Dr. Brian Cox explains what the problem is with traveling near the speed of light. From the traveler’s perspective the distances shrink.
The protons travel around the LHC – Large Hadron Collider at CERN, a circumference of 27 kilometers. But due the protons traveling around it at 99.999999% the speed of light, distances shrink by a factor of 7000. The protons see its circumference as only 1/7000, or 4 meters.
“”According to the laws of physics, if you can build a spacecraft that goes very close to the speed of light, you can shrink the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy and therefore the time it takes to get there by an arbitrary amount, in principle in a minute, according to physics. However, the downside is that you couldn’t come back … If you came back to the Earth at that speed, to tell everybody what you had found, *at least* four million years would have passed on the Earth.Dr. Brian Cox explains what the problem is with traveling near the speed of light. From the traveler’s perspective the distances shrink.
The protons travel around the LHC – Large Hadron Collider at CERN, a circumference of 27 kilometers. But due the protons traveling around it at 99.999999% the speed of light, distances shrink by a factor of 7000. The protons see its circumference as only 1/7000, or 4 meters.
“”According to the laws of physics, if you can build a spacecraft that goes very close to the speed of light, you can shrink the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy and therefore the time it takes to get there by an arbitrary amount, in principle in a minute, according to physics. However, the downside is that you couldn’t come back … If you came back to the Earth at that speed, to tell everybody what you had found, *at least* four million years would have passed on the Earth.
We could in principle explore the galaxy and beyond, but getting to chat to everybody about what we found is forbidden.”
https://youtube.com/shorts/dRtebhvrg80?si=Y7PTo3AJOFGo8d-C
