Getting light speed without accelerating...

[Kojiami]

Yes, yes, we know, to accelerate to light speed you need infinite energy. We figured that much. But what if you actually didn't accelerate? Now most theories involve things like hyperspace, timespace tears, etc.

 

My idea is to use rotation. Now, if you would normally have a super-light weight stick of say, 5,000,000,000 miles, you could rotate it very fast with relative ease. Let's say the "Stick" is 1 KG heavy for speculation. However.. The energy needed to accelerate at light speed would keep increasing, making it's relative mass higher and higher. Even if the end tip would be spinning at 290,000 KM/second, it would be around 1,3 KG. But the closer you approached C, it would be heavier.. At a speed of 299,999.999.999 it would already be over 6000 megatons... This is because the rotation needs to accelerate.

 

But.. what if you used an extendable chain, and extended it while already having the rotation present? This way, no energy would be needed for the acceleration, only for maintaining the rotation. For example, let's say we have a 0,1 LY long chain of super-light material. Extend this chain 10 meters, and get it to a speed that will equal C2 if at chain length of 0,1 LY. Then, just extend it. The energy needed for maintaining the rotation will be pretty large, but acceleration energy will remain null because the rotation speed remains equal.

 

 

Now, please tell me why this couldn't work? I'm sure it couldn't or someone would already have thought of it -.-.

[insane_alien]

because it still needs to accelerate. because if you let it out then the rotation is going to slow due to conservation of angular momentum, a lot of things cause that to fail.

[Kojiami]

What if you extended it at an extremely slow rate, where you only added say, atom by atom? It would take an incredibly long time (billions of years), but nothing wrong with theory...

[insane_alien]

but it would still be accelerating. anything travelling in a circle is under going an acceleration.

[swansont]

At some point the material will simply not hold together. One consequence of SR is that there cannot be any infinitely rigid materials. Before the tip of whatever you've extended can reach c, it would bend or some part would break off and proceed in a straight line at v < c.

[Kojiami]

What if you created ONE gargantuan atom, with such ammounts of electrons spinning you can actually use this one atom material?

[insane_alien]

nope. atoms, in the sense that they have an electron cloud that doesn't plummet into the nucleus. have a size limit. i can't remember what it is but its not really that much bigger than the heaviest atoms we've made so far. after that your left with a ball of neutrons.

 

anyway, massive atoms don't last long. they tend to be extremely short lived with half lifes in the milliseconds.

[Klaynos]

you could argue that a neutron star is just a big atom.

 

But these things are not ridged there is still time dependent interactions between nuclei and the electrons.

[insane_alien]

yeah but he specifically mentioned an electron cloud which is why i discounted neutron stars. not that they are anywhere near rigid.