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Light Questions
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Question:
The physics students at Pocatello High school have five
questions about light:
1. If light is a particle, how can it travel at the speed
of light without becoming an infinite mass?
2. If light is a particle, when it leaves a flashlight why
does not it have enough momentum to push the flashlight backwards?
3. Relativity states that o the observer, the mover's time always
goes slower. Then how can one person's clock be ahead of
the other's, considering either one would be the mover or observer?
4. If you could stand in a black hole and shine a light straight
up, would it escape, turn around and come straight back down
or orbit to the right or left?
5. If you could travel at speeds greater than the speed of light, would
we travel back in time?
Replies:
Addressing your questions 1 & 2:
1) photons have zero rest mass so they can travel at the speed of
light without acquiring infinite mass
2) photons DO carry momentum, so, indeed, they DO impart a backwards
momentum to the flashlight... it is just extremely small!
John Hawley
Questions 3&4:
3) That is one of the fundamental paradoxes of relativity - your
statement is correct in a sense - the problem is one embedded
in your statement, that you are assuming that the mover and
observer agree on which two points in time (at their particular
moving locations) are simultaneous. Two points in time that
the observer claims to be simultaneous, the mover would
claim to occur at different times (unless the "points" were
associated with exactly the same location in space). That is
why space and time in relativity are melded into "space-time".
Check out some library books on relativity!
4) As long as you pointed straight up, I believe the light would
go up (spreading out under the influence of the strong gravity
there) turn around and come back. I could be wrong though...
The inside of a black hole is a rather speculative place to be...
5) In a sense yes - the actual act of travelling faster than
light does not make you go back in time, you are just going
forward in space very fast. But if it was possible to travel
faster than light, then one could do it in a "frame of reference"
moving with respect to the earth, and done properly that
could mean going backwards in time relative to earth's time.
Faster than light and backwards in time travel are essentially
equivalent in special relativity.
Arthur Smith
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Update: June 2012
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