Recently I have been watching a TV series about the life of my favorite scientist, the great Albert Einstein. Curiosity led me to read a book about his life and his theories about space-time. It was mentioned that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and he mentioned that its speed will always be relative to the observer no matter how fast that person is moving. (If you measure the speed of light on a spaceship or on earth it will be constant)
I find it puzzling and it took me a while to grasp this theory. I managed to think of an example to explain this phenomenon.
Here goes,
You could get to any speed limit by adding velocities on a moving platform. A simple scenario can be seen if a person is walking inside a moving bus. When you are outside the bus, you would see that person moving faster than the bus.
Imagine that we are on a train moving at the speed of light, the outside world would look really weird but if both of us stood about 5 meters apart on the train, how would you observe me? Will I look different than if the train was not moving at all? Of course not.
What can we conclude here? The light on the train travels faster than the light outside because the light from a lamppost will not be able to overtake the train.
This might sound impossible but let me put it this way. The amount of time that you take to walk towards me will be the same in both cases(stationery or at the speed of light)
The stars are usually many light years away. What we are looking at might be a sight before we were even born.
I will end of with a simple thought experiment:
It takes the light from our sun 8 minutes to reach us. If we can travel faster than the speed of light, does it mean that we can travel back in time? If we can travel from The Sun to earth in 5 minutes, a person on earth will see me on earth 3 minutes before seeing me near The Sun.
Cheers,
Leapingluqe
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