Relativity

[Loren Pechtel]

Idea version 1.0:

When my newton cap is on, it's a close approximation to reality but only as we whiz along in our snail-paced lives; however, as we pick up speed and compete in a world of the furious fast, the approximation becomes less and less, and when we go all out and shift into high gear, the newton hat helps us not one bit. It requires the wearer to put on einstein's hat. And, we can't go wrong with that, as it correctly portrays reality.

Yeah. You're looking at light in a Newtonian fashion.

Idea version 2:

Houston, we have a problem, for the faster we go, for some, we're picking up speed and climbing the percentage ladder to the speed of light, but for others, never shall we gain.

What happens is that as you get closer and closer to lightspeed you find your clocks slowing, your yardsticks shrinking and your mass increasing. These all balance out so your environment looks normal but they distort your measure of anything outside yourself.

(And, yes, there is no doubt this is true. We see it routinely in atom smashers where particles live longer than they should. We see it with the GPS system--the satellites are whizzing around in orbit rather than sitting on the ground. The error this would introduce if you used Newtonian math is considerably greater than the accuracy of even the plain vanilla civilian system. {The fact that they are in lower gravity than on the surface of the Earth also introduces an error in the opposite direction which also must be dealt with.})

 

[fast]

Idea version 1.0:

When my newton cap is on, it's a close approximation to reality but only as we whiz along in our snail-paced lives; however, as we pick up speed and compete in a world of the furious fast, the approximation becomes less and less, and when we go all out and shift into high gear, the newton hat helps us not one bit. It requires the wearer to put on einstein's hat. And, we can't go wrong with that, as it correctly portrays reality.

Yeah. You're looking at light in a Newtonian fashion.

Idea version 2:

Houston, we have a problem, for the faster we go, for some, we're picking up speed and climbing the percentage ladder to the speed of light, but for others, never shall we gain.

What happens is that as you get closer and closer to lightspeed you find your clocks slowing, your yardsticks shrinking and your mass increasing. These all balance out so your environment looks normal but they distort your measure of anything outside yourself.

(And, yes, there is no doubt this is true. We see it routinely in atom smashers where particles live longer than they should. We see it with the GPS system--the satellites are whizzing around in orbit rather than sitting on the ground. The error this would introduce if you used Newtonian math is considerably greater than the accuracy of even the plain vanilla civilian system. {The fact that they are in lower gravity than on the surface of the Earth also introduces an error in the opposite direction which also must be dealt with.})

But am I getting closer to lightspeed? If I am in fact traveling at 99.99%c, that's one thing, but mightn't it be that because of the very reasons you cite, my speed is not increasing? After all, the faster I go, photons keep pace, but because it remains constant, so do I. I'm speeding up but light isn't and our distance doesn't alter but instead spacetime. It's like people are wanting their cake and to eat it too.

Either I'm going faster or I'm not, and if I am but light isn't, my size changes and clocks change pace. If we had a storm of objects converging in near miss trajectories at vastly different speeds, is there room for shared spacetime?

 

[skepticalbip]

Yeah. You're looking at light in a Newtonian fashion.



What happens is that as you get closer and closer to lightspeed you find your clocks slowing, your yardsticks shrinking and your mass increasing. These all balance out so your environment looks normal but they distort your measure of anything outside yourself.

(And, yes, there is no doubt this is true. We see it routinely in atom smashers where particles live longer than they should. We see it with the GPS system--the satellites are whizzing around in orbit rather than sitting on the ground. The error this would introduce if you used Newtonian math is considerably greater than the accuracy of even the plain vanilla civilian system. {The fact that they are in lower gravity than on the surface of the Earth also introduces an error in the opposite direction which also must be dealt with.})

But am I getting closer to lightspeed? If I am in fact traveling at 99.99%c, that's one thing,

traveling at 99.99%c with respect to what? Citing a speed without specifying a reference point is meaningless.

 

[fast]

Yeah. You're looking at light in a Newtonian fashion.



What happens is that as you get closer and closer to lightspeed you find your clocks slowing, your yardsticks shrinking and your mass increasing. These all balance out so your environment looks normal but they distort your measure of anything outside yourself.

