When Flight’s mom, Cheap Gold, stepped into the room with a glass of whiskey in one Hands, the first words out of her mouth were in a derisive tone. “What is that purple pony doing in here?”
Twilight opened her mouth to speak, looking offended- but Flight held up a hoof to silence her, and stepped forward. “Mom,” she began.
Predictably, her mom ignored her, and started ranting about strange ponies being let into her meeting room.
“Mom,” she repeated.
Again, Gold ignored her. This time, she noticed that Twilight was an Alicorn, and started whining about pony half-breeds.
Flight grinned at that. She had no idea. “Mom,” she repeated again.
This went on for a few minutes, before Flight’s father, King High Cost, stepped into the room- and as he always did, ignored anypony he considered beneath his notice… which meant Twilight. He did, however, get Cheap Gold to stop whining about her, if only by passing between Gold and Twilight.
“Ahh, Flight,” he muttered. “I heard you left a couple months ago. I didn’t realize you were back.”
She nodded. “Yep, I got back just in time to see my new sister.” Then she leaned slightly to the side, to look at her mother. “And Mom, did you know, the mare you’ve been insulting for the past five minutes is Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria?”
“Well why didn’t you say so?”
She gave her mom a level-lidded look, ignoring her father’s raised eyebrows. “I tried, but your invective was continuous.” She took a deep breath, let it out, and turned back to her father. “... Yes, I went to Equestria.” She glanced at Twilight. “Princess Twilight, meet King High Cost, of Equineothame.” She gestured between the two.
“Ahh,” he muttered, before looking up at Twilight. “Well, Welcome to Equineothame, Princess. This… isn’t exactly the venue I would have chosen to meet a member of foreign royalty, but I suppose it works. And don’t mind my wife, she’s a bit… vocal.”
“And by that, you mean she’s a diplomatic disaster waiting to happen,” Flight scowled.
He tilted his head, and nodded.
Cheap Gold scowled, and moved to one of the couches with her whiskey.
“Anyways,” Flight stated, deliberately changing the topic. “I must have missed the announcement?”
He nodded. “I’m not surprised,” he answered her. “We never made any major announcement.” He sighed. “It’s… we didn’t intend to have another foal, either.” He shrugged. “But it happened, so here we are.”
Flight gave him another level-lidded look. “You mean my sister is also an oops child.”
He sighed. “Yes.”
“Are you ever going to have a foal you intended to have?”
He shrugged. “At this point, probably not. Had we never had you, though, we would’ve. Probably…” He tapped his chin with one hoof. “A year or two ago.” Then he let out a snort. “Though, the nation might then have collapsed around us without your support, wouldn’t it?”
She shrugged. “Yeah, it might have.”
“Speaking of which,” he began, an edge of irritation entering his tone. “You don’t happen to have told the Navy to go on a spending spree, do you?”
“Ah, no, I didn’t,” she stated. “But I do know why. And it’s a good thing- their spending spree has already boosted the economy by dozens of times. Equineothame is once again an economic power- and for as long as we remain one, the nation- and, by extension, the Royal Vault- will keep getting richer.” She shrugged her wings. “Besides, we need the military strength, not just to end piracy- which they’ve gotten really good at- but to protect us against any invaders, now that we have a working Distortion Drive.”
“We do?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yep. I traveled to Equestria, and back, with one. About nineteen and a half lightyears.”
Then he tilted his head. “And why do you have wings…?”
“Oh, that?” She glanced back at her wings. “I got an upgrade.”
“An… upgrade.”
“Yep! With wings and Equestrian magic, I can fly.”
“... Okay.”
Then the doctor stepped in, carrying a bundle of blankets. He, also, relaxed noticeably when he spotted Flight, though neither High Cost nor Cheap Gold were looking. He headed for Cheap Gold. “Congratulations,” he began, drawing the attention of everypony else in the room.
Gold put her whiskey down on the table next to her. “About time.”
