Philosophy Discussion Forums

David,

If you haven't done it already, I think it would be a useful exercise for you to investigate the experimentally determined reasons why 'c' is deemed to be a constant, starting by looking at the work of the great experimental physicist Michael Faraday. Faraday's experiments measured the relative strengths of the electric and magnetic fields. Maxwell's analysis of those experiments revealed the (then) extraordinary conclusion that the relative strengths of those two apparently different forces is directly related to the speed of light. And Maxwell's equations, firmly rooted as they are in the experimental evidence provided by Faraday and others, turned out to be wave equations.

But the results of experiments to determine the relative strengths of the electric and magnetic forces, like the results of mechanics experiments, do not depend on relative differences in the uniform motion of the laboratories in which the experiments take place. This is the observation, grounded as I said in solid experimental evidence, that led to the idea of 'c' as a universal constant.

If you've studied this subject in the depth required to overturn it at a very high level, then you are already very, very well aware of all this to a much greater extent than I, who does not have such ambitions, right?

David Cooper wrote: ↑September 5th, 2018, 6:56 pm

Halc wrote: ↑September 5th, 2018, 1:56 amA 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.

Oh good, you are taking this one apart. I am having real trouble with a few things you have left unspecified. Where is the origin of your angles? It is apparently the direction of travel, so that the light moving up and down the hall does so at angle 0 if we're moving that way, and light crosses straight across the hall if you're moving sideways. I get an angle of 60 degrees for the mirror then, but I don't know what you mean by 'that the light perceives' or where the <not-perceived> 63.4 figure comes from. 60 seems to be what it is.

Let's say the hall is measured by me to be 300m long, so it takes exactly one usec to get there and another to get back in my frame. I am at the south end of it, so my laser initially points east, straight at the paper target on the opposite wall, but with the spinning mirror prism in the way.

You seem to describe moving the whole setup eastward. In that case, your protractor is aligned with east, so the mirror is at an angle 60 deg. The beam comes in at right angles and is indeed is deflected to a 30 degree angle and takes 2 usec each way to travel the 300m hall. My dilated clock (had I used one) would read 2 usec total.

If instead we move the setup at .866c north, in the direction of the length of the hall. The hall is now 150m long, and light takes 3.73 usec to catch up with the receding mirror and .27 usec to get back which is exactly 4 usec. The dilated clock would still read 2 usec, same figure it reads when it all stands still. But we have no clock, all we have is the return-mirror, which if it spinning slowly, sits at an angle of 120 deg. and deflects the photons forward at 30 deg. (vs 90 deg if we're stationary) at the paper on the side of the hall.

Success! Both moving setups report the same value as the one run when it is stationary. The computation in the selected absolute frame did not yield a different figure. I could also move the setup upward, which doesn't yield any 60 deg angles of mirrors or anything, but the timing analysis would be similar to the eastward one with identical time to go out and back.

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.

SR says I don't have to carry out the calculations on that basis. So ran with two different scenarios above to verified that. What I never did was "assume I was moving but typing in numbers for being stationary". That would be mixing frames, which would yield nonsense results, similar to the way you mix interpretations of relativity and get nonsense contradictions. Each interpretation is quite self-consistent.

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

I just did the same thing with your .86c scenario, and it yielded the same result, verifying SR's implication that it doesn't matter if some different frame is designated to be an absolute one.

Steve3007 wrote: ↑September 6th, 2018, 4:13 am 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

Good find there Steve. Nice goodies to be found. I see now why you brought up the Sagnac effect, so I would like to quote David's first reply to the OP in that thread, post 25"

David Cooper wrote:Most of the experiments you refer to do no such thing, not least because both SR/GR and LET (Lorentz Ether Theory) make the exact same predictions about the outcomes of all of them and render most of the discussion in this thread misguided in the extreme. However, the Sagnac experiment does lead the way to a proof that there is an absolute frame, so that has settled the argument for those who respect mathematics.

You claim in the same quote that SR/GR and LET but make the exact same predictions, but then go on to claim that SR is refuted by the Sagnac effect and an implication that LET is not, which is a statement that they make different predictions. This is empirical physics this time, not metaphysics, so such a discrepancy would indeed invalidate SR. dressed-scientist seems to be reasonable.

Concerning "most of the discussion in this thread", there are definitely mistakes. I disagre with posts from jeffreyH, chiralSPO, and partly Colin2B, interestingly all moderators. Janus seems to know his stuff.

With Sagnac and MGP (Michelson Gale Pearson) we have experiments where light must be passing material at speeds higher than c relative to that material, and as soon as we have material with that property, we have a cast iron guarantee that some frames of references are making incorrect assertions about the speed of light relative to some material.

This is nonsense. SR says that through a material with a >1 refractive index, light moves at less than c in any reference frame including the frame of the material. Sagnac effect does not ever contradict that.

As we extend the logic of this, we can further show that there can only be one frame that doesn't make any incorrect assertions while all the others are misrepresentations of reality, although we still cannot identify which is the correct (absolute) frame. Those who continue to insist that none of the frames are misrepresentations of reality have parted company with mathematics and rely for their position on nothing more than the authority of what is essentially a clergy.

And you go on with your trademark trash talk about anybody who disagrees with your SR understanding have 'parted company with mathematics' (slightly different wording that the one you throw at me). Show me where the mathematics of SR do not predict the Sagnac effect, especially since you say it doesn't make different predictions than the LET that you happen not to be describing either.

Good find there Steve. Nice goodies to be found.

A minor point to be fair to David: I didn't find that science forum myself. David linked to it from one of his early posts in this topic, along with his link to his article.

OK. Still makes the stuff in there 'goodies'.

David, SR does not forbid light passing through a material at delta-V (difference between material moving one way and light moving at sub-lightspeed in the other) > c. In your favorite absolute frame for instance, light coming from 'in the wind' passes through Earth's atmosphere at > c since Earth's speed is greater than air's refractive index slows it down. In Earth's frame, that light's speed is sub-c. In no frame is it > c.

Steve3007 wrote: ↑September 6th, 2018, 7:02 pm I just want to work out whether you're interested in studying physics. It's an interesting subject. I think you'd enjoy it.

I do enjoy it and have studied relevant parts of it in depth, but I reserve the right to use words in ways other than the ways you want me to use them. So long as you define the word to mean a particular thing, it means that particular thing in that context regardless of any normal rules about standard definitions.

And when you make grand claims about a subject, such as that the majority of the people who have studied it are sheep following the herd who have no power of reasoning, you have to be prepared to be probed to see if you know exactly what it is that you are criticizing. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. I am yet to be convinced that you have studied physics. Sorry.

Your task is to try to break a specific argument and not to attack me over irrelevant issues. If someone points out that 2 is not equal to 1 but that a theory generates claims that 2=1, you can't destroy that point by attacking them for using the word "accelerate" in a manner that is fully legitimate regardless of any particular way that physicists like to use the word.

There is one, and only one, meaning to the word "acceleration" in the context of physics. It is a vector quantity representing the rate of change of the vector quantity velocity with respect to time.

If I want to, I'm entitled to create two entirely new words, such as zakh and voop to represent my intended meanings and to define them so that they can be understood in the context presented, and to twist them to assign some other meaning to them as an attempt to breaking the argument is to fail - that can't break the argument, but merely runs away from it by using diversion tactics. The same applies when I use the words "acceleration" and "deceleration", and the mere presence of the latter automatically provides the definitions of both words as I intend them to be understood. No one in physics should be incapable with accepting that usage and going along with it. It is up to them whether they want to copy that usage themselves, but if they don't, they are free to work out their own ways of expressing the same ideas. What they are not entitled to do is to try to force their definitions on my usage.

Halc wrote: ↑September 6th, 2018, 10:38 pmYou send a signal to both clocks that sets each to zero or some other common value. Since the clocks are at the same location, they get the signal at the same time in any frame.

