On Thursday, January 9, 2025 at 3:59:09 AM UTC-7 Quentin Anciaux wrote:
Le jeu. 9 janv. 2025, 11:54, Alan Grayson <[email protected]> a écrit : On Thursday, January 9, 2025 at 3:47:17 AM UTC-7 Quentin Anciaux wrote: Le jeu. 9 janv. 2025, 11:44, Alan Grayson <[email protected]> a écrit : On Thursday, January 9, 2025 at 3:26:31 AM UTC-7 Quentin Anciaux wrote: Le jeu. 9 janv. 2025, 11:23, Alan Grayson <[email protected]> a écrit : On Thursday, January 9, 2025 at 12:21:56 AM UTC-7 Quentin Anciaux wrote: AG, your "explanation" keeps repeating the same half-baked point as if saying it louder will somehow make it complete. Yes, we all understand that length contraction sets up the paradox by showing that the car and garage have different apparent lengths in different frames. What you fail to grasp—or deliberately ignore—is that this doesn’t resolve the paradox; it only establishes the disagreement. Let me spell it out for you yet again, since you seem so intent on pretending you’re making a groundbreaking point: 1. Why doesn’t the car fit initially? Because in the car’s rest frame, its proper length is longer than the garage’s proper length. This sets the stage for the paradox. Congratulations, you’ve grasped Relativity 101. 2. What happens when the car moves? >From the garage’s frame, the car appears shorter due to length contraction, so it can fit. From the car’s frame, the garage appears shorter, so the car can’t fit. This is where simultaneity becomes crucial—because whether the car fits depends on when and how you compare the positions of the car’s front and back relative to the garage. 3. What does length contraction do? It provides the necessary condition for disagreement: the car and garage have different lengths depending on the frame. But this alone doesn’t resolve the paradox. Simultaneity resolves it by explaining why one frame sees the car fit (events are simultaneous) and the other doesn’t (events are not simultaneous). *So why do the frames differ in their conclusions about simultaneity? Does it have anything to do with the fact that they're viewing different entities (car or garage) of different initial lengths with different length contractions? AG* *BTW, the main reason I don't like discussing these issues with you, and why I dislike you, is because when I make an honest statement, such as why I made an error, say, in how fitting is defined, you immediately draw false interpretations, such as that I am demonstrating false humility. You do this sort of crap regularly, as if you're some sort of perfect mind reader, when in fact you have no clue about my motives. AG* AG, your latest attempt at engaging with relativity is as hollow as ever, wrapped in a thin layer of fake intellectualism. Let me answer your question while dismantling your nonsense once again. Why do the frames differ in their conclusions about simultaneity? It has nothing to do with "viewing different entities" or "different length contractions," as you suggest in your usual hand-waving manner. It’s because of the relativity of simultaneity, which you still clearly don’t grasp despite it being explained to you repeatedly. 1. In special relativity, simultaneity is not universal. Events that are simultaneous in one frame are not simultaneous in another frame moving relative to it. This isn’t an optional feature of relativity—it’s a cornerstone of the theory. 2. In the garage frame, the car appears contracted, and the garage clocks are synchronized. Simultaneity in this frame means that, at a specific moment, the back of the car passes the entrance while the front is within or at the exit. The car fits. 3. In the car frame, the garage appears contracted, and the car’s clocks are synchronized. Simultaneity here means the events the garage frame sees as simultaneous are no longer simultaneous. The back of the car passes the entrance before the front reaches the exit. The car doesn’t fit. This isn’t complicated unless you’re deliberately trying to overthink it—or more likely, derail the discussion by throwing in irrelevant nonsense about "entities" and "length contractions" being the cause. The difference comes entirely from how time and space behave in relativity, and your inability to grasp this is a problem of your own making. As for your personal grievances, let’s be clear. Your habit of playing the victim while slinging insults and pretending to engage in good faith is transparent trolling. You’re not here to understand; you’re here to assert your own half-baked conclusions while accusing others of arrogance and bad teaching. You don’t like that I call out your tactics? Too bad. I’ll keep doing it. Your problem isn’t that I misunderstand you—it’s that I see through your act. You’re a troll, AG, and not even a clever one. If you want to keep embarrassing yourself, go ahead. Just don’t mistake your whining and bad arguments for intellectual engagement. You’re not convincing anyone, least of all me. Quentin *You're a hopeless case of paranoia. You keep doing the same thing. Maybe there's something in the food or water in Belgium that's corrupting your judgement. Why don't you answer my question; that is, why do the frames differ in their conclusions about simultaneity? You assert that they do. There must be a reason for that. Surely someone with your immense intellect and understanding of SR can answer this basic question. AG * *For example, you claim the car fits in the garage frame, and you relate this to where and when the endpoints of the car pass the endpoints of