Alternative Cosmology continued

[lodestar]

No problem.

TheGatesofLogic = Logic Gates... that makes sense.

[SargeRho]

By your logic, Neutrinos aren't real either, since they only interact weakly with ordinary matter. Trillions are passing through you right now, without any of the particles composing your body ever interacting with even one of them. There are 4 fundamental forces - Strong, Weak, Electromagnetic and Gravity. Dark Matter is non-baryonic, and thus doesn't interact electromagnetically, or through the strong or weak forces. It has mass however. And the theories describing the motion of objects through space work. Observations indicate that there's something that we can't detect with telescopes (ie, doesn't interact with the electromagnetic force), but still interacts gravitationally. Exactly what it is is still uncertain, but what is fairly certain is that it's there.

[lodestar]

By your logic, Neutrinos aren't real either, since they only interact weakly with ordinary matter. Trillions are passing through you right now, without any of the particles composing your body ever interacting with even one of them. There are 4 fundamental forces - Strong, Weak, Electromagnetic and Gravity. Dark Matter is non-baryonic, and thus doesn't interact electromagnetically, or through the strong or weak forces. It has mass however. And the theories describing the motion of objects through space work. Observations indicate that there's something that we can't detect with telescopes (ie, doesn't interact with the electromagnetic force), but still interacts gravitationally. Exactly what it is is still uncertain, but what is fairly certain is that it's there.

My logic? I'm not arguing on how the speculated properties of Dark matter fit the observations. Of course it does, that's what it was made for. I'm arguing that Dark matter is an ad hoc hypothesis used as a fudge factor to preserve another ad hoc hypothesis that was used as a fudge factor to preserve even another ad hoc hypothesis that was again used as a fudge factor to preserve an assumption that is taken on purely ideological grounds. While one can argue that neutrinos also were an ad hoc hypothesis, they weren't used as fudge factors to preserve another ad hoc hypothesis like that. That's my logic, and your analogy obviously fails. Needless to say, there's actual physical evidence for neutrinos, and none for Dark Matter, despite decades looking for it.

Fairly certain? Until at least a single particle is actually detected, the degree of certainty for Dark Matter only goes as far as the degree of certainty for the Cosmological Principle itself goes, which is nowhere, since it is a fundamental dogma. The certainty of it depends only on your willingness to believe in it. The choice is ideological, not scientific. It all boils down to which one you are more willing to swallow: Dark Matter or scrapping the Cosmological Principle?

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.1443.pdf

Edited February 20, 2014 by lodestar

[Z-Man]

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.1443.pdf

Minor correction to your statement: They consider binning Dark Energy, not Dark Matter. Dark Matter is still needed. That is a splendid paper, by the way. Why can I say that? Well, they do not jump to the conclusion that the alternative model implies Earth is at the center of the universe and they propose tests for their alternative model that can distinguish it from the standard model. Didn't you say such a blasphemous article would never be published? It's not the only one on that subject.

Jumping around a little with the quotes today, the structure requires it:

I don't know what happens with an MM-experiment in a moving frame. I'm not aware of any. You want to talk about hypothetical results while there are around at least a dozen different major interferometric experiments done that give results inconsistent with Special and General Relativity?

Apparent time dilation can be accounted for in the ether theory. Actual time dilation can't.

I'm not thinking of any specific, because frankly, no matter what problems they come up with, I doubt it's worse than Dark Matter.

That's not an assumption. The center of mass of a gyroscope doesn't move. Those forces do have an effect on anything that's not materially attached to the center. They can resolve themselves in many effects on the surface, coriolis, centrifugal, euler, seasons, tides, tectonic movements, etc.

As a curiosity, that's how I got interested in Geocentrism. Back in 2011, after some crackpots claimed we were given warning of the 2010 Haiti earthquake...

But back to the topic, that's essentially the same previous objection, and you also used it regarding something in the conference or podcast. As I said, it's answered by the book... the cd-rom even has some animations explaining it. If you don't want to read the book, it's also answered by Martin Selbrede in the article below. Basically, not only Earth is not moving besides all those forces, they are precisely the reason why it doesn't move. ...

http://www.geocentricity.com/ba1/no071/selbrede.html

Handwaving, baseless claims and stuff I already proven wrong. As I said eariler, you have been collecting this stuff for a while. I'm not digging through all of it. I'm also sure they have a perfect explanation for why the force of a rotating ether is strong enough to cause tectonic activity at its center, where it is slowest, but does not rip the rest of the universe apart.

Being a jerk doesn't make one wrong.

No, but being a jerk and being wrong together is bad for your career. In every field. Except maybe if you're a CEO

You can easily falsify an observation?

Man... that's the weirdest petitio principii I've ever seen. If he's saying the radar data from the surface of Venus matches a c + v "newtonian light speed" and the JPL confirms that by adding the Earth's motion and doing the same for signal transit time in solar system probes, you're talking about falsifying it by looking at distant binaries? If the constant c is invalidated in our own backyard, how can you falsify that by distant observations that rely on constant c itself to be interpreted as observational facts?

All I have for the c+v thing is the quotes in his book. The articles are too old to be freely available online (it seems). From what I gather, he saw a term somewhere that looked like c+v and jumped to the conclusion it means something it doesn't mean. It probably didn't. The confirmation was just for the terms being there, not his interpretation of them.Terms like that pop up in SR as well.

I may be misinterpreting what he means by c+v, he is not very clear there either. He talks of Newton's corpuscular model, which suggests he means that light moves faster if it is emitted from a moving body in the direction of movement. That's what the binary stars falsify. He may mean something else.

Why people defending relativity love to talk about hypothetical results of thought experiments as if they were actually real? That's really an interesting pattern.

Sorry, I was not making that clear. That was hypothetical. If the result is different from SR predictions, obviously SR is falsified.

And see, there lies the crux. I should have noticed this earlier. The general hypothesis you are putting forth there, "ESI is an intrinsically special reference frame", is not falsifiable. No matter how many experiments you make, there still may be something left that you did not test that makes ESI special. In Physics, falsifyability is considered the most important property of a hypothesis (Other sciences have other standards, some make it impossible to state a testable, but non-falsifiable hypothesis in the first place.) Well, technically, it is falsifiable: but only if you find a special reference frame and that is not ESI. So it's falsifiable only if Relativity is falsified first, the framework it is trying to replace. That simple logical relationship is what makes it strictly inferior as a hypothesis at this point. If Relativity is falsified one day, sure, yes, ESI being special would be an option, though my money would then be more on the microwave background or some spontaneously broken quantum field.

Same goes, of course, for Earth being the center of the Universe. The only way to falsify that is to find the center of the Universe and it's not Earth.

Yep... after ten years, after he was fired for "disgracing his team", etc. Schechtman was just lucky that Pauling died first.

Exaggeration. It took ten years for the Standard of what is considered a crystal to be changed. He won prices for is work way earlier.

If you believe in that, well... assume that I have a billion dollars. The observation that my bank account only has a few bucks doesn't violate that assumption. I just need much more money. All the equations still work just fine and are even testable when you add my daughter's Monopoly bills to my balance (she draws a few extra zeroes on the 100 dollar bills for excitement).

That would imply we want Dark Matter. It's more like this. A man lives in a beautiful big house in an expensive part of the city, swimming pool and all that. The IRS, CIA, NSA, FBI, KGB or whatever is investigating him, looking at his financial history. They find no heritages, just a lowly income at a low-to-medium level job (construction overseer, say), no lottery wins, nothing that would allow him to live that large. Will they

a) Assume he is just good at spending the money smartly and move on to their next target, or

Assume he does not trust banks very much and keeps most of his money in cash, maybe related to criminal activity, and investigate further?

