Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Could somebody verify my understanding of special relativity?

Since light has the property of special relativity space and time must distort and dilate respectively to accommodate this. However the effects are only noticeable to humans are speeds approaching light speed.|||Not quite.





The speed of light is an absolute and because of this space, time, mass and volume must be variable to match this and they are all measurements dependent on the speed of motion. In the case of Special Relativity the frame of reference is special and unique to the observer.





One of the Laws of Physics says that the speed of light, in a vacuum is absolute and an unchanging maximum. Then when the SI System defines a meter to be the wave length of a specific element they tie absolute distance to the speed of light; thus fixing our relative frames of reference.





Normally the effects of dilation are only noticed at near light speeds, but they have been observed and proven on air craft flights around the world and on the Space Shuttle using atomic clocks. The GPS system is satellite based and since the satellites are moving so much faster than the surface of the earth their clocks are adjusted to keep "earth time" not their own relative time. Forgetting this little issue would introduce a constant error in GPS calculations.





According to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Rel…


"Special relativity (SR) (aka the special theory of relativity (STR)) is the physical theory of measurement in inertial frames of reference proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein in his article "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"[1]. It generalizes Galileo's principle of relativity — that all uniform motion was relative, and that there is no absolute and well-defined state of rest (no privileged reference frames) — from mechanics to all the laws of physics, including electrodynamics.





To stress this point, Einstein not only widened the postulate of relativity, but added the second postulate that all observers will always measure the speed of light to be the same no matter what their state of uniform linear motion."|||Yes, the effects are noticeable only when you get up to speeds of at least 10% of light speed. At that speed, things are distorted by about 5%.





At 90% of light speed, things are distorted by a factor of 3.2


At 99% of light speed, things are distorted by a factor of 10.|||o ya ,, i know that light speed can be distorted by heavenly body's ego black holes so time must also distort but then again it might not as time is relevant to distance as measured from our starting point,,and any theory's about that just that theory's..

No comments:

Post a Comment