I can now see one way of doing it if they're adjacent perpendicular to their current direction of travel and equidistant from the axis of rotation, but if they're adjacent in the direction around a rotating ring, and if there are clocks all the way round that ring, each adjacent to two others and all the same distance from the axis, the synchronisations are going to become problematic. Sending out a signal from the centre would synchronise them correctly from one perspective, but when two clocks compare themselves with each other, they'll regard themselves as out of sync (unless they're directly opposite each other on the ring). It may be that this was what the writer was thinking of, but he missed the exceptions (or felt they weren't important enough to mention if he was just trying to draw attention to the problems that can occur with it).

Halc wrote: ↑September 6th, 2018, 11:57 pmThat 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.

It isn't designed to help an alien find the right place to deliver mail. The point is simply that the alien can put his origin wherever he likes and I can do the same with mine at the same time - if they're both at rest in the same frame, they're co-moving and the frame itself is co-moving with them. If there are objects at the two origins which remain at rest in the frame, they can be used to refer to the frame and to illustrate how that frame moves relative to other frames.

The impossibility of doing what I ask illustrates that we don't have an absolute location.

Only the universe would,if it could think and feel where things are, be able to tell us what the absolute location is. Our inability to pin it down does not mean there isn't an absolute location for anything.

I find pointless to posit undetectable things.

That it exists can be determined through reason. The issue which this relates to is becoming lost with distance, so I'll take it back to it. The point is that frames make incompatible claims about the speed of light relative to objects. Each frame can be tied to an object which is at rest in it, and that object can represent that frame. There can be one such object assigned to each frame, and none of those objects are co-moving with any other of those objects. A frame claims that the speed of light relative to its object is c in all directions, and it also claims that the speed of light relative to all the other objects is >c and <c in some directions. Each frame makes the same claims about its object versus all the other objects, and each frame's claims contradict the rival claims of all the other frames. There is no possibility of more than one frame providing a true account of reality.

None that I know of do, but they should.

You do realize how this makes you sound, right?

They should be teaching the truth rather than pumping out debunked propaganda.

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.

It has nothing to do with my personal view, but about rigorous application of reason which forces correct information to be generated which is inherently superior to incorrect information. The argument isn't about me, but represents that rigorous application of reasoning. You don't like what I say about the rules about how frames work, so you deny that they work that way, but I've shown that I'm right and that you're breaking the rules of maths by failing to make valid measurements. For example, if an alien rocket goes past us at 0.86c and another one goes past in the same direction at 0.99c, our frame asserts that the relative speed between them is 0.13c. From their point of view, each sees the other as going at 0,86c relative to them, but we don't let that mess with our frame measurements. In the same way, when we measure the speed of light relative to the faster of those rockets (faster by our frame's claims), we get speeds ranging from 1.99c to 0.01c depending on which direction we're providing a measurement for. Those are the correct measurements from our frame. If you jump to that rocket's own frame, it asserts that light goes at c relative to it in all directions, but your knowledge of that does not give you permission to pass that off as an Earth-frame truth for the speed of light relative to that rocket. The claims being produced by these different frames contradict each other and they cannot both be providing the true relative speed for the light and the rocket: if one is true, the other must be false.

That was the point being discussed - the incompatibility of frames due to the contradictory claims that they necessarily generate (unless they are labelled as conditionally true, as is done in LET).

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.

I do understand the published view, and I have debunked it. I'm not going to switch career just to correct someone's shoddy work in a different field, and particularly not when I'm working in a more important field where we are building machines that will end up replacing all the people working in that other field.

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.

SR is simple and the maths isn't hard either, so this subject is actually very accessible to people. The simulation is simple too, so it should be easy for anyone who thinks they can program a functional SR model to run the same scenario to do just that if such a functional model is possible, but the reason no one has ever produced such a model is that it's impossible. My simulation does the best that can be done with SR, and it shows that it breaks. I've explained why it can only ever break and I've invited people to explain how they can mend it to turn it into a functional model, but none of them can. The SR model has never been run by anyone without breaking or cheating.

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.

Whether GR accepts it or not is questionable, but he was very clear that it isn't there in SR, and that's the dogma that needs to be thrown out.

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.

It would be a waste of time as they ban people for going against the clergy - being demonstrably right isn't something they consider as an excuse for heresy. They are breaking the rules of frames by passing off Frame B measurements as Frame A measurements when they state the measured speed of light relative to objects which are at rest in Frame B while viewing the action from Frame A. They are making an error that no competent mathematician would make.

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.

LET says that clocks run slow but that time does not. Moving clocks under-record the amount of time that has actually passed. Einstein rejected that because it brings in the absolute frame.

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.

Hardly - it generates event-meshing failures in the first case, and requires an absolute frame in the other to avoid generating contradictions. Our ability to choose any frame as a potential absolute frame and for it not to matter which one we choose for any other purposes than knowing our absolute position or speed doesn't make the assertions made by that chosen frame true (unless they're labelled as conditionally true with the condition being that it is the absolute frame, so if it is, the claims are true, and if it isn't, they're false).

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.

If they were not part of physics or treated as such by practically everyone involved in teaching physics and discussing it on physics forums, including all the experts who are paid by the establishment to tell the public what's what, that biased metaphysics would not be given a high status in all those contexts while better metaphysics is shouted down at every turn. Why is it that anything asserting SR metaphysics is allowed there while LET metaphysics is always run out of town? You are not describing reality - the SR metaphysics is deeply entrenched in physics and is aggressively pushed while LET is shouted down and ridiculed. That is what needs correcting, and since they're all happy to push SR metaphysics at every turn despite it being disproved, something needs to be done to fix that so that they stop misleading the public and making physics look like a ridiculous religious cult.

I don't think a model would be very useful if it didn't make sense of things.

It actively puts a lot of people off physics because it sounds like voodoo rather than science. People see the contradictions and they choose other paths in life.

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.

Einstein was the one who made a big thing of time being a dimension tied up with other space dimensions. There's no clear divide though between these labels as you can still regard Newtonian time as a dimension if you want to, but it would make more sense to call it that in a Minkowski Spacetime model.

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.

Well, we could simplify it to a game with a 2x2 board that has two pawns on it which both start on opposite corners where the aim is to take the other piece to win and where if they're promoted they must become a queen - that makes it easier to visualise the range of options and allows us to make the set of valid positions more real by producing a physical representation of every member of it (perhaps by drawing them all on paper). What are we really dealing with here though? How does the set of legal states for this game come into being? It already exists as soon as the rules exist, and indeed it arguably existed before the rules were drawn up. Everything that can ever happen necessarily exists from the outset in a set of potential happenings where laws of nature govern what's possible, but this set has no substance: it doesn't exist in the same way that non-abstract things exist. And in this set of everything that can ever happen, the set of rules of the game is there too, so it turns out that they existed in this form right from the start, even though they hadn't been formulated at that time. Back then though, there were no physical representations of the members of most of those sets, including the set of valid states of the game. The whole set "exists" only in an abstract sense, but with no physical existence.

You can calculate members of these sets, and at that point, representations of those members exist physically, but the members themselves remain in a state that has no substance because they are just possibilities. You can work out all the members of a set like the set of valid positions in the game, and then physical representations of those members exist, but until you do that, the members of the set are not physical. They merely exist as things that could be calculated, and they have not been calculated. No causation exists within these abstract sets and nothing has been done in any order because nothing has been done, and nothing is even there.

At least I can see now though how it is that people have managed to get themselves into a position where they imagine that causation can happen in a static block universe, so thanks for providing that valuable insight. The problem with it is that the example involves something that doesn't physically exist, and which contains no causation. Causation comes into it when you try to create representations of the sets and their members, but up until then, all you have is potential, and none of it has been actualised. When you create the rules (which already existed as potentials), you create physical representations of those rules. At that point, all the valid positions (which already existed as potentials) can seem more real, but they still have no substance beyond the abstract and have not been calculated - the process to identify them has not been run and so no causation has yet been involved. They remain as mere potentials which can be identified through process, and that process (including the causation tied up in it) is also just potential until it's actually been done. There may be a valid position x, for example, which can only be identified by reaching valid position w first, so finding position w is part of the cause of position x subsequently being identified as valid, but until that process of identification runs, there is only potential for that causation to play out and the causation is not yet actual.

