4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 19 April 2022
⏱️ 28 minutes
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What does everybody think is the twin paradox? What's the REAL twin paradox? How is the paradox resolved, and what does it teach us about synchronicity? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.
Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).
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0:00.0 | You ever hear the one about the so-called twin paradox? |
0:12.0 | Let's say it's far, far, far in the future. How far? |
0:16.0 | Well, it doesn't matter as long as it's far enough that our characters have access to whatever technology we need them to have to tell the story. |
0:24.3 | So anyway, future. |
0:25.5 | Our characters are Alice and Bob. |
0:28.7 | They are twins born less than 10 minutes apart. |
0:33.0 | At the start of our story, they've just celebrated their 20th birthday. |
0:37.3 | Happy birthday, Alice and Bob. |
0:39.5 | But that day, Bob decides to get in a rocket ship and blasts off. Bob quickly approaches a |
0:46.6 | cruising speed of three-fifths the speed of light. He travels to a destination three light years |
0:53.3 | away, somewhere near Proxima Centauri, perhaps, turns around and returns to Earth. |
0:59.2 | He lands a spaceship. |
1:01.1 | According to Alice, Bob has been gone for 10 years. |
1:05.7 | Five years to get to his destination, wherever the heck that is, somewhere near Proxima, presumably, and five |
1:12.8 | years to return. Alice is now, of course, 30 years old because 20 plus 10 equals 30. But Bob is only 28 |
1:24.1 | years old. Alice is confused. See, she had a watch on the entire time and kept |
1:30.0 | careful track of the seconds, the minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks, the month, |
1:34.5 | the years. She really missed Bob. But so is Bob. He had a watch on the entire time, and |
1:43.0 | he kept careful track of the seconds, |
1:45.5 | the minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, and the years. I mean, he missed |
1:50.1 | Alice, but he was also having a really good time. According to Alice's watch, 10 years have |
1:55.2 | fast. According to bombs, only eight. Indeed, Alice does seem a little bit older now, a few more wrinkles, a little sprinkling of gray hair. |
... |
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