Relativity of Science

Unfortunately this just says that relativity is a classical theory which indeed it is. It does not say anything more than that.

When someone says something crazy, no amount of logic can “answer it”. All one can do is point out that it’s crazy.

You claimed that the same physical laws could not lead to different timing for different events. I showed you that this happens all the time. I also provided you with three links that provided detailed arguments about exactly why SR leads to the relativity of simultaneity.

That is the craziest thing you have said yet.

You want me to prove SR? That’s the new craziest thing you’ve said.

Because, if you were trying to produce a paradox for special relativity, then you would have to start from the assumption that SR was true. To do otherwise is really, really stupid.

The paper says far more than that Calrid. You should read it: The Other Meaning of Special Relativity. All the mathematics is the same, and it still matches all the experiments, but this employs space with waves running through it. Setting gravity aside, some go straight (light), some follow closed paths (massive particles), and some are in between (neutrinos). Hard evidence like pair production and magnetic dipole moment back this up, and it logically explains why massive particles can never reach c and we always measure c to be the same locally. I’m thinking it’s fairly close to what James would advocate, but it’s still special relativity. It’s a different interpretation of special relativity employing wave/particle duality in absolute space. And since the universe is pretty absolute, and we can determine our motion through the universe from the CMBR, it all seems reasonable. I think Einstein would have liked it.

It removes it. What you think of as “the time” is merely your cumulative measure of wave motion, which is altered by your own motion. Irrespective of that, and irrespective of where and when they were emitted, two photons either meet at the same location at the same time according to the station clock, or they don’t. The motion of outside observers and what they deem to be simultaneous has nothing to do with it.

It’s something of a grey area. Einstein didn’t quite get his clock synchronisation right, and from 1911 was challenging his own postulate, but people who feel themselves to be knowledgeable in SR don’t seem to know about these things.

And it’s still SR. Same maths, same predictions, same experimental proof… but with a wave/particle duality interpretation. What’s not to like?

I’ll take a look later. What I meant was that James was probably reading something into it that was not implied. If he whole heartedly agrees with that statement there should be no problem with accepting relativity without some “paradox” therefore.

Special relativity has no trouble mixing it up with other classical theories such as optics or electromagnetism, it never really has, it doesn’t have any real problem mixing it up with non classical theories even like certain aspects of quantum field theory for example.

If one actually describes the scenario in the reference frame of the train, then what one frame takes to be simultaneous is absolutely required. Otherwise, the mathematical descriptions of the events to not match up.

Einstein thoroughly rejected his 1911 work, as those knowledgeable in General Relativity know.

And it’s still SR. Same maths, same predictions, same experimental proof… but with a wave/particle duality interpretation. What’s not to like?
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SR is completely compatible with quantum mechanics and it always has been.

Robert Close is simply regurgitating mistakes about SR that are about 100 years old. Here’s his own words:
"Thus we see how Lorentz transformations can be obtained by using sonar or any other type of wave to measure time and distance. Lorentz invariance is not a property of time and space per se. Rather it results from the methods used to measure time and distance. If the above-mentioned sailors were to rendezvous to share their data and some vodka, they might conclude after a few drinks that absolute time and space in moving underwater reference frames are related by Lorentz transformations using the speed of sound in water. After sobering up, however, they would realize that sonar is not the only way to measure time and distance and that their measurements are not evidence of any non-Euclidean properties of underwater time and space. "

Robert Close wants us to forget that there is a big difference between the sonar case and SR: sonar is only one way to measure, whereas SR applies to all means of measuring. He wants us to neglect that we have no evidence for his preferred, absolute reference frame whereas we do have a preferred frame for our sonar applications.

In SR, we might excuse this by using some mathematical chicanery, as Close does, to suggest that something about physics hides the real absolute reference frame from us. he might also suggest that unicorns and fairies work to carry electrons from place to place and then remove all trace of their work. This might work for SR, but when we get to general relativity, we can no longer accept this. GR gives us absolute freedom in picking a system of coordinates and putting physics to work in that system. And we cannot accept the frame co-moving with the bulk of the background radiation as an absolute reference frame because we rely on GR to analyze that radiation and to analyze the anisotropies in that radiation. These anisotropies are the relics of places where there were changes in the density of the background radiation and thus they have a different co-moving reference frame (and different proper times) from the rest of the background radiation. Do present the background radiation as an absolute reference frame, one has to produce analysis on these anisotropies that recover all the information from these regions that we get from GR.

