Is Relativity Reality?

[lpetrich]

And isn't ALL the interaction between fundamental particles done by electromagnetic, gravitational, strong and weak forces, all of which are properties of fields and limited by the speed of light?

Yes, because of the geometry of space-time. It imposes the speed-of-light-in-vacuum limit on all those effects.

Gravitational effects propagate at exactly the speed of light. Is that just a coincidence, or do you suspect any connection? And the same goes for any kind of particle. If they are totally foreign to light, why do they experience the same limit? Why not half the speed of light, or double?

As I'd posted earlier, the geometry of space-time.

And while you're at it, ChildInAZoo, tell us whether you think nuclear decay rates are affected by relativistic time dilation.

I'm not CIAZ, but I'll answer: they are, because of the geometry of space-time.

[mistermack]

I wouldn't argue with c being a consequence of the geometry of spacetime. I've asserted often that c is a fundamental property of spacetime, so same thing really.

Spacetime is a mathematical model that combines space and time. Einstein is saying it's a void filled with fields. When you boil it all down, spacetime is just a word, and what exists is fields and movement, and c is a property of that.
You say the geometry of spacetime, I say fields and movement, but I think we're fundamentally talking about the same thing.

The whole point of this thread is not why c is a certain value, but why it's the same value in any inertial frame you care to choose. I'm claiming that it's not because of some magical property of spacetime, but because of the variables that we have to use to measure it in any frame.

And I'm claiming that you get the same effects in sound in water, if you use a clock working from sound in water. You would get the same value for the speed of sound in water, no matter what frame you chose, and the clock would slow with velocity.
Just like SR.
So SR applies to soundwaves in water in the same way, meaning it's not a unique property of matter moving in spacetime.
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[Farsight]

Yes, because of the geometry of space-time. It imposes the speed-of-light-in-vacuum limit on all those effects...

...I'm not CIAZ, but I'll answer: they are, because of the geometry of space-time.

I'm glad you agree that nuclear decay rates are affected by relativistic time dilation. But I'm afraid the cause is not the geometry of spacetime. That's an effect. Remember I mentioned gravitational potential, and said the time dilation is at a maximum in a void at the centre of the earth? The spacetime there is flat. Objects don't fall down, and they travel in straight lines. But nuclear decay rates are reduced, in line with the propagation of stress-energy and field effects. The cause is this: the space is different. It's actually vacuum impedance that's different. This is Z0 = √(μ0/ε0), and of course c = √(1/ε0μ0). The light goes slower, as does all motion. We can't measure it locally because we are in essence "made of light", along with our rods and clocks, as evidenced by pair production and low-energy proton-antiproton annihilation. That's why we always measure the speed of light to be the same, just like Close was saying. There's no escaping this lpetrich. And it's time people like you started getting used to it before the Chinese do.

[ChildInAZoo]

If it's an effect, show us the mathematics that guarantees these geometrical effects. So far, all I see is gobbledygook.

[lpetrich]

...I'm not CIAZ, but I'll answer: they are, because of the geometry of space-time.

I'm glad you agree that nuclear decay rates are affected by relativistic time dilation.

You're surprised by that? I know SR well enough to conclude that that is what's expected.

But I'm afraid the cause is not the geometry of spacetime. That's an effect.

Farsight, you are just plain wrong about SR. In fact, your inversion reminds me of many crackpots' inversion theories. Like trisecting angles, squaring the circle, constructing perpetual motion machines, and theories like gravity being a push, we living on the inside of a hollow Earth, complicated mathematics being unnecessary, sound not waves but particles, etc.

Remember I mentioned gravitational potential, and said the time dilation is at a maximum in a void at the centre of the earth? The spacetime there is flat. Objects don't fall down, and they travel in straight lines. ...

That's because of continuity of gravitational potential. No mystery there. That's an effect easily derived from GR and similar theories of gravity using those theories' mathematics. Yes, that great Hoerbigerian no-no.

There's no escaping this lpetrich. And it's time people like you started getting used to it before the Chinese do.

Not something worth losing sleep over.

[Farsight]

Farsight, you are just plain wrong about SR. In fact, your inversion reminds me of many crackpots' inversion theories. Like trisecting angles, squaring the circle, constructing perpetual motion machines, and theories like gravity being a push, we living on the inside of a hollow Earth, complicated mathematics being unnecessary, sound not waves but particles, etc.

I'm not wrong about SR, what I've said, what mistermack says, and what the Close paper says is backed up by patent scientific evidence. It's transparently ridiculous and dishonest to compare that with abject nonsense like push-gravity and the hollow earth. Shame on you.

[lpetrich]

Farsight, you are just plain wrong about SR. In fact, your inversion reminds me of many crackpots' inversion theories. Like trisecting angles, squaring the circle, constructing perpetual motion machines, and theories like gravity being a push, we living on the inside of a hollow Earth, complicated mathematics being unnecessary, sound not waves but particles, etc.

