To LastOneStanding:
Yes of course, if you have to carry all the needed fuel at take off (old technology).
But what if technology has advanced to the point where the ship can gather its fuel components from intergalactic space (Hydrogen, Helium), manufactures what's needed, and exhausts it at...
To yoyopizza:
I should have mentioned in the earlier reply that your story need not be limited to traveling to Alpha Centauri. With 1g acceleration/deceleration any galaxy/star in the observable universe (that is, out to about 13.7 BILLION light-years) can be visited with less than about 45...
To yoyopizza:
Travel to a distant star needs to be realistically comfortable for the travelers. That implies that spaceship acceleration (to speeds near light speed) should be about the same as the gravitational acceleration one experiences on Earth, namely 1g (which = 1.0326 ly/y^2)...
To all who set me straight: Mea culpa!
I am now convinced that I erred in thinking that SR was not adequate to show that the string in Bell's Paradox will break. The clincher was the Born rigidity solution that yuiop had suggest that I review. My new understanding also removed my concern...
yuiop (181):
Thanks loads for this suggestion. Though I am totally familiar with the math in Born rigidity, I confess that I hadn’t thought to apply it to adjacent particles in the rod. I clearly need to rethink my position which, at first glance, seems incorrect. If so, then I owe all...
To All:
A bit more about our connection to SR’s message.
The reason we call these SR results paradoxes is because they seem so strange to us as beings who never got even close to leaving the frame we live in and entering a frame that has a great velocity relative to the one we left. All our...
Yuiop (175):
Be assured that I was careful in assuring that the string (or rod, if you like) was not heated or cooled ;-)
You add: I will state my belief as "The proper length of a rod that remains unstressed… does not change, regardless of its acceleration history...”
This is a worthy belief...
DaleSpam (173 & 174):
You really needn’t have spent so much of your time enlightening me about those “core concepts.” But thanks for your concern. PS, my degree in physics is 61 years old, undilated ;-)
harrylin (162):
This hypothesis (which turned out to be a good guess) of a Lorentz contraction to explain the Michelson-Morley experimental result was overshadowed by SR’s explanation that this same contraction could be derived from the hypothesis of an invariant speed of light. SR is what...
A.T.:
I forgot to tell you that your legs are frame-invariant because all events in one frame are also there in other frames, and I would guess that your legs are events ;-)
A.T. & Doc Al:
"You just proved it yourself,..." & "Simple as that."
The physics of the rigid body hasn't changed because the observer has changed. They just have different views of what they observe ;-)
Doc Al:
You say "Whatever mechanism you used to accelerate the rod so as to preserve its length in the original frame is what is causing the destruction."
Is this so by your pronouncement? Or is there some physics proof you can share with us?
To All:
It may be too easy to lose track of SR’s message. That message is that reality exists only in the worldlines that are engraved on the spacetime manifold. Any observer’s measurement of multi-worldline relations (such as time intervals or spatial separations, or even what we’ve chosen...