• Questioning the Foundations Essay Contest (2012)

  • There May Be a False Assumption in the Minkowskian Geometry That Led to Block Time, Which Disagrees With Quantum Theory on Whether the Future Already Exists - A Short Look Through the Clues About Tim

Jonathan,

You wrote: "We may have been held back by too often assuming that Minkowski's assumptions about the time dimension are inseparable from SR. But a theory can be absolutely right without its interpretation being right, and only the core of SR has been confirmed by experiment."

Has it? The core of special relativity is shielded by what Lakatos calls "protective belt":

http://bertie.ccsu.edu/naturesci/PhilSci/Lakatos.html

"Lakatos distinguished between two parts of a scientific theory: its "hard core" which contains its basic assumptions (or axioms, when set out formally and explicitly), and its "protective belt", a surrounding defensive set of "ad hoc" (produced for the occasion) hypotheses. (...) In Lakatos' model, we have to explicitly take into account the "ad hoc hypotheses" which serve as the protective belt. The protective belt serves to deflect "refuting" propositions from the core assumptions..."

Without the protective belt ("contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations") the Michelson-Morley experiment would have unequivocally confirmed the emission theory's tenet that the speed of light varies with the speed of the light source (c'=c+v) and refuted the assumption that the speed of light is independent of the speed of the light source (c'=c):

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its-Roots-Banesh-Hoffmann/dp/0486406768

"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Hello again Pentcho,

it can be a matter of taste what constitutes the core of a theory, but it is comparatively clear what has been confirmed by experiment. In SR a key part of the core is the time dilation equation, from the Lorentz-Einstein transformations. This has been confirmed many times, a good example being the experiment with muons at CERN in 1976, in which travelling near to c led to the fixed lifetimes of the muons being multiplied by around 29.3.

This looks like time itself being affected, because the lifetime of the muon in its restframe had been measured accurately before then. And as Einstein arrived at time dilation from a fixed speed of light (which was also implied in Maxwell's equations), this looks very much like confirmation for that whole part of SR. There are many other experiments, see

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/experiments.html

and for tests of light speed from moving sources

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/experiments.html#moving-source_tests

I always hope people will admit the clues we have and get on with solving the puzzle, instead of trying to deny them, get around them, or just to ignore them. Even clues that look very weird can turn out not be quite so weird once the puzzle is solved, as past experience has shown.

The constant speed of light in relation to motion time dilation seems definite to me, but in relation to gravity it's not so certain. Einstein suggested a variable speed of light in a gravity field well after SR, in 1911, during a transitional phase when he was trying to splice SR with gravity. And others have done the same - experimental results in relation to a constant speed of light within a gravity field are more ambiguous.

But returning to what you mentioned in your post, it's very clear that spacetime hasn't been confirmed, but that the core, or some of the core, of SR has. The spacetime interpretation of SR is untestable, incomplete at best, and a cul-de-sac that has caused a century of confusion at worst.

Best wishes, Jonathan

    Jonathan,

    You wrote: "This looks like time itself being affected, because the lifetime of the muon in its restframe had been measured accurately before then."

    If you knew how the lifetime of muons "at rest" is measured, you wouldn't be so sure:

    http://cosmic.lbl.gov/more/SeanFottrell.pdf

    "Experiment 1: The lifetime of muons at rest (...) Some of these muons are stopped within the plastic of the detector and the electronics are designed to measure the time between their arrival and their subsequent decay. The amount of time that a muon existed before it reached the detector had no effect on how long it continued to live once it entered the detector. Therefore, the decay times measured by the detector gave an accurate value of the muon's lifetime. After two kinds of noise were subtracted from the data, the results from three data sets yielded an average lifetime of 2.07x 10^(-6)s, in good agreement with the accepted value of 2.20x 10^(-6)s."

    That is, muons bump into the plastic of the detector and their speed suddenly changes from almost 300000km/s to zero. Could such a violent collision cause rapid subsequent disintegration? Or non-colliding muons gloriously live longer because they suffer time dilation, as Divine Albert's Divine Theory has predicted?

    http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/ugrad/389/muon/muon-rutgers.pdf

    "In order to measure the decay constant for a muon at rest (or the corresponding mean-life) one must stop and detect a muon, wait for and detect its decay products, and measure the time interval between capture and decay. Since muons decaying at rest are selected, it is the proper lifetime that is measured. Lifetimes of muons in flight are time-dilated (velocity dependent), and can be much longer..."

