Can you rotate while traveling at near-light speed?

Question

If you were traveling at 99.999... % of light speed past a planet and you rotated fast enough to add that 0.00...001% of light speed so one side of you was traveling AT LIGHT SPEED... well, is that possible?

Answer 1

As your mass increases as you approach the speed of light you would probably need an incrdible amount of energy to rotate whilst traveling at that speed!

Answer 2

it is possible according to physics-

you CAN travel at the speed of light (hypothetically)

but you cannot travel faster than it

Answer 3

You can NOT travel at the speed of light or greater than the speed of light. What you describe is not possible. I am guessing that you are thinking of rigid rotation, I mean that you have an object and that when you rotate it the parts seem to stay in the same relationship to each other as they did before the rotation. However, suppose you have a wheel and you rotate it from the center, it takes a small but non-zero amount of time for that information to travel from the center to the outer part of the wheel. Small wheel, not too rapid rotation, etc and it does seem like the wheel acts as a solid body. However when dealing with solid bodies, relativity can make them act like they are  not quite so solid as we tend to think of solid bodies. The old classic of a runner carrying a 20 meter pole into a 10 meter barn and will the pole fit in the barn since the person standing on the side sees the pole shrunk to 10 meters. But the guy carrying the pole sees the barn shrunk to 5 meters and his pole is still 20! When the front end of the pole hits the back of the barn and starts to compress, it takes time for this impact information to travel the length of the pole and while it is doing so the back part of the pole continues along not aware of the fact that the front has run into a wall. Anyway, when you start something rotating and doing this faster and faster, there are relativisitic effects that come into play and prevent from happening what you describe.

Answer 4

Yes you can rotate while moving at or near c, but you have to take into account the Lorentz contraction due to your rotation.  The tangential speed of your rotation will add relativistically (not  c + w*r  where r = radius of rotation and w = angular speed).   THus, none of the speeds will be greater than c.  

Since special relativity is really limited to uniform (constant velocity) motion, the case of rotating while translating leads to conclusions like a circle whose circumference is not equal to 2*pi*r.