4 ms·
I like this, but it doesn't completely remove the "unintuitivenes" of relativity. For example, why do we measure in fractions of light speed? What happens when
by doctoboggan 5y ago
I like this, but it doesn't completely remove the "unintuitivenes" of relativity.
For example, why do we measure in fractions of light speed?
What happens when we are already rotated all the way to light speed and then fire another bullet?
I guess there are other ways to reason about this, but it still doesn't feel intuitive to me.
- OscarCunningham 5y agoLightspeed has infinite rapidity, so when you add on the rapidity of a bullet you just get lightspeed again
- gowld 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapidity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapidity That's amazing, and it was well explained in 1908! Yet students today are learning a horrific bastardized version of it. Physics is absolutely terrible when courses and books try to to remove the "complicated" math, and in its place they put something more complicated and ambiguous. Teach the math! It's like Greenspun's Tenth Rule, but for math: "Any sufficiently complicated scientific theory contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Complex Analysis."
- codeflo 5y agoIt’s important that the “angle” isn’t directly the fraction of c, but tanh^-1(v/c). This number is also called “rapidity”, and goes to infinity as v -> c. Yes, hyperbolic angles aren’t limited to [0, 2 pi). You can’t rotate all the way to lightspeed, that would be rotation by an infinite angle. For any finite angle (i.e. speed below c), you can always add the angle of the bullet to get a new (finite) angle.
- d-d 5y ago
- fknorangesite 5y agoI look forward to your Nobel prize.
- astrange 5y agoThe GPS people would be surprised to hear that.