Question about approaching light speed of a rotating object

firefox5926
Messages
3
Reaction score
0
this is my first post so please be gentile with me

what would a wheel or a disc turning at a speed approaching that of light look like

my knowledge of the subject it quite small

but say the disc was rotating clock wise then looking at it from its right side would the top half look like it was blue shifted and would the bottom half look like it was red shifted
also would that mean that the blue shifted area of the disc be ageing more quickly and the red shifted area be ageing more slowly.

and looking at it straight on would the centre of the disc look different to the edges of it because it the centre is rotating slower than the edge.

any thought's would be appreciated

sorry about the lack of punctuation if this is in the wrong part of the forum i Apologize if some one could direct me to a more appropriate section it would be appreciated
 
Physics news on Phys.org
thanks for the link ghwell jr its sort of helps i understand that spinning a disc up to that sort of speed is near impossible but if it was. what would the observable effects be. but thanks all the same :)
 
I think the point is that you cannot use a theory that predicts one thing to ask what that theory would predict if it predicted something different. There are lots more threads that deal with this subject if you search on "disc" in this forum.
 
I wonder whether any galaxies (some of which are disc shaped) spin fast enough that stars on the rim are moving at relativistic speeds relative to the centre, or to stars antipodally opposite them.

Regarding your specific questions, I would expect the answers to be as follows:

If you are looking along the axis you will see no red or blue shift, because the direction of motion of the disc's rim is perpendicular to the line from you to it.

If you are looking at a nonzero angle to the axis, there will be some part of the rim that has a maximal component of velocity towards you and the antipodal part will have a maximal component of velocity away from you. You will see light traveling from those parts to you as blue and red shifted respectively, but the effect will probably be too small to measure for an artificial disc. For a galaxy, it may be measurable, depending on the answer to the first question above.

The parts moving towards you would be aging (in your observer's reference frame) fast and those moving away would be aging slowly. So in a complete circuit I would expect the amount of aging you perceive to be the same as in the comoving reference frame (maybe not, though, as it's an accelerated frame). Here I'm thinking of a pulsar on the rim of said galaxy. It will appear to be pulsing faster (than in its own co-moving reference frame) when it's moving towards you and more slowly when moving away.
 
Thread 'Can this experiment break Lorentz symmetry?'
1. The Big Idea: According to Einstein’s relativity, all motion is relative. You can’t tell if you’re moving at a constant velocity without looking outside. But what if there is a universal “rest frame” (like the old idea of the “ether”)? This experiment tries to find out by looking for tiny, directional differences in how objects move inside a sealed box. 2. How It Works: The Two-Stage Process Imagine a perfectly isolated spacecraft (our lab) moving through space at some unknown speed V...
Insights auto threads is broken atm, so I'm manually creating these for new Insight articles. The Relativator was sold by (as printed) Atomic Laboratories, Inc. 3086 Claremont Ave, Berkeley 5, California , which seems to be a division of Cenco Instruments (Central Scientific Company)... Source: https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/relativator-circular-slide-rule-simulated-with-desmos/ by @robphy
Does the speed of light change in a gravitational field depending on whether the direction of travel is parallel to the field, or perpendicular to the field? And is it the same in both directions at each orientation? This question could be answered experimentally to some degree of accuracy. Experiment design: Place two identical clocks A and B on the circumference of a wheel at opposite ends of the diameter of length L. The wheel is positioned upright, i.e., perpendicular to the ground...

Similar threads

Back
Top