Tuesday, January 17, 2006

More science questions

V at Left in the West posted a cool link about black holes. One of the advantages of being a lawyer is that you get to learn a little bit about just about everything. It would be really cool if someone would host a strange scientific question segment that would allow knowledgable people to give a quick answer.
Just for fun, I will posit one of those questions that I have not been able to get my head around and see if anyone can explain it to someone as dumb as I am. The question:
If you have a space ship travelling at one half the speed of light, we know that the person on board would also experience a time dilation that would slow time down to one half of what an outside observer would see. So if our spaceman were to measure the speed of light, he would be using the Newtonian system of rate times time = distance. But if his time is one half, wouldn't that require twice the speed to come up with the same distance. If so, what does that do to the speed limit that nothing can go faster than the speed of light?
Any help would be appreciated.

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