The speed of Darkness

Originally posted by WraothAscendant
But wouldn't that mean that the speed of darkness is the speed of light once all the light has sped out of an area you get dark?

Are you being serious? If you are I can see why you don't understand the physics involved with the WTC collapses...

Buildings collapse themselves with no resistance, and darkness is the same speed as light, yeah... I fear for the future of this world, I really do...

Originally posted by Nyte Angel

Do you have any kind of proof revealing the expansion of our universe?

I am not asking for the scientists who find new galaxies and such, I'm asking about the actual universe expanding.

If you come up withe proof to back up your theory, I'll 100% believe it.

Just what do you view as proof? Do you disagree with Hubble's law and the red shift of galaxies?

reply to post by Matyas


I don't need to. The Earth isn't round buddy. Nice try though

I can't believe this thread is still going. The def. of dark is the absence of light waves there is no speed, it relies on the speed of light to absent itself.

There is no speed of quiet only speed of sound.

This reminds me of that question:
If a tree falls in the woods, and no-one was around to hear it, would it make a noise?
-This is a question to confuse non-pragmatic thinkers-
The answer is no
The problem is the question.
Noise is defined as the movement of the cochlea or ear drum as sound waves pass through. If the person heard it it would have been noise.
If you ask if it makes a sound then the answer is yes!
Sound is defined as the wave produced from an action or vibration in the earth's atmosphere. It exists with the lack of a person to hear it.

This question is flawed, the question is what is the speed of light?

reply to post by Nyte Angel


Well it is an oblate spheroid.

reply to post by Nyte Angel


Have it your way. If you are not going to take me seriously, I don't have to take you seriously.

I am going to unsubscribe to this thread. Don't come knockin' unless you are ready, then we will talk.

Originally posted by Nyte Angel
Another question came along with the speed of silence one, the speed of darkness:

Whats the speed of darkness?

I really wonder about this and have searched the net and gotten only theories. Well out of everyone, ATS is by far the best theorists around.

Thoughts?

well judging by shadows.. I'd say.. the speed of darkness if just a bit behind light.. or perhaps ahead of it? .. was there shade/darkness before light? or ?

Good question ..

do we need light to see darkness? or darkness to see light? ..

even in our darkness (the planet) .. there is some light always there.. even in absolute darkness is there light? or in absolute light is there darkness?

It's really hard to say.. in my opinion.

The speed of darkness cannot be mesured because darkness doesnot exist. Darkness is the abscence of light... or so I heard.

If something was faster than light or light switched off faster than the speed of light it self then the darkness would match it, if it's that fast your eyes would only see darkness and no light.

Darkness is faster as light can not consume it, must be space time that is self creating faster than light for it to happen. Just my theory as space is bigger than the travelling light it holds.

The universe would not be so Black looking if darkness was slower, so darkness was there first so God then created Light.
Makes sense now really.

[edit on 26-2-2008 by The time lord]

Came up with a new concept for this idea, took a few days to think it over and it seems very plausible.

Darkness had to exist before light correct? Well the the speed of that darkness will then be the rate of speed at which the universe was expanding. Now what stumps me is what was the universe 'expanding' into?

The speed of darkness in my new obtained point of view is infinite. The speed of it is impossible to measure as it is impossible for us to reach the end of the universe. Which in this case means that the universe in turn is the speed of darkness.

Thoughts?

[edit on 8-3-2008 by Nyte Angel]

No.

No.

No.

You can't have speed of something that doesn't exist. "Darkness" is just a term that refers to the absence of light.

Darkness is the lack of photons reflecting into your eyes.

That's it.

I suggest you read up on simple (high school level is as far as you need to go) physics. Wikipedia would be a nice place to start - maybe start with a search for "photon" or "light."

^Yeah what he said, no offence but this is a really dumb thread and im surprised its gone on for as long as it has, darkness = absense of light aka nothing which doesn't have a speed obviously, im sure someone must have made this clear long ago but i never wasted my time reading more than the your opening and last post, read some basic science books and you'll see how silly going on with the idea is.

reply to post by Nyte Angel


Maybe it is'nt the speed of light that we are calculating just that we are calculating at which the time it takes for darkness to be consumed?

I dunno hehe

Originally posted by Blaine91555

I only have one thing to add to those words of wisdom:

If the universe is curved and we develop a telescope that can see to infinity; would you be looking at yourself?

If the universe is not infinite; whats on the other side?

Where did matter come from?

It's almost certain that the universe is a curved 3d space, and that if we could see to infinity in any direction, we'd see ourselves. The universe isn't infinite, but it curves back on itself. Nobody knows for sure where matter comes from. Religion has it's ideas, and as far as science can tell, space time and everything inside it started out occupying a very small space, probably a singularity, and has since expanded to it's present size and density.

But even that doesn't really explain where it came from, just what has happened since. An acceptable, if unsatisfying answer is that everything was present from the very beginning of time itself, and had no origin.