Steve3007 wrote: ↑September 7th, 2018, 7:22 amIf you haven't done it already, I think it would be a useful exercise for you to investigate the experimentally determined reasons why 'c' is deemed to be a constant, starting by looking at the work of the great experimental physicist Michael Faraday. Faraday's experiments measured the relative strengths of the electric and magnetic fields. Maxwell's analysis of those experiments revealed the (then) extraordinary conclusion that the relative strengths of those two apparently different forces is directly related to the speed of light. And Maxwell's equations, firmly rooted as they are in the experimental evidence provided by Faraday and others, turned out to be wave equations.

Okay, let's pick those apart. Do they contain any distance terms (yes, they do), and how are those distances measured? Are they naively measured on the basis that the experimenter is stationary? If so, the assumption that the apparatus is stationary is being fed into the equations at the start, so it's no surprise when that's spat out again at the end. This is the same thing Halc is tripping over with his experiment (and I'll respond to his post on that subject tomorrow, and hopefully some of the other sitting ducks that follow it).

This is the observation, grounded as I said in solid experimental evidence, that led to the idea of 'c' as a universal constant.

Of course it's a universal constant, but when it pops out of experiments and the assertion is made that it shows the speed of light relative to the apparatus to be c, there it is a serious error because that assumption was inadvertently fed in at the start.

David Cooper wrote:I do enjoy it and have studied relevant parts of it in depth...

OK. Fair enough. Which parts do you regard as the relevant ones?

...but I reserve the right to use words in ways other than the ways you want me to use them. So long as you define the word to mean a particular thing, it means that particular thing in that context regardless of any normal rules about standard definitions.

OK. I take your point there. If you want to use words in ways other than the standard ones then there is nothing wrong with that. The only caveat is that if you use words according to their standard definitions in the context of physics then people reading your words can look up those definitions in a third-party source without troubling you, whereas if you use your own definitions then you have to go to the trouble of defining them yourself. But if you're willing to do that, no problem.

Your task is to try to break a specific argument and not to attack me over irrelevant issues...

OK. So in order to do that, my first task is to precisely understand what that specific argument is and the intended meanings of the words and/or mathematics that it uses. Then I have to determine whether it actually is an argument - i.e. whether it is a set of logical steps leading from premises to a conclusion, and (this being a conversation about an empirical subject) whether the premises are grounded in something that can be observed and the conclusion says something about what can be observed. Then I can get down to the business of assessing whether the argument appears to me to be valid. I will try to do that.

...If someone points out that 2 is not equal to 1 but that a theory generates claims that 2=1, you can't destroy that point by attacking them for using the word "accelerate" in a manner that is fully legitimate regardless of any particular way that physicists like to use the word.

That is true. If someone says 2=1 then the definition of the word "accelerate" does not alter the fact that they have deviated from the laws of mathematics as we all understand them. But since nobody has said 2=1, you can't be talking literally. So I have to work out what you mean when you say "somebody said 2=1". The most likely explanation is that you are accusing them of breaking some other law of mathematics as we know it, and are using "2=1" as a simple and obvious example of mathematical law-breaking to make the point.

So, if I've guessed your intended meaning correctly there, which law of mathematics have these people broken? What mathematical statement, analagous to "2=1", have they made which deviates from the standard rules of maths?

---

In answer to my post about Faraday et al and Maxwell's equations:

Okay, let's pick those apart. Do they contain any distance terms (yes, they do), and how are those distances measured?

In the above, by "those" and "they" I assume you mean Maxwell's Equations. Just to be clear about what you did when you "picked them apart": Which terms in Maxwell's equations are the distance terms? How were they measured by Faraday and other experimental physicists?

Are they naively measured on the basis that the experimenter is stationary?

No.

Of course it's a universal constant, but when it pops out of experiments and the assertion is made that it shows the speed of light relative to the apparatus to be c, there it is a serious error because that assumption was inadvertently fed in at the start.

It's not just an experimentally unsupported assertion. It was a direct mathematical consequence of experimental results. As you know, measurements were made which led to the determination of values for the permeability and permittivity constants, and the speed of the waves described by Maxwell's equations is given by those two constants, and is 'c'. And the constancy of 'c' for all observers came about from the applicability of Maxwell's equations to all inertial observers. Right?

Please could you describe how the fact that the wave solution of Maxwell's equations yields a value of 'c' for the electromagnetic waves described in those equations works in the context of Lorentz Ether Theory.

David Cooper wrote: ↑September 7th, 2018, 6:33 pm I do enjoy [physics] and have studied relevant parts of it in depth, but I reserve the right to use words in ways other than the ways you want me to use them. So long as you define the word to mean a particular thing, it means that particular thing in that context regardless of any normal rules about standard definitions.

The rest of us use the physics concept of the word, and it is very relevant in this context. I cannot say 'accelerated reference frame' if you think that means a frames that has sped up. If you're going to redefine a word for a paragraph or a post, be explicit about that in each post where you do it. Yes, it would be better to use zakh and voop for this different thing, since I still need to use the word the way physics defines it. Or better yet, use 'increasing speed' which is what you actually seem to want to convey. 'Acceleration' does not mean that in physics.

I don't know how you can have studied relativity without the basics underneath you. You don't even think there is a significance to the difference between speed (scalar) and velocity (vector), or how to do arithmetic with the latter.

David Cooper wrote: ↑September 7th, 2018, 10:10 pm

Halc wrote: ↑September 6th, 2018, 10:38 pmYou send a signal to both clocks that sets each to zero or some other common value. Since the clocks are at the same location, they get the signal at the same time in any frame.

I can now see one way of doing it if they're adjacent perpendicular to their current direction of travel and equidistant from the axis of rotation, but if they're adjacent in the direction around a rotating ring, and if there are clocks all the way round that ring, each adjacent to two others and all the same distance from the axis, the synchronisations are going to become problematic. Sending out a signal from the centre would synchronise them correctly from one perspective, but when two clocks compare themselves with each other, they'll regard themselves as out of sync (unless they're directly opposite each other on the ring). It may be that this was what the writer was thinking of, but he missed the exceptions (or felt they weren't important enough to mention if he was just trying to draw attention to the problems that can occur with it).

This whole paragraph shows that you seem baffled by a trivial situation. The clocks are in the same location. They are synced in any possible perspective you can imagine. They're probably the same clock since there's no point in having two if one can do the job. To initially sync two adjacent clocks, the one merely has to set itself to the time of the other. No signal is needed.

Halc wrote: ↑September 6th, 2018, 11:57 pmThat 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.

It isn't designed to help an alien find the right place to deliver mail. The point is simply that the alien can put his origin wherever he likes and I can do the same with mine at the same time - if they're both at rest in the same frame, they're co-moving and the frame itself is co-moving with them. If there are objects at the two origins which remain at rest in the frame, they can be used to refer to the frame and to illustrate how that frame moves relative to other frames.

OK, each of you has put an origin at an arbitrary location of choice. Now what. Each only knows where his own origin is. What do you write on the envelope? You need to say where your origin is (since apparently you resists just saying where you are) and then go from there. Even that is unnecessary. Specification of a known event is enough to get the mail here, but you can't do that either.

I'm persisting with you because you assert that we have a location. Been about 6 posts now, and you've not told me your location. I assert that locations are only relative to other things whose location is equally not known. There is no possible objective address that can be written on the envelope that gets the mail delivered here. The alien doesn't actually have to deliver anything here since he's probably too far away to do it. I just want him to know where we are. If you accept that it cannot be done, then I need to know what you mean by 'location' because the circular 'we are where we are' that you gave doesn't tell me a different definition.

I find pointless to posit undetectable things. [absolute location]

That it exists can be determined through reason. The issue which this relates to is becoming lost with distance, so I'll take it back to it. The point is that frames make incompatible claims about the speed of light relative to objects.

