Lightspeed

[freeztar]

A useful tool, I've found:

 

Awesome! :)

[goku]

Goku, every time I start thinking you really want to learn about reality you prove me wrong. We are being serious, trying our best to give you the information you need to understand the answers to your questions, please give us the same effort.

 

reality?

maybe i dumded it down a little too much

my reality says one doesn't just start increaseing mass :rolleyes:

 

i reckon if the particles of your thrust (exhuast gasses, or what ever) do not travel at or beyond light speed you may not acheive light speed

 

has anyone ever actually tried to go light speed?

[DI5STURBED]

Goku, all I have to say is research it you have the tools Google search it or go to a library. There is no point in a discussion if you will not look at the sources I listed or the mathematical proof I presented to you.

 

By the way we are trying to accelerate things to the speed of light but it takes allot of energy we are getting closer and closer to getting things close to the speed of light. The things we are doing this with are called particle accelerators and the reason we haven’t gotten things to the speed of light is because it takes infinite energy which I stated in a past post. Since it takes a huge amount of energy to just accelerate protons and electrons it is doubtful we have tried to accelerate a human to that speed.

[Moontanman]

reality?

maybe i dumded it down a little too much

my reality says one doesn't just start increaseing mass :shrug:

 

Neither does mine, unfortunately our reality changes drastically as the speed of light is approached. This can be proved in particle accelerators. Charged particles are much easier to accelerate than people or space ships and when they approach the speed of light all the changes that have been described to you in this thread take place. They become more massive, harder to accelerate and shorter along the direction of acceleration and time slows down for them.

 

i reckon if the particles of your thrust (exhuast gasses, or what ever) do not travel at or beyond light speed you may not acheive light speed

 

Actually the acceleration does not depend on the speed of your exhaust, acceleration is cumulative, You can go faster then your exhaust. The effects of trying to go to or faster than the speed of light are indeed real.

 

has anyone ever actually tried to go light speed?

 

Our civilization does not have the power out put necessary to approach the speed of light as individuals or space craft but as I pointed out we have and can routinely accelerate charged particles to speeds near the the speed of light and the effects I have described do take place. There are also the effects pointed out by DI5STURBED

 

Originally Posted by DI5STURBED

 

A useful tool, I've found:

Perihelion precession of Mercury

Deflection of light by the Sun

Gravitational redshift of light

Post-Newtonian tests of gravity

Gravitational lensing

Light travel time delay testing

Gravitational redshift

Frame dragging tests

Gavity Probe B

(and many more)

[goku]

i've been thinking about those particle accelerators, i know it's been a while but the thought just came to me the other day, they're built in a circle right?

 

there's your problem ;)

[Pyrotex]

goku,

I'm sure you remember me.

It would seem that you might possibly be engaging in prevarication.

This is a rather rude thing to do with honest folk who only want to teach and explain.

 

Yes, Mankind is currently accellerating things to within 99.99% of the speed of light. Those "things" are currently nuclear particles such as protons and electrons. And they DO become more massive as they approach the speed of light.

 

Accellerating the particles in a circle is a great convenience -- otherwise we would have to build linear ("straight line") accellerators too long to fit on a continent. The fact that the particles go in a circle makes no difference to any of the arguments that have been presented so far.

 

Measuring the mass ("inertial mass") of a particle is rather easy. One way is to allow the particle to impact a target, say a number of thin layers of gel, and count how many layers the particle penetrates.

 

It should be noted that Einstein's equation that relates the mass of a particle to its velocity, should be interpreted very carefully. (We'll keep this simple) His equation predicts the "observed" mass of a particle (or spaceship) from the viewpoint of a "stationary" observor. The scientist (or grad student) will measure that the particle does indeed increase in mass the faster it goes.

 

This does NOT say that the particle retains this extra mass after it comes to rest again. In fact, the particle returns to its original mass in this case.

 

This does NOT say that the particle "experiences" a gain in mass. If we switch to the example of an astronaut in a spaceship, though WE will observe the astronaut to have a mass measuring in many TONS when he is speeding away at 99.9% of the speed of light, HE will experience his own mass as not changing at all. If he looks back at the grad student on the Earth, he will observe the grad student as having a mass of many TONS.

