Exceeding speed of light idea.

No surprise that Einstein had some thought on this...

I recall an idea about 2 trains travelling towards each other, he threw a ball from one speeding train at the other and shone a torch at it, the ball was observed to travel at the sum of the two trains speed plus the speed it was thrown at, the photons from the torch travelled at the speed of light, which is a constant.

From memory it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light (? tachyons - 10x speed of light, I think) but the important things is that no informaton can travel faster than the speed of light.
 
SlyReaper said:
It's so annoying when you provide the correct answer to the question, but it's overshadowed and ignored because of all the tripe from other posters. :(

Too many armchair experts in this thread.
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Indeed.

Welcome to the internet - where everyone is a self-described expert.

Oh, and by the way, 0.999999... != 1. I know this because it doesn't make sense to me any other way.
 
I think the official quote from civ4 regarding this situation is "nothing travels faster than light, except for bad news, which obay's its own special laws"

That said theres a joke in pratchett that hireditary rule travels faster than light (conventional light not discworld light which is rather slow).

Yeah im still waiting for the warp drive too....
 
Masterdog said:
Photic boom?
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I would imagine something like Cherenkov radiation. That's caused by a charged particle (usually an electron, seen in Beta- decay) moving through a substance faster than the phase velocity of light in that material.

It's a blue glow and is interesting because it's continuous. Google it if you're interested :)

Sinque said:
But would it actually be able to go faster than light?

And to fix the opposite direction problem you could just drive in the opposite direction to where you want to go :p
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Personally, I don't think it is. F=ma goes out the window. Its replacement is a modification where 'm' is replaced with something involving the Lorentz factor (can't be bothered to write out the term), which in simple terms, tends to infinity as v tends towards c.

In short it means that to accelerate an object to the speed of light would require an infinite amount of energy.

It's a weird concept, but photons could be said to time travel. At the speed of light, time stops for the object travelling at that speed. As photons always zoom around at c, they can travel thousands light years, but for them, it seems like no time has passed.
 
Cookie-Monster said:
I had a flatmate with an Mphys and he tried to convince me that bernoulli's principle didnt exist (not suggesting all physicists are that 'special')
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And I knew a fellow maths student who reckoned there were a finite number of primes, despite knowing the proof that there are infinite. I'm not sure if he was trying to wind me up or what.
 
Forget about light, Newton's Third law states that


"Whenever a particle A exerts a force on another particle B, B simultaneously exerts a force on A with the same magnitude in the opposite direction. The strong form of the law further postulates that these two forces act along the same line. This law is often simplified into the sentence, "To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."


Therefore if its on wheels, you are slowing down whatever you are on top of, if its not on wheels then it's just going 1/3 of speed of light.

Don't need to go into all that math guys lol
 
Photon boom. I like that :)

...anyway, yes...
vcl_X1 said:
From memory it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light (? tachyons - 10x speed of light, I think) but the important things is that no informaton can travel faster than the speed of light.
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If a vessel is travelling at two point five tachyons carrying aboard the instructional information on how to stop written on a piece of paper and an operator aboard to effect that information... That could be bad couldn't it ?

Ah, wait. What if he memorised it before setting off ? Would he have forgotten ? Or are we just referring to information travelling down a fibre optic cable ? :confused: :)
 
Raymond Lin said:
Forget about light, Newton's Third law states that


"Whenever a particle A exerts a force on another particle B, B simultaneously exerts a force on A with the same magnitude in the opposite direction. The strong form of the law further postulates that these two forces act along the same line. This law is often simplified into the sentence, "To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."


Therefore if its on wheels, you are slowing down whatever you are on top of, if its not on wheels then it's just going 1/3 of speed of light.

Don't need to go into all that math guys lol
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You're confusing velocity with momentum. Assume object n is sufficiently heavy compared to object n+1 as to render such considerations negligible.
 
you need to read up on relativity before asking the question. you are using newtonian none-relativistic mechanics which yes would say if light is emmitted from a moving source would travel faster than the speed of light. this however is not the case due to time dilation and the light only appears to travel faster with respect to your refereance frame

and person above, yes that is true, but as u approach the speed of light time dilates.

again read up on special relativity. theoretically the only way to travel faster than the speed of light is to bend spacetime
 
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