Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[Halc]

Yes, this has been verified. That's what the Sagnac effect is. You act surprised by it. The light goes further one way than in the other, so the long way takes more time. Relativity does not predict otherwise, as you have asserted.

I'm not in the least bit surprised by it, and I never said that SR or any other kind of relativity predicts otherwise. The point that you should be focusing on is the speed of the light relative to the material of the ring that it's passing (when it's at the closest point of approach to each bit of that material).

That speed is very frame dependent. In your preferred frame, it varies around the circle as the disk spins, sometimes slower and sometimes faster than c. Both beams of light exhibit this variance.

I'm using a single frame of reference, though the whole thing can be thought through from the perspective of any other frame with the same finding coming out of it in every case. The easiest frame to imagine to begin with is the one with the centre of the ring stationary in it while the disk rotates. The ring is divided into lots of sectors, but let's keep it down to 100 of them, and we can name them s0, s1, s2, etc. all the way up to s99.

You never specified a frame. Now that you have, the ring need not be divided up. Each one of them yields the same delta-speed value for the red beam and a different one for the blue beam, but dividing up is necessary to express the varying delta-velocity value around the ring.

The emitter/detector is on the boundary between sector s0 and s99. That's how I described the experiment in the threads linked to on the other forum. I have the ring rotate anticlockwise (because I started off describing it as being set round the equator of the Earth and viewed it from over the north pole, while the sector numbers go up as you move eastward round the ring [faster than the ring is rotating]).

The point of introducing these sectors is simply to uncover something that would be hidden otherwise by averaging out the effect that we're trying to see. I want the speed of the clockwise light relative to the material of the ring as it's passing that material at close range and not when it's at the far side of the ring, so it's added up on a sector by sector basis. We have the speed of the clockwise light relative to the material of s99 while it's passing through s99, the speed of that light relative to s98 while it's passing through s98, etc. all the way round. This produces the finding that the speed of light relative to the material to the ring that it's passing while it's right next to it is higher clockwise than it is anticlockwise.

Yes it is. Don't even need to invoke relativity yet. Newton would have agreed with this. Cutting up the ring makes no different to that.

If we rotate the ring at a suitable speed, e.g. 0.6c, we can ensure that both lots of light return to the detector/emitter at the same moment after a few laps but with the clockwise light having passed all the material of the ring more times than the anticlockwise light.

OK, we have parted company with Newton. That's fast. You have a ring dilation of 4/5 to contend with. Either the ring got smaller or you will need to add more material to it. Maybe it doesn't matter. Either way, the one beam hits the detector 4 times as often as the other, same as what Newton says.

It has, on average, passed through the sectors of the ring at a higher speed relative to them than the anticlockwise light, and it has done so at a speed greater than c relative to them (on average). [The wording "on average" isn't actually necessary in this case where the centre of the ring is at rest in the frame we're using, but it is needed for other frames where the centre of the ring is moving through them.

So far so good. Yes, the rate of both beams is the same all the way around in the frame where the axis is stationary, as you proposed.

This statement makes no reference to a frame, so I presume you mean that each little sector has light moving at c in the frame where the material is stationary.

Yes - each sector is moving through the frame that we're using, and light always moves at c through this frame, as the rules demand.

Now you're switching frames mid-example. One frame has become 100 of them now, despite your lack of use of the plural. But I see in the rest of this post that you don't do anything with these little measurements. You just sort of let it drop, so I don't so the point in bringing it up in the first place. Yes, these little local frames have both beams moving at c through the momentarily stationary material.

The mathematics is all there for you to extract and run through your head,

Yes, they were pretty trivial so far. The movement of the transparent material is (pun intended) immaterial. It is the movement of the emitter/detector that matters.

and you can easily supply your own numbers to test it. I've suggested rotating the ring at 0.6c because it produces a convenient amount of length contraction for the ring - this speed contracts things to 0.8 of their rest length, so you'd need an extra 0.25 of ring material to complete the ring (which actually means it has to shrinks down in size once it's up to speed).

OK, that answers the issue I brought up. You're letting the ring contract. I still think it doesn't matter since we never specified the radius or lap time in the first place.

After the ring has completed three rotations, both lots of light have done five laps by this point from the point of view of a stationary observer standing by the ring who is not rotating with it, but the clockwise light had passed through each sector eight times while the anticlockwise light has only passed through each sector twice. This means that the clockwise moving light has passed through the sectors of the ring at a speed four times higher relative to them than the anticlockwise light did. The speed of the clockwise light relative to those sectors while passing through them is 1.6c, while the speed of the anticlockwise light relative to those sectors while passing through them is 0.4c.

As I said, pretty trivial arithmetic. Except for the shrinking unspecified ring circumference, we have yet needed to open the relativity book on this one.

I found your first post and discovered that you assert that SR and LET make the same predictions, but that only one of them predicts the Sagnac effect.

I made no such claim, so you must have read a meaning into something that wasn't there.

Oh. I thought I did. The OP posted a list of things that refuted relativity, and your initial response was that most of them do no such thing. However the Sagnac experiment ... "

That wording carried an implication that the effect was some sort of falsification of SR since it doesn't predict it, that it perhaps denies this relative speed of two moving things at > c. It doesn't. You put this up against relativity's claim that that relative speed is different in different frames. Yes, SR claims that it is measured thus, but no further. The 3D interpretation of the geometry of the universe for instance says that measurements in non-stationary frames are not actual values, and the Minkowski interpretation says all the values are actual.

