We all learn in school, or at least from a more rigorous selection of science fiction, that you can never travel faster than the speed of light. That may sound disappointing at first, but when you think about it, 186,000 miles per second is nothing to sneeze at. Questions about how to achieve that speed quickly give way to questions about what an attempt to achieve that speed would look like, and many of them are answered like this: ScienceClic’s animated video above. The first surprise is that moving this fast does not in itself have any negative effects on us. When we travel by bicycle, car, airplane, spaceship, etc., we only feel acceleration. As long as this speed remains at a safe speed, in theory, absolute speed doesn’t matter if you can reach it. Still, even if there’s dust, it’s not a bad thing to buckle up, but it doesn’t help much in the event of a crash.
By assuming that our ship is equipped with a force field that repels dangerous objects and allows us to roam freely through space, we can put that out of our minds and focus on what we can see out the window. First of all, “the stars in front of you that are approaching you appear to gradually recede.The sky shrinks in front of your eyes,” similar to how rain appears to fall in front of you when you are driving past.
“Behind us, the sky widens and darkens,” and objects we pass “appear to be tilted slightly in our direction.” Just as the light in the sky we see during stargazing takes time to reach us and makes up the starscape of the past, the events on Earth that we are moving away from will appear to be happening in “slow motion” (assuming we have a way to see them). The image of the Earth shifts to red, and the image of everything in front of you shifts to blue. After a few hundred days, our ship begins to approach the speed of light, and that’s when things get even weirder.
Scientifically speaking, this is the special theory of relativity that causes our ship to deviate into its own “time axis” away from the one that follows Earth. From our perspective, the entire universe contracts along the length of our movement, making our journey shorter than expected. As your movement speed increases, your forward vision becomes stronger and your rear vision becomes pitch black. And what happens when you finally reach the speed of light? “You may try to catch the ray, but from your point of view it will always escape with the same speed.” Accelerate as much as you like. “From your point of view, you still don’t move, and the light leaks inexorably.” At best, “our ship will continue to accelerate forever, our field of vision will become even narrower, an infinite bright spot will form before us, surrounded by an infinite black sky.” But even if objects can’t do that, there might be a loophole where “there is nothing to prevent space itself from moving faster than light.” This is the premise if truly amazing science fiction existed.
via ion
Related content:
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Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages ​​and cultures. he is the author of the newsletter books about cities books as well Home page (I won’t summarize Korea) and korean newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
