the speed of empire

 Before the invention of the locomotive no man had ever traveled faster than a horse, well unless he fell off a cliff or something, and there were some that thought the speed would kill him.  I think there may have been something similar thought about the speed of sound.  So why the speed of light, sounds a little arbitrary doesn't it?

I always thought of the example of two spaceships blasting off from Earth headed in opposite directions and both reaching a speed over half of the speed of life, well then aren't they traveling faster than the speed of light away from the other?  Well no because while observing the two ships from Earth and adding them up it comes to oh, 1.2 times the speed of light, the view from each spaceship towards the other spaceship is not the same.  Then there is that thing about acceleration.  You can start from no motion and accelerate to half the speed of light, but then if you take your foot off the pedal for just one second and cease accelerating you are once again in freefall and when you resume accelerating you are not starting from half the speed of light, you are starting from zero.

Well like daylight savings time, the more I talk about it the less I understand it.  I feel like I had a pretty good understanding after I read that book forty some years ago, but it seemed to slip away after awhile and since then I have gone through it several times and walked away feeling like now I have a good grasp, but each time it seems to slip away over time.

Perhaps I need to watch another video, perhaps the one Beagles sent me, but I note that it is twenty minutes long, longer than I want to spend this morning.  In my mind that is the trouble with videos, you have to watch the whole thing to the end, whereas if you are reading something you can skip around.  A video is one dimensional, like a piece of string whereas text is two dimensional, like a sheet of paper.

I don't think you can speak of the speed of time.  Speed is distance divided by time, so you can't speak of the speed of time anymore than you can speak of the speed of distance.  The only way we know that time is passing is that we can see things move.  And even for the guru on the mountain, electricity is moving through his head.

Saw a cartoon lately of some American soldier firing away outside of a cave and inside the cave were the skeletal remains of a Russky, an Englishman, and a Greek.  Oh that's right the Greeks.  Alexander the Great conquered Afghanistan on his way to the rest of the world.  His empire didn't last longer than he did, but the four big chunks of it went on on their own for some time, but what exactly happened in Afghanistan.  I will have to look that up, after I watch Beagles' video.