The reference to it not being Minkowski Spacetime is there simply because if you use that you're dealing with different models where light has no speed because it reduces all paths to zero length.

If I parse this statement correctly, that is the straw man that steve is talking about.

A 3D theory that asserts that all frames are equally valid necessarily generates claims from different frames that contradict each other.

Hence steve asking you to define what you mean by 'valid' in this context. The 3D interpretation of SR makes no assertions that events in a moving frame are simultaneous with the current time. That such frames are valid or not I suppose depends on one's definition of valid. I've seen you use the phrase 'corresponding to reality', so no, those other frames do not correspond to the ordering of events in reality. The 3D interpretation requires two things: A preferred frame (which GR has, so it is actually pretty hard to avoid), and a preferred moment, which not even LET asserts. The 3D model simply asserts that physics works unchanged in these other frames.

People typically assert that the speed of light relative to object A is c in all directions

Straw man. This is false in any frame where said object is not stationary. If they say this, they're implying the frame where the object is stationary, as I have previously assumed you've been doing when leaving frame references off your statements like you did just there.

and then they switch frame to assert that the speed of light relative to object B is c in all directions

Again, only relative to that different frame, not to object B, and only that light will be measured thus in that frame. The Minkowski interpretation would say that objects are worldlines and their speeds are just slopes of their worldlines in various frames, all of which accurately reflect reality.

and they insist on the frame B claim about the speed of light relative to object B being the correct one for frame A too while rejecting frame A's measurement for the speed of light relative to object B.

Do you even know what a reference frame is? It is a relative reference, not an objective one. Any statement about frames is a relative one. It simply is not contradictory for me to be stationary relative to my laptop here yet be moving relative to a bird flying by, but you seem to be asserting exactly that here. I make no claim about actual objective speed of anything when saying those things. Yes, different frames order events differently, and that makes the relative speed between any two things (not just in relation to light) a frame dependent thing. You are comparing different events when making delta speed assessments, not the same events, so of course the separation between them is going to be different.

Your simulation shows this. Play with the +/- button and the relative speed between the two planets is the same in the frames at either end of the range of the frame selection, but that relative speed is greater between them in the frame half way. It can be seen better if you let that button go all the way to the frames of either of the ships.

Any frame that represents that material as having the speed of light relative to it as c in all directions is misrepresenting reality

It 1) No theory claims that all light moves at c relative to a moving object, and 2) SR theory makes no claims about the geometry of reality, but interpretations that do make claims about the geometry need to be consistent within the chosen geometry.

[Steve3007]

David,

As a starting point in correcting your mis-conceptions about what Special Relativity says, I can recommend some sources. One example of a good 1st year undergraduate level text book on Physics, that was used when I was an undergraduate (and of which I still have my copy), is "Physics" by H.C. Ohanian:

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/ ... edir_esc=y

It has sections dealing with Newtonian/Gallilean Relativity and Special Relativity on a 1st year undergraduate level.

One of the first books on Relativity for a lay audience was "ABC of Relativity" written by Betrand Russell.

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/ ... &q&f=false

You will know that the way Physics works is by making empirically testable propositions. If you've read a source similar to the ones I've suggested, you'll also know the propositions made by Special Relativity. Newton's proposal was that the laws of classical mechanics will be found to work equally well in their role of describing and predicting the results of experiments performed by anybody who is not accelerating. Then, in the 19th Century, the laws of electricity and magnetism, and then the combined laws of electromagnetism, were demonstrated. SR's empirically testable proposal was that all the laws of physics, including both mechanics and electromagnetism, would work equally well in their role of describing and predicting the results of experiments performed by anybody who is not accelerating and not in the presence of a gravitational field.

Even if you don't know any details about Electromagnetism, do you fully understand and accept the above paragraph as a reasonably accurate summary of the starting point for SR?

[David Cooper]

OK, so how are we going to answer this question?

Your way looks unnecessarily complicated, and it doesn't appear to be measuring the speed of the light relative to the material that it's passing.

The simple way to measure the speed of the light relative to the ring material is to measure the length of the ring and time how long the light takes to pass all the way through it. This should be done from a single frame. The easiest frame to visualise for this is the one in which the centre of the ring is stationary (and where all the ring material is moving round it). If we call this frame A, there is a single frame A measurement that we can measure for the length of the ring from detector/emitter all the way round and back to the detector/emitter, and it's the same length regardless of whether we measure it clockwise or anticlockwise. There is also a single frame A measurement for the time the clockwise light takes to pass all that material, and a single frame A measurement for the time the anticlockwise light takes to pass it all. That gives us speeds for the light relative to the material of the ring that it's passing (while its at closest approach to that material).

The reason I describe dividing it into lots of sectors is simply to force people to produce the measurements the right way rather than hiding the more useful result behind the useless one that would be measured by measuring the speed of the light relative to the material of the ring all averaged out (with the speed of the light relative to the ring material furthest from it also being included in the result). There's no actual need to devise a system for trying to measure the speed of light relative to the material on a sector by sector basis and average those results, but it would come approximately to the same answer and become more precise if more sectors are used. But, to get the accurate result in the easiest way, we simply measure the length of the ring material (the ring's circumference) and time the light from emitter/detector to emitter/detector.