I'm not wrong about SR, what I've said, what mistermack says, and what the Close paper says is backed up by patent scientific evidence.

The Close paper is a big fat non sequitur with a weird way of obtaining an effective mass term for the matter-wave dispersion relation.

It's transparently ridiculous and dishonest to compare that with abject nonsense like push-gravity and the hollow earth. Shame on you.

On the contrary, given what poor support your theories have, it's a good comparison. It's especially good for your theory that time is somehow a byproduct of motion.

[mistermack]

When I started this thread, I was quite happy to go wherever it led. I was expecting a rapid refutation of argument one, because it seemed too obvious to not have been gone into in the past, by better brains than mine. I'm quite happy to be proved wrong on anything, because you gain in the process.

Having refuted my own argument, I don't think I can be accused of wishing it to be so, or bias of that kind.

I must say though, that the more it's been chewed over, the more I'm convinced that SR is a sub-plot, and that overall reality is absolute, not relative.
The title of the thread is not very good though. SR is a form of reality, it's the reality we experience, so I could have phrased it better. ( although the very best title stlll escapes me ).

Like I've said a few times now, the one part of SR I disagree with most, is the assertion that there is no fundamental, or 'preferred' inertial frame of reference.
This has never been proved by anyone, or disproved. So I don't think I'm committing heresy to question it. People assert that it's unlikely, that it's never been proved, that every frame works just as well, but nobody has proved anything either way.
And to repeat what I said earlier, if there was ONE fundamental frame, nothing would be any different to what we experience now. All physical laws are obeyed in every frame, so they would be equally obeyed in that frame.

I think that the submarines argument of Close is very telling. You don't need to be a mathematical genius to realise that if you made a clock that worked by sound in water, it would slow with velocity.
All you need is an arm, sticking out of the sub, with a sound reflector pointing back at the sub. A sound generator on the sub sends a ping to the reflector, and when a microphone on the sub hears the echo, it automatically generates the next ping. When the sub is stationary in the water, the pings are at their most rapid. When the sub starts to move, the pings have farther to travel, so they slow down. When you reach the speed of sound in water, the pings would stop, as the sound could never get to the reflector, or get back.

So your sound-in-water clock does exactly what an atomic clock does, slows till it reaches the speed limit for the medium, when it stops.

Of course, we have the means to observe this, and know it was happening, because we have light, and clocks that are not affected by the speed of the sub through the water. But if we were totally made of sound-waves, time would slow down for us too, and we wouldn't be aware of any change in the clock. If you were to measure the speed of sound in water, using your sound-in-water clock, you would get the same value, in any frame of reference. We know, because we have light and ordinary clocks, that actually, the speed of sound in water is not the same in every frame. But it is, if you are made of sound-in-water.

Of course, all this would apply equally to sound in air, or cooking oil, or any medium to care to choose.

All this is a direct parallel to clocks made of matter, moving in spacetime. And as every atom, and every fundamental particle, is it's own type of clock, every physical process slows along with the clocks.

Unknowingly, I was making exactly the same argument when I wrote out argument 2, linked from argument 1, in my original post. So I'm posting it below, in case people didn't read it.
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[mistermack]

Is Relativity Reality?
Argument 2
Do I think that we should abandon relativity? No, I'm not saying that. I'm very definitely saying we should USE relativity, we should NOT be trying to use absolutes, because we don't have the tools. I'm just saying that we should just be aware that we are using apparent reality, not REAL reality.

To see what I'm getting at, imagine that today it was announced that physicists had discovered a new form of 'light' we call Light2.
Light2 is of a totally new nature, and as far as we can tell, the speed of L2 is infinite. It turns out that the universe is bathed in L2, and with new L2 cameras we can now see all the farthest galaxies and stars as they are this very instant, with no detectable delay.
Also, we can now make clocks that use L2, that never vary, keep perfect universal time, and are totally independent of gravity and motion. Also, L2 waves conveniently have markers every centimetre that give us a perfect, invariable ruler.

The big question is :
Which set of tools would you say gives you a true picture of reality?
L2, and L2 clocks and L2 rulers, or the old Light, with finite speed, and with clocks that vary with velocity?.
Anybody who answered that our current tools give you reality would just be being dogmatic. I would accept that they give us the only reality we can experience, given the tools we have.
Who would prefer to look at where a distant galaxy was millions of years ago, when you could see it as it is now? What would give you a picture of reality, our current light, or L2? And what physicist would not like to get their hands on a clock that did NOT slow down with velocity?.
If you answer 'L2' would give the true picture of reality, try applying it to two moving clocks.


