Hello,
Can light accelerate light?
Benjamin
No. The speed of light is constant.
Ummmm…
The way the question is worded doesn’t make alot of sense to me. Light by definition never accelerates (or deccelerates). It always moves at the speed of light in whatever medium that it is in.
Light can interfere with itself. For an excellent book on the way light behaves pick up Q.E.D. by Richard Feynman.
I wondering if light accelerate?
(Sorry about the above phrasing; I don’t know what I was thinking.)
Is light moving at 3x10^8 but is it moving at that speed the moment it is generated / transfered.
Also, my physics teacher mentioned reading about an experiment about accelerating light twenty times its current speed.
Photons have momentum but not mass. Don’t try to apply classical physics to them. Light does accelerate when going from a more dense medium to a less dense and does it instantaneously. This is how optics work.
As Padeye said, photons do not have mass. They are Methodist.
–Nott
Technically speaking, light can accelerate light, in that acceleration is a change not in speed but in velocity. Since there is a process in QED known as the scattering of light by light (NB: we cannot at present detect this phenomena and can only predict it), in principle you could have two photons interact in such a way that each changes direction, which would be an acceleration.
But as far as increasing speed, as other posters have noted, you’re out of luck.
Thank you,
I will be looking up QED
Benjamin