sagexp
Member
+16|6867
Heres two questions that should (hopefully) get an interesting discussion going

Its said that nothing with mass can travel the speed of light, now if light can get sucked into a blackhole then it must have mass right ? but how can it travel and the speed of light ?

If the sun dissappeared suddenly, what would happen first, would it go dark or would the earth spin out of orbit ?






no i dont have the answers and apparently most scientists dont either, its all conjecture,,apparently
DonFck
Hibernator
+3,227|6944|Finland

The earth would probably spin out of orbit first, followed 8 minutes later by total darkness, IMO

The other question.. let me ponder for some time..

Last edited by DonFck (2006-07-17 04:44:44)

I need around tree fiddy.
Nessie09
I "fix" things
+107|6983|The Netherlands
I don't know about the first one, thats very interesting though

And I think the earth would spin out of orbit first, because the light of the sun takes 8 minutes to get here, so we still have light for 8 minutes if it disappears.
Sydney
2λчиэλ
+783|7156|Reykjavík, Iceland.
1. That probably means that things with mass can travel at light speed, giving interesting opportunities.

2. I dunno, lets try!
imortal
Member
+240|6978|Austin, TX

sagexp wrote:

Heres two questions that should (hopefully) get an interesting discussion going

Its said that nothing with mass can travel the speed of light, now if light can get sucked into a blackhole then it must have mass right ? but how can it travel and the speed of light ?

If the sun dissappeared suddenly, what would happen first, would it go dark or would the earth spin out of orbit ?
From what I understand of Einstein, the light/photon phenomenon works because photongs cannot travel at anything OTHER than the speed of light.  Yes, you can bend the path of the light with extreme gravity, but you cannot slow it down.  Red shift/ blue shifting of the doppler effect is the stretching of the wavelength of light, but not the slowing of any photon.   Time to get really scary. That light slowing effect near the event horizon of a black hole is not the slowing of light, but a slowing of time.

Einstein also postulates that the gravitational shift would propogate at the speed of light, so if the sun dissapeared, the light would dissapear and the earth would "veer off" at the same time.

Now I just wish there were a way to test the theories... you know, without blowing up the sun?  as if we could.
DoctorFruitloop
Level 13 Wrongdoer
+515|6859|Doncaster, UK
I thought photons travelled at the speed of light because are massless, just energy? They carry a charge and it is the charge that is affected by the immense gravitational field of a black hole as it causes a massive distortion in space-time. Think of it like a heavy ball on a trampoline, so heavy that it pulls the trampoline don to infinity. Any light travelling in the vicinity of the distortion, within a certain distance (the schwarzchild radius, I think it's called and apologies for spelling) is follows it's straight line path in space-time, but the straight line path is distorted into the black hole.

There's another factor called the Chandreskar Limit (again apologies for spelling) but I haven't got my reference books at hand and it's been a long time since I covered this stuff.
tehmoogles
Don't touch the pom-pom!
+7|7023
Within a few seconds the Earth would reach Absolute Zero and we would all die. 8 minutes later all would be dark.
Dieselboy
Flicker of beans since 1986
+87|6863|Reading, Basingrad
Light has no mass - it's a phototonic particle and photons are massless.....Light does have momentum and energy which can be altered and attracted by large gravitational forces like a black hole.

Earth would spin out of orbit first - the moment the sun dissappeared there wouldn't be an "Orbit" anymore so technically we would be out of orbit

Last edited by Dieselboy (2006-07-17 04:44:11)

duk0r
Administrator
+306|6980|Austin, TX

A single photon has zero mass but several photons may collectively have mass. Thus, black holes sucking up allot of light at once.
https://bf3s.com/sigs/a3a6d1102d14bf2f7e266fba7f728dc2cc38b316.png
THA
im a fucking .....well not now
+609|7083|AUS, Canberra
ok here it is.

you cannot go faster than light as if you do time would stop and everything would shrink to nothing

and its impossibly to stop time.

think of a photon bouncing between two mirrors in a super space craft craft going around the earth. and it takes a second for it to get from one mirror to the other. and its going straight up and down. no as you start to move its going to start traveling on a path that is wavy then as you go faster its going to get more and more stretched out until you reach the speed of light the line it draws will be dead flat.

ill draw some pics and post them.

if you are traveling round the earth close to the speed of light, ten seconds for you might have passed but when you get back to earth ten years might have gone bye
Bubbalo
The Lizzard
+541|6874
Also, scientists don't yet fully understand right.  So far as they can tell, it has no mass, yet bends w/ gravity.  It also behaves like a particle and like a wave.
Dieselboy
Flicker of beans since 1986
+87|6863|Reading, Basingrad

duk0r wrote:

