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Relativity and Velocity

I see the Theory of Relativity  as arising from a confusion between a velocity of mass or a velocity of light.

from online reference via stanford.edu:
'
Physics at the end of the nineteenth century found itself in crisis: there were perfectly good theories of mechanics (Newton) and electromagnetism (Maxwell), but they did not seem to agree. Light was known to be an electromagnetic phenomenon, but it did not obey the same laws of mechanics as matter. Experiments by Albert A. Michelson and others in the 1880s showed that it always traveled with the same velocity, regardless of the speed of its source. Older physicists struggled with this contradiction in various ways. In 1892 George F. FitzGerald and Hendrik A. Lorentz independently found that they could reconcile theory and experiment if they postulated that the detector apparatus was changing its size and shape in a characteristic way that depended on its state of motion. In 1898, J. Henri Poincaré suggested that intervals of time, as well as length, might be observer-dependent, and he even speculated (in 1904) that the speed of light might be an "unsurpassable limit".

None of these eminent physicists, however, put the whole story together. That was left to the young Albert Einstein, who already began approaching the problem in a new way at the age of sixteen (1895-6) when he wondered what it would be like to travel along with a light ray. By 1905 he had shown that FitzGerald and Lorentz's results followed from one simple but radical assumption: the laws of physics and the speed of light must be the same for all uniformly moving observers, regardless of their state of relative motion. For this to be true, space and time can no longer be independent. Rather, they are "converted" into each other in such a way as to keep the speed of light constant for all observers. (This is why moving objects appear to shrink, as suspected by FitzGerald and Lorentz, and why moving observers may measure time differently, as speculated by Poincaré.) Space and time are relative (i.e., they depend on the motion of the observer who measures them) — and light is more fundamental than either. This is the basis of Einstein's theory of special relativity ("special" refers to the restriction to uniform motion).
'

I see this relativity as arising when  a velocity limit of mass was an issue at the end of the 19th century.  Light was known to be electromagnetic in nature and to have a fixed velocity limit. No one had tried to go faster.

continuing from the reference:
'
Four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime is often pictured in the form of a two-dimensional lightcone diagram, with the horizontal axes representing "space" (x) and the vertical axis "time" (ct). The walls of the cone are defined by the evolution of a flash of light passing from the past (lower cone) to the future (upper cone) through the present (origin). All of physical reality is contained within this cone; the region outside ("elsewhere") is inaccessible because one would have to travel faster than light to reach it. The trajectories of all real objects lie along "worldlines" inside the cone (like the one shown here in red). The apparently static nature of this picture, in which history does not seem to "happen" but is rather "already there", has given writers and philosophers a new way to think about old issues involving determinism and free will.

The language of spacetime (known technically as tensor mathematics) proved to be essential in deriving his theory of general relativity.
'

Einstein's theory of relativity is based on considering what if a person (who has mass) moved at the speed of light which was assumed to be a limit per Minkowski.
 However light is the propagation of EM fields and has no mass.
They are inherently different.

I might be wrong interpreting old texts but it appears the theory of relativity is based on trying to understand how an observer in 'uniform motion' can move at the speed of light which was perceived as a limit.

Einstein's space time attempts to describe how the observer has a distorted frame of reference to accommodate the velocity nearing the speed of light. 'Something' must change for an observer to move at the velocity of light and that 'something' is called space time.

Given enough force to accelerate a mass to achieve a very high velocity there should be no velocity limit for mass. Relativity apparently expects mass has a limit. Can that be confirmed?

The Hadron Collider has accelerated protons to very near the speed of light.

The collider has a limit in the beam energy.
I found this online:

For the design energy of 7 TeV, that is the design goal, [the velocity limit] is:
v=99.9999991c

I suspect we must try another mechanism to exceed 'c'.

There is no observer on the proton to report a distortion in its space time.


Someone responded to my post with this link to a video that explains why the speed of light is not a limit.



After viewing that video, I found an earlier presentation by this person showing relativity is wrong:


here is his part 5; includes a recap:


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