- #1
FIL
- 21
- 6
Hey again physics forums! I'm just a lug who likes watching science videos and appreciates the occasional answer to questions that pop up as I watch them.
This morning I came across a video that explained time dilation really well by using an odometer analogy, that a clock is like an odometer that measures your distance through spacetime, but the longer your "path" the less time you experience.
Well that got me thinking, and I wondered if you could use that "odometer" to settle who's moving if you've got two starships in motion drifting towards each other. Now it's my understanding that relativity makes no distinction between which starship is moving and that each can safely regard itself at rest and say it's the other moving towards it. If that's wrong the rest of this comment is gobbledygook, but I think I got that bit right!
Okay so now imagine each starship syncs their clocks with each other the moment they pass, then a few minutes later each launches out a probe synced with the starship clock. The probes are programmed to travel in an arc so that they leave their starship of origin and dock with the other starship. Now because of how the clocks were synced and the delay in launching the probes, unless both starships happened to be going the same speed, the paths through spacetime for each probe would be different. The arced path is identical, but due to the delayed launch there's a horizontal component that should be detected by the clock if the starship it originated from was moving.
If the above is accurate the probes would not have the same reading on their clocks and we could tell which starship was moving, or exactly how much each was moving.
Okay now tell me why I'm wrong![Face with tears of joy :joy: 😂](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f602.png)
This morning I came across a video that explained time dilation really well by using an odometer analogy, that a clock is like an odometer that measures your distance through spacetime, but the longer your "path" the less time you experience.
Well that got me thinking, and I wondered if you could use that "odometer" to settle who's moving if you've got two starships in motion drifting towards each other. Now it's my understanding that relativity makes no distinction between which starship is moving and that each can safely regard itself at rest and say it's the other moving towards it. If that's wrong the rest of this comment is gobbledygook, but I think I got that bit right!
Okay so now imagine each starship syncs their clocks with each other the moment they pass, then a few minutes later each launches out a probe synced with the starship clock. The probes are programmed to travel in an arc so that they leave their starship of origin and dock with the other starship. Now because of how the clocks were synced and the delay in launching the probes, unless both starships happened to be going the same speed, the paths through spacetime for each probe would be different. The arced path is identical, but due to the delayed launch there's a horizontal component that should be detected by the clock if the starship it originated from was moving.
If the above is accurate the probes would not have the same reading on their clocks and we could tell which starship was moving, or exactly how much each was moving.
Okay now tell me why I'm wrong
![Face with tears of joy :joy: 😂](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f602.png)