If a car runs at the speed of light, will the headlights work?

H. Li, Born in China, Phd candidate i... (more)

174 upvotes by Jules Stoop, Ross Heyman, Robert Hogben, (more)
Excellent question!

You just come up with the same question that Einstein had when he was 16,Einstein's Most
Famous Thought Experiment. That question was the original motivation for him to develop
the Special relativity.

The first problem is any object that has a "non-zero inertial mass" cannot travel as fast as
the speed of light, only Massless particles can travel at the speed of light. However, this
question is reasonable since you may not know Special relativity, actually no one knows that
before 1905.

The short answer is, Yes! The headlights still work.

Because Special relativity states that in any Inertial frame of reference, the speed of light is
the same, about 300000km/s. No matter where you measure the speed of light, in a space
ship or somewhere in your house, you get the same result. (Strictly your house is not a
good Inertial frame of reference because the Earth's rotation).

So when you're in a car that travels at the speed of light, the physics in your world is totally
the same. The speed of light you see, is still around 300000km/s. More interesting, if one of
your friend is standing by the road and watching you and your car, and he decides to
measure the speed of light of the headlights too. He will definitely get the same answer,
around 300000km/s.

Sounds weird?

When we add two velocities, we're using Galilean Velocity-addition formula,

Say if you are running at 10m/s on a train that is travelling at 100m/s, an observer stand
beside the railway would notice you are travelling at

Unfortunately, that's actually WRONG! The correct way is to use Special relativity, also
known as Lorentz transformation.

where c = speed of light.

m/s

In everyday life, the speed of an object is much much much smaller than the speed of light,
u' and v <<< c, so those two transformations of velocities are almost the same, just check
the value above, they are very close. But when dealing with objects moving at a speed
comparable to that of light, Galilean theory fails and Special relativity is the right one.

For example, in your question:

When you sit in a car that travels at the speed of light, the car is just anInertial frame of
reference, since you can't feel the velocity (we can only feel the acceleration). So in your
world, the physics laws are totally the same as those in another Inertial frame of reference.
Then a better question would be: If another person stands outside the car and measure the
speed of light, what would he get?
the answer is not

but

You see, in his world, all the Physical constant should be the same, and the speed of light is
just one of those constants.