Shannon’s View on Wheeler’s credo by Eckard Blumschein

Dear Eckard

Just to let you know that I have read your well structured and written essay. You raised several interesting issues such as those mentioned above by Edwin. My major motivation in reading your essay was to verify your claim that you have an alternative explanation to the MMX. I read also the endnotes. There I could find some of the comments that you already posted in my entry. As I mentioned in my entry, Lorentz' contraction is not an artifice but it's well justified if one recognizes that bodies are not rigid entities but deform under the action of a force.

You:The velocity of light c equals to the distance d between the position of emitter at the moment of emission and the position of receiver at the moment of detection divided by the time of flight t: c=d/t.

Here, of course, we have to determine the time at the emission and receiving points. In doing so, this will inevitably lead us to the problem of clock synchronization (that you mention in endnote 4), which from my point of view is a dead end given the circular reasoning that emerges when we try to synchronize a clock by determining the one-way speed of light which in turn requires a clock synchronization procedure. The synchronization by slow motion has been extensively studied in the literature and I would not like to discuss it here. I remember that we have already discussed at length this topic.

With respect to endnote 1, I couldn't get what you really mean. It seems that you are suggesting absolute time and denying local times. You suggest negative values for t, which I don't get the physical meaning of negative time. Could you comment on this part please.

Best Regards

Israel

Eckard

The fault is in representing both time and spatial position in the same way. And then if you use a triangle, one gets gamma. There is only x (ie space), which occurs in one form at a time. t is the rate at which it alters form and is therefore a different spatial reality. Solving any particular event is a matter of relating the time of each light received to distance travelled (bearing in mind other environmental factors), not the Lorentz transformation.

Obviously time as an all pervading now exists, reality is the entirety of all physically existent states at a given time. Reality does not exist over time. There is no duration in any given reality. That is why one cannot, from a proper physical perspective, keep on talking about A and B and the distance AB as if it all exists at the same time. There is one physically existent form of A and B, and hence a spatial difference AB at a point in time, ie in a reality. At the next point in time there may well have been alteration. A point in time being the equivalent of whatever alters the fastest in existence, because with that level of differentiation one will identify all alterations (ie realities).

Paul

Eckard

"A and B are merely assumed to increase their distance. It did not matter if they possibly traveled in the same direction. Only their relative motion matters"

No, it is the distance which matters. If the distance is altering then the rate at which successive lights are received alters, and hence the perceived rate of change varies from the actual rate of change. This can be an outcome of both travelling at the same constant speed, in straight lines, but in different directions, or they are travelling at different speeds in the same direction, or any combination thereof. Put the other way round, the actual and perceived rate of change only remains the same if both are travelling at the same speed in the same direction, ie despite movement the distance remains constant over time, so the delay (duration) whilst light travels remains constant. So the frequency of receipt remains constant and the same as reality. Indeed, both could accelerate/decelerate, so long as they do that simultaneously. Einstein's 'hangup' with inertia was because of his concern about supposed length alteration at different speeds. He was not thinking of actual/perceived rate of change effects.

Re the Poincaré quote you picked up on. The point here is that he is talking about getting timing devices synchronised with a specific event, given that they are in spatially different locations. In other words, eliminating the effect of the spatial difference. So a timing device has to be set backwards if it is to tell the time of occurrence of a 'distant' event, in order to compensate for the duration incurred whilst the signal travels from that event. This is not how timing works. All timing devices are set to the same point in time and alter at the same rate. So they provide a common reference. Then, obviously, determining when an event occurred depends on calibrating distances and times of receipt of light. There was only one event, it cannot occur at different times. The two points have to be stationary, ie no alteration in distance over time, because of the way he is going about 'synchronising' these devices. Any given event (reality) occurred at a time. Any given other event may or may not have occurred at that same time. That's it, the occurrence of reality has nothing whatsoever to do with observation (ie the receipt of light).

Einstein picked this up and was meant to be applying it to observation, ie the signal becomes observational light. But he failed, because he had no observational light.

Re you translation, I seem to be confusing you. In the Introduction, the postulates are defined (as of second sentence second paragraph). The 1923 translation reads:

"They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good. We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the "Principle of Relativity") to the status of a postulate, and also introduce another postulate, which is only apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely..." What did he actually write?

Paul

Israel

If I may jump in. There is no synchronisation problem, neither do timing devices have to be synchronised using light. The whole point of the timing system is that all the devices are 'telling' the same time, ie the reference is a conceptual constant rate of change. The devices themselves are irrelevant, just a means to an end. There is, obviously, a practical problem with getting all devices 'telling' the same time and maintaining it, but that is not what was being considered.

Timing is not time. The consideration was about occurrence (reality). Now, any given reality only occurs at a specific time, not at different times. There is no such thing as 'local time'. It is the timing of the receipt of lights which were generated as a result of that occurrence, which represent that reality which alter, mainly dependent on spatial position.

Paul

Eckard,

Sorry to hear of all your tribulations. I consider your essay largely excellent even without considering all those issues and am pleased to report I have it down for a high mark. I really loved your "Wheeler's preposterous idea" comment!

I'm sorry about the over-literal English in my own essay, too much Shakespeare and Chaucer in my youth! But my essay is too richly constructed to be able to extract the value from in a 'quick scan'. It builds a full ontological construction using orbital angular momentum to show how the stupidities of FTL assumed from Bells' theorem can be dispensed with. That's not an easy task! I do hope you get to read it carefully.

The blog comments also expand on precisely how the cosine curve is produced at EACH detector, thus reproducing the predictions of QM without spookyness. Your incisive falsification is most welcome. If you like donuts you can perform the experiment very simply yourself!

