Evolving Time's Arrow

Tom and LC,

I consider the Siegel pamphlet here as inappropriate as LC's attempt to convince John Merryman by means of mathematics that an alternative explanation of redshift is wrong. Do not hide missing arguments behind alleged competence. Cheeky tongues are weak arguments.

Tom, You wrote: "Any good guess supported by real results is good science." Well, whether a guess is really good will be indicated by real results that are unambiguously attributable to it. Is this the case for SR? So far I am not aware of any example for an illogical guess that has proven useful for good.

Let me reiterate my simple question: What does the speed of light in vacuum refer to? The space, the emitter, the receiver, an observer, or what else?

While I usually do not like the thought experiments Einstein is notorious for, I would nonetheless suggest rather simple ones as to test how light behaves. An electromagnetic impulse could be sent through a cable with parts that can be switched on or off during propagation. Intuitively I would not expect a "motion" of the receiver to change the measured speed of propagation.

I would like to second Pentcho who argues: The principle of relativity or the principle of constancy of the speed of light seems to be wrong. My hopefully good guess is: Relativity of time is based on desynchronization. Perhaps already Lorentz transformation is ill-founded. Doesn't theory of relativity even contradict to Galileo Galilei's relativity? Aren't there enough results that confirm my guess? Nobody ever measured Lorentz contraction etc., and there is ongoing trouble with the metric of spacetime.

Eckard

Eckard,

Here is an even-handed treatment of special relativity experimental results .

Knock yourself out.

Tom

John,

I realize that in the nonscience world, the sins of inefficiency, waste and redundancy are punished and ridiculed. To nature and to science, however, these are assets to creativity.

Science(and liberal, rational thought in general) is founded on intellectual freedom, and free inquiry recognizes above all the right to be wrong.

Worry about science being in jeopardy when freedom itself is threatened. Look for science to flourish when academic freedom spreads beyond the academy. In fact, it is happening in our lifetimes.

Tom

Tom,

It's not waste, it's fertilizer.

The same cycles of expansion and consolidation apply to all areas of life. Time decides what is the wheat and what is the chaff.

Exactly. Fertilizer.

Without which, there is no wheat.

The major distinction is that a quantum theory of waves that have them dissipating this way would not be unitary. This causes lots of damage to basic concepts in physics. It is actually at the heart of the problem with quantum gravity. If space expands the energy of a photon is then taken up by the gravity of the universe, here the "gravity" being the Einstein dynamics of the expanding spatial manifold.

Cheers LC

So is it all a self sustaining cycle, or is just that long slide down from low entropy and high energy?

So the wave aspects of reality are ignored because it messes up the theories?

Wouldn't the energy also be taken up by expanding volume of space and you end up with redshifted light, until all that's left is that black body radiation we see emanating from the edge of the visible universe.

What if they don't find the Higgs? Then everything can't be explained by particles.

Craig Callender suggesting, very carefully, that Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate might be false:

http://www.thedivineconspiracy.org/Z5237I.pdf Craig Callender: "We think it's impossible that photons go faster than relativity claims. Why? Because our most powerful theories, the theories upon which we base our explanations and predictions - upon which we even stake our lives - say so. (...) We don't have to be too strict about this. Scientists are free to devise models of the world wherein (say) the absolute speed of light is not constant."

If Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate is false, then the Michelson-Morley experiment says that the antithesis of the postulate given by Newton's emission theory of light, the equation (c' = c plus v) showing how the speed of light varies with v, the speed of the emitter relative to the observer, is true:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1743/2/Norton.pdf John Norton: "The Michelson-Morley experiment is fully compatible with an emission theory of light that CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE."

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

A fertilization process is always self-sustaining. Continuous.

John,

One has to study classical mechanics in order to understand quantum mechanical unitarity. I tried to make the point as simply as possible in my FQXi 2008 essay, that volume preserving is energy conserving.

Seriously, if you would please just get a good grasp on the basics, theorists would not seem as wacky as you imagine. Your intuition cannot fill the gaps in knowledge.

