No, you will not catch up because the light you are emitting, at the speed of light, will be traveling faster then the speed of light.

I know this from experience.

not so smart

So that was you then! Well, I was going at the same speed and I never even saw you. I was coming the other way, remember?

The only thing traveling faster than light is the distance we covered while approaching each other. When you put on your lights and I put on mine they will meet at half way. The combined distance of that, could not be covered if it was only one light source, trying to cover that same distance.

I wonder what sb will come up with!

I'm out of here, for now, Ky.

Yes, You will. Considered the speed of light is also the maximum speed of light, and you generate and maintain the photon beam yourself while moving, you will catch up with the light when your speed is the same. At that point no light of the beam you emit will be seen by yourself while moving in the same direction at the speed of light.

I should not advise to try to attain the speed of light, but a simple test kan be made: Run forward peeing, at a certain speed you will completely run into the wet.

The speed of light is roughly MACH1000 the previous poster must be a "black hole"?

Unfortunately i tried this and found at about mach 2 the pee just turned to steam due to air friction, any help of trying to catch the wet!!!

It's not "vini", it's "veni" from the Latin infinitive "venire". But you do know more about light & its speed than I do!

There's no ENCE like XpiRiENCE

It is very interesting, reading all printed idea of magnificent brains gathered here, wonderful!! But guys, is there nothing you can do other than trying to catch up the light? what happened if you can catch it up? that's the real question.

BobD has the physics right, although the relativistic equations diverge at the speed of light so maybe there is no determinate answer at that speed. From the point of view of an outside observer looking at this oncoming "car", the headlight would be blue shifted (Doppler effect) to an infinitesimally short wavelength. I don't think that would be good, either... Anyway, the vehicle is toast as soon as a relativistic bug hits the windscreen.

Let's be practical boys...... If your car was accelerated to the speed of light, it would immediately incinerate as the space shuttle would without heat tiles when entering the atmosphere. Even if we do not compute the heat generated by a mass of plastic and steel at the speed of light in the atmosphere and the vehicle survives, we would always see the light at any speed no matter where your are viewing it.

Welcome to the insanity.

No.

Particularly not if you have a Lucas electronics system in your car.

No. Particularly not if you have a Lucas electronics system in your car. Lucas + electronics = oxymoron

If you have Lucas electronics in your car then you would catch the light, since the Lucas car would not emit light. On the back of my old TR-3 i had a bumper sticker made that said "Joseph Lucas invented darkness". plus this is the only time i owned SI tools.

I vowed to never let Lucas in my life again, and I converted the Triumph to a negative ground car.

Lucas and Bosch- the Princes of Darkness!

You were caught up to the light the tail end of it. The head lights being the source. So I say yes.

If you are talking about the leading front edge of the beam. No, once the vehicle obtains the speed of light the distance from the leading edge of the beam and vehicle would remain constant.

Assuming that your vehicle would be able to maintain the true speed of light, you would catch it. The photons in the beam of light would interact with microscopic particles causing friction and marginally slowing it.

Okay, first of all if you are travelling at half the speed of light you should already have your headlights turned on. It's just too dangerous not to. That's why most interstellar class ships these days come equipped with 'warp speed running headlights'.

Secondly, you need to distinguish between the light emitted by your vehicle in this universe, or the light emitted by your vehicle in a parallel universe. Obviously you can't catch the light you emit in this universe (you'd have to exceed 'C'), but it is possible to catch the light the 'parallel you' emits in a parallel universe (using a space-warp drive). The other option would be to try to warp back into the same universe, but you'd need to remove the 'Pauli Exclusion Principle converter' from the warp drive, which is against the law, and then risk running into yourself. Pretty dangerous.

Thirdly, there is the problem of energy consumption in trying to go the speed of light. Most vehicles average about 20 parsecs per gallon. Even running at 1 parsec per 20 gallons you'd still not quite reach the speed of light, and at the cost of gas these days it would be an awfully expensive experiment.

So, in general, I'd say the answer is 'no'.

In this papallel universe isn't the maximum speed the speed of light too?

Mu!

possibly one of the most inane questions.

nobody is getting in a "vehicle" and doing such a thing.

what the heck would you need headlights for anyway?

a node of light will travel alone, not with a heaping clump of matter.

shouldn't real questions be asked instead of fantastical what ifs?

