Speed of light?

Question

If your traveling at the speed of light and you turn on your headlights can you see ahead of you?

Answer 1

Yes, you can see, according to Einstein. He performed (or rather thought of) an experiment in which he was flying at the speed of light, holding a mirror in his hand. He asked, whether he would be able to see his image on the mirror or not, 'coz if he were indeed to see his image, then light rays would have to be reflected from the mirror & into his eyes. But since he himself was traveling at the speed of light in the experiment, that seemed unlikely. But Einstein said, after thinking a lot, that the speed of light is a constant & that it is not affected by anything. So, even if you were racing against light, AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT, even then light would appear to you as it did when you were stationary; that is, the relative speed of light against anything, irrespective of whether it is at rest or in motion, is always a constant, whose value is approximately 300,000,000 m/s. This is kind of an absurd notion & one doesn't seem to be too comfortable with it at the beginning, but this is what is universally accepted. And mind you, this is not a theoretical blah-blah ---- this explanation of the nature of light has led to several results, which we know are correct today.

Answer 2

No, because the light from the headlights is going at the same speed as the car. Also, if your going at the speed of light, I don't advise driving manually, let the nav computer handle that.
An example is: if you're in a plane traveling down faster than your own terminal velocity, and you jump out, you will slow down until you reach your terminal velocity( the speed at which the pull of the earth is equally resisted by the wind resistance of the object(I think))

Answer 3

Your answer awaits:


17-Jun-1988

Dear Cecil:

If you're driving your car at the speed of light and put your headlights on, what happens? --Rob M., Sausalito, California

Dear Rob:

Man, what are you guys in Sausalito on, anyway? As anyone with even the most tenuous grasp of the theory of relativity knows, the speed of light is constant for any inertial observer. Does that answer your question? I didn't think so. Let me put it another way.

Suppose you're zipping down to the Dairy Queen in your Hyundai at 0.99c--in other words, 99 percent of the speed of light. While en route you flip on the high beams and perform various subtle and ingenious experiments that I will not describe here. You discover that the light from the headlamps is traveling away from you at (surprise!) the speed of light. In other words, your headlights operate normally.

Now suppose a stationary observer at the side of the road performs the same experiment on the same beam of light. She (her name is Myra) discovers that the beam is moving away from her at speed c also. But how can this be, you ask? Since I'm going nearly the S. of L. to start with, shouldn't that give the photons emitted by the headlamps a running start, so to speak, enabling them to travel nearly twice the speed of light with respect to Myra?

Not to put too fine a point on it, no. The explanation for this is a little complicated, but the gist of it is this: when your speed approaches c, you and all your measuring sticks become foreshortened, i.e., squished like an accordion along your axis of travel. This throws off all your measurements, making the light beam appear to recede from you at the same speed c no matter how fast you're "really" going. Unfortunately, nobody knows how fast you're "really" going, because in this morally permissive universe of ours, everything's relative. You think I'm moving and you're not? Hey, maybe the truth is you're moving and I'm not. Only God knows, and ip (see column on non-sex-specific pronouns: The Straight Dope: Is there a gender-neutral substitute for "his or her"?) ain't saying.

No doubt this still leaves a few questions in your mind, but believe me, thousands have been over this ground before, and nobody's poked holes in the theory of relativity yet. For an excellent short treatment of the subject, see Space and Time in Special Relativity by N. David Mermin (1968).

--CECIL ADAMS

Answer 4

You can't travel at the speed of light, it would require infinite energy. If you were a photon of light itself, you would be massless, therefore with no headlights or eyes to see with. A photon can go the speed of light because it's massless, and since E=mc^2, and mass is zero, energy is also zero.

Answer 5

If you are travelling at the speed of light, then your time as perceived from an outisde observer, is completely stopped. So you would never have the time to turn on the lights.

Answer 6

If you are traveling at the speed of light, when you look ahead of you, you are already there.

Answer 7

Friends

It is just amounting to showing of bits and pieces on light and you "yourself" or I myself.

When the most basic and established presumption of today, that velocity of material particle canot be = " c '' , has carved out the measurement/observation of relative L, T, M, E then why are we trying to put back into same equations/perceptions what is denied or derived thereform.

Answer 8

No.