Reply Ronald Raygun from closed thread: Why Special Relativity is wrong and the speed of light

[mythoughts]

@Ronald_Raygun

Let’s not dance around what this paradox is. This is the well-known ladder paradox (or barn paradox), and its resolution is precisely the fact that simultaneity is relative. I close the doors simultaneously in my reference frame. Yes, in a manner of speaking, this “looks to be simultaneous to [me]”, but this isn’t a problem. It looks simultaneous in one reference frame, and not simultaneous in a different reference frame.

It is a length contraction paradox, so it is going to have length and contraction in it.
And I made it look like the barn paradox because I am vaguely aware of it.

But there are no doors and no issues with simultaneity.

Take a hexagon disk, rotate it, even though it is rotation there must be SR length contraction since the deviation of curved to linear is relative and infinity variable, so the length of the sides contract as you rotate it and you can then fit it in the cylinder.

The paradox is not different, there are no doors as there is no exit.
It can fit around permanently in one frame (Lab).
But can’t even enter the cylinder at all in the other (disk).

The other one makes sense of both observations, this one can’t, a cylinder can’t be simultaneously placed around the hexagon and simultaneously not around it because it won’t fit.

No shit. At any non-zero speed, the plank can only remain in the barn for a finite amount of time. As this speed increases, the time decreases. What’s your point?

My point is that you can only alter my experiment until it is different and now like one I already knew and knew the solution to.

OK. This is a different – but also well-known – paradox, the Ehrenfest paradox. I’m going to change your hexagonal disk back to a circular one,

Harder to measure lengths now, so let’s still put marks on it.

The plank argument I made is identical except we remove sides of the hexagon till you arrive at one, a plank.

since by your own admission its peculiar geometry is to make visualization easier. The radius of your disk doesn’t shrink, because any point along the circumference moves orthogonally to the radial vector. Since the radius doesn’t shrink, your disk can’t fit into a cylinder of smaller radius.

Since the radius doesn’t shrink the length can’t contract, well that is an issue it suggests the disk breaks, in other words and disk rotating is a paradox, one thing must happen the other thing can’t happen, but both must happen.

Never the less the hexagon can be either converted an outline of a hexagon, or back to one side of the hexagon.t’s self with anything that rotates.

If anything that is moving in a way that could be consistent with a rotating disk of any size it can’t undergo length contraction at all! Since that super slight curve in it’s motion could be because it is part of a galaxy sized rotation/orbit etc!

Now unless you have motion that can’t POSSIBLY describe a portion of a very large circular motion of ANY size!?!?!

So the largest galaxy or larger no matter how fast it rotates can’t undergo any length contraction if we compare it to our Hexagon.

Thanks for breaking Relativity for me.

Yes, the circumference gets smaller by a factor of gamma. Since the circumference is no longer 2πR, we conclude that the disk is not in Euclidean space. Acceleration must warp spacetime.

So the circumference does get smaller!
Great, if we were to put a measuring tape around the new smaller circumference, and before it was rotating it was 20 units of length in circumference, and not is is rotating enough to be 19 units of length we can make the measuring tape or the cylinder fit since the cylinder as the circumference but the center is a hole happy to accept and geometry of space with no concern.

This comment reveals that you don’t really understand what doing the math actually entails, and makes me suspect that you don’t trust mathematics because you refuse to put in the work to understand mathematics. You don’t need to assign a precise length to the plank – just call it L in the rest frame.

– In a sense, the burden of proof is on you to explain why the paradox fails

Since my paradox is sound, it fails to fail, so I fail to fail it.

Special relativity is a mathematical theory built upon a few axioms about the nature of the physical world. Any contradiction must be mathematical,

Er, no.
If what it describes in the physical world paradoxical I agree.

I am sure it is possible that it could be flawless mathematically, but it is flawed when ported into what can be possible in reality.

I am going to ignore further arguments and just say “already asked and answered ad nauseam, see elsewhere”.

If fact that could cover a lot of what I say.

and once you point out what that contradiction is, you should be able to trace it back to which axioms are in conflict, and thus which we need to get rid of or alter.

IF it is in flaw mathematically.

A lot of things can be done with math without making sense physically, however open minded.

– To expand on the previous point, no one said math is easy. It takes a lot of time, something that few people have.

People HAVE said it is easy.
But one thing is for sure, I don’t have math when I spend so much time answering questions about math I have already answered.
How’s that for a Paradox!

