[ExI] QT and SR

[Mike Dougherty]

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 1:39 AM, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:

> Suppose that 20 mighty spaceships with extremely
> powerful nuclear engines are all lined up nose to stern
> on a very long runway at the spaceport, except for a 10 meter stretch
> between each pair. All their clocks are
> synchronized, and their orders are as follows:  "At exactly 12 noon in our
> local time zone, you are to all
> take off, accelerating at one gee until you reach velocity
> c/2, at which point you will continue at velocity c/2 relative to our solar
> system."
>

it'll be even trickier if you play with the definition of "local time zone"

is this magic string that doesn't break or melt from the mighty spaceship
exhaust?  Does the exhaust from the first one in the line destroy the ones
behind it before they reach c/2 (10 meters isn't much of a minimum safe
distance unless these are extremely eco-friendly spaceships)

You are going to post your explanation now that everyone has had a day or so
to think about, right?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080716/8ef363f4/attachment.html>