Thursday, January 15, 2009

E does NOT equal mc squared!

I had a little spare time in my day today, so I undermined of one element of Einstein's Theory of Relativity called time dilation.

To oversimplify, Einsten postulated that if two travelers were moving through space, one at a speed approaching the speed of light and the other at, say, half that speed, time would pass more slowly for the first traveler than for the second.

The so-called twin paradox, as I understand it, is another expression of the phenomenon: Send one Doublemint twin hurtling through space in a super-spaceship that travels near the speed of light for a given number of years, and when she returns home, she'd be just a little younger (and presumably just a little hotter) than her now-ever-so-slightly-more haggard twin sister who stayed earthbound.

For my experiment, I bundled up (it was about 6 degrees F) and climbed on my trusty beater bike for some sub-LT intervals -- 10 minutes each at 96-100% LT, with three-minute recovery spells in between.

I can attest that Einstein was wrong.

During those intervals, I traveled considerably faster than I did for the rest periods. And that's when I observed this critical and earth-shattering fact:

At that faster (and far more uncomfortable) interval speed, every minute seemed to last longer than a corresponding minute in the recovery period! Conversely, as I ambled along recovering (pleasantly) at a substantially lower speed, the minutes hurtled by as though they were mere seconds!

This is precisely the opposite of Einstein's theory!

Ye gods. If Einstein is wrong, what are the implications?

- JN