Originally posted by Nyte Angel
Why do you keep giving back the same answer over and over again? Is there really only one possible answer to my thread?
[edit on 29-1-2008 by Nyte Angel]

Because it's the right answer. This is a question about an easy to understand aspect of the universe itself. You may as well ask why every calculator in the world tells you that 2+2=4.

Originally posted by Sri Oracle
Nobody seeing me on this deceleration of light being darkness thing huh?

I see darkness as a place which captures light... either through the shape of its surface or its intrinsic mass.

That capturing process has to involve some form of deceleration either as the light becomes heat (black colored object) or the light becomes mass (black hole).

There was recently a nano-surface that was a series of nano skyscrapers in grid fashion that managed to trap (decelerate) light and create heat.

Sri Oracle

What you're talking about is the shade of objects, though. That has nothing to do with darkness in it's absolute form, just with the difference between light-colored things and dark-colored things. When you look at a dark colored thing, most of the light that would be reflected towards your eyes is absorbed by the material, and you see it as dark, because compared to other objects, less light hits your eyes from that thing. That nanomaterial just happens to be very good at absorbing light. Everything absorbs light to some degree.

Originally posted by Nyte Angel
Scientific answer all the way. I don't want to hear the same thing over and over again, I want knew theories. New possibilities. Anything to further along our finding of a Scientific answer.

One more thing, what makes you think thats the right answer? Look at your Signature for example, I don't want just one answer repeated over and over, I want a series of answers that will eventually feel like the most significant one to myself.
[edit on 28-1-2008 by Nyte Angel]

You don't want a scientific answer, you want fantasy. The scientific answer is the one you keep hearing. It's a trivial question. Light travels in quantized units, and when there are few or none of the ones we can perceive with our eyes, we see darkness. It is a subjective classification. If you can't handle the real world, that's your problem.

Originally posted by Nyte Angel
If we can measure kelvin which is -, then how can we not measure darkness. Each one exists just as much as the other one does.

We can, it's just that we don't tend to. It is often useful to have an absolute temperature scale, but for light, we're usually only concerned with relative intensity. After all, you can project movies onto a white screen with the lights off, and the darkest black on the movie screen is still white. It just looks black because it's darker by comparison.

Originally posted by Mabus
What if darkness never moves and light only moves???

Well, that's technically true, if you think of darkness as what's around when light isn't. Then we're in constant sea of darkness, which has light going through it all the time, which we perceive. This is, of course, meaningless semantics. There is no such thing as darkness, it's just a categorical observation about the amount of visible light. Like other posters have said, it's as much of a "thing" as silence is.

Silence, darkness, and cold are all simply ways of quantifying the amount of something else. You can't add more darkness to a room. you can't add more cold to an object. You can't add more silence to a place.

(you can, of course, add an out of phase source of light or sound and destructively interfere with the light or sound, but I don't think anyone would argue that that's adding darkness or silence, since it's technically adding more sound and light to the system.))

Light, sound, and heat are all quantifiable values, which are on scales with an absolute zero. Zero kelvin is as cold as anything can be. You can't have anything colder than that, since cold is simply the absence of heat. A complete lack of light is as dark as anything can be, since darkness is just the absence of light. You can't make something any darker than no light, so there's really nothing to propagate.

As such a lack of light propagates at the speed the light goes away, 3x10^8 meters per second.

Originally posted by Nyte Angel
Why do we see black? Why couldn't it be an extremely bright pitch of some other colour that cancels everything else out?

just a thought...

Because the universe doesn't work that way. It would only look the same to our eyes. It would look quite different to machines that are designed differently from our eyes. We don't actually see black. We see a lack of everything else.

Originally posted by leira7
The speed of darkness is twice the speed of light. Although that is not suppose to exist. j/k....maybe

I think the only way you can measure, or figure this out is when we get a better knowledge of how dark matter operates.

Originally posted by CaptGizmo
I would have said darkness was without void and form a few years ago, however with the recent discovery of dark matter I just don't know anymore. Some would say darkness and dark matter are different.I'm not sure if they are since we don't even know what dark matter is.Perhaps the best way to measure darkness is to measure the speed at which light is absorbed into darkness or retreats from darkness.

Darkness has nothing to do with dark matter. Dark matter is postulated to explain odd gravitational activity that doesn't match up with the visible matter in the area. If dark mater exists, it's not actually dark at all. It's invisible. You can see right through it. We call it dark matter because it's something that's supposed to be somewhere to account for the gravitational attraction we see in other objects, but we don't see any stars there. And stars are bright compared to something that we can see right through. hence dark. Dark energy is completely distinct from dark matter, but it's still nothing to do with darkness.



I'm glad there's at least a few well-informed people here on ATS. Not that it's really related at all, but I have a hard time believing people's ideas about politics and government secrets if they don't even know high school level science. There is, after all, just one universe we live in, and it's no different from person to person. We may not know anywhere near close to everything, but we sure do know a good few things for as certain as we're certain of anything.