the garage. How do you know this? AG * AG, your question "How do you know this?" is nothing more than another pathetic attempt to feign ignorance and waste time. The explanation has been handed to you repeatedly, yet you keep circling back like a broken record. Let me crush this nonsense for the last time. In the garage frame, the car fits because of simultaneity. The back of the car passes the entrance, and the front is at or within the exit at the same time, according to clocks in the garage frame. This is not speculation—it’s a direct result of how special relativity defines time and space. The garage’s clocks are synchronized in its own frame, and simultaneity is determined by these synchronized clocks. This is basic physics, not up for debate. In the car frame, simultaneity shifts due to relative motion. The back of the car passes the entrance after the front reaches the exit. The garage appears shorter due to length contraction, and the events that are simultaneous in the garage frame are not simultaneous in the car frame. Again, this is Relativity 101. Your constant whining about "how do you know this" is laughable. How do I know this? Because it’s a fundamental part of special relativity that’s been understood for over a century. The fact that you’re still asking shows either your incompetence or your commitment to trolling. My money is on the latter. Stop pretending that your questions are profound or challenging. They’re not. They’re the same tired attempts to derail the discussion by ignoring basic concepts and rehashing points that have already been answered. If you can’t grasp this by now, it’s because you don’t want to. You’re not engaging in good faith, AG—you’re just here to waste time and throw insults like the bad troll you are. Quentin *I'm trying to demonstrate that the only thing that determines whether the car fits depends on one thing; the relative lengths of the car and the entity in which it is contemplated to fit in. I am not denying simultaneity; nor am I asking you to prove it. Rather, I'm making the case that slogans about simultaneity obfuscates the underlying reality of relative lengths. My questions are straight-forward, but will always be baffling, or misconstrued, for someone seduced by slogans, such "the relativity of simultaneity". We know that, but how do you get the car to fit without doing a deep dive into length contraction? AG* *On Wednesday, December 4, 2024 at 2:41:25 PM UTC-7 Jesse Mazer wrote:* *On Wed, Dec 4, 2024 at 4:06 PM Alan Grayson <**[email protected]* *> wrote:* *In the case of a car whose rest length is greater than the length of the garage, from pov of the garage, the car will fit inside if its speed is sufficient fast due to length contraction of the car. But from the pov of the moving car, the length of garage will contract, as close to zero as one desires as its velocity approaches c, so the car will NOT fit inside the garage. Someone posted a link to an article which claimed, without proof, that this apparent contradiction can be resolved by the fact that simultaneity is frame dependent. I don't see how disagreements of simultaneity between frames solves this apparent paradox. AG* *Can you think of any way to define the meaning of the phrase "fit inside" other than by saying that the back end of the car is at a position inside the garage past the entrance "at the same time" as the front end of the car is at a position inside the garage but hasn't hit the back wall? (or hasn't passed through the back opening of the garage, if we imagine the garage as something like a covered bridge that's open on both ends). This way of defining it obviously depends on simultaneity, so different frames can disagree about whether there is any moment where such an event on the worldline of the back of the car is simultaneous with such an event on the worldline of the front of the car.* *Jesse* *I think I've mostly resolved this issue. Firstly, despite the unanimity* *of our resident experts, the importance of simultaneity for solving this problem is way overblown. Obviously, that the frames disagree about whether the car fits in the garage can be immediately and unambiguously determined by length contraction. I was ridiculed by the arrogant fool from Belgium and accused as trolling for not placing greater emphasis on simultaneity for the car fitting frame disagreement, but it isn't needed; one can infer the disagreement qualitatively, directly from how the problem is set up by using length contraction. One of the things Brent did in his plots was to define the problem numerically, or **quantitatively*, *but that wasn't necessary. The statement of the problem easily implies the alleged contested result qualitatively, which is sufficient. Since length contraction, time dilation, and simultaneity all follow from the LT (which follows from the invariance of the SoL), they have the same ontological status; that is the same truth value, so using any of the three phenomena, or any combination thereof, is sufficient to reach the conclusion of fitting disagreement for the two frames under consideration. Brent might have established that disagreement of simultaneity can be used as a factor in the analysis, or he may have known about it beforehand and included it in his plots. I'm not sure which is the case, but it really doesn't matter concerning the result of the analysis; the frame disagreement about the car fitting can be established by applying length contraction alone. I think the problem appears to have an ambiguous paradoxical result because SR gives us hugely non-intuitive results. We tend to think that both frames MUST see the same physical result. But if we accept length contraction as a reality, then IF both frames showed the same physical result, we'd be in a worse situation. It would imply that length contraction is falsified. In fact, one of the videos I posted, ended by concluding just that, the video with a poor sound track at the end, namely, * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDqUbBYpB_k#:~:text=from%20the%20car's%20reference%20rate%20however%20the,will%20get%20smashed%20by%20the%20garage%20doors.