No, what Einstein said was that “time was different for every system in motion”.
And if time is different for every system in motion the speed of light is going to be affected by the change in time, where the speed of light remains relative to the system of reference.
If you slow time and or increase the duration of the second you slow the speed of light.
He was also the one who suggested that gravity might not itself be a force of any kind but simply a response to an underlying force which had yet to be discovered.
But my argument has to do with the idea that we can employ linearized static terms to determine the speed of light and define the condition of universe.
By using such terms we determine the speed of light to be constant and remaining constant for billions of years, whereby allowing us to determine the approximate size and age of universe.
If we are wrong about this it changes the picture in a very radical manner.
If time slows and space is stretched isometrically we have the imagery of an expanding universe. And if what Einstein said is true the apparent size of universe is going to be different for every system of reference due to a change in the apparent rate of expansion.
Also, not only is the speed of light going to be different for every system in motion but the speed of light is going to decrease isometrically in proportion to the rate of expansion.
But regardless of the speed of light no physical mass can equal or exceed the upper speed limit of light.
Guys, arguing with him is pointless. He doesn’t understand what he’s talking about, he is using circular definitions to avoid the things he doesn’t want to accept, and he’s laughing up his sleeve at your willingness to try and actually pin him down to something provable. :rolleyes:
I’ve enjoyed your exposition on Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Could you comment on what Einstein referred to as “spooky”, the concept of ‘action at a distance’? Doesn’t “action at a distance” suggest that there is some speed which exceeds the speed of light? Isn’t there also a theory that the speed of light has not always been fixed at its current speed? Pardon my ignorance if I have mistated these theories.
Einstein was concerned about the apparent instantaneous action between two entangled particles. This behavior is described as being nonlocal–that is, the connection or mechanism between the particles is not transmitted through the intervening continuum, and thus is not subject to the limits of Special Relativity. This isn’t the first time that the notion of “action at a distance” caused some upset; indeed, the action of any fields that we think of as forces (electromagnetic, gravity) falls into the category, but these forces are (to the limits we can test them) well behaved in Special Relativity and General Relativity respectively, and adhere to the invariance of c as the absolute maximum speed for force propagation. (Gravity is kind of tricky on this point because it is so weak and doesn’t tend to vary much, aside from the occasional supernova, but all measurements to date put it around c, and we’d have some serious problems if it ended up being greater than c.)
Anyway, Einstein–never a satisfied customer of quantum mechanics–along with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen came up with the EPR paradox, which was intended to dispute the results of QM as being complete and really explaining what is going on. Real world experimentation has actually demonstrated that there are indeed non-local effects; i.e. a change in the spin of one half of an entangled pair of electrons will have a complementary change in spin of the other member. This sounds like a really exciting way to transmit information faster than light until you realize that the behavior of the particles is only statistically deteminable, so if you modify the behavior of Particle A in order to transmit information, you have to know its instantaneous state at Particle B before you can seperate the data from the random noise…which means that you have to send that correction information by some other means (radio, laser, federal mails, et cetera) thus not really giving you anything useful.
What does this all mean? There are a few different conclusions to be drawn from this; one is that entangled particles are connected “non-locally”, not by fields that only act within the framework of Special and General Relativity. Another is that either reality–at the quantum level–is totally “random” in the sense of being able to predict the specific position, momentum, or orientation of a particle at any given time, though its behavior falls into a very rigid statistical distribution based upon its energy level, so it’s not really random in the general sense of the word. (“We demand rigorously defined areas of uncertainty and doubt!” – The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy) The alternative to this is that there are “hidden variables”; underlying rules which explicitly describe the seemingly random (but statistically determinant) behavior of fundamental particles. However, by virtute of the “fundamental interconnectedness of all things” (Douglas Adams is getting quite the workout today) these hidden variables must be nonlocal, i.e. unable to be read by an observer.
The practical upshot is whether you favor interpretations involving utter randomness, simultaneously dead-and-alive cats, Wigner’s uncommunicative friend, alternate timelines full of evil twins sporting goatees, or this hidden variable stuff makes no different whatsoever; the rules of quantum mechanics all work out the same way regardless, or as poster Chronos recently noted, the favored interpretation of most physicists working in the field today is the “shut up and do the math” interpretation. It also means that as long as you don’t stare to hard at it, entanglement does not, in effect violate a liberal reading of Special Relativity, although it does sit uneasily beside it like a canary next to a cat. (Since there is really no good or accepted mechanic for gravity in quantum field theory, General Relativity is perfectly safe…for now.)
