Non-Platonic geometry definitions

[DavidCooper]

That's not what I mean. Obviously, it is not true in general that you can switch coordinates and have a system continue to be described by the same equations with the new coordinates substituted in place of the old ones. SR tells you that you can, as long as the coordinate systems are both inertial.

That is a reduced claim and it is not the normal one. If you are working with sound in air and using s-frames instead of c-frames, you can make the same kind of switches with the action being described with the same equations. That's just the phenomenon of apparent relativity which can be found in play in both types of system. The STR interpretation is that if you are looking at three apparently identical systems moving at different speeds relative to each other along a straight line (for example, light clocks aligned with their direction of travel), the underlying physics of what's happening to them is identical due to the lack of absolute speeds. If you recognise that the underlying physics of what is actually happening is different, you're bringing in absolute speeds and departing from STR. In at least two of those light clocks the light pulse takes longer to travel the length of the clock arm in one direction than the other, and at least two of them have different proportions of time spent with the light moving in one direction (the same direction for each), but in STR that is heretical.

You could just have him walking in circles around a room, muttering "The pill tray is before me! The pill tray is behind me! The pill tray is before me! The pill tray is behind me!" Same amount of crazy, less rocket fuel expended. What all this has to do with physics, only the gods know.

False comparison. In space dimensions you can reverse your trip, but it doesn't work with time. Events happen once, and once they've happened they don't unhappen and then rehappen every time a mad physicist changes the frame he's using to analyse the action. If you're switching to a model where time doesn't run (such that you turn time into something more like a space dimension), you kill causation because no apparent effect can ever be caused by its apparent cause.

Let's see, I have had my face smashed with a rock, been threatened by gangs as well as been nominated for the US Terrorist Exclusion List for the crime of speaking against some of Einstein's fellow kinsmen (never even been to the US and have no relations with the country), so I really doubt that my unwillingness to address awkward questions is the issue here.

Nevertheless, you are overriding mathematics repeatedly in order to back broken models, and there has to be a rational explanation for why you do such an irrational thing. Different people are emotionally tied to different ideologies, so their lack of ties to some ideologies doesn't impede their ability to spot the faults in those, but their ties to other ideologies selectively overrides their reasoning when their bonds to those ideologies are strong.

This is about you deliberately misinterpreting everything and arguing against things that have never been claimed.

I'm not misinterpreting anything: I'm showing you the consequences of running broken models.

Again with your silly two-dimensional time which is not a thing in SR.

It isn't my silly two-dimentional time: it's the broken model's two-dimensional time where the fans of the model are blind to one of them, but where computer programs cannot be fooled. There is no simulation in existence that can run spacetime on its sole type of time without that second kind of time appearing. When you look at mode 1 of the STR program that shows event-meshing failures, or the GTR program that shows an event-meshing failure, in both cases when you advance objects at the rate of their unslowed proper time,
you end up with events changing over an undeclared kind of time at single spacetime locations with one object arriving there first and another arriving there later. That's the fault of the model breaking due to the incompetence of its designers. If you try to avoid the event-meshing failures though and have all the objects that reach that spacetime location arrive at it simultaneously, then you have to advance them in such a way that some proper times tick slow, and if they tick slow, they aren't ticking out the full amount of time that's actually passing, so again you have two kinds of time in the model, one of which you've failed to declare. Your models are incompetent, and I'm not the one misinterpreting them.

but you can also see that the Lorentz invariance has been lost: if you stop the action at any point and then change the frame of reference in this mode (for example, when the time counter reaches 360 or 550), events are changed as a result of switching frame, some events being undone while other events which hadn't happened before have suddenly happened.

Why do you think the system is not Lorentz invariant? Whether a spacetime separated event has or hasn't happened yet isn't a measurable fact, and is merely a philosophical question with no effect on the physics.

