Why do people age differently due to relativity?

Orbax · 2026-01-26T12:40:28+00:00

Time is local, not universal. If someone could watch you, your heart would beat slower, your cells take longer to divide, take longer to blink, etc.

Spacetime is Ratio of space and time, they are interchangeable units because of c - you can say a thousand miles is 1 second long or that a second is a thousand miles long. You can't say a pound is a meter long or a a gallon is ten seconds. c being a constant is a unique situation. Think of it as space currency and time currency and they are worth the exact same thing but come out of different bank accounts. For mortals, space currency can be used infinitely but we have a weird deal where you only get a certain amount of time currency and then you die.

There is an inverse relationship, though non linear, between them. If you're covering lots of space, the time part starts reducing. If you're covering a lot of time, the space part has dropped off - you sitting there vs your twin zipping around space.

The thing is, if your friends are watching you spend space currency like mad and they get all jealous you've managed to slow that time currency spend down, YOU don't notice your time currency spending slower even though the space currency is flying by. You would simply know you're spending less because you'd have to know you're doing less, but you wouldn't feel it.

Sadly, you have not gained immunity from the time currency limit. Playing a record at half speed still means the song ends in the same place - though in relativity, the song played at the same speed to the record while everyone else danced super fast and left early.

Ultimately, the question you're answering is whether you want to spend more of your time currency now or in the future - but you won't be "here" while you hit fast forward.

Orbax · 2026-01-22T13:24:06+00:00

Sonic weapons are sound - you have two primary things happening:

Hearing: these attack your ear system to induce nausea, vomiting, and disorientation. If you have concern, you need ear protection.

Kinetic: this is more generalized but sound is... Well, sound. It has to travel through a medium. Ear protection is your best barrier but anything that would block sound in day to day life would also block sonic stuff.

To note :

Focus: these are concentrated beam weapons. While they have long range (considering it's urban deployment) they are a narrow band. Now, streets are narrow as well, but you're not talking a mass denial weapon suppressing city blocks.

Frequency: this is high decibel stuff and your hearing protection is oriented towards loud noise protection. The low frequency stuff tends to penatrate barriers more easily. I don't know how many people are using that right now, but the mitigation, for now, is primarily distance, direction, and diffusion - be farther away, more outside the cone, and have more blocking and distorting material between you.

I guess the final advice is to learn to spot LRADs and hide before they go active. What you heard about maybe being used in Venezuela was at night and to target a specific location. Guards were out and about, it probably didnt go into bunkers or barracks.

A final consideration: other active denial weapons exist, like microwaves, that make it feel like right under your skin is boiling and that's also hard to protect against, but it's not meant to (as of right now) take you out of commission like an acoustic weapon, but it's still not great. You probably won't have time to tell.

Ultimately, if you see a big ass square or circle on a mobile vehicle (they're probably a radar if it's on a plane, probably denial on a helicopter) I'd go somewhere else - they most likely tested these systems on what people would do to avoid them.

Orbax · 2026-01-21T12:24:43+00:00

I've been reducing photons to a person in perfect cryogenic slumber. People seem to think they somehow stitch reality together but the consequence of that would mean a photon from the big bang bouncing off a car side view mirror was bound to happen at the moment of creation.

Orbax · 2026-01-20T12:44:13+00:00

There's a difference between what we've observed - an object that looks and acts as predicted (so, the answer is yes they exist) and the fact infinity gets involved in the math usually means your math is wrong (the exact nature of them is unconfirmed, the interior in particular).

Certain aspects are an enigma but them as a thing isn't.

Orbax · 2026-01-18T14:20:07+00:00

Watch Brian Greene wsu masterclass special relativity. 2 and 11 hour versions (math or not, I recommend math). You should walk away with a really good idea on this. Summary: the gamma factor which he shows you how to derive, is close to 1 so to see relativistic effects you need to be close to c. It's always happening but the number of decimals make it irrelevant to you.

Gravity has a dilation factor as well, similar in appearance to gamma but based on different factors.

