3 ms·
You overstate it by calling it a theory. I'm sure you just watched the Veritasium video [1] on this very subject. The point wasn't to claim that space has a pre
by tasty_freeze 6y ago
You overstate it by calling it a theory. I'm sure you just watched the Veritasium video [1] on this very subject. The point wasn't to claim that space has a preferred direction (which would contradict known physics) but highlighting that there is no way to prove the speed of light is uniform, only that the round trip speed is 'c'.
Second, even if the speed of light is unbounded (or has a much higher bound) in one direction, that doesn't give a free ride for objects with mass to travel any faster than they currently do. It would take an incredible amount of energy to accelerate such rocks to near/above the constant 'c' and then you'd need to explain how it returns to normal asteroid speeds before crashing into Earth.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTn6Ewhb27k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTn6Ewhb27k
- varispeed 6y agoThank you! Haha yes I watched Veritasium video...
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoWith synchronized atomic clocks, I could measure one-way speed - at least well enough to tell the difference between c, c/2, and infinity.
- tasty_freeze 6y agoWatch the linked video. He goes into that issue.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoNo, I'm not going to watch the linked video to find out whether he's really answering my question or not. Tell me why I can't synchronize two atomic clocks that are right next to each other, then put one in a car and drive 1000 km away. Tell me why that won't allow me to correlate departure and arrival times well enough to answer the question.
- tasty_freeze 6y agoYou are being rather demanding, but I'll bite anyway. When a synchronized clock is accelerated, it will experience time dilation as compared to the stationary clock; they will no longer be synchronized. You might think: ah, I'll just correct for that using relativistic calculations. But you'd be wrong again because Einstein explicitly states that everything in his theory assumes that the speed of light is uniform. Really, the video does explain all this and more.