Delta1212

But light doesn't slow down. It always travels at exactly the same speed. That's what c represents.

But you know that any such pressure would lessen as you moved away from the sun, which would cause light to slow down if this was how it actually worked, right?

You seem to be saying the c is the rate at which photons are produced, and they move at c because they are continuously being displaced by the photons behind them as new ones are produced. Did I understand that correctly?

You seem to be confusing combining frames with observing relativistic effects. A person traveling at .99c (as observed from Eartg) will not cover 7 light years (as observed from Earth) in one year (as observed from Earth). From Earth, he will be observed to have taken about 7 years to travel 7 lightyears. He will have experienced about 1 year during which time he will have traveled a distance that he measures to be 1 lightyear. If he then "stops" (I.e syncs velocity with Earth again) he will see that distance as being 7 lightyears and agree that he spent 7 years traveling that distance during which he experienced time at a slower rate. Mixing frames would be taking the time measured by the traveler and the distance measured by the non-traveler and saying that the traveler moved at FTL speeds. Experiencing the effects of relativity involves syncing observers from different frames back up to the same frame at which point the measurements of that frame will be held to be valid by all parties with time dilation and length contraction being the phenomena that explain the difference in the subjective experience of each while they were in different frames.

They are functionally the same phenomenon viewed from different frames. A very fast plane might see itself traveling 1 mile in x amount of time. An observer on the ground might see the same distance as being 2 miles, which the plane takes 2x amount of time to cover, but the observer will see the plane's clock ticking at half speed. When the plane lands, it will come to rest with respect to the observer, and they will both agree that the clock on the plane ticked off half as many seconds as the clock on the ground.

Observe it with what? Sight isn't magic. Our eyes are just light detectors. No matter how small you are, you can only "see" something by bouncing photons off of it, and photons don't get smaller just because the detector gets smaller. Something the size of an atom can't "see" things that are small in any greater detail than we can with lab equipment, because there is a lower bound on the level of detail that it is physically possible to observe.

You can if those things vary proportionately. 2/1=2 4/2=2 10/5=2 The numerator and denominator both vary but the quotient is constantly 2.

A moron is classically more intelligent than an idiot.

Motion due to the expansion of the universe is different than motion due to normal acceleration because the objects themselves aren't actually accelerating, space is just increasing between them. Beyond the distance at which space is expanding at a rate greater than one lightyear per year, objects do not appear frozen in time, they simply cannot be observed because the light will never reach us. It's like a train that can't reach the end of a track because track is being laid down in front of it faster than it can move. Part of the problem with labeling length contraction and time dilation as illusory is that there is no absolute rest frame from which you can measure things to determine what the "real" distance and timing of objects and events is. From Earth, I can say that a certain galaxy is 7 ly away, but Earth is moving around the sun, and the sun is moving around the Milky Way. Because the Earth is moving, it experiences time dilation and length contraction, so how do I know what the "real" distance is? You could launch a spaceship away from Earth and sync its motion with the galactic core, but the galaxy is hurtling through space as well. Measurements of the distances to other galaxies will be contracted, so you have to adjust again. You could sync up with the average of the galactic cluster, but that's moving with respect to other things. No matter what you sync with, you're always moving with respect to something else. There's no way to reach a point where you can say, "Ok, I am now not moving, and am therefore experiencing no length contraction or time dilation." Anything that you see moving will be length contracted and will appear to expand if you match velocities with it, and it will also see you as being time dilated and you will find that you agree that your clock was previously running slow when you match velocities with it.

It's a coincidence in the sense that shadows don't always point toward the moon and they didn't set it up intentionally to create a situation where it would. It's not a coincidence in that there are specific, non-arbitrary reasons that this event happened, but very few things qualify as being coincidental if you trace the causes of them far enough.

Let's say you fire off markers from Earth. You fire them in the same direction, at close to the speed of light such that they are traveling away from Earth spaced out at intervals of one "lightday" each. If you took a spaceship, caught up with the markers and matched speeds with them, you would find that they are actually much farther apart but the space between them appeared contracted from the moving frame of Earth. From the perspective of Earth, the markers are each 1 lightday apart. From the perspective of the markers, they are each perhaps 2 lightdays apart. You cannot say that one is "really" how far apart they are and the other is an illusion. You could decide that Earth's frame is real so something that appears to be 7 lightyears from Earth is actually 7 lightyears, even if you see it as 1 lightyear, but that's just defining "real" as "measured from Earth's frame" and illusion as "measured from a frame other than Earth's." There's no reason to select Earth's frame as representing the most accurate picture of reality except that we happen to be living on it at the moment. Someone living on a different planet may measure the distances we see very differently because their planet is not at rest with respect to Earth, and there is no reason why our measurements are real while theirs are an illusion.

