[gumby5647]

So im sitting in math class.....and this guy next to me says, "hey, what would happen if you could speed up the speed of light?" I said i didn't know.......and the rest of math class is a blur, because i was trying to think of what would happen........
i'd like to hear what other people think, before i post my idea........

also,

anybody know how to get 9 9 9 9 to equal 100? four nine's used anyway, added , subtracted, divided, whatever......only four, and equal to 100......

any guess's?

[Cipher13]

IMO, nothing.
I mean time travel is possible, but not by breaking the speed of light.
Einstein thought it was the, you know, ultimate barrier of... well everything. If he's right about light speed (not the "speed of light", but the 300000k/s), then you can theoretically travel in time by breaking it.
I think he's wrong.
What happens when you go past 300000k/s? You hit 300000.001k/s etc.

I have pages and pages and pages of notes I wrote down about time travel all through out school during detention and whatnot, and I've still got them.
Full of the possible problems with time travel I thought up, and I've come to the conclusion that even if time travel is possible, and we could use it accurately, it would be impossible to harness, due to a number of reaons: the main one being the way the earth moves around the sun, and the sun around the center of the galaxy, and so on.
We're never in the same place twice, so if we go back, then we'll be in a different location.

I mean light speed is simply the speed at which a quanta travels - its really nothing more.

If you could go that fast, time would APPEAR to stand still cause its so damn fast, but thats just the same as doing 200km/h in a car as opposed to 30.

I don't think time and light correlate.
But on that issue I'd have to think about it a little more.

Speeding up light? Its been done. They fired a photon into a chamber filled with some gas (radon? rubidium? Can't remember), and it once it entered, well, it appeared to hit the end of the chamber before it entered it. Why? Time travel? Maybe.
Most likely? Our instruments are just too primitive to measure such an extreme example of speed like that is - I mean 300 times the speed of light they say it was moving at.

Ah well.

Lotsa good thoughts come about from thinking about that sorta stuff. I'll post more stuff if I find all my notes (literally, books worth, lol).


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[This message has been edited by Cipher13 (edited 03-28-2001).]

[vega24]

Full of the possible problems with time travel I thought up, and I've come to the conclusion that even if time travel is possible, and we could use it accurately, it would be impossible to harness, due to a number of reaons: the main one being the way the earth moves around the sun, and the sun around the center of the galaxy, and so on.
We're never in the same place twice, so if we go back, then we'll be in a different location.

For time travel to work properly, you have to open a portal in both worlds. One in the world you're in and another one in the world you want to enter. If not, you'll step into oblivian when you enter the portal. Atleast that's what some physist on the Discovery Channel said.

"hey, what would happen if you could speed up the speed of light?"

It maybe possible for somethings to travel faster than the speed of light, but you can't speed up the speed of light itself. It's a constant. You might be able to speed up something as simple as a photon passed the speed of light, but not something as complex at the atomic level as a human being. A photon is a quantum of electromagnetic energy that has both particle and wave properties. For all practicle purposses it has no mass, but yet it has momentum and energy. Therefore it might be possible to accelerate something like a photon pass the speed of light, it's when you try pushing more massive particles pass the speed of light that you start running into problems. It takes more energy to accelerate more mass. Just how much energy is the question. It may be completely impossible for anything more massive than subatomic particles to travel faster than light.

My brain hurts, I think I'll go lay down now.

[This message has been edited by vega24 (edited 03-28-2001).]

[lucylawless]

Originally posted by gumby5647:

anybody know how to get 9 9 9 9 to equal 100? four nine's used anyway, added , subtracted, divided, whatever......only four, and equal to 100......

any guess's?

99 + 9/9 = 100

[gumby5647]

yes, but what if you WERE able to acclerate the speed of light, even just by a fraction of a percent.....like by some freak act of nature.....what would happen?

[lucylawless]

The Earth's atmosphere would act like a lens to focus the sun's light and heat and burn us all in a sea of molten rock and fire and poking.

plus, the wavelength of light would get longer, so we would only be able to see things giving off UV or gamma radiation, depending on how much the speed of light was changed...

[Archangel]

Cipher, where did you get the info on that experiment when they sped up that photon? I heard about that a while ago, but I never found a source for it. I would like to read it. TIA.

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"This is absolutely fascinating. . ." the blonde chick in Arizona Werewolf

[Cipher13]

Oh yeah, I'll get it out of the archives. Its some where around here.

Another impact of light speeding up, which would actually be quite cool to see, is everythign we see at night (stars, etc) would all just change.
The light we see from a star can be billions of years old - we don't actually see where that star is, but where it was x-billions or millions of years ago.
It'd all change.

And everything'd change colour (would it?)... hehehe
Hey, purple iMacs and they didn't even have to remanufacture!


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[vega24]

yes, but what if you WERE able to accelerate the speed of light, even just by a fraction of a percent.....like by some freak act of nature.....what would happen?