You guys must have nagged your mothers crazy with all the nagging for the same thing constantly. It’l just give you a belly ache if I do give you the math!

Since you are the one who wants to overturn relativity, please do so using mathematics or experimentation.

Yes, because no one reads math that I can’t be sure is internally inconsistent.

Great idea.
And I really have the kind of budget to do experiments of things involving relativistic velocities.

Are you for real? Oh, silly question.

Why am I limiting you to those? Because your paradox leads to contradiction due to common sense. Common sense is often wrong, particularly in physical regimes (such as relativistic or quantum ones) where our brains didn’t evolve, and so we must rely on experimentation and mathematics to navigate these domains.

Yes, that is the crux of it.
So if Relativity describes a paradox in reality but the math works then you will never see it is wrong because it describes math not the universe.

But if it gives you a can’t happen answer for reality and you accept in, as with the rotated disk, the circumference dilates, but if you measure the new circumference around the measuring tape reads 2 different lengths, the outside frame it is fitting snugly at 19 units of length closing the tape ends together.
But the rotating disk sees the marks on the measuring tape are smaller so the end of the tape now reads 21 units of length.

But the end of the measuring tape can point to the 19, the 20 or the 21, but it can’t be seen differently from different frames!
If it is closing around at 19 the other numbers are covered.

So sure, SR can describe reality if reality splits into 2!
Schroedinger’s measuring tape, it is in 2 states in 2 different frames at the same time.

And if you can believe that I have nothing I can say to you.

– Everyone is harping on you to do the math because when you do the math, you understand the problem and the paradox.

So, you must understand the problem above then?

So which is it?

I have had a scientist tell me it seem like a solid paradox (the experiment with 2 sensors in the other (moved) thread.

This is why math textbooks are filled with proofs that are “exercises left for the reader”. You understand physical theories best when you solve problems with them. Similarly, you can’t understand how to paint by simply watching someone paint – you have to get your hands dirty and play around. Arguing by thought experiment is fine, but it only enables you to pose questions (which are frequently ill-proposed because your assumptions aren’t explicit). It does not equip you with the machinery to answer those questions.

No, there are only so may options.

So? If I showed up at an academic conference on Islam with a dissertation on a new and radical interpretation of the Koran, but I don’t understand a lick of Arabic, who would take me seriously?

I don’t trust thought experiments because it is very easy to do something with language and without realizing it you have done something that is grammatically and semantically sensible but not physically sensible.

I don’t trust math because it is very possible to do something in math that is absurd if you could see physically what you were saying.

I could easily make an equation even at my skill level that takes physical things and does something with them that is find mathematically, but impossible physically.

Id SR is that, not flawed mathematically (which I do not believe, but can;t be sure) but nonsensical physically…

I can do the same thing.

I fail to see what this has to do with anything.
A few things about this paradox
How is she moving relative to me if we always remain the same distance from each other?

Consider the disk above, if one person is at 180 degrees and another at zero they are constantly heading in opposite directions.

If you are really having trouble understanding this, consider instead of a disk we had a 2 pulleys and a belt, now place you and the girl as far away from you as possible, as so:

her-> O O <-you

I don’t think there is an ascii aret char belt, but the O’s are the pulleys and the arrows point to the most distant points which compare to if it were a disk to 0 and 180.
She will never get far from you, but do you see that on the straight portion you will pass each other and be heading in opposite directions, she is moving realative to you.

In rotation that is constantly present, but the way that she is moving though always in sight is opposite.

I would also have relative motion to someone standing in the center of the disk but constantly see them and not be moving away.

Linear motion can’t do this for more that a moment.

I think you have ‘trouble with the curv’. (It’s a recent movie).

[/QUOTE]

Even if we were moving past each other, why is this a problem?

Really? Really? Getting up from a stationary position and moving is not notable acceleration?

[/QUOTE]

Getting up out of my chair involves very very slight acceleration, I would not expect to come back from the kitchen a few minutes later and have people overjoyed at my sudden miraculous return. You don’t look any older. Wow, that was some cup of tea!

Yeah, I said they walk, with their LEGS, not accelerate at 10000G and go to .8 c.
I have personally never noticed SR or GR time dilation in my day to day life, damn I must not be noticing! Then again, sometime I do wonder where the time went, OH!

Ok, should I have said that the acceleration from standing to walking does not seem to require analysis under GR for analysis of acceleration based time dilation, which I might add has been experimentally disproved with Muons at incredibly g-forces.