The comoving frame would be needed, yes. All large-scale diagrams of the universe use it, but none of them are absolute. They always put the origin here, which makes it relative.

The topic suddenly seems to shift mid-paragraph:

Each frame can be tied to an object which is at rest in it, and that object can represent that frame. There can be one such object assigned to each frame, and none of those objects are co-moving with any other of those objects.

I was agreeing, but what do you mean by 'comoving with'. Comoving is a property, not a relation, so I don't know how I might be comoving with another object.

A frame claims that the speed of light relative to its object is c in all directions, and it also claims that the speed of light relative to all the other objects is >c and <c in some directions.

OK, I see what you mean by this. Yes, two ships can fly past earth quickly, and they'll have a delta-speed of up to nearly 2c in the frame of Earth. It isn't that light does this. Anything can do it.

Each frame makes the same claims about its object versus all the other objects, and each frame's claims contradict the rival claims of all the other frames.

The relative speed of two non-stationary objects in one frame is not a statement about the relative speed of the same two objects in another frame. If it was, you would have your contradiction.

There is no possibility of more than one frame providing a true account of reality.

True account of reality is interpretational. Here is where you consistently make your mistake. You mix different interpretations and find them contradictory. In some interpretations, all frames give a true account of reality, which is no more contradictory than my left profile being a true account of what I look like as a view from above, despite them being quite seemingly contradictory images. But you are mixing statements from two interpretations. In fact you assert one of them just above.

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.

It has nothing to do with my personal view, but about rigorous application of reason which forces correct information to be generated which is inherently superior to incorrect information.[/quote]Your reason is based on your personal views, and you don't even understand the validity of alternate views. Your rigor falls totally apart when you mix the two views. It is OK to only accept the one view, but you cannot assert it when disproving an alternative.
Take the other interpretation on its own claims, and drive it to self-inconsistency. That's the rigorous way to disprove it. All you are doing in this thread is demonstrating that what you see as SR doesn't correspond to your beliefs. Relativity (not just some interpretations) acknowledges a preferred frame. That it can be determined by anybody is testament to that. But it does not necessarily assert that only that other frames are less real, leaving that to interpretation. Another interpretational difference is the assertion of a preferred moment (the 3D model). The model is valid, but I know no named interpretation of relativity that asserts it. LET doesn't seem to. I agree that the 3D model is not compatible with interpretations where all frames are equally real, so you're going to have to drop that assertion of you want to disprove the alternative interpreation on its own grounds.

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.

Whether GR accepts it or not is questionable, but he was very clear that it isn't there in SR, and that's the dogma that needs to be thrown out.

It has no place in SR, which is not about a universe with gravity and expansion. Your insistence on this 3D model seems quite dogmatic to me. You are totally closed minded about the alternative.

LET says that clocks run slow but that time does not. Moving clocks under-record the amount of time that has actually passed. Einstein rejected that because it brings in the absolute frame.

Sorry, my mistake here. Yes, LET interpreation takes a stance on this. It is the 3D model that it doesn't assert.

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.

Einstein was the one who made a big thing of time being a dimension tied up with other space dimensions. There's no clear divide though between these labels as you can still regard Newtonian time as a dimension if you want to, but it would make more sense to call it that in a Minkowski Spacetime model.

I don't care what Einstein said here. The question was about LET possibly asserting a 3D or 4D model. Einstein didn't author LET. I don't want his or your opinion. I want what LET asserts. I didn't see the subject come up. It seems not to matter to the view.

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.

Well, we could simplify it to a game with a 2x2 board that has two pawns on it which both start on opposite corners where the aim is to take the other piece to win and where if they're promoted they must become a queen - that makes it easier to visualise the range of options and allows us to make the set of valid positions more real by producing a physical representation of every member of it (perhaps by drawing them all on paper).

I never mentioned being able to visualize the entire set at once. The game sort of depends on the inability to do that. I'm just talking about the abstract mathematical set, not about expressing the data in an obscene pile of paper somewhere in this universe. You asked for an example, and that was mine. The pile of paper would not be the abstract set. The pile would be a pile. Mathematicians talk about properties of the integers (a far larger set) without anybody insisting that they must be realized on paper before we can talk about them.

What are we really dealing with here though? How does the set of legal states for this game come into being?

Again: Maybe the same way our universe is. Maybe not. Opinions vary.
I don't care how it exists or if it exists. I care that it is a structure that illustrates the properties I wanted illustrated. If and how it exists is irrelevant to my being able to discuss those properties.

It already exists as soon as the rules exist, and indeed it arguably existed before the rules were drawn up.

Yes, very good. Maybe our own universe is exactly like that.

Everything that can ever happen necessarily exists from the outset in a set of potential happenings where laws of nature govern what's possible, but this set has no substance: it doesn't exist in the same way that non-abstract things exist.

It is abstract to us. To some other entity capable of abstraction in another universe, we are the abstraction. I find 'abstract' to be a relation. I think in those terms because everything seems to make more sense that way. But again, that's just me.

The whole set "exists" only in an abstract sense, but with no physical existence.

Of course. I never said it was physical (is made of our atoms or something). But it has temporal properties fairly identical to the structure that is our own universe.

You can calculate members of these sets, and at that point, representations of those members exist physically,

I don't care about our physical representations of any members. I am talking about the abstract set, never about anything physical.

but the members themselves remain in a state that has no substance because they are just possibilities.

Yes, quite like our own universe. Those possibilities are read to the members. Each chess state has a real set of where all the pieces are, and the moves leading up to that state are in the past (designated real or not) are somewhat determinable, and alternate moves are not real to the chess state in question, and future moves are indeterminate. It isn't much like a wave function in that there are no probabilities in the structure, just a finite list of legal possibilities. The set has no preference of better and worse moves. It is the set of legal moves. An altered structure would weight each subsequent move as to how 'good' the move is, and then you'd have something more closely approximating the probabilities that fall from our Quantum mechanics, and then a probable position would look more like a real game that was abandoned, and less like a meaningless arrangement of pieces.

They merely exist as things that could be calculated, and they have not been calculated.

Again, just like the states of our own universe.

No causation exists within these abstract sets and nothing has been done in any order because nothing has been done, and nothing is even there.

Halc wrote: ↑September 4th, 2018, 11:55 pmYes, I noticed you have this bias. You'd not like my example then.

Here (about 50 posts ago) I predicted you would not accept the example, but you said you wanted it anyway. There it is.

So here you go with your pet assertion again. The states are very much ordered, and I never suggested that any of the states had 'been done'. Each state has a causal relationship (but not a determined relationship) with the prior state, just like today's relationship with yesterday. That's the non-flowing way of defining causality. It doesn't make sense to you because you are mixing in a different interpretation of causality, the same mistake you make when finding contradictions in SR.

At least I can see now though how it is that people have managed to get themselves into a position where they imagine that causation can happen in a static block universe, so thanks for providing that valuable insight.

Oh good. Maybe you can find an inconsistency on its own grounds then, without mixing in assumptions from incompatible interpretations. But probably not, based on the next thing you say:

The problem with it is that the example involves something that doesn't physically exist, and which contains no causation. Causation comes into it when you try to create representations of the sets and their members, but up until then, all you have is potential, and none of it has been actualised.

Not asking you to accept it, but here you seem to declare your intent to refuse to consider the alternate interpretation on its own grounds.

Most proponents of the 4D interpretations consider the structure to be actual, so since a lot of your post focuses on your bias that somebody else's view cannot be actual, why don't you go with the assumption that there is an actual 4D structure with no flowing going on, and that each reference frame is just an abstract orientation of the axes assigned to that very real structure, and each frame is just as real as the one non-inertial frame where the expansion seems balanced. What contradiction with itself results from that?

If you don't accept these, then you're not really questioning relativity, but unrelated philosophical topics such as origins of reality, which are completely in question in any interpretation of the properties of this thing with unexplained existence.
Note that I did my best to express the mainstream 4D view above, and not bring in my own views to that picture. I personally would never assert what I just wrote above, but not because it is in conflict with TOR.

