Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[David Cooper]

The time axis is always vertical in the diagrams and represents the selected frame's version of time, so an object cannot be moving parallel to the time axis in any frame that shows that object moving to the right.

Agree. I didn't assert otherwise.

Having read what you said again, I can see that I misinterpreted it before, so no conflict there.

Earth has no coordinates for instance. I notice you didn't answer my request for that.

You can apply coordinates in whatever way you like. That will involve putting an origin somewhere and it will, for a moment, be co-moving with the Earth.

I'm just saying that no such origin is needed. Positions are typically given with a relative reference (like N light years left of event X), and not a set of coordinates (100, -20, 15, 75). Not wrong to do it with coordinates, but just less meaningful.

It is sufficient to have something at rest in the frame to recognise that the frame must move in the same way that object does, so if two objects are moving relative to each other, the frames in which they are at rest are also moving relative to each other.

So the university textbooks teach that Einstein's relativity has been disproven??

None that I know of do, but they should.

Yes, Einstein affirmed this assertion that was made at least 3 centuries before his time. It is not his assertion.

Where it becomes his assertion is when he denies the existence of the absolute frame. If he wasn't the first to do that either, it's of little significance - it was his position, and it's his theory that's being discussed. The aim was to introduce people to the subject with as little extraneous baggage as possible. That's the normal way to do things to improve readability and avoid going of on long diversions. You'll notice that I did include somewhere a wording along the lines of "Einstein wasn't the first to say this, but".

Answer the question. You evade this consistently.

I don't do evasion.

Are the speed limit signs wrong at the side of the road, because they ask you to decelerate your car to a nearly stationary speed while Earth smashes into you at about 1/800th c?

The speed signs are all about speed relative to the road under your wheels. Why would I need to evade answering that, or anything else? If you somehow imagine that I'm avoiding answering questions, put them in a numbered list and demand answers in the way I do when dealing with people who refuse to answer questions.

It's an essential service which the universe provides.

Another evasion.

An evasion? It was a reply to "Things have a location????" and I was pointing out in response that location is an essential service which the universe provides. No locations --> no relative positions.

Tell me your location please, without relating to anything with a location that hasn't been provided. I assert that location is only a relation, and the thing I ask cannot be done.

My location is somewhere in the fabric of space, but the fabric of space doesn't allow us to access labels to tell us where we are within it - it keeps that knowledge to itself. We can only see some aspects of our location by comparing how we move relative to other things in that fabric.

Since you seem to equate location to spatial separation, I also assert that spatial separation is a relation.

There's no equating involved - location is a service that provides spatial separation by dint of there being many available locations with different amounts of fabric between them.

If there is a universe with just two existents, there is no meaningful way to express the separation between the two things. It requires at least a third thing so that Y might be twice as far from X as is Z.

The space fabric is not hampered by our inability to see what's going on. Things are where they are within that fabric, and not where they aren't.

This describes all theories - it is fundamental to how frames work. If SR doesn't want to work with valid frame rules, it shouldn't pretend to use frames of reference.

Classic strawman fallacy then. No physicist would describe things that way. Use their own words if you want to discredit a theory.

What I said is correct, and here it is again for reference: "Different frames set the speed of light relative to them to c as part of the rules as to how frames work, and that dictates everything else they do - they do not confirm the speed of light relative to themselves because they have set themselves up directly on the basis that light travels at c relative to them, and in doing so, they all assert that the speed of light relative to ALL other frames is >c in some directions and <c the other way."

Any physicist who disagrees with that is plain incompetent, failing to understand what frames are and how they are required to function. You cannot allow light to move through a frame of reference at a speed other than c (unless it has been slowed down by interactions with a medium like gas/glass/etc. or by gravity). That is a founding principle of a frame of reference - if you have light move through it at other speeds, you're either breaking the rules of that frame or have failed to create a valid frame. Whatever wording your physicists want to use, they have to conform to frame rules - there is no magic override. There is no possibility of them confirming that the speed of light relative to themselves is c because that was the basis on how they were set up, so it's circular. All frames assert that the speed of light relative to other frames is not c in some directions, and this is a necessary consequence of the way frames are designed - this is a point which most physicists don't want to tell you, but it is an absolute requirement with no way to get around it. They don't like it precisely because it undermines their position. All other frames are moving relative to the current frame, so if light moves at c through the current frame, it doesn't move at c in some directions in every other frame. That's a fundamental truth, and no amount of misguided authority can overturn that - it is a mathematical necessity. My wording is correct and should not be replaced by irrational alternatives from people who don't respect the rules.

In LET, the mechanism for "time dilation" (which is actually just the slowing of apparent time) is that movement of a clock through the space fabric slows its cycles by increasing the round-trip distances for moving parts. That mechanism does not exist in SR because no clock is allowed to run slow.

