Eckard,
"While you wrote "the speed of the waves relative to the observer" I didn't find this in the lesson you criticized."
The reason is that "relative to the observer" is too trivial and universally agreed upon to be mentioned. I am constantly repeating it here because you constantly reject it, for unknown reasons.
Pentcho Valev
The Essence of Special Relativity IV
Professor Sidney Redner: "The Doppler effect is the shift in frequency of a wave that occurs when the wave source, or the detector of the wave, is moving. Applications of the Doppler effect range from medical tests using ultrasound to radar detectors and astronomy (with electromagnetic waves). (...) We will focus on sound waves in describing the Doppler effect, but it works for other waves too. (...) Let's say you, the observer, now move toward the source with velocity vO. You encounter more waves per unit time than you did before. Relative to you, the waves travel at a higher speed: v'=v+vO. The frequency of the waves you detect is higher, and is given by: f'=v'/(lambda)=(v+vO)/(lambda)."
"Relative to you, the waves travel at a higher speed: v'=v+vO." In Divine Albert's world, this could only be true for waves other than light waves. For light waves (v is replaced by c) Einsteinians apply the fundamental calculation of special relativity and the waves always travel at the same speed c relative to the moving observer:
c' = c + vO = c
Pentcho Valev
Pentcho,
Redner referred to sound when he wrote "Relative to you, the waves travel at a higher speed". In this case the receiver is moving relative to the medium air and Redner is correct.
You are wrong when writing "For light waves (v is replaced by c)...
You must not replace Redner's v that relates to the medium by c.
The speed of light does not at all refer to emitter or receiver but to the DIFFERENCE between the positions of ...
I don't defend Einstein. I merely criticize your unjustified criticism and your attempt to justify emission theory.
Eckard
Eckard,
"Redner referred to sound when he wrote "Relative to you, the waves travel at a higher speed"."
You snipped the equation - Redner wrote:
"Relative to you, the waves travel at a higher speed: v'=v+vO."
Redner then uses this equation, v'=v+vO, in the derivarion of the frequency shift:
"The frequency of the waves you detect is higher, and is given by: f'=v'/(lambda)=(v+vO)/(lambda)."
The frequency shift f'=v'/(lambda)=(v+vO)/(lambda) is valid for light isn't it? How can the wrong (according to you) equation v'=v+vO produce the correct result f'=v'/(lambda)=(v+vO)/(lambda)?
Pentcho Valev
Pentcho,
Please distinguish relativity of position and therefore of motion too from Einstein's relativity of time. Michelson's null result showed that the speed of light does not depend on a medium, only on the relative motion between emitter and receiver.
What did Redner call vO in case the observer moves towards the source? It is the speed of the observer relative to the medium. In case of light there is no medium to refer to. The motion between observer (receiver) and source (emitter) is in this case a relative one. Therefore I defined the speed of light as DIFFERENCE between the positions ...
The receiver can directly only measure frequency but neither speed nor wavelength lambda.
May I remind you of my question concerning Pound and Rebka?
Eckard
Eckard,
You said, "Michelson's null result showed that the speed of light does not depend on a medium, only on the relative motion between emitter and receiver". Take a look at this article about the possible earth-bound medium.
Akinbo
(The article needs to be updated).
Eckard,
"What did Redner call vO in case the observer moves towards the source? It is the speed of the observer relative to the medium."
Redner wrote: "Let's say you, the observer, now move toward the source with velocity vO."
This means that the observer moves with velocity vO RELATIVE TO THE SOURCE. And yes, if the source is at rest relative to the medium, the observer moves with velocity vO RELATIVE TO THE MEDIUM as well.
Eckard, these are trivial matters - we cannot discuss them endlessly.
Pentcho Valev
Pentcho,
As we may conclude from Michelson's null result, there is no light-carrying medium relative to which something may move. Do not ignore this endlessly.
Eckard
Akinbo,
There is no preferred point in universe except for the actual now. This implies that there are only relative measures and velocities in space. I consider your "Speculations on dark matter as a luminiferous medium" merely an unnecessary variant of the hypothesis of locally fully dragged aether.
Well, Einstein's theory of "relativity" is silly. However, do not equate it with relativity in its original meaning.
