Lightspeed

You get in to a car and travel at the speed of light. What will happen if you turn on the headlights?

the light stsys in the bulb

The light from the bulbs goes at warp factor 1.4, duh

answer: you can't travel at the speed of light!

>>4 ftw!

>>1's initial assumption is bogus with respect to physics as we know it.

What if the car is travelling at the speed of light in glass?

>>6  

>>1's question only makes sense if the car and the light from the headlights are traveling through the same medium, whatever that medium is.  Vaccuum, water, glass.  And the results are the same, the car won't hit the same speed as light in that medium.

Light always travels at c + your speed.  However, light will appear to travel faster or slower, depending on where you're going and how fast you're going in reference to where the light is coming from.

So...your lights turn on, and space deer fly in front of your car, then you slam into them in a fiery nuclear explosion.  Microwaved venison, anyone?

What if you have a machine that can measure the speed of light. And you're in a car going the opposite direction of the light. Will the machine measure the speed as more than c?

>>8

I don't believe you're correct.  That's the whole bizarre space-time warpage as velocity increases.  No matter what your speed with respect to the source of the light, the light travels at the same speed as measured by you.  The wavelength may (and will) change (red-shifting and blue-shifting), but the velocity of the wave remains the same.

The speed of light does change if the light travels through different mediums.  The commonly quoted speed of light "c" is the speed of light in a vaccuum.  The speed of light through water, glass, whatever is different.

The bizarre/unintuitive behavior of light with respect to frames of reference is one of the basic underpinnings of relativity.

>>1

Technically, it would be c, the speed of light.  No matter how fast you go, it'll still appear to go at c.

Energy and momentum are real qualities.  Time, space, and distance are illusions created by our perception of energy and momentum.

Yeah, >>8 is full of it.

The speed of light ( in a vacuum ) is the same NO MATTER WHAT.

>>12
Yes, it'll seem to be going pretty fast to you, but you'll in actualiyu, be experiencing time slower, so it'll even out.

>>8
>>11 I'm augmenting your argument with example.

Yeah, I'll have to throw my comment into this as well.  The idea behind relativity is that all speeds are relative dependent upon position expect for the speed of light.

For instance, two vehicles are travelling towards each other at 30mps.  The relative speed of the driver observing the other vehicle would judge its speed to be 60mps.  However, if you replace the other vehicle with a beam of light, no matter what, the driver would see light travelling at c speed.

you are destroyed at light speed, for you it will seem like an instant, but in reality you travel round and round the universe, following "contours" made by anything with a field of gravity till you hit something and are destroyed in an explosion in which infinite energy is released (due to your infinite mass)

for the instant that you are travelling at the speed of light the light will appear to travel at the speed of light (assuming you can break the laws of physics and sense the movement of this light) however this would happen for no time at all from your perspective. So it essentially wouldn't happen

thx

Stupid question, you would require infinite energy to accelerate anything with mass to the speed of light, all the energy in the universe couldn't get a 1.0x10^-99 kg mass to c relative to the medium.

As a thought experiment, c is constant while time and space are not. Therefore the continuity of c is preserved over time and space, essentially, time and space get out of the way of light. I'm to tired to explain in any more detail right now.

The light would be travelling at the same speed as you, c. You would not see the headlights because it is travelling with you. If you were to slow down to less than c, you would be able to see your headlights. The speed of light is the same in all reference frames.

>>17
From your perspective, but you will be destroyed before time progresses. There will be no time, it won't apply. So I guess you wouldn't be able to measure velocity.

bump

why are all these 3 year old threads being bumped? especially one based on a steven wright joke

>>20
Are all the 3 yr old threads being bumped?  If not, I can't see a pattern among the ones that are being bumped.  What in the world is happening to our /sci/?

/sci/ just loves to discuss division by zero and religion.

old topic is old. The answer is that the light won't escape it's source or will double which is supposed to be impossible. The hypothesis has to do with vectors, photonic motion, and relativity. So, good luck going the speed of light to test that hypothesis...look out for the...wall. :|

>>23
Congratulations on getting a very simple question completely wrong but trying (ineptly) to cover it up by using random words you found on Wikipedia.

The answer is that to the guy in the car, the light from the headlights will appear to be going at (gasp) the speed of light, but to an outside observer, the guy in the car will be frozen in time, and the light will still appear to be going at the speed of light, but because the car is as well, the first photons will never actually leave the headlights.

As thought experiments go, this one is in the very easy category.

You are propelled to the speed of light.  What will happen if you then ejaculate?

>>25
It goes back in time and impregnates your mother, who catches the AIDS and fucking dies.

Oh noes, paradox.  You broke it.

LOL 3 year old thread back from the dead. I had forgotten that threads are even kept that long.

Starting a thesis from an impossible premise will only lead to confusion, wild speculation, and paradoxes. But here goes anyway:

The speed of light is not just a velocity, it's a velocity limit. That is, it is one end of the absolute limits of velocity through 4-dimensional space-time (3 spatial and 1 temporal dimension). Think of it this way: at all times you are moving at the same exact speed. When you are sitting still (ignoring the movement of the planet through the universe), you travel through all three spacial dimensions at 0 m/s, but you move through the temporal dimension at exactly 1 s/s (read that as 1 second on your timeline being the same as 1 second against some hypothetical hyperdimensional multiversal meta-second, the "absolute" second). As you move faster through the spatial dimensions, you move slightly slower in the temporal dimension. At the speed of light, ALL your velocity is through the spatial dimensions, effectively stopping your personal clock, effectively allowing you to travel ANY distance "instantaneously". But that's only according to your personal timeline. Everyone else sees that you were going at 299,792,458 m/s for a really long time. Sitting perfectly still with respect to an imaginary meta-space grid and travelling at exactly 1 s/meta-second is the other absolute limit opposite c.

So. If you were travelling at the speed of light, ignoring the fact that it would take literally an INFINITE amount of energy to accelerate to that speed because you have mass, the question becomes meaningless. No matter how long (to an outside observer) you were travelling at that speed, it would still be 0 time elapsed for you. You can't operate a flashlight in 0 seconds. But let's say you turn on the flashlight as you're approaching c. At first you would see the light going off at normal speed away from you (and a rearview mirror would work normally too), but as soon as you hit c, you'd stop seeing anything at all unless you somehow slowed down again, after which you wouldn't even realize you had been at c.

As you hit c, time slows down and your surroundings become contracted in the direction of travel. At c, time stops and the Universe is flat (a perpendicular 2-dimensional plane, like looking at a map). The light appears to always be traveling at c relative to you because no matter how fast you go (less than c), to the light you appear to be standing still. When you hit c, you are, from your point of view, occupying all points in the Universe along your direction of travel simultaneously for 0 time. There are also no trasitory stages between seeing light travel away from you and becoming "one" with it. Why? Because it's impossible, that's why. All bullshit hypotheticals aside, something at c can never go below c (0 time to decelerate). For the same reason in inverse, nothing below c can accelerate to c.

Also, if you had any mass to start with, you get more and more the closer you get to c and then it becomes literally infinite, hence the reason it would require infinite energy to get you to c. Before you became infinitely massive, though, you'd trigger a Big Crunch and destroy the Universe.

lol

Wasnt the idea of going at the speed of light and observing a light wave the inspiration for the theory of relativity and all its convoulted distortions of space-time?
also, lulz

>>29
No. The question is trivial to answer in a pre-relativity (Newtonian) context.

>>30
From what I've heard, going at the speed of light and observing a light wave pwns Maxwell's equations.  Nothing special happens with the rest of Newtonian mechanics.