Maybe a nonsense question, but, is it hypothetically possible to become motionless relative to the universe? Meaning that from your point of view you have zero motion along any axis and the universe is moving away from you in all directions at the speed of … well, the speed of the universe. Would this state of non-motion be as difficult or impossible to reach as light speed?
Wouldn’t that be absolute zero?
That’s probably the closest thing to an answer to the OP’s question. But I think what they are really asking is if there is some central X,Y,Z coordinate one could station keep with. Or maybe there is some center of gravity to the universe that everything orbits around. The answer is “no”. Everything in the universe is moving relative to everything else and as far as we know, the universe is infinite in every direction.
All you have to do is sit there in a universe undergoing Hubble expansion. Seems to work fine in real life, as in you can observe distant objects and they are all moving away from you.
You can also measure cosmic background radiation (e.g., microwaves) and then adjust your velocity to be at rest with respect to it. Then presumably you’ll be in tune with the universe…
ETA in fact the Earth is already traveling several hundred km/s with respect to this background radiation- the order of velocity you would expect through random chance- so it could be done but one would need to leave one’s living room.
The center of a black hole singularity you are practically infinatally away from everything and any motion makes no difference.
You are always moving at zero speed in your own frame of reference. That’s what “your own frame of reference” means.
And relativistic effects can be measured even for extremely slow speeds. Take a footlong piece of wire, and wrap it around a nail. Attach the ends to a C or D cell battery. The electrons in that wire are moving, on average, at about one inch per second… and because of the relativistic effects of the motion of those electrons, you can use that coil of wire to pick up paperclips.
Note that due to the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the more certain you are of your speed, the less certain you are of your position. So as your speed approaches zero (as would the speed of a particle as it approaches Absolute Zero in the naive meaning), the greater the “blur” of your position. If by some magic you weren’t moving at all in any way, your “position” would be spread out all over.
In terms of the OP, the “opposite” in Physics of Relativity is Quantum. Which has been a rather annoying problem in the field for almost a century now.
You might sort of vaguely say that general relativity (which deals with gravity) is the “opposite” of quantum mechanics, in that we don’t currently have any theory that can encompass both (though even that is really just a statement about our own ignorance, not anything fundamental about how the Universe actually works). But special relativity, which the OP is asking about, can be and is reconciled perfectly well with quantum mechanics. I mean, it’s difficult: You won’t learn how to do it until the grad school level, at least. But it works exquisitely well: In fact, the scientific theory which has been tested to the greatest precision is a relativistic quantum theory.
Einstein’s infamous Twin Paradox…in which one twin takes a near-lightspeed round-trip ride on a spaceship and returns to find his other twin has aged significantly…highlights this OP.
The paradox arises when each twin…from his own point of view/frame of reference…sees the other twin move away at the speed of light.
If each twin is relatively near the speed of light compared to the other, how does one end up youthful and the other age?
The key to resolving the paradox is the one which undergoes acceleration is the one that didn’t age.
To answer the OP, one must remain within a non-accelerating frame of reference…
…sitting still, outside of the gravity well of a massive object.
Although even within your frame of reference the atoms that make up your body are still at a distribution of randomized motion consistent with your temperature (~37 °C or 310 K for most of us) even is your net momentum relative to your own reference frame is zero.
Being “motionless relative to the universe” would require being able to measure and sum up the momentum of the universe, which for a closed universe (or an open one with extents beyond measurement) is definitionally impossible. If you were to constrain the universe to a finite, measurable mass and volume, you could hypothetically achieve a relatively motionless state down to the limits of measurement (although doing so would probably require violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics). However, once you interact with anything else in this closed universe you will exchange momentum and this no longer be motionless, and there is no way to measure the properties of a system without interacting with it in some way. So, quite aside from relativity, you cannot achieve a state of absolute motionlessness or net zero momentum.
Stranger
That would be at a much smaller scale than I’m thinking of
Not what I was asking, I already knew that
But you’re still moving
Probably the closest thing to what I asked out of all the answers.
Y’all are overthinking the question.
Ok, restate the question,
Using the CMB as a reference, is it hypothetically possible to come to absolute rest in relation to the rest of the universe? If so, what would the energy requirement be? Less than the requirement to a achieve c? The same as achieving c?
