• Question: Let's hypotheticly say that you are travelling at the speed of light in your car. What will happen if you turn your headlights on?

    Asked by lewichan to Cat, Daz, Holly, Johnson, Pamela on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Cat O'Connor

      Cat O'Connor answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hi lewichan,

      Honestly I have no idea! I never really understood physics and all that stuff!

      But why would you want to turn on your headlights…..you wouldn’t be able to see anything! 😀

      Off the top of my head, a complete guess, I would say that your fingers would turn into cumcumbers!

      Hope this helps,

      Cat 😀

    • Photo: Pamela Lithgow

      Pamela Lithgow answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hi lewichan,
      Boy this is a difficult question! I find physics really difficult to get my head round so I have been asking around to try and find you an answer and I have found the answers difficult to understand myself.
      But what I have found is that it would be impossible for you to travel at the speed of light in a car, as you approached the speed of light the energy required to make you go faster would get greater and greater and it is just impossible. Apparently according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity you cannot get an answer to this question (it confuses me but the answer was zero :S)
      I can answer what would happen if you were travelling NEAR the speed of light…..apparently then you would observe no unusual effects, your lights would turn on as expected however what you see of the world around you would be strange.
      This is where it starts to get really odd….ok…so apparently due to the speed you are travelling the light gets changed to ultraviolet! So you would need a special camera to see anything then it would all be rotated…weird right!!!!!!
      So that is a very complicated answer and I am not even sure I understand but I hope you like it!
      Pam 🙂

    • Photo: Darren Braddick

      Darren Braddick answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Hi lewichan!

      Well I do not know. So far its impossible to go that fast, and in fact it may be theoretically impossible to be as fast as the speed of light.. But theory is boring, so let’s assume we can!

      Headlights make light, which will travel at a certain speed. The speed is constant, and so if your car is going at a certain speed, than the speed of the light from your car is the same anyway… So maybe nothing would happen !

      However, if you go at the speed of light, there’s a might be an excellent chance of some cheeky time traveling, as moving increasingly fast is looking like the most likely way of achieving ‘time travel’, at least in some sense.

      I have a bad feeling Einstein would be very upset by all this though….. Lol

      I hope that helps answer your question somehow..

      Daz

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