traveling at the speed of light.

[Umlüx]

everybody knows those pretty star trails from star trek. but what would it really look like, looking out a window while traveling with lightspeed?

all white? all black? or still the same view you saw when you were accelerating, because you are as fast as the photons out there?

[tiger336]

Due note you can't go at the speed of light©. Because the closer toC you get the more weight you have to move.

[Mr Shifty]

http://www.gizmag.com/hyperspace-travel-look-like/25794/

[BeefTenderloin]

Due note you can't go at the speed of light©. Because the closer toC you get the more weight you have to move.

Incorrect. Imagine it as a triangle of speed, energy, and mass. If you have any mass, you can't make energy = speed if you have any mass. Will draw a diagram later.

[lajoswinkler]

everybody knows those pretty star trails from star trek. but what would it really look like, looking out a window while traveling with lightspeed?

all white? all black? or still the same view you saw when you were accelerating, because you are as fast as the photons out there?

Those trails in Star Trek aren't stars. Typical high speed in TNG is less than 6500 c and that's several hours to the nearest star.

The trails were implemented as a cool thing for the science fiction show and later explained as meteorites impacting the warp bubble or shields.

[Awaras]

You can try this little game that simulates the visual effects of moving close to the speed of light, but be warned, you WILL feel slightly nauseus after playing it for more than a few minutes.

Do not try it if you are prone to epileptic seasures.

http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/

[Seret]

or still the same view you saw when you were accelerating, because you are as fast as the photons out there?

I know next to nothing about relativity, but my understanding is that c (being a constant) is the same for all observers, irrespective of their own motion. Photons moving towards you always appear to move at c, even if your velocity is c as well. I wouldn't like to say there aren't distortions in what you'd see, funny things happen to spacetime at those speeds, but I don't think the speed of photons arriving at you being anything other than c would be the cause. I'll leave it to someone that understands the maths to take a crack at what you would see.

[stringyquark]

Even though they appear to move at you at C, they would be very heavily red or blue shifted that the human eye most likely wouldn't be able to perceive them. So it would look like a lot of black.

Just my best guess.

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

Black, because time would have stopped and the Doppler effect as noted above

[qeveren]

Photons, traveling at c, don't actually have a meaningful frame of reference: to them, all journeys take precisely zero time, regardless of distance, and all of spacetime is to them compressed to zero size. Not much to see, there.

[WestAir]

In Star Trek the starship is bending spacetime and riding the bubble to achieve FTL, as opposed to actually accelerating past C.

Because the ship isn't moving faster than light, but is riding a bubble of bending space-time, does that change how the effect of moving FTL will appear? Would all electromagnetic radiation still be red-shifted past the cosmic band and into infinity if the ship isn't really accelerating all that fast?

[K^2]

We don't need to talk about Star Trek. We have theoretical warp drives within General Relativity. If, say, we talk about Alcubierre Drive, there is the corresponding Alcubierre Metric, and one can answer questions of what will the universe look like to the traveler with mathematical precision.

Some simple things can be answered without getting into differential geometry. For example, imagine somebody is shining light directly at the ship from the front. The simplest way to think about blue shift in this case is to picture that light is sent in pulses. There is going to be a finite number of such pulses sent and the ship will pass through all of them in finite time. So the light from the front will be blue-shifted, but not infinitely so. In contrast, light sent from behind the ship cannot catch up at all. You will not see any light from behind. You can also think of that as infinitely red-shifted. In general, you will see something qualitatively similar to what you would observe traveling at near light speeds. There will be visual distortion with more of the universe appearing to be in front of you than behind, as well as areas of blue and red shift. But unlike warp travel, if you travel at sub-light speeds there is no blind spot behind you which you cannot see at all. Depending on how fast you are traveling, from the warp bubble you cannot see a cone of space behind you. That doesn't mean that there is just a cone of darkness, however, since light you shine in any direction from within the bubble has to end up somewhere. Rather the field of view is distorted in such a way that you see something in all directions, but can still see only a portion of the universe around you.

The one thing I'm not sure about is whether the rear portion of the bubble appears "reflective". Basically, light you shine directly back behind the ship cannot exit directly back. Otherwise, light could enter going the other way and we already agreed that light cannot catch up to the bubble. So there will definitely be deflection. But I'm not sure if any of that light is deflected back into the bubble. It seems most reasonable that looking directly back you should see reflection of your ship in some distorted form, but I can be wrong about this. I suppose, I could do some math and find out, but I'm feeling lazy right now. It's a bit of work.