Revenge of the Cranks by Chris Kennedy

Dear Chris Kennedy,

This look timely. Get ready for perhaps 200 messages :)

James

Excellent, Chris - you will get 10 points from me. But you have mistakes, too. For instance, you believe gravitational time dilation does really exist. Yet the following text (written by a very important Einsteinian) may make you hesitate:

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

Banesh Hoffmann: "In an accelerated sky laboratory, and therefore also in the corresponding earth laboratory, the frequence of arrival of light pulses is lower than the ticking rate of the upper clocks even though all the clocks go at the same rate. (...) As a result the experimenter at the ceiling of the sky laboratory will see with his own eyes that the floor clock is going at a slower rate than the ceiling clock - even though, as I have stressed, both are going at the same rate. (...) The gravitational red shift does not arise from changes in the intrinsic rates of clocks. It arises from what befalls light signals as they traverse space and time in the presence of gravitation."

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Chris,

Congratulations on a very focused and well written essay. Don't expect any establishment figures to address it though, when multiverses and string theory have all their attention. In the future, I think the current generation of theoretical physicists will get far more attention in psychology textbooks, than in physics textbooks.

I have to say the most logical explanation for time dilation I ever read, is that since nothing can travel faster than C, atomic activity in an accelerated(rather than accelerating) frame has to slow down, so the combination of electron spin and frame velocity doesn't exceed C. Though I must say this presents a far more convincing argument for space as an inertial frame, than for the "fabric of spacetime." One only has to consider centrifugal force to understand motion is not only relative to other points of reference, as it is an effect of motion relative to inertia.

To the "shut up and calculate crowd though, it's all about what can be measured, so time is a measure between two events and space is a measure between two points. Then two additional linear dimensions create volume and that is space. Which is about as logical as saying latitude, longitude and altitude create the earth. Reductionism has its uses, but reality is inherently wholistic. All the parts are necessary to explain the whole.

I'm hoping something can come of this contest, possibly drawing attention to broader dissatisfaction with the fantasy reality being promulgated by establishment figures. I think that the hunt for the Higgs being a climb up a lonely mountain and not a stairway to heaven of ever more exotic particles has created a situation where future physicists will have nothing better to do than pull at the many loose threads in current theory. Revolutions build for a long time, before exploding.

Good luck in the contest.

Excellent essay! Yes, for mainstream physicists, all the money is in perpetuating the string theory/multiverse non-science hoaxes; not in asking and contemplating foundational questions!

Chris writes, "When GPS technology first became known, mainstream physicists were so excited they had another experiment that proved relative time, they didn't realize that it also disproved Einstein's theory for why time is relative. Realizing this should pave the way for a new, responsible investigation into the true nature of time. And with the key word being responsible, this is a call to all cranks and crackpots willing to take on this challenge."

Yes! Moving Dimensions Theory finally offers a lucid, simple account of the twins paradox and GPS. MDT's dx4/dt=ic means that the fourth dimension is expanding at c relative to the three spatial dimensions. So there is a frame of absolute motion--the fourth expanding dimension (and hence no rest mass for photons which surf entirely upon the fourth dimension)--and there is a frame of absolute rest--the three spatial dimensions. In light of this, the reason that the clock which underwent acceleration--or the GPS satellite clock which was accelerated into orbit on a rocket--experiences time dilation is that such clocks exist more in the fourth moving dimension than they do in the three spatial dimensions, and hence their length is also contracted. There is an absolute motion and an absolute rest in the universe, however difficult they are to measure, due to the subtly interlinked nature of space, time, light, and measurement which occurs because the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions at c, or dx4/dt=ic.

While both observers may measure one-another's clock to be moving slower in certain scenario,s there is actually one clock that is *physically* moving slower--the one that underwent acceleration. Were this not so, as Chris points out, GPS would not work.

Chris deserves an honorary doctorate for his bold research, and we all look forward dot his book on all of this. The reigning multiversers have all long since thrown in the towel on rugged, independent thought and exalted curiosity, but all the better for Chris.

