that it is therefore a mistake to confuse theoretical models with the true nature of reality, and hold that the series of approximations will never terminate in the "truth". Einstein himself expressed this view on occasions. On this view, we may reasonably hope for a theory of everything which self-consistently incorporates all currently known forces, but should not expect it to be the final answer."
you assumption might not be wrong, but it might be impossible to exhaustively prove. but then again, exhaustive proof isn't realistically possible in science anyway, since real exhaustion would involve testing everything possible. my personal view is that the universe is far too complex for us to boil it down to math. we make all this hoop-la about what we've observed, but we (humans) often put aside serious consideration of just how much we might not know. figuring out what you don't know is probably the hardest part of learning, IMO. we currently know of 4 fundamental forces in phsyics. what if this mysterious dark energy (whatever's accelerating the galaxies away from each other) turns out to be a whole new force?
in any regard, major congrats on passing! late shift... not my gig, but sounds like you're really excited, and that's good. not that i assume police work is nearly so exciting, but have you ever seen The Wire?
