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Question:
I am a science teacher, and throughout my training, never found out what would happen if you turned on your headlights while traveling at the speed of light. In a really fast car of course. david


Replies:
You CANNOT travel at the speed of light. Only massless particles can do so.

jasjeet s bagla

More importantly, to emit light you need to create electric and magnetic fields, and this requires charged particles. But no charged particle of zero mass exists. So charged particles, and hence creation of light, can only happen at speeds that are less than the speed of light. And what happens is completely determined by the relativity principle - in your frame of reference it looks just like normal light, but in a frame travelling close to the speed of light relative to you the light is "blue-shifted" or shifted to higher energy (such as X rays etc).

Arthur Smith


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