I'm new too! I have met a few not-so-nice physicists in my life and so I was very nervous to post here. But so far, I have not been chewed out or made to feel that I do not belong here. I appreciate your response.
I agree with you that the twin who finds their clock is the slower clock...
Is there no way to trick them so that they don't know which one is moving toward the other? For example, have one being spun around in a circle to simulate the same motion that the other is feeling due to acceleration? Or would this introduce too much SR complication? I would only want to do...
Wow! I wish I would have kept following up on my post. I just thought it was kind of over. I learned a lot from reading through the posts. Thank you for having the conversation. I wanted to especially thank George for performing that calculation for me on page 2 (post 25 or so).
Amazing...
Consider this scenario involving twins.
The twins, A and B, are some unspecified distance apart and are placed inside a container. They are told that one of them will be traveling to the other at a given fixed speed, but things will be done so that neither twin will know which one did the...
Okay, imagine this scenario.
An observer on Earth is going to measure the distance to Alpha Centauri in two ways. First, he will send a photon and calculate the distance as 1/2 ct.
Then, he will send an odometer to Alpha Centauri traveling near the speed of light (say .9c) and have it return...
Ah, I just made a connection (in my mind)!
Light takes the shortest path through space-time. Thus, the closer you are traveling at the speed of light, the shorter your distance will be.
But now I don't understand this: You say that the distance measured by Earth-bound twin will be greater...
It just seems like 1 second for Twin A is the same as 1 second for Twin B. What is different is the time that Twin A sees passing for Twin B.
I think I just need to think some more about it. I need to reconsider how I view the situation in light of thinking about the distance of the...
Ah, very interesting. The traveling twin will have measured a smaller distance relative to the Earth-bound twin's measurement. That helps me feel better about it.
Because of this, will they both measure the same velocity for the traveling twin (since v=d/t)? In other words, does the...
I find it strange that everyone assumes that something is there in the past to go back to. Is there some reason to assume that the past contains a copy of all events and objects? Like a copy of of the universe is taken and stored on a continual basis.
I find it much more likely that there is...
This question is in regard to special relativity.
From my rudimentary understanding, concerning the twin paradox, if one twin leaves traveling near the speed of light and returns, he will find himself younger than his twin who stayed behind. Hence, the effect of time dilation is permanent...