Can you deny in good conscience that if the MM experiment or Hubble's observations could have been performed at the time of the Galileo trial, we wouldn't be having this discussion now?

No. But someday, someone would have noticed it gets quite hard to accelerate particles towards the speed of light, that gravity lensing exists, that moving clocks go slower, and somebody would have put together the pieces.

(Correction factor for experiments done in Earth's gravity)

Relative to what? You don't have any other reference to that but Earth. The relative error is computed based on the assumption that the same experiment will give the same results anywhere else.

No. You calculate what the experiment would give in a true inertial frame, adding corrections for the expensive to avoid deviations from that: gravity, earth rotation, etc. The corrections due to gravity are of the given magnitude relative to uncorrected values. Care needs to be taken, of course, if the measurement takes differential values (such as the MM-Experiment), then even tiny correction terms can matter. Easiest way to avoid problems with that is to build your experiment in the horizontal plane, like you would normally do anyway. You don't need full GR for those calculations. Yes, you are assuming for the correction calculations that SR is correct, but you're doing so anyway for the main calculation. So in total, you'll get a prediction for what your experiment under real world earth surface conditions would produce if SR was correct. Then you run the experiment and compare. If you find a discrepancy, SR is proven wrong.

Nope. I'm complaining to the cartographers that they can't say the Earth actually is flat just because that's the only way they can make a map that works.

You should probably rethink that statement.

Well.. I didn't quote the article for that, I quote it for their statement that the JPL software was using a Solar Barycentric corrected with the ECI and c constant to the ECI for navigation and signal transit time. That is not a thought experiment. That's a fact.

ECI is a problem why? ECI is the most convenient coordinate system to work for low earth orbit. Where do they say Solar Barycentric, and what nature are those corrections?

Anyway, how can that be a mistake if that's precisely the point of the experiment?

I was referring to the light speed measurement experiment with the moving ship, where they have a detector at the front and one at the back, each with its own clock, comparing the times the clocks show when a signal is received. Not whatever GPS satellites do. That experiment only measures the true light speed (as opposed to some meaningless coordinate speed) if the clocks are properly synced. Or, in other terms, what they are proving in their paper is that if you use Galilean transformations to switch frames, then the speed of light is not constant. Which, surprise! Is precisely why the SR postulates lead you to use Lorentz transformations instead.

As a matter of fact, when they use the satellite inter-tracking for syncing in orbit they have to take the Sagnac Effect into account, and that shouldn't be necessary if SR is valid.

The Sagnac Effect is in perfect accordance with SR; rotating frames simply are not inertial reference frames. And for the variant where you don't have a rotating frame, but probes moving relative to another in straight lines in empty space: Also not a problem. You can calculate it in the barycentric frame or any other frame, the result of the different runtimes will be the same. If you know what you're doing, you can of course also switch frames in between.

Thinking about this, there's one MM experiment in a moving frame, the GPS satellite network itself. I realized Howard Hayden already pointed that, and Robert Bennett considers this on the Galileo Was Wrong book. Unfortunately, I can't find Hayden's article in full, and you won't read Galileo Was Wrong, so...

That is a nice idea. Unfortunately, any observation you can make with tiny satellites exchanging light signals does not test SR very well; whatever SR predicts for their timings, any fixed ether model with time dilation for movement relative to it predicts identically.

Second, if you take the whole network to be a huge interferometer detecting the Earth's motion around the Sun, we should have to correct the clocks for the gradient of the Sun's gravitational potential, but we don't. It just works.

No, the gradient of the Sun's gravity field is irrelevant. That is eaten up by the fact that you are already working in the ECI frame which is accelerated by that field. What you do have to take into account if you want to be precise is the difference between the Sun's gravity field at your position and the ECI's center: The tidal forces.

One interesting fact I just noticed is that GPS raw pseudo-ranges show an 'unexplained' 12-hour sidereal period correlated with the Sun direction, and that reminded me of a 1983 experiment that recorded 'unexplained' ground pulsations also with the same 12-hour sidereal period. Weird...

Edited February 22, 2014 by Z-Man

[lodestar]

Minor correction to your statement: They consider binning Dark Energy, not Dark Matter. Dark Matter is still needed.

Sure, but the paper is merely to illustrate the point that you don't need to evoke magical substances to explain something if you are willing to re-examine your assumptions.

That is a splendid paper, by the way. Why can I say that? Well, they do not jump to the conclusion that the alternative model implies Earth is at the center of the universe and they propose tests for their alternative model that can distinguish it from the standard model.

Indeed.

Didn't you say such a blasphemous article would never be published? It's not the only one on that subject.

Nope. I didn't said an hypothesis wouldn't be published. I said you would have a hard time publishing actual experimental or observational results confirming such an hypothesis.

Handwaving, baseless claims and stuff I already proven wrong. As I said eariler, you have been collecting this stuff for a while. I'm not digging through all of it.

That assumes dishonesty on my part, and I thought we were beyond that. I wouldn't be bringing something back if you had proven it wrong. As to the rest, what you're saying is: "you spent too much time on this, I won't dig through all of it, so it's baseless".

This is getting tiresome, I agree, and if you want to say you don't have the time or you're not willing to go through it, as I did when you presented your objections to the geocentrists conference, fine, but don't come saying something is baseless or handwaving because the volume is too overwhelming for you.

I'm also sure they have a perfect explanation for why the force of a rotating ether is strong enough to cause tectonic activity at its center, where it is slowest, but does not rip the rest of the universe apart.

Why the need for sarcasm? That doesn't fit well, specially following the strawman above.

No, but being a jerk and being wrong together is bad for your career. In every field. Except maybe if you're a CEO

Or if you have a friend named Eddington.

All I have for the c+v thing is the quotes in his book. The articles are too old to be freely available online (it seems). From what I gather, he saw a term somewhere that looked like c+v and jumped to the conclusion it means something it doesn't mean. It probably didn't. The confirmation was just for the terms being there, not his interpretation of them. Terms like that pop up in SR as well.

I'm beginning to notice a pattern of you presenting absurdly elementary objections when an issue doesn't have any reasonable one. Yeah, right... he saw a c+v term somewhere in the JPL equations and based on that jumped to the conclusion that the JPL is contradicting relativity, and that's why it was denied publication? Maybe the c+v was just a recipe for a chocolate and vanilla milk-shake, how about that?

Please... yes, I couldn't find the original articles in full either, but the path to the conclusion is clear on the book. He didn't jumped to any conclusion, he already had that conclusion for years based on his research of the the 1961 Venus radar data, which showed a much better fit to a newtonian particle c+v model than the relativistic c model. He goes through the whole conundrum involving his exchanges with the original research team on the next chapter. After all that, he became aware that the JPL was doing the same thing, and attempted to publish a further study including that fact as an independent confirmation of his findings. How is that jumping to the conclusion?

How in the world the confirmation was just for the terms being there and not his interpretation, if the interpretation is the same and the russian author even solidarizes with his struggle, saying the Pulkovo Observatory she works for is also an "outpost of orthodox relativity"? Also, the Wang and Hatch article cited here confirmed the same data and interpretation.

If you don't have the time or you're not willing to read it, then don't object to what you imagine it is saying. It's a waste of time.

I may be misinterpreting what he means by c+v, he is not very clear there either. He talks of Newton's corpuscular model, which suggests he means that light moves faster if it is emitted from a moving body in the direction of movement.

That's exactly what he means.

That's what the binary stars falsify. He may mean something else.

