Any science freak out there can answer that?

[maniajk]

What I was wondering was, if one was to (theoriticaly of course) build a contraption that would allow travel at and above the speed of light, would an effect analogous to the sonic boom occur?

As far as I know this would be impposible to test because:

1. When objects start to near the speed of light they lose mass because their nuclei get excited and start emiting pions, and their electrons start to change their spin more often and start emiting low energy photons (infinitly redshifted). This means that somewhere just before the speed of light the objects would lose all their mass and we would be left with nothing to accelerate. :o

2. When objects near the speed of light it takes more and more energy to accelerate them, this need increase exponentially, until we would need an infifnite amount of energy to keep accelerating it (this would happen just before light speed). :wacko:

I can only guess on that matter.  I can imagine how photons behind the said device would not reflect against it, so it would be 'invisible' from behind, assuming you can manage see and object that can go 'round the earth 7.5 time per second.

Not only would anything directly behind the object not be able to see it, but it would be "censored" from them as an "event horison" would form beetwen them.
But the "weak forces" (gravity) from the object would still effect the obserever because the light can still theoreticlly reach him (it's just infinitly redshifted). :blink:

In front of the device, photons would 'stack' and create a light so bright and friction created by all those photons would probably generate gargantuesque amounts of heat that would obliterate anything.

Since the object would then be traveling so fast that it can't exist in normal time-space the photons would just ignore and go right through it!
On the other hand, according to quantom theory the object would be at the "end of time" and "see everything simotaniously" (although it would al be infinitly blueshifted). :w00t:

I'm still waiting for the demonstration of quantum gravity though! :whistling: