someone once tried to explain to me that nothing can be faster then the speed of light, even light itself. They told me if you have a solid beam of visible light on a train, and accelerated very fast, the light would supposidly be moving faster then possible, but it actualy doesnt. The light stays the speed of light. While moving faster, time actually slows down slows down. (this still makes no sense to me, its just what i was told). That being said, i dont think that you would see the lights on the ship.
yep from what ya say, that's right, you wouldn't. if there were an absolute relativity at work. i speculate. but ponder this... if someone was a million light years away and you had an entirely 100% rigid stick just a foot short of a million light years and you pushed it... you'd be able to poke them faster than you could if you were travelling ftl. or has someone already done that one?
thanks for kicking this thread back into action, digit. I reread part of the thread, but I don't think it was ever mentioned that the speed of light has varied throughout time. I'm having a hard time remembering all the specifics, because it's been a while, but I saw it out there. On a related matter, light has been slowed significantly in an einstein-bose condensate and technically travels at a different speed in any medium (vacuum, atmosphere, water, etc.).
the way it works is if the light goes on and u are travilling at light speed the light would inter-lap with u.so in the areas in front of the light or left or right or back of it would not have any time to make the distance because we are traviling as fast as it is so it would all just stay near the lamp the only other way to make this work would b to go so fast u slow down time
What would happen if you hit a rock or somthing while you were traveling light speed? Would you go right through it or would it hit you and stop your flight?
Rock bigger than you = smashed human Smaller rock = rock 'bullet' going through you. Haha seeing as light travels at 186, 000 miles per second! And a high powered rilfe travels at about 1 mile per second. LoL! Super rock bullet indeed!
well i wasnt sure if you would pass right through it because your basically energy when your traveling at light speed.
Ive always wondered this, people say light has no mass therefor it is the fastest thing in the universe and nothing with mass can travel faster then it. Without mass there is no inertia therefor, no force is requiered to accelerate it to its maximum velocity. OK so how is it that black holes suck in light? Obviously (from what I know black holes might not work this way) for gravity to have any effect on light, light would have to have some mass. Gravity is simply an attraction between particles with mass. If it were true that light had mass, then it would be possible to travel faster then it. Can anyone answer my question?
When you travel at the speed of sound, you can still hear sound right? And even if you could not hear sound while traveling at the speed of sound that would not make traveling at the speed of sound impossible.
i suppose its all about the measuring stick. how it's measured. take thermal dynamics for example, many scientists in the past had said that much of it were impossable, and yet, stuff that would be simple to even a cave man were happening despite claims of being impossable. this is where pragmatism slaps theory in the face for being so obtuse, dogmatic, static/rigid in thought. if it can be observed, then is it not so? who knows what's actually in light. it could be things, many things, conscious inteligent things, exploring the universe. call it hyperspace? call it the roadside of warp 10? who knows. there are things that travel at speeds faster than light, and travel at the speed of thought. in an instant things can be there. light at such speeds seems painfully slow.
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=1868661388454830893 one piece of this (still watching as i post this), the concept of a variable speed of light... lead me to loudly outburst (after some other thoughts working their way about) "Of course, i mean, how can you have colour if light's speed was constant! ... not to mention a black hole's effect on light. yep, light is not a constant speed, and space is far from "flat". anyways, it all lead me to post, yet again, in this thread. edit, at around the 25th to 27th minute, it irks me... watch it, and read this: if you have an infinate number of universes, just like the monkeys hitting upon the complete works of shakespeare, eventually you'll hit upon a balanced expansion. if you attempt to balance a pencil an infinate amount of times.. surely then, you'd have an incalculably large quantity of successes. in all the unbalanced pencils, we're not there to ask the question. the fact that we're here asking the questions prooves that it was a balanced pencil in which we exist.
Regardless of whether or not lightspeed is a variable of the cosmological constant, at this time all light (and other EM radiation) travels at the same speed (in vacuum), aka lightspeed. Different colours are just different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Not different speeds. Just as different pitches of sounds travel at the same speed in the same medium. It's just a difference of wavelength. As for lights properties in the vicinity of black holes or any other gravitywell, it's not light slowing down. Light moves at lightspeed even through gravitywells. However due to the effect of gravity, light must travel somewhat further in time/space to escape the gravitywell. The light is thus bent like through a lens. Again, it does not slow down.
