How to have light move faster than C

The BBQ Pit
502

I found this elsewhere, being just a paragraph and not copyrighted I think it should be ok…

*A photon gains energy when it falls under gravity and loses it in the process of escaping from gravity. Photons have momentum and pressure is felt when they hit a surface. All the maths works out and show that they are perfectly normal particles with mass (Waldron). Relativity says that nothing with mass can travel at c. Photons have mass and travel at c so a prediction of relativity is wrong. Relativity is disproved. But No! Relativists are allowed to change the rules and redefine mass.

Relativity is true therefore photons don’t have mass.

If someone promoting Ballistic theory had to make just as big a change to the rules to stop it being ‘disproved’ would you be happy? With that kind of flexibility allowed I really can’t see how he could fail.*
source: http://sci.tech-archive.net/Archive/sci.physics.relativity/2008-09/msg01013.html

I have thought of making this point myself, the fact that photons can be used to produce thrust, act like they have mass in every way, and are then proclaimed to be massless.

The flexibility given to SR is astounding, it can be as inconsistent as it wants and is given a free pass.

If you had a bunch of photons reflecting around in a mirrored sphere, the sphere would act as though the photons increased the inertial mass of the sphere as movement of the sphere would create red/blue shifting causing an imbalance of forces.

If you put the sphere in a gravity field it would even weigh more with the photons inside as the photons are effected by the gravity and impart more force on the bottom of the sphere.

So goes light bend space? (create a gravitational field?)
UCSB Science Line <2 out of 3 answers says it does
Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos <a poor source to be sure, still…
Do photons create gravity? <Several apparently knowledgeable people answer that is could be.

So a mirrored sphere with lots of light bouncing around inside would and as if it had more inertia, more attraction to gravitating bodies and likely act to create a greater gravitational field it’s self.

And yet photons are said not to have zero mass, which is why they can do something that anything with mass couldn’t. Riiiiight.

503

So you think you, a guy who doesn’t know much about anything, have found a *gotcha *that every working physicist for the last, what century has missed?

Or is it more likely that you’re kinda stupid, and since you’re kinda stupid, the *gotchas *aren’t actually as rock solid as you think they are?

504

Photons do not have “rest mass.” They do have relativistic mass, which is equal to energy.

In modern particle physics, it is understood that there are two kinds of particles: those that have rest mass – protons, electrons, neutrals, quarks, etc. – and those that do not have rest mass. It is currently debated whether neutrinos have rest mass.

Particles without rest mass tend to move at the speed of light. Photons are one example. They “acquire” relativistic mass because they move at the speed of light. They are a special case in the equations.

(At a high-school level of math, you would say that their mass is “zero divided by zero.” Obviously, the math has progressed far beyond the high school level in the last century.)

Yes, photons have momentum. When an atom emits a photon, the atom “recoils” physically, like a cannon recoiling when it fires a projectile.

No, this does not contradict relativity. Relativity exists to explain these actual physical observations.

Your argument is naive, and indicates a total lack of comprehension of relativity. Read a reference source. Several good links have been posted in this and previous threads.

505

Are you presenting this quote because you trust its source? It appears to be somebody just saying stuff on the Internet in a discussion thread. Would it carry equal weight for you if someone on the Internet said “All the math works out and shows that photons are perfectly normal particles without mass”? Here, I’ll say it now: All the math works out and shows that photons are perfectly normal particles without mass. Can someone cite this post with equal weight to your citation, or is there a reason to take yours more seriously?

If you search for pages that say SR is flawed, you will find those pages. If you search for pages that say SR works fine, you will find those pages. Why would you choose to do the first search and trust those results over what you get from the second search? That seems like a very biased way to do a review of the body of knowledge.

When I tried a few days ago to keep the discussion focused on a particular train of thought, I wanted to zero in on where the potential flaws were in your train of thought. Each attempt (mine or others’) ended with you switching to a brand new train of logic or thought experiment whenever things started to get either interesting or complicated. I don’t believe you switch topics this way maliciously. Rather, I believe you subconsciously reboot the discussion this way when things reach a point of cognitive dissonance. When someone says something that seems correct but also incompatible with your conclusion that SR is flawed (or alternatively, when someone says something that is too complex for quick digestion), you have two choices. You can either take a deep breadth and dive deeper into the contradiction or complexity to understand where the disconnect in conclusions comes from. Or, you can assume there must be a problem with the statements they are making. So far, you have only taken the second route. This manifests as your trying to derive your conclusions a completely different way. This approach is frustrating for the other person. Why not suspend disbelief for just a moment – give the other person the benefit of the doubt – and put in the extra effort needed to approach the arguments on their terms. If you just jump to a different argument on a different set of terms (your own), no progress in understanding can happen.