Will any of the reigning faux-"multiverse"-physicists step forth to definitively support or prove wrong Wheeler or Born? Or will they just pretend the glaring discrepancy--the elephant in the room--does not exist, as they do with foundational questions regarding Eddington's Challenge to find a physical mechanism for time and liberate us from Minkowski's block universe, Godel's refutation of time, Einstein's pursuit for the foundations of relativity, and the glaring lack of a *physical* model for time, its arrows and asymmetries, quantum nonlocality and entanglement, and the second law of thermodynamics.

Chris's paper characterizes yet another set of unresolved questions which today's reigning pseudo-phyicists are too happy to ignore from the perspective of their physics-free money-machine multiverses--a set of of unresolved, foundational questions which MDT finally provides an answer for, while also exalting the *physical* foundations of relativity, and ta physical model for time, its arrows and asymmetries, quantum nonlocvality and entanglement, and the second law of thermodynamics.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1429

MDT's dx4/dt=ic Triumphs Over the Wrong Physical Assumption That Time Is a Dimension by Dr. Elliot McGucken

Congrats to Chris! We look forward to a book on all this! :)

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Doublethink:

1. The youthfulness of the travelling twin has nothing to do with the acceleration she has suffered:

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/research/gr/members/gibbons/gwgPartI_SpecialRelativity2010.pdf

Gary W. Gibbons FRS: "In other words, by simply staying at home Jack has aged relative to Jill. There is no paradox because the lives of the twins are not strictly symmetrical. This might lead one to suspect that the accelerations suffered by Jill might be responsible for the effect. However this is simply not plausible because using identical accelerating phases of her trip, she could have travelled twice as far. This would give twice the amount of time gained."

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a909857880

Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages 57-78: Albert Einstein wrote in 1911: "The [travelling] clock runs slower if it is in uniform motion, but if it undergoes a change of direction as a result of a jolt, then the theory of relativity does not tell us what happens. The sudden change of direction might produce a sudden change in the position of the hands of the clock. However, the longer the clock is moving rectilinearly and uniformly with a given speed in a forward motion, i.e., the larger the dimensions of the polygon, the smaller must be the effect of such a hypothetical sudden change."

2. The youthfulness of the travelling twin is entirely caused by the acceleration she has suffered:

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

John Norton: "Then, at the end of the outward leg, the traveler abruptly changes motion, accelerating sharply to adopt a new inertial motion directed back to earth. What comes now is the key part of the analysis. The effect of the change of motion is to alter completely the traveler's judgment of simultaneity. The traveler's hypersurfaces of simultaneity now flip up dramatically. Moments after the turn-around, when the travelers clock reads just after 2 days, the traveler will judge the stay-at-home twin's clock to read just after 7 days. That is, the traveler will judge the stay-at-home twin's clock to have jumped suddenly from reading 1 day to reading 7 days. This huge jump puts the stay-at-home twin's clock so far ahead of the traveler's that it is now possible for the stay-at-home twin's clock to be ahead of the travelers when they reunite."

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dialog_about_objections_against_the_theory_of_relativity

Dialog about Objections against the Theory of Relativity (1918), by Albert Einstein: "...according to the special theory of relativity the coordinate systems K and K' are by no means equivalent systems. Indeed this theory asserts only the equivalence of all Galilean (unaccelerated) coordinate systems, that is, coordinate systems relative to which sufficiently isolated, material points move in straight lines and uniformly. K is such a coordinate system, but not the system K', that is accelerated from time to time. Therefore, from the result that after the motion to and fro the clock U2 is running behind U1, no contradiction can be constructed against the principles of the theory. (...) During the partial processes 2 and 4 the clock U1, going at a velocity v, runs indeed at a slower pace than the resting clock U2. However, this is more than compensated by a faster pace of U1 during partial process 3. According to the general theory of relativity, a clock will go faster the higher the gravitational potential of the location where it is located, and during partial process 3 U2 happens to be located at a higher gravitational potential than U1. The calculation shows that this speeding ahead constitutes exactly twice as much as the lagging behind during the partial processes 2 and 4. This consideration completely clears up the paradox that you brought up."

