Science Forums 2

[arkain101]

Something about special relativity that I noticed was this.

Lets use Einstiens example where he wondered... What if I was to ride on a beam of light and hold a mirror in front of my face. Would I become invisible? what would happen.

First of all light does not emmit from a human body so we cant assume that that is where this "light" to show our image is coming from. The light has a source, and in this case we should call it the sun, with the traveler in space. If this person were to ride away from the sun on a beam of light facing away from the sun traveling at 300,000m/s the light would need to hit the mirror, bounce off and then bounce from the face back onto the mirror over and over to display an image. The problem here is light does not have a beginning. If this were tested you would be traveling inside a source field of light. Or in other words, there is no beginning of the beam the sun is constant, unless we went to the birth of its time. So as you reach the speed of light you are in fact not on the front of a beam but inside a beam from the sun that reaches past the outter solar system. So at this point you and light would be traveling the same speed from the sun. Now we humans pick up light from a virbration in our eyes to make a constant change with in the retina. Without a vibrating eye your vision will darken. So If you were traveling the same speed as this field of light there would not be a source directing light at your face, or fast enough at the mirror to start bouncing between your face and the mirror. Your vision would soon darken and all the light that you are with in, including the light that was bouncing off your field of reference would balance and everything would soon dim and become black excpet fr the light of the stars around you. This is the same for any direction you choose to face the sun, assuming nothing is traveling faster than you.
As for the observers on earth watching from a perpendiclar angle to your travel, the from the sun would cease to reflect off you to the observers. Although if we include a secondary light source like a planet for example.. there would be a field of light that is already ahead of your path, that has bounced off the planet and is traveling all infinite angles from the planet. So in this situation you would be visible as you would pass through the planets field of light. The planet acts like a mirror to reflect light everywhere light flash light. Eventually as you get far enough away from the angle of light coming from the planet, the angle of the light coming from the planet will match that of the light form the sun, causing a non reflection situation again.
The experiment with light floating between mirrors and two trains is not logical. Because you can not in reality see a light photon if it isnt coming into your eye. So unless we had a video camera that viewed the photon bouncing between the mirrors at the stationary frame and sent that video to the traveler going away from the light it would not be plausible. The signal from from camera would have to keep up to the recieve on the travelers train , speeding away, eventually reaching near the speed of the signal and ruining all transmission. As soon as you stop, there will a massive amount of signal data waiting to get to you. When you stop (and we assume you only saw 10seconds of the video before you reached speed C /speed of signal and caused the signal to pause) the video would then continue feeding you information. from the past even though the time is actually the same on the stationary observers frame.