Hi Christopher, sorry for the late reply - been away from computers (and relativity!) for a while.

Your diagrams are now correct, as far as I could establish and so is your conclusion:

Here we see that the simple claim that clocks are slowed by traveling fast is sheer nonsense, neither true nor false, just physically and conceptually meaningless.

But it is true that identically constructed and identically working clocks can disagree on the time lapse between two events (at which respectively they are present to register together) if they have different adventures on the way between.

I've said something similar on various occasions before: an inertial observer present at two events will always observe a shorter time interval between the two events than any inertial observer not present a both events. 'Observe' here obviously means compensating for light travel time.

In the twin's case, the traveling twin is the only one present at the turn-around event and hence will observe a smaller outbound time. One can ignore the "acceleration event" as insignificant and argue the same for the inbound trip.

This way I keep my sanity in relativity's "paradoxes"!

Regards,

Burt Jordaan (www.Relativity-4-Engineers.com)