Again a strawman wording. Moving clocks 'run slow' under SR. The term is dilation, not 'running slow', but I presume you mean that at least.

Moving clocks are not allowed to run slow in SR. SR has time dilation, but it produces contradictions where a clock slows its ticking rate and increases its ticking rate at the same time. Einstein was very clear that clocks don't really run slow - they all tick at the rate of one tick per second and there is no other kind of time in the model to govern them. This exposes a contradiction in the whole model, because either it's running mode 1 with no clock running slow under the governance of any other frame's time, or there's an absolute frame mechanism which allows some clocks to run slow. That's why there are multiple versions of SR that need to be modelled separately.

If you want to pick on something: If there is an objective metaphysical frame, SR asserts that clocks that are objectively stationary are dilated in any other frame. That means that time back on the home planet to either rocket ship (after launch) 'runs slower' than the clock on the rocket. I think your simulation would show this, especially if you could rotate it a bit further to the frames of the ships.

SR's claim that all frames are equally valid means that it requires an infinite number of such frames all governing the rest while at the same time being governed by the rest. The way out of that hole is to accept that only one frame can have such a governing role.

This is not a contradiction since SR does not make any metaphysical claims. LET would simply state that the alternate frame does not represent the ordering of events as per the preferred frame, and so the objective clock is not objectively running slow.

SR makes a metaphysical claim as soon as it asserts that all frames are equally valid and that there is no absolute frame. We can see though that that puts it into a position that breaks it, so when you assert that it makes no such assertions, the only rational option you leave it with is to accept an absolute frame and to hand over to LET.

Science is about explaining reality

No, Metaphysics is about explaining reality. Science is about making practical predictions.

Spin and hogwash. Science is about explaining reality, and SR makes metaphysical claims. There's an army of SR experts out there including a whole stack of famous physicists pushing the metaphysical claims at every opportunity and shouting down rival metaphysical claims, asserting that those are philosophy and shouldn't be allowed. They are hypocrites.

You really need to understand this distinction.

You need to understand that your physicist friends are not playing by those rules.

Science produces useful models, and cares not a hoot if the model corresponds to reality or not.

How stupid would science be if it really worked on that basis - of course they want their theories to correspond to reality rather than being abstract stuff which doesn't make sense of things. Science is very much about understanding things.

The 2 digit speed limit sign at the side of the road is a useful model even if reality is a varying figure with about 7 more digits. The value on the speed limit sign is science. The 9 digit figure is a metaphysical interpretation.

Speed limit signs are not there to explain how the universe works. Science and theories are. Science is much more than just methods for working out numbers, but if you want to restrict it to that, you've got a lot of work to do to convince everyone else, and I don't think they'll listen because they don't want to farm explanations out to a different discipline. When people phone a science phone-in and ask "how" questions, they don't want to be fobbed off with mathematical methods for crunching numbers - they want real explanations, and the scientists try to answer them. In the course of doing so, they often lay down the law about which explanations are valid and which should be rejected, and with relativity they always back the SR version with all its metaphysical dogma and reject the LET one. They are all pushing metaphysics - it's what they do. On every science documentary on the subject, the same thing happens - they push metaphysics. And the reason they do this is simple - it's because this "metaphysics" IS part of physics.

Time runs at the rate time runs - it could run ten times as fast or ten times as slowly and no difference would be detectable, but that doesn't mean it has no rate at which it runs.

Oh good. You acknowledge that there is no distinction between it running faster or slower.

It likely has no ability to go at any speed other than the one it goes at. For it to run slower, you then need to have some other kind of time for its speed to change relative to, at which point that other kind of time would be revealed to be the real time. If there is no superior kind of time beyond Newtonian time, then there is nothing to slow it against.

I shy away from positing undetectable things, but that's just me. I could find nothing in the LET description that posits this sort of thing. All it proposed was a preferred frame, but nowhere could I find a mention of flow. There was a reference to a presentism article somebody wrote, but the reference was only used to pull one of Einstein's quotes.

LET has Newtonian time, and that time simply runs. It isn't a dimension. If time didn't run, nothing could happen.

That is something I'd like to see. No flow --> no possibility of it being real causation.

Yes, I noticed you have this bias. You'd not like my example then. Your define causation in terms of flow, so an example without it will not be designated as causation in your opinion.

I'd love to see your example. If you've got something that can change my mind, I want it. There's nothing more useful than finding out that you're wrong about something so that you can correct a fault in your model of reality, and unlike most people, I'm always ready to tear mine up and start again whenever that happens.

[David Cooper]

I'm not getting a response yet to my attempts to establish common ground. So I'll go back and catch up on some earlier posts for now.

