How to exceed the speed of light

There’s a flaw in this logic, but I don’t remember it:

Let’s say that you have a giant disk. It’s so big, that it has a circumference of 187,000 miles.

It makes one revolution in one second.

If you’re at the perimeter, you have just exceeded the speed of light.

Where is the flaw?

My physicist license was revoked, but it seems like it couldn’t make a revolution a second without hitting the ol’ speed of light, thus making anyone sitting on the edge a bowl of chunky salsa. Therefore, you wouldn’t be able to know if it did or not.

Okay, okay, I’m an idiot. I admit it. Can we all just move on with our lives?


A computer without a Microsoft operating system is like a dog without bricks tied to its head.

The flaw is that you cannot accelerate the object to that velocity. Saying that the object is a cylinder and that you are rotating it does not escape the limitations of relativity. You might just as well be saying, “what if we had a stick 187,000 miles long and we flipped it end over end in one second”.


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The worst are full of passionate intensity.
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Here are some more acceptable ways of travelling faster than C.

http://www.sciam.com/askexpert/physics/physics57/]really fast

Another try

really fast

I suppose the most obvious flaw is that, presumably, the disc has mass. You’re going to need a whole lot of energy to get that thing shifting anywhere near c, and a whole lot more to nudge it even closer to c.

List of small problems with the spinning disk:

A disk that large will collapse under it’s own gravitational forces, into a sphere.

A disk requires energy to accelerate in any manner, including rotation. The stresses involved in that acceleration will rip the disk to pieces long before the speed of light becomes a factor.

Accelerating the outermost micron of the disk to C still requires an infinite amount of energy, since the mass of the outermost part is increasing as the speed increases, the same as if it were travelling in a straight line.

As the mass of the edges increases, the problems of gravitation and centrifugal stress increase even beyond the already ridiculous magnitude which make the static object impossible.

Tris

Things can’t accelerate past or directly to the speed of light, but there’s nothing stopping particles from being created (such as tachyons) at speeds greater than c (therefore, they never accelerate past c).

Studi


When I grow up, I want to be the Minister of Silly Walks.