- #1
Swiss Army
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The first of my two questions concerns the aspect of SR that deals with the mass of an object increasing as is moves faster and faster (or more appropriately, as the energy gets larger and larger). I'm a novice when it comes to higher level physics, and everything I know comes from reading books on it because I'm only in classical physics classes at the moment, so if I'm overlooking some critical aspect of the theory, please forgive me.
As the energy of a moving object increases due to velocity, according to SR, it's mass would increase with it's velocity as well. This was supposedly the factor that proved that according to SR, faster than light travel is impossible because at the speed of light, the relativistic mass of the moving object would be infinite, thereby making it's energy content infinite as well. But what I don't understand is that, relativistic mass increase, as I understand it, is something that a stationary observer would witness, not the object in motion itself. Much like time dilation is not felt by the object in motion, but witnessed by the stationary or uniformly moving onlooker. So how would this mass increase influence how much energy it takes to move the object in motion when the increase in mass is not felt by the object in motion, just witnessed by someone in a stationary reference frame? It's sort of like saying that, because I'm stationary and I observe your time to be stopped due to your traveling at the speed of light, you aren't able to set the alarm clock on your spaceship because I don't view you to be moving. I hope I got my question across effectively.
As the energy of a moving object increases due to velocity, according to SR, it's mass would increase with it's velocity as well. This was supposedly the factor that proved that according to SR, faster than light travel is impossible because at the speed of light, the relativistic mass of the moving object would be infinite, thereby making it's energy content infinite as well. But what I don't understand is that, relativistic mass increase, as I understand it, is something that a stationary observer would witness, not the object in motion itself. Much like time dilation is not felt by the object in motion, but witnessed by the stationary or uniformly moving onlooker. So how would this mass increase influence how much energy it takes to move the object in motion when the increase in mass is not felt by the object in motion, just witnessed by someone in a stationary reference frame? It's sort of like saying that, because I'm stationary and I observe your time to be stopped due to your traveling at the speed of light, you aren't able to set the alarm clock on your spaceship because I don't view you to be moving. I hope I got my question across effectively.