Good point. The constant rotation shown by the gyroscope would be a continuing indication that the person on Earth was on Earth - making a continuing assymmetry between the Earth person and the space person (who would not have the daily rotation). You’ve definitely established a way to distinguish between the two persons.
The gyroscope tells him that he’s turned around - you acknowleded that just a few sentences ago.
Bretheren, we are gathered here today to mourn the passing of EQ, alias equivalence principle. EQ has been hanging on to life for some time now, but has finally succumbed. The final nail in the coffin of his tortured existence was hammered in by Andy L, who by a beautiful piece of logic, pointed out that gravity and acceleration were not equal.
The final truth dawned on me as I was perusing the problem of the turn around in the rocket consisting of 60 seconds of freefall followed by 1G acceleration, and the comparison with the chest on Earth being in freefall for 60 seconds and then being in 1G acceleration. Andy quite correctly pointed out that the man in the chest on Earth, after 60 seconds freefall, would be at a very high velocity - to be precise 588.4 meters per second relative to the Earth, and therefore relative to the chest when it stops. At the moment the 1G returns and the chest stops, he would be spread like strawberry jam on the floor of the chest, whereas the man in the chest in the rocket is doing zero meters per second relative to the chest when the 1G acceleration returns, and would hardly graze his knees during the impact with the floor.
Congratulations Andy, on disproving the Equivalence Principle. As you would not have done it without my help on this forum, may I claim 50% credit? We can call this work the TomAndy disproof.
Now back to more serious refutations. HMHW asked “What, in particular, do you feel needs to be commented on?” as a follow up to the following comment :-
I notice no references to either Einstein’s adress to the Prussian Acadamy of Sciences, or to Tom Van Flandern’s page. Does anybody care to comment?
You should be commenting on the fact that in 1921, Einstein realised that he was wrong about time dilation and length contraction in SRT. He just could not bring himself to admit it in one sentence however, but the end result is that he then (in 1921) said "…Poincare, in my opinion is right. The idea of the measuring rod and the idea of the clock cooordinated with it in the theory of relativity do not find their exact correspondance in the real world… "
You should also comment the fact that LET not SRT was used to synchronise the GPS satellites
As you can tell, I’ve sort of given up, I don’t feel Tomh is being honest.
Just point out though, for all the difference it makes, that of course the relativstic paradigm as opposed to the Lorentz ether theory paradigm was used for GPS. And the perosnal feeling of Einstein cannot be used as evidence for or against a theory, that’s not how physics works (see QM). Purely as a matter of historical accuracy though, of course Einstein did not ‘recant’ on special relativity in 1921, to interpret what he said in such a way is barmy, especially given all his later writings.
Thank you for graciously acknowledging the flaws in your thought experiment. It was a very interesting problem to think about. I may mention your examination when explaining how the Equivalence Principle ought be applied.
Einstein’s opinions of Poincare’s thoughts about the philosophy of science aren’t a big interest of mine. Einstein and Poincare no doubt agreed on a bunch of things, but I don’t suspect that Einstein was hinting about any major change of heart during this speech.
Van Flandern left the GPS program very early on (in 1983, well before the program reached operability). Even if it originally did not include relativistic effects, it does now (as discussed here
http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/ptti/1996/Vol%2028_16.pdf).
On the off chance it helps any, of course the equivalence principle is perfectly valid in what AndyL said, you’re just misapplying it – it holds as long as both observers are in an equivalent state of acceleration, i.e. both can be described in one reference frame experiencing 1g. As soon as that symmetry breaks, i.e. the moving observer changes reference frames, causing an inequivalence between the observers, of course the effects observed in both frames will differ. In particular, as we have established, the moving observer will experience a larger time dilation over the course of the experiment.
What Einstein thought or didn’t think I don’t know, but of course that sentence is perfectly in accordance with believing in special relativity; and even if it weren’t, what do you think it would prove, if Einstein were to recant? Reportedly, Galileo did, too, but that didn’t stop the Earth from revolving around the Sun. What Einstein thought, or what you think he thought, has no bearing on the accuracy of relativity.
I don’t know anything about that; but if LET is meant in the modern sense, then it’s a theory that is experimentally equivalent to SR, in particular including the Lorentz transformation – so neither mathematics nor consequences would change depending on which one you used, only the interpretation – an absolute spacetime that only looks special relativistic because of the fields that populate it versus a spacetime that simply is special relativistic – differs, which GPS doesn’t care one whit about.
