[NOTE: I inadvertently placed my assessment of your essay under your comment on my essay, so I suspect you have not even seen this yet (and I apologize in advance if you've already seen this and just did not choose to comment). Please also pardon the genuinely spontaneous "argh"s, as I actually quite impressed your essay. Finally, I inserted a rather long justification for how "primary causal frame SR" models can exactly the same results as traditional fully symmetric SR model. My reason to bother was that your model appears to fall into that category; I suspect you are using the term "classical" to mean much the same thing.]
Declan,
Argh! Dang it! I was all ready to dismiss your 2012 essay out-of-hand as "obviously and immediately geometrically self-contradictory"... and then realized you've created a genuinely clever and self-consistent world with this idea, even if I'm still not convinced of it being the same world we live in.
If I'm reading your idea rightly, what you have created is a rigid, isotropic 3D universe in which gravity becomes something very much like optical density in a gigantic cube of optical glass. In fact, for photons I'm not seeing much difference at all between the variable-index glass cube model and your model. Light would curve near a star because the optical density of the glass would increase near the star, and so forth for all other gravity fields. That's about as close of a match between a model and what is being modeled that you can get.
But your truly innovative addition to such model is the idea that since matter has a quantum wave length, it is also subject to the same velocity and wavelength shifts in higher-optical-density space as are photons. Photon wavelengths shorten as the photons slow in denser glass, and similarly, so do your mass waves. But mass and total energy depends on these wavelengths, so you are using these changes to implement relativistic masses.
Once again, that sounds like it should be an immediate contradiction with the extremely well-proven results of SR... except that it is not. You have to compare any two frames relative to each other, not to your "primary" frame of the giant optical glass cube, and that should still give you self-consistent and SR-consistent results.
To make matters worse, even though you have clearly designated one inertial frame as being in some way "special", that does not necessarily and absolutely mean that your model necessarily contradicts the enormous body of experimental observations that on the exact equivalence of physics across all inertial frames.
Alas, the problem is not that simple, since it is most definitely possible to create asymmetric frame models that fully preserve SR. You just have to take more of a computer modeling perspective to understand how it works.
I think I've already noted elsewhere in these 2017 postings that from a computer modeling perspective it's not even all that difficult to create a model in which one inertial frame becomes the "primary" or "physical" inertial frame in which all causality is determined. All other inertial frames then become virtual frames that move within that primary frame. Causality self-consistency is maintained within such virtual frames via asymmetric early ("it already happened") and late ("the event has not yet occurred") binding of causality along their axes of motion relative to the primary frame. Speed of light constraints prevent anyone within such a frame from being aware of any causal asymmetry, since by the time the outcomes of both early (past) and late (future) binding events reach them, both are guaranteed to have occurred by information of the events reach the observer.
Incidentally, one of the most delightful implications of asymmetric causality binding in virtual frames is the answer it produces for the ancient question of whether out futures are predetermined or "free will". The exceedingly unexpected answer is both, depending on what direction you are facing! For us, if one plausibly assumes that the CMB frame is the primary frame, the axis of predestination versus free will is determined by whether the philosopher is facing toward or away from a particular star in the constellation Pisces, though I don't recall off hand which is which. Direction-dependent philosophy for one of the most profound questions of the universe, I love it!
Even better is the fact that no one in any of the frames, primary or virtual, can tell by any known test that can do whether they are or are not in the primary frame. Special relativity thus is beautifully maintained, yet at the same time having a single physical frame hugely simplifies causality self-consistency.
Bottom line: I can't even fault your idea for its use of what is clearly just such a singular frame, because I know that having such a singular frame can very beautifully support every detail of SR. Ouch!
So, ARGH! Your 2012 model is a lot harder to disprove than I was expecting... and please recall the goal in science is always to destroy your own models to prove that they really, truly can pass muster.
Well. Wow. I can't rate your 2012 contest model, which I think makes me happy because it would take me a lot of closer examination of your model to comment on it and feel confident. You have a lot of equations and equation specificity there.
But it's late so I'm calling this a wrap. I won't forget your model. And the key defense you might want to keep in mind, since I'm sure your earlier attempt got tossed out for violating SR, is simply this: Having a primary frame in a physics model is not a sufficient reason to dismiss it because there exist single-frame models can be made fully consistent with all known results of special relativity. Given that such models are possible, any attempt to eliminate a model solely on that criterion is a bogus dismissal. You have to find a true contradiction with SR, one that flatly contradicts known results, rather than just offending people philosophically for making SR more like a computer model and less like an absolutely pristine mathematical symmetry. It's not the beauty of the symmetry that counts in the end, it's whether your model matches with and perfectly predicts observed reality, that is, whether it is Kolmogorov in nature (see my essay again).
Thank you for helping me tear my hair out in frustration!... :)
(Actually, seriously: Good work! But still... argh!)
Terry
Fundamental as Fewer Bits by Terry Bollinger (Essay 3099)
Essayist's Rating Pledge by Terry Bollinger
