So apparently time stops at the speed of light?

[Calgetorix]

I think you might go blind. If we're talking about the human eye I vaguely remember the chemical reactions are reliant on photons knocking around electrons. If you and light are moving at the same speed, those light particles have effectively stopped. There will no longer be any impacting your retina, so all will be black as your eyes aren't recording any light.

Just throwing that out there.

Imagine you're inside a spaceship travelling faster than light. Now let's say there was a lamp. Would the photons be able to reach your eye? The source of the photons is after all travelling faster than light but relative to the inside of the spaceship it is stationary.

 

[aaronmcc]

ok so here is a simple answer for you. sound does not stop at the speed of light. Light travels faster than sound, therefore, if you were travelling at the speed of light the sound could never reach you, assuming you are travelling away from it.

theoretically if you went faster than the speed of light...? unfortunately, that IS impossible.

/thread

Excuse me, but when did sound ever come up in this thread? We were discussing light, a duality of particles and waves that carries energy from one end of the Universe to the other.

apparently i read the OP wrong. i thought the 1st part was about sound relative to light speed and the second about time relative to light speed.

my bad

there is no need to pad your post with a description of light.

 

[Plazmatic]

SNIP

Hey cant you go faster than the speed of light (or atleast get to one place to another faster than light) though entanglement, (which, i think, is using one atom to affect another, which, if we can get the atom to do the same thing, we may be on our way to teleportation, see ending of half life 2, were Dr. Breen tries to get away using an entanglement device) or folding the universe to get from one place to another, (Wormholes)

I guess we cant really go faster than the speed of light, but we can get to places faster, possibly.

and


WE ARE YOUR GENETIC DESTINY

you may have a point here but it's not useful. the entanglement comes from separating two halves of a whole quantum particle. it can't actually be applied to a person.

http://calitreview.com/51 if you hadn't snipped out my url, you would see I had a source...


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15817394/

also, link above on time.

 

[Danny Ocean]

I think you might go blind. If we're talking about the human eye I vaguely remember the chemical reactions are reliant on photons knocking around electrons. If you and light are moving at the same speed, those light particles have effectively stopped. There will no longer be any impacting your retina, so all will be black as your eyes aren't recording any light.

Just throwing that out there.

Imagine you're inside a spaceship travelling faster than light. Now let's say there was a lamp. Would the photons be able to reach your eye? The source of the photons is after all travelling faster than light but relative to the inside of the spaceship it is stationary.

I'm making all this up as I go along, so bear with me if you're trying to educate me.

Well. No. I don't think so, but it depends where the lamp is in relation to you. Although any light moving in parallel with you will never reach you, the light can still have movement along a horizontal plane in relation to you. I'd draw a picture but I'm terrible at animated images. I'll have a go. Watch this space.

Imagine yourself standing up. Imagine a set of axis are drawn from above, with you as the source. Ignore the vertical aspect, it makes it easier. X is in front and behind you, and Y is to the left and right of you.
I'm thinking that moving at the speed of light removes any relative movement along X, but light can still move along Y relative to you.

Actually, no, I don't have the skill to illustrate this. What I'm trying to say that is, relative to the source, any light not emitted in parallel to your direction of travel will have a horizontal 'speed' relative to the angle at which it was emitted from the source. This horizontal movement could mean that your retina could "Catch" light from outside like throwing a bucket sideways through a stream of water.

 

[Uberjoe19]

ok so here is a simple answer for you. sound does not stop at the speed of light. Light travels faster than sound, therefore, if you were travelling at the speed of light the sound could never reach you, assuming you are travelling away from it.

theoretically if you went faster than the speed of light...? unfortunately, that IS impossible.

/thread

Excuse me, but when did sound ever come up in this thread? We were discussing light, a duality of particles and waves that carries energy from one end of the Universe to the other.

apparently i read the OP wrong. i thought the 1st part was about sound relative to light speed and the second about time relative to light speed.

my bad

there is no need to pad your post with a description of light.

But padding is fun!

 

[Plazmatic]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...vel&aq=0&aqi=g1&oq=quantum+entanglement+time+

Interesting thing to look up on Google, you might find something interesting on time travel and teleportation.

 

[quiet_samurai]

This is why I love theoretical physics. It doesn't really stop, because if time stopped then space itself would cease to exhist as well. Now I'm not sure about this, so don't hold it against me, but the reason time seems to be going slower for a person going at the speed of light is because you are traveling faster then the images of space around you to focus on you're retina. So going the speed of light would make it seem like time stopped, but really its just that space itself that isn't reaching you in time through the visible spectrum.

 

[aaronmcc]

SNIP

Hey cant you go faster than the speed of light (or atleast get to one place to another faster than light) though entanglement, (which, i think, is using one atom to affect another, which, if we can get the atom to do the same thing, we may be on our way to teleportation, see ending of half life 2, were Dr. Breen tries to get away using an entanglement device) or folding the universe to get from one place to another, (Wormholes)

I guess we cant really go faster than the speed of light, but we can get to places faster, possibly.

and


WE ARE YOUR GENETIC DESTINY

you may have a point here but it's not useful. the entanglement comes from separating two halves of a whole quantum particle. it can't actually be applied to a person.

http://calitreview.com/51 if you hadn't snipped out my url, you would see I had a source...


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15817394/

also, link above on time.

i see your point, i'm just saying that a person can't jump through an 'entanglement gate' or whatever. which is confirmed in your source. the quantum signal pass instantaneously, yes but shatner can't get from bed to the store without a car

 

[aaronmcc]

ok so here is a simple answer for you. sound does not stop at the speed of light. Light travels faster than sound, therefore, if you were travelling at the speed of light the sound could never reach you, assuming you are travelling away from it.

theoretically if you went faster than the speed of light...? unfortunately, that IS impossible.

