So you are saying that Einstein in his thought experiment predicted laser light. He had the coherent photons all neatly lined up one after the other. Possibly.
Radio waves are formed when many electrons move together backwards and forwards in a wire. Laser light is coherent as well, but did not exist in Einstein's time. An ordinary tungsten bulb is emitting photons in a random incoherent way, and yet Einstein treats it as a wavetrain.
Yes but Maxwell was working at a time when light was considered to be the vibration of an 'ether', something that Einstein had helped to supersede in his 1905 paper on the basic principles of special relativity, as well as his paper on the photoelectric effect. In the ether theory its easy to...
Excuse me, but I don't think that explanation is quite good enough. I remember that our fluid mechanics teacher (way back in the 70s) told us that the fact that we could treat fluids such as water using a continuous mathematical model was still not fully understood, so you can't explain one...
Thanks for this help. there is one final point that is puzzling me. In his treatment of the subject (I think in 1911) Einstein considers light as a continuous wavetrain (as in the classical model of the vibrating ether) to explain time dilation in a gravitational field, whereas he himself (in...
Yes but over a long time period (say, years. Very boring but its only a thought experiment) the number of oscillations of the pendulum as seen, say by a third party standing at a distance, must be the same at the top and the bottom if its one pendulum.
I've got it now. Light traveling up the tower from the lower clock undergoes a redshift, so the lower clock appears to be ticking faster to an observer at the bottom of the tower than it does to the guy at the top. If the guy at the top then sends back the beam to the bottom it undergoes a...
I don't think the thread Nugatory quotes is relevant. Of course if you push one end of a bar there is a time lag before the other end moves. But in this problem the time difference between the two clocks can get as big as you like by waiting long enough.
Here is a variant of the problem: a pendulum (if you like activated by a spring, not by gravity) long enough to reach near the ground fixed to the top of the tower. If time runs more slowly at the bottom of the tower then over a large time interval, the bottom of the pendulum will have carried...
A friend of mine posed the following conundrum: If you have 2 identical clocks one at the top and one at the bottom of a tower (on the earth), then for an observer at the top, the clock at the bottom appears to go more slowly than the clock next to him. This one can deduce from the redshift of...