Posted on 11/21/2008 6:38:36 PM PST by camerakid400
Maybe Leo Szilard who came up with the idea of the nuclear chain reaction.
They move at the same speed.
Multiple similar events (photons striking various spots on the screen) are not a single phenomenon, nor a cause and effect relationship (the cause couldn't move faster than light anyway). You wouldn't be able to spin the rod at a speed such that any particle was moving faster than light speed. That part would get too heavy.
You mean the blue one or the red one?
The speed of light is not just an observed number.
It is a direct result of solving Maxwells Equations. If c is not constant than half of physics is wrong, which I highly doubt.
So if you had a canon that was capable of firing a laser pointer as fast as the speed of light, then turned on the laser pointer, no light would come out of it?
If you could add the propagation velocity to the velocity of the source as you suggest, then sound waves leaving an approaching train would travel at sound speed + train speed, and there would be no reason for the wave peaks to get scrunched together in time, hence no Doppler effect.
I think you're thinking of the emitted light as a solid rod rather than a series of photons. Think more of the situation where you have a machine gun and you rotate it as you shoot. Each bullet goes straight. They are independent entities when they leave the barrel. The photons leaving a laser go straight also--they don't know about the later change in direction of the laser, because they are gone. So the pitter patter speed of photons at the periphery may seem to be fster than light, but each one is unrelated to the ones next to it.
The interesting part is that a lot of sunlight can be converted into a bit of gold down the line. Or any matter.
Matter to energy is easy relatively, the other way takes a Dyson sphere type arrangement. But, someday, will work.
Seems to be a total impossibility.
THat’s different. Sound is not matter, it is vibration of matter. A wave on an ocean moves laterally without any lateral displacement whatsoever of any water molecules. THey only displace in the vertical.
Light is a particle.
No, the laser light would still travel at the speed of light.
I think they’ve already proven that time slows when you move. They’ve built some really really accurate atomic clocks that are accurate to within a millionth of a second every million years, or something like that. Then start them at the same time and synchronize them. Then put one on a rocket and send it out on a trip and bring it back. Then compare the two clocks. The one that went on the trip lost a few millionths of a second. THe effect is supposed to become more pronounced the faster you go and the farther you travel.
Can anything named "Yahoo" be serious?
IF the laser pointer is already moving the speed of light, and the light itself cannot surpass the speed of light, then the light can’t come out the laserpointer.
Explain to me that one!
Both beams will appear to be moving at the speed of light, regardless of the reference frame of the observer.
An observer who is directly in the path of both beams will observe a shift in frequency of the beam coming from the moving laser pointer. This would be a "blue-shift" due to the fact that the source of the light is moving toward the observer.
Objects with non-zero rest mass cannot move at the speed of light. It would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate such an object to the speed of light.
The light, coming from a pointer which is moving at NEAR the speed of light, will still be traveling at the speed of light. An observer in the path of the beam will see the frequency of the light dramatically shifted toward the high end of the spectrum due to the extremely high velocity of the pointer.
And what would a tiny bug that is riding on the laser pointer see? Light coming out of the laser pointer like toothpaste oozing out of a toothpast tube?
In his point of view, light isn’t moving at the speed of light.
The speed of light in a vacuum is a simple ratio of the magnetic and electric constants in a vacuum. So as long as the vacuum is the same everywhere in the universe, then the speed of light is a constant.
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