On the level of the everyday world, decoherence gives us an experiental reallity in which neither the statistical behavior nor the nonlocality plays a significant part, and you really have to study statistical mechanics, quantum chemistry, or stare really hard at a very small object before it becomes obvious that something seriously screwy is going on. However, you can display a fundimental artifact of quantum mechanics with a very simple exercise; the double slit experiment, which demonstrates the wave nature of photons or electrons. It’s all really nothing to lose sleep over, and I enjoy nothing more than introducing these concepts to friends so that they freak out and have nightmares about angry half-poisoned cats and particles splitting between two slots and interfering with each other.
As for variations in the speed of light, c is defined as being 299,792,458 metres per second. The assumption in Maxwell’s (and others, but for the sake of convenience we’ll assign the blame all to him) electrodynamic theory, which predates Speial Relativty by not quite half a century) is that the speed of light is invariant, and Einstein extended this to demonstrate that time and distance are two aspects of the same fundamental topology, the so-called spacetime continuum. In a sense, when you are inertial (not under acceleration) you are travelling at c on the time axis, and 0 on the x,y, and z (or rho, phi, and theta, or whatever coordinate system you like) axes. Move, and you slow down in time. Move really fast, and your movement through time (from an inertial observer) slows significantly.
Note that this invariance applies to mass and energy, but not the continuum itself. There is nothing in Special Relativity that limits the underlying plenum from stretching at any speed whatsowever, and in fact this whole business about the expansion of the universe, and acceleration thereof (such that points further away from your position are moving away at a faster rate) creates a scenerio in which the relative speed between you and your twin outside of a particular horizon could be greater than the speed of light, even if you and your sibling are standing still in your own reference frames. Note that the speed of light is still invariant; you won’t see light travelling faster, but it will reduce in frequency (redshift) as the space it occupies stretches out, not unlike light infalling into a black hole.
As a practical matter, the only way we know of using energy to actively “stretch” space in a nonsymmetric manner is by binding it up as a lot of mass and moving it around or rotating it, and because the gravity field created by mass is so insubstantial it takes enormous amounts of energy to do these things, perhaps prohibitivly so on scale of real world objects. So, not really an issue unless you have some magic science that allows you to artificially construct gravitational singularities.
“Note that this invariance applies to mass and energy, but not the continuum itself. There is nothing in Special Relativity that limits the underlying plenum from stretching at any speed whatsowever, and in fact this whole business about the expansion of the universe, and acceleration thereof (such that points further away from your position are moving away at a faster rate) creates a scenerio in which the relative speed between you and your twin outside of a particular horizon could be greater than the speed of light, even if you and your sibling are standing still in your own reference frames. Note that the speed of light is still invariant; you won’t see light travelling faster, but it will reduce in frequency (redshift) as the space it occupies stretches out, not unlike light infalling into a black hole.”
Thank you for your reply Sir. Could you simplify your above comments. I understand that the variable speed of light theory proposed by João Magueijo and John Moffat has been proposed to explain the horizon problem but I’m having problems conceptualizing it. Thank you for your patience.
Laughing? I hardly think so, in fact I’m a little disappointed that most of you don’t have anything original to say, nothing of your own to add.
It’s all very fine to quote someone else’s words, but where do you as individuals come into the picture, what do you have to contribute?
No I don’t have all the answers, of course I don’t, and I’m more than willing to listen to someone else’s ideas and consider the possibility that I might be wrong about some of my own, but I have yet to hear any such ideas.
But what I have heard are a few defensive remarks, which might suggest that some of you are not very comfortable with anything that deviates from a fixed angle of approach, something outside the box.
So, no, I’m not laughing…laughter is hardly appropriate.
With respect, sir, when I see your movie of devices defying gravity or other accepted laws of physics, I’ll pay a bit more attention to your ideas about light and matter. Until then, your posts here have been filled with circular reasoning and lacking in rigorous definitions, allowing you to dismiss the assertions of the mainstream without actually offering an alternative that can be studied and understood, let alone debated. And your self-promotional web site offers no additional guidance.
And just how many companies are signing up to move Project Unity forward?
David, the ideas on your website look interesting, but you seem to be having trouble creating a device that actually manipulates gravity. Tell me, have you tried reversing the polarity?
