Posted by Lokileby at fibre242.63.nas.net on March 11, 2004 at 13:32:20:
In Reply to: Special relativity theory question posted by AshFan on March 11, 2004 at 13:10:07:
: If you were riding in a spaceship going 1mph LESS that the speed of light, and you walk forward on said ship at 3mph, what would happen to you? Would you end up in an infinite loop because by surpassing the speed of light you would go back in time? Would you just keep walking till you hit a wall?
~~ My assumption is that, yes, you would be going faster than the speed of light.
: Same situation (ship going 1mph less that the speed of light) but this time, the ship fires projectiles from the forward guns.. what happens to the projectiles? Do they go back in time (back into the "clip") do they just achieve infinite mass and do some serious damage?
~~ The problem with this is that the firing mechanisms would have to be able to shoot the objects at a speed faster than the speed of light for the projectiles to even leave the ship. So you would have to have a ship that was going just under the speed of light to shoot projectiles that would be able to go the speed of light (whether or not the ship is actually travelling at 1mph shy of the speed of light)
~~ This is all assuming, of course that anything besides light can reach the speed of light. I always assumed that the speed of light was more of an asymptote (been a while, so I don't know if that is correct spelling). By that (for non-math people) it is a point that you can continue to get closer and closer to but never actually reach.