# Tag Info

119

Here's a video of physicist Richard Feynman discussing this question. Imagine a blue dot and a red dot. They are in front of you, and the blue dot is on the right. Behind them is a mirror, and you can see their image in the mirror. The image of the blue dot is still on the right in the mirror. What's different is that in the mirror, there's also a ...

32

Because they don't flip left with right (or up with down), they flip the 3D space you're standing in "inside out", so far from the mirror becomes far away inside the mirror and vice versa. A hand 1 meter from the mirror seems like it's 1 meter on the other side of the mirror but in the same spot with regards to left/right so nothing is flipped. Wiggle your ...

25

It's not a mechanism so much as a misconception of the nature of space (and its relationship to time): at low velocities, everything looks linear and Euclidean so we assume it is, but in reality it is not (as can be determined by appropriate experiments). It's kind of like asking by what mechanism you can reach something to your west by traveling east: if ...

21

This common confusion stems from our familiarity with photographs. We forget that we rotate them to face ourselves. Take a picture of yourself and hold it up in front of you. Probably you are holding it so that you can see your image. If so, you "flipped" the image of yourself when you rotated it 180 degrees around the vertical axis. When you look to the ...

13

The right way to think about this is geometry--- but the geometry mixes up space and time. I wrote some answers about this here: Einstein's postulates <==> Minkowski space. (In layman's terms) and here: Help Me Gain an Intuitive Understanding of Lorentz Contraction and if you read these first, you can easily understand the effect. The Lorentz ...

12

Take a picture and look at it. Now turn the picture to face the mirror. Question one: who flipped the picture? Answer: you did. Now, face the picture back to you, and walk to the nearest refrigerator. Turn the picture to face the refrigerator. Wow! Refrigerators flip images too! Don't believe me? Take your flipped page and hold it up to a bright light. The ...

11

First, lets separate the concepts; there is nothing that is "flipped" in the mirror image regarding one orientation more than others. the full group of transformations $O(3)$ includes transformations where $det(R) = -1$. You can consider the following transformations examples of this: 1) they have one random direction flipped in sign, or 2) for the special ...

10

"Relativity" is actually a misleading word that Einstein didn't like. It doesn't mean "every vantage point is equivalent and it's all relative". It really means only inertial, non-accelerating vantage points are equivalent. You could think of it as, prior to relativity, people believed that there was an absolute position/speed to the universe. Special ...

10

It's easier with images... The mirror doesn't flip left and right as you can see in the upper image. The so-called flip occurs when somebody in the real world rotates 180 degrees about the vertical axis to see you face to face, as can be seen in the lower image. Regards Hans

10

There is a definine velocity and momentum, we just don't know it. Nope. There is no definite velocity--this was the older interpretation. The particle has all (possible) velocities at once;it is in a wavefunction, a superposition of all of these states. This can actually be verified by stuff like the double-slit experiment with one photon--we cannot ...

10

This is a simple and clear issue, with a unique answer. I see other replies mentioning weather conditions, dark adaptation and so on. That's just so much hand waving, given that the first thing you said was "I've always lived in somewhat large cities". The core problem here, by a very wide margin, is light pollution if you live in a large city. This is the ...

10

This is just a footnote to Crazy Buddy's answer (which is correct! :-): Length contraction is a real phenomenon, and indeed the RHIC observes this every day because the nuclei are moving so fast that the collision is between two disks not two spheres. However to see something you need to have light emitted from the object reach your eye, and the light from ...

10

Your question is a natural one to ask, but it has no answer. It is a bit like asking by what mechanism the angles of a triangle always wind up adding to 180 degrees (in Euclidean geometry). There is no mechanism for that - no one is going around checking all the triangles to make sure their angles add up right. It is just a logical consequence of the theory ...

8

If you are standing up, and your friend is inclined on a tilted incline of slope 45 degrees, and you are both the same height, you would say that your friend is shorter by a factor of .707. But from his tilted point of view, you are also shorter by the same factor. There is no contradiction, and there is no need to invoke an absolute notion of up. This is ...

8

The sphere is contracted in the horizontal axis and perceived as an ellipsoid. This is what we believe about length contraction and this happens only, when we take Einstein's simultaneity into account. But, the stationary observer would see the sphere appearing as the sphere always (i.e) the circular outline would still be there at any velocity relative to ...