If you're referring to the actual speed of light (186,000 miles per second) than my guess is that what was once visible has now become invisible. Remember, visible light is just one section of the electromagnetic spectrum and in order to raise it's speed limit to something higher, I would think the speed limit for the whole electromagnetic spectrum would have to be raised as well. Meaning radio waves, microwaves, visible light, x-rays, gamma rays all would be travelling faster than before. This might have already happened in nature, say for a very tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Everything that happened in that first nanosecond is a complete mystery to Physicists.

[gumby5647]

yeah i was wondering about the color this as well.....since color is just a specific wave length.....if you were to change it and speed it up, there would be no colors?

[vega24]

Another impact of light speeding up, which would actually be quite cool to see, is everythign we see at night (stars, etc) would all just change.
The light we see from a star can be billions of years old - we don't actually see where that star is, but where it was x-billions or millions of years ago.
It'd all change.

This would make astronomers very happy, but you would have to know the exact frequency to look for. Our eyes are tuned to specific electromagnetic frequencies, so pure naked eye viewing is out of the question and the equipment we have today is designed for the original electromagnetic spectrum, not a altered one.

[Daishi]

Originally posted by gumby5647:
"hey, what would happen if you could speed up the speed of light?"

Like change the value of the constant in some God-like fashion? And then watch what would happen in a universe that had one constant all of a sudden changed?

Well, my first problem would be the violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics. I'd get real pissy if the total energy of the universe wasn't constant. Would make my thermo quiz on Friday a real nuisance.

Then I'd get pissy because my Electrical and Magnetic Circuits notes would need updating. And I had enough trouble in that class as it is...

But I suppose that's a selfish line of thought... meh.

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not strong - only aggressive
not free - we only licensed
not compassionate - only polite
not good - but well behaved

[Fyre4ce]

originally posted by Cipher13:
I don't think time and light correlate.

They do, in fact. There is a phenomenon known as time dialation, which causes time to move more slowly for objects moving fast. For example, if I were to hop in a space ship and cruise around the galaxy at 0.80c (80% the speed of light), when I returned to Earth, I would find that its inhabitants aged much faster than I. This has actually been measured using very sensative instruments.

originally posted by vega24:
It may be possible for somethings to travel faster than the speed of light, but you can't speed up the speed of light itself. It's a constant. You might be able to speed up something as simple as a photon passed the speed of light, but not something as complex at the atomic level as a human being. A photon is a quantum of electromagnetic energy that has both particle and wave properties. For all practicle purposses it has no mass, but yet it has momentum and energy. Therefore it might be possible to accelerate something like a photon pass the speed of light, it's when you try pushing more massive particles pass the speed of light that you start running into problems. It takes more energy to accelerate more mass. Just how much energy is the question. It may be completely impossible for anything more massive than subatomic particles to travel faster than light.

Sort of... A few points: Some people get confused by what it means for the speed of light to be constant. It simply means that ALL observers, regardless of their speed, perceive light to have the exact same speed. This is in part due to time dialation. In other words, if you're in a space ship flying toward a star at half the speed of light, you would see light coming at you from the star at exactly the speed of light, and NOT one-and-a-half times the speed of light. Pretty cool, eh?
About accelerating things past the speed of light: It is impossible to accelerate anything with mass to the speed of light or greater. The reason for this is that, as a massive (in the true sense - having mass) object approaches the speed of light, its mass increases. Therefore, the amound of energy required to accelerate it further increases as well. An object at the speed of light would have infinite mass, and would therefore require infinite energy, a physical impossibility. Regarding massless particles, I really don't know if it's possible to get a massless particle moving faster than the speed of light. You don't have to worry about changes in mass, although time dialation and length contraction may present problems...

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Fyre4ce

"I need a vacation." - Terminator robot

[Daishi]

Originally posted by Fyre4ce:
...Therefore, the amound of energy required to accelerate it further increases as well...

And this folks is why I chose Geology 121 (Rocks for Jocks) instead of Physics 128 (The Savage Mind Thrashing) for my elective last year...


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not strong - only aggressive
not free - we only licensed
not compassionate - only polite
not good - but well behaved

[AlbertWu]

Einstein said something about always traveling at the speed of light (either in time or space or time+space) If you were moving in space, you slow down in time, etc...

If we raised the speed of light, either time would move faster, or time would stay the same and we would go faster...

Hmm...

Maybe you DID increase the speed of light and thats why the rest of math class was a blur

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Bored, Albert is.
Speak like Yoda, he will.

Email address of him, [email protected] is.

[The Godfather]

If the speed of light was 600,000km/s instead of 300,000km/s then the universe would be more Newtonian-like. The effects of relativity would have been discovered some decades later (Fitzgerald experiment). We would have faster computers, we would be able to communicate with the moon with less time lag. The atomic bomb would have been developed just now (what would Bush do? ).

[Cipher13]

They do, in fact. There is a phenomenon known as time dialation, which causes time to move more slowly for objects moving fast. For example, if I were to hop in a space ship and cruise around the galaxy at 0.80c (80% the speed of light), when I returned to Earth, I would find that its inhabitants aged much faster than I. This has actually been measured using very sensative instruments.

