Don’t forget the mouseover.
And if you liked the xkcd, maybe you’ll like the Death by Puppets. Although the DbP is a general statement and not about the OP in particular.
Actually, I think the OP is trying to get at the fact that if you shine a beam of light at X from the left and another from the right, a 3rd party would conclude that the beams of light are closing in on X at 2c, which is correct, but doesn’t violate what SR is trying to say.
He waited 30 posts to tell us why special relativity is wrong. Imagine what’s coming up 100 posts from now!
While you’re right that neither twin has a privileged reference frame, the situation isn’t a symmetrical one because the travelling twin undergoes acceleration that the stay-at-home twin does not. It’s not really a paradox at all, when that is considered.
That deserves at least a golf clap. Well played, sir or madam.
It’s the turnaround and voyage home that makes it so the twin’s can agree on which clock went faster and which went slower.
Think of this. You have a spaceship traveling at 99% of c. One twin gets in his shuttlecraft, and turns on the rockets to slow himself down. The twin back on the mothership is zooming away at a frightful pace and so will have a slowed clock, while the twin who slowed down will have a normal clock. Right?
Except from the perspective of the twin on the mothership, the shuttlecraft blasted off until it was traveling at .99c. So the twin on the mothership thinks the shuttle twin should have a slowed clock, and he has a normal one.
And both will think this is true. The only way they will agree is if the shuttle twin turns around and zooms back to the mothership, or if the mothership turns around and zooms back to the shuttlecraft. Then they can compare clocks and agree on who went slower and who went faster.
But the mere fact that one twin accelerated while the other didn’t doesn’t mean the accelerating twin is going “faster”, since acceleration can make you go slower OR faster.
Obviously this mothership/shuttlecraft example is exactly the same as an Earth/rocketship scenario. You’re traveling to Alpha Centauri at .99c? Or are you slowing down while Alpha Centauri zooms towards you at .99c? If you want to match velocities with Alpha Centauri then yes, you’re going to have to speed back up from 0 to .99c when it gets near you. Or slow yourself down from .99c to 0. Either way of looking at it is equivalent. And when you match velocities with Alpha Centauri (which just so happens to be matched with Earth), then you can send laser messages back to Earth and compare clocks, and we will agree on whose clock is faster and whose is slower.
But if I just zoom off at .99c and keep going and start sending laser messages back to Earth, we will NOT agree on whose clock is faster. I will think your clock is slower, you will think my clock is slower. Just because I accelerated to .99c (from your perspective) doesn’t mean I think my clock is slower.
No. From the perspective of someone on the train, time is flowing more slowly for a stationary observer. From the perspective of the stationary observer, time is flowing more slowly on the train.
If you don’t even understand what relativity says, how can you critique it?
‘We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.’ – Carl Sagan
Archimedes Plutonium lives!
Most replies have ignored what I said, probably from not reading what I wrote.
#1: I never said that time dilation (or length contraction) was not real, What I argued is that SR form is impossible.
The problem is that SR tries to have all frames be entierly equivilent, so if you are looking at muon speeding at 99.99999% of the speed of light you think ‘gosh it hasn’t decayed yet, but it should have’ and the muon is looking back at you thinking 'What’s up with the dumb ass in the lab with a frozen expression on his face, and why isn’t his clock ticking…
SR tries to have you see time moving for you and stoped for the muon, and the muon (or if you disbelieve in sentiont muons, a brave researcher (another joke) or a very fast spaceship (with a brave researcher)) see time as moving normally for them but you seem frozen in time.
This is a paradox, and it works if a spaceship is speeding away from earth because you can’t have instantanious communication between the ship and the earth, and because the time it takes light or radio to get from the ship to earth and visa versa keeps on increasing, time genuinly does look like it is occuring slower for the other guy whichever side you are on.
But if you are communicating orthagonally to the directon of motion, you can have communication with just a few miliseconds delay, and that delay can be mostly or entierly constant. (entierly if the space ship is flying in circle around the earth)
#2: The speed of light has not always been observed to be constant, but with an entrained aether (with LET) it would give the same predictions as Special Relativity in most cases.
#3: Regarding GPS, time dilation is still expected, but someone how knows more about GPS than all us us put together says: A Dissident View of Relativity Theory by William H. Cantrell, Ph.D.
