traveling at light speed

[Bill Walker]

is this statement correct thet if we travel at the speed of light we would return to earth to find our childrens children have died of old age but yet we are well within our life span, so if correct my question is age as we know it relates only to earth

the faster you move through space the slower you move through time, see Einsteins
theory of relativity, that why people on earth would age quicker than you

 

[skelpomike]

A Russian cosmonaut holds the record for time dilation. Though the speed he was travelling at meant he only aged 0.02 seconds less than us on Earth. Still cool though!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Avdeyev

 

[pominoz]

<a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele%E2%80%93Keating_experiment" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele%E2% ... experiment</a>

 

[its a Barm]

fuck me im off back to gifs of the day.

 

[Skashion]

A Russian cosmonaut holds the record for time dilation. Though the speed he was travelling at meant he only aged 0.02 seconds less than us on Earth. Still cool though!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Avdeyev

You have to be going very very high fractions of the speed of light before it becomes meaningful. If you are going 99% of the speed of light one second for you would be seven on Earth.

 

[casualdeyna]

The closer to the speed of light you travel the heavier you become, if you could travel at the speed of light you would be almost infinitely heavy, which would make time travel pretty tricky, unless you could make yourself as light as a photon (which is what light is). It is true though that time lapses differently when you travel at speed, so if you could travel fast enough for long enough you could age differently to everyone else!

 

[everythingchangesbutblue]

have'nt neutrinos been observed travelling faster than the speed of light.think it may have been a error though.still quantum entanglement is faster than light isnt it?.

 

[a.woollam]

have'nt neutrinos been observed travelling faster than the speed of light.think it may have been a error though.still quantum entanglement is faster than light isnt it?.

There was a wire incorrectly fitted i believe, so the experiment was meaningless.

Entanglement is "instantaneous", but it cannont be used to send any useful information

 

[metalblue]

You have that mixed up mate.

Time is relative, the speed of light is constant.

Time is relative to what? It's surely a human concept, our bodies deteriorate our organs fail and we die...it doesn't matter if that is measured in years, months and days or by the number of grains of sand I can count until I die...speed of travel surely has no bearing on that.

You're looking at it in the wrong way. You can't think of time as being linear. If you really want to know put time dilation into google and you'll have all the answers.
But it is actually true that, very simply speaking, if you travel at the speed of light other people will age quicker than you. Although saying "quicker" is misleading because obviously their bodies don't go into some rapid decomposition - it's all relative.
For example if i sprinted round the room at the speed of light for about an hour and then sat back down in my seat, everyone who was in the room when i started my run would have died.

google time dilation

I had a google and that is some fascinating stuff way beyond my brain but the bit I struggle to grasp is this concept of relativity of simultaneity. I understand if I observe two stars exploding at the same time on earth it may have occured at very different times relative to me (and ergo relative to each other) but I don't understand how two events can occur relative to each other but independently relative to either of the observers...the train-and-platform experiment suggests that if the light was "fired" as someone on the platform and someone on the train passed each other we would see the light "hit" the back of the train at different times, however surely the light would travel slower for the person on the platform (as the source providing light moved away) thus it would hit the back of the train relative to both of us...consider if the train was moving at the speed of light as it passed the observer on the platform surely the light beam fired would appear stationary to me. If that is the case in your example of running around the room for 1 hour at light speed you would not live long enough to do it as your body is still relative to me, just because we conceive time differently it just means you life expectancy would go from say 75 years to say 30 minutes (or whatever the calculation turned out to be).

 

[SWP's back]

If that is the case in your example of running around the room for 1 hour at light speed you would not live long enough to do it as your body is still relative to me, just because we conceive time differently it just means you life expectancy would go from say 75 years to say 30 minutes (or whatever the calculation turned out to be).

You are getting confused old man. ;-)

The faster you go then the slower times go (for you) relative to someone travelling slower. So no, you don't age at the same rate.