(May 14, 2013 at 5:50 am)Aractus Wrote: It depends on your definition of "information", Sal.
A physics teacher explained to me a pole thought experiment: Let's say you have a 3*10^8 meter long pole attached to pushing a ball off a similarly long table.
The physics teacher said that the information here (of the pole pushing the ball off the table) would be instantaneous, i.e. as soon as you push on the other end of the pole, the resulting movement of the entire pole would result in pushing the ball off the table.
I argued, in response, due to non-locality of time and space that it would take ~1 second for the contraction of the pole (the atoms in the pole contracting and pushing each other) to make the action possible; think of it like a wave of contraction moving down the pole, together with time being non-local.
We didn't really get past this impasse - I wonder if a similar experiment has been done testing something similar out (obviously doesn't have to be on the order of ~1 second) but what about GPS satellites? don't they account for this all the time?
