Thoughts?
Thoughts?
You'd crash into something because no one could control a car moving that fast.
Bear of Bad News wrote:
You'd crash into something because no one could control a car moving that fast.
Are you 12?
I suppose you have a better prediction, then?
It's all relative ...
What would happen if you were in an elevator that was plummeting to Earth, but in the split second before you jumped up ... ?
triangle and mango wrote:
Bear of Bad News wrote:You'd crash into something because no one could control a car moving that fast.
Are you 12?
Underage driving as well
triangle and mango wrote:
Bear of Bad News wrote:You'd crash into something because no one could control a car moving that fast.
Are you 12?
No, actually he sounds smarter than you. Because he's right.
Even if you could go that fast, you would probably be ripping off a Steven Wright joke.
According to the theory of relativity (as I understand it), if you were traveling at close to light speed, and you turned on your headlights, the light produced by your headlights would still appear to move away from you at the speed of light. In other words, from your perspective, it would be as though you were standing still relative to the light that was being emitted from your headlights.
However, from the point of view of a "stationary" observer, like someone on earth's surface (even though that's technically not stationary), it would appear as though the light emitted from your headlights was only moving fractionally faster than you.
It seems weird, and it is when you think about it from a classical physics perspective, as we are used to doing, but the reason it works this way is because there is no absolute reference point from which to make measurements, instead, we each make "relative" measurements based on our own perspective, which are all equally correct. Hence the reason for the name, the theory of relativity. To all of these observers, light always moves at the speed of light, regardless of the observer's motion.
"Not Einstein" is correct. You could also mention that, to the observer, the light would be blue shifted; it could be shifted all the way into the gamma-ray regime, depending on your relative speed.
lucKY2b wrote:
"Not Einstein" is correct. You could also mention that, to the observer, the light would be blue shifted; it could be shifted all the way into the gamma-ray regime, depending on your relative speed.
this is correct. relative to a still medium, your headlights would appear to give off gamma waves forward and radio waves backward the same way a car horn at one "tone" sounds like a much higher frequency when it is driving towards you.
If Not Einstein is correct then wouldn't the person in the car see some object down the road as illuminated by the headlights while the side observer would not?
To the side observer the light would be slowly creeping away from the headlights and would have not yet reached the object down the road. I point this out because it is not relative whether or not that object down the road is illuminated, as I understand it, it is objective, not relative. The object down the road either is or is not being hit by the the light waves and particles from the headlights, no matter who sees it or not and regardless of their vantage point.
I don't claim to have an answer, that is just my line of thinking.
you wouldn`t get a speeding ticket cause you could outrun the cops and their radios
my wife would tell me i should have turned the headlights on earlier.
well maybe not since she threatens to open the door and jump out every time i creep past the posted limit.
If you think this through you can see why there are time effects from increasing velocity. Time is travelling at different "rates" for each of you - much slower for the car relative to the observer. That's because the speed of light is constant. If light is moving at 3e8 m/s relative to me, and you see the light as moving at ~0 m/s relative to me, then we must be experiencing time at different rates.
That makes "sense." If time is skewed then I could imagine how the relative perspective would work. It is all too weird.
You're exactly right. Because of the effects of relativity, various events can appear to happen at different times depending on who the observer is. The driver and the observer will report that the driver was in a different location and at a different time when the object was illuminated by the headlights. This sounds crazy, but again, it comes back to the fact that each observer has his own frame of reference, and the faster one goes, the more that frame of reference is altered relative to a "stationary" observer.
You're right in thinking that the object down the road is being hit by light, the complexity arises when you try to determine when the object is illuminated, because that depends on your frame of reference.
Snatch wrote:
If Not Einstein is correct then wouldn't the person in the car see some object down the road as illuminated by the headlights while the side observer would not?
To the side observer the light would be slowly creeping away from the headlights and would have not yet reached the object down the road. I point this out because it is not relative whether or not that object down the road is illuminated, as I understand it, it is objective, not relative. The object down the road either is or is not being hit by the the light waves and particles from the headlights, no matter who sees it or not and regardless of their vantage point.
I don't claim to have an answer, that is just my line of thinking.
You aren't going to be able to foil relativity that easily. They will agree that the object is illuminated, but they might disagree at what point in time it becomes illuminated (the concept of "at the same time" is not one you can toss around lightly in SR-land). No contradiction.
If you going near the speed of light you would never know it. You would never know if you moving really really fast, or just standing still. All speed, and running, WRs would be infinitely fast, and infinitely slow, at the same time.
This reminds me of another mind bender I was recently pondering....
What would happen if you were going 90mph and THEN you turned on the Flux Capacitor, would it work? Is it necessary to be going PRECISELY 88mph, or must you simply be going AT LEAST 88mph?????
....this one has kept me up for nights on end.