I still don't get it

No bending in Special Relativity.
It's more like two surveying parties begin at the same point and mapping the surrounding territory relative to that base.
But one orients their maps using True North and the other group uses Magnetic North.
Of course, all features wind up with different coordinates on the resulting maps. But if you combine the East/West and North/South values between any two points you get a quantity called "Distance". And everybody computes the same distances. Distance is an "Invariant".

There's a similar invariant in Relativity called "Interval". Everyone measures the same Interval between any two points (events) ins space-time. But differently moving observers will slice the interval into different amounts of space and different amounts of time.
It's just a rotation of the coordinate-system. What's real is space-time, a unified entity. The speed of light is the conversion factor between distances and times. 300,000 km = 1 second.
It's not weird at all once you understand it's all geometry.

The bending and stretching part only enters in General Relativity. That's not difficult either, though harder to visualize since we're limited to 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time. Any number of good books out there were make it clear, usually though lower-dimensional analogies. Brian Greene, Martin Gardner, and Ian Stewart come to mind as people who've done it especially lucidly.

thats a good example.

I don't want to deceive you. The _equations_ of General Relativity are not easy. (Really only one equation, but it's a tensor.) They can be solved exactly only for certain cases, usually when there's some symmetry to reduce the complexity. Otherwise, you have to resort to numeric approximations.

That's what they did to produce the animations in "Interstellar". Kip Thorne, one of the world's best relativatists, provided the equations and the CGI crew took it from there. The appearance of the black hole is what you'd really see. Other aspects of the plot are sheer hokum because the director opted to ignore Thorne whenever it suited him to do so.

But I think most anybody can _understand_ the concepts provided someone does the math.

>I still don't get it.

no one gets it... they just bash their head against a wall TRYING, until they cave to social proof and peer pressure, and "Believe" it.

Thank you.
I did the illustration but can't take credit for the basic idea.
The "light-clock" is part of the standard explanation.
Of course, all other timepieces keep in step with it. Your wristwatch, heartbeat, etc. If this wasn't so then the rocket pilot, merely by noticing that the light-clock didn't agree with all other measures, could tell _he_ was the one moving.
The Lorentz Transforms describe a rotation in Minkowski's space-time. Though Lorentz and Fitzgerald had something quite different in mind when they wrote the equation, pre-Einstein. Suppose V = 0.9 C The expression in the denominator evaluates to 0.43588 Rocket (or "proper") time passes less than half as fast as Earth-time.

Now, take the inverse-sine of 0.9, then the cosine. 0.43588 Same answer, using nothing but trig-functions. That shows it's a rotation.
Now, take the inverse-sine of 0.43588 , then the cosine. 0.9 It works in both directions! I usually do it that way because it takes fewer key-strokes on a calculator than squaring, subtracting, and taking the root.

'bout tree fiddy

I'm the one writing the explanations.
I disagree with you. Obviously.
No peer pressure required.
Relativity WORKS. Your GPS would have you drive off a cliff if it didn't.

dont want to sound like a total brainlet but do u have an explanation for the reason behind delation if u dont take into effect distances like in the laser clock? or is it that time developement in everything is related to distances? so the quartz christal does vibrate slower, ok, but does a radioactive substance decay slower? it must! but how is that related to distances? maybe slower vibration in the nucleus?

>cave to social proof and peer pressure, and "Believe" it.
It's used for real world applications you retard.

you're not supposed to get it
time dilation and relativity don't make any logical sense and are the opposite of intuitive
the only way we know it's true is because of equations, you're supposed to memorize it since there is no logical train of thought that leads you to relativity

Because you are a brainlet. Relativity can easily be described in terms that are familiar to our every day experience. Light is the same speed relative to every possible observer, you may have expected otherwise, that light would move faster if the photon emitter is moving, but that's because you are wrong, not because relativity is weird.

^This.
Complicated and abstract truths exist which can't be accurately approached through common sense or appeal to analogy with something you do understand.
This is exactly what pseud brainlet predators like Deepak Chopra count on when they peddle their own "alternative" view of how these topics work.
It's very common for normies to hold the conviction anything can be understood without mathematics as long as the explaining party does a good enough job explaining it. So quantum physics becomes "the universe only exists because you observe it and you can psychically manipulate reality by having positive thoughts."
Or to go back to the original topic of this thread, "Einstein is a fraud because I can't understand what he wrote, so instead I'll consume this alternative science that says everything is just electricity and numerology and this intuitive, non-mathematical, and straightforward framework is being suppressed by the government."
youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM
motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nz7neg/electric-universe-theory-thunderbolts-project-wallace-thornhill
Of course there are a variety of topics that have nothing to do with your everyday existence interacting with human scale events, and there's no reason for any of these topics to make intuitive sense to you because intuition itself isn't some magical objective discernment of the truth so much as a very narrow set of assumptive tendencies that evolved out of what makes sense on the human scale.