Doctor Horse winced. “Congratulations on your new daughter,” he continued, handing her the bundle of blankets.
“Oooh, I’ve always wanted a dark daughter,” Gold commented, accepting the blankets.
“... She’s a thestral.”
There was a second of silence, before Gold rose the baby over her head, and threw her down on the floor. “I don’t want a thestral!” she declared.
Then she, like everypony else in the room, actually looked at the baby… and stared.
The little bundle of blankets had stopped cold just inches away from the floor, surrounded in a golden aura. It then floated through the air, and landed in High Admiral Timber Wolf’s hastily outstretched forelegs, before the aura vanished.
Flight released her levitation, then stepped forwards. She hopped into the air, and rose herself to her mother’s height, to see her eye-to-eye. Then she took a deep breath.
The whiskey glass on the table exploded.
High Admiral Timber Wolf gasped as, less than a second before the Princess started yelling, their entire group- which included both King High Cost and the doctor, the latter of which had backed quickly away when it became evident Flight was angry- was covered in a purple dome. As a result, inside the dome, it wasn’t much louder than a conversational tone.
“Hurk,” Twilight muttered, horn shining bright, matching the barrier. “Sh-She’s powerful.” She stopped to take a breath. “This is… This is the most I can do.”
Timber Wolf nodded, gently rocking the baby the Princess had apparently given her with the levitation she’d never shown them. “Good timing, thank you.”
“Uhh,” the King muttered. “Is…?” he raised a hoof to poke at the barrier.
“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Admiral Mantle Core warned him. “Even if Twilight’s barrier is permeable, the last time Princess Flight yelled like that, she yelled through forty kilometers of vacuum- and anypony caught within normal shouting range was knocked silly.”
Vice Admiral Night Mare tilted her head, looking up at the ceiling. “I wonder how impossibly far she’s yelling this time?”
“...your own daughter, just because she’s a thestral!”
“Uh, Space Lord?”
Space Lord Hard Stomp, of the Earthen Space Force, flinched at the sudden interruption to the stunned silence that had penetrated the Pit, their main surface command room, ever since the strange noise made its way in. “Uh, yes, um, Commodore?”
Commodore Sharp Ears bowed her head. “I’ve… figured out what it is, I think. Princess Short Flight of Equineothame seems to be yelling at her mother in a hospital on Equineothame’s surface.”
“Impossible,” Hard Stomp answered. “We’re a light-hour away!”
She flinched, and shrugged her wings. “I’ve got reads on forty orbiting satellites, and it all triangulates to be coming from the general hospital nearest the Equineothame Castle. Near as I can tell, the yell is also traveling at about a hundred million cee.” She looked at her panel for a second. “And yes, I also know we’re on the side of Earth that’s facing away from Equineothame.”
Princess Luna suddenly froze at the dinner table. “Somepony just tried to kill their own foal,” she stated icily.
Princess Celestia nodded stiffly, only her thousands of years of experience keeping her burning fury in check. “I know.” She looked up, in the direction the Royal Canterlot Voice magic was coming from, too weak to be detected by anything other than an alicorn.
Princess Cadence appeared out of thin air, wearing her full, brand-new armor, and brandishing the accompanying sword, startling all present, Princesses and Guards alike. “Somepony just tried to kill their own foal out of hate,” she declared. “And I can’t find them.”
Princess Celestia looked up again. “It’s a long way away.”
Cadence looked, snarled, and vanished in a second bright flash of light.
“Wait a minute,” Prince Shining Armor, who had been visiting Canterlot with his wife and headed down to breakfast while she slept in, stated. “When did Cady learn to teleport?”
Where there's a will there's a way, and she has the will.
What’s the range on her teleport? 20 lightyears?
Well, yep, you don't do that. And soon everypony everywhere will know that you don't do that, and why.
Huh, somehow I never really got it in my head that Equinothame was still in Earth's solar system. One of Saturn's moons I guess, based on the distance.