    A similar wisdom:

    In order to measure the lifetime of a driver at rest, one must observe a car coming to a sudden stop into a wall. Lifetimes of moving drivers can be much longer...

    Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

    This page has links to several hundred experiments that have confirmed the core of special relativity:

    http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/experiments.html

    I'm not going to discuss them all with you for many reasons, including some that have exclamation marks. One reason is that I don't know if even that would convince you of what we know clearly from experiment. Some people don't want the clues, they don't want to know what's out there. Instead they want to fit some other idea to the world at any cost.

    Being right doesn't make Einstein divine, a lot of people are right about a lot of things. And a lot of people are wrong about a lot of things, and they frequently include people who deny SR. As you can see from my essay, I'm not one to follow blindly - I've questioned many things relating to SR, including Minkowski's work, which Einstein took onboard, and believed. He's not a sacred cow to me, and I think he was wrong about some things. But look at that page with the experiments, you look through them. It just is like that - we don't know why, but it is.

    Best wishes, Jonathan

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      • Post #44

      Jonathan, as a history major, I note this about your ideas, which may or may not be true. I only offer this because it is something that jumped out to me. I know that "bias" is an important part of ascertaining the truth, and that bias plays an important role in scientific experimentation. Thus, I offer the suggestion that you disagreement with the "illusions" of block time may be rooted in a cultural bias we in the West have, which is a "linear view" of history.

      The "block time" you described, that there is no future, may or may not be new to modern science, but has roots in many old philosophies, sciences, beliefs, such as Taoism. This isn't suprising, as cultures of old had a "cyclical view of history." That view of history no longer exist in the West, and now a "linear" view of history exists, and permeates our religions and I would argue our sciences.

      At its core, under a linear view of history, history doesn't repeat, its not knowable, for it is unknown. Man determines his own destiny. This move to a linear view of history was driven in large part by technology, through which man believes he can create a new future, his own destiny. Is it any surprise the, that Quantum dillemmas, very dependent on technology to measure the smallest of scales, sees an open unknowable future? There is probably no better statement showing a "linear view" bias than this: So quantum theory shows us an unfixed world, which potentially "allows us to be affecting events around us, and altering the future, as we seem to be."

      In your introduction, you begin by phrasing the problem of time as first being a conceptual problem. I agree. There is a "conceptual" problem of time easily explained in cultural biases of their time. Does this mean your is wrong? No. But I raise this issue only for you to consider, in case you haven't.

      "The nature of time may well include elements outside our present ideas, that we haven't yet found." This statement shows a present bias. By definition, it limits from consideration ideas from other philosophies, written, recorded, and still practiced by some.

      You go on to write "A century later we know a lot more about the physical world, but we still don't understand time." You recognize the limitation of modern experimentation, and even quantum theory as a theory, but refuse to accept "concepts" of time, that time in fact doesn't exist, and thus there is no past, present or future.

      I don't share some of your conceptual problems with block time. For example, you write "It's hard to argue that the future already exists at larger scales, but not at smaller scales. Any causal connection across scales would make that impossible, and (rather like the butterfly effect), a little would go a long way." First, this again is a "linear" view of history/time. It assumes that the future is not certain because we cannot see it. The fact that modern technology allows us to see things at a small scale does not change, however, the concepts of time. You believe it does. You believe that because we can see and measure things so small, and because those things appear to have motion in the third dimension, that both time exist and motion is time exist. As you begin your essay, time is conceptual, and technology has not changed that. It has not dispelled any illusions, but possibly created others.

      However, conceptually, the breaking down on objects on an "everyday scale" doesn't create a conceptual problem with "block time." An explanation is again a cartoon. Quantum theorist look at an individual frame, with the inability to see the next frame, and try to predict what that next frame will be, but they can't with certainty, bc they can't see it, they only guess at what it might be with probabilities. Fourth dimensionally, however that entire cartoon exists. Thus "time" is the illusion created by looking at a part and not the whole.

      Hello. Not sure if it's Chris or someone else, welcome anyway.

      There are so many things you haven't understood in your post that it's hard to know where to start. You seem not to understand the physics at all, which would fit with... your having studied history, not physics. So let's talk about history first, at least you'll understand me. I agree that a linear view of history is sometimes a very bad idea. It implies a progression, and that can involve a bias towards various economic views of the world that may not be good for people psychologically. (Some economic systems, for instance, require growth constantly, and that can be unsustainable, which can eventually be bad for the planet and people in a number of ways.) And in a more general way, change for its own sake is not always good.