I'm trying to avoid jumping ahead without first dealing with posts that got in ahead of later ones. I've given up reading on ahead too, so all I'm seeing of the later ones are glimpses when I post things of my own and they appear one or sometimes two pages ahead of where I'm reading.

Yes. I did read through the first few pages of it. ... You appear to enter the conversation on page 2.

There are only two pages, although maybe different people get things cut up in different lengths. I've never changed the default settings for what I see there, so I would have thought you'd get the same. Anyway, my first comment is reply #25 on the first page, and most of the people involved in the thread will have realised that I'm referring to a previous discussion where I set out the same thought experiment (and a linear equivalent where the rotation is eliminated) - that's why I don't spell out the details straight away, because they've already seen them.

I may have missed them, but I can't spot any posts in that topic in which either you or "dressed scientist" address the salient points made by "Janus". You keep talking about establishments, clergy and mind viruses without properly addressing his points.

There's a lot of irrelevant stuff there that I didn't bother responding to - I was restricting things to the thought experiment that proves the point and the rest was of no consequence, but I was also pointing out places where the OP was wasting time by barking up the wrong tree. Reply #48 is where I start to ratchet it up, then #50 and #52 set things out fully. Thereafter it runs into avoidance as people are unwilling to answer the simple yes/no questions that I've provided (along with the correct answers to help them).

[Incidentally, at the end of reply #57, I linked to the earlier thread in which I set out a linear version of the same experiment, but it's a much longer thread with a hundred posts by people playing ridiculous games of avoidance instead of answering the simple numbered questions that I was putting to them. The linear version is introduced in reply #148 of that thread and is expanded on in later posts, such as #156.]

You also seem very confused as to whether you think GR/SR and LET are mathematically the same or mathematically different. Sometimes you say they're the same. Sometimes you say that SR/GR fails to conform to the rules of mathematics. For example (from page 3 of that discussion):

They most certainly are contradictions, and anyone who doesn't understand that is being plain irrational, failing to conform to the rules of mathematics.

There's no mention of GR there, and I don't remember it entering the discussion at all. However, GR is defective in the same way as SR in that clocks are not allowed to run slow, so it generates event-meshing failures.

If they use "the same maths" and one of them "fails to conform to the rules of mathematics" then so does the other.

One of them accepts contradictory claims which means it accepts that 1=2. The other doesn't accept the contradictory claims, but recognises that some of the claims involved must be wrong.

If you do assert that there are logical contradictions in GR and SR which don't exist in LET, while at the same time also asserting that they are mathematically identical, these two assertions themselves directly contradict each other.

The difference is in the dogma that's tied to the maths. One theory says that different frames are equally valid. The other says that one frame is right and that the rest are wrong (at any given location).

A contradiction is a logical error. The logic of a scientific theory is expressed in the language of mathematics. It is impossible for two theories to say the same things in that language but for one to contain a logical contradiction and one not to contain a logical contradiction.

1=2 is a contradiction. A theory that accepts 1=2 is not the same as a theory that rejects 1=2.

[David Cooper]

A laser hits the mirror and when it is at 45 degrees, it shines the laser down a long hall of known length.

If you're moving, the angle won't be 45 degrees. The light path will also be more than twice the length of the hall.

When it reflects back, the mirror has rotated a bit. If the mirror turns slowly, the laser continues in a line parallel to the original laser, hitting a zero mark on a target on the wall say 4 meters away. As the RPM speeds up, the mirror has rotated a bit when the light returns and the beam is deflected a bit differently. A little calculation yields light speed.

So, if you do the maths on the basis that you're moving at 0.86c, the length of the light path is four times the length of the hall. If the light comes directly "upaether" to the mirror, the angle of the mirror is 63.4 degrees rather than 45, and that effective angle that the light "perceives" it as being aligned at is different again, adjusting it to 60. The light moves through the hall at 30 degrees to the direction of travel of the hall, then makes a 60 degree turn to come back the other way, etc. Have you ever carried out the calculations on that basis? No - you've only ever done it on the basis that the apparatus is stationary, even though you've been thinking of yourself as moving. It isn't good enough to think that your moving while typing in numbers for being stationary - you need to type in the right measurements for a moving system if you're going to get an answer for a moving system, and if you do that correctly, you'll measure a speed of light relative to you that is very far from being c.

Point is, the experiment yields the same value even if the whole setup was moving at a very different velocity. ... So you need to tell me how that setup assumes that it is stationary. We made no such assumption.

Point is, it doesn't - your methodology was wrong because all your measurements were based on the apparatus being stationary.

I'll read and respond to the rest of that post tomorrow, but I wanted to get that bit out of the way now.

