Armchair theorizing (or, using the technical terminology, “bullshitting”) can be a useful exercise which helps suggest avenues of research.
However, at some time the armchairman needs to put his money where his mouth is. Show your work, design and perform the experiment, and demonstrate whether the bullshittery matches, models, or gives any insight into the actual workings of the real world. Until then it is just storytelling and word games.
If you claim you do not have the tools or understanding to perform the experiments or work through the math, then you do not have enough understanding to recognize whether your “though experiments” can be productive.
Given that we have been* unable to convince you that you are not a professional physicist*, what are the odds of success in convincing you of possible errors in other fields of thought?
You cannot claim to be a physicist professional or otherwise. If you were, you could do what physicist do - which is prove your concepts - but you can’t. What’s very curious to me is why someone who claims to read (and understand) hundreds of physics books at a time won’t take the relatively easy step of checking out a fraction of that number of math books and learn the means to prove your theory. I have a feeling you are afraid of what you might learn.
Special relativity is incorrect in setting the speed limit at C because it doesn’t adequately explain how the one way speed of light (the actual speed of light in one direction, not the average speed on light both directions) can be seen as C in inertial frames. No Lorentz transformations or Lorentz “BOOSTS” can slow down a speeding photon due to relative motion, except orthogonally.
Special relativity is incorrect in setting the speed limit at C because it doesn’t adequately explain why the speed of light can be much greater than and lesser than C relative to the rotating frame around the whole loop, but then claim the speed of light is equal to C in both directions, that is illogical and readily proven otherwise.
Special relativity is wrong in claiming that mass increases with relativistic velocities because this would allow changing the inertial mass of a gyroscope (or 2 counter-rotating gyroscopes) such that spinning it up and throwing it to the rear of the ship, then stopping the rotation then stopping the now less inertially massive gyroscope would break both the conservation of energy and Newtons law of equal and opposite direction.
Special relativity is incorrect in claiming that there are no preferred frames and then proclaiming that every frame experiences simultaneously faster and slower time than any other frame, and this claim can be shown to be false with various thought experiments that SR cannon solve.
Special relativity is incorrect in claiming the same as the previous example but with length, this becomes untenable if rotation is employed as the circumference of the disk shrinks according to the non-rotating frame allowing something to small to be placed around it.
Special relativity is incorrect in setting the speed limit at C because Quantum Mechanics breaks this in many examples, my favourite is the decision a photon makes at the surface of a partially reflective surface which is based on immediate knowledge of the depth of that surface and any other optically relivant surfaces below.
Special relativity is incorrect in setting the speed limit at C because it doesn’t adequately explain why the evidence that the speed of light being C (which I assert is extremely poor, and actually does not show the one way speed of light is C) should result in such a hugely contradictory theory then far far simpler and more plausible theories can account for the results.
Special relativity is incorrect in setting the speed limit at C because it doesn’t adequately explain observations of the speed of light being exceeded by many times over in astronomical observations.
Special relativity is incorrect in setting the speed limit at C because it doesn’t adequately explain why a convention of synchronization that precludes measuring the one way speed of light should be accepted, when other synch schemes exist that do not act in this ‘protective’ manner.
I could probably do more, but that should suffice for now.
“Can be seen” is the problem in this statement. If I buy something that costs $3 by giving $10 and getting $7 in change, it doesn’t mean I bought something that cost $10 or $7. The only observationally relevant quantity in the math is $3. Likewise, the only observationally relevant quantity is the two-way speed of light unless you are willing to get into the synchronization of separated clocks, which you eschewed upthread and for which you haven’t constructed a well-formed thought experiment.
I don’t know what “the whole loop” means here, so I’ll skip this one. Presumably this was one of the dozens of thought experiments you jumped between.
I’ll stop this one here, because SR doesn’t claim that mass increases with relativistic velocities in the way you are saying. There are many quantities that increase with velocity, and there are many quantities that has the word “mass” in their definition, but you can’t pick and choose these randomly in your “analysis”. This is why math is essential. Words get used for multiple things, and you are mixing definitions. Heck, “mass” is the thing that Christians attend around Christmas time, and its also the lump that a surgeon extracts from a cancer patient.
SR doesn’t “proclaim” that every frame experiences simultaneously faster and slower time than any other frame. Frames don’t experience anything. Observers do, and in a typical “gotcha” thought experiment, you have to be more careful about observers that have to switch frames during the experiment.
Again, a thought experiment I didn’t see due to the whiplash all the jumping around was causing.