If we switch to a different frame, we can again measure the ring's circumference and time the light, and the result will match up with the results of using frame A in that if frame A says the anticlockwise light takes four times as long to pass the material of the ring than the clockwise light, all other frames will agree with that. If you use a pseudo-frame that rotates with the ring, even then you will get the same result - they all agree that the average speed of the clockwise light relative to the material of the ring that it's passing is >c.

[David Cooper]

I compare the claims of different frames and rule them to be incompatible because to accept them as compatible is to accept that 1=2.

You are comparing claims of different interpretations and proving the interpretations are not compatible. In particular, you mix Minkowski geometry of the universe with non-Minkowski, and find claims made by each to result in this 2=1. If you want to demonstrate the inconsistency of the Minkowski model, don't have non-Minkowski as one of your premises.

It doesn't matter whether mode 2 is 3D or 4D (Minkowski), the contradictions appear in it and invalidate both mode 2 models.

Your quiz in your webpage starts right out with a premise of non-Minkowski model of reality, which is fine, but then the remaining questions presume a Minkowski interpretation of reality and SR to draw contradictions. That is mixing models..

The first question relates primarily to a static block universe (which covers both 3D and 4D, though the latter is its main focus). In question two, the preamble includes the following: "The interactive diagram ... shows three different models for running the events during the construction phase of a block universe (with a 4D Spacetime structure), but they also serve to show the progression of events in universes where the past does not persist and there is no lasting block, so all bases are covered." I notice that I didn't spell out that 3D versions are included, but they are included in this. Question 3 also covers the non-block version of mode 1, but I can see now that I haven't spelt that out clearly enough. That's one of the hazards of writing and rewriting something and losing track of what it says now and what it said before - things can go missing and I don't notice because it's still there in my mind. However, I haven't looked at the questions for a while and I'm seeing lots of places where clarifications are required. You're also helping to flag them up. Some of the inadequacies of the wording have also been influenced heavily by my attempt to pin down specific people who were arguing against it at the time of its design, and I can see now that I've weighted it too heavily towards their peculiarities. I can also see now that its tone is driven by irritation at the irrational people who had been wasting my time for months playing games of avoidance and who had to be pushed ridiculously hard to get them to answer direct questions.

Looking at something from different angles and creating different images of them does not generate contradictions.

You are arguing otherwise.

Hardly - if the two things map correctly to the same reality, they're compatible, but if they don't, they aren't. If you freeze everything at one moment and change frame, mode 3 shows different compatible views of that frozen moment, but mode 2 shows incompatible views.

Consider just for a moment that I am correct about your mixing two different views. I really tire of these repetitive posts where you give the same repetitive answers and don't actually address the point I am trying to make here.

If someone keeps getting something wrong, it doesn't become right by repetition - I have to keep labelling it as wrong so that they don't get the idea that their wrong position is right. The contradictions show mode 2 to be invalid and no amount of wanting it to be valid can stop the contradictions being contradictions.

If you don't think that's happening though, just go to a physics forum and watch your perfectly reasonable posts being deleted until you get banned

Or alternatively you could actually consider the replies you get instead of assuming up front that it is a conspiracy of inconsistency. Clearly you know I'm wrong so you're not even considering that I have a point.

You're trying to make out that the dogma tied to SR either doesn't exist or carries no weight in Physics, but that doesn't fit with Einstein's own claims, with the claims of the people teaching the public about what SR is, the people who run physics forums, and the host of enforcers who dominate science forums and actively push the dogma while shouting down LET. The establishment is heavily biased in favour of the dogma, and the dogma is irrational.

The 4D version of SR generates contradictions in the same way as its 3D equivalent - modes 2 and 3 can both represent 3D or 4D universes.

Well, they do if you assert them both at the same time, yes.

Each should be treated separately, and that's what I do: mode 3 3D is one model, mode 3 4D is another, etc.

LET's very clear - it's a 3D model which runs under Newtonian time.

Give a reference to that please. The wiki doesn't say it. Maybe somewhere else does.

There's very little available to reference - you just pick it up from people who work with LET through communications with them. I use language the way they typically do, though there are some who use SR terms instead because they want to talk the same language as SR people, but the tendency is to reject badly formed terms. Lorentz himself used the term "time dilation", but most of the people working with LET that I know reject it and only use it (reluctantly) when communicating with people who use SR.

It does not run under Newtonian time since that model predicts a different light speed measurement when you're not stationary. That one has been empirically falsified.

Newtonian time works fine - moving clocks run slow (under-recording time as a consequence) and get length-contracted, and that's all that that's needed for compatibility with experiments. Of course, we can't identify which clocks are ticking fastest, so we never know if a clock is registering Newtonian time or if it's under-representing it.

The concepts don't require one to visualize all members of the set at once any more than the concept of integers is less understandable becuase nobody has printed the entire list. Considering of a select state and the states that immediately relate to it are enough.

I know you aren't required to be able to visualise them, but it's always worth finding ways to do it regardless as it aids clear thinking.