Tom

A huge population of unbound planetary-mass objects was predicted in the Astrophysical Journal in 1987 [vol. 322(1), pgs. 34-36]. Pulsar-planets were also later predicted in a published paper.

A discussion of this form of dark matter ,and its detection via microlensing was published in:

http://arxiv.org/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0002/0002363.pdf

[Fractals 10(1), 27-38, 2002]

It is a great pleasure to see this population finally being revealed to us. The stellar-mass MACHOs and the planetary-mass unbound objects discovered via microlensing may constitute the galactic dark matter, and its specific two-peak mass spectrum was predicted definitively almost 25 years ago. It has been a long wait, but better late than never.

Robert L. Oldershaw

http://www3.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw

Discrete Scale Relativity; Fractal Cosmology

Tom,

I agree I'm an idiot on the subject, but the gaps I keep having problems with are those which keep popping up between theory and observation, that get filled in with increasingly bizarre ideas, supposedly supported by ever more complex math.

While you keep telling me I have no idea what I'm talking about, you seem to have no recognition that it is a fairly classic social phenomena for belief systems not to question core principles when reality does not cooperate, but to blame the problems on everything else, rather than reconsider those core assumptions.

I don't doubt that reality is far more strange than our basic, normal human perception thinks of it as, but it does seem as though physics is also susceptible to making up answers when it really doesn't know, then not being able to let go of those fabrications as they become ever more imbedded in the network of knowledge.

Exactly.

John,

Physics is a science, not a "belief system." When ideas don't work (e.g., luminiferous ether, phlogiston, planetary atomic model, etc.) they are thrown out, modified or ignored.

The mathematics that supports leading edge theories seems complicated to you because one has to be grounded in fundamental physics, as I have emphasized, to see that the connection is complete and the extensions are reasonable. Whether these particular techniques and methods are the best ways to deal with the problems is an entirely different question with which researchers wrestle every day.

You do your intellect a great disservice, however, to simply dismiss the solutions as "fabrications" of a society subset that has some mysterious power to determine the course of physics knowledge for the whole population.

One cannot effectively question "core principles" that one hasn't studied. You have the capacity -- it's beyond me why you don't use it.

Tom

LC,

When I heard lessons on probability about 50 years ago, I was told without explanation that ergodicity is a hypothesis. Well, unitarity is also considered essential to a lot of theory. However if used in physics, is it really more than a hypothesis?

There are crowds of those who do not trust in Cantor's and Einstein's admittedly paradoxical ideas. Maybe, their criticism is even largely correct. Nonetheless I wonder why almost nobody thoroughly deals with pre-runners like Bolzano, Weierstrass, Dedekind, Voigt, Lorentz, Poincaré, etc., and I got not aware of someone who put the unitarity of the world in question.

I was educated from engineers who were convinced that the world is not a closed system. If I understood you correctly, then inflation is required as to maintain the perhaps arbitrarily chosen hypothesis of an unitary (closed) world?

Eckard

Tom Ray,

Being left-handed, I nonetheless consider myself more even-handed as compared with what you offered "an even-handed treatment of special relativity experimental results".

While I did not at all intended any criticism of SR until recently, I am increasingly sure that the FQXi is a necessary complement to experimental physics because the latter alone seems to be unable to solve most foundational questions.

Unfortunately, the rest of my lifetime will not suffice as to clarify the matter.

At least, the textbook by Bohm I have at hands is among the three recommended by Roberts. What would such a cheeky guy like Einstein say in front of so many "evidence"? Didn't he ridicule the pamphlet "100 arguments (or professors?, I am sorry for my shaky memory) against Einstein" by arguing that they altogether are void and cannot replace a single compelling conter-argument?

With such cheekiness I may also easily invert the biased meaning of what I quote here from Roberts:

"Experimenter's bias is a phenomenon caused by the inability of human participants in an experiment to remain completely objective, in which the human experimenter directly influences the experiment's outcome based upon his or her personal desires or expectations." and "Unpopular or unexpected results may not be published."

