Revenge of the Cranks by Chris Kennedy

Dear Chris,

You've written an interesting essay including some historical context of which I was unaware. Certainly no one can blame you for demanding consistent explanations! I wouldn't mind discussing some aspects of your ideas a bit further; if you're interested, send me an email at bdribus@math.lsu.edu. Take care,

Ben Dribus

Dear Chris Kennedy,

sorry it has taken so long for me to get to your essay. I like the first person style of it which takes us back over your personal exploration of relativity theory. That comfortable, easy to read, style of writing stands out from many of the other essays.

I have my own thoughts about why relativity theory is useful even though it does not completely describe the realities we inhabit. With many essays still to consider, now is not the best time to get into a lengthy debate. Though I have talked about the paradoxes in my essay and think that the explanatory framework that is introduced does resolve a lot of problems. High res. version of diagram 1. is in the discussion thread.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts in your enjoyable, well written essay. Good luck in the competition. Georgina

If you do not understand why your rating dropped down. As I found ratings in the contest are calculated in the next way. Suppose your rating is [math]R_1 [/math] and [math]N_1 [/math] was the quantity of people which gave you ratings. Then you have [math]S_1=R_1 N_1 [/math] of points. After it anyone give you [math]dS [/math] of points so you have [math]S_2=S_1+ dS [/math] of points and [math]N_2=N_1+1 [/math] is the common quantity of the people which gave you ratings. At the same time you will have [math]S_2=R_2 N_2 [/math] of points. From here, if you want to be R2 > R1 there must be: [math]S_2/ N_2>S_1/ N_1 [/math] or [math] (S_1+ dS) / (N_1+1) >S_1/ N_1 [/math] or [math] dS >S_1/ N_1 =R_1[/math] In other words if you want to increase rating of anyone you must give him more points [math]dS [/math] then the participant`s rating [math]R_1 [/math] was at the moment you rated him. From here it is seen that in the contest are special rules for ratings. And from here there are misunderstanding of some participants what is happened with their ratings. Moreover since community ratings are hided some participants do not sure how increase ratings of others and gives them maximum 10 points. But in the case the scale from 1 to 10 of points do not work, and some essays are overestimated and some essays are drop down. In my opinion it is a bad problem with this Contest rating process. I hope the FQXI community will change the rating process.

Sergey Fedosin

"Inconsistencies and incomplete explanations gnaw at me."

Continue to gnaw back, dear sir!

This is a delightful, well-written essay (FR: "attempt").

Thank you for the enjoyable time it gave me!

This "Sergey" is bombing the entrants' boards with the same "why your rating has dropped" message.

WTH? This is the third I've seen, dated Oct. 4, same message.

I noticed it on yours, and just HAD to comment, finally... I've seen one fine essay drop 89 (eighty-nine) positions, in "Community Rating" in the past 24 hours.

What is up with this weird vote/scaling? "Hackers Rule!", I suppose!

Well??? What else is one to think? The General Public is... watching.

Concerned Public,

Thanks for reading.

Regarding your comment on the voting - It is easy to see how essays can be manipulated up and down the chart. As I said earlier in a response to someone else, I'm not terribly concerned because I'm not in it to win it. I just wanted to get some interesting info on relativity out there and I'm thrilled that it reached so many people. A lot of good (sometimes heated) discussions resulted. Inconsistencies in Relativity is a topic that deserves more attention than it is getting and this contest definitely helped shine a light on it. (No pun intended.)

Chris,

Good comment on the Smolin book review at Not Even Wrong. I tried giving some support and Woit actually left one of my posts up, but took down the subsequent one. Smolin does a masterful job of mathematizing your question to death.

My question to his reply was;

" "if you shrink the volume a clock occupies you make it tick faster because clocks are physical devices and their size affects their rates."

This seems identical to ideal gas laws. Would it be reasonable to propose a geometric model of volume and temperature, similar to spacetime?

It seems temperature and time are both fundamental measures of action, somewhat analogous to frequency and amplitude."

Peter took it down quickly, as he usually does to any of my posts there. I was actually surprised the first one was left up.

Good luck raising the issue. Any opportunity to shine a light into the fog is not to be passed up.

John,

Thanks. I just posted a follow up on Woit's. I asked for clarification on his size issue as well.

Chris,

Then consider this;

"But if you shrink the volume a clock occupies you make it tick faster because clocks are physical devices and their size affects their rates. This is evident in models of clocks called light clocks in which what ticks is a photon bouncing back and forth between two mirrors."

Consider what happens as the volume falls into a galactic vortex. Is it really falling into a black hole, or is it getting spun around and shot out the poles, as jets of cosmic rays?

Which then go on to coalesce into other bodies. Past to future. So what is falling in is "shrinking," going into the past and what is radiating out is "enlarging," going onto the future.

For the clock of what falls in, its clock is slowing, while as a (light)clock to an external observer, it is speeding up. So there is a reciprocal in this relationship of observation of one state to the other.

Thinking out loud here.

John,

It seems like he's hinting that no matter where you are, there can be a possible orientation that would consider you at rest with respect to the Cosmic Microwave Background. But I see your point about absolute zero and its a good one. would the internal motion of a "resting" molecular sytem be farther from preferred global time than a sitting electron right next to it?