But it does! If you curve through space, you’re in an accelerated reference frame!

WALKING POWERED!
Are you saying I need to do this on a carousel to notice the effects?

Or are you claiming that if the difference between a linear velocity is .9c or .9c plus walking speed there will be a big difference?

How fast do you walk?

I’m not sure what you’re getting at here.

Ditto!

I am getting at the fact that if they each see the other time dilated for an extended period of time, much like if we sat in chairs opposite and both note the other is almost frozen in time right across from each other.
It quickly becomes untenable, and if we turned the effect off (stopped the rotation) and time returned to normal, both would expect to see the other with a late watch and no 5’oclock shadow like we have grown during the experiment.

Since the paradoxical appearance can’s be justified at all once the effect is ended, then both must see the other to have beards they didn’t have an instant ago (symmetrical), the missing time must be observed to happen with extreme rapidity as they come to a stop.

I have a feeling you’re confused about how infinitesimal quantities can be related, but it seems like the crux of your complaints against special relativity can be encapsulated in this quote of yours:

Are you referring obliquely to Selleri’s argument against special relativity? I’m not sure, but you’ve also made mention of walking around turntables and of trains on circular tracks, so I’d advise you to do some reading on the Sagnac effect, as well as on how different synchronization conventions cause Selleri’s paradox to disappear in the limit of an infinite radius (i.e., linear motion).

I am 99.9% sure it does not refer to Selleri’s argument.
I have not read it though. I very much expect it is unique.

[AClockworkMelon]

@mythoughts

I could easily make an equation even at my skill level that takes physical things and does something with them that is find mathematically, but impossible physically.

Do so.

[Gyrate]

@AClockworkMelon

Do so.

Two apples minus four apples equals negative two apples?

[AClockworkMelon]

@Gyrate

Two apples minus four apples equals negative two apples?

This clearly represents apple debt.

[Gyrate]

@AClockworkMelon

This clearly represents apple debt.

Thanks, Obama!

[Smeghead]

@mythoughts

I don’t trust math because it is very possible to do something in math that is absurd if you could see physically what you were saying.

Wow.

Is there anything left to say?

[mythoughts]

@AClockworkMelon

Do so.

water height in an unspecified volume cup in cm x the atomic number of mercury = firbulancy.
Firbulancy is a non-dimensional value that effects the half life of fictionium.

Sadly since fictiononium is harder to find that unobtanium I don’t have any handy to prove that the more water I put in a glass, bath or swimming pool, the faster it decays.

Oh, I have not said how it effects the half-life, paraboliclly, so be careful if you fill up anything too high and there is a mass of fictiononium in the water, crap could explode.

Look obviously when the point of making a rubbish equation I’m going to make it absurd and obvious, but take an equation that deals in volume and switch it to area.

Probably nothing will break but it won’t make any sense anymore.

I guess everyone has a choice.

They can realize that there is no evidence against an entrained aether, and this describes a common sense world and is compatible with all evidence.

Or they can take a mathematical model that creates predictions that are paradoxical, you literally need 2 things to happen at time as with the tape measure about and basically choose to believe a literally indescribable reality.
I say that because no one has tried to describe what will happen to my experiments completely, and the only one that did predicted a non-vibrating dropped clock oscillating between running fast and slow or some nonsense, and then left because I asked him what the frequency would be determined by.

So if you want to believe a simple truth or an unconvincing fiction that has the stamp of orthodox approval but literally can’t be defended by anything other than appeals to authority, asking for math I am unskilled to provide and school yard taunts…

Then obviously you’d rather believe a bunch of bull than an obvious truth.

There is no experiment that shows the constancy of light that would not also show the constancy of sound.

Good by if that is you, if you’d rather keep a theory that can’t describe what would happen in reality if these thought experiments were conducted.

[Gyrate]

@Smeghead

Wow.

Is there anything left to say?

It is certainly quite difficult to defend or disprove Special Relativity without recourse to math, given that it’s all math.

[Gyrate]

@mythoughts

water height in an unspecified volume cup in cm x the atomic number of mercury = firbulancy.
Firbulancy is a non-dimensional value that effects the half life of fictionium.

Sadly since fictiononium is harder to find that unobtanium I don’t have any handy to prove that the more water I put in a glass, bath or swimming pool, the faster it decays.

Oh, I have not said how it effects the half-life, paraboliclly, so be careful if you fill up anything too high and there is a mass of fictiononium in the water, crap could explode.

