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Originally Posted by Grey
Tensor's pretty bright.
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I'm gonna hold you to that.
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Originally Posted by Grey
I'd assume that he's aware that it's not really possible to accelerate instantaneously to the speed of light.
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That would be a good assumption.
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Originally Posted by Grey
But his statement gets most of the idea across.
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That was the main idea. If you go back to the post that RussT took that statement out of, you will notice that it was an answer to someone who, I thought, would understand a simpler reply much better.
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Originally Posted by Grey
A more precise wording might be that if you travel from here to Alpha
Good explanation snipped.
then it will take you a whole second to travel four billion light years.
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Your explanation is certainly more correct.
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Originally Posted by Grey
As always, don't take a casual statement attempting to explain the general idea of a theory to someone as the theory itself. If you want to know how differently moving observers will measure time according to special relativity, you need to look at the math of special relativity. And if you want to address problems that you think exist within special relativity, you definitely need to be looking at the math itself.
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This has been, from my point of view, a problem with RussT's ideas. He's very good at taking quotes from different sources to support his ideas, but he seems to be very weak at actually understanding the math behind those quotes. As a result, to those who understand the math, his ideas seem rather quixotic.
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Originally Posted by Grey
Well, I'm not "ignoring" some blatant contradiction inherent in special relativity. I'm being aware that casual statements about complex theories may sometimes lack mathematical rigor in their effort to explain those complex theories to people who may not have the background needed for a fully rigorous explanation.
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I have, what I think, is a really good example of this concerning Mercury's anomalous precession. While I realize that it is due to the non-linearity of the GR equations, expressed, in the math, as a second order effect of the power expansion series, I like to explain it as the difference between Newtonian Gravity (where mass creates gravity) and GR (where energy is the cause of gravity). One can point out that the energy of the Sun's gravitational field adds to the gravity caused by the Sun. This extra bit of energy causes the extra tug on Mercury, causing the precession. While this explanation is obviously not complete (for one, it ignores the elliptical component of Mercury's orbit), it illustrates some of the differences of the two theories and the non-linearity of the GR equations, for people who have no idea what a power expansion is.