Not needed. The events have the same relationship without that: A being the immediate prior state to B.

There's a set of all items that will ever be invented, but many of them haven't been invented yet, so many items that belong in that set don't actually exist and the set cannot contain them. It's the same with your positions - if they've never been actualised, they don't exist. (Even when they do "exist", they don't really exist because they're mere patterns. There are no circles. The things we call circles are just circular in shape. The positions in a game are patterns, and they too should ideally be described without framing them as nouns as if they exist. Abstract nouns are just a linguistic convenience.)

You asserted that causation is at play in a static set of things which don't actually exist in any real form until they've been actualised through a running process with real things representing them, and even then they only exist in the way that patterns and shapes exist.

I found the model to be similar. I bolded the part I never asserted. In particular, I made no ontological assertions about anything.

I know - you didn't supply the part in bold, but I did because it reveals the truth of what would be required for causation to be at play there.

Yes, it exists in the way that patterns and shapes exist, but I left that agnostic. I don't know the ontological status of such things.

Well, when I say a plate is circular, there is no actual circle involved. The circle as a noun is an abstraction and isn't real. It's the same with all abstract nouns - they aren't real things, but have merely been worded as if they are things.

It is a valid model if the model of our universe plays by similar rules, which is a static set of things with indeterminate ontological state except for the Minkowski addition that different states have equal ontological status. It doesn't specify that status, but just that they're all the same. The set of chess states is exactly like that. There is no ontological difference between one state and another one, despite the fact that I've left that status unspecified.

The block universe that was never generated through running time then becomes like the set of things that haven't been invented yet - nothing in it exists, but is merely a potential reality that could be actualised by real stuff with events running through in order of causation.

I didn't rule it out entirely - I only ruled out SR. A 4D theory similar to SR could be viable, but it goes against the metaphysical dogma tied to SR.

Umm... What do you think is the assertion of the interpretation you say is contradictory???? What dogma are you talking about? I thought I understood your argument. Are you trying to disprove a 3D interpretation of SR? I thought that's the model you're pushing.

I've gone through all the different models: each of the three modes can be 3D or 4D, and block or non-block, and all have been covered. Mode 3's 3D and 4D ones are both viable (while the block versions of them are superfluous), but they accept that there's an absolute frame. Mode 2 models all generate contradictions (which also affect the block versions by making their generation depend on contradictions). Mode 1's 3D and 4D models suffer from event-meshing failures which are fatal to the non-block versions, but the block versions of them are arguably viable if you accept a Newtonian time into them to run in addition to the "time" of the "time" dimension so that events can change over Newtonian time at individual Spacetime locations. The dogma about there being no absolute frame produces mode 2 models which are invalidated by the way they generate contradictions.

A 3D model has an objective frame, and only events simultaneous with a preferred moment are real. Your mode-3 in the simulation depicts a 3D interpretation of SR. The other two modes depict no interpretation that I know of, but the diagram above the simulation is a reasonable depiction of the 4D model.

Mode 3 when treated as 3D is LET. The other two modes are automatically come from trying to run SR's dogma, one (mode 2) showing what happens without an absolute frame and run some clocks slower than others (while also trying to run them faster than the same others), and the third (mode 1) showing what happens if no clocks are allowed to run slow. These models should be known to everyone who's a fan of SR, but because they show up its failings, they are not normally shown anywhere precisely because they show SR to be broken.

There is no possibility of real causation in that model.

This presumes a definition of causation from a different interpretation. I don't care if you disagree with the model you don't like, but bringing in definitions from different models just proves that the models are not compatible.

Of course they're not compatible - that's exactly what I've shown. People mix models and use a bit of one and a bit of another to try to show that SR works, but they're mixing parts of different, incompatible models to do this. If they were to stick to trying to do it with a single model, they'd find that it doesn't work. The only models that are viable break key rules of SR (which you write off as metaphysics and say aren't part of physics, but hardly anyone out there in the real world appears to be aware that they aren't part of the physics, and they don't understand that they've been disproved either).

You apparently are not even aware that you are doing this. Maybe you should drop the SR claim and just push your presentist claims with the begging argument that a block model says it is also yesterday, therefore it is wrong. 2=1 and all that.

What I'm doing is separating out all the incompatible models to stop people making illegal mixtures of them, and I'm showing them how they relate to SR and how none of them can make SR function in a viable manner.

I won't accept any model with fake causation in it

Didn't ask you to accept it. I'm asking you to demonstrate inconsistency with itself, including what you label as fake causation. It is quite fallacious to put the 'fake' label on a part that doesn't match your opinion.

It's fake because there is no causation in it. Your example of non-running causation isn't causation, and that should be obvious when you realise that the things it's supposedly acting on without running don't exist.

[Steve3007]

There are now so, so many points to deal with in this thread that, at this time, it doesn't seem worth me trying to address more than one of them with another long-ish post. So I'll address just one important point from a previous post for now.

The claim that all frames are equally valid is part of the mathematics. If you don't accept that claim as part of SR, then it's being taught wrongly practically everywhere because that assertion is locked firmly to it along with the denial of an absolute frame.