10412734
There are certain actions that cannot be borne, laws of physics and/or magic or not.
10412832
Given the action fueling her rage? I wouldn't be surprised if she could pull it off.
10412833
Postpartum abortion is FrOWnED uPoN.
Right?
10412865
Absolutely.
10412832
About 19.5, actually, but yeah.
Well, I figured her teleport range needs to be farther than the distance to the planet in question. I mean, can you imagine if they are moving slightly away from each other, and barely in range, why, Cadence would be stuck in a land where people need to be taught love ...
10413597
I was just citing the range of the teleport- as in, the distance she had to cover with it...
Yeah, she probably could have gone further.
Cheap Gold just tried to assassinate a member of the royal family. That's treason, right?
Then from the perspective of anypony traveling away from Flight faster than three meters per second (one hundred millionth of cee), the yell is traveling back in time!
So two copies of Flight, flying away from each other while yelling at the top of their lungs, could send messages backwards in time.
Now that I think about it, from Celestia's and Luna's perspective, they may have heard Flight up to a day after or before she started yelling, depending on the relative velocity of Equinothame and Equestria!
It happened.
10415349
Yes! Even though she's the Queen herself, it still counts! ... Which also means Cadence & Twilight technically committed an act of war (assassinating a foreign leader), but Flight chose to ignore it.
... As for the time thing, for simplicity's sake, the time distortion effect doesn't exist in this story. As such, it's not traveling back in time... and would only appear to be doing so to because it was moving faster than a lightspeed signal. Anypony watching the live BEN broadcast on Earth would've heard Princess Flight's yell an hour before she started yelling on TV, and if somepony had blasted a signal powerful enough to travel the distance at Equestria, the difference would be about nineteen and a half years, assuming they could sense the RCV magic... And of course, assuming nopony used an FTL ship to carry the broadcast to Equestria in the meantime.
Yes.
10412953
There is no upper range on an alicorn rage teleport!
Also Cheap Gold -10/10 worst parent ever
10415495
Did I miss something? I have no clue what this is referring to.
Special relativity is a logical consequence of two postulates:
So if you throw out relativity, light no longer has a constant, observer-independent, speed.
And there is no longer any fundamental light-speed barrier. So talking about "the speed of light" doesn't make as much sense.
On the other hand, there are a lot of little things in this story that make more sense in a non-relativistic universe.
Here's the fundamental issue:
In a non-relativistic universe, there is no light-speed barrier, but there is an infinite-speed barrier, that keeps you from accelerating past infinite velocity and traveling back in time.
In a relativistic universe, on the other hand, there is a light-speed barrier. But if you somehow pass that, there's no infinite-speed barrier to keep you from accelerating past infinity. In a relativistic universe, FTL implies time travel.
There's also a third potential universe design, with neither a light-speed barrier nor an infinite-speed barrier. This universe design was explored in the Orthogonal trilogy by sci-fi author Greg Egan.
I know of no way to design a universe with both barriers.
10416338
Must’ve- Cheap Gold was the Queen, and Cadence/Twilight curbstomped her.
Well, this story universe has both barriers.
Only, the light speed barrier isn’t a hard barrier, per se. You can pass it, but without special technology (like a Distortion Drive, or teleportation spell because magic is an FTL force), the forces scale so fast it might as well be a hard barrier. Not unlike the sonic barrier in atmosphere...
Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.
FTL plus relativity does NOT, by itself, imply time travel.
FTL, plus relativity, plus two different FTL trips in two different frames of reference, do.
If all FTL trips use a single fixed frame of reference, then FTL does not imply time travel.
This is equivalent to saying that there is a privileged frame of reference, and that's not incompatible with relativity.
10416785
... Yes. That time distortion DNE because of the impartial FOV of the universe. And that light speed is not a reference to the universe- Earth is traveling, relative to the origin of the Big Bang, at around 0.3c, after all, but we detect no difference in light speed no matter what direction...