A photon makes no such instantaneous decision. The standard treatment of the interaction of light with matter is fully compatible with special relativity. There are certainly problems where it is convenient to approximate the speed of light as infinite. But that’s just an approximation. The fact that I can say “I see light as soon as I flip a light switch” doesn’t disprove relativity. It just means I’m making an approximate statement. A full, correct treatment would correctly predict that I see the light a little bit after I flip the light switch. Most introductory treatments of quantum mechanics work in an explicitly non-relativistic regime to keep the math from getting cumbersome.
There is no contradiction in the theory. See above and below. For what it’s worth, while relativity is a beautifully simple theory, it doesn’t matter how beautiful a theory is. It just matters if it matches reality.
Citation? There are no astronomical observations demonstrating light traveling faster than c.
The convention doesn’t preclude measuring the one-way speed. It defines what you mean by speed. My financial example from above is relevant. If you choose to define the cost of an apple as the amount of money I originally hand over to the cashier ($10) before receiving my change, that is fine, and you can even choose to measure that quantity. If someone else chooses to define the cost as the net cash I leave with the cashier ($3), that’s fine, too. It would be erroneous to say, though, that all of economics is wrong because this same transition costs $10 and $3 at the same time. Someone making such a bold claim is just not being careful about how “cost” is defined.
Returning to what I said upthread, if you want to convince anyone that you are correct or if you want to discover that you have a misconception yourself, you need to choose one point and one thought experiment, ideally the simplest one for which you are sure you can demonstrate a failure of SR and, thus, for which you would be most convinced of a mistake on your part if the logic doesn’t stand up to step-by-step scrutiny. Thrashing around and not drilling down into the issues of a single situation is fruitless and is the core source of the disconnect you are having with participants in the thread. If you are just interested in splashing claims around until one lands in the sweet spot of “too murky to understand, too murky to refute”, then you will indeed get to yell “See!?” But I know you recognize that this isn’t advancing scientific knowledge. It’s just schoolyard bickering. You need to engage your interlocutors with as open a mind as you expect of them and with as fair a chance to follow a train of thought to its logical end.
It explains it perfectly as a consequence of choice of clock synchronisation, simultaneity etc.
If you want to claim the Sagnac effect as evidence of the one way speed of light being other than c in a rotating reference frame, then you have to deal with sending light opposite ways round a loop being proof of the one way speed of light being exactly c in a non-rotating frame.
If you instead claim the the latter example doesn’t show the one way speed after all …
Sagnac is a good one, light can complete the loop many times in one direction before it can complete one loop in the other direction from the perspective of the rotating frame.
And similar such as Michelson-Pearson-Gale.
The original Michelson Morley experiment showed a drift, just not what was expected for a non-entrained aether.
There are many other interferometry experiments that could be checked, but probably most don’t agree with the speed of light being C.
Additionally the constancy of C is also questioned:
Velocities exceeding C were discovered by the inventor of the modern AC electrical grid, the patent offices’s pick for the real inventor of radio and the synchronous motor, Tesla. This may not be considered light, but it was something he found notably exceeding C.
The GPS system, but I am unsure of the exact details, is it a speed of light thing or a time dilation disagreement with SR, I don’t know.
I have also heard that the radio signals from one of the probes sent into space disagreed with the speed of light, I forget the details (was it Voyager?) and it was something I heard in an interview.
I have also read an article from the International Tesla Symposium of a successful attempt to send special impulses faster down a wire than normal electrical signals.
There are also claims of light moving in FTL ways in various lab experiments, these quickly become confusing about what is being found to be FTL, the actual speed of light or some interference pattern. Many seem to say that the experiments exceeds the speed of light, only later to say that the speed of light wasn’t broken.
In some cases such as NEC it seems maybe the retraction is false.
There are actually more very good arguments in the final post on stormfront by user ‘Wernerheisenberg’ that I mentioned previously: http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t928728-28/
Again, Google turned this up, and the post makes good arguments, I am reluctant to link to a sickeningly racist message board but the admins will delete anything I copy and post the link anyway.
The arguments are valid and I do not have the inclination to reproduce it in my own words, however more evidence that you requested is in that post.
Do you read your citations? The first two sentences in this link: “Every physicist is taught that information cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light. Yet laboratory experiments done over the last 30 years clearly show that some things appear to break this speed limit without upturning Einstein’s special theory of relativity.” (bolding mine)
This is the same physics that leads to the slowing or stopping of light. This is light in a medium. It is completely compatible with relativity and has no bearing on whether light traveling through free space does or doesn’t travel at c.