[Halc]

Just a few comments here:

• 4. If an object is moving in a circle (rotating), like a stone on a string, a planet in a circular orbit or the apparatus in the Sagnac Effect experiments that you have mentioned, do you accept that the object is accelerating towards the centre of the circle and is therefore in a non-inertial reference frame?

Well, all things, accelerating or not, are in all frames. This accelerating thing would be said to be stationary in some non-inertial frame. This is a nit, sure. And as David says, all things can be considered in any frame, inertial or not. David desires to consider everything in just one frame despite the total impracticality of doing that.

5. Do you accept that, strictly speaking, the statement: "object A is moving at 5 m/s" has no physical significance because it does not correspond to anything that can be empirically confirmed or denied? Do you accept that in order to give it such physical significance I have to say something like: "object A is moving at 5 m/s relative to object B"?

This of course is exactly what David has been denying. Science finds no physical significance to that statement for the reasons you state, but David finds significance to it because it has metaphysical significance, and our conflict seems to revolve around my (and you?) asserting that difference and him denying it.

[Halc]

That explains what Steve was getting at, but if you're adding vectors, you're just hiding decelerations by passing them off as accelerations, so it is indeed just a mathematical abstraction.

You are referring to speed here, not velocity. Speed (but not velocity) is always positive. Something can accelerate without changing speed. Something can have positive acceleration that reduces its speed, and negative acceleration that increases it. Vectors simply don't work like scalars. Acceleration in physics (not in common language) is a vector quantity, the one in Newton's F=ma. F is also a vector, as is momentum. Mass and energy are not, despite both being frame dependent.

There is one underlying reality when it comes to the frequency of light coming off the apple, but you can't know what it is unless you can identify the absolute frame.

This is false even in your view. A moving uniformly colored object has different frequencies coming off the one side vs the other, and those frequencies degrade in this absolute reference since that reference is not inertial. This is why the super-bright light still visible from the big bang is such low energy now. The frequency has gone down over those billions of years. Yes, I know what you are saying. If there is this reference handy, clearly any photon has but the one frequency at that one event, just not at some other event the photon encounters.

If all frames are equally valid, you have no basis for not accepting all of them as being asserted to be equally correct.

SR doesn't assert that they're correct (matching reality) since it makes no assertions about what actually is. It just asserts that experiments yield the same results in any frame. Please respond to this point, and not just repeat what you've already asserted so many times. I understand what you're saying, but I claim that you are doing metaphysics, and SR is about physics.

SR claims that there is no absolute frame

No it doesn't. It just says that one is not needed to get local physics to work. Again, you ignore this point which I have repeated multiple times.

[Steve3007]

4. If an object is moving in a circle (rotating), like a stone on a string, a planet in a circular orbit or the apparatus in the Sagnac Effect experiments that you have mentioned, do you accept that the object is accelerating towards the centre of the circle and is therefore in a non-inertial reference frame?

Well, all things, accelerating or not, are in all frames. This accelerating thing would be said to be stationary in some non-inertial frame. This is a nit, sure...

Yes. Good point. I should have said:

"...do you accept that the object is accelerating towards the centre of the circle and is therefore stationary with respect to a non-inertial reference frame?"

I don't think that is a nit-picking point. I think you're right to point it out and it illustrates the importance, in a subject like this, of using precise unambiguous language and being absolutely clear what we're saying. Perhaps the term "reference frame" is sometimes misleading. Maybe it leads some people to believe that it's some kind of physical object. As far as I recall, it's not a term that is explicitly introduced in the high school physics in which we learn the basics of classical mechanics.

[Steve3007]

To David Cooper.

For reference, here is a link to a recent post of mine:

viewtopic.php?p=318936#p318936

Here is a thing that I said in that post:


You also seem very confused as to whether you think GR/SR and LET are mathematically the same or mathematically different. Sometimes you say they're the same. Sometimes you say that SR/GR fails to conform to the rules of mathematics. For example (from page 3 of that discussion):

They most certainly are contradictions, and anyone who doesn't understand that is being plain irrational, failing to conform to the rules of mathematics.

In answer to the question: "So Lorentz came up with all of the same ideas as Einstein?":

An alternative theory using the same maths but with a radically different interpretation.

If they use "the same maths" and one of them "fails to conform to the rules of mathematics" then so does the other.

If you do assert that there are logical contradictions in GR and SR which don't exist in LET, while at the same time also asserting that they are mathematically identical, these two assertions themselves directly contradict each other.


I pointed out a condradiction between your two assertions. Your answer, in a more recent post, did not address that contradiction. For reference, here is a link to that more recent post:

viewtopic.php?p=319010#p319010

Here is something that you said there:

1=2 is a contradiction. A theory that accepts 1=2 is not the same as a theory that rejects 1=2.

