"Ain't I sumthin?"
DOB: 3/22/1931
Posted on 03/22/2006 5:34:03 PM PST by KevinDavis
March 22, 2006: Consider a pair of brothers, identical twins. One gets a job as an astronaut and rockets into deep space. The other stays on Earth. When the traveling twin returns home, he discovers he's younger than his brother.
This is Einstein's Twin Paradox, and although it sounds strange, it is absolutely true. The theory of relativity tells us that the faster you travel through space, the slower you travel through time. Rocketing to Alpha Centauri—warp 9, please—is a good way to stay young.
(Excerpt) Read more at science.nasa.gov ...
If it's coming the other direction, does it hit you at twice the speed of light?
'Very interesting from a biological POV. Though it doesn't seem to change the physics.
"Ain't I sumthin?"
DOB: 3/22/1931
But the stay at home one got a good deal on PriceLine.
Laddie, ye canna' take 'er to warp 10, if ye do, the engines'll blow!;)
>> One thing I've never understood about the Twin Paradox is: if velocity is relative, how does the universe know which twin is "traveling" and is therefore the one who should age more slowly? If I understand Einstein's theories, if the twins are moving apart at near lightspeed, either one of them or both could have accelerated to cause that relative velocity. <<
The aging is not an effect from an outside source; it's an internal effect.
Think of it this way:
The speed of light is a constant, no matter how fast you are travelling, the speed of light appears to be 186,000 miles per second. (or is km per second?)
Suppose you are travelling at what appears from MY perspective to be 157,400 miles per second (90% of 186,000). That would mean that light is travelling only 18,600 miles per second faster than you. Yet you still observe light as travelling 186,000 miles per second? How could that be?
Simple. It's our experience of seconds which have changed. What you experience as one second, I experience as ten seconds. That way, to me, you seem to have travelled 18,600 slower than the speed of light in one second. But you will have experienced it as 186,000 miles per second, because your second will last ten times longer than mine. In those ten seconds, I will perceive you as having travelled 186,000 miles less far than light.
So how does the universe "know" to make you age accordingly? It doesn't. It's what is happening to YOU that makes you age slower.
If you experienced light moving at only 18,600 miles per second, the electrons buzzing around your molecules would be travelling TEN TIMES faster relative to the speed of light than they should. Yet they don't. The ratio of the difference between the speed of light and the speed of your subatomic particles must remain constant, because it is the speed of light which determines the speed of your subatomic particles.
If light is moving 1/10th as fast relative to your speed, every quantum event in your body is going to be experienced at 1/10th the speed it normally would. Your electrons will spin at 1/10th the speed; your acceleration will be 1/10th as fast; your molecular decay will be 1/10th as fast; chemical reactions will happen at 1/10th the speed. EVERYTHING that you could possibly use to measure the passage of time in the universe will occur at 1/10th the speed that it normally would; you are aging at 1/10th the speed you would.
Whether you want to say that the rest of the world is aging faster than you are, or you are aging slower than the rest of the world doesn't matter; there's no external reference point to determine whose experience of the passage of time is "correct," or represents an objective base point. All we can do is compare our experience of the passage of time RELATIVE to someone else's. And hence, it is called "relativity."
Why do we say that you age slower and gain mass as you speed up, when you experience neither of these things? Well, that way we can continue to describe the world according to Newtonian physics. (It's not that Newtonian physics is right or wrong; it's whether it is capable of describing the reality of the universe consistently.) That's why you will refer to Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics; how you approach relativity makes equations based on the formulae they created work or not work.
(Have you also seen why the metaphor "relativism" is used to describe the assertion that what constitutes a moral law to you may not constitute one to me? Of course, that comparison is invalid, because there is observed no principle on which to describe the variations of moral law from person to person.)
Ah yes! The 'Evil Spock' (complete with goatee) vs. the 'Good Spock'
uh...mated?...do you mean, they...you know...was, ah, Capt. Janeway, ah, uh, you know, ah...was she like,
didn't have her clothes on, uh, or ah, something???
Good point: And the answer?
Because it is the rocket's sudden change of trajectory which constitutes the application of a force in Newtonian physics. To say the Earth moved is to violate Newtonian physics.
Of course, then there's the little problem of why couldn't you just say that BOTH the Earth and the Rocket had been moving in circles at a very, very high speed, and the Rocket merely applied Newtonian forces to STOP moving at such remarkable speeds, so that answer isn't an effective one.
I HAVE to read what Hawkins has to say about the twin paradox; it would seem to establish a transcendence he claims violates Occam's razor actually becomes what is permitted under Occam's razor.
>> the difference is that only one of the twins 'feels' the acceleration. <<
Naw, he only felt the deceleration. THere is no acceleration or deceleration in relativism; there is only change in momentum.
Relativity does not cause you to think that everything becomes relative.
The whole point is that the speed of light in a vacuum is absolutely constant. No matter where you are or what you are doing, light is always rigidly exactly the same.
LOL!!
YOU'RE embarrassed? Think of how Janeway must've felt!!!
None of the theoretical work underlying this paradox ever included consideration of acceleration. It all assumed constant velocity to simplify the considerations.
Does a path toward resolution of this paradox lie in this assumption? Who knows? I don't.
Warp is a logarithm of the speed of light; 10/warp=log speed/e?, so warp 10= 10/10 =log e/speed = 1; warp 1 = 10=log e/speed; speed=.0000000001*e
e is the speed of light,
speed is the speed of the subject, expressed as a fraction of the speed of light.
The only thing I'm not sure of is whether this is base 10, but I presume it is, since they select warp 10 to be e.
The question with whether an object could travel faster than sound was what would happen to air particles if that occurred: Could air move faster than it moves due to sound waves? The answer is that air gets spatially compressed, causing a sonic boom. It was not clear whether than spatial compression would destroy the craft doing the compression; as it turns out the compression happens in advance of the object.
A "photonic boom" would certainly be a concern if it were possible to travel than light. But the problem with surpassing the speed of light is one of relativity, not mechanics; since time of the stationary objects travels faster and faster relative to you, as your speed asymptotically approaches light speed, the time elapsed from the observer's reference point approaches infinity.
Then again, maybe the solution to a photonic boom is that the "vacuum" ceases to be a vacuum, thus actually allowing light to appear to slow down relative to you...
I have to think if that makes sense...
That's funny! Even he would get a kick out of that.
In the movie Space "Balls" it was called ludicrous speed and the transition was observable when the light rays passing around the space ship turned to a Tartan pattern.
Obvious Scottish faster that ultra light speed in excess of warp 10 where observable light rays intersect at 90 degree angles, as the space continuum folds in on itself.(LOL)
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