[ExI] speed of light at the speed of light

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Thu Aug 22 19:58:47 UTC 2013


On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 7:29 AM, Gordon <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I am in a spaceship accelerating away from earth and approaching the
> speed of light. I have a flashlight. My instruments tell me that the light
> emitted from my flashlight travels at c. This is true no matter whether I
> shine it forward in the direction of my travel or backward toward the rear
> of the ship.
> I am accelerating away from earth such that my ship's velocity relative to
> earth compared to c is halved in each time period. For example at time t,
> my ship is travelling at 90% of c. At t2, my ship is travelling at 95% of
> c. At t3, my ship is travelling at 97.5% of c, and so on for an infinite
> amount of time as I approach c.
>

It's OK for thought experiments to be wildly impractical but they must be
physically possible, and the above experiment would not only take an
infinite amount of time to perform it would also take an infinite amount of
energy.

 John K Clark
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