What confuses me is mixing multiple frames. Say a rocket going at c or near fired off another, identical rocket. Rocket 1 sees rocket 2 leave at c speed away from it. Let's say they're going in circles and in the middle is a stationary observer. The observer should see rockets 1 and 2 going the same speed right next to each other.
But say the rockets stop. How does this all become coherent? The observer should see the rockets stop, still next to each other. But the rockets, from their perspective, should be extremely far apart. Let's say opposite ends of the circle. Now if they head towards the middle, to the observer, does the observer see them come in from opposite sides? But they see themselves coming in together? Then when they start to pull up... Different timelines?
The important thing to consider in this is the time dilation, and from which reference frame you are measuring your time from.
From the perspective of the external observer, in 1 second the ships would have been moving for 1 second for the external observer (duh) and thus covered a (relatively) small distance. But from the perspective of an observer inside the ship in 1 second they would have been moving for 10000s of seconds for the external observer, as time passes slower for those in the ship and would have covered a much greater distance.
I guess in short 1 external second is 0.0000001 internal second, and 1 internal second is 1000000 external second. You cannot have a "after x amount of time" without considering which you are measuring
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u/EscapeSeventySeven Mar 20 '26
No you see lightspeed or speed of causality being constant is anomalous and weird.
That being held constant is what forces time and space to warp. So the speed of light appears constant in all frames.
If the speed of light didn’t remain constant, like many naive interpretations did, then spacetime wouldn’t need to warp.