Hate to be the one to tell you this but there is no such thing as time. It's a figment of your imagination. tick tock, tick tock... pass the cornflakes.
Hate to be the one to tell you this but there is no such thing as time. It's a figment of your imagination. tick tock, tick tock... pass the cornflakes.
Not to mention that GregDarcy and Skitch forgot to mention one very important thing...
Okay, all joking aside, I really did enjoy the conversation. Loved all the theories, explanations, and interpretations that were put forward. Not to mention all the Sci-Fi references...I have found my people!
Okay, if you're watching me travel in a vehicle at the speed of light and I turn my headlights on ... would you see them do anything?
Wellll... I was a little flippant in my first answer, of course, because the original question posits something not meaningful. Nothing except light can go the speed of light because the math doesn't allow it* (or the "maths" for community members who adhere to the British etymology). The original question can only be made meaningful by rephrasing it as "a car going almost the speed of light".
So given that, the followup question made meaningful is: what does an observer see if a vehicle traveling almost the speed of light turns on its headlights? To answer this question we have to define a few things and make a few assumptions. First, let's assume we're talking about a car coming toward us. When you "see" a car, you're actually seeing light that has reflected off the car itself. So if its headlights are on, you're seeing light being emitted by the headlights plus light reflected off the car. At a given instant in time, the light from the headlights and the light reflected off the front bumper left the car at the same time, but the light reflected off the rear quarter panel actually left a little bit earlier (because it had farther to travel to reach your eye). The faster the car is coming toward you, the smaller the time gap between the light leaving the front and rear of the car. This means that the car would appear squashed flat along the axis of travel. The closer the car is to the speed of light the flatter it would appear to the observer. Also, recalling that light is a wave, the wavelength of the light (the distance between the wave crests) would be squashed flat as well. This means that light arriving from the car would be higher frequency and would appear shifted toward the blue side of the spectrum (this is the Doppler effect).
These effects are reversed for a car moving away from you: the faster it's moving away, the longer the time gap between light leaving the front and rear of the car. In this case the car would appear stretched out and shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. This is why the Starship Enterprise stretches out in the instant it's jumping to warp speed **
Taken to the limit, these effects are why the idea of the car actually reaching the speed of light are mathematically meaningless: it would take an infinite amount of time to accelerate to light speed and the car would seem to become infinitely short or infinitely long to an observer (and really, who's got the time to wait around for that to happen anyway?).
* Mr. Newton didn't have the whole story... ** The Starship Enterprise can't really go faster than light
So what do you do for a living?
I actually meant neither travelling towards or away from me, but perpendicular to me. Which, if I am a stationary individual, would mean circling me, i guess. If I am looking at a vehicle travelling at the speed of light, neither away from me or toward me, what would I see when they turned their headlights on?
With regards to nothing travelling faster than the speed of light, I wonder what you think of entanglement? Do you think there is something massless that is connecting the particles allowing for instantaneous transmission of information?
I actually meant neither travelling towards or away from me, but perpendicular to me. Which, if I am a stationary individual, would mean circling me, i guess. If I am looking at a vehicle travelling at the speed of light, neither away from me or toward me, what would I see when they turned their headlights on?
The thing most folks struggle with when thinking about this is the "relative" part of relativity. We can only "observe" something by interacting with light, and our observations can only occur with respect to a specific frame of reference. An observer in the car is observing from a frame of reference that is moving at almost the speed of light while an observer outside the car is observing from a frame of reference that is "still" (relative to the car). The key is that the speed of light is the same for both observers independent of the frame of reference.
If the car is circling you at the speed of light, this introduces a bunch of other variables that complicate an already complex situation. A moving object that changes direction can only do so under acceleration in a direction different from the direction of travel, which requires force applied to the object. An object traveling at the speed of light has infinite mass and therefore infinite momentum and infinite inertia and therefore would require an infinite amount of force to change its direction. For the purposes of your question we can simplify the situation by assuming that the car is traveling past you at almost the speed of light and you make your observation when it passes closest to you (or perpendicular to your direction of observation). Also, to reiterate: what you are observing is light that has been emitted from the car or reflected off the car. In fact, you can't really "see" the headlights of a car unless you can see the filament emitting the light. The beams you see leaving the headlights of a car not pointed directly at you are actually light being reflected off of dust and vapor in the air (you wouldn't see this effect in empty space). So, simplifying further, lets assume there is a naked lightbulb on the roof of the car that can be directly seen from every direction.
