Why would'nt this work?
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The push would travel at the speed of sound in the stick, much slower than the speed of light
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Ok so since there's a bunch of science nerds on here and I'm sleep deprived I'm gonna ask my dumb ftl question.
If you're on a train and you walk towards the front of the train, your speed measured from outside of the train is the speed of the train (T) plus the speed of you walking (W).
So if there was a train inside of that train, and you walked inside of that, you'd go the speed of the outside train, plus the speed of the inside train, plus your own walking speed.
So what if we had a Russian nesting doll of trains, so that the inner most train was, from the outside, going as fast as light and you walked towards the front? Wouldn't you be going faster than light if you measured your speed from the outside?
Didn't come at me with how hard it would be to build a Russian nesting doll of super trains it's a hypothetical and I'm tired.
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No it wouldn’t. Sound is air vibration, which has to travel from one place to the next, static atoms don’t have to actually move to a place just transfer kinetic energy to the adjacenct atom, so it would be much closer to the speed of light. Although probably still (relatively (get it??)) slower.
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A wooden stick is pretty much unfordable in an unaltered state
Or a glass stick -
Not a science nerd. But I would assume the inner trains would like to push forward, stealing some kinetic energy from the outer train because it pushes itself away from the outer train and making the outer train slower or even push back.
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Probably quantum entanglement, which we (and certainly I) don’t fully understand yet
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Glass easily bends
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Sound is air vibration
Sound is not exclusive to air, it can be generalized to vibrations in any media. Whale song and dolphin echolocation are certainly sounds, and we're almost always talking about them propagating in water rather than air.
which has to travel from one place to the next
No, that isn't how sound works. In air this would be a description of wind, not sound.
just transfer kinetic energy to the adjacenct atom
This is actually a good description of how sound waves propagate.
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Perfectly rigid sticks don't exist.
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Because of relativistic effects, from your point of view on the train you would just walk forward. But you would notice a strange effect while the trains were accelerating: your atomically synchronized wristwatch has slowed down and stopped counting time. So it seems that your journey to the front of the train takes no time at all.
From someone standing on the side of the tracks catching a glimpse of you and the train as you whizz by, the front of the train is moving at light speed. You're at the back of the train completely frozen still, unable to move forward because the front of the train is moving away at light speed.
Weird things happen when you're talking about the limits of physical reality.
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your atomically synchronized wristwatch has slowed down and stopped counting time.
Wait, surely time would move at a normal speed within your own reference frame. The act of you walking to the front of the inner-most train you are in would be a normal occurence to you, but if you looked out of the window you would see a completely frozen scene.
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I would liken it to a long freight train starting to move. Once the front starts moving, it will still be a minute before the back starts moving. The space between the train couplings is like the spring effect between atoms, or something.
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Relativity would prevent this. If the train moves at the speed of light, then nothing inside it will move because time will stop. The amount of trains inside trains doesn't really change much except the effect of time dilation (slowdown) on each train. You can't actually accelerate to the speed of light.
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You are correct, I should have said there was an atomic clock out the window that the walker looked out at.
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There's no such thing as a perfectly rigid object.
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In a "perfectly rigid" stick (a fictional invention), the speed of sound is the speed of light.
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That's a great guess when you try to answer the problem with traditional (Newtonian) physics. However, space and time do not behave in a way we would expect when we go nearly at light speed. So Newtonian laws do not apply in the same sense anymore.
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There was, but now I'm getting older and more tired