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17

George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary."

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Pentcho,

Have you read Bernard Schutz' treatment of the 'paradox' in his intro GR textbook? I think he's right on the money.

Daryl

He's not. During the almost instantaneous turn-around of the travelling twin, the sedentary twin's clock jumps suddenly from reading 2 years to reading 48 years. Einstein's 1918 inanity.

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Mr. Kennedy,

Your essay speaks to a knowledgable method of investigation combined with a high level of objectivity, and the combination wrks superbly for you. If I must be critical, though, I would say you may have taken the long and unnecessarily complex route to explain the issue.

My essay gives a very simple reason why one frame is "preferred" over another - without a single equation to help it do that. However, yours is to me the most rational one here so far wrt the topic of time. That is why I wish you would read my contest entry, "On The Nature of Time" by me. Then please let me know what you think about it, pro or con.

I still have one problem with it, which is, unfortunately, the same one you brought up. My answer to it would be at this time that since it may not be possible for one twin to know the other's time rate whenever they differ, then knowing why both will see the same time rate on the other may not be relevant.

"Einstein's 1918 inanity": nope---Schutz doesn't describe this as a result of acceleration, as Einstein did (which Chris detailed in his essay), but as a result of the fact that the moving twin changes reference frames. Therefore, in that instant, due to the relativity of synchronicity (which describes, at that event, what is synchronous in the two different coordinate systems), the sedentary twin's clock goes from reading 2 years to 48 years. That's the "reality" of what's going on on Earth according to the observer who instantaneously switches reference frames BUT

*always claims that what's happening synchronously on his clock is really what's simultaneously taking place in reality*.

Schutz' resolution of the "paradox" is consistent with the description that's given according to the special relativistic framework I've set out in my essay.

I love your essay's title, but your analysis of the twin paradox is misguided. When one twin stays in one inertial frame, and another is in two different inertial frames plus a non-inertial frame, the symmetry in the picture is broken. The twins age differently because consistency in the universe is preserved; they don't age according to how human intuition thinks they should age.

Thank you for this well-written essay. You know how to let the reader in by telling a story.

Hi Chris,

I agree with what you written, I enjoyed some of your arguments and style, sadly it will fall on mostly deaf ears, you need different arguments. I give you two.

I presented in my essay a new paradox challenging SR. The Michelson Morley Einstein paradox in section 2.3 and elaborated in the endnotes will challenge the academia. 聽I will appreciate your opinion.

Regarding the twin paradox consider following. Two laser beams A and B of equal frequency pointing at each other. We construct a clock by counting cycles received from A and B summing them to C=A+B, C now is our clock. 聽This clock if moving up and down the laser beam will never loose sync with a similar stationary clock and will always tick at the same rate and this too will challenge the academia.

Regards

Anton @ 聽( 聽/topic/1458 聽)

PS stay in touch and mail me, address in essay.

Chris

Worth a top score if just for the title! Very good and nicely written analysis. I believe I have valuable contributions, see my essay, and took up your challenge ref GPS a while ago; http://vixra.org/abs/1001.0010 (probably now in need of updating).

One shock was a revelation about the 'overwhelming evidence' for clocks falling out of syc, and the cause of apparent lateral Doppler shift, which is now both proved and DISproved! IEEE Trans. On Inst&Measurement. Vol 52. No.5 2003 http://ivanik3.narod.ru/Eather/ejo7t3n8Thim.pdf

I've published in the UK Skeptics magazine (2011) that Hafele & Keating were co-erced into omitting their actual atomic clock results, which were not consistent with SR, to get published. This is also mentioned, with Hafele's own quote, in Kingsley's essay here.

