# Tag Info

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 ...

12

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 ...

11

"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 ...

11

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 ...

11

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 ...

9

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 ...

8

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 ...

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 ...

7

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 ...

7

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

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 ...

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 ...

6

They could not - don't think of the observers as people, think of them as experiments. If two individual experiments were taking place on the same particle simultaneously, there's no reason why they couldn't be combined into a singular experiment, and you'd then have an experiment that is able to determine both a precise position and momentum, which is ...

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

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

The effect you're talking about is called gravitational time dilation. The effect is easily calculated from the metric (typically the Schwarzschild metric) but when you ask "why is this?" I'd guess you're asking if there is a way to understand why this happens without working through all the algebra. The answer is no, not really, but I can attempt to give a ...

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

You are simply looking at it from an observer's viewpoint. Yes, looking from outside, matter tends to asymptotically approach but never reach the event horizon. If you were part of that matter spiraling into a black hole, there would be no problem reaching the horizon, crossing it, and going right down to the singularity. The event horizon is not a physical ...

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 ...

4

Yes, I agree with David. If somehow, you were able to travel at the speed of light, it would seem that 'your time' would not have progressed in comparison to your reference time once you returned to 'normal' speeds. This can be modeled by the Lorentz time dilation equation: $$T=\frac{T_0}{\sqrt{1 - (v^2 / c^2)}}$$ When traveling at the speed of light ...

4

It depends on the situation and interpretation, but it certainly can be the case that your shadow is faster than you. If you imagine a single spotlight shining in front of you, you would cast a shadow behind. If the spotlight moves to behind you, even if you stand still, your shadow will move to the other side. Depending on the distance of the object onto ...

4

The short answer is : it is a fundamental property of nature. The very short answer is "quantum" The long answer: From the beginning of the 20th century, slowly but certainly Nature revealed to us that when we go the very small dimensions its form is quantum. It started in the middle of the nineteenth century , with the table of elements which showed ...

4

in relation to anything else that can make such measurements. As the speed of light is universal, nothing can see any other massive field moving at the speed of light (which is reserved for massless fields) your 0.51 number suggests that you expect that naive addition of velocities holds when velocities approach the speed of light. This is wrong. Here is ...

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