Wow no sense of imagination or intuitious drive.

how does imagination figure in?

This is an engineering question

..oh.. and you don't know me.

Imaginer - Disney, Creating a practical solution from your imagination and then developing an engineered solution to creation of the imagined product.

Imagination is always a part of engineering. If not how do we develop such beautiful buildings if we do not "see it" first in our imagination and then create a practical solution for creation.

Have you ever drawn with cad? Have you imagined a product solution to a practical application?

I'm with you Sted,

And since you brought up imagination, thought is the only thing that travels FTL. Light emmited from your headlights, or your tail lights, no matter how fast you are traveling, is a (this) universal constant. If the emmiter was traveling at or above the speed of light, no light would be observable from your headlights, but your tail lights wouldn't need a red lens due to Doppler shift. Actually that's not right either. Whatever came from the tail lights would approach a flat line (radio waves?) if you were tied to the trunk (whee!) looking backwards. Someone following at your speed would see the light as normal, as would your local planetary watch group.

I'm wearing Kevlar/Nomex shorts for this. Go ahead, make my day.

Well thank you.

Though truly, I think the Kevlar and Nomex is not necessary unless you like the fell of it.

I think it may be a bit itchy.

yes. I have

thanks for asking.

..Imaginer .. Disney.. whoa

leave armatures out of this.

Light would travel at the same speed regardless of the speed of the vehicle emitting it. As is the case with sound. A supersonic jet will be well past a point before the sound emitted by reaches that same point.

But sound within the cabin still travels from point A-point be with reference of the observer within that cabin, say from the instrument panel to the pilot, or from the pilots mouth to the microphone?

Hey, I'm only a Newtonian kind-o-guy, so that's about as far as my brain can manage ...

BUT, if C is a constant, then it is leaving your headlights at that speed no matter how fast the emitter is traveling. Relative to your vehicle's C/2 speed, the light is traveling away from you at C/2. Now, bump up the speed to C, and you'll keep up with the traveling beam ... in other words, the light that is trying to leave your headlights can't, but the beam already emitted continues to travel in front of you at the same speed as you. It's not a matter of 'catching up', just that the beam of light in front of you won't continue to extend away from you, but remain the same.

(then the apple fell on my head, Steve Jobs smiled, I discovered both gravity AND applesauce ... then I woke up)

Kind regards ...

No, you can never catch up with the light unless you travel faster than the speed of light. . . . . . . only then you can

My Car is a very short one - shorter than a wavelength and my headligths just to the left and rigth!

Short answer : Nope, you will NOT catch up!

G'day,

From my recollection of "Relativity", a "car" could never attain the speed of light because at the speed of light the cars mass would be infinite. The car would need an infinite force to accelerate to light speed. (f=ma).

not quite right, you would need more than infinite force to obtain that speed.

If your looking at jet thrust, to obtain Mach speeds, the thrust from the rear of the aircraft would be travelling at a greater speed than the speed of the craft in the opposite direction.

If you have a look at jet thrust flame, the little triangles you see in the flame are the speed of sound pulses, if you count the diamonds, you get the approx speed of the engine thrust (could be wrong, but thats how I understood it)

these little triangles in the jet-thrust are shockwaves - but not one for every machnumber

the number of triangels differs from the machnumber and depends from the environment - its just to pass the environmental

The person in the car will notice nothing as he is increasing speed if the light is not reflected back at him. The only way for him to see any light is if it is reflected back towards him. Then as he is increasing his speed the frequency of the reflected light will change and become more blue and eventually dissapear into the ultra violet spectrum. As for running into his own light, this will not happen. In his frame of existence the light will always leave his headlamps at lightspeed. The light that has left his vechile will also move away at light speed if he could detect it, but will shift in frequency towards the blue spectrum.

In the galaxy there are lot of bodies travelling at near the speed of light. But will still get light from them. Likewise even if the car attains the speed of light, the light emitted from its body will always be ahead.

Definitely not!

A lot of reasons have been written before, but my two cents: Even it was possible for car to reach light speed, you driver must be at the same speed (unless jump out by a window) I don't believe a crushed mass of matter which some time before was flesh, bones, eyes, etc is able to catch anything.

Kind regards.

P.S: Were have all the good challenges gone?

Gone with the flowers everyone?

Oh! When will they ever learn!

mc^2=(Pi*D^2)/4=>Do (i++); Print"Blip Blip"; End; Stop; Process Terminated; Ctrl-C; 00010011011001000011...

Overflow

This relativity trivia is getting trivial.

GK,

You've given here the best answer so far. Particularly with one critical subtle inclusion, "the vehicle approaches the speed of light..." The vehicle never achieves the speed of light. To achieve the speed of light requires breaking the known laws of the universe. If it actually is possible to achieve this velocity, surely we don't know what will happen when it does. We have some good guesses, but that's all that they are guesses. Until experimentation or observation identifies this condition happening, anything could happen. Even my other fictitious post on this topic.

and some of these 10-typepeople are from every type

I said: "For an outside observer: ..... the "new" light will never leave the headlights of the vehicle....." Of course, this should be true if the vehicle could reach exactly the speed c. But it cannot. In fact, as the speed of the vehicle tends to c, the light still (barely) leaves the headlights (because the speed of the vehicle is always something less than c).

(This is, also, a kind of answer for BobC on his post #59.)

I don't know a thing about traveling at the speed of light,

I did put instant coffee in the microwave once and went back in time. Wow what a rush.

Every now and then I look out the window up at the sky and smile for a satellite picture.

I put tape on the mirrors in my house so I don't accidentally walk through into
another dimension.

Sorry, my mind was wandering. One time my mind went all the way to Venus on
mail order and I couldn't pay for it.

A friend of mine once sent me a post card with a picture of the entire planet
Earth taken from space. On the back it said, "Wish you were here."

Is Steven Wright asking the challenge questions now?

You missed your calling, you should be writing for the Tonight Show.

Unfortunately its not my stuff, Those are the ravings of Steve Wright. He delivers all those lines straight faced and dead pan. Funny as heck to watch him do it though.

According to relativity: the mass changes as the speed varies. A body with a mass that would travel at the speed of the light, would have an infinite mass.

An infinite mass is a senseless statement. Therefore the question makes no sense, it is actually impossible to travel at that speed.

Now, if one rejects the relativity postulate by saying that the speed of the lights emitted from a body in motion varies with the speed of that body then the answer to this question would be different because the speed of the light would then not be a constant anymore.

Note that black holes have an enormous mass that allows them to literally swallow the light, that is actually the reason why they are black. Other objects such as stars curve the light. So it is likely that a body traveling at a speed close to the speed of light would because of its enormous mass also curve and maybe "swallow" the light. In brief at that speed we would be traveling in the dark.

"it is actually impossible to travel at that speed."

Nothing is impossible, we have cell phones today, we fly in and out of space, if it was not for the engineers that that believed that nothing was impossible we would not have this world of possibilities we work with each and every day.

Limited thinking only keeps us here!

In reply to #23

Black holes don't actually swallow light. It's just that the escape velocity of the black hole exceeds the speed of light therefor light cannot escape.

Harrumph

Maybe the black hole is too massive for the itty-bitty light to push it away.

I know that if i could travel with a speed of light i won't be travelling with half of it from the very begining. So next question?

Assumptions:

1) Light ALWAYS travels at the speed of light (c)

2) Cars can also travel at c

The light emitted while traveling below the speed of light out paces your car by c/2 while you are traveling at c/2. When the car is accelerated to c, the light is still traveling at c (assuming light is impervious to friction). Therefore, at best, you will remain even with all previously emitted light. Whether your headlights are now, effectively, putting out light at 2c is another discussion.

At the dawn of the fighter jet age, and possibly some late WWII prop planes, running into their fired rounds was a major consideration. This question involves light which does not suffer the same effects as a bullet in flight (i.e. drag).

But the big question is: "Is your car now able to out-run police radar?"

arh but one may run into their own little laser gun fire now ... mmmm gotcha

Oh - they've tried sometimes. But I've been always corect!

No. Einstein's theory of relativity states that the speed of light will always appear to the observer to be 186,000 miles per second.

