From my interpretation of it, it seems to be just a quirk of how humans see things; namely that light from the thing being seen must hit a person’s eye(s).
Given this, it would make sense that M’ saw flash B first, since the light from B has to travel less distance to M”s eyes than the light from flash A (because M’ is traveling right at a high speed). While with M, the two flashes were equal distance from him *and* he was stationary, so the light from both flashes has the same distance to cover to meet his eyes, making it appear simultaneous.
Am I misunderstanding something?
In: Physics
Prior to this, there was an understanding that there is a “universal clock”. Meaning there could be no dispute over what happened in the past, what is “now”, and what is future.
The idea of seeing light flashing might appear trivial, but consider that the implication of this thought experiment is that past, present and future are observer dependent. Different observers would NOT agree on what sequence of events occurred in which order. Some event that you think happened already could be an event in someone else’s future.
This generates profound ideas on determinism – ie since you already “saw it”, then essentially you can predict the future for the other observer? So is there an observer that already knows everything that will ever happen? Is the universe deterministic?
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