Revenge of the Cranks by Chris Kennedy

Dude! I don't drink anything expensive either--no alcohol as my hero is Kelly Slater who leads a clean lifestyle.

But I want to hear about the "fundamental behavior theory of time!"

You've been seeing the problems, so your solution will be cool!

When do we get to see it? You may wish to copyright it online first at copyright.gov, along with all your other essays. :) Now and then I run into folks who say they came up with MDT. :)

Dear Nobody, my essay will show that Bob can pass Ann when they are each 5 years old, but that requires Bob to be moving at a speed that makes him Ann's age when he passes by her.

Then, in order to meet Carl when they are both 9, Bob must have been traveling at a speed that will allow him to catch up w/Carl in 4 yrs for Bob, but in more yrs than that for Carl.

Thomas Garcia, "On the Nature of Time."

Hello, Garcia,

Could not locate your essay, and I do not understand your above. There need not be any history involved (such as your "but that requires Bob to be moving at a speed that makes him Ann's age when he passes by her"); we can start the process with two people of any age passing each other. (It's just for convenience that I made Ann and Bob both 5 years old at the start.)

For example, if Bob is 25 when he passes Ann when she is 5, and then Bob goes on to meet Carl when Bob is 29 and Carl is 40, we still have Carl catching up with Ann when she is 15 and Carl is 44, which means that Ann gained 10 years whilst Bob/Carl gained only 4 4 = 8 years. And we can also eliminate history by replacing people with clocks and setting them to read whatever times we want as they pass. (For example, we can set the "Carl" clock to match the "Bob" clock as they meet in passing.)

As for your second sentence above, I am just as confused as I was re your first sentence.

When Carl's entrance occurs, his history before that meeting with Bob is irrelevant. As I just said, it really does not matter if Carl's & Bob's ages are the same when they meet. All that matters is the end result, and that result is the fact that people in different inertial frames age differently. And special relativity theory has no physical explanation for this experimental result. This is - to be kind - a serious defect of the theory.

Hi, again, Garcia,

I *was* able to locate your essay - had a not-found false-negative error at first. Here are a couple of comments re the essay:

In your train example, the different observers do not necessarily have different speeds through space. This is just the standard case of reciprocal time dilation where each observer sees the other's clock as "running slow," so there is no proof here that observers who move at different speeds through space age differently. However, this is proved by the Triplet Example which I gave above (which of course was not original with me).

You said that the traveling and turning-around twin would be younger than the stay-at-home people "because his ship would have to accelerate." As the Triplet Example shows, acceleration has nothing to do with it.

Thanks, Nobody, for reading my entry, and for your feedback as well.

The train experiment shows time "dilation" better than the Twins Paradox, I think. I try to explain why both observers are moving through space at different speeds when they take their measurements. Both are on the earth's surface, so both are moving with the planet as it moves through space at the same speed. Also, both are moving with the spin of the earth at the same speed. However, their speeds are different from each other because one is moving on a train while the other is stationary with respect to the train's motion. Granted, that is a tiny difference in speed, but if it happens to the twins, it must happen to the train observers too, IMO.

The observers of my essay do not "see" the other's clock. If it is so that if they could do that, their clocks would appear to each other to be moving slower, I do not know why that would be, because I have not read that argument yet. If you have a link, I would appreciate reading it.

Your "Triplet example" cannot have A & C stationary because all objects are in motion. Thus, for space travelers to be a certain age as one passes by another and then reaches a third object requires dfferent speeds of all of them. SR clearly shows the rate of the passage of time for objects depends on their speed (not velocity). From that, I draw the conclusion that time is a property of matter and passes inversely proportional to any discrete object's speed.

Thomas Garcia

Garcia, I admit that this stuff can be a bit tricky.

It is, however, possible for your two observers to have the exact same speed through space whilst still moving differently relative to Earth.

For example, let's say that our Earth is moving to the right through space at 50 mph (50 miles per hour absolute speed through space). This of course means that the observer who is at rest on Earth is also moving at 50 mph to the right through space.

Now let the train move to the left at 100 mph relative to Earth. This means that the train is moving at 50 mph relative to space, just as is the other observer.

