Moving with the speed of light

Today is already 105 years since Einstein first introduced the Theory of Special Relativity that explains what happened to an object at the speed of light.

Actually there are many who have studied related questions. But we just see what happens when we make an object moving near the speed of light. There are three important things:

1. Contraction. This will happen to everyone. If we are moving near the speed of light, then someone who sees us, will see us shrink. But from our side, everything that we see will appear to move backwards we approach the speed of light, and also like having a smaller dimension.

2. The slowing down time. This phenomenon is called dilation (dilation), and again, this happens to everyone. This means that if we are moving near the speed of light, everyone who sees us will see that the time will run slower for us: we watch runs slower, slowing our age, our heart rate slows, and so on. But we also see the same thing, the age of the men slowed, and so on.

But if we go close to the speed of light and then we come back to earth at the speed of the earth, we will find the fact that during our trip, although we run a normal life as usual, which occurred on Earth over a long time has passed.


Let's see how this happens. See this video:



3. More energy is required to increase speed. Some of you who know a little physics know that the magnitude of the energy of a particle is E = mc2. Some of you also know that Kinetic energy = 1 / 2 mv2. But when you move near the speed of light, it takes longer and takes more energy to move faster. In the chart below, the purple line is the old formula for kinetic energy, but the red line represents the actual energy (relativistic). Note that you will never really be able to reach the speed of light, but that the energy approaches infinity (infinity).

So that's what happens when an ordinary object approaching the speed of light: seen to contract, time slowed, and the need for greater energy to increase speed. Or for example, something that has no mass (like photons, or mengkin gravity), must travel at the speed of light.

But let's say you have a spaceship, and somehow decided to travel at the speed of light. What happened?

If you use all the energy in the universe for your spaceship, you may be approaching the speed of light. How close?

The speed of light exactly 299,792,458 meters / second. And you can reach between approximately 1 x 10-30 meters / second of that figure - already really good. Put you reach that speed, what will happen?

First, the entire universe will contract transformed into just a few billion kilometers - less than one light year!

Second, time will slow down so violently, until the age you are just a few seconds while the universe in fact has increased by billions of years old!

Galaxy will fuse, the stars will be born and explode in a trice.
And finally, you probably will be the first to see the fate of the universe: if the universe had a final, you can slow down time so great for yourself, so maybe you do not just see it, you may do so only in a matter of seconds.

So the problem is not just how to reach the speed of light, but there are other reasons why we do not try mending to do it.