Readers' Choice: Cheating the Causal Game

" ... please offer any scientific (rather than just belief based) reason why option 1 has any advantages over option 2."

Okay.

"(1) we have a local framework ('at rest') to work with, and simply ignore any other such local frames, which is convenient as otherwise they might prove problematic. We assume then that as many as we wish can simply 'co-exist.'"

Peter, relativity is coordinate free. It is not "problematic" that every local inertial frame is independent of every other, because all physics is local. Inertial frames that are timelike or spacelike separated are precisely reconciled to a common spacetime locality by the Lorentz transform. If this is not "scientific" to you, good luck falsifying it.

"The discrete field interpretation (2) follows Einstein's ultimate 1952 concepts more closely (i.e. 'small space 's' in motion with large space 'S', 'Infinitely many 'spaces', in motion, and Bodies not 'in space but spatially extended' etc.)."

This a completely superfluous assumption to the physics of relativity and as such has no meaning. As I told you, it is simply a restatement of Mach's principle that all motion is relative. That is also scientific.

Tom

Tom,

So again you provide no scientific falsification. You simply;

1) Re-state the other interpretation, which we both already well know.

2) Re-state that all else (i.e. consistency with observation - of FTL, plasma refraction etc.) is 'superfluous' to that interpretation.

Well of course it is. That wasn't what I asked, or the important matter. You were supposed to be 'comparing' the models scientifically, not just 'chanting' what you believe. If that's all you have then you've failed.

I see no logic or evidence for your views (all evidence applies to both). You also seem to remain head-in-the-sand about the apparent FTL motion

Pete,

I'm a little fuzzy about the distinction between 'optional interpretation'.

It still goes back to the method of the math. GR dispenses with force on the grounds that we have not established a unification between gravity and EM. It is not a contradiction by Lonesome Al to then say 'there is not a region in space that does not have a field'. Force is the product of mass and acceleration and GR relies on both but does not employ the product. It is thereby through acceleration that the math describes the surface as a boundary of a boundary which is shrinking to describe gravity geometrically, not as an energetic dynamic. In concept gravity is not mass/energy taking up space which must then push outward, it describes gravity giving way to 'flat' space as the reason why discrete fields aggregate into greater masses. And Einstein was painfully aware that the math did not extend down to a scale where energy can be described as gravitating into mass. I think what Tom tries to get through, is that GR is firstly a General Theory (and) of relativity (comes later). It's your own personal mind-held computer.

also I just posted a correction about the refraction delay. jrc

...dammit, I used the 'up to' arrow again and it chopped the post. It was the irrefutable proof of FTL quasar pulses, at up to 46c I referred, which are fatal to SR if you are correct. Is that what you want?

Do you really believe that is; "not problematic" and that the solution to it (also deriving the LT) will prove entirely "superfluous."?

I can find no logic or reason for your view whatsoever, and you haven't offered any.

Peter

" ... . It was the irrefutable proof of FTL quasar pulses, at up to 46c I referred ..."

Sigh. Peter, this is no refutation of special relativity. Even if the quasar jets are actually traveling faster than light speed (a big if) one would still need show that quasar events are exchanging physical influences with other bodies in the universe at a speed greater than light.

There is no "proof" at all in a scientific theory, let alone "irrefutable." A theory only lives or dies on its correspondence to phenomena, and special relativity shows such strong correspondence.

I suggest you take your own wise advice to slow down and think.

All best,

Tom

Tom,

Aha! Too fast twixt parry and lunge! you have just described and adopted the foundational proposition of the Discrete Field Model.

"one would still need show that quasar events are exchanging physical influences with other bodies in the universe at a speed greater than light."

So who was it who didn't slow down enough? ..not I Monseur Ray!. We now see you never did understand the proposition as you clung onto another!

One would not; "need to show...exchanging physical influences" at all to support the DFM or to show the assumptions "surrounding" SR as inconsistent, because even 'apparent' superluminal speed is not permitted using those assumptions. But where we DO agree is that there is no 'actual' superluminal propagation.

This is where the well understood 'two fluid' plasma mechanism does it's job, which is the physical modulation of all EM wave propagation to the speed c with respect to the rest frame of that particle. If you read the PRL/MNRAS quasar jet analysis I posted you'll have seen the derivation of the 'hypersurfaces' which do this, and the 'cancellation' of plasma charge over the Debye length, (annihilation) well known in plasma as the instantaneous 'virtual' electrons. The mechanism avoids the whole prospect of "physical influences" between "bodies."

