Re: OT Speed of light stuff - was Pluto.

ElAlumbrado wrote:


Lon, I think some of us understand the question very clearly. The question, regarding the perceived speed of two objects approaching each other at light speed, is covered in first year physics (that's the whole purpose of "education": the passing down of knowledge previously acquired). The answer, according to General Relativity, is "no observer, regardless of his frame of reference, can perceive any speed in excess of c", or more precisely that the speed of light is constant for all observers in an inertial frame of reference. It doesn't matter if the observer is watching two light beams approach each other from the surface of a nearby planet, or from inside one of those light beams, the closing speed will be perceived as no greater than c. This effect is counter-intuitive to human senses, but is never-the-less real and is accounted for by the compression of space/time predicted by the general relativity equations and confirmed by experiment.

It doesn't matter what an observer can observe. If light from the sun is traveling into space at the speed of light, which it obviously does, and it meets (going in the opposite direction) light coming from a star, which travels at the speed of light, by definition, the speed of each light, in relation to the other, is the speed of light X 2.

That's not to say that either has achieved twice the speed of light, but the RELATIVE speed of each, when compared to the other, is twice the speed of light.

That's what I've understood Will to be saying.


Once that is established, I can't help but ask which particular spots in space are moving, and which are not, and at what speed?
I'm not convinced that there _IS_ such a thing as a fixed spot in space, as every object we observe is moving when compared to all other objects in space. You can pick a spot in our solar system and claim it isn't moving, but when you compare ours with others, that isn't such a certainty. Once we grasp the concept of infinity, apply it to large, to small, to space, and to time, we might conclude that our galaxy might simply be a blip of light in another dimension. As we discover more small and more large, one never knows what we may discover.

Imagine yourself many billions of times larger and peering into a giant microscope (not telescope, I mean microscope) as you study a tiny little galaxy which contains earth. Infinity allows that.

IMHO, we have much to learn yet, and shouldn't allow accepted but unproved science to limit such thoughts. I know what infinity means.

Lon
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