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How fast would you have to be going for that to happen?
To get red-shift? An appreciable fraction of light-speed, which is 3×10^8 m/s.
Blue-shift, not red-shift.
Anyway, if you want the reflected light to shift from, say, 700 nm to 450 nm, you would have to be approaching the bumper at about 0.42c (42% of the speed of light in a vacuum), or 125,000 km / s (281,000,000 mph).
Depending on how red and how blue, the required velocity could be upwards of .55c, which equates 170,000 km/s.
I found 0.4 times ligthspeed, depending on the color of the stricker and the blue you want.
Right, which is why I specified 700 nm to 450 nm as an example.
I am such a geek, I thought this was hilarious.
One would think that readers of this blog would get it.
One also wonders what percentage of the general public would.
About the same percentage who get “1.803 × 10^12 furlongs per fortnight. It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law!”
I didn’t get it…then again, I’m only 17.
I didn’t get it either, but I’m only 30…
Hint look at doppler effect.
Then read the text about “red-shift”. But in this case it is blue-shift since the red colour of the sticker will become more and more toward the blue if you move towards it at a very fast speed. A bit similar like a high pitch sound of the train when you drive fast towards it.
I don’t get it because I’m a girl! I mean, if I were a nerd, I would get it. Even so, I figured it had something to do with being a nerd, so I would have looked it up within that category of knowledge and not said I don’t get it. The internet, and all of your evidential use of it, leaves none of us any excuse to admit we don’t get something.
It doesn’t mean you have to look it up, it just means you fail at googling shlt that flies over your head.
Kodie, don’t worry to much. Most people won’t understand it unless you know a bit about astronomy.
Basically it is some kind of “Doppler effect” when a train comes at you you hear the sound of the train in a much higher pith than it is travelling away from you which would be a lower pitch than when it stood still.
Just like sound, light is also some kind of wave with a specific frequency for a given colour. Red would be a low pitch the blue a high pitch. So when you travel very very very very fast towards the car the colour will change from red to more blue like.
The joke is that if you see the red part of the sticker as more and more blue then you are travelling too fast and will hit the car. And some people calculated this and it turns out that you would have about half speed of light. In about 1 second you would be about halfway to the moon, that fast!
Apparently my nerdosity overcomes my girliness, then.
I was wincing about kodie’s response, thank you.
I know this is two years old.
I am made glad that my power to wince people extends over two years beyond my blog comments.
Relativistic effects do distort one’s perception of time, dear.
How about this one; There are 10 types of people in the world; those who understand binary, and those who don´t.
Right, and five out of four people have trouble with fractions.
There are only 2 kinds of people in the world: people who have eaten a tuna sandwich in the last day and those who have not.
There are three types of people in this world – those that can count, and those that can’t!
I’m not surprised that not everyone on this blog gets it. That’s not a disparaging comment about UF posters, just an observation on the way our society values science education. Posters are (in general) intelligent and well-educated, but getting the reference requires A) actually learning some basic physics and B) remembering what you’ve learned since you will probably never use it. We as a culture (Western, but American culture in particular) put a very low value on scientific and mathematical training as part of a basic education, to the point where admitting that you know this stuff can be a source of social embarrassment. Even among college-educated people, those who have taken even a single basic physics course are in the minority, and the number who remember the details after graduation is smaller still. It’s almost chic to be able to say that you’ve forgotten it; this admission is the first step towards absolution for being a geek and studying (ugh!) Elitist Hard Stuff in the first place. There are probably a few out people there who are inquisitive enough to educate themselves on basic physics, but they constitute a vanishingly tiny minority.
That’s totally right=(
I qualified for an early college course in biology. The whole time I had the attitude that it wasn’t helpful, and I think this seeped into my brain and made it decide that it wasn’t important to remember those things long-term. It never made it to permanent memory. I made a 95 on my final exam, but now I can’t even remember the name of the chemical that broke something apart to make energy. ACP? ATP? ATD? ATC? I certainly don’t remember the basic cell structure or DNA, except for a few things. I remember telomerases(which I’m not even spelling correctly enough for spell check to fix) , and a very basic understanding of how evolution works(I would of remembered it better if I wasn’t a creationist at the time), but that’s really all.
Come to think of it, I think religion had a big thing to do with it. I can remember all of the creationist arguments I was taught, even though I didn’t make good grades in the class, and even though that was a very long time ago. The fact that my brain considered it useful for debating evolutionists probably had a lot to do with it. I sincerely believe that if I wasn’t a creationist when I took the course, I’d know a lot more than I do know about biology. Fortunately, there’s thunderf00t.
I think your comment that if you’d not been a creationist at the time, then you’d have remembered more of what you were taught is quite telling. It’s an indictment of the bad that believers do to their children.
And: “now I can’t even remember the name of the chemical that broke something apart to make energy. ACP? ATP? ATD? ATC?” I think it’s ATM, and the energy is called money.
It’s mostly that atheists =/= science nerds. I mean, draw the venn diagram, a lot of us are, but it’s not the value of education, it’s not that some of us haven’t studied this, it’s possibly that this is the sort of thing I missed by opting out of science after 10th grade and the uselessness and inspirationlessness of science beforehand, but it is just not a requisite of atheism, bare fact, to have a handle on scientific jokes.
