Reply To: Proliferation?

[Brian H]

Aeronaut wrote:

I get a kick out of all those with a better physics education than Einstein that are afraid to publicly challenge any and/or all 4 parts of the theory of relativity, which was published 104 years ago. Wasn’t Einstein working on a unified field theorum when he died?

So far, tests of GR have supported it, including such things as “frame dragging”, measured from orbit. The problem is synching it with QM (which Einstein resisted as a theory until his dying day — the famous “God does not play dice” was his objection to resorting to probabilities at a fundamental event/causal level. He also disliked the “spooky action at a distance” aspect of entanglement. A very cause-and-effect kind of guy!) So it’s more like fear of making readily provably false statements that inhibits physicists, I think.
Can’t follow you into the specific theories, but I’ll agree with the human nature parts. As I understand it, Relativity was an attempt to describe God’s M.O., so to speak, despite all he didn’t know. I’m surprised nobody connected the dots and did a “top floor” to tie everybody else’s slices together.

One way to help “visualize” the effects of relativity is to imagine yourself in a spaceship with nearly unlimited power available, and measure your speed and acceleration by watching the stars & galaxies whiz by. You would apparently be able to travel at any multiple of the speed of light you wanted, and would experience only perfectly normal internal time and gravity (acceleration) within the ship itself. But when you put on the brakes and came to a halt, you would discover that far more time had passed outside the ship, sufficient to relegate your speed to just under C by external measures. Inside your own “frame”, your experience was normal, but seen from the outside you got very compressed in the direction of travel, sufficient to compensate for the redshift of light (or other energies) travelling in your direction inside the ship. In the extreme, a long pointed ship would shorten till it looked like a disk moving face-forward from the outside. But inside, you’d still experience it as long and narrow.

So, did your ship really flatten out like a coin? Or stay long and spear-shaped? It all depends; it was all relative! :cheese:
P.S. For a fascinating and fun read in fiction of the phenomenon, read Tau Zero by Poul Anderson. A Bussard Ramscoop ship that suffers a glitch that won’t let it slow down, so it must continuously accelerate. Before long, they’re punching through dense star cores to keep the scoop fed! :gulp: :ahhh: :coolsmirk: