So apparently time stops at the speed of light?

[blalien]

i am happy to be seeing another point of view. but something still confuses me, how do you create matter from only pure energy. im not saying its not possible, but im curious as to how it actually happen. the electron to positrons didnt make much sense to me, but it doesnt hurt to add impute. also, i still don't think that something can be created from nothing. sorry, im going to need more proof for your info. so put down a link for me. i do like being proved wrong when it comes to this stuff, shows that we all have something to learn.

There is no such thing as pure energy. Energy is a property that matter and vacuum possess, but you won't just find energy floating around. Matter is one kind of energy. Electricity, thermal, and speed are other kinds of energy. Energy can change from one form to another, and it happens all the time.

Here is a good article on virtual particles:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=are-virtual-particles-rea

 

[The_Healer]

Wow I'm missing all of the whole Bold Capitals thing completely but obviously someone knows something that I don't.

What I do know is that we should all stop talking about theoretical physics and start practising theoretical physics.

Seriously, first one to reach C wins.

 

[Subject134127]

A real scientist would have been able to use ambiguous technobabble to avoid this sort thing.

Lol, true.

though, light always has the same speed (distance per time unit)

Sorry, but: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light#In_a_medium the 'Speed of Light' is a constant, measured at 299,792,458 meters per second, but the light itself may, on a lot of occasions, actually move slower than the speed of light.

well there is no medium in space, is there? no there isn't ^^

 

[Irridium]

Oof, this is way above my level of intelligence. Times like this I wish I was an expert at this type of stuff. If I had to take a guess, I would say that time and space likes to fuck with our brains. But thats just what I think happens.

 

[bonnerjohn]

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

Yeah. You're not actually travelling at the speed of light. That's like saying instant teleportation is travelling at the speed of light. It has the same practical benefits, though.

If you travel at the speed of light, light can't catch up with you, so you can't see anything new. Because of this, it appears to you that time has stopped (because you can't see anything new happening).

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 sub-atomic particles. 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 sensing any light.

Just throwing that out there.

Phototransduction [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototransduction].

You would not be able to see anything new behind you, but you would be able to see in front of you because the light from those objects is traveling towards you. The whole theory is crap. If you were able to travel at the speed of light, and you were carrying a clock with you, the clock would not stop. If time were to stand still, then I guess your heart would stop and you would die.

 

[Johnmw]

At lightspeed, relativistic effects become unignorable, and due to the way that the equation is written, the mass of an object at lightspeed is essentially infinite, which is impossible. Hence why lightspeed travel is ALSO impossible.

On this equation, v is velocity and c is the speed of light. As you can see, as the value of v approaches c, the Lorentz factor of the object represented by gamma becomes greater and greater. As it is clearly impossible to divide by zero in a way that does not introduce infinities, the mass of the object also becomes infinite. Let's put our resulting Lorentz factor value into the following equations:

,
Where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light.

Lightspeed is actually not obtainable because the closer you get to it, the more energy that is required to accelerate the object further, the energy required basically being infinite as well.

- A really good explanation!

If you managed the impossible of travelling at the speed of light, the you yourself would perceive time as standing still but the universe at large would not. At the speed of light you would have infinite mass, or to put it another way more mass than the multi-verse (or every multi-verse put together)

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

To reach the speed of light you either need infinite acceleration and finite time or infinite time and finite acceleration, so it doesn't matter what happens when you reach that doesn't matter, because it can't happen. Although my understanding of it all was that you would just perceive time as having stopped. Its like that other theory the more you move in space the less you move in time and vice-versa.

Anyways you really shouldn't be thinking about this shit, go do something more productive with your time.

 

[Thaluikhain]

A necro bump from when I'd only been here for 2 months. Huh.

 

[Frission]

A necro bump from when I'd only been here for 2 months. Huh.

Looks like it was a cool thread. The number of ghosts is pretty chilling though.

 

[Thaluikhain]

*googles*

This thread is about twice as old as "Tropes vs Women".

(And I've now improved it by mentioning Sarkeesian, which every thread must do)

 

[Lionsfan]

Man, talk about nostalgia. The Escapist used to be fun, what happened to this place?