Back to Physics

Many moons ago, I was quite active in these fora and after the science forum was created I was specially active on it.

Anyway, I am trained as physicist academically, but life happened and I had to gravitate (see what I did here) to consulting and then the financial world (have pitty on my soul).

Now, that I am older I've decided to get back to physics and intend to have a kind of personal diary out there: https://fromsuitstospectra.wordpress.com/2023/12/29/a-little-bit-more/

This is will be a technical diary, so expect to see lots and lots of equations, but also a personal diary, so expect to see some mushy stories.

Please feel free to read it and engage with me in a new journey in my life.

@adam-warlock said
Many moons ago, I was quite active in these fora and after the science forum was created I was specially active on it.

Anyway, I am trained as physicist academically, but life happened and I had to gravitate (see what I did here) to consulting and then the financial world (have pitty on my soul).

Now, that I am older I've decided to get back to physics and intend t ...[text shortened]... e some mushy stories.

Please feel free to read it and engage with me in a new journey in my life.

@divegeester said
Happy to engage with you here Adam.

@adam-warlock
I logged in and left a reply. Hoping you achieve your life goal and get your PhD.
I didn't know till today I actually have an account on wordpress and had to change my password there but I got in so I can see your blog all the time now.

@sonhouse said
@adam-warlock
I logged in and left a reply. Hoping you achieve your life goal and get your PhD.
I didn't know till today I actually have an account on wordpress and had to change my password there but I got in so I can see your blog all the time now.

@adam-warlock
My son in law is a genuine physicist, his field is called Statistical Physics and he is giving a lecture Monday next at U of Maryland and I will be there listening for sure.
I also have a science scenario to ask him about.
So here it is, see if you agree.
In our atmosphere, the speed of sound is pretty much a constant, some 750 odd miles per hour or so and the same with light, like a foot a nanosecond or so.
Now if you have an aircraft flying at just under Mach one, and you run a sound through a speaker hooked up on the outside of the plane and you have a mic say a couple of feet in front of the speaker, it would seem to me if you are going say 90% of Mach 1, then say a one Khz sound transmitted to the speaker, would result in about a TEN khz sound picked up by the microphone, I think, anyway, like a kind of doppler shift because you are running into the sound generated close to the speed of sound.
So go to the speed of light, you are in a spacecraft doing say 90% of c and you do like wise but with a laser, shooting out the front of the craft, you have a light sensor hooked up way in front of the beam reading the color or frequency of the resultant light and it would seem somewhat the same as a plane going through air, you are going so fast you are pushing the speed limit so at say 90% of c it would look similar, say a 1 micron wavelength IR beam shoots out and of course it doesn't matter in the slightest to the beam that you are actually in a ship close to c, it will still shoot out at c, not c plus your velocity. BUT it would seem to me the sensor posted out away from the ship but able to pick up the signal from the laser would now if put on a spectrum analyzer would show that now instead of 1 micron wavelength, the readout would be something like 1/10th of a micron or up into the ultraviolet range. That would be my question, is my reasoning and logic correct?
Now of course if a non moving sensor was reading that laser beam, to THEM it would in fact look like a 1 micron beam but not to the people on the ship. I think.
It seems to me if that is so, it could be a speedometer independent of anything else you would use, parallax measure, whatever, GPS signals, doesn't matter, this would give you an independent way of seeing exactly what your velocity is. Maybe?