Timeline for What exactly is different about the slice of space and lightcone concept in special relativity?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 hours ago | comment | added | Filip Milovanović | "I understood that having a slice for one moment in time makes simultaneity possible so it's wrong." - I also think there's a confusion here on your part. Simultaneity is possible - after all, as you're reading this, something else is happening simultaneously outside, at the exact same moment according to your clock. It's just that an observer moving relative to you won't agree. Their "now" slice is tilted compared to yours, so those two events won't be simultaneous for them - but some other two evens will (but they won't be for you). | |
| 4 hours ago | comment | added | Filip Milovanović | It's not that the light cone "solves" this problem, that's not the way to look at this. It's that in the Newtonian idea of spacetime, slices have a predefined orientation and are all parallel and the same for everyone. In SR, slices for different observers can be at an angle, tilting up to the light cone (asymptotically approaching it), depending on the relative velocities of the observers. In GR it gets worse - you no longer have a unique way to slice globally (across the entire universe) even for a single observer (because of curvature). | |
| 15 hours ago | history | edited | Qmechanic♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 4 characters in body; edited tags
|
| 16 hours ago | history | became hot network question | |||
| 20 hours ago | answer | added | mmesser314 | timeline score: 3 | |
| 21 hours ago | answer | added | Dale | timeline score: 6 | |
| 21 hours ago | answer | added | Professor Sushing | timeline score: 7 | |
| 22 hours ago | comment | added | Toffomat | In addition to @JohnRennie's comment: The light cones in SR are in some (vague) sense analogous to the time slices in Newtonian mechnsics in the sense that while in SR, simultaneity is relative, but light-like separation is not. | |
| 23 hours ago | comment | added | John Rennie | I think his point is that in Newtonian physics there is one and only one way to foliate space into spacelike slices arranged along a time axis, and this one foliation is the same for all observers. In SR an inertial observer also has a unique foliation for their rest frame, but different observer in different rest frames will have their own different foliations. That means that unlike Newtonian physics there is no unique foliation that applies to all observers. | |
| yesterday | history | asked | Phyilio | CC BY-SA 4.0 |