Interesting, thanks.

When all else fails you can always whip out another theory that may or may not yet be accepted as true as an explanation....from the article:

"It's All Relative

Relativity is really, really weird. It says that things like distance and time can change depending on how you look at them, especially if you're moving very fast relative to something else."

Time is just your mind's way of ordering things so everything doesn't happen all at once. It's just an illusion anyway.

Reality is like a big flea market. In this booth you can find cavemen. In that booth over there, they're having the Crimean War. In the booth down that way, It's the Renaissance. And over there, they're having World War II.

You're just stuck in one booth, moving in a particular direction. If you could change directions and get out of your booth, you could go anywhere you wanted.

Besides, just because neutrinos aren't doing it doesn't change anything about tachyons.

And have you ever thought about a sweep second hand on a watch? Along that rigid "hand" of the watch, there are an infinite number of points. And they're all covering different distances in the same amount of time, and yet it's a straight, rigid "hand". If the tip of the hand is then going faster than the root, and all the points in-between are going different speeds, shouldn't it be blurred all over the face of the watch? Or at least noticeably bending? And what would happen if you kept extending the length of the "hand"?

Nothing is as it seems. Somewhere, it's still last week and you're there.

Cheers!

Rick...

Aw comeon Sauron! I'm getting tired of you saying the same dang thing every week! Sheesh.

Isn't relativity fun? Although, I wouldn't call it totally closed just yet... I'm not an expert by any means but it's hard for me to believe that so many of the world's top physicists would totally forget to account for these relativistic effects.

I only repeat the classics. That would be the ones most apt to drive someone off their rocker if they think about them too much.

Cheers!

Rick...

speed of light, i bend it everytime i sleep, silly scientist and their limited minds.

It seems to be the modus operandi of our superior intellects who write the rules on how stuff works to spend some time explaining to we lowly followers that "this is the way it goes today folks but..." and then throw in some new theory that they claim not to fully understand so we will nod OK to funding the research to get them to feel comfortable with this radical thought one of their clan has invented as their next generation's means of making a living. Who says there is no such thing as perpetual motion

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

The tip of the hand is only going faster relative to the root and not 'faster than the root'. It's not going faster in relation to the distance both tip and root have to travel. They are both travelling at the same speed relative to the distance they have to travel.

If the tip was travelling faster than the root in relation to the distance they have to travel then it would be a blur.

Congrats NineLives, you've just invented a whole new porno sub-genre.

I suppose in the pre-GPS days, they would have used some point to point synchronization method (shortwave perhaps), which could then be adjusted for signal latency, and never met this problem.

I've got to wonder then... How were the GPS clocks synchronized? Keeping this problem with relativity in mind when using the satellites for timing down stream, how does one avoid the problem when synchronizing the satellites to a ground based clock going upstream?

This would assume that synchronizing the satellites on the ground prior to launch is not possible, due to the rocket launch accelerations required to place the satellites in orbit causing small relativity based errors between each satellite.

For those interested as per my questioning how the GPS clocks were synchronized... Some searches led me to this webpage, and a document titled "The Science of Timekeeping".

http://www.allanstime.com/Publications/DWA/Science_Timekeeping/index.html

This document contains references to a "relativistic Sagnac effect" which GPS must take into account when using radio signals to synchronize clocks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagnac_effect#Practical_uses_of_the_Sagnac_effect

So this appears to be a well known territory.

If you were the size of a galaxy, it would take you millions of light years to reach down and tie your shoes. Or would it?

One of my biggest questions in life is how do porcupines f*:k ?

Very carefully.

Let's say it's a huge watch. If a point near the root is covering a mile in the sixty second sweep, it's going a mile per minute, or 60 miles per hour.

If a point near the tip is covering sixty miles in the sixty second sweep, it's going 60 miles per second, or 216000 miles per hour.

Something is not right with the sweep second hand of a watch.

Cheers!

Rick...

I read some more on this last night. As I thought, the original experimenters did say that they accounted for relativistic effects, though they didn't give precise details. So don't throw out their results just yet.

What will really blow your mind is if you had a powerful enough flashlight on the earth pointing out into space and shine it in an arc very fast - would the particles of light across the universe be going faster than the speed of light to be able to cross that distance of the arc extrapolated out?