Halc wrote: ↑September 7th, 2018, 8:47 amOh good, you are taking this one apart. I am having real trouble with a few things you have left unspecified.

It's your experiment, so you should be able to pin down your own angles for it and go through the maths without needing my help.

Where is the origin of your angles? It is apparently the direction of travel, so that the light moving up and down the hall does so at angle 0 if we're moving that way, and light crosses straight across the hall if you're moving sideways. I get an angle of 60 degrees for the mirror then, but I don't know what you mean by 'that the light perceives' or where the <not-perceived> 63.4 figure comes from. 60 seems to be what it is.

There are many ways you could be aligning the experiment with the direction of travel, so I picked a convenient speed for you and decided to have the hall perpendicular to that. That means you shine the laser in the direction of travel, it hits a mirror, it travels to the far end of the hall and back, then hits the mirror and returns to the laser, but it misses it because your mirror is rotating, so it's deflected a little to the side of the laser. If that doesn't match up with your apparatus, that doesn't matter as you can work out for yourself how to do the maths for your actual setup.

So, the aim is to go through this without making the assumption that the apparatus is stationary, and I chose a speed of 0.86c (or sine of 60 degrees for a more accurate figure) because that produces convenient numbers which I've already worked out (as used on my page on relativity where I discuss the MMX mirror angle being affected by length contraction). The mirror in your apparatus must now be considered to be length contracted to half its rest length, and this changes its physical angle from 45 degrees to 63.4 degrees away from the direction of travel. When the wave front of the laser light hits the mirror, one end of it touches first, and the positions where subsequent parts of it contact the mirror are made further away in the direction of travel, thereby changing the effective angle of the mirror to 15 degrees from the direction of travel - it takes a long time for the light to catch the mirror because the mirror is moving at 0.86c, so that's why the effective angle is so different from the physical one. The laser light is thus reflected at an angle of 30 degrees to the angle of travel of the apparatus to make the journey along the hall (which is aligned perpendicular to the direction of travel of the apparatus). This angle takes it along the hall and back, and the distance the light travels through space while travelling the length of the hall and back is four times the physical length of the hall. When the light returns to the angled mirror, it approaches it at 30 degrees to the direction of travel of the apparatus, but the wave front hits the top first and then hits progressively lower parts of it, but in such a manner as to make the effective angle of the mirror 85 degrees (if we ignore the rotation of the mirror), so this sends the light back to the laser. Add in the rotation of the laser and the beam will miss the laser, but I'll leave it to you to do the maths to work out how far it will miss by. If it hits a different spot from the one it hits when you do the maths for the apparatus being at rest, then you've made a mistake in your maths - relativity guarantees that it will hit the same point regardless of which frame's measurements you use. Other things to consider are that the frequency of the light has halved (if the apparatus is really moving at 0.86c) because the functionality of the laser has been slowed, but your clocks have slowed to match, and so have you, so it all looks normal. The apparatus has also been length contracted in the direction of travel to half its rest length, so you certainly need to take that into account when working out how far the light travels from mirror to laser/wall in the final leg of the trip, and you also have to remember that the wall is racing towards the point where the light came from when it left the mirror.

Let's say the hall is measured by me to be 300m long, so it takes exactly one usec to get there and another to get back in my frame. I am at the south end of it, so my laser initially points east, straight at the paper target on the opposite wall, but with the spinning mirror prism in the way.

It sounds as if you want the apparatus to be aligned at 90 degrees to the way I was picturing it, but that's fine - you can work through the maths of both if you like.

You seem to describe moving the whole setup eastward. In that case, your protractor is aligned with east, so the mirror is at an angle 60 deg. The beam comes in at right angles and is indeed is deflected to a 30 degree angle and takes 2 usec each way to travel the 300m hall. My dilated clock (had I used one) would read 2 usec total.

If the mirror's at 45 degrees with the apparatus regarded as being at rest, when you consider it instead to be moving at 0.86c, that angle is adjusted by length contraction to 63.4 degrees from the direction of travel, but the effective angle is only 15 degrees.

If instead we move the setup at .866c north, in the direction of the length of the hall. The hall is now 150m long, and light takes 3.73 usec to catch up with the receding mirror and .27 usec to get back which is exactly 4 usec. The dilated clock would still read 2 usec, same figure it reads when it all stands still. But we have no clock, all we have is the return-mirror, which if it spinning slowly, sits at an angle of 120 deg. and deflects the photons forward at 30 deg. (vs 90 deg if we're stationary) at the paper on the side of the hall.

Your mirror angles are again wrong, but if you've understood why I gave the numbers I did before, they still apply here - you are pointing the laser in a direction perpendicular to the direction of travel, but the light leaving it is travelling at 60 degrees to that direction due to aberration - for the light to move through the laser at c, it has to move at 30 degrees to the direction of travel of the apparatus. This light then hits the mirror (length contracted to make its angle 63.4 degrees from the direction of travel of the apparatus) in such a way as to make it behave as if it's set to 15 degrees from the direction of travel of the apparatus. If you draw that on paper it looks impossible, because the light looks as if it will hit the wrong side of the mirror but if you draw in the wave fronts, you'll see that the mirror is moving faster than them in the direction of travel of the apparatus, so it overtakes them in that direction rather than them catching it.

Success! Both moving setups report the same value as the one run when it is stationary. The computation in the selected absolute frame did not yield a different figure. I could also move the setup upward, which doesn't yield any 60 deg angles of mirrors or anything, but the timing analysis would be similar to the eastward one with identical time to go out and back.

Relativity guarantees that the light will hit the same end point every time, and if you want to claim that it confirms the speed of travel that you used for your measurements, then you've just confirmed that the apparatus is moving at 0.14c relative to the light in its direction of travel. It "confirms" the assumption that was made at the start, and it does that regardless of which assumption you make, which means that it confirms nothing of the kind and merely confirms the fact that there is a phenomenon of relativity.

SR says I don't have to carry out the calculations on that basis.

If you are attempting to measure the speed of light relative to the apparatus, then you should do it on this basis so that you don't end up thinking that you have generated a result that confirms the speed of light relative to the apparatus as c. If we go back to how this part of the argument began, it was because I said this: "Whenever you try to measure the speed of light you get the same value for it if you assume that you are stationary. If you assume you are moving, you measure values other than c for the speed of light relative to you." My point was that if you use measurements that are based on you being stationary, you get back an answer that asserts that the speed of light relative to the apparatus is c, whereas if you use measurements based on some other assumption, you get back an answer that asserts that the speed of light relative to the apparatus is >c and < c in some directions. (In LET, those assertions are conditional on the original assumption being true, so there are no contradictions.)

You then replied with: "This is completely wrong. They initially assumed that they were moving and were surprised at the measurement not changing when 'moving with or against the wind' so to speak. How do you go about measuring light speed that requires assuming one is stationary? I've done it myself. Crude, but accurate to a digit at least. It took a laser, power drill, tachometer, and a piece of paper on the wall. All the components had the same relative velocity as each other, but not assumed stationary. Other early measurements used components that were moving relative to each other, so by definition could not have assumed a stationary measurement." In that, you deny that you assumed the apparatus to be stationary, but you used measurements that were based on the apparatus being stationary. I know that you didn't do it using measurements based on the apparatus moving, because you didn't know how to calculate the mirror angles correctly.

So ran with two different scenarios above to verified that. What I never did was "assume I was moving but typing in numbers for being stationary". That would be mixing frames, which would yield nonsense results, similar to the way you mix interpretations of relativity and get nonsense contradictions. Each interpretation is quite self-consistent.

You did exactly what you're denying you did - your measurements were based on the apparatus being stationary. You've now attempted to do it by applying measurements for a different frame to assume that the apparatus is moving, but your angles are wrong, so you've still never done the job correctly.

I just did the same thing with your .86c scenario, and it yielded the same result, verifying SR's implication that it doesn't matter if some different frame is designated to be an absolute one.

