Real-Time Physics

Lakatos' Protective Belt : Justification of Dishonesty

Theoreticians don't abandon false postulates (core assumptions, axioms) in the face of refuting experimental evidence - rather, they surround them with a wall of ad hoc hypotheses which "serves to deflect refuting propositions from the core assumptions". Imre Lakatos described the phenomenon and called the wall the "protective belt":

"Lakatos distinguished between two parts of a scientific theory: its "hard core" which contains its basic assumptions (or axioms, when set out formally and explicitly), and its "protective belt", a surrounding defensive set of "ad hoc" (produced for the occasion) hypotheses. (...) In Lakatos' model, we have to explicitly take into account the "ad hoc hypotheses" which serve as the protective belt. The protective belt serves to deflect "refuting" propositions from the core assumptions..."

In 1887 the Michelson-Morley experiment UNEQUIVOCALLY confirmed the assumption that the speed of light varies with the speed of the emitter (c'=c+v). That is, at that time, Newton's emission theory of light was the only theory able to explain the null result of the experiment. Then FitzGerald, Lorentz and Einstein performed a revolution by replacing the Newtonian assumption with its antithesis - the false assumption that the speed of light is independent of the speed of the emitter (c'=c). They also devised a protective belt - "contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations" - that quite successfully deflected refuting evidence from the false assumption:

"Relativity and Its Roots" by Banesh Hoffmann, p.92: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."

The "protective belt" is a universal tool in scientific theorizing and in this sense it is something normal - any different science would be anomalous. Yet... a dead organism emits a specific smell which is again... normal.

Pentcho Valev

Pentcho,

Michelson's 1881 and 1887 experiments disproved Maxwell's idea of an aether relative to which the earth was imagined to move. However, they did NOT confirm what you are stubbornly reiterating, and it is NOT a false assumption that the speed of light is independent of the speed of the emitter. Read the endnotes of my current FQXi contest essay.

Eckard

Regarding the Ballad of Pentcho and Eckard (8/19/13) Einstein related his epiphany of SR as time stopping at light speed. While this is true for an observer at light velocity it cannot be true of time itself. Rather the Equivalence Principle must be interpreted as the faster an observer goes, the more closely he-she approximates the limit velocity to which time can extend. Otherwise EMR would have to create more time to be able to continue in its propagation.

Hi John Cox,

Isn't Epiphany a Christian festival held on January 6th which commemorates the arrival of the three wise man who came to see Jesus Christ? I wonder, why did you write epiphany instead of Epiphany? Did you intend ridiculing Einstein?

A ballad is a long song which tells a story in simple language. Why did you use this metaphor in connection with my rather short post of Aug. 19?

I don't share Einstein's (and your) opinion that time is stopping for a hypothetical antenna/receiver which is thought performing a relative motion away from an antenna/sender.

Eckard

Yes, Eckard.

Webster also defines epiphany as (2) a manifestation, esp. of divinity. The Eureka moment if you will. Pardon my quip of 'Ballad' referring to the disagreement between you and Pentcho Valev, There is an old country-rock song about a deal in Mexico that went way south, titled The Ballad of Poncho and Lefty.

As I said, I do not agree with the metaphor that Einstein employed, time 'stops' for no man. It is independent of the emitter. My point I seemed to have failed to make is that light velocity is that specific velocity and an observer approaching that limit would experience time seeming to extend less quickly. Fitzgerald remarked that the speed of light was 'astonishingly' low, which given a common Newtonian belief of it being instantaneous, the M&M results and the calculated distance to the sun would have been astonishing to many at the time.

The gist of my remarks were that time is local to any discrete mass, and our human experience is a second order effect in aggregate. But also that time itself in relation to gravitational domains apparently has an upper limit to the rate of its extension. Corrections to synchronization for SR and GR effects in Global Positioning satellites * Peter Galison; Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps - Empires of Time pp287-89* are more proofs of both theories. An observer, human or otherwise, cannot exceed the upper limit of velocity to which time can extend but that does not mean that time always extends at equivalent light speed. The common joke that the speed of time is one second per second is true enough in any gravitational reference. That said I'll risk outcry by suggesting that some value might be found in a mathematical construct where the 'speed of time' is equivalent to escape velocity of the local gravitational reference.

Thank you for your explanations, John.

Poncho does hopefully not remind too much of Sancho Pansa. Being a lefty (in the sense of left-handed) is something that I share with Einstein, and, if I recall correctly, also with Obama, Clinton, Bush, and others.