Again, you're repeting the same petitio principii. That's not an argument, because they falsify each other, and that's obviously not possible. One of them must be wrong. He suggests how you can adjust the Ritzian theory to fit the variations in visual and spectroscopic binaries, and how de Sitter's original objection to Ritz was flawed. This was done recently here: http://www.worldsci.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_6022.pdf

How do you explain the observed c+v from a relativistic standpoint in the same way?

And see, there lies the crux. I should have noticed this earlier. The general hypothesis you are putting forth there, "ESI is an intrinsically special reference frame", is not falsifiable.

Of course there lies the crux! I'm glad you finally get to it, but no, that's not the hypothesis I am putting here. No hypothesis regarding the absoluteness or relativiness of any reference frame is falsifiable! They necessarily carry a metaphysical assumption that can't be parted with no matter what you observe. That's what I've been saying all the time. You can't choose that metaphysical assumption on scientific grounds, it's a choice made on the existential level, and my argument here is that most scientists no longer make that choice personally, but follow an ideology.

So it's falsifiable only if Relativity is falsified first, the framework it is trying to replace. That simple logical relationship is what makes it strictly inferior as a hypothesis at this point.

Absolutely wrong, because relativity is an ad hoc hypothesis to counter evidence for Earth being an absolute frame. Nobody is under the obligation of falsifying an ad hoc hypothesis in order to reject it, because you can simply pile them up as much as you want in order to keep the alternatives at bay. No matter what evidence one cames up with against relativity, if you have an ideological commitment with preserving the dogma that sustains it, you can simply draw another ad hoc hypothesis and keep moving. Eventually, even ridiculous ad hoc hypotheses, like Dark Matter, become socially acceptable, like the emperor's new clothes.

If Relativity is falsified one day, sure, yes, ESI being special would be an option, though my money would then be more on the microwave background or some spontaneously broken quantum field.

Sure. No matter how much relativity is falsified, your option will always be the one that sticks to the same casualist ideology, the option which attributes everything to chance, not to purpose. You may think that option is scientific as much as you want, but it's not.

Same goes, of course, for Earth being the center of the Universe. The only way to falsify that is to find the center of the Universe and it's not Earth.

Indeed, that's why the Copernican principle is an unfalsifiable assumption, obviously. As I said above, the same goes also for creationism vs. evolutionism, for physicalist vs. dualist theories of mind, and even for conservatism vs. liberalism. They are all merely modern dialectical expressions of the centuries old dispute between biblical and epicurean myths. No matter how enlightened and evolved we believe we are, we are still struggling over the same old problems. At least we have vacuum cleaners now.

That would imply we want Dark Matter.

Indeed. We want.

It's more like this. A man lives in a beautiful big house in an expensive part of the city, swimming pool and all that....

Nah... you have a very poor imagination. It's more like the man is framed for some financial crime and the authorities claim he has all that, and he says he actually doesn't. They say he actually has, but since he has a lot of money he built a magical house that can't be seen in order to evade capture. The man is eventually condemned, because by that time everybody has been through so much nonsense that they would rather believe that a magical invisible mansion exists, than admit their whole legal system could have framed someone innocent like that.

But these analogies are going too far... let's stop here.

No. But someday, someone would have noticed it gets quite hard to accelerate particles towards the speed of light, that gravity lensing exists, that moving clocks go slower, and somebody would have put together the pieces.

Wishful thinking. Relativistic interpretations for such phenomena aren't the only available, and scientists were willing to make the anti-intuitive leap into the relativistic interpretations only because that was easier to swallow than the ideological implications of an stationary Earth. Most of them admit that even explicitly. Even with those implications, there weren't few who were against it.

No. You calculate what the experiment would give in a true inertial frame, adding corrections for the expensive to avoid deviations from that: gravity, earth rotation, etc.

Man... what is a true inertial frame? There's no such thing in the universe! You just reversed the issue back to my initial objection. I'm not saying you can't get the math to work if you go through enough gimmicks. Of course you can. What I'm saying is that getting the math to match reality and saying that reality actually corresponds to what's represented by the math are very different things.

So in total, you'll get a prediction for what your experiment under real world earth surface conditions would produce if SR was correct. Then you run the experiment and compare. If you find a discrepancy, SR is proven wrong.

That's a very naive idealization. When I said there are dozens of experiments with such discrepancies you called that handwaving. When I presented a book from someone documenting such a discrepancy and it being observed by independent researchers and used for practical purposes by the very same people who deny it, and denied publication of that, you didn't even read it, you objected to what you imagine it to be, and your objection is answered by it.

Extrapolate this pattern between us in this informal chat to the scientific community at large, and you'll understand what I mean when I say they are more concerned with ideology than with truth.

You should probably rethink that statement.

Not at all. It's a very good analogy. Why do you think I should rethink it?

As a matter of fact, it's an excellent analogy. Watching the geocentrism vs. relativism/big-bangism issue is like watching cartographers arguing whether Earth is actually like the Hobo-Dyer or the Gall-Petters projection, not realizing that both are mere symbols and their choice has other motivations.

ECI is a problem why? ECI is the most convenient coordinate system to work for low earth orbit.

Sure, but they aren't using it only for LEO. That's the point.

Where do they say Solar Barycentric, and what nature are those corrections?

Page 5, in The Fundamental Question session.

The JPL equations [10], used to track signals from interplanetary space probes, verify that the speed of light is with respect to the chosen frame. In the JPL equations, the chosen frame is the solar system barycentric frame. The motion of receivers during the signal transit time from earth to probe and from probe to earth is taken into account. Even the motion of the earth around the moon/earth center of mass is taken into account. Clearly, the JPL equations treat the speed of light as constant with respect to the frameâ€â€not as constant with respect to the receivers.

I was referring to the light speed measurement experiment with the moving ship, where they have a detector at the front and one at the back, each with its own clock, comparing the times the clocks show when a signal is received. Not whatever GPS satellites do. That experiment only measures the true light speed (as opposed to some meaningless coordinate speed) if the clocks are properly synced. Or, in other terms, what they are proving in their paper is that if you use Galilean transformations to switch frames, then the speed of light is not constant. Which, surprise! Is precisely why the SR postulates lead you to use Lorentz transformations instead.

Another elementary objection that overlooks the whole issue. Nope. They're not saying that if you use Galilean transformations to switch frames the speed of light is not constant. They are saying the GPS range equations already use the galilean transformations and treat the speed of light as constant with respect to the frame, not to the receivers, and it works, despite the SR postulates. It's not a thought experiment. They propose an experiment to provide further confirmation to that, and you keep saying the experiment is wrong based on the assumption that SR is correct. That's so common with people defending relativity that it gets old quickly.

The Sagnac Effect is in perfect accordance with SR; rotating frames simply are not inertial reference frames. And for the variant where you don't have a rotating frame, but probes moving relative to another in straight lines in empty space: Also not a problem. You can calculate it in the barycentric frame or any other frame, the result of the different runtimes will be the same.

Sure. And you think they don't know that? The problem is that the results aren't the same. If you read Ashby's article, you'll see the whole issue is precisely that the times calculated for the satellites using the inter-tracking don't match what you get with the ECI in between, breaking equivalence, which is essentially the same issue mentioned above, the JPL fixing the solar barycentric to match the ECI.

Ashby's even tries to solve that by playing semantics and saying "Observers in the non-rotating ECI inertial frame would not see a Sagnac effect. Instead, they would see that receivers are moving while a signal is propagating.", which Wang and Hatch expose as the pure sophistry it is, since receiver motion during the transit time is the Sagnac effect.

