baptizo1403
04-05-10, 05:21 PM
From what I can recall of physics, in order for an object to travel at the speed of light it must have infinite energy (which I know is not possible), and once an object is traveling at light speed it would have infinite mass. My question is, if a human was in a situation where we were traveling at light speed and we had infinite mass as a result, what effects would that have on us physically? Would we survive?
As a secondary question, in the event that there is an object in our vicinity that has infinite mass, would that have an effect on anything not having infinite mass?
Neverfly
04-05-10, 06:18 PM
This is a bit like asking if a person turned into a frog, would they feel pain?
Realistically, there cannot exist such a thing as matter at infinite mass and infinite energy(mathematically).
Pandaemoni
04-05-10, 06:54 PM
From what I can recall of physics, in order for an object to travel at the speed of light it must have infinite energy (which I know is not possible), and once an object is traveling at light speed it would have infinite mass. My question is, if a human was in a situation where we were traveling at light speed and we had infinite mass as a result, what effects would that have on us physically? Would we survive?
As a secondary question, in the event that there is an object in our vicinity that has infinite mass, would that have an effect on anything not having infinite mass?
If there were an infinite mass, all of spacetime (everywhere, near and far away) would collapse in on it at the speed of light, creating the mother of all singularities. That said, the rule is that, in the limit, if an object with a mass has a speed approaching the speed of light, then its mass will approach infinity.
SIncxe it would take all the energy in the universe and then an infinite amount more to accelerate the human to that speed, though, one imagiones that we'd be dead, our bodies, planets, stars, galaxies, etc. converted to pure energy and then burned to accelerate the one human traveler.
rpenner
04-05-10, 08:00 PM
If a person was traveling at light speed, the rest of the material universe would be travelling at light speed with repect to him, and he would be flash-fryed by CMB and effective irradiated to death by cosmic rays ( read: interstellar hydrogen ) in effectively ( time dilation ) no time at all.
From what I can recall of physics, in order for an object to travel at the speed of light it must have infinite energy (which I know is not possible), and once an object is traveling at light speed it would have infinite mass. My question is, if a human was in a situation where we were traveling at light speed and we had infinite mass as a result, what effects would that have on us physically? Would we survive?
As a secondary question, in the event that there is an object in our vicinity that has infinite mass, would that have an effect on anything not having infinite mass?
In theory, the faster you travel, the slower the clocks in your spaceship will tick. This does not mean you can reach light speed because you can't- you're made of mass. In order to travel at light speed you need to have no mass i.e. be made of energy. So no- it's impossible to ever speed up to light speed which makes the question flawed.