Slenn said:
Lightknight said:
1. Durability:
From what I've been told, the forces that hold objects together would break down at light speed. I was wondering if the objects traveling at those speeds really experience those forces since the idea is that they'd be in a vacuum and that they would increase to that speed incrementally. So relative to us they'd be going the speed of light but relative the them we're just moving really slow. I would think that the objects traveling at that speed would be shielded from feeling the effects of that speed in the same way we are shielded when we are in a car from really feeling like we're going that fast.
I'm a little confused. Are we talking about a space ship that's in a vacuum in the first place? And what are you referring to by "increasing to that speed incrementally?" Are you assuming that the ship is increasing velocity at a constant rate?
A ship is certainly the easiest way to think of matter traveling at that speeds and increasing in velocity. Though the current arguments revolve around any matter as it reaches these speeds. All I really mean is that it isn't accelerating so rapidly as to be destroy itself by the rate of acceleration. In a frictionless vacuum the only forces one should really encounter is whatever the force accelerating them is as long as they don't encounter objects in said space (either directly or near enough as to constitute significant gravitational forces high enough to consider as a vector/vectors in the equation).
2. The interior of a vehicle traveling at near light speed:
If my question from number 1 is answered in the affirmative, then if you were inside of a vehicle traveling at light speed. What would happen if you shone a flashlight within the vehicle or tossed a ball. Would it reach the other wall? I know this is a question traditionally asked as though the flashlight were on the front of the vehicle so I thought I'd ask from the inside of the vehicle. Like how if I drop a ball inside a car it falls mostly straight down but outside the window it appears to fall behind the vehicle (I presume due to wind resistance). Or maybe within a closed system that has reached that momentum the distance from the light source to the other wall isn't seen as traveling faster than the speed of light whereas being outside of the environment would be. I'm just having a hard time considering the idea that I could technically toss a ball within a car traveling at 100 miles per hour and from the outside it look like I'm tossing the ball at 101+ miles per hour. It seems like relative speeds should still be relevant here.
Inside the vehicle, the bubble that allows for the ship to travel at the speed of light would probably mean that the beam of light inside the ship moves normally.
I'm challenging the notion of requiring a bubble for light speeds. So I'm inquiring of a scenario where a ship increases its velocity gradually enough up to the speed of light within a vacuum. I'm sure that inside a magical bubble everything would remain intact since the mythical nature of this idea would inherently mean that it's almost like the universe would be moving past the ship relative to the ship rather than the ship moving through the universe where forces enacted on it are concerned. Warp fields are fun to think about, especially with recent announcements regarding the EmDrive, but I really don't think they're as much as a given as we'd like to think they are.
Your analogy with the car needs a little more clarification. Are you suggesting that the scenario with the wind resistance is when the ball is tossed out of the window? Or are you referring to an observer watching someone drop a ball inside the car?
Keep in mind that I'm fully aware that the ball falls at the same rate either way just as a bullet if shot from the same point it would otherwise have been dropped ends up hitting the ground at the same time if unobstructed in its journey across a level plane. I'm also aware of the differences between the observer in motion compared to the stationary observer on the ball. Looking back on my quote I'm unsure what I was trying to say about wind resistance. I imagine that was an incomplete thought where I was trying to indicate that my own personal experiences have been watch the ball fall backwards rather than straight down due to air resistance that makes the reduction in momentum once unsupported/unpowered by the vehicle more noticeable. But that is my best guess as to what I meant there.
What I'm saying is that inside the car the ball is relatively unaffected by the speeds the vehicle is travelling. I can toss the ball up and it does not start to loose momentum in the same way that someone with dice on their rear view mirror do not witness it flying backwards as the car speeds forward unless an external force like wind acts on it.
So hypothetically when inside a vehicle traveling at the speed of light you should not feel as though you are moving at the speed of light just as we do not feel like the surface of the earth is moving at 1,000 miles per hour or that the earth itself is moving at 67,000 miles per hour. So at light speeds in a vacuum, what force is causing the traveler to then feel like they're going that fast if we do not experience that already? So you should be able to throw a ball and it get to the other side or shine a flashlight and illuminate the far side.
