Relativity - In Words of Four Letters or Less

NoNukes writes:I'd label the exercise of using tiny words "cute".The most off putting part about the explanation was the need to call people things like Ari, Izzy, Herb etc. just to avoid using longer words. If the people were important to understanding the explanation, then using unfamiliar names for those people was at least an impediment to understanding.I didn't see anything obviously wrong, but I found the whole thing quite tedious to read, so I did only skimmed the special relativity stuff, and completely blew off the general relatively stuff. Surely an attempt using ordinary, if somewhat longer words would have been more effective and probably a good deal shorter.

Percy writes:I couldn't get through it myself, I didn't have the patience for wading through paragraphs of analogy about something I thought I already knew (can never be certain about that ). I didn't look at the other one, either (perkel.com/nerd/relativity.htm), but it would be interesting to find out if you actually gained a fair impression of relativity from these sources. Do you feel like you could explain relativity in your own words now?--Percy

We have Bert and Dana. Take a bus, and put Bert on the bus. The bus goes down the road. Dana, she sits here, on the side of the road. He's in the bus and she's on her ass. And now take a rock off of the moon, and let it fall at them. It hits the air and cuts in two. The two bits burn, and then land just as Bert and Dana are side by side. One hits the dirt up the road a ways, and one hits down the road a ways. Dana sees each rock at the same time, but Bert sees one rock and then sees the next rock. Now: if Bert and Dana both see Dana as the one who is "at rest", they both will say that the two bits came down at the same time. Dana will say, "I am 'at rest', and I saw them both land at the same time, so they both did, in fact, land at the same time." And Bert will say, "I move away from the rock down the road, so when I add that fact in, I can see that if I were 'at rest', I'd have seen both land at the same time. So it must be the case that they did land at the same time." Okay, but what if Bert and Dana now see Bert as the one who is "at rest"? Eh? You get to pick who is "at rest" and who isn't, no? So make Bert be "at rest". Now Bert will say, "I am 'at rest', so the one up the road beat the one down the road, on the way to the dirt, just the way I saw it." And Dana will say, "I saw them land at the same time, but I move away from the rock up the road, so when I add that fact in, I can see that the rock up the road must have beat the one down the road."

I'm am not sure whether its accurate or not...

If light always travels at c why would Bert see one rock land before the other?

Ragged writes:I'm surprised I am the only one who seems to have liked the four letter word style though....