6

Here's how I explain it (this is pretty similar to most of the other answers). Assume the mirror is hanging vertically on a wall, and you're standing upright and facing it, looking at your own reflection. (Just to make the assumptions explicit.) And let's assume that you're facing north, and wearing a watch on your left wrist. The mirror doesn't flip ...

6

Think about where a point above, below, left, and right of your point of view are in the reflection. Your head is still on top, your feet still on the bottom in the mirror. Likewise, your left hand is still to the left and your right hand to the right. It seems flipped because, to look behind you, you are used to turning around (which swaps left/right), ...

6

It is true that, from an outside perspective, nothing can ever pass the event horizon. I will attempt to describe the situation as best I can, to the best of my knowledge. First, let's imagine a classical black hole. By "classical" I mean a black-hole solution to Einstein's equations, which we imagine not to emit Hawking radiation (for now). Such an ...

6

Intuition and perception (or the lack of there of) can be a big problem when you're trying to comprehend the implications of special/general relativity. You must understand that in everyday life which fuels our intuition is pretty slow. Most people don't move faster than $900 km/h$ or $250 m/s$. And that's a luxury for most, to travel by a fast jet. The ...

6

Manishearth's answer is correct, and this is just a minor extension of it. Manishearth correctly points out that the problem is your statement: There is a definine velocity and momentum, we just don't know it. Your statement is the hidden variables idea, and courtesy of Bell's theorem we currently believe that hidden variables are impossible. Take the ...

6

You can't travel at the speed of light. So it's a meaningless question. The reason some people will say that time freezes at the speed of light is that it's possible to take two points on any path going through spacetime at less than the speed of light and calculate the amount of time that a particle would experience as it travels between those points along ...

6

If you're sitting outside the event horizon watching a clock fall in, you will never see the clock reach the event horizon. You will see the clock slow as it approaches the horizon and you'll see it running slower and slower. However there is no sense in which time stops at the event horizon. You can wait as long as you want, and you'll see the clock creep ...

5

Don't worry, you don't need any quantum mechanics or any knowledge about what happens at the subatomic level to understand this phenomenon. Length contraction and time dilation are purely a property of the 4 dimensional space-time continuum that we live in. It has to do with the actual measurements of length and time that can be performed by different ...

5

Indeed, nothing can get under the horizon. The stuff close to the event horizon does move outwards as the BH radius increases. Even more with any BH deformations such as waves on its surface, the tidal deformations or the change of the rotation speed, all the oblects close enough to the horizon remain "sticked" to it and follow all the changes of the BH ...

5

Mentions of "acceleration", or lack of it, to establish the difference between the twins' careers, are confusing the issue. (This can be proved by concocting roadmaps for two travelers with identical acceleration or deceleration periods, only placed at different times of their respective journeys. This way, their watches don't show the same elapsed time ...

5

Objects, defined as things with mass, don't move at the speed of light. The time dilation factor is $$\gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{1 - v^2/c^2}}$$ and it has no limit - it diverges at $v\to c$. For speeds very close to the speed of light, we could define $\epsilon = \frac{c - v}{c}$, then we'd have $\gamma \sim \frac{1}{\sqrt{2\epsilon}}$ This shows how much ...

5

From the comments to user16307's answer I'm guessing you're fairly new to special relativity. Until you get familiar with the subject it's very dangerous to throw around concepts like time dilation and length contraction because you can easily fall into traps like the pole in a barn paradox. The only safe way to work out what happens is to use the Lorentz ...

4

Isn't it the case that it is just as legitimate to say that the universe and people on the planet accelerated/decelerated No, it's not. If you stay on the planet, you know you didn't accelerate (that is, not any more than usual due to the gravitation and rotation of Earth, etc.). But if you are in the spaceship and you turn your engine on, you'll ...

4

There are two observers and one qubit in the state $| 0 \rangle$ (known to both of them). Then the qubit is randomly with equal probabilities either intact $U=\mathbb{I}$ or reversed $U=\sigma_x$ (i.e. $| 0 \rangle \mapsto | 1 \rangle$), but only the first observer knowns which action was applied. Consequently, the first observer has one of the following ...

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