(And, yes, there is no doubt this is true. We see it routinely in atom smashers where particles live longer than they should. We see it with the GPS system--the satellites are whizzing around in orbit rather than sitting on the ground. The error this would introduce if you used Newtonian math is considerably greater than the accuracy of even the plain vanilla civilian system. {The fact that they are in lower gravity than on the surface of the Earth also introduces an error in the opposite direction which also must be dealt with.})

But am I getting closer to lightspeed? If I am in fact traveling at 99.99%c, that's one thing,

traveling at 99.99%c with respect to what? Citing a speed without specifying a reference point is meaningless.

Light

 

[skepticalbip]

traveling at 99.99%c with respect to what? Citing a speed without specifying a reference point is meaningless.

Light

Light is hardly a reference point. A light shining from the nose of the "fastest" imaginable rocket will be moving at c with respect to that rocket. Kinda difficult for the rocket to move at any percentage of the speed of light with respect to light much less to catch something that always moves away at c no matter how fast the rocket goes. That is sorta like the old cartoon of a carrot dangling from a stick strapped to a mule that the mule keeps trying to catch up to.

 

[bilby]

traveling at 99.99%c with respect to what? Citing a speed without specifying a reference point is meaningless.

Light

Division by zero error.

From the perspective of a photon, time doesn't pass. Velocity is distance divided by time. So it's nonsensical to discuss speed relative to light, as to do so requires division by zero.

Photons get away with this by traveling zero distance (due to Lorentz contraction), so speed is irrelevant. A photon 'sees' the universe as two dimensional - the source that emits a photon, and the target that absorbs it, are in the same place from a photon's perspective, and neither time nor speed are required to travel zero distance. This is true even for photons that, in our reference frame, have traveled very long distances.

 

[fast]

traveling at 99.99%c with respect to what? Citing a speed without specifying a reference point is meaningless.

Light

Light is hardly a reference point. A light shining from the nose of the "fastest" imaginable rocket will be moving at c with respect to that rocket. Kinda difficult for the rocket to move at any percentage of the speed of light with respect to light much less to catch something that always moves away at c no matter how fast the rocket goes. That is sorta like the old cartoon of a carrot dangling from a stick strapped to a mule that the mule keeps trying to catch up to.

Exactly!!!

 

[steve_bank]

Fast

No No ! A thousand times no!

Sometimes you seem to get, then you don't. C will be the same no matter the frame.

Close your eyes and create a mental picture. Two spaceships are at rest. One accelerates away to a relative velocity of say .5 C. The other emits a laser pulse towards the other ship. The other ship will measure the pulse's speed as C. Is that not clear?

Regardless of acceleration and relative velocity on each ship a meter, second, and kilogram will appear the same.

P1: If I'm traveling at 99MPH and you come up behind me at 100MPH, I will recognize two things: you are traveling fast but coming up slowly.

P2: If I'm traveling at 99.9%c and light comes up behind me at c, I will recognize two things: light is traveling fast but coming up slowly.

I'm saying P1 and P2 are true, but it's like most of y'all are saying P2 is false.

If I'm the one on the space ship that takes off and you emit a beam, then WHEN it actually gets to me, sure, I'll measure it at C, and when it passes me, I'll measure it at C, but the speed of light relative to myself should seem slow, as if I could reach out and pet the leading photons as they turtle by.

According to the models P2 is wrong. C is finite. If you are moving away from a radio station the photons leaving the antenna will progressively take longer to reach you, but are traveling at C. Turn on a light and it takes time to reach you. Light speed is finite, you can not 'see' it coming. Here on the surface when you see an object move you do not see it in real time, there is s delay due to C.

That relativity is valid is empirically demonstrated.

Obviously we can't accelerate macroscopic Newtonian mass to high percentages of C. So we do not know what would happen experimentally. As v -> c the model starts to break down.

Note that without correction for time dilation the GPS system would not work. The orbiting clocks would not correlate to ground clocks.

 

[fast]

When I hear things like "it takes time for light to travel ...," certain ideas come to mind. So, when I hear, "it takes over 8 minutes for light to travel from the sun to Earth," and when I hear, "it would take a second for light to circumnavigate our planet 7 times," certain ideas come to mind. The examples are pervasive. Here's the gist: light can travel x distance in t time doing w whereas it would take a human doing w to travel the same distance but in a great amount of time. Intuitively, this makes sense unless you're under the mistaken notion that light travel is instantaneous.

