| So, actually, like, it's actually really intuitive I feel like: From the perspective of an object accelerating, newtonian physics works totally intuitively. If you had a rocket that could accelerate at 1g indefinitely, you just go faster and faster and faster and you get to any destination you want (even far away!) pretty quickly. And it would be a rather comfortable trip! You'd have Earth-like gravity the whole way. It's really only the observer's perspective that things get confusing. When an observer watches something accelerate, they see it never going faster than the speed of light, no matter how fast it "actually" goes. The trick is time. Time for slow things passes faster than time for fast things. A clock on a very fast rocket ticks much more slowly than clocks on (relatively) stationary things. That's how the paradox is solved. Let's say you wanted to visit the Andromeda galaxy, which is around 2,500,000 light years away. If you had a rocket that could travel at 1g indefinitely, you'd get there in a comfortable 29 years! However, observers on Earth would see the trip taking around 2,500,000 years. If you'd like to play with these numbers yourself, feel free to check out this neat calculator (not made by me) http://nathangeffen.webfactional.com/spacetravel/spacetravel... |