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Halc

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Everything posted by Halc

  1. The distance between the ships does contract in the S frame, but since the proper distance between the ships increases, it effectively stays the same in the S frame. So say the ships (separated by 1 light hour) accelerate identically (same proper acceleration, commencing simultaneously in S) to 0.6c. In the new inertial frame (T) where they both eventually come to rest, the ships are now 1.25 light hours apart (proper distance), which is length contracted to 1 light hours in frame S. The 1 light hour string is length contracted to 0.8 LH in S, which isn't enough to connect them. It is fully 1 LH in T, which also isn't enough to connect them.
  2. The distance between the ships in frame S remains the same, but the length of the rope contracts in that frame and doesn't span the distance anymore. So it breaks. There is no paradox in this. One rigid ship of significant length does not accelerate at an equal rate along its length, so the pair of ships tied by a string does not behave as a rigid object would. The ships in this example are assumed to be essentially small objects of negligible length. Only the string has non-negligible length. I don't know what you mean by seeing a person running. In the frame of either ship during the acceleration phase, the rear one is going slower and the lead ship is going faster. So again, the string must break. There is no disagreement between the frames, and thus no paradox at all. Your spacetime diagram shows all of this.
  3. This is what I am getting at, and what nobody is answering. I am after the invariant spacetime interval between a pair of events separated in a time-like manner, under GR rules. In flat spacetime, the interval between two events is not a function of any worldline connecting the two events. Nevertheless, the one inertial worldline connecting the two events in question happens to have a proper temporal length equal to that interval (or to the square root of it). It is the worldline that maximizes this proper time between the events. Any other worldline will give a smaller time. This is by definition, and all observer will agree that Fred's clock must measure X time between this event and that. I don't care about this. I'm asking if any one of their time measurements happens to equal the spacetime interval between those two events. The measured times (worldline lengths) are obviously different, and the interval is not different for each observer, so at most only one of them can directly measure it. It's either X, Y, Z, some 4th worldline, or none of them. Z seems the only viable candidate (the one on a ballistic trajectory straight up, falling back just in time for the 2nd event. Z measures the maximal value, just like the one 'correct' observer in the flat scenario. I cannot think of a worldline that can log more time in my gravity scenario. How is a bunch of observers agreeing on the lengths of each other's worldlines in any way relevant to the spacetime interval being invariant? Said interval being invariant means that it isn't dependent on a choice of worldline connecting the two events. Again, this isn't my question. My question is this: If the interval between the two events in my example is 1 (we choose our units so the interval is 1), does any of the three clocks read 1? I can tell you that Z will always trace the longest worldline, using the equivalence principle logic in my prior post. I'm not asking which traces the longest worldline. I'm asking if any of the three is taking a direct measurement of the one worldline-independent interval between those two events. I don't know how to do the tensor computation, else I'd not be asking.
  4. All three observers are present at both events, and they all measure a different time on their clocks, so it can't be as simple as just reading the clock. You picture an orbit too high. One meter altitude is plenty to orbit an ideal sphere. The tower is just there to keep Y from getting belly burns and to give Z some acceleration space. Let's just say the blinks are far enough apart that the Z observer is going to measure the most time. If 90 minutes isn't enough for that, we can make it a month. X just sits at the light, experiencing proper acceleration. Remember, the planet is not spinning and has no air. Y orbits multiple times, but is inertial, and follows a geodesic at constant potential, so I assume he's dilated due to velocity, per H-K. Z goes up, fast at first, but quickly slowing to a near halt for most of the month at an altitude of considerable higher potential, so the +dilation due to potential will be greater than the -dilation due to the motion at either end of the trajectory. Z does his acceleration before the first blink, so the entire duration between the two events is inertial and follows a geodesic, albeit a different one than Y's worldline. This seems a nit-picky objection. Work with me here. I'm not after exact figures. I'm just pointing out that these three observers are going to measure different times between the events, so they can't all have measured the frame-invariant interval between the two events. If one of them is by definition correct, then which? Your equation doesn't immediately shed light on that. You hint that it is X, the one experiencing proper acceleration. This seems to contradict the equivalence principle which I think would have chosen Z. I can have observer X and Z in flat SR space, but in equivalent accelerating Rindler space. In that scenario, the two blinks take place at the same location in some inertial frame for Z and in the Rindler frame for X. In the inertial frame, X goes out and back, and Z is stationary at that location the entire time. In the Rindler frame, X is stationary and Z goes up and down, changing potential along the way, kind of like with Earth above, but different velocity relative to X. I cannot work out a path equivalent to Y in that scenario.