(I post this down here for convenience).

Stay well. And I hope and expect to see you finish higher up the field. Best wishes.

Peter

Eckard

I really wanted a translation of the second half of that sentence, which in the 1923 version is: "the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good"

There are lots of references to first/second order. It seems to be associated with this differentiation of effects: Michelson (1887) para 2: "first, the ether is supposed to be at rest except in the interior of transparent media, in which secondly, it is supposed to move with a velocity less than the velocity of the medium in the ratio (n2-1)/ n2, where n is the index of refraction". Hendrik Lorentz (1895) section 1: "Now according to Maxwell, two kinds of deviations from the equilibrium state can exist in this medium. The deviation of first kind, which (among others) can be found in the vicinity of any charged body, we call the dielectric displacement...The second deviation of the equilibrium state of the aether will be determined by the magnetic force... whose applicability we also presuppose for the interior of ponderable matter..."

There are then a whole host of arguments as to why there was no 'ether effect' and the justification boiled down, effectively, to 'reality occurred at a local time'. Before GR then took over.

Paul

Eckard

Whether a body is rigid or not, in the sense meant by Einstein, is to some extent irrelevant. In that rigidity is an attribute over time. That is, a body is only that body once, whenever it exists. At any other point in time, physically it is something else. It might look the same at the higher level we are conceiving it at, but physically there will have been alterations, so it is different. In other words, there is only ever one physically existent state of something , which one could say is rigid, in effect, because there is only one discrete definitive occurrence. Whether subsequent states, which are actually a different something, happen to have the same spatial configuration is another matter.

Paul

Eckard

In ordinary usage, that is what the term means, but it is plainly not what they were referring to. Clearly the argument was not about the level of accuracy to which they worked out an effect, but an allusion to different effects (especially when one follows the point through the various writers over time, and does not just rely on one quote).

You did not give a translation of the sentence as requested.

Paul

Eckard

So 'all co-ordinate systems' instead of 'frames of reference'. And the caveat of 'in uniform translatory motion' which is explicit in section 2, is implicit here by virtue of the condition 'for which the mechanical equations are valid'. Because if there was any form of altering motion, caused by a differential in force incurred, then something else happened (supposedly).

There is no duration in a reality, so x=vt is only conceptual, ie it is expressing distance in terms of duration incurred whilst something travels it, had it been able to. And by substituting c for v, ie a specific velocity for a generic one, c was asserted to be: 2AB/(t'(a) - t(a)). Which was wrong, because that time involved duration incurred from subsequent timings, apart from being deemed an elapsed time in both cases anyway, which it is not. Assuming the quantity is doubled, it should have been either twice A to B or B to A, or the sum of A to B and B to A incurred at the same time. So it should have been: c = 2AB/2(t(a) - t(b)). Or simply, as considering either direction is irrelevant, c = AB/(t(a) - t(b)). Which, although correct, is a statement of the obvious. That is, the velocity is a ratio of total distance travelled to the time taken to do so, ie the definition of velocity.

Their quest was to find something that was an absolute reference against which to calibrate velocity. He did not then conclude that light velocity refers to the observer. He correctly concluded that light always starts at the same velocity, and like anything else, will continue at that velocity unless impinged upon. In other words, light, in ideal circumstances, is the nearest thing to an absolute reference. He failed to differentiate reality from light reality, and did not understand timing. So in effect, ie he did not mean to, he attributed the relativity of receipt of light to an inherent characteristic of reality. That is, contradicting the fact that reality occurs at a specific time. SR (as defined by him) is valid. It is the only circumstance in which the two postulates reconcile, had the second one been about observational light.

Paul

Eckard

There are a lot of things I have not heard of, but I do not need to, because I am only interested in the generic circumstance.

There cannot be a block of 'spacetime', unless the 'block' is just the spatial occurrence at one point in time. Which is the reality, but hardly a block. There can be no duration in reality, because whatever constitutes it is altering, and it cannot exist in different states at the same time. So reality is the discrete definitive physically existent state of whatever comprises it at any given time. And reality is what physically occurs, not what we conceive.

So the real reference for timing would be the fastest rate of alteration which occurs in existence. It might be that ultimately everything is comprised of the same substance and in effect everything, irrespective of its physical manifestation and therefore superficial difference is really (physically) altering (ie being a different reality in a sequence) at the same rate. It might be the opposite. In which case some components could have altered, whilst others have not, in the same timing frame. But one needs to find that out. The point is, physical existence does not occur in accordance with some arbitrary rule we impose for the purposes of discerning it.

There might be a problem with expression here, because, obviously, the past does not exist. That is why it is called the past. It did exist, but not now. And obviously since it did exist, thee are going to be existent 'traces of it' (like light for example), but this is not the reality, but, as you say, traces of it. Equally obviously, the future is non-existent. That is why it is called the future. It is what will occur as a consequence of what occurs immediately before it. One can only examine reality in terms of what happened at a point in time (though in practical terms we will probably never achieve the level of differentiation required), because that is how it exists. We are mixing up components from different realities and designating them as being of the same one.

I do not understand your last comment on time. Existence alters, at a rate. This is really what time is. But the important point to recognise there is that an alteration is a difference, ie it is another reality. Difference is difference. There is no time in a reality, it is about a feature of the difference between realities (ie physically existent states). Indeed, I should not refer to this in terms of 'altering', because that confuses the notion of difference. But the entire way in which we conceive existence, and hence the language used, is built on the incorrect concept of 'it changes'. We calibrate this with a timing system which involves the comparison of rates of change.

Paul