Any science freak out there can answer that?

[Occhidiangela]

You know how and object, namely a fighter jet,  traveling at high speed will produce a sonic boom when breaking the speed of sound, due to the Doppler effect, which effectively is the 'stacking' of the sound waves, all being heard at once, which is VERY loud!

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?

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. 

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.

Hope someone out there has a less whacky  :w00t:  and more rigorous theory!

Cheers!
-D
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Your model will not transfer. The speed of sound is faster in iron that it is in air, while speed of light, as Thecla points out, is not quite the same sort of thing. It is either a wave or a partical or both. Sound is quite simply a pressure differential, or a measure of agitation of molecules in a material. There is no sound in outer space if you presume space to be a vacuum. Nothing to rub together. "In space, no one can hear you scream."

Traveling through a copper wire sound can go very quickly, approaching the order of magnitudes of "the speed of electricity." Through fluids, it goes much more slowly, and attenuates more quickly. Air is a fluid.

The sonic boom you see and hear is driven by the nature of air, a mixture of gases. The vapor cone is the result of compression of the suspended fluid droplets in air.

In air, sound's speed is roughly 760 MPH at sea level. (CHanges with altitude and temp.) AKA Mach 1. You can travel many times the speed of sound. Bullets have been doing it since the meeni ball at least. The North American X-15 flew about Mach 7. It was an experimental airplane/rocket plane in the 60's. The F-15 can fly about Mach 2+.

No one has demonstrated that one can travel many times faster than the speed of light. The difference in orders of magnitude between the speed of sound in air and the speed of light being 186000 Miles Per Second

are something like

7.6 x 10^2 mph versus 6.48 x 10^8 mph (1.8 X 10^5 mph x 3.6 x 10^ 3)

Many models do not scale across six orders of magnitude. Even the equations on lift get interesting when you start looking at high mach numbers and for that matter, in a plasma. I don't know enough to discuss light moving in a vacuum in this case: in anything greater than a vacuum, friction becomes a significant limiting factor.

Even at mach numbers (in air) of 3 or 4, the temperature of the material, the leading edge in any case, typically experiences heat in hundreds of degrees Celsius. OK, increase that by six orders of magnitude. AT mach 4,000,000 what ever your were trying to propel became vapor or pure energy a while back.

What material will not deform, or for that matter vaporize, under the "light speed mach experiment" you propose? The Mach wave you are looking for is an atmospheric phenomenon, to say nothing of the issue of mass, and the energy to drive anything that fast. Remember the Columbia, and how relatively slow (to the speed of light) it was going? It burned to a crisp rather quickly.

There were some experiments a few years back regarding hypervelocity projectiles travelling on the order of Mach 12-17. As far as I know, they have not been put into practical use, partly because the ballistics at Mach 17 are considerably trickier than at more pedestrian Mach numbers.

Mach in the Millions? Not any time soon.

Occhi

For what it's worth, your idea of a light wave in a vacuum is intriguing from a "what if it worked that way?" perspective Taradox is that you and I can only see things in space time withing the speed of light. As soon as it was "down doppler at > Speed of LIght, it would be invisible to us mere observers on Terra Firma.