Cnn screw up

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Nspire

New Member
When CNN was covering the Columbia thing, did anyone notice the little message at the bottom of the screen that was telling info about the explosion? It said that the shuttle was speeding through the sky at "18 times the speed of light" a few times. No wonder the shuttle blew up.
 
umm im pretty sure it's imposible for anything but particles of light (photons) to travel at the speed of light, let alone 18 times.
 
I wasn't watching CNN. I don't watch the news. Nothign to see: going to war, blah blah, Columbia tragedy, blah blah, going to war, blah blah, affairs in office, blah blah, economy crashing, blah blah, rapist found and strung up, blah blah.
 
[b said:
Quote[/b] (Demon Hunter @ Feb. 06 2003,2:01)]umm im pretty sure it's imposible for anything but particles of light (photons) to travel at the speed of light, let alone 18 times.
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Yup, that's why I said CNN screwed up. It should have been sound instead of light.
 
Anything that exceeds the speed of light would have an infinite mass, which is why it's impossible to exceed the speed of light.  For photons to travel at the speed of light they must be massless.
 
ok Nspire i read ya now
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Tom, photons do travel at the speed of light because they are released from the atom when the electron changes orbit.

Definition from my astronomy book:

photon: " a particle of visible light or other electromagnetic radiation."
 
It's a particle. It's a wave.

It's a wavicle... ;)

And I do believe they managed to accelerate something to faster than the speed of light, but I'm fairly sure it required truly obscene amounts of energy.

Eon
 
rgr that Eon,
Photons are waves and particles, kinda wierd if ya think about it. I cant quite rap my brain around that one.
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Aarrghh! How can something be a pointsource entity AND a waveform... It breaks my brain...

:/

Eon
 
A wave or a particle? The reason why light is considered both is because it behaves like both.

I think it's interesting how Einstein theorized in his theory of relativity that time slows down the closer one gets to the speed of light. It comes to the point where the speed of light is completely devoid of the passage of time. In other words, if I were to climb into a spaceship and, moving at the speed of light, start a billion-or-so year journey to the nearest neighboring galaxy, it would seem to me as if no time had passed.
 
"umm im pretty sure it's imposible for anything but particles of light (photons) to travel at the speed of light, let alone 18 times."

Never say never...
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hrm... from what I've seen of the theory of relativity... I don't think its that... the word's not "credible"... uhm... maybe something else. but it looks kind of iffy to me.
 
It's also been superceded by a more complete theory - I believe. Albert Einstein was on the right track, but he didn't have the instrumentation to work with that our modern guys have got.

Still - I'll take his word over yours, no offence!

Eon
 
What's the theory Eon?
I needa know. I think that if we can break the speed of light, we'll eventually be able to go backwards in time! Or is time travel only future? Can one never go to the past? MORE DEBATE! Yea!
 
lol i did all that as part of my degree... man it bent my head.

Getting a 12 foot pole into a 8 foot barn.. o_O
 
LOL

Pole in a barn for nubs...
                           _ _ _ _
O                         /         \
|--------------       |_         |
^                        | |        |
Man Pole              Door      Wall
<--12ft---->          <---8ft--->

You have a runner running with a 12 foot pole towards an 8 foot barn. He is running near the speed of light (yes i know its silly). The basic priciple is that signals take a finite time to travel from one place to another.. i.e. nothing can go faster than the SOL.

So the runner runs into the barn.. the front end of the pole hits the back of the wall. But by the time the shock signal from the pole hitting the back wall reaches the runner, he has already entered the barn with the rest of the pole.

Then relatitvity catches up with him and everything flies out the barn (or the back wall breaks).

Its madness..truly madness.. i had an exam question calculating that. o_O
 
I thought you were talking about your head. like getting 20 megabytes into a 740kb floppy.

minimum width of the barn would have to be 8.95 feet for the pole to fit, if the barn was flat.

I don't want to bother figgering out the rest. you go on and have fun with your smrtness.
 
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