reaching the speed of light.

H

HERETOLEARN1

Temporal Novice
Ok. the thiory is that as you reach th speed of light time starts to slow down. at the speed of
light time stops. if you exceed the speed of light time will go in reverse.
but now if time stops at the speed of light how can you go beond the speed of light if you can't move. you will be going nowhere. and even if you did wouldnt it when it got 1 MPS (mile per second)over the speed of light send you back to the speed of light? cousing you to still only be going the speed of light where you can't move?
 
The real problem here is a question of energy. As you accellerate closer and closer to the speed of light, your mass gets bigger and bigger exponentially, so that it would be infinite if you ever reached the speed of light. Similarly, as you get closer and closer to the speed of light (I'll just call it "c" from now on, for ease), it takes exponentially more and more energy to get there. In the end, it'd take an infinite amount of energy to reach c. As that's impossible, it's not going to happen.
 
Heretolearn1,

the theory is that as you reach the speed of light time starts to slow down. At the speed of light time stops.
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From your perspective as you approach the speed of light you will have two different observations. Your personal clock and measuring rod would appear to be unaffected. You wouldn’t observe or feel anything unusual. If you looked out the front window of your ship you would see a very different picture.

First, the entire universe, with the exception of everything directly behind your plane of travel, would appear to be a cone of light directly in front of you that would tend to collapse into a single point to closer you approach the speed of light.

Second, you would also see the universe age at an ever-increasing rate. If you managed to get to 99.999…% the speed of light the aging process would be so rapid that the universe would come to an end almost instantly.

Technically, you cannot reach the speed of light. There isn’t sufficient energy available to do that. But even if in theory sufficient (infinite) energy was available there isn’t sufficient time available. The universe ends just as you reach the speed of light.

But you wouldn’t survive to see the end. The universe has collapsed into a point in front of you. The light from every star in the universe and every other form of energy in the entire universe are pointed directly at your ship in a single super fine laser beam. Your ship would be vaporized and there’s nothing that you could possibly do to shield yourself from it.
 
Darby said:
The light from every star in the universe and every other form of energy in the entire universe are pointed directly at your ship in a single super fine laser beam. Your ship would be vaporized and there’s nothing that you could possibly do to shield yourself from it.
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This is interesting, and I've not heard it before. Can you explain your reasoning here, please?
 
trollface,

This is interesting, and I've not heard it before. Can you explain your reasoning here, please?
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As you approach a very high percentage of the speed of light spacetime around you warps and begins to take on the geometry of a sphere. From inside the warped spacetime everything outside appears to be directly ahead of you (imagine your eyeball in that area of spacetime, warped into a sphere - you can see everything around you 360 degrees in the x, y and z planes simultaneously).

The Observer, at rest WRT you, sees you stretch infinitely and warp into a sphereoid shape (it would be impossible for the Observer to see this but if he/she could that's what would be seen). Your ruler stretches to infinity from the Observer's POV.

Your POV is the opposite. Not only do you see the universe collapse to a point but you also see the Observer's measuring rod shrink in length to virtually zero.

That measuring rod describes the length of all of spacetime that you observe outside your ship. You would still measure the speed of light both inside and outside your ship as 300,000 km/sec. But the universe outside your ship, like the measuring rod, shrinks to virtually zero radius. Every photon ever emitted over the ~10 billion years since the Big Bang is on a collision course with your nose. Because of your velocity they have been blue shifted far past the cosmic ray spectrum and they are coming from almost zero distance. The radiant energy of the entire universe strikes you in an instant.

Traveling at light speed isn't the answer to time travel.

Another more mundane problem with extremely high velocities is friction. Space is only a vacuum in relative terms. If you travel slowly enough you say that space only has an atom or so in every cubic meter of space and an occassional bit of dust and once in a "blue moon" a tiny sand pebble.

At half the speed of light you begin to realize that space can also be viewed as a thin but very significant gas. Striking a grain of sand at half the speed of light would be disasterous.

If you completely ignore relativity and figure the force of the impact in Newtonian terms you can see the problem:

F = 1/2 * mv^2. A 1mg grain of sand becomes an extremely high velocity armor piercing round.
 
why are u so sure that black hole will provide enough energy to energize the ship?
and where is the black hole lead us to?
 
As you approach a very high percentage of the speed of light spacetime around you warps and begins to take on the geometry of a sphere.
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You mean that it appears to to the observer, not that space itself actually warps, don't you?

From inside the warped spacetime everything outside appears to be directly ahead of you (imagine your eyeball in that area of spacetime, warped into a sphere - you can see everything around you 360 degrees in the x, y and z planes simultaneously).
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See, now, I thought that there was tremendous foreshortening, but that space would look "normal" to the sides.

Your ruler stretches to infinity from the Observer's POV.

Your POV is the opposite. Not only do you see the universe collapse to a point but you also see the Observer's measuring rod shrink in length to virtually zero.
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I'm sure this is wrong. Objects moving at near-lightspeed appear to shrink to objects at rest, so you're right about what we'd see with regards to the observer. However, from his POV, he is standing still and we are moving at near-lightspeed. As a consequence, our rod would also appear to shrink from his perspective, not to grow. The same thing has to happen to both the object in motion from the POV of the stationary position and to the stationary position from the POV of the object in motion.

Traveling at light speed isn't the answer to time travel.
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I absolutely agree with that.

I also agree with what you say about friction.

And, even if friction weren't a problem and it was possible to accelerate up to such speeds, how would you steer? What kind of reaction time would you need going at such speeds? Come to that, how would you see? If you were moving at a significant proportion of the speed of light, then the wavelength of the light would either be too short or too long (depending on which way they were heading) for them to be anything resembling visible light.

darkjin6920 said:
only way u can get that type of energy we are talking about is from a black hole.
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Nothing has that kind of energy, by definition. You need an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to lightspeed. You could be using every single bit of energy that exists in the universe and it still wouldn't be even a tiny fraction of the amount that you need.
 
What allot of you are not getting in understanding the near light or past light speed variable, is that once you have isolated a portion of null space, with a space-time exclusion appliance, then the traveling may not be the only answer in traversing distance traveled.

This was said before in earlier time travel discussions, linking said UFOs, with time travel devices.

Both over tensioning of light coupled with the speeding up of light over its normal velocity, in standard space-time, right there, gives one the ability to either go through time, or traverse very vast distances, in a short amount of time.

As I had said earlier, it is certain realms that one goes into, with refence to time, that is a problem for both space and time travelers.

If the traveled to destination is a world that is back in time millions of years ago, your ship materielizes infront of a group of wizards plus a dragon and you have no idea what they are, nor they you, then I would say that this is a definite miscalculation in social parameters?

One can also travel great distances and stay within relative time, with a current time localizer, however at more primitive technologies, utilizing some forms of light, with distance possibly one can also travel back in time.
 
What you all are really not getting is that the relativistic equations all contain the factor SQRT(1-v^2/c^2). Any value of v greater than the value of c (lightspeed) would result in a complex solution. Mass, time, and length are not known to have non-real values.
 
Ahhh' Keeb' yes they are known to have unreal values.

This was recorded by the U.S. Naval Observatory, in reference to superluminal expansion ejecta from quasars.

Also the Bose Einstein and super cesium C experiments, certainly do give C, unreal handling qualities.

Care to expand a little more on your equation and why you have expressed this equation as such?
 
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