I do not imagine time propagating.

Eckard

My Bad, Eckard,

I do tend to be glib among a few friends with eclectic tastes, but must apologize for not thinking. This site is so generally well spoken that I forget that it is a truly international audience and what might be quickly grasped as a playful use of words culturally for me, can be gibberish to others. Also I'm an old dog and computerized communication is a really new trick, I'll try to be more careful in my choice of words.

I do like this thread, the concept of time being a fundamental constituent of natural physical reality is neither radical or revolutionary to me, perhaps because I came to physics more from a philosophic approach than mathematic. I've therefore given some serious thought over the years as to why physics has come to think of time as something other than a natural phenomenon, and in truth it took me a long, long time to realize that conceptually the reason why I struggled to understand many aspects was that generally physics has treated time as a quantum or relativistic effect, or a manifestation of abstract mathematics.

Long before Newton the old questions of time arose as to whether it was like a river carrying us along with it, or was it like a static state which we move through. Both concepts have problems but there seems little else to choose from. And the roots of arguments for 'non-real' time can be found in those problems. The river of time implies that someone has passed this place before it is being written by me, what intersections with that can there be? multiverses become a possibility. If it is static why can't we move around space and eventually wind up back here now? quantum entanglement comes to mind.

So the right question to ask is: what have we been missing? What nuance can be distinguished? I long ago thought that times arrow flowed past us yet carried us along at our own pace, not that we are tethered to an anchor other than our own relative mass. Time has become fundamentally localized for me, and I have no difficulty in imagining it continually recreating in seeking equilibrium with space yet also existing in a static distribution of continuum variation of rate of extension. That probably sounds pretty weird.

John,

We experience time as a sequence of events and in its mathematical reductionism, physics treats it as a measure of interval. It might seem little different whether you simultaneously measure between the peaks of waves/distance, or as they pass a marker/duration, but with the first, you are measuring space and with the second, you are measuring action.

Is time the frame of action, like space, or an effect of it, like temperature?

Does duration transcend the point of the present, or is duration simply what is present between the occurrence of events?

Now ask yourself, does the earth travel this duration from yesterday to tomorrow, or does tomorrow become yesterday because the earth rotates?

People spent a long time trying to figure out how it is that the sun moves across the sky, before realizing it was the earth moving the other direction.

Regards,

John M

Thanks, John Merryman,

for the specificity of argumentative questions you pose. I would qualify my response by referring to your preface that "physics treats (time) as a measure of interval". I do not reject that but neither do I accept it as exclusively so. It is the prevalent paradigm in assignment and generation of values in quantitative analysis, but imposes a number line on all such operations.

If I may briefly digress, a fairly recent book 'Where mathematics come from, how the embodied mind brings mathematics into being' (my library lend receipt doesn't list the authors and I've forgotten) presented research showing that precognitive infants have the innate ability to immediately distinguish 1, 2 and 3 objects, and slightly less readily 4. Also infants can readily distinguish between those numbers of objects. It seems we are genetically predisposed to cognitively develop math as a construct of interval and object.

We also possess a capacity, perhaps instinctively, to perceive continuous, nonsegmented motion or change. It is this paradigm in which I find time most accessible. A number line can be applied to it but is not a necessity. Quantitative analysis can be made by rational comparative proportion with space and energy.

I could launch into a wordy monologue but prefer to be welcome, so I'll concisely reply to the questions from a paradigm of continuum.

Time is a frame of action along with space, but covariant in scale. That

covariance induces action of time to extend seeking equilibrium with space, and energy is emergent from the stress between the rigid covariant scales, like temperature.

Duration is more difficult to express as it can be a zero point determined as an instantaneous rate of time extension of any value between nil and light velocity. That point however, is manifold of the existant velocity, the relative energy density proportional to that velocity, and the location spatially along a radial length of a rest mass of energy determined as an exponential function of the difference between the simultaneous existant velocities of nil and light velocity producing a distribution of energy in a continuum of density variation across the mass-energy volume.

So while duration could be said to transcend the point of the present, it is finite as a manifold point of occurrence between relational proportional values.

Energy emerging continuously from the spacetime covariance maintains a cohesion as a discrete mass though the lower energy density values of multiple masses may overlap and meld without loss of cohesive integrity. Those lower density limits can prescribe comparatively vast volumes so in aggregate it is quite applicable to operate in a paradigm of object/intervals as the individual discrete particles can fit right into a number line. The composite field on energy of the sun must reach at least as far as the aphelion of the longest period comet. Hope this was somewhat comprehensible.