I would post a diagram of this, but I have no idea how to control it in this forum. Perhaps someone can give me a hint?

As for your claim that your observers did not look at each others' clocks, they did not really have to actually do this in order for the reciprocal time dilation to be involved. But if you think about the train observer looking at a light beam that is moving straight down in the other observer's frame, then you can see that the train observer would see the same diagonal as did the other observer see for the train's light.

Since your observers could be moving at equal speeds through space (as I showed above), this means that their clocks would really be running at the same rate, so all we have left is the fake slowing of special relativity - its reciprocal "time dilation" where each observer sees the other clock running slow.

By the way, it is much, much easier to show this fake time dilation by simply letting a single clock in one frame pass two clocks in another frame. This will reveal that the true cause of this reciprocal "time slowing" is simply Einstein's definition of clock synchronization, which, of course, does not truly synchronize clocks but instead leaves them asynchronous.

At the risk of making another mess, I will try to show this diagrammatically.

[4]-->passing clock

[4]--------------------[5]

-----------------------[6]-->

[6]--------------------[7]

Note that all 3 clocks moved up by 2 hours, so they are actually all running at the same rate; however, since the two clocks in the bottom frame are not absolutely or truly synchronous, the observers in this frame "see" the passing clock as "running slow." (It "fell behind" by 1 hour.) This is clearly a ridiculous and not-worthy-of-science situation of no more importance than the fact that two departing people see each other "shrink."

You wrote:

"Your 'Triplet example' cannot have A & C stationary because all objects are in motion. Thus, for space travelers to be a certain age as one passes by another and then reaches a third object requires dfferent speeds of all of them. SR clearly shows the rate of the passage of time for objects depends on their speed (not velocity). From that, I draw the conclusion that time is a property of matter and passes inversely proportional to any discrete object's speed."

I did not say that A & C were stationary, so I do not know why you said that. (Also, it is not necessarily true that "all objects are in motion" - any number of objects could very well be at absolute rest in space for all we know. Certainly, nothing prohibits this!)

As for SR showing that the passage of time depends upon clock or object speed, this is not really the case because SR did not predict physical clock slowing - it merely incorporated it when it accepted the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment, which, by extension, says that clocks must physically slow. The only kind of "slowing" given by SR per se is its silly and trivial reciprocal "slowing."

Let's look a little closer at this sentence of yours:

"SR clearly shows the rate of the passage of time for objects depends on their speed (not velocity)."

If you are speaking of a real, physical, intrinsic passage of time (the only passage that counts), then you cannot be speaking of SR because this would mean that SR admits to an effect of absolute motion because only such motion can have any effect on a clock's physical or a person's age.

Let's also look a little closer at this sentence of yours:

"From that, I draw the conclusion that time is a property of matter and passes inversely proportional to any discrete object's speed."

When you say "speed," are you referring to "absolute speed" or "relative speed"? You do not make this clear in your essay. Also, it time were solely a property of matter, then why does the speed of the matter also come into play? (And this time, I am speaking of an absolute speed through space.)

I would rather say that a person's aging is slowed by his absolute motion through space. (But we do not yet know the why of this.) The faster a person moves through space, the slower he ages. Taken to the extreme, one triplet could still be a mere baby whilst his triplet brother could be a great-grandpa or long dead.

A clue to the solution of the twin paradox:

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

Relativity and Its Roots, Banesh Hoffmann, p. 105: "In one case your clock is checked against two of mine, while in the other case my clock is checked against two of yours, and this permits us each to find without contradiction that the other's clocks go more slowly than his own."

Note that, according to special relativity, time dilation can only be measured in the system with (at least) two clocks - it cannot be measured in a system with a solitary clock. Hence the trick used by Einsteinians: thought experiments described in textbooks implicitly convert the sedentary twin's system into a full-blooded measurement system (that is, capable of measuring time dilation) while the travelling twin's system is reduced to a solitary clock moving between clocks belonging to the sedentary twin's system. As a result, the travelling twin always returns younger and Einsteinians fiercely sing "Divine Einstein" and "Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity".

