If you are traveling at the speed of light, and turn oon your headlights ...what happnes??

Question

Quote by the great comic. Steve Wright

Answer 1

It would be bad.
I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Total protonic reversal.
Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.

Answer 2

Traveling at the speed of light, do you have need of headlights? Maybe taillights.

What would the ocean be without sponges.
--Steven Wright
When I think of the past, it brings back memories.
--Steven Wright

Answer 3

The light from your headlights is traveling away from you at the speed of light no matter what speed you are traveling. If you increase your speed that light is still traveling at the speed of light away from you and always will. You will never catch up to it, and definitely will not pass it.

Answer 4

It's really hard for me to wrap my head around this, but for some reason if you were in that car, it would appear that the light was going no faster than the speed of light. It's constant. For someone watching you drive by, they too would see your headlights at the speed of light. No faster. (view source)

Answer 5

It goes away from you just as fast as it would if you were standing still. That's what's so weird about the Theory of Relativity, according to you, the light will be going 600,000 km/sec. (your velocity + the light's velocity) According to someone watching, the light will be moving at 300,000 km/sec, and so will you. (Actually you'll be going a little slower, since you can't reach light speed.)

Answer 6

well you would be able to see the light right in front of you, but then the light would go faster than you because traveling at that speed every thing affects you and when turning on the lights it takes energy and then ou would slow down.

Answer 7

According to Einstein, it's relative to your point of view.
To you..you feel as if you're not moving and therefore the lights go on and illuminate the area.
But to people outside you your reference point, you appear to be standing still because time slows down and you will spend forever trying to reach the button and the lights will never come on.

Answer 8

Sadly this question and all others about experiences at the speed of light do not have a definitive answer. You cannot go at the speed of light so the question is hypothetical. Hypothetical questions do not have definitive answers. Only massless particles such as photons can go at the speed of light. As a massive object approaches the speed of light the amount of energy needed to accelerate it further increases so that an infinite amount would be needed to reach the speed of light.

Sometimes people persist: What would the world look like in the reference frame of a photon? What does a photon experience? Does space contract to two dimensions at the speed of light? Does time stop for a photon?. . . It is really not possible to make sense of such questions and any attempt to do so is bound to lead to paradoxes. There are no inertial reference frames in which the photon is at rest so it is hopeless to try to imagine what it would be like in one. Photons do not have experiences. There is no sense in saying that time stops when you go at the speed of light. This is not a failing of the theory of relativity. There are no inconsistencies revealed by these questions. They just don't make sense.

Despite these empty answers, nobody should feel too put down for asking such questions. They are exactly the kind of question that Einstein often asked himself from the age of 16 until he discovered special relativity ten years later. Einstein reported that in 1896 he thought,

``If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest. However, there seems to be no such thing, whether on the basis of experience or according to Maxwell's equations. From the very beginning it appeared to me intuitively clear that, judged from the standpoint of such an observer, everything would have to happen according to the same laws as for an observer who, relative to the earth, was at rest. For how, otherwise, should the first observer know, i.e., be able to determine, that he is in a state of fast uniform motion? One sees that in this paradox the germ of the special relativity theory is already contained. Today everyone knows, of course, that all attempts to clarify this paradox satisfactorily were condemned to failure as long as the axiom of the absolute character of time, viz., of a simultaneous, unrecognizedly was anchored in the unconscious. Clearly to recognize this axiom and its arbitrary character really implies already the solution to the problem.''

In 1905 he realised how it could be that light always goes at the same speed no matter how fast you go. Events that are simultaneous in one reference frame will happen at different times in another that has a velocity relative to the first. Space and time cannot be taken as absolute. On this basis Einstein constructed the theory of special relativity, which has since been well confirmed by experiment.

Questions of relative velocity in relativity can be answered using the velocity subtraction formula v = (w - u)/(1 - wu/c2) (see relativity FAQ: velocity addition). If you are driving at a speed u relative to me and you measure the speed of light in the same direction (w = c in my frame), the formula gives v the speed of light in your reference frame as, v = (c-u)/(1 - u/c). For any speed u less than c this gives v = c so the speed of light is the same for you. But if u = c the formula degenerates to zero divided by zero; a meaningless answer.

If you want to know what happens when you are driving at very nearly the speed of light, an answer can be given. Within your car you observe no unusual effects. You can look at yourself in your mirror which is moving with the car and you will look the same as usual. Looking out of the window is a different matter. The light from your headlights will always go at the speed of light in your reference frame. It will strike any object in its path and be reflected back. Everything else will be coming towards you at nearly the speed of light, so the light reflected from it will be Doppler shifted to very high frequencies--towards the ultraviolet or beyond. If you have a suitable camera you could take a snapshot. The objects passing are contracted in length but because of the different times of passage for the light and effects of aberration, the snapshot will show the objects you pass as rotated.

Dr. H

Answer 9

I like candy canes. I like the red part.

~Steven Wright

Answer 10

Poof!

Absolute obliteration.