What you're saying is that the locations of the lightning strikes stay with the train even as it continues traveling. So if my car is hit with hail when I'm on the highway, even after I get home and see the dents in the roof of my car, I'm still at the location where the car was damaged because...
According to standard interpretation, the discrepancy of opinion between observers results from the relativity of simultaneity, which follows from relative motion in the context of the absolute speed of light. I think a better explanation is that the discrepancy results from the fact that one of...
Dale said:
The passenger remains in the middle of the train car and the lightning bolts struck on the ends of the train car. He is, at all times, equidistant from where the bolts struck in his frame.
He is at all times equidistant from the front and rear of the train. Since the lightning...
Clocks that are synchronized in one frame are not synchronized in another frame. So clocks that are synchronized in a speeding train are not synchronized in the ground frame. This is the relativity of simultaneity. The question is whether this is the cause of the outcome of the train-lightning...
I'm certainly not claiming the strikes really happened at the same time, though that's what the embankment observer thinks. The question is why the passenger thinks they happened at different times. Is it because of the relativity of simultaneity or the finite speed of light? In contrast to the...
Okay. The passenger is at rest as the embankment moves by. The scorch marks left by the lightning bolts on the embankment are also in motion relative to the passenger. The mark from the bolt ahead moves closer to the passenger, while the mark from the bolt behind moves away. So by the time the...
And the passenger is no longer equidistant between the lightning bolts because the train has moved toward one bolt and away from the other during the time it takes the light signals to reach the center of the train. The difference in the distance of the passenger from each bolt is evident to...
To make sense of the relativity of simultaneity, I had to go back to Einstein's 1905 paper, On the electrodynamics of moving bodies. Here Einstein proposes a "moving rod" thought experiment that explains relative simultaneity far better than the train-lightning thought experiment in the 1920...
Thanks to Dale for providing exactly the piece of the puzzle I was missing. I did not understand the significance of Einstein's emphasis on synchronizing the clocks of the moving frame with the clocks of the stationary frame. Incidentally, I began my study of special relativity with An...
I'm struggling to understand Section 2 of Einstein's 1905 paper, "The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." This is my source for the paper: http://hermes.ffn.ub.es/luisnavarro/nuevo_maletin/Einstein_1905_relativity.pdf
In section 1 Einstein states that by definition light travels at the same...