Recent content by csullens

I'm afraid I don't have the tools to solve that problem in such a way that I would get a different answer for the rocket than I would get for the free falling elevator. Which tells me that I guess I don't know how to approach that problem correctly.

I admit, I have no intuitive understanding of why two objects at opposite ends of an accelerating rocket, would experience relative time dilation. I will need to look into that.

Thank you for that. Exactly what I'm trying to drive at! Why is it that I get the distinct impression that the two of you agree with each other completely, and yet somehow one manages to support the basic idea I'm presenting, while the other does not. LOL.

If the elevator is in free fall, wouldn't that violate the equivalence principle if I should show that clocks were ticking off at different rates at different locations in my elevator?

Thank you. I remarked earlier that one seeming reason for this is that the "gravitational charge" from Newtonian gravity cancels with the inertial mass from F=ma leaving g = a on the surface of the Earth, showing that all objects will accelerate in the same way. Is this not a key feature which...

So on the one hand a force which acts equally on everything is really "not a force at all," but on the other hand it will produce a nonzero proper acceleration and time dilation? If it wasn't really a force could it still do those things?

Well, then I suppose we have come full circle because that is precisely the point I made early on and which you claimed I was incorrect about. But now you seem to agree with it.

I can grant that you guys understand this material better than me. And even as I try to be humble and acknowledge that, I think there is one part of this that you have just not got quite right. And that is that any force which accelerates all objects, all particles, all atoms, equally and in the...

When you look at the force law for Newtonian gravity and the force law for the electric force, they look almost identical. The similarity is striking to anyone. The differences are, it seems, the sign, and M vs Q. The point that no one seems to want grant me is the essential importance of the M...

Yes I realize that. I was hoping you might be able to imagine a force, like the electric force, but imagine that there was just one charge. It's not the fact that there are two different electric charges that kept Einstein from reaching conclusions about electric forces that would otherwise have...

Before I say anything else, I want be sure to thank you for your very thoughtful responses and you attempt to help me understand. It seems to me that you are having difficulty pretending that you don't know the conclusions of GR to get into the mind of Einstein as he initially pondered the...

Well, I'm talking about the case of free-fall, not sitting on the surface resisting the pull of gravity. By Einstein's own thought experiment, the clocks in various places inside the elevator should all agree, otherwise you could use the clocks to conclude that your elevator is actually in a...

Wouldn't such time dilation be due to the different curvature of space time in the different locations though? If you were in a uniformly curved space-time, such that the curvature at the top of the elevator was the same at the bottom (at least by approximation) then this effect would disappear...

Can that really be true? Particles that have no relative motion and being accelerated in the same direction and magnitude would have clocks moving at different speeds? How could the clocks decide to move differently when the only difference between the particles is their position in space?

If this were true, then it seems like it would violate the Einstein's elevator thought experiment. Also, if you act equally on every atom and subatomic particle, then I really don't think you would create stresses on the object. There would be no tendency for any part of object to move...