  5. It cannot be done 'all at once' since different parts of the ruler need different levels of proper acceleration. I did a topic once positing the minimum time it would take a 100 light year Born-rigid object to move one light hour in frame X, beginning and ending at rest in that frame. We had to carefully define independent acceleration all along its length to keep it always stationary in its own frame. It can be done, but it is necessarily not all moving at the same speed in any other frame, which doesn't contradict born rigidity. The only rule was that at no point could there be either stress or strain. Keeping it stationary in its own frame wasn't a requirement, but we couldn't find a quicker solution. It takes over 55 days to move the object as measured in any frame since the speed never got very high. The math is pretty trivial until you investigate alternate methods, but none of them yielded a shorter duration.
  6. Of course. I don't know my tensor calculus, but I know that tensors are frame invariant, and any scalar quantity like that must thus also be frame invariant, so that answers that. Thanks. Some specific examples then: OK, it makes more sense for the guy present at both events to have an easier job of determining the interval than the remote guy. Is the interval then just the time on his clock, or is it more complicated than that? I ask because I can have three observers X,Y,Z. The light blinks every ~90 minutes. X is our guy located at the top of a tower on a spherical non-rotating Earth (effectively Schwarzschild spacetime). Y is in low orbit and comes around exactly when it blinks. Z is lauched straight up a somewhat under escape velocity and comes back exactly in time for the second blink. All three observers are present at both events. Y I think will measure the shortest time and Z the greatest. Those two are inertial in that they follow geodesic worldlines. X does not and is under 1g of proper acceleration between the events. My guess is that all three are going to have to do some complicated mathematics to compute the invariant interval between those two events. None of them has the luxury of simply looking at his watch. I also admit not being able to explain concepts like time-killing vector fields. Heard of them, but I'm just a novice at this.
  7. I can think of few frame-invariant things. In fact, the interval seems to be a rare such thing. Yes, anybody can compute what is being measured relative to a different frame. We're all doing it in this forum all the time. That doesn't make the thing being measured frame invariant unless there is somehow a way to determine the objective frame that all can determine independently instead of an arbitrary choice that all decide to use. There is no such frame. In particular, there is no objective measure of gravitation potential. It is always relative. Ideally one would assign 0 gravitational potential to a place infinitely distant from all matter, but of course there is nowhere you can go to get away from it all. I've never seen the gravitational potential of Earth expressed in any absolute way. If you could do that, you could compute the objective dilation of a clock here on Earth and then get a figure for the actual rate of time passage in the universe. It would probably change over time. Again, I've never seen any valid attempt at this, just religious presumptions that we're the standard and the universe is all about us, just like we're also by chance the only stationary thing in the universe, and thus the center of it.
  8. The interval cannot be invariant between observers at different gravitational potentials. Consider a light blinking at the top of a radio tower (on a non-spinning planet if we want to be more precise). We have an observer at the top and one on the ground, each measuring the interval between the blinks. They're both stationary relative to the tower, so the interval is trivially just the time between the blinks, but the two observers will measure different elapsed times on their local clocks because they're at different potentials and don't run in sync. So the spacetime interval being invariant is a property only of flat Minkowskian spacetime.
  9. Dandelions and Homo are genetically similar enough to be connected, but that doesn't mean that either is descended from the other. It just means we share a common ancestor at some point. The more recent that common ancestor, the closer we are related to a thing.
  10. Gifts of silver and gold will vir- ginity tend to put an end to. The tortithe and rabbit rathed theee timeth thith month. The rabbit won twithe and the torithe onthe. Started choking, turning purple, A hardy slap and one good burp'll put you to rights. Quoted from memory. Credit: James Hogan. There was one with orange as well, but it was really reaching, and I don't remember it.
  11. Accelerating an electron to nearly light speed is regularly done in particle accelerators, which then go on to add momentum to said electron perhaps another thousand-fold, and the electron still doesn't go faster than c. I think that is a practical example of verification that's been done. I cannot parse what you have in mind with the M and the little m's. A rock is composed of a bunch of molecules, which is a set of smaller masses making up a larger mass. That fact seems totally irrelevant to the limit the separation rate of a pair of rocks. GR limits separation speed locally to c, but non-locally, this is not the case. Hence there are distant galaxies increasing their proper distance from us at a rate greater than c. No object can have a peculiar velocity greater than c. Peculiar velocity is local in a sense: it is its velocity relative to the center of mass of all matter within some radius (typically the size of the visible universe, or possibly the Hubble radius) centered at the location of the object.
