If you shine a laser toward a wall 1 light year away that is 4 light years long and is diagonal to the center of the direction of travel for your laser.
If you move the laser from one side of the wall to the other really fast, then go about your life for 1 year then come back, what would the light hitting the diagonal wall be like? Would the wave length splat and stretch out like your shadow when the angle of the sun is really low and your shadow becomes long?
Another question… might be related you tell me. Can you have light of infinite wave length?
PD, I think you need to read you some physics books.
I have no idea what you mean by
As I’ve noted before, laser beams , despite what you may have heard, do expand. If you are more than a confocal parameter from the beam waist, they spread out at a geometric rate – a beam twice as far away creates a spot four times as large. Sad, but true. So a wall a light year away will have one BIG spot on it.
I don’t know what moving the spot fast on the wall does. If you image a laser beam much closer to a wall (say about a meter away) the fact that the wall is not perpendicular to the beam means that the spot will, indeed, spread out. If the spot size is pretty small, then to first order the spot size along that direction is about 1/cos(theta) times the original size. You’ll need to modify that if the angle is really extreme.
You can have pretty big wavelengths od electromagnetic radiation, but when they get too big you don’t call them “light” anymore. Radio Waves, Millimeter Waves, etc. I don’t know how high practical wave lengths go (how the hell do you generate really huge waves, let alone detect them?), but it’s a good question.Please note that the photons lose energy as the wavelength increases, so eventually they’d be swamped by noise and background radiation. A truly infinite wavelength would just be a static electric and magnetic field, which most people wouldn’t even call a wave.
If you stand close to one end of the wall and fire a gun on rapid fire from one end of the wall to the other… If the bullets were round, as they hit the wall at a near infinitely acute angle wouldn’t they scrape along the wall and a splatted strip of bullet would be left along a bit of the length of the wall. (This is if the wall is strong enough to take the impact of the bullets) And converting to my question, the wall strong enough to withstand the impact of the photons.
What would happen? Deflection? Splatting? Stretching?
If your going to say deflection then I’ll add in a force perpendicular to the wall which is pushing the photons into the wall so they can’t deflect only run along the length of the wall.
I have no idea what you meant by the “splat” thing either. But with the wall you described, the center of the wall will be 1 light year away from you and the ends of the wall would be sqrt(5) light years away. So if you swipe a laser at it, you’d see the center of the wall light up after 2 years. The spot will then split and head to both ends of the wall. They will take 2*sqrt(5) years to get there.