 

Graduate students all over the world, and in every language, conduct experiments to test Einstein's theory every year. And every time, in every year, they prove that Einstein was correct.

 

If this doesn't make sense to you, then perhaps there are either limits to your ability to understand, or limits to your willingness to understand.

 

But the truth stands on its own.

[goku]

goku,

I'm sure you remember me.

It would seem that you might possibly be engaging in prevarication.

This is a rather rude thing to do with honest folk who only want to teach and explain.

 

i don't know what you're talking about there, but yes i remember you ;)

 

and you missed my point, but does anyone else want to take a jab at post #22 before i elaborate?

[Moontanman]

i've been thinking about those particle accelerators, i know it's been a while but the thought just came to me the other day, they're built in a circle right?

 

there's your problem ;)

 

Goku! Good to have you back, I've missed your moronic ambush posts, it's apparent that you back up to snuff and in your normal fine form, keep it up, suspension can only be a few more posts away ;)

[CraigD]

i've been thinking about those particle accelerators, i know it's been a while but the thought just came to me the other day, they're built in a circle right?

Some are, some are not. A particle accelerator that’s built in a straight line is called, sensibly enough, a linear particle accelerator. A famous, and the longest one is the 3.2 km (2 mile) one at the SLAC, which can accelerate electrons and positrons to about 0.99 times the speed of light. It found slew of quarks and other theoretically predicted particles from the ‘70s through the ‘90s, leading to a few Nobel prizes for its users.

 

Impressive as linear accelerators like the SLAC’s are, they’re limited in that the distance over which they can accelerate particles is the same as their length. Scaling a linear accelerator up to the length necessary for the particle speeds needed for today’s experiments quickly results in something longer than will fit on earth, requiring more expensive engineering material and construction than there is on earth. So higher energy accelerators are built in circles, allowing the same stretch of machinery to accelerate each particle many times. The biggest one yet is the 27 km (17 mile) diameter LHC, which can accelerate protons to about 99.9999991 times the speed of light.

 

there's your problem ;)

There are some problems with circular particle accelerators not encountered with linear ones, a major one being that they constantly emit synchrotron radiation, making them less energy efficient than linear accelerators, requiring heavily shielded (usually solved by burying them), and must have their detectors situated in a way to not be interfered with by unwanted radiation. However, having been building these things for many decades, these engineering problems have been pretty well solved, so that nowadays the major engineering challenges are simply putting more and more energy into the accelerated particles.

 

In addition to the links above, a good starting place to read about particle accelerators is the wikipedia article “particle accelerator”.

[goku]

the thought i had was the amount of centrifical force being applied to the particale.

the faster you go, more centrifical force is applied

and i assume a greater amount of energy is needed to keep the particle from running into the gard rail

[goku]

Goku! Good to have you back, I've missed your moronic ambush posts, it's apparent that you back up to snuff and in your normal fine form, keep it up, suspension can only be a few more posts away ;)

 

accually i do dip snuff,

ambush? our diffinitions of ambush must somewhat, differ

 

just wandering if anyone else had the same thought

[Pyrotex]

i've been thinking about those particle accelerators, i know it's been a while but the thought just came to me the other day, they're built in a circle right? there's your problem ;)

No. It isn't a problem.

 

The following is a summary from the Wikipedia entry.

 

Back in the early 1900's, the first linear accellerators were built, most no longer than a few inches. In the 1920's universities in America and Europe began building quite a few linear accellerators, ranging in length from a few feet, to a kilometer or more. The longest in the world is the Stanford Linear Accelerator, SLAC, which is 3 km long.

 

In the meantime, the earliest circular accelerators, cyclotrons, were invented in 1929. There was one small problem with the cyclotrons: making the particles travel a curved path caused the particles to emit energy (as photons). In other words, the particles lost a little bit of their energy on each circuit. So universities began building larger cyclotrons, up to several km in diameter, because the larger the circle, the smaller the loss of energy.

 

The bottom line is this: when you subtract the energy loss from cyclotrons and their more modern circular cousins, the particles accellerate -- and are observed to gain mass -- in exactly the same way for both kinds of accellerator.

