- #1
Amygdala
- 4
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Hey all,
I've been reading my fair share on physics and I would like to find a solution to a question that has been eating away at me. Look at the following extract from a book I read a while ago.
"If we managed to travel at 99.99999999 percent of light speed, then we could travel out of the Milky Way and all the way to the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, almost 3 million light-years away, in a mere fifty years."
The above is based on a hypothetical situation that we could build a spaceship to reach such speeds.
Is the the above situation true? I'm assuming it's to do with space-time warping and objects/spaces becoming smaller at fast speeds.
Finally, a thought experiment:
If you got a stopwatch [on the spaceship] and timed the time it took to get to Andromeda. It would read 50 years.
If you then got a hypothetical stopwatch to attach it to a photon and timed the same route to Andromeda it would equally read 3 million light years. - It appears as if the spaceship traveled faster than the photon.
^Could you explain where I have gone wrong in that thought experiment as clearly relatively cannot be violated.
Sorry for the long post, I'm excited to of found a forum to discuss such ideas.
I've been reading my fair share on physics and I would like to find a solution to a question that has been eating away at me. Look at the following extract from a book I read a while ago.
"If we managed to travel at 99.99999999 percent of light speed, then we could travel out of the Milky Way and all the way to the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, almost 3 million light-years away, in a mere fifty years."
The above is based on a hypothetical situation that we could build a spaceship to reach such speeds.
Is the the above situation true? I'm assuming it's to do with space-time warping and objects/spaces becoming smaller at fast speeds.
Finally, a thought experiment:
If you got a stopwatch [on the spaceship] and timed the time it took to get to Andromeda. It would read 50 years.
If you then got a hypothetical stopwatch to attach it to a photon and timed the same route to Andromeda it would equally read 3 million light years. - It appears as if the spaceship traveled faster than the photon.
^Could you explain where I have gone wrong in that thought experiment as clearly relatively cannot be violated.
Sorry for the long post, I'm excited to of found a forum to discuss such ideas.