Electrical circuit the size of the visible universe.

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#43
MarcelvdG said:
When you have two experimenters, one at the switch and one at the lamp, both having a clock and a flashlight, they can check whether their clocks are properly synchronized by measuring the time light needs to travel from A to B and from B to A. When there is any difference, the clocks need to be adjusted. Once you have two observers with synchronized clocks, they can just do the experiment. It's a pity that this simple calibration will take at least another 170E9 years, though.
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I am very curious as to how the clocks can be synchronized. They will invariably be huge variations on time settings if one is waiting stationary and the other is travelling, perhaps it would be possible to lessen the variance if they both travelled the same distance in the same speed, but this would still be rather difficult.

Two different races of Time-Keepers would have emerged at opposite ends of the universe.
Creatures bred for maintaining "Absolute time", based on Homo Sapiens billions of years ago.
Two races that have developed an inherent sense of time and tolerance adjustment per speed and distance travelled.
 
#44
Mooly said:
🙂 I'm not really sure tbh. It all seemed a bit open to interpretation to me.

I wondered if the voltmeter in the middle of the wire would read 300 volts after say 0.5 seconds and then 150 volts after 1 second.

What would the ammeters show... maybe zero current (apart from V4 meter current) until 1 second when all three would then show 1 milliamp.
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You can’t really analyze this using circuit theory in the time domain because it is not a circuit by definition, it is a distributed network. It would take two round trips of the initial wavefront for the voltages to stabilize. The initial current when the switch is thrown is always the applied voltage divided by the charactristic impedance of the cable. And you don’t have enough information to calculate the reactive components which reallly determine Z0 (the lossy part is a minor player). The steady state solution of 1mA is the superposition of the forward and reflected waves, at T = infinity. There could be multiple reflections, but with a “circuit” this lossy, their effects should be negligible compared to the result of the initial wavefront and first reflection.
 
#45
martin clark said:
The limit on that, assuming physical movement of material, will be the speed of sound in the substance of the observer's 'arms.' Compared with the electronic transmission line effect, it'd be like watching a large slowly unfurl a tentacle...
You've just made the experiment take 200,000-1,000,000 longer: so it is likely the current universe ends before outcome is observable %)


PS unless the observer has conveniently folded space-time in ways we cannot at present, and to them it's just like poking the switch on the other side of a rubbery membrane between 'here' and 'there' . And if your observer has access to that kind of physics, the whole thing is moot anyway!
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All tongue in cheek of course.
No, wait: maybe he can poke his arms through a worm hole!

Jan
 
#49
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#50
There is a beter video

So the answer is not dependant on how big the circuit is, but on how far away the switch and lightbulp are.
If the switch is juist 1 meter away from the lightbulp the answer is 1m/c, the lenght of the circuit doesn’t matter as the energy is not in the electrons but in the electromagnetic fields surrounding the circuit.
 
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