A single photon has zero mass but several photons may collectively have mass. Thus, black holes sucking up allot of light at once.
Zero plus zero still equals zero mate!!
DoctorFruitloop
Level 13 Wrongdoer
+515|6859|Doncaster, UK

Bubbalo wrote:

Also, scientists don't yet fully understand right.  So far as they can tell, it has no mass, yet bends w/ gravity.  It also behaves like a particle and like a wave.
That's wave-particle duality, a very strange phenomenon in which light is a discrete particle and yet travels in waves.

For example, shine light through a difraction grating, ie particles passing through two slits and you get an interference pattern of light and dark bands where the wavelenghts either add together and give a bright spot, or cancel each other and give a dark spot.

Now, fire a single particle and you get the same interference pattern which could only happen if the particle had passed through both slits at once.

Ain't physics great
Sydney
2λчиэλ
+783|7156|Reykjavík, Iceland.
Who needs lightspeed anyway?
Infinite Improbability Drive ftw!
DoctorFruitloop
Level 13 Wrongdoer
+515|6859|Doncaster, UK
Yeah, but who wants to finish a journey thinking you're a sofa?
Sydney
2λчиэλ
+783|7156|Reykjavík, Iceland.

DoctorFruitloop wrote:

Yeah, but who wants to finish a journey thinking you're a sofa?
If it would take me billions of lightyears in a few seconds, I would.
max
Vela Incident
+1,652|6880|NYC / Hamburg

sagexp wrote:

Heres two questions that should (hopefully) get an interesting discussion going

Its said that nothing with mass can travel the speed of light, now if light can get sucked into a blackhole then it must have mass right ? but how can it travel and the speed of light ?
thats why we call it a paradox. The problem with light is that it has the properties of something that has mass (like it can be influenced by gravity) and it has wave characteristica. also what the poster above said about it always going the speed of light is not true. in mediums it travels slower (in air its nearly the same but in glass i think it goes only goes c/1000 (c=speed of light))

If the sun dissappeared suddenly, what would happen first, would it go dark or would the earth spin out of orbit ?
thats simple to answer: gravity "moves" at an infinite speed. ie. as soon as mass is created (or take away) its gravitational pull is instantaniously in the whole universe. So if the su were to disappear we would first loose our orbit (we would just go straight) and 8 minutes loate the light would be gone.

if you are interested in these kinds of questions i suggest you read "the universe in a nutshell" by steven hawking. it sort of understandibly explains most of this matter (but i think that some thoughts are outdated by now).

and yes: i did take physics higher level when i was still in school
once upon a midnight dreary, while i pron surfed, weak and weary, over many a strange and spurious site of ' hot  xxx galore'. While i clicked my fav'rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning, and my heart was filled with mourning, mourning for my dear amour, " 'Tis not possible!", i muttered, " give me back my free hardcore!"..... quoth the server, 404.
DoctorFruitloop
Level 13 Wrongdoer
+515|6859|Doncaster, UK

max wrote:

thats why we call it a paradox. The problem with light is that it has the properties of something that has mass (like it can be influenced by gravity) and it has wave characteristica. also what the poster above said about it always going the speed of light is not true. in mediums it travels slower (in air its nearly the same but in glass i think it goes only goes c/1000 (c=speed of light))
Actually 'c' is stated as the speed of light in a vacuum. By definition light is always travelling at the speed of light, but the speed of light is dependant on the medium it is travelling through. For the purpose of the discussion about black holes, 'c' is relevant and a constant.
Burning_Monkey
Moving Target
+108|7150
Scientists have the answers, you just don't look in the right spots.

sagexp wrote:

Its said that nothing with mass can travel the speed of light, now if light can get sucked into a black hole then it must have mass right ? but how can it travel at the speed of light ?
The particles that make up light do have mass, when it is convenient for them to have mass.  That is the easy version of the wave-particle duality theorem.  For light to be affected by gravity it needs to have mass, and by the power of wave-particle duality, it does have mass.  The said mass is then converted into energy and ejected out of the black hole as x-ray radiation (with no mass, since that is what I want ) so that the black hole's mass never changes and thus never stops being a black hole.

sagexp wrote:

