Re: The gravity of the situation laughed away - yep.
Posted by Dale on Mar 03, 2002 at 12:27
(204.212.222.2)Re: The gravity of the situation laughed away (dogrock)
If Einstein said it, however strange, it must be right it would appear
Not just because he said it - because what he said turned out to predict what would be found when experiments were performed. The classical theory predicted one result and Einstein predicted another. Experiments were performed and Einstein's predictions fit the result closer than the classical predictions. Things that are moving with respect to the observer are display all the traits of being smaller in the direction of movement.
This is totally irrelevant to the inertia that keeps things in motion from changing direction without a force being applied.
I thought my response fit the questions fairly well. The idea that an inanimate object might “find a wave motion is the quickest way to travel” is ludicrous.
The question “If a rock was traveling at half the speed of light and was shrunk by this, would it rotate to even the forces throughtout its structure, would it curve.” is nonsense. What forces? There are no forces that cause the shrinkage. The shrinkage is caused by the way space/time works. It took you some time to read that sentence. Was there a possibility that your head could explode from the internal forces that moved your brain through time? No, we just observe time passing just as we observe moving objects appearing to change shape. If you move with the object the shape doesn’t change. There is no force. The changing shape is only our best approximation of what is really happening which is that the shape is different for us than it is for an observer moving at the same velocity as the object.
But if there were some mysterious force it would be an internal force causing the shrinkage. It could not affect the external direction of the object. It couldn’t even rotate the object since you have postulated no change in angular velocity or force that could affect angular velocity.
Finally “If a rock behaves this way then setting something in motion in space does not guarantee it will travel in a straight line even if no forces are acting on it.” is a nice thought experiment that violates the evidence we see everything we do such an experiment. You might as well postulate that you can jump over the moon when it is very low on the horizon. If you ever find something changing direction without a force being applied then let me know. I can produce a dandy perpetual motion machine from it. We’ll be able to buy and sell Bill Gates if you can just come up with a single instance where it happens.