- #1
1MileCrash
- 1,342
- 41
"No speedometer"
My friend is an electrical engineering major and he's probably my only closest friend whom with I can talk physics and math with for fun.
We got on the subject of that new planet that was discovered, 27 light years away, whatever. Well, light speed travel is of course impossible for any craft made of mass/humans, but his reasoning was different.
"At those speeds mass approaches infinity, we'd be crushed from the gravitational forces between us and whatever craft we were in."
But aside from the truth in the mass increases, it's wrong. I told him that going at a constant speed it is impossible to know if you're moving or what speed your moving at because it can be arbitrarily defined in relation to anything else; IE if there are no windows and you are moving constantly it's the same as being "motionless." If we actually felt our mass increasing through gravitational forces in the craft we would know we are moving, which relativity says is impossible to know.
The best answer I could give him was that anyone in the craft does not experience the mass increase and that the mass increase is only relative to another inertial reference frame.
But that leaves a lot to be desired even for me..
So, anyone got a better answer? Or is it just that simple?
My friend is an electrical engineering major and he's probably my only closest friend whom with I can talk physics and math with for fun.
We got on the subject of that new planet that was discovered, 27 light years away, whatever. Well, light speed travel is of course impossible for any craft made of mass/humans, but his reasoning was different.
"At those speeds mass approaches infinity, we'd be crushed from the gravitational forces between us and whatever craft we were in."
But aside from the truth in the mass increases, it's wrong. I told him that going at a constant speed it is impossible to know if you're moving or what speed your moving at because it can be arbitrarily defined in relation to anything else; IE if there are no windows and you are moving constantly it's the same as being "motionless." If we actually felt our mass increasing through gravitational forces in the craft we would know we are moving, which relativity says is impossible to know.
The best answer I could give him was that anyone in the craft does not experience the mass increase and that the mass increase is only relative to another inertial reference frame.
But that leaves a lot to be desired even for me..
So, anyone got a better answer? Or is it just that simple?