Friday, July 4, 2008

Constant Acceleration in Special Relativity

I admit I am completely powerless to make the internet do what I want. Instead of posting here, I'm putting a pdf up at scribd.

Also, I'm not going to put in all the effort to change it, but at the end I somehow added a magical power of 10^-1 to the value of Earth's gravity. A spaceship accelerating away from Earth at a constant 1g would only need about a one light-year head start to keep permanently ahead of a photon chasing it.

For an observer riding on the ship, this essentially means that objects more than a light year back disappear - light from them will never reach the ship. Objects very near one light year back become more and more red-shifted and time-dilated. These are the same effects that occur as an objects falls towards the event horizon of a black hole.

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