>
> Okay, I have to say this. Everyone will yell at
>me, but, oh well...
>

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!

There. I yelled at you.

> Does the spaceship experience "sped up" time, or
>does its motion cause the universe to "slow
>down"? That sounds stupid, but it's actually a
>valid question (at least, to my mind).
>

Actually, that's backwards anyway. The space ship's time slows down--meaning less time passes for the ship than for the stay-at-homes.


> One may be tempted to answer this by saying "it
>doesn't matter, the effect is the same", but the
>process is just as important. I was going to rant
>about stuff for quite a while here, but I'm
>falling asleep so I think now it distinctly *not*
>the right time. I'll rant later. :-}

Well, I suspect what you're really trying to do is answer the question "how does time dilation work?" You say that it *does* matter which is happening, even though the result is the same. But since the results *are* the same either way, the only way it would matter is if you were looking for some underlying idea of how the effect occurs.

Truthfully, I don't know the answer to that question and I don't know if anyone knows it. But I do know that you can use the simple principle of Occam's razor in regards to this question. Which is the simpler answer: A speeding spaceship experiences a slow down in time, or a speeding spaceship somehow causes the whole entire rest of the universe to experience a time "speed-up"? I'd vote for the first. We may not know how the time dilation effect works, but it's much easier to see how a strange effect could act on the object in question, instead of on the entire rest of the universe.