RE: Questions about Time, Distance, and Relativity
November 6, 2014 at 7:49 pm
(This post was last modified: November 6, 2014 at 7:51 pm by TheRealJoeFish.)
(November 6, 2014 at 4:24 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: Yeah, it's quite confusing... Greene writes, "Einstein proclaimed that all objects in the universe are always traveling through spacetime at one fixed speed--that of light... If an object does move through space, however, this means that some of the previous motion through time must be diverted... We now see that time slows down when an object moves relative to us because this diverts some its motion through time into motion through space. The speed of an object through space is thus merely a reflection of how much its motion through time is diverted... the maximum speed through space occurs if all of an object's motion through time is diverted to motion through space. This occurs when all of its previous light-speed motion through time is diverted to light-speed motion through space."
Can you elucidate that?
A good read of Flatland might help. How about this: let's say you're in a car going 100 mph, driving east to west. There's someone south of you, and he sees you silhouetted on the horizon. You turn your car 45 degrees to the right, so you're now going northwest. He can only see the car's east-west movement, do to him it now looks like you're only going about 71 mph (100*sqrt(2)/2).
When we're not moving, we're going (speed of light) through time. When we move, it's like we're still going the same speed, but we've turned 45 degrees (or, in reality, like, a billionth of a degree) off of the straight past-to-future line and into the set of dimensions we see.
That's probably a really inexpert way of thinking about it, but that's how I always sort of conceptualized it. Someone please tell me if I'm way off. And I will note that the particular paragraph you quoted, for me, was the one paragraph in that book that I have always remembered and cherished.
