Relatively speakingFollow

Fu[/b]ck you all, fu[b]ck this thread and fu[/b]ck its bullsh[b]it arguements. All relatively speaking of course.


See I contribute.

so this is saying that the measurement of a part of something makes it the measurement of the whole?

The issue that I have with isn't with people making theories. I can actually get with relativity. I can get with based on our placement in time and space will effect our perception of time and space. Myself, even go as far as to say that part of ourselves that perceives waht we perceive also is permeated into everything else, therefore can in some way be perceived by us, the microcosms. Philosophical arguments? You bet. Fluff, but well thought of, unfortunatly not easy to communicate.


Ummmm Yeah
so Steven Hawking hates my theories because I havn't expressed it mathematically? well **** him too.
Beyond that, it makes no sense to ask if it corresponds to reality, because we do not know what reality is independent of a theory.
I believe in proper context by the way, he (as Einstein before him) is saying that EVERY theory is never to be taken too seriously, his or any.
My issue with all of this is that scientist will believe these theories like a they are Holy doctrines and they develope blinders into anything else that may not conform the way they want it to, to the sand castles that they have built from the beaches of their predecessors. In this capacity sciences always tend to branch and fork in differnt dirrections, and so Like philosophy(which I detest) ends up being many holes being dug in many differnt places instead of one deeper hole being dug to reach waht you are looking for. It's like chopping down a tree a branch at a time.
So the farther apart they get the less true production will be made. And it only takes so many theories for everything to become mere invention as the "grapevine effect" takes place.

The speed of light is a referance frame, and nothing more, Just like Ether was a referance frame, and as is well know people begin to perceive the theory of this magical ether to be fact, and when somone delaclare it to never have existed, everyone acts al stunned and shocked that this fabricated unit of measurement has no material substance. Out theories based off of the speed of light are based upon the limitations of our capabilties. So indeed we play with scraps off the table of knowledge and only on that one path out of many do we travel. We try so hard to pund and pound our heads against the wall... "relativity can Never! mix with quantum mechanics!" "Nothing can travel faster than light because we can't get there anyway" so let's just worship and bounce up and down on the trampolene of our own egos.

So we fly some planes around and we percieve that it happens to match up with waht we thought. I don't think that's such a big deal. They saw the results, and they applied the closest theory that they had to it. They still cannot fully explain waht they are seeing, they can only speculate. Maybe atomic clocks just aren't accurate in those conditions, or maybe the conditions do have an effec on the atommic level that causes waht we percieve as so-called "gravitational time shift". Surly I will not be lead like a sheep to believe that the Hafele-Keating experiment proves that speed has an effect on the unit of measurement known as time.



I suggest you check out Karl Pribram and David Bohm before you go any further with that slinging that sh[b][/b]it buddy boy.

You feel clever enough to discuss the theory of relativity, yet few of you have mastered the skill to avoid the actual (as opposed to theoretical) dreaded multiple posts!

Hmmm. No.

Superposition occurs at the subatomic level, it can be proven. Particles can be shown to exist at multiple places at one point in time. No *********

this bump is dedicated to Nonlinear, may the Valar be with you.
g'day

Where's Zephram Cochrane wehn you need him?

dork alert!


hehe, yeah that's him. He's the man. He's bad, he should be in detention.


NIce bit of Cliff Clavin Trivia....
The Enterprise supposedly can never go Warp 10, because it it did, it would be in like all points in the universe at once... which would make it too easy for them to get around, thus less exiting shows... so it's always Warp 9.X...
Also the unit of measurment used for Warp stuff is the "Cochrane".

oh yeah, where are my Spock ears?

Yes ********

So we cannot know when the cat has died so we tell people that is is Dead AND Alive, at the same bloody time?? Is that a fu[b][/b]cking joke? Sure sure, have to give it some explaination, but really... it's merly mathematical, it should not literally be saying that the cat is both dead and alive at the same time. It's just a fabricated interpretation of an undefined variable, and a variable that we are not equiped to define. That's why it's *****************

The fact is the cat may have NOT died. It may still be alive. However there is no way to know what the current status of our feline friend actually is. And, thanks to the rigging of the box, if you actually examine the cat, it will always end up dead.

So it is accepted that, as there is a 50% chance of the cat's death every hour, the cat is both 50% likely to be alive, as well as 50% likely to be dead at any given point in time. Thanks to the radioactive isotope's constant decay this does not change. So, we are forced to accept that the cat is as equally likely to be alive as it is to be dead at any given point in time. Technically speaking, you can consider it to be both alive and dead, because, on an average, were you to take a thousand... nay.. a million cats and toss them in boxes with the experimental rigging, approximately half will be alive, and half will be dead at any given time. So, they are both alive and dead. I do agree with you though, from a Computer Science point of view, there's a big difference between an undefined variable, and a variable with two definitions.

