A, B, C, D, Pointless Relativity
Probably the most profound claim of relativity is that there’s no such thing as synchronized events. For example, you and a friend, sitting in the same room, can synchronize your watches, and it seems that you have succeeded. But according to relativity, to space travelers zipping by your planet at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, you and your friend’s watches are substantially out-of-sync. And not by some tiny fraction of a second either — your watches might be seconds or even minutes different from each other.
Wow! That sounds pretty profound. But why does it sound profound? What’s so profound about it? The reason it seems so profound is because when the average person hears the above description, they imagine a universe in which we can’t do anything reliably, a universe in which confusion reigns and humans’ best efforts to accomplish anything is stymied by massive synchronization problems.
Of course, relativity’s champions never claim that confusion and human ineptitude will result from the truth of their theory — a specific claim like that would result in a sudden, mass lack of belief on the part of most of the population, who can easily look around and see humanity advancing and succeeding nicely — but the idea of a confusing, unworkable world is implied every time people hear the claim that we can’t synchronize events.
Easy As ABC
Imagine the following scenario. I call you on the phone and I say, “A.” As soon as you hear me say “A”, you say “B.” Then, as soon as I hear you say “B”, I say “C.” Etcetera. Together, we recite the English alphabet from A to Z, taking turns saying each letter.
Now, if we lived in a confusing, unworkable, unsynchronizable universe, this conversation would be impossible. If we are many seconds off in our perceived synchronization, then I should get half-way through the alphabet before you even begin. And since I’m not going to say the letter “C” until I hear you say, “B”, then clearly the whole scenario isn’t going to work.
The synchronization issues described by relativity theory are such that the just-described problem will not occur. Specifically, the space travelers would say that you and I are many seconds off, but we’re also massively time-dilated so that to us, those many seconds seem like a tiny, unnoticeable fraction of a second. So the space travelers do not claim that the letters were spoken out-of-order. They would agree with you and me that the first event that occurred was that I said “A”, then the second event was that you said “B”, then the third event was that I spoke “C”, etc. So our ability to to recite the alphabet together in a synchronized way was not actually compromised by the so-called synchronization issues of relativity.
And this same scenario can be repeated with us reciting the alphabet twice as fast, or ten times as fast. Using computers, we can increase the speed of the back-and-forth recitation up to what is permitted by the speed of light and the distance between us. And it is at that limit (the speed of light) that our ability to synchronize breaks down. If I’m on Earth, and you’re on a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, then the answer to the question of whether our watches are synchronized to within an accuracy of less than one second is a pretty useless statistic — it takes years for the fastest messages to get from one of us to the other!
Irony, Anyone?
Relativity sprang out of the idea that if we can’t measure our absolute motion through space (thanks to Lorenz contraction and time dilation), then there must be no such thing as absolute motion through space, and so all motion must be relative. Or more generally, if we’ve tried to devise experiments to measure X, and failed, then X must not exist — if for no other reason than that science is about things we can detect, not things we can’t.
How incredibly ironic, then, that the same relativists utterly fail to apply this same logic to their own precious synchro issues. If a claimed inability of you and me to synchronize our watches just happens to be of a form that happily doesn’t interfere with any activities (e.g. alternating alphabet recitation) by which we might test our synchronization, then the purported synchro issues are just as meaningless as absolute motion through space — and therefore just as nonexistent.
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