“Still don’t get the relative age in relation to speed thing.”

Hi A Mom,
I have an example that might help. I’m staring at a coffee mug right now, so we’ll just use that as the object in the example. For all my examples, by the way, the “object” and the “self” are the same thing…so if I use those terms interchangeably, you understand that they are the same thing. Object and self are realized ultimately at the subatomic level, but for my purposes (philosophical purposes…which are the most important to humanity), we can assume that any self or object is anything which is separated from anything else by “space”; and even more literally, separated by “space” as observed by a self-aware consciousness (which is, I argue, the only way by which anything can actually EXIST).   In my fight against Calvinism, the “self” I’m most interested in is the human being. The human being being the very epitome of ACTUAL, and LITERAL self, due to his awareness of SELF via his observation of OTHER.  (Nothing else, except God, can “observe” anything, and so outside of man, there is no existence at all; and yes, I argue…literally.  Existence does not occur without consciousness.  Take that atheists.  I’ll debate any of you right now on this.  Existence, in the words of the great Ayn Rand, is axiomatic.  And it can only be by God and by extension man (who IS consciousness) that anything exists.)

Moving on.

In this case, we’ll make the object the coffee mug.

Okay. Take a coffee mug and put it on the table. Sitting there, nice and still. Take a picture of it. That’s you “slow moving” object. Your still object. Next, take the mug and drop it on the floor….take a picture of it while it is moving (before it hits the floor and gets coffee all over your cat). Make sure you use an old camera with a real slow shutter speed so that the mug looks like a blurry line.

Put the picture of the blurry mug next to the clear, still mug.

Define “moment”. Moment is a timeless instance of existence…it is the POINT where the object exists, in stasis, no longer a function of the timeLINE (moving time).

Next, create a visual of a moment for the static mug and a visual of a moment for the moving, blurry mug. In other words, use your imagination to put the still mug in the moment next to a 3D “cutout” of the blurry, moving mug from the picture…having the exact same dimensions and cubic volume as the still mug.

So, you have two mugs sitting next to each other. One is still and the other “moving”…both the exact same size and dimensions, because they are both captured in the singular MOMENT of existence when the picture was initially taken.

What is the observable difference between the two? Well, one looks like a solid, normal mug. The other looks like a “blurry” mug…or rather, an opaque mug, right. It doesn’t look solid. So…what does that mean? It means that for the blurry/opaque mug, at the MOMENT the picture of it was taken, while it was accelerating to the floor, more light was able to pass through it.

Okay…why is that?

Well, simple. Because at that MOMENT, it occupied less space than the still mug….in the same moment. Relative to the still mug, there wasn’t as much of it THERE. It is still a whole mug, but the velocity of the mug, added to it in the moment means that it doesn’t take up as much “space” as the still mug. And if it isn’t THERE in the same amount as the still mug, then the mug cannot be “aging” as much as the still mug either, relatively speaking.

Moving objects exist in LESS space and time than still objects, which is why they are “younger” relative to the still object.

This is the underlying premise of Einstein’s example of the person on earth versus the person traveling out and back at light speed. When they arrive back at the same moment of “spacetime”, the faster object is younger because at light speed, it simply doesn’t use as much space or time to EXIST.

Does this help? Or have I made it worse?