 

The particles in linear and circular accellerators behave the same. They both gain mass at exactly the rate predicted by Einstein.

 

This verification between two different types of machines demonstrates beyond any doubt that the measurements made in circular accellerators is valid. No problem.

 

Now stop being so snarky. If all you really want to do is tease the physicists here, then it will be a trivial matter to have you excluded. If you want to learn about modern science, you're in the right place.

[CraigD]

the thought i had was the amount of centrifical force being applied to the particale.

the faster you go, more centrifical force is appied

The right term is centripetal force, but you’re essentially right. If not for this force, the particle wouldn’t follow a circular path.

 

If the acceleration were due to an electrostatic force, such as gigantic accumulation of opposite charge in its center, no energy would be required. Energy = Work = Force x Distance, so if the radius of a body traveling in a circle is unchanged, Energy = Work = Force x 0 = 0. This is why planets orbiting stars and moons and satellites orbiting planets don’t “run down”, and why, if it has a good bearing, even a heavy, fast-turning wheel turns for a long time.

 

This is not, however, how circular particle accelerators keep charged particles traveling in a circle. They do it with a magnetic field perpendicular to the particles’ direction of motion. When a charged particle passes thought such a magnetic field, it’s deflected. Surprisingly, rather than making circular particle accelerators more difficult to design and build, it makes them easier. An explanation is more than I think this post should attempt, so for details, check out a textbook or online reference like the wikipedia article “cyclotron”.

and i assume a greater amount of energy is needed to keep the particle from running into the gard rail

For the somewhat complicated reasons I touch on above, the strength of the magnetic field need to deflect the particles, and thus the power needed to produce the field, doesn’t depend on the speed of the particles. However, the faster the particles travel, the greater their loss of energy and speed, requiring more power to accelerate them in their direction of travel. Thus a giant accelerator like the LHC requires a huge amount of power – around 180 MW (a quarter million horsepower), about the same as the largest aircraft carrier afloat, or 14% of the total power used by all of Geneva. Not all of this power goes into accelerating particles. Roughly half is needed to run the refrigeration system that keeps its electromagnets chilled to superconductive temperatures.

 

When it comes to the actual collision experiments accelerators that are the main purpose of particle accelerators, it doesn’t matter if the particles were accelerated by a linear or a circular accelerator, because the particles aren’t accelerated in any way in the region of the collision target.

[arkain101]

i just can't get over it, someone said it again on the history chanel i think.

 

"you can't go the speed of light because E=MC2 blah blah you get fatter the faster you go"

 

i don't understand, it's not like they're useing "you can't go the speed of light" to cover up something :rolleyes:

 

maybe they just missed it, standing too close to focus on the truth, an honest mistake.

 

to acheave acceleration you must overcome resistance.

the question is, how much resistance is in space?

 

The Mental Preperation

 

What is reasonable? Most of our reason at least what we think is reason, is based on a very tiny field of knowledge known as the basic walk of life on the planet earth. This form of reason we use to survive the day has very little insight into what actually causes the day to work. With this understood it would suggest to one that, what we think we know as reality can actually be accepted as ones most efficient model adaptive behaviors.

 

With that being said, a person beginning the journey into the "strangeness" of science theories can recognize the cause of confusion, the justification of confusion, and this very realization allows one to put aside a vast amount of lens's and filters of the human mind to open up to a new way of understanding and general thinking.

 

 

The technical visualization and logic

 

There is two possible views. 1)Within a fast moving frame or 2)Observing a fast moving frame.

 

According to 1)Distance in the direction of travel shrinks as it reaches ever closer to C, speed of light. Imagine snap shot views of a series of separate and identical trips at increasing speeds per trip. Trip 1 the distance looks 2000km, trip 2 the ditance looks 1000km, trip 3 the distance looks 500km, trip 4 the distance looks 100km.. so on and so forth untill eventually, the trip looks almost as zero distance. Now, of course you can't reduce a distance less than zero, not to mention equal to zero, which is a logical reason why you can't travel the speed of light not to mention exceed it.

