Originally posted by Empire:
Hey this is my first post here and I'm just a sophomore in highschool. I'm obviously very interested in science and I came across this site when I was reading an article about elecrtron entanglement.
Anyway I'm trying to understand more about this topic now. I know light, even from a stationary object, can go faster than the measurment of the speed in a vaccum. "Scientists have seen a pulse of light emerge from a cloud of gas before it even entered."
So if you could explain this example that I am going to put together after reading all posts thus far.
So imagine the experiment to measure the speed of light using one stationary mirror and one rotating. Imagine all of that equipment was on a desk along with observer 1. Observer 2 is stationary.
Now assume the whole desk (and observer 1) is moving 99.99% of the speed of light. I imagine that observer 1 would see the same thing as if the desk were stationary.
Heres my real question. Would observer 2 see the light as moving 1.9999 times the speed of light? From what I've read it seems not, but why?
You are correct to conclude that observer 1 will still see the same result; because observer 1 and the equipment remains stationary relative to each other no matter how fast the desk is moving.
The point you have to realise is that observer 2 will always (also) measure the speed of light as c relative to his/her "stationary" position, no matter how fast the desk moves relative to him/her. According to observer 2, the second mirror will move away from the light reflected from the first mirror. So the light will have to travel a further distance to reach the second mirror. I hope it helps.