John (Cox),

Let's be careful in thinking rather than in the choice of marginal words. You were musing about the question whether time "was like a river carrying us along with it, or was it like a static state which we move through". Admittedly, I don't consider such metaphors. When I was teaching EE students for more than four decades, I used the notion of time as a measure how distant from moment of consideration something will be in the future with the option to arbitrarily shift the point zero of reference. When I dealt with auditory perception, I got aware that only data from the past are available in the moment of consideration. Accordingly I mimicked the auditory function with reference to the (moving relative to the usual scale) "now" because the ear does not know our agreement on Christ's birth midnight in Greenwich. It works based on elapsed time instead.

Let me try and explain why I prefer only one ubiquitous time everywhere instead of a different local time for every inertial system:

Well, I meanwhile distrust the ideas by Lorentz/FitzGerald and fellows because they tried to rescue a guess that was disproved by Michelson. However, there is a compelling reason too:

The measure time is only valuable if it correctly reflects the relationship between earlier and subsequent events, in other words: causality. Any cause precedes its effect. There is no preferred origin in space. Any spatial distance between two locations is positive.

Eckard

Like temperature is a scalar measure of action, it is simply a measure of change caused by action.

"Time is to temperature, what frequency is to amplitude."

John, I think because I am myself dyslexic, I continue to be fascinated with how you go on creating logically coherent narrative from false premises. That's what Pauli meant, I suppose, by "not even wrong."

Wave frequency and amplitude are independent. Frequency is actually the inverse of time . That is, a time unit is defined by counting a number of wave cycles, oscillations between up and down amplitudes. Amplitude describes the energy content of the wave. We can have high frequency/low energy waves and low frequency/high energy waves.

Yes, I know you'll have some explanation to follow that makes sense to you. It won't make sense to physics, however, because it's very fundamental logic that if "time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude," the only possible conclusion is that time and temperature are independent.

Tom

We all know what time is until we try to explain it.

Tom,

I really would like to say; Oh wow! I see your point! But I just don't.

When did I ever say frequency and amplitude are not independent? Turn up the volume on your radio and it raises the amplitude, but doesn't affect the frequency.

You also seem to be agreeing that frequency is the basis of how we measure time.

The "energy content of the wave" is a scalar measure of energy. Yes, temperature isn't a single wave, but I'm not saying amplitude is temperature, I'm saying time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude. Frequency and amplitude are characteristics of wave action, while time and temperature are far more generalized effects. We can certainly have change and thus the effect of time, without there being any regularity to it. In fact, if it was only regular frequency, there would be no "arrow of time," only a metronome.

And one reason I like you is because I know you will never agree with anything I say. If you did, it would likely kill the conversation.

Regards,

John M

John, your assumption is entirely equivalent to assuming 0 = 1. Your argument is disconnected. It's a mystery to me why *you* don't see that.

Best,

Tom

John M and John C, respectively,

Temperature has an absolute point of reference: zero.

CF v. Weizsaecker referred to Aurelius Augustinus when he wrote the sentence you quoted. He argued that there was no time before God created the universe. Mockers added: Before He made the Big Bang, He made the hell for those who are rising insubordinate questions.

I consider only the duration of an already finished process, i.e. the time that has already elapsed, as an unchangeably fixated measure, as something that can be measured, in principle. The usual notion of time has been an abstracted, flipped and arbitrarily shifted measure.

It is certainly tempting and possibly rewarding for theoreticians to conjecture that the measurable duration of oscillatory elementary processes relates to expectation values and the transfer between kinetic and potential energy and return. However, I did not came across to any fertile and provably consistent suggested mechanism. I doubt that we need such speculations at all.

On the other hand I am sure that it is not necessary to integrate from minus infinity to plus infinity as to calculate the frequency spectrum of measured data. Future data are not available in advance. Expected future influences did not yet become real. Nice theories by Descartes and Fourier (who were still on search), Einstein, Hilbert, Minkowski, and many others do not overrule that experience.

Eckard

We've been circling our wagons around measurement of time, rather than the thread from Lee Smolin's book. Is time existential or emergent? "GO!"

Tom,

You don't argue with what I say, but your model of what I say, aka. the strawman argument.

I suppose it is a natural consequence of seeing only the model as real.

Regards,

John M

Eckard,

Nor did we need those cosmic gear wheels to explain the motions of the sun, planets and stars.

Regards,

John M