It's all relative

Does Elon Musk not remember his special relativity?

You may have come across a lot of discussion this week about this recent tweet from Elon Musk:

Elon Musk @elonmusk

If you’ve been in this heterodox-y space for a while, you probably came across this drawing a long time ago, as it was first created by Colin Wright of Quillette. Much debate ensued on Twitter, with lots of people attempting to dunk on one another over which party has moved further to their prospective extremes.

From a pen-to-paper policy perspective, I think it’s hard to deny that the Democrats have, in fact, moved substantially to the left over the past 14 years. This should not be surprising, as a “progressive” party wants things to “progress.” Remember how 2008 Obama was hesitant to endorse same-sex marriage, and a “public option” was a non-starter? Matt Yglesias brought the receipts: quotes from the actual Democratic Party platform.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

For better or worse this is a real change that people put a lot of time and effort into making happen.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

All of the above energy policy vs no new oil & gas permitting on public lands. Again, people worked really hard and spent a lot of money to get these ideas adopted — it’s absurd to pretend it didn’t happen.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Immigration — bragging about tough enforcement vs vowing tougher oversight of the enforcement agencies.

This is setting aside the entire discussion about “woke” progressive culture- this is the written word of the politicians who lead the party. As Matt suggests, it’s funny that the people who should actually be proud that their activism has been working (at least on the platform of the Democratic party) are most in denial about it.

On the other hand, “conservatives” want to “conserve” a.k.a. keep things the same. It sure would be nice to compare the Republican Party’s 2020 platform to 2016’s or 2008’s, but they didn’t bother to write one in 2020, which I suppose could be a rather pathetic piece of evidence to support the claim that they are indeed “standing still.” But I’m actually, genuinely hard-pressed to think of many examples of policy stances where they’ve moved significantly to the right since 2008, except the (dumb) border wall and perhaps the more aggressive stance on rolling back gun control measures. (On abortion rights, I don’t think their positions have changed; only their willingness to pass laws and defend them in court.) On things like acceptance of legalized gay marriage, not privatizing Medicare or Social Security, running up federal deficit spending, or avoiding foreign wars, they’ve arguably moved to the left. But on the basics, they’ve stayed put. Has anyone on Twitter watched a 2001-era episode of The West Wing lately? Pretty sure Ainsley Hayes would giving the same speeches today (but on Twitter).

Back to the meme, though… what I actually want to do today is nerd out about Lorentz transformations!!!

Now, according to Wikipedia, Elon Musk has a B.A. in Physics. I am not sure how this is possible, as I thought a B.A. generally lets you skip stuff like calculus and I don’t know how far you can get in physics without calculus. But regardless, surely he learned about special relativity, and this video does a great job of explaining the basics of special relativity and Lorentz transformations without relying on advanced math.

I don’t want to sit here and transcribe the video- it’s really well-done and short so I encourage you to just watch it. But it is a little snapshot of how my mind works on these political/social/cultural issues. I’m a total nerd- I love the concept of spacetime, and basic mental models that form the foundation of engineering and physics heavily influence the way I think about non-technical topics as well.

In this case, it seems clearly obvious to me that it’s very difficult or even impossible to accurately measure the speed of another moving object when you yourself are moving, or could be moving. And it’s very difficult to know for certain if you are moving, or how fast you are moving, so long as your velocity is constant. (For those who don’t recall high school physics at all, you really only feel acceleration, or changes in velocity. You feel pressed back in your seat as the plane takes off, changing from a speed of zero to over 500 miles an hour. But once you’re cruising at a constant 500 miles an hour, you go back to feeling like you did at zero mph.) Therefore you can only measure your position relative to the other moving object, and the relative speed with which you’re moving together or apart; there is no universe where everyone can agree that there’s any one thing that’s not moving at all.

None of that actually has much to do with special relativity or Lorentz transformations; I just think they’re cool and like refreshing my memory about them. But the basic premise that “from your perspective, you’re not moving” is such an obvious, undebatable building block from which all of the rest of physics flows, and it makes this whole Twitter debate seem absurd.

Now the really interesting question would be, if I attempt to measure, from my own (let’s say) leftward drifting perspective, the length of a rightward-moving cat, would I witness length contraction?

Put another way, for things that are moving apart from each other at speeds sufficiently close to the speed of light, my perspective of the position of the cat’s head and the cat’s tail at the same moment in time would say that they are closer together than someone who was moving at the same speed as the cat would say.

What does this have to do with politics? Heck if I know. I could make some high-minded inference that perhaps it leads us to not appreciate the wide diversity of political positions that are taken by people with views shifting in the opposite direction of our own.

But really it’s just Friday and I felt like nerding out with you all :) Have a good weekend and stay off Twitter!