Read about the concept of Relativty (both Newton's and Einstein's) in any textbook or any online source written by somebody who knows about the subject. Every textbook and online source I've seen, with the single exception of yours, says something very close to this:

The laws of physics are invariant (i.e., identical) in all inertial systems (i.e., non-accelerating frames of reference).

That's from the Wikipedia article on Special Relativity. The textbook I mentioned earlier, by Ohanian, says this on page 992, chapter 41, of the second edition:

All the laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames.

Think carefully about the meanings of those statements.

Notice the fact that they do not simply make the vague, ambiguous and apparently untestable proposition "all frames are equally valid". They make it clear that they're talking about inertial frames and, crucially, they propose something that can be empirically tested - a key requirement of any scientific proposition. Saying "all the laws of physics are the same" here proposes that if you do any experiment (i.e make an observation), using the same inertial reference frame against which to record all your results, and observe the relationships between your experimental results in order to derive general laws, then the laws that you derive will be the same as if you'd done that experiment, and recorded all those results against a different inertial reference frame. This is a testable proposition.

Let the precise meaning of that sink in before going on to consider anything else. It's essential to let that sink in, and then consider exactly which laws of physics are being considered, before going on to consider the famous testable proposition that comes out of Special Relativity as a conclusion.

[Steve3007]

David, to refresh my memory I've just had a quick skim back through our discussion from the start (page 3). It seems pretty clear to me that your misunderstanding of what the Theory of Special Relativity proposes is built right into the foundations of everything that you subsequently say. As I said at the start, this is exemplified by the very first sentence in the article that you wrote about Special Relativity:

Relativity came out of the simple idea that you can never tell whether you are moving or not...

This statement is simply not true. Your excuse for it was this:

It's an introduction aimed at readers who don't necessarily have any pre-existing knowledge of relativity. In the interests of simplicity and being concise, certain things are not told with absolute precision or with complete elimination of ambiguity. However, it is as correct as it needs to be - the aim is to get people to the point where they can see what it is, what it does, how it can do it, and how it can't do it.

Telling untruths because you want to make things simpler for a lay audience is not an excuse for telling untruths. It just means you're misleading that audidence.

So, for what it's worth, I think it's important for you to properly consider what I said in my previous post and to properly understand the real reasons why the Theory of Special Relativity was proposed, taking it one step at a time.

---

A quick aside on the subject of intellectual snobbery: Various things you've said in the past to both me and others suggest that you think a lot of people who disagree with you are appealing to authority rather than good argument and empirical evidence. I can't speak for others, but for myself I want to state that this is absolutely not the case and I have taken pains to make that clear to you and others in many, many previous posts here. I have stated the level of education in a subject that I think you need in order to properly understand it. I have said nothing about the circumstances in which that education should be attained. There are many examples of physicists and mathematicians from the past who have made great contributions without having had what might be regarded as a formal education to an advanced level. Oliver Heaviside, who I mentioned before, is one example. No, I judge your arguments by properly considering what you actually say. I just ask you to do the same for others.

[Halc]

Concerning the Sagnac reply to Steve:

I was still wondering why the description of considering the ring in sectors. The whole point of this post is to ask why you bring that up, since you seem to be drawing no conclusions from it. I'm not disagreeing with anything you post here except that part about 'the right way' being the creation of more work by dividing up the ring.

The simple way to measure the speed of the light relative to the ring material is to measure the length of the ring and time how long the light takes to pass all the way through it. This should be done from a single frame. The easiest frame to visualise for this is the one in which the centre of the ring is stationary.

Agree.

The reason I describe dividing it into lots of sectors is simply to force people to produce the measurements the right way rather than hiding the more useful result behind the useless one that would be measured by measuring the speed of the light relative to the material of the ring all averaged out (with the speed of the light relative to the ring material furthest from it also being included in the result).

There is no need to average anything out since the values you are expressing (speed of each light beam light relative to the moving transparent material) is constant for each color, but not identical to each other. So this doesn't really answer what the division into sectors is expected to gain. How it is 'the right way' has not been spelled out.

There's no actual need to devise a system for trying to measure the speed of light relative to the material on a sector by sector basis and average those results, but it would come approximately to the same answer and become more precise if more sectors are used.

Still don't understand what the sector approach provides. Averaging a bunch of identical numbers is not going to alter the result, or make it somehow more accurate. One sector (the whole piece of material) is enough. 5 is the same as the average of 100 5's.

If we switch to a different frame, we can again measure the ring's circumference and time the light, and the result will match up with the results of using frame A in that if frame A says the anticlockwise light takes four times as long to pass the material of the ring than the clockwise light, all other frames will agree with that.[/quote]Yes, the ratio will be preserved, even though the ring is smaller and the angular velocity (RPM) is reduced. It would now possibly be instructive to describe averaging those sectors since the material speed is not constant and therefore the light speed relative to the moving material is no longer constant either. It would still be doing it the hard way, and likely incorrect since there is no obvious way to divide up a length of material that isn't moving at uniform speed.

If you use a pseudo-frame that rotates with the ring

It is called a rotating frame of reference, not a pseudo-frame. A paper map of your hometown utilizes a rotating reference frame, else it would be pretty useless. I say this just to correct your terminology. The ring material is everywhere stationary in that frame, and the two beams of light move at constant rates of greater and less than c in it respectively, so again, no need for cutting up and averaging.

