• Question: Let's hypotheticly say that you are travelling at the speed of light in your car. What will happen if you turn your headlights on?

    Asked by graciemaii to SarahJane on 21 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Sarah-Jane Walsh

      Sarah-Jane Walsh answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      It’s hard to answer because it is physically impossible to travel at the speed of light! even in the large hadron collider the fastest they can get particles to travel just falls short of the speed of light at 99.999994%

      I’ve tried to look in to what could happen, but physics says the closer you get to the speed of light, time gets slower and slower for anyone who is watching you, and if you could ever reach the speed of light time would stop completely!

      So there is no real answer to your question because its fundamentally impossible.

      However i did find one answer,

      It works on the principle that if you are moving fast and throw some thing you give it a boost, so if you were on a train traveling at 90 miles per hour and you threw a ball at 20 miles per hour, the fact that you are moving on a train would boost the speed of the ball. So theoretically if you turned your headlights on while traveling at the speed of light you would give the light a boost, but because the speed of light is the fastest speed you give it a boost of energy. The color of light relates to how much energy it has. Red light is the lowest energy and UV is the highest, so if you turned your headlights on they would just look a little blue!

      Hope that helps!

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