This does not mean that one fast-moving FOV (near-light or FTL, I hate my phone autocorrect “bear-light” twice in a row) will not perceive time travel, because they certainly will. And the enormous energy involved in traveling that fast could interfere with current timekeeping technology...
Remember that all the evidence we have for the time distortion effect is A) anecdotal, and B) Far too small to be perceived by anything other than our timekeeping technology. As such, I am amazed that the scientific community is taking it as such a solid fact...
Just like, speed of light as a hard limit. Do we really know that nothing can go faster? All we know is that we cannot see or propel anything faster with our current technology! And they say the speed of light is a constant, but all the measurement methods used only measure the speed relative to Earth... which is a measured constant independent of direction, even though Earth is known to be moving.
10416469
Is that in a not-yet-published chapter? Cadence didn't appear until the end of this one.
What would happen if you tried the Michelson–Morley experiment in this universe?
10416785
I interpret "special relativity" to refer to the statement that the laws of physics are invariant under Lorentz transformations. This implies that there is no privileged reference frame.
But there are reasonable weaker definitions of the term "special relativity", under which you are correct.
DNE?
And ... Ho boy, this is something I'm familiar with.
First, lets look at special relativity. Prior to special relativity, you had Newton's laws of motion, plus the Lorenz corrections. (Plus a few others, but still...). This represented a universe where objects actually changed shape as they moved, and there was an explicit privileged frame of reference.
And it gave some really complicated explanations for what's happening.
Then, Einstein made two simple "what-if" predictions.
1. The speed of light is constant in all inertial frames of reference -- because there was no detectable change in the speed of light no matter where in the orbit the earth was. We didn't see a difference with the earth moving in one direction in the orbital year, or in the other direction 6 months later.
2. The laws of physics are the same to all observers in all inertial frames of reference.
Number two is just a "This makes the universe make sense" assumption.
From these, you can set up what is the equivalent of a sound-doppler shift setup. A person in the middle of two lightning strikes, one on the ground standing still, one moving at high speed on a train.
Some highschool level algebra later, and in about half a page, you get the same correction factors that Lorenz and others took pages of calculus to derive under the old rules.
But, that's for the assumption of an inertial reference frame. That doesn't take into account gravity, rotation, etc.
But here's the important thing: Special relativity makes all the exact same predictions as the old complicated behavior does, while at the same time making it completely impossible to detect the privileged reference frame that the old system needed to exist somewhere.
Now, fast forward 10 years. Someone else has helped with the math. General relativity takes away the need for an inertial reference frame.
And ... we get all sorts of strange behavior of gravity wells. But if you are inside the gravity well, you don't notice.
It's actually the CHANGE IN GRAVITATIONAL GRADIENT that causes the oddities, or the change in speed from acceleration. Not the presence of a gravity well. (But, at the moment, all sources of gravity wells we know of have to be non-constant, with changing vectors as you move around. And if we _had_ one that was constant, it would have to be the length of the universe, and would provide time travel as you move around it.)
Actually, we have a very strong experimental support for this. GPS has to take into account both the special relativity and general relativity corrections -- both want to alter what the time signatures coming off the satellites will look like. We can easily detect a change in clocks from the bottom of a skyscraper and the top of it, 100 floors away. The best clocks can detect a change at 10 floors, and scientists are working to detect it at 1 floor.
No. What we know is that nothing slower than the speed of light can be accelerated to a speed faster than the speed of light, because the effective mass grows. It would require infinite energy to reach/pass the speed of light.
It is an open question as to whether or not anything moves faster than the speed of light. It is the case that the positron actually looks like an electron moving faster than light and traveling backwards in time -- that turns out to be a perfect solution to one of the equations that makes things messy.
It is an assumption that the speed of light is a constant.
It is a fact that the speed of light, as measured on earth, is constant no matter where on earth, no matter which way the rotation, no matter which season, no matter if measuring something from one point on earth to another, or from any direction in space to earth. (Assumption: We know the distance to distant location X due to standard candle novas that always go off at a known constant value, and can measure the apparent strength/light, and get the distance from that.)
