Space, Time & Everything: Travelling @ lightspeed

I will start with the idea that time as we know it, only exists on planets or other celestial objects that have an orbit and complete full revolutions in a certain period of time.
On Earth, we have 365 days in a year, 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute. This is all calculated by the Earth’s revolutions and its orbit around our sun. If Earth spun at exactly half the speed, there would be 730 days a year, 48 hrs in a day, 120 minutes in an hour and 120 seconds a minute. This means that our time has no relevance anywhere in the universe, except here on Earth.

When we talk about light years in space, we are talking about the distance light can travel in one earth year. This means that a light year would not be the same distance on another planet with a different meaning of time. If we were out in space without any reference for time, we could not have any possible way for measuring time. Let’s say that we were in space from the day we were born and had no contact with anyone else or any equipment that had any reference to time. We wouldn’t even know time existed we would be floating around in space… in a void. Then, we arrive on a planet we will call ‘Planet D’ it orbits its sun at ‘x’ speed and rotates on its own axis at ‘y’ speed. We decide to call one whole orbit of the sun a year and a whole rotation on its axis a day. Planet D completes 40 ‘days’ in a single ‘year’ and from this we figure a scheme for minutes and seconds. They would of course be totally different to the minutes and seconds on Earth.

Light travels at a speed known to man as miles per hour. If what I have said above is true, then mph is no good out of earth. If we travelled at the speed of light, the person on the ship would be looking at his watch and the seconds would still be ticking as normal. Time on earth would also continue as normal. Therefore the person in the ship would be travelling at the speed of light, nothing more. If the speed of light was exceeded, then there would be a visual lag from any motionless object outside the ship just as there would be a sound delay in something travelling faster than the speed of sound. For the person on the ship everything on the ship and the ship itself would appear normal as it all has the same momentum. If he were to look out of the window, what he would see would not be outside the window by the time it had reached his eyes.
If this person was travelling at twice the speed of light, they could reach a destination 2 light years away in a single year.

The theory that if you were to travel at these incredible speeds and return to Earth, millions of years will have passed is totally back to front. You would in fact travel these vast distances in less time than it would take the light to get there. Of course acceleration and deceleration are major problems and we wouldn’t physically be able to cope with the strains. However just to make clear what I have said, you could travel to a star 10 light years away in 5 Earth years if you travelled at twice the speed of light. To theoretically prove this, you could take a watch and its time would stay synchronised with the time on earth. The watch wouldn’t start ticking at a different speed just because of the speed you are travelling.

I believe that Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin were great men. I also believe that what they have led the world to believe, especially Einstein’s theory of relativity is false. We as a race, have been trying too long to find the answers to questions that needn’t be asked. The answers are there, within our understanding. If we could stop the global divides and work together as a single global community, we could achieve more than we can imagine. Global warming could be controlled and we could engineer ways of travelling faster than the speed of light to reach the other habitable places out in our vast universe.

Reality is not what we think it is. Religions have gripped the people of Earth since humanity began and they are holding us back from ever taking that giant leap of faith. I dream of the day that the other people of Earth share my belief and realise it’s time to stop fighting with each other and concentrate on what really matters in life… the truth!



[edit on 29-9-2006 by fiftyfifty]

[edit on 29-9-2006 by fiftyfifty]

Time is not measured anymore by revolutions aroung the sun....

Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K.

Source

That means that a second is a second and light year is a light year since the SI measurement of a Metre is defined as the distance light travels in 1/299 792 458 of a second.
Source

Of course however the Second and the Metre are not 'the same' after taking into account Lorentz transformations, one of the major basis' of Einstein's Special Relativity. This leads to such things as Lorentz-FitzGerald contractions.

General Relativity also mucks about with it, but someone with mnore knowledge than me will have to explain that one - it just gets a bit too weird for someone with little Math skills.




[edit on 29/9/06 by Strodyn]

I didnt know that actually. how does that affect what i am saying though?

You would in fact travel these vast distances in less time than it would take the light to get there.

Well from my understanding that is exactly what will happen.

If you were able to travel at the speed of light (well given that you really cant due to mass increases, just below).....a star measured 10 light years away from earth by earth measurements would NOT take 10 years to get to from the point of someone on the spaceship travelling at appox 1c......it would take just moments, yet the time it would take you to travel from someone watching on earth would still be 10 years.

Now on the return trip, the time taken from the observer on earth would still be 10 years, but again the person on the ship would make the journey in just seconds.

Now if I am correct this is why the twin paradox is called just that....not the fact that there is a time discrepency between the two parties, but the fact that there isnt. If everything is relative then from the person on the spaceships point of view, the earth travelled away nearing the speed of light away from the ship....exactly the opposite to what was seen from the earth observor......so why is there a time discrepency of 20 years?

I found a nice example here

Consider a space ship going from Earth to the nearest star system a distance d = 4.45 light years away, at speed v = 0.866c (i.e., 86.6% of the speed of light). The round trip will take t = 2d / v = 10.28 years in Earth time (i.e. everybody on earth will be 10.28 years older when the ship returns). Ignoring the effects of the earth's rotation on its axis and around the sun (at speeds negligible compared to the speed of light), those on Earth predict the aging of the travellers during their trip as reduced by the factor \epsilon = \sqrt[1 - v^2/c^2], the inverse of the Lorentz factor. In this case ε = 0.5 and they expect the travellers to be 0.5×10.28 = 5.14 years older when they return.

The ship's crew members calculate how long the trip will take them. They know that the distant star system and the earth are moving relative to the ship at speed v during the trip, and in their rest frame the distance between the earth and the star system is εd = 0.5d = 2.23 light years ("length contraction"), for both the outward and return journeys. Each half of the journey takes 2.23 / v = 2.57 years, and the round trip takes 2×2.57 = 5.14 years. The crew arrives home having aged 5.14 years, just as those on Earth expected.

If a pair of twins were born on the day the ship left, and one went on the journey while the other stayed on earth, the twins will meet again when the traveller is 5.14 years old and the stay-at-home twin is 10.28 years old. This outcome is predicted by Einstein's special theory of relativity. It is a consequence of the experimentally verified phenomenon of time dilation, in which a moving clock is found to experience a reduced amount of proper time as determined by clocks synchronized with a stationary clock. Examples of the experimental evidence can be found at Experimental Confirmation of Time dilation.

Previous invesitigations into this sort of blames the fact that there are 3 inertial frames for the traveller but only one for the earth observor.....that is where calculus and my Math falls over......and also makes me wonder if velocity alone as opposed to speed is the actual explanation, especially considering GR accounts gravitational changes in time therfore distance, and gravity causes velocity. I doubt however this has been ever overlooked so I still dont understand.

I cant help much more - it is weird stuff - perhaps someone else can help here for both of us.


[edit on 29/9/06 by Strodyn]