Recent content by aaj

This is incorrect. Your sentence would have been correct if the word 'measure' had been used instead of 'see'. As to what you would see, you would actually see other objects rotated and not length contracted. This is a visual effect and is known as 'Terell rotation'. Length contraction is...

To that extent you are right. An object must always keep moving in a geodesic through spacetime. It cannot sit still in spacetime. For instance, in the absence of a gravitational field i.e in flat spacetime, an object is still moving through time. In other words, its worldline is still a...

Its also intetresting to note that the above hypothesis seeks to make a clear distinction between mass and inertia. Most common definitions of mass itself are in terms of inertia. For instance, 1kg of mass may be defined as that mass which accelerates at 1m/s^2 in response to a force of 1N. Now...

This is interesting. Just as a curiousity, has there been any experiment conducted to verify this notion? I haven't thought over this much but should it not be possible to simply test this out by performing an experiment on an object, once with no heavy object close by and once more with many...

Please refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenfest_paradox for a description of this very interesting paradox. Although I understood the apparent paradox, I could not get a grasp of the resolution ofthe paradox, as explained on Wikipedia. Could any of the pros on this forum explain the...

The way I interpret 'Newton's bucket' experiment is that it does indeed show that there is some absolute reference and that relative motions are not all that matter. Now I don't think, it automatically implies the existence of absolute space, as Newton and most contemporaries thought. Indeed as...

Exactly. And either way, the observations will enable the man and the lady to correctly deduce whether the train had accelerated in order to stop in the fram of the platform or whether the platform had accelerated to be in the frame of the moving train. And, Relativity has no objection to them...

JesseM, I think you did not read the full argument of the author in the link that I provided. The argument that was discussed in the thread provided by you was a different one by the same author. Here is the link I am referring to again...

I chanced upon an article http://homepage.mac.com/ardeshir/TrainDisprovesRelativity.html which sought to show through a thought experiment that SR is inherently contradictory. Now I am not a pro in Relativity but from whatever understanding I have built up, here is the response that I...

So you mean that it is possible for two observers in relative motion to each measure a different value for the distance between them? For instance, if a planet revolves in a precise circular orbit around a star, will an observer on the planet measure a different value for the distance between...

This confuses me. I thought that if two observers have a velocity between themselves, each observes the distance to the other to be length contracted. In this discussion, the relative velocity between A and C is 0.866c. From the standpoint of either of them, the other observer is moving away at...

I am not a physics student (my background is that of an engineer + MBA) but have read a lot about relativity and have built up a fair level of understanding. I just thought up a situation regarding Lorentz contraction that has kind of confused my understanding of the same. Consider the...