So lets observe the car and lightbulb from several frames of reference: from inside, from the front, from the back, and from the side. Remember that the observed speed of light is a constant from each of these reference frames. From inside the car, the light from the bulb will appear to move away from you at the speed of light (in all directions!). From the front and back you would perceive the effects previously described: a blue-shifted, squashed car or a red-shifted stretched car. From the side, you will perceive a normally shaped car traveling almost the speed of light. The light reaching you from the bulb is traveling directly toward you at the speed of light but perpendicular to the car's direction of travel. You can't directly see the light leaving the bulb in the direction of travel, but if you could it would appear to be moving a little faster than the car. Similarly, you can't see the light leaving the bulb in the opposite direction of travel, but if you could it would be moving at the speed of light (which from your frame of reference would be separating from the car at almost twice light speed).
With regards to nothing travelling faster than the speed of light, I wonder what you think of entanglement? Do you think there is something massless that is connecting the particles allowing for instantaneous transmission of information?
Entanglement is a real thing and experimentally observable. Unfortunately, interaction with an entangled system presents a unique set of difficulties that make it difficult to do anything useful with it (the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and Schrodinger's cat, etc.). While we can repeatably create experiments that demonstrate entanglement we may never be able to harness it to send complex information an arbitrary distance away (so instantaneous communication and 3D printing [i.e. transportation] may never be achievable). Fun to think about though!
GCID: akaSkitch
Hydrogen is a colorless, odorless gas, which if left alone in large enough quantities, for long enough, will begin to think about itself.
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Skitch, thankyou for all this, makes my brain itch, in a happy way! At the risk of being spanked by a mod for going off DV; I have, due to this game, become fascinated with trying to understand code; like how off/on or 0/1 makes a dragon and colour and movement; can you point me to a site which explains the basics for a non tech type person please? My only experience w code was way back at uni chomping out Fortran cards I have also thought I wd contact the local polytechnic to see if there is a basic course. Like how do these tech-gen kids know how to develop mobile ph apps etc I don't want to DO it, just understand the concepts like trying to understand the concept of electricity Thanks!
Last Edit: Nov 7, 2015 12:14:01 GMT -6 by Kiwichris
You can't directly see the light leaving the bulb in the direction of travel, but if you could it would appear to be moving a little faster than the car.
So this is the point I was getting at. I could not see light leave a headlight on a vehicle travelling past me at the speed of light. A hypothetical vehicle, travelling past me in an atmosphere with particulates to be eliminated, etc, etc. Because the light leaving the vehicle would be travelling at the same speed as the vehicle, relative to me.
Entanglement is a real thing and experimentally observable. Unfortunately, interaction with an entangled system presents a unique set of difficulties that make it difficult to do anything useful with it (the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and Schrodinger's cat, etc.). While we can repeatably create experiments that demonstrate entanglement we may never be able to harness it to send complex information an arbitrary distance away (so instantaneous communication and 3D printing [i.e. transportation] may never be achievable). Fun to think about though!
Very fun to think about, and a head scratcher to say the least. Something is travelling faster than light if particles simultaneously reflect change occurring in other particles.
This has been fun. Did not expect this to go on so long from a throw away joke. :-)
You can't directly see the light leaving the bulb in the direction of travel, but if you could it would appear to be moving a little faster than the car.
So this is the point I was getting at. I could not see light leave a headlight on a vehicle travelling past me at the speed of light. A hypothetical vehicle, travelling past me in an atmosphere with particulates to be eliminated, etc, etc. Because the light leaving the vehicle would be travelling at the same speed as the vehicle, relative to me.
Entanglement is a real thing and experimentally observable. Unfortunately, interaction with an entangled system presents a unique set of difficulties that make it difficult to do anything useful with it (the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and Schrodinger's cat, etc.). While we can repeatably create experiments that demonstrate entanglement we may never be able to harness it to send complex information an arbitrary distance away (so instantaneous communication and 3D printing [i.e. transportation] may never be achievable). Fun to think about though!
Very fun to think about, and a head scratcher to say the least. Something is travelling faster than light if particles simultaneously reflect change occurring in other particles.
This has been fun. Did not expect this to go on so long from a throw away joke. :-)
Actually. You would. Provided of course you could see that far into the spectrum. But you would see it at the same time you are run over by an infinitely massive juggernaut. I very much doubt you would have time to process the image to work out what hit you. Which brings us neatly to our next great head butting point. Do you see with your eyes or with your brain?
On a side note... This month marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of that bit of light reading called The General Theory of Relativitiy. We have been discussing his earlier paper, The Special Theory of Relativity.
Last Edit: Nov 7, 2015 18:12:15 GMT -6 by GregDarcy
Main GCID: GregDarcy Secondary: GregDarcyToo All gems friends spoken for. Happy to accept friends for party hats. I blame Apple's auto incorrect for all my typos. I actively discourage challenges. All challengers are unfriended.