 

According to 2)The view of an object traveling relativistically fast appears to slow down in time. So, if we imagine it far enough away it won't look like a streak in our thought experiment and we can see it as a stationary object, and if we use our mind to zoom in we can view the object as slowing down in time.. At the speed the math explains it to stop in time. How can you reduce something more than zero again? you can't so you see another logically aspect of why a speed limit occurs.

 

Why do these dilations even exist? Try to use that everyday logic in the following scenario. You are in a space ship, you don't know where, there is no visible objects around you, and your ships instruments detect zero light or energy around you.

 

Ask, How fast are you going? Are you even moving? Which direction are you moving? Are you rotating?

The answers to these questions of this strange empty universe exist all the time in the universe we live in and observe today. We only aquire answers to these questions relative to other sources of locations (information). However, just because one measurement appears certain, it does not remove the concept of an object in its own empty universe. So the logic of an empty universe, exist in our filled universe, but its not filled in the stationary way we think it is, it is relatively existing in a countless of uncertain ways, which means, non absolute.

[arkain101]

no really, if going fast makes you bigger then going slow would make you smaller.

every action has an equal opposite reaction.

 

the math part just doesn't work, you can't give a mathmatical value to something by picking a number between 1 and 100.

 

if resistance is 5 and thrust is 6, 6 being greater than 5, then you acheave acceleration. the longer you can accelerate the greater your speed will become.

 

after you break the photonic barrier things should smothe up nicely :rolleyes:

 

of course the real problem will be running into stuff, the faster you go the worse the wrech will be :phones:

 

Imagine you had the perfect ship. It was 99.99% fuel, and .001% capsule. Eventually the ship runs out of fuel, and the ship stops accelerating. There may be other ways to accelerate, but you either distance yourself form the source too much or run out of fuel, But all thrust designs aside, the point is this:

 

Break this ship idea down to some simple laws of physics. Take two objects, and put the fastest and strongest force between them that is possible. The put an unmovable wall behind one of them and let the force act on them. The object get sent off at the fastest known speed. Now, in order for something to catch up to it in order to accelerate it more, it has to move faster, but the fastest force was already used, and anything not catching up to it, will only slow it down. So, how can this object ever go any faster relative to the object it came from?

[goku]

the strength of the magnetic field need to deflect the particles, and thus the power needed to produce the field, doesn’t depend on the speed of the particles. However, the faster the particles travel, the greater their loss of energy and speed, requiring more power to accelerate them in their direction of travel.

 

if the particle loses more energy/speed the faster it goes, doesn't that mean it's scrub'n the gard rail ;)

 

here's what i'm thinkin,

if you take a ten pound weight

tie ten pound fishin line to it

hold the line and spin around as fast as you can

the line will break because of the centrifical force

and the faster you spin around the heavier the fishin line will need to be

[Pyrotex]

if the particle loses more energy/speed the faster it goes, doesn't that mean ... the faster you spin around the heavier the fishin line will need to be

You are collapsing two different things into one.

 

1 True: the particle loses more energy the faster it goes--for a given circular radius.

Let's call this radiative loss. Make the radius of the accellerator bigger, and the energy loss goes down, for a given particle velocity. In any case, the only effect this has on our particle is that it makes the accellerator a little less efficient. Some energy is lost (and this drives up your electricity bill). But this has no affect on the particle itself. It's path is not determined by efficiency.

 

2 True: the faster you spin the bucket, the heavier the fishing line you need. The centripetal force needed to hold onto that fishing line is :

F = m v^2 / r

 

where m is the mass of the bucket

v is the velocity of the bucket (squared)

r is the radius of the circle, or basically the length of the fishing line.

 

So, increasing the spin velocity (v) increases the centripetal force (F).

 

But, increasing the radius ® decreases the centripetal force (F).

 

This is why the new Large Hadron Collider is soooooo big. Increasing the radius does two things: (1) decreases the radiative loss of energy and (2) decreases the amount of energy necessary to bend the particle path into a circle.

 

This leaves more energy for actually accellerating the particles to higher speeds. And proving that Einstein was right. Particle mass increases very close to the speed of light.

 

Bottom line: There is no problem. Particle mass behaves exactly the same in linear or circular accellerators.