The Preferred System of Reference Reloaded by Israel Omar Perez

Dear Israel

I am also supporter of opinion that gravity is not a fundamental force. It seems to me that Sakharov's view about elasticity of space close to truth.

See detail my article "What Wolfgang Pauli Did Mean?"

http://vixra.org/abs/0907.0022

Hello Israel Perez,

Thank you for your most interesting essay. You will find the following proposition relevant to the theme you expound in your essay: "If the speed of light is constant, then light propagates as a wave". You can find the proof to this in End Note II) of my essay, "The Metaphysics of Physics". This establishes that the CSL Postulate contradicts the Photon Hypothesis. And it unequivocally shows light is a wave. And as a wave, certainly the speed of its propagation through a medium will be innate and independent of the source or the observer.

I have made reference to your essay in mine. You may wish to check this out!

Best wishes!

Dear Israel Perez,

You write, "The problem arises when there is an observer moving in relation to the medium and the question do not appear to be as simple as in the previous case."

There can be no doubt light propagates as a wave. And as such, light will have an absolute and innate propagation speed in a medium. And that constant speed is what we measure 'locally' to the medium of propagation.

So the only question really is can we measure the speed of light in any other way but 'locally'?

Constantinos

Dear Israel,

I came across this definition of "hume" in the Philosophical Lexicon (www.philosophicallexicon.com) and I thought of your essay. You could have named your essay, "The Preferred System of Reference Exhumed":

hume, pron. (1) Indefinite personal and relative pronoun, presupposing no referent. Useful esp. in writing solipsistic treatises, sc. "to hume it may concern." v. (2) To commit to the flames, bury, or otherwise destroy a philosophical position, as in "That theory was humed in the 1920s." Hence, exhume, v. to revive a position generally believed to humed.

Best, Daryl

Dear Israel,

You have argued for a preferred reference system in your essay, and I have argued for the relational view of motion (and extensions of it) in my essay Absolute or Relative Motion...or Something Else? , which are completely opposite views. I think we may have a very exciting discussion.

First, I will adress your question: i) Does the fact that the PSR cannot be experimentally detected mean that the PSR

does not exist?

As you have noticed in your essay, the introduction of any concept can be justified if it leads to useful empirical confirmations (that may have nothing to do with the concept in question). So we may say that there is a preferred system of reference (even tough it cannot be observed) in order to obtain a completely new theory with possible new experiments and empirical success, but it seems that such a theory will always have one drawback: it will produce statements that can never be verified.

For instance, what is my absolute position? This is a meaningful and unanswerable question in the PSR framework. It happens to be unanswerable because of the coincidence that no experiment can answer this question due to the particular form that the laws of physics happen to have. So any theory that does not need the invisible structure of absolute space and still produce the same results is superior. The introduction of the PSR need some extremely compelling arguments.

So now I turn to your arguments in that support the PSR hypothesis. You have written that

''Suppose that before the discovery of RT, particle accelerators had been already developed. And assume that the ALICE, ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the large

hadron collider had released the news, well know today, that the quantum vacuum is actually a perfect fluid [\LHC experiments brought new insight into the primordial universe" (21; 22)]. If this fluid were assumed to be at rest and

not signicantly affected by the presence of material particles it would immediately be identied as the aether or AS.''

That it not strictly true. Newton introduced absolute space in order to define motion. Suppose you have a snapshot showing physical objects in euclidean space. Now suppose after some time has elapsed, you take another snapshot. How can we know if any change has happened? It is necessary to have an equilocality relation: a relation that tell which point in one snapshot is the same in the other snapshot. The equilocality relation is necessary to make motion of objects in time a meaningful concept, and Newton´s absolute space does exactly that, and that was the reason why it was introduced (see Barbour´s book The discovery of dynamics).

The presence of a quantum vacuum field does not entail that there is a PSR, or that AS could be identified with it. The reason follows from the same argument above: suppose you have two snapshots of field configurations defined on a 3D euclidean space taken at different times. How can we tell what´s the difference between them without a way of identifying a point in one snapshot with a point in another?

You have also written

''And fourthly, it is also well understood that the paradoxes in special RT such as the clock paradox,

the Supplee paradox, etc. arise due to the lack of the PRS. For if one assumes that the PRS exists all paradoxes as

well as the intuitive perplexities inherent to the theory automatically vanish.''