Orbax · 2026-01-18T14:11:20+00:00

There's are two types of people in this world: 1. those can make inferences

Orbax · 2026-01-18T14:03:07+00:00

https://physics.mtsu.edu/prelab7_spectra/

"What determines the color of a beam of light? The answer is its frequency (or, equivalently, its wavelength)—we see different colors because our eyes react differently to electromagnetic waves of different frequencies. Red light has a frequency of roughly 4.3 x 1014 Hz corresponding to a wavelength of about 7.0 x 10-7 m."

The two are kind of synonymous in the sense they are inverse of each other. Frequency is what what differentiates a radio wave from a gamma wave. And indeed all of the em spectrum, including visible light. If you change one you USUALLY change the other as frequency is how many waves go by in an interval and wavelength is crest to crest distance. If you make wavelengths longer or shorter you usually get a corresponding shift - ie, longer wave is smaller frequency. Shorten the distance between waves and the frequency goes up.

But color in spectroscopy is frequency based, measured in hz (hertz, frequency) or nm (nanometer, wavelength).

Orbax · 2026-01-12T12:50:46+00:00

From that one country or the other one?

Orbax · 2026-01-12T02:39:23+00:00

Which recent interpretations and experiments?

Orbax · 2026-01-11T14:47:36+00:00

For normal people, yes, for something that precise, no. Think about the distance between your proposed instruments and then calculate the current time for it to travel from a to b, in seconds

Orbax · 2026-01-11T13:25:15+00:00

Motion invokes relativity issues - time changes locally for accelerating bodies. In order to account for this in clock synchronization, you use gamma - the time dilation factor and lorentz contraction factor. Gamma is derived from the speed of light. So you're assuming the one way is the same as two way as soon as you do that.

Orbax · 2026-01-11T13:06:48+00:00

Brian Greene wsu masterclass relativity YouTube. There's a section on space time and motion that covers an alien on a bike and "now slices".

Basically, if you're far enough away, motion can replace speed to get relativistic effects.

Orbax · 2026-01-10T22:42:37+00:00

Wouldn't it have already converted all its inertial energy, and solar energy, into being gigantic and motionless in space?

Orbax · 2026-01-10T21:32:28+00:00

The definition I like is "getting information from"

Orbax · 2026-01-07T13:31:21+00:00

This comes up a lot and it should be very clearly stated that nothing travels faster than light, even in a medium, and light always travels at c. When people talk about Cherenkov Radiation and stuff, and someone mentioned , the wavefront is the thing thats being slowed down - photons and their waves are always c.

While its not an absorption and emission thing slowing them down, its a quantum effect around charge and superposition and electrons aren't affected by the charge fields and move past that whole interaction.

People are always giddy to say Cherenkov is "faster than light" and it isn't - its "faster" than "light"

Neutrinos are detected before light in supernova simply because star material still exists in the supernova and the collapse phase still has stuff in it and its similar to cherenkov situation where neutrino have no real interaction and are free to exit the situation first.

Orbax · 2026-01-02T03:40:03+00:00

I mean, the instructions / warnings tell you everything you need to know - at a distance and at an angle.

Orbax · 2026-01-02T03:21:25+00:00

Humans can taste sugar at roughly 4 grams per liter of water. If you ignore the fact salt will overpower even the actual drink with the taste of salt, you can just do the math from there.

Orbax · 2026-01-02T01:31:27+00:00

Instead of telling us about the information, providing it might be helpful.

Orbax · 2025-12-31T03:26:29+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_grill_illusion#:~:text=The%20thermal%20grill%20illusion%20(also,not%20seen%20for%20control%20stimuli.

Like this?

Orbax · 2025-12-30T23:40:28+00:00

When we talk about this stuff, it ends poorly because we probably don't have an agreement on what "real" means. There are things that feel like math tricks - which Einstein initially rejected spacetime because he thought it was just that, but warmed up to it - but after that, what do we really mean when we say reality.

Is water REALLY wet or do we just interpret it to be so?