From the second paragraph: “[T]he energy of the pulse still travels at the speed of light, which means that information is transferred in agreement with Einstein’s theory.” (bolding mine)
Then later: “But like anomalous dispersion seen in the lab, the pulsar’s superluminal pulses do not violate causality or relativity”. (bolding mine)
It doesn’t unless you use obviously rigged means of clock synch.
But in a Sagnac loop if the velocity is exteme enough it becomes faster to send a message around the long way, this overcomes the rigged nature of Einsteins method of clock synch making it possible to find the speed of light to be different in the
2 directions.
Additionally the synch from the center of rotation which is not directionally biased will show the speed of light to exceed C in one direction and be below C in the other direction according to SR supporter Ronald Raygun.
A rigged method that would give the same results with sound is obviously rigged because we know sound moves relative to the air.
That is no problem if it is recognized that the speed of light in a Sagnac loop can be very different CW .vs CCW (in one directin exceeding C) which SR asserts is true.
And this can be found even measuring the speed of light in a portion of the loop with a clock synch scheme that isn’t rigged as at least one SR supporter admits.
Then all that is needed is to increase the size of the loop until the arc of the rotational frame is slight and appears over a small portion of time to be almost imperceptibly different to a straight line.
This means that a spaceship could move in a very slight arc around a distant pulsar, synchronize it’s clocks from the pulsar and now it would be identical to the synch scheme that user “R’R” said can be used to measure the speed of light in a Sagnac loop to be greater than C in one direction and less than C in the other.
This can even be made to work with perfect (and practically not possible) inertial reference frames, but that requires going a bit deeper.
Not quite sure what you mean, but as Wikipedia says, Einstein’s synch scheme makes the one way speed of light measurement impossible, it actually makes it a 2 ways speed of light experiment as the synch signal is the other half of the measurement.
Yes, I did.
But that is IMO just evidence of the state of denial that exists.
The speed of light should not be able to be broken as that can bust SR, but if it is, that’s ok SR still lives since things can exceed the speed of light now.
What?
I have read various different articles on the same news, I did not read this one.
Each one has a different logic behind why this does not break SR.
One is that the photon can travel faster than C provided that it doesn’t carry any information.
And yet photons DO carry information.
This then makes it a complex job of deciphering the actual evidence to see if it is a real breach that is being ‘fixed’ to conform to theory. And I do not have access to the actual evidence.
Or a non-breach that is being giving the impression of breaching the speed of light.
At any rate I am aware there are arguments against it, and seemingly different ones.
I was asked for evidence of the speed of light exceeding C, and this very may well be evidence that is being twisted to conform with SR, or not.
If the curve is almost imperceptibly different, then the effect will be almost imperceptibly different. Or, to put it a different way. The Sagnac related effects of using a rotating frame will be as perceptible as any other effect that tells you that you’re not in an inertial frame.
No, in an inertial reference frame you won’t get the same result.
What the quote said was that Einstein synch is the same as slow moving clock synch in inertial reference frames. In the inertial frame you can’t move the clocks along a radius, because there are no radii. So moving the clocks will look differently in a different reference frame moving with respect to the one you’re synching the clocks in, and the disagreement in what constitutes simultaneity will be just what is needed for observers in both reference frames to agree that light speed is c in whichever direction you measure.
That’s the problem: you’re wrong at the general school yard level! Your lack of understanding of relativity operates at junior high school stage of mathematics.
This has been explained to you dozens of times now, and yet you keep saying, “No one has addressed my points.” Yes, we have. Repeatedly. You just refuse to acknowledge this.
This has driven one of our members, Colibri, normally one of the most tolerant, reasonable, and patient members of this board, to indulge in rude name-calling against you. Everyone else here gets the hint. You don’t.
Get the damn hint, kid. You don’t know as much as you say you do. Your claims have been thoroughly debunked. You’re just using repetition as a form of argument.
(And…at this point, so am I. The difference is, you’ve been dishonest, and not a single other one of us here has been. You’re acting like a creationist, and some of us here have begun to treat you like one.)
I’m only counting theories that have actually been meaningfully described and examined of course, not whatever cobbled together mess you have in your mind.
It’s a vibrating mirror, there are no inertial references frames where it isn’t vibrating. No preferred frame required.
Lorentz transformation changes the entire frame of reference observed by someone in another frame of reference. It explains the actual observed behavior of light, and of moving objects, in moving frames of reference.
Back this up with a reference, please. Relativity explains the Sagnac effect.
