The Preferred System of Reference Reloaded by Israel Omar Perez

Hi Israel,

You wrote: "...the second postulate of special RT cannot be and has never been experimentally tested."

I am not so sure. When the observer starts moving towards the light source with speed v, the frequency he measures shifts from f to f'=f(1+v/c). This (Doppler effect) is experimentally tested. The speed of the light waves relative to the observer shifts from c to c' and the wavelength shifts from L to L'. Let us assume that there is no wavelength shift: L'=L. Then the formulas f=c/L and f'=c'/L' imply that, by measuring f', the observer in fact measures c':

c' = f'L' = f'L = f'c/f = c+v

That is, the speed of light as measured by the observer shifts from c to c'=c+v.

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Dear Israel,

Very clearly and succinctly written essay. Extremely relevant to the competition question, and insightful.

Feels like you've really put a few things straight that needed saying, with no messing around. Science and its aim, "laid bare" was one of things that resonated with me.(I have talked a bit about truth and science as I see it with J.C.N Smith in my essay thread.)

I like what you said about the preferred system of reference- and the paradoxes which is something that has interested me for a long time now.

My only irritation is not to do with your extremely well written and insightful essay itself, its the feeling that this is just warm up before the match. You've given us the serious team talk, shown us what field we're playing on. Now I want to see the game started... because there is so much more that can be done.

Good luck in the competition. I hope you get lots of appreciative readers who will give your essay the high marks it deserves according to the judging criteria.

Dear Israel Omar Perez,

I enjoyed your essay immensely. You present a view that I have considered to be the likely case, and believe it comports very well with my first two FQXi essays. Reinterpreting the warping of space as change in the density of the field is extremely significant. Your essay is very well written, simple and clear, and I hope you do well in this contest. There must be something in the water in Saskatchewan.

I invite you to read my essay, The Nature of the Wave Function, for still another perspective on the gravitational field (the gravitomagnetic aspect thereof).

Thank you for a very stimulating essay,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hi Israel,

you have nothing to apologise for. You have done a brilliant job of fitting a lot of important ideas into your essay. I hope it will be inspiring to lots of people.I was not implying that your essay is lacking in any way but expressing my impatience to see change, resulting from the kind of understanding of science and its wrong assumptions that you have talked about. I will be interested to read whatever else you add here.

Dear Isreal,

It's interesting to me that we both live in Saskatoon, we've both submitted essays to this contest that argue for a preferred frame of reference, and that we've never met! I liked the way you set out your argument: beginning with an epistemological discussion, then moving on to discuss the historical development of the physics, and how that could have been different since a preferred reference frame is theoretically allowable, and then concluding with some considerations to support the assumption of a preferred state of rest. In your final paragraph, you mention that ''the expansion of the universe would need to be reinterpreted in the light of this new paradigm.'' Actually, standard cosmology already assumes an absolute rest frame. In my essay, I've argued that absolute simultaneity and the assumption of a cosmic rest frame should be revisited and reconceived more relativistically, since they are described in the most trivial way possible in standard cosmology. Maybe we could meet up sometime to talk about these kinds of things. In any case, I'd be grateful if you read and commented on my essay.

Good luck!

Daryl

Hi Israel,

The formula f'=f(1+v/c) gives the RELATIVISTIC Doppler effect when v is low enough. If you don't believe me, see this:

http://rockpile.phys.virginia.edu/mod04/mod34.pdf

Paul Fendley: "Now let's see what this does to the frequency of the light. We know that even without special relativity, observers moving at different velocities measure different frequencies. (This is the reason the pitch of an ambulance changes as it passes you it doesn't change if you're on the ambulance). This is called the Doppler shift, and for small relative velocity v it is easy to show that the frequency shifts from f to f(1+v/c) (it goes up heading toward you, down away from you). There are relativistic corrections, but these are negligible here."

Next you write: "If the frequency changes for the observer in motion the wavelength will change also in the same proportion, thus the observer will measure c and not c'."

For waves other than light waves, the motion of the observer OBVIOUSLY cannot change the wavelength. Both relativists and antirelativists admit that so when the observer starts moving towards the wave source with speed v, they all agree the frequency he measures shifts from f to f'=f(1+v/V) and the speed of the waves he measures shifts from V to V'=V+v.

For light waves, it is again obvious that the motion of the observer cannot change the wavelength but relativists would not admit that of course. Still the assumption that the wavelength does not change is indispensable in the derivation of the frequency shift (moving observer). So this assumption is implicit in such derivations but some scientists forget the danger and advance it explicitly (or directly say that the speed of the waves as measured by the observer shifts from c to c'=c+v)):

http://a-levelphysicstutor.com/wav-doppler.php

"vO is the velocity of an observer moving towards the source. This velocity is independent of the motion of the source. Hence, the velocity of waves relative to the observer is c + vO. (...) The motion of an observer does not alter the wavelength. The increase in frequency is a result of the observer encountering more wavelengths in a given time."

http://www.usna.edu/Users/physics/mungan/Scholarship/DopplerEffect.pdf

Carl Mungan: "Consider the case where the observer moves toward the source. In this case, the observer is rushing head-long into the wavefronts... (...) In fact, the wave speed is simply increased by the observer speed, as we can see by jumping into the observer's frame of reference."

http://physics.bu.edu/~redner/211-sp06/class19/class19_doppler.html

Professor Sidney Redner: "We will focus on sound waves in describing the Doppler effect, but it works for other waves too. (...) Let's say you, the observer, now move toward the source with velocity vO. You encounter more waves per unit time than you did before. Relative to you, the waves travel at a higher speed: v'=v+vO. The frequency of the waves you detect is higher, and is given by: f'=v'/(lambda)=(v+vO)/(lambda)."