You appear to have ignored my point about your contradiction. Rather than pointing out the contradiction again, this time I will ask direct questions and see if you address it in that form:

1. Leaving aside which page they're on, do you acknowledge that the two quotes above are taken from your posts in that physics forum?

2. If two different theories "use the same maths" (as you put it) and one of them contains logical contradictions, does the other one:

a. Not contain any logical contradictios.
b. Contain logical contradictions.

[Steve3007]

Just to be absolutely crystal clear, the first quote was taken from post #41. The second quote was taken from post #48. The label of the poster who added those two posts is "David Cooper". Here is another link to that forum:

https://www.thenakedscientists.com/foru ... c=74095.40

Here is a link to post #41:
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/foru ... #msg548268

Here is a link to post #48:
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/foru ... #msg548134

[David Cooper]

I probably got the effective mirror angle wrong in my previous post - it more likely becomes 15 degrees but I'm not working with a diagram, so it's easy to forget what's going where. What matters is the approach: you have to use measurements from a frame in which you aren't at rest instead of using the frame in which you're at rest, because doing the latter is building in an assumption that you're stationary.

This quote does not omit the relations(which I bolded). The one (italicized) line does admittedly leave it off, because the context provides it.

I've lost track of what your issue is with this. "Relative to you" automatically means a frame is being used in which you are at rest, while "relative to them" automatically means a frame is being used in which they are not moving. The part in italics shouldn't be controversial either as it's necessarily true if both frames are equally valid. If it isn't true, it's necessarily not the case that both frames are equally valid.

Funny, since the undetectable flow of time seems like magic to me. It solves no problems except ones you make up. 'Magic' seems to just be the word you use to label opinions with which you disagree.

The flow of time is seen in the flow of causality. Ban flow of the latter and you have no causality, and causality can't flow if time is frozen. Magic is the label I apply whenever someone depends on magic instead of selecting a rational mechanism.

OK, you seem to have no concept of the block model. There are no moves or flow.

Why do you think I used the word "imaginary"? The whole point of the block is that it is static, but you can pretend that movement exists in it in some abstract way when messing with the minds of gullible people. You can show them that things can "travel" forwards through less time than others and still meet up without event-meshing failures. The whole thing is a contrived mathematical abstraction which is so extreme that every part of the block is directly adjacent to every other because light can "move" from any part to any other part downstream by covering zero distance.

An objective (preferred) frame is possible in a block. It doesn't imply flow. A frame is not a specific slice of the block, only an orientation. LET has that frame, but it doesn't assert the flow. I found no claims to that nature. You're not describing the claims of LET.

Let has a Newtonian time that flows. It would be possible for there to be a block left behind by this, but the real physics is in the flow rather than in any fossil left behind.

You are drawing conclusions from the misworded conclusion (denial of flow). If that were reworded to match the question, your argument that apparently depends on it would fall apart. I said it doesn't matter. LET asserts a preferred frame. It doesn't assert (or deny) flow.

LET requires flow - causality cannot operate without it. The argument only needs to separate non-flow from flow models, then it shows why the non-flow ones aren't viable (because they ban causality), leaving you with no option other than to go with the flow.

SR does not say this. It says clocks can be measured to run slow in frames in which they are moving. This statement has no dependency on an absolute frame or the lack of it.

Without an absolute frame, no frame can run its clocks (clocks at rest in that frame) slow. If some clocks actually do run slower than others, you have an absolute frame whose clocks run fastest.

It does run at an unslowed rate in the frame in which he's at rest. The part about that frame being "some subservile frame that takes its lead from an absolute frame" just doesn't come into consideration. It makes no difference whether such a thing exists or not.

The universe is doing one thing and one thing only - it is either running all the clocks at the same unslowed rate or it is slowing some down in a systematic manner to avoid event-meshing failures. The choice is between those failures, contradictions or a rational underlying mechanism.

Remember, this is science. To say it is 'unslowed', it means there is no local experiment that can be done that would indicate that the clock or anything else isn't running normally, but there are tests to demonstrate that clocks moving relative to that frame are dilated.

Science should not be built upon the toleration of contradiction - that should be reserved for religion.

It isn't a metaphysical assertion about what IS: that the clock measures the actual pace of the universe or something. GR does have that concept: A preferred frame at event X might be the one where the age of the universe is maximized. Measuring the age of the universe is not a local test.