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On the off chance it helps any, of course the equivalence principle is perfectly valid in what AndyL said, you’re just misapplying it – it holds as long as both observers are in an equivalent state of acceleration…
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Now its my turn to say you’re wrong. The EQ is specifically about the equivalence of gravity and acceleration - not one accelerated frame to another accelerated frame. Chapter XX of the previously mentioned book.
TAMOP thinks I am being dishonest. I refute that. What I have done though, is not to lay all my cards on the table before we started, but that is not being dishonest. For instance, I have known all along that the EQ is wrong, but have gone along with it because it would have been impossible to get this discussion going otherwise.
See my web page :- http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/carmam/Hollings.html
and Hans Zweig’s :- http://www.aquestionoftime.com/
Hans’ refutation is very elegant, mine is not so elegant but is still correct.
Andy L provided us with another.
I said early on that my argument was with SRT, and was trying to steer the discussion to where I could seamlessly insert the fact about Einstein’s change of heart. I failed miserably, but learned a lot on the way.
Am I the only one who thinks it odd that relativists - adherents to Einstein’s theories, when faced with that address to the Prussian Acamedy of Sciences, are still believers? Einstein changed his mind, and therefore his theories, many times, as can be seen by reading his papers in chronological order.
The point about LET being very close to SRT is misleading. LET allows for faster than light travel and a preferred FR, which in the case of GPS synchronisation, is the Earth. The Earth then becomes the “standard” clock, and the GPS satellites are synchronised to it.
From Tom Van Flandern’s website :-
Of critical importance to choosing the model that best represents nature, none of the eleven independent experiments testing SR verify frame reciprocity or distinguish SR from LR. In fact, historically, de Sitter, Sagnac, Michelson, and Ives concluded from their respective experiments that SR was falsified in favor of the Lorentz theory*. Indeed, the GPS itself is a practical realization of Lorentz’s “universal time”, wherein all clocks remain synchronized despite being in many different frames with high relative speeds.
Each clock in the GPS system is synchronized to an imaginary clock in the Earth-centered inertial (ECI) frame, instantaneously co-located with the moving clock, and assumed to be in a gravitational potential equal to that at sea level at Earth’s poles. (Note that the GPS makes use of the Lorentzian preferred frame, the local gravity field.) This trick makes the clock rates all the same as they would have been if they were at rest in the ECI frame and in a constant potential field. This is all very nice, but hardly what Einstein envisioned when speaking of two clocks in relative motion, one at a station and one on a passing train. How simple special relativity would have become all these years if physicists had realized that all they had to do was reset the clock rates so they all ticked at the same rate as the reference clock in the local gravity field!
The converse is also true. Suppose we did not change the clock rates before launch, but instead let them tick at their design rates in accord with whatever speed and potential they experienced in orbit. Now, suppose we tried to Einstein-synchronize the system of clocks. Satellite and ground clocks would tick at different rates. And if we tried to work in any local, instantaneously co-moving inertial frame, the corrections needed to synchronize with each orbiting clock would be unique to that observer’s frame and different from moment to moment because both clocks are accelerating. The practical difficulties of operating the system would be virtually insurmountable. What we would gain by doing that is constancy of the measured speed of light in all inertial frames. But because all clocks are now re-synchronized to just the ECI frame in the GPS, the speed of light is constant in that one frame, and the invariance of the speed of light in other inertial frames is of no practical value.
Notice in that last sentence, that the speed of light is not a constant in all frames.
I have been on other forums where the tone got very nasty, and swearwords thrown about along with insults. You are all gentlemen (and to be politically correct, perhaps some ladies). It would apear that this discussion is over, but watch this space!
Not to be blunt, but the discussion never started. You claimed some things, people explained why you were wrong, you ignored their responses. That’s not a discussion.
Definition - “Discussion means talking about something with other people in order to reach some kind of decision”.
I would call agreeing with Andy L some kind of decision wouldn’t you? As for ignoring responses, I am totally at a loss as to why you would think that. I replied to as many responses as I could.
Am I wrong about the equivalence principle? We have just demonstrated on this forum that it is possible to detect the difference between an accelerated chest and a chest in a gravitational field, despite Einstein telling us there is no way to tell the difference.
Can I leave now?