I think our difference is Tom that I do real 'science' (study and analyse data and findings), not just 'theory'. I then don't have to rely on any 'beliefs.' A pure theorist must select his own 'theoretical' foundations, so he feels challenged when they are.

Feeling challenged does not encourage objective scientific analysis. Chanting the same beliefs as you have is 'tiresome' to use your word, as you know from Pentcho. You don't need to feel challenged.

Peter

"I think our difference is Tom that I do real 'science' (study and analyse data and findings), not just 'theory'. I then don't have to rely on any 'beliefs.'"

Peter, you are welcome to show by your study and analysis that your findings are not superfluous to the theory of special relativity.

You claim not to falsify special relativity out of one side of your mouth, and out the other you claim that special relativity is not consistent with your analysis of the data.

Just what is it? -- is the real science of special relativity true or false?

Tom

Tom,

Thank you for the effort, but if I may review some relevant parts of the conversation;

I said, "Clock rates slow as gravity contracts space/time. Correct/not?"

To which you replied, " If we remove an identical atom, or clock, further from the influence of the gravity field where we first synchronized the beats, and then bring the clocks back together, we will find that the clock that traveled outside the local frame has recorded fewer beats than the one that stayed at home. Why?" "...because this vertical acceleration is indistinguishable in principle between some force pushing bodies upward and another force pulling bodies downward -- there is equivalence between inertial mass and gravitational mass, and therefore between gravity and acceleration."

Yet this is not my point. Yes acceleration will increase the drag and further slow the clock, but I did not say acceleration, I said gravity and a stronger gravity field does slow a clock, relative to a weaker one, so when you compare a clock already in a higher orbit, it runs faster than one on the ground.

"Time dilation cannot be separated from length contraction when we speak of real measurement parameters. The contraction of time and space is covariant but not symmetric -- "We measure time with clocks," said Einstein, "We measure space with rods." You can do the calculation, and find that at about 85% of the speed of light, a body is contracted to about one-half its length at rest."

Presumably then, the clock rate is slowed to about half its sped at rest. Yes/no?

"This is why special relativity as a bedrock physical principle finds that physical influences among bodies cannot exceed the speed of light in a vacuum."

So what is this vacuum, if not empty space?? I don't think this should be considered some kind of trick question or ignoring your considerable efforts to explain. Pardon my ignorance, but I cannot see what the difference is and it is a question you are not addressing directly.

Regards,

John M

Tom,

One more question;

"You can do the calculation, and find that at about 85% of the speed of light, a body is contracted to about one-half its length at rest."

What is this "at rest," if not inertial to the aforementioned vacuum?

Regards,

John M

"Yes acceleration will increase the drag and further slow the clock, but I did not say acceleration, I said gravity and a stronger gravity field does slow a clock, relative to a weaker one, so when you compare a clock already in a higher orbit, it runs faster than one on the ground."

Just the opposite, John! Moving clocks run slower than clocks at rest. This one example among many serves to evidence that you haven't read one damn word I or the sources I referenced wrote. You have no idea what relativity says or how it works, and yet you continue to hold forth on your contrary notions.

" ... a question you are not addressing directly."

That's just the thing, John. I (or at least Andrew Hamilton)addressed ALL your questions DIRECTLY. At this point, I am convinced you are just messing around, with no serious interest in the actual physics.

Best,

Tom

There's really no clamor, John C. Peter simply wants to impose information, by inductive inference, onto special relativity which it neither requires nor can accommodate. The theory is already complete.

It doesn't have anything to do with a GUT or with DFM, whatever that means.

Best,

Tom

Tom,

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

"For instance, the clocks in GPS satellites experience this effect due to the reduced gravity they experience (making their clocks appear to run more quickly than those on Earth) and must therefore incorporate relativistically corrected calculations when reporting locations to users."

Sit back and read what I wrote. I said gravity, not acceleration.

Maybe we should just drop the actual question.

Regards,

John M

John,

Visited the wikipedia site and I have asked before: Which planet's gravitational field's clock was used to determine that light would cover 299792458m in one second?

