If you're traveling at the speed of light and you turn your headlights on, what happens?

naughty_b0yee

If you turn your headlights on at the speed of light the light emitted from your headlights will be going twice the speed of light. When you're going the speed of sound in a jet the guy sitting in the back can still talk to the guy sitting in front, his voice doesnt stop just because the jet is going mach 1.

geoff w

you disappear up your exhaust pipe,,,a place all idiotic road users should go to.

boglin

Some silly old bugger in a brown metro still wont see you! If it's any help if you put instant coffee in a microwave it travels forward in time!

Pete T

you would be traveling at the speed of dark if you needed your lights.

Vince M

Those that try to compare the behavior of objects traveling at the speed of sound and those moving at the speed of light have got it dead wrong.

These two principles operate under different laws of physics.

To keep in simple, just take it as a given that the speed of light is the ABSOLUTE speed limit in the entire universe. Essentially, it takes an infinite amount of energy to accellerate a solid object of ANY size to the speed of light.

There is no such limit on the speed of objects and there relation to the speed of sound.

wvparanormal

The same thing happens as would happen if you turned your headlights sitting still. Electric current would go from the switch to the element in the bulb.

Considering the fact that your car would be ripped apart and your headlights would be long gone, I suppose the current would only go to the plug where the bulb used to be.

Courage

The light would turn on, but since you would be traveling at the same rate of the light, you wouldn't see it.

Lover not a Fighter

The light would build up on one side of the bulb and just like if you were to travel at the speed of sound (the sound shock wave).

>> If you're traveling at the speed of light and you turn your headlights on

That is why you cannot travel at the speed of light, because time will not flow and you cannot turn on a light (or doing anything in time).

good luck...

Killik

If your traveling at the speed of light, everything around you will freeze. Thats what my physics teacher told me

Handyman

I'm agree with lightflo, that the light would come on ,but you would not be able to see them.

golfer

Not much, since you will obviously have to be traveling in outer space to theoretically achieve the speed. Every time I do it, it STILL takes the silly beam a light year to travel a light year. They do, however, appear to instantaneously shine on my flight lead (about 30 meters in front of me).

bluff mike

You see only the glow around the filament. Of course, if you're also at absolute zero you have that whole time thing to deal with, as well.

Ahdunno

Hmmm

you cannot travel that fast, but, for the moment, I will ingulge you. Look at it logically.

your propulsion is likely to be light, so it would be like a small brake.

Hruth

I'm not going to go into the intricacies involved in near-light speed travel (currently light speed travel is impossible, even theoretically!), bu twhat I will say is that when the lights are switched on, light will radiate from them at the speed of light. So if the headlights are already travelling at the speed of light, the light emissions from them will be travelling at twice the speed of light.

When a fighter plane is streaking through the air at Mach 2.2, and fires its cannon, the bullets do not come out the back of the gun, do they? No, they travel away from the gun at their regular velocity. I can't remember exactly which aircraft it was, but I read about a large bomber equipped with a rear-facing gun used for defense that flew quickly enough that the standard sub-sonic ammunition from it's gun flew backwards, relative to the ground. That is, the gun fired the bullets backwards away from the plane slower than the plane was flying forwards.

dise

obviously the light wont turn on... but this is impossible and irrelevant unless you are planning on building a time machine?

UCANTCME

Nothing really because the star ship enterprise does it all the time.

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