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What's something that recently boggled your mind?
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this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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If you’re on a truck traveling at 60mph, and throw a ball forward at 60mph, that ball is moving at 120mph.
But if you replace the ball with a flashlight, then the light isn’t moving at the speed of light plus 60mph. Instead, it slows down so as not to exceed the speed of light.
It’s like if you threw that ball at 60mph and it went flying forward, but at 10mph, no matter how hard you throw.
Uhh, relativity, fun. This gets a lot more mind boggling, imagine 3 people, A and B are in a train and C is an observer outside. From C point of view, B will pass him first, then A. This train is going at 50% the speed of light and it's very long, A and B are 1 second light apart, i.e the distance that light takes 1 second to travel.
If A shines a flashlight B will see it 1 second later. However from C point of view since the light was shone the train moved forward 0.5 light seconds. So the light has to travel 1.5 light seconds distance, and it does so in exactly 1.5 seconds. So the observers disagree on the distance the light travel, but also disagree on the time it took, but they agree on the speed of light.
This makes things weird, because both A and B say that 1 second passed, but C says that 1.5 seconds passed. This means that people moving faster experience time slower. Which means that if you take two twins, put one on a fast moving ship, e.g. 80% speed of light, by the time he comes back only a few minutes would have passed for him, but years would pass for the other.
There was once an experiment where a particle traveling at 99.999...% the speed of light aged 1 second in 5 minutes. Conclusively, next to lightspeed moves time 300x faster than our speed in universe + gravitation dent.
Question: is even faster time possible in a huge enough gravitation dent (neutron star)?
It all depends on the amount of 9s.
At 99% speed of light you age 8.5 seconds per every minute. At 99.9% it's 2.7 At 99.99% it's 0.85 At 99.999% it's 0.27
At 99.99944444% it approximates what you described, with 1 second becoming 5 minutes. But you can keep adding 9s, at 99.99999% one second becomes over half an hour, and at 99.99999999999999% it becomes over 2 years.
So on and so forth, so at 99.999...% like you said it's essentially 0 seconds vs infinite time.
You can play around with this calculator to get the numbers https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/time-dilation
The back of my brain is fizzing.
Technically it would be moving at something like 119.99999999km/h and that discrepancy slowly increases the closer you get to the speed of light
I had the Relativity conversation with my 16 year old this past weekend, as he is taking AP Physics.
Yeah, he couldn't wrap his mind around it. Honestly, I can't say I understand it very well. I get that C (speed of light) is C in all reference frames. What I do not understand is for a spaceship traveling at C, the forces being transmitted between the atoms from stern to bow are unable to catch up to the next forward atoms. Hence time dilation, at least for those forces being transmitted "forward" in the ship's reference frame.
However, what happens to those forces being transmitted bow to stern or "backward" in the ship's reference frame? Would those forces be "dead stopped" in an external reference frame? Yet travel at C from bow to stern in the ship's reference frame? What does that mean for the ship if those forces are only being transmitted one way?
Or, as I very much suspect, do I just not have a clue as to how it really works. I always thought that "time dilation" was simply the inability of forces being transmitted from atom to atom. As those forces are limited to C and they are attempting to catch up to another atom also traveling at C. With that said, those forces are transmitted in multiple directions, not just the vector the ship is on.
Ok, another one of my very few brain cells just committed suicide and I'm not drinking anything, so I'll stop now.
My understanding is that it's impossible for a spaceship or anything else with mass to actually reach the speed of light. It can only approach it. Only massless energetic waves like light and radiation can travel at the speed of light.
Your understanding is correct.
Relativistic mass increases the faster the moving object gets. That in turn means more energy is required to accelerate an object the closer it gets to the speed of light.
Fun fact: the speed of light is not as absolute as it might seem when looking at relativistic effects. In media with a refraction index above 1 (only perfect vacuum has a refractiom index of 1), the speed of light equals 1/(refraction index).
For light moving in water that results in a speed of light of around 3/4 the speed of light in vacuum.