3 ms·
There's something I don't understand about that type of explanation. Say a particle and I are moving along like so: -----[photon @ speed of light]-->
by Nition 9y ago
There's something I don't understand about that type of explanation.
Say a particle and I are moving along like so:
-----[photon @ speed of light]-->
-----[me @ 50% speed of light]-->
Or more simplified, say two cars are moving like so:
-----[other car]-->
-----[my car]-->
When I'm stationary, I see him go past at 100km/h. When I move at 50km/h, in the real world he would now appear to only be going 50km/h. But if I slow down my time to half speed, now he'll look like he's going 100km/h again. Because he looks to me like he's at 50km/h at double time speed = 100km/h. That seems to make sense - time slows down and the apparent speed stays at C (100km/h in this case).
That's how I've understood the explanation for relativity. But it must be a very wrong understanding - because that whole idea breaks down when the other car is going along a different vector to me! In this situation:
<----[other car @ 100km/h]--
-----[my car @ 50km/h]-->
His speed relative to me would come out as 150km/h in the real world, and no amount of making him look like he's going faster would reduce his speed to 100km/h.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ptrincr 9y agoThe reason is Lorentz transformation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation Your measurement of time and space will always adjust to ensure light travels at a constant speed. Time dilates, length contracts. So perhaps it would "look" like the car travelled a smaller distance over a longer period of time that what you expected, from your frame of reference, versus a third observer who can see you both.
- Nition 9y agoThanks, that looks like what I'm talking about and I'll have a read through. It looks like pretty dense reading but the equations mostly don't look too horrible.
- posterboy 9y ago> Your measurement of time and space will always adjust to ensure light travels at a constant speed. Enough with the metaphors already, the measurements don't do anything, you, or rather phyisicists and the like do measurements, and they adjust numbers normalized to c=1 because how else would you do it. There is no way to synchronize clocks because of the CAP theorem, nevermind relativity.