A Questioning Thought for the Day

[MountainMan]

Yes...if you turned the car around. The electrons from the headlights would then be traveling slower that the speed of light - Doppler Effect - and would be "on".

Let's assume that the car is traveling in a northerly direction. Turning the car facing south would then require the electrons to have to overcome the inertia of the wire going north at the speed of light and since electrons go at the speed of light they would have to move to the south down the wire at twice the speed of light, or at a minimum, something faster than the speed of light in order to reach the light bulb, so I'd say that theory is out of gas..

Not when you stop to consider the short travel distance.

The original question is akin to the "If a tree falls in the forest and no one there to hear it..." paradox, as well as the "If a light is on but no one is there to see it..." one as well. The answer to both of those is "no", since both sound waves and light waves require receptors and specific neural connections to be perceived and translated as such.

If you turned on a light on something traveling the speed of light, the electrons would go forward at the speed of light plus, since the base speed of the originating device itself is already established. To an observer standing in front of them, the light would therefore appear to be "on", since the observer would be standing still in reference to the light source.

A few years ago, research proved that the speed of light can be varied, and there is a well-thought-of theory making the rounds right now that strongly suggests that the speed of light is not an absolute limit at all; it just requires a different approach to go faster. You cannot develop a horse that can go sixty miles an hour, but if you put him on a train and gallop the length of the freight car...? Crude logic in my analogy, but the point is obvious - by a simple trick, your horse can now gallop around 90 mph, and to an observer with a radar gun standing beside the track, the horse's speed would be scientifically verified.

Not so very long ago, it was impossible to travel anywhere because we would fall off the edge of the Earth, which was the center of our universe. After that, we knew that men could not fly. When I was a kid, it was an "absolute fact" that no airplane could break the sound barrier. Then it became "fact" that no one could get into space without massive amounts of rocket power, and then along came Rutan and the Space Plane and did it anyway.

I think the problem with human progress is that we insist on limiting ourselves.