Troot Catching and Special Relativity
- Details
- Published on Sunday, 02 December 2007 14:04
- Written by Bob Graham
I mentioned in a previous article that we would have a wee paddle in the waters of relativity. When I re-read it in electronic print I realised that I had had made a mistake and should have said Special Relativity for relativity has been known about since the sixteenth century and maybe even earlier.
It was Albert Einstein who developed this theory at the start of the twentieth century. This is the famous one that says E=MC2, amongst other things. Einstein had a totally boring job in the Swiss Patent Office and, with lots of time on his hands tended to day-dream a lot although he called it conducting “thought experiments”. He wondered how a passenger in a train, looking out of the window, could know if the train was moving though the country or the country was moving past the train. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? But he went one step further and asked, “if I am a passenger in a spaceship somewhere in the universe how do I know the spaceship is moving? Could space be moving past the spaceship”. Or something like that.
He had a problem though. He could not write up his theory because he did not have the necessary mathematical knowledge. So of he went to night-school, or something similar, and learned about Lorentz Transformations. Now I read somewhere that, at any time, only a few hundred people in the world understand these things but plainly it worked for Albert and soon, instead of being a wee unknown man with black hair and a black moustache he turned into a scientific hero with white hair and a white moustache and was often pictured with his tongue hanging out.
Now what you need to understand here is that much of Special Relativity is still a theory; every part of it is not completely proven despite almost a hundred years of investigation. Even Albert felt the theory was incomplete.
One thing that, possibly, can be predicted by it is “time dilation”. Scientists are sure they have shown that clocks launched into space and travelling at high speeds run faster than stationary clocks on Earth. And they’re still not sure why light is the only thing that can travel at the speed of light and they’re desperately searching for a “massless” particle to complete the theory.
If only they had asked us troot catchers – we have known for years that the theory is a load of tosh. Let me explain.
We all have experienced the sight of a big troot coming out of nowhere to attack our flee. At that moment time stands still. But if you believe Albert time cannot stand still. But believe me, and believe your own experience – time does stand still. Mind you it doesn’t stand still very long and whether you hook the fish or not every troot catcher knows that time can stop and the universe cease to move while that big troot is on its way to your flee. Has it happened to you? Another thing, that troot has instantly been transported in from another dimension; that’s something the theory doesn’t explain.
So let’s cock the theory up even more seriously. We say that troot can take and spit out our flee like lightning. I’ll go further, we know that troot can take and spit out our flee like lightning. Just a minute here, nothing can move faster than lightning! But we see it day in and day out, troot moving faster than lightning. You’ve seen it yourself, haven’t you? Is there a possibility that a troot is the elusive “massless particle”? Have those clueless scientists been spending billions when the thing they are looking for is right in front of any troot catchers eyes?
I’m sorry Albert, your theory sounded good but it just doesn’t work. Why didn’t you take up fishing? – it’s more fun and you learn a lot more.