If we are travelling at the speed of Light in a space ship, what will happen if we switch on the headlight?
350726
If you could travel at the speed of light in your space ship (which you can't) and turned on the headlights the light would travel away from your ship at the speed of light. The speed of light is invariant -- not affected by the speed of its source.
490235
Assuming you are standing still relative to the airplane, and the airplane is going at the exact speed of light... yes you would see it, but only as it colides into you.  if you are asking if you would see if before it hits you, then no.  Due to it's speed, all of the light coming off of it would not be able to outrun the plane.
641394
As weird as it sounds, the theory of relativity says that if you are in a car traveling at 200,000,000 m/s with the headlights on, then the light from those headlights will pass a person standing still at 299,792,458 m/s and not 499,792,458 m/s. And if that stationary person shines a light at your car, you will see his light approaching you at 299,792,458 m/s and not 499,792,458 m/s.\n\nThe theory is so weird that numerous scientists have done numerous experiments to test it. The most famous of these experiments is the Michelson-Morley Experiment. All experiments have confirmed that this strange prediction of relativity is true.\n\nBelieve it or not!
1061558
Moving faster than light isn't really the real issue for space travel as traveling AT the speed of light solves all the distance problems(unless you are interested in time travel!). Of course that in itself is a big challenge. If one could demass the vehicle then surely one could achieve the speed of light!!! Afterall photons do travel at this speed.\nBut we would do very well even with speeds like .99999c because time dilation will reduce the time required drastically. Have the science, just need the technology!
688056
This question comes up very regularly. If you do a search you will find it has been answered dozens of times in the past few months.\n\nThe speed of light is an absolute constant. It doesn't matter what speed you are travelling at the light will always be travelling away from you at the same speed: the speed of light.\n\nThe freaky part is that the light from your headlights would seem to be travelling away form you at the speed of light (C), but to an observer who was sitting still the light would also appears to be travelling away from them at the speed of light. How can that happen? Well it's one of the tricky bits of relativity, but part of the solution lies in understanding that although light never slows down or speeds up relative to any observer it does change frequency.\n\nSo to you the light from your headlights will look quite normal, but to someone sitting still your headlights will appear to be emitting x-rays. The light would be invisible to them.\n\nThe corrolary of that is that any light approaching your windshield will be equally shifted into the x-ray part of the spectrum. Although the headlights will be emitting visible light, any time they strike an object and reflect back they will reflect back extremely low frequency light that is invisible to the human eye.\n\n\nSo no, it won't do a damn bit o good to turn on your headlights. That's not because the light won't travel, it will travel just fine. The problem will be that any light that reflects back off the road will be invisible to the human eye.
113625
The car, you, and the headlights would no longer exist.  Light would continue at its usual speed.
211837
This is where the general theory of reletivity comes in.  if your car is moving at light speed. it needs a refrence point. Its moving light speed from one point to another point. Say point   A    is the point where you are starting, and point   B  is the point you are going to.  Since YOU are in the car moving at exactly the same speed as the car its general speed is Zero. so the lights would turn on as normal. from a third persons point... say a person on the side of the road point    C    his movement would be ZERO, and YOUR speed would be light speed, as you turn on your headlights they WOULD come on, because once again light speed is general.  Time is general, and space is general.
429293
This is a frame of reference question.  To someone sitting in the car, the head lights would come on just like they always would, because the car is sitting still for that person.\n\nFor a person sitting on earth watching the car go by at the speed of light, they would not see the headlights come on.  This assumes a massless car, since no car with mass could go the speed of light, but I digress.\n\nI bet a massless car could get really good gas mileage.
1185271
I've heard this one before, there is no answer for we do not have the resources nor the expertise yet to answer such a perplexing problem. but i would imagine that the light from the headlights would travel 2x the speed of light and rip a hole in the time space continuum and cause a black hole.
592518
This question comes up very regularly. If you do a search you will find it has been answered dozens of times in the past few months.\n\nIgnore what the previous poster said, he is completely incorrect. The speed of light is an absolute constant. It doesn't matter what speed you are travelling at the light will always be travelling away from you at the same speed: the speed of light.\n\nThe freaky part is that the light from your headlights would seem to be travelling away form you at the speed of light (C), but to an observer who was sitting still the light would also appears to be travelling away from them at the speed of light.  How can that happen? Well it's one of the tricky bits of relativity, but part of the solution lies in understanding that although light never slows down or speeds up relative to any observer it does change frequency.\n\nSo to you the light from your headlights will look quite normal, but to someone sitting still your headlights will appear to be emitting x-rays. The light would be invisible to them.\n\nThe corrolary of that is that any light approaching your windshield will be equally shifted into the x-ray part of the spectrum. Although the headlights will be emitting visible light, any time they strike an object and reflect back they will reflect back extremely low frequency light that is invisible to the human eye.\n\n\nSo no, it won't do a damn bit o good to turn on your headlights. That's not because the light won't travel, it will travel just fine. The problem will be that any light that  reflects back off the road will be invisible to the human eye.