&text=in%20order%20to%20find%20out%20we%20must,use%20our%20friends%20the%20lorentz%20transformation%20equations *BTW, I was also confused about the definition of fitting. With all the emphasis about endpoints, and the fact that all clocks in any frame can be sychronized, the ends of the car are always simultaneous whether the car fits or not. I somehow wasn't clear that the event times which were decisive involved the crossing times of the front and rear of garage by the front and rear of the car. The arrogant not-skilled teacher from Belgium was unable to grasp how I misconstrued the fitting conditions and used my error for undeserved accusations. * *AG* AG, the frames differ in their conclusions about simultaneity because of the fundamental structure of spacetime in special relativity. This isn’t some obscure detail—it’s one of the core principles of the theory, and the fact that you still don’t understand it after all this time is nothing short of embarrassing. Here’s the reality: simultaneity is frame-dependent. In the garage frame, clocks are synchronized within that frame, so events like the back of the car passing the entrance and the front reaching the exit can happen at the same time. In the car frame, which is moving relative to the garage, those events are not simultaneous because time is measured differently. This isn’t rocket science—it’s basic relativity. Your nonsense about "entities" and "different initial lengths" is a pathetic attempt to sound insightful while avoiding the real explanation. The difference in simultaneity has nothing to do with the objects being observed and everything to do with how time and space are measured in different frames. If you can’t grasp that, the issue isn’t the complexity of the concept—it’s your refusal to engage with it. And let’s not forget your tired, irrelevant insult about Belgium’s water corrupting my judgment. Are you really so desperate to avoid admitting you’re wrong that you have to resort to playground-level jabs? The irony of you accusing others of arrogance while spewing this kind of trash is staggering. You’re not here for answers, AG. You’re here to stroke your ego, throw insults, and waste everyone’s time. So here’s the answer, one more time, in plain terms: the frames differ in their conclusions about simultaneity because spacetime itself behaves differently for observers in relative motion. If you can’t accept that, it’s not because it hasn’t been explained—it’s because you’re more interested in trolling than understanding. Your claim that length contraction is "sufficient" is simply wrong. It’s like saying the setup of a chessboard determines the outcome of the game. No, AG, it determines the conditions, not the resolution. Ignoring simultaneity leaves the question of why the car fits in one frame but not the other completely unanswered. If you’re so set on keeping things "simple," fine—but don’t confuse simplicity with sufficiency. You’re presenting half an explanation and pretending it’s the whole picture, which is either intellectual laziness or deliberate trolling. And if pointing out your fundamental misunderstanding is "arrogant BS," then so be it. The truth doesn’t need to be polite. Le jeu. 9 janv. 2025, 07:50, Alan Grayson <[email protected]> a écrit : On Wednesday, January 8, 2025 at 11:33:12 PM UTC-7 Quentin Anciaux wrote: AG, your oversimplified drivel once again misses the mark entirely. Yes, we all agree that length contraction can set up the paradox by establishing the conditions for disagreement between the frames. But claiming that this alone resolves the paradox is flat-out wrong and demonstrates your inability—or unwillingness—to engage with the actual physics. Your assertion that "this is all we need to know" is laughable. Length contraction only explains why the car and garage appear to have different lengths in different frames. It does not explain why one frame sees the car fit while the other doesn’t. That’s where simultaneity comes into play, and dismissing it as "bells and whistles" is just you trying to avoid admitting you’ve fundamentally misunderstood relativity. Here’s the reality: Length contraction sets up the disagreement by showing that the car appears shorter in the garage frame and the garage appears shorter in the car frame. Simultaneity resolves the paradox by explaining why, in the garage frame, the car fits because events (back entering, front exiting) are simultaneous, while in the car frame, those events are not simultaneous, so the car doesn’t fit. Ignoring simultaneity doesn’t simplify the problem—it leaves it unresolved. Pretending otherwise is either trolling or incompetence. Your "advice" for me to STFU is as meaningless as your argument. You’re free to shout nonsense into the void, but don’t expect anyone who understands physics to take your childish attempts at "resolution" seriously. If you want