Might I suggest that today would be a good time to send a few $$ to NPR? Even if it’s only $5., it would still demonstrate that people care about non-corporate news. That’s about the only place where I regularly get any science news, and of course Republicans are frothing at the mouth to defund it and PBS (the only channel for sugar-free kids’ shows.)
The best part is they want to silence NPR because they think NPR was trying to silence one of their own. An eye for an eye!
As far as I’m concerned, if an organization is publicly funded, then it is a government organization. I don’t think the NPR should have fired Juan Williams. He’s totally a dumbass; I don’t panic everytime I see a priest in full Christian garb with his robes and his cross fearing that he’ll molest me or publicly tie me to a stake and burn me alive. I don’t freak out when I see a Rabbi in full Jew garb, fearing that he’ll stone me to death.
TheAmazingAtheist did a good video a while back. “Muslims just need an Ipod”. While it was simplified and mainly intended as comedy, it had a good point. Juan Williams lives in a nice neighborhood, even if his NPR salary was cut. Any Muslims he sees aren’t going to blow him up; they’re too comfortable.
Still, back on point, all he did was express stupidity and unfounded bigotry. I don’t think he should be fired for this while the NPR gets public funding; to me, public funding=Government organization which means they’re bound by the first amendment.
As far as I’m concerned, if an organization is publicly funded, then it is a government organization. I don’t think the NPR should have fired Juan Williams.[...] Still, back on point, all he did was express stupidity and unfounded bigotry. I don’t think he should be fired for this while the NPR gets public funding; to me, public funding=Government organization which means they’re bound by the first amendment.
There are good reasons why it doesn’t work this way in practice; mere receipt of funds has consistently been held to be an insufficient connection to declare an organization a government agent. In this case, it particularly makes sense, because the percentages of funding from the government are truly minuscule, and indirect (primary through competitive grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting).
In order to be a government agent in this case, the additional element must be in showing some degree of control by the government over the operations and programming decisions of NPR. Unlike, say, the BBC model of public broadcasting, this is not the case with NPR. Ironically, if Congress succeeds in punishing NPR for this firing by withholding or attenuating funds, thus changing its behavior, they may indirectly cause it to meet this second prong of the standard in the future.
That would be a baaaaaad thing.
For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t have fired him for this either. Excoriate, yes; fire, no. On the other hand, there is sufficient anecdotal evidence that suggests he *wasn’t* fired over this; that this incident was just a pretext for firing him for a long string of other problems and poor performance.
I suppose that makes sense; Iraq doesn’t have to use our constitution just because we gave them AK-47s and fancy helicopters.
I still don’t know if its the best policy, but if it is indirect funding due to a program, then that’s different. Its like taking away someone’s food stamp card because they told their kid to shutup.
They had the NPR Ombudsman on Talk of the Nation. She said quite clearly and plainly that he wasn’t fired over this incident. The Muslim comment was just the final straw in a long list of warnings that Williams was given. She said he was hired as a news analyst, and that his transitioning into a pundit sacrificed his credibility in his original position.
I always enjoyed Juan, even though I didn’t always agree with him. After hearing about all the previous warnings, and his ignoring of them, I fully support NPR’s right to cancel his contract.
What really pisses me off about NPR is that they only pay for 10% of the cost of producing Science Friday! How can they fully fund Talk of the Nation, but fail to fund my favorite frelling program!!
I understand red shift and all that (kind of…sort of); I just didn’t get the joke because it had no context. What is the APS? Physical Society? For me, that sounds like some kind of organization that encourages people to go see a doctor for their regular physical. If it had said Physics or Astronomy Society, I’d be all like, “That is not a funny joke because no one can go that fast.”
Chester, it’s funny in that inside joke sort of way.
Half of your laughter is directed at the people scratching their heads and trying to figure it out.
As a physics major, I fell off my chair laughing.
Slow down, you move too fast.
You got to make the moment last, just
Kickin’ down the cobblestones,
Lookin’ for fun and feelin’ groovy.
La ta da da da da da, feelin’ groovy.
If that sticker is blue, I’m going at warp speed, which means I’m totally awesome.
Nah; one half impulse power would do it.
Okay, so I’m only half awesome…
Only from the rest frame perspective.
Win.
A friend on facebook posted a link to a article by a dating site. It was mostly about the differences between homo- and hetero-sexuals. But they had an amazing statistic from a survey they had given: 5% of men and 10% of woman (independent of sexuality) don’t know the sun is bigger than the earth.
There are small steps and big leaps.
Pretty sure this is the one you’re talking about.
Gotta love the quaintness of the phrase “Practising Homosexual”. I want someone to ask me that question, just so I can reply, “no, by now I’m pretty damn good at it.”
My response is something like that: I say, “I’m a perfected homosexual.”
Mua-ha-ha-ha… Gotta love that one.
Of course, if I could go that fast, I wouldn’t be anywhere near the I-95 parking lot—errr, highway. :-)
I saw this IRL once. In Central (read Hicksville) Minnesota of all places.
Nice thread!!