Moving faster than light

Two not totally unrelated thought experiments

I’m neither a physicist nor very close to professional natural sciences. But I think a lot about random stuff…

Experiment 1— Scissors

Imagine your holding scissors in your hand. When you’re closing them, the point of intersection accelerates towards the tips. Let’s assume you’d pinch something between the two blades (which cannot get cut in half), it would be accelerated when you close the scissors. If your scissors where long enough you’d accelerate the pinched thing to infinity and beyond, right? Not quite: you’d need infinite force as well because the pinched thing gets heavier and heavier — and the blades would become a bit heavy, too.

Open questions:

• Do we have mass-less scissors and mass-less things to pinch between them?

Experiment 2 — Laser pointer

Imagine you’ve got a laser pointer — a very powerful one. You can point at the other end of the solar system with it. Now imagine there’s a wall at the other end of the solar system (40 light years). You can now point at it and in 80 years you should see a dot appear on this wall. If you now moved your laser pointer 10 degrees downwards in 10 seconds, the dot on the wall would move with a velocity of about 66bn km/s (2*3.14159*(40*300000*31536000))/36 (if we assume the wall to be a sky dome for simplicity). This is quite a bit more than the speed of light.

Open questions:

• Does the projected light point count as a thing?
• How discrete are the light particles when they bang into the wall?
  Or: is there a difference if a light particle bangs into the wall near a place where another light particle already was?
• Can we transport things on battering light particles (like surfing a wave)?