Despite your wrong angles, you still got an answer that worked, but then you knew that you wanted to make it work and so you made sure that it did. However, you also lost track of how this thread within the thread began and the fact that you reacted with "This is completely wrong" to something that was completely right, and then you asserted that you hadn't used measurements that assumed the apparatus to be stationary when it's quite clear that you did exactly that, and you've been shown up by your lack of understanding of the mirror angles.

Halc wrote: ↑September 7th, 2018, 10:37 amYou claim in the same quote that SR/GR and LET but make the exact same predictions, but then go on to claim that SR is refuted by the Sagnac effect and an implication that LET is not, which is a statement that they make different predictions. This is empirical physics this time, not metaphysics, so such a discrepancy would indeed invalidate SR.

This has all been covered already. LET accepts an absolute frame and thereby generates no contradictions, whereas SR tries to have its cake and eat it by asserting equal validity to the claims of all frames.

With Sagnac and MGP (Michelson Gale Pearson) we have experiments where light must be passing material at speeds higher than c relative to that material, and as soon as we have material with that property, we have a cast iron guarantee that some frames of references are making incorrect assertions about the speed of light relative to some material.

This is nonsense. SR says that through a material with a >1 refractive index, light moves at less than c in any reference frame including the frame of the material. Sagnac effect does not ever contradict that.

Refractive issues have nothing to do with this. The whole thing can be done using a mirror-lined hollow cable where the light is slowed minimally by occasional reflections, and we can easily use speeds of rotation that lead to substantial differences in the time taken for the light to go one way round the circuit (from emitter/detector to emitter/detector) in one direction than the other. In my thought experiment, we're sending light in both directions round a rotating ring circuit, and the way that light would behave in this experiment has been confirmed by the real experiments of Sagnac and MGP, but we're not tied to the apparatus of Sagnac or MGP - we're merely using them to prove that the thought experiment would work as claimed.

When we analyse the thought experiment that I set out there, we then find that the light sent clockwise round the ring (which is rotating anticlockwise) will return to the emitter/detector before the light that was sent out in the anticlockwise direction. This demonstrates that the speed of the clockwise light relative to the material of the ring that it was passing while it was passing it (and you need to picture this being done on a sector by sector basis rather than losing the key finding by averaging it for the whole trip) was higher than the speed of the anticlockwise light relative to the same material (on the same basis). It is crucial that the effect isn't lost by playing games with the maths: I'm talking about speed of light relative to ring material local to where the light is, so we divide the ring into lots of sectors and consider only the speed of light relative to the material of each sector while it's passing through that sector and not relative to that sector while it's passing through other sectors.

By doing this, we can show that there must be some material in the ring which is being passed by the clockwise light at speeds >c relative to that material. It is mathematically impossible for this not to be the case. This means that there must exist frames which misrepresent reality by asserting that light moves in all directions relative to that material at c because we know that some of the material of the ring cannot conform to that requirement.

This merely confirms that the frame rules I spelt out earlier are correct - that all frames contradict each other and that only one of them is not misrepresenting reality.

As we extend the logic of this, we can further show that there can only be one frame that doesn't make any incorrect assertions while all the others are misrepresentations of reality, although we still cannot identify which is the correct (absolute) frame. Those who continue to insist that none of the frames are misrepresentations of reality have parted company with mathematics and rely for their position on nothing more than the authority of what is essentially a clergy.

And you go on with your trademark trash talk about anybody who disagrees with your SR understanding have 'parted company with mathematics' (slightly different wording that the one you throw at me).

Well, you need to tell me how you haven't parted company with mathematics if you reject my claim. I provide a list of questions in that thread which people refuse to answer, with one exception who provided wrong answers which showed that he had parted company with mathematics.

Show me where the mathematics of SR do not predict the Sagnac effect, especially since you say it doesn't make different predictions than the LET that you happen not to be describing either.

It isn't my job to do something irrelevant to the issue. The issue here is about some (and ultimately all but one) frames of reference misrepresenting reality, and this thought experiment shows that this is the case. If you want to try to break it, go ahead and answer the numbered questions that I invited people to have a go at in that thread. Those who aren't prepared to answer the questions clearly lack sufficient understanding of relativity and the workings of frames for their opinions to carry any weight.

Halc wrote: ↑September 7th, 2018, 12:51 pmDavid, SR does not forbid light passing through a material at delta-V (difference between material moving one way and light moving at sub-lightspeed in the other) > c. In your favorite absolute frame for instance, light coming from 'in the wind' passes through Earth's atmosphere at > c since Earth's speed is greater than air's refractive index slows it down. In Earth's frame, that light's speed is sub-c. In no frame is it > c.

When I'm talking about light moving at >c relative to an object, I mean relative speeds higher than the unslowed c that light moves at through empty space with no medium slowing it other than the fabric of space (which limits it to c). That doesn't mean that light ever moves faster than c, but that its relative speed to other things can be substantially higher, and it reaches 2c when we're giving its relative speed to light that's moving in the opposite direction.

Steve3007 wrote: ↑September 8th, 2018, 12:02 pmOK. Fair enough. Which parts do you regard as the relevant ones?

Any parts relevant to any phenomenon that I'm exploring. If there's an area I'm not sure about, I do the necessary research, and if all I can find are pages of mathematical squiggles with a lack of explanation in ordinary language to go with it, I can ask for help in interpreting them at a science forum, though that's rarely necessary.

But since nobody has said 2=1, you can't be talking literally.

I'm talking absolutely literally. The rival claims of different frames can only be valid and equally valid if we throw out the rule that 2 cannot be equal to 1. The claims generated by different frames don't merely say that 2=1, but that every number is equal to every other number. That's what the contradictions tell you if you decide to tolerate them instead or rejecting them.

In the above, by "those" and "they" I assume you mean Maxwell's Equations. Just to be clear about what you did when you "picked them apart": Which terms in Maxwell's equations are the distance terms? How were they measured by Faraday and other experimental physicists?

It would make more sense for you to show me a way of using Maxwell's Equations to show that the speed of light is c relative to the apparatus being used to test them. If they can't be used for that, then there is nothing to argue about as they prove nothing, but if the assertion is that they do show the speed of light to be c relative to the apparatus, then a distance term must be involved, and as soon as you have a distance term involved, you have questions to answer about how you measure that distance. Every time this has been brought up on the TNS forum, the people making the claim that Maxwell's Equations prove that the speed of light is c relative to the apparatus fail to go beyond making the assertion, so when I ask them to show them how they're applying the maths and whether there are distance terms involved, they back out of it and go silent. I've never reached the point where I can see what they're basing their assertions on. You have now made the same assertion, so I need you to show me how you're doing it to get a speed of light relative to the apparatus without using a distance term. I can well believe that the constant c pops out somewhere, but that is not a speed relative to the apparatus.

It's not just an experimentally unsupported assertion. It was a direct mathematical consequence of experimental results. As you know, measurements were made which led to the determination of values for the permeability and permittivity constants, and the speed of the waves described by Maxwell's equations is given by those two constants, and is 'c'. And the constancy of 'c' for all observers came about from the applicability of Maxwell's equations to all inertial observers. Right?

That the constant is c is not disputed, and that they all measure it to be c relative to the apparatus when they use distance measurements based on the apparatus being stationary is also not disputed. Maxwell's Equations only become interesting if they can somehow allow you to measure the speed of light relative to the apparatus without the involvement of any distance terms, and that doesn't just mean the terms used directly in the equations, but the terms used when generating the values for the terms that are used directly in the equations.

Please could you describe how the fact that the wave solution of Maxwell's equations yields a value of 'c' for the electromagnetic waves described in those equations works in the context of Lorentz Ether Theory.

