From: utzoo!decvax!cca!gwyn@BRL@sri-unix Newsgroups: net.physics Title: Re: paradoxical twins Article-I.D.: sri-unix.3320 Posted: Fri Sep 17 01:47:43 1982 Received: Fri Sep 17 06:33:51 1982 From: Doug GwynHope you liked my long explanation of the twins paradox. There is a fundamental problem with trying to "understand" relativity to the extent that things like the twins paradox seem obvious -- This paradox, and many other points, cannot be completely understood within ANY known conceptual scheme. In fact this is why Einstein kept on going, on to General Relativity, then Unified Field Theory. He saw very deeply into the situation and realized that many such questions could only be satisfactorily answered when global considerations were properly dealt with. Such things as asymptotic degrees of freedom of fields and boundary value determination are crucial to a complete comprehensive relativistic physics. This means you are right to feel that there is something hard to grasp about the twins paradox!