Here's an interesting tidbit from wikipedia...

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The Global Positioning System can be considered a continuously operating experiment in both special and general relativity. The on-orbit clocks are corrected for both special and general relativistic time-dilation effects so they appear to run at the same (average) rate as clocks at the surface of the Earth. In addition, but not directly time-dilation related, general relativistic correction terms are built into the model of motion that the satellites broadcast to receivers -- uncorrected, these eccentric terms would amount to a 12-hour, approximately 7 metre, oscillation in the pseudo-ranges measured by a receiver.

So what would happen to time in the limiting case, if one were travelling at the speed of light?

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Originally posted by HardTranceProd So what would happen to time in the limiting case, if one were travelling at the speed of light?

According the formula:



If you would put in a speed equal to speed of light there it would be to divide by zero which is impossible, so it can't happen. Someone else might have a better explanation though

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Originally posted by HardTranceProd So what would happen to time in the limiting case, if one were travelling at the speed of light?

You'd be there and back in a split second while for the rest of the world you'd be travelling at the speed of light. The faster you travel the faster the events in the universe around you seem. I suppose if you'd reach the speed of light, universe around you would start to unveil at an infinite speed. So I guess you'd end up being everywhen at once. Now, unless the equations are flawed or incomplete, if you'd travel even faster I guess you'd start travelling through a timeline perpendicular to ours, whatever that might mean.

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I thought, if you travelled at the speed of light, then time dilation would be so extreme that time would hold still. And then, if you exceeded the speed of light (impossible of course), you would go back in time (into the past).

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Originally posted by HardTranceProd I thought, if you travelled at the speed of light, then time dilation would be so extreme that time would hold still. And then, if you exceeded the speed of light (impossible of course), you would go back in time (into the past).

Yup, they proved that in Star Trek IV. Used the sling-shot effect around the sun. That's how they saved the whales.

In Spaceballs, they simply went plaid.


It's actually an interesting question that I never got satisfactory answers for back in physics classes. On one hand, I was told that there was "dark matter" out there that moves around faster than the speed of light. On the other hand, I was told that the speed of light was an asymptote/limit and that according to the numbers, it was therefore not even possible to reach said speed. (all the while recognizing that the speed of light certainly isn't a theoretical limit for light itself, rather it is essentially an absolute!) So in essence, all I could do was theorize about what could possibly happen. Since time was supposed to slow down, relatively speaking, as one approaches C, the logical conclusion would be for time to stop at C, and possibly reverse at a velocity greater than C, thus explaining theoretical time travel. Or something like that.

As far as never being able to achieve C, my understanding was that if thought about incrementally, at the margin if you will, each additional increment of speed/acceleration would require an additional amount of energy to get the incremental push to reach the faster speed. In essense, since C represents an asymptote, the incremental amount of energy needed would approach infinity, therefore rendering getting to C absolutely impossible. Go figure. Mind blowing stuff to try to comprehend.

Of course, in a perfect vacuum, with an infinite amount of space, I'd think that Newton's first law could be taken a step further to say that an accelerating object in motion will continue to accelerate unless acted upon by an external force, which not only would allow it to reach the speed of light, but also to theoretically go beyond it since nothing would slow it's accleration. But of course I'm sure I'm wrong about that. Maybe the object would burn up before it could reach C. Shit, I give up.

My dumb way of explaining it:

Imagine a box which you trap a beam of light in and it bounces off mirrors (perfect ones..) at the top and bottom of a box. Just goes up and down.

In 1. the box is moving relative to yourself (clearly on a train in my advanced diagram..).

While in 2. it is just sitting there (the box that is).

Now the saw tooth thing is ment to be the path of the light when the box is moving. The line is just the one where it isn't.

Now cos the one which is moving has to move not only up and down but also along it has to go further. And yet it is light... which only goes one speed... which means time has to change to preseve it.

speed = distance / time

so

time = dist (diff) / speed (const) so time must be diff too (but instantatously in our way of looking at it it is the same, but it is actually different relative to each other.

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Originally posted by NeoPhono Well, it wasn't two people, but they did have "twin" super-accurate clocks for an experiment such as that. They allowed one clock to orbit the Earth (for us Earthlings, that pretty much as fast as we get, unless you're traveling to another planet), while another "reference" clock stayed on the ground. After a fixed amount of time for the reference clock on Earth they compared the two and found there was a difference. Here's a pretty neat webpage that puts some of the more modern views of space time into at least potentially digestable form. http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/home.html

TY, I knew they tried something about this theory

I love this stuff I would guess that reaching the speed of light would be a "supertask"

I thought as you approached the speed of light your mass increases such that when you reach the speed of light your mass would be infinite. Thats why its impossible to go the speed of light.