Echolocation, Relativity & Simultaneity: What Changes?

  • Context: Graduate 
  • Thread starter Thread starter UndeniablyRex
  • Start date Start date
Join the discussion
Ask a follow-up here, or get your own question answered by working scientists, mathematicians and engineers — people, not an autocomplete.
Real named experts · corrections over time · the nuance an AI answer skips
2 replies · 2K views
UndeniablyRex
Messages
11
Reaction score
0
I'm not sure where to put this question, but relativity sounds about right.

Suppose all human race were blind and had no idea that em radiation even exists; suppose we "saw" with echolocation. How does this now effect relativity? Simultaneity is now heavily skewed because now the speed that information comes to us is very much smaller.

Does the maximum speed, c, change? obviously not, but I don't know enough about relativity to prove why.
 
Physics news on Phys.org
UndeniablyRex said:
I'm not sure where to put this question, but relativity sounds about right.

Suppose all human race were blind and had no idea that em radiation even exists; suppose we "saw" with echolocation. How does this now effect relativity? Simultaneity is now heavily skewed because now the speed that information comes to us is very much smaller.

Does the maximum speed, c, change? obviously not, but I don't know enough about relativity to prove why.

Prove why?
Well, why would anything change if we were blind? If we could feel, we might have been sending signals by electric pulses, or be laserbeaming each others arms, burning the information, I dunno. But that anything would change just because human kind was blinded, that ludicrous.
 
UndeniablyRex said:
I'm not sure where to put this question, but relativity sounds about right.

Suppose all human race were blind and had no idea that em radiation even exists; suppose we "saw" with echolocation. How does this now effect relativity? Simultaneity is now heavily skewed because now the speed that information comes to us is very much smaller.

Does the maximum speed, c, change? obviously not, but I don't know enough about relativity to prove why.

We are blind to the vast majority of em radiation but we convert it into forms that we can see through our technology. If echolocation was the only way to see, then our experiments would have to convert everything into that medium. This doesn't affect the final equations - just how we go about determining them.