Shiro no Konran - Castle of Confusion

  • home
  • forums
  • galleries
  • old wiki
Xeriar's picture

The most common misconception about the speed of light...

Xeriar — Tue, 11/03/2009 - 04:36

...is that a multiple of it means something on its own.

This is a personal pet peeve of mine. "Ten thousand times the speed of light" means nothing unless you specifically tie it to an external frame of reference, and if that frame of reference is fixed within our Universe, you are breaking relativity just as blatantly.

An observer can move about the Universe as quickly as they like - going to Alpha Centauri and back in ~7.5 hours is not the problem.

The speed of light is the same in all frames of reference.

Alice looked round her in great surprise. 'Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!'

'Of course it is,' said the Queen, 'what would you have it?'

'Well, in OUR country,' said Alice, still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else--if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.'

'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'

- Alice and the Red Queen, Through the Looking Glass

In Newtonian mechanics, the invariant speed is infinite, rather than light's prorogation velocity. No matter how fast you fly, something moving at an infinite velocity would still be moving at an infinite velocity with respect to you. The speed of light is similar - no matter how fast you move, the a photon still moves at the speed of light.

Although 299,792,458 meters per second is not 'infinite', there are infinities associated with it. It takes an infinite amount of energy for something with mass to reach this speed, and even more to actually surpass it. Playing with this while being bound by the limits of our own Universe simply does not work.

Now is relative.

  • Future Thoughts
  • Login to post comments
  • Read more
Xeriar's picture

So it has been awhile

Xeriar — Sun, 11/01/2009 - 14:51

I had wanted to launch this a year and some ago. Funny how priorities align themselves.

My name is Brandan Yares. I mostly do server work and web design now. For the latter I've been working on building a portfolio so hey - if you want something done, feel free to ask (xeriar@gmail.com).

Stuff that will go on this site:

• The archive of my wiki can be found at the 'old wiki' link up top. I'm going to be integrating a new wiki into Drupal on separate sites for my Solar Storms stuff. If you are looking for the OpenRPG Community Server code, it can be found at that link.

• Maps of Exalted are going to be uploaded to the Exalted Maps gallery, naturally. This is not where I will be placing the .psd bases. Those are huge and I only have so many terabytes of bandwidth a month to play with. Make a topic in the Getting to Know You forum. You'll be spared mollom and I will know you are going to spend some minimal effort when you get the files. If you make a good map, I would indeed appreciate if you 1) gave credit here and 2) uploaded them back : )

• I also have similar stuff for Legend of the Five Rings to do.

• Finally, I want to post some thoughts about the future - particularly deriving from my research while developing Solar Storms. I hope some people will find my observations useful.

Thank you for noticing.

  • Site Discussion
  • Login to post comments
Syndicate content

User login

  • Request new password

Navigation

  • Search
  • Forums
  • Image galleries
  • User list
  • home
  • forums
  • galleries
  • old wiki