Look obviously when the point of making a rubbish equation I’m going to make it absurd and obvious, but take an equation that deals in volume and switch it to area.

Probably nothing will break but it won’t make any sense anymore.

I guess everyone has a choice.

They can realize that there is no evidence against an entrained aether, and this describes a common sense world and is compatible with all evidence.

Or they can take a mathematical model that creates predictions that are paradoxical, you literally need 2 things to happen at time as with the tape measure about and basically choose to believe a literally indescribable reality.
I say that because no one has tried to describe what will happen to my experiments completely, and the only one that did predicted a non-vibrating dropped clock oscillating between running fast and slow or some nonsense, and then left because I asked him what the frequency would be determined by.

So if you want to believe a simple truth or an unconvincing fiction that has the stamp of orthodox approval but literally can’t be defended by anything other than appeals to authority, asking for math I am unskilled to provide and school yard taunts…

Then obviously you’d rather believe a bunch of bull than an obvious truth.

There is no experiment that shows the constancy of light that would not also show the constancy of sound.

Good by if that is you, if you’d rather keep a theory that can’t describe what would happen in reality if these thought experiments were conducted.

Arthur Eddington would like a word with you.

[mythoughts]

try this on for size, take any mathematical equation and physics and treat v as voltage and any equation in electrical science and treat as velocity.

The equation still works in that they treat numbers, but amps*velocity=watts is false.

Or take any mathematical equation and mix metric and imperial units.

No issue with the math, except it does not have any connection to reality.

If I was a math whizz I am sure I could make a mathematical equation that would be hard to fault.

[Gyrate]

That’s the thing about doing the math in theoretical physics - the units matter. You’re not doing math; you’re producing gibberish with numbers and claiming that it’s math.

[mythoughts]

@Gyrate

It is certainly quite difficult to defend or disprove Special Relativity without recourse to math, given that it’s all math.

Seriously, what nonsense is this?

The effects aren’t math, and the results aren’t math.

Math does not create the real world, it is either a successful or unsuccessful attempt to model the real world.

So if you mean the effects of Relativity to be a description and prediction of reality, then it had better be able to describe what we see and predict what we would see if put to the test.

Take this experiment: Time dilation - Wikipedia

Ok, so if we add a clock we can see it’s hands rotating on each frame and from each frame, the clock revolves once between each reflection on that side.

So we start the thought experiment off with with both frames relatively stationary and each agrees that the clocks revolve once each time the light bounces of that side.

Next we will move the observer as we look on from stationary frame, we see that according to him the light now has further to go, so each time the light reflects the clock must turn faster to show an extra half turn or so to show that more time has elapsed for him, this what the guy in the moving frame should expect his clock to do if the speed of light is designated to be constant.

This is the same as what Wikipedia says except the Wikipedia page looks from the other fame, but they can’t disagree about how many times the moving frames clock rotated or else they would disagree about the angle it was on when the light was seen by both frames to reflect by it.

So now we have time acceleration.
Which Relativity does not predict.

Relativity twists this experiment the other way to be consistent with it’s hypothesis of time dilation only.

And if you want the constancy of the speed of light untenable, what you have to do is very simple, just launch another photon to bounce between the mirrors from the moving frame of a different colour.

Now there is no way the clocks can change, they each disagree which beam of light is the most direct but oh it gets worse, they disagree about how many times each beam of light has bounced.

If we put this in a rotary frame so that things don’t end up far away then you get a real solid disagreement about how many times each is detected to hit the same mirror, if we let the mirror be a sensor, we find that they can’t agree how many each colour bounced so now it depends on which frame the sensor is in.
Then we are again deeply into unreality.

Relativity might be a bril

[Shodan]

I am guessing someone is about to be banned, albeit not as fast as light.

Relativity might be a bril

Pardon my fit of unseemly giggles if this are his last words.

Regards,
Shodan

[watchwolf49]

In some respects I agree the OP, there are some clever ways to fill out tax forms …

[mythoughts]

@Shodan

I am guessing someone is about to be banned, albeit not as fast as light. Pardon my fit of unseemly giggles if this are his last words.

Regards,
Shodan

Something I wrote got cut off, something about it being a brilliant mathematical mode but not related to reality, I no longer recall.

or maybe it was a sentence fragment that got left over…
Anyway here is an argument, but based on previous experience no one will understand it.
Let’s setup a hybrid for fun, we will place mirrors together as in the wiki light clock on time dilation and set light bouncing between.

