Traversing the solar system at the speed of light

C

combatentropy

Veteran
Eh, I don't belong to any physics forums, but I wanted to share this with somebody.

This video depicts what it would look like if you traveled at light speed (186,000 miles per second). Surprisingly, it looks a lot slower than I would have thought. It takes over 8 minutes to go from the Sun to the Earth -- which I think I knew, but still it surprises me to watch it.

The video ends after 45 minutes, but you've only got past Jupiter. Maybe at the beginning the creators thought about going all the way to Pluto. But when you realize that it would take another 35 minutes just to get to Saturn, and the rest of the planets are even farther apart, this already-long video just got intolerable, maybe even for physics geeks.

Still, I thought it turns around a question. Instead of, "Why is light so fast," the question becomes, "Why is light so slow?"

 
combatentropy said:
This video depicts what it would look like if you traveled at light speed (186,000 miles per second). Surprisingly, it looks a lot slower than I would have thought. It takes over 8 minutes to go from the Sun to the Earth -- which I think I knew, but still it surprises me to watch it.
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Assuming it would be possible for a traveler to travel near light speed from the Sun to the Earth it would be practically instant for the traveler due to time dilation.
 
Yes, the passage of time is location dependent. Time for the person travelling is different than for an observer outside. That is true regardless of speed - even just taking an ordinary airplane will affect time for the passanger vs observer.
 
Space, time, light, and the solar system always trips me out.

Just the notion that light has a speed is interesting, because everything we see is light and/or light reflection. That we are seeing "old" light at any given time. I like your reverse on the question, "why is light so slow". Isn't it interesting how perspective changes everything?

How about not just with speed, but with size. We are so microscopically small in the grand mist of the solar system. The speed of light takes that long to traverse our known planets, forget about our galaxy!

Fractal images have always interested me, just the notion of a repeating pattern that maintains the more and more one zooms out. While the universe doesn't hold to that with mathematical perfection, it's shocking how similarly it holds up in the more abstract sense.

The sun is the nucleus, the planets the electrons, orbiting in pattern. Even the sun resembles a cell. Sperm cells crashing into an embryo; comets into the earth... the resemblance is striking.

So yeah, why is light so fast? Why is light so slow? Why is the earth so big? Why is our solar system so small?

What is perspective, and why does it have such a power to completely flip and reframe everything - even the very nature of perspective itself?

Thanks for sharing!
 
Like watching paint dry. Maybe not quite as exciting. But of course, that's just my perspective.
 
here is what i don't understand. if you get heavier the closer you get to light speed, why has no one developed a weight loss program that involves moving really slow?
 
That is a keen observation. That leads me to wonder if a large portion of the United States population is traveling faster than me.
 
ugafan said:
here is what i don't understand. if you get heavier the closer you get to light speed, why has no one developed a weight loss program that involves moving really slow?
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You actually don't, your mass remains the same, however your momentum increases.
 
But what is stationary, other than relative to? And is anything stationary relative to every observation point (like, say, center of the universe)? Everything is always moving, and therefore everything has momentum.
 
OldCorpse said:
But what is stationary, other than relative to? And is anything stationary relative to every observation point (like, say, center of the universe)? Everything is always moving, and therefore everything has momentum.
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Indeed momentum is relative to the frame of reference.
Mass however is absolute, but on the other hand mass in general relativity is hard to define. :)
 
Mass is defined referencing the gravitational field. But the gravitational field is described by space curvature, which in turn is referenced by adjascent gravity gradient values, so you cannot get away from general relativity even in the case of mass (Newtonian). Which raises the issue of dimensions - can you have space dimensions without time, space doesn't just "exist" as that in turn implies the dimension of time. And once we have time, we again bump against the speed of light - and ultimately, unified field theory with gravitational waves (that's the speculative part). So - mass, momentum, space-time, speed of light are all related and inseperable.
 
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