What would happen to someone travelling at c
- Thread starter 11parcal
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The only possibility is to accelerate towards an infinitely potential gravitational field; but then all the particles that make up you would be destroyed, although you, as far as a worldline in this universe, would get sent both to the edge of it, and also back into it as quantum information.
Cool or what?
Cool or what?
It would reach infinity. The faster you travel, the more your mass increases. This is why it is impossible to reach the speed of light.
But, hypothetically, if you reached c, your mass would become infinite.
That question is beyond my level of knowledge.
It's beyond mine as well, anyone better equipped to answer?
Black hole physics isn't bulbs and batteries, exactly.
What happens to the matter that they're made of, when it gets inside an event horizon, why are these things predicted by general relativity, or by solutions (by Schwarzschild and Kerr) to the equations, but the equations can't explain what happens (it predicts its own downfall), why is relativity an incomplete picture?
Those would be some of the questions you would deal with in a cosmology or astronomy course, at some stage: the ones we don't know the answers to.
What happens to the matter that they're made of, when it gets inside an event horizon, why are these things predicted by general relativity, or by solutions (by Schwarzschild and Kerr) to the equations, but the equations can't explain what happens (it predicts its own downfall), why is relativity an incomplete picture?
Those would be some of the questions you would deal with in a cosmology or astronomy course, at some stage: the ones we don't know the answers to.
Neddy Bate
Valued Senior Member
The inertia of a body is dependant upon its energy state. It's not increased mass, it's increased inertia.
eace:Another factoid is: relativistic particles that collide with molecules in the upper atmosphere, have a longer apparent lifetime (to us), because of their momentum.
They see their journey or timeline as normal (which is generally much shorter if they get created at our energy scales, or have a small fraction of c) - they decay into some other form that is more probable in the background they get to be in, relative to the one they got created in, so to speak.
They see their journey or timeline as normal (which is generally much shorter if they get created at our energy scales, or have a small fraction of c) - they decay into some other form that is more probable in the background they get to be in, relative to the one they got created in, so to speak.
If you believe strongly enough in Relativity and keep your fingers crossed, then you would not notice anything unusual in your body or your immediate environment. You would notice that the external environment was moving very , very slow. In fact, you would not be able to see any movement at all out there.
If you are a darned crockpot heretic pervert who only believes in Newton physics and you are lucky enough to have guessed right, then you would notice nothing unusual in your body or your immediate environment and also you would see nothing out of the ordinary in the external environment, life, the universe and everything.
The current mainstream physics standard model upholds Einstein physics and therefore your sight of a frozen universe out there.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Well duh. Do you think maybe that's the reason only massless particles like photons can actually travel at c?
No we cannot.
No matter how close you are to the speed of light if you have all the thrust in the universe you cannot get going past the speed of light. "The famailar notions of absolute space and absolute time independent of your relative motion must give way." - Carl Sagan. There is a nice thing that happens though. As you mentioned time slows down when you approach the speed of light. This is because atomic particles dont decay as quickly near the speed of light. I could survive a trip to the farest galaxy and back to Earth. If I left today when I am 17 years old.
The trip would only seem to me and my body to be 56 years. So when I got back 15 billion years later I would only think that I had been gone for 56 years and I would be 73 years old. Although nothing would be living on Earth anymore and our sun would be dead. Anyways you could also have so called generation ships where the people that leave would not be around when they arrived at their destination but rather their decendents on the ship would.
Going faster than the speed of light is a problem as far as space travel goes. I bet very few civilizations actually come into physical contact with each other because of this barrier. I don't fully understand relativity as few people do.
Carl Sagan's Cosmos episode on relativity and time travel.
No matter how close you are to the speed of light if you have all the thrust in the universe you cannot get going past the speed of light. "The famailar notions of absolute space and absolute time independent of your relative motion must give way." - Carl Sagan. There is a nice thing that happens though. As you mentioned time slows down when you approach the speed of light. This is because atomic particles dont decay as quickly near the speed of light. I could survive a trip to the farest galaxy and back to Earth. If I left today when I am 17 years old.
The trip would only seem to me and my body to be 56 years. So when I got back 15 billion years later I would only think that I had been gone for 56 years and I would be 73 years old. Although nothing would be living on Earth anymore and our sun would be dead. Anyways you could also have so called generation ships where the people that leave would not be around when they arrived at their destination but rather their decendents on the ship would.
Going faster than the speed of light is a problem as far as space travel goes. I bet very few civilizations actually come into physical contact with each other because of this barrier. I don't fully understand relativity as few people do.
Carl Sagan's Cosmos episode on relativity and time travel.
You'd notice nothing special inside your spaceship. You wouldn't notice your mass increase, and your watch would run at the normal rate.
On the other hand, somebody who was not moving, watching you from outside would see you moving in slow motion in your spaceship, and it would look to them as if you and the spaceship's mass had increased. The spaceship would also look much much shorter in its direction of travel, but only from the outside. You wouldn't notice any "squashing" from the inside.
Your view of the outside world would change, though. The galaxies ahead of you would seem to be much closer, and the space between them would be shorter from your point of view, so you would seem to travel much more quickly between them. Time outside the spaceship would look to you as if it was running slow.
The main risk you would face would be running into particles of dust and gas in space. If you're not travelling too fast, these particles would be approximately stationary relative to your spaceship, but at high speed these particles would be hitting the front of the ship at almost the speed of light, which could cause a huge amount of damage. Also, light from in front of you would appear to you to be shifted to higher energies, so the light from the stars ahead, for example, would become x-rays and gamma rays, so it would be like sitting inside a permanently on x-ray machine.
Your field of view of the outside world would also do weird things. You'd see essentially nothing but black when you looked out the side windows of your spaceship. In front, there'd be blazing light in a small circle. Behind would be black. And you'd be able to see things that are actually behind you in your forward field of vision.