photog212 said:
owever, the speed of quasars as well as their energy consumption does raise interesting questions about the speed of light and mass.
Umm... not meaning to be an ass, but do you know what quasars are? They don't consume energy to accelerate in any meaningful way. I personally doubt that real superluminal quasars exist, but then again I'm not an *astro*physicist.
slowpoke999 said:
Hmm so if I understand, if humans could live forever and move at that speed, the person who moved that fast would view time as normal and take billions of years in his time, but an outside observer would see it happen in less then a second?
Or is it that if someone travelled 100 lightyears away and then travelled back in 1 minute in his time it would be like 1000 years for anyone not moving that fast?
Explained very simply, things travelling very fast with respect to you "age" more slowly than you. So, someone goes to this star, takes, say 150 years Earth time to do it, then takes another 150 years to get back, he will have aged 240 years rather than 300. If you do it faster, the effect is more pronounced.
The bit that is a little harder to understand is that *relative to the spaceship* the Earth is moving very fast and so ages more slowly than the guy on the spaceship from his perspective. Also, due to length contraction, the star would get closer, so he would not be aware of the 150 years his trip would be taking in Earth time, only the 120 years in his time.
You might be thinking that this would mean that when the spaceship gets back to Earth then how from his perspective could the Earth have aged more slowly AND he aged more slowly, it doesn't make any sense. The trick is that he had to decelerate and re-accelerate backwards to get back, and when he did that the situation changed. From his perspective, during that brief period, Earth would have aged 60 years extremely fast so that after his 240 years, when he arrives back Earth has aged a total of 300 years.
Note that I'm ignoring the fact that our spaceman could only "see" the earth through light which travels at a finite speed. Also these effects are not finite light speed based illusions, in his movement frame the Earth really would age at a different speed, and the star really would get closer. Space and time are much more flexible than we are used to assuming at these speeds and energies.
Shoggoth2588 said:
They say nothing is faster than the speed of light but, darkness is always there first
...
I know that's from something but I can't remember what >.>
Neverending story 2 I think