On a different planet, with a different gravitational field intensity and thus a different clock, will this value be the same?

On a planet collapsed to a black hole, GR tells us it would take an infinite time for light to cover same 299792458m distance. So the mathematics of gravity slowing clocks is correct, even if there may be other physical explanations for the phenomenon.

Regards,

Akinbo

Aknibo,

Yes and if we reversed this principle and said space expands between gravity fields/galaxies, then wouldn't time presumably speed up as well? But it doesn't, because the basis of this concept is the physics, not the mathematical principles. The medium slows the clock rate, but there is no negative medium on the other side of the vacuum, that would cause the speed of light and thus time to go faster. So we need to explain gravity as a consequence of the physics, not the mathematics.

Regards,

John M

John,

Time is a measurement system that actually measures duration elapsing. The measurement baseline is the constant period of the Earth`s rotational motion.

Duration elapsing is what our clocks measure.

Jiim,

I think we both appreciate duration as the effect of stable perception in a dynamic context. Otherwise physical reality only exists as what is referred to as the present and duration is the process occurring in the present between particular events.

The challenge here is how to get beyond the very strong psychological presumption of narrative as foundational, given that it is foundational to the very concept of personal experience.

It is not that physics doesn't understand this, but that they still focus on the measurement of duration, because it is a simple factor that can be calculated. Here is an interesting description of the situation from an entry in the Questioning the Foundations contest, by Edward Anderson;

"``It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive through the changes of things." Ernst Mach [1]. *What* change? Three answers to this are `any change' (Rovelli), `all change' (Barbour) and my argument here for the middle ground of a `sufficient totality of locally relevant change'"

Even though there is the Machian recognition of time as effect, yet somehow a simple measure of this effect is what is incorporated into 'spacetime' as foundational. As I keep pointing out in these discussions, we think of time as that progression from past events to future ones, that we experience as a necessary function of only existing in the present. Yet the larger dynamic is that these events form and dissolve into the next, thus it is the future becoming past that is the larger reality.

Then the various seeming absurdities in physics, such as clocks running at different speeds and reality branching out into multiworlds, are explainable. Clocks run at different rates because they are all physically different processes, much as some things move faster than others. As for multiworlds, when you go from an ordered past into a probabilistic future, it does branch out into possibilities, but when it is the collapse of these possibilities, yielding actualities, ie. future becoming present, the branches come together. It is the actual collapse of the wave function.

Safe to say, this idea gets quickly filtered out by those who have spent their lives studying the geometry of spacetime, with its assumption of a causal property.

Regards,

John M

John,

The Earth`s rotational motion is the fundamental physical mechanism responsible for maintaing our confusion over time.

At the Equator, we travel at a rotational surface speed in excess of 1,600 kilometers per hour. We all see the effects of the Earth`s rotational motion, in seamless harmony with our clocks, on a daily basis. The constant rotational speed of the planet permeates life on Earth.

Jim,

One even more basic feature to keep in mind is that as predatory creatures, we are very focus oriented, with our eyes in the front of our head. So we are biased toward a very linear view of reality. Reality, on the other hand, is non-linear. So we are a single entity moving through a dynamic ecosystem. Therefore we are generally focused on singular aspects of this reality, like particular objects, events, processes, measurements, concepts, etc, rather than just being generally aware of the situation. Yes, this leads us to the complex understanding of reality that has created human civilization, but, like the spinning planet, introduces particular biases into our thought processes at a foundational level. Consider how plants essentially just expand outward and prey animals have eyes on the sides of their heads to give them greater situational awareness and while they possess far less analytical abilities, generally have faster reaction times. Now consider how we think of the more contextual side of our minds, the instinctual and emotional, in terms of the heart and the gut. As a pump, the heart is constantly expanding and contracting, creating a rhythmic cycle, while the gut is our own internal ecosystem.

So we are constantly trying to distill this dynamic reality around us and in us into some narrative/linear sequence in order to understand it. Thus the primacy of the temporal effect.

Now this is not to say we shouldn't try thinking linearly, but a lot of these conundrums would make more sense, not vanish, but make more sense, if we begin to understand our forward, focal bias in context.

Regards,

John M

John,

"but, like the spinning planet, introduces particular biases into our thought processes at a foundational level."

I agree, the spinning planet does introduce particular biases in our thought processes at a foundational level.