Recent content by DonB

Thanks everyone for the input!

I appreciate the insights and corrections, Dale. But it still doesn't tell me if the light will be on for O1 yet off for O2 -- and if so, how that is possible. (I'm such a novice. Sorry.)

Hello. I am an occasional poster here with little background but a big interest in the mental experiments (ME) of Einstein and others. Of particular interest to me are factors related to what I call the Classic Spaceship Mental Experiment. [mentor's note: a link to an unacceptable reference...

That explains at least a part of my overall misunderstanding, for I somehow assumed both X and Y to be representing the same units of measure. And whether there was something that actually 'rode' that wave, or even if the wave was a fluctuation/oscillation, as the sine waves nears the X axis...

So, there really is a wave, but it is not so much matter in itself as it is a measure of the fluctuation/oscillation of the electrical field. So, the travel of the light beam graphed along the X axis is a measure of distance, but the oscillation of the electrical field (plotted as plus and...

Just a jump of logic within my own mind -- can't blame anyone else but me. If the straight-line light beam is going c, then my own logic figured anything traveling along the sine wave superimposed on that beam would have to be going faster. Not saying that is the right way to look at it...

If that is the case, then doesn't that make the EM wave an actual "thing" (which someone earlier said it is not), and thus in its wave form it is going faster than c?

Thanks Smattering. As I just asked someone else, a list of some of those experiments that I could look up and study would be most appreciated.

Thanks. I would be very curious to know what some of those experiments are. One of the main things I would like to get out of my interaction here is to grasp the reality of this concept. So far my search for answers has still left the question unexplained. So, if you could give me a list of...

Thanks. So would it be right to say that the electro/magnetic wave is not so much a separate 'companion' to the light beam (as I've thought), but is rather 'radiated' (in a non-technical sense) from that beam of light?

Right, I understand that. So, you're saying that there is no actual wave from the electrical or magnetic "components" of light? I didn't know that. Maybe this is a different thing altogether, but there is an aspect of light that is a wave -- whatever it is that allows light to pass through a...

I've heard that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Is that actually held to be a scientific truth, and if so what is the basis for that? The reason I ask, I was watching a video on relativity, and it illustrated a straight-line light beam traveling through space. Superimposed...

Thanks for the interaction, and I hope to soon be able to give fuller attention to learn more of the muons. (I do know of them, but really haven't studied the subject out.) I'm not so much challenging that relativity doesn't work, just trying to see how two people observing the same thing...

Okay, I get that I don't loose or gain any years just because my twin flies out to the stars and back at the speed of light -- nor does he loose/gain. It's as if one of us has a 'fold' in our time line (or world line as you called it) that allows one individual to have more years of living...

Thanks for the interesting link. So, if I understand Lasky right, this Twin Paradox is not really due to how the light beam path is viewed (vertical vs. diagonal) by the two observers (since both will see the same thing as they look at the other's time clock), but is possibly sole because of...