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Dear Israel,

Thank you for a very well written and accessible essay. I was immediately interested in what you had to say due to your abstract being so simple and informative. I appreciate your knowledge of physics history with the mental concepts that our early great scientists held and the way these ideas came in and out of favour over the years. It was most enlightening. I did notice that my own essay topic, Newton's assumption of isotropy and the weak equivalence principle, was merely touched upon though. I have a new angle on this with regard to real data and have pursued an exotic matter hypothesis which has been most fruitful. I would much appreciate it if you would take a look at what I have discovered, Newtons Isotropy and Equivalence Is Simplicity That Has Led to Modern Day Mass Misconceptions of Reality.

The very best of luck to you,

Alan

Hi Israel,

You suggest the speed of light is variable in a gravitational field but do not treat the problem quantitatively. So let me ask you a question (I have already asked it to James Putnam who also claims the speed of light is variable):

The top of a tower of height h emits light with frequency f, speed c and wavelength L (as measured by the emitter):

f = c/L

An observer on the ground measures the frequency to be f'=f(1+gh/c^2), the speed of light to be c' and the wavelength to be L':

f' = c'/L'

The questions: c' = ? ; L' = ?

My answers: c'=c(1+gh/c^2) ; L'=L

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Dear Doctor Pérez,

I found your essay to be absolutely absorbing. Unfortunately, as I clumsily pointed out in my essay Sequence Consequence, I still have to question why scientists ignore the reality of what exists here and now in favor of trying to prove abstract theories about what ought to have been in the mystical historical there and then. For instance, just as oxygen has to be present here and now in order for one to be able to breathe, it is evident that visible light has to be present here and now in order for one to be able to see. Real visible light cannot have a real constant speed separate from the surface it is striking in order for it to become visible and that is why visible light is always present here and now while one is looking.

Dear Dr. Israel Perez

I enjoyed your essay - it shows clear thinking on every level, and is not afraid to defend the usefulness and importance of the Newtonian concept of absolute space AS. Einstein was 'too clever' in presenting his elegant and seemingly foolproof system in SR. His system avoids AS by saying that the speed of light is constant. But by abolishing AS he abolished the ether, and his Leyden lecture on the ether clearly shows he regretted this later.

Your thought experiment about supposed knowledge of physics in 1898 is to the point. It shows how physics 'could have been'. I can add that the gulf between QM and GR could have been avoided had it not been for this 'too cleverness' of Einstein. He has created obstacles in physics because of his photon-as-point idea which as I discuss in my fqxi essay Fix Physics! is the basis of the probabilistic interpretation in QM. And his warped spacetime in GR is unnecessarily complicated and anti-intuitive. As I have been advocating for years for example in Beautiful Universe Theory , Eddington's refractive index idea should replace GR's unnecessary complexities. I am glad that you too have accepted the usefulness of this approach. I can add that even before Eddington Young had such an idea in relation to optical refraction at an open aperture. Another great 19th c. concept that Einstein swept into oblivion is that matter is permeable to the ether to use Fresnel's phrase, and the related idea of Hertz' that everything (matter and ether) is 'electrical'- concepts that are also, together with AS, inherent in my theory.

Congratulations on a job well done.

Vladimir

Dear Israel,

I truly enjoyed your essay. You have exposed with exceptional clarity some of the flaws in reasoning that led to abandonment of the preferred system of reference hypothesis.

I completely agree with you that the constancy of the speed of light is not experimentally founded. If a preferred system of reference existed, then any effect on the speed of light attributable to the motion of a two way measuring apparatus relative to the PSR must cancel out. What a two way measurement gets is the average relative speed of light, not the actual speed of light.

But there is, I believe experimental evidence of the existence of a preferred system of reference. Though the measurements of superluminal neutrinos claimed last year by the OPERA group proved to have been flawed due to systematic errors, it provided an opportunity to detect the motion of the Earth against the preferred frame of reference, hence to prove its existence. An unbiased look at the data used by the ICARUS group to refute the earlier claim of the OPERA group shows variations in the speeds of seven neutrinos of than 18 nanosecond below and above the time of arrival of the speed of light. The measurements, which here were one way, were then averaged out to the speed of light (and thus replicated mathematically the error from two way measurements). But, if a preferred system of reference exist, then the larger variations may be attributable to the absolute motion of the measuring apparatus against the PSR. Of course, this may imply, as I believe, that the speed of neutrinos, like that of photons, is independent of its energy and is equal to c.

That said, I am convinced that the constancy of the speed of light is not incompatible with the existence of a preferred system of reference. That is, if space is discrete and emergent, as I describe in my essay, then the constancy of the speed of light becomes a direct consequence of the structure of space itself. This implies, that any apparatus located on Earth provides measurements of the relative speed of light (or any other particle) between source and target and not the absolute speed of light (or particles).

I am convinced that non-biased analysis of the data of neutrino speed measurements will be found to be consistent with the existence of a preferred system of reference.

Thank you for offering such a stimulating essay.