  12. I said no such thing. Either your reading comprehension skills are completely absent or your are deliberately twisting everybody's replies. I suspect the latter. I said that since the 'traveler' considers himself stationary in his own frame (by definition no less), clock 2 rushes towards him from 36 light minutes away, and this takes 45 minute, which is less than SoL. That makes no statement about what he sees while this is going on. 10 years away as measured in a different frame than your own, yes. If I have a fast enough ship, I can get to the far edge of the galaxy in my lifetime, despite it being 70,000 LY away in the frame of the galaxy. That speed is called proper velocity (dx/dt') and there is no limit of c to it. Normal velocity (dx/dt, or distance and time measured in the same frame) is bounded locally by light speed.
  13. That error has already been pointed out. The example shows clock 3 traveling the light hour in 5/4 hours. That's what it means to be moving at 0.8c. Due to time dilation, clock 3 just happens to have logged only 3/4 hours during that trip. Relative to the clock's own frame, only 45 undilated minutes pass, but it is stationary (by definition), which is hardly traveling faster than SoL. In that frame, clock 2 comes to it at 0.8c, and moves 36 light-minutes during those 45 minutes, which is also less than SoL. 2: As seen some observer A, the incoming clock is seen to go from a light hour away to 'here' in 15 minutes, yes. That's the difference between its actual speed in that frame and the speed of the light the observer is observing.
  14. Yes, it takes 1:15 in the frame of 1st/2nd clock for the 3rd clock to get one LH away. In the frame of that 3rd clock, it is stationary, so it isn't traveling anywhere in the 45 minutes it logs, so it isn't moving faster than light.
  15. Because one and a quarter hours is an hour and 15 minutes, not an hour and 25 minutes.
  16. Not going to watch a 6 minute video to look for where he says that. As swansont points out, there is no such thing as 'the gravity'. It needs to be more specific. The gravitational potential above the surface of some mass is -GM/r, which is proportional to M/r, so perhaps by 'the gravity' he means gravitational potential. It can be expressed in the same units as velocity.
  17. Janus is describing the ballistic theory of light, which is actually a much better fit to Galilean relativity which asserts no preferred frame. One cannot 'continue to see B as "frozen"' '. Light from that moment can at best be measured once, not continuously. Oddly enough, if the missile moves at 2c, with either theory, if they look at a 'stationary' Earth from the missile, Earth will appear to run backwards. At 11:00 missile time, it will see Earth at 9:00 given a 10:00 departure. The 9:00 light from Earth gets to the same location as where the missile is at that time. Funny thing is, the image of Earth will appear in front of the missile, not behind it like intuition suggests. Sound works the same way. The post of mine discussed both, but the part to which you responded involved more of a Newtonian preferred-frame ether theory which denies Galilean relativity. Don't get the question. The only measurements you describe are both of them in each other's presence at the time of departure. They both measure 10:00 on both clocks at that time. Not sure what it would mean for those identical observations to 'cancel'.
  18. It depends on what theory Galileo uses. Using the ballistic theory of light, the missile is immediately invisible at A because it is going faster than light, and thus light emitted by it cannot propagate towards A. It can only fall behind. Using a pre-relativity ether theory (Newtonian), and assuming A is stationary in that ether, the missile clock reads 11:00 when it passes C and it takes 2 hours for that light to go back and reach A, so A sees the missile clock ticking at 1/3 rate. In both cases, the missile can see nothing behind it because it is superluminal, similar to how a supersonic aircraft cannot hear any noise from behind. Both theories predict different results than what is actually observed, but the actual theory has no different answer for the problem since it forbids the missile from having a space-like worldline. As you say, relativity forbids that you go there, but the other two theories do not.