What you're attempting to do (and I'm not entirely opposed to it) is restrict science to blind measuring without allowing it to consider rational mechanisms, although all manner of metaphysical junk is getting packaged along with it regardless and is being pushed relentlessly while better stuff is being shouted down. However, if all of that was stripped out and you were just left with calculation methods in theories that don't attempt to explain how things work, what would that do for you? It would hand over the right to lay the law down about which explanations are rational and which are magic to the philosophers, mathematicians and logicians, thereby shutting physicists right out of this, removing their right to pose as an authority to pontificate on matters of "how". You thus hand over that authority to people like me who can pronounce on the different theories to rule some out as magical/irrational and others as viable. If you do that, I win - people will come to me to tell them how things most probably work and physicists will be banned from doing this. If you don't do it, I again win, because reason will prevail, and you can't get away with pretending that reasoning isn't part of physics.

Yes. That's what spacetime is. Your model (not the LET model) is one of space, changing over time. There is no spacetime in that model. You apparently find spacetime to be magic.

Spacetime isn't magic - it's just superfluous. The static block is magic because it prevents causality and renders it apparent causality instead (with the apparent patterns of causality running though the block being accounted for by an infinite number of extreme coincidences). LET does have space changing over time.

The same way you generate the flowing business: Opinions vary. "God made it" seems to be popular, especially with the 'flow' camp. Relativity has about as much opinion on this subject as the theory of natural selection has on the topic of abiogenesis. The theory is about what appears to be going on, but not about how it got there.

Either it was generated in order of creation, or there is no causation in it and it depends squarely on magic/God. It's a religious model.

Well LET doesn't assert a current position of objects. Mode 3 thus doesn't depict LET, but it does at least depict the preferred frame of LET.

LET has a current position of objects just as mode 3 shows - click the Start/Stop button and you'll see a frozen moment in time with objects in the positions they are in at that moment.

[David Cooper]

Yes David it would be unreasonable to categorically state that disproving relativity wouldn't earn a Nobel prize without knowing why it didn't earn a prize.

Disproving relativity might actually earn one, but that would require someone to find a way to identify the absolute frame by grabbing hold of the space fabric in some unexpected way, but it's hard to see any way for waves to do that, and all we have to use as tools are waves. Disproving some models of relativity isn't going to win the prize though.

Again it is funny that you chastise me for sheepishly following the scientific consensus but you yourself have no issue with conferring authority to a small committee who handed out Nobel prizes many years ago.

Where did I say I have any time for them at all? I'd only approve of them if the judges were perfect AGI systems.

I am told that modern computers rely on QM, but I can't prove that.

If QM is right, practically everything relies on it.

As proof you will see the non self correcting nature of the church.

It actually has some - they're now overriding a lot of the homophobic stuff, putting some reason before dogma.

There is no authority within the scientific community. And personal I would say the results speak for themselves.

There is an enormous amount of momentum with people peddling misinformation that should have been discarded many decades ago - the authority is collective and it selects people who misinform the public to speak for it.

Oh and I'm not attacking you either. I just disagree with you. Perhaps you feel these two things are the same?

I have no problem with people going on the attack, but you don't break down an argument by the approach you were following which was aimed at discrediting the person putting the argument across on the basis that most people making arguments against an establishment are nutters. If you think you can find a fault in the argument though, I'm all in favour of you getting your teeth stuck into it because that would be useful rather than just squandering time.

[David Cooper]

Another heading near the bottom announces: "Note that You Can't Synchronize the Clocks in a Rotating Frame"
Well you can if the clocks are adjacent, so this is irrelevant. There is no movement you can do to a pair of clocks to get them out of sync if they're always together.

How do you synchronise them if there are adjacent clocks all the way round the circuit? If you can't do this in a satisfactory way, how can any two clocks there be regarded as validly synchronised?

[David Cooper]

But the answer is c.

The correct answer is not dependent on the coordinate system you're using, so the answer c is wrong. The correct answer depends on whether it's accelerating, decelerating, or doing one followed by the other, and that depends on its movement relative to the space fabric.

2. Do you appreciate the difference between an inertial and a non-inertial frame of reference?

A non-inertial frame is one which is accelerating or is in a gravitional field. I don't know what you mean by "switches real frame continually".

If it's in a gravitational field, it can be a genuine frame. However, if it's something moving on a curved path, it's a pseudo frame. Such an object is at rest in one frame for a moment, then at rest in an adjacent frame the next, then at rest in another frame the moment after that, and so on. The frame that it's at rest in throughout is a pseudo frame.

Again, an odd answer. You don't see the significance of the concept of a vector? Does that mean you do or don't appreciate that velocity and acceleration are both vector quantities? You must surely be aware of the basic mathematics of vectors? Vector addition? Vector (cross) and scalar (dot) products? Vactor calculus? All that kind of thing? Do you see the significance of scalars? Or of any mathematical concepts?

