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. 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/291890a2-6c96-4bd0-9437-11eef8145e3cn%40googlegroups.com.