Two experimenters, 'a' and 'b', traveling towards each other at a closing speed of 100,000 mph, carrying identical stopwatches. They are both using the same reference clock, an extremely distant pulsar, both observing it using L2. When they pass each other, they start their stopwatches. When the pulsar has revolved one million times, they stop their stopwatches.
The question is, will both stopwatches show the same elapsed time, or not?
If you consider 'a' to be at rest, and 'b' to be moving at 100,000 mph, you would expect 'b's watch to be running slow.
If you consider the opposite, then 'a's watch should be slow.
But special relativity says that both cases are equally valid. Neither watch has undergone any acceleration, while making it's measurement. So each watch should be running faster, and slower, than the other. We know this is impossible, so it can only be that both cases are NOT equally valid. The truth is that they are only both valid using clocks running in their chosen frame of reference. That is why you can get totally opposite results, because you are using clocks running at very different speeds.
If you were able to use an L2 clock as described, you would get one actual result, not two theoretical ones that contradict each other.
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[mistermack]

This light/L2 situation is an exact parallel to the sound-in-water / light situation.
In both cases, SR applies, till you use the faster form of information. Then you find that the SR was an 'illusion' brought about by time dilation.
L2 and L2 clocks would show that light is actually travelling at different speeds relative to different inertial frames, and that there is a 'master' frame, in which stationary clocks go at the fastest possible speed, and any movement relative to that frame would make them slower.
Just like the sound-in-water clocks.
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[colubridae]

Is Relativity Reality?
Argument 2
Do I think that we should abandon relativity? No, I'm not saying that. I'm very definitely saying we should USE relativity, we should NOT be trying to use absolutes, because we don't have the tools. I'm just saying that we should just be aware that we are using apparent reality, not REAL reality.

To see what I'm getting at, imagine that today it was announced that physicists had discovered a new form of 'light' we call Light2.
Light2 is of a totally new nature, and as far as we can tell, the speed of L2 is infinite. It turns out that the universe is bathed in L2, and with new L2 cameras we can now see all the farthest galaxies and stars as they are this very instant, with no detectable delay.
Also, we can now make clocks that use L2, that never vary, keep perfect universal time, and are totally independent of gravity and motion. Also, L2 waves conveniently have markers every centimetre that give us a perfect, invariable ruler.

The big question is :
Which set of tools would you say gives you a true picture of reality?
L2, and L2 clocks and L2 rulers, or the old Light, with finite speed, and with clocks that vary with velocity?.
Anybody who answered that our current tools give you reality would just be being dogmatic. I would accept that they give us the only reality we can experience, given the tools we have.
Who would prefer to look at where a distant galaxy was millions of years ago, when you could see it as it is now? What would give you a picture of reality, our current light, or L2? And what physicist would not like to get their hands on a clock that did NOT slow down with velocity?.
If you answer 'L2' would give the true picture of reality, try applying it to two moving clocks.


Two experimenters, 'a' and 'b', traveling towards each other at a closing speed of 100,000 mph, carrying identical stopwatches. They are both using the same reference clock, an extremely distant pulsar, both observing it using L2. When they pass each other, they start their stopwatches. When the pulsar has revolved one million times, they stop their stopwatches.
The question is, will both stopwatches show the same elapsed time, or not?
If you consider 'a' to be at rest, and 'b' to be moving at 100,000 mph, you would expect 'b's watch to be running slow.
If you consider the opposite, then 'a's watch should be slow.
But special relativity says that both cases are equally valid. Neither watch has undergone any acceleration, while making it's measurement. So each watch should be running faster, and slower, than the other. We know this is impossible, so it can only be that both cases are NOT equally valid. The truth is that they are only both valid using clocks running in their chosen frame of reference. That is why you can get totally opposite results, because you are using clocks running at very different speeds.
If you were able to use an L2 clock as described, you would get one actual result, not two theoretical ones that contradict each other.
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Never in the field of internet posting has so much, been owed, by so many, to one smiley!

[mistermack]

Never in the field of internet posting has so much, been owed, by so many, to one smiley!

Wow colubridae, The Whole Argument Trumped.
I'm impressed.
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[colubridae]

Never in the field of internet posting has so much, been owed, by so many, to one smiley!

Wow colubridae,



The Whole Argument Arsegravy Trumped.
I'm impressed.
.

Yes! I am very well aware how fucking easily you are impressed. I wouldn't try to emphasize it if I were you

[ChildInAZoo]

mistermack, you again ignore the fact that we have different kinds of clocks in the form of physical systems that act according to different kinds of principles. They all agree on time dilation, so you cannot simply appeal to some kind of common physical operation to explain time dilation.

[mistermack]

mistermack, you again ignore the fact that we have different kinds of clocks in the form of physical systems that act according to different kinds of principles. They all agree on time dilation, so you cannot simply appeal to some kind of common physical operation to explain time dilation.

Read that back to yourself, and try to see how illogical it is.
If you have many very different things behaving in an identical manner, you would obviously suspect something common to them all, would you not?
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