What does one of the world’s foremost experts on GPS have to say about relativity theory and the Global Positioning System? Ronald R. Hatch is the Director of Navigation Systems at NavCom Technology and a former president of the Institute of Navigation. As he describes in his article for this issue (p. 25, IE #59), GPS simply contradicts Einstein’s theory of relativity. His Modified Lorentz Ether Gauge Theory (MLET) has been proposed32 as an alternative to Einstein’s relativity. It agrees at first order with relativity but corrects for certain astronomical anomalies not explained by relativity theory. (Also see IE #39, p. 14.)
#4: I have about 20 years of experience in trying to understand and dispute Relativity, I have never had anyone find the flaw in any of these arguments. And no one here has even attempted to.
#5: Many long cherrished theories will eventually be shown to be incorrect, or incomplete. The fact that it is old doesn’t mean much especially when arguments such of these aren’t addressed. It is very easy for a flaw to exist (for the empror to be naked) if no one will take objections seriously.
And again saying there is evidence for it does not help when other threories which are logical (possible) and make the same predictions of the experiments exist.
#6: Syncing clocks is easily achieved when the train is stationary and at the station (near OB1), and it is trivial for observer 3 to get in sync, secondly syncing clocks isn’t even really required since the perpendicular observer (OB3) can easily communicate with OB2 in real time.
They can communicate while in different frames, but deceleration (to the detriment of the survival of the occupant) can happen in an instant (instant here means not zero time, but some infintesimal period).
Secondly OB3 could accelerate to half the speed OB2 is doing while OB2 could decelerate to half the speed it was doing, this could also be termed crashing 
The point is that there would only be a very time moment where perhaps a difference could exist, and may even be expected since time slows in a gravity field and inertial force is equal to gravity.
But this could not suddenly correct clocks that SR might require are both ahead of the other until this moment.
Time dilation in SR without an preffered frame is a bluff that there is no means to see the real time progress of time for the other party due to a doppler like effect. Indeed that is largely the reason instantanious communication was not allowed.
Since acceleration is too breif to allow any large difference in time to occur in that time, then you would need to be of the opinion that either:
1: If one party exists in a reference frame naturally, and another accelerates to get to that reference frame, that as they have a meeting they notice that they are experiencing time at different rates since one accelerated to get there.
2: You see the the chap on the super fast train, or space ship, or brave phycist who has decided to have the whirlwind tour of CERN, you communicate with him in real time and you both seeem to be experiencing time the same, only when he suddenly decelerates to the earth frame you find he has no memory of this, his watch is reading earlier than it was when you saw him before because the decelleration/acceleration caused time travel to occur at sublight speeds.
#7 Just to be super clear to Lemur866, the twins in this example can see each others clocks, hold a conversation or have some super creepy homosexual incestious video sex with each other since they are not moving away from each other.
There are 4 ways this can occur, 1: The twin moving at high speeds is traveling in circles around the other twin who is in the center. 2: Near by pass, in this example they only have a moment when they are aligned, but in that moment they can easily compare clocks ( I said clock guys, sheesh) with each other. 3: Distant pass, there could be a light year between the twins, but for a good while the moving twin is not getting notably closer or further away, if they shared communication or used telescopes, while there would be a year delay, it would be a constant delay which would mean thay the motion would not distort the rate time appears to pass for the other twin. 4: The moving twin is again moving in circles, but the other twin is standing right by, several times a second the moving twin passes by triggering a strobe light.
If there is an argment that because of constant acceleration the orbiting twin is going to experience time dilation (other than that caused by gravity) then another observer can be added that is moving at the same speed but going in a straight line, this observer would expect to see the lab time frozen (according to SR) and yet be able to hold a very breif convo with with the orbiting twin in the same reference frame.
If the twin moving in a circle is not the only one, but in a carrage of a train chasing it’s own tain, then as he looks to the passanges on the other end (180 degrees apart) he sees that they are moving with more relative velocity to him that the Lab frame and would expect time to be really slow in thas carrage, despite this he can wander through the cabins and get to this carriage with no drama, when he looks at the carrage he left he sees that moving super fast and expects that to be almost frozen in time.
Time Dilation IS real.
Time Dilation without a preffered reference frame is a total nonsense.
Let me just repeat the last part in the event people do not read the entire post.
If you had a train on a large turn table and spun it up until the linear velocity was near the speed of light, you would get dizzy, puke, flat, dead. A large power bill, sure. But let’s assume you solved those issues.
If you looked at the earth, according to SR you would see earth is moving relative to you (albeit at inconsistent velocities), and as such you would expect to see clocks run slower in the earth frame than in yours.