to continue embarrassing yourself, be my guest. Just don’t mistake your stubbornness for intellectual rigor—it’s not. *Why doesn't the car fit initially? Can you figure it out? Right; because it's longer than the garage. Brilliant! And what happens when the car is moving? From the pov of car frame, the garage gets even shorter. So length contraction is a legitimate answer to why its fit gets worse when moving. If you want to advance a more complicated explanation, go for it. But don't give me your arrogant BS that this explanation is insufficient. AG* Le jeu. 9 janv. 2025, 07:19, Alan Grayson <[email protected]> a écrit : On Wednesday, January 8, 2025 at 11:06:39 PM UTC-7 Quentin Anciaux wrote: AG, your "standing by" what you wrote doesn’t make it any less wrong. Clinging to your incorrect belief that "length contraction is sufficient to define and resolve the problem" is the intellectual equivalent of digging a hole and declaring it a victory because you’ve hit rock bottom. Length contraction alone can define that there’s a disagreement between frames, but it cannot resolve why the disagreement exists or how it manifests in each frame. That’s where simultaneity comes in, which you consistently dismiss because it complicates your oversimplified worldview. It’s not my opinion; it’s the framework of special relativity that you claim to understand but clearly don’t. Your refusal to engage with simultaneity shows a deep misunderstanding of how the Lorentz transformations work. Length contraction isn’t some standalone magic trick—it’s part of a system that includes time dilation and the relativity of simultaneity. Ignoring this is like trying to explain how a car engine works by only talking about the pistons and pretending the timing belt doesn’t matter. Your declaration that my opinion is of no interest to you is as predictable as it is irrelevant. This isn’t about opinions; it’s about facts. The fact is, your argument is incomplete and wrong, and your refusal to acknowledge this says more about your intellectual dishonesty than anything else. So go ahead, AG, "stand by" your flawed understanding. It won’t make you right. It’ll just make you the guy who loudly insisted water isn’t wet while everyone else rolled their eyes and moved on. Le jeu. 9 janv. 2025, 07:02, Alan Grayson <[email protected]> a écrit : On Wednesday, January 8, 2025 at 10:46:42 PM UTC-7 Quentin Anciaux wrote: AG, your self-congratulatory monologue is a masterpiece of revisionist history, bad physics, and unearned smugness. Let’s unpack your nonsense with all the precision your trolling deserves. You claim, "the importance of simultaneity for solving this problem is way overblown," as if this is some bold revelation. It’s not. It’s yet another demonstration of your failure to understand the very basics of special relativity. Sure, you can use length contraction to infer that a disagreement exists, but simultaneity is the reason why the disagreement exists in the first place. Ignoring this is like describing a murder scene and pretending the motive doesn’t matter. You don’t get points for arriving at half the answer. Your statement that "using length contraction alone is sufficient to reach the conclusion" is blatantly wrong. Length contraction alone doesn’t explain why one frame sees the car fit while the other doesn’t—it merely sets the stage. Without simultaneity, you can’t define when the endpoints of the car and the garage align. This isn’t an optional detail, AG; it’s the entire mechanism by which the paradox is resolved. Your refusal to grasp this after endless explanations is either stubborn ignorance or pure trolling. You keep repeating that length contraction, time dilation, and simultaneity have the "same ontological status." Yes, they’re all derived from the Lorentz transformations. What you fail to grasp is that they work together, not in isolation. Your attempt to reduce everything to length contraction is like trying to describe a triangle by talking about one side and ignoring the angles. It’s incomplete and fundamentally wrong. Your backhanded swipe at Brent—claiming his work "wasn’t necessary"—is laughable. At least Brent took the time to analyze the problem quantitatively and correctly. You, on the other hand, have spent the entire discussion flailing around with half-baked ideas and then congratulating yourself for stumbling into conclusions that were explained to you weeks ago. And now, let’s address your newfound "confusion" about the definition of fitting. Suddenly, you admit you "somehow wasn’t clear" that the crossing times of the car’s front and back with the garage’s front and back were the decisive events. This is the very definition of the problem that’s been spoon-fed to you repeatedly. Yet, instead of owning your ignorance, you blame the "arrogant not-skilled teacher from Belgium" for your failure to understand it. The projection here is staggering. Finally, your mention of clocks being synchronized in any frame as if it undermines simultaneity’s frame-dependence is the cherry on top of your nonsense sundae. Of course, clocks can be synchronized in a single frame, but the relativity of simultaneity ensures that events simultaneous in one frame are not simultaneous in another. This is Relativity 101. That you’re still bringing this up after all this time is proof of either deliberate trolling or an inability to grasp even the most basic concepts. So let’s summarize: you’ve wasted everyone’s time, misunderstood the problem, ignored explanations, twisted