That is a nice idea. Unfortunately, any observation you can make with tiny satellites exchanging light signals does not test SR very well; whatever SR predicts for their timings, any fixed ether model with time dilation for movement relative to it predicts identically.

Yeah, what a bummer, huh?

http://ether-wind.narod.ru/Gift_2012/Gift_2012.pdf

No, the gradient of the Sun's gravity field is irrelevant. That is eaten up by the fact that you are already working in the ECI frame which is accelerated by that field.

No. Read carefully. I wasn't talking of the GPS user on the Earth, but when you'd use the satellite inter-tracking network as a huge interferometer to detect the Earth's motion through the ether around the Sun.

I don't know what you are talking about here, but the Sun's tidal forces have precisely the required symmetry to explain such effects.

They happen in sidereal time, not solar time.

I'll try to explain this better in a minute. For now, I'll assume you expect that time dilation relative to ECI is a real thing.

OK.

Look, don't take this wrong. I don't want to insult you.

I already admitted I'm merely a physics enthusiast, so, there's no way that would insult me. Don't worry.

One of the reasons, the main reason maybe, that you reject SR and GR is that you don't understand them properly.

First of all, I don't reject SR and GR in favor of something else. I already made that clear, but somehow you slowly drift back into it, maybe because you unconsciously feel it's easier to refute that. I'm not defending geocentrism, nor SR and GR. Again, I'll state my opinion as clear as possible. For me they are both myths. As I explained above, geocentrism is the dialectical counterpart to relativism/big-bangism, as biblical myths are the counterpart to epicurean myths. What I reject is the attempt to create an epistemological cartel that presents whatever is the scientific mainstream theories as the only valid description of reality. I reject that, because as Max Planck used to say, scientific truth doesn't triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but because it's opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. In order to subvert a dogma, you need a new generation to grow familiar with the alternatives to it, and when modern scientists try to hide the dogmas in their convictions, they are simply trying to rig the game. That's politics, not science.

Second, that argument has been used by everyone since SR was first presented. To quote Herbert Dingle, "the universal inability of present day physical scientists to believe that any criticism of special relativity that they cannot answer can proceed from anything but misunderstanding."

If you think SR is hogwash, you only think what you think SR is is hogwash, and you're absolutely 100% right! And the worst thing is that you're down in this swamp with the other people who don't understand it properly and tell you why their version is wrong and there is just no way out of this swamp if you keep listening to them.

Well... that's a very rough example of what I called "epistemological cartel" above. You claim some monopoly over truth, and claim everyone who disagree do it on misunderstanding. You can join the post-modernists on that, since that's their only argument all the time.

Seriously, my problem isn't with whatever "version" of truth anyone is presenting, but how they fill the gaps in that. I gave up on physics when I realized my teachers were filling that gap with ideology. That's the real issue here. Most of modern science is hogwash on that aspect, only QM sort of escapes from that because it's almost impervious to the attempts to make it fit the prevailing dogma. As I explained on the other topic, the issue there is clearly the wrong ontology, but people still rather say it's somehow incomprehensible than admit that their dogmas are wrong.

I wish I could recommend you a really good book. Unfortunately, the only book you'll ever need, the best one that can ever be written, is Einstein's own general introcution. It seems it has never been translated to English.

The language is not an issue, but I doubt anything I can read from Einstein will change my mind. It's not like I haven't been there before.

I wish I could recommend you a really good book to understand fully what's the issue here, but unfortunately, I think any book I recommend will be read as a scientific textbook and defeat the purpose anyway, not to mention the harm it may cause. If there's anything you can read to understand what I'm saying that won't cause more harm than good, it's this article:

http://perennialphilosophyreadings.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/response-to-stephen-hawkings-physics-as-philosophy-by-wolfgang-smith/

So! Let me try to throw you a life line.

Now you insulted me.

What do you think the most distinguising feature of SR is? Is it length contraction? Time dilation? Mass increase? Or something else?

I think the most distinguishing feature of SR is that it attempts to present a physical solution to a metaphysical problem. It attempts to create the illusion of physical casualism, to counter the metaphysical possibility of purpose. I believe centuries or even millennia from now, SR will be seen as a sort of an hysterical reaction, typical of our times. People couldn't understand the implications of the MM experiment were more metaphysical than physical, but were already unable to tell the difference, so they blew it out of proportions and restarted everything from scratch.

If you mean the most distinguishing physical artifact it uses to accomplish that, they're all the same, since they're all derived from applying the relativity of the terms in a mathematical equation to the reality itself. In reality you can't relativize all absolutes, as you can't absolutify all relatives, as one doesn't exist without the other. In that point, SR having only relative spacetime is as nonsensical as Newton's laws asking for an absolute empty space.

Let's investigate! Say you have a laboratory somewhere in your preferred frame of reference with stockpiles of infinitely accurate clocks, infinitely fast computers, perfectly accurate tape measures, light pulse emitters and detectors, mirrors, beam splitters, lenses and all the good stuff, plus of course everything interfaces with each other so that all actions you can imagine can be automated and performed with arbitrary accuracy.

Man... it doesn't matter what's the equipment you have, how you sync your clocks, how accurate they are, etc. The main argument here isn't that the math won't fit, despite the evidence that in some cases it doesn't.

Before this explanation, you asked me to assume time dilation relative to the ECI is real. I conceded you that, but if I throw that away now, the only thing you'll prove by all the experiments you can actually perform is that the speed of light is constant relative to the ECI. To apply whatever results you obtain from that experiments to any other observations of the universe, you'll have to perform the experiments there, or ask me to expect that the results you obtained here would also be the same anywhere else in the universe, which requires me to accept that there's nothing special about our location and our existence here in this place is merely casual, and that requirement is beyond physics. At that point, you'd be asking me to make a metaphysical assumption disguised as physical, but you can't have a physical theory that carries with it a metaphysical assumption that can't be disproved by any observation. How would you convince me to agree with that? Ideology.

If there's one thing to be understood from this discussion is that. This is not about geocentrism being wrong and relativity being right or the opposite. What I'm saying is that there are no observational facts of the whole universe beyond the very few that we have from the Earth. All knowledge we think we have comes from an interpretation of those observations. What we actually know is a very, very small subset of that. If you believe in a casualist universe, you'll be inclined to think the casualist interpretation is correct, and if you believe in a purposeful universe, you'll be inclined to think the purposeful interpretation is correct. It's as simple as that.

Edited February 22, 2014 by lodestar

[SargeRho]

Doppler Shift, for which there is plenty of evidence, and one particular practical example, falsifies c+v.

And that example would be Cassini-Huygens. They didn't take Doppler Shift into account, and as result, almost doomed the Huygens-part of the mission. To solve it, they altered Cassini's course in order to reduce the effect of the doppler shift of Huygen's radio signals. The 5.5km/s difference between the two probes during Huygens' atmospheric entry of Titan created a significant doppler shift, compared to Cassini's reciever.

If c+v was a thing, Doppler Shift would not exist, and that problem wouldn't have existed. And I'm sure you're aware of Doppler Radar?

[Z-Man]

Well, if you're willing to alter the speed of a photon mid-flight with a mysterious mechanism, you can just as well alter its frequency. The Ritz Hypothesis is based on light particles, not waves, so you have to fudge in frequency anyway.

Nope. I didn't said an hypothesis wouldn't be published. I said you would have a hard time publishing actual experimental or observational results confirming such an hypothesis.

Well, in this particular case, the experimental data would be future supernova redshift surveys. Quite a lot of money goes into them, they can't hold back their raw results. That Neutrino thing also got published just fine, remember?

