Loosing Two Dimensions?

by D wiltshire 20 Replies latest jw friends

  • D wiltshire
    D wiltshire

    Einstien's theory of time and space, made from the observation that the speed of light is a constant (in a vacuum) no matter what speed we,.. the measurer is traveling,.. either away from, or towards the light source.

    As he says time not a constant,.. and length in the direction in which one is moving is not a constant.
    Only the speed of light is a constant.(All true laws of physics are absolute.)The speed of light is an absolute.

    So from this he concluded that Space and Time our relative but the speed of light is absolute.

    Here's a question for all you physic buffs:
    If we travel the speed of light do we loose two dimensions?
    That is time, and lenght in the direction we are traveling the speed of light?

    Just a little something I thought up.

    If someone lived a trillion X longer than you, and had a billion X more reasoning ability would he come to the same conclusions as you?
  • slipnslidemaster
    slipnslidemaster

    What is the sound of one hand clapping?

    Slipnslidemaster: "Just because I look sexy on the cover of Rolling Stone doesn't
    mean I'm naughty."
    - Britney Spears

  • funkyderek
    funkyderek
    If we travel the speed of light do we loose two dimensions?
    That is time, and lenght in the direction we are traveling the speed of light?

    No, travelling at the speed of light and looking at a stationary object is the same as being stationary and looking at an object travelling at the speed of light. Motion, like time, is relative to the observer.
    (Strictly speaking, under relativity, no object with mass can reach the speed of light, only approach it.)

    --
    "The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion." - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794.

  • David Gladden
    David Gladden

    What he was saying is that all motion is relative. Think about this: If you were the only thing in the universe, how could you tell if you were moving or not. There would be nothing for you to look at to measure your motion. You are not moving unless you are moving relative to something else.

    Another thing to think about... time and space are the same thing. The more space you travel through, the more time you travel through. The faster through space you travel, the faster through time you travel.

    Also, since nothing can go the speed of light, your perception of the passage of time is dilated as you accelerate. This makes you "think" that you are going faster than light, when what is really happening is your clocks (on the space ship) are slowing down relative to the clocks on earth. Remember the old “Twins” experiment? One twin stays on earth, the other gets in a spaceship and travels near the speed of light and then returns to meet his twin on earth. Only, when the space-traveling twin gets home, he finds that his twin on earth is an old man. The space-traveling twin traveled through more space, and therefore, more time.

    I recommend that you read A Brief History of Time
    by Stephen Hawking

    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553380168/qid=1012582070/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_71_1/104-3177095-9611913

  • AlanF
    AlanF

    You can't ever reach the speed of light, according to Einstein's equations. Mass is a function of velocity, and as velocity approaches "c", the speed of light, the mass goes to infinity. Thus it would require infinite power to accelerate a finite mass to the speed of light, and since infinite power is not available, you can't get there.

    Massless particles like photons can travel only at the speed of light.

    AlanF

  • David Gladden
    David Gladden

    Alan,
    Remember, you cannot travel at the speed of light relative to anything else... A spacecraft can accelerate and accelerate forever, but observers will always see it traveling at just below the speed of light.

    A craft can accelerate until it can travel across the galaxy in one second as perceived by the occupants of the craft. However, observers outside the craft still would have only seen it traveling at a speed just under light speed. The occupants in the craft would emerge from the craft thinking that only one second had passed only to find out that 100,000 years had passed for everyone else. This is the effect of the time dilation.

  • Skeptic
    Skeptic

    Here I go revealing my ignorance of basic physics...

    Massless particles like photons can travel only at the speed of light.
    Alan, I remember several times looking up the mass of a photon in my high school physics book. It always struck me as odd because I knew that at the speed of light its mass would be infinite, not the tiny amount given in the book. Obviously, to travel at the speed of light, a photon would have to be massless...when I asked about this, I was told that light is both has photons and is a wave and that the answer is unknown.

    Could you explain it to me? Is the textbook simply wrong or outdated? It has happened before.

    Richard

  • sleepy
    sleepy

    Light can be measured to be granular i.e particle or wave like i.e it creates an interference pattern like sound waves.
    It is neighter.
    These are the effects of what we call potons when you measure them.As with all else that we observe it is the effects that we can measure through machines or ourselves.
    The true nature of such things remains annoyingly out of reach for now.
    Photons I believe are thought to be massless but then can be effected by gravity as gravity is believed to be the effects of space collapsing which the proton needs to travel through thus it can be bent.

  • David Gladden
    David Gladden

    Skeptic,

    Great observation! You bring up a very good point!

    You are right. Photons are a mystery. They are not yet understood. They obviously have energy (Collected in Solar Cells as electricity) and therefore have mass.

    If you do the math and calculate how much force a photon’s mass would exert upon impacting with something, each photon would exert the same force as a bowling ball dropped from a few feet in the air.

    It is obvious that we still do not understand everything and that our current models of the universe are not complete or 100% accurate.

    Here is a good web site about that: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/photon_mass.html

    The energy in a photo is about 6 x 10^-16 Electron Volts. Plug this number in to the old E=mc^2 and you get an approximate mass of 2 x 10^-24 kilograms (Almost nothing)

  • Moxy
    Moxy

    it is useful sometimes to apply this 'loss of dimensions' idea to photons. by the strict definition of general relativity, distance and time do not exist for a photon. a photon has the same age today as when it first emerged from the big bang, that it is to say, no age at all. and whatever distance it appears to have travelled in that time is, from the photons point of view, no distance at all.

    i sometimes see language like this in quantum physics discussions, but since no one can ever reach the speed of light and a photon can never slow down, trying to make comparisons about our 'points of view' doesnt really have any real world significance.

    mox

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