What would happen if while traveling at the speed of light towards me you attempted to throw a ball at me? The answer is that you would have no time to actually do the throwing, because from your perspective you would run into me instantly. Okay, so now to address the original question. Of course, youРІР‚в„ўd also be dead pretty much instantly as you collided with object after object (each traveling at the speed of light with respect to you). Hence, if you crashed into anything (and you wouldРІР‚В¦after all, from your perspective the universe is flatter than a pancake in the direction youРІР‚в„ўre heading) it would get hurtled at insane speeds (since it would absorb some of your momentum). Since your mass is positive, infinite speed implies that your momentum is infinite. The race will be over as soon as it begins.Р”Р„nother consequence of light speed travel is that youРІР‚в„ўd become the most dangerous thing imaginable (move over, Chuck). In particular, if you are on a straight race track, and traveling at the speed of light, the race track will be compressed to zero length so that the starting line and the finishing line will be on top of each other. So if O is a hippo, and you are going fast enough, it will look like one damn flat hippo.Р”Р„s you approach the speed of light, this effect becomes increasingly pronounced, and at at the speed of light itself O will have zero length in the direction you are traveling. shrunk) along the direction of your motion.

If you move towards object O at a fast speed you will notice that O will be compressed (i.e. the light particle) no time will have elapsed on the journey! Yes, true physics is even weirder than crazy person made up physics.Р”Р„ possibly even wackier effect crops up as the result of length contraction (another consequence of relativity). But from the perspective of the photon (i.e. One reason this is really trippy is because if we view light coming from a distance object (such as a far away sun), from our perspective it might have taken years to get from us. The upshot of this is that youРІР‚в„ўll get wherever you are going without witnessing any time pass for anything not moving along with you. a clock strapped to O will stop ticking completely) from your perspective. When you are exactly AT the speed of light (impossible, but bare with me) no time whatsoever will elapse for O (i.e. As you approach the speed of light (with respect to O), this time dilation effect becomes more and more pronounced. That means, from the perspective of a person strapped to O, clocks attached to you are ticking slowly (i.e. You moving past O at 10,000 miles per hour is indistinguishable (as far as the laws of physics are concerned) from O moving past you at 10,000 miles per hour. This isnРІР‚в„ўt just an issue of you seeing clocks attached to O tick slowly, they actually DO tick slowly from your vantage point (no experiment you could possibly do would conclude otherwise). But that doesnРІР‚в„ўt mean that it wouldnРІР‚в„ўt be fun to speculate about what would happen if you were going at light speed.Р”Вue to a relativistic effect known as time dilation, the faster that you move with respect to some object O, the more time slows down for the object O (from your perspective). Burning all the oil (and plants, and animals) on our planet and converting them into kinetic energy would get you going really fast, but would give you exactly 0% of the total energy that you would actually need to get going that speed (since any number divided by infinity is zero).

It would take an infinite amount of energy to get anything with mass (e.g. Mathematician: First of all, let me point out that you will never travel at the speed of light (see this for details). If this is the case, however, then the tennis ball would have been moving at a speed of 0 m/s with respect to me. On the other hand, if it were moving at the speed of light relative to you, then it was moving at the same speed as me relative to you, thus both myself and the tennis ball will hit you simultaneously. The original question was: If IРІР‚в„ўm moving at the speed of light towards you and I throw a tennis ball at you (at, say, 5 m/s), what do you observe? Will I hit you first, the tennis ball, or both at the same time, or will something else happen entirely? The problem that IРІР‚в„ўm having thinking about this is that if the tennis ball did hit you first, then it would have been moving faster than the speed of light (relative to you).

Everything moves at the speed of light