to answer the question again, since i've still not answered it to my own satisfaction, you're traveling along in your psychedelic super VW hippie bus, n aproach lightspeed.... long before you get to be traveling at lightspeed to switch on the light above the rear view mirror, what you see infront of you would blue shift so much that it would pop beyond our visable spectrum. seems obvious now i can get my head around it. so what about the light you switch on... oh i still havnt got that bit figured out for real yet, my experiences dont give me enough confidence in whether the relativity paradox makes it behave most abnormally in that it behaves like the rest of the light around (blueshifted infront, redshifting behind), or if it behaves as one might expect when imagining light traveling as if more familiar in a newtonian way and looks as if it would when the bus is sitting still in park/neutral. .. now i say it, as mad as it sounds, its the former of the two hypothesis isnt it. no wonder i havnt answered this even to my own satisfaction, the answer that presents itself is so perplexingly unfamiliar, the mind recoils in horror, desperate to reject it in favour of the comfortable mappings already made and been reinforced over and over for security. heh, tsk tsk.
My thoughts: The lights would never turn on. If you are moving that fast, the light from the bulbs cannot travel faster than itself, therefore the light would never hit your eyes (this is if you're looking at the headlights while traveling that fast). You would not even be able to see anything as your vision only constitutes of light reflecting off objects, so if you're going as fast as the light travels in order for you to be able to see, nothing would be visible. Im sorry if someone has already said this but there are quite a lot of posts.
All observers at any speed will observe the light coming from the headlights to be going at c (assuming you're in a vacuum and all that) relative to themselves. You will observe it to travel 300,000 meters per second - relative to yourself. Someone sitting at rest will also observe it to travel at 300,000 meters per second - relative to themselves. If you assume that time is universal that doesn't make any sense, but if time becomes a local phenomenon - something dependent on your particular circumstances - then it does in fact work. Actually, as a matter of fact, for your particular example (of somebody going at the speed of light) relativity begins to have major problems. Anything with mass can't do it. Photons are fine, they don't have mass, which is why they can manage it, but observed mass increases with speed, so the faster you go the heavier you observe yourself to become so the more energy it takes to accelerate you any further, and the energy required to accelerate you to c itself becomes infinite. We actually don't know what would happen if you were to somehow travel at the speed of light, but we know the word "infinity" would come up a lot. So if you're going at, let's say .9c (9 tenths the speed of light), and you switch on your headlights, time for you simply passes at a rate such that you observe the light from your headlights to be moving at 300,000 meters per second. Time passes for people at rest such that they observe the light to be going at 300,000 meters per second, and you at .9c. What that amounts to is that time has to pass more slowly for you than for the guy at rest. Effectively, what that means is that time and space themselves bend and change such that any observer in any frame of reference will observe light to be traveling at c. Why? Well, we haven't quite gotten that far yet...
So in order to reach the speed of light, one must go at an infinite speed. So if we were able to discover the constant of infinity, that is the number at which our universe can no longer interpret physicality it got me thinking about how any number divided by zero is undefined: in the equation y = 1/x as x approaches zero y increases so if infinity(inf.) could be considered a constant than: inf. = x/0 where x is any number other than 0 (assuming that 0/0 = 1) which led me to the equation of acceleration: a = dv / dt where dv = change in velocity and dt= change in time so if dt = 0 where dv = all numbers except 0 a would equal inf. so in order to reach a constant form of infinity as set by the limitations of our universe we must stall time, or inversely when a in fact reaches infinity, change in time is stopped. so this led me to an equation involving time(t), rate(r) and distance(d) t = d/r in order for time to equal 0 distance must = 0 t = 0/r Where r does not = 0 t =0 so time is non existent when there is a rate ie. 30 mph but no distance traveled but if we rearrange the equation so that the rate is isolated and assume there is a traveled distance than r = d/t r = d/0 Where d does not = 0 r = inf. so in order to travel any distance while time is not in motion rate must be infinite so in conclusion achieving the speed of light is dependent on the absence of time for any object with mass. now this theory assumes that photons do not follow the same rules as an object containing mass. I'm interested in applying the theory to an equation involving what you described, where an "observed mass increases with speed" and the increase in weight that consequences and the energy needed to proceed. after some quick research and realization I can assume that you are referring to E = mc^2 where E = energy and m = mass and c^2 = the speed of light if m = 0 than E/0 = c^2 meaning that c^2 = inf. and e = 0 so for a photon to travel at it's speed, energy is unnecessary which is true to an extent, energy is needed to create light, energy creating a flame creates light, but i feel the explanation is that within a flame the limitation of infinity is found through some exponential growth. This agrees that the speed of light is the number at which our universe is limited for objects containing no mass. So the ability to travel at those speeds for an object with mass is confined by the number at which the universe is limited for objects containing a mass. So assume that this unknown number is U E = mU