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From: Sam Wormley on 13 Feb 2010 10:04
On 2/13/10 7:29 AM, Ste wrote:
> I've been absolutely racking my brain (to the point of getting a
> headache) for the last few days about this issue...

Physics FAQ: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/index.html
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/velocity.html

From: Tom Roberts on 14 Feb 2010 00:27
Ste wrote:
> I've been absolutely racking my brain (to the point of getting a
> headache) for the last few days about this issue, and it's clear that
> the speed of light (where light is either considered in the form of a
> ballistic photon, or a wave-cycle) cannot, physically, be constant in
> all relative frames, and at the same time be constant when travelling
> between two objects in two different frames. It's a physical and
> logical impossibility.

Not true. You are making implicit assumptions that are not valid in the world we
inhabit.

At base, this is GEOMETRY, not any properties of light itself. And the only way
to understand it is to study SR and its underlying geometry, Minkowski spacetime.

The primary invalid assumption you make appears to me to be Euclidean geometry.
But you also implicitly assume that speeds add like vectors; they don't.

Indeed, even this is wrong: "I mean the alternatives are that
a object's velocity must cause either an increase or a decrease
in the speed of light in a particular direction relative to
something."

One does not "reconcile this physically", one reconciles it GEOMETRICALLY.

Speaking VERY LOOSELY, one could say that there are "grooves"
in spacetime that go in every direction at every point, with
the speed of light. And light "just happens" to always travel
in these grooves. The actual geometry is MUCH more interesting,
but as I keep saying, you must STUDY this -- your "20 questions"
approach on the internet is woefully inadequate.


Tom Roberts
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