Georgina,
Have I said congratulations yet, Ms. Parry? Best wishes.
But yes... "talk of time in relation to a real physical particle you are now no longer talking about the perception of time, time within the emergent reality of the observer, but passage of time in the external substantial reality."
That is physics prior to the *information age* which I recognize has its own validity in examining the roles of information as we devise its criteria, and the vast investments in information theory due to the global addiction to ever increasing computational capacity at no increase in cost. And which despite the rosey promises of the Quants that by the time 5G hits the shelves they'll have given us 'quantum computers', I doubt. After the collapse of the functional financial wave in 2008 leaving the too big to fail boys uncertain about their principal, I don't think the Saudi's are banking on it. They want to sell as much oil as they can, while they still can. My small investment strategy concurs.
Though differing in our perspectives, I think we both agree that Einstein's famous gedanken is indeed flawed, but its curious because Einstein then immediately introduces as postulates the conclusions of Maxwell's results; the universal constancy of light velocity, and that the laws of physics are identical in any frame of reference. Which of course includes the passage of time in the light velocity frame, and which in the hard physics of his day treats the role of humanity in the observer role as a given. SR is simple geometry and a little algebra, NOT simple arithmetic.
Maxwell's silver hammer came down on Newton's head, Einstein just used it to put the last nail in his coffin. You have to do some digging to get an understanding of Maxwell beyond the tired homage that his equations 'give a complete understanding of Electromagnetism', which is only true enough. But Maxwell's electrodynamic theory upon which Einstein founded all his work, is not itself a complete theory. Like GR, Maxwell's equations produce a mathematical singularity which cannot exist as a physical reality or all the intensity would be concentrated at a zero dimensional point and there would be no volume of field to observe. That is why QM hangs onto the *zero-point particle* and evolves to non-locality, superposition, entanglement and etc. since it took the quantum leap of faith.
Many like to argue against Relativity by contesting the validity of the postulates because Einstein doesn't lay out the theoretical and mathematical proofs for them. But Maxwell had already done so (in spades) , and Einstein cites Maxwell's theory. To argue against the postulates of SR, one must disprove Maxwell and offer a consistent, full theoretical treatment that explains all of the technology higher than Volta's chemical cell. That's physics.
Which brings me back to my point to James. Einstein's ride gedanken has the time metric backward's. Not that it doesn't grab people's attention and illustrate that given Maxwell's never-disproven conclusions, it is time and space that are not absolute. But so does the metric of 0 sec/sec @ ~rest >> 1 sec/sec @ c, and that metric dispels the psychological paradox and might well be taken as the fifth dimension which Klein and Kaluza hypothesized but failed to provide a theoretical rationale for its existence. I don't have the math to explain it, but in the Klein-Kaluza 5D application to GR, Maxwell's equations emerge. KOOL!
Please forgive me for not engaging in the layered perceptual-informational arena, I'm an old guy on short time and quite frankly miss the world before ninetendo. Best wishes, jrc
