OK. You’re in a car that’s moving at the speed of light and you turn on your headlights. What happens??
Light May Break Its Own Speed Limit
We’ve broken the speed limit people. What’s that flashing blue and red light??
OK. You’re in a car that’s moving at the speed of light and you turn on your headlights. What happens??
Light May Break Its Own Speed Limit
We’ve broken the speed limit people. What’s that flashing blue and red light??
Your car can’t be moving at the speed of light. If it was, its mass would be infinite and it would collapse to form a black hole. In fact, this could occur even if you were merely very close to the speed of light, which is barely possible.
Ignoring that for the moment - light being emitted from the headlights is blue-shifted, that is, the photons don’t move faster than light but instead their energy increases and so their “colour” shifts up the spectrum.
So if you have red headlamps and travel forward fast enough, you can change them to yellow. Go even faster, you can make them green, blue, violet, ultraviolet, X-rays etc. Go faster still, you can make gamma rays energetic enough to form electron-positron pairs.
If you were AT the speed of light, the photons emitted by your headlamps would have infinite energy. So they’d have infinite mass, and you’d collapse to form a black hole. Except you’d already BE a black hole.
You just can’t do it, okay?
Trion, I’m so glad for you that you didn’t post this in GQ. Manny would have eaten you alive. But contratulations!! You’re the 100th person to post a link to that story over the last 24 hours
By the way, for those REALLY interested in breaking speed limits, click here. The Fastest Site on the Web!
Damn and double Damn. I did a quick look in GD before this post. For some reason this seemed more a Great Debate topic than anything else. I need to go get my coffee.