Yeah, Time Dialation... thats all well and good but we can't measure that accurately enough until we can send a guy around the galaxy at proxiluminous speeds.
And still, that doesn't really show a perfect and unwavering correlation between time and the speed of light... its pretty inconclusive.
It could be merely coincidental, or really, what causes ageing in humans?
The buildup of certian chemicals? The gradual wearing away of whatever?
Perhaps the cause and effect of all that are merely dispelled at fast speeds, or in certain environments...


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[Macfreak7]

Im not sure about increasing the speed of light..... but, the speed of light HAS been REDUCED. In some experiment where light was made to pass through some extremely cold sodium atoms, and that worked like an 'optical molasses' to slow down light down to 38mph. Pretty old news that.

As for time travel, i've had a dozen discussions about that, but its always as interesting.
If you could travel FASTER than the speed of light (which is highly impossible), you could go faster than the light that has reflected off the earth and gone back into space, 'overtake' that, and then look back at the earth the way it was when the light reflected off it.
That was just one of the points...

ok i just found this link... breaking the light speed limit

another thing i love is thought experiments... heres one someone asked me recently: what would happen if you turn on a flashlight while travelling at the speed of light? (thats just like rephrasing "what would happen if you could speed up the speed of light?")

{edit:UBB CODE}

[This message has been edited by Macfreak7 (edited 03-29-2001).]

[doug young]

another thing i love is thought experiments... heres one someone asked me recently: what would happen if you turn on a flashlight while travelling at the speed of light? (thats just like rephrasing "what would happen if you could speed up the speed of light?")

This is something I have often wondered about.

What about if you are driving at 60mph, is the light from your car then travelling at 186347.490 miles per second instead of 186287.490 miles per second

What if your driving with the headlights on and slam on the brakes...
Will there be a gap in the light, will the light stretch or what???

And if you're reversing does that mean that that the light from your headlights is travelling slower than normal???

What would happen If you could reverse at the speed of light. Would the light from your headlights just hang stationary in the air???

And if you were driving forwards at the same speed, could the light actually escape from your headlights???

Owww My head Hurts


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I used to belong to a three ring circus.
Yeah, Me and two other ar5eholes!

[Fyre4ce]

originally posted by AlbertWu:
If you were moving in space, you slow down in time, etc...

Yeah. Imagine a graph with the y-axis as movement through time, and the x-axis as movement through space. Now imagine a vector of a fixed length going from the origin up the y-axis. All of the movement is through time. You are standing still. Now, as your velocity increases, that vector is going to have to have some x-component. But, because of time dialation, the y-component (movement through time) decreases. The solution, according to the equation for time dialation, is to rotate that vector about the origin. What were to happen if you were moving at the speed of light? The vector would be completely along the x-axis, and would have no y-component. Thus, if you were moving at the speed of light, time would stand still.

originally posted by Cipher13:
thats all well and good but we can't measure that accurately enough until we can send a guy around the galaxy at proxiluminous speeds.

That's not true. We have conducted experiments where we synchronize two highly precise clocks, take one up in a fighter jet, fly it around for a while at a few times the speed of sound, then return it to the ground. The result? The two clocks had a measurable difference.

originally posted by Macfreak7:
but, the speed of light HAS been REDUCED. In some experiment where light was made to pass through some extremely cold sodium atoms, and that worked like an 'optical molasses' to slow down light down to 38mph. Pretty old news that.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but yeah that's pretty old news. Every substance has a property called an index of refraction, which is the ratio of the speed of light in a vacuum to the speed of light passing through that substance. Water has an index of refraction of 1.333, meaning that light travels only 75% of its "normal" speed when traveling through water.

Fyre4ce, who spends his time reading physics books...

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Fyre4ce

"I need a vacation." - Terminator robot

[socialpants]

ooh, quantum stuff, just my field

Questions of relative velocity in relativity can be answered using the velocity subtraction formula v = (w - u)/(1 - wu/c2) (see relativity FAQ: velocity addition). If you are driving at a speed u relative to me and you measure the
speed of light in the same direction (w = c in my frame), the formula gives v the speed light in your reference frame as, v = (c-u)/(1 - u/c). For any speed u less than c this gives v = c so the speed of light is the same for you.
But if u = c the formula degenerates to zero divided by zero; a meaningless answer.

If you want to know what happens when you are driving at very nearly the speed of light, an answer can be given. Within your car you observe no unusual effects. You can look at yourself in your mirror which is moving with the
car and you will look the same as normal. Looking out of the window is a different matter. The light from your headlights will always go at the speed of light in your reference frame. It will strike any object in its path and be
reflected back. Everything else will be coming towards you at nearly the speed of light so the light reflected off it will be Doppler shifted to very high frequencies towards the ultraviolet or beyond. If you have a suitable camera
you could take a snapshot. The objects passing are contracted in length but because of the different times of passage for the light and effects of aberration, the snapshot will show the objects you pass rotated. I Think

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I've been 'ere before......

[Fyre4ce]

originally posted by doug young:
What about if you are driving at 60mph, is the light from your car then travelling at 186347.490 miles per second instead of 186287.490 miles per second

You would see light leaving your headlights at exactly the speed of light (2.998 x 10^8 m/s - I prefer SI units, sorry). Someone standing a couple hundred meters down the highway would see light coming at them at exactly the speed of light, and no more. Einstein's theory of special relativity is that the speed of light is constant no matter what inertial frame of reference you observe it from (how fast you are moving).

