What does the view outside my ship traveling at light speed look like?
World Rules:
Travelers are able to move at the speed of light without disruption of their lives. Time passes "normally" for them. They think, breathe, love, cry, and steer the ship as if they were merely crossing the Atlantic.
Whatever allows the ship to travel at the speed of light, it does not distort the traveler's view of the rest of the universe. There is no "warp bubble" or "bending of spacetime" to get in the way of what they see. (Edit: I think this is what's getting in some people's way. I don't mean that physics is suspended. I mean that any effects caused by the ship's method of getting to V=c should not be considered as part of your answer.)
Premise:
After a probably notable amount of time, the intragalactic cruise liner Prinzessin Victoria Luise II has, for the first time, achieved what was previously believed to be impossible: the ship is traveling at 100% c, or exactly at the speed of light.
Little Victoria Luise, who understandably believes the ship is named after her, breathlessly looks out the viewing port. She's excited to be among the first to look at the universe from the perspective of a photon of light. With wide eyes and an imagination filled with the hope of angels and the fear of dragons, she sees...
What?
Question: What, really, would Victoria Luise see outside that view port?
Victoria Luise is looking out a starboard view port.
The trip is at least 20 light years long and there are stars near (relatively) and far out the view port.
Edit: Several commenters are getting bogged down in the backstory. An observer traveling at the speed of light looking perpendicular to the transit vector would see what? If you believe how the observer got to the speed of light affects that question, then you need to explain why.
It is certainly true that Victoria experienced no time while traveling at the speed of light (from the perspective of a photon, it arrives at its destination instantaneously regardless of distance traveled). However, while traveling across the distance photons impacted physically on Victoria's eyes. So, what did she see?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/147641. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
Edited. - as per edit to the question.
Assuming the Current model of the universe.
Fore: nothing, because - Photons blue-shifted beyond the furthest reaches of the EM spectrum (way beyond human perception) as the Doppler shift would seem to predict - you would think.
Aft: Nothing much, surely all would be shifted to the lowest conceivable frequency, the wavelength of the universe - you would think.
To the side: perhaps a thin line of white light, tinged at the fore edge with blue, at the aft with red? - You would think.
There would be heat death before she'd had time to move to the window, before she'd taken a single step, before a single neuron in her brain to enact the intention to move to the window had fired, before a single electron had completed a trillionth of its orbit about its nucleus... Entropy has consumed the universe.
She gets to the window, looks out, catching the sight of her own reflection in the plexiglass, apparently next to the ship in an identical, but reversed room and an eerie strip of light. She raises a hand and brushes a curl aside - "Hey, it's all dark out there, can someone turn the lights on?"
"Let it be so."
In terms of Physics
The ship is two dimensional to an outside observer - a flying pancake of zero thickness, it is unclear whether a photon would be able to enter or leave the ship from the side as the side would be dimensionless. And that's not taking into account its mass - it is now essentially a singularity of mass tending to infinity and shouldn't even be two dimensional.
- An interpretation would be that all the light from the ship is reflected back in the form of a thin dimensionless vertical line, that tracks the head's movements to always remain perfectly perpendicular to the direction of travel (a bright ring around the belly of the ship, the same direction from every porthole: ie. effectively at infinity), as a result of light being unable to escape (*except photons whose polarization exactly matches the angle of the slit ie. probably none).
No light would get "in" (probably none).
(If you ignore her disappearing behind an event horizon into a dimensionless point that is, but then again, maybe even there there's hope....).
Aside: The more I thought about this question, the more I realized the limitations of what I know, especially from the point of view of a Flatlander.
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