- #1
slam7211
- 36
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Ok I am only a physics undergrad so if this is obvious I am sorry.
I understand the concepts of SR pretty well but one thing has bugged me. In the most basic light clock example used to describe the effects of time dilation, where 2 mirrors are placed 1 ls apart on a moving boxcar with an observer on the car and not on the car. with each observer measuring the same event happening at different times. I know that the light has to hit the mirrors in both reference frames because events must always occur in all reference frames; however, the thing I don't get is in the reference frame of the observer outside the boxcar the light is moving at a diagonal in order to hit both mirrors because the mirrors are moving with respect to the observer. How do you make sense of light moving like that when bounced off of 2 flat mirrors
I understand the concepts of SR pretty well but one thing has bugged me. In the most basic light clock example used to describe the effects of time dilation, where 2 mirrors are placed 1 ls apart on a moving boxcar with an observer on the car and not on the car. with each observer measuring the same event happening at different times. I know that the light has to hit the mirrors in both reference frames because events must always occur in all reference frames; however, the thing I don't get is in the reference frame of the observer outside the boxcar the light is moving at a diagonal in order to hit both mirrors because the mirrors are moving with respect to the observer. How do you make sense of light moving like that when bounced off of 2 flat mirrors