That assumes dishonesty on my part, and I thought we were beyond that.

No, just negligence. I was referring to your mentioning of the stable gyroscope. True for the gyroscope, but false for more general arrangements of bodies. The center of mass does move in general.

Why the need for sarcasm? That doesn't fit well, specially following the strawman above.

Before you try to criticize inappropriate style of others, have a hard look at yours. Need? There was none. But it feels appropriate. Any critical thinker would ask what I asked. If the forces in the eye of the storm are large enough to pin the Earth, what happens to the rest of the universe? Not at least mentioning it and promising a solution if you read on is, well, not convincing me to read on because I expect there to be no answer. More standard questions for models with a lumiferous ether: How do you explain stellar aberration, both for terrestrial telescopes and HSP and other space instruments? How can the Sagnac effect be explained, why is it sensitive to rotations of the device relative to the fixed stars? And, of course, what about the negative results of ether drag experiments and the most precise MM type experiments? It's clear that for any given ether model, some of those will not be a problem, but the others will be.

Wallace:

Page 5, in The Fundamental Question session.

The JPL equations [10], used to track signals from interplanetary space probes, verify that the speed of light is with respect to the chosen frame. In the JPL equations, the chosen frame is the solar system barycentric frame. The motion of receivers during the signal transit time from earth to probe and from probe to earth is taken into account. Even the motion of the earth around the moon/earth center of mass is taken into account. Clearly, the JPL equations treat the speed of light as constant with respect to the frameâ€â€not as constant with respect to the receivers.

I suppose those are referring to the same equation (whether the other end is a reflecting planet or a responding probe should not matter). I looked for a copy of the JPL book, it's not available in digital form, and according to Google Books, there is one copy available on the whole continent in some University library I naturally don't have immediate access to. It would only be 200 km away, though, so I suppose I have to consider myself lucky?

Ok, after a lot of digging, I found some stuff online. Numbering it! Think of it as at the bottom if you want a proper reference section.

[1] Wallace's paper on the radar timings: http://sciliterature.50webs.com/SpecLetters1969-p361-367.pdf

That is actually a very good looking paper. For a day or so, I really thought it had no actual fault and that the data available at the time really would have supported his claims. I really thought I'd need to take back some things I said about him.

[3] Reference 3 from there: http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1962AJ.....67..181P/0000183.000.html

[6] Reference 6 from there, Smith's paper: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1963AJ.....68...15S

[36] (referenced from Farce) Moyer's paper with JPL equations: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1981CeMec..23...33M

That adsabs archive is pretty comprehensive. I can't believe I did not know it existed before!

[2] Farce, Chapter 4:

During a current literature search, I requested and received a reprint of a paper [36] published by Theodore D. Moyer of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The paper reports the methods used to obtain accurate values of range observables for radio and radar signals in the solar system. The paper's (A6) equation and the accompanying information that calls for evaluating the position vectors at the signal reception time is nearly equivalent to the Galilean c+v equation (2) in my paper RADAR TESTING OF THE RELATIVE VELOCITY OF LIGHT IN SPACE. [18] The additional terms in the (A6) equation correct for the effects of the troposphere and charged particles, as well as the general relativity effects of gravity and velocity time dilation. The fact that the radio astronomers have been reluctant to acknowledge the full theoretical implications of their work is probably related to the unfortunate things that tend to happen to physicists that are rash enough to challenge Einstein's sacred second postulate. [22] Over twenty-three years have gone by since the original Venus radar experiments clearly showed that the speed of light in space was not constant, and still the average scientist is not aware of this fact! This demonstrates why it is important for the APS to bring true scientific freedom to the PR journal's editorial policy. [33]

Let's get to work. Equation A6 from [36], stripped off the ignored GR and ionospheric terms, reads

(A6): R = r₁₂/c + r₂₃/c

Where R is the range variable, the signal round trip time that corresponds to distance D_1 = Rc/2 roughly at time of signal processing of the probe, r₁₂ is the distance, in solar barycentric coordinates, of the location where the signal is sent on Earth to the location where it is received by the probe, r₂₃ is the same for the way back. Simplified:

D_1 = r₁₂/2 + r₂₃/2

Equations 1 and 2 in Wallace's paper [1] read:

(1): D_E = tc/2 - vt/2

(2): D_G = tc/2

With t the total round trip time of the signal, v the relative motion of Earth and the probe/planet, D_E the distance assuming constant light speed, D_Gthe distance assuming Ritz's emmitter theory. Both distances interpreted as taken at the time of signal arrival back at Earth.

The similarity between (2) and (A6) is the missing vc/2 term that (1) has. Nothing more. It is solely due to the chosen reference time. If, instead of signal receive time back at Earth, Wallace would have written his equations to get the distance at reflection time, they would have read:

(1'): D_E' = tc/2

(2'): D_G' = tc/2 + vt/2

(He is clearly aware of this, by the way). Looking at how you derive the equations, (A6) is more similar to (1') than it is to (2).

So yes, I am absolutely positive he looked at the structure of the JPL equation (A6) and jumped to wrong conclusions based on a v term. Just a missing vt/2 term, not a c+v instead of a c somewhere. Which is worse. Yep, now that I know what to look for, I find it in Farce:

Dr. T. D. Moyer of the JPL, in his 1981 Celestial Mechanics paper [36] evaluates the distance at the time the signal returns to the transmitter, does not include the -tv/2 term that would make the evaluation relativistic in the Einstein c sense

Moyer simply does not need to include the term because he is not calculating the distance at receive time. It does not even have anything to do with Relativity, the equations are practically the same for any ether theory.

So why does Wallace's plot 1 in [1] show a better fit for the c+v model? (Nevermind that he mislabeled his curves.) Well, his formulas (1) and (2) caclulate the distance at receive time at Earth. The tables in Smith's paper [6] give the times when the signal was sent, the tables in [3] the time when the signal was reflected (the actual light model used does not change this much). If he blindly went with those times, he should have used (1') and (2') for the data from [3] and (1'') and (2'') for the data from [6]:

(1''): D_E'' = tc/2 + vt/2

(2''): D_G'' = tc/2 + vt

Equation (1') would have fit just as well as (2), all others would have been just as wrong or worse than (1). I suspect (1') and (2') would have been the correct equations to use on the data he picked.

Speculation, you probably think. Well, a bit. He is not too clear on how he actually used the data (which counts against him by science logic). But there is a bit of evidence visible: Look at Fig 2 in Smith's paper [6], it shows the residual error in the round trip times for their best fits to the data, it hovers below 1 ms. That corresponds to a distance error of 150 km or 10^-6 au, one tick in Wallace's Fig 1. The curve following equation (1) shows a much, much higher error, the (2) resp. (1') curve is more in the region where you expect a 1 ms residual error to land.

Interesting historical notes encountered on the way: The discrepancies between previous observations of the astronomical unit and orbital parameters and the radar data were "settled" by declaring the radar measurements the correct ones: http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4218/ch2.htm

And when they sent Mariner 2 to Venus, one of the mission objectives was to find out where Venus actually is: http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1963IrAJ....6...59O/0000059.000.html

That's rather Kerbal

I can't say anything insightful about the Russian's reported struggles without touching on forum taboos. Well, ok, I probably can't say anything insightful at all, but I can't say much at all with those restrictions.

