Memes

Can I imagine a tardigrade instead?

Thanks for that that's actually a really helpful analogy.

I mean i still dont understand. Brain hurty. But thanks anyway

All we are going to die?

This is a truly great explanation. One worthy of Feynman. Physics degree?

The space between atoms starts to expand faster than the speed of light. Well i guess that is the universe fucked.

courtney you are going to invent rocket ants knock it off

Well, the thing space is moving into and across. Or the nothing.

Best intuition I've heard for this is that "things" can't move faster than light, but not everything is a "thing".

Imagine doing shadow puppets on the wall with a flashlight. You move the bunny left, shadow moves left. The further away the wall is, the faster the apparent speed of the shadow bunny. You might think that, far enough away and with a strong enough light, your shadow bunny would be racing across the sky faster than the speed of light -- and the crazy thing is, you'd be correct! The shadow (absence of light) can move arbitrarily fast. But the light itself is moving at its normal constant speed from the flashlight out into space, perpendicular to the travel of the bunny, like a garden hose spraying water. The time it takes for the shadow to even begin to move is governed by the speed of light. No information can be communicated faster than light because the light travels at the speed of light to illuminate the places where the shadow isn't.

Best analogy I heard for it is if you put a load of dots on a balloon, then inflate it. Are the dots getting further away? Yes. Is there just the same amount of rubber between each dot as when you put the dots on? Yes. Can you measure the relative speed of the dots? Yes! But have they actually gone anywhere? No...ish?

Wtf is a megaparsec? It's a million parsecs. Tf is a parsec? A parallax arcsecond.

...Tf is a parallax arcsecond?

It's 3.26 lightyears.

That's intuitive but actually completely wrong. There is no "absolute" reference frame, and nothing can move faster than light in any relative reference frame.

The only thing that gets around that is the expansion of space itself. It's not that the objects are moving away from each other, it's that the distance between them is expanding, causing them to become farther apart.

The best analogy is to picture an ant crawling on the surface of an expanding balloon.

I fucking hate that aspect of Special Relativity when I did l A-Level Physics (wait, shouldn’t that be “Physic” in the US to go with “Math”?). Two spaceships head off in opposite directions at light speed - from the frame of reference of each spaceship, the other is moving away at C, not 2C, because the Universe would rather slow down time itself than let anything move faster than its stupid precious C!

Relative speeds also cannot exceed the speed of light. Since there's no absolute reference frame, if this were possible it would be no different than exceeding the speed of light on "absolute" terms. Once you get up to speeds where this would matter, funny dilation effects that I'm too dumb to understand would prevent this.

I have had thoughts like that before! Especially since at school the atomic model that was taught looked like a little galaxy (which I now know is inaccurate) and it seemed like going smaller or going bigger just repeated similiar patterns, so to say.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

Terry Pratchett