Quote:
Originally Posted by Crack
If you could drive a car at the speed of light and then turn on the headlights, what would happen?
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As an object with mass would require an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to
c, the car would have to be moving through a medium in which the speed of light is slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. Friction between this medium and the car caused by the relative velocity difference would heat it and destroy the car from the front forward and outside in. The car would therefore have to be accelerated to this arbitrarily high sub-
c velocity in a vacuum prior to exceeding the speed of light..
Upon transition to a non-vacuum in which an object with mass could exceed the speed of light, you would switch the lights on and nothing would happen because your nervous system is incapable of acting quickly enough for the switch to be fully actuated before the headlights were destroyed by friction between the car and the atmosphere. The process would probably emit quite a bit of light, though.