Originally posted by sparda4355
DUDE... Darkness existed before there was light, that is total darkness! I don't care who you are or what you believe in, there was a point in time before the big bang, or before god snapped his metophysical fingers and created light!

Plus you can theoretically travel beyond the reach of light into the vast emptyness that is outside our cosmos and eventually you would have to reach a point at which light particles didn't exist, again creating total darkness!

Actually, most scientists would argue that there was no time before the big bang. It is an expansion of space and time, which can be extrapolated back to a point where both space and time were at zero. It's entirely possible that there was never a point in time where there wasn't a huge quantity of photons going around. Perhaps they weren't in the wavelengths that we can see, but it's kind of an anthropocentric kind of view of darkness.

Originally posted by hidatsa
I'm not qualified to comment, but I'm going to, anyway.

Time is something many people have done thought experiments on for at least a century and I joined the ranks of the uninformed enthusiasts about 20-odd years ago. Light, to me, is only visible because of the existence of time, but I'm not sure I can conceive of a circumstance whereby affecting light can affect time. I imagine an analogy would be attempting to stop a car by supergluing the needle to zero on the speedometer.

Slow light, though? Doesn't that make it a radio wave or something? If it's slowed down enough, wouldn't we start to hear it?

Just a thought - or two ...

Radio goes just as fast as light. It just has a longer wavelength, and consequently, less energy. In fact, all EM radiation, from (at intensities low enough to not physically cook people) harmless radio and microwaves, to helpful infra read and visible light, to deadly X-rays and gamma rays travel at the speed of light. Light can't be slowed, in a real sense. light propagates slower through different materials, but that's because it literally takes a longer path through that material, because it is either obstructed by the atoms in it, or is absorbed and re-emitted by the atoms. Sound is a completely unrelated phenomena. It is a wave, so many of the equations are the same, but it is a longitudinal wave that propagates through a medium. Light requires no medium except space time itself.

All kinds of concepts only exist because of time. Anything involving rates of change are only meaningful with time.

Originally posted by Nyte Angel
Well if we can 'BELIEVE' in god, why can't we 'BELIEVE' in a speed of darkness?

We 'BELIEVE' that god exists and helps us in many ways. Why can't we 'BELIEVE' that there is a speed of darkness and try to figure it out?
[edit on 15-2-2008 by Nyte Angel]

Because this is the "Science & Technology" Forum and not the "Believe whatever makes you happy" forum. If you post in this forum, you should expect to be corrected on matters of fact, if you're not correct.

I dont see how this is still going on myself. Darkness has been defined in over 3 places, making it well known common knowledge. How can you keep arguing that Darkness has a speed? Darkness is a concept, something to describe, again, the absence of light. Our eyes can only see certain wavelengths of light, or other forms of energy on the Electromagnetic Spectrum(Being the visible light part that we can only see). This question has got to be one of the easiest questions to answer and here we are having a huge discussion about it like we're trying to teach a newborn Black hole physics.

If you want something to argue about, go argue about the color of a black hole or something(which actually isnt hard to answer either, and it isnt black!). There is no sense in arguing about darkness and making another 10 pages on the subject.

Stated before by others, Think of this in a different way, the speed of water defined as how fast it can be drained from a cup, and the speed of dryness(a concept or idea).

What Im trying to get at here is that its pointless to argue about an idea or concept that is in place to explain what our eyes cant perceive. If you want some more proof on darkness not existing, look through some Night Vision Goggles at night time, can see almost perfectly.

Rekar

mdiinican is my new best friend.

Time and space it self is dark and that is the speed of darkness. If space was created before Light (Genesis) then light would never fill space and we can tell by looking anyway. If for example expansion was before Light created or could escape light we will always be behind the speed of expansion of darkness of space and time which are not properties of light. Which means Darkness of 3-D universe will cover more ground than the straight line of light waves because they don't produce space Time as they travel. Although a bright star can be seen from all directions it does not grow like space does and only its lightwaves can be seen as photon particles and you need a telescope to focus more light in which it can be seen more clearly.

Maybe space time travels faster than light because LXWXH= 3x Speed of light as they move in all directions and photons can never catch them up because to make particles in 3-D universe you need a 3-D universe first to begin with otherwise Light would not exist in the 2-D universe if people say light has always been. Light would then be spacetime it self which clearly is not and is a seperate 3-D object that came afterwards.

Maybe the Bible is right God created light and it came after in this universe.

[edit on 28-5-2008 by The time lord]

reply to post by The time lord


Ok, You arent completely correct. Space is 4D, 3D is up, down, left and right. Space is one step more than that, time. But, Dimensions, time, and many other things are ideas and concepts.

Darkness is an idea used to explain what our eyes cant see, and thats the other types of wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum. our eyes can only see a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and thats the visible light portion. Darkness/Dark is a Adverb or Adjective(depending on how its used) to describe something or describe a noun. Dark/Darkness itself is not a noun, since its an idea.

Rekar