Relativity

Whaddya you smoking Vengo?

Did you harvest it during a violent electrical storm like Mailer says you should do?

I promise you, I haven't been smoking anything, just pondering the nature of the universe.

photons have mass (albeit tiny) and travel at the speed of light, consequently if what you posit is true, photons would be black holes.

Consequently, there's something else happening here---granted for most mass, it does increase (Lorentz factor) at near relativistic velocities. The thing to be considered here is not mass but the effect of mass and velocity--in other words momentum and its conservation.

BTW its too early to smoke this years summer crop---wait for October.

Rap

Fast Flashlight
The photons are going at C as soon as the light turns on. If you are accelerating the flashlight to near C then its mass will be increasing. I can see the analog of a star collapsing from behind its outgoing photons, pulling/curving back the space they are going through.

Getting a photon source, flashlight, heavy enough to affect them by coming up behind the photons seems like the long way to go around. The fact that the speed and the mass increase infinitly would probably make it difficult to work out just how the event horizon and all shows up.

I can see Wyle E. Coyote painted on the side of the flashlight.

This is incorrect.
Photons do not have mass.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon

Re: Relativity

Yes.



Eventually yes.



The photons would be red shifted until their energy was too low for them to be detected. Before that happens they are still detectable. When the event horizon forms then they can no longer be observed from outside.



I'm assuming you're talking about normal classical objects like bricks, chairs and ice cream sundaes.



The light cannot move more slowly.
Photons always travel at the speed of light.
This is the Law. No exceptions.
What happens instead is that the photon's energy is lessened due to relativistic red shifting as above.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity

Why does red-shifting affect the energy of a photon, and not just the wave's frequency?

Red shifting does affect the frequency.
It makes it lower.
More red shift means lower frequencies.
ie. Light that was originally blue will be shited towards the red end of the spectrum due to the increasing wavelength which equals the lowering of the frequency.

The wavelength of a photon is intimately linked to it's energy.
Lets say you start off with a red photon.
You pump a bit of energy into the photon and instead of affecting it's speed which obviously can't change, the energy has to be spent somewhere so the only other thing about the photon that can be affected is it's wavelength.

In other words there's no such thing as a "high energy" red photon.
A given blue photon has more energy than any given red photon.
A photon can change energy as in you can give it more energy and turn a red one into a blue one. Or take some energy away by whatever means, such as gravitational red shift etc..., and turn a blue photon into a red one.

If you're thinking about intensely bright red lights and assuming that there is more energy in the beam than a dim blue beam then you'd be right.
BUT, and it's a big but, the reason that the red beam has more energy is because there are more photons in it.
If you restrict each beam to have say a billion photons in the red beam and another billion in the blue beam then the total amount of energy in the blue beam will be more than that in the red beam.
The energy of an individual photon cannot change without affecting it's wavelength. But you can have more photons to make your beam more intense.

Red light has a lower energy than blue light.
X-rays have more energy than radio waves.
It's a continuous spectrum so if you start off with gamma rays and red shift them enough you'll see them decrease in energy and increase in wavelength through x-rays, ultraviolet, visible blue-green-yellow to red and then down into the infra-red then into microwaves and on into radiowaves and if you keep red shifting them they eventually end up as really, really long wavelengths.
Their energy is being sapped all the time too remember so you'd not be able to see this process to this extent because the energy of your original gamma photon would be so low it'd be undetectable by current instruments.

I'm glossing over some of the more technical aspects here but this is fine for a layman's understanding of photons.

Relativity cannot tell us what happens when a mass is accelerated to c. The theory says it can't happen, or can't handle it if it can happen. It also can't tell us what happens to create a black hole as the theory breaks down at densities over 1x10 exp78 tons/cubic inch. QM incorporates SR so it can't say anything about the acceleration to c. It can tell us a good deal more about the creating of a black hole.

According to QM as you increased the very small mass of the flashlight toward infinity or undefined, as you wish, you would get to the point that conditions could create a black hole. However, before this could happen the black hole would probably be of so small a size it would simply explode into an x-ray shower. It would do this because it would need to shed energy so fast to keep an equilibrium temperature it would have to explode to do it. This is analogous to the end of life for a black hole as it shrinks because of losing energy by the Hawking process.

So 1: Relativity is silent, QM says the flashlight would explode into a shower of x-rays before it gets to c and
2: Both say you would need to accelerate an enormous object to near the speed of light before its mass would be great enough to red shift photons near it. The only real objects massive and dense enough of do this are neutron stars and black holes.