We're even given the speed in which light travels the universe. Sure, it's sometimes spoken of as if only traveling that speed in a vacuum, but then we're reminded that space is mostly just that, vacuum, so when we're told light travels at x MPH in a vacuum, we know that light in fact travels pretty darn close to that speed througout the cosmos, only occasionally being altered by things that might find its way in its path.

I haven't spoken of relativity. I didn't mention any frames of reference. Sure, those things exist, but the beforementioned ideas merely eluded to earlier don't just go away or become nullified or dismissed as imaginative. There's time dilation, there's length contraction. Fine. Fine. There can be a spaghetti monster out there farting out double split experiments with nearby neon signs that read QM loves Lorenz transformation formulas. I'm not out to dispute any of that.

I just think the idea that a spacecraft traveling from the sun to the Earth in twice the time it takes light to is traveling 1/2 the speed of light. Does this not mean from our frame of reference on Earth, the spaceship is traveling .5c relative to lightspeed? How do we say it?

 

[fast]

Oh shit, it just dawns on me the math is off, but it's still point something. Maybe not .5 but something close to it.

 

[skepticalbip]

I just think the idea that a spacecraft traveling from the sun to the Earth in twice the time it takes light to is traveling 1/2 the speed of light. Does this not mean from our frame of reference on Earth, the spaceship is traveling .5c relative to lightspeed? How do we say it?

We would say that the spaceship is traveling at 0.5c with respect to the Sun, or 0.5c with respect to the Earth, or 150,000 Km/sec with respect to the Sun, or 150,000 Km/sec with respect to the Earth, or that sucker was really movin'... but we would never say it was moving relative to light or relative to lightspeed. A possible pass could be that it was moving at half lightspeed with respect to the Sun or with respect to the Earth.

But most likely we would just say it was moving at .5c with the unspoken assumption that it was with respect to the Earth sorta like we say we are driving 70 Km/hr with the unspoken assumption that it was with respect to the highway surface and not with respect to Alpha Centauri.

 

[steve_bank]

Yeah. You're looking at light in a Newtonian fashion.



What happens is that as you get closer and closer to lightspeed you find your clocks slowing, your yardsticks shrinking and your mass increasing. These all balance out so your environment looks normal but they distort your measure of anything outside yourself.

(And, yes, there is no doubt this is true. We see it routinely in atom smashers where particles live longer than they should. We see it with the GPS system--the satellites are whizzing around in orbit rather than sitting on the ground. The error this would introduce if you used Newtonian math is considerably greater than the accuracy of even the plain vanilla civilian system. {The fact that they are in lower gravity than on the surface of the Earth also introduces an error in the opposite direction which also must be dealt with.})

But am I getting closer to lightspeed? If I am in fact traveling at 99.99%c, that's one thing, but mightn't it be that because of the very reasons you cite, my speed is not increasing? After all, the faster I go, photons keep pace, but because it remains constant, so do I. I'm speeding up but light isn't and our distance doesn't alter but instead spacetime. It's like people are wanting their cake and to eat it too.

Either I'm going faster or I'm not, and if I am but light isn't, my size changes and clocks change pace. If we had a storm of objects converging in near miss trajectories at vastly different speeds, is there room for shared spacetime?

It is more like you're spinning your wheels instead of going faster...

 

[steve_bank]

When I hear things like "it takes time for light to travel ...," certain ideas come to mind. So, when I hear, "it takes over 8 minutes for light to travel from the sun to Earth," and when I hear, "it would take a second for light to circumnavigate our planet 7 times," certain ideas come to mind. The examples are pervasive. Here's the gist: light can travel x distance in t time doing w whereas it would take a human doing w to travel the same distance but in a great amount of time. Intuitively, this makes sense unless you're under the mistaken notion that light travel is instantaneous.

We're even given the speed in which light travels the universe. Sure, it's sometimes spoken of as if only traveling that speed in a vacuum, but then we're reminded that space is mostly just that, vacuum, so when we're told light travels at x MPH in a vacuum, we know that light in fact travels pretty darn close to that speed througout the cosmos, only occasionally being altered by things that might find its way in its path.

I haven't spoken of relativity. I didn't mention any frames of reference. Sure, those things exist, but the beforementioned ideas merely eluded to earlier don't just go away or become nullified or dismissed as imaginative. There's time dilation, there's length contraction. Fine. Fine. There can be a spaghetti monster out there farting out double split experiments with nearby neon signs that read QM loves Lorenz transformation formulas. I'm not out to dispute any of that.

