Recent content by Spacie

I saw this old thread when looking up the same question. I also came across a paper by a student of a mechanical engineering department of a SA uni that describes how they built a small turbine for a 12v battery. The thing was pretty heavy (25kg, including 12v car battery), but at 120 km/h it...

Ok, I read the first 3 pages of that thread and stand my grounds. Sorry. I find the whole topic distasteful. You think otherwise and that is fine. Let an actual experiment decide. SR says that objects appear shorter in a frame in which they move. In comparison with the frame where they are at...

Thank you very much DrGreg for excellent explanation and illustration. It makes sense to me and it underlies the point that contraction happens only for the moving observer. Just as I thought. Which means, dear A.T., that for the frame of the ships, the string does not break. It breaks for...

I thought the chain represented the atoms that make up the string that connects the ships. Should not it contract under the length contraction? According to your picture, high speeds, instead of contracting the objects, should shatter them by breaking their molecular bonds. Besides, what does...

Thank you pervect for the info. I'll keep in mind that I my opinion on this paradox differs from both Bell and mainstream. As for alleged hearsay about CERN informal consensus, Bell tells it firsthand in his own words in his How to teach special relativity.Thank you for the picture, A.T. To me...

harrylin, frankly, I do not care for Bell's spaceship paradox, as I rarely care for these mental exercises. When someone makes an actual test of it, then I will be all ears. Until then, as far as Bell's spaceship paradox is concerned, I side with the consensus at CERN that Bell discovered in...

Dear ghwellsjr, thank you very much for your explanation! I need time to absorb it all. There are 2 things which are still unclear to me. One is that counting-seconds signal that B transmits, say, by a peak in frequency every second. That should arrive from B to A with ever growing delay, as the...

I found this quote by HallsofIvy, who is PF Mentor with 31,611 posts:

Yeah but with your logic the string in Bell's Spaceship paradox will certainly break, no?

Thank you ghwellsjr very much :smile: So, if I work the calculations backwards, say A gets info of a B moving at speed x but appearing to him moving at 0.882c with a frequency shift of 0.5 (is that right?) then would not he be able to calculate that B is actually moving at 1.2c away from him...

I'm trying to understand relativity on a simple example: 2 objects A & B moving in exactly opposite directions at 0.6c each, starting from frame C at the center of things that remains stationary. So, we have: W <----0.6c A ...... C ..... B 0.6c----> E 1. From frame C, A is moving...

Why there should be the consensus on how SR works? The important thing is that my way of looking at things does not contradict the theory, helps me to understand it better, does not lead to false paradoxes or "a wrong answer at first". What is the claim that is inconsistent, and inconsistent...

Thank you for your reference to Bell's Spaceship paradox. I see no paradox. The string should not break. That is because length contraction, first of all, affects the space and, by extension, everything it contains. In computer graphics it's called scaling and is considered elementary. Less...

But THERE IS a distortion of space (due to the motion of the observer). If there were none, the speed of light he would measure would vary in accordance with his speed. But the experiment shows that the speed of light propagating through empty space is a constant for all observers, regardless of...

This has nothing to do with Einstein's theory. You don't need to go faster than light in order to give an impression of a continuum. For example, a standard rate for movies is 16 frames per second, which is very, very slow in comparison with the speed of light, and yet it's good enough to fool...