Calling all physics ponies!

swicked wrote:The twin paradox is a thought experiment in special relativity involving identical twins, one of whom makes a journey into space in a high-speed rocket and returns home to find that the twin who remained on Earth has aged more. I don't exactly understand how the inertial reference frames are applied. It's assumed that the twin that stays at home doesn't move, essentially. Movement is relative, though, so you could just as easily say that the moving twin is the one not moving, and the stay at home twin IS moving, albeit with his planet under him. Only one of the twins has undergone acceleration and deceleration, though, so that is the one that is considered to of moved. The aging happens, for the most part, during the two inertial frames the moving twin goes through that the stay at home twin does not.
If you make the moving twin your frame of reference, then while he is 'stationary' everything else in the universe is moving in a gazillion directions at a really big bunch of different rates. One of these vectors is the twin on the planet. Basically, everything you've said above is probably wrong. Maybe.

The experiment, however, assumes that the moving twin returns to the stay at home twin, since I suppose the fact of the matter is that they need to be in the same inertial frame for us to know they are experiencing things at the same time, since objects in different inertial reference frames are subject to the relativity of simultaneity.
It's a thought experiment. With the right math, both the twins should be able to calculate how the other is aging before any light transmits information between each of them. There's no need for them to meet for us to know (theoretically) who lost their hair first.

I guess I'm trying to figure out why the reference frames are defined as they are. Because an absolute frame of reference 'resolves' the 'paradox'. Don't let the man define your frames for you! In a universe of two objects, the two could really be moving at any speed to start out with. I'm trying to wrap my mind around. If something is moving at the speed of light it breaks relativity, but the speed of light as compared to what? The thing about light is that because it is massless, it gets to dodge the fact that the faster you travel the stronger gravity gets for your particles. The mass increases because moving faster is actually adding energy to the particles. The whole dealio with needing infinite energy to get to lightspeed is that photons have literally zero mass, so they get to cheat. (My pet theory is that our arbitrary measurement of lightspeed is actually wrong because lightspeed is an infinity, [and therefore a measurement of speed is actually a fraction of infinity,] but w/e.) Anyways, it breaks relativity because the math doesn't work out when you give stuff the infinite energy to get to lightspeed. Dividing by zero and all that. If we take them to already be moving nearly that speed, couldn't one of them conceivably be slowed down and, if so, what happens? Well, for the one that starts decelerating, it's gonna get dragged by the faster one more and more. So the guy with less energy is gonna have less and less effect on the higher energy guy. Somewhere in this stuff is 'time' and that's why the slower guy 'ages faster' maybe. Um. And if you have photons between the two then the fast guy is gonna see the slow guy start suddenly breathing faster.