- Location
- Inside my skull
If travelling at light speed it only takes a few years to reach any star in the Universe.
Really TRUE odd factoids
- Thread starter Blue Hills
- Start date
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Beebo
Firm and Fruity
- Location
- Hexleybeef
To the person travelling, not the outside observer.
- Location
- Inside my skull
Did I say outside observer?
ebikeerwidnes
Guru
- Location
- Z’ha’dum
depends on how you pronounce eight
ebikeerwidnes
Guru
- Location
- Z’ha’dum
It isn;t travelling at it that is the problem
getting up to it seems to be the problem
so far anyway
but with some of the adverts for carbon frames and aero bars and all that it does look like they might be close
or possibly the marketing people are exaggerating
ebikeerwidnes
Guru
- Location
- Z’ha’dum
I did say "spell it"
yeah - but it was funnier this way!
- Location
- Inside my skull
DaveReading
Don't suffer fools gladly (must try harder!)
- Location
- Reading, obvs
It works in the USA, where "and" is not used when writing out or saying numbers.so you mean ignoring the other 891 (i think that's right) numbers that have "a" in the "and" part then
Presumably the claim originates from there.
Alex321
Guru
- Location
- South Wales
Yes, and the link given earlier in the thread is also to an American site (obvious from the fact they use "math" rather than "maths").
Sorry, at that speed your interactions with the cosmic background radiation are blue-shifted to the proton-degeneration resonance energy. This would erode your spacecraft and you to something rather unrecognizable over a distance of 160 million light years.
matticus
Guru
You've piqued my curiosity! How does that work? If we take this as fact:
"The radius of the observable universe is therefore estimated to be about 46.5 billion light-years"
... doesn't that mean that anyone will take (minimum) 46.5 billion years to travel 1 radius?
(as observed in their own intertial frame of reference).
No doubt there is a trap here - but feel free to trap me, if I learn something!
- Location
- Inside my skull
From the perspective of a traveler moving at the speed of light, time would effectively stop. According to Einstein's theory of special relativity, as an object with mass approaches the speed of light, time slows down for that object relative to an outside observer. Thus if you were Methusala watching it would take billions of years, but for the person travelling at near light speed it’d be moments.
The trap you’ve fallen into is assuming time passes the same for everyone.
markemark
Veteran
Hmm. The observer from earth it would take the person in a rocket 14bn+ years. The time for the person in the rocket would be approaching zero time from their perspective as they reach light speed. However the universe would be expanding and every star would have died and new ones born during the trip. Th person in the rocket will not have any notice of this as it would be a tiny fraction of the time they are experience in travel. They would experience 14bn years of the universe in a few seconds with all the death/creation along the way which would be tiny tiny fractions of a second and so not noticeable. And there's every chance the universe would have done something weird in the time as to make the trip nonsensical.
Or something like that
matticus
Guru
So why would it take "a few years"?