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Fyre4ce

"I need a vacation." - Terminator robot

[nealconner]

An electron's mass increases at very high speed because it is approaching the speed of light, and the enormous amounts of energy needed to attain such high speeds actually weight on the electron to keep it from ever reaching the speed of light. The electron need so much energy to approach the speed of light that it will always take on too much mass and become too "heavy" ever to actually attain that speed.

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I lie down now.

[Fred CHOTTIN]

If you are interested by the possibilities of time travel (and teletransportation as well as parallel universes), read the book Timeline by Michael Crichton. As usual, he used scientific informations to support his story and gives precise references for interested readers. The problem is that theories supporting the possibility of time travel are using quantum physics and is very hard to follow for the average person as it contradicts many ways to see the world and does not correspond at all to commoner's logic.
Years ago, i tried to read the book of Stephen Hawking 'a brief history of time' but i could not manage the last third of it though i don't feel stupid but quantum physics will make dumb most of the population.
About experiments of actual time travel, years ago, it was noted that explosions of nuclear bombs happen a fraction of time before the critical mass is reached thus implying that there is a time distorsion somewhere.
For myself, i support the theory of parallel universes which could explain many strange facts like :

- simultananeous discoveries at different points of the world with people having no contacts at all. It happens too often to be due to hazard.

- knowledge of places you never seen before either for real or on documentaries (the feeling of d�j�-vu) as i think that some people can move from one to another (mostly without knowing it, during their dreams)

- cognition of future events. It happens to me several times (over 10 times) for accidents : i knew they would happen but could not avoid them. Other people in my family had this faculty (genetic inheritance?)

I think Western conception of space and time is too much rigid compared to Eastern conceptions and quantum physics are going to break the walls in which westerners are locked in.
Our so-called logical thought is too limited. I will take an example : in IQ tests, very often, you are submitted to give answers to logical progressions of geometric figures or numbers. The solution of these puzzles, very often, is not unique (as people tend to think) but very often, others can be found that are as logical than the ones they try to impose to you.
Discoveries in sciences are much more related to mistakes than pure logical calculations and when the discoveries are made, the authors try to cover them up by logical reasoning once the discoveries are made.
We are too much relying to mathematics to solve problems as they are other ways (often more simple).
An example : one time, Thomas Edison asked his engineers to calculate the volume of an electrical bulb produced by the Edison company. A day later, they came back to his office with figures that were erroneous (by more than 30%. Edison took a bulb and put it in water contained in a graduated bowl and got a good result in one second while his engineers tried during one day, in vain, to slice the volume of the bulb in geometric figures they could calculate.
I won't say that mathematics, physics or logic are bad but i stand to say they are only ways among others to comprehend our universe.


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Fight against the Dark Force (Microsoft)

[darcybaston]

Quote:
---
1- simultananeous discoveries at different points of the world with people having no contacts at all. It happens too often to be due to hazard.

2- knowledge of places you never seen before either for real or on documentaries (the feeling of d�j�-vu) as i think that some people can move from one to another (mostly without knowing it, during their dreams)

3- cognition of future events. It happens to me several times (over 10 times) for accidents : i knew they would happen but could not avoid them. Other people in my family had this faculty (genetic inheritance?)
-------

These are also spiritual questions.

1-When the abstract world (the spiritual one we come from) decides to help the earth reality as a whole, it sends an intention. This intention reaches everyone at the same time, because we're not apart from each other. Each concentration of a soul (individuations) are just clumps from the one true soul. So yeah, send a message to one or all, doesn't matter, it's the same pond. Of course some personalities are better focused to this vibration/harmonic of energy (the intent from the abstract) and it would seem that only a handful get "insight" at the same time instead of every single human at the time. Besides, is everybody paying attention to their intuition every second of the day? If I'm having sex...I couldn't care less about the speed of light hehe.

2-Your soul is much larger (in ability, not physical size, physical size is an illusion) than this earthly body, and since time is an illusion of relativity and doesn't exist in the absolute (your spiritual home), it can easily animate many different incarnate personalities at any time. From the soul's point of view, each different varyation of 'you' are all happening at the same time, while each of your idividuated versions of you happen from a past,present,future perspective.

In order for each person that forms the whole you to remain fully aware of their own realities and experiences, there's a layer of time. A wonderful game of smoke and mirrors so that you don't have to be conscious of all your simultaneous realities at once. I mean, if you were about to have a joyous experience, would you be able to fully experience that joy if you were also aware of a painful experience happening to other parts of you from the past and/or future?

Now, your consciousness does focus to the timeless soul aspect of who you are sometimes. This flutter opens a flood of knowing. Your soul doesn't percieve time and therefore, should your earthly consciousness focus on your soul's consciousness, you would percieve any moment in time as having already occured, occuring now, and will occur later.

I felt this once. I had a deja vu of having a deja vu. The cyclic awareness of time while this happened was REALLY fascinating, but I had to relinquish present knowing of my body's position, and I quickly found myself on the floor. Damn knees weren't made for this sort of thing.


