Thinking in Relative Terms

Having messed about with a few ideas concerning time and space, I think I finally had a bit of a breakthrough in the post on how to measure distance.

When neutrinos are added to a system, things swell up. At the same time, the clicks of the clock slow down.

For the local observer, himself swelling up and slowing down, nothing noticeable happens. Everything stays the same. Even the speed of light, measured with the swelled-up ruler is the same, because the slowed down clock lets photons run the entire stretch of the ruler with the exact same number of clicks as before.

The key to understanding this is to think in terms of local reference frames. There is the outside observer, with his clock and ruler, and there is the local observer with another clock and ruler.

Also, the way we think of time has to be correct.

Time is the clicks of the clock, and nothing else. There is no absolute time.

The way we can construct a clock is by putting a photon inside a confined space, such as an atomic nucleus. Every time the photon hits a wall, there is a click.

Photon traversing an electron

When the nucleus swells up due to more neutrinos pushing the walls apart, the distance between the clicks becomes larger in exact proportion to the increase in distance between the walls.

This is in essence why the speed of light remains the same regardless of reference frame.

When things swell up, the clicks of the clock become more stretched out too. If it took hundred clicks of the local clock for a photon to travel down the length of a local ruler before everything swelled up, it still takes a hundred clicks of the local clock for the same photon to travel down the same ruler after it swelled up.

Electron swelling to produce slower clock