Nope. If they have a consistent frame of reference, no matter how fast, they will see the same laws of physics. They will observe the slower parts of the universe behaving at a different speed, but they will pass through so quickly it's not that big of a deal. Except, you know, for the gravitational wake they leave behind.
We don't detect any such gravitational wake, so we've got a pretty good idea that there's no such object nearby. Well, except for the strange drift that we see right at the edge of the observable universe, that implies a really, REALLY large gravity source outside the observable universe. A relativistic black hole could be the cause.
Relativity does not say "there cannot be a privileged reference frame". It says "If there is one, there is no way to detect it from inside the reference frame".
While it's not explicitly stated in the chapter, It sounds like Cadence is teleporting from Equestria to Equinothame. If so, then an angry Cadence is 1031 times more powerful than a non-angry Twilight! In which case it's a good thing you threw out relativity -- otherwise by E=mc2, she wouldn't survive her own gravitational field!
(She wouldn't quite collapse into a black hole, but it would be close.)
Is this story becoming "My Little Pony: Anger is Magic"?
10416863
... Very possibly. My bad.
Edit: I kinda want to release a chapter early as an apology, but then I wouldn't have any for Monday- it's been on writer's block for a while...
10416930
It shouldn’t be...
10416894
Great explanation.
Wait... how does this work? A signal shouldn't be able to get to us from outside the observable universe, by definition!
We see the objects inside the observable universe with a drift towards something outside the observable universe.
10416966
And I don't see how that's possible.
If we see object A, then it is in our past light cone. If object A is affected by the gravity of object B, then object B is in object A's past light cone.
Therefore, if both hold, object B is in our past light cone, and therefore in the observable universe.
What am I missing?
10416894
Case in point. None of the things you just named are truly perceptible to a human, only to our time-measuring instruments that may or may not be truly consistent, since the oscillation frequencies of quartz crystals and cesium atoms might possibly change, even if only marginally, when in motion. I don't mean to say that they do, I mean to say that we have no way of knowing for certain that they don't, since we don't have anything to compare it against, aside from more of the same. And yes, it's entirely possible that propelling a human to near the speed of light- assuming he was in a vessel that gave him sufficient protection- would also be slowed down by a similar process, and so not notice. Thus, I don't think the "Time Distortion Effect" is itself bogus- it's merely the part about how it's truly time that is changing, rather than our perception (or our clocks' perception) of it, that I find suspect.
To which I say... No. All we know is that it takes an increasing amount of lightspeed energy to drive a particle closer and closer to lightspeed. Which makes perfect sense- if a stream of water is traveling at 40km/h, and you've got a large, rectangular object (that is heavier than water) sitting in its path... the faster you want it to move, the more water you'll have to pour at it- and no matter how much water you have, you'll never get it over 40km/h.
And don't say "gotcha" about "effective mass" or "rest mass" or whatever else... because we can't truly measure mass, only how much energy we're pouring into it. Which, for the reason stated above, obviously shares an exponential relationship with its closeness to the velocity of the energy we're using to keep it in that circular accelerator. Thus, I discard that objection with we don't have the technology to measure that accurately.
Yes. I fully expect that the speed of light in a vacuum actually is a constant, just like the speed of sound in vacuum (or pure iron, since that actually carries sound) is.
This is exactly what I meant. They would perceive time travel, even though they weren't actually, by approaching or exceeding the speed of the light telling them stuff is happening in front or behind. Not unlike how, when Flight went supersonic a few chapters ago, Celestia's RCV started talking backwards, then ended at the beginning. She knew exactly why that was, and knew it wasn't time travel, but imagine the same thing happening with something like light. Those stand-stillers would certainly appear to be moving backwards, wouldn't they? This is perception: What you saw, whether it was what was actually happening or not. Naturally, they would perceive normal non-time-travel relativistic physics with anything moving at such velocities with them.
