Nothing exists.

It's true though. I once had a car that was slightly too long to fit in my garage, so I drove it into the garage really fast. Now it fits.

 

A 10ft ladder moving at the speed of the person carrying it can already fit into an 8ft deep garage. We live in 3 dimensions and can easily fit it across the diagonal.

Let us assume the garage is 6 ft. x 6 ft. x 8 ft. (An incredibly small garage). Your 10 ft ladder fits perfectly across any diagonal, as proven by the Pythagorean theorem.

Also, how would accelerating something to c alter its dimensions? Does not make sense to me.

 

There's a contraction of space and the moving object at relativistic speeds (called a Lorentz Contraction). This results in not only a shortened travel time perceived by the traveler, but a visibly contracted craft (or ladder) to an outside, non-moving observer. The contraction was observed first by the negative results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, in which a measuring device called an interferometer was to measure the time it took for light to reach it both while static and while moving. The experiment was proposed to determine how movement would affect light's travel time through the aether. While static, all beams of light reached the interferometer at the same time. While moving, all beams of light reached it at the same time. This was caused by the contraction and elongation of space in front of and behind the interferometer (respectively), and the results demonstrated the first real evidence against the luminous aether, as well as providing evidence for what would later be known as Special Relativity.
As for making the ladder fit better in a small garage? Well, the ladder still "knows" it's 10 feet long, and is only apparently contracted in the direction it's traveling. As Magikot said, it would fit in there diagonally no matter how fast it was going. The question of the contraction is whether it's real or apparent. The shortening of the ladder moving at light speed would not be visible to the carrier of the ladder, but only to an outside observer watching the person carry it. Meanwhile, the contraction of space would only be apparent to the ladder carrier, while not to anyone else watching. In reality, it's the same phenomenon. The degree to which an object is contracted while moving at relativistic speeds is equivalent to the contraction of space between two points. This leads to something traveling at c being completely flat (i.e. only observable from a certain point of view) and experiencing no travel time between origin and destination, no matter how far it travels. Or, if you actually want to see the flattened ladder, say it's traveling at .9999% c. It will be just 1.4% it's length when it's seen. The 3 meter ladder will appear to be just 4.2 millimeters long, and if it travels 1 light year, it will experience 5.11 days of travel time, or 122 hours, 38 minutes, and 24 seconds.
That was the long explanation. The short one is: Your co worker is wrong and doesn't understand the Lorentz contraction. No matter how short something looks while traveling that fast, its actual size doesn't change and won't make it fit any better in a small space.
It may not help you care about it anymore, since when is someone living in 2011 going to travel at speeds within 1/10000th of light? Even at the highest speeds humans travel while orbiting the space station, their lives are lengthened at most by one millisecond.

 

Pythagoras's conclusions notwithstanding, my coworker presented this factoid without any semblance of guile and meant for the ladder to be contained within the garage not on the diagonal, but in a direction perpendicular to its point of entry. I'm glad that this doesn't make sense to anybody else here.
My point was that while I do not know what it would cost to accelerate a ladder to the speed of light, I think it would be more cost-effective to expand one's garage.

Thanks for the explanation. I didn't read it all because I don't care and because I prefer the imagery of Smuelissim0 smashing his car into the back of his garage.

 

Oh, I agree completely with the reviews. But my interest in this question isn't a question of How? (such as how things works), but of What if? What if all of reality isn't real?

It gets me thinking on lines like these:
· We die don't we? And if we die then "I think therefore I am" (and the logic that proves that statement) ceases to be true because at death one stops thinking.
· If truth is subjective, then truth dies with the subject. If truth is objective, then truth exists without regard of whether or not we exist.
· ....

You see, both religion and science provide absolutes certainities about reality. Only in philosophy is my certainities challenged and questioned to sufficient degree to make boring reality interesting. It is the process of questioning what we take as givens that ... oh, hell, It's fun! Philosophy is play while religion & science are work, memorizing and learning what is and is not true. Philosophy provides my mind the break it needs from such mental rigors. So sue me if I want to play with ideas that are disproven. What's the point in being always right!