What is the scientific value of the lack or presence of intuitive perplexities? The clock and Supplee paradox are not actual paradoxes: they are fully resolved and explained by special relativity without any problem. Why bother with them?

Another idea of yours is

''[...] keep space immovable a la Newton and assume it as a non-homogenous material fluid with different refraction indices that vary

as function of the distance between the observer and the source of GF. The gradient of the refraction indices is caused by the GF and will automatically make the speed of light to have dierent values as function of its position within the GF. So, within this context, the warping of space can be physically reinterpreted as the change in the density of

the material medium (23).''

How can this framework explain how the time measurement differences of clocks situated on different points of space close to a massive objects (such as the earth)? This effect is considered everyday for GPS devices to work.

I´ll be waiting for your answers and invite you to read my essay and share opinions about a different view on time, space and motion.

Best regards.

Dear Daniel,

The implication that we must live in a Block Universe, as realised through the Andromeda paradox, is a significant issue, from the point-of-view of relativity, for any realist to overcome, if they would reject the relativistic possibility of a preferred reference frame.

As for experimental evidence, local experiments can't decide either way, since the physics is the same with or without a preferred frame; however, beyond the empirical fact that time really does pass, which can't be reconciled with relativity in any realistic sense without a preferred space, all empirical evidence from cosmology decidedly favours---and really can't work in the usual way without assuming---a preferred reference frame.

I hope you read my essay as well, and I'll read yours, as I'd be interested to join in on this discussion you've proposed. I'd very much appreciate such a well thought out critique of my essay as you've offered Israel here.

Best, Daryl

Hi Israel,

(After reading your essay for a second time I slowly starting to appreciate the gist. Why slowly? The overuse of unusual acronyms means that my brain has to multitask (which I am no longer good at); the first task digesting and appreciating the content and the second learning acronyms that have no relevance beyond the essay. This was now a self criticism regarding my short term memory or lack thereof that all scientific writers should be aware of; 聽I am sure that I am not alone.)

Nevertheless, congratulations to the extremely well written and structured philosophical disquisition; explaining the historical background that moulded our way of thinking and raising the valid questions and presenting argument that there must be more.

Your essay and my essay ( 聽 .../topic/1458聽 聽 ) support each other well; I, like you, raise 聽the question of a, yet unknown, underlying absolute reality verses our only ability to model, possibly degraded, a relative reality.

Regards and good luck - Anton

PS let's stay in touch my email in my essay.

Israel,

Was it you who linked me to this article last year?

I think the whole issue of redshift only being possible due to recession is based on the assumption photons remain point particles during transmission. But why? Wouldn't quanta of light expand, much like a gas when emitted? Then when absorbed, there are various possibilities why this expansion would be causing redshift. The one I suggested in last years contest was simply that beyond a certain luminosity, the loading theory of quantum absorption would mean it would start to take longer for each photon to register.

As for 5, expansion is already balanced by gravitational attraction, so the space expanding between galaxies, is matched by the space contracting into them, leading to overall flat space.

Dear Israel:

"The general theory of relativity offers one way to solve the puzzle by postulating expansion of space though it does not seem to be very probable. The fact that expansion does not solve Olber's paradox at all makes me lean towards the other model."

!!!!!!!

First of all, GRT is NOT---*absolutely NOT*---needed a priori in order to describe the metrical expansion of space! The metrical expansion of space, described by the RW metric, is *assumed prior to bringing GRT into cosmology at all*. The RW metric is NOT general relativistic in and of itself, but GRT---viz. Einstein's equation---is ONLY subsequently imposed in order to constrain the FORM of expansion that such a universe can take, depending on the possible energy-content of space, according to the theory. One can presume to describe redshifts through the metrical expansion of space *in any case*. Second of all, the inference from the redshift measurements, that space is *actually expanding*---INSTEAD OF, as you say, associating redshift with recessional velocities of galaxies moving through space (which is NOT what's actually done!)---is by far the MOST NATURAL inference to make from the evidence (see below). Thirdly, Olbers' paradox is completely resolved by the standard model, which tells us that our particle horizon will monotonically increase, asymptotically approaching a FINITE comoving distance (i.e., finite coordinate distance in expanding space) from us (please see comments I posted on Abraham Loeb's site on Aug 13 & 14). Olbers' paradox exists only if the Universe were infinite in age and not (asymptotically) exponentially expanding. In the latter case, even with infinite age (e.g., Steady State theory), only a finite amount of light can reach any point in space at any time. Actually, (see, e.g., references to Krauss et al. in Loeb's paper) in exponentially expanding space light becomes completely undetectable after only 10^11 years.

