Saturday, December 15, 2012

There Once Was A Joke From Steve Wright

I was watching a 30-year-old TV special and there was Steven Wright at the beginning of his comedy career.  One of his gags had him asking "if you were in a vehicle and you were traveling at the speed of light, and you turned your lights on, would they do anything?"

I've heard this question asked elsewhere (by, among others, a different comedian who may even predate Wright).  This is presented as some sort of baffler, but for anyone familiar with the theory of relativity, it's quite easy to answer.

First, you can't be traveling at the speed of light. But even as you approach near-light speeds, your headlight beams would appear to be traveling away from you at the speed of light. This seems anti-intuitive because we're used to things traveling nowhere near that fast, and thus the effects of relativity seem to us nonexistent and we mistakenly assume length and time are fixed.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Denver Guy said...

I want to hear a joke based on quantum entanglement.

7:49 AM, December 17, 2012  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I heard a blood curdling scream in the middle of the night so I called the police. They said it wasn't them.

8:09 AM, December 17, 2012  

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