possibly a stupid question.

[cameron marical]

ok, this may sound like a stupid question, but i dont know. say you efficently stopped time by going at the speed of light. well, would we still age? my first guess is no, no time, of course no age. but im not sure when i really think about it. having no time on a referance frame sounds like that referance frame shouldnt age, but would it be affected by things like other timeless referance frames? also, that brings up the question, what would it be like with no time? just like now?

[iNow]

Relative to outside observers (people watching you), you would not age. However, within your own frame of reference, you would age... all would seem normal.

 

Then again, really anything could happen since you'd have to suspend the laws of physics to get any object with mass to go that fast. Once you suspend the laws of physics, you're talking about fiction so it can be anything you want.

[cameron marical]

hmm. well that sucks.

[Mr Skeptic]

You can get as close as you like to the speed of light, and time in your frame of reference will come to as close as you like to a standstill. You won't notice any different though. And of course the mechanism to get near the speed of light would be insanely large and expensive.

[cameron marical]

then whats with the twins paradox? i thought that the guy is .576 or whatever seconds younger than his twin? doesnt that mean that traveling faster than normal does have an aging effect on seperate moving referance frames? at least thats the impression i got from it.

[NowThatWeKnow]

There is a difference in clocks running at different speeds and stopping the clock. The twin story I read said the difference in age was years, not seconds.

http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/einsteinlight/jw/module4_twin_paradox.htm

[Prabbit22m]

As an object (of mass) approaches the speed of light, it's mass approaches infinity. Think about that. How to propell an infanantly massive object at the speed of light. Wow, talk about power to weight ratio!

 

I agree it's a realitivity question. Time is the same to each person in their own element. The "traveling" person will say the "stationary" person aged faster than normal and the "stationary" person will say the "traveling" person aged slower than normal? Who is right? They both are.

 

You can't say that traveling at the speed of light will make time stop for that person without considering that it will infinatively speed up the "stationary" people's time.

[NowThatWeKnow]

...Time is the same to each person in their own element. The "traveling" person will say the "stationary" person aged faster than normal and the "stationary" person will say the "traveling" person aged slower than normal? Who is right? They both are...

 

But one twin is older then the other when they reunite.

[coke]

This reminds me of another question... say you're going at the speed of light- how long does it take to get to the sun? 8 minutes? So you would age 8 minutes? Or would it take 0 minutes?

 

But if it would take 8 minutes, why is light necesarily the fastest thing in the universe? What if something could do it in 7 minutes?

[NowThatWeKnow]

This reminds me of another question... say you're going at the speed of light- how long does it take to get to the sun? 8 minutes? So you would age 8 minutes? Or would it take 0 minutes?

 

But if it would take 8 minutes, why is light necesarily the fastest thing in the universe? What if something could do it in 7 minutes?

 

You can't go the speed of light but at relativistic speeds the distance from the Earth to the Sun would be covered in seconds, not minutes. You would also age only seconds. This would be because of time dilatation and length contraction.