- #36
Gokul43201
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
Gold Member
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I just did a calculation and I find myself about a foot away from where I was, for a 1 second error. Remember, there is no such thing as an absolute rest frame. The only frame meaningful to me is the inertial frame in which I'm at rest at any moment. So it doesn't matter how fast the Earth or the Solar System or the Galaxy are moving, what matters is their accelerations. The greatest of these accelerations is the Earth's rotational acceleration about its polar axis - which is about a foot/s^2 (the others are several orders of magnitude smaller).Art said:We do it all the time??
We're on a planet spinning on it's axis orbiting a sun which orbits the galaxy which itself moves through the universe. If you got even one second out of synch you would find yourself a long way from planet Earth.
If I vanished at some instant for a period of about 1 second, and then in the inertial frame that was attached to me when I disappeared, I reappear at the same spatial co-ordinates that I had before disappearing, I'll find myself about a foot up in the air from the spot I was on before I left.
You can't talk about time (and hence, time travel) without specifying a frame. And your rest frame is, like it or not, being dragged along with the planet/sun/solar system/galaxy/universe. And rest frames which are inertial are only gradually spinning away from the Earth.For instance if you went back in time a million years unless you dragged the entire planet/sun/solar system/galaxy/universe with you then you would appear at your point in space as it was back then, 1 million years before planet Earth reached this spot which is why I said time travel could equate to long distance space travel.
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