I posted a reply to Peter Jackson yesterday on my site, describing in more detail the rationale behind the assumption of a preferred reference frame in cosmology, based on redshift observations and the *natural inference* that space is actually expanding (which, I MUST STRESS, does not require GRT *a priori* in order to construct an appropriate space-time metric). Here's what I wrote:

I thought I'd give some more details about why I think the cosmological evidence justifies the assumption---usually thought to be unjustifiable strictly from the point-of-view of relativity---of a Cosmic Time and preferred reference frame to describe the evolution of a three-dimensional Universe. To begin with, note the principal reason for inferring that the Universe is expanding: as Eddington wrote in The Expanding Universe,

"The lesson of humility has so often been brought home to us in astronomy that we almost automatically adopt the view that our own galaxy is not specially distinguished---not more important in the scheme of nature than the millions of other island galaxies...

"When the collected data as to radial velocities and distances [of these galaxies] are examined a very interesting feature is revealed. The velocities are large, generally very much larger than ordinary stellar velocities. The more distant nebulae have the bigger velocities; the results seem to agree very well with a linear law of increase, the velocity being simply proportional to the distance. The most striking feature is that the galaxies are almost unanimously running away from us...

"We can exclude the spiral nebulae which are more or less hesitating as to whether they shall leave us by drawing a sphere of rather more than a million light-years radius round our galaxy. *In the region beyond, more than 80 have been observed to be moving outwards, and not one has been found coming in to take their place*...

"The unanimity with which the galaxies are running away looks almost as though they had a pointed aversion to us. We wonder why we should be shunned as though our system were a plague spot in the universe. But that is too hasty an inference, and there is really no reason to think that the animus is especially directed against our galaxy. If this lecture room were to expand to twice its present size, the seats all separating from each other in proportion, you would notice that everyone had moved away from you. Your neighbour who was 2 feet away is now 4 feet away; the man over yonder who was 40 feet away is now 80 feet away. It is not *you* they are avoiding; everyone is having the same experience..."

So, if the basic inference is really justified, that the redshifts of galaxies outside this sphere are all due to the dominance of the Hubble flow over peculiar motions of galaxies (i.e., their motions *through* space), so that any peculiar motion (which includes our own) really does become increasingly negligible with distance according to Hubble's law, then of course it's justified to treat the peculiar velocities of all galaxies, including ours, as noise in the redshift measurement, and describe ourselves and all sufficiently distant galaxies that we model as remaining at rest at comoving coordinates of expanding space.

Therefore, even though our clock, here on Earth, doesn't measure Cosmic Time because we're moving through the Universe (as indicated by the CMB dipole anisotropy), from the point-of-view of cosmology this doesn't matter, and we *are* able to determine what the present value of cosmic time is, because the metrical expansion of the Universe (as we infer from the empirical evidence) totally overwhelms any [special] relativistic effects due to the random peculiar motions of galaxies [which would otherwise indicate that two randomly chosen galaxies couldn't agree on a cosmic time due to their relative motion].

In essence, since the CMB indicates that we're moving through the Universe a little faster than 0.001c, and by the cosmological principle and observations of nearby galaxies we infer that this velocity is likely a typical value, peculiar velocities of galaxies along our axis of motion would produce the largest errors to our assumption that we're all at rest with respect to a comoving rest frame, and these could be as large as (0.002 -- 0.003)c. But this value is much less than the cosmological redshifts we typically observe. Therefore, when inferring that cosmological redshifts are mainly caused by the metrical expansion of space, we're also inferring that all peculiar motion, including our own, is eventually negligible with respect to that.

Cosmology therefore demands an absolute foliation of space-time, against which all local space-time measurements, at all levels, can be made. I've discussed this in regard to general relativity in my response to George Ellis on Aug. 15, 2012 @ 18:53 [on my site].

Best, Daryl