Relatively high speeds, time dilation and weight gain

I'll start with a quick apology to anyone who receives this
mail and my last one twice. Mailand news seems to be exploding.
Sorry.

Concerning weight gain at speeds that make Einstein pay attention:

(this is what I understood at least)

You start off with E=mc2. This provides you with a direct
relationship between matter and energy. Now according to old Albert,
once you reach for example 99% (where have I seen that figure before)
of the speed of light, any energy you pump in to increase your speed
starts feeding in not to your acceleration because you are getting to
the stage where you can't accelerate any more. It must go somewhere so
your mass starts to get increased - the more energy you put in, the
heavier you'll get, the equations will all still work.

For another way of describing it, check out the Gap series by
Stephen Donaldson. This contains a nice weapon called a matter cannon.
What it does is send out a beam of energy at the speed of light which will
convert to matter when it hits matter. because at the moment of hitting matter
it will have the maximum possible speed, it also has maximum mass for a second
or two. Enough time to do severe damage anyway.

Chris Lyth
...................................................
Nothing really rocks, and nothing really rolls
And nothing's ever worth the cost.

I'll start with a quick apology to anyone who receives this
mail and my last one twice. Mailand news seems to be exploding.
Sorry.

Concerning weight gain at speeds that make Einstein pay attention:

(this is what I understood at least)

You start off with E=mc2. This provides you with a direct
relationship between matter and energy. Now according to old Albert,
once you reach for example 99% (where have I seen that figure before)
of the speed of light, any energy you pump in to increase your speed
starts feeding in not to your acceleration because you are getting to
the stage where you can't accelerate any more. It must go somewhere so
your mass starts to get increased - the more energy you put in, the
heavier you'll get, the equations will all still work.

For another way of describing it, check out the Gap series by
Stephen Donaldson. This contains a nice weapon called a matter cannon.
What it does is send out a beam of energy at the speed of light which will
convert to matter whn it hits matter. because at the moment of hitting matter
it will have the maximum possible speed, it also has maximum mass for a second
or two. Enough time to do severe damage anyway.

Chris Lyth
...................................................
Nothing really rocks, and nothing really rolls
And nothing's ever worth the cost.

Yeah, but it's the inherent energy in an object at rest, and has bugger all to
do with travelling at speed.
That sounds like "f = ma" to me, one of the few formulae I can still remember
from all that time ago.

It almost sounds plausible, too.

Dominic.

"The body is a sacred temple. Sex is not just a matter of knowing how
to enter that temple, it's finding out where everything is, shifting
the furniture about, and remembering to move more slowly and with
more respect than you'd really like to." [Spanky (by Christopher Fowler)]

to
I admit I had forgotten F=ma, but E=mc2 is important to this matter
simply because it allows for matter to be converted into energy and
vice versa.
Without that principle in place to begin with, the concept of energy
becoming matter simply because you are going quickly is just a load
of bollocks.

Chris Lyth
...................................................
The world won't end in darkness,
It'll end in family fun,
With Coca-cola clouds
behind a Big Mac sun.

One God by The Beautiful South

In article <E10ud7z-0000to-00@>, Chris Lyth <beeblebear@> wrote:
Well, actually no.

"f=ma" can be integrated over distance to get "e=1/2 mv2". Which is odd,
really, because at the speed of light that would give "e=1/2 mc2", which
looks dangerously familiar.


But what you start off with is the business of trying to measure the speed
of light when you are moving yourself. Michelson and Morley did it before
the war - and their experiment was what set Einstein off on all his
speculation. They asked "if the Earth is moving through space, the speed of
light must be different in different directions". But it isn't.

Don't ask me why - I'm tired enough. But all the fudge trying to work that
point out is called "relativity". And they still don't know, because all
this "time dilation" stuff to alter the speeds only works in one direction.


Example: I go to the next star and you stay home. I accelerate at 10
metres per second (a good way to accelerate, since my body is used to it),
and so get within a smidgen of the speed of light in about a year. (Do the
maths - it's true. A year is about 31,000,000 seconds, and lightspeed is
about 298,000,000 metres a second.) When I do, I point the ship back in the
direction I came from, and come to rest at Proxima sometime in 2002. Then I
poke around a bit, and come home - four years older.

The only problem is that you lot are all ten years older. Now according to
relativity, at the point I turn my ship around there is no way to tell which
of us is moving and which is still. But you can - by comparing clocks.

So, if we want to find out which planet in the Universe is the one that is
stationary, all we have to do is compare clocks. The place where time
travels fastest - that is the centre of the Universe.

Which rather breaks the central tenets of Relativity, unfortunately.


Me, I try not to worry about it.



Simon

---
"This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind" -Ecclesiastes 4:16

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