• [deleted]

Eckard,

You wrote, "I didn't pay attention to the question of what I consider inconsistent SR related conventionality. Of course, due to the simple Doppler effect each twin perceives the pulse frequency of the other one slower and not higher if the distance between the twins increases while higher if they move towards each other."

As I implied, those who don't understand relativity in the first place won't be swayed by explanations that follow directly from the model. Even though relativity clearly illustrates that all motion is relative and there is no preferred Galilean frame of reference, there just has to be "something else" that "makes sense" to one's naive sensibilities. I see it in this forum time after time.

The Doppler effect has nothing to do with the twin problem. RELATIVE motion between the twins in straight line acceleration where each sees the other as staying young (though in their own respective frames they see themselves age normally) implies that there is no preferred Doppler frame. There is no objective third observer, in other words (which is another error some forum participants consistently make).

Only when the traveling twin reverses course, does the aging of each twin appear asymmetrical, because the curved path the traveling twin takes on return to his sister implies decreasing increments of spacetime between them. Now there IS an (arbitrary) fixed reference frame, that of the stay at home twin. That is, the traveling twin speeded up his own aging process (relative to his twin) only at the period of negative acceleration in reversing course; otherwise, his (relative) motion preserves some of the youth that his sister lost.

The physics is straightforward, and I think that's all I have to say about it.

Tom

  • [deleted]

Dear Tom,

While I shared your agitation for decades, I am sorry if you do not have more to say. You wrote "there is no objective third observer". Well none of the possibly many other observers is "objective" in the sense of to be preferred as neutral reference. However, when you wrote "another error" does this mean you are blaming me for assuming "a preferred Doppler frame"?

Woldemar Voigt was the first who introduced what we are calling Lorentz factor in a paper "Ueber das Doppler'sche Prinzip", dealing not with light but with oscillations within an elastic incompressible medium. More precisely, he started with the constant velocity of propagation for plane acoustic waves.

It does not matter whether I see the relative motion from the "objective" perspective of twin 1 or twin 1. The Doppler effect is measurable and logical the same back and forth and seen from either side unless we break the symmetry of relativity and the separation between past and future by arbitrarily declaring one twin moving and the other one at rest.

My concern is to reveal and remove any unjustified arbitrariness from physics. Our time scale is arbitrarily bound to midnight in Greenwich and the birth of Christ. Isn't the only natural point of reference is the very moment, the border between past and future?

Minkowski introduced so called proper time. Did it prove useful? I cannot confirm any benefit. See Proper_time in Wikipedia. I merely recall proper time that it gave rise to ridiculous science fiction.

Regards,

Eckard

  • [deleted]

"Time is an illusion" is a consequence of two postulates - the principle of relativity and the principle of constancy of the speed of light - advanced by Einstein in 1905. Anyone who rejects "time is an illusion" should make a suggestion as to which postulate is false. Pentcho Valev

    • [deleted]

    'Time' is misunderstood, and the proof of its quality, whereby 'either light speed or 'time' must vary', is false. That incorporates a confusion between the experience of reality and reality itself, which leads to the mis-attribution of 'time' as a spatial dimension, when actually the effect which we experience is just a function of light.

    Think on this: We do not see the dog, we see a light based representaion of the dog. That is, the experience of reality is not reality, it is an experience of reality.

    And so, yes Amrit, 'space-time' is a conceptual mistake

    Paul

    • [deleted]

    Penchto,

    Both the principle of relativity as found by Galilei and the principle of constancy of the speed of light in vacuum can be correct, and nonetheless time need not to be an illusion.

    On the other hand, the round-trip method of synchronization, which was used by Poincarè and tacitly adopted by Einstein, is unfounded. Tom Van Flandern called it perhaps aptly desynchronization. Is here anybody who can justify Poincarè? Obviously no.

    Tentative interpretations of some experiments concerning the ether hypothesis and aberration gave rise to what Poincarè called Lorentz transformation.

