Revenge of the Cranks by Chris Kennedy

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

Chris,

Hmm. There are definitely bubbles forming in the bottom of the kettle, but it's not quite to a boil yet.

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.

The following will be a rather quick reply as I am pressed for time at the moment:

You wrote:

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.

My response:

Actually, in my diagram, the two frames are moving at the same speed through space. I just tried too hard to keep it simple, that's all (so it would not get too jumbled when posted). That is, the passing clock frame is moving at the same speed through space as the frame that has the two clocks. This means that all three clocks are moving at the same speed through space, and this means that they are all running at the same intrinsic rate. ("Intrinsic" here refers to "physical" which in turn relates to "the triplets had physically different ages.")

You wrote:

"My essay also rejects absolute time in my insistence that time is a property of individual objects."

My reply:

This is an absolute time since individual objects are absolute. However, maybe you meant to say that it is not universal absolute time; however, it is easy to have such time by simply using truly synchronous clocks to measure light's one-way speed, thereby getting our absolute speed, and then correcting for our personal clock slowing. In this way, all observers in all frames can share the same time universally.

You wrote:

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.

My reply:

Time must slow because of round-trip light speed invariance. Here is how John Wheeler put it:

The following quotes are from John A. Wheeler's book:

[_Spacetime Physics_ ©1963, 1966, p. 80]

"... when Kennedy & Thorndike made their measurements in

1932, two alternatives to the Einstein theory were open

to consideration (designated here as Theories A and B)."

"Both [Theory] A and [Theory] B assumed the old idea of

absolute space, or 'ether,' ["Nobody" objects here by saying

that no ether is needed in Lorentz's view because light

needs no medium] in which light has the speed c. Both A

and B _explained_ ["Nobody's" emphasis] the zero fringe shift in

the Michelson-Morley experiment by saying that all matter

that moves at the velocity v relative to "absolute space"

undergoes a [physical] shrinkage of its space dimensions

in the direction of motion to a new length equal to

sqr[1-v^2/c^2] times the old length ...."

"The two theories differed as to the effect of 'motion

through absolute space' on the running rate of a clock.

Theory A said, no effect. Theory B said that a standard

seconds clock moving through absolute space at a velocity

v has a time between ticks of sqr[1-v^2/c^2] seconds."

"Thus the Kennedy-Thorndike experiment ruled out Theory A

(length contraction alone) but allowed Theory B (length

contraction plus time contraction) - ...."

Chris,

If you are up for some math, the good news for you is that - if you take advantage of the opportunity - you will be able in the near future to learn something pretty cool. Namely, special relativity. I know you took physics in high school that touched on the subject but it's clear that you didn't really learn SR at that time, and after all, most high school students don't.

Like I said, if you analyze it in any given inertial frame, you get the same result for the age difference.

Various different explanations you've encountered that seem so contradictory to you are actually all correct. Relativity is like that: A lot of things that you might expect to be different are equal, while a lot of things that you might expect to be equal are different.

This wikipedia article should help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox

You can tell different "stories" about what happens just by choosing different inertial frames to analyze it in, or indeed by getting more fancy like Einstein did and using accelerated frames, but all observable results are the same for all such choices. You might feel that in reality there must be only one true story, and I'm inclined that way myself, but all the stories that SR tells are experimentally equivalent and that's what's at issue here.

You would need to learn the actual math to *really* make sense of it, not just read explanations. Luckily, the math is not that hard if you can handle algebra and geometry. You can derive it all yourself using Einstein's two postulates (physics is the same in all inertial reference frames, and the speed of light is fixed) but I don't recommend you try it without a textbook handy. I remember doing that exercise in school, pen and paper, and yes, I got the standard results.

One main point you are missing involves the relativity of simultaneity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

Thus in your Fig. 1, with clock A being distributed over a long distance in the direction of motion, then if in the frame of clock A all parts of it read the same time, then in the frame at which clock B is at rest the different parts of clock A all read different times. It is exactly like the train-and-platform example in the wikipedia article. If clock B is the platform, then from the viewpoint of clock A, different parts of clock B read different times (assuming that clock B is also long). This is how they can BOTH think the OTHER guy's clocks are ones going slow: When they compare a FIXED part of one clock to the nearest part of the other clock at every moment in time, because of the motion it's a *different* part of the second clock at every moment, and it's kind of like comparing apples and oranges.

If they try to compare using only two small point clocks to get around that, then they need to send signals at light speed or less to report the time, which introduces the needed time differences, or to send one clock on a round trip by accelerating it and that's the "twin paradox". Does the math really work? Get a pen and paper and you can see that it does.

Sincerely,

Jack