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To: sodpoodle

Me too. I was never comfortable with the concept of relative motion. A simple thought experiment makes the problem clear. A friend of mine in physics class raised this and the teacher simply ducked it. If you have a bar, say 200 million light years long, and you push it, assuming incompressibility, you will get the same amount of motion on the other end. This becomes an argument for motion as absolute, not relative. As stupid and silly as this simple experiment appears, put in the frame of light years, it becomes different.

Also, dark matter brings back the idea of an ether.


4 posted on 03/07/2010 2:35:41 PM PST by bioqubit
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To: bioqubit

Get outta heah;)


8 posted on 03/07/2010 3:15:37 PM PST by sodpoodle (Despair - Man's surrender. Laughter - God's redemption.)
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To: bioqubit
If you have a bar, say 200 million light years long, and you push it, assuming incompressibility, you will get the same amount of motion on the other end.

The soonest that the other end of the bar can move in response to the pressure you exert on your end depends on the speed of sound in the material the bar is made of. Sound is a pressure wave propagating through a medium.

The speed of sound in an incompressible bar would be infinite....that isn't the universe we live in.

13 posted on 03/07/2010 4:32:29 PM PST by poindexter
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To: bioqubit
I once asked a better version of that question, and got myself corrected.

Take a long laser beam, several light-years long. Now sweep the beam across an equally long screen. The projected spot will move with a velocity that could be greater than the speed of light itself.

The correction was that the laser beam is actually made up of photons, and no individual photon acquires a speed greater than that of light.

As for Einstein, his god was not the same god most here are familiar with. He was more of an agnostic than anything else.

“When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe, everything else seems so superfluous.”

- Albert Einstein.

14 posted on 03/07/2010 5:02:02 PM PST by James C. Bennett
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