- #1
ejlyles
- 1
- 0
Two/Three-parter:
First, a very basic physics question - if you could just step onto a speeding train (pretending that the force of such an act wouldn't break every bone in your body), are you accelerating to the speed of the train, or did your speed just suddenly increase?
The underlying question - If you have a nearby object going the speed of light, is it possible, from the physics perspective, to hitch a ride?
The facets to that are that the object either has to have no mass, which would get totally screwed up by having a hitchhiker for baggage, or the object already has infinite mass ( I don't really know what the implications are for being in the same universe as an object with infinite mass, so let me know also if that's as suicidal as the stepping on a train scenario) in which case jumping on won't be affecting the mass at all.
First, a very basic physics question - if you could just step onto a speeding train (pretending that the force of such an act wouldn't break every bone in your body), are you accelerating to the speed of the train, or did your speed just suddenly increase?
The underlying question - If you have a nearby object going the speed of light, is it possible, from the physics perspective, to hitch a ride?
The facets to that are that the object either has to have no mass, which would get totally screwed up by having a hitchhiker for baggage, or the object already has infinite mass ( I don't really know what the implications are for being in the same universe as an object with infinite mass, so let me know also if that's as suicidal as the stepping on a train scenario) in which case jumping on won't be affecting the mass at all.