(binary stars)

Again, you're repeting the same petitio principii. That's not an argument, because they falsify each other, and that's obviously not possible. One of them must be wrong. He suggests how you can adjust the Ritzian theory to fit the variations in visual and spectroscopic binaries, and how de Sitter's original objection to Ritz was flawed. This was done recently here: http://www.worldsci.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_6022.pdf

I was aware of that possibility:

(at least the variation where that's the speed for the whole runtime)

It has several huge problems, let's concentrate on just one. There can be three ways the speed equalization can work:

1. Slowly (>some nanoseconds)

2. Quickly to the matter near it (average range < earth diameter)

3. Quickly to the matter in a larger radius ( > earth diameter)

If it is 1, the regular Sagnac effect vanishes for non-gigantic interferometers.

If it is 2, Sagnac experiments would not be able to pick up earths rotation relative to the stars. We know they do for sure because even Relativity skeptics measure it.

If it is 3, MM type experiments would pick up Earth's rotation.

The move from 2 to 3 is gradual, of course. No matter. It's essentially the old ether drag problem once 1. has been ruled out.

Probably more here. The usual paywall, but useful peek at the first two pages is allowed.

And no, of course it's not falsifying observation with observation. It's falsifying the Ritz hypothesis. If three experiments disagree with a Hypothesis and ten agree with it, the three win. If a hundred agree and one disagrees, well, maybe recheck the one, but if it keeps disagreeing, it still wins.

Of course there lies the crux! I'm glad you finally get to it, but no, that's not the hypothesis I am putting here. No hypothesis regarding the absoluteness or relativiness of any reference frame is falsifiable! They necessarily carry a metaphysical assumption that can't be parted with no matter what you observe. That's what I've been saying all the time. You can't choose that metaphysical assumption on scientific grounds, it's a choice made on the existential level, and my argument here is that most scientists no longer make that choice personally, but follow an ideology.

O dear. Of course the equivalence principle is falsifiable, independently of any metaphysics. Just find an experiment that does not take external sources as input and gives different results in two different reference frames. Careful science does not claim authority over metaphysics. It only cares about the numbers, remember? You complained about that! And you even claim a few sentences on it is already falsified. How can you do that if it is not falsifiable?

Nobody is under the obligation of falsifying an ad hoc hypothesis in order to reject it, because you can simply pile them up as much as you want in order to keep the alternatives at bay.

Please list the suppsed ad hoc hypotheses that were put into place to save Relativity (and only Relativity, nothing else, and let's stick to local validity of SR).

And stop complaining about what you perceive Ad Hoc Hypotheses. At this point, you're just waving it around as a blanket statement at anything you don't like. No science handbook will say "If a hypothesis is falsified, reject everything and start from scratch." As long as the new hypothesis not only explains away a single problem, but also makes new predictions that can be tested, it is fine by scientific standards (Dark Energy is the one thing not looking too good in that regard currently, the only reason to accept it is that the data so far suggest the Cosmological Constant type, which has been there all along in GR). I'll have to apply your own criteria to everything you put forward otherwise. That would certainly save time.

Sure. No matter how much relativity is falsified, your option will always be the one that sticks to the same casualist ideology, the option which attributes everything to chance, not to purpose. You may think that option is scientific as much as you want, but it's not. Indeed, that's why the Copernican principle is an unfalsifiable assumption, obviously.

Wrong. Remember history. The first scientific cosmological models based on GR were steady state models, models without a creation event. When the Hubble Redshift was discovered, that model became no longer sustainable (it hung on for a long time, of course) and was replaced with a model with a 'beginning'. You'd think anti-creationist scientists would not be unable to do that. Same here. Bring the experimental evidence and what you think science considers holy and untouchable will fall. After a while where it will put up a good fight with, yes, your beloved ad hoc additions, of course; and somebody exceptionally clever needs to come up with the right alternative model.

As I said above, the same goes also for creationism vs. evolutionism, for physicalist vs. dualist theories of mind, and even for conservatism vs. liberalism. They are all merely modern dialectical expressions of the centuries old dispute between biblical and epicurean myths. No matter how enlightened and evolved we believe we are, we are still struggling over the same old problems. At least we have vacuum cleaners now.

And all off limits here. No comment.

But these analogies are going too far... let's stop here.

Yes. Do you think mine are as terribly contrived and beside the point as I think yours are?

Wishful thinking. Relativistic interpretations for such phenomena aren't the only available, and scientists were willing to make the anti-intuitive leap into the relativistic interpretations only because that was easier to swallow than the ideological implications of an stationary Earth. Most of them admit that even explicitly. Even with those implications, there weren't few who were against it.

Well, and you assume a consistent stationary Earth model that does not scream "I would be much easier to work with in those other coordinates!" is even possible. Things would have started to shake once Newtonian mechanics were applied to the solar system.

Man... what is a true inertial frame? There's no such thing in the universe! You just reversed the issue back to my initial objection. I'm not saying you can't get the math to work if you go through enough gimmicks. Of course you can. What I'm saying is that getting the math to match reality and saying that reality actually corresponds to what's represented by the math are very different things.

Nobody is saying reality matches Math. Scientists speak in models. Like your philosophical "In my opinion, ..." addition we always have to assume you use, when a scientist says "A is B" with A something from reality and B a mathematical abstraction, you have to replace it with "The model of A we use for the purpose of this discussion is B". The Universe is not a 4-Manifold with Minkovski metric signature. That is just the model GR uses.

That's a very naive idealization. When I said there are dozens of experiments with such discrepancies you called that handwaving. When I presented a book from someone documenting such a discrepancy and it being observed by independent researchers and used for practical purposes by the very same people who deny it, and denied publication of that, you didn't even read it, you objected to what you imagine it to be, and your objection is answered by it.

I did read large portions of it (if you mean Wallace's book). What kept me from reading it all was not the content, it was the horribly unreadable style.

GPS:

I'll throw this more detailed article by Ashby on GPS out here first.

Sure, but they aren't using it (ECI) only for LEO. That's the point.

It's also good for higher orbits. If you are willing to correct in the influences of the other planets and the sun, it can in principle cover half the solar system (our side of the sun), though it gets massively impractical.

Another elementary objection that overlooks the whole issue. Nope. They're not saying that if you use Galilean transformations to switch frames the speed of light is not constant. They are saying the GPS range equations already use the galilean transformations and treat the speed of light as constant with respect to the frame, not to the receivers, and it works, despite the SR postulates.

GPS range equations (the simple ones) use no transformation at all, they work in ECI, where they are correct because that's close enough to an inertial system. Nowhere does GPS use Galilean transformations. Wang and Hatch do not use them explicitly either, they are just doing equivalent things. You can work in the receiver's frame and treat c as constant there, but you have to do it right.

It's not a thought experiment. They propose an experiment to provide further confirmation to that, and you keep saying the experiment is wrong based on the assumption that SR is correct. That's so common with people defending relativity that it gets old quickly.

They already proclaim Relativity falsified by the result they expect. No experiment was done. And they use relativity wrong. They plan to use coordinate time to measure the speed of light (read the detailed Ashby article, he explicitly refers to GPS time as a coordinate time), which then gives them the coordinate speed of light, which can be anything without contradicting SR. I am not assuming SR is correct here, you just can't falsify a hypothesis if you apply it wrong.

Sure. And you think they don't know that? The problem is that the results aren't the same. If you read Ashby's article, you'll see the whole issue is precisely that the times calculated for the satellites using the inter-tracking don't match what you get with the ECI in between, breaking equivalence, which is essentially the same issue mentioned above, the JPL fixing the solar barycentric to match the ECI.