3-Same as above. The spirit world is not affected by time and they can therefore observe what you deem future events. Cool thing is, that that would make it seem that your native energy state is aware of everything (no beginning nor end of existence) simultaneously. That's true too. Which is why life isn't about achieving anything. It's about experiencing the process. Of course, as we frequently try to do, defining a beginning and and end would necessitate time, and therefore...there actually is no beginning nor end. Your soul, which is not apart from mine, it IS mine as mine IS yours, is eternal.

---phew!----speed of light stuff next----

I believe the speed of light is constant. Of course, this applies for objects with mass that travels(beginning and end point separated by space-time) through space-time. Our 4 dimension reality. There are Quantum particles that are happy to have no mass, disappear and reappear wherever they feel like. If we were to point out a space here, and a space there and watch Quantum particles appear here and there without an interval of time, you'd say they broke the speed of light. But they never travelled the distance, they were just here and there. Speed ,measurement REQUIRES a space within which to travel. Abandon distance, and the speed of light is completely discarded.

So I folding space is the way to go. Remove the percieved space, and there's no distance to travel, and therefore no speed to measure. Grab a sheet of paper, and roll one end so that it curves to reach the other. You're at one end and you want to get to the other. Oh...it's alrelady here, and so are you. That was fast.... You got there without leaving.

Throw in what we know of time dilation, and the understanding that time slows the faster you go, and when you reach the speed of light, and time should stop, you are everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Oh, and the mass increasing thing gets so very interesting when we unify Quantum and relativity with Super Strings involving gravity and acceleration heh.

best wishes,
Darcy

ps f course I could be wrong. If I were never wrong, I'd never be right. I'd just be.

[Don Pickett]

What about recent experiments showing particles moving up to seven times the speed of light?

[RDJL27]

A man somewhere 8 months ago reflected light in a chamber of Cesium gas, and the results stated that he sped it up 300 times. I believe this was at a tempertature significantly different then something average like 25� C (lower or higher I don't know). The results were doubted, everyone thought he was a crack-pot... So they got a panel of scientists to watch it-it was done again. So it's not breaking the speed of light, but making that barier, and constant faster....

[maxelson]

Originally posted by Don Pickett:
What about recent experiments showing particles moving up to seven times the speed of light?

I don't know much about that stuff, but one of my co workers here at THE TEMPLE OF INTELLECT was involved in the experiment which basically ground the speed of light to a halt. Incredibly fascinating and just think of the practical uses. The experiment here involved passing the beam of light through an incredibly cold substrate. There was anoth experiment at some other institution which was able to get the same results without the cold. NOt only could they stop the beam in its tracks, but they could then move the beam again. Think of the practical uses of this kind of thing- starting with simple data transfer and storage. As a side note, neither experiment reported any rips, speeds or halts in the space/time continuum as a result of the slowing of the light beam.

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Hat, Hat, baby.

Ciper13,
This is really fun stuff but, I have read of a theory that solves the movement of the earth and so on. It has something to do wtih the fact that time and space are really part of the same thing so what you would have to do is have some thing that would give you space/time coordinates. Making the underlining distance between irrelevant. I read this in one of my More progressive physics books. Sorry I can't remember which one but I'll try to find it.

[Cipher13]

Originally posted by jimmer:
Ciper13,
This is really fun stuff but, I have read of a theory that solves the movement of the earth and so on. It has something to do wtih the fact that time and space are really part of the same thing so what you would have to do is have some thing that would give you space/time coordinates. Making the underlining distance between irrelevant. I read this in one of my More progressive physics books. Sorry I can't remember which one but I'll try to find it.

Yeah, co-ordinates are nice, but useless without a vessel with which to travel to them. And I mean if we're gonna go back in time, then fly trillions of miles (thats how great the distances would be), by the time we reached earth it'd be back in the same time we left from
So the only way is to, as Darcy mentioned, get there is to bend space and never really leave, a la wormholes and so on.
The problem is, like the piece of paper example, what happens when you bend a piece of paper around like that? Especially close to the axis? It distorts, irreversibly, no matter how mildly.
So unless hypersphere will just snap back into shape... then there are implications for universal disruption.
Also, then you do that, not only a single point comes in contact, but many do.
So what if two 'local' stars in the fold zone were to come into contact with each other? OUCH!
There are innumerable problems with time travel.
But, it'll happen one day, and I also get the feeling that if its to do with things like, not so much bending the hypersphere or going really fast (hehe, when you say those aloud, which sounds more stupid? LOL, just an observation), but hell, it is likely a "natural" occurence in nature... natural as it happens without "our" influence, not as if it was common...

I've gotta go, I'll post back here later.


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[iBook]

Ok. Call me a moron if you will, but if I take a flash light and stick something that will not let light through in front of it, am I bringing the light to a halt?

