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Comment by John Wolff on April 7, 2015 at 1:25pm

Eureka.  I have it. 

Corgis warp spacetime, just like gravity.  They follow a geodesic (a line of shortest length and least resistance) to anything edible, or spherical, or generating a vacuum with electromagnetic current.

Einstein imagined walking off a roof:  you'd be accelerating downwards with force g = 9.81 m/s², but you'd feel no acceleration (if inside an opaque capsule, you'd have no idea that you are accelerating).  He reformulated Newton's laws of motion to include the idea that gravity curves spacetime, so that a corgi walking straight off a flat roof continues in a straight geodesic line right into the ground (the plane of Earth's surface being curved by gravity).

Don't try this at home, kids.  F = ma, so you'll hit that curved surface really hard.

And I always thought they simply liked to chase tennis balls.

Comment by Shippo & Koga Corgis on April 4, 2015 at 7:18pm

Haha!  John, this is a moment when I wish we could like peoples' comments. =)

Comment by Lois B. Allen on April 4, 2015 at 1:18pm

Those are Excellent Observations by Mr. Wolff on the physics of fluffy Corgi Hair and Relativity!

Comment by Lois B. Allen on April 3, 2015 at 8:36pm

So handsome!!  As ever!

Comment by John Wolff on April 3, 2015 at 1:20pm

Much discussion of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity lately, as we just marked its centennial.

But I don't understand what's happening here.  It looks like the ordinary Doppeler Effect:  since corgis always chase a ball at the speed of light, c, the wavelength of the fur is redshifted, making the coat appear longer from a stationary frame of reference.  But Special Relativity entails the Lorentz length contraction

which means the fur should actually appear shorter to a stationary observer.

I am mystified.

I wonder how it appears from the tennis ball's frame of reference?  Probably just like approaching the Schwarzchild radius of a black hole.

A pity that no 19th century physicist ever had a corgi, else we would have learned much earlier that gravity curves spacetime -- every corgi owner observes this daily when a treat is dropped into the intense gravitational field.