      Then there's what I was saying about physics, which is nothing to do with that, or anything you mention in your post. Every single bit you mention, more or less without exception, you have misunderstood, so it might be better if we just leave it, but I'll try a little.

      When I say 'the nature of time', I'm not talking about cultural ideas. I'm talking about the actual physics of time. I'm going to talk about what happens in one room, because otherwise you might start relating it to human history and culture again. If I move my hand past my face at 6 km per hour (about walking speed), I'm seeing it in slightly slow motion. it has been slowed down by a factor very close to 1, 0.9999999999999999845, so very slightly. This isn't noticeable, but we measure it accurately in laboratories.

      Nobody knows why - we're trying to find out. We have a lot of clues, and the essay you read is about looking at them, and trying to work out what's going on. One of them is that the present interpretation of special relativity suggests motion through time doesn't exist. But no-one has been able to explain why we still seem to observe a sequence of events every day. In the one room I'm talking about (so you won't start relating this to history again), events appear to happen in an order - one event follows another. This allows cause and effct to happen, and the person in the room seems to be able to affect events. If she puts the kettle on, she can make a cup of coffee, and so on. No-one knows why we appear to experience a flow of time, or if you like, a sequence of events. But the standard view, in as far as there is one, is that it is an illusion. But no-one can explain how such an illusion might work.

      Where I say time is a conceptual problem, I mean within the physics. I mean that it's not a mathematical problem initially, it's on the conceptual side - that is, it's a problem with the interpretation, ie. the conceptual picture we use, that is, Minkowski spacetime.

      When I say "It's hard to argue that the future already exists at larger scales, but not at smaller scales", I'm talking about a specific problem in physics that you haven't understood, about the difficulty we have relating what happens at a small scale and what happens at a large scale. Each is described by a different theory, and we have trouble making ends meet.

      And it goes on, there were several other points you hadn't understood.

      Looking at this sentence "The "block time" you described, that there is no future, may or may not be new to modern science, but has roots in many old philosophies, sciences, beliefs, such as Taoism.", this has more than one error in it. Block time says the future already exists, not that there is no future. You can't start relating it to other ideas until you understand it, and even then it's not backed up by experiment, so it's not a good idea to do that. And it doesn't 'have roots' in those ideas. If you must grab things and loosely relate them to other ideas (which you do quite a few times in your post), then at least do that with solid physics that has been confirmed by experiment - there's plenty to choose from.

      I hope this helps to make a little sense of it. Physics isn't a loose discipline where you can loosely throw one idea at another and say they go together. If you're interested, I suggest you start looking at physics from the beginning - this isn't the right place to start. Or read more about the cultural side of time, which has plenty of literature about it, and which seems to be your area of interest.

      Best wishes, Jonathan

      You don't want to discuss fraudulent experimental evidence, Jonathan? Why not? Let me refer you to perhaps the greatest fraud:

      http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010AAS...21530404H

      Open Questions Regarding the 1925 Measurement of the Gravitational Redshift of Sirius B, Jay B. Holberg Univ. of Arizona: "In January 1924 Arthur Eddington wrote to Walter S. Adams at the Mt. Wilson Observatory suggesting a measurement of the "Einstein shift" in Sirius B and providing an estimate of its magnitude. Adams' 1925 published results agreed remarkably well with Eddington's estimate. Initially this achievement was hailed as the third empirical test of General Relativity (after Mercury's anomalous perihelion advance and the 1919 measurement of the deflection of starlight). IT HAS BEEN KNOWN FOR SOME TIME THAT BOTH EDDINGTON'S ESTIMATE AND ADAMS' MEASUREMENT UNDERESTIMATED THE TRUE SIRIUS B GRAVITATIONAL REDSHIFT BY A FACTOR OF FOUR."

      http://irfu.cea.fr/Phocea/file.php?file=Ast/2774/RELATIVITE-052-456.pdf

      Jean-Marc Bonnet Bidaud: "C'est ce qu'aurait dû trouver Adams sur ses plaques s'il n'avait pas été "influencé" par le calcul erroné d'Eddington. L'écart est tellement flagrant que la suspicion de fraude a bien été envisagée."

      http://www.gravityresearchfoundation.org/pdf/awarded/1979/hetherington.pdf

      "...Eddington asked Adams to attempt the measurement. (...) ...Adams reported an average differential redshift of nineteen kilometers per second, very nearly the predicted gravitational redshift. Eddington was delighted with the result... (...) In 1928 Joseph Moore at the Lick Observatory measured differences between the redshifts of Sirius and Sirius B... (...) ...the average was nineteen kilometers per second, precisely what Adams had reported. (...) More seriously damaging to the reputation of Adams and Moore is the measurement in the 1960s at Mount Wilson by Jesse Greenstein, J.Oke, and H.Shipman. They found a differential redshift for Sirius B of roughly eighty kilometers per second."

      Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

      Hello Pentcho,

      In most areas of science people are simply trying to find out the truth. But there are a few areas where sadly people have a bias about what they hope to find.

      In those areas, to put it mildly, you can't believe all you read on the internet. Relativity is one of them. In areas such as that there are people trying to show the standard view to be wrong, for reasons other than scientific ones. Yes, in the case of relativity there's bias in both directions, so you have to check everything carefully, but the people trying to deny SR are sometimes cleverly distorting the facts.

      I think you have been taken in by these websites you read, and they can't be trusted. Whether or not Eddington got a measurement wrong, we know the restframe lifetime of the muon. Modern measurements are where you should look, and there was one made at NIST in 2010, in which they measured the time dilation of a moving object, at a speed of only around 10 m/sec. There have been other experiments recently which confirm SR very accurately, and our conversation is going to be unscientific if you don't look at them. Try this one:

      Chou, C. W. et al, Optical clocks and Relativity, Science 24 Sept 2010: Vol. 329 no. 5999 pp. 1630-1633

      In fact, I suspect it might not really be a discussion of physics even if you do look at the evidence. But I'd like to warn you about these websites you read, and help you to be more aware of the pitfalls in the landscape. Physics is very hard even if you get all the clues in front of you. If you don't, it's impossible. So you must work hard to get at the real clues, check everything you can, then you can try to solve these puzzles with some chance of success.

      The only other thing to say is that as you know, I believe SR to be right but the spacetime interpretation to be wrong. This can explain some of the confusion about SR, but not all of it. Some people are against the physics establishment because of what it represents to them, rather than for better reasons.

      Good luck, Jonathan

        Jonathan,

        You wrote: "I believe SR to be right but the spacetime interpretation to be wrong."

        That's all I need to know, Jonathan. Thank you for the discussion.

        Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

        Yes, there are many who take both to be right, and quite a few who take both to be wrong. But if in fact neither of these approaches is accurate, and instead the theory is right but the accompanying picture is wrong, then an interesting new landscape appears, which is comparatively unexplored. It may hold answers that haven't yet been found. Thanks for the discussion,

        best wishes, Jonathan

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          • Post #50

          Just a suggestion: Sooner or later you will have to answer the question:

          Can Minkowski spacetime be presented as a deductive consequence of Einstein's 1905 two postulates?

          If the answer is yes, you will have to question the postulates - the combination "true premises, false conclusion" is forbidden by definition. If the answer is no...

          Best regards, Pentcho

          Of course Minkowski spacetime is not a deductive consequence of any part of SR. A good relativist would never claim that it is, but people often imply it. It's just that spacetime looks like it might well be true, and if you make time a dimension as similar to the other dimensions as possible (and it still isn't very similar), then you get what looks like a few things clicking into place. And what comes out works very well mathematically, and allowed us to simplify many theories.

          But there are probably humdreds of other possible interpretations of SR out there, well - ones that look possible initially. But when you pursue them, you might find contradictions come out around sixty years later, as we did with spacetime.

          As I said, physics is full of equivalence. Often more than one conceptual picture can be described by the same mathematics. The mathematics of SR is like Pythagoras' theorem - three speeds are in the same relationship as the three sides of a right angle triangle. No-one knows why.

          best wishes, Jonathan

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            • Post #52

            Jonathan

            I think right time for reading my essay

            http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1413

            • [deleted]

            • Post #53

            Jonathan,

            You wrote: "Of course Minkowski spacetime is not a deductive consequence of any part of SR."

            Are you joking, Jonathan?

            http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/spacetime/index.html

            John Norton: "That the speed of light is a constant is one of the most important facts about space and time in special relativity. That fact gets expressed geometrically in spacetime geometry through the existence of light cones, or, as it is sometimes said, the "light cone structure" of spacetime. (...) So if we mean a spacetime that also behaves the way special relativity demands, then we have a Minkowski spacetime."

            Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

            Hello Yuri,

            thanks, will read your essay.

