Comment on highlight #1. These two adjacent flashes of yours must each have a duration, no? Let's stipulate that the sources are separating at 1/2 the speed of light, OK? Let's stipulate that each flash has a duration of 1 second, OK? Let's stipulate that some how we manage to get both sources to begin their flash at one half second before they meet, and end their flash one half second beyond the meeting point, OK?Aardwolf, Thu Jul 21, 2011 8:33 am wrote:[#1.]I don't see the point in going forward if we can't agree that 2 adjacent flashes of light, traveling through exactly the same medium, will not reach any given destination at exactly the same time. Further discussion will just be the result of your insistence that this doesn't happen. Been here too many times before and this is the crux of it, and its something you can't mechanically resolve even if you are conceptually happy with it. Of course you need to be conceptually happy with it otherwise your entire theory dissolves. In the real world, you know they reach the destination at the same time.Goldminer wrote:OK, Aardwolf, I now have your theory of how things work expressed several times now. I can hold your theory and what I see concurrently without having a fit.
Can you please humor me and answer the questions I posed in the above post? (I am not trying to trap you, but where there are contradictions, they should be ironed out, don't you think?)
#2. What if instead of 2 separate flashes from X & B there was a single flash caused by an electric arc between X & B?] Now you would have me believe that A & C see the arc at the same time after 5 years, and X & Y see the arc at the same time after 5 years. But Y is 4.5ly past C when the flash reaches it; that's some weirdly twisted sphere.
This expanding sphere wave front (for either source) will be one lightsecond thick. In other words, by the time the initial wave front is one lightsecond away from the source, the trailing portion will just be leaving the source. The shell of this wave front will be 186,000 miles thick. This thickness will remain with this wave front for eternity, AFAWK. [as far as we know]
An observer located anywhere in the source frame (i.e, traveling with the source in the same direction at the same velocity as the source) will just see this source emit for one second. This is true for either source and observers in the same frame.
However, as any one observer views the wavefront of the opposite frame source, they will be traveling through the opposite sphere wave front at one half the speed of light. (This is not what Einsteinians believe with all their hearts. They believe that somehow the 186,00 thick wave front contracts down to, or expands, (I forget which, so that the observer still sees the wave front for one second. Actually it needs to do both, from their POV.)
You see, an observer on the approaching side of the opposite source frame wave front is traveling through a wave front that is moving at the speed of light in the opposite direction. Thus, after seeing the source begin emitting, providing this observer is more than a light-second away from the opposite source, will think the source pulse was only one half second duration; and the entire spectrum of the source's light will be shifted to the blue.
On the other hand you see, an observer on the receding side of the opposite source frame wave front is traveling through a wave front that is moving at the speed of light in the same direction. Thus, after seeing the source begin emitting, providing this observer is more than a light-second away from the opposite source, will think the source pulse was apparently one and one half second duration; and the entire spectrum of the source's light will be shifted to the red.
Comment on highlight #2. Quoting Ardwarf: "What if instead of 2 separate flashes from X & B there was a single flash caused by an electric arc between X & B?"
As I deftly pointed out above, an arc will have a given duration. If we accept the above given situation the arc between (spaceships?) moving at one half the speed of light WRTEO [with respect to each other] will have to be 186,000 miles long if the duration is for one second!
There is no twisted sphere, the expanding sphere only exists in the rest frame of the source, all other observers in whatever moving frame just meet the sphere where they do. An observer can be stipulated to be in the rest frame at close to the exact place the moving observer meets the expanding sphere.
.