Recent content by ZikZak

No it won't. You do not suffer time dilation. It does not "halve your experience" of the trip's duration. Time dilation is something you observe about other things, not something that ever happens to you yourself, the observer. In this case, you will observe clocks on the Earth and destination...

By definition, science is the description of that which is observed. If you are trying to talk about something that is unobservable, then you're in the wrong place.

Brian Greene's ideas of how to teach this concept are rather unique to him. I don't think many other Relativists would agree that "the combined speed of any object's motion through space and its motion throught time is always precisely equal to the speed of light." This is his idiosyncratic way...

That isn't a misconception, because you happen to know the solution. The misconception is that students of relativity frequently DON'T understand that travel at nearly c is relative to anything, but rather absolute in some sense.

No, because your preference for fields is at least as arbitrary. A field is a mathematical object which assigns a numerical value to each point in space, or space-time. There's nothing more mathematically abstracted from reality than that.

On what basis do you claim that curvature is less-than-real, while fields and gradients are really-real? What does really-real mean anyway? How do you determine when something is really-real?

When YOU travel at nearly c, YOUR time slows down. A lot of students never rid themselves of the absolute rest idea, and still want to assign absolute speeds to bodies, including the observer.

Time dilation is not the only relativistic effect. Lengths of bodies traveling at relativistic speeds also contract. So, the spaceship pilot, at rest in the spaceship, observes that the distance between the relativistically moving Earth and Proxima to be contracted. In other words, he does not...

That's not obvious at all, in fact. Einstein himself said that he was only dimly aware of the MM result at the time.

The speed of sound waves in the air, or water waves on the ocean don't have anything to do with the source. Generally, waves travel at a speed in the medium that depends on the characteristics of that medium, not on anything having to do with the source of the waves. The difference is that...

It would be better to say that regardless of your speed relative to Earth or some other reference body, that the light ray travels at c. Bringing the act of acceleration into it complicates matters. But it's true that as long as you are not accelerating, the speed of light is always c, you can...

PerpStudent, the quantity you are trying to define is called the "celerity," or "proper velocity" of the proton. The proton finds this quantity by dividing the distance in the AB rest frame by the time in the moving frame. The celerity can be as large as you please, and is not bounded by c. But...

Because the cones are initially at rest relative to the spacecraft . If the spacecraft were not accelerating at all, then each time they dropped a cone, that cone would simply drift along with the ship, at rest. The cones do not fall behind the craft because of its velocity, but because of...

See, this is why Relativistic Mass is a Bad Thing and should be eradicated from all physics classrooms everywhere. No, you cannot obtain the relativistic mass from F=ma for a relativistic rocket, because when the Earth observer measures F/a, he does NOT get the relativistic mass \gamma m. He...

Yeah, MM were never very good theoretical physicists (Morley was actually a chemist), and I think were a bit overwhelmed by all the possible interpretations of the experiment. What they did discover is that they had invented a fantastic means of measuring length, which was an activity both...