I would like to add something essential to the first sentence: I learned not just form Nimtz's consistently measured superluminal signals that the community is obviously not in position or not willing to realize theoretical flaws in the used methods, and this problem gets increasingly worse with procedures and tools that can less and less be checked for plausibility.

While Roberts did not mention Van Flandern he could not deny that Van Flandern was correct: "At this time there are no direct tests of length contraction."

A lot of references are difficult to attribute to the core question. Others were bewildering, e.g., I quote: "Marinov, Progr. in Physics, 1 (2007), pg 31; (posthum. reprint from "Deutscher Physik" 1992). This is a series of experiments using mechanically rotating mirrors and apertures that claim to measure a local anisotropy in the one-way speed of light. Marinov thinks his rotating mirrors and apertures provide an "absolute synchronization" which can be used to measure the one-way speed of light; this is not so, and is a major conceptual error in his design: they merely provide synchronization in the rest frame of his lab." Was Marinov an idiot?

A second example, I quote:"Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) results have been a puzzle for several years, as they appear to be inconsistent with other experiments. Just recently they were directly contradicted by the Mini-BooNE results from Fermilab (May 2007, no reference yet)."

Interesting to me was the following comment by Roberts: "Lorentz Invariance is the technical term for the statement that SR is valid. Any violation of CPT invariance implies a violation of Lorentz invariance; theories without Lorentz invariance need not have CPT invariance."

In all, I did not yet find any convincing evidence that could refute the numerous serious arguments against the alleged logical consistency of SR. This does not imply that possibly GR is correct at least to some extent. It is not my business to investigate whether or not a re-installation of absolute simultaneity will already provide a way out of notorious trouble. Nonetheless I will appreciate any genuine support for my strict distinction between the usual abstract and infinite to both sides notion of time and what I consider its traceable unilateral basis.

Eckard Blumschein

Tom,

Thank you for the compliment. I am a bit of the product of my environment. Lots of emphasis on work and not so much on education. I respect the total commitment it takes to become truly professional at many areas of expertise, but I also recognize that it distorts one's perspective. I grew up around horsepeople and that's the major subject of discussion. Occasionally I can get a conversation going about economics, especially since the recession, but that's about as deep as it gets. My interest in physics is due to the understanding of the laws and processes governing everything. So for me, physics is profoundly intuitional. I know that sounds like heresy, but I really don't have problems with viewing reality as fundamentally illusionary and that even coming to some degree of understanding is itself something of a contradiction, since knowledge is necessarily reductionistic. To the extent I live my life as a flash of light, I'm living it as I understand it. Thus it's more an intuitive juggling act, than a course of singular study.

"Physics is a science, not a "belief system." When ideas don't work (e.g., luminiferous ether, phlogiston, planetary atomic model, etc.) they are thrown out, modified or ignored."

Yet you don't think that various of today's theories might also be scales that will eventually fall from our eyes? The problem is that many of them are interconnected in ways that dropping one will raise problems for others and few in the theoretical community want to start pulling that string. Yet it seems that many with strong professional interests in these ideas(computers, electrical engineering, etc.) do think there are serious conceptual problems, but make do, without making a huge issue of it.

It does bear some resemblance to a priesthood, with a laity that is not quite as committed, but still need and like the community.

Unitarity just means that any operator which transforms a quantum state Uψ = ψ' is such that its transpose in a matrix representation and complex conjugate, denoted by † is such that U^† = U^{-1} and for an operator H which is the generator of U, U = exp(iH) then

U^† = exp(iH^†) = U^{-1} = exp(-iH)

And so H^† = H. The theory of quantum mechanics based on this has been experimentally tested thousands of times. So unitarity is more than a hypothesis.

Ergodic theory is more hypothetical because it is based on a certain interpretation of statistic. This is a form of frequentism.

Cheers LC