I'm not talking to them, I assume they know I see the term inter-tracking nowhere mentioned and I see no mismatch that you mention. I see two mentions of errors they at first made: in the paper you linked, he says they at first forgot to add a Sagnac component to the built-in clock speed adjustment... which is odd, in the more detailed artile, he talks about a centrifugal gravity potential term they forgot. I assume that's the same one. They didn't notice for a couple of years because the accuracy of the clocks was not good enough for the omission to matter. Anything I read in the detailed description WRT Sagnag adds up. (I did not check their GR calculations, they are of little concern here.)

Ashby's even tries to solve that by playing semantics and saying "Observers in the non-rotating ECI inertial frame would not see a Sagnac effect. Instead, they would see that receivers are moving while a signal is propagating.", which Wang and Hatch expose as the pure sophistry it is, since receiver motion during the transit time is the Sagnac effect.

That's nitpicking the definition of the Sagnag effect. I see no problem with either viewpoint. Fact is, you can either explain the measured effect in SR in an inertial frame or in GR in the rotating frame.

Yeah, what a bummer, huh?

http://ether-wind.narod.ru/Gift_2012/Gift_2012.pdf

They are also using GPS coordinate time and thus are not measuring the real speed of light. And again, no actual east-west experiment.

And well, we just need to find different tests for Relativity in space. How about checking whether the Hubble space telescope shows the expected amounts of stellar aberration, which would be different from those of ground based telescopes based on its orbital speed?

No. Read carefully. I wasn't talking of the GPS user on the Earth, but when you'd use the satellite inter-tracking network as a huge interferometer to detect the Earth's motion through the ether around the Sun.

Again, same problem, just this time in Solar barycentric: There will be too little difference in the predictions of GR and a model with a lumiferous ether at rest with respect to the solar system COM with appropriate time dilation on the clocks.

They happen in sidereal time, not solar time.

Oh. You said "correlated with the Sun direction", that's why I assumed it would be solar time. Well, in that case, no clue what effect you mean or what it could be.

First of all, I don't reject SR and GR in favor of something else. I already made that clear, but somehow you slowly drift back into it, maybe because you unconsciously feel it's easier to refute that.

It's beause you keep reeling in papers claiming to falsify SR. Of course I assume you consider them relevant to the discussion. Of course I read them. If they have obvious errors, I point them out. What you have brought here, the Wangs, the Gifts and I don't remember what else are not valid alternative viewpoints. They are simply factually wrong. And your claim was that mainstream science is full of imposture, lies and dogma and the things you present are not. Well, yeah, they are not, but they're still wrong.

(order changed)

Well... that's a very rough example of what I called "epistemological cartel" above. You claim some monopoly over truth, and claim everyone who disagree do it on misunderstanding. You can join the post-modernists on that, since that's their only argument all the time.

Second, that argument has been used by everyone since SR was first presented. To quote Herbert Dingle, "the universal inability of present day physical scientists to believe that any criticism of special relativity that they cannot answer can proceed from anything but misunderstanding."

Fact: Wang, Hatch and Gift misunderstand what SR says when it talks about measuring the speed of light. They are using GPS coordinate time. They can do that, but then they need GR and the appropriate metric to transform the coordinate speed to the true speed. Or they can use the proper times for their near inertial frames directly. They do neither. I can answer them, so Dingle's statement does not apply.

I'm not defending geocentrism, nor SR and GR. Again, I'll state my opinion as clear as possible. For me they are both myths. As I explained above, geocentrism is the dialectical counterpart to relativism/big-bangism, as biblical myths are the counterpart to epicurean myths. What I reject is the attempt to create an epistemological cartel that presents whatever is the scientific mainstream theories as the only valid description of reality. I reject that, because as Max Planck used to say, scientific truth doesn't triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but because it's opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. In order to subvert a dogma, you need a new generation to grow familiar with the alternatives to it, and when modern scientists try to hide the dogmas in their convictions, they are simply trying to rig the game. That's politics, not science.

Well, fair enough, but I think you are overcategorizing. While Relativity is not falsified, we have strong, non-political, non-philosophical, non-religious, just purely scientific reasons to not consider geocentric models (both the literal ones and the ones that put Earth just pretty near to the center of the Universe) for as long as not one comes around that is both falsifiable on its own and compatible with observations.

Seriously, my problem isn't with whatever "version" of truth anyone is presenting, but how they fill the gaps in that. I gave up on physics when I realized my teachers were filling that gap with ideology.

Sorry to hear that; you did not have very good teachers. When my favorite physics teacher at school did not know an answer to a question immediately, he said "That is a good question! I don't know. Let me think about it, maybe I can answer it next time." And he could most of the time. If not, he said "Go study physics."

I wish I could recommend you a really good book to understand fully what's the issue here, but unfortunately, I think any book I recommend will be read as a scientific textbook and defeat the purpose anyway, not to mention the harm it may cause. If there's anything you can read to understand what I'm saying that won't cause more harm than good, it's this article:

http://perennialphilosophyreadings.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/response-to-stephen-hawkings-physics-as-philosophy-by-wolfgang-smith/

Reading it. Well, I don't want to open that can of worms here again. But I'll say that I personally would not recommend Hawking's books to anyone. Structurally, they are almost indistinguishable from Pseudoscience. I appreciate his effort to bring the currently best speculations about what models can be used for the universe to the masses. And if you accept them, they succeed marvellously. But if you're a bit of a critical thinker, you will ask "How?" and "Why?" on every second page and leave a bit empty and disappointed. And yeah, with The Grand Design, he is leaning a bit far out of the window. Science should not claim to have all the answers. Neither should Philosophy claim authority over how Science finds the answers it can find, though.

Edit: Read. Well, most of my comments would be out of forum bounds, so let's just say that when he talks about stringent, mathematically sound proofs... better double check whether that is a) true, applicable and c) actually leads to the conclusions he claims. For the Penrose "The human brain is not a computer" thing, check this, for example: http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/penrose.pdf .

I think the most distinguishing feature of SR is that it attempts to present a physical solution to a metaphysical problem. It attempts to create the illusion of physical casualism, to counter the metaphysical possibility of purpose. I believe centuries or even millennia from now, SR will be seen as a sort of an hysterical reaction, typical of our times. People couldn't understand the implications of the MM experiment were more metaphysical than physical, but were already unable to tell the difference, so they blew it out of proportions and restarted everything from scratch.

O...k. Hey! I understand what you are saying! I'm as surprised as you are.

If you mean the most distinguishing physical artifact it uses to accomplish that, they're all the same, since they're all derived from applying the relativity of the terms in a mathematical equation to the reality itself. In reality you can't relativize all absolutes, as you can't absolutify all relatives, as one doesn't exist without the other. In that point, SR having only relative spacetime is as nonsensical as Newton's laws asking for an absolute empty space.

See previous comment about scientists always talking in models.

Man... it doesn't matter what's the equipment you have, how you sync your clocks, how accurate they are, etc. The main argument here isn't that the math won't fit, despite the evidence that in some cases it doesn't.

To apply whatever results you obtain from that experiments to any other observations of the universe, you'll have to perform the experiments there, or ask me to expect that the results you obtained here would also be the same anywhere else in the universe, which requires me to accept that there's nothing special about our location and our existence here in this place is merely casual, and that requirement is beyond physics.

The Hypothesis that the laws of nature are the same everywhere in the observable universe is also one that is constantly getting tested. Spectral lines, for example, are quite sensitive to changes to natural constants. If we see a distant galaxy with spectral lines that can't match any we could see here (after redshift correction), we know something is up. A switch from GR being correct to it being massively incorrect would be a hugely visible boundary surface, probably. It's falsifiable. Your blanket statement counter-hpyothesis obviously not. You'd need to make it more specific. When and where can the laws change? How much? And by what mechanism?