Eckard
Einsteinians and the Red Queen
Philip Ball and Lee Smolin are doing all the running they can do to get rid of the idiotic special relativistic time - a consequence of Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate - and keep close to the postulate itself, to be able to worship it as ecstatically as possible:
Philip Ball: "Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says [Lee] Smolin."
QUESTION: Setting aside any other debates about relativity theory for the moment, why would the speed of light be absolute? No other speeds are absolute, that is, all other speeds do indeed change in relation to the speed of the observer, so it's always seemed a rather strange notion to me. LEE SMOLIN: Special relativity works extremely well and the postulate of the invariance or universality of the speed of light is extremely well-tested. It might be wrong in the end but it is an extremely good approximation to reality. QUESTION: So let me pick a bit more on Einstein and ask you this: You write (p. 56) that Einstein showed that simultaneity is relative. But the conclusion of the relativity of simultaneity flows necessarily from Einstein's postulates (that the speed of light is absolute and that the laws of nature are relative). So he didn't really show that simultaneity was relative - he assumed it. What do I have wrong here? LEE SMOLIN: The relativity of simultaneity is a consequence of the two postulates that Einstein proposed and so it is deduced from the postulates. The postulates and their consequences are then checked experimentally and, so far, they hold remarkably well.
'Well, in OUR country,' said Alice, still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.' 'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'
It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.
Pentcho Valev
Eckard,
Miller did not agree your conclusion of no background frame. You assume it as some 'light carrying medium' but I point out that a simple dielectric particle system does the same job over the distances involved.
In a 1933 paper, The Aether-Drift Experiments and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth physicist Dayton C. Miller reviewed the evidence and concluded;
"The brief series of observations was sufficient to show that the effect did not have the anticipated magnitude. However, and this fact must be emphasized,the indicated effect was not zero; the sensitivity of the apparatus was such that the conclusion, published in 1887, stated that the observed relative motion of the earth and aether did not exceed one-fourth of the Earth's orbital velocity. This is quite different from a null effect now so frequently imputed to this experiment by the writers on Relativity."
Miller showed that there is a systematic effect in the original M-M data indicating a speed of the Earth relative to the Aether of 8.8 km/s for the noon observations and 8.0 km/s for the evening observations. He believed that the aether was entrained ("dragged along") by the earth.
After years of careful experimentation, Miller indeed found a systematic deviation from the null result predicted by special relativity, which greatly embarrassed Einstein and his followers. Einstein tried to explain it away as an artifact of temperature variation, but Miller had taken great care to avoid precisely that kind of error. Miller told the Cleveland Plain Dealer on January 27, 1926,
The trouble with Professor Einstein is that he knows nothing about my results. ... He ought to give me credit for knowing that temperature differences would affect the results. He wrote to me in November suggesting this. I am not so simple as to make no allowance for temperature."
But the enthusiasts of the geometric interpretation suppressed all discord, and logic was lost. Misunderstanding experimental evidence will ensure it remains so.
Peter
Peter,
I meant the vacuum "is no light-carrying medium relative to which something may move". Experiments by Miller and the theory by Cahill were certainly influenced by the atmosphere of earth.
Eckard
Eckard,
As an astronomer I can reassure you no 'perfect vacuum' exists out in space when considered at the large scales of space. It's full of particles. Maybe not the 10^14/cm^-3 near Earth, but certainly plenty enough to do the same job over a longer distance, so with gentler 'curvature'.
As an astronomer I can reassure you that there is a lot of 'longer distance' out there in the QV. There is no mystery. Each bunch of particles is in some LOCAL inertial rest frame K, and after a while all light passing through it is modulated to c in the local frame K.
That is all that's required for CSL. But when in motion K' we can't measure the 'approaching' wavelength to find speed, we measure the wavelength on arrival of the second wave peak. So as propagation is then at local c (c') in K' we have c' = f* lamba'. it's c and lambda that have changed ready for measurement.
Unfortunately that seems possibly to have perfect logic so is incompatible with current physics.
Hi Peter,
It's always good to hear the voice of reason.
Hey, I was thinking about the big bang, dark matter and the quantum vacuum. I was wondering if dark matter might offer some bosons and fermions that we don't know about? I was playing around with the idea that at a time very early in the big bang, perhaps 10^-37 seconds or less, could some kind of quantum entangled mesh have been created? I'm borrowing an idea from biology, the Endoplasmic Reticulum, which is a transport sytsem for cells. The idea is that we've never noticed it because it's made out of dark matter (invisible matter); it would have invisible fermions and bosons. I'm assuming that particles might become quantumly entangled at very high energies. At 10^-37 seconds after the big bang, the energies were incredibly high. Could some kind of quantum entanglement because a large number of dark matter particles have occured?