    Subsequently Einstein and Minkowski built further speculations on this primary misconception. Einstein's 1905 relativity is obviously a logically broken relativity.

    Being a German myself, I wonder why in particular Germans before the two WWs were prone to admire questionable or even horrible ideologies including Cantor's naive set theory and Minkowski's spacetime. I do not consider just Einstein worth to be blamed for what he largely plagiarized. One hundred years after in France Paul Langevin found the first one of several SR-related paradoxes, and in a situation where some theorists are ready to abandon anything including time and the Euclidean notion of number except for aleph_2 and spacetime, only retired experts are in position to frankly utter criticism.

    Eckard

    • [deleted]

    Eckard (Penchto)

    Indeed, the fundamental notion of relativity and the constant speed of light can co-exist, if one understands how reality works and what 'time' is. Your notion Penchto that 'time' is an illusion is sort of on the right track. In that, can anyone go and get me cup full of 'time'. Answer: No. And why not? Answer: because what is known as 'time' is the manifestation of something else in reality. Herein lies the flaw with SR.

    Eckard, as a Sociologist (well 40 years ago!)I am fascinated by your comments. Over the past month, having got sufficiently annoyed by Stephen Hawking's book to think it through based on stuff I wrote on reality back then, I think there is a very interesting 'back story' here. How did this fallacy arise, what kept it going, etc, etc

    Paul

    • [deleted]

    Eckard

    Just had a look at Cantor. Without going into it in any depth admittedly, and indeed I doubt if I would understand it anyway, I'm prepared to suggest that this suffers from the same flaw that Goedal suffers from (I was referred to that a few days ago). I suspect there are several more of the same era if not Nationality. The problem is that they do not recognise that you must be working in a 'closed system', ie if 'A', there is always the possibility of 'not A'. But a) this is only a possibility, b) those that are inherently within the closed system will never be able to prove 'not A'. So, in my opinion, what has probably happened here is that these arcane mathematical theories have 'crossed over' from 'A' to 'not A'. This is the same as someone proposing an hypothesis which has elements of facts mixed in with mustical beliefs. But numbers 'look' so much more objective than words, so the fault goes unnoticed.

    Paul Reed

    • [deleted]

    Dear Paul,

    You wrote: "what is known as 'time' is the manifestation of something else in reality. Herein lies the flaw with SR." Well, the usual notion of time including future allows manipulations like shift, zoom, and even reversal. I see it derived from unilateral just elapsed time by abstraction and anticipating extrapolation. The natural zero got lost with this abstraction.

    What about Georg Cantor's logically split but unfortunately nonetheless accepted thinking, his allegedly rigorous interpretation of his, borrowed from Paul Du Bois Reymond, second diagonal argument assumed trichotomy: either smaller or equal to or larger. Cantor ignored the so called 4th logical possibility which was already described by Galileo Galilei: Infinite quantities are incomparable.

    Regards,

    Eckard

    • [deleted]

    Eckard Blumschein wrote: "Both the principle of relativity as found by Galilei and the principle of constancy of the speed of light in vacuum can be correct, and nonetheless time need not to be an illusion."

    "Time is an illusion" is not the best example of absurd consequence of Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate. Length contraction absurdities are much more illustrative. Fore instance, the postulate entails that an arbitrarily long object can be trapped inside an arbitrarily short container ant that a bug can be both dead and alive:

    http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/barn_pole.html

    "These are the props. You own a barn, 40m long, with automatic doors at either end, that can be opened and closed simultaneously by a switch. You also have a pole, 80m long, which of course won't fit in the barn. (...) ...the rod will be trapped IN A COMPRESSED STATE inside the barn."

    http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/Relativ/bugrivet.html

    The Bug-Rivet Paradox

    Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

      • [deleted]

      Dear Pentcho,

      As the velocity of sound in a given medium is constant, I do not see any reason to doubt that there is a corresponding limit to the velocity of photons. You are quite right, SR caused numerous paradoxes. You asked which principle might be wrong.