3. Faster than light travel.
When they say that if an object is traveling faster than the speed of light that it would actually be traveling backwards through time, doesn't that really only mean that the object would "appear" to be traveling back in time in relation to us but wouldn't literally be getting someplace before they left? For example, I see light as a sequence of photos stacked in an ordered pile. If you travel faster you just speed up the frames that they go past you (so if you approached a planet, it would appear to age faster as your speed increased but only because you are traveling faster and if you left the planet it would appear to be getting younger even though it only appears that way). The hypothesis here is that if you traveled faster than light and looked back that you would see yourself going backwards. But wouldn't this just be your appearance going backwards rather than you literally going back in time?
You have the right idea. You're only seeing your appearance twice, one going backwards, and the other going forwards.
The other one traveling forward being yourself in this instance, I assume.
I just don't get how we have a universe where instantaneous teleportation of information exists (quantum entanglement) but somehow traveling at an ultra fast rate of speed means that you're traveling more than instantaneously when light itself isn't anything close to instantaneous. I mean, the claim here would imply that if light traveled only 1 unit of distance faster per second that it would then be traveling backwards in time, right? Yet we measure distant objects in light years which should discredit the notion that they are on the cusp of reaching destinations before they were sent out. Right? There has to be a trick in what people mean by "time travel". Surely every object in space has its own relative "now" and no matter how fast we travel between them we can't change the object's "now" in relative to our "now". We can only make it appear like we're altering it when we aren't really. Also, at no point would we be able to look in any direction and see our future selves, only our past.
What do you mean by "ultra fast rate of speed"?
By "ultra fast rates of speed", I mean faster than light speeds. The time where science currently holds that if we could travel that fast we would be traveling through time.
I'm also not sure what you're talking about with the light year analogy. "they are on the cusp." Who's "they"? The light waves?
Yes, light waves are always on the cusp of traveling faster than light since it is itself traveling exactly the speed of light. 1 more inch per second and it should hypothetically be crossing the time travel threshold that science says we'd be crossing were we to do so.
So if it is that very close to going so fast that it could arrive at its destination before it leaves, why does it take so much time to get places even though I know those distances are vast. In fact, it is said that a photon does not experience any time at all. But it takes so long that we can even measure it on earth. Do we really hold that had light been even one iota faster in a vacuum that it would all be time traveling? Hmm... I wonder how that would look. Would we still have light or would everything be black due to light having arrived before it left ergo what we would be looking at would be a time before the light left, ergo darkness. Weird.
4. Permeation of light photons in space.
Should space be absolutely full of light photons? We can see stars from thousands of light years away from any point in space which should mean that photons are reaching our point of view. You'd think there'd be more detection of this or that they'd even interact with one another at such great numbers... right?
The thing is, space is big. Big. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is peanuts compared to the distance between the sun and the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. And that distance reduces the power at which we receive light from them.
Sure, but for us to perceive them that means that photons from each and every one of those stars we see at night is hitting our eyes, right? If I move over four steps I presume that I am then being hit by different protons from the same stars and the longer I stand in one place I'm seeing however many subsequent photons hitting my eyes, right?
Now the stars emitting these are shooting these photons out and way from themselves in literally all directions. As far as I know, this means that as long as nothing is between me and the source of light, then I can travel anywhere and still see it as long as light has had enough time to travel to that location. So the only inevitable conclusion is that there are photons packed in every square inch in all directions, right? How do these photons not interact with one another since I can therefore assume that there are photons from every other source of light. I mean, even stars that are too faint for our human eyes to make out are still hitting us with photons as evidenced by how many stars the hubble telescope can see that aren't detectible by the human eye from earth. So why isn't this more evidence?
Though, we don't actually see light unless a photon hits our eyes, so that's why the entirety of space isn't white. But in every square inch of space the number of present photons should be astounding, right? From what I've read even the dimmest star we can still see is packing 100,000 photons per in^2 per second. From something like the sun its 2 x 10^18 photons per in^2 per second. Are we unable to see distant stars during the day because the environment is so permeated by photons from the sun both directly from the source and also bounced off of so many things to our eyes? (Though astronauts can't see stars during the day either despite the surrounding area not being dark due to a lack of things for the sun's photons to bounce off of)
So there must be a maximum saturation point of photons that our sun is capable of meeting enough to prevent viewing lesser light sources... right? I wonder if the stars we can see are actually responsible for blotting out stars we can't see. Maybe the reduction of power actually is interaction between photons... maybe not.