If you look to the other side of the experiment you see a pretty girl in the cabin opposite (180 deg away) , and she is moving even faster relative to you than the earth, even though you can see her constantly she is moving extremely rapidly in the opposite direction.
Because of this you expect to see her clock run super slow, even slower than the clocks on earth.
And she thinks the same should be happening to you!
Finally you can’t help yourself, you go through the other carriages to get to her, now you see your old cabin which you reason must now have slowed time due to the huge relative velocity.
This contains no notable acceleration or deceleration to meet someone in another frame, just walk around the train.
If curving though space a bit drastically changed the rate you experienced time relative to a straight line journey then that would be news to everyone.
Indeed if this were so then significant degrees of time dilation (or acceleration actually!) could be achieved on earth easily by moving an object in a way that would make it consistent with orbiting a very distant point at near light speed.
At this point, I don’t think you even know what a frame of reference means.
nm. The op is right in one respect: I didn’t read his post.
I’m willing to concede he’s right. What’s next?
In Relativity, all frames of motion are equal, you could say that there is no such thing as motion (linear), and no such thing as still as it is all relative.
Even something moving at near the speed of light is as still as we are from it’s own equally valid perspective, and to that object we are ones moving at near the speed of light.
A reference frame in SR is the recognition that all frames of motion/stillness are equal and that we are viewing something from that perspective.
This is all fine, except that while all reference frames are equal, the are each meant to see that time in other frames moves more slowly than theirs.
This means that all frames disagree about how time is moving in other frames.
This can be hard to disprove when objects in these reference frames have distances that are rapidly opening or closing since this causes an illusion of time in other frames being either faster or slower than ones own frame as transmission time alters every moment.
This is known as Doppler shift, and the degree of the apparent shift is greatly effected by the speed of the transmission, light is changed less than sound which would lead to the view that the other reference frame is experiencing 2 or more different time rates!
Doppler isn’t an actual change in time rate, but it muddies things greatly.
If you communicate with a party in another reference frame perpendicular to the motion, you can easily communicate in real time.
Now if each frame is equal, then each should find the other to have the same time rate as their own, but SR want a situation where both finds the other to experience time at a slowed rate.
Each expects to see the other frozen in place, this becomes utterly absurd when observers in each frame are constantly physically close. and can see each other or communicate with standard equipment.
And more absurd when someone can walk around a big turn table and suddenly be in that other frame as well.
So yes, I know what a reference frame is.
And as far as SR is concern, it makes no possible sense.
Good question. Assuming you are being genuine.
If you aren’t a physicist, and being that you are the only person to agree, not much since I have not yet got an argument that has good traction.
The problem is that beliefs are very very hard to change, and cherished beliefs are so much harder to change.
This is why most will not even read the argument, and ridicule it at sight.
And since even the perspectives from which SR seems to make sense can be hard to wrap your head around, it can seem like maybe this is simply a challenging aspect of SR if you don’t want to see it clearly.
If you are a physicist, you could help devise alternatives and experiments that would distinguish between SR and theories that would fit the available evidence while being actually possible.
Er, you DO realise that a rotating frame is accelerating, right?
If you want anyone to take you seriously, mythoughts, here’s what you need to do:
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Read up on the subject beforehand. As many other people have pointed out, special relativity is a century old at this point, and it’s about as well-established as anything in physics gets. Here’s a MIT OpenCourseWare free online course that covers the basis of special relativity. It’s not a particularly difficult subject, but it does make specific, precise, experimentally-verifiable predictions using math. You don’t show any of that in your post. In fact, your argument looks like a more complicated version of the twin paradox, which we’ve all seen many times before. From what you write, I don’t think you even know what exactly a reference frame is.
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Be more specific in your argument. If your argument involves no math or equations, it’s wrong (or more accurately: as Pauli put it, it’s not even wrong). There’s nothing to argue against in your post; it’s just a poorly-detailed thought experiment that we’ve all seen many, many times before. Isolated quotes from scientists who may or may not agree with you, trying to burnish your credentials by saying that you’ve “have about 20 years of experience in trying to understand and dispute Relativity,” and so on are just appeals to authority and invalid. (And honestly, why has it taken you 20 years to understand relativity? The course I linked to above was only four weeks long when I took it, back when it was a formal class and not part of OpenCourseWare. You could get three or four full doctorates in physics in that time.)