Yes. Radioactives decay slower.
That's one of the best proofs.
Cosmic rays slam into atoms high in Earth's atmosphere and the energy of the collision releases a shower of mesons. Mesons are very short-lived. Even traveling close to the speed of light, almost none would make it all the way to the ground. But they _do_ survive!
Because they're moving fast, their "clocks" run slow and they live longer -- from our viewpoint.
A quick check found
youtube.com/watch?v=tbsdrHlLfVQ
Quartz crystals vibrate slower. EVERTHING is altered. There's no need to invoke a special reason for each phenomena. Time is running slower. Rather, space-time is absolutely unchanged, but we're seeing it "sliced though" at a different angle.

I might add the Lorentz and Fitzgerald did think there was a "physical" mechanism which shortened lengths and slowed clocks. It with an interaction with the luminiferous ether whose vibrations (supposedly) transmitted light, even through a vacuum. They had the right equation to "explain" the Michelson-Morley experiment but could not take the final conceptual leap. That was left to Einstein.

Absolutely right! Chopra and the Electric Universe are good examples of BS. A great deal of science CAN be explained clearly (Asimov, Sagan, and Gould were all terrific at this) and be understood by laymen -- but they have to be willing to listen and abandon their preconceptions.

youtube.com/watch?v=kGsbBw1I0Rg

it comes from very intuitive concepts though. namely that there shouldn't be some special frame of reference in the universe. which makes perfect sense.

Have you ever thought that if something is too far away or too small or too complicated that you don't know what's really going on? That's the point of special relativity/quantum mechanics/philosophy. If you can't prove the relevancy of something outside the scope of your experience then you can't know for sure whether it really exists.

>you can't know for sure whether it really exists
Do you use GPS?
Also that's the exact opposite of what we have good evidence for vs. what we don't. The stuff that isn't intuitive has been tested much more rigorously, whereas stuff you believe you "know" like the literal reality of your sensory "experiences" is the stuff we have little reason to believe in.
"Intuition" is a behavioral routine for getting us to do useful things, not a reliable diagnostic system for what's literally true. You should be even more skeptical than usual when dealing with what seems "intuitive," not less.

>Your GPS would have you drive off a cliff if it didn't.

god, you people are fucking dumb.

GPS literally doesn't use relativity, because there is no point.

tycho.usno.navy.mil/ptti/1996papers/Vol%2028_16.pdf

The satellites clocks are synced with the ground station EVERY ORBIT (90 minutes), and even if relativity was real, the predicted drift is so minuscule that it's smaller than margin of error.

Only relativity shills keep parroting this bullshit GPS line.

>It's used for real world applications you retard.

No, it's not.

So, yeah... thanks for proving my original point, brainletts.

>1996
>even if relativity was real, the predicted drift is so minuscule that it's smaller than margin of error
>The plot for Cesium, however, characterizes the best orbiting clocks in the GPS system. What this means is that after initializing a Cesium clock, and leaving it alone for a day, it should be correct to within about 5 parts in 1014, or 4 nanoseconds. Relativistic effects are huge compared to this.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5253894/
>The combination of these two relativitic effects means that the clocks on-board each satellite should tick faster than identical clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day (45-7=38)! This sounds small, but the high-precision required of the GPS system requires nanosecond accuracy, and 38 microseconds is 38,000 nanoseconds. If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day! The whole system would be utterly worthless for navigation in a very short time.
astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html

please tell me that they aren't placing microwave resonance cavities in orbit around the earths magnetosphere for the purposes of accurate timekeeping....

Excellent analysis!
Won't shut up certain know-it-alls but
the links are useful for the rest of us.

...

If entropy is the arrow of time and reversing entropy is time travel back in time then how does that make sense with respect to space-time as dimensions?

>If entropy is the arrow of time and reversing entropy is time travel back in time then how does that make sense with respect to space-time as dimensions?

or thermodynamics.