Thanks everyone. Mostly reminders of what I know already or ought to know already, but it is appreciated all the same. The MTW book is expensive for me right now but I am very tempted and will think about it.
Well anyway the consensus opinion here seems to be that what I read was not mis-information. I cannot say I am perfectly happy since I would have liked a neat simple anwer to my dilemna (like confirmation that what I read was nonsense) but I accept that there are good reasons (which some of you...
I have read that the expansion of the universe is not a relative velocity and therefore not restricted to the limitation of the speed of light. I read that this creates a horizon which we cannot see beyond due the fact that the portions of the universe are moving away from us at a speed greater...
This is off topic, but I already opened it above myself. Your understanding of the Copenhagen interpretation is coming from its detractors and is certainly not how it is expessed today. Accordingly, the universe has a state whether it is observed or not, but it is a quantum state (consisting...
You can call it whatever you like but it has no objective reality. Regions of space time separated from you by space-like distance are in a gray area between already happened and not happened yet. Already happened because nothing you do can change them in any way and not happened yet because...
You were "confusing the observers conclusions with the raw information" in the what you said in the portion I quoted, but perhaps this is only a problem with how you were trying to express yourself and that this is not the real source of confusion. So forgive me if I am wrong but I am going to...
That is correct. Though you should modify the parenthetical: (of course hundreds of years will have passed at the destination according to the interpretation of simultaneity used by an observer at the destination, assuming the desination is not itself moving relativistically with respect to...
I find the combination of comments by AnnsiH a little peculiar in complaining both about a lack of understanding about the relativity of simultaneity and the excess of mathematics. Any true understanding of the relativity of simultaneity must use the mathematics since it is primarily a...
No. c represents a measurable quantity, the speed of light in a vacuum. Is it only a coincidence that electrodynamic depends on a constant that happens to be the speed of light in our inertial frame? Is the speed of light in a vacuum different in different directions? Does this measurement of...
The problem is that this idea of an increased resistance to velocity is hidebound to a single reference frame. Put a small ship inside a big ship and accelerate it to 99.5% of the speed of light. Now if the small ship comes out, does it have any great difficulty accelerating away from the big...
This idea of increased mass is very misleading. If you get on a ship and accelerate to 99.5% of the speed of light, nothing on the ship changes in any way. However if a particle of mass m is moving toward you with this velocity its total energy is 10 mc^2, which is the rest mass energy mc^2...
The object is shortening according to his calculations after he takes into account the different times that the light takes to get to him from different parts of the object (called the aberration of light). If he does not take this into account the object actually appears elongated when in...
Well you can ask why endlessy, but I can explain a few things. First of all motion is relative so for an observer on that moving object it is you that is moving and not him. So while you think the object is shortened, he thinks it is you that is shortened and not him.
This seems like a...
Just some superficial thoughts...
Well isn't this consistent with the description of magnetic fields in terms of photons. Isn't the result simply saying that this magnetic field in the second case has no momentum in the direction of motion.
Furthermore for the magnet field to be purely...
No but the lower limit is more interesting. Nothing in theory as far as I know imposes a lower limit on black holes but that doesn't mean that any low mass black holes exist. It is a question of how could low mass black holes come into existence. Apparently many physicist think that a lot of...