I’m hoping he’ll read it too, and then appreciate that special relativity ought not to be the target here.

Agreed. There’s a rather simple way to extend this to gravity too. For the life of me I don’t know why Einstein didn’t nail it. Take a look at iopscience.iop.org/0256-307X/25/5/014 sometime, and do read that Leyden Address.

He didn’t reject c varying with gravitational potential. He repeated it year after year. See the GR section of this article which says the modern interpretation rejects it, not Einstein.

So take note of the other interpretation.

He’s right. Apply wave/particle duality, and it’s obvious. Everything is made of waves.

There is no difference, and the CMBR dipole anisotropy is the evidence for the preferred frame.

Don’t bother me with garbage like chicanery and fairies. The paper is sound.

No problem. It’s an SR paper. And in a place where gravitational potential is lower the energy density is higher. In a place where the energy density is higher, the light goes slower. It’s as simple as that.

A) The actual science is the modern interpretation, so it doesn’t matter what Einstein thought. B) He did reject the variable speed of light. You always like to produce his 1911 speculative piece, but you have no other reference for Einstein ever entertaining a variable speed of light.

No, the anisotropy is evidence of a difference between a frame co-moving with the average of the solar system movements and a frame co-moving with the average of the CMBR. There is no one CMBR frame, there is only a frame that we can identify with the average. Additionally, we have no physical means of measurement that identifies any frame as special. All we have is one means that measures the difference between one average and another average.

It is only sound insofar as it is able to recapture the basics of SR, basics known for 100 years. It is not sound to use sonar as an analogy, since we do not have any physical means of measurement that violates SR, while we do have many that violate Close’s sonar.

If it’s no problem, then let’s see you model anything in physics with your theory. You have had what, six years to do this?

Dismiss Einstein if you wish, I’d rather pay attention to what he actually said. And the “actual science” isn’t in the modern interpretation, it’s in the evidence like Shapiro and the GPS clock adjustment. Clocks go slower in a region of low gravitational potential, and some of those clocks are light clocks.

You’re in denial, and mathematical demands will not distract from the evidence or from what Einstein said. Here it is again:

OK, these phenomena are modelled by the “modern interpretation” of GR. Please provide a model of these phenomena without the “modern interpretation” of GR. You have had years to do this.

The mathematical details are all the details. The constancy of the speed of light is a statement about the speed of light in a free-falling coordinate system. Your quote mining does nothing to hide that you haven’t addressed the facts of the mathematics.

No. See Inhomogeneous Vacuum: An Alternative Interpretation of Curved Spacetime for the mathematics. And note that the mathematics isn’t the facts. The scientific evidence is the facts. Things like the GPS clock adjustment. A light clock goes slower near the surface of the earth, because the light goes slower, and that’s it. Einstein said it, and the Shapiro delay is proof positive. The coordinate time diverges because we define the second using the motion of light. The wikipedia article even includes the Einstein quote. The word in the translation is velocity, but the word in the original German is geschwindigkeit. That means speed, and it’s crystal clear it really did mean speed because Einstein talked about one of the postulates of special relativity. He previously talked about c on this matter, and c is not a vector quantity. See the NIST caesium fountain clock and the definition of the second:

“Since 1967, the second has been defined to be the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K (absolute zero), and with appropriate corrections for gravitational time dilation.”