Yes, yes we are.

Yes, you could simply say that all physical processes slow down as speed increases, rather than saying that it's time. But since time is just a measure of the comparative rates of physical processes and there are no processes that do not slow down to compare them with, I'm not sure how that means time isn't "really" slowing down.

Of course, as the slow ones get eaten by the lions, the average speed of the population is going to inch up over the generations. Evolution does tend toward increased efficiency because being wasteful with resources is not an effective strategy (unless you're showing off your fitness by demonstrating how wasteful you can afford to be, but that's not truly being wasteful). In a changing environment, though, you're never going to reach maximal efficiency because the definition of what is efficient keeps shifting, often faster than many species can keep up with. Evolution doesn't so much maximize efficiency as slowly peel away inefficiency. Over time that has similar results, but it does take a lot of time, often turns out less than optimal strategies and never quite reaches the peak, because evolution isn't concerned with the best way of doing things, only a way that is "good enough." The most it can do is raise the bar on what qualifies as good enough.

The expansion of spacetime can create apparent speeds greater than c because nothing is actually moving. It's just having more space inserted between it and other stuff. Gravity waves cannot travel faster than c because they actually move through spacetime; they are not products of the expansion of spacetime.

Gravity was thought to be instantaneous in Newtonian Gravity. That was overturned by General Relativity quite some time ago.

He also didn't like quantum physics because he didn't think it made any sense.

I think the reasoning is that since the objects are moving at 10 mph in one frame of reference, but move 18 miles in an hour in another frame, they must be skipping over an intervening 8 miles. I'm not 100% sure I have a clear picture of what is going on, so that may not be perfectly accurate, but I think that's the gist of the argument.

I enjoy finding ways to make sense of nonsense, even if it doesn't ultimately mean anything. I sincerely apologize if that was inappropriate in this context.

Imagining it as math is not as far off the mark as you might think. I am trying to come up with a way to concisely communicate how I conceptualize this stuff, since I know the feeling of wanting something concrete to imagine even if you acknowledge that it's an imperfect representation. The problem I'm having is that the way I conceptualize things has evolved over a considerable period of time and a lot of exposure to the subject, and has involved several rethinkings of how the world fundamentally works. I'm not sure how well I can express that perception of things in a single post so that it will actually be comprehensible.

That was sort of the point.

But despite a lot of common conceptions, the goal of science isn't to build castles in the sky. It's to figure out where the heck the rock is. Taking that into consideration, planting your feet firmly anywhere is likely to impede your progress because you won't be able to look anywhere else, and since you planted your feet without knowing where the rock is, it's just as likely that you planted them on quicksand. So yes, people who want to build castles in the sky need to plant their feet first, but those people become politicians, not scientists.

Absolute certainty is a good quality to have if you want to be wrong.

It's not adding anything, the number in the numerator is obviously +.- or - tens more than +. This is a constant such that, if multiplied by any number, it equals the square of that number. Thus that equation yields 1 as an answer.

To give a more specific answer: Do I find it personally significant to me? Not really. This isn't something that I base my identity around normally, and I've spent too much time immersed in biology to attach much meaning to what population a particular bit of genetic material first arose in except as a vaguely interesting data point. Certainly socially it's not something I care about. Do I personally think that it has general significance? Only in so far as other people may find it significant. I don't think it has any objective significance, so it's really only social significance that would matter. I also don't think that enough people are scientifically interested enough to even know that this is true, that many of the people who would be most impacted by this knowledge don't want to know it, and that most people who do know it find it to be interesting at best and almost certainly not life changing to a great extent, I don't see it having much impact on society and societal views, and as such, personally doubt that it has much social significance either. Whether it should logically impact a number of people's worldviews is another question, but we're a rather irrational species with a lot of very resilient irrational beliefs, so I don't see that making much difference.