Eta, oops, didn’t see stranger’s reply,
So ok, in an absolute meaning the answer is "no, not without magic and even then you wouldn’t have anyway of knowing without even more magic we haven’t even invented yet "
So, I think it is important to explicate a few things about the cosmic microwave background. It is a field of microwave energy that is essentially the remnant from when the universe first became transparent; prior to that point in time, matter was so dense that photons had essentially no free mean path between electrons. As the universe expanded the field cooled resulting in both longer wavelengths and cooler temperatures (currently at 2.7 K). Although we can treat it as a nearly homogenous field (with very small fluctuations) it is wrong to think of it as a static background any more than the static on your old school CRT television is a fixed image. The space in which the energy is embedded is still expanding, producing the characteristic redshift in distinct objects proportional to the distance from those objects. The background field looks essentially the same (again, except for tiny fluctuations) wherever you are in the universe, so it isn’t as if you can look at any object or point and declare it to be non-moving. In fact, any object at a cosmic distance will appear to be moving away from you by dint of the fact that space itself is expanding. (Whether you refer to that as motion or not depends on who you are speaking to but it is not inertial motion since the reference frame of the distant object is accelerating away from you.)
We can measure the peculiar velocities–that is, the relative motion between distant objects around us–and from that determine that everything in the Local Supercluster is moving toward a massive gravitational source known as the Great Attractor. However, there is no stationary point in spacetime that can be defined as an absolute reference frame; we’re just observing that things are moving at different speeds toward a gravitational focus at velocities proportional to their distance, and from that can infer our speed relative to the same object, which we unfortunately cannot directly image because it likes in the Zone of Avoidance right through the galactic core. Just our luck to be on the wrong size of the galaxy.
Stranger
I have always considered the Maxwellian description of electromagnetism and the Einsteinian relativistic description of space-time to both be equally valid approaches to describing the same phenomena. Both approaches might be incomplete and require further work to be completely reconciled with one another but they are both very recent developments in the overall history of human knowledge.
Until today, I have never even thought about describing a simple electromagnet using relativity. I am intrigued. Can you elaborate further?
I don’t want to derail this thread. Would you like to start a new thread?
If you measure the CMB, you will find a dipole anisotropy where one side of the sky is hot, and another side of the sky is cold. This shows that the Solar System is travelling at about 370 km/s with respect to the observable universe. The amount of energy it would take to cancel this out is proportional to your mass (cf rocket design), but note that it is kind of a lot compared to typical orbital velocities. It could be done, though. The speed of light, on the other hand, is closer to 300000 km/s, with the added complication that, no matter what, you can’t actually go that fast and it would take infinite energy.
But let’s say you use some kind of efficient propulsion system to cancel out that 370 km/s and also keep yourself getting re-accelerated by nearby mass concentrations. Now you are at rest with respect to the universe. Done, right?
As Stranger On A Train points out, space is still expanding. So you will still find that distant objects are flying away from you, no matter in which direction you look. And there is not much you can do to stop the expansion of the universe. There is no center.
But, at least you will have cancelled out your “peculiar velocity”, and can confidently set up your cosmic meditation pyramid.
In practice, we always measure velocities relative to objects, and it is often useful to measure relative to big objects. The Earth is pretty big, so we often measure velocities relative to the Earth. The Sun is even bigger, and so we can speak of the Earth’s velocity relative to the Sun, and so on. Ultimately, using the CMB is just measuring relative to the biggest object available… but it’s still just an object, and no more inherently special than any of the other objects we could use. And in fact, there are other equally-large objects, represented by the CMB as viewed at other points in the Universe, that are not all at rest relative to each other.
Ynnad, Maxwell’s electromagnetism is already perfectly reconciled with Einsteinian relativity, and was even before Einstein developed his theory. Maxwell was in fact Einstein’s starting point: He realized that everything else in the Universe should follow the same sort of relativity that electromagnetism does.
As for describing magnetism relativistically, the simplest case is two parallel wires, with currents running in the same direction in both. From the point of view of a proton in wire 1, the protons in wire 2 are all at rest, but the electrons in wire 2 are all moving, and thus the space between electrons is slightly compressed, and thus any given section of wire contains more electrons than protons, and so the proton sees the other wire as negatively charged, and so is attracted to it. Likewise, the electrons in wire 1 see the other wire as slightly positive, and so on, and so the two wires are attracted to each other.
I’ve often said that given more time and vitality (he died at 48 and spent the last several years of his life in an essentially administrative position) Maxwell would have substantially advanced the fields of both special relativity and statistical mechanics, and potentially gotten to the fundamentals of quantum mechanics (a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but his ability to apply mathematical abstractions to physical phenomena was almost unparalleled in his day). Indeed, his laws of electrodynamics were largely ignored and it took Oliver Heaviside (an eccentric individual himself) to formulate the reduced but accessible vector formulations of what are commonly taught as “Maxwell’s Equations” in basic electrodynamics. Maxwell was a scientist well ahead of his time, and of course built his knowledge upon Faraday who was also at the forefront of his field but lacked the knowledge of mathematics to formalize his theories and persuade others of the inherent unification of electricity and magnetism.
Stranger
I’ve often commented on the unfairness that the fourth greatest physicist in history would find himself so thoroughly eclipsed by the third-greatest happening to come along a mere few decades after him.
(and yes, of course there’s room to quibble about precisely who takes which of those top spots)