The Telepathy and Relativity Paradox!

The twin paradox, sometimes called the "clock paradox", stems from Paul Langevin's 1911 thought experiment in special relativity: one of two twin brothers undertakes a long space journey with a high-speed rocket at almost the speed of light, while the other twin remains on Earth. When the traveler returns to Earth, he is younger than the twin who stayed put. Or, as first stated by Albert Einstein (1911).

So in other words, the twin who’s stationary, ages much faster than the other one who’s traveling.

Now if telepathy is real then another paradox kicks in. Telepathy is transference of thought instantaneously to any place in the universe. If you were sitting on Alpha Centauri, we could communicate in ‘real time’. So time is not a parameter to contend with.

So now, if ‘A’ were traveling at light speed, ‘B’ who is stationary, would be ageing much faster than ‘A’ was. The flow of time for 'A' would be much slower. But suppose they were continuously communicating telepathically with each other in real time? How could synchronization occur?

How do you resolve this paradox?

There seems to be a presumption that thoughts travel in a linear fashion, where as I think thoughts don't have to 'travel', they are present in all states already. You cannot touch a thought as a part occupying physical space.

I think that if B tried and perhaps did communicate telepathically with A, then A wouldn't apreciate it and it would be some sort of major head&^*%

But an important point is raised because if a slower alien species, like dwellers, where to receive telepathic thoughts from a faster species, like humans, they'd probably get really annoyed with us and it would all come to blows.

And of course because the dwellers live for a very long time, and they are bigger and stronger than us, and they have much more knowledge than us, and they would surely smash us into peices. I think that sort of telepathy is dangerous for our survival.

On the other hand, if telepathy is some sort of intuition where we read body language at a high art level...that's possible...i'm just rambing now...

I think you have to think about this experiment a bit more.

For instance, how fast is one twin traveling in relation to the other one (how fast is the aging)? Are you assuming that telepathy has no fixed range? Is the traveling twin just orbiting something at beyond-fantastic speeds or is the TT heading off into the universe at beyond-fantastic speeds?

Just on a "I have no coffee and this thought wandered through my mind level", it seems that the one on the ground would "hear" the transmitted thoughts much more slowly... to the point where they might get one syllable a day and only if they were paying attention (imagine the word "cowboy" being "said" to you at such a slow pace that it takes a week to finish "saying" it.) On the other end, the Traveling Twin would be receiving messages at such a rapid space, that two weeks' worth of messages might translate into a single "sk" sound.

But that's off the top of my head and with no coffee.

Think of it as being on a plane. The plane is the body, the people in it is the mind. The plane goes super fast, but the people in it do not feel how fast it is going. They are unaffected by it. Basicly the same thing with the mind and body.

Originally posted by Byrd
...it seems that the one on the ground would "hear" the transmitted thoughts much more slowly... to the point where they might get one syllable a day. On the other end, the Traveling Twin would be receiving messages at such a rapid space, that two weeks' worth of messages might translate into a single "sk" sound.

But what we generally contend as 'communication', is on the physical plane - the electromagnetic spectrum. What you mention would happen if they're communicating through normal radio transmissions, which travel at the speed of light, ie, a finite speed.

The speed of telepathic communication is infinite, instantaneous. So here is where the dichotomy occurs. Or is telepathy in another dimension but which also needs to be taken into account when we're talking about the Theory of Relativity?

So did Einstein miss out something here? Probable his theory will never become law until such imponderables are also taken into account. But hell, how does one go about measuring something which does not exist in the physical plane?

I dont think Einstein missed it. Can we prove telepathy really occurs today?

I am sure telepathy was not on the great mans mind... there were enogh cranks with crazy ideas enough as it was.

The way I see it, how long is a thought? I see it as instantaneous, therefore it has no length of time...it operates outside of the boundaries of temporal physics or whatever. I think we must be careful of defining time as if some quanta, to make it easier for our caveman brains just like we do with width, depth and height.

I believe our perception that a thought must have some finite amount, is a result of the time it takes for us to process one. What we see is the lag in detection of an effect / action, not the length of time that it actally takes. Our conceptof thought is ths flawed.

Or maybe I speak excrement of a male bovine

Just 2 cents...

I am somewhat new to quantum physics but as far as I understand, thought occurs on a higher dimension than time, so would it be safe to assume that thought can move about the 4th dimension(aka thought can time travel)? So I think that twin A would be receiving twin B's thoughts from the future as twin B would be receiving twin A's thoughts from the past, but it would seem to them that they are communicating in "real time" since the thoughts themselves would be traveling across the dimension of time and arriving to one another instantly (from their perspective.)

This reminds me of a Deep Space Nine episode where they are rushing to a planet to rescue a women that had already been long dead, and were communicating with her across sub-space in real time as the transmissions were somehow time traveling (think it had something to do with the planet's atmosphere, been a while since I have seen it).

Well anyways, hope I'm not way off here and this helped a little