For the gravitational wake... I don't know. If I'm right, and "effective mass" at 0.99c is nonsense, then the gravitational wake would be no heavier than that same object traveling at a lower speed. You might get atmospheric wake, though, or other results of the collisions with objects in your path...
And as for a stupidly large gravity well? Who knows, maybe that's a nearby Big Bang-ready universe... and so effectively, a super-super-massive black hole, far bigger than anything at the heart of any galaxy. But I chose not to dispute that, it's simply an unknown.
It may be known that I'm not a physicist. I just know that new scientific facts don't generally win by beating down the wrong ones, but by outliving them.
10416863
The Michelson–Morley experiment? looks it up Oh. Probably no different. As a matter of fact, if such a "luminiferous aether" actually does exist but moves with the Earth or other objects (and is not subject to wind), you'd get the same result anyways, wouldn't you?
10417162
Relativistics. Say object B is at rest, object A is moving at 0.6c to the left, and object C is moving at 0.6c to the right. An observer at B can see both, but since the relative velocity between A and C is 1.2c, they can't see each other. We're merely observing that far-out objects moving in the really high speed range relative to us (say, 0.8-0.9c relative) have a tendency of moving in another direction, with a pattern that looks suspiciously like there's a gravity well or something.
... We're at object A, looking at object B.
You cannot add velocities!
Your statement there --
-- That is assuming you can add relative velocities. That's Newton's view, and it is *dead wrong* in relativity.
I don't know enough math to calculate what's going on, and what the observed velocity would actually be. I'm pretty sure they'd see each other moving at less than 1c away from each other. But only about 80% sure.
I hate to break it to you. But we know for a fact that they DO change when in motion, by exactly what relativity predicts.
If it's a case of something in orbit, then it will come back to us, after being under acceleration from gravity.
If it's a case of something sent off in a straight line, and then has to turn around and come back, that turn-around is acceleration, and that is what we expect to see on the return -- and it is.
If it's a much stranger case: I have a clock. I'm standing still, out in space. Another clock in a ship at constant speed passes me, and as it passes, it is synched to have the same time. A ways out, it passes a third clock, again at constant velocity, and is synched to that clock. Finally, this third clock comes back -- no acceleration anywhere -- and when it reached my clock, it matches what special relativity says the speed effect will be.
Surprising? I'm pretty sure we can see that with laser beams and the phase of the return; it also comes from the realization that not only does special relativity describe the "no acceleration"case, it matches everything that can be predicted with all the observed experiments and backfitting that was done by Lorenz and others.
And?
We can have two (or ten) identical clocks, all synched, all next to each other. They will be perfectly in time with each other. We then take half of them, subject them to the same G.R. effect, and then bring them all together. All of group 1 will be the same, all of group 2 will be the same, but they will be two different "sames". And the difference matches G.R.'s predictions.
And I'm pretty sure that atomic clocks measure radioactive decay now, rather than crystal vibrations.
So ...
Time is basically the occurrence of events. And locally, I will always see the same number of events per second, no matter what speed I'm traveling at.
But, if I'm not traveling in the same frame you are, then when we come back together, we will have seen a different number of events.
That's what time is. It is not, as Newton thought, something that exists as an absolute. It is just the relationship of how many events have passed since we last agreed on what the clocks should say.
And that depends on the path taken by the two groups.
On accelerating something to really-really fast speed:
I don't know what "Lightspeed energy" is.
The basic equation is "F=mA" -- force equals mass times acceleration.
Or, Acceleration = Force / mass. A=F/m
As "m" increases, "A" drops.
Eventually, A will be zero when velocity is C, because as velocity increases, m increases.
Remember, the two observers have different clocks.
If I am under constant acceleration, I don't see my mass change. I see my clock and your clock go out of sync with each other. I will see you moving away from me, and your velocity will increase slower and slower as time goes on; no matter how long I'm thrusting, you won't reach light speed away from me.