            Hello Pentcho,

            It's you that must be joking! You're saying that you can rule out ALL possible interpretations other than spacetime? How do you know? What kind of thinker would say that all possible interpretations, including all as yet unknown and unimagined ones, are ruled out? John Norton certainly isn't saying that, he's a reputable scientist.

            He's also very careful not to say that spacetime is an unavoidable consequence of SR. He implies it, but he doesn't actually say it. Look at his careful wording. First he says SR gets 'expressed geoetrically' that way. That says nothing much at all. Then he says:

            "So if we mean a spacetime that also behaves the way special relativity demands, then we have a Minkowski spacetime".

            The word 'demands' might seem to imply that it's an unavoidable consequence. But the initial phrase "If we mean a spacetime that..." gets him out of saying that it's unavoidable - he knows very well that it isn't, and there's no way he's going to say that. Because according to what he says, if we mean a particular spacetime that suits SR, then we mean Minkowski spacetime. But of course, if we don't mean a spacetime at all, then we can have another interpretation for SR.

            I should say, as I did in the essay, that it's impossible to disconnect block time from spacetime. The Rietdijk-Putnam argument is a rigourous proof that one leads to the other. But it's very possible to disconnect SR from spacetime, although they might not tell you that.

            Best wishes, Jonathan

            Regret for the spelling mistake on this post. Please read, 'Planck' instead of 'Plank'

            Jayakar

            Hello Jonathan,

            As you know from reading my essay; I also have some problems with the standard formulation based on Minkowski space. I look forward to reading your essay, which is on my short list of what to read next. I have many thoughts about the nature of time question. I find block time to be an inadequate representation, both physically and philosophically, but I'll read through your essay before I say more.

            Thank you for your kind remarks on my essay forum page.

            Regards,

            Jonathan

            Thanks, and for your positive reply there. Look forward to hearing from you.

            Best wishes, Jonathan

            Dear Jonathan,

            I have read your essay and I appreciate your novel viewpoint. Even though our views regarding SR may not fully coincide, I agree on the main thrust of your argument regarding time. All authors in this contest have presented their viewpoints in different styles. In the grand maze of the unknown it is important to consider all possible alternatives and different viewpoints for building a consolidated common approach. I wish you good luck in the contest.

            Recently, I have noticed some wild variations in community rated list of contest essays. There is a possibility of existence of a biased group or cartel (e.g. Academia or Relativists group) which promotes the essays of that group by rating them all 'High' and jointly demotes some other essays by rating them all 'Low'. As you know, we are not selecting the 'winners' of the contest through our ratings. Our community ratings will be used for selecting top 35 essays as 'Finalists' for further evaluation by a select panel of experts. Therefore, any biased group should not be permitted to corner all top 'Finalists' positions for their select group.

            In order to ensure fair play in this selection, we should select (as per laid down criteria), as our individual choice, about 50 essays for entry in the finalists list and RATE them 'High'. Next we should select bottom 50 essays and rate them 'Low'. Remaining essays may be rated as usual. If most of the participants rate most of the essays this way then the negative influence of any bias group can certainly be mitigated.

            I have read many but rated very few essays so far and intend to do a fast job now onwards by covering at least 10 essays every day.

            You are requested to read and rate my essay titled,"Wrong Assumptions of Relativity Hindering Fundamental Research in Physical Space". Kindly do let me know if you don't get convinced about the invalidity of the founding assumptions of Relativity or regarding the efficacy of the proposed simple experiments for detection of absolute motion.

            Finally I wish to see your excellent essay reach the list of finalists.

            Best Regards

            G S Sandhu

            Hello Gurcharn,

            thank you for your kind comments on my essay, I'm glad you appreciated it.

            To me, the arguments about relativity are off the point unless they mention existing experimental results. We all know the concepts are sometimes counter-intuitive, that means nothing. Things often 'confound common sense' and still turn out to be true. The stale old debate about how to take SR is a dead argument to me, it has been largely won by SR supporters, who have a lot of experimental results to back up their position. This page has links to several hundred experiments, and I don't discuss anti-SR stuff unless people have gone through them:

            http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/experiments.html

            I think much of the confusion arises because the interpretation is wrong. But the actual theory is unavoidably right. How you frame it doesn't necessarily matter, people have been going round in circles with that for most of a century. I'd say look at the experimental results, and try to come up with an interpretation that fits them. But don't criticise it - the experiments show that something like that is true, whether you believe it or not. But we have absolutely no idea what SR is describing. It's describing something, we just don't know what.

            Best of luck to you... Jonathan