cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19504984
It’s all relative
Color is a social construct
Well, the names for different parts of the color spectrum are, I suppose. Wavelength of EM radiation, and how your brain interprets it as color, is ‘real’.
What use? The only thing I can think of is ‘colourful’ language, which doesn’t seem to really make sense in this context.
OK I need someone to explain this to me cause AFAIK light speed is constant no matter how fast moving the source is
Light speed is constant but the apparent frequency and wavelength (which roughly corresponds to what colour we see) change due to the Doppler effect
So light is a wave. Shorter wavelengths are bluer longer wavelengths are redder. When you walk towards a wave you hit the peaks and troughs faster than had you been still. They come slower if you’re walking away from it. The Doppler effect is that but with light waves and velocities that make it relevant
Adding to the other comments; I once saw a interesting video of a visual demonstration of that effect and other weird things that happen close to the speed of light. It was this one if i remember correctly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge_j31Yx_yk
Which is achieved by spacetime dilation which can in turn stretch or compress the light waves.
While it is true that space time dilation can cause red/blueshift, that is a distinct from the doppler effect which is the primary effect here.
(dilation plays only a small role: without time dilation our answer going from 700nm to 350nm would be 0.5c instead of the 0.6c calculated below)
How fast would the rose have to be going to blueshift that much? Someone please do the math
For a shift from about 700nm to 350nm: coming right at you at 0.6c
It would also have a kinetic energy of about 1.1234 Petajoules, on the order of magnitude of the Tsar Bomba
Kinetic energy or total energy? Assuming the rose weight 10 grams I get that 1.12PJ total energy, but only 0.23PJ is kinetic.
I don’t know about blue but here is all the math to turn a red light green… Don’t think of doing it though while you could probably get out of a ticket for running a red light I don’t even know what the fine is for driving many thousand times the speed limit is.
Edit: just realized I forgot to post the actual link… https://sciencenotes.org/fast-go-make-red-light-look-green-relativistic-doppler-effect/#:~:text=If we take the speed of light to,to convert to km%2Fhr%2C you get 197%2C640%2C000 km%2Fhr.
To bad the traffic light is in the speed radar’s reference frame, when your licence plate is on the photo I doubt the judge will care that your yellow car is clearly blue in the photo
Speed chills
