Dirk Van de moortel wrote:
"Spoonfed" wrote in message
Dirk, If I am not mistaken, you believe that beyond a certain length,
distance loses its meaning

No, I don't.
You are mistaken :-)

My error. You had a pretty explicit definition for length--only it was
different than mine, because we disagreed about which version of
"simultaneity" needed scare quotes.

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.p...e=source&hl=en

To understand your interpretation, I guessed that you calculated the
"current" distance to faraway galaxies by first, switching to their
reference frame and then calculating the distance to earth in their
reference frame at the time when earth reaches its current proper time
in their reference frame. Another method to do the same thing is by
plotting out locations at times by using rapidity (v/sqrt(1-(v/c)^2)
instead of velocity; multiplying the rapidity of the galaxy by the time
on earth to find the distance.

I'm not actually sure this is how you calculated the distances, but it
seemed like whatever you were doing was getting this result.

This makes some sense, because if we were to send them a message, they
would regard it to have been sent from the earth in their reference
frame, not in our reference frame, and it does create a nice infinite
but expanding model. The only problem with it is that it's not what we
see from here.


And the idea is not to get laughs.
I am *having* an incredible laugh over a statement like:

| "Other than the rod being light-years in length, the parameters are
| values that occur in our daily experience."

I think that David has another kind of sense of humour.

Dirk Vdm

Eh, 20 to 30 trillion kilometers? With length contraction, we can
bring that down to only a few hundred billion. No biggie. I grant
that it is humorous, but not necessarily a blunder.