OK, so Ibx seemed to understand my question. I thought the follow-on sentence amplified it enough, however I'll reword the OP below to make it clearer.
Ibx, thanks for the response. That's the way I've always understood it as well, ie the Presentist interpretation requires a preferred frame...
OK, so I was reading thru a prior thread UNLEARNING THE BLOCK UNIVERSE, initiated by user Lynch101, and which has already been locked by the forum. There were many good responses. It was stated that PRESENTISM and the BLOCK UNIVERSE are 2 philosophical interpretations of the very same LTs, and...
By convention, the unprimed frame records the primed system moving at +v, and so the primed frame records the unprimed system moving at -v.
As Erland said above, you can just substitute -v for v in the LTs, and you'll find that the inverse LTs are attained. Gamma is found to be the same for the...
I think that a derivation of the LTs, either as Einstein did in his 1905 paper, or by Algebra alone (as it's often taught today), is all that's needed. However for many, the Minkowski spacetime diagrams are also needed to reach the full meaning of SR, as a picture can paint a 1000 words. I can...
Mister T,
Agreed. I thought the Mechanical Universe episodes wrt relativity theory were very good, particularly for the year in which it was made (so long ago). They did a very nice job on those, in presentation.GrayGhost
NoahsArc,
Just to add to the above ... algebra alone suffices, because the relationship between differing inertial frames is assumed to be linear, due to the observed properties of homogeniety attributed to space and time. That was stated by Einstein in his 1905 OEMB paper, near the beginning...
x-vision,
BTW, for your scenario the LTs apply, but only after some modification. The LTs were derived for spacetime systems that have a common origin. IOW x,y,z,t = x',y',z',t' = 0,0,0,0. Their spatial origins momentarily coincide at one point in time, when both their clocks read zero. In...
x-vision,
While my prior spacetime diagram was correct in its depicted coordinates, it was technically incorrect from a standpoint of "proper convention" for spacetime diagrams. Proper convention, is to present the system which holds the velocity as positive (worldines slant from lower-left to...
x-vision,
I reposted the spacetime diagram after you looked at it. I noticed I had omitted the negative signs on the (star's) x' values depicted there. They are corrected now.GrayGhost
Hi Dale. I see you guys were trying to make a single scenario that matched v-vision's OP, although I don't believe he had that in mind when he initially posted. It is a good idea though. I did draft the spacetime diagram here, however whereas you said "In both frames the other frame’s clock...
x-vision,
In your OP (original post), in the 1st half of your scenario description, you mentioned the star as stationary, and the rocket 10 ly distant moving inertially inbound toward the star at 0.9c. At that velocity, the gamma factor is indeed γ = 1/√(1-v²/c²) = 2.294. So when the rocket...