Relativity Illuminated, Addendum I

Addendum I
The Number Line Argument

Still need convincing? Perhaps you think that relativity is a purely subjective illusion, lacking in truth... perhaps you suspect that underneath lies a more profound ACTUALITY, wherein two spacecraft each retreating from Earth at .75c in opposite directions DO exceed light speed (thus can NOT communicate with one another). You’d be wrong, and here’s why.

When you count the number of grains of sand in a jar, or on a beach, or on a continent, a planet, a galaxy; that Number Line starts with zero, one, two… and can go all the way up to any imaginable zenith. That would be an example of a perfectly ‘flat’, or unremarkable, numeric continuum.

But velocity is a trait constrained by Nature: its range cannot extend to just any arbitrary pinnacle, because then we’d live in a world where objects could outrun being seen, and in a world where objects could ram you with devastating impact before you could even see them coming. No! this is one area where nature has laid down the law with an iron fist: light is the quintessential mediator of all that exists and so her unique speed is inviolable, and expressly tantamount to an infinity. Hence, the Number Line representing velocity is not a flat continuum, but is somehow fundamentally skewed – a skew, clearly, that cuts into both the spatial and temporal components of velocity.

So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that a special computation needs be employed to add or subtract velocities, to deduce their value per a moving reference frame. However confident we may be that one jelly bean plus one jelly bean equals two jelly beans, it doesn’t follow that one MPH plus one MPH equals two MPH. The test results are in, and the findings leave little doubt that relativity is our reality, and not some illusion.