Lasers and a microwave cavity are employed to cause hyperfine transitions, which are electron spin-flips within caesium atoms. Electrons are literally made from light in pair production, and the hyperfine transition is an electromagnetic phenomena, as are the emitted microwaves. Microwaves are light in the wider sense. There’s a peak “frequency” in the emitted light, which is found and measured by the detector, but get this: the “frequency” is measured in Hertz, which is defined as cycles per second, and the second isn’t defined yet. So what the detectors essentially do, is count incoming microwave peaks. When they get to 9,192,631,770 that’s a second. Hence the frequency is 9,192,631,770 Hertz by definition. And did you catch the gravitational time dilation? If you were to take this clock and place it in a region of low gravitational potential, it would be like pressing a slow-motion button. All electromagnetic and other processes then occur at a reduced rate, including the hyperfine transition and the motion of the resultant light towards the detector. However regardless of this, when the detectors get to 9,192,631,770, that’s a second. Only this 299,792,458 m/s is not the same as previously, because the second is bigger, because the light goes slower. The patent evidence is as obvious as the nose in front of your face, and you would have to be suffering from something resembling a religious conviction to dismiss both it and Einstein.

I have seen and read it. It accounts for a single phenomena and there is no evidence that it is consistent with the remainder of GR. It is published in an obscure journal of dubious editorial standards and I doubt that you have ever actually read that paper. If you disagree, use that paper to calculate the perihelion advance of Mercury or the rotation curve of any galaxy.

But these facts are useless unless we can describe them in a way useful to physics. GR describes events that we observe or predict by using the specifics of a spacetime manifold–this is entirely mathematical. If you have some other way to do this, then please provide the details. Please describe in detail that we can asses either the perihelion advance of Mercury or the rotation curve of any galaxy.

So far, you have a lot of talk, but no game. Let’s see your theory do anything.

You know I’ve read the paper, I’ve quoted sections to you. Here’s another:

In this Letter, we emphasize the strong similarities between the light propagation in a curved spacetime and that in a medium with graded refractive index. These similarities suggest that an inhomogeneous vacuum may be the physical reality of the curved spacetime. We provide a general method to derive exactly the corresponding graded refractive index of the vacuum in a static spherically symmetrical gravitational field both for outside and inside the gravitational matter system, and point out that the refractive index profile is simply a unified exponential function of the gravitational potential for a weak gravitational field. We show that even the long puzzling central image missing problem in gravitational lensing[34] can now be solved clearly with the use of the obtained refractive index profile.

But you dismiss it, along with Einstein, and the scientific evidence. You’re in denial PhysBang. All you can do is attempt to erect a smokescreen of mathematical demands and call it “your theory”. Don’t you get it yet? It isn’t my theory. It’s Einstein’s.

When speaking of the consistency of the speed of light, shouldn’t you be distinguishing whether you mean with gravity fields or without? Einstein later realized that gravity affects the speed of light. But when speaking of SR, it is assumed that there is a uniform gravity field (as in “none”) merely for the sake of discussion.

What I am seeing in the Paradox thread is that I am the “Atheist” arguing the logic in the “Bible” with the “Christians” PhysBang and Carleas defending the faith while the “Jews”, Maddy and Churro are still using the Torah.

The primary issue is merely the interpretation of their “Bible”, very much as Farsight pointed out. And although Farsight is hardly alone in his plea that interpretation is “the issue”, I still see logical error in every current perspective.

The Paradox merely displays the issue of relativity of simultaneity by presenting a case wherein we would know which frame of reference didn’t see correctly. But rather than logic being used to defend the faith, the defense thus far has been, “but our scriptures say…”, even when that isn’t what they meant by what they said (the exact scenario of religious people who argue over doctrine - and with the same lack of progress).

If the Torah had included a dictionary from the beginning, the entire world would be very different and there probably would be no separation between Christian and Jew. And a commonly heard phrase among the Arabs would be “Mohamed who?!?”.

Sorry. Yes, when speaking of SR we assume no gravity, and people talk of a constant speed of light. There is however an oddity to this however related to Einstein’s clock synchronisation. Imagine you’re in the middle of a “motionless” mirrored box which serves as your frame of reference. (You can’t be sure it’s truly motionless, but you know what I mean). You send a pulse to the front of the box, it bounces back, and you mark the time of its return. You assume that the speed of light is the same both out and back. Now repeat this in a fast-moving box.

And what are the presumed results?

In my world, the speed of light is not an observed constant. But I can explain why it has appeared so.

Not mathematically or logically so anyone can understand it. Explaining how something out of kilter with reality works is really explaining nothing except the root of your misconceptions.