Maxwell's Equations are not a part of physics that I know enough about to use them, so I rely on other people showing me what they do with them. I've followed the trail in the past far enough to find distance terms which were being loaded with rest-frame values, and I have every confidence that the same thing will always be the case in these situations. There is also the difficulty that if you do feed in measurements in based on other frames, the equations themselves may be too simple to be able to apply to them - you may need more complex versions to handle this, while Maxwell's versions are simpler because they rest on the luck of the fact that relativity always works as a shortcut. I've been led to believe that Poincaré woked on fixing this, but I've never seen the details. So, the way forward for this part of the argument depends on you showing me how you apply numbers to these equations to get a speed of light relative to the apparatus. If you can't do that without using distance terms, then it won't prove anything. You shouldn't expect it to prove anything though, because if it showed that the speed of light relative to an object is always c in all directions, it would prove that 1=2 and we'd have to throw out all our maths.

Halc wrote: ↑September 8th, 2018, 12:05 pmThe rest of us use the physics concept of the word, and it is very relevant in this context. I cannot say 'accelerated reference frame' if you think that means a frames that has sped up. If you're going to redefine a word for a paragraph or a post, be explicit about that in each post where you do it. Yes, it would be better to use zakh and voop for this different thing, since I still need to use the word the way physics defines it. Or better yet, use 'increasing speed' which is what you actually seem to want to convey. 'Acceleration' does not mean that in physics.

My use of the word "decelerate" in the same sentence as "accelerated" gave you all the information you needed to know how to interpret both they way I used them. They were also only mentioned en passent as I moved on to mentioning the bit about the impossibility of a clock slowing its ticking while at the same time speeding up its ticking. That's the bit that should have woken you up, but instead you fixated on the acceleration issue and unnecessary definition games.

Also, you claim that this stuff is taking us into metaphysics and that physics isn't involved in this area (regardless of the reality), but if that's the case, you should not be trying to force me to use physics terminology in place of general terminology more appropriate to my field where I have a superior role in determining the rational validity of theories. Compromise is necessary with this, and yes - if you want your "accelerated reference frame" to be understood and think it isn't being understood properly, you have to say so.

I don't know how you can have studied relativity without the basics underneath you. You don't even think there is a significance to the difference between speed (scalar) and velocity (vector), or how to do arithmetic with the latter.

I have expertise that you lack, so do you want to be belittled on the basis that you can't handle mirror angles and effective mirror angles correctly? It works both ways. I don't care how many holes there are in your knowledge - they can be filled in as we go along, and the same applies to mine.

This whole paragraph shows that you seem baffled by a trivial situation. The clocks are in the same location. They are synced in any possible perspective you can imagine. They're probably the same clock since there's no point in having two if one can do the job. To initially sync two adjacent clocks, the one merely has to set itself to the time of the other. No signal is needed.

I'm not baffled at all - I'm just seeing something that you've missed, but I'm not going to bother showing you what it is right now because it'll be more fun to let you trip over it again later in a spectacular way. But I will say now that if you're synchronising two adjacent clocks that are adjacent and not in exactly the same place, you will rely on signals moving between them.

OK, each of you has put an origin at an arbitrary location of choice. Now what. Each only knows where his own origin is. What do you write on the envelope?

For my purposes, I don't care about the postie finding the right door. What matters in my argument is that the different origins applied to the same frame are co-moving, and the fact that objects at those locations are co-moving proves that the origins are co-moving.

You need to say where your origin is (since apparently you resists just saying where you are) and then go from there. Even that is unnecessary. Specification of a known event is enough to get the mail here, but you can't do that either.

If you want the mail to be delivered correctly, you either need to use a shared coordinate system or swap the details and work out how to convert between them.

I'm persisting with you because you assert that we have a location. Been about 6 posts now, and you've not told me your location.

You need to ask the fabric of space what my location is. I told you long ago that that information isn't accessible to me, but that the universe knows.

I assert that locations are only relative to other things whose location is equally not known. There is no possible objective address that can be written on the envelope that gets the mail delivered here.

There would be an objective address for the universe to use, if it was able to process ideas and measure things.

The alien doesn't actually have to deliver anything here since he's probably too far away to do it. I just want him to know where we are. If you accept that it cannot be done, then I need to know what you mean by 'location' because the circular 'we are where we are' that you gave doesn't tell me a different definition.

I've already made it more than clear that we cannot access the information needed to pin down our positions in the space fabric. To do that, we'd have to break relativity.

The comoving frame would be needed, yes. All large-scale diagrams of the universe use it, but none of them are absolute. They always put the origin here, which makes it relative.

You can make diagrams with the origin anywhere you like, so there is no such restriction. All you're doing is picking a frame and treating it as the absolute frame. There are further complications on the scale of the universe though as the absolute frame will be different in different places if the space fabric is expanding.

The topic suddenly seems to shift mid-paragraph:

That's because I keep trying to move it back to the point that the argument was originally about instead of going off on irrelevant diversions.

I was agreeing, but what do you mean by 'comoving with'. Comoving is a property, not a relation, so I don't know how I might be comoving with another object.

If two objects are co-moving, each is co-moving with the other. It's a simple transformation between wordings which allows one of the objects to be mentioned at the end rather than putting both up front.

The relative speed of two non-stationary objects in one frame is not a statement about the relative speed of the same two objects in another frame. If it was, you would have your contradiction.

And the same applies to the speed of light relative to an object. The important point is that frames make claims which contradict all other frames and that you can't make them compatible by asserting that relative speeds between light and objects from one frame carry across into other frames.

There is no possibility of more than one frame providing a true account of reality.

True account of reality is interpretational. Here is where you consistently make your mistake.

I'm not making any mistake with this at all: any two frames contradict each other and cannot both be true unless you accept contradictions and throw out a lot of mathematics by accepting that 1=2.

You mix different interpretations and find them contradictory.

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.

In some interpretations, all frames give a true account of reality, which is no more contradictory than my left profile being a true account of what I look like as a view from above, despite them being quite seemingly contradictory images. But you are mixing statements from two interpretations. In fact you assert one of them just above.

Looking at something from different angles and creating different images of them does not generate contradictions. Looking at a frame asserting that the speed of light in all directions relative to an object is c and another frame that asserts that the speed of light in some directions relative to that same object is >c produces a contradiction. My thought experiment confirms that the speed of light relative to some objects must be >c in some directions, and thereby that any frames which assert it to be c in all directions relative to those objects are misrepresenting reality. There are fundamental contradictions in play here, and you can't wish them away by providing examples of things that aren't contradictions while pretending that they're equivalent cases.

Your reason is based on your personal views, and you don't even understand the validity of alternate views.

I'm using accepted reasoning and I'm allowing it to dictate the conclusions. My involvement is irrelevant. If you want to break the argument, you need to break the argument and not try to misrepresent it as anyone's personal views.

Your rigor falls totally apart when you mix the two views. It is OK to only accept the one view, but you cannot assert it when disproving an alternative.

A contradiction's a contradiction. I'm not mixing up anything, but am simply applying reason in the strict way that it demands to be applied.

Take the other interpretation on its own claims, and drive it to self-inconsistency. That's the rigorous way to disprove it. All you are doing in this thread is demonstrating that what you see as SR doesn't correspond to your beliefs.

What I've done is show that SR does not function in the way that's claimed on the tin when you try to run it by its own rules. It generates contradictions which render it invalid. You are incapable of breaking the argument, so you just call it personal views and hope that other people will be stupid enough to take the same lazy way out. I've encountered no shortage of people who take that lazy way out before, but the thought experiment with the light going round the ring in opposite directions shows them up - they refuse to answer the questions. I haven't directly asked you the questions, but I'm going to ask you the most important one now. Does the light moving clockwise round the ring move faster relative to the material of the ring that it's passing (while passing close to it) than the light moving anticlockwise round the ring does? (And bear in mind that we're dealing with light not slowed by a medium other than the fabric of space.)

But it does not necessarily assert that only that other frames are less real, leaving that to interpretation.

Reason shows them to be misrepresentations of reality, so there is no point in leaving it open. It's a closed issue and there is certainly no excuse for SR's metaphysical baggage being pushed and LET's shouted down. 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 talk to one of the qualified scientists who popularise physics in the media and find that they behave in the same aggressive manner, telling you that LET was disproved a century ago. There is a massive re-education job needing to be done in the physics world to stop this abusive stuff going on and to stop misleading the public.