79821
Simple answer is NOTHING.  This is the explaination:  When you are traveling in a car at 70 MPH and there is a bug flying around in the car (say 0.5MPH), the bug is also traveling at 70 MPH ().5MPH can be ignored as bug is flying around in the car with null effect on the speed).  This is the part of theory of relativity.  Now let's see our car is traveling at the sped of light, when you turn the light on, the rays are traveling at the same spped and you see no effect of light (i.e. still dark-if driving at night).  If you just slow down at little (say 5%) then you will see light just ahead of the car and same applies as if you spped up the car slightly, it will be still dar and you may see back of the car lit (light left behind) for having lheadights in the front.
644825
According to Special Relativity Theory, when you are transporting a mass at a speed near lightspeed, the energy needed to increase your speed rises to infinity. We can't provide the system with enough energy to reach the light of speed.\n\nEnergy, though, can travel at the speed of light because it has no mass. If we could transform a mass in energy (remember: E = m c^2) and re-create it at destination, travelling at lightspeed would be possible.\n\nBut, as Dark Helmet said, speed of light is too slow. We need ludicrous speed!
719819
This question comes up very regularly. If you do a search you will find it has been answered dozens of times in the past few months.\n\nThe thing you need to relaise is that the speed of light is an absolute constant. It doesn't matter what speed you are travelling at, the light will always be travelling away from you at the same speed: the speed of light.\n\nThe freaky part is that the light from your headlights would seem to be travelling away form you at the speed of light (C), but to an observer who was sitting still the light would also appears to be travelling away from them at the speed of light. How can that happen? Well it's one of the tricky bits of relativity, but part of the solution lies in understanding that although light never slows down or speeds up relative to any observer it does change frequency.\n\nSo to you the light from your headlights will look quite normal, but to someone sitting still your headlights will appear to be emitting x-rays. The light would be invisible to them.\n\nThe corrolary of that is that any light approaching your windshield will be equally shifted into the x-ray part of the spectrum. Although the headlights will be emitting visible light, any time they strike an object and reflect back they will reflect back extremely low frequency light that is invisible to the human eye.\n\n\nSo yes, you most ceratinly owuld need headlights if a car is travelling at the speed of light. Unfortunately it won't do a damn bit o good to turn on your headlights. That's not because the light won't travel, it will travel just fine. The problem will be that any light that reflects back off the road will be invisible to the human eye.
70554
First of your car can't go faster than the speed of light.  If your car were going faster than the speed of light, the laws of physics would not apply (since the car is breaking them), so there is no way to accurately predict what would happen.\n\nThat said, if you were going really close to the speed of light relative to some observer (keep in mind that velocity is relative, so it could just as easily be you standing still and the observer moving at near the speed of light), you would see the headlights behave perfectly normally, but he would see you almost catching up to them.  So if we imagine that you could go faster than the speed of light it would follow that everything would seem normal to you, but the observer would see you pass the front of the beam of light emitted by the headlights (actually he would see you in front of the light because he can only see the light when it reaches his eyes, and basically you would get there first, but it's the same idea).\n\n***Response to Cecil***\nAnyone with the audacity to assert that they *know* what would happen based on the laws of physics is mistaken.  Because the car CANNOT travel faster than the speed of light, and therefore the laws of physics DO NOT APPLY!  Any attempts to address this question are purely speculative, and an explaination based on science is no more likely to be correct than one based on Gene Roddenberry's imagination.  Anyone who attempts to apply Einstein's theory of relatively or any other scientific law or theory to this senario and present it as the absolute truth clearly has no understanding of the theories they are attempting to apply, and is, so to speak, the one "without a clue."\n\n***Response to Boomer***\nApparently I need to defend my answers yet again.  Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.  There are no exceptions, and that's not a "belief," it's a fact.  Thus the car defies the laws of physics, and consequently its interactions with the physical world are unpredictable.  Meaning we cannot predict them, and thus cannot know what would happen.  And anyone who thinks that light and urine behave in the same manner is in no position to be calling others "ignorant morons."