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VxDx · 03-11-2004, 08:48 PM

well, special relativity is where the idea of light speed being a constant and a physical limit. If, in special relativity, something, no matter how small, achieved the speed of light, time, to an outside observer, would stop completely for whatever was going that fast. The particle (lets say) would be cease to exist in the direction of it's travel, and the momentum would be infinite, as would the energy. This is why photont, which travel at the speed of light, ahve no mass. Interesting to say the least.

According to special relativity, the person traveling at some speed notices no difference, but would see everything outside of his frame of reference as traveling at a faster pace, theoretically. Alternately, time for the person traveling would seem to slow down for the person as observed by a person at rest. It follows the equation...

t=to/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) where t is the outside observed time, to is the observed time in motion, v is velocity and c is the speed of light.

Time dilation does have some very interesting and practical uses in the field of particle physics, specifically with regards to particle accelerators and the calculations that predict the outcome of atomic collisions.

03-11-2004, 08:48 PM	#11
VxDx FFR Player Join Date: May 2003 Posts: 1,871	well, special relativity is where the idea of light speed being a constant and a physical limit. If, in special relativity, something, no matter how small, achieved the speed of light, time, to an outside observer, would stop completely for whatever was going that fast. The particle (lets say) would be cease to exist in the direction of it's travel, and the momentum would be infinite, as would the energy. This is why photont, which travel at the speed of light, ahve no mass. Interesting to say the least. According to special relativity, the person traveling at some speed notices no difference, but would see everything outside of his frame of reference as traveling at a faster pace, theoretically. Alternately, time for the person traveling would seem to slow down for the person as observed by a person at rest. It follows the equation... t=to/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) where t is the outside observed time, to is the observed time in motion, v is velocity and c is the speed of light. Time dilation does have some very interesting and practical uses in the field of particle physics, specifically with regards to particle accelerators and the calculations that predict the outcome of atomic collisions.