Let’s have a periodic light source on a rotating frame release red photons (it must repeat since the red photons will be lost out the side every so many bounces) from the moving frame and the stationary frame will launch blue photons.

To clarify, the red photons are sent parallel to the axis of rotation of the red light source so it traces out a circle around the axis of rotation.

Now we have a rotating and non-rotating censor that can each count each colour of photon that passes though it.

So from the rotating frame the red light has a more direct path and the rotating sensor must detect more red photon passes.
From the lab frame the blue photons have bounced more times since they have the more direct route.

If you watched the data coming in from the 2 sensors which might be a fraction of a mm apart, they obviously could not agree on when a photon is present or which colour!

If the speed of light is to be constant in all frames, then each frame must hold a different view of which has passed though each sensor more often.

As I have stated before, the constancy of the speed of light can only be real as a possibility is if a photon is in a different position in each frame at any moment.

[Shodan]

As Gyrate points out, this is gibberish. These kinds of “thought experiments” have been tried. The speed of light is an observed constant.

If you shine a light from a stationary source onto a spot, and measure the speed, it will be 186,282 miles per second or thereabouts. But if you put the light source on the top of a car, and drive the car towards the spot at 100 miles per second, and measure the speed of the light, it will still be 186,282 mps - it will not be 186,382 mps. Special relativity was created to try to explain that.

It doesn’t matter if the light source is rotating, or red, or blue, or a neon sign reading “Eat At Joe’s” - the speed of light in a vacuum is 3 x10[sup]5[/sup] kilometers per second. That’s an observed fact - it has been demonstrated many times over.

Now, if you or anyone else can show some circumstance where light travels faster than that, I will be the first to congratulate him on his Nobel prize. But he will actually have to show that. You are not showing that at all. Your posts are not thought experiments - you are simply making up nonsense and pretending that it would do something in the real world that it doesn’t, hasn’t, and won’t.

Regards,
Shodan

[Gyrate]

@mythoughts

Something I wrote got cut off, something about it being a brilliant mathematical mode but not related to reality, I no longer recall.

Except that mathematics MUST match reality. You cannot fudge the numbers. And (assuming you haven’t screwed up your math) if the numbers say something is true you’d better either recheck your math or recheck the universe.

Consider positrons. The famous Dirac equation showed that electrons could have a positive charge and negative energy. To quote Wikipedia (to keep this simple),

The paper did not explicitly predict a new particle, but did allow for electrons having either positive or negative energy as solutions. The positive-energy solution explained experimental results, but Dirac was puzzled by the equally valid negative-energy solution that the mathematical model allowed. Quantum mechanics did not allow the negative energy solution to simply be ignored, as classical mechanics often did in such equations; the dual solution implied the possibility of an electron spontaneously jumping between positive and negative energy states. However, no such transition had yet been observed experimentally.

The positron was discovered a few years later, earning Carl Anderson a Nobel Prize in 1932.

My point is this: if the math doesn’t match reality, either the math is wrong or our understanding of reality is wrong but you can’t, despite your ridiculous attempts to do so, present calculations that are valid yet don’t match the model of how things actually work without something in the model being wrong or missing.

You’re hardly the first person to object to relativity on the grounds that it is counterintuitive from a Newtonian perspective but then relativity and quantum mechanics are pretty mindblowing stuff.

[John_Mace]

@Gyrate

That’s the thing about doing the math in theoretical physics - the units matter. You’re not doing math; you’re producing gibberish with numbers and claiming that it’s math.

Real physicists don’t use units.

[Gyrate]

@John_Mace

Real physicists don’t use units.

Shh - don’t encourage him.

I heard a radio bit - might have been a segment on This American Life or something similar - where they talked to one of these laymen who spend years developing their proofs debunking Einstein. They spoke to a number of physicists, most of whom wouldn’t even look at it because they get a constant stream of these and the ones they do look at are complete garbage. When they found someone to look at this one he pointed out that the guy had made some fairly basic errors in units (equating momentum and acceleration or something like that) which meant that the math was all wrong.

So the point stands: if you’re using units, units matter.

[Smeghead]

Basically, what you’re saying about math is the equivalent of this:

It’s possible to use the English language to say things like “The cake of the blue rabbit seltzer nongoes for clockism”; therefore we shouldn’t use words, and anyone who claims to be using “words” in some sort of “language” to express actual “thoughts” must be lying to us, largely because I do not understand that language.

Brilliant.