The only major problem I've ever found with Schrodinger's idea is the one way transition the cat makes. More exactly.. a cat can be taken from living to dead. However, it cannot be taken from dead back to alive. Were the system to run ad infinitum, in theory all cats would end up dead eventually (or at least have such a statistically low chance of survival that they could all be considered to be dead). Though this could be because I still have a novice's view of quantum mechanics.

Hey Nonlinear. I've got a question for you. First let's examine this example:



Ok. All very clear. But let's say you didn't just fly around in a big circle, but rather traveled directly to a fixed point in space and back (like another star). How far away was that point?


What I'm getting at here is that we measure distances between stars in light years, right? But that's a measure of how long it takes light to travel to a point and back. Presumably, that measurement is taken by someone sitting at a single stationary point. Does this example mean that the distance is actually different for the guy at the starting point and the guy who was traveling? Something in the distance/time/velocity equation has to give here, or (at least relative to the moving observer) it has to actually be possible to travel faster then light.


Look at it another way. We measure the distance between ourselves and our nearest neighboring star(s) at about 4 LY. That's presumably the time it takes for light to travel from that point to us. Presumably also, if we set up a big mirror and shined a laser at it, it would take 8 years from our stationary perspective to travel to Alpha Centauri and back, right?

But if a round trip would take longer to the stationary observer then to the person making the trip, then how long did the trip take to the light? So assume for a second that I could travel in my spaceship at light speed. To someone on earth, it would take me 8 years to travel there and back. But relativity says that it's going to take somewhat less time from my perspective.

Wouldn't that apply to percentage C speeds as well? In the example given above, I'm traveling at .9C. Presumably that means that if it takes me 10 years to get to a point in space, that point is actually 9 LY away. Thus, it would take light 18 years to make the round trip, right? Are we measuring that .9C velocity purely from the perspective of the guy moving? Clearly, if the object is actually 9LY away, and it actually takes 46 years from the observer's point of view for someone to travel there and back, then the traveler wasn't going anywhere near the speed of light from that observer's perspecitve.


If we measure the objects distance from the stationary observers perspective, and the traveler is moving relative to that same stationary observer, and we measure the travelers speed relative to the stationary observer, then if it takes that traveler 46 years to make the trip at .9C, the object was actually 20.2 LY away, right? If that's the case, and the traveler made the round trip in just 20 years from his perspective, wasn't his rate of speed from his perspective a bit over twice the speed of light?


I'm sure I'm missing something. I just kinda thought this up after reading the thread last night. Haven't given it a ton of thought, but figured I'd see what answer you'd give. It just seems to me that we most certainly do measure distances based on the percieved speed of light to a stationary point, and I'd just assumed we'd measure speeds relative to C in the same way. That second assumption could clearly be wrong (and would "fix" things nicely), I just wanted to make sure.

Ok. Riddle me this then.

Let's say I have the aformentioned giant mirror set up at Alpha Centauri.

Let's say I simultaneously fire off a laser beam towards that mirror and launch a traveler in a spaceship (at .9C) towards the same point (or very near it on a parallel path in this case).

Assuming a 4LY distance, I would expect my beam to return to me in 8 years. Assuming no acceleration issues or turnaround issues with the spaceship (we'll ignore it cause that just makes things ickier and doesn't really matter), how long does the trip take for the ship and its passenger to me and to it?

I would expect that from my perspective as a stationary observer, the trip would take the beam 8 years, and the ship about 8.9 years.

How long would it take from the passenger's perspective? If it's significantly less (as the earlier example seems to imply it should be), then time has slowed down for him (which seems correct to me).

I guess the point I'm getting at here is that from the passenger's perspective, he'll think he traveled faster then the speed of light. He didn't actually, since the light beam still arrived ahead of him at every point along his trip, but the journey might have seemed to him to have only taken maybe 3.5 years instead of 8.9. From his perspective, he traveled 8 light years in less then 4 years.


Which actually makes perfect sense. Just wanted to bounce it off ya.


Heh. It actually bears onto some interesting psuedo-philosophical stuff I was thinking about recently about the nature of reality in general. I was theorizing that everything in the universe actually occupies the same point, but that they're actually just separated by time (well, more then that, but that's the Reader's Digest version). We only think things are far apart because we percieve that it takes time to get from point to point. There was more then that, but my head started to hurt... ;)