Question about time stoppage at Speed of Light

Actually, in theory, this might be possible someday, however, our great grandchildren won't even live to see it, its a long time down the road.

 

If I've ever read a good explanation for it, I don't remember it so I can't tell you how time stops when you go the speed of light. Also, apparently if you were watching someone fall into a black hole you would never actually see them fall in b/c the event would just become slower and slower the closer they got. Don't know why I mentioned that. Also, according to Einstein and everything else nothing with mass can travel faster than the speed of light so unless physics changes humans will never achieve this speed. However, I was just reading something that said the information that determines a particle apparently can travel faster (or as fast as, I forget) the speed of light so theoretically they could take all the information for every particle that makes up your body and transport it somewhere else and you could end up there quicker than light. Of course they only have done this with a photon so far and they said it would be a long time before they could even consider it for something as small as bacteria. I wanna say I read in the first 30 pages of A Brief History of Time (damn I should actually read that whole thing but I'm just so damn lazy) that as something approaches the speed of light it gets converted into energy and at the speed of light it would just become pure energy (I guess that makes sense because it can't have any mass and travel at the speed of light) but to propel any object to the speed of light would take more energy than there is in the universe (or something to that effect). I know that was just a bunch of rambling but that's what I can contribute to your little problem and I just plain love Astronomy so I had to keep typing.

 

Cuz Einstein's the man, that's how.

 

Did anyone see something in the news not long ago about theories that the speed of light might have actually <i>changed</i>?

 

I think I saw an article in the Chronicle that it has changed ever so slightly in the fifteen or so billion years the universe has been around. Can't remember why it was changing or if it's getting faster or slower but I don't the change was too significant. Damn there are so many astronomy things I need to read more about.

 

Interesting thread.


About 2 years ago, I read a huge article in NewsWeek about time travel and all the various theories and problems associated with it, including the speed of light. It was a great read, and I meant to keep that issue, but of course I forgot/lost it and I can't remember too much. Check out NewsWeek's website and see if they have anything about it. It might be available in a back-issue or something.

One theory I found particularly interesting concerned worm holes. Imagine this:
A sheet of paper with two small circles drawn at opposite ends of the paper labeled points A and B. Rather than traverse the length of the paper to reach point B from point A, fold the paper in half so that point A is touching point B. The distance needed to travel decreases to a fraction of its original length. This is the basic idea of a worm hole in its simplist form. The cool thing was that, in theory, worm holes can exist.

Sorry for the tangent.

 

I think also in theory you would get nicely mangled and smooshed up as you went through. But at least the trip would be short.

Actually I'm not completely sure if you get torn to pieces in a wormhole but I read something that said it would take a tremendous amount of energy to create one which surprised me in the sense that they actually could make one and because they were acting like this would be a way to travel through space; just creating wormholes and going through them.

There was also something about somehow being in a piece of space-time that was going the speed of light and then within that piece of space-time you could go some other high speed and in this way you could actually exceed the speed of light w/o breaking any rules. All I know is I read a lot of articles about all this stuff and it still completely boggles my mind when I try to envision it all.

Another cool thing is that in some superaccelerators apparently they run experiments that if certain conditions occurred it could possibly create a tiny black hole (or something similar to a black hole) that would go on to swallow up the earth. Now they said the odds were in the trillions or trillions of trillions but I was thinking damn I don't want y'all doing some stupid ass experiment to see a tiny particle for like a billionth of a second and then you end up destroying the earth. Of course I like reading about those experiments but I think I'll pass on the dying part of it all. So just think, tonight you could get swallowed up by a black hole and not even know it was coming because of some scientist.

 

Here's why time slows down at high velocities:

Rule #1
The speed of light is always the same, no matter what. There is no such thing as compounding velocity for light.

]If I'm driving in my car, and turn on my flashlight, the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s, not 299,792,458 m/s + how ever fast I'm driving.

Unfortunately, it's going 299,792,458 m/s for me while driving, but for the guy who's just standing in a room using a flashlight, it's going 299,792,458 m/s also. This makes absolutely no sence and really will screw with your equations. As you will see in:

Rule #2
The formula v=d/t is true where velocity equals distance over time. Here's where we have the problem.


To make the math easy I'm going to change the speed of light to 100 mph.

Guy in a room turns on a flashlight for 1 hr. I do as well while driving my car at 100mph. Here's what happens:

for the guy in a room
v=equals 100, the speed of light. d=100 We can therefore say that t=1. Easy enough.

v=d/t

100=100/1


Now, for me driving in my car at 100 mph.
V = constant no matter what speed of light 100 mph. T = 1hr. For D? Well, I drove my car 100 miles in 1 hr and light went 100 miles, therefore we get d=200Mi.

That leaves us with this for our eq.

v=d/t

100=200/1

Which obviously is wrong. How do we fix it? Well we measured the 200 feet. Can't do anything about that. The speed of light is constant. Can't do anything about that. Time therefore, is the only thing we can alter to fix the equation, so it must be relative, and the actual amount of time that passed was only 1/2 hour, despite your watch ticking off 1 hr.


Why you can't accelerate to the speed of light

By the same freaky math that makes time warp, as you accelerate to the speed of light, your mass increased and your length decreases. If you achieved the speed of light, according to the eq's, you'd have infinite mass and absolutely no length.

