Trying to Understand Relativity (part 3)

Before taking yet another crack at Relativity, I tried to do a little "research" this time, which basically means I Googled "understanding relativity" and clicked on a bunch of links, read a bunch of articles, followed some of Google's suggested, related searches, and so on.  Not that I've always taken such a lazy, haphazard approach to the subject.  I've actually read a few books on relativity in the past.  But the problem has always been the same.  It's this problem that lead me to writing these posts in the first place.  All of these sources do a fine job of explaining the way that relativity works, but they never really tell me how or why it works that way....At least, not to my satisfaction.  Maybe I'm just missing something. Examples like the Twin Paradox merely demonstrate the fact of time dilation.  Yes, when the twin in the ship gets home his brother is older than him, I get it.  Yes, it's amazing and mind blowing and all that, but I want to know why.  

Maybe I need to have a clearer definition of what I mean by that.  I'm sure someone could sit me down and explain the math to me with a bunch of crazy equations involving triangles and italic letters until I was sure that I was about to have a brain aneurysm, and who knows, maybe that's what it takes to even have a basic understanding of it.  Maybe I'm totally out of my league on this one.  But I'm hoping that there's a way to comprehend the concept itself without getting deep into the technical details.  I'd like to imagine that someone could give me a satisfying explanation of how an air conditioner works without having to resort to wiring schematics and a chart showing the molecular configuration and chemical composition of the refrigerating agent.  I just want a brief description of how the damn thing makes cold air.  Am I asking too much?

Of course relativity is a bit more complicated that an air conditioner, I realize that.  I guess I'm trying to understand how the idea first occurred to Einstein.  There had to be a moment before he worked out all the math and the details when he looked at the constant speed of light, relative motion, space, and time and saw the first hints of his theory.  There had to be a moment when the simple genesis of the idea made sense, and he knew he was on to something.  I guess that's the moment I'm trying to return to.  I want to take those same elements and figure out how someone could see relativity there.  Nowadays relativity has been tested and confirmed and it has a solid place in the annals of scientific history.  But what if somehow all evidence of it completely disappeared and it somehow vanished from the public consciousness?  How could someone rediscover the idea from scratch?  How could they work it out from the elements involved?

This may seem like a pointless line of speculation and waste of time.  It must sound odd the way I'm putting it.  I'm not talking about reinventing relativity, or trying to forensically recreate Einstein's mental processes.  I'm talking about the core understanding of a basic idea.  Let me put it like this, let's say you wanted to understand how fire is made.  You read some books, you search the internet, and yet you keep seeing the same thing.  They all just keep saying, "Rub two sticks together and voila!"  But that's not what you want to know.  You want to know why rubbing the two sticks together makes fire.  So then they tell you, "Well it's all based on this guy's theory of rubbing sticks together."  So at that point, you say, "Well, what if that guy never existed.  What would make a person look at two sticks and think that rubbing them together would make fire?  What if we had to figure it out for ourselves?"  

This is where I feel like I'm at with relativity.  I don't know why I bother.  It just frustrates me not to be able to understand it.  Like I said, maybe I'm just in over my head.  Maybe I should just humbly accept my limitations and move on.  Really, it's not even the whole theory I'm trying to grasp.  Obviously, most of my speculation has focused on the time-dilation effect, which is only a very small part of the theory.  Not that the concept of gravity being caused by mass warping space is any picnic to try to understand either, but I'm not even close to ready to open that can of worms yet.                                            

Anyway, I hope to get things back on track with my next post on the subject.  I guess I got off on a bit of a tangent here.  I'll return to my two neighboring houses next time, and maybe have some new ideas on how to approach the whole thing.  Almost immediately upon hitting the "publish" button on my last relativity post, I noticed a possible flaw in my scenario.  At first glance it seemed as though this flaw might undo any progress I might have made and put me right back at square one with guy B's trip seeming instantaneous to the guy in house A.  However, after considering the matter, I think this "flaw" might actually point to a way through, rather than a step back.  I'm still working it out, though.  

Next time?