Finally: think to yourself why you switch topics and examples so much. Do you switch at moments when the current discussion reaches a impasse in logic or complexity? If that happens, you cannot ignore the impasse if you are truly seeking truth. The impasses – the clashes of conclusions – mean there is something worth digging into. It does not mean that one side of the clash must be wrong because the other conclusion must be right. It just means that things might be subtly different than they seemed at first, and that’s the wonder of discovery. I ask you: do you think the logic clashes or complexity hangups that prompt you to change topics so frequently could possibly be evidence that things are not what they seem? Could it be that maybe things are just a little bit different than you currently understand them to be? Any chance at all? I’m not asking whether things are different than what you currently understand them to be. I’m just asking if you think that’s a possibility worth exploring at all.

506

Wow these arguments are getting lame and off topic.

So I give a quote from Feynman and I am told I am suddenly respecting authority…
Now a quote from Einstein saying he did not understand the math applied to his own theory and you have the cheek to consider this an appeal to authority?

If I was arguing with a communist, and I mentioned that Stalin liked to sing the song “money money money mone-y… m-o-n-e-y”, this would not mean I was appealing to authority!

It would mean that the authority that they respect would agree with me on some points. It is not my opinion of Einstein or Feynman that matters here, I am addressing the reader.

I could be an aetheist and use the bible to disagree with what a Christian says, or use the Koran to dispute what a Muslim believes.

This would still not mean I was making an appeal to authority.
Indeed I could even throw someones own words against them.

This would still not be an appeal to authority.

If anything it is an attack against authority, saying that Einstein could not understand his own theory is hardly an appeal to authority, it is denigration of it.
It is pointing out that he is not even qualified as an authority in his own theory as he does not understand it.

Same thing with Feynman, the quote “Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.” was quite opposed to authority.

507

Agreed. If someone says, “X is good,” and then, shortly afterward, says, “X is bad,” then it is entirely valid to “throw their own words against them.”

The problem here is that, in quoting from sources that explain relativity, you have failed to point to any such contradiction.

You have, most certainly, identified a difference in the way relativity treats particles with rest mass and particles without rest mass. But this has been well-known and pretty fully understood for a century now. You have not shown us a “smoking gun.” You haven’t presented a case of the theory of relativity contradicting itself.

508

I just can’t take Special Relativity seriously. It’s a nice idea to pay around with, but physics has many real world applications, and I don’t think Special Relativity takes the gravity of the situation into account.

509

Snicker.

My own point of view may be faster-moving than yours. No doubt about it, my viewpoint is bent, and very definitely singular. Sometimes fate throws us a curve-ball, and sometimes a fast-ball.

Not being a gynecologist, I don’t have much of an opinion on dilation.

510

You posted links to stormfront as alleged evidence for your views. I maintain my suspicion that you are only against SR because you view it as Jewish science that needs to be overturned.

You haven’t changed a single mind in all your time here, or raised a single valid point. Still after all these posts no-one here understands what your actual claim is. One person failing to understand could be them being dense, but all of them means that the problem is on your end. Either you are hopeless at explaining your theory, or your theory is wrong, or your theory makes no sense. I opt for door #3.

Why exactly are you bothering?

511

Oh no, some of us get the claim. It’s just mindbogglingly stupid.

The basic claim is that it’s possible to measure the speed of light as exceeding c if you stand on one foot, spin around, and chant “te deum” in front of a mirror in a darkened bathroom. Or something along those lines. At any rate, seeing a velocity above c.

There’s also the thought experiments. Now I would bow down before anybody who actually understood most of those. Those made absolutely no sense. Still better than time cube but vastly less entertaining.

512

These are not mutually exclusive possibilities. His theory is wrong, makes no sense, and he is incoherent in his attempts to explaining it.

513

I did not.
I simply copied and pasted text from a post to stromfront.
And said I was.
The main reason I posted it was because of a news piece about superluminal light from a pulsar, this was widely reported.
But the post contained many other news pieces that I thought worth including despite the fact that it was posted there.

Then you are some kind of idiot who does not read what other posted have said about this accusation.
I just posted text from a post that google turned up, and I said i was copying and pasting because I felt linking to stormfront was in bad taste.
An admin instead posted to stormfront after wiping out my post.

So that you can still make this accusation seems to me like it is just a very lame alternative to addressing the arguments I present.

No, I am not against Einstein because of antisemitism, it is because he is wrong IMO.

Wrong, I have had very little success and that is about what I expected.
But there has been at least one who seemed convinced early on, maybe I should have quit then.

Funny that the only “point” that has been addressed by anyone was one I was able to identify the flaw in without math.

Secondly saying I have made no valid point is utterly absurd, no matter what your view may be on SR and my main arguments, to say I have made no valid point in anything I have said no matter the subject is next to absurd.

To claim that you would have to dispute almost all of SR since I have made many points about relativistic effects.

I have made points that are proven by experiments, such as muon decay rate not being effected by G-force.

This puts you clearly far far beyond the realm of making an honest argument and shows you up as a troll or similar.