I couldn't see the point you were making at the time, but what you're doing is taking a very specific definition of acceleration and deceleration where they become the same thing and where they shed no light on the underlying reality in which energy is either being added or removed. You seek to make out that they are the same thing so that you can assert that something can accelerate and decelerate at the same time, and by your definition of the words, that's correct. By my definition though, it's not possible, and my definition is the one that addresses the contradiction between the object taking on additional kinetic energy at the same time as it's ditching kinetic energy. Switching to a definition that hides the issue does not make the contradiction go away from the more fundamental statement using the other definition.

But, to answer the question, you do understand the definitions of "vector", "speed", "velocity", "acceleration", and "circles" which lead to the fact that an object moving at constant speed in a circle is accelerating towards the centre of the circle, right?

By one very specific definition of the word, yes. It isn't necessarily a real acceleration though just because it's been given a label with a misleading name.

And you do appreciate that if an object is accelerating then a reference frame that is stationary relative to that object is non-inertial?

Certainly, but it's not a genuine frame. I'm happy to work with such a frame regardless though if you think you can do something impossible with it.

Another odd answer.

It was a correct answer.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but, based on these strange answers, and non-answers, to straightforward questions, I can't help thinking that you're confused about what some basic physical properties such as velocity and acceleration mean and thinking that this leads you to make category errors.

You are trying to impose special meanings on certain words in order to hide an issue, whereas I am going by meanings that are more directly applicable to reality. Your intention is to equate real acceleration with real deceleration by rebranding them both as acceleration, that isn't going to work - real acceleration and real deceleration remain distinct.

In order to start analyzing advanced theories of physics such as SR, GR and LET in sufficient depth to be able to decide that SR and GR are invalid, did you do the groundwork of studying physics and maths to the equivalent of GCSE, 'A' Level and first degree standard? I don't mean necessarily having to actually do those qualifications. I just mean studying the subjects in the depths that they are studied by people who do.

I "studied" it right up to the top of school (but it was very lightweight stuff). After that, I read parts of my sister's university physics books, but I chose to follow a path into linguistics (which I had already been heavily into as a child). The actual issue here isn't how much I've studied the subject, but about which word definitions different people are using here, and you should be able to recognise when my answers relate to different meanings from yours.

If not, I honestly can't see how you can draw the conclusions that you have. In general, I don't see how it's possible to properly critique a subject unless you know what it's saying and the language in which it's saying it. I wouldn't myself. I wouldn't, for example, claim to have overturned the prevailing theories of economics (whatever they are) until I'd studied that subject in enough depth to appreciate what they say.

If you look carefully at the conflict between our answers, you'll find that yours answers (and your interpretation of your questions) are thoroughly rooted in SR and that mine are equally firmly rooted in LET. Your answers are wrong in LET. Mine are wrong in SR. None of this addresses the issue of which of the theories is/are viable/invalidated. If you want me to give you SR answers, then they will end up agreeing with yours, but that will reveal nothing. I gave you my answers, and they are naturally based on LET because LET is the most rational framework to use.

[David Cooper]

OK, backing up even further in the attempt to find some kind of common ground:

I am 5 feet 11 inches tall. That's 1.8 metres. Do you accept that I am both of those things? Or do you think it has to be one or the other?

(This is not some kind of trick question. The obvious answer will do.)

There is no contradiction there (ignoring any tiny conversion error). With acceleration and deceleration though, the kinetic energy is being increased or decreased, so if it starts at n, it either becomes n+a or n-a, and n+a = n-a only if a=0.

[Steve3007]

There is no contradiction there (ignoring any tiny conversion error).

Good. I'm glad we've found some common ground. Albeit at a very, very basic level.

With acceleration and deceleration though, the kinetic energy is being increased or decreased, so if it starts at n, it either becomes n+a or n-a, and n+a = n-a only if a=0.

No, it does not become n+a or n-a. That is incorrect. The quickest way to show that it is incorrect is by dimensional analysis. If 'n' is an energy (S.I. units = Joules) and 'a' is and acceleration (S.I. units = ms^-2) then the units of the S.I. quantity 'n + a' are not Joules.

I strongly advise you to start you education in physics and maths at GCSE level and work up towards degree level subjects like SR, GR and LET if you want to understood those subjects in sufficient depth to propose replacing any of them.

Classically, Kinetic Energy = ¹/₂mv²

As we know from our maths, velocity is a vector and multiplication of vectors takes two forms, the vector (cross) product, which returns another vector and the scalar (dot) product which returns a scalar. So what does v² mean in the above expression? It means the square of the speed because kinetic energy is a scalar quantity. i.e. it has magnitude but no direction. So if an object is accelerating but its acceleration vector, relative to the Earth, is pointing in the opposite direction to its velocity vector then the magnitude of its velocity, a.k.a. its speed, relative to the Earth, is reducing. Therefore its kinetic energy, relative to the Earth, is reducing. It is accelerating, and its K.E. is reducing. Its speed is reducing. So it is decelerating, and its K.E. is reducing.

