Obviously theoretical but if I took a light year long stick and say pushed a button at the other end would that button be pushed at the same time for me as say someone standing at the button? How does the frame of reference work when physically moving something? And could that “work” as a method of instant communication?
In: Planetary Science
No. c is the speed of any information. The fact that light travels at c is only because photons don’t have rest mass, so they travel at the maximum speed of information. Everything in the universe that has mass travels at a slower speed than the speed of information. Everything without mass travels at exactly the speed of information.
If you pushed a very long rod, a couple of things… First, it will be too heavy to move. Something that long would likely weigh more than the Sun.
Second, even if you could push it, you can’t push the entire thing, because you only exist at one location. You can push on the end, which would compress it slightly, starting a wave which would travel down the material at a particular speed. It would be called a compression wave. Another word for compression wave is “sound.”
Your information traveling through a rod of physical material would travel at the speed of sound, which is dependent on the material and its density.
Sound is much slower than light.
This happens because what we call the “solid” state of matter is a macro scale illusion. Molecules and atoms don’t actually touch each other. They are packed closely in what we call a solid but they are separated by the electric charge of the electons in their orbitals. *All solids are made of mostly empty space, and are squishy.*
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