So that everyone else is clear then: Jimmy is claiming that, although he is making claims about the Lorentz transformations, it is not relevant for him to actually support these claims with the actual use of these equations.
Every scientific publication on these systems disagrees.
Yep, people are forever taking mathematical abstraction as reality. I’ve even had 'em swear blind that a star “really” length-contracts into a discoid when you accelerate towards it.
I go for relativity of count. Then it’s quite easy to resolve the pole-and-the-barn length contraction paradox. All you have to do is understand that what you measure is affected by your own motion.
As you’ve no doubt been told many times, nobody has ever told you this. You are either grossly mistaken about this despite multiple corrections or you are simply lying about this point. At best you are doing a straw man argument, because it is not the case in relativity theory that one’s acceleration causes a star to become oblate. According to relativity theory, the star is already oblate in an infinite number of frames of reference. All acceleration does is change the the frame of reference that we use to describe an object.
Haha… and if we close our eyes, they no longer exist at all. “Reality is only perception” (straight from the Quantum Magi). 
And I rewrote the OP with a simpler explanation and corrected the use of an inline material spinner.
These claims about a “transverse spin counter” are pure fantasy. Presumably these things spin a number of times dependant on the time in their rest frame, which is different than the time in other frames.
Again, despite all these claims that Jimmy makes, he never actually uses the Lorentz transformations he claims to be criticizing.
Okay PhysPot, so you want to take the challenge…
You say that the Lorentz equations will show the solution to this problem. So let’s see it. Do DO know the Lorentz transformations, right? Carleas showed them to you. You should be able to find them again. So find the transformations and “plug and play”. Be sure to show your work.
But DO try to be more careful this time. The last time you tried to use equations was a bit embarrassing.
Why should I be the one doing your work for you? You are the one who is trying to actually criticize SR.
And as to my ability with the equations, anyone can see that for themselves here: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=172642&start=250#p2163463
One can also find in that thread 1) your bizarre idea that the Lorentz transformations somehow use a floating centre of frame value for “x” rather than an actual coordinate value, 2) your surrender in that thread that you were using the equations incorrectly, and 3) your claim that you would be dealing with the equations of the Lorentz transformations in this thread. That last claim of yours is an obvious lie, since you haven’t actually done anything with the equations in this thread. This is similar to your lie that you would put me on ignore. As you are incapable of actually addressing any of the questions about the science I bring up, it may be better for you to not read what I have to say. You can then blather on in ignorance and I can give warnings out to those who might be interested in the science.
I showed my logic, son. If you think you know better, show it. Now it’s your turn.
Put up or shut up.
I don’t lie, I’m not “grossly mistaken”, and this is no straw man. Take a look at our earlier discussion
You said: Do you doubt that stars are not flattened in reference frames in which these stars are in motion?
I said: A star appears to be flattened to observers in relative motion with respect to that star. But it isn’t real, as the orthogonal observers will agree.
Now please, don’t assert “according to relativity theory” to me. What you present as relativity is ersatz, and bears no resembles to Einstein’s equations of motion. Those frames of reference have no actual existence. You cannot look up to the sky and point one out. They are artefacts of measurement, and your practical choice of frame will depend upon your motion. We ignore the rotational motion of the earth in our everyday lives, and so we plot latitude and longitude. But we don’t ignore it in the Shuttle. In the Shuttle we ignore the orbital motion of the earth round the sun. But we don’t ignore it for Cassini.
It is true that all measurements are relative. This must be true simply because a measurement is a comparison, a relative measure. But if you cross-check (“transverse”) and verify your measurements then correct for consistency and cohesiveness, you discover absolute measure that is the same for all. Thus measurements are only relative when you don’t cross verify them and correct for the logical inconsistencies.
Otherwise it is like listening to only one witness or one bit of evidence at a murder trial.
Your logic is equivalent to:
You haven’t shown us that SR says the moon is made of green cheese and you haven’t shown us that the moon is made of Stilton. What you have been writing about SR is so off base that it is, as the physicists say, “not even wrong”. The only way that SR introduces time dilation, length contraction, and relativity of simultaneity is through the use of the Lorentz transformations (or, equivalently, through the invariant spacetime interval). If you want to make a claim about the nature of these things, you have to demonstrate them using the Lorentz transformations. Your logic is worthless without any demonstration that it applies to SR.