At that point, you'd be asking me to make a metaphysical assumption disguised as physical, but you can't have a physical theory that carries with it a metaphysical assumption that can't be disproved by any observation. How would you convince me to agree with that? Ideology.

No, I'm just trying to explain where people misinterpret how SR works.

Before this explanation, you asked me to assume time dilation relative to the ECI is real. I conceded you that, but if I throw that away now, the only thing you'll prove by all the experiments you can actually perform is that the speed of light is constant relative to the ECI.

That's not fair! But hah. If you don't know whether movement causes time dilation, obviosuly you cannot move the clocks after they have been synced. So you need to put the clocks in place and use one of the light based synchronization schemes.

(Yeah, this bit is probably not for you, but more for those interested other forumites still reading along)

So what you need to do is take two clocks, place them at distance D apart. In the center at time T=0, we send out a signal, when it arrives, we set each clock to 0. That happens at T=D/2c for both clocks, they will be in sync. When we later send a test light signal from clock 1 to clock 2, starting at T=t_0, it will arrive at T=t_1=t_0 + D/c, the speed we measure is v = D/(t_1 - t_0) = c. All that was with everything at rest. No surprise so far.

Now assume the whole lab is moving at the very slow speed u (we'll ignore terms that go with u²; time dilation and length contractions won't bother us). Assume we have set up stationary, synced clocks everywhere so we can look up their times for comparison. That external time will be denoted with T, times the moving clocks show with t. Set the clocks in the moving lab up, again with distance D, in the direction of movement.

The sync beam from the middle is activated at T=0, again, for convenience, we set the clocks to t=D/2c when the signal arrives. Now, to get to the front clock, it takes longer than before in terms of T, the clock is running away with speed u. So the light reaches it at T=D/2(c-u), approximately T=D/2c + Du/2c². Since it is synced to D/2c, it is now running late by Du/2c² relative to T. Likewise, the light pulse arrives at the back clock a little earlier, that clock is running early by Du/2c². So we have

t_front = T - Du/2c²

t_back = T + Du/2c²

The clocks are not in sync at all! This can't be good. Let's see how things progress:

So, say at t_front,send, we send a signal from the front clock to the back clock. When does it arrive? First, we need to go back to stationary clock time:

T_send = t_front,send + Du/2c²

The signal is moving into the opposite direction as the lab, so to cover the distance D, it takes (approximately, u² terms swallowed) the time

DeltaT = D/c - Du/c²

in stationary clock time, so it arrives at

T_rec = T_send + DeltaT = t_front,send + D/c - Du/2c²

which reads at the receiving clock

t_back,rec = T_rec + Du/2c² = t_front,send + D/c

The guy in the moving lab will measure the speed of light as D/(t_back,rec-t_front,rec) = c. So even with the out of sync clocks, moving lab guy will still measure the same speed of light. And, in fact, he gets the same speed as the stationary observer because his clocks are out of sync compared to stationary clocks.

TL;DR: There it is. The most important thing about Relativity: Even at slow speeds, clocks you sync in a moving frame will be skewed. The stationary observer will see clocks in the front running a bit late and clocks in the back a bit ahead. This is a linear effect and not measurable from within the moving frame alone. But when switching frames, it is the most important thing to keep in mind. It is, for example, what resolves the Twin paradox.

(Using 'stationary' here as just a label for an arbitrary fixed reference frame)

This is by no means meant as a proof that Relativity is correct. Maybe there are better ways to sync the clocks in the moving frame? Relativity simply postulates there are none.

If there's one thing to be understood from this discussion is that. This is not about geocentrism being wrong and relativity being right or the opposite. What I'm saying is that there are no observational facts of the whole universe beyond the very few that we have from the Earth. All knowledge we think we have comes from an interpretation of those observations. What we actually know is a very, very small subset of that. If you believe in a casualist universe, you'll be inclined to think the casualist interpretation is correct, and if you believe in a purposeful universe, you'll be inclined to think the purposeful interpretation is correct. It's as simple as that.

Absolutely!

However: The believer in the purposeful universe can believe it is purposefully (appearing to be) casualist. He can arrange himself with a seemingly casualist universe; mysterious ways and all that.

On the other hand, the casualist's view is incompatible with an evidently purposeful universe.

And therefore, the scientist will be inclined to pick the casualist view between the two, if possible. Not because it is more likely to be right. No, Truth is for priests and philosophers. Because it is the choice that may be a priori more likely to be wrong, but not proven wrong yet; falsifiable, but not falsified.

Sorry. I guess I have found a hammer and now every problem looks like a nail. But it's the same problem all along, just on different levels! And I like that hammer. Yes, I am aware I am explaining one ideology with another. I'm not saying science is always right. But science is bold. It says "This is what I think. This is how you could prove me wrong. I invite you to prove me wrong. I tried myself and failed." It's none of that postmodernist relativism, "Both sides are valid viewpoints, why can't we all get along".

Ugh. And when you have to look for the "Submit Reply" button, your posts are definitely getting too long.

Edited March 4, 2014 by Z-Man
Small comment about perennialphilosophyreadings.

[lodestar]

Sorry for the very long delay, but I've been really, really busy. I haven't even played KSP since my last post here.

I couldn't read your whole answer before, and couldn't reserve some time to go through the whole cycle again until now. Now that I do, frankly, I think we reached a point in this conversation where there's a level of mutual understanding that we can call it productive as a whole, but it's really not that productive anymore, because your expertise in physics goes far beyond mine, and the philosophical aspect that really interests me isn't really out of bounds here, from my understanding of the forum rules, but can easily be interpreted as such. There's no point in me continuing to present physics to support a philosophical concept, for you to debunk the physics in a way I don't fully understand and we not being able to talk openly about the philosophy, if you were interested. I agree with a lot of what you said on this last post and it changed my opinion in some points, and your take on Wallace's work was really good (but I'm still wondering why he was denied publication, which would have prevented the whole mess).

Anyway, thanks for the time and effort put into this. As you can see, I do have a passion for the subject, although it's not my main interest, but you're one of the few people I met who act like a real scientist when approaching a conversation about it, as you were in the other about Quantum Mechanics, even though the issue there was far more philosophical. I had a lot of misconceptions and wrong opinions precisely because I couldn't figure it all out by myself, and the subject is so polarized that most people I could met on both sides of the issue were either dismissive or fanatic about it. I really learned a lot here.

There's just one point where I really can't hold myself:

However: The believer in the purposeful universe can believe it is purposefully (appearing to be) casualist. He can arrange himself with a seemingly casualist universe; mysterious ways and all that.

That's the whole point. They exist only as a dialectical counterpart to each other, precisely because no casualist explanation of our reality can be so complete to not leave a window open for purpose, as it would have to explain itself in the process, and the other way around. The only way the issue can be solved on any side is by calling that residual window to the other side an illusion, which often happens, or embracing all of it, which is what I try to do. That's what I find so wonderful about the reality we live in. It really doesn't want us to know it fully, it wants us to make choices. But I guess I'm seeing purpose where there is none, right?

Because it is the choice that may be a priori more likely to be wrong, but not proven wrong yet; falsifiable, but not falsified.

Nice catch. I believe the choice is more due to other historical and philosophical reasons, but I never thought of that deduction. Anyway, it goes back to my point above, since neither choice can be ever falsified completely.

Thanks again. I'm glad to say this was the first conversation I ever had on the subject that was actually worth the copious amount of time spent on it. You're a true gentleman.

[Z-Man]

But I guess I'm seeing purpose where there is none, right?

Nah, just where it is unscientific. That does not mean it is wrong.

I thank you, too. I certainly learned a lot.