arguments, and insulted people who tried to help you. And now you’re declaring victory in a fight you’ve lost at every turn. If arrogance and ignorance were Olympic sports, AG, you’d be bringing home gold medals. *The car starts out longer than the garage, so it can't fit inside. Then, when the car is moving, the gararge gets shorter due to length contraction from the pov of the car. So the car fitting in garage gets worse. This is all we need to know. If you want to include additional bells and whistles, you can do so, but it's not necessary. My advice for you is simple; STFU. AG * *I stand by what I wrote. Length contraction is sufficient to define and resolve the problem. Your opinion is of no interest to me. AG* Le jeu. 9 janv. 2025, 04:53, Alan Grayson <[email protected]> a écrit : On Wednesday, December 4, 2024 at 2:41:25 PM UTC-7 Jesse Mazer wrote: On Wed, Dec 4, 2024 at 4:06 PM Alan Grayson <[email protected]> wrote: In the case of a car whose rest length is greater than the length of the garage, from pov of the garage, the car *will fit inside* if its speed is sufficient fast due to length contraction of the car. But from the pov of the moving car, the length of garage will contract, as close to zero as one desires as its velocity approaches c, so the car *will NOT fit* *inside* the garage. Someone posted a link to an article which claimed, without proof, that this apparent contradiction can be resolved by the fact that simultaneity is frame dependent. I don't see how disagreements of simultaneity between frames solves this apparent paradox. AG Can you think of any way to define the meaning of the phrase "fit inside" other than by saying that the back end of the car is at a position inside the garage past the entrance "at the same time" as the front end of the car is at a position inside the garage but hasn't hit the back wall? (or hasn't passed through the back opening of the garage, if we imagine the garage as something like a covered bridge that's open on both ends). This way of defining it obviously depends on simultaneity, so different frames can disagree about whether there is any moment where such an event on the worldline of the back of the car is simultaneous with such an event on the worldline of the front of the car. Jesse *I think I've mostly resolved this issue. Firstly, despite the unanimity* *of our resident experts, the importance of simultaneity for solving this problem is way overblown. Obviously, that the frames disagree about whether the car fits in the garage can be immediately and unambiguously determined by length contraction. I was ridiculed by the arrogant fool from Belgium and accused as trolling for not placing greater emphasis on simultaneity for the car fitting frame disagreement, but it isn't needed; one can infer the disagreement qualitatively, directly from how the problem is set up by using length contraction. One of the things Brent did in his plots was to define the problem numerically, or **quantitatively*, *but that wasn't necessary. The statement of the problem easily implies the alleged contested result qualitatively, which is sufficient. Since length contraction, time dilation, and simultaneity all follow from the LT (which follows from the invariance of the Sol), they have the same ontological status; that is the same truth value, so using any of the three phenomena, or any combination thereof, is sufficient to reach the conclusion of fitting disagreement for the two frames under consideration. Brent might have established that disagreement of simultaneity can be used as a factor in the analysis, or he may have known about it beforehand and included it in his plots. I'm not sure which is the case, but it really doesn't matter concerning the result of the analysis; the frame disagreement about the car fitting can be established by applying length contraction alone. I think the problem appears to have an ambiguous paradoxical result because SR gives us hugely non-intuitive results. We tend to think that both frames MUST see the same physical result. But if we accept length contraction as a reality, then IF both frames showed the same physical result, we'd be in a worse situation. It would imply that length contraction is falsified. In fact, one of the videos I posted, ended by concluding just that, the video with a poor sound track at the end, namely, * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDqUbBYpB_k#:~:text=from%20the%20car's%20reference%20rate%20however%20the,will%20get%20smashed%20by%20the%20garage%20doors.&text=in%20order%20to%20find%20out%20we%20must,use%20our%20friends%20the%20lorentz%20transformation%20equations *BTW, I was also confused about the definition of fitting. With all the emphasis about endpoints, and the fact that all clocks in any frame can be sychronized, the ends of the car are always simultaneous whether the car fits or not. I somehow wasn't clear that the event times which were decisive involved the crossing times of the front and rear of garage by the front and rear of the car. The arrogant not-skilled teacher from Belgium was unable to grasp how I misconstrued the fitting conditions and used my error for undeserved accusations. * *AG* -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/fb9ac163-a028-494a-878f-9324e2178c5en%40googlegroups.com <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/fb9ac163-a028-494a-878f-9324e2178c5en%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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