[Halc]

Your quiz in your webpage starts right out with a premise of non-Minkowski model of reality, which is fine, but then the remaining questions presume a Minkowski interpretation of reality and SR to draw contradictions. That is mixing models..

The first question relates primarily to a static block universe (which covers both 3D and 4D, though the latter is its main focus).

A 3D block model is not one of our own universe.

In question two, the preamble includes the following: "The interactive diagram ... shows three different models for running the events during the construction phase of a block universe (with a 4D Spacetime structure)

If it has a construction phase, it would be a growing block model, which is a flowing present coupled with the ontological reality of moments prior to that preferred present. Proponents of that model typically assert that they experience this leading present, not the history left in its wake. Your simulation does not depict this construction phase. All three modes show objects 'happening' at one moment and not existing in other moments. The Minkowski model has no concept of a preferred moment. The simulation seems capable of depicting such a model, but no mode seems to have been programmed for it.

Consider just for a moment that I am correct about your mixing two different views. I really tire of these repetitive posts where you give the same repetitive answers and don't actually address the point I am trying to make here.

If someone keeps getting something wrong, it doesn't become right by repetition

OK, you won't consider it. Gotcha.

The contradictions show mode 2 to be invalid and no amount of wanting it to be valid can stop the contradictions being contradictions.

Yes, mode 2 is invalid, and for the reasons you state. But it doesn't correspond to any known valid interpretation of reality, for the reasons you state. It is your straw man. Knocking mode 2 down is not discrediting any model except mode 2.

Give a reference to that please. The wiki doesn't say it. Maybe somewhere else does.

There's very little available to reference - you just pick it up from people who work with LET through communications with them.

The philosophical opinions of people that typically gravitate to LET is irrelevant, especially since it works either way, just like SR and GR. It is the published model I want. If it isn't a published necessary part of the model, then your claim is not backed by LET theory. LET is also no longer the theory originally proposed by Lorentz. Empirical evidence has since evolved it to its modern form.

Lorentz himself used the term "time dilation", but most of the people working with LET that I know reject it and only use it (reluctantly) when communicating with people who use SR.

What do they call the effect of clocks running slow when moving? Also, who are these people "working with LET" with whom you communicate. I have communicated once with a physicist that one might recognize, and I don't have regular contact with minions that work on these sorts of theories. Perhaps you do. I was not aware for instance that active work is being done specifically on LET by any group. How could there be if it makes no distinct predictions?

Newtonian time works fine - moving clocks run slow (under-recording time as a consequence) and get length-contracted, and that's all that that's needed for compatibility with experiments.

Newton's model did not have moving clocks running slow.

The block universe that was never generated through running time then becomes like the set of things that haven't been invented yet - nothing in it exists, but is merely a potential reality that could be actualised by real stuff with events running through in order of causation.

This is your opinion. As I said, I don't expect you to accept it. But if the model makes the same predictions, it isn't inconsistent.

Mode 3's 3D and 4D ones are both viable

Mode 3 depicts presentism. The other modes don't depict any known model, but I agree that your logic demonstrates their inconsistency.

Mode 3 when treated as 3D is LET.

The text accompanying each mode treats them all as 3D. The 4D model is nowhere represented. This is why I say mode 2 doesn't depict any known model.

This presumes a definition of causation from a different interpretation. I don't care if you disagree with the model you don't like, but bringing in definitions from different models just proves that the models are not compatible.

Of course they're not compatible - that's exactly what I've shown.

You were supposed to show that the non-presentist interpretation of SR was wrong, not just incompatible with the presentist interpreation of it.

People mix models and use a bit of one and a bit of another to try to show that SR works, but they're mixing parts of different, incompatible models to do this.

The irony drips from this statement.

[Steve3007]

Halc: Sorry to keep posting straight after you've posted, but I really feel that I need to make it clear to David the extent to which he's misunderstood Special Relativity at the most basic level, and the long time delays between posts make that difficult.

In anticipation of David's possible further assertions that his article called "Understanding Relativity" was sloppily written just because he was trying to make it accessible, and not because it's just plain wrong, I'd like to quote the first two paragraphs rather than just the first sentence:

Relativity came out of the simple idea that you can never tell whether you are moving or not. When you think you are walking past a tree, it is quite possible that the tree is actually moving past you and that you are having to walk along just to stay still. However, because the Earth is moving as well, it is much more likely that you and the tree are both moving, though there is still a question as to whether you might be moving faster or slower than the tree.

Albert Einstein's theory of relativity says that it is impossible to work out whether anything is really moving or not, and that does indeed seem to be the case (although he wasn't the first person to say this), but he went on to claim that it is perfectly correct to say that everything is both stationary and moving at the same time: you can claim that you are stationary while everything moving relative to you is moving, but it is also right for someone else to claim that they are stationary while everything moving relative to them is moving, including you: it's all relative! Both beliefs are valid not just because neither can be proved or disproved, but because he asserts that both claims are true, and that both claims are equally true.

I've highlighted some particularly clear errors, which will mislead readers, in bold. Special Relativity does not say these things. If you claim that it does, you are misrepresenting it and misleading your readers. As I said in my last-but-one post, if you want to know what it actually does say read what it says. I've helped you out by citing some sources. There are many, many others.

