I can’t seem to be able to phrase my question in any simpler way.
Basically, the question refers to Einstein’s theory of relativity, and to an example used to illustrate one of its principles in the text “[Short Words to Explain Relativity](https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html)”.
I tried to paste the relevant fragment in its entirety, but the bot flagged it as speculative. So here’s a trimmed version I hope will pass the tests:
>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**.
(continued on the site)
The basic idea is that depending on the point of reference (stationary Dana vs. mobile Bert), the two rocks hit the ground either at the same time or one after the other.
I cannot for the love of me imagine how that would work. Call me naive, but something touching the ground at the same time should look the same to all observers, whether they’re moving or not. So, although I feel stupid asking you to explain something written “in words of four letters or less”, can anybody dumb it down even further?
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In: 143
It has been explained that because one person is moving and one is not, and because it takes time for light to travel a distance, therefore there is a difference in what the two observers see.
But it’s intended as a way to get you to think about the conundrum. It’s not an experiment that could be put into practice because we have no way of measuring the events with anything near the accuracy to prove it. Not with human observers involved. There is no way that Dana and Bert could perceive any difference on that small of a time scale.
Some kind of equivalent electronic setup could perform the experiment and produce the results. But that’s harder for people to relate to, which is where these kinds of thought experiments come in.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your misunderstanding, but I used to have a similar issue with maths where I would get hung up on concepts being descriptions of stuff, rather than actually being stuff.
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