Recent content by flatearther

Just a final note for other beginners like myself - I found a very good online book (linked to from this forum) called Relativity for the Questioning Mind by Daniel F. Styer. It's clear and informative and covers all of the main 3 points with correct emphasis (i.e. it doesn't just focus on time...

It's puzzled me for a long time that there seemed to be no 'directionality' in SR - for example 'moving clocks run slow' and nothing about what direction they're moving. The relativistic simultaneity piece solves the puzzle for me - that's where directionality got to.

Question: If we take the previous example and have the ruler moving away at 0.6c rather than toward us, how does the relativity of simultaneity treat the clocks? Is the front clock's (closest to us) time ahead of the back clock's time in this case?

Ah, that's right. I think I'm starting to get it now. Thanks!

I'll have to ponder that for a while. It seems a bit circular: The clocks are out-of-sync because the speed of light is constant in all frames, and the speed of light is constant in all frames because the clocks are out-of-sync.

Interesting. The piece I was missing was the moving clocks being out-of-sync in the rest frame. So 25 seconds in the rest frame is 20 + 30 = 50 seconds in the moving frame, which allows the photon to be measured at speed c in the moving frame. This seems like it might be a bit recursive - but...

Sorry I meant near mirror to far mirror, as you point out. So it's the relativity of simultaneity? I guess I have some more reading to do! Thanks for your help!

Yes, the mirror is oriented so it has one mirror is in front of the other (according to me) i.e. turned on it's side. So the path the photon travels from the far mirror (from me) to the near mirror is shortened by the mirror's motion toward me and also by SR length contraction. Doesn't...

I'm having a bit of trouble with the famous light clock example, where the photon bounces between 2 mirrors and the light clock is moving laterally across my view. The description is that I see the photon's path longer (spread out) and so it should take longer to travel between ticks. The...