[vega24]

Sort of... A few points: Some people get confused by what it means for the speed of light to be constant. It simply means that ALL observers, regardless of their speed, perceive light to have the exact same speed. This is in part due to time dialation. In other words, if you're in a space ship flying toward a star at half the speed of light, you would see light coming at you from the star at exactly the speed of light, and NOT one-and-a-half times the speed of light. Pretty cool, eh?
About accelerating things past the speed of light: It is impossible to accelerate anything with mass to the speed of light or greater. The reason for this is that, as a massive (in the true sense - having mass) object approaches the speed of light, its mass increases. Therefore, the amound of energy required to accelerate it further increases as well. An object at the speed of light would have infinite mass, and would therefore require infinite energy, a physical impossibility. Regarding massless particles, I really don't know if it's possible to get a massless particle moving faster than the speed of light. You don't have to worry about changes in mass, although time dialation and length contraction may present problems...

That's what I was trying to get at before my brain melted.

[iBook]

Also, if you keep repeating the light, in theory it would go slower each time it is repeated, right??? No. Becuase as someone noted light is constant, so theoretically you cannot slow light becuase it is constant.

Is the speed of light the same in all colors, or are all colors different speeds?

If the speed of sound is considerably slower than the speed of light, then why when I am watching TV does the sound sync up with what I am seeing on the screen, or, is it just an illusion that they are.

And how about this. Say I hollar to someone who is say 150 feet away in plain sight. Will they see my mouth move before they hear my voice?

One more thing. A friend and I are both watching the same thing on TV through the same Dish provider, however I hear something on my TV before I hear the same thing through the phone. Say by the time I hear something and ask if he heard it, he hears it before I say did you hear it. Is time different at two different points in the same time zone, and even within a mile of each other?

Excuse me if these are really dumb questions. I never took physics in college.

[Don Pickett]

What about recent experiments showing particles moving up to seven times the speed of light?

Said experiments are as follows:

A German physicist took a recording of a piece of classical music and split the sound into two channels. One channel was unimpeded - the particles carrying the sound information went on their merry way at c until they arrived at their destination. The other channel's progress was considerably impeded.

Both channels arrived at the destination at the same time. It was calculated that the particles in the impeded had to travel at 7 times c to arrive at the other end in sync with their sibling particles. So, not only did something travel faster than light, it transmitted coherent information.

Wow. . .

[vega24]

Originally posted by iBook
Ok. Call me a moron if you will, but if I take a flash light and stick something that will not let light through in front of it, am I bringing the light to a halt?

That is called blocking the light. What they were talking about above, I think, is slowing down a beam of light below it's normally traveled speed of 186,000 miles per second.

[This message has been edited by vega24 (edited 03-29-2001).]

[vega24]

Orginally posted by iBook:
Is the speed of light the same in all colors, or are all colors different speeds?

If the speed of sound is considerably slower than the speed of light, then why when I am watching TV does the sound sync up with what I am seeing on the screen, or, is it just an illusion that they are.

And how about this. Say I hollar to someone who is say 150 feet away in plain sight. Will they see my mouth move before they hear my voice?

One more thing. A friend and I are both watching the same thing on TV through the same Dish provider, however I hear something on my TV before I hear the same thing through the phone. Say by the time I hear something and ask if he heard it, he hears it before I say did you hear it. Is time different at two different points in the same time zone, and even within a mile of each other?

To answer your first question, the speed of light is the same for all colors. What makes different colors is the different wavelengths of light. Visible light starts around wavelengths of 4000 angstroms with the color red and ends around 7000 angstroms with violet. Our eyes can distiguish between wavelengths seperated by 10 angstroms at best. That means we can distiguish between a few hundred different colors (I'm talking about color, not tint, shades, or color saturation).

Your second questions is easy. The sound and the image on your TV syncs because you sit close enough to the TV for it to do so. Try observing your TV several hundred yards away and notice that it doesn't sync up anymore. This also answers your third question.

Your forth question can be answered by the lag time in the phone system. Same thing happens when callers talk to a radio station DJ with the radio turned up, us listeners hear this wierd echo. It takes more time for the information to travel through the phone company's wires and satellites than for the information to travel from the radio station's tower straight to your radio receiver or for the information to travel from the dish provider's satellite straight to your satellite receiver.

whew!!!

Edit: had (I'm talking about color, not tint, shades, or color saturation) in the wrong place.

[This message has been edited by vega24 (edited 03-29-2001).]

[RAzaRazor]

Originally posted by iBook:

If the speed of sound is considerably slower than the speed of light, then why when I am watching TV does the sound sync up with what I am seeing on the screen, or, is it just an illusion that they are.

And how about this. Say I hollar to someone who is say 150 feet away in plain sight. Will they see my mouth move before they hear my voice?

One more thing. A friend and I are both watching the same thing on TV through the same Dish provider, however I hear something on my TV before I hear the same thing through the phone. Say by the time I hear something and ask if he heard it, he hears it before I say did you hear it. Is time different at two different points in the same time zone, and even within a mile of each other?

Excuse me if these are really dumb questions. I never took physics in college.

The TV Sound Syncs up because you are close to the TV. The sound reaches you a tiny bit later than the light, but your brain can only process the light so fast anyway, it doesn't really matter. IF you were to place a BIG screen TV several hundred feet away, and turn the volume up loud enough so you could hear it, then you would be able to notice a lag.

