Silver-Tiger said:
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however, if time stops, we would still age and die, wouldn't we?
Been away for a bit, but sneaking back in.
Gaming on: PS4, PC, 3DS. Got a Switch! Mainly to play Smash
mysticwolf said:
however, if time stops, we would still age and die, wouldn't we? |
No, we would not.
Lets assume for the moment that we have a spaceship that is capable of travelling at the speed of light.
We fill this spaceship with some colonists and a clock, which keeps track of the time, day, month, year. Included in the group of colonists is a person who is leaving their twin sibling on Earth, whilst themselves venturing out into space.
The spaceship travels to Gilese. The earth observatory watching the mission notes that it takes 20 years for the travellers to reach their destination, whilst for the colonists it happens in the blink of an eye. When the colonists arrive, they work out that Earthlike does not mean it is habitable. The air is a potent mix of cyanide, arsenic, and second hand cigarette smoke.
Disappointed, the colonists return home. The spacefaring twin is excited to return and see his sibling. When they arrive back on Earth, the spacefaring twin is shocked to see that his twin brother has aged 40 years, while he himself is not a day older. The clocks confirm, that 40 years has passed on earth but not for the colonists - moving clocks run slower.
If you want to see what the Earth is like in a million years time, don't freeze yourself, go on a journey at speeds approaching that of light.
scottie said:
No, we would not.
Lets assume for the moment that we have a spaceship that is capable of travelling at the speed of light.
We fill this spaceship with some colonists and a clock, which keeps track of the time, day, month, year. Included in the group of colonists is a person who is leaving their twin sibling on Earth, whilst themselves venturing out into space.
The spaceship travels to Gilese. The earth observatory watching the mission notes that it takes 20 years for the travellers to reach their destination, whilst for the colonists it happens in the blink of an eye. When the colonists arrive, they work out that Earthlike does not mean it is habitable. The air is a potent mix of cyanide, arsenic, and second hand cigarette smoke.
Disappointed, the colonists return home. The spacefaring twin is excited to return and see his sibling. When they arrive back on Earth, the spacefaring twin is shocked to see that his twin brother has aged 40 years, while he himself is not a day older. The clocks confirm, that 40 years has passed on earth but not for the colonists - moving clocks run slower.
If you want to see what the Earth is like in a million years time, don't freeze yourself, go on a journey at speeds approaching that of light.
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So, in theory, if we could constantly travel at the speed of light, we would be immortal (given that we don't die of disease/murder/stuff like that)??
Been away for a bit, but sneaking back in.
Gaming on: PS4, PC, 3DS. Got a Switch! Mainly to play Smash
but why don't we age when we travel at light speed?
@ mysticwolf - it depends on your definition of immortal. An observer on Earth would see you living for millions of years, but for you it would go by in the blink of an eye. It would not give you extra time to do stuff.
@ jay - wall of text commencing.
Relativity (ie what I was describing above) started with the assumption that, no matter what speed you are going at, you will always observe light going at a constant speed, which depends on the material it is traveling through, and is 3*10^8 metres/second in a vacuum and lower in materials. How Einstein decided that this assumption was a good one to make is quite beyond my understanding.
Fortunately, there is now a significant amount of experimental evidence for relativity, implying that Einstein was almost certainly right to make such an assumption. It was demonstrated that if you syncronise two very accurate clocks, and send one on a plane to do some laps of the world, and keep the other in it's original place, the moving clock will start to lag behind. As I mentioned ages ago, there are particles created by incoming sunlight that decay too quickly to reach the ground without relativity. But because they are going fast enough, time slows down for them and they can make it to the surface, or even underground before they decay.
The mathematics of relativity all follows from the assumption that the speed of light is constant, and from the assumption that certain types of events must be observed by everyone,if I observe that two spaceships collide, then someone who is moving at 90% of the speed of light must also observe the same thing. If the speed of light were constant, but the effects associated with relativity (moving objects act as if they had increased mass, moving clocks run slower and moving objects shrink) did not occur, it would be possible for a stationary observer to see someone crash their spaceship and die, but a moving observer see them avoid a collision and live. This is an irreconcilable difference.
This doesn't really answer the question of 'why' it just changes it from 'why dont we age' to 'why do we observe the speed of light to be constant' and I'm sorry to say, I don't know. I'm not sure anyone does. Why is always the hardest question in physics.
Hold on, wut about Titan, the moon they mentioned on Wonders of the Solar System?
“When we make some new announcement and if there is no positive initial reaction from the market, I try to think of it as a good sign because that can be interpreted as people reacting to something groundbreaking. ...if the employees were always minding themselves to do whatever the market is requiring at any moment, and if they were always focusing on something we can sell right now for the short term, it would be very limiting. We are trying to think outside the box.” - Satoru Iwata - This is why corporate multinationals will never truly understand, or risk doing, what Nintendo does.
yay!! one step closer to star ocean happening in real life!!
now lets set a generic blonde spiky-haired teenage male and a girl that is a child-hood friend into a super-high tech ship and send them off!!!
highwaystar101 said:
Essentially you are right, but you can't reach the speed of light (if you have mass). |
It's why "FTL travel" if it exists will be found by cheating Via "Spacial Folding".
| The_vagabond7 said: Why the fuck did they feel the need to translate "years" into "turtle lives"? What fucking country uses that as a metric? Was there anybody here that said "330,000 years? I don't know how long that is! Oh wait, good they put it into turtle lives, now I understand." |
was totally wondering the same thing >_<
| scottie said:
@ mysticwolf - it depends on your definition of immortal. An observer on Earth would see you living for millions of years, but for you it would go by in the blink of an eye. It would not give you extra time to do stuff.
@ jay - wall of text commencing.
Relativity (ie what I was describing above) started with the assumption that, no matter what speed you are going at, you will always observe light going at a constant speed, which depends on the material it is traveling through, and is 3*10^8 metres/second in a vacuum and lower in materials. How Einstein decided that this assumption was a good one to make is quite beyond my understanding.
Fortunately, there is now a significant amount of experimental evidence for relativity, implying that Einstein was almost certainly right to make such an assumption. It was demonstrated that if you syncronise two very accurate clocks, and send one on a plane to do some laps of the world, and keep the other in it's original place, the moving clock will start to lag behind. As I mentioned ages ago, there are particles created by incoming sunlight that decay too quickly to reach the ground without relativity. But because they are going fast enough, time slows down for them and they can make it to the surface, or even underground before they decay.
The mathematics of relativity all follows from the assumption that the speed of light is constant, and from the assumption that certain types of events must be observed by everyone,if I observe that two spaceships collide, then someone who is moving at 90% of the speed of light must also observe the same thing. If the speed of light were constant, but the effects associated with relativity (moving objects act as if they had increased mass, moving clocks run slower and moving objects shrink) did not occur, it would be possible for a stationary observer to see someone crash their spaceship and die, but a moving observer see them avoid a collision and live. This is an irreconcilable difference.
This doesn't really answer the question of 'why' it just changes it from 'why dont we age' to 'why do we observe the speed of light to be constant' and I'm sorry to say, I don't know. I'm not sure anyone does. Why is always the hardest question in physics. |
Actually...
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