NeilUnreal

The subjective experience of time is the same at home and at work. There's an evil conspiracy which supplies employers with special slow-ticking clocks, and electro-magnetic devices which slow down your wrist-watch. Schools have them too -- I wised-up to this on the first day of kindergarten. (And spent the next 13 years unsuccessfully trying to convince my parents of its veracity).

Schools also have bigger, more complex devices which produce the same effect for summer vacations.

-Neil

p.s. Good explanation, fando.

[ June 07, 2002: Message edited by: NeilUnreal ]</p>

JohnR

Question: Would the value of c matter in all of this. I mean if the speed of light has changed (I have been told that it has slowed down) how would relativity be affected? I did a google search and found some articles about the change in light speed but nothing has been proven yet it seems.

Skydancer

(snort) Nor will it be. This is one of the creationist quibbles that they use to try to tapdance around the fact that we have light arriving from billions of light-years out in a universe that they insist is only 6000 years old. The only legitimate speculation I've ever seen involves a different speed for c during the inflation phase of the Big Bang, and has no effect on relativity theory in the present universe.

PaulT

Just a semantic correction -- time isn't a fourth Euclidean dimension, it's not on an equal footing with the 3 space dimensions. Otherwise the spacteime interval between 2 points would be dx^2+dy^2+dz^2 plus dt^2, and it isn't -- it's dx^2+dy^2+dz^2 minus dt^2. It's just the difference between Minkowski spacetime and a 4-D Euclidean space, but to say that time is merely a fourth dimension is not accurate.

Starspun

wow. I have always wished to be as learned as you's, but my mind just doesn't grasp the concepts you bring forward. <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

In the move Contact, Jodie Foster was talking about how mathematics was THE universal language that any intellectual being could understand. I assume their 'device' used theorom's that are based on all your relativity theories. Right?
Also, for someone whom really wanted to know how a math problem could explain something, where do I begin? For example, I was saw an equation by Steven Hawkings that attempted to prove that the universe would reverse it's direction and actually implode on itself. How can x(w)-r/q etc. etc. prove this? I know, I have a lot to learn, but would love to try. Maybe i am to dense or my math teachers didn't explain things well enough for me. Any help for this old man?