As noted in this thread, physicists don’t say “mass increases with relativistic velocities” any more, but use a different formulation. However, mass is (at a simplistic level) observed to increase with relativistic velocities. This is shown in the design of particle accelerators. Very fast-moving objects are harder to accelerate further, exactly as if they have increased mass.
This is wrong. You have not been able to cite any studies or experiments showing this claimed effect. You have not been able to construct a well-defined thought experiment. Furthermore, since you don’t have any skill at mathematics, you are not able to predict what the outcome of your experiments ought to be, either under relativity or under your own personal revision of it.
In any case, SR exactly explains the matter of relative frames of reference. That’s what it was created to do. There was an observational conundrum, and Einstein solved it by showing that frames of reference do not change the observed speed of light.
That’s what relativity is. You cannot meaningfully say “It cannot explain it” because that’s exactly what it does. It’s like arguing, “Arithmetic cannot explain why 2 + 2 = 5.” Well, gosh, no, it can’t. But that’s because 2 + 2 doesn’t equal 5.
You have also never actually defined your personal revision of it. It would be kind of nice for you to tell us what you do believe, as well as harping incessantly (and incorrectly) on what you don’t believe.
You’ve repeated this many times, and it still doesn’t make sense. You keep adding “rotation” to the classic barn-and-ladder example, as if it makes a difference. Until you comprehend the barn-and-ladder example, as it is, you don’t gain anything by adding unnecessary complications to it.
No actual objects travel faster than light, even in the weirdest quantum physics models. No “signal” can be sent via quantum entanglement. The photon has no “knowledge” of anything external to it. Your understanding of quantum physics is no better than your understanding of relativity.
Please cite evidence for this claim. Point us to experimental evidence that the speed of light, as understood, results in any contradictions.
Cite, please? Show us one example of light being detected from an astronomical object “earlier” than it should.
(Do you comprehend the speed-of-light measurement using the satellites of Jupiter, which I explained in an earlier post?)
Cite, please, that this ever happens or has ever been observed.
You’re being dishonest here, but, worse, you’re being childish. You are making empty claims, without being able to back them up from any external scientific source.
Fair enough. Are you interested in seeing evidence and hearing explanations that help you understand which it is? If ‘yes’, I implore you to put in the effort that you ask of everyone else and walk through this post. I promise you will learn something interesting, and hopefully that is reward enough. If something doesn’t make sense, please ask rather than introduce a new thought experiment or line of discussion.
Grab a drink and watch this video here demonstrating visually the difference between the speed that a wave (photon) moves and the speed that a wave packet moves. (The pattern is developed fully after 30 seconds or so, which I’ve linked directly to.)
There are exactly two things to understand about what you are seeing, and no math beyond basic arithmetic is required.
(1) The two waves at the top are added together to produce the wave at the bottom. To convince yourself of this, pause the video at any point. I’ll use t=35 seconds for my example here. At that time, the bottom wave is pinched down to zero around horizontal positions -1 and 2. Let’s look at the -1 position. Notice that the blue and red waves on top have opposite values here: the red one is low and the blue one is high. Those negate one another when added together to form that point on the bottom wave. More mathematically, the red wave has height -1 and the blue wave has height +1, so the black wave (the addition of the two) has height 0. Now take a look near horizontal position 0.5, where the black wave has its full variation going on, from height -2 to height +2, oscillating back and forth. Exactly at the peak value of the black wave, you’ll notice that the blue and red waves are “synced” up. Both are at their maximum values of +1. That is, “red + blue = black” works out to “1 + 1 = 2”, which is what the waves show at that point. Do the same check at a couple of oddball horizontal points as well to see that it’s not something special that happens at certain location. The whole black wave pattern is purely a consequence of adding the very simple red and blue waves together.
(2) Notice the green dot on the bottom wave. It is pinned to one point on the crests/troughs and follows that crest/trough as the black wave moves to the right. Now look at the pink dot on the bottom wave. It is pinned to a peak in the larger pattern that is sculpting the black wave. Notice that this peak amplitude point, the pink dot, moves to the right very quickly. Its speed is much higher than the speeds of the blue and red waves themselves, yet they are the source of the black wave!
If there were a physical law that said exactly what speeds the blue and red waves had to move at, the pink dot can happily move faster than that without violating that rule, as the video demonstrates.
Does this make sense? Was it new to you?
If it was new to you, could it be possible that there is more that might be new to you when approaching SR and your various citations? If the very simple set up in this video can make peculiar things happen, then carefully constructed physics experiments might be able to do the same, yes? Without breaking any rules, yes?