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Lightspeed and your headlights

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posted on Aug, 18 2004 @ 12:26 AM
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Originally posted by Viendin
You, in the ship, would see the light move out in front of you just like if you were sitting still.

Anyone outside would see the light and you at the same moment. It wouldn't go faster, time would just be distorted.

That's the thing about relativity, it is all relative. No matter your speed, light speed is still light speed.



Bingo. The current thinking is that light always moves at the speed of light.
You see the light moving away at the speed of light. So does the person on the outside.
The casual reader would say that this is impossible, because you would objectively observe the light to be moving twice as fast as the stationary viewer would objectively observe it.
Something has to give in this equation- either time or distance. It won't be distance. The speed of an object's travel through time is not a fixed value. Speed of movement through space affects speed of travel through time.

Although physicists may disagree with me after this point, I would conclude at first that the stationary person, who thinks light moves 1/2 as fast as the person at light speed thinks it is moving, must be experiencing time twice as fast.

Imagine a plane which is not running. It is picked up by a HUGE wind and blown sideways at a certain rate. Another plane directly behind this plane is observing. The first plane starts its engines and accelerates. The question is this... will the effect of the cross-wind be lessened if the planes speed is increased enough? I believe so. Picture the movement of in the crosswind as the drift through time and standard speed. Slowing time by approaching the speed of light is represented by turning on the engines and moving forward.

Now here's the problem, you will no longer be in front of the other airplane- not in his present. This means he can't see you to observe all of this. So why can we see light?
1. Light can't escape the flow of time?
2. Light isn't being propelled through time by the same force that propells everything else through time, so escaping the force that propells us through time doesn't slow light down like it slows us down. For example, if I had a sail that could only catch a wind from the north (the northern wind being the force that pushes us through time) my progress through time (southward) would be slowed if i anlged towards the west. Then I might encounter somebody with a sail that functioned in higher dimensions, and captured a stronger south-western wind which propelled that sail through space and time at a rate that was not subject to any affects I was feeling.

Now, you will realize, if you do what I have just attempted to do, that this subject can give migranes. I simply have to think longer. I don't know where to go with this illustration or what to make of it. I just want to watch TV now- i've had enough thought for tonight.



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