David Cooper wrote: ↑September 5th, 2018, 5:27 pm
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.
That doesn't work unless you tell the alien trying to deliver mail here where you put the origin. So tell me where you put it, and if you reference anything, tell me where that thing is first.
The impossibility of doing what I ask illustrates that we don't have an absolute location. You cannot specify an absolute location except for the big bang, and we have no coordinates relative to that. I can tell you how far we are from it (that's one of the 4 numbers needed), but not in what direction one must point from it to get here (the other 3).
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.
I find pointless to posit undetectable things. Add those labels to that list. I can't get the mail delivered here by writing 'somewhere' on the envelope. Yes, we do it by comparing how we move relative to other things. Our location is relative to those other things. I see no absoluteness at all in that.
So the university textbooks teach that Einstein's relativity has been disproven??
None that I know of do, but they should.
You do realize how this makes you sound, right? I have a very controversial philosophical view, but I'm not so arrogant to say that all the texts should be rewritten to assert my personal choice, despite the fact that I arrived at the position through reason, not comfort. If on the other hand I had a scientific view that bucked the consensus like that, I would at least understand the published view, or get a job in the field since I clearly think I'm smarter than the guys getting paid to do it.
FYI, GR is beyond me. There are plenty out there that can talk circles around me. But I know my high-school physics at least, and SR isn't that hard to understand. You seem to know the math. That simulation thing, if you wrote it, is pretty impressive.
Where it becomes his assertion is when [Einstein] denies the existence of the absolute frame.
He doesn't. GR has it. Yes, it bothered him to put it back after publishing SR without the need for it. But none of SR was invalidated by that since the preferred frame is only useful on a non-local scale.
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."
I dare you to post this statement (this is what you all claim to believe) in a physics forum.
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.
That I believe is a metaphysical interpretation. He made plenty of such statements. You seem to assert otherwise. LET seems to not take a stance on this.
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.
And it all works regardless of your choice of absolute frame.
No, Metaphysics is about explaining reality. Science is about making practical predictions.
Spin and hogwash.
OK, we have a serious disagreement here. There is a lot of metaphysical speculation based on the current state of physics (especially from relativity and QM), but metaphysical claims have no way to be empirically verified or falsified. If they did, the claims would be physics.
You really need to understand this distinction.
You need to understand that your physicist friends are not playing by those rules.
I don't care if my physicist friends are expressimg metaphysical opinions. The published ones usually admit to being metaphysical interpretations, such as any interpretation of QM. Yes, those get published in physics journals, but they're not presented as physics. The parts of SR that you are attacking are the metaphysical implications that are suggested by it, but not asserted by it.
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.
I don't think a model would be very useful if it didn't make sense of things.
LET has Newtonian time, and that time simply runs. It isn't a dimension. If time didn't run, nothing could happen.
Does LET assert time not being a dimension? I didn't see that. All I say was an assertion of a preferred frame. Maybe there's a better description than whatever uninformed people put in the wiki page.
I'd love to see your example. If you've got something that can change my mind, I want it.
I doubt you want your mind changed. I'm not trying to do it. I have no better truth, but I have one that's just as good.
One example I frequently use is the set of all legal chess states, a large but finite set. It has space, time, entropy, Hilbert space, and yes, causation. It doesn't have much in the way of relativity, but you can't have it all. It is a very useful model of our own universe. Anyway, I said it wouldn't change your mind, despite it having all the elements of your ordered calculator example. Each state has one prior state that must have 'happened' first, and in order, yet the set has no rate of flow, mostly because it doesn't have a current state to give meaning to that flow. Only the positing of a current state makes the positing of the flow necessary.
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.
I know. Been there. I've taken up and discarded several radically different stances on things, especially in philosophy of mind. My QM stance is in its 3rd incarnation now, and for less than a year now.