If you could travel at the speed of light How long would it take you to Travel 1 light year from your ...?

Question

Perspective. Remember Special Relativaty

Answer 1

God I hate know it alls who don't.

But love know it alls who do.

First, mass has nothing to do with time dilation, in fact the effects of speed on mass is exactly opposite of than that on time.

Now, lets do some history and some math.

First, I am going to assume that you have already accelerated to light speed (c), so the time for acceleration can be disregarded.

(And, of course I am also fogeting for the moment that traveling at c is impossible.)

Let’s go back to 1887 and the Michelson-Morley experiment. If you are unfamiliar with it, then here is a brief explination.

The Michelson-Morley experiment was intended to show Earth’s absolute motion through the ether. It did this by using a device that would split a light beam, shoot half off at 90◦ and then reflect it back. By measuring the time it took for the beam to travel they could determine if the device was moving because if the device was moving perpendicular to the beam, it would have a longer distance to travel (I could add a lot here, but trust me, this is basicly it. If you want more information do a search for Michelson-Morley experiment).

They took their measurements over a year while the Earth orbited the sun, and guess what. No difference was found! The experiment was a failure.

Why did it fail? Every one knew that the Earth moved and the experiment should have worked.

Everyone jumped on the bandwagon of coming up with different theories on why the experiment failed. Theories bounce back and forth like the beam of light, among them were:

1.)The experiment can be dismissed. Perhaps something was wrong with the equipment or the procedure or the reasoning behind it. Lord Kelvin and Oliver Lodge took that point of view.

However, this point of view is not tenable. Since 1887, numerous physicists have repeated the experiment, in 1960, masers were used for this purpose and an accuracy of one part in a trillion was achieved. But, always, the failure was repeated.

2.)Well, the experiment is valid and there is no ether wind for the following reasons.

a)The Earth is not moving. It is the center of the universe and everything revolves around it.

Let’s get real, ok. This would throw everything we ever learned about astronomy out the window.

b)The Earth does move, but in doing so it drags the neighboring ether with it so that it seems motionless compared with the ether at the earths surface.

British physicist George Stokes suggested this, but, this implies that there is friction between the Earth and the ether, and this would raise the question as to why the motions of heavenly bodies weren’t slowing down due to “ether drag”. Stokes’ notion died a quick and painless death.

c)The Irish physicist George FitzGerald suggested that all object (and therefore all measuring apparatus) grew shorter in the direction of motion in accordance to a formula which was easily derived.

The FitzGerald contraction (derived from the Michelson-Morley experiment) was one of the formulas that Albert Whatzname used in formulating his general theory of relativity.

d)The Austrian physicist Ernst Mach went right for the theart of the matter. He said there was no ether wind because there was no ether. What could be simpler?

This still doesn’t explain how light could cross a vacuum. (I could say more about Mach, but I have very little good to say about a man who believed that atoms were a convenient fiction.)

Lets go back an look at FitzGerald. What is easily derived for him is actually a bit complicated for most of us, and I am not going to show it all (I did once and bored three people to death and drove 4 to insanity), but the formula he came up with is:

L’ = L / sqr(1-v²/c²) (sqr means square root)

Old Albert Whatizname showed that you could replace time with length and the formula would still hold and be true (no one has been able to disprove it yet), so that the faster you go, the slower time would pass (I am not going to go into the effect of gravitational fields and such, but it has been demonstrated experimently that the time dilation works).

So we can subsuite T for L and we get:

T’ = T / sqr(1-v²/c²) as you can see if v=c than (1-v²/c²) = 0 and sqr(0) = 0 so we have T'=T/0 or. . .

Hold on a second . . . T/0. You can't do that!

That's right people, if you travel at c (not 9.99999999999999...% of c) time has no meaning.

It is not zero as most assume, it does not go backwards as others have assumed, it becomes totally meaningless!

So, I can't tell you how long your trip would take! But I can tell you that, once again, traveling at the speed of light is impossible.

Looks like forgeting it for the moment does not work.

Answer 2

It would take 1 year to travel 1 light year.

Answer 3

Notime.
Full respect to Walking Man and his reply.

I'd just add one reference and one pedantic correction.

If you are seriously interested in looking at this type of question in detail you might consider Roger Penrose's recent book 'The Road to Reality'.

Walking Man asserts that it is impossible to travel at the speed of light. It's not. Light does it all the time. It is at least theoretcally impossible for you, the reader, to travel at the speed of light.

I find the idea that the starlight which touches me having experienced no time since leaving the star quite profoundly affecting at an artistic/human/spirital level, it underlines an immediacy and intimacy in the way that we are connected with the cosmos.

Answer 4

Your question is either deliberately misleading, or deliberately misposed, "Dr Karl" !

If "you could travel at the speed of light," you could get ANYWHERE in the Universe in no time at all, AS FAR AS YOU'RE CONCERNED. It happens to photons all the time! And along with that fact, the distance that you'd travel, from your perpective, would shrink to:

................ PRECISELY ZERO.

So the answer to your question "... How long would it take you to Travel 1 light year from your Perspective?" is that :

You couldn't EVER "Travel 1 light year from your Perspective," because from your perspective all things are ZERO distance away, and concomitantly, you reach them in zero time.

You could however travel 1 light year from someone else's perspective. That would naturally take precisely 1 year from their perspective. But from your perspective, it would still take you precisely no time at all.

My answer is of course predicated on travelling the entire trip at the speed of light, since if you're going to allow time to accelerate from some slower speed up to the speed of light, the time it would take to travel 1 light year from your ORIGINAL perspective would be quite arbitrary, as you also know full well.

I really don't like this kind of question that tries to trap readers with its verbal ambiguities.

Nevertheless, the spirit of the season compels me to say:

Live long and prosper.

Answer 5

If you could travel at the speed of light, 'How long would it take to Travel 1 light year'?
Ans: 1 light year

Answer 6

just under 1 year. A mass is needed for an exact figure since it effects the curvavture.

and if you did so facing your point of departuer, nothing would appear to move, because you are seeing the same light pattern.

However if you are able to accelerate just a little bit, the image you see would move in reverse. due to intercepting older light images.

With sufficient optics you could watch 9-11 the Kennedy shooting, or even dinosaurs, if you could ptot the exact path of the light waves from their point of origin.

Answer 7

It's impossible to travel at the speed of light unless you have no mass.

Answer 8

given the fact that you could accelerate to c (which is impossible for a couple of reasons)
and given the fact that you would travel with exact C
you would need ZERO seconds to travel the distance of 1 ly
an external observer would conclude you would have needed one year.

Answer 9

Time dilation would cause the gamma coefficient to have to become infinite...

Thus causing the time in object with the speed of light's reference frame to be instantaneous.

Answer 10

1 year I think, unless you have kids, then allow at least 2 years for frequent stops.