Another interpretational difference is the assertion of a preferred moment (the 3D model). The model is valid, but I know no named interpretation of relativity that asserts it. LET doesn't seem to. I agree that the 3D model is not compatible with interpretations where all frames are equally real, so you're going to have to drop that assertion of you want to disprove the alternative interpreation on its own grounds.

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. All models are covered by these modes, and they show that SR doesn't function as claimed - it breaks every way you try to run it unless you take it into mode 3 where it either becomes LET or a 4D variant of it where the time dimension there is superfluous as the superiority of the time of one frame reveals a Newtonian time distinct from the "time" of the time dimension.

Your insistence on this 3D model seems quite dogmatic to me. You are totally closed minded about the alternative.

I go through all the models and show them to be broken unless they accept the addition of Newtonian time in addition to a "time" dimension and the inclusion of an absolute frame. I make the point on my page that a 4D mode 3 model is viable, but that its "time" dimension is superfluous. Of course, it isn't superfluous when you move on into GR, and that makes it possible to unite SR and GR in the same theory, but there would need to be an acceptance of there being an absolute frame and Newtonian time in addition to the "time" of the "time" dimension (this being the time tied to the absolute frame which is clearly distinct from the "time" dimension. Those are not the SR or GR that are currently being pushed, and they would not be recognised as SR or GR either.

I don't care what Einstein said here. The question was about LET possibly asserting a 3D or 4D model. Einstein didn't author LET. I don't want his or your opinion. I want what LET asserts. I didn't see the subject come up. It seems not to matter to the view.

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

I never mentioned being able to visualize the entire set at once.

I know you didn't, but I wanted to make it more imaginable as that helps to demystify what's being discussed - it's much clearer when you can picture things easily.

The game sort of depends on the inability to do that.

Only because it leaves room for confusion when the task's so big that most people can't get their head around it. There's nothing wrong with me simplifying it as the principles as to how it works must still apply if there's no cheating being done.

I'm just talking about the abstract mathematical set, not about expressing the data in an obscene pile of paper somewhere in this universe. You asked for an example, and that was mine. The pile of paper would not be the abstract set. The pile would be a pile. Mathematicians talk about properties of the integers (a far larger set) without anybody insisting that they must be realized on paper before we can talk about them.

But the key to understanding what's actually going on here is to work out what exists and what doesn't. If you have a set of things that don't exist, that set is not altogether real. This is one of the problems with set theory, because it can promote things that don't exist into things that supposedly do exist if you get the rules of the system wrong.

What are we really dealing with here though? How does the set of legal states for this game come into being?

Again: Maybe the same way our universe is. Maybe not. Opinions vary.
I don't care how it exists or if it exists. I care that it is a structure that illustrates the properties I wanted illustrated. If and how it exists is irrelevant to my being able to discuss those properties.

I think you should care about whether it exists or not. I would suggest to you that the positions in the game don't exist until they are actualised during a game. Until that happens, they are merely potential positions that have yet to be realised. Your set of valid positions is thus hiding the reality that it is initially a set of positions that don't exist yet because they've never been actualised, and they are only actualised during the application of a running process in which real causation is in play. Your set is therefore a set of non-existent things (initially) and it is not a real thing - it doesn't really exist at the start and only becomes a set of all valid positions once all valid positions have been actualised by a running process.

It already exists as soon as the rules exist, and indeed it arguably existed before the rules were drawn up.

Yes, very good. Maybe our own universe is exactly like that.

And here you are equating the universe (or considering it being equated) to something that doesn't exist.

It is abstract to us. To some other entity capable of abstraction in another universe, we are the abstraction. I find 'abstract' to be a relation. I think in those terms because everything seems to make more sense that way. But again, that's just me.

If there are other universes out there, they aren't an abstraction any more than we are. Abstract things don't exist. A circle is a pattern/shape, but there are no physical circles. Positions in a game are patterns, so they don't physically exist either, but merely have real things represent or conform to them. This puts them in a different category from the physical content of the universe, and different rules apply to each.

But it has temporal properties fairly identical to the structure that is our own universe.

It is timeless, but time and causality do come into play when the positions are actualised and stop just being potentials.

I don't care about our physical representations of any members. I am talking about the abstract set, never about anything physical.

But the causality only comes in when there are physical representations turning them from potential positions to realised ones. Up until then, all you have is a set of positions/patterns that don't exist.

but the members themselves remain in a state that has no substance because they are just possibilities.

Yes, quite like our own universe.

Quite unlike our universe which contains things that are real and where real causality is in operation.

Those possibilities are real to the members. Each chess state has a real set of where all the pieces are, and the moves leading up to that state are in the past (designated real or not) are somewhat determinable, and alternate moves are not real to the chess state in question, and future moves are indeterminate.

But it's a set of things that don't exist yet. So long as they are unrealised potentials, they aren't real things, and no befores or afters have been played through for them.

They merely exist as things that could be calculated, and they have not been calculated.

Again, just like the states of our own universe.

Our universe is real, and real causation is active within it as a running process. Even with QM there are absolute realities as to what waves are doing and they are not just potentials in a set of non-existent things that might exist some day.

Here (about 50 posts ago) I predicted you would not accept the example, but you said you wanted it anyway. There it is.

I wanted it, and I greatly appreciate you supplying it - it's been highly illuminating.

So here you go with your pet assertion again.

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. They are part of a set of abstract things which play by different rules, so it isn't valid to equate the two kinds of things. When we call the members of the set what they actually are (i.e. nothing), we then see that the set only contains potential patterns which can only be actualised in any sense by representations of them coming into being. There is no causality at work in this set of potential patterns.

The states are very much ordered, and I never suggested that any of the states had 'been done'. Each state has a causal relationship (but not a determined relationship) with the prior state, just like today's relationship with yesterday. That's the non-flowing way of defining causality. It doesn't make sense to you because you are mixing in a different interpretation of causality, the same mistake you make when finding contradictions in SR.

Your model of reality has an error in it where you're counting things that don't exist as things that exist. This comes from the dodgy rules of a particular set of rules for handling sets where defining a set of things can be asserted to bring something into existence even though nothing real exists in the set.

Not asking you to accept it, but here you seem to declare your intent to refuse to consider the alternate interpretation on its own grounds.

I've considered it, and I've found that a stunt is being pulled in which things that don't exist are being asserted to exist. My set of all the things that could exist is another example of such a set - the members of that set don't exist until they are actualised. This set contains the space elevator, but there isn't a real one yet (unless aliens have them, but we can simply translate the idea to some other device that no aliens yet have, so it's fair to treat this as a non-existent item at the moment). Once things exist, they move into the set of real things, and if they cease to exist, they move into the set of things that have existed but no longer exist. Once no representations of a position in a game exists, that too becomes a position that doesn't exist, returning to the set of potential positions.

Most proponents of the 4D interpretations consider the structure to be actual, so since a lot of your post focuses on your bias that somebody else's view cannot be actual,

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. A block universe could be real too, but a theory with that has to be able to generate the block in order of causation.

... why don't you go with the assumption that there is an actual 4D structure with no flowing going on, and that each reference frame is just an abstract orientation of the axes assigned to that very real structure, and each frame is just as real as the one non-inertial frame where the expansion seems balanced. What contradiction with itself results from that?

There is no possibility of real causation in that model.

If you don't accept these, then you're not really questioning relativity, but unrelated philosophical topics such as origins of reality, which are completely in question in any interpretation of the properties of this thing with unexplained existence.

I won't accept any model with fake causation in it - it has to be able to run if effects are to be caused by their proposed causes. You have shown me something interesting which supposedly has a causality that doesn't run built into it, but it turns out that it's based on dodgy ideas which promote things that don't exist to the status of things that do exist. This is a really useful insight though which is important to my work, so I'm very grateful to you for providing it. You have been extremely helpful and the time that you've put into your posts here is much appreciated as you have made this thread one of the more valuable ones that I've been involved in anywhere.