I thought one of the many paradoxes of relativity is that while the moving bodies would appear changed, their "self-world" view is invariant. They see the relativistic effects applied to the atationary frames. It's been a long time, so I might be misremembering...
No, you're right. Its a classic error to accidentally mix in a little fixed reference thinking with your relativity when first coming to terms with relativistic reasoning. What helps me most is to remember that something somewhere is going .9c relative to me right now, and more importantly, I, it.
This is exactly correct. The amino acids don't "see" themselves being relativistically stretched, so the chance of their chirality randomly flipping doesn't change.
Yes that lept out at me. Isn't that first year physics? I mean I remember it from years back, my first fond memory of university physics (and from which point I knew I would love it). It was really a 1 short lecture task to derive special relativity (which covers this) from a few basic postulates? (or course was a huge crazy leap to postulate in the first place).
I inferred that, since he couldn't be talking about an effect at constant velocity, that this effect would be an extra mysterious hazard of extreme acceleration - beyond the mundane hazard of being crushed into a damp spot on the bulkhead. Perhaps related to the tidal deformation one would experience falling into a black hole. The consensus here is he just blew it - nothing more to be concerned with.
Bullshit. The "relativity" part of "relativistic" means that the physics are the same in all inertial (non-accelerating) reference frames, independent of their relative velocity. The author isn't keeping his reference frames separate.
If I'm in the spaceship, I don't notice any shortening of my molecules in the direction of travel, the outside world just looks longer along that axis.
Thankyou, I picked up on this to. It amuses me that someone can know quite a bit about the theory and then completely miss the most obvious flaw in his idea. The ridiculous mass of objects, however, is (theoretically) true.
but yeah, there may be a reason to make your interstellar ships have small cross-sectional area ... and ice shields ... wonders why he forgot to take an Alastair Reynolds book on vacation
The first part about small bits of interstellar matter impacting the starship becoming an increasing problem as the speed approaches the speed of light is something as surprising as it is obvious in hindsight.
I had hever had though of that until yesterday when, coincidentally, I finished reading Arthur C. Clarke's "The Songs of Distant Earth".
According to an interview about Gene Roddenberry (with one of the writers who had worked with him), this is the problem that deflectors (which are separate from defensive shields) are designed to solve. The dish on the front of the Enterprise's drive section projects a cone of force in front of the ship, moving dust and other small things out of the way.
I believe this was on one of the TNG seasons' DVD's special features.
Yeah, but the idea that a single atom of hydrogen was a threat hadn't occurred to me, and this was the real eye opener. Even though I've seen Star Trek and understood that deflector dishes were supposed to move "tiny bits" of matter from the ship's path.
