B "Forced Conclusion" in Train-Embankment Experiment

[Dale]

The nature of light continues to make absolutely no intuitive sense to me. Frustrating.

Honestly it took me 7 years of sporadic effort to intuitively grasp SR. What finally did it for me was the spacetime geometry stuff I was mentioning above. Do a little reading about spacetime diagrams, four vectors, and the spacetime interval.

 

[peety]

It seems that a lot of these lengthy discussions are held up because of the temptation to slip out of the agreed frame of reference.
Imagine (classical physics) a flight attendant on a plane is pushing a trolley forwards and at the same time moving a pot backwards. We are asked to calculate the speed of the pot. It would be absurd to analyse this without specifying a frame of reference. Relative to the trolley it's moving slowly backwards, relative to the plane forwards, relative to the Earth quickly backwards, relative to the sun (to continue using this precise technical language) very fast who knows where. The analysis completely breaks down if we move the goal-posts.
The nice thing about this is that you work out the speed but don't argue about the time. Bring a light beam into the discussion and we've got to calculate time as well as velocities.

 

[georgir]

the passenger is moving toward... the photons that were emitted from event B, and away from the photons that were emitted from event A

Think about what you are saying here. In the frame of reference of the passenger, he is not moving, by definition. Here lies the key to the tent, as they say...