4 ms·
No, your interpretation is not quite correct. You do indeed use your own clock to determine the time of events in your own frame of reference. But you still n
by antognini 7y ago
No, your interpretation is not quite correct. You do indeed use your own clock to determine the time of events in your own frame of reference. But you still need to account for the light travel time of the event. This is why you need both the position and the time of the event in order to do a Lorentz transformation.
To see this another way, suppose you saw two events at the same time, one two light-years away, and the other one light-year away. In your interpretation you would call those events simultaneous. Simultaneous events cannot affect each other in any reference frame. But if the two events were in a line, the light from the first event could have triggered the second.
- baddox 7y ago> To see this another way, suppose you saw two events at the same time, one two light-years away, and the other one light-year away. In your interpretation you would call those events simultaneous. Yes, I would say that those events occurred at the same time in my reference point, while also recognizing that we can't say in an absolute sense that they were simultaneous. Isn't that the point of relativity of simultaneity?
- bendavis381 7y agoYou're confusing the local observation time of a phenomena with the time the phenomena occurred as observed from our frame of reference and relative distance from its origin.
- philipov 7y agoSpecial Relativity states that the time (component of spacetime distance) to an event depends on the relative velocity (angle) of the observing reference frame. It does not state that an event occurs at the moment it is observed; that would imply light has an infinite velocity. The whole point of relativity is that events do not occur at the exact moment they are observed, because light has a finite velocity. The fact that light's finite velocity is the same in all reference frames is what causes reference frames to tilt their spacetime angle according to their velocity. It's the same as saying the Y component (height) of a line segment changes if you rotate it. The length of the line is the spacetime distance, the height (Y component) of the line is time, the x component is spatial distance, and the angle of the line depends on the relative velocity of the observer.