On 12/29/2018 11:26 AM, John Clark wrote:
Richard Feynman had something to say about clocks and rickets in his
book Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman, he posed this puzzle to a
fellow physicist:
"Y/ou blast off in a rocket which has a clock on board, and there's a
clock on the ground. The idea is that you have to be back when the
clock on the ground says one hour has passed. Now you want it so
that//when you come back, your clock is as far ahead as possible.
According to Einstein, if you go very high, your clock will go faster,
because the higher something is in a gravitational field, the faster
its clock goes. But if you try to go too high, since you've only got
an hour, you have to go so fast to get there that the speed slows your
clock down. So you can't go too high. The question is, exactly what
program of speed and height should you make so that you get the
maximum time on your clock?"/
/
/
/"This assistant of Einstein worked on it for quite a bit before he
realized that the answer is the real motion of matter. If you shoot
something up in a normal way, so that the time it takes the shell to
go up and come down is an hour, that's the correct motion. It's the
fundamental principle of Einstein's gravity--that is, what's called
the "proper time" is at a maximum for the actual curve."/
It's an example of a geodesic being the longest path (in interval)
between two events in 4-space.
Brent
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