Any scenario converting the sedentary twin's clock into a solitary clock moving between clocks belonging to the travelling twin's system, if analysed correctly, leads to the conclusion that, at the end of the journey of the travelling twin, the sedentary twin is younger. The "paradox" is, in fact, an absurdity.

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Oops! Sorry to confuse...

On my above model - I forgot to mention the inner cube room of the ship (on a swivel) stays directionally constant as the rest of the ship rotates 180 degrees in the turn. Including that will certainly help to keep the blue wall as the floor!

From: Thomas Garcia

Hello, Nobody, let me just say I am truly grateful to you for your part in this discussion. You make excellent points that I'm sure others would ask if they dared. I will try to respond in the clearest way I know. First, this riddle has been around since Man came out from the caves, I believe, so you are right - this stuff is tricky indeed.

Your example of equal-speed objects may be correct, and I address that in my essay in stating that all objects in motion at the same speed within the universe will have the same time rates regardless of location. If we include the earth's spin and its curvature, however, the speed of the train increases.

I mentioned my observers do not see each other's clock to emphasize that is not necessary for the success of the experiment. Your point about "reciprocal time dilation," well known in the Twin Paradox, is not applicable to the train experiment without fundamentally changing it as you say. In the TP, there are instances when the speed of both twins will match each other, but at other times, they will not. At the times when their speeds are equal, there is no "time dilation." Otherwise, SR's premise holds. In order to invalidate SR's "time dilation," you must first show that the result of the train experiment is false. I have been unable to do that.

About your diagram, in order for the "passing clock" to pass the others, it must have a higher speed, thus that clock will show, correctly, a slower time rate. The falseness, if any, may lie in the claim that the others would also see the passing clock as moving slower in time. I am unconvinced either way.

I mentioned that all objects are in motion because you seemed to not take that into consideration, which is a necessity for your diagram. However, I certainly agree there can exist objects without motion in our universe. In fact, I wrote an essay on that years ago, titled "The Ether Found," which I am revising now so that I can post it in the forum here for comments pro and con.

Insofar as SR initiated the invention of the two thought experiments in my essay, which show without exception that time varies in the physical world when speeds between two or more objects vary, and which have not yet been invalidated, SR cannot be ignored as the source of so-called time dilation.

I am indeed speaking of a physical real time, but you claim that violates SR's rejection of absolute motion!?! SR rejects the theory of absolute time, and yet half of the world's population believes time is a power imposed equally onto all things in the universe, including space, and the other half believes space-time is a real physical place. My essay also rejects absolute time in my insistence that time is a property of individual objects.

Absolute or relative speed? My reference is to relative speed (between objects) as it affects their time rates. If by absolute speed you mean an object's specific speed in space, my reference then is to a speed vs time spectrum similar to the light spectrum. Such a chart would have times rates accruing to objects at every speed.

Wikipedia defines a physical property as "any property that is measurable whose value describes a physical system's state." Time sets the age of an object, which depends on the sum of the number of all time rates having accrued to it times their lengths. However, if time is a force that causes aging, it may be that it does that by changing an object's chemical nature. If that is so, it may not be a property of matter, per se, but a supervenient to an underlying quantum structure instead. For example, aging may be a supervenient to the force of time, but if time is not a force and aging is fundamentally caused by, say, natural decomposition or quantum decay, time could then be a property of time. Otherwise, "A rose by any other name..."

I admit I don't know why speed is the preferred frame of reference for the application of time rates, but if by absolute motion you mean the speed of a sole object, why would time slow down for it and not increase instead? That statement is incomplete, it seems.

I certainly need no help to become confused, especially about time dilation, especially at this hour!

Just a hint, please - what other causes of time dilation are there?

Thanks for the helpful clarifications!

Wow, Bill. He latched onto your last sentence which was a short comment and pretended it was your whole post, ignoring your obvious technical point about the asymmetry. In this short exchange Chris thus displays a perfect example of crackpot mentality. When you deal with crackpots, it's necessary to keep the editorializing to a minimum. Just analyze the whole thing in a single inertial frame - it doesn't matter which one - and it's easy in SR to derive the standard result in which they have aged differently by the time they reunite.