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Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

I thought one of the many paradoxes of relativity is that while the moving bodies would appear changed, their "self-world" view is invariant. They see the relativistic effects applied to the atationary frames. It's been a long time, so I might be misremembering...

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No, you're right. Its a classic error to accidentally mix in a little fixed reference thinking with your relativity when first coming to terms with relativistic reasoning. What helps me most is to remember that something somewhere is going .9c relative to me right now, and more importantly, I, it.

This is exactly correct. The amino acids don't "see" themselves being relativistically stretched, so the chance of their chirality randomly flipping doesn't change.

Yes that lept out at me. Isn't that first year physics? I mean I remember it from years back, my first fond memory of university physics (and from which point I knew I would love it). It was really a 1 short lecture task to derive special relativity (which covers this) from a few basic postulates? (or course was a huge crazy leap to postulate in the first place).

I inferred that, since he couldn't be talking about an effect at constant velocity, that this effect would be an extra mysterious hazard of extreme acceleration - beyond the mundane hazard of being crushed into a damp spot on the bulkhead. Perhaps related to the tidal deformation one would experience falling into a black hole. The consensus here is he just blew it - nothing more to be concerned with.

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