If a lightbulb travels at light speed, does it's light travel even faster?

Question

Would a lightbulb traveling at light speed create light that travels at twice that speed to an outside observer, or would the light just slow as it entered the regular spacetime?

Answer 1

A lot of the answers almost hit the main point of your question.

Light travels at a constant speed. Period. It does not matter how fast you are going, light will always move at the same speed. You can go as fast as you want. You can go as slow as you want. The speed of light is constant.

Answer 2

No, the bulb would only travel at the speed of light itself. An outside observer wouldn't see anything, considering it's moving at the speed of light. If you could slow it down a million times, you would still only see the lightbulb moving.

Answer 3

This is one of Einstein's thought experiments stated in a different way. He asked if you move at lightspeed and chase after a beam of light, would the light look like it was standing still? The point of the question was that nobody has ever seen light standing still. Light is your quintessential traveler. It never stops, it never slows down, it never speeds up. In a vacuum it will travel at approximately 186,000 miles per second, and it doesn't matter if you're moving towards the light beam or away from it, it's 186,000 miles per second. What does change is time. Time is what gives in the equation. Time insofar as the reference frame is concerned.

So, your hypothesis is nonsensical because a lightbulb traveling at the speed of light yields infinities as far as the relativity equations are concerned. How does something have "infinite" mass?

Answer 4

If a lightbulb travels at light speed, does it's light travel even faster?
Would a lightbulb traveling at light speed create light that travels at twice that speed to an outside observer, or would the light just slow as it entered the regular spacetime?



The speed of light is constant no matter what the source of that light is doing and no matter what the receiver of that light is doing. This means that the answer to your question is ‘no’, light would not go twice as fast. But, it also means that if you were to be going towards a stationary source of light at the speed of light you would still measure the speed of the light from that source as the speed of light.

Let’s look (no pun intended) at what this really means. Light is an electromagnetic wave. Just like the microwaves in your microwave oven, like radio waves, like x-rays and so on, all of these are electromagnetic waves.

In the 1880s as young man named James Clark Maxwell figured out that all electromagnetic waves are generated by the weaving together of electric fields and magnetic fields. A light wave is really two waves moving perpendicular to each other. One of those waves consists of magnetic fields and the other consists of electric fields.

These equations that describe how these weaving fields cause electromagnetic waves have as a part of their solution the rate at which these fields must weave together. Guess that that speed is? It is the speed of light! Maxwell figured this out way before Albert Michelson measured the speed of light using rotating mirrors between two mountains in California in 1926.

So, when someone says that the speed of light is 186,000miles per second what they are really saying is that these electric and magnetic fields weave together at a rate of 186,000 miles per second. This is not the same thing as me saying that I am traveling in my car at a rate of 55 miles per hour.

When I travel in my car I am moving from one place to another and when I get there I am no longer where I was nor am I in the space in between where I was and where I am going. But, this is not so for light. Light can ‘travel’ from one place to another but when it gets there it is still where it was when it left and it is also in the space in between.

Think about the stars. The light from the stars left the star millions of years ago and that light is still at the star and it fills all of the space between you and it. If that star were to go supernova then, obviously, its light would be different but we would not know that for millions of years because the light that left the star just before things change has to get to us before the light from the supernova can reach us.

Can you see that when we say the ‘speed of light’, it does not mean the same thing as the speed of anything else.

One more little thing: Maxwell’s equations for the ‘speed of light’ reach the same answer for the speed of light regardless of what the person calculating the speed of light using these equations is doing. This means that if you are traveling at the speed of light and if you calculate the propagation of a wave of light your answer will still be the speed of light.

Answer 5

no, light bulbs travel much slower than the speed of light, they travel at
"the speed that the eclctrictiy comes through the circuit in you lightbuilb and enough thermal energy is produced to emit light"

once this is done the light travels at the speed of light to you eye.

Answer 6

Hi. I assume you mean NEAR the speed of light. Light would move away from the bulb at the speed of light no matter what direction. Except towards the base, I suppose.

Answer 7

no, the light at the front of the bulb would stay right in front of the bulb

Answer 8

Judging from your last string of questions, don't you have anything better to do than ask ,what are obviously for you, rhetorical questions?

Answer 9

I just heard this discussed on a recent podcast, I don't remember the details but they said no.

Answer 10

NOPE ( my theory at least ^^~) don't want to type my whole theory because it spends too much time ...