Again, that would be absurd.
Many have understood many of my points.
Not all granted, but not none.

I am pretty bad at explaining things, have been all my life.

514

How about measuring the speed of light to exceed C in a Sagnac light loop?

That doesn’t involve hardly any chanting.

And to keep it simple, if you have a fibreoptic loop and rotate this loop at near the speed of light SR would agree that if you sent a photon in both directions one would do the loop in less time than you would have expected based on the speed of light, and the other would do the same distance in much much more time.
This much is not even disputed by SR, even though it is indicating the speed of light not being equal and necessarily exceeding C.

The part that would be seen differently by SR is that if you looked at the speed of light in each direction over a small portion (not the whole loop) SR would insist that the speed of light over that portion would be equal in both directions, where I would argue that if the scheme to measure the speed of light does not suffer from a synchronization scheme that is based on the speed of light (which would obviously cancel any results as the synch scheme would be flawed) then even over a finite portion the speed of light could not be the same in each direction.

But you won’t answer this, you will just use personal attacks.

515

I did not say that was a smoking gun.

I said that SR really stretches things to make it’s claims.

Maybe light has no mass despite providing momentum, appearing to act as if it had inertia, despite possibly generating a gravitational field.

So, it has no mass but seemingly does everything we would say mass does.

It doesn’t disprove SR, but it doesn’t make SR look very good either.

It is very convoluted.

The smoking bullet is every one of my other arguments except for the one that was flawed.

516

What he has isn’t a theory. It’s the unstructured ramblings of someone who isn’t capable of doing basic math or logic.

517

The speed of light never exceeds c in a Sagnac light loop.

No, it doesn’t.

Special relativity says no such thing.

I am answering it. Nothing of what you claim is true.

These are not “thought experiments”. They are fantasies. Special relativity does not say what you think it does, and the results of your experiments will not show what you claim.

Regards,
Shodan

518

That’s because you don’t understand what GR predicts. Note that this page is directly linked to [the one you posted](Experimental Basis of Special Relativity Hypothesis).

I would argue that Einstein synchronization of two clocks is equivalent to:

  • taking a third clock
  • placing clock 3 next to clock 1
  • setting clock 3’s time to clock 1’s time
  • moving clock 3 as slowly as possible (in order to avoid relative time dilation) to clock 2
  • setting clock 2’s time to clock 3’s time
    (source)

and:

  • that makes more sense than synchronizing two clocks and then moving them around
  • SR’s definitions are a part of the theory, because they affect its results; you can’t change its definitions and then say the theory is wrong because of changes you made to it (well, obviously, you just did, but hopefully you can see why this is wrong)

Reposted for truth.

P.S. Your not understanding the math doesn’t make the math go away. E.g., Itself’s demonstration that Lorentz transformations imply the speed of light is constant for all observers in inertial frames still holds. Maybe you can get your scientist friend, who totally really exists, to do the math for you? It’s post 187.

519

Case in point.

Measure it and come back to us.

This is exactly what we’re talking about. You assume outcomes to experiments that can’t actually happen.

Try the actual fucking experiment. It doesn’t work the way you think it does. This literally enrages the engineer in me. Too many fucking crackpots propose little theories that can be easily disproven with the slightest modicum of actual work. SO, SHOW THE FUCKING WORK. Either you’re right and you measure what you think you will (Hello, Nobel Prize!) or you are wrong and should reconsider your life choices.

And that’s the saddest thing about all your little thought experiments. You assume you are correct, so you don’t bother actually testing them. Well, test them out. Why do you think relativity has been accepted? It’s not because of some bizarre “orthodoxy”. It’s because the math corresponds to what people measure in the real world. Unlike your case, where there’s a big fucking void in the intersection of your little ideas and reality.

520

Could someone get Susanann in here to sell this guy some gold?

521

It is clear in the Sagnac effect that the speed of light never exceeds c in any inertial frame, indeed the exact form of the Sagnac effect can be derived from this fact. Generally (though not absolutely) speaking theories which don’t preserve the speed of light in inertial frames can’t explain the Sagnac effect.

Whether the speed of light is c in non-interial frames in special relativity is another matter. The problem being that special relativity defines very nicely global inertial frames, but nice global non-inertial frames are hard to come by. Take the Rindler Coordinate chart, which is probably the ‘nicest’ spatially-extended coordinate system there representing a non-inertial observer (NB Rindler coordinates only apply to a very special class of non-inertial observer), certainly the coordinate speed of light in the Rindler chart is not generally c (it is in fact non-constant and can even be arbitrarily small). However the question you have to ask is what is the physical validity of such spatially-extended non-inertial systems. The Rindler chart fails to cover all of spacetime and coordinate singularity occurs called the Rindler horizon which looks almost exactly like the event horizon of a black hole, which of course is nothing more than an artifact of the Rindler chart.