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I recently watched a scathing report on the history and timing of the push to war with Iraq. Startling revelations include that attacking Iraq was promoted almost immediately following the attacks of September 11, and that administration in-fighting led directly to the erosion of American civil liberties through the sidestepping of natural checks within the White House. The two-part series reveals a shocking manipulation of both the system and the facts at hand in the push toward war, primarily by two members of the Bush administration, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. The realization that a few men were able to mobilize the nation in the face of such glaring holes in the case for war is a sobering one.

As I voted of the president, my opinion of him at the beginning of his term was very high, but has deteriorated over his two terms to certainly more negative than positive. This expose on the war that will undoubtedly define his presidency has eroded all of the good opinion I had left. It reveals shocking manipulation by the President’s closest staff, while Bush went seemingly unaware.

While I avoid the discussion of politics in open forums, I felt the gravity of this report warranted mentioning. You may watch the full report online at Frontline: Bush’s War.

The story of this exposition starts one Friday night when I decided to spend quality time on the subject of special theory of relativity with the famous “Lectures on Physics” (I-15 in Volume I) by Richard Feynman. In this, Feynman addresses the so called twin paradox. Although Feynman is always fun to read, I figured that his explanation was on the lean side and decided to delve deeper into the subject. Truth be told, you can find many discussions of this so called paradox; some a manifest of good science as in Wikipedia, others revealing “novel discoveries” from new Einsteins.

A good one from the Louisiana State University: The Daily Reveille Online Edition Issue date: 2/23/07 reads: “Professor solves Einstein’s twin paradox”, the reader may enjoy reading the clip and some of the responses. Better yet, Wang Guowen from the College of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, China, in January 25, 2005. In his paper “Einstein’s concept of a clock and clock paradox”, found that the slowing time is altogether a blemish in Einstein’s theory. I hope the following exposition sheds light on the matter and provides a good introduction to relativistic kinematics.

Relativity and the Twin Paradox

Update

For further reading, you can read the English translation of Einstein’s 1905 paper that started it all, On The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies

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