      Experimental results were misleading. Nimtz "measured" propagation of signals with velocities in excess of c. Michelson-Morley were interpreted as evidence against an ether, and this lead to theoretical constructs by FitzGerald, Larmor, Lorentz, Poincaré, Einstein, and Minkowski. Nonetheless, the special theory of relativity is untenable. Einstein's speculative principle of relativity must not be confused with Galilei's logically founded and experimentally confirmed principle of relativity. Presumably, the mistake arose from evident mathematical flaws, a questionable readiness to resort on Poincaré's round-trip synchronization, and the competition-driven preferences for as difficult to imagine as possible applications of advanced, in particular Riemannian, mathematics.

      Regards,

      Eckard

      • [deleted]

      Experimental data of Gravity Probe A confirm that velocity of material change depends on gravity. Clocks rate is faster on satellite than on the surface of the earth. Same is valid for all material change from chemical to biological one.

      Experimental data of Gravity Probe A does not give any evidence that clocks run in time and gravity influences time, so clocks on the satellite run faster. Existence of time as a physical reality in which clocks should run is an unproved preposition. What we can conclude out of data of Gravity Probe A is that gravity influences velocity of material change.Attachment #1: Analysis_of_experimental_data_given_by_Gravity_Probe_A_and_Gravity_probe_B.PDF

      • [deleted]

      Eckard Blumschein: "As the velocity of sound in a given medium is constant, I do not see any reason to doubt that there is a corresponding limit to the velocity of photons."

      The velocity of sound varies with the speed of the observer. Do you see any reason why the velocity of light should not vary with the speed of the observer?

      Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

      • [deleted]

      Dear Pentcho,

      Does the velocity of sound really "vary with the speed of the observer"?

      Regards,

      Eckard

      • [deleted]

      Eckard Blumschein: "Does the velocity of sound really "vary with the speed of the observer"?"

      Yes.

      • [deleted]

      Penchto Valev,

      Can you please explain what you means with velocity of sound and speed of the observer when you maintains "The velocity of sound varies with the speed of the observer"?

      I refer to the front of the response to an sound pressure impulse which propagates with constant velocity relative to the acoustic medium, and I cannot imagine a mere observer influencing a physical process. As the moon exists, no matter whether or not we can see it, sound propagates, no matter whether or not it is heard.

      Eckard

      • [deleted]

      Eckard Blumschein wrote: "Penchto Valev, Can you please explain what you means with velocity of sound and speed of the observer when you maintains "The velocity of sound varies with the speed of the observer"?"

      If the observer starts moving towards the source of sound, the speed of the sound wave RELATIVE TO HIM increases:

      http://ibphysicsstuff.wikidot.com/doppler-effect

      "In the case of the moving observer the wavelength of the sound does not change, but the frequency as measured by the observer does change. This happens because the observer encounters a wavefront more frequently."

      • [deleted]

      http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue13_Paper_Norton.pdf

      John Norton: "It is common to dismiss the passage of time as illusory since its passage has not been captured within modern physical theories. I argue that this is a mistake. Other than the awkward fact that it does not appear in our physics, there is no indication that the passage of time is an illusion."

      Which of the postulates of special relativity is false: the principle of relativity or the principle of constancy of the speed of light?

      4 days later
      • [deleted]

      Dear Pentcho,

      I am well familiar with the non-relativistic Doppler effect. However, I cannot share your idea of a velocity of sound "RELATIVE TO" an observer if I assume said velocity refers to the same object. The reason is quite simple: Different observers could attribute different velocities to the same wave. It is only reasonable to refer the front velocity of propagating sound to the medium it propagates in.

      Regards,

      Eckard

      • [deleted]

      Eckard Blumschein wrote: "Different observers could attribute different velocities to the same wave."

      That is crucial. You refer to sound, but can you say "Different observers could attribute different velocities to the same LIGHT wave"? If you can, then your statement would be compatible with Maxwell's original theory but not with Einstein's special relativity.

      Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com