question
- Started
- Last post
- 7 Responses
- Momentum
if you drove your car at the speed of light, and you turned on your headlights... would they work?
- mrdobolina0
Headlights wouldn't work in space. what would they reflect off of?
- Mal0
f you want to know what happens when you are driving at very nearly the speed of light, an answer can be given. Within your car you observe no unusual effects. You can look at yourself in your mirror which is moving with the car and you will look the same as usual. Looking out of the window is a different matter. The light from your headlights will always go at the speed of light in your reference frame. It will strike any object in its path and be reflected back. Everything else will be coming towards you at nearly the speed of light, so the light reflected from it will be Doppler shifted to very high frequencies--towards the ultraviolet or beyond. If you have a suitable camera you could take a snapshot. The objects passing are contracted in length but because of the different times of passage for the light and effects of aberration, the snapshot will show the objects you pass as rotated
- Momentum0
thats what i thought, i just didn't know how to articulate it.
- Mal0
- Momentum0
oh what the haha
- ThreeSevenFive0
If anything could travel at the speed of light then, molecules would be like speedbumps that would cause nuclear reactions.
- Rand0