I just think the idea that a spacecraft traveling from the sun to the Earth in twice the time it takes light to is traveling 1/2 the speed of light. Does this not mean from our frame of reference on Earth, the spaceship is traveling .5c relative to lightspeed? How do we say it?

Pragmatically but not simply if two equals a mass equals jabberwocky then not so much unless one, two, or eleven.

 

[Wiploc]

Yeah. You're looking at light in a Newtonian fashion.



What happens is that as you get closer and closer to lightspeed you find your clocks slowing, your yardsticks shrinking and your mass increasing. These all balance out so your environment looks normal but they distort your measure of anything outside yourself.

(And, yes, there is no doubt this is true. We see it routinely in atom smashers where particles live longer than they should. We see it with the GPS system--the satellites are whizzing around in orbit rather than sitting on the ground. The error this would introduce if you used Newtonian math is considerably greater than the accuracy of even the plain vanilla civilian system. {The fact that they are in lower gravity than on the surface of the Earth also introduces an error in the opposite direction which also must be dealt with.})

But am I getting closer to lightspeed?

Relative to some cosmic ray, sure. We are all of us always going at .99c relative to things that go .99c relative to us. And we are always stopped relative to ourselves.

And that's the only kind of movement (and the only kind of stoppedness) that exists.

We've known since Einstein that all motion is relative.

When people tell kids that the earth "really" goes around the sun, they stunting their intellectual growth.

If I am in fact traveling at 99.99%c, that's one thing,

You are in fact traveling that fast, relative to many things, in many different directions. But there is no sense in which you are traveling that fast "really." Just as there is no sense in which you are stopped "really." You can only be stopped relative to things that are stopped relative to you.

but mightn't it be that because of the very reasons you cite, my speed is not increasing? After all, the faster I go, photons keep pace,

Remember that the light goes a different speed for Sara. The same light.

but because it remains constant, so do I. I'm speeding up but light isn't

The horse runs 100mph relative to you when you're standing next to Sara, and it runs 100mph relative to you when you sprint away from Sara.

and our distance doesn't alter but instead spacetime. It's like people are wanting their cake and to eat it too.

Nobody would choose to believe this stuff in the absence of overwhelming proof.

Either I'm going faster or I'm not,

It's a viewpoint thing.

and if I am but light isn't, my size changes and clocks change pace. If we had a storm of objects converging in near miss trajectories at vastly different speeds, is there room for shared spacetime?

I don't know what that means. But we don't think Sara is hallucinating. We can do the math to see that, from her point of view, you are traveling at .99c, so you ought to be able to reach out and pet the photons as they pass. And she can do the math to see that, from your point of view, you can do no such thing.

 

[Wiploc]

I just think the idea that a spacecraft traveling from the sun to the Earth in twice the time it takes light to is traveling 1/2 the speed of light. Does this not mean from our frame of reference on Earth, the spaceship is traveling .5c relative to lightspeed? How do we say it?

The ship is traveling half the speed of light relative to us.

 

[barbos]

I still don't quite get where OP author stands or what he is trying to say.
Do you accept that STO (Special Theory of Relativity) is true?
Yes, it's very counterintuitive, it's not really a news.

 

[fast]

Do you accept that STO (Special Theory of Relativity) is true?

I have no qualms with the math. By the way, what is the distinction between the Theory of Special Relativity and the Special Theory of Relativity? Not to be confused with the General Theory of Relativity or General Relativity for short.

 

[barbos]

Do you accept that STO (Special Theory of Relativity) is true?

I have no qualms with the math.

What math? I mentioned no math. The question was about physics.

By the way, what is the distinction between the Theory of Special Relativity and the Special Theory of Relativity? Not to be confused with the General Theory of Relativity or General Relativity for short.

No distinction, but usually it is called "Special Theory of Relativity", Why do you ask?

 

[fast]

What math? I mentioned no math. The question was about physics.

By the way, what is the distinction between the Theory of Special Relativity and the Special Theory of Relativity? Not to be confused with the General Theory of Relativity or General Relativity for short.

No distinction, but usually it is called "Special Theory of Relativity", Why do you ask?

I ask because of the acronym. I didn't even mention the principle of relativity.