This question

[lemit]

Originally Posted by freeztar

...What would happen to your body? Wouldn't you become instantly cratered and amorphous with all those high speed particles knocking around you?

Wait! Are you suggesting I may have been right when I suggested "Dissolution of all the tissues of the body?" Did I come close to answering a physics question? Or am I just too dumb to understand what you're really saying?

--lemit

[Don Blazys]

To: Sniperjak.

Inertia is a property of mass (and energy, since the two are fundamentally equivalent).
Thus, in order to eliminate a bodys inertia,
one would have to convert all of the particles that make up that body
into massless particles such as photons.

Now, unconfined massless particles must move at the speed of light
in order to exist,
and for anything that moves at the speed of light,
time can not exist,
and anything that is not subject to the ravages of time
must be immortal... (not subject to death or even aging).

Thus, the answer to your question:

Quoting Sniperjak:

If someone (anyone) could completely negate their inertia (Newton's first law and such), what special abilities would be granted to that person?

is "The Godlike ability to be immortal."

Fun question!

Don.

[lemit]

Originally Posted by Don Blazys

To: Sniperjak.

Inertia is a property of mass (and energy, since the two are fundamentally equivalent).
Thus, in order to eliminate a bodys inertia,
one would have to convert all of the particles that make up that body
into massless particles such as photons.

Now, unconfined massless particles must move at the speed of light
in order to exist,
and for anything that moves at the speed of light,
time can not exist,
and anything that is not subject to the ravages of time
must be immortal... (not subject to death or even aging).

Thus, the answer to your question . . . is "The Godlike ability to be immortal."

Fun question!

Don.

So those "unconfined, massless particles" would be imbued with "special abilities?"

What kind of comic book hero would a photon be?

--lemit

[Don Blazys]

To: lemit.

Quoting lemit:

What kind of comic book hero would a photon be?

Any human body is made of atoms.
However, if each and every one of those atoms was converted to a photon,
then our "comic book superhero" would become a "light being"...,
kind of like an "angel".

Besides being immortal, he or she would also have
the following qualities and attributes:

(1) Since photons contain much "information",
our "superhero" would be "naturally well informed"
and would not need to "study" in order to know things.

(2) Our "superhero" would also be "well armed" in that
his or her light could be focused (as in a laser),
and could also be used to generate electricity
(in order to "shock" its enemies or some particular nemesis).

(3) Needless to say, our superhero would be fast.
In fact his or her biggest "problem" would be "slowing down"
(in order to meaningfully interact with us mortals)
without going "out of existence".

(4) Since photons have properties of both waves and particles
our superhero may (under certain conditions)
even exhibit symptoms of having a "dual" or "split" personality...
perhaps even a touch of schizophrenia...I don't know...
At this time, there is insufficient data to make that determination.

Don.

[Pyrotex]

Wait a second guys. You're having too much fun with this.

Remember, photons DO NOT EXPERIENCE TIME.

So, no matter how powerful a "photon angel" would be, this angel would exist in a static, uniform, motionless universe, with nothing to do!

[lemit]

Originally Posted by Pyrotex

Wait a second guys. You're having too much fun with this.

Remember, photons DO NOT EXPERIENCE TIME.

So, no matter how powerful a "photon angel" would be, this angel would exist in a static, uniform, motionless universe, with nothing to do!

I'd buy that comic book! But then I've been having some trouble sleeping.

So, SciFi fans, where do you store the genetic code in a disconnected photon?

--lemit

[maddog]

Originally Posted by lemit

So, SciFi fans, where do you store the genetic code in a disconnected photon?

Photons do not have a genetic code. They are a massless particle. I won't go so far as Pyrotex
to say whether a photon experiences anything, just no method to mark time. Thus, is said
"no experience of time". To say whether a photon experiences is to say that a photon is
conscious. I am not prepared to say one way or the other.


maddog

[Ben]

Originally Posted by Pyrotex

Remember, photons DO NOT EXPERIENCE TIME.

I am confused! Suppose I sit atop a photon as it leaves Sol, and time how long it takes me to get to Earth, what will my clock read on arrival? Zero? Infinity? I don't think so. I suspect I will have timed it at roughly 8 minutes.

Am I wrong?

[freeztar]

Originally Posted by Ben

I am confused! Suppose I sit atop a photon as it leaves Sol, and time how long it takes me to get to Earth, what will my clock read on arrival? Zero? Infinity? I don't think so. I suspect I will have timed it at roughly 8 minutes.

Am I wrong?

There's a thread here where we tackle this issue extensively:

http://hypography.com/forums/astrono...e-no-time.html

Basically, since photons travel at c, their time dilation is infinite. Because of infinite time dilation, they do not experience time.

[Jay-qu]

Sorry but this question is flawed.

Since inertia implies motion and all motion is relative, you only have inertia relative to something else. Therefore when you say 'negate' you would have to say 'equate' your inertia with some other object, this would make you stationary in that frame only.

Then making many such negations of inertia between reference frames would essentially be performing Lorentz boosts between reference frames, with infinite acceleration.