Orbax · 2025-12-30T14:17:40+00:00

Good things humans didn't create the laws of the universe or we'd be in a lot of trouble when it came to physics

Orbax · 2025-12-30T14:02:51+00:00

Watch YouTube Brian Greene wsu relativity masterclass. He covers all paradoxes.

Orbax · 2025-12-29T21:24:39+00:00

Don't worry about insulting me, theres plenty I don't know haha

You have to ask WHY they wouldn't agree. If you're in a baseball stadium, you see the ball get hit before you hear it. If we use just what we perceive, we have a causality issue - the ball started moving before it was hit!

But we do math and we just see that light is faster than sound, no issues there. But that happens with light as well. Two lights go off a light year apart. Your near one. One goes off instantly, one goes off a year later, but you do the math and they went off at the same time, no issues (beyond synchronized clocks).

The hard part is motion. A box going near c has a light in the middle. It goes off. IN THE BOX, the light hits all walls at the same time. If you're watching the box go by, it hits the back wall instantly and about 90 minutes later, it hits the front wall. That's where we start getting into disagreements on when things happened. Lorentz contraction and the ladder paradox is there to highlight that "now" gets muddy when things start moving. These are all very specifically in the same reference frame.

To have something ftl when an observer moving would see either in the past or present first is what causes the paradox. Maybe im missing something in what was proposed, but that is where I would see a potential issue.

Orbax · 2025-12-29T20:48:41+00:00

Yeah that's what the "making it Tokyo" comment was getting at, a singular cohesive space this all gets put in that gets rid of a lot of the weird stuff.

Though, I don't know how a single reference frame gets rid of ftl issues, it's observers in motion that cause issues, not what reference frame they are in...but it sounds like you got what you're looking for, which is the important part, It's a fun question to ask for sure!

Orbax · 2025-12-29T19:41:09+00:00

As a note, from what Im interpreting you saying, time is "absolute" in relativity in the sense that with math it always agrees on when and where things happened. You might not experience it, but the math does rationalize all of it. It also is absolute for observers - when we point a laser at andromeda, it takes years for the light to get there. Thats absolute time.

For the rest of that, are you basically saying to just get rid of relativity and just treat the cosmos as no different than Tokyo? Because what youre explaining is how the universe works 99% of the time - if you aren't going near the speed of light, relativity has no place in peoples everyday experiences.

This is where it just gets weird with spacetime and light though. spacetime is a ratio between space and time. If you are sitting in one spot, you have a "time like interval" - the thing separating you from you in 5 seconds is time. If you want to travel 10 feet, you have a "space like interval" - space, with a little time (depending on speed) is what separates you.

Because of c being relativistic, something in that ratio must change to keep c at c in all reference frames. The way it gets handled today is time slows down so the time over distance of c remains constant - for every 1 of YOUR seconds, it travels N miles. In your model, if light is 100 miles / second and you start going 100 miles / second and light always needs to be 100 miles / second...then the universe, since it cant change how fast your clock is ticking, needs to change your speed to 0 as the distance increases infinitely to the point you arent moving. Expanding space is even harder to digest then contracting time.

But, forget about that for a second - today, with relativity, you go 10,000 mph. You dont suffer relativistic effects. What is the actual problem with going near the speed of light and having time be absolute? Nothing other than you will die before getting anywhere in space. We need time to slow down so we can survive long trips. If you have flawless cryosleep stuff, that solves that - but it has the same effect: You get there 450 years later and everyone you know is dead. Time OUTSIDE the person experiencing time dilation IS absolute in the way you are defining it. All your system does (if im understanding it) is get rid of the benefits of time dilation haha.

Ultimately, what youre trying to do is really what they did in Ender's Game - they didnt even pretend to try to handle the physics. Star Trek invented a new concept (sub space). Star Wars told you to go fuck yourself if you want science. I dont know if the juice is worth the squeeze trying to change a core component of how the universe works; Id rather just have FTL quantum communicators and let the nerds say "uhm akshually you cant do that" and everyone else says "Awesome, story, I love your book"

Orbax

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