Regarding the shrinking space/clock topic, I hope he responds to clarify how this new theory relates. By the way - I have to remember to be more careful with my terminology. In certain relativity circles - the mutual symmetrical effect of dilation and contraction is phrased as "reciprocal" although in general math language it is taken as equal but opposite. An object approaching a black hole or other mass increases the "time slowing" while that object sees the rest of the universe's time speeding up. I like Paul Davies observation that in order for an object to experience a complete cessation of time - the rest of the universe's time would have to go infinitely by. Tough to imagine.

Chris,

"It seems like he's hinting that no matter where you are, there can be a possible orientation that would consider you at rest with respect to the Cosmic Microwave Background."

I don't know why there is this institutional rejection of space and its various inherent attributes, such as infinity, equilibrium, inertia, as anything other than a measure of actions. Presumably any clock is slowed by velocity, gravity, or acceleration, so if we were to position various clocks in different situations, the one running the fastest would be the closest to universal equilibrium, not any particular field, microwaves, etc.

As you say, "even if you consider a particular object to be at absolute or preferred rest, it is still in some other object's gravitational field even if by just a trace, and will have a miniscule deviation from the true global time."

So that absolute rest is not the CMBR, because the CMBR, being radiation, is not at absolute rest and is a deviation from it. What is the absolute rest, if not the inertia of space? Absolute zero.

"would the internal motion of a "resting" molecular sytem be farther from preferred global time than a sitting electron right next to it?"

Wouldn't a molecular system essentially require a greater wavelength to manifest? More fluctuation from the mean?

Temperature is amplitude, time is frequency. Zero temperature=zero time.

Global time is simply that inertial state. Like absolute zero is the only thermal absolute, no time is the only temporal absolute. Any fluctuation from it is its own frequency/clock.

John,

Your line: so if we were to position various clocks in different situations, the one running the fastest would be the closest to universal equilibrium, not any particular field, microwaves, etc.

-- is a good one and the follow up question would be: Is the fastest of all of the clocks closest to the "true" aging of the universe, and if we accept that then is it possible that the most accurate clock depicting the age of the universe must therefore lie outside of the universe or (as David Wiltshire pointed out before I did) is the actual "age" of the universe also a relative concept and would someone on a faraway galaxy who has calculated it to be 11 billion years old be just as valid as our claim that it is almost 14 billion years?

By the way - Smolin responded and I just posted my most recent follow up.

Speaking of which - Woit has kicked me off in the past too but I will take responsibility since sometimes when I get bored I make attempts at being humorous on blog sites. I guess I've been lucky these past few days since what I have to say is very relevant to that specific topic.

Chris,

Keep in mind Big Bang cosmology is based on the fabric of spacetime being physically real, not just a mathematical model. This is a bit like thinking epicycles are due to giant cosmic gear wheels turning in the heavens, in a literally clockwork universe.

Without time as an actual physical vector(blocktime) in that geometry, the concept falls apart.

A point I've frequently made and which no one refutes(Tom dropped the discussion) is that it is contradictory to assume both that space expands and a stable speed of light can otherwise exist, against which to measure it. For example, if two galaxies x lightyears apart were to expand to 2x lightyears apart, that is not expanding space, as measured in lightyears, but an increased distance. The only rational explanation for redshift is as an optical effect, likely due to light traveling as an expanding wave, not point particles and redshift being a consequence of receiving the resulting signal as a quantum of that wave.

In reality, any clock is subject to creative and destructive forces. I think the most stable clocks are galaxies themselves. They are the most spatially stable and least deflected by outside action. I think the whole notion that a galaxy could form from intergalactic gases in 14 billion years is about as possible as the earth forming in a few days, 6 thousand years ago. Presumably the inflation stage distributed the initial energy fairly broadly. Then it would have to start gravitationally coalescing out of this radiation, then forming structure. Zeeya put up a blog post, questioning BBT and I've provided various links. one of which shows a star in this galaxy to be older than 14 billion years and a second generation one at that!

Beside redshift, the only real concluding proof for BBT is cosmic background radiation, but in a spatially stable universe, in which redshift is due to distance, this radiation would also be the solution to Olber's paradox, redshifted off the visible spectrum.

One thing to keep in mind is that the light from distant galaxies gets here by passing between all the intervening ones. If we think of gravity as curving space inward, the mathematical opposite(cosmological constant) would be that it curves outward in those intervening spaces. So the light would have to be "walking up the down escalator." That's why overall space appears flat, as these balance out. Those ripples in the background radiation are the shadows of ever more distant galaxies.

"Is the fastest of all of the clocks closest to the "true" aging of the universe,"

If time were a vector from past to future, one would think the fastest clock moves into the future more rapidly, but the opposite is true, as it ages quicker and thus moves into the past more rapidly.

Chris,

" there is no compensation that can be applied to either clock (or both) to get them to run in sync from both perspectives simultaneously - but yet they do and the system works quite well."

This goes to another point I think doesn't get enough attention, that on a very fundamental level, information is subject to perspective. There is no God's eye view, no global perspective. Information breaks down when you start combining information and perspective, resulting in a lack of detail to a generalized point of view, or blurring/white noise.