No we haven’t - we’ve shown that a self-contradictory thought experiment (one that talks about a chest that is both on the surface of the Earth, and in free fall) produces incorrect conclusions. I thought you were admitting that when you joked above about “disproving the equivalence principle”.
I am not surprised that scientists care more about the fact the Einstein’s predictions of physical phenomena are accurate, than that his philosophical discussions can be misunderstood.
Sure, why not…
In your thought experiment, the experience of the people inside the chests is not symmetrical.
Chest A (On the Earth):
Chest B (On the Spaceship):
Even if you make sure steps 1 & 4 are identical, the differences introduced by steps 2 & 3 break the symmetry. Specifically, the 180 degree rotation experienced by the occupant of Chest B means that his second “upward” acceleration is in a different direction.
I didn’t read all the responses to this question, so I apologize if I’m repeating.
Time travels slower for those on the ship. If we could observe them from Earth, they would appear to be moving in slow motion.
However, traveling faster than the speed of light is impossible no matter the size and power of the ship because relativity states the faster you travel, the ships mass increases exponentially. So the faster you go, the heavier the ship is, the more power required, increasing the necessary fuel load which makes the ship heavier, requiring more power to go faster, and on and on…
An interesting side note: according to Stephen Hawking, time travel to the past is impossible, but time travel to the future can be done… On a ship traveling at 99% of the speed of light, each day that passes equates to one year on Earth. So if you could travel at 99% of the speed of light for one year, you would return to Earth 365 years in the future.
But you can’t go back.
I think you’ll find those principles were worked out (without benefit of time travel) some decades before Stephen Hawking was born.
Yes, you are wrong.
That’s entirely up to you.
I’m quite aware of that, but I was referring to a specific speech I heard Stephen Hawking give, so I credited him. Is that OK with you?
I’m not going anywhere while you are all still talking about me.
The above point is easy to refute. It is on my web site and on this forum in a very early posting of mine (if not the first).
The applicable equation is :- m = m0 / sqrt(1 - (v/c)^2) .
m = mass of body under discussion
m0 = rest mass of same body
v = velocity (but see below)
we all know c
All experiments which have been done to “prove” mass increase, have used an external power source ie a particle accelerator. The PA and the particle itself consist of two seperate FRs, and the power source is electro magnetic. The PA is pushing (from eg FR1) the particle (in eg FR2) using a force which is itself constrained to c, so cannot possible push anything faster than that speed, hence the illusion of mass increase.
Contrast that scenario with this one. The rocket motor is in the rocket, therefore in the same FR as the rocket. The v in the above equation is the relative velocity between the rocket and its power source (the rocket motor). The relative velocity between motor and rocket is zero. Make v = 0 in the above equation and you will see that m = m0. There is no mass increase.
Well it looks like you’ve suceeded at disproving one of the most tested theories in the history of science.
Can we expect a paper to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal of some kind soon?
Mass increase isn’t generally considered a good way to look at the outcome of SR, but never mind that. You can’t disprove something by totally misrepresenting it. The concept requires an observer in a different reference frame, not an observer connected to the source of propulsion. SR follows very obviously from accepting an invariant light speed. The experiments have so far failed to falsify SR and GR in the eyes of practically every scientist examining them.
How does your ideas deal with the results of Michelson-Morley?
Oh, and experiments with particle accelerators show that the kinetic energy of particles follow Ek = mc^2 (1 - γ) . That’s what relativity predicts, not a mass increase as you’ve just completely not disproven.
Yes, it’s well known that from the rocket’s frame of reference, it’s mass doesn’t increase. Here’s a helpful mathematical discussion if you have any questions http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.html
As someone on this forum said quite a while ago “you can’t just wave your hands in the air and say it is so…” or something like that.
Andy L pointed out a way that the man in the chest on Earth can tell that he is in a gravitational field and not an accelerated field, and therefore by inference, the man in the accelerated field can do likewise. Einstein’s EQ stipulates that there is no experiment which can detect a difference. There are now three that I know of, one by me, one by Hans Zweig, and one by Andy L.
Naita asked :-
“How does your ideas deal with the results of Michelson-Morley?”
All the facts that seem to require special or general relativity can be more simply explained by assuming an ether that corresponds to the local gravitational field. Michelson found no “ether wind,” or fringe shift, because of course the Earth’s gravitational field moves forward with the Earth. As for the bending of starlight near the Sun, the confirmation of general relativity that made Einstein world-famous, it is easily explained given a non-uniform light medium.