Is it possible?

Question

It is possible to magnify light if you can use a magnifying glass to burn ants and grass, right? It is possible to bend light..

why wouldn't it be possible to magify light to make it travel faster than the speed of light? you can do it to film space.
Based on Einstein's theory nothing can travel faster that speed of light...what do you think?

ok, but if you look through a magnifier backwards it makes it further away....
I started looking online and found a few articles that support it being magnified...not just through glass, but they use the same thing that slows it down in vacuum, can speed it up.

http://www.scienceblog.com/light.html

Answer 1

Space-Time is one entity. The faster you move through space, the slower time moves for you. If you travel at light-speed, time stands still for you.
Right now we are taught that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. But lots of things we've accepted as fact in the past have been proven false in light of new evidence. We're all still learning, after all.
Perhaps, someday, if we're able to travel faster than the speed of light we'll actually be able to travel backward in time. What a cool idea!

Answer 2

A magnifying glass works as a magnifier because the speed of light in glass is much lower than the speed of light in a vacuum. The photons take the shortest way out and where the glass is the thickest the photons will have altered its direction the most. After the photons leave the glass they are again moving at the same speed as they were before the glass. So it is not the velocity that has been amplified, it is just that the photons are now closer together giving the bundle of photons at the magnifying glass focus a higher concentration of energy.

-edit-
In the case of Cherenkov radiation it only occurs when something tries to move faster than the speed of light in a certain medium. Like water. But the speed of light in water is much lower than the speed of light in a vacuum. Nothing can move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.

Answer 3

personally i think that human beings should strive towards being capable of traveling even up to the speed of light, before we worry about going faster than that. but light has no mass, thus light cannot exert force, so it cannot be harnessed as a method of propulsion. as a result if there were a vessel retaining mass capable of maintaining its material shape while achieving light speed, it would still take a constant source of propulsion that would keep it accelerating through the vacuum of space. but no material used as a fuel on earth could be used as a sustained method of accelerating to the point of reaching light speed. nor is there any mass based material capable of maintaining its compound structure under that much stress. the only possibilities would both be hypothetical...first if we could devise a way to "wrinkle the time-space continuum" then we could traverse a smaller path, while in fact crossing a massive amount of space-time. the other alternative would be to use a method similar to that used in Willy wonka, breaking human matter down and sending it like a light or radio signal across space then reconstituting on the other end.

Answer 4

Well light behaves like two different things like waves sometimes and like particles other times. So you can't really bend it... Also all observed light travels at the same speed so it's natural to conclude that all light will always travel at that speed. Maybe if you used gravity to sling shot it it could go faster than it normally does, but it would take decades in technological development to test that.

Answer 5

Hi. There ARE some things that travel faster than the speed of light. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation Bending light happens all the time. Not just possible but useful. Got a camera? You bend light to the focal plane.

Answer 6

No, the magnification only concentrates the light, nothing speeds it up.

Answer 7

not possible. ur question is wrong. megnifying glass concentrates the ligth waves into a point, ie converges them. does not increse its speed. first under stand the science and than ask question please.
may be u shold go to some other catagory of quetions called jokes and riddles.

Answer 8

♠ my granny with her pills is better of Einstein; given one or two pills of hers I can travel to bathroom faster than light; it makes me serious problems sometimes coz I have no time to take off an item or two;

Answer 9

Hmm? I simply don't know what you mean...