Skitch, thankyou for all this, makes my brain itch, in a happy way! At the risk of being spanked by a mod for going off DV; I have, due to this game, become fascinated with trying to understand code; like how off/on or 0/1 makes a dragon and colour and movement; can you point me to a site which explains the basics for a non tech type person please? My only experience w code was way back at uni chomping out Fortran cards I have also thought I wd contact the local polytechnic to see if there is a basic course. Like how do these tech-gen kids know how to develop mobile ph apps etc I don't want to DO it, just understand the concepts like trying to understand the concept of electricity Thanks!
Well, unfortunately I don't have a very good answer for you. The sites I use are platform documentation sites and professional support sites. I haven't really had to try to find a site that approaches development from a basic viewpoint. I did a quick Google of course, and there are lots of potential sites to choose from, but I have no good way to evaluate their quality or appropriateness for what you're looking for. My best advice is just to spend some time poking around and drill deeper into those sites that grab your interest quickly. And just try to have fun!
GCID: akaSkitch
Hydrogen is a colorless, odorless gas, which if left alone in large enough quantities, for long enough, will begin to think about itself.
Posts: 4,392
Platform: iPad Accepting New Gifts: Thanks friends; this game now a solid chore, no longer a delight sadly, so taking an indefinite break. Koala to all. Forum Name to Tag: kiwichris01
So this is the point I was getting at. I could not see light leave a headlight on a vehicle travelling past me at the speed of light. A hypothetical vehicle, travelling past me in an atmosphere with particulates to be eliminated, etc, etc. Because the light leaving the vehicle would be travelling at the same speed as the vehicle, relative to me.
Well, my point here was that you wouldn't be able to directly see that light because you would have to be directly in its path. From the side you could only "see" that light reflected off of dust ahead of the car and I wanted to remove the added complication of reflection from the discussion.
The challenges of actually seeing the system posed by the question are extreme (of course!) but if we ignore the difficulties and concentrate on the thought experiment at the single instant of observation, you would be able to see light pulling away from a car traveling arbitrarily near the speed of light. Since extending the thought experiment to imagine an object traveling at the speed of light produces undefined math, it's hard to draw a meaningful conclusion about what is physically going on.
Last Edit: Nov 8, 2015 12:25:28 GMT -6 by Skitch: spelling is hard
GCID: akaSkitch
Hydrogen is a colorless, odorless gas, which if left alone in large enough quantities, for long enough, will begin to think about itself.
GD: ..... Which brings us neatly to our next great head butting point. Do you see with your eyes or with your brain?
I'm gonna hazard a guess; eyes collect the data, brain assembles the picture, eyes being functional organs of the brain How'd I do,Teach?
Well done grasshopper. And it ties in neatly to your question about computers. It is wrong to think about binary within a computer being ones and zeroes. They are really high and low voltages. Think of a fridge ligt. high voltage means the light is on. Low voltage means the light is off. This is a BIT. Of information. On means the door is open. Off means the door is closed. Of course you will need to cut a hole in your fridge to confirm this. . However you don't need to use this bit of information this way. Assemble a bunch of fridges. Open some doors. Leave others closed. Now look at the result from a hill. Depending on the pattern of open/closed, your brain will be able to interpret all those bits of information as a smiley face. Change the pattern and you can interpret the assemblage as a sad face. Or a letter or... It takes a mind to do the interpreting though. Without all this bits are just a collection of open and closed fridge doors.
Back to the computer. It simply contains a group of voltage states on different wires. These get manipulated by a set of rules to form different states. These then get interpreted by the human mind to mean things according to context. In one context, they may be a picture. In another context, the exact same assemblage could be a novel. Or a complex calculation. For convenience we call the low voltage state zero and the high voltage state one. Then we assemble them into groups 0001 could be interpreted as the number "1" 0010 as the number "2" and so on. They could equally validly be interpreted as "A" and "B" respectively or blue and yellow. Or... The set of rules is the program. The data is then shifted to an output device and interpreted partly by the type of output device, but mostly by the human mind to become information
Main GCID: GregDarcy Secondary: GregDarcyToo All gems friends spoken for. Happy to accept friends for party hats. I blame Apple's auto incorrect for all my typos. I actively discourage challenges. All challengers are unfriended.
I so love this forum! I have learned, laughed, & cried. Thank you all for that! My brain, though, is having a hard time with the theory of relativity discussion.
