Thought Provoker
Posts: 530
Joined: April 2007
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Hmmm, it’s gotten quiet all of a sudden.
Hi Henry,
Thank you for your comment.
I had put together the Star Trek example in anticipation of the standard "changing inertial frames" argument.
It is the landing party that is going out and back, not the Captain on his ship. At least from the Captain's frame of reference.
You are using acceleration to choose a preferred frame of reference.
Now if the ship was orbiting a gravity well, the Captain and his ship wouldn't experience acceleration. Oops, special relativity breaks down and then the hand waving begins. Why make exceptions for an antiquated concept that has outlived its usefulness? Nostalgia?
Did you understand what Penrose was talking about with "'arc length' measured along a world line"? Minkowski brought Einstein and physics back to the "absolute world" of a single, non-Euclidean reference frame. The integral of ds is the summation of the path taken by the respective twin. The path taken by the traveling twin is shorter in the single, "absolute world" that is our universe.
The traveling twin takes a short cut.
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