 

Now, for me driving in my car at 100 mph.
V = constant no matter what speed of light 100 mph. T = 1hr. For D? Well, I drove my car 100 miles in 1 hr and light went 100 miles, therefore we get d=200Mi.

That leaves us with this for our eq.

v=d/t

100=200/1

Which obviously is wrong. How do we fix it? Well we measured the 200 feet. Can't do anything about that. The speed of light is constant. Can't do anything about that. Time therefore, is the only thing we can alter to fix the equation, so it must be relative, and the actual amount of time that passed was only 1/2 hour, despite your watch ticking off 1 hr.





I'm confused, if D is only for light and the light itself only went 100 miles, then shouldn't the car's distance be separate and we only get D=100. Now, if D=200 and you want v=d/t and you can only change t then wouldn't t=2 so you get 100=200/2. In that case you just went through two hours for one watch hour which I would assume at very high speeds would come out to going through extremely long times in short real times which is the opposite of time stopping. Right.

Now what would make sense is if the combined value of your velocity and the flashlight's light velocity (which would be the overall speed of the light) could only equal the speed of light which would mean that at super high speeds the speed of the light coming out would get closer and closer to zero and the distance for it would get closer to zero and then for v=d/t you would get a very low value of d with v=186mps which would mean t would get closer to zero and it would be like time stopping. But since I'm sure I just broke all the laws of physics with that explanation I'll just wait for you to clarify your original explanation.

Again I probably just read something wrong, but I do know 100 doesn't =200/(1/2).

Why you can't accelerate to the speed of light

By the same freaky math that makes time warp, as you accelerate to the speed of light, your mass increased and your length decreases. If you achieved the speed of light, according to the eq's, you'd have infinite mass and absolutely no length.

OK now I remember the whole infinite mass thing (didn't know about 0 length) but is there anything about becoming pure energy at the speed of light or did I just make that up a while ago.

 

Do a search for "tachyons". They are hypothetical particles that are theorized to travel faster than light and have imaginary mass.

Do a search on the Internet to read about them.

I remember about 10-12 years ago, when I was in high school, I went to a symposium at UH featuring Sheldon Glashow (1979 Nobel Laureate for his research concerning I believe superstrings/unified field theory). When I asked him about the existence of tachyons and the possibility of faster-than-light travel and how it would completely turn physics on his ear, his only response was something like "never say never; that's one of the first rules of physics".

Classical mechanics was turned on its by relativistic mechanics, but classical mechanics is still taught because it's still holds true. Things just happened to get a little goofy at near-light-speeds which is why we have relativistic mechanics. Relativistic mechanics takes into account things such as the mass-to-velocity relationship that others in this thread are talking about.

As for your question, I don't think there's been any theory or study saying that time does stop at light speeds. It's just a hypothesis based on the time dilation that does occur as you approach relativistic and light speeds. There is a direct relationship for velocity and the life-span of certain subatomic particles accelerated to these velocities, but no one can know for sure what happens at the speed of light until somebody can go that fast.

Also, I don't believe that Einstein ever said "you can't travel faster than the speed of light". I think people simply deduce this from his equations.

 

When you ask people to quote "Einstein's equation", they'll blurt out E=mc^2. This is not exactly true... the equation in that form is true for most calculations and at classical speeds, but fails miserably at near-light-speeds. Why? Because the equation is actually :

E=mc^2/(sqroot(1 - v^2/c^2))

As you can see when v approaches c, the denominator goes to 0 leading to the reduction :

E=mc^2/0

ie, infinite energy... so you didn't make that up a while ago.

 

What I wanna know is if your car is traveling at the speed of light & you turn your headlights on......will you be able to see the light in front of you?

 

Oops... Sorry wrote this at 5AM. Not thinking clearly. Yes, T=2. 2 Hours of real time has passed for 1 hour of subjective time. Does that make any more sense?

The rule is that light always travels at the same velocity, even when it goes different distances. It's kind of one of those silly paradoxes, where the rule makes no logical sense.

I know of no pure energy thing at the speed of light, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

 

Dr. of Geek comes thru again!!

Check your email, DoD. I have a technical question for you, and some clique membership issues to clear up.

 

My theory is very simple. If you can view the beginning of time by looking outward. Then you should be able to view the end of time by looking inward. I believe the 'future' exists at some molecular level. Which in a weird way makes sense if you consider that life often replicates itself. Get yourself a powerful microscope, search long enough, and you should be able to find an exact duplicate of the universe (at a much smaller scale). Viewing something on a much smaller scale gives you a perspective that is much faster than viewing it from within that scale. Thus, the ability to see the future happen right before you. And Thus the ability to see time and travel through it.

 

OK I'm getting hung up on what real time applies to and what subjective time applies to. Does the real time apply to me since I am moving and the rest of the universe goes on in subjective time and if so then wouldn't time be speeding up for me which would again be the opposite of time getting slower at light speed. Now if it's the reverse situation then I understand. And yeah I wanna know about that car with the headlight thing. Cuz I was thinking about future light cones and all last night (damn Rockets03 for keeping me up) and I was thinking if you were going light speed then you would be keeping up with your future light cone which means you never actually get to the future (or your present is your future which means your future is your present) which would kind of be like stopping time. But again, this is just something I'm picturing in my head so I doubt it's the right way to look at it. I need answers people.

 

Just did a quick search, here's the only thing I found on it.

Speed of Light, other constants may change