Jason,
"It's always good to hear the voice of reason." Seems a bit scarce at times! I agree the fermion bit, but not the big bang bit, none the less the big blast will produce a whole load of fermion pairs, many of the ones that don't extinguish each other evolve to protons. I see no theoretical bar to those as dark matter.
Have you seen the Majorana fermion?
best
Peter
Peter,
Majorana fermion: "A Majorana fermion, also referred to as a Majorana particle, is a fermion that is its own antiparticle. They were hypothesised by Ettore Majorana in 1937. The term is sometimes used in opposition to a Dirac fermion, which describes fermions that are not their own antiparticles. No elementary fermions are known to be their own antiparticle, though the nature of the neutrino is not settled and it might be a Majorana fermion. By contrast, it is common that bosons are their own antiparticle, such as the photon."
I don't think the photon is its own anti-particle. When a particle meets its anti-particle, they're supposed to annihilate one another (perhaps giving off photons). In the case of a photon, I would argue that a photon would annihilate with its own gravity field. Of course, this doesn't happen. If it did, the whole universe would just vanish. I don't know what prevents mass-energy from recombining with its graviational curvature.
O tempora o mores:
"Could Einstein's theory of relativity be wrong? That's among the burning questions being asked by theoretical physicists today. It's a startling claim and one that has received a lot of attention from other scientists. Researchers from UC Santa Barbara's Department of Physics and the Kavli Institute for Theretical Physics (KITP) have received a $1.32 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue their work on finding an answer."
Pentcho Valev
Akinbo,
Your article mentions "Bradley's aberration .... supports advocates of light whose velocity can not be relative and which requires no medium for propagation" and "Some of the arguments can be found in [7] " Whittaker 1910. If you have the book at hand, could you please add some details? Do you refer to advocates of emission theory or to those like me who conjecture electromagnetic waves in empty space?
Eckard
Burning Questions in Divine Albert's World
University of California, Santa Barbara: "Could Einstein's theory of relativity be wrong? That's among the burning questions being asked by theoretical physicists today."
High priests in Einsteiniana know that, as long as Einstein's 1905 postulates are believed to be both true, Einstein simply cannot be proved wrong. Whatever errors he may have committed at later stages, they are insignificant - the groundbreaking miracles such as relativity of simultaneity, time dilation, length contraction, travel into the future etc. remain valid.
Hence the rallying cry in Einsteiniana:
"Brothers Einsteinians, "Einstein is wrong" is nice and profitable as long as you don't question the fundamental falsehood, Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate!"
"Was Einstein wrong? At least in his understanding of time, Smolin argues, the great theorist of relativity was dead wrong. What is worse, by firmly enshrining his error in scientific orthodoxy, Einstein trapped his successors in insoluble dilemmas..."
Philip Ball: "Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin."
QUESTION: Setting aside any other debates about relativity theory for the moment, why would the speed of light be absolute? No other speeds are absolute, that is, all other speeds do indeed change in relation to the speed of the observer, so it's always seemed a rather strange notion to me. LEE SMOLIN: Special relativity works extremely well and the postulate of the invariance or universality of the speed of light is extremely well-tested. It might be wrong in the end but it is an extremely good approximation to reality. QUESTION: So let me pick a bit more on Einstein and ask you this: You write (p. 56) that Einstein showed that simultaneity is relative. But the conclusion of the relativity of simultaneity flows necessarily from Einstein's postulates (that the speed of light is absolute and that the laws of nature are relative). So he didn't really show that simultaneity was relative - he assumed it. What do I have wrong here? LEE SMOLIN: The relativity of simultaneity is a consequence of the two postulates that Einstein proposed and so it is deduced from the postulates. The postulates and their consequences are then checked experimentally and, so far, they hold remarkably well.
Pentcho Valev
Pentcho,
Lee Smolin's space dynamics reminded me of Julian Barbour. While I didn't much agree with his price winning essay, I consider it now nonetheless more appealing to me than the essay by the last winner the name of which I unfortunately forgot.
Eckard