If the sun disappeared suddenly, what would happen first, would it go dark or would the earth spin out of orbit ?
Both would happen at the same time.  We would continue in pretty much a 'straight line' from the moment that the sun disappeared and as that happened he would go dark too.  The two events are tied together by gravity and the speed of light.
.:XDR:.PureFodder
Member
+105|7142
If the sun disappeared then absolutely nothing would happened for 8 minutes as it takes 8 minutes for both light and gravitational forces to travel to Earth. After those 8 minutes it would suddenly look a lot like a night. There would be no sunlight to illuminate the moon or other planets, so you wouldn't be able to see them. It would also start to get cold. If the temperature drops around 10-20 degrees at night, depending on how cloudy it is, I guess the temperature will be dropping around the same rate every 8 hours, so within a day it will be well below freezing and within a couple of days we'll all be dead.
The instant the gravitational force from the Sun has gone the solar system as we know it will cease to be. All the planets will just travel in a straight line in the direction they were going at the time the gravity stopped never to return. The moon will keep orbiting in the same way as it is trapped in the Earths gravitational pull.

As far as photons getting sucked into black holes goes. As I understand it photons don't have mass, but they do have momentum (the mass component calculated from E=m*c*c). So if they don't have mass why do they get attracted to heavy bodies? All mass slightly alters the shape of space-time around it. Heavy object alter it a lot more and the black holes you are refering to are unfeasable massive. Light when moving always follows a straight path through space-time, but if this space-time is curved through the presence of a massive object then from our perspective (we cannot see space-time) the light appears to bend its trajectory towards the heavy object.

Oh and the speed of light is fixed for a given medium. Light travels at different speeds through a vacuum, through air, through water etc. The slowest speed of light measured with light passing through a supercooled Bose-Einstein condensate of Sodium atoms was a whopping 38 miles an hour.
Dieselboy
Flicker of beans since 1986
+87|6863|Reading, Basingrad
Haven't done Quantum mechanics since Uni.....don't miss it one bit!!
Ottomania
Troll has returned.
+62|6834|Istanbul-Turkey
light has mass, but I dont have enough technical english to explain it
MaximaRX
Member
+8|6848|Charlotte

.:XDR:.PureFodder wrote:

Oh and the speed of light is fixed for a given medium. Light travels at different speeds through a vacuum, through air, through water etc. The slowest speed of light measured with light passing through a supercooled Bose-Einstein condensate of Sodium atoms was a whopping 38 miles an hour.
Not to add to the complexity of the discussion......but there is a British physicist who has postulated that doing the course of the history of the universe, since the Big Bang, the speed of light may have (may still) varied. I am reading his book now. Actually Einstein himself proposed VSL (varying speed of light) right after his special theory of relativity, but was actually told it was basphemy and threw out his papers.

So, in the end, it is all more complicated than we know. But yes, everything said above is correct. Even our Sun is able to bend light, if only slightly. Einstein found it to be around 0.0084 degrees (may be slightly off). If we could actually see stars during the day, we would be able to see some of them which are directly behind the sun.

Oh, one more thing, I have wondered since they slowed light to 38 mph, if you could actually see the photons.....seems reasonable is suppose. Course they are microscopic I would guess.


Just my addition to the discussion.

Max

Last edited by MaximaRX (2006-07-17 05:47:06)

Cbass
Kick His Ass!
+371|7007|Howell, Mi USA
#1 because black holes R Teh Pwnz0r3 thats the best i can figure

#2 pretty sure earth would spin out of orbit and the moon would crash into tEh earth and it would be total maddness and teh earth would split in half and form 2 earths and get whiped out by teh blackhole the sun would leave behind.         it could happen
https://bf3s.com/sigs/bb53a522780eff5b30ba3252d44932cc2f5b8c4f.png
Vub
The Power of Two
+188|6807|Sydney, Australia
1. Scientists have no idea whether light behaves as a particle or as a wave. Obviously if it's a wave, it would have no mass, but if it was a particle, it would have mass. Because light both behaves as a particle and wave, people are getting pretty confused. The reason why things can travel at the speed of light if it has mass is because with mass expansion, the mass would equal infinite at speed of light, therefore infinite energy is needed to accelerate it to that speed. We know from experimentation that light has momentum, and since momentum = velocity times mass, light must also have mass, but in trying to find that mass, we annihilate the light particle/wave we're trying to measure and so we can't obtain numerical data.

2. By Einstein's law of relativity and the idea of space-time continuum, when the sun disappears we'll remain in orbit for about 8 minutes or so because time travels at the speed of light. Therefore at the end of 8 minutes there'll be no more light, and we'll continue in a straight line out into space.

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