Recent content by my_wan

Among the last of the classical tests of general relativity was the Pound–Rebka experiment performed in 1959. This experiment employed a variation of Mössbauer spectroscopy in which a moving emitter was used to counteract a gravitational redshift. The idea here is to exploit QED to measure the...

Agreed that the trampoline analogy is limited in a multitude of ways, and the dimensionality is no small part of it. At best it's a conceptual springboard to get past certain conceptual blocks, but by no means the only hurdle to overcome.

If you put put it at a certain height the curved space will merely make it fall straight to the ground. Like rolling straight down hill. If you push it to the side fast enough it'll still fall toward the Earth, but because it's also moving sideways it keep missing. To visualize this here is a...

When you extend your inertial frame over all space-time, assuming it is flat, not all frames have the same properties even without rotation. If it is a rotating frame then it is by definition not an inertial frame as defined by SR. There is nothing unusual about an 'apparent' speed of light...

Yes, I was merely expanding on that fact. No disagreement from me. The only difference is, as you say, coordinate dependence. SR you could extrapolate a coordinate choice out globally. In GR this is no longer possible. New people trying to get a handle on it tend to start from a coordinate...

No, both proper length and proper time are defined by the things in the same reference frame as the observer. The measurements of space and time of things moving relative to you not measurements of proper space or time for the object being measured.

I found one quote that describes the situation: http://www.bartleby.com/173/27.html

The key word word here is 'local'. In SR the speed of light was a global constant. In GR it became a local constant. This has lead some to quote Einstein stating that the speed of light can no longer be considered an absolute constant to make all sorts of wild claims. One of the ways you can...

I'm not going over every detail of your criticism, unless you request specific clarifications. By clock rates I mean what the observers measure wrt each other, irrespective of what interpretation you put on those measurements. That's debatable, since you can't analyze orbits involving time...

There are situations where two inertial observer with no relative motion between them can nonetheless have differing clock rates wrt each other. Also there are situations where a non-inertial observer and an inertial observer with a constant distance between them will have the same clock rate...

The page you got this from was referring to earlier theories about what powered the sun, not present day understanding. This happening is not dependent on the sun burning by any other method at any time prior to that. All it has to do is get big enough from capturing meteors and such...

Here is something that occurred to me many years ago, as a teen, and espoused by Edward Arthur Milne. Newtonian physics notwithstanding, IIF we do live in a purely mechanistic Universe I can't personally comprehend how it could be conceived that distance and time have any direct empirical...

If at the point of impact you draw line A from center point r to center point R, then at the center of the ion draw line B perpendicular to A. Then the ion will recoil as if recoiling off a wall at B.

There are interpretations in which treats environmental interactions collapse the wavefunction, important for things like quantum computers. In this case the cat was never isolated from the environment to begin with. It also does address the fact that the problem is reintroduced once you assume...

Instead of collision detection your program can simply test for proximity. If proximity = r+R then you can assume a collision is occurring. At this point you can then treat the recoil as if the ion had a zero radius and collided with a zero radius post at the center position of the ion.