Quote (Kamikizzle @ Mar 8 2011 08:53pm)
the end of the rod does not move instantaneously with the back end. it would take time for it to move from your end to that end. and my guess is its slower than light.
Correct. A push/compression force travels at the speed of sound through the material that you pushed, and that is much lower than the speed of light.
Quote (general_patton @ Mar 8 2011 10:17pm)
Huh.
Pretty sure it's true that information can't travel faster than the speed of light. I'm familiar with lorentz transformations, it's just been a while since I've used them and I still don't understand them that well.
My only observation with the ideal lightyear long rod is that maybe it wouldn't violate relativity since while the information is sent to one end, it exists in the reverse on the other. Maybe no net difference in information exists. I dunno, just racking my brains and trying to see if there's some way it doesn't violate relativity, probably wrong ofc
Well information would definitely be transferred instantaneously if the rod were ideal/incompressible/etc. I can't think of any other way it would possibly not violate relativity
That's why it's troll physics. Sometimes it's actually hard to figure out why something doesn't work.
Quote
There's some contradiction with that troll logic on pi = 4 there somewhere. I googled it and found something on "taxicab geometry" that's fundamentally different from euclidean geometry.
Lol, wish I could make sense of this. :/
edit: Definitely impressed with those troll mathematicians. Those guys know their shit.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/DiagonalParadox.htmloh OK
it violates pythagorean theorem
that's cool, I suppose
Yeah, I had to Google when I first saw that one too, it's the only one I've ever seen where it wasn't immediately apparent. That's why I remembered it and posted it here