If it makes you feel better, Stranger, I know what you’re talking about. DSYoung, let me try to explain:
Two particles can be in a state of quantum entanglement, and in this state, a phenomenon described as spooky action at a distance can occur. In this state, when a waveform of one of these particles collapses(by doing something like say, observing it), the other one will also collapse. The waveforms of these particles will collapse simultaneously, without regard for distance. In other words, they seem to violate the principle that no information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), there is no way to influence how these waveforms collapse, nor even any way of ascertaining if they have collapsed, without making them collapsed by observing them. It’s like you could transmit via radio, but could only send out static. There’s definitely a mode of transmission, but there’s no way to control what gets sent out. Because we have no control over how the waveform collapses, no information is transmitted, and the universal speed limit (AKA the speed of light) is preserved.
At least, that’s how a freshman physics major understands it. Anyone with better knowledge can feel free to clarify or correct.
That’s right! Don’t forget, they all laughed at Galileo! Laughed! And Einstein! And Bruno was burned at the stake! Geniuses! Misunderstood geniuses all!
There are any number of snarky comebacks to this, but in all seriousness, what I have to contribute is an attempt to make those words of others comprehensible to people through simple and direct language. I am a professional explainer, in that I get paid for presenting complicated subjects in a way that enlightens and adds to the general understanding of our world.
You, sir, simply obfuscate. You invent vocabulary, conflate concepts, and believe that your individual contribution is to deny the millions of hours of work that others have put into the basic understanding of our universe. I don’t think highly of such behavior.
You can’t add anything original of your own, because you have no understanding of the field. All you can do is add ignorance and confusion, which - amazingly - you appear to take pride in doing.
There are any number of highly capable physicists who are using every ounce of their intelligence, experience, and ingenuity to formulate deeper and better understandings of the world by testing the current theories, revising them, or presenting counter-theories of their own. I salute them, because that is the way that science is done and always has been done.
You are not even a gadfly. You are a parasite on the legitimate works of others. If you had one actual piece of true knowledge to contribute I would take back everything I’ve said. You don’t. This is more than sad: it is dangerous.
I’ll go back to snarkiness next time. Four out of five dentists agree that ridicule is the best treatment for parasites.
That’s pretty good, but it’s worthwhile to note that this entire business about waveforms is nothing but an abstract mathematical construct which happens to work, even though it has no visible physical instantiation (i.e. you can’t see waves) and completely violates our “classical” experience of how the world works.
For instance, we can take the double slit experiment and “kick it up a notch”; instead of allowing the photon/lightwave to merely pick/be distributed between two adjacent slots we can use an interferometer with waveguides that give the light particle/wave two entirely independent paths, then brings them back together. If you do this, the light (which is definitely quantized, i.e. it only existis in little packets of specific energy and can’t arbitrarily be broken up without being absorbed and reradiated) has to go either down one waveguide or the other; even if we assume that it is a wavepacket that can be broken up, there’s no way that the individual waves can possibly be connected to one another outside the waveguides with out some kind of high weirdness going on.
And yet, they are; the resulting wave interferes with itself a la the double slit experiment, but if you go and try to detect the photon in one of the waveguides before they come back together, you never find √2 photons or somesuch; it’s either there or it’s not, and the resulting pattern on the target reflects this. Hence, the isolated sections of wavepacket must “talk” to each other. Particles that are entangled behave similarly, even though they can’t by any classical standard, resulting in “spooky action at a distance.” There’s clearly more funny business going on here than in a double feature of Marx Brothers movies.
If this sounds more bizarre than a trip to the Psychiatry: An Industry of Death Museum then you’re on the right track. As I said, the business with the waveform and the Schrödinger equation is essentially a mathematical trick to describe the behavior of particles in quantum mechanics for which the only virtue is that it happens to work. It does not, however, give us any insight into the underlying reality of what is actually going on with the particles and why they act by a mechanic that is so at odds with our everyday experience. The fact of this, and the apparently theoretically impenetrable veil which prohibits us from making direct, explicit, non-interfering observations of interactions at the quantum level, is what so offended Einstein about QM, labeling the whole theory as incomplete and unsatisfying.
Ronald Salmond, I’m familiar with Moffat and his unusual history, but can’t say that I have more than a passing familiarity with with variable speed of light theory. What I understand of it, which isn’t much, is that it essentially involves backfitting a change in the speed of light to various models of cosmology to obtain a consistant result. The problem with this is that the speed of light isn’t a constant, upon which the impact of a change is independent of other constants but has relationships (dimensionless ratios) with other seemingly arbitrary physical constants, so changing c would have an effect on those, which would propagate into other effects that should have visible results that we could find in Nature. Making this all work together is very tricky, and is really mostly a matter of ad hoc fitting of parameters and models. Paul Dirac suggested time-varying constants on this in the 'Thirties as a way of trying to integrate gravitation into the other forces as they were known then, resulting in the Dirac large numbers hypothesis, but this violates the strong equivilence principle (that physical laws should be the same in any inertial framework regardless of location) and a history of variation not apparent in any of the multitude of physical tests.
