If tap a steel rod with a small hammer at one end, it doesn't instantaneously budge at the other end (though it may look that way to the naked eye). The person on the opposite end should receive the pushes and pulls instantaneously as no particle is making the full journey.Īs other answers have pointed out, you can't have perfect rigidity, and the signal would propagate at the speed of sound in the material. No atom will move until he has received the message to do so, and the message won't travel any faster than all the messengers can run and the messengers can't run faster than the speed of light.įor instance, take a rigid pole of several AU in length. Then they all decide to move as well, so they each send out messengers to to their closest neighbours to let them know they are moving and so it continues, until the message to move has travelled all the way to the end. You might like to think of atoms as next door neighbours If one of them decides to move, he sends out a messenger to all his closest neighbours telling them he is moving. In order to move the whole pole, you need to move every atom of the pole. The transmitter of the EM-force is light, and thus the signal cannot travel faster than the speed of light instead the pole will bend, because the close end will have moved, and the far end will not yet have received intelligence of the move. The reason is that the force which binds the atoms of the pole together - the Electro-Magnetic force - needs to be transmitted from one end of the pole to the other. The pole would bend/wobble and the effect at the other end would still be delayed.
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