🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug3.200726.18986@u.washington.edu>, jcr@milton.u.washington.edu (Mr. EuStress) writes:
|> Christopher Neufeld writes
|> > Velocities don't transform from frame to frame by simple addition,
|> > but by so-called Lorentz transformations. 
|> 
|> Another writes
|> > Relativity says that you can consider one of
|> > the systems as stationary (because all inertial frames of reference are
|> > equivalent), and then the other would be, according to you, travelling
|> > at twice the speed of light, which is not possible.
|> 
|>     Remember my "IF"s -- "if the one system could `observe'
|>     the other".  The one system cannot observe the other
|>     because observations can only made within *ONE*
|>     single (Lorentz transformed) system.  But,
|>     **observation does not make reality**.
|>       If two things, both moving near the speed of light,
|>     hit each other the real velocity is near 2c.
|>     The observed would be under c, but that observation
|>     does not change the "reality".
|>    


  Okay I'm only an undergraduate with a month of special relativity behind me 
  so bear with me and flame lightly because I'm gonna take a stab at this.

  I wonder how you get two objects going near the speed of light to crash into 
  each other and then get them to go 2c. The only way would be for them to stick
  to each other as one mass with a unified mass:

   m1v1 + m2v2 = (m1 + m2)v3 where m1,m2 are the mass of the objects and v1 and v2
   are some velocities near the speed of light. Now according to the above ideas v3
   should be near 2c. My question is how? If we're dealing with macroscopic masses then
   in a collison like this most of the energy would be lost in heat and other frictional
   forces. If we're dealing with microscopic or atomic particles then the closer you get
   these particles to the speed of light the more their mass increases. Now when these two
   masses meet they create a burst of high energy particles which is often seen in particle
   acclerators the world around. I really don't think anything could go faster than the speed
   of light but then I could be wrong.

   Okay but now a question:
   Why is it the "speed" of light and not the "velocity" of light? 

   Tripp Wallin
   Physics and Math Undergraduate                      "I'm not a man, I'm an angel...."
   wallin@hep1.physics.arizona.edu                      - Sun Ra live in London 1990