As I said, you're trying to prove your right semanticly. You're just playing word games.
Although if you really don't understand, it would explain your entire posting history.
The Swing of a Pendulum
- Thread starter Motor Daddy
- Start date
As I said, you're trying to prove your right semanticly. You're just playing word games.
Although if you really don't understand, it would explain your entire posting history.
Motor Daddy
Valued Senior Member
It's not semantics. Saying one object is faster than another object means each object has it's own speed. A relative velocity is not of one object's speed but of a closing speed, which is nothing more than measuring the distance between the objects at points in time and stating that information in terms of the units for distance and time. The distance and time is not of one object's motion but of the space between the objects.
Motor Daddy
Valued Senior Member
Bull! Stop backpedaling!
Motor Daddy
Valued Senior Member
A relative velocity is not a velocity of an object, or even a velocity at all. A relative velocity is a measure of changing distance between two objects.
Motor Daddy
Valued Senior Member
No it isn't but if you think so then how is it that you claim there is a change in velocity between two rockets when the pendulum swings when the distance between the rockets stays the same at all times???
Again, word games. No one has claimed that there is a change in relative velocity if the distance stays the same.
The pendulum swings due to the force of acceleration. Acceleration does not have to result in differing velocities.
Motor Daddy
Valued Senior Member
Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity. Zero change in velocity means zero acceleration. The distance stayed the same so the relative velocity was zero the entire time. How do you explain a zero change in velocity and a swinging pendulum at the same time???
The pendulum is reacting to the force applied to the ships. You have now entered the realm of General Relativity.
You are very hung up on the words and sentence structure. If you knew the mathematics behind the concepts you so poorly attempt to articulate, you wouldn't be the confused individual you are.
Motor Daddy
Valued Senior Member
The pendulum moves because the mass of the pendulum doesn't change velocity as quickly as the point of the vehicle that it is attached to.
How would they even know what is absolute rest, so they could travel at that speed even if they did have infinite mass?Yeah, go figure. They don't have infinite mass.
There is no absolute rest. There is no absolute frame of reference. Black Holes do not have infinite mass. Their mass is quite finite.
Motor Daddy
Valued Senior Member
Absolute rest is when the center of a sphere emits light and the expanding light sphere remains centered on the outer sphere at all times.
So then you could never say there is a special frame of reference that determines what the mass of an object would be that would make it harder to accelerate. All frames would say that an object had increased in mass, but then all of frames cannot be correct if they all say that it has a different amount of mass that would prevent it from accelerating differently. The relativistic mass increase could only be felt by the other object that was traveling with a relative velocity. So then say if you had two object traveling close to the speed of light, they could say they are at rest and slowly gravitate to each other and at the same time both objects would just gravitate to the body that was at rest more. You can't just say that oh time dialation is relative to the observer but then when it comes to mass it is not. An object traveling at a constant speed close to the speed of light couldn't make everything else gravitate to each other more just because it is traveling close to the speed of light relative to their frame of reference.
With no absolute frame of reference there can be no absolute speed of light, you couldn't say there is one special object that from that frame of reference it determines your mass increase and you cannot go faster than the speed of light relative to it. A lot of things in the universe travel at a lot of different speeds, the speed of light relative to all of those objects would be a lot of different speeds. No one of these objects has a special frame that they prevent everything else going faster than the speed of light relative to it because it is the frame that increases mass that in turn lowers acceleration. The relative mass is only relative to the frame of reference, science has missed on this issue.
The only way all frames could be consistant is if the relative mass increase didn't affect velocity. So if a ship traveled close to the speed of light relative to Earth, then it would just think that Earth has become more massive and pulls it in more. It could stop accelerating and travel at a constant speed and then be able to accelerate the same way it did before. It would just never reach the speed of light because no matter how long or how fast it accelerated it would still measure the speed of light to be the same speed. The speed of light is the absolute frame of reference. It is constant in all frames.
In addition to your difficulty with the definition of "velocity", you are also confusing yourself by working with too many objects and reference frames. If the two cars or two rockets are stationary with respect to each other, you don't need to have both in the thought experiment.
The problem is that when a rocket is alone in space with nothing around from which to measure its speed, it can define its speed to be literally anything between zero and C. However, doing so establishes a reference (synthetic, but still valid) from which to measure changes in speed. Then when it fires its rockets, it measures a change in speed with its accelerometer and a clock, and can calculate a new speed.
But see, since the initial speed can be arbitrarily chosen, the acceleration doesn't help you pin down an absolute speed. It shows that while acceleration is absolute, but speed is not.
You are trying to define yourself as correct. You can define yourself as President of the United States if you want, but that doesn't make it true so good luck getting anyone else to agree!
Besides which, there is no need for such a game. To eliminate ambiguity, instead of "speed" (or velocity), we/you can just say "absolute speed" or "relative speed" to make sure it is unambiguous which one we mean. You believe that "absolute speed" exists and "relative speed" does not. You are wrong (which is why scientists don't differentiate), but at least it will be easier to discuss if we use consistent and unambiguous terminology.
Is there an echo in here? I thought I was the one telling you that everyone would always measure the speed of light to be the same. How do we know that an absolute frame of reference would not be invariant? I think an absolute frame of reference would have to be invariant inorder to be an absolute frame of reference.
The point I was trying to make in the statement was that you can't just say that you can't travel faster than the speed of light relative to an object, because another object can be traveling at a different speed where the speed of light faster than that object would then be faster or slower. So when you say you can't travel the speed of light, it leaves the question, relative to what? When any object can travel at any constant speed then the speed of light faster than those objects could be seen as different speeds. If there was a difference in velocity of 300,000 km/s that everything could travel in then it would require an absolute frame of reference.
I would say it is a special frame of referance that is resposible for all the quantum weirdness discovered by scientist. Science will never come to grips with it until they acknowledge that the speed of light is a frame of reference.
All you can say is "the other guy is going faster than I am by 20m/s." That's the only speed he can see, thus the only speed is 20 m/s.