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Platform: iPad Accepting New Gifts: Thanks friends; this game now a solid chore, no longer a delight sadly, so taking an indefinite break. Koala to all. Forum Name to Tag: kiwichris01
Aaahhhh that is such a grasp-able explanation of code and programming for me, thanks GD! Brill.
I am fascinated by this tech-gen and how smoothly they move into that field: youngsters writing apps...so impressive: I wouldn't have a clue where to start lol
My grandson is almost 9 years old & is at the kitchen table right now with his mom learning the very basics of coding. His goal is to write a game app. She's including it as part of his homeschooling. It's amazing me, how quickly he's catching on.
My grandson is almost 9 years old & is at the kitchen table right now with his mom learning the very basics of coding. His goal is to write a game app. She's including it as part of his homeschooling. It's amazing me, how quickly he's catching on.
A further project might be to make some sort of real world automation. You can get small programmable microprocessors that can be connected to almost anything. Arduino and Raspberry Pi are two examples. I have seen garage door openers, robots, scoring systems, light shows, weather stations, trick boxes that can only be opened at one place on the planet, "you've got snail mail" sensors, etc, etc. You can make them wireless by adding an XBee or even a Wifi module, and location aware by adding a GPSr module. I've played extensively with the Arduinos. They can be a lot of fun. And you earn some basic electronics skills as well as programming along the way.
I am thinking of making a chook pen door opener/closer next so I can let the chooks out in the morning before getting out of bed.
Last Edit: Nov 9, 2015 18:26:01 GMT -6 by GregDarcy
Main GCID: GregDarcy Secondary: GregDarcyToo All gems friends spoken for. Happy to accept friends for party hats. I blame Apple's auto incorrect for all my typos. I actively discourage challenges. All challengers are unfriended.
Posts: 4,392
Platform: iPad Accepting New Gifts: Thanks friends; this game now a solid chore, no longer a delight sadly, so taking an indefinite break. Koala to all. Forum Name to Tag: kiwichris01
*sigh* so very far off topic... I can NOT get the song Bangerang by Skrillex out of my head! It's house / electronica / dance - *shrug* dunno what to call the style, but the sounds are SO ADICTIVE! It's coursing through my walk all day, making me strut, bob & weave, while rubbin' a ton-o-funk all over it, which gets both smiles and blank stares
And knowing the whole thing is about Peter Pan's Lost Boys while it has a real hard-core twist to them just makes it pure awesome sauce! That's right boys and girls, Peter Pan and his gang was one baaaaad dude!
What songs make you feel alive / make you dance all day?
Last Edit: Nov 10, 2015 9:38:35 GMT -6 by EuroKnuter
iOS GCID EuroKnuter Friends ALWAYS welcome, but I'm full for GT buddies =) Rockin' an ElektronX Jet Icon!
*sigh* so very far off topic... I can NOT get the song Bangerang by Skrillex out of my head! It's house / electronica / dance - *shrug* dunno what to call the style, but the sounds are SO ADICTIVE! It's coursing through my walk all day, making me strut, bob & weave, while rubbin' a ton-o-funk all over it, which gets both smiles and blank stares
And knowing the whole thing is about Peter Pan's Lost Boys while it has a real hard-core twist to them just makes it pure awesome sauce! That's right boys and girls, Peter Pan and his gang was one baaaaad dude!
What songs make you feel alive / make you dance all day?
I am just the opposite, and on this side of the spectrum. I like New Age and so very much listen to any artists in this genre. Boring, I know. I feel alive, and dance all day, inside ; in a boring way?
Some friends touch your heart in a way that you can never erase.
Neatie !! Can you then print and make an actual jigsaw out of it Buffy?
It's a jigsaw puzzle app that my Mom plays on the iPad, just recently. I paid 2.99 to turn pictures to jigsaw puzzles. No, I can't print them and make an actual jigsaw. Plan to turn my mom's old pictures (black/white) to jigsaws; sort of surprise her. Let's just hope that she doesn't cry when she completed putting them together.
Guess you can w/ a 3-day printer, but would be time consuming if you have like 150 piece set...not sure how it would work.
Some friends touch your heart in a way that you can never erase.
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I have also thought I wd contact the local polytechnic to see if there is a basic course. Like how do these tech-gen kids know how to develop mobile ph apps etc
. However you don't need to use this bit of information this way. Assemble a bunch of fridges. Open some doors. Leave others closed. Now look at the result from a hill. Depending on the pattern of open/closed, your brain will be able to interpret all those bits of information as a smiley face. Change the pattern and you can interpret the assemblage as a sad face. Or a letter or... It takes a mind to do the interpreting though. Without all this bits are just a collection of open and closed fridge doors. 