  19. That was sort of my thinking at the OP, but I wasn't sure. Energy is conserved, so where does it go? The 'expansion' doesn't seem like a form of energy that can receive it. Maybe all the slowing down stuff powers the dark energy, translated into acceleration of expansion. Energy is conserved in an inertial frame, but not from one frame to another, so the rock has no kinetic energy in the frame in which it is stationary, but has KE in the frame of Earth from which it was launched. Relative to the curved FLRW frame (also known as cosmological or comoving frame), the rock has been imparted with a sort of absolute KE which is derived from its peculiar velocity. The reply from @swansont thus made some sense in that light. KE relative to an inertial frame makes sense only for a local object. What's the KE of some star receding from us at 2.3c?* It isn't computable, but its KE based on its peculiar velocity does make sense. This is why I was willing to accept that answer, even though it wasn't my initial guess. *recession velocities are not measured in units that add relativistically, but rather add linearly, per the FLRW frame, so 2.3c doesn't have the usual meaning when computing something like KE. Good argument, but I've heard that the photon doesn't lose energy since relative to Earth it was always red-shifted to its observed measurement,. But as I said, 'relative to Earth' loses meaning over these sorts of distances. The universe isn't Minkowskian. The photon definitely does lose energy in the FLRW frame. Its peculiar velocity must be c, so its peculiar energy (is there such a term??) must be lost to something in that frame. That or the curved frame does not have the property of conservation of energy. How do the absolutists (which typically select this frame as the absolute one) deal with that? Violation of thermodynamic law has sunk an awful lot of theories. I'm not going to disagree, but I'm getting conflicting answers. Is there an article or other page somewhere that discusses this? I didn't know how to frame a search on stack exchange. Anyway, you seem to address one question in the OP: "Two such ballistic objects are ejected, one at .9999c and the other at .999999c. Is there a major difference in when the two get here? " Apparently the number of 9's makes a significant difference. The speed is nearly identical, but the energy/mass is not. That's good, since it would be harder to swallow a view where the rock lost proper mass along the way, fading to dust... Why not? A neutrino seems to be a very small and typically fast rock. It has proper mass. It has an inertial frame in which it is stationary, all just like the rock. The photon has none of this. That would seem to need more justification than just an assertion. I thought it was a valid point, and cannot easily think my way around it, especially when it is expressed as 'peculiar energy' as I put it.
  20. Well, that's my question. I'm not asserting anything here. Suppose I launch a rock at half light speed. The proper distance between it and some object 7 GLY away is constant, making it sort of stationary relative to it in a way. But over time, the Hubble 'constant' goes down, and that distant object is no longer stationary relative to our rock, so the rock starts gaining on it. Given that logic, perhaps it will not only eventually get there, but it will pass by it half light speed. That would imply that expansion has no effect on peculiar velocity over time. If so, then our neutrino gets here pretty much the same time as the light. Not sure if that logic holds water.
  21. I know that, but that supernova occurred barely outside our galaxy, hardly enough distance for cosmic expansion to play a role. I'm asking about a hypothetical event 5 orders of magnitude further away than that, from a source with a recession speed greater than c.
  22. I am trying to figure out ballistic trajectories over cosmological distances. All the literature seems to speak only of light, and shows worldlines only of comoving objects, not objects with motion relative to the comoving frame. So suppose some early galaxy exists 1.7 billion years after the big bang, 12 billion years ago. Some star emits light and neutrinos at that event. The light gets here today, so the galaxy at the time was something on the order of 4.7 GLY away (proper distance measured along line of constant cosmic time) from here (the place where our solar system will eventually be). Due to expansion, the star is increasing its proper distance from us at something like 2.5c at the time, although the same galaxy is currently receding at more like 2.1c today. My question is about the neutrino, which is not light, but rather a simplistic ballistic object. It is moving at nearly light speed relative to the star that emitted it. Does it get here? When? If it doesn't get here close to today, how far does it get in the 12 billion years (cosmic time)? I don't know how to apply expansion of space into an integration of its movement, and special relativity is not help whatsoever. The light is easy because it always moves locally at c. Both light and neutrino increase their proper distance from 'here' at first since they're both well beyond the Hubble distance at the time but still well inside the particle horizon. Does the speed matter? Two such ballistic objects are ejected, one at .9999c and the other at .999999c. Is there a major difference in when the two get here? The neutrino has a lot of 9's.
  23. Closest approach (about 16 au) is still well outside the Roche limit of Sgr-A (about 1/30th that distance). So imagine the speed of an object getting that close. Just outside that limit, I imagine a passing star would still get pretty torn up.
  24. Neither view posits a special role for humans. You're thinking the Wigner interpretation which has a special role for humans, but even Wigner backed off support for it since it can be shown to lead to solipsism. If humans (or biological consciousness) are necessary, then the universe never collapsed into say the existence of Earth until humans came along to do the first measurement. Kind of a chicken/egg problem there.
  25. Out of curiosity, why? What possible evidence do you have against it? Or is this just a statement of your lack of warm fuzzies for the view? This statement presumes that there is one 'the Buddha' that experiences one of the worlds and not any of the others. This is not what MWI is all about. That would be a supernatural philosophy, otherwise known as religion. Wrong forum to discuss that. Under MWI, all versions of a person are self-experienced (and yes, none experiences death), and there is no epiphenomenal entity that 'follows' one of them.
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