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>> ^critical_d:

I would be very careful to have that guy buzzing about a jet I was flying. At those speeds you don't have the chance to say "oh shit" before you are gone.


It's not that bad really, I mean you are on a planet that is spinning like a thousand miles an hours, but shaking hands with someone isn't that big a deal. Once you are in formation, speed isn't as much of an issue. Relative velocities is what makes things crazy, so when you have 2 jets going head to head...ya, little room for mistake there

"QM is no more difficult to understand than relativity"

I've always found some of the "weirdness" of quantum theory to be a little easier to wrap my peabrain around than some of the weirdness of relativity.

Honestly - consider the Doppler effect. With sound waves (and every other wave except for light/EM, so far as I know), the frequency of the wave changes depending on the relative velocity of the observer to the wave. But with light, we can observe the Doppler effect while the relative velocity is constant (speed of light remains constant regardless of the observer's frame of reference). WTF?

All light is measured as traveling at the speed of light (300,000km/sec or 186,000miles/sec) by all observers. Even those traveling at or near c measure light to travel at c because their perception of time is altered by their velocity.

The misconception that if I'm traveling at .9c that if I shine a flashlight in front of me it will only appear to be traveling at .1c is because people forget to factor in how the passage of time (and space) changes for the observer at .9c. Remember, velocity is a measure of distance over time. Time passed for you is different from time passed for another observer at a different relative velocity. So the light particle travels 300,000km over one of your seconds while they measure it traveling 300,000km over one of their seconds. For each of you 1 second has passed and the 300,000km was traveled by the light particle leading to the same measurement for the speed of light by all observers.