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Which is the fastest thing in the world?

 
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Four guys, one each from Harvard, Yale, MIT university and SANTA were to be interviewed for a prestigious job. One common question was asked to all 4 of them.

INTERVIEWER: WHICH IS THE FASTEST THING IN THE WORLD?

YALE guy: Its light, Nothing can travel faster than light.

HARVARD Guy: It's the Thought; b'cos thought is so fast it comes instantly in your mind.

MIT guy: Its Blink, you can blink and its hard to realize you blinked.

SANTA : Its Loose motion

INTERVIEWER: (Shocked to hear Santa's reply, asked) "WHY"?

SANTA: Last night after dinner, I was lying in my bed and I got the worst stomach cramps, and before I could THINK, BLINK, or TURN ON THE LIGHTS, it was over!!!
 
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Originally posted by Chetan Parekh:
YALE guy: Its light, Nothing can travel faster than light.

Nothing with mass can accelerate to the speed of light, but is it the acceleration which is the problem, or the speed? Would it be possible to have an object travelling faster then light as long as it had always been doing so? Would that object have to be mass-less? Would this object still observe light as being at the same speed as when any subluminal observer would observe it to be?
 
Chetan Parekh
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Originally posted by Dave Lenton:
Nothing with mass can accelerate to the speed of light, but is it the acceleration which is the problem, or the speed? Would it be possible to have an object travelling faster then light as long as it had always been doing so? Would that object have to be mass-less? Would this object still observe light as being at the same speed as when any subluminal observer would observe it to be?



What happen if your car is traveling at the speed of light and you turn on your headlights?

P.S. – This question was asked somewhere in MD before.
 
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Surely, we don't know yet!

But being abstract, I would go with the mind thing, the mind can reach you upto the farest of the galaxies in a nanosecond.
 
Dave Lenton
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Originally posted by Chetan Parekh:
What happen if your car is traveling at the speed of light and you turn on your headlights?

From what I understand, both the driver and a person watching the car would both measure the speed of the light coming out of the headlights as being exactly the same.
 
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the only thing faster than light is bad news.
 
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It is time that travels faster than everything...


This I got from some book. But I forgot the book name.

In my opnion this term "fast" is a relative term..
 
Jeroen T Wenting
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It's quoted among other things in the Guide.
But it certainly doesn't originate there.
 
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Originally posted by Chetan Parekh:
... What happen if your car is traveling at the speed of light and you turn on your headlights? ...


It would be too late.
 
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Originally posted by Dave Lenton:
Nothing with mass can accelerate to the speed of light




well, it depends on what you mean by mass....
 
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But even under that definition of mass (i.e. relativistic mass) - light doesn't accelerate to the speed of light. It's already at the speed of light.
 
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I guess darkness is at least as fast as light.

Turn on the light.
Turn it off.
Any difference in speed?
 
Chetan Parekh
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Originally posted by Stefan Wagner:
I guess darkness is at least as fast as light.

Turn on the light.
Turn it off.
Any difference in speed?



Nice observation!
 
Dave Lenton
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Originally posted by Jim Yingst:
But even under that definition of mass (i.e. relativistic mass) - light doesn't accelerate to the speed of light. It's already at the speed of light.

What happens when light is made then? I guess that there is some kind of reaction which results in photons being released. Those photons were presumably something else in some kind of other form - when I light a match, the photons released come material in the match head, the wood and the air. So, somewhere along the line some other molecules get changed into energy/photons (the line seems a bit blurred) which are then instantly travelling at light speed. Why no acceleration? How does the reaction change them from fuel at a slow speed to light at light-speed with no acceleration involved?

Perhaps I'm seeing it the wrong way. Acceleration is something associated with mass, and if photons have no mass (I haven't finished reading the article above, but I accept there may be arguments against this), perhaps the whole issue of acceleration is not applicable here.
[ July 20, 2006: Message edited by: Dave Lenton ]
 
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