links for 2008-03-06

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  1. The Twin Paradox is cleaned up by triplets. Three identical clock kit boxes. Each clock will have a little on-off toggle switch. Two space ships, one home base.

    Space ship L goes waaaay to the left, space ship R goes waaaay waaay to the right of home base H. Each spaceship accelerates to a large fraction of lightspeed aimed at skimming home base, then coasts with zero acceleration for the remainder of the experiment. All three observers proceed to build their clocks from parts after acceleration is zero, toggle them off, and set them to zero elapsed time.

    Space ship L skims past home base and the toggles touch (locality!). Clocks L and H are on. Space ship L and space ship R pass each other, toggles touch. Clock L is off, clocks R and H are on. Space ship R skims home base, toggles touch, all clocks are off. Both space ships radio their elapsed times to home base. Home base compares L+R to H elasped time. Not equal!

    It’s not acceleration or even the clocks, it is the inertial reference frames. They have different relative mixes of spacetime even though none of them accelerated after the clocks were built.

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