Hey I'm a ligth-wave-surfer

Another silly question that ignores fundamental trans-dimensional kinematics. (May I have my shovel and hip waders please, thank you. ) Traveling at half light speed is close to the limits of today's impulse drive technology. (Weapons systems being the exception, but nobody is supposed to survive these machines.) The high drag created by inter-spatial debris, both macroscopic and microscopic, seriously questions the structural integrity of any craft. This "living on the edge" challenge does bring both intrigue and suspense to the myriad of sub-light racing forums found in our civilization. But as others here have pointed out, traveling at this hazardous speed obligates the driver to turn their headlights on to permit evasive action to be attempted. (Wish you luck. )

But as anyone who has properly studied trans-dimensional kinematics knows, switching to superluminal velocities must be done at no greater than c/4 to create a successful transition to folded dimension space. Once a craft transitions into second, third, or other space, light from one realm does not interact with other realms. Fortunately mass one tenth the mass of the traveling craft does naturally produce trans-dimensional markers between adjacent realms or transitions would become prohibitively hazardous. This leads me to the discussion about scout ship requirements but that's way off topic here.

Ah! but....

As post #23 points out, accelerating to the speed of light would bring the vehicle to infinite mass. Infinite mass would have infinite gravity. I could go through another few steps. But suffice it to say, "Yes, the vehicle accelerated to the speed of light would catch up to the light previously emitted by the headlights."

Since everything in the universe is moving in one direction or another, it would be impossible to create a coordinate system in space that is based off of any fixed points. Since there are no fixed points, the only way to know that you are moving at all is if you are going towards or away from something. But you still would not know if you are moving or if that object is moving towards or away from you. So we could be moving at the speed of light right now along with all of the other stuff around us ( I think that we probably are). If that is the case and we are moving at the speed of light then i have never seen anyone catch up with their headlights so, light must move at the speed of light away from it's source, regardless of the motion of its source. I suppose if you were not moving and turned on your lights, and then accelerated to just faster than the speed of light, you could catch up with the photons that left before you started moving.

With such unknowns as dark matter and dark energy and coupled photons, we really have to admit that we don't know if anything we think we know is known. So there is no answer today. Maybe sometime in the future.

I would like to see a car of this generation obtain the speed of light if not, at least half the speed of light without falling apart.

The situation in the question can never happen - traveling at the speed of light, only light can do that. therefor it is not possible to give a correct A. to this Q.

This is like asking: if 2+2 = 7 then how many minutes are in on hour.

It is simply not possible to find correct answer to uncorrect questions!

One hour is approximately 4.3 + 4.3

YES!! You will catch up to the light from the headlights. The analogy would be with respect to the speed of sound. The sonic boom is created soon after the aircraft speed exceeds the speed of sound ie a little more than 1000 kmph. After that the sound TRAILS the aircraft. Similarly, hypothetically speaking, if the vehicle's speed exceeds the speed of light, no light is emanated.

Oh brother. ;)

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

Let us assume the car is emitting light (from its head lamp) as pulses.

say t=0 , car is stationery, the pules moves at velocity C

Now at time say t=10 , car is c/2 and again emits a light The gap between the two beams now will not be 10sec (it will be less) but the second beam will not overtake first beam say the gap is 7 sec between the two square pulses.

at t=20 say car is at 3/4C - this beam now again will have a gap say 3 sec from second pulse (after leaving the car it is in free space and hence it is independent of source) the time gap changes are what we call the red-shift.

at t=30 say now the car is at C.

this beam will be at a gap of 1 sec from 3rd pulse hence 11 sec from first pulse but this is the gap that will be maintained.

Then onwards the lights will be as continuous beams (unbroken) but still they will move forward at a speed C away from the car and the car will never be able to catch-up with them (just like the 3rd beam is from a car that is already at 3/4 speed of light but is not going to overtake the first beam, only effect is in the wavelength/frequency of the beam.

No, at best you would be just behind the headlight beam.

At first we may be right that velocity is always relative to a reference point.
In that case the observer is inside the vehicle but the reference point to define his velocity as C/2 must have to be defined his velocity and position too. This can create a great field of discussion.
Abstracting from all variables and taking reference only about the sistem composed by the vehicle and the light from the headlight we can say that the velocity from the light will have the same value over the reference point he is measured, C.
The observer inside the vehicle will never reach the light.

But observers outside the vehicle... this is another history!