Back
18.4 Horizontal Light Clock
Discussion
-
-
I love this course and I understand it, and see the logic, nonetheless I find it fascinating that if another ship travelling in the opposite direction at much slower speed, they will of course say the distance and travel time is different than their space-travelling counterparts, even when crossing one another in a very close fly-by. This seems to imply that space can be severely ‘distorted’, for the lack of a better word, in one very local space, dependent upon the traveller’s speed/perspective, which says something very interesting about space existing in multiple configurations simultaneously. I guess it is not distortion, but more perspective being in the eye of the beholder. Incredible.
-
-
From our perspective it is indeed Lorenz contracted, the clock is moving in a horizontal direction. So the trajectory of a light ball is not very straightforward. So it is not ticking symmetrically right-left as if the clock was stationary, but only now its length is shorter. If the clock is contracted, by doing some calculations we get that the tick-tock time is the same in the moving horizontal clock as in the moving vertical clock. Actually, we used that fact to derive that the clock is Lorenz contracted. But if we forget this method of derivation and use the fact that it is contracted (because we derived it using another method), we get the same tick-tock times for horizontal and vertical clocks. I see it this way.
-
-
I was at first confused about the multiplication by gamma instead of dividing; however Brian is looking at the duration of the tick-tocks, which are longer on a moving clock and which is inversely proportional to the elapsed time on the clock; longer tick-tocks result in lesser elapsed time; see video 10.1.
-
Hi Brian. The explanation is great, crystal clear, but unfortunately both the animation and the diagram are completely wrong. The light particle velocity should be c in both directions but, in both visualizations of the horizontal light clock, the speed is being added in the newtonian way. The board diagram is specially wrong beacuse after the reflexion on the right mirror the light particle is still going to the right at less speed. It should be travel to the left at speed c!
Although the reasoning is impecable of course, the diagram is wrong and confusing. You should correct it.
You must be logged in to reply to this discussion.