I have a question that I feel needs an answer concerning James S Saint and PhysBang. Do either of you feel you have sufficiently responded to each other’s assertions concerning this topic. If you believe you have responded exhaustively, then either agree or agree to disagree and leave it at that.
I’m happy to leave it at that. As long as people are able to realize that it might be the case that JSS is simply not talking about anything to do with the topic he claims to be discussing.
To my knowledge, he hasn’t actually addressed the OP. His remarks are merely concerning me, how wrong I am, how I should go read, I should show him more of how to resolve the puzzle, his opinion of me, and what others should do because of it (the very definition of “ad hominid”).
Ignoring him doesn’t shut him up nor inspire him to actually address the topic at hand rather than his opinion of me or anyone else. So yeah, I’d say that I have answered his topic relevant replies sufficiently.
Ok, then there shouldn’t be further need to address one another. If it continues, I will lock this thread and remove any remarks to each after this post.
James, I’m a little confused as to how your light-based transverse spin counter measures distance. Its spin doesn’t seem to be associated with motion along the track, because 1) it is light, so its motion is not caused by contact with the track, and 2) it is transverse, so track is never a tangent to the path of the light around the circumfrence of its spin (which seems essential to a spin counter. In that case, it seems that the “spin counter” is just a light clock, as Physbang has suggested.
I apologize if my questions are basic, but as I said to MMP in the other thread, the best place to start is to figure out what everyone is saying, so that we can get identify and resolve the core issues.
(Aside: Farsight, what’s the difference between a start being “really” flattened, and only being observed to be flattened? I don’t mean that sarcastically or rhetorically. For all intents and purposes, the star is flattened for the observer in motion. Would it be possible to devise an experiment that would distinguish between “real” and “observed” flattening? You’ve mentioned an orthoganal observer, but that just seems to either put another observer in the stationary reference frame, or to introduce yet another frame of reference into the question, without truly answering the question. I tend to favor saying that it’s “really” flattened, just because, for all possible applications of the idea (as far as I know), it can be treated that way.)
The issue is one of counting. The train measures the length of his journey to take only perhaps 9 seconds whereas the station measures it to be perhaps 10. There are no dilation effects for motion in the transverse directions. They both see the transverse spin counter taking the same amount of time per spin because it is spinning in a transverse direction which is the same for both observers. This results in them counting a different number of spins for the same journey.
Or do I need to prove that transverse motion to the station-train motion is not affected in either time or length? Lorentz didn’t argue against that notion. I don’t know anyone who does except those who don’t really understand the equations. Space-time is given the coordinates of {x,y,z,t}, the changing distance between the train and the station is the x.
So you don’t have to take my word for it; Modern Physics
Btw, it doesn’t really even appear flattened. One cannot measure length in the line of motion. That is why you have 2 eyes - parallax.
But simply rotating a light clock to be orthogonal to the direction of motion couldn’t be enough to undo time dilation. Wikipedia provides this illustration of why this won’t work:
EDIT: this image didn’t work in the image tags. See it here.
This isn’t a light wheel, but the principle is the same. The distance D is greater than L when the two observers are in motion, even though the motion is orthoganl to the axis on which L sits (e.g. if motion is along the x axis, L is in the direction of y).
ASIDE_____
I’m not really talking about “appearances”, but about observed length. There are many ways to measure legth, and any could be used to meaure a distance in a moving frame (for instance, travel time of a photon)
EDIT: I added a divider to keep the aside aside.
I don’t really see the connection you are trying to make with the Wiki page.
This is what I am talking about;
But it’s clear from the diagram that the distance traveled around the spiral path is greater than that traveled around the circular path, right? Similarly, in the wikipedia article, the distance traveled along D is greater than the distance traveled along L. Even though the motion of the light is orthogonal to the motion of the clock, the path is still longer for the moving observer, so the clock measures time to be passing more slowly.
How is this a spin counter? It seems to just be a light clock.
