Thank you Steven for taking time to add your insight to the discussion about many things Einstein. It is a good thing to consider nature in alternate ways and you appear to posses an excellent eye for the unusual. The rocket ship analogy has always been one of my favorite as well since it is easier to get a hand upon large objects and simple ideas when compared to the super small and elusive world of quantum things.
I might be able to assist you in an explanation for one of your questions. The first paragraph where you are considering the motion of a body in space circling a second much larger one under the influence of gravity has captured my attention in the past. If a force is applied at right angles to the direction of motion of the orbiting body then the definition of work, or in this case energy, comes into play. Only motion that occurs in the direction of the force can extract energy from the source. In the case of a circular orbit the force will always be at right angles to the instantaneous motion and as a consequence no energy is taken from the source. If the orbit is anything but circular then this is not true. Energy is extracted from the force field for a portion of the elliptical orbit and then an equal amount is returned later. This process can be considered a trade off between potential energy, which is a function of distance from the large mass, and the velocity of the smaller mass which is a measure of its kinetic energy. In a stable elliptical orbit the sum of these two types of energy remains constant. I applaud your thinking about our little ship causing everything within the universe to appear to accelerate at 1 G when viewed from the window. It will serve you well to keep looking at nature from alternate view points. That is what I am doing in my search for clarification to the twin paradox since I remain under the belief that every observer must see a world that obeys the laws of physics from his perspective. On many occasions this makes some strange expectations, but the payoff can be large. One observation that I find interesting is when the guy making a measurement or feeling a force when the windows are closed tends to be under the influence of an important effect. He does not need to see the outside world in order to feel acceleration within his enclosure as example. Or, if he applies torque to objects and sees them begin to spin, it does not matter that he does not have windows. In both of these cases our space friend can use these phenomena to add or subtract energy (trade) from his local system components. Your thoughts about warp drives certainly are of great interest. I tend to look upon the current level of physics knowledge as being wonderful but primitive. I can not help but to recall reading about how many of the great minds of the day thought that everything was understood in the past only to have Einstein come along with his ideas. This has happened many times throughout history and I suspect that it remains within our mental systems. Why should we expect things to be different now? Who can imagine what lays ahead of us to discover? Warp drives might be simple when compared to the third generation of drive technology which may take several generations to perfect. I maintain an open mind with regard to alien contact even after one very strange encounter I experienced a few years back. I suppose that the case would have been closed had I been offered a ride upon the device that I witnessed, but that did not happen. If they are watching our crude behavior then there must be a way to break the light barrier. A warp drive seems like a good first approach. Dave -----Original Message----- From: OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson <orionwo...@charter.net> To: vortex-l <vortex-l@eskimo.com> Sent: Sat, Nov 16, 2013 5:57 pm Subject: RE: [Vo]:Local Calculated Velocity of Space Ship ... > You know that I relish asking questions which generate turmoil among the > crew. :-) Teasing the Collective again? You know what they say about teasing the animals. Other than that word of advice, well said, Dave. ;-) Since we are currently dining on a cuisine of thought experiments, let me add my own little recipe to yours. My recipe is actually related to yours, in a vague sort of way. Let me explain: We've all heard of Einstein's thought experiment of the rocket ship with a magical infinite accelerant engine onboard. The rocket's engine is constantly accelerating (thrusting) away at 1 g as it zips through outer space. The rocket has no windows. Anyone on board the rocket has no way of determining whether the rocket is accelerating or whether they are simply feeling the mundane effects of gravity at 1g. This thought experiment is, of course, Einstein's way of trying to convey to the ignorant masses the fact that the effects of acceleration are essentially no different that the effects of gravity. Both types of physical effects are essentially the same phenomenon. Of course, the effects of acceleration versus gravity is fascinating to most of us ignorant folk when space becomes warped as it does around large massive bodies like planets and suns. We observe these large masses spinning around other large masses continuously, forever. Wow! How does that happen! Why don't these planets and moons quickly lose energy and slow down, or simply fly away! Where’ the energy coming from the keeps them in orbit? As we all learned in classical physics, it takes energy to move a resting mass. Making continuous circles, regardless of the fact that it might be circling a massive body would nevertheless seem to involve the need to expend a constant amount of energy in order to continuously change the mass’s direction. But, alas, I'm getting distracted here. I want to get back to the infinitely accelerating rocket and it's passengers. Let's pretend the rocket now magically possesses a window. Passengers can peer out into the vastness of space to their heart's content. What will they observe? Well, we know that if one of the passengers drops something like a pencil within the rocket ship they will observe the object fall immediately to the ground. But what’s far more interesting, at least to me, is the astonishing fact that when the passengers peer outside the window they will observe the fact that every single bit of external matter belonging to the rest of the vast Universe is also obediently falling, relative to our rocket ship. Whoa! How did we manage that? Understanding this little twist of physics blows my mind - to realize the fact that an infinitely tiny little accelerating rocket ship appears to be capable of giving us humans this crazy illusion that seems to imply the assumption that the entire universe outside of the rocket ship is literally falling away from us. Said differently, how can our accelerating rocket ship essentially appear to be capable of INFLUENCING all of the external mass belonging to the rest of the universe. How can our little rocket (that thought it could) possess such a mind boggling influence on the rest of the universe? Remember, gravity and acceleration, according to Einstein, are the same thing. The only way I, personally, have been able to reconcile this fascinating little paradox is to stop thinking of gravity as a phenomenon that "influences" other objects. “Gravity” doesn’t influence other objects, as contradictory as this statement might initially seem to many. To me the effects of gravity, what we perceive as an “influence” is nothing more than realizing the fact that we are observing the fabric of space (3D space) being bent or warped out of shape from that of a flat 2D infinite plane. If we can ever figure out how to bend and/or warp what we perceive as the fabric of flat 2D space in a manner similar to how planetary bodies do it, but scaled down to a much smaller human scale, or allegedly as how some of those pesky aliens that the controversial character, John Lear, has alluded to, we may likely be able to start building economical space travel to anywhere within the solar system and perhaps beyond. “Make it so.” Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson svjart.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/newvortex/
