> AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!
>
> There. I yelled at you.

(wimper, wimper)

> > Does the spaceship experience "sped up" time, or
> >does its motion cause the universe to "slow
> >down"? That sounds stupid, but it's actually a
> >valid question (at least, to my mind).
> >
>
> Actually, that's backwards anyway. The space ship's time slows down--meaning less time passes for the ship than for the stay-at-homes.

Picky, picky. :-}

> > One may be tempted to answer this by saying "it
> >doesn't matter, the effect is the same", but the
> >process is just as important. I was going to rant
> >about stuff for quite a while here, but I'm
> >falling asleep so I think now it distinctly *not*
> >the right time. I'll rant later. :-}
>
> Well, I suspect what you're really trying to do is answer the question "how does time dilation work?" You say that it *does* matter which is happening, even though the result is the same. But since the results *are* the same either way, the only way it would matter is if you were looking for some underlying idea of how the effect occurs.

Not necessarily. I'm really more curious if anyone knows. I'm almost *always* more interested in whether or not people know than in what it is they know, if that makes any sense whatsoever.

> Truthfully, I don't know the answer to that question and I don't know if anyone knows it. But I do know that you can use the simple principle of Occam's razor in regards to this question. Which is the simpler answer: A speeding spaceship experiences a slow down in time, or a speeding spaceship somehow causes the whole entire rest of the universe to experience a time "speed-up"? I'd vote for the first. We may not know how the time dilation effect works, but it's much easier to see how a strange effect could act on the object in question, instead of on the entire rest of the universe.

Which answers my above question nicely. :-}

I guess I just reason differently from everyone else - I see the spaceship's acceleration as the catalyst in this situation, acting upon the static universe to create an odd effect.

Am I just dumb, or do you see what I mean? Or neither?

(Or both?)

dkd1