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Physics Archive
Index Key: PHY083
Author: David Ratner
Subject: Light and relativity questions
Text: This question has to do with the speed of light. If you are
traveling at the speed of light and then turn on a light will you see that
light?
Response #: 1 of 1
Author: A. Smith
Text: Einstein's special relativity asserts that the laws of physics do
not change no matter how fast you are going relative to somebody else - you
will see the same things in objects you manipulate at your speed as the other
person sees at their speed. So, turning on a light in a speeding spaceship
looks just like turning on a light in your living room. Actually, no object
with non zero rest mass can travel at exactly the speed of light - only the
special massless particles can do it, such as the photon, the particle of
light itself. So your experiment is not actually possible.
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