Magnifying light speed Questions
2 Jul 2006 6:56:57 UTC
Topic 191501
(moderation:
If your traveling at the speed of light with a
mirror in front of you, you will not see your reflection.
What will you see if you have a magnifying glass in
front of you?
Where would a video camera have to be placed to record such an event?
The further you hold it away, what changes might
occur?
Just thought I'd ask!
Ernie S
Team Art Bell
God Bless
Magnifying light speed Questions
)
at the speed of light your time stops.
If you moving very close to the speed of light then things in front of you that you approach will be changing very fast (live and age in an eye blink) and the things you leave behind you will look almost freezed (passing very slowly)
mirror in front of you (that travels together with you) will give you reflection up until the very speed of light. At the speed of light the mirror will be at zero distance from you and give you immediate reflection of your current state (or you can treat it as giving no reflection) When space becomes flat there is no space to speak about moving back and forth and reflecting anything (i mean in the direction of your movement)?
The more interesting question here is this: if you put a clock in front of your mirror and try to compare the clock in your hand and the clock-reflection that comes back. will both show the same time ? What the difference will be ? will it be changing (decreasing increasing) if you move faster ?
i don't see how it would be different in any way from what you see when you do not move. Have in mind that when you move at speed close to speed of light the things in front of you that you are approaching get magnified by themselves (well not exactly magnified but they approach you and it looks like they stretch out from the destination point of your movement) - well in normal situation when you look at road in front of you it looks narrowing the farther you look , at the speed of light however it will not look narrowing - it will look equally wide at any distance ahead. So for magnifying glass there is nothing to magnify because all distances ahead of you become zero - collapse to the plane perpendicular to the direction of your movement.
At this point i would like to mention wave-function collapse paradox.
If you look at two entangled photons moving in opposite directions and then detect one's polarization immidiately knowing that the other's one polarization must be perpendicular. This looks for you as faster than light collapse of wave function. But for those photons the space is flat and they are still at zero distance from each other. Could this provide a solution to the paradox ? Look at paradox from photons point of view ;)
sorry i don't get your question. You mean how an outside observer would monitor your motion ? the observer that is standing still ahead of you will not see you until the very moment you reach him (interestingly if Jesus Christ arrives in the light-speed spaceship to earth we will have no warning before his arrival - he would indeed come as promissed in the bible - unexpectedly without prior warning ). Incoming at light speed objects cannot be seen in advance so we can get unexpected incoming at any moment (and actually some scientists were warning us about incoming very fast objects from the milky way central parts).
The observer staying behind you will see you freezed (when you move at close to speed of light the objects that you run away from they will look almost freezed and from those objects standpoint you will also seem to be changing very slowly)
RE: What will you see if
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oh you mean - "and look at the reflection in the mirror" ?
never thought about it not talking about recording the reflection with a camera
I thought this post was
)
I thought this post was cool!
Its from Alex at LHC@home:
There is no travelling AT the speed of light.
What would be interesting would be if you were travelling at 95% the speed of light, but the optics of the magnifying glass were to slow light down to .9 the speed of light (when stationary).
The fact the magnifying glass is moving would be interesting
RE: RE: What will you see
)
Debugas,
thanks for your reply sir!
Ernie S
Team Art Bell
God Bless you
What if we were travelling at
)
What if we were travelling at 99.9% the speed of light and pushed the
magnifying glass away from us. Could we see beyond the barrier of light speed?
Come on guys, help me out.
Always an honor to ask my fellow crunchers!
Ernie S
Team Art Bell
God Bless
RE: What if we were
)
Nope. Relatavistic velocities don't add linearly. IF you were approaching a planet at .999c and pushed a magnifying glass out in front of you at .999c, the glass would be seen by someone on the planet as moving towards them at .9999995c.
You can get the formula from below. A word of advice, if playing with velocities greater than .95c or so, do all your work with speed measured in ly/year or an equivilant where c = 1. Otherwise rounding errors in your calculator can become a significant source of error.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/velocity.html
RE: RE: What if we were
)
Thanks for helping a rookie!
Ernie S
Team Art Bell
God Bless
RE: http://math.ucr.edu/hom
)
w = (u + v)/(1 + u*v/(c*c))
interestingly if u=c and v=c we get that w=c
intuitively we would expect w=u+v giving us w=c+c=2c
but the velocity of the test object(magnifying glass in our case) v is relative to the observer that himself is moving at speed u=c and for us his time is slowed so his time intervals (observer's "seconds") are very very long for us and that makes the speed's v influence non significant when calculating w
in aproximation at v close to 0:
w=u+(1-u^2/c^2)*v+O(v^2) so when u is close to c the influence of v is insignificant because of (1-u^2/c^2) being close to zero
in aproximation at v close to c:
w=(u+c)/(1+u/c)+(1-u/c)/(1+u/c)(v-c)+O((v-c)^2) which again is insignificant at u close to c due to (1-u/c) being close to zero
This reminds me of a comment
)
This reminds me of a comment made about an upgrade at SLAC ( Stanford Linear Accelerator ). They had spent $Q to nearly double the energy of the particles, but only made them go about 60 miles/hour faster! They were already within a whiff of the speed of light beforehand ( around 186,000 miles/second ).
Cheers, Mike.
NB. $Q = $Qui,teA,Lot,OfM,one,y!!.00
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
RE: This reminds me of a
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Hi Mike,
Curious, what do you think we would see (through the glass) at 99.9% the speed
of light?
Ernie S
God Bless
Always an honor!
P.S. Please feel free to add your favorite speed of light animation web page.