Same thing with if your friend yelled at you from far away.
A good example of this is to have a friend bounce a basketball. You will see the ball hit and then a second later hear the sound of it. By this time, the ball will be back in the air again.

As for the Friend on the Phone, TV thing, there could be several reasons.
The biggest reason is just the time it takes for the sound from his TV to be translated into electrical signals, sent to the TelCo, Switched, sent to your Phone, and translated back into Sound.
Another possible reason is that his dish is taking a bit longer to decode the digital signals from the satellite, and turn them into sound. Also, different sound systems would be a factor in this as well.

Basically, it's just the time it takes for signals to get from their source to you.

[doug young]

http://www.absolute-space-time.net http://www.absolute-space-time.net/a...e/odyframe.htm http://www.absolute-space-time.net/a...n/odyframe.htm

I found this site which looks very interesting.
Click through those pages and tell me you don't get an ache in your skull.
I didn't have enough brain cells to take it all in

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I thought it time i got in on the act!!!

[vega24]

Ok, here's some food for thought.

Has anyone thought about the speed of gravity. Yeah, gravity. It takes light 8 seconds to travel from the sun to earth ,BUT during that time, the earth and the sun have moved with respect to one another, which means that during that time, the earth and the sun have kept in touch with one another nearly instataneously through gravity. That means that every object in the universe can "communicate" with every other object in the universe in a time frame that's faster than the speed of light. If we build gravitational propulsion systems instead of chemical propulsion or nuclear propultion systems, we can make space travel happen. This might also prove that the speed of light and time are not linked, as they are thought to be.

[gumby5647]

ok, anybody figure out the four 9's =100 deal?

[Cipher13]

Originally posted by gumby5647:
ok, anybody figure out the four 9's =100 deal?

Lucylawless did - 99 + 9/9 = 100


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[Cipher13]

Originally posted by iBook:
And how about this. Say I hollar to someone who is say 150 feet away in plain sight. Will they see my mouth move before they hear my voice?

This has already been responded to, but anyway.
Get a race-starter capgun.
Get someone to stand 100 meters away.
They fire the gun, you will see the smoke well before you hear the sound.
Its the same thing.


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[jTea]

Accelerating the speed of light - if it were indeed a possibility - presents at least 2 conceptual problems.

Firstly information (in its widest sense) can only travel at the speed of electromagnetic energy, which is lightspeed (ie 'c'). If you increase lightspeed then subsequent events start to overtake past events. For example, imagine a radio signal, containing information, say, about the start of a horse race beaming out into space. To an outside observer the radio waves containing the information about the end of the race are following along in sequence some way behind (duration of race x lightspeed). If the speed of light changed halfway through the race then a distant listener would hear the end of the race before the start, etc. And of course unless you can instantaneously update lightspeed throughout the universe (ie- broadcast the 'signal' to change lightspeed universally at a speed so fast that it crosses the entire cosmos in no time at all) this problem persists. Therefore there is no halfway house between current lightspeed and complete simultaneity.

The second major problem is that increasing the speed of light universally, creates problems if it exceeds the speed of the expansion of spacetime. Curved space notwithstanding, there is the problem of part of the universe (electromagnetic energy) outstretching the basic fabric of the medium that supports it.

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oooooh - you mustn't!

[Raman]

Originally posted by Cipher13:

Speeding up light? Its been done. They fired a photon into a chamber filled with some gas (radon? rubidium? Can't remember), and it once it entered, well, it appeared to hit the end of the chamber before it entered it. Why? Time travel? Maybe.
Most likely? Our instruments are just too primitive to measure such an extreme example of speed like that is - I mean 300 times the speed of light they say it was moving at.

In other words, the heisenberg uncertainty principle.... your error in measurement is related to the time it took you to make that measurement. ie. if it took you 2 nanoseconds to measure an object (energy?) moving at the speed of light then the object isn't where you think it is - it's somewhere further - exactly 2 nanoseconds.
Kinda like when you're shooting a gun at a moving target - you have to compensate for gravity and the distance the object will travel in the time it takes your bullet to get to it.

-raman

[Raman]

Originally posted by Don Pickett:
Said experiments are as follows:

A German physicist took a recording of a piece of classical music and split the sound into two channels. One channel was unimpeded - the particles carrying the sound information went on their merry way at c until they arrived at their destination. The other channel's progress was considerably impeded.

Both channels arrived at the destination at the same time. It was calculated that the particles in the impeded had to travel at 7 times c to arrive at the other end in sync with their sibling particles. So, not only did something travel faster than light, it transmitted coherent information.

Wow. . .

last time i cracked my physics book, sound traveled much slower than the speed of light (344m/s -help me out, guys) in any medium since it requires such a medium to travel in, unlike light.

[zac4mac]

Thanks, guys(and Lucy), I feel much less guilty not doing my Modern homework.
Found a paper the other day by a "BARRY SETTERFIELD - 15 November 1999. Edits 14 December 1999, January 10,
2000, February 18, 2000."
I was doing a Sherlock search for info on Compton Scattering, specifically the Compton Radius when I found this. His paper is titled " THE VACUUM, LIGHT SPEED, AND THE REDSHIFT" and has some wild ideas. #1 being the red shift from distant galaxies is due, not to an ever increasing acceleration from the center of the big-bang, but a pervasive "zero-point-field" (kind of a Lorentz-Invariant ether) that is causing a drop in the speed of light over time.

