Re: Questions about light

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From: Paul Doherty (pauld@exploratorium.edu)
Date: Wed Oct 18 2000 - 15:21:15 PDT 

Message-Id: <l03110733b613bd3b9c38@[192.174.2.173]>
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 14:21:15 -0800
From: Paul Doherty <pauld@exploratorium.edu>
Subject:  Re: Questions about light

Ah! light and black holes.

In Newtonian mechanics a force causes an object to accelerate, increasing
its speed,

In relativistic mechanics an object can both change its speed and its mass.
For a photon which is travelling at the speed of light there is no change
in speed at all when it falls into a black hole, instead its mass increases.

I'm an experimental physicist so I can't speak much about what happens
inside an event horizon since I can't get results of experiments out of the
black hole.

However outside of a black hole in a vacuum light always travels at the
speed of light.

Paul D

Paul "But it is more complicated than that!" Doherty,
Senior Staff Scientist, The Exploratorium.
pauld@exploratorium.edu, www.exo.net/~pauld

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