This thread has been the best laugh I've had for ages. 
Keep up the good work BOB
Keep up the good work BOB
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The light is doing the speed of light + 200 i believe (when you release something from a moving vehicle, it carries on moving at the same speed at the vehicle). You, however, are merely doing 200. IdiotSlogger said:
Maybe we're all being a bit harsh on Otto.....
Say you had a torch emitting a beam of light 10cm wide, then turned it off. Immediately after turning it off, when the back of the beam is, say, only one micron from the torch's face, Otto's darkness has already travelled the 5cm from the edge to the centre of that beam. Magic.
A simpler way would be to send this beam round a curve though and hang onto the outside - The inside will travel at the speed of light, but the outside will go much, much faster.
And now that Otto doesn't need it anymore, maybe he could share the secret of his wonder-fuel with us .
(Crafty, btw, even if he is going at 200 when he turns them on, Slogger's lights still don't travel faster than the speed of light. this'll need a physicist, but its something to do with the photons getting heavier as they approach the speed of light which means that things can only get close to that speed, but never exceed it)
Say you had a torch emitting a beam of light 10cm wide, then turned it off. Immediately after turning it off, when the back of the beam is, say, only one micron from the torch's face, Otto's darkness has already travelled the 5cm from the edge to the centre of that beam. Magic.
A simpler way would be to send this beam round a curve though and hang onto the outside - The inside will travel at the speed of light, but the outside will go much, much faster.
And now that Otto doesn't need it anymore, maybe he could share the secret of his wonder-fuel with us
.(Crafty, btw, even if he is going at 200 when he turns them on, Slogger's lights still don't travel faster than the speed of light. this'll need a physicist, but its something to do with the photons getting heavier as they approach the speed of light which means that things can only get close to that speed, but never exceed it)
So how do you explain the red shift of distant stars. This is caused by the dopler effect. In sound waves it is simple to explain. The sound from a moving object will travel at the nominal speed of sound + the speed of the said object. Therefore the sound waves will reach the ears of the observer (or should that be auderver) at a higher or lower rate (dependant on wether the object was approching or receding).
Now if Light travels at the same speed all the time, there would be no dopler effect. So the red shift (used to determine the relative speed of distant stars) would no longer exist.
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J
JulieL
Yes I know what travels faster than light........the speed my salary leaves my bank account every month!!!
TexMex said:
I'll prefix this again by the statement that Im not a physicist, but light doesn't go at the same speed all the time - It can go slower depending on the material its travelling through, but I thought the 'speed of light' was a maximum that couldn't be exceeded by anything, due to things getting infinitely heavy the closer their speed gets to it.
And, Doppler shift is nothing to do with sound going slower or faster, it is to do with the relative position of the source fo the sound causing the wavefronts to arrive differently to how you would expect compared to if the source was static....
johnny_t said:
Do photons have mass though? I am aware that we have not managed to make something travel faster than light due to mass increasing close to the speed of light, but i thought maybe the actual exception could be light, since it is actually AT the speed of light, not just below it, so could theoretically travel faster.
I'll have to hold my hands up here and admit that I don't really know, but I must admit that I thought that even light was subject to the same maximum as everything else.
When we talk about the speed of light, I think that we actually mean the physical constant that is the speed of light when travelling through a vacuum, so in fact, even most light isn't travelling at the speed of light either, what with it not being in a vacuum.
When we talk about the speed of light, I think that we actually mean the physical constant that is the speed of light when travelling through a vacuum, so in fact, even most light isn't travelling at the speed of light either, what with it not being in a vacuum.
I wonder what would have happened if at the last minute (billisecondjohnny_t said:
) they deflected the pulse so it didn't enter the cloud but the light still ouputted the cloud??!!?? effect without cause? creating something from nothing? free energy(ie a multiplier, deflected beam's energy collected via solar panel and gas cloud output beam also collected by solar panel two lots of energy from one source?)? the end of the universe as we know it? Is time travel now becoming feasible?
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2scoops0406
some of you, i think, are confusing velocity with speed, velocity is a vector quantity and speed is not (i.e depends on the relative vector (suppose you could call it direction) it is going in). Einstein's laws infer that you cannot accelerate beyond the speed of light however they do not rule out that a particle can travel beyond the speed of light.
The speed of light is reckoned to be a constant in a vacuum, but does vary in different media (supposedly).
The speed of light is reckoned to be a constant in a vacuum, but does vary in different media (supposedly).
Eddie M, a vector is only relevant if you define the reference point, and the reference direction. I can't see where anyone has got confused with this, except people who say that Einstein was right. Even he said what he did was thought experiments, and no one has managed to get anywhere near the speed of light, and in anycase what speed are we going now? and with reference to what? There is lots of theoretical physics, and you can do quite well if you can get a grant to research it, since no one can disprove it, they can merely get a grant to propose a counter arguement.
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2scoops0406
oilman said:
Well, I can see your point, but generally our (human) reference point is within the "observable" 4D universe that we live in, and more usually, but obviously not always, earth.
Yes, you are right in intimating that theories can never be proved,only disproved, you just have to do the experiments, hope the data fits the model, and wait 'til something comes along and screws it all up.
Hey ho, that's life.
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