My Mom's 79th Birthday Poem (With thanks to my Sister)
Who says you need a jet
To have jet lag
Change moves at the speed of life
And sometimes you miss the plain
Truth that shows up at the gate
Saying goodbye as you leave
Or waiting for you as you arrive
Most leavetakings aren’t a clean break
You parole from relationships
If you’re not already on probation
Your mindclock stays a few emotions behind
Taking off is hard to do
Let’s not even talk about crash landings
Spring forward
Fall back
But there’s only one time stamped on your passport
Entry visas
Sometimes leave exit wounds
Hibernate a season
And you’re still a season older
Back springs
Make you fall forward
Don’t ever change
As if you could
But life does
Life lags
Behind you
As you run in place
Faster and faster
Pay attention from the train
They have real lives out there
Those people you see through the window
But not as real as yours
Not as real as yours
MCO 2004
Mark, Your poem reminds me of Einstein's Train:A Thought Experiment.
Imagine an extremely high speed train moving at approximately 1/2 the speed of light with respect to the ground. Inside the train a passenger stands in the center of the train. Outside the train a lone cowboy watches it speed by.
As the train passes the cowboy, two lightening bolts strike either end of the train leaving burn marks on the track and sending flashes of light into the train. The cowboy sees the lightning bolts strike the two ends of the train simultaneously. The cowboy sees the two flashes of light meet at the center of the distance between the two burn marks, (as he must as the speed of light in all directions is the same and independent of the source or observer.)
The passenger sees things differently. She is standing in the middle of the train. After the lightning strikes she first sees a flash of light from the front of the train then a bit later a flash of light from the back of the train. As the speed of light is a constant in her frame as well she must conclude that the front of the train was stuck by lightning before the back of the train.
The cowboy and the passenger disagree as to whether the two events (the front and back lightning strikes) are simultaneous. They are both correct.
You might be tempted to say that the cowboy must be correct as the passenger is moving and he is not. But the first postulate tells us that we can not tell the difference between moving frames. (Surely both the passenger and the cowboy are "moving" as they are both on the Earth which is spinning on its axis and rotating around the Sun.)
Sandra:
Actually, isn't the following just as trippy but rather simpler to conceive?
If you are walking west on a train going east, which direction are you going?