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Explain how all the theory and experiments that support special relativity could be wrong. (If you don’t know what they are, see point #1). Scientists don’t believe special relativity out of some idea of orthodoxy; we believe it because it’s been repeatedly and ambiguously proved by experiment, is internally consistent, and is used in (and is necessary for) other physics results that have been confirmed by experiment. If special relativity is wrong, why do we have 100 years of data and theory supporting it? When Einstein came up with special relativity, for example, the theory had to explain how its effects (addition of velocities, for example) agree with the observed evidence at low, nonrelativistic speeds.
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Don’t bother ranting or pontificating about intellectual dishonesty, scientists who are afraid of the status quo, the need to be courageous enough to reconsider even cherished theories, etc. As in point (3), the problem is not the scientists or the scientific community. (And if it is— which it isn’t— ranting wouldn’t help anyway.)
So go become a physicist and do it yourself. Seriously, learn as much as you can about physics, and then try to prove your theory. If you think that you have something that’s obviously and manifestly correct but is only being held back because “beliefs are very very hard to change,” then it shouldn’t be hard to do. You don’t even have to publish it in a journal (where the physicists would just sneer at it because they can’t handle your truth); just write up the details formally and post it here, and I’m sure at least some people on the board would be willing to read it. But by “the details,” I mean exactly that: calculations and rigorous arguments, not hand-waving and appeals to authority. If you can’t do that, then you don’t actually understand the physics involved.
Yeah, that’s probably it.
(Also, I’m surprised that so many laymen think they’ve conclusively disproved special relativity. If you accept the basic, experimentally-confirmed premise that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant in any inertial reference frame, then everything in the theory naturally and straightforwardly pops out. If you want to snipe at science with thought-experiments, it’s literally the worst area to pick. Also, how do I become the president of physics? Is there an election, or do I have to challenge Ed Witten, Steven Weinberg, and Zombie Richard Feynman to a battle royale?)
I did mention that.
I also explained why it doesn’t matter, and rotation is only one means to really run the effect in.
I think you will find I covered acceleration quite completely.
recap: Acceleration creating inertial force (centrifugal force) could create a small degree of time dilation since inertial forces are equivalent to gravity in SR and gravity creates time dilation, but the can be lessened by increasing the diameter till G-forces are low enough to ignore.
Secondly if acceleration from rotation somehow changes the way time advances on the train turn table, compared to if it had a linear path without acceleration then we could have a long straight train with the same linear velocity as the other train , it would pass by the train on the turn table allowing a small opportunity for the turn table train to communicate, compare clocks and at a stretch even have people swap which train they are on. If this train were really long this comparison would not even need to be rushed.
If you expect the train on the turn table with zero net velocity relative to the linear train to experience time at about the same rate as the turn table train then we are in agreement, it would be absurd to have otherwise, and indeed as I have argued, if all you need to do to experience time in a vastly different reference frame than the one you are on is to turn a little, then this would have been noticed long ago when people experimented with the twist or driving along gradual bends in the road.
Third, in the train turntable experiment, all carriages undergo identical acceleration, acceleration is used in the twin paradox to create an asymmetry to decide which twin comes back younger, this has no such asymmetry, and yet people in opposite carriages still see huge relative time rate differences.
Fourth, do you really need a fourth? If you propose that accelerating to particular reference frame matters to the rate of time that passes relative to the frame you were in (which is essentially SR’s argument), then this would imply that your experience of time while in that state of motion (reference frame) would differ from the rate of time those who are native to that reference frame. If not, then what does acceleration matter if it doesn’t change how time passes somehow? It can’t be during the acceleration because that can be very short indeed.
If you want an experiment without acceleration that has an eternity to compare clocks, imagine 2 infinitely long parallel trains, each moving at 99.99% of the speed of light relative to each other. There is a small but non zero amount of time when the rate of time in each opposing cabin can be compared, additionally if you decide that all the clocks for each cabin of each train are synchronized with each other (not too hard given they are in the same reference frame) then you can even see the passage of time on the opposing train progressing despite never seeing the same clock/cabin twice.
If the trains are much further separated then you have longer to check out each cabin before Doppler effects kick in, less detain but more duration.
SR looks ok from a great distance if you don’t really think about it, or just use abstract equations without considering what they are actually implying in the real world.
None of it makes a fig of sense if you have the balls to really look at it, to challenge it.
Show your work. The “abstract equations” you deride so greatly do a marvelous job of modelling the “real world.” If you feel they are at fault, show us better models.
Keep in mind the physics is the math used to describe how the real world works.
I doubt anyone here cherishes their belief in SR. It’s simply a fact of nature. Equally, I don’t cherish my beliefs that the sky is blue, water is wet and gravity holds me to the surface of the earth. These things just are.