Posted: 30 November 2021 at 2:52am | IP Logged | 2
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Bob>>I'm far from an expert on this, but my interpretation of what I've read is that our "common sense notion" of two events (a significant distance apart) happening "at the same time" is fundamentally flawed<<
My favorite relativity Thought Experiment is the pole/barn paradox. (The pole is often changed to a rocket for flavor, but same result).
An important takeaway is that a different point in space is ALSO a different point in time (very much flying in the face of intuition)--and events can only be truly simultaneous (instead of relatively so) if they happened at the exact same point in space.
Our "common sense" notion is only because everything in our experience that moves is moving much less than the speed of light relative to us.
Fun visualization on this episode of Minute Physics : Link
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