Note that this doesn’t mean that it is wrong; the widely held Cosmic Inflation hypothesis (outlined previously) fits nicely within Special and General Relativity, but we can’t actually observe observe or measure the plenum of spacetime. We can observe the effect on matter and energy (i.e. the redshift, the cosmic microwave radiation background, et cetera) but this occurs on scales too vast for direct observation, so we have to infer from what we see locally as to what is occuring nonlocally, i.e. we have to wait for light, redshifted, to make its way back from distance parts of the Universe than us, then guestimate the effects of expanding spacetime upon it by assuming what they would be and filtering them out. This doesn’t cause any serious inconsistancies with relativity, and has the virtue of being very simple, but that doesn’t make it true, just the best and most self-consistent hypothesis to what we observe. Time-varying physical constants could be more accurate, but are more difficult to make work with observations and thus disfavored as a valid theory until the more simple theory proves to be unworkable.
David Barclay, the problem with your arguments is that they are nonrigorous–that is, they don’t outline the mechanics of your theory in a way that could be tested and falsified–and lack definition. Talking about “dynamic space” is meaningless until you explain–in a way that can be modeled in a non-arbitrary algebraic system–what this means and how the operations of it translate to physical observations. There isn’t a single claim in the chapters of your book that I skimmed through that is falsifiable or applicable to any physical mechanic, which makes it as useless as the technobabble that science fiction authors and screenwriters use to justify their indistinguishable-from-magic technology. Your new and original ideas are neither new and original, nor stated in a way that gives them any substance. It’s like arguing what the color green “means” without defining what green is in terms of wavelength or intensity.
Thank you for your reply? I have a couple of questions for you which are of a physical and philosophical nature. It relates to Plato’s allegory “The Cave”. I’m sure that you are familiar with it. Due to the bizarre nature of the quantum world, and concepts that you commented on quite elegantly such as decoherence, entanglement, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the elegant double-slit experiment, Schrödinger’s Cat, and the Copenhagen Interpretation, can we really know our true reality? When I close my eyes while I’m looking at the Moon, is it still there while my eyes are closed? Do you accept the “many worlds interpretation”? Have we all taken the “blue pill”?
Stranger On A Train, that weirdness is the main reason why I’m getting (or trying to get) into Physics. The fact that we live in a universe where don’t know all the rules and can’t understand most of them fascinates me to no end.
I am similarly fascinated by the fact that we live in a universe where we don’t know all the rules, and can’t currently understand most of them. I’m particularly fascinated by some of the speculations based upon quantum theory which have implications as to how we understand consciousness and reality. Have you had the opportunity in your studies to explore the "many worlds , multiverse interpretations?
“There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.” – Niels Bohr
Bohr wrote that over fifty years ago, and since then there has been no physical cause to believe differently. On the small scale, quantum mechanics gives us consistant rules for how things operate, but gives no preference to any interpretation. A strong belief in one of these interpretations over all others is akin to non-evangelical religious belief; it’s a fun pastime that hurts no one and may give you some degree of comfort, but it’s essentially inconsequental to how things actually work mechanically. Like arguments about solipsism, they can’t reveal any inherent underlying mechanics by their own logics. Imagine Plato’s cave closed by a rockfall. The inhabitants can hear muddled sounds from outside, but as hard as they dig they only cause the cave to collapse further. The residents–at least, the most curious of them–can infer what it might be like outside from what they hear and the texture of the rock in the cave, but they can’t just poke a head out and be blinded by the Sun.
What actually occurs that the quantum level is probably beyond our ability to comprehend in the familiar terms of the everyday macro world, and thus all of the interpretations of what happens (waveform collapse, Many Worlds, et cetera) are all approximations that are all equally incomplete, if not demonstratably wrong. Like all analogies, they break down at some level and fail to convey the essence of what is actually going on. My personal belief is that the Moon is still there, the cat is just sleeping, and taking unprescribed medication of any color is ill-advised. Extending arguments beyond that is sophistry.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – Hamlet Act I, Scene vShakespeare…the original quantum physicist.
