if you are traveling at light speed in your car and you turn your headlights on will anything happen?

Answer 1

The question is flawed. The initial premise of something with finite rest mass (you or your car) moving at the speed of light is flawed.

I will restate the question and answer that. If you are traveling at very close to the speed of light (say 99.9999999% the speed of light) you will see light travel from your headlights of the normal wavelength (color) and at the normal speed (the speed of light.)

If you imagine traveling AT the speed of light, from your perspective causal events do not appear to occur. Changing the state of a switch will never appear to occur. Signals propogating from events to you are all frozen in your frame. So I suppose the answer would be "nothing" would happen in your frame, but it is a nothing to the point that you can't even flip the switch!

Answer 2

I found an answer to that a few years ago. Here goes: Light is absolute according to theories. So if the car you are in is traveling the speed of light, then a car turns on it's headlights, that light will pass you at the speed of light.

I wouldn't have understood it but there was a whole flash animation demonstrating it. It's all according to the theory that time and space will stop because of the warp. But it's the same as the theory that the black hole only takes things in, but Dr Stephen Hawking found that it releases energy (unvisible to the eye). So no one will truly know that answer until it is somehow further studied.

Answer 3

This is the exact question Einstein dealt with when forming his ideas on relativity. Except....you can't go at the speed of light, so let's change the question a bit. Let's say you are traveling at nearly the speed of light, like 95% of the speed of light, and you turn on your headlights. What will the light do? Well, it turns out the speed of light is a constant, so it will leave the car at the speed of light. But........it can't travel faster than the speed of light, it can't go 195% of the speed of light.....so.....how can this be?
That's the cool part. The speed of light is not only constant, it is THE ONLY real constant that is constantly constant. :) So what has to happen is that time has to slow down to make the math work. The mass of the car has to increase, and the length of the car has to shorten. Space and time have to warp to keep the time a constant. That is SO COOL!
Don't try to figure it out all at once. It'll make your head spin. Just keep in mind it's as simple as
s = (v)(t)
If you dilate time and shorten length you can keep velocity constant, period. Constantly constant.

Answer 4

Ok, I asked a question like this to my physics teacher. I asked if I was on a bus traveling the speed of light and ran up the bus, if I could even do that. The answer is no because when mass travels to the speed of light, weird things start to happen in the universe. First of all according to Einstein, you would be a string of atoms stretched out for hundreds, thousands, even millions of miles. Of coarse, this is why the laws of physics are still in question. If this is a science question, I would say that you would be a line of atoms and that light would not flash or do anything.

And...the dopler effect has nothing to do with light, Sonic booms are the result of an object going faster than the sound that it makes, light speed is a physical limit in the universe, nothing can go that fast.

Answer 5

Your headlights will come on but won't be visible because the light is traveling at the same speed as your car. What I'd like to know is where I can get a hot car like that!

Answer 6

From your point of view everything looks the same, but from the point of view of someone watching you whiz by, the light never leaves your head lights, because you and the light is travelling at the same speed!

That's all just in the thought experiment, of course. In real life, going at the speed of light means you have a lot of mass, but I don't now how much, whether it's meant to be infinite, or what, I only know that since, according to Albert, that energy and mass are the same (think of mass, stuff, as energy bound up in a stable state, not radiating out in waves like light, and you, energy in a stabe state, interact with other stuff, energy in a stable state, creating the experience of touching a solid object). This is why you can't actually get to the speed of light because every time you get more kinetic energy going faster you become more massive, which requires more energy to push you, so the harder you try to get to the speed of light, the more fuel you need and you're never able to get enough to get your increasing mass to the speed of light.

Lessee, wud I leave out - oh yeah, gravity isn't a force so much as it is curved space, which means that gravity happens for the same reason you feel pushed against a car door when you whiz around A CURVE. Space is curved (but not in a way we 3 d creatures can see, just like 2d creatures cannot visualize our 3d space) and while we're standing on earth we're moving through time (forward, generally) which means we're moving through time/space, which is curved near masses like the earth, and when you move in a curve you are accellerating just as when you move in a curve while in a car and this results in getting pushed against the earth just as you do against a car door when moving in a curve on the road.

Anyway, it gets pretty hairy if you go deeper than that.

Answer 7

If you're travelling at the speed of light, you'd become infinitely massive, unless you are a photon. Let's say you were a photon, and you turned on your lights-- the photons would travel with you, not jumping ahead as the photons in auto headlights usually do (because the auto is travelling much less than the speed of light).

Answer 8

Light is subject to the doppler effect just like sound. When a train is approaching and the horn makes a different sound as it passes, light does the same. So, your speedy car would send out a beam of light at twice the speed of light because it is already going one times the speed of light when you switch the lights on. By the way, what kind of car is this?

Answer 9

The question is based on a false premise. Your car cannot be accelerated to the speed of light. If, however, you were travelling at nearly the speed of light relative to the ground - 99.9% say - and you shined a flashlight in the direction of your motion, you would see the wavefront of the light recede from you at exactly the speed of light, but an observer who was staionary relative to the ground would also measure the light beam as tavelling at exactly the speed of light and gaining distance ahead of you at only .1% of light speed.

Answer 10

The light from your headlights will then be traveling faster than the speed of light. This of course cannot happen, so the universe will blink into nothingness. Are you happy now?