Faster than the speed of light...

[GoldenRivet]

Someone asked me the other day.

"what would happen, if you were driving faster than the speed of light, and you turned your headlights on?"

so... any takers?

I say, nothing would happen.

to an observer outside your craft - you would be completely invisible; as vision as we know it depends on light to be reflected off a surface for it to be seen.

from you're own point of view... you, your control panel, the interior of your craft and everything else would also be completely invisible as you would be moving faster than the light required for you to see other objects.

[Raptor1]

What would happen? Well, Einstein might be really, really mad.

Anyway, wouldn't light reflected or emitted by an object moving faster than light also move...err...faster than light? Conservation of momentum and all that...

[ASWnut101]

If you want to know what happens when you are driving at very nearly the speed of light, an answer can be given. Within your car you observe no unusual effects. You can look at yourself in your mirror which is moving with the car and you will look the same as usual. Looking out of the window is a different matter. The light from your headlights will always go at the speed of light in your reference frame. It will strike any object in its path and be reflected back. Everything else will be coming towards you at nearly the speed of light, so the light reflected from it will be Doppler shifted to very high frequencies--towards the ultraviolet or beyond. If you have a suitable camera you could take a snapshot. The objects passing are contracted in length but because of the different times of passage for the light and effects of aberration, the snapshot will show the objects you pass as rotated.

Taken from: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic...eadlights.html

Basically, you wouldn't see anything, regardless of whether something is in front of you, as the reflected light would be blue shifted well beyond what we can perceive. If you could, it would look...funky lol. All distorted and stuff. Though, it's not like your eye could track the object fast enough to actually get a good look at it anyway.

Fun stuff to think about though!

EDIT: That was at like 99.99999999% the speed of light. At 100% of c, nothing would really happen. Kinda like dividing by zero, only with your eyes. If you get my drift lol

[magic452]

Somebody going the other way would flash his high beams at you.

And you could also tell the judge that you didn't see the red and blue lights when you get caught speeding.

I think that someone outside your craft would see you but at a point after you have passed, the light is reflected off an object, the head's rear reflector.
Any light reflected to either side would be seen. Most certainly the tail lights could be seen. Maybe.

Or not Wasn't fast enough with the typing. Forgot about the Doppler shift thing.

Magic

[Sledgehammer427]

on a not-so-serious note...I read driving and speed of light and my mind went straight to Porsche 917.

[Torplexed]

[Oberon]

[Pisces]

I say nothing, the navigation lights on the Enterprise (D) never caused any harm while in warp.

[Hitman]

Your light beam would travel at 2x speed of light ... same as when you throw something forward while travelling in a car. The objet has the speed of the car already and then also the extra one you gave it by throwing it.

[MH]

Originally Posted by Hitman

Your light beam would travel at 2x speed of light ... same as when you throw something forward while travelling in a car. The objet has the speed of the car already and then also the extra one you gave it by throwing it.

...or it would travel back in time and knock you out before you attempt such a outrageous experiment.

[Herr-Berbunch]

The only thing faster than the speed of light is dark - because it has to get out of the way!

[Raptor1]

Originally Posted by Hitman

Your light beam would travel at 2x speed of light ... same as when you throw something forward while travelling in a car. The objet has the speed of the car already and then also the extra one you gave it by throwing it.

That's what I thought at the start, but now that I think about it, the light can still move at the speed of light without violating the conservation of momentum. Though if that's the case we might have photons that move at the standard c but have some other ridiculously unreasonable property, like a null or negative wavelength.

Or I could be totally wrong. Not that it matters much, this is sort of the reason moving faster than light is impossible in the first place...

[Krauter]

[Radioshow]

Nothing!! will travel faster than the speed of light(locally). You can't "add up" the speed of light like with normal velocities. If you are moving at "c"(lightspeed) and you turn on lights they would move out no faster than c. If you shoot a bullet out front it would not move away from you faster than "c".
2 ships closing on each other at c would appear to be moving towards each other no faster than the speed of light. They would not be closing on each other at 2x light speed.

So no matter what you do things will ALWAYS move no faster than lightspeed, regardless of their velocity/position.

The only possible way is if they are spatially separated by great distances.

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

"what would happen, if you were driving faster than the speed of light, and you turned your headlights on?"

You might see a few particles of free floating hydrogen before they vaporize your space craft due to your kinetic force...

Originally Posted by Raptor1

What would happen? Well, Einstein might be really, really mad.

Originally Posted by Pisces

I say nothing, the navigation lights on the Enterprise (D) never caused any harm while in warp.

Because the nav lights are inside the ship's warp field and thus are not really traveling faster than light from the perspective of an observer inside the warp field itself.