 

Science doesn't have absolute certainties of anything. It's all experimentation, and if a theory doesn't match given evidence, it changes. Sure, people will say "Oh, if this is how it happens for the grand majority of whatever, then what you're saying about going against the evidence can't be true." However, that's what experiments and data are for. That's how those physicists at the LHC discovered muon neutrinos possibly have the ability to travel faster than a photon in a vacuum. The reason they want other people to do the experiment is because, despite so little room for machine error over the 3 years the experiment was performed, they're concerned about convention and want other teams to reach similar, if not the same, results. The reason I'm against physics and metaphysical philosophy is because it's based on something that's continually changing and improving, and I can deal with evidence supporting a theory better than "This is how everything must work in the universe, given what we know, so I know the driving forces behind reality must work this way. Oh, something changed, so this is how things must work, and the force behind the universe did this." It keeps going. People who study the physical universe have had philosophies limited by what they can see, and they can only see more as time goes on.
Honestly, the same thing can be said of religions. People's interpretation of a religious text, or how closely they follow it, will change with the evolution of society and how individuals think. This, in turn, will ultimately change people's philosophy regarding their religion. However, as a source of religious knowledge will change relatively little over time, the philosophy of a person following a certain religion will change more slowly than will the philosophy of one who follows physics.
However, one change seems to stick no matter what;
Circumcision. It was added to the story of Abraham's covenant in 500 B.C., more than a millenium after Abraham was around. This was during the time that Jews were captive in Babylon, and the Rabbis of the day wanted to be seen as the most prominent political force to the Jews. So, they put circumcision into the bible and started a cult where newborn males would have their foreskins cut off. Now, it's more of a culture thing than it is part of Judaism, but people will still do it.
My point? Change is constant. We'll continue to discover more about the physics of the universe as time goes on, so making up some philosophy about how everything in the universe is affected by what we currently know is bogus. It's arrogant, because we don't know everything, and we never will. I can understand the desire to make sense of everything, but seriously; physicists will get uppity with people who have religion for claiming to understand the universe, so really, a good scientist should shove the metaphysical and just deal with new knowledge as it's discovered, unless there's a way to properly show what happens to people when they die.
The problem with people who are "always right" is that they can come up with arguments that "aren't even wrong." That's bad, because if someone is simply wrong about something, you can occasionally reason with them and steer them in the right direction. When they aren't even wrong, they use examples of things that aren't falsifiable in any sense of the word and will staunchly defend their position, especially if you're on their level while arguing your point. Everyone who knows better than to claim absolute certainty constantly learns new things. Those who "know" they're right will never learn anything.

 

The way I see it, reality is wholly independent of religion. What do you mean that religion provides absolute certainties about reality?

 

Religion provides plenty of absolute certainties about reality, but sadly they all turn out to be made up. I'm guessing Xyle doesn't know that, though.

 

My understanding has led me to believe that you're all dopes.

 

Wayne, given how much you pointed out my use of first-person pronouns, my understanding leads me to believe your penis is long enough to allow you to go fuck yourself.

 

Why can't we just get along guys?

 

Is that an insult or a very generous compliment?

 

It could honestly be both. The Jews, who were enslaved by Egypt for a while, hated them so much that all they could do to insult them was remark how big their penises were in the old testament. Is it an insult? Well, that depends on how eager an Egyptian was to say their penis totally wasn't as big as a horse's. I'd say it's however you want to take it, but be reminded that if you're insulted by someone saying how huge your penis is, saying it's much smaller than that makes it funnier. Plus, even if you were upset by the "go fuck yourself" part, at the least I'm saying you masturbate. At most I'm saying you have no confidence in finding a mate and therefore choose to love yourself and only yourself. It's called being an "autosexual," which, despite the prefix "auto," does not have anything to do with being turned on by cars; that is described as mechanophilia, which also describes a general attraction to machinery.

 

Well, in the defense of mechanophiliacs, who doesn't put Rube Goldberg Machine videos on endless loop and beat their ding dong like it owes them money?

 

A gifted mechanophile would make their own rube-golberg machine to do it for them! When ebaum's world was still a "thing," there was a video of a guy on there who attached a rotating, oscillating motor to a fleshlight. I don't want to talk about that anymore, I got nauseous.

 

I saw a video years back of a guy who's unusual penis curvature allowed him to fuck himself. I think the video was called Hook Dick, though I can't find it now and I don't want to spend 20 minutes trawling through questionable websites to provide a link. Just thought I'd share.

 

I think I remember that. A girl at my primary school mentioned it during math one day.

 

In your primary school?! Seriously what was wrong with your primary school? I don't know if seeing wierd porn is the norm for most primary or elementary schools but I certainly didn't see anything like that when I was that young. I'm sure at that age I still thought a woman's lady parts consisted of a hole that wee came out of.

 

Tasmania is commonly referred as the state where brothers marry their sisters. With this whole pro gay marriage motion going on down there brothers may start marrying each other. That being said I don't doubt a girl in primary school mentioned it.

 

I've...seen it. Or something similar. The case I saw didn't involve a case of curvature, but rather, flexibility of the ligaments and what I'm assuming wasn't a full erection. Bending a full erection the way I saw can end in penile fractures.