Ash Fohx Posted July 19, 2007 Share Posted July 19, 2007 Discussions like this always get me excited. I'm no expert but I love discussing this. x3 Anyways, myncknm (clever name by the way XD), excellent job explaining that. You said all and more than I was going to say as I read the first few posts and made it easier to understand. That would've taken me hours to pull together. x_x As for travelling at the speed of light, I firmly believe that it's impossible. Travelling close to the speed of light may not be but I can't be sure. In fact, I think it would be easier to actually bend space to bring our destinations closer to us than it would be to travel the speed of light (and that would be no easy feat). As for light behaving like particles, I believe it was already said that no one can clearly explain what light is, even the experts. That should say enough about that. I'm sure humans will find the answers eventually, but I doubt it'll be in our lifetimes. Questions like "What is light?" aren't what concern most people. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tbone Posted July 21, 2007 Share Posted July 21, 2007 Well i dont think we will be able to go the speed of sound anytime soon... must have mistyped sound instead of light Yeah that was a mis-type.. lol. never caught it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
naynesh Posted September 8, 2007 Share Posted September 8, 2007 light!for us to get to the speed of light it will take 100s of years we need a energy source for that!i think that the craft we make which will go at the speed of light will takethe size of antartica! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ninjagaiden Posted March 21, 2008 Share Posted March 21, 2008 we can go the speed of sound but not light it too fast ( well ridiculusly fast) and we would die due to the mach speed the human body will encouter, and baisically it aint desgined to go at the spped of light thats approx :(1,079,252,849 km/h) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
teh silly Posted April 5, 2008 Share Posted April 5, 2008 Light does have mass...in a sense. For instance, if you were in the unlikely situation where you were stranded (stationary) a couple of feet from your spacecraft (also stationary) with a flashlight, you could move yourself back to the craft simply by turning on the flashlight and pointing it in a direction opposite the craft. Of course it would be much easier and more effective to simply throw the flashlight in that direction.... But light always moves, so its rest mass cannot be measured. So in a sense it also has no mass. It depends on your definition of mass. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AverageJoe Posted April 6, 2008 Author Share Posted April 6, 2008 It's not that it can't be weighed, it's just that we have nothing to compare it to. It's like trying to measure the solar system in millimeters. Light is energy which is carried by a proton as a median. Therefore it doesn't need other matter as a median (like sound and heat). Since light is (somewhat) made up of matter, it definitely has mass. It's simply that we can't measure the mass. In fact the Earth's gravity effects the light that passes closely to it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garryyy Posted May 3, 2008 Share Posted May 3, 2008 in the near future we will be able to travel at the speed of light and when we do we shall find another planet! and cause global warming on that planet to! hey... we might even find some aliens Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JcX Posted May 4, 2008 Share Posted May 4, 2008 Light does have mass...in a sense. For instance, if you were in the unlikely situation where you were stranded (stationary) a couple of feet from your spacecraft (also stationary) with a flashlight, you could move yourself back to the craft simply by turning on the flashlight and pointing it in a direction opposite the craft. Of course it would be much easier and more effective to simply throw the flashlight in that direction.... But light always moves, so its rest mass cannot be measured. So in a sense it also has no mass. It depends on your definition of mass. wink.gif Well.... light behaves as wave-particle duality. In certain situation, it shows properties of a particle, vibration etc. In some situation, it shows wave properties, dispersion, reflection etc. If you ever search wiki, light has zero rest mass because it's in the form of photon (to awsomejoe23: not proton, t's photon) Many theories are still under construction, so we cannot make much assumption without proper experiment on lights. But what's for sure is, if we need to achieve speed of light, that is quite impossible as we require zero mass to do so, or infinite energy to push us forward, which is rather impossible. The only possible explaination of moving in light speed is in quantum physic and cosmology, in the wormhole theory. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awesomegamer Posted May 4, 2008 Share Posted May 4, 2008 The problem with reaching the speed of light, if hypothetically possible, is that the act would not be observable or, possibly, only observable at the speed of light. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JcX Posted May 4, 2008 Share Posted May 4, 2008 I believe that it's not observable, because as described in a theory (I guess it's from Maxwell's Equation). It's stated, as the object moving at higher speed, the length of the object observable from a stationary observer, will get shorter and shorter. The form of equation is kinda like this L = square root of ( 1 - [speed of object / speed of light]^2 ) Mathematically, if one exceeds speed of light, its length will hypothetically become 0. That is cannot be observed with plain eyes. *Please correct me if I do made any mistakes of scientist name or equation, I've read this years ago, and I've forgot it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awesomegamer Posted May 4, 2008 Share Posted May 4, 2008 If that formula holds true for values less than 0 the appearance would be backwards, is this related to the classic problem of arriving before you leave? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JcX Posted May 5, 2008 Share Posted May 5, 2008 Well.. that is believed to be true. If one can exceed the speed of light, he can travel back to the past, arriving before you leave. This is what scientist thought, but not me. I believe that time could be slow, possibly could be stopped, but not be reversed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awesomegamer Posted May 8, 2008 Share Posted May 8, 2008 I think the traveling to the past isn't what it seems. I believe it to be you travel so fast that you catch up with the other fleeing "facts" of the universe that you experience them again and if accelerating, in reverse order. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JcX Posted May 9, 2008 Share Posted May 9, 2008 Well... scientist believed that there exists several universes around us. When you be able to travel faster than light, you might get into a wormhole and travel into other universe - where the universe might be as same as yours, but million years ago. Or maybe, the other universe is just billion light years away from us. By travelling faster than light, we can reached that universe. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awesomegamer Posted May 12, 2008 Share Posted May 12, 2008 What about the Doppler effect? Would we be able to experience things if we weren't going the proper speed? Due to the Doppler effect some of our senses would be mis-calibrated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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