You, sitting still, will see me under thrust, and your measurements will show my mass increase and my rate of acceleration drop.
Actually, we finally can. This is maybe a year or two old. The old standard of platinum bars in a vacuum chamber is being retired in favor of repeatable lab tests -- and it turns out those bars have changed mass over time, some by 25%. (I think 10% was the typical change).
Sorry, you lost me. Please clarify?
Oddly, you CAN'T just expect it to be constant. For years it was assumed that it wasn't. It was only when we could not detect any change no matter what that we said, "What happens if it is forced to be constant?".
Here's a simple thought experiment that will explain special relativity. I'm in a car. I have two mirrors, and a laser beam. I shine a laser pulse between the two mirrors. I "see" a red dot bounce back and forth between the two mirrors.
You are outside the car, watching. You see the light beam pulse bounce back and forth, but you see it moving along the road with the car, at the same time. You see it drawing triangles basically -- a "sine wave" of straight lines.
Are you with me so far?
Ok. You are seeing the light travel a longer distance than I am.
If the speed of light is constant, and you see a different distance traveled than I do, how can this be?
The answer is that we disagree on the time between bounces. You see a longer path, and think there is more time; I see a shorter path and less time.
This is exactly correct. If I am traveling FTL, I will arrive before the light. I will have a 100% perfect prediction of what will happen, and can win bets.
** BUT MY CLOCK HAS NOT GONE BACKWARDS **.
If I then turn around, and head back to you at FTL, what happens?
The math is a pain, but if I use one frame of reference for the FTL out, and a different frame of reference for the FTL back, then I can arrive before I left. This is called a closed timelike curve.
If the same frame of reference is used in both cases, then on the way back, I will see all the events that happened at your end on my way back. I will have a very compressed sense of time on my clocks -- they will show only a tiny bit of time elapsed -- but I will arrive after I left, instead of before I left. This is faster than light travel without time travel into the past.
Sadly, nope. A baseball moving through the solar system at 0.99c would be really heavy and would disrupt the planet orbits it moves close to.
And that's not even that far off. There's serious "what if this is another universe close enough to ours to have gravitational influence" discussion. We don't know -- we don't have nearly enough observational data yet to rule out a lot of proposed ideas.
I won't dispute this. But they outlive because they work better.
Special relativity did not make any new predictions; it was easier to work with.
Oxidation theory turns out to be identical to Phlogiston. Except for the sign -- where you add oxygen to make an oxide, you would remove phlogiston instead. But oxidation is a lot easier to work with -- there is only one oxygen, as opposed to a different type of phlogiston for each material.
Etc. Hell, go all the way back to Lavoisier. He decided to call something "burned" by putting it in a closed container, burning only as much as would burn, and then declaring that "equals" was the proper relationship. Everyone else said the stuff was not fully burned, and he was doing it wrong. But this gave us conservation laws and *everything* in modern chemistry because it works better than what was done before it.
Ok, I got someone to do some fact checking for me:
The concern that I had (that had me only give 80% confidence) deals with the oddball cases at the edge of the observable universe, and near black holes, but that is where space itself is moving/expanding.
And, I got something wrong.
It might be me, but I always love moments in stories where someone just pulls out the most gloriously impossible bullshit and whacks someone else over the head with it. Admittedly, she's quite overpowered, but that's not really a bad thing*. :D
I'm also looking forward to what I can only assume is a visit from First Strike Assault Craft Cadance. That should be entertaining.
*Just read the Troy Rising trilogy to see what I mean. (It's an actual published book, so it's not on here, but if you do purchase it and get the ebook, buy it from Kobo. Theirs is DRM-free and you can then read it wherever you want, including on computers and phones without needing a reader app. It can also never be taken from you or revoked without your permission. Which is only fair for something you purchase!)
If you want, I'm happy to attempt to explain how special relativity works. It turns out there's a simpler way to understand it than by memorizing facts about time dilation, length contraction, and so on.
Oh kay, this is just Priceless..