\n\n***Response to Cecil's Response***\nFirstly, if you're going to assert that your answer is correct based on the extend of your education, I strongly recommend the use of proper grammar.  As for the car and the light, if you had actually read my answer you may have noticed it is based on the assumption that the speed of light is constant.  For the person in the car, everything is perfectly normal.  He would see the light moving in front of him at 3 x 10^8 m/s and the observer (relative to whom we are measuring the speed of the car) would appear to be moving away from him faster than 3 x 10^8 m/s second, lets say 4 x 10^8 m/s.  The observer would also see the light moving 3 x 10^8 m/s, but he would see the car moving in the same direction at 4 x 10^8 m/s, so to the observer it would appear that the car reaches any given point before any of the light it had previously emmitted.  Also, I'm not sure what the doppler effect has to do with any of this, but it occurs because the wavelength of the sound waves decreases because the object creating the wave moves either closer to or farther away from the previous peak before creating the next one, not because the speed of the sound waves change.  This occurs with light as well, and can been observed as red shift and blue shift.  When this occurs, the speed of the light does not change but the wavelenght of the light is altered by the motion of its source.\n\n***Comment on Tjtindal's Response to Cecil***\nStar Trek is science fiction, but the entire concept of faster-than-light travel is pure fiction.  Nothing can move faster than the speed of light because mass increases with velocity and becomes infinite at 3 x 10^8 m/s.  Because F=ma the force need to i
992432
Your question is similar to Einstein's question that led to a revolution in physics, so it's not a stupid question by far. Einstein asked, what would happen if someone could travel along a beam of light? What would the traveler see? \n\nThink of relative motion. When I'm on a train, watching the country side go by, it appears to me that everything else is moving and I, the tables, the chairs, and the people on the train are not moving. If I were standing on the ground watching the train go by, it would be the oppisote: I would appear, to myself, to be standing still, and the train, people on it, chairs and tables would all appear to be moving. Relative motion, hense the term "relativity."\n\nWhat Einstein discovered is that even if one could travel at the speed of light, that person would observe the light in your headlight traveling away from him AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT. Weird, huh? Think about it. If you're on a ski slope and an avalance is chasing you, what are you going to do? You are going to RUN. Why? It decreases the rate at which the avalance is approaching you. If the avalance is traveling 20  mph and you can run 15 mph, the avalance is only gaining on you at a rate of 20 mph - 15 mph = 5 mph. You slow it's approach to you. However, that does not work with light. If you ran away from a light beam, and managed to travel at the speed of light, the light beam behind you would STILL BE APPROACHING YOU AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT. Light speed is constant in every reference frame, no matter WHAT the speed of the observer. \n\nIn short, you would see the light in the headlight traveling away from you at the speed of light.
321687
OK, to answer this question, we first have to make a few important assumptions, otherwise the question is meaningless.\nFirst, we have to assume that you can accelerate your car to the speed of light....this is not actually possible since it would have an infinfity mass and thius take an infinite amount of energy to achiece.  Secondly, wehave to assume that at the speed of light, your head lights will opperate noramlly (i.e. you turn them on and light shines out) due to [for reasons beyond the scope of this answer] the way head lights actually work.\n\nI would also like to preface my answer with say that traveling AT the speed of light is much different than traveling just UNDER the speed of light.\n\nOne VERY important thing to remember is that in ALL frames of reference, the speed of light is constant.\nNo matter who is watching the light travel and measuring its speed, it will always come out to be the exact some value, 299,792,458 m/s exactly.\n\nWhen you, inside your car traveling at the speed of light (with respect to some "stationary" observer), swtich on your head lights and look out the wind shield, you WILL see light traveling away from you at the speed of light.\n\nIf this "stationary" observer (by which I mean a someone who you are traveling past at the speed of light) watches all this happen, both you and the light are still traveling at the same speed in his reference frame....the speed of light.\n\nSo the answer depends on who's frame of reference your talking about.  From your point of view, yes, you would see the light traveling away from you at the speed of light as if nothing was out of the ordinary.\nFrom the "Stationary" person's reference frame, you and the light would be keeping up with eachother, neither moving infront or falling behind the other one...tied.
712928
if a cow laughs does milk come out of its nose     or what if traveling  at the speed of light will your headlights work