“If you are in a vehicle going the speed of light, what would happen if you turned on your headlights?”
Then you’d see the wavelength of the light emitted by your headlights as a function of your velocity. You’d measure the speed of light (the photons coming from your headlights) as c but the wavelength (energy) of the light would depend on whether you were traveling with or against the flow of the photons coming from the headlights.
With the proper Lorentz Transformation you have:
u = (((v1+v2))/(1+v1*v2))/c
If you arbitrarily set the speed of light (c) to c=1 you have:
u = ((1+1))/(1+1))/1 = 1
where “u” is the relative velocity
The speed of light would be 1, where c=1…the speed of light.
The only thing that occurs is that the wavelength of the light either approaches zero or infinity depending on whether the light is travelling with, against, or at some angle relative to the car.
ruthless
Nothing would happen. At the speed of light, TIME stops.
Only WRT the photons. Time doesn’t come to a stop WRT a person who shines a flashlight into the heavens.
Darby
Ruthless did say the person was in the vehicle traveling at the speed of light. He didn’t say how the vehicle got to the speed of light. But since it is traveling at the speed of light. Time on board the vehicle is standing still. And the vehicle has to have infinite mass. So turning on the headlights at the speed of light would take an infinite amount of time WRT the rest frame it originated from.
I agree with ruthless: heh.
The quote is one of Stephen Wright’s one-liner jokes. Another of his in the same vein is:
“We know what the speed of light is. What is the speed of dark?”
heh
RMT
Einstein,
Come on, my friend. Neither you nor I assumed that ruthless was, himself, a photon not did we assume that his “vehicle” was a photon. We assumed, correctly unless ruthless indicates elsewise, that he was asking the question in terms of a normal sub-luminal object that has a rest mass, “What would I see if…”
Einstein,
Come on, my friend. Neither you nor I assumed that ruthless was, himself, a photon not did we assume that his “vehicle” was a photon. We assumed, correctly unless ruthless indicates elsewise, that he was asking the question in terms of an object (a person and his vehicle in this case) that has a rest mass but was somehow accelerated to the speed of light, “What would I see if…”
And you’ve incorrectly solved the differential equation for what ruthless would observe about the world around him if he was traveling at the speed of light. Should you do the math and show how the world appears as he approaches the speed of light you’d observe that the “outside” world begins to evolve at an ever increasing rate tending toward an infinite rate as v —> c, rather than slowing down.
If he attained the speed of light he’d observe whatever the ultimate fate of the universe will be, instantaneously.
Lightlike objects do not incur the concequences of time - but the sub-luminal world around them do. You have to think in terms of symmetry. If time stands still for a photon then the sub-luminal world that they “observe” ages at an infinite rate. If a photon created at the Big Bang could actually experience the evolution of the universe, The Beginning and The End of the universe would be simultaneous from their perspective. The term “experience” would be a bit silly from that perspective. There is no interval that would be termed “time between” for them to actually experience anything. For them the universe never existed at all.
But in no case do objects that have a rest mass observe photons traveling in a vacuum to have a velocity other than ~300,000 km/sec no matter what their velocity is WRT some third object.
If you believe this not to be the case please show me the theory, complete, with the math. A simple opinion, absent a complete proof, is just another Internet pop-sci New Age guess. A complete proof, with the math, a few competent referees agreeing and substantial evidence is a Nobel Prize in the waiting.
are you kinda sorta saying time is incompatible with light?
good job mr. einstein but the question you should be asking is where do you go when time stops?
to figure that out you will need residue calculus.
Darby
I didn’t play with the fictional mathematical constructs to come up with my answer. I merely extrapolated my answer from current theory of what is believed about an object traveling at the speed of light. Ruthless stated an impossible scenario, so I responded with a logical but impossible outcome from his scenario.
This depend of the “Spin” of the magnetic distortion of your device…
a- Forward on Time
b- back to the past
satown
You can play with the fictional mathematical language if you want. Since reality isn’t predictable with mathematics, I would suspect that any mathematical computation would lead you down another blind alley.
But your question is interesting. I would hazard a speculation based upon current observations from my experiments. If you could stop time locally, the dimensions of length would cease to exist. That would suggest you are no longer within the universe.
The Dark Energy…
btw:
i find this article:
Quoted:
Tuesday, December 16, 2008 18:11
Washington (DC) - NASA held a phone-in press conference today wherein three astrophysicists reported the latest findings on dark energy. They have now “clearly seen” the effects of dark energy on the most massive collapsed objects in the universe. This new evidence has aligned scientists behind the central belief that
- dark energy exists,
- that it explains why we are seeing the universe expanding and accelerating, and
- that Einstein’s General Relativity theory is correct - so long as the cosmological constant is applied (something Einstein himself called his “greatest blunder”).
More at
That considered, explain once again how it is that your computer connected with the Internet, then this server, sent your message down a blind alley yet your post somehow appeared here.
(Doing so, of course, without reference to the fictional mathematics of the quantum mechanics of condensed matter solid state physics.)
Oh really? So are you telling me the satellite shoot-down earlier this year with a Standard Missile 3 was all dumb luck with no mathematics involved to predict the reality?
(Side Note: My brother was the guidance and control engineer on the earlier versions of the SM-3 that lead to this missile defense variant. He will be very interested to hear that all the math he packed into those guidance algorithms do not predict reality… he just got lucky!)
RMT
What would happen if you turned on your lights?
You don’t need math for this. The speed of light–compared to what?
In relativity it works both ways, Since there is no preferred coordinate system, the planet is traveling at the speed of light away from the vehicle. If you turned on the lights of your car normally, what happens? We’re probably traveling at the speed of light compared to something else–but that really doesn’t matter. If the vehicle traveling at the speed of light (the Observer) suddenly went poof! would that affect us?
The STR has been criticized for tacitly retaining absolute space and time." It makes the assumption that the Observer’s frame of reference can be projected onto the observed. This is based on the assumption that there is a common dimension of time. 
Darby
I take it you haven’t seen the comcast high speed internet commercial. It’s all done with liquid speed invented by comcast.
RMT
I suppose I could counter with: Why is a laser guided missile more accurate at hitting its target then a conventional calculated trajectory missile?
Let’s face it RMT, dumb luck will outpace mathematics hands down any old day of the week. I suppose if you had your way, you would take an eraser to reality and replace it with mathematics just so no one would find out the truth.
Yep. When caught making a really dumb statement - deflect and try to use some humor.