You might alo recall that gravitational potential energy, in a uniform gravitaional field g, is given by:

P.E. = mgh.

where m = mass and h = height.

Height above what? Height above the thing relative to which you are measuring its gravitational potential energy. So if g = 10 ms^-2 and h = 10m above the ground and m = 1kg, then the P.E. relative to the ground is 1 X 10 X 10 = 100 Joules. But its P.E. relative to a line 10 metres above the ground is zero. Its P.E. relative to a line 5 metres above the ground is 50 Joules. And so on.

Do you get all this? It's basic stuff. If you haven't got it, you really don't have any chance of properly understanding the concepts that are built on it, to the point where you can critique them. Remember: You can't build the roof of a house until you've built the foundations and walls. Do you understand what I mean by that metaphor?

[David Cooper]

You are referring to speed here, not velocity. Speed (but not velocity) is always positive. Something can accelerate without changing speed. Something can have positive acceleration that reduces its speed, and negative acceleration that increases it. Vectors simply don't work like scalars. Acceleration in physics (not in common language) is a vector quantity, the one in Newton's F=ma. F is also a vector, as is momentum. Mass and energy are not, despite both being frame dependent.

I'm quite happy to stick to talking about speed relative to a space fabric and relative to other objects, with accelerations being increases in speed relative to the space fabric and decelerations being speed reductions relative to the space fabric. When I say something can't accelerate and decelerate at the same time, I do so on that basis, but clearly if you don't buy into an absolute frame, that argument doesn't go far. It wasn't intended to though: I moved straight from there to the point about a clock not being able to tick faster and slower at the same time. You may be able to fool yourself into thinking that things can accelerate and decelerate simultaneously in the underlying reality, but it's harder to make the same error with the clock speeding up and slowing down its rate of ticking simultaneously. If all clocks are able to do this, you have no mechanism to have the time of one frame govern the tick rates of other frames in the systematic way required to coordinate the unfolding of events. The simulation in mode 2 has to work using one frame to govern the ticking rates for clocks that aren't at rest in it, slowing them down. When you switch frame, the current account of events has to be thrown out and recalculated on the basis that a different frame governs the rest, and that makes some events unhappen every time you change frame. To avoid this ridiculous behaviour, it would have to calculate everything independently for each of an infinite number of frames and maintain an infinite number of parallel universes in order to allow a change of frame not to unhappen any events - what would happen then is that the frame change would be a universe change.

There is one underlying reality when it comes to the frequency of light coming off the apple, but you can't know what it is unless you can identify the absolute frame.

This is false even in your view.

There is only one frequency for it through the space fabric at any point in time, so it isn't false, although light leaving the apple in different directions can vary greatly.

A moving uniformly colored object has different frequencies coming off the one side vs the other, and those frequencies degrade in this absolute reference since that reference is not inertial. This is why the super-bright light still visible from the big bang is such low energy now. The frequency has gone down over those billions of years. Yes, I know what you are saying. If there is this reference handy, clearly any photon has but the one frequency at that one event, just not at some other event the photon encounters.

That lowering of the frequency is caused by the absolute frame being a different frame at different locations due to the expansion of space, but at any point where the light passes through the space fabric, it has a specific frequency.

If all frames are equally valid, you have no basis for not accepting all of them as being asserted to be equally correct.

SR doesn't assert that they're correct (matching reality) since it makes no assertions about what actually is. It just asserts that experiments yield the same results in any frame. Please respond to this point, and not just repeat what you've already asserted so many times. I understand what you're saying, but I claim that you are doing metaphysics, and SR is about physics.

SR has a simple choice to make, and it must make it regardless of whether it wants to avoid the issue or not because the choice is forced. Either the accounts of all frames are equally true or they aren't. If they are, then contradictions are generated, and so they cannot reasonably be taken to be equally true. The only option is that they aren't all equally true. Having accepted that they aren't equally true, it then becomes clear that a rational SR needs an absolute frame, and when it gets that it either becomes LET or a 4D alternative with a lot of superfluous complexity.

SR claims that there is no absolute frame

No it doesn't. It just says that one is not needed to get local physics to work. Again, you ignore this point which I have repeated multiple times.

It does, but if you want to rewrite it to allow it to have one, that suits me fine as it turns it into LET. And if it's been LET all along, then no one should have any objection to teaching relativity properly by describing how it works as LET. As it stands though, teaching SR using irrational versions with all the dogma about there being no absolute frame is accepted everywhere, but teaching it through a rational version like LET isn't allowed and will get you banned from all the physics forums. You have a lot of work to do to get rid of the accepted dodgy metaphysics from all these places that toe the establishment line and to get them to accept superior metaphysics instead.