OK. I promise to leave it there now until I get a reply.

[Halc]

Halc: Sorry to keep posting straight after you've posted

Why sorry? Not like I'm striving to be last all the time...

but I really feel that I need to make it clear to David the extent to which he's misunderstood Special Relativity at the most basic level, and the long time delays between posts make that difficult.

In anticipation of David's possible further assertions that his article called "Understanding Relativity" was sloppily written just because he was trying to make it accessible, and not because it's just plain wrong, I'd like to quote the first two paragraphs rather than just the first sentence:

Relativity came out of the simple idea that you can never tell whether you are moving or not. When you think you are walking past a tree, it is quite possible that the tree is actually moving past you and that you are having to walk along just to stay still. However, because the Earth is moving as well, it is much more likely that you and the tree are both moving, though there is still a question as to whether you might be moving faster or slower than the tree.

Albert Einstein's theory of relativity says that it is impossible to work out whether anything is really moving or not, and that does indeed seem to be the case (although he wasn't the first person to say this), but he went on to claim that it is perfectly correct to say that everything is both stationary and moving at the same time: you can claim that you are stationary while everything moving relative to you is moving, but it is also right for someone else to claim that they are stationary while everything moving relative to them is moving, including you: it's all relative! Both beliefs are valid not just because neither can be proved or disproved, but because he asserts that both claims are true, and that both claims are equally true.

I've highlighted some particularly clear errors, which will mislead readers, in bold. Special Relativity does not say these things. If you claim that it does, you are misrepresenting it and misleading your readers. As I said in my last-but-one post, if you want to know what it actually does say read what it says. I've helped you out by citing some sources. There are many, many others.

OK. I promise to leave it there now until I get a reply.

For one thing, the entire quote above makes reference to claims from the principle of relativity (POR), which is centuries older than Einstein. SR holding to this principle is not what makes the newer theory distinct.
Of the four passages you bolded, the 3rd one was actually said by Einstein (with frame references in the context there), making reference to this principle. He was speaking of different speeds relative to different things, which is fully allowed. The wording implies that the quote is part of Einstein's theory of relativity, but it doesn't come from that theory. Einstein was just giving a POR reminder.

I don't find the last item entirely wrong. "Both are true" is different than asserting that "both correspond to reality", which would be a metaphysical assertion. Neither POR nor SR make metaphysical assertions, despite the latter suggesting some. The 'both are true' might be interpreted that it is not incorrect to do your calculations in any convenient frame, which is what POR asserts (but knowing David, wasn't meant that way). Being in addition 'equally true' seems deliberately misleading. If something is true, how can something else be true but not as much, or more? The 'equally' bit is definitely not claimed by POR.

The first two bolded passages do indeed misrepresent POR. The theory of relativity actually makes the opposite claim, that it is possible to determine being stationary in a preferred frame. As for SR, it actually claims to not be a model of reality, just a model of a special ideal case which happens not to exist anywhere.

No claims actually introduced by the theory of relativity (TOR) are mentioned in any of what you quoted from David's page.

[Steve3007]

Halc,

When you say POR, meaning Principle of Relativity, I assume you mean the thing that is also sometimes called Galilean or Newtonian Relativity.

In my view, the claim "everything is both stationary and moving at the same time" is incorrect (regardless of who said it) because it incorrectly implicitly states that "stationary" and "moving" are properties of single, individual objects ("every-thing"). It is part of the definition of the terms "stationary" and "moving" that they are not. They are properties of the change in the spatial relationship between two objects with respect to time. So the sentence makes a category error. if that sentence said "everything is both stationary and moving at the same time with respect to the aether" then it would not make that category error. But it would contain a logical contradiction. Neither POR nor SR say that.

The sentence "Albert Einstein's theory of relativity says that it is impossible to work out whether anything is really moving or not" is, in my view, the worst one in the passage that I quoted, because it is the most obviously factually incorrect one. Movement is a well defined empirically measurable quantity. There is no theory of physics which states that it is impossible to measure it. It might be possible to forgive these inaccuracies if David didn't then go on the spread them through everything he subsequently says.

Anyway, my main aim here, for now, is a simple one. It is to get David Cooper to read enough about Special Relativity to understand what it means when it proposes: "All the laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames", and why it proposes that. Never mind the speed of light for now. All his talk about more advanced things, such as the Sagnac effect, are pointless until he's done that.

[Steve3007]

SR holding to this principle is not what makes the newer theory distinct.

Yes, the thing that makes SR different from POR is, at heart, really very simple. POR says the laws of mechanics are the same in all inertial reference frames. SR extends this to the laws of Electromagnetism.

[David Cooper]

(C) Does the red light pass through that material at a higher speed relative to it than the blue light does?

No. Unlike for question A, we are now no longer talking about the time taken for the light to pass through the whole ring of material.

We are talking about the red light (the clockwise-moving light) moving through/past the material of the ring as a whole relative to that material piece by piece at closest approach. You have interpreted the question in such a way as to turn it into a different question, so you haven't answered the question that was intended, and have thereby avoided the issue that it's designed to pin you down on. The same applies to your answers to (D) and (E).

Frames of reference don't talk.