[Cipher13]

Originally posted by jTea:
Accelerating the speed of light - if it were indeed a possibility - presents at least 2 conceptual problems.

Firstly information (in its widest sense) can only travel at the speed of electromagnetic energy, which is lightspeed (ie 'c'). If you increase lightspeed then subsequent events start to overtake past events. For example, imagine a radio signal, containing information, say, about the start of a horse race beaming out into space. To an outside observer the radio waves containing the information about the end of the race are following along in sequence some way behind (duration of race x lightspeed). If the speed of light changed halfway through the race then a distant listener would hear the end of the race before the start, etc. And of course unless you can instantaneously update lightspeed throughout the universe (ie- broadcast the 'signal' to change lightspeed universally at a speed so fast that it crosses the entire cosmos in no time at all) this problem persists. Therefore there is no halfway house between current lightspeed and complete simultaneity.

The second major problem is that increasing the speed of light universally, creates problems if it exceeds the speed of the expansion of spacetime. Curved space notwithstanding, there is the problem of part of the universe (electromagnetic energy) outstretching the basic fabric of the medium that supports it.

I think I get what you mean, but I don't quite follow, unless I'm misinterpreting, because, if you speed up the constant c, then past events will be sped up just as present events - its a constant.
So nothing will overtake anything - its like fast forwarding on a VCR - time is still relative to the rest of the film, past, present, and future, you're just passing it all faster, know what I mean?


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[thirtyfootsmurf]

I read somewhere that scientists actually slowed light to something like 38.4 MPH. That would be cool. Then you could go faster than the (altered) speed of light. My buddy also told me that the closer you go the the speed of light, the more mass you gain (there is some formula for it but I dunno where). As someone was saying before, it would be (using that theory) impossible to reach light speed because you keep on gaining mass therefore requiring more power to reach the speed of light.

Another question:
Is it possible to "ride" a light wave? Something like surfing? The question popped into my head just now.

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Some people say that I must be a horrible person, but that's not true. I have the heart of a young boy. In a jar. On my desk.

--Stephen King

[Don Pickett]

Has anyone thought about the speed of gravity. Yeah, gravity. It takes light 8 seconds to travel from the sun to earth ,BUT during that time, the earth and the sun have moved with respect to one another, which means that during that time, the earth and the sun have kept in touch with one another nearly instataneously through gravity. That means that every object in the universe can "communicate" with every other object in the universe in a time frame that's faster than the speed of light. If we build gravitational propulsion systems instead of chemical propulsion or nuclear propultion systems, we can make space travel happen. This might also prove that the speed of light and time are not linked, as they are thought to be.

There is, as yet, no explanation for how gravity works. It is one of the fundamental problems in bulding a Grand Unified Theory. The best physicists have come up with is to propose "gravitons", particles which exchange gravity between objects, but there isn't much else.

This also highlights another oddity - QUIP, or Quantum UnInseparability. The math of Quantum Physics implies that two particles which have influenced each other will continue to influence each other forever after, no matter how far apart. This implies a) that travel much faster than light happens all the time and that b) the view of some Eastern religions and philosophies is essentially correct, i.e., that everything is related, and changing one atom will change the entire universe.

To get really weird, look at Einstein's Quantum Field equations, which define the ground state from which all particle interactions (and, hence, everything) rise from and fall back into. The Quantum Field is everywhere, infinite, and never changing. It can not be observed, described in language, or "known" in a solipsistic sense. Sounds awfully close to God. . .

A quote: "All the physicists have become mystics, and the mystics physicists."

last time i cracked my physics book, sound traveled much slower than the speed of light (344m/s -help me out, guys) in any medium since it requires such a medium to travel in, unlike light.

Yes, but these were not sound waves - these were electrons travelling down a wire, carrying the signal. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.

[Cipher13]

Originally posted by thirtyfootsmurf:
I read somewhere that scientists actually slowed light to something like 38.4 MPH. That would be cool. Then you could go faster than the (altered) speed of light. My buddy also told me that the closer you go the the speed of light, the more mass you gain (there is some formula for it but I dunno where). As someone was saying before, it would be (using that theory) impossible to reach light speed because you keep on gaining mass therefore requiring more power to reach the speed of light.

Thats right - making it theoretically impossible to attain the speed of light.
But that beckons my earlier statements - IF light speed is indeed what people assume - the upper limit.
I think someone mentioned that forumla earlier.

Another question:
Is it possible to "ride" a light wave? Something like surfing? The question popped into my head just now.

That'd be interesting... cause of lights strange properties (neither entirely a particle, nor a wave, but with some properties of each), who knows?
It behaves oddly.
Hm.
If its a wave, it doesn't pass through much - I think it has characteristics of each that are not so conjoined - each type of thing carried in the one package (quanta), like a .avi file.
I mean, light won't penetrate a dense physical object that some forms of radiation will, right?
Hm.


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