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
To those talking about made up FTL travel in SciFi – I recently watched The Orville, and well- Spoilers – >!They travel back in time but their time device breaks. To get back to the future, they turn off the “quantum shield” of their FTL drive (which protects the ship from the effects of relativity) and travel at 99.9999% the speed of light to a star 200 lightyears away and back (for a total of 400). Because of time dilation, they experience less time on the ship and effectively travel to the future. In the show they say this only takes “a few minutes.” So as you can see, Sci Fi can just make up some words and devices to make all things possible!!<
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