User talk:Psychicgeoff

I read this quote on Wikipedia "However, some "things" can still move faster than light. For example, the location where the beam of a search light hits the bottom of a cloud can move faster than light when the search light is turned rapidly.[30]" This quote is under the title special relativity and subtitle Causality and Prohibition of motion faster than light. This quote should be removed because it wrong and is not supportable by special relativity which states clearly due to the Lorentz invariance nothing can travel faster light including light. For example. Spinning a spot light will not move the light beam faster than C because the light cannot travel outside the Minkowski space light cone. Therefore one cannot move a beam a light faster than C by rotating a spot light quickly since the photons in the beam still leave the spot light at C and move through space at C no matter how faster you spin the spotlight. Only the direction of the light will be changed but not its velocity which is limited to C, 186,000 miles per second. Psychicgeoff (talk) 22:19, 13 March 2015 (UTC) A simple thought experiment will disprove the idea that you can spin a spotlight so the light will move faster than C. On a clear night we have a large spot light. The Moon is within eight degrees from Mars in the sky. We shine the light on the Moon and then on Mars and back to the Moon quickly. From our perspective it looks as thought the light bean is hitting the Moon and Mars at the same time so it's going faster than light, but that is only an illusion since we only see the light beam with the naked eye in our atmosphere. It takes one and one half seconds for the light to go the Moon but it takes anywhere forty minutes to over an hour for the pulse of light to get to Mars depending on how far away Mars, a distance which can vary depending on the positions of the planets in their orbits. We get the same with with the spot light reflecting off the bottom of a cloud. I might think if I spin it fast enough the reflection will appear to be moving faster than light but that is not correct because light cannot move faster than C or it would be outside the Minkowski space light cone and violate special relativity.