5 ms·
how can that work if nothing is faster than light in the referential of the objects being compared? is it that space expands faster than light moves?
by make3 4y ago
how can that work if nothing is faster than light in the referential of the objects being compared? is it that space expands faster than light moves?
- seanw444 4y agoCorrect, as I understand it. No matter can travel at the speed of light, and no light can travel faster than the speed of light. But the rule doesn't extend to the rate of expansion of the "field" on which those things exist.
- seszett 4y agoWhen I read this, it seems to me like this is more or less the same as saying that the speed of light is decreasing, but I am probably wrong?
- jhoechtl 4y agoIs this something anybody ever thought out to look at things this way? Sounds like an intriguing Gedankenexperiment
- eigenket 4y agoYeah, ideas like this are usually called "tired light" models, they have been extensively explored for the last hundred years or so. A lot of these models have been shown to be false by experiments, but I guess if you try you can probably cook up models which haven't been falsified by anything yet.
- dpkirchner 4y agoLike if you calculated the speed not in meters per second but fraction-of-the-universe per second?
- cout 4y agoWhat if space isn't expanding and we are just shrinking?
- make3 4y agoonly if the expansion is really equal everywhere I guess
- function_seven 4y agoI vote we bring back “aether” as a valid term. The aether is stretching everywhere, and in so doing it spreads distant things away faster than light can overcome.
- make3 4y agoI mean that's just space
- micromacrofoot 4y agoI did a wrong, ignore me
- fknorangesite 4y agoThis is exactly wrong: c is the one speed that is constant to all observers.
- micromacrofoot 4y agooh so, space changes... not the light?
- tetha 4y agoAh. So it's a referential thing? If we had some absolute zero reference outside the universe - let's call it a great alien petri dish - we probably could find something moving faster than the speed of light, in reference to that absolute, out-of-universe observation point? But measuring that might be hard. And on the other hand, we might be able to find two objects which are static with reference to the universe, but actually increasing the distance from each other at a speed beyond c or rather 2c, which should be impossible, because the universe between them expands? This is very weird to think about, but accepting your reference framework - the universe - changes makes it easier.
- delecti 4y ago> is it that space expands faster than light moves? Yes. Picture an ant walking on the surface of a balloon. You could conceivably blow up the balloon faster than the ant could walk across it. If you were blowing up an infinitely stretchy balloon with an ant at the far end, you could conceivably blow it up fast enough that the ant could never reach you.
- thom 4y agoThink of the universe as some sort of information system. The speed of light caps the rate at which information propagates, which is a desirable or at least necessary property at scale. But there’s some discrete substrate underlying that propagation of information. That substrate can multiply, like inserting nodes in a graph or empty spaces in a linked list. That makes it longer to traverse from one end to the other. The rate of propagation stays the same but the map keeps changing.