Statements can be generated from frames by following the rules about how frames work, so all such statements can be described as assertions made by those frames. This is a convenient way of reducing something long-winded to something compact and clear.

Measurements are made using them as a reference (hence the name). Measurements made in inertial frames of reference find that the local instantaneous speed of light is c in all directions.

Which means that they assert that the speed of light relative to objects asserted to be stationary in that frame is c in all directions, and yet we know that some of the material in the ring cannot have light moving past it in all directions at c, so some frames are necessarily misrepresenting reality.

[David Cooper]

The theories of Relativity and the LET brought them into this.

My argument has no reliance upon Maxwell's Equations at all. They simply have no relevance to it as the only thing they're going to do is conform to all the theories being discussed.

The 2=1 comes out of the claims that there is no absolute frame of reference and that all frames are equally valid, as you've been told repeatedly.

Please define the word "valid", as you understand it, in this context.

"Equally valid" is the relevant wording, and it includes the idea of being equally true - otherwise they are not equally valid.

The claim that all frames are equally valid is part of the mathematics.

Please show me the part of the mathematics that contains this claim.

You are playing the same old game of trying to split off the claims that aren't expressed as mathematics to pretend that they are not part of SR. If they are not part of SR though, SR still has to consider the issue of validity and truth, at which point it must recognise that contradictory claims generated from different frames cannot be equally true, at which point SR is logically required either to accept an absolute frame or go to an extreme model that suffers from other fatal defects.

The contradiction only appears if you assert that clock A is ticking more rapidly than clock B and that clock B is ticking more rapidly than clock A at the same time.

That assertion is not made...

It is if you take the claims generated from different frames to be equally true.

and the expression "at the same time", in the context of that sentence, is a misuse of language.

If you are standing at any location at all and one frame is telling you that clock A is ticking faster than clock B while another frame is telling you that clock B is ticking faster than clock A, how is that not at the same time? These contradictory claims are being generated at the same time at the same place.

This is an example of you mis-translating the Theory of Relativity, as I mentioned previously. You have therefore not collected all the knowledge necessary for the argument.

This is an example of you telling me I'm wrong when I'm the one who's right (and it keeps happening that way). You have effectively just told me the a single time is not the same time as itself! An infinite number of frames make contradictory claims (claims can be generated from them) at the same point in space at the same time - absolutely simultaneous according to the rules of any theory of relativity, but you say "at the same time" is a misuse of language in this context! You keep trying to make out that I lack competence on the basis of irrelevant gaps in my knowledge, but just stop for a moment and ask yourself why you keep making such huge errors.

The travelling twin (TT) sets off and the stay-at-home twin (ST) sees TT's clock slow down (after compensating for the Doppler effect which he knows to take into account). TT sees ST's clock appear to slow down in the same way, but he knows that ST didn't accelerate, so he might determine that his own clock must have speeded up.

"He might determine that his own clock must have speeded up" relative to what? What precisely is meant, in this context, by the statement: "my own clock has speed up"?

Relative to the other clock, of course - that's what we're comparing here. If one of them is ticking slower relative to the other, it cannot also be ticking faster relative to the other.

Either way though, these observations produce contradictions and both accounts cannot be correct (that ST's clock is now ticking faster than TT's clock and that TT's clock is now ticking faster than ST's clock at the same time). It's really straightforward stuff and I can't see why you have so much difficulty with it.

The above is a mis-representation of the accounts of ST and TT, similar in form to your earlier mis-representation.

You are just sticking your head in the sand now. We have different frames making rival assertions; one that clock A is ticking faster than clock B and another that clock B is ticking faster than clock A. If you can't see the contradiction between the two claims, your ability to judge things simply isn't up to the mark, and that's become increasingly clear as you make error after error after error.

[David Cooper]

Yes, everybody is absolutely entitled to do so. But when they want to scrutinize something that somebody else has said, the first step is to understand what it is that they have said! You repeatedly show that at the most basic level you have not done that.

Practically each person I've discussed SR with has a radically different idea of what SR is, so I go by the most common factors rather than taking any of the extreme views as gospel. You are extreme in denying the dogma that most people push along with SR at every turn as a part of SR, dogma which is pushed heavily practically everywhere and which leads to people being banned from physics forums for criticising. You are simply not describing reality.

I keep telling you what it is that the theory says and you keep just changing it back to the same old incorrect form so that you can keep finding your contradictions.

I'm attacking SR as SR is presented practically everywhere. You're trying to deny the role of the dogma, and that's great - it's always a pleasure to find people who want to disassociate themselves from it. The key thing that you're missing here though is that even if you strip away that dogma, reason and mathematics show that some models are not viable and they should be rejected as a result. That limits the options as to which models remain in play, and it actively requires the acceptance of an absolute frame or a model with two kinds of time in it. You don't have any other viable model, and the ones that are still viable are rejected by most people in the establishment as not being SR. There is a mess that needs to be cleaned up, and denying that it is there won't fix it.

You appear to be repeatedly constructing and re-constructing a straw man and then triumphantly knocking it down again. I don't know why you would want to do that.

I am isolating the different models, keeping them in different compartments and not allowing them to be mixed where they're incompatible, and I'm systematically going through those models showing which ones are still viable and which are not. The few that are still viable are not recognised as SR by most people in the establishment because they contain banned components.