From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Jul 06 1998 - 05:27:29 MDT
At 10:29 AM 7/5/98 -0700, Hal wrote:
>By the principle of relativity (which says that you can't tell if you're
>moving, i.e. all motion is relative)
Of course you can tell you're moving if you're in an accelerating spaceship
- the floor pushes on your feet.
>As the
>stars approach the speed of light [...]
>they undergo Lorentz contraction, flattening out in the
>direction of motion.
Well, they grow closer together. But they don't individually flatten, they
undergo relativistic rotation. This curious truth has been known since
1959, and is due to James Terrell of Los Alamos; I met it in Milton
Rothman's nice little book THE LAWS OF PHYSICS (Basic Books 1963).
Damien Broderick
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