Speed of Light determines size?

I just had a thought when I mentioned in the Moron Award 186,000 light years per second....just how important Speed is to size!

It's like on the tip of my tongue, exactly what I want to say, but to sum it up...picture how large a galaxy is...now picture how large it is if you could travel across it in 1 second?

We all figure this, but I wonder if the speed one can travel, has more effect on the actual physical size of things, than we give credit for.

Instead of Speed being only a relative issue, with the faster you can travel the more distance you cover

To being, the faster you can travel, the larger things actually are, compared to a previously slower speed.

To the faster traveled thing, things seem to be smaller, but...well how big would a galaxy be if light could travel 186,000,000 miles a second? Billions of miles a second?

Bah this is just a ramble, but I can't bare to delete it....read it, think about it, wonder!!!!!

maybe in the future I'll figure out exactly what brief flash of thought I had, but can't re-obtain....

Sincerely,
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FM,

Are you talking about the lorentz contraction?

www.fourmilab.ch...

Sound's similar to your idea... But instead of the size of the galaxy getting bigger the faster you travel, it's you getting 'smaller' the faster you travel....

(Trying to recall the basics without looking up the information.... bear with me...)

The speed of light changing relative to some stable galactic constant has been theorized for quite some time. This has been based on the expanding universe theories. Some thing that if it were possible to have an observer external to our universe, who could observer the expansion, they would also observe changes in our universe's speed of light.

However, as the theory continues, the speed of light remains constant relative to we observers within the expanding galaxy.

So.... you must have heard this before. I've even seen bits of this idea on various Discovery Channel specials.

No I'm not yet really talking about anything, I had a "flash" of what I was getting at, when I was thinking of being able to cross a galaxy in a second but I can't just put it into words yet, and haven't really thought about it much at all yet to be able to do so.

It is purely just along the lines of size being dictated by how fast something can travel. For instance if light could travel 186,000 "light years" a second heh...then perhaps life forms would grow to much LARGER proportions than we are currently used to.

Only now think of it more on the level of particles, and matter.

Sincerely,
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Would gravity also then be much much less?

How could life be significantly larger if gravity were not also less?

This seems an illogical path of reasoning.

FM,

can you explain furthur? Are you suggesting that if, you or I traveled that fast, we'd get larger, or the thing's around us would get larger and we'd stay the same size?

No...it's not a bad path of reasoning, just a bad path of analogy, we all know that E=mc^2 can better be represented by using momentum...so that would show a small linkage of "size" being determined by speed as well.

Sincerely,
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FM,

I still don't get it... What's changing? The speed of light itself, or the speed of an object? That would help me understand abit better

The energy for a rest mass particle is given by E=mc^2,but for particles with momentum E=mc^2+p^2c^4 or E=K+mc^2 ,where K is the kinetic energy of the particle.Another expression is E or the total energy is given by E=gEo,where g is the greek gamma or the lorentz factor ,depends on the speed of the particle only ,so with speed egual to c the lorentz factor becomes infinite,and with greater than c we complex energies or vectors in the time-space !!!The same is happening with the length contraction and time delation.
Also as i have explained before before the big bang radiation and matter where trapped in a form a state that we don't really know .At the beggining of our universe there where different particles than those ones we know ..The speed of light was greater than this one we know right now ,and as things cool down heavier particles would be created !!!Therefore in another 10-15 billion years other particles might be exist along with those right now and the speed of light will have a value less than it is observed right now.It like the three states of matter ,when it is air the particles are free to move -low density ,when gases become liguids by giving up heat the particles are not so free to move-greater density.And finally in the solids the molecules are not moving at all but only the free electrons-greatest density.So the universe is behaving somehow like that and the speed of light depends on the evolution of the universe...