I agree with you that Einstein's solution to the effects of lateral shift which ARE found is illogical. There is a better solution, which recognises the quantum process of scattering at 90 degrees; The light signal measured is NOT the original signal. It is a new signal scattered (re-emitted by Raman/Compton scattering) from the particles CHARGED BY the primary signal. This has even greater implications. A receiver in relative motion cannot then use 'Proper Time' to estimate the original speed of a 'light pulse' from the sequence of individual scatterings from the particles. He can then quite validly find APPARENT c+v for that original signal relative to his own frame.

This is indeed hard to first get your head around, then suddenly everything falls into place, like solving a hierarchical 3D moving jigsaw puzzle. Surprisingly, the postulates emerge unscathed, but can now have a logical explanation. space-time and SR emerge direct from QM, if both slightly re-interpreted. It's all about the effects of the 'detection' process.

I hope you'll read my essay (slowly!!) and comment on the quite beautiful logical solution that emerges. You've made far better inroads through the quagmire than most so should grasp it, though it's slippery as an eel until the old assumptions are abandoned!.

Very best wishes.

Peter

Superb straight-talking essay! Well done.

Best wishes for the competition,

Alan

Dear Chris,

Nicely written essay which shows much consideration to the inner inconsistencies of the theory. That said, are you aware that the GPS argument may be invalid. See article at http://www.physicsmyths.org.uk/gps.htm .

Daniel L. B.

The title of this essay is similar to the title of the film which inspired my nickname, i.e. "Revenge of the Sith". On the other hand, the result will be different. The Siths in the film dominated a galaxy. Indeed, it is impossible that the Cranks will dominate the physics...

Darth,

"Indeed, it is impossible that the Cranks will dominate the physics..."

Of course it is. I do not believe that Chris meant to say any such thing. What do you think of his technical arguments? What is wrong, and, is anything right or, at least reasonably arguable?

James

Hi Chris,

You initially asked: "So you think you know relativity?" Will, in my case, no I don't - however, I do think I understand it a little better having read the introduction of your fine essay! It's the rest of it that confuses me - it gets pretty complicated for me.

I'm compelled to make one comment - IMO acceleration is essentially identical to deceleration; only their relative directions are different. In both cases directional energy is applied, affecting a clock's momentum, effective mass and rate of progression. Similarly to the 'arrow of time', motion and velocity have only a single direction: forward. I think there is no backward motion, except in relative terms considering an object's topography or other objects.

I suggest that it may not be the relative velocity between two clocks that affects their rate of progression, or two people's physiological processes' rate of progression, etc., but the absolute measure of energy applied to each, affecting their effective mass. Unfortunately, I can't do the math or apply this premise to all of the conditions imposed in your analyses...

Dear Chris Kennedy,

You are not alone. Maybe, you just decided to not mention the links I pointed to in my essay . Sapere aude is almost a who is who. I did not (yet) find Kennedy between Kempczynski and three Kelly's including Dr. Alphonsus (alias Alf alias Al) G. Kelly in Ireland to whose book I was just guided by Pentcho Valev.

On the other hand, the last contest was won by someone who fabricated a fictitious Newton who was of course so intelligent that he of course easily understood Einstein. This time, the perhaps most welcome to FQXi author did not just arrive at the benignly revisionist insight that singularities are not physically real but he also wrote arXiv:1008:0174 which seems to be formally correct while it omits the conclusion that SR is just a bizarre approximation.

Robert Schlafly does not just criticize Einstein's SR but he also deals with the surrounding propaganda. I would appreciate hints to other dissident essays.

What about me, I felt challenged to deal with foundational issues when a Hendrik van Hees blamed me for damaging the reputation of my university because I suggested that the ear cannot perform complex Fourier transform but cosine transform instead. While CT works well in MP3 too, Hees firmly believed in theory.

Meanwhile I am understanding Einstein's naivety more and more. I do not necessarily agree with Michelson & Morley and More, although I felt sympathetic to More when he was brutally asked to shut up. If the corrected by Lorentz interpretation of the experiment by Michelson and Morley was wrong, then even the Lorentzian interpretation is unfounded. Dealing just with Einstein's SR will perhaps not be sufficient.

Eckard