Who exactly are these two men, Stan O’Stanley and Herbert J. Steingold, Jr.? Not whom they appear to be by a superficial reading of their names. Their birth names are lost to history, but their ethnic origins are known to them and to their adoptive parents.

Herb and Stan were both orphaned in the Arab-Israeli Six Day War in 1967. The war had only a few civilian causalities, but some people who were inconveniently in the wrong place at the wrong time simply disappeared and were never seen again. Herb's and Stan's parents were among these.

Stan is an ethnic Jew who was adopted by a mixed race Scottish-African-Italian family. Herb is an Arab who was adopted by an intellectual, atheist, ethnic Jewish couple. Herb's and Stan's adoptive parents were friends in 1967, when both their adoptive fathers were studying international relations at the American University in Beirut. At that time, and until the Lebanon civil war of 1975-1990, Beirut was a popular international tourist city and known as the Paris of the Middle East.

The adoptive parents of both Herb and Stan later taught political science for a few years at the University of Texas at Austin. Although their two families moved to different parts of the world after that, Herb and Stan stayed in contact, and both of them eventually chose to live in Austin, though they didn't make the choice simultaneously.

Which brings us back to the problem at hand, namely the nature of time as understood in terms of the relativity of simultaneity, as postulated in 1905 by Albert Einstein . . .

Stan is having an elaborately detailed dream, which is interrupted most inopportunely—or at least that is what he immediately thinks when he is awakened by the playing of the third movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique piano sonata, meaning he has an incoming call from his friend, or possibly soon to be ex-friend, Herb. Stan answers the call, but says nothing as he puts the phone up to his ear. He notices his bedside alarm clock reads 5:01:53 a.m.

“Stan?” says Herb, rather plaintively. “Are you there?” Apparently, Herb is not going to apologize for calling at 5 a.m. “Talk to me, Stan.”

“Can you hear me now?” Stan icily replies.

“Okay--I’m sorry!” Herb says quickly. “Apparently you were asleep. I thought you might be awake.”

“This is a recording,” Stan says, still speaking as though he wanted frost to form on his words. “Stan is sleeping soundly. Please call back at a more appropriate hour, such as half past eternity.” Stan ends the call, puts the cellphone on his bedside table, pulls the covers over his head, and sighs loudly. “Well,” he says after a few moments, “it was only a dream.” After a few more moments under the covers, he sits up, picks up his phone, and calls Herb back.

Herb answers with an apology. “I am sorry I woke you up,” he says immediately. “I’m even sorrier if I interrupted a good dream--”

“Which you did,” says Stan, whose voice has warmed a few degrees above absolute zero.

“Well, like you told me, you should write it down if you don’t want to forget it.”

“In this case, I’d rather just forget it. In fact, I’m beginning to be glad you woke me up.”

“It was about Juanita, wasn’t it?”

“Yep, Herbvert, old bean, it was. And we were in the process of getting back together, um, literally, so it was kind of like your dream of the beautiful and naked woman that I interrupted. But mine isn’t the kind of dream one should pursue, so I can say thanks for waking me up--and, by the way, what’ve you got on your mind?”

“All right, I won’t bug you about reciprocal relationships and x squared equals one and all that. I called because I’ve come up with the ideal thought experiment and wanted to tell you so you could start thinking about it right away.”

“I’ll start thinking about it, but I am planning to go back to sleep, so I won’t think about it much.”

“No problem. In fact that may be the best way to think about it. You can sleep on it. How about meeting me for coffee in the morning?”

“Ugh. Not too early, but yeah, I wouldn’t mind discussing it over tea and scones. Not earlier than 10:30.”

“10:30 is fine. Tea for you, coffee for me, as usual.” Herb paused briefly. “All right here’s the basic info on my new idea. The neat thing about it is that the simultaneity is set up at the beginning of the experiment. We each have identical timer-flasher-detectors. I stand by the side of the road, and at the moment you pass by me, an electromagnetic switch in each device starts the timers--they are at the same point in space, approximately, so this starting of both timers is a single event. Okay so far?”

“Yeh, nothing to it so far, no offense.”

“Well, yeah, you’re right. No great shakes, yet. The real test of the relativity of simultaneity comes eight seconds later . . . “ Herb paused and waited for a reaction from Stan. Stan is thinking Herb was actually offended by his “nothing to it” comment, so, in an effort, however weakly conceived, to perturb Herb, he waits exactly eight seconds, watching his bedside clock, before saying anything.

“Okay, so now it’s eight seconds later,” Stan said.

Herb had to laugh at that. “You’re a quick one, Stanley old bean. But this is a good example of simultaneity--eight seconds has passed for each of us, but we are both in the same rest frame, so we don't have to do a time transformation into the other guy's rest frame. In the experiment we will have a time transformation to do, in order to calculate what our eight seconds corresponds to in the other guy's rest frame. Make sense?”

“Not entirely. I don't see what the point is, yet.”

“Okay, I haven't said what it is yet, but it has to do with both frames being rest frames--which is nothing new, but saying it that way brings out the fact that in your rest frame and separately in my rest frame, we will both measure eight seconds. Our timers will, that is.”

“Okay so that's simultaneity in the pre-Einstein sense--the timers are programmed to flash simultaneously. That's a simplification of the usual thought experiment I've read about.”

“Thanks, Stan. I'm glad you appreciate that fact. I am thinking the same thing, and thus I'm calling this an ideal relativity of simultaneity thought experiment. Next, each timer-flasher-detector detects light from the other one and stops timing at the moment the flash is received. That's the other simplification--we don't have to deal with what happens to the clocks—the timers—later, and the crucial reality of the experiment is the question of what the two timers will read when we bring them together again in the same rest frame. It's a simplified experimental test of the relativity of simultaneity.”

"Well, Herb, congratulations on coming up with the idea." Stan is partly assuaging Herb's easily bruised ego, but mainly is truly impressed with the idea. But he also wants to go back to sleep. "So I'll sleep on it, and meet you at the cafe at 10:30."

“All right then--see you at 10:30. Pleasant dreams.”

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