Space Gnomes

Gnomes are our enemies. Anyone who does not know this is dangerously deluded. Consider this: when was the last time a gnome did anything but steal your possessions and make you late for work? Space gnomes are particularly odious. One thing about space gnomes I will never understand is their objection to relativity.....both general relativity and special relativity piss them off, presumably because it interferes with their plans for interstellar dominion.

Here is a space gnome trick, repeatedly tried, to circumvent relativity. Gnome 1 departs from a stationary object, in deep space, with no other point of reference. Gnome 2 stays on the stationary object. Gnome 1 accelerates, reaches a speed of 95% the speed of light, stays at that speed for ten years, turns around, and returns after accelerating to 95% the speed of light in the other direction. Gnome 2 stays put. When gnome 1 returns to the stationary object, usually someone's yard, it talks shit about how the YARD was not stationary at all, and that to think of it as such violates the entire principal of relativity. There ARE no privileged frames of reference. AND YET, gnome 1 has aged many more years than gnome 1, enough time to drink a great deal of beer. Gnomes are assholes for even bringing this up. In fact, the garden is never stationary, it is moving with respect to the rest of the universe, whether the gnomes choose to observe stars, planets, silver surfers, or not. There is no such thing as a stationary object. So, why the fuck was it gnome 1 did all the aging? This REALLY happens to gnomes.
I finally get it, what gnomes do not understand when they gripe like that.
It is the acceleration, both ways, and the deceleration, all of it, that broke the symmetry between the gnomes. In fact there was no symmetry to begin with. Not in this case. The gnomes usually try a new trick after pulling this one.

The next trick is to go to very distant points, with respect to each other, using their long lifespans as an aid to space travel, then accelerate to a good fraction of the speed of light, and cruise past each other, not accelerating, so that their combined velocities are greater than the speed of light. They do this because relativity pisses them off and they are trying to fuck with it. This trick is never really satisfying though, because from the perspective of each gnome, the other is receding at less than the speed of light. The Lorentz contraction of space, in the direction of movement, and time dilation, make it so that, to each other, they are receding at just shy of the speed of light. They can add a third observer, gnome 3 to the mix, as a stationary point between them, and this third gnome sees them receding from each other at greater than the speed of light, but this is not a violation of relativity and all three gnomes know it.

I remember a time when two gnomes, in separate spacecraft, accelerated to 99% the speed of light, using an enormous amount of fuel. They cruised at the same rate, relative to each other, one of them trailing a bit, and turned on their headlights. Both were annoyed because the light was not blue-shifted at all, since both were not moving with respect to each other. They even tried using a mirror, the one in the front turning around and shining its headlights on the gnome in the back, who was holding a mirror. Nothing, because from their perspective, noting in particular was amiss, even though, from the perspective of the rest of the galaxy, as they cruised, clocks were running SLOWER both aboard the gnome ships, AND in every distant planet (not faster there unless they mess it up by turning around and accelerating home), also, everything aboard the ships was very short in the direction of motion, from the perspective of distant planets, and all the distant planets were squished really flat in the direction of their apparent recession away from the gnomes....but none of this was apparent to the gnomes on the ship, even though it was happening, and that pissed them off.

The truth is that relativity pisses off gnomes because they have a belief that there is one, single, center of the universe that is NOT part of cosmic expansion, that is totally still in the absolute sense, and that they can put a planet, and a nice green lawn there, and sit, unmoving, forever.