/thread

Excuse me, but when did sound ever come up in this thread? We were discussing light, a duality of particles and waves that carries energy from one end of the Universe to the other.

apparently i read the OP wrong. i thought the 1st part was about sound relative to light speed and the second about time relative to light speed.

my bad

there is no need to pad your post with a description of light.

But padding is fun!

not in bras

do i win a prize for least intellectual comment in this thread?

 

[TheScarecrow]

Didn't some astronaut technically travel back in time by like a 50000th of a second or something?

 

[LiftYourSkinnyFists]

Yes. If you were somehow travelling at the speed of light time would appear to you to have stopped. Everyone else looking at you would be all like "How the fuck is he going at C?!"

Oh, I see. It's because light can travel in waves, and waves don't have mass. That's why waves are the only things that can travel at the speed of light. E=MC[sup]2[/sup] and all that means that it's impossible to reach it anyway. The faster you go the more energy you need to make you go faster. You can never get there. You can get damn close, but never there.

It's like walking half way from point A to B. Then half again. Then half again. Then half again. And each time it requires significantly more energy to halve the distance between you and B. You'll never get there. No matter how much energy you have.

Or something. I'd ask Harbinger here bef-

ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL.

MY ATTACKS WILL TEAR YOU APART.

Light behaves both like a particle and a wave

 

[aaronmcc]

I think you might go blind. If we're talking about the human eye I vaguely remember the chemical reactions are reliant on photons knocking around electrons. If you and light are moving at the same speed, those light particles have effectively stopped. There will no longer be any impacting your retina, so all will be black as your eyes aren't recording any light.

Just throwing that out there.

Imagine you're inside a spaceship travelling faster than light. Now let's say there was a lamp. Would the photons be able to reach your eye? The source of the photons is after all travelling faster than light but relative to the inside of the spaceship it is stationary.

I'm making all this up as I go along, so bear with me if you're trying to educate me.

Well. No. I don't think so, but it depends where the lamp is in relation to you. Although any light moving in parallel with you will never reach you, the light can still have movement along a horizontal plane in relation to you. I'd draw a picture but I'm terrible at animated images. I'll have a go. Watch this space.

yeah, that's spot on. i mean, if you drop something in a plane it doesn't fall backward cuz it's going fast.

 

[balanovich]

"if time stops at the speed of light"
that's not correct.

The thing is, no one knows for sure what happens beyond the speed of light; lots of theories and speculation but nothing certain. We don't even know how to reach the speed of light.

The speed at witch time flows varies depending of the ambient gravity. That's why there's an american base that's constantly GPS timing signals. The satellites are in orbit where's theres less gravity. It's an extremely small timing delay, but it's enough to screw our GPSs.

The very complex universe in witch we live, we don't understand the vast majority of it. It's like baby squirrel freshly pushed out of it's mother's uterus trying to understand the entire work of Freud!



That universe has limits, Time wise, it's the Big Bang. Before, there was something... something that most of changed because it caused the Big Bang, but we don't what. And We especially don't know how to qualify it time-wise. If the Big Crush exists, it would be another limit.

Energy wise, there's the Absolute 0; 0 Kelvin. At that temperature, atoms can't exist the way we know them to. So what happens to them?.... they can't disappear...we just don't know. There is also a theorical maximum temperature. At witch, electrons move so fast it would be impossible for them to be kept within any atom's orbit.(But that one is not a quite stand alone theory)

And speed wise, the limit is the speed of light. What happens at that limit and beyond?We don't know. Some might have ideas, but nobody has scientificly worthy knowledge.

We have equations that map, more or less, reality within those limits, and with them we try to extrapolate how things would be beyond those limits... but mostly a futile exercise.

 

[aaronmcc]

Ok, well aside from the Big Crunch being dis-proven already it is clear there is a lot we don't understand but it's still fun to chat about.

I've got one that will bake your noodle...

Alledgedly, a positron is an electron travelling backwards in time. Therefore, there exists the possibility that every electron in the universe is the same electron having travelled back and forth in time sufficiently to populate the entire universe with itself.

faceplant

 

[accountant]

I'm confused, if time stops at the speed of light, then how can it take any amount of time for light to reach point A to point B? For example the speed of light is exactly 299,792,458 meters per second, and it takes 8 minutes for the suns light to hit earth, and for some stars light to get to earth it takes millions, and sometimes billions of years. If time stops at the speed of light, then how come it takes time for light to reach us? It seems to make more sense that time goes very slow at the speed of light.

Second question, theoretically, if you went faster than the speed of light you would go back in time, if you were to go faster than the speed of light, and lets say that the time it takes you to get from point A to point B is five seconds backwards in time, would you see your self before you traveled if your ending point (point B) at point B, if it was close enough ahead of your self to see (two meters ahead of your starting position for example)? (Obviously end up two meters ahead of your self at the speed of light you would not go in a straight line, you would travel far out and then back, almost make a circle, accept you would end up two meters in front of your original position when you stopped)

Light isn't affected by things the same way physical matter is, that's why it can travel as fast as it does. And the idea that traveling faster than the speed of light can send you back in time is still theoretical, because it's apparently impossible to accelerate a mass past the speed of light (it would require more fuel than the entire universe)the finer points of this theory can't be worked out. Go to wikipedia and look up time travel, it explains most of what you might want to know.

 

[Vladamir69]

Im pretty sure the term in Relative. the fact that when you travel at the speed of light time might look like it stopped, but in reality you are moving really fast and everything else is moving really slow. time itself does not stop just gos to a crawl. but don't take it as law cause i only gots 1 year of physics under my belt.