I didn't remember writing that, but I see that you've taken that quote from the page I linked to (which I wrote 15 years ago) rather than from this discussion. It may be technically incorrect depending on how you define the term. I would certainly not use that wording if I wrote the page now as I doubt it is a correct usage. The point though is that if you are using mode 1 and change frame between frame A and B and back again, there is no reshaping of events, so that is invariant. In mode 2 though, events do unhappen and rehappen when you do this. That is not invariant, but saying that it's not Lorentz invariant may be incorrect. The unhappening of events though reveals the brokenness of the model and rules out mode 2 as describing the real universe, while mode 1 is ruled out by its event-meshing failures. The survivor is mode 3 which uses absolute time and an absolute frame.

[DavidCooper]

Why does the speed of light relative to an object matter? Only the speed of light relative to the observer measuring that speed matters, and the observer will always measure light to be moving at c as long as that observer is in an inertial frame of reference.

The observer is an object. If an observer and object are comoving and light is not moving at c relative to the object, it is not moving at c relative to the observer. Also, an observer who is not naive will know that he can't assume himself to be at rest and that whatever speed he assumes himself to be moving at will result in his measurement of the speed of light relative to himself confirming his speed of travel through space. A naive observer who has been trained to treat himself as if he is at rest and only trust the measurement that results from that will avoid making measurements that produce heretical results. The same can be done with sound in air where a naive observer always measures sounds as moving relative to him at c regardless of his actual speed through the air, so long as he makes his measurements using directly equivalent methods governed in every relevant aspect by the speed of sound rather than the speed of light.

You can't prove there is absolute speed because no observer can measure whether they are "actually" moving - only whether things appear to move from their perspective.

There are plenty of experiments that show that absolute speeds must exist, and some that show that they can in principle be pinned down in expanding space, so I already have proved that there are absolute speeds, and that in an expanding universe an observer could in principle pin down their absolute speed.

I'm talking about the Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment, where the entire apparatus - including the two rings and the device used to observe the difference in the speed of light - were firmly attached to Earth's surface. In the observer's frame of reference, the rings did not move.

Yes, and I'm talking about it too: it is fully possible to have extra observers who are not going round with the ring (by such means as flying round it in a plane), and their observations will be no different from those of observers who are going round with the ring. The crucial measurements are frame-independent.

Right. Where does relativity say it doesn't do that?

Relativity says it doesn't do that by denying absolute speeds and insisting that light always travels at c relative to every observer.

(And an observer on the ship will say the same thing about light moving past you, so how do you know the ship is moving and you aren't?)

In expanding space it is in principle possible to determine which is moving, but it isn't necessary to know which is moving to know that light cannot travel at c relative to all objects/observers.

Special relativity says light moves at c relative to the observer's frame of reference, not relative to some object moving within that frame of reference.

That means that it claims that light moves at c relative to any object that's at rest in that frame. It's the same thing with s-frames and sound in air, and when you change frame, you change the speed of the sounds relative to the objects, and change the speed of a sound relative to itself.

Are you sure you understand the model?

I understand it better than anyone who thinks it works. I produce simulations that show it breaking and they fail to produce simulations that show it working because it's mathematically impossible for them to do so.

People on the internet can lie about being qualified experts.

They can do, but when they're known physicists and cosmologists they don't appear to be lying.

Just as air speed makes no difference to the clocks in the wind tunnel, aether speed makes no difference to the clocks in space. So how does the twin paradox prove the existence of an absolute frame of reference?

It proves that some clocks moving inertially are ticking fundamentally slower than others, and such differences can only occur under the governance of absolute speeds.

Mode 1 is incorrect. Mode 2 seems to be correctly demonstrating the counterintuitive nature of special relativity.

Mode 1 is indeed a broken model, but it is an STR model. Mode 2 is another STR model and it displays contradictions by showing events unhappening and rehappening when you change frame. Things that generate contradictions like that aren't counterintuitive, but counterfactual.

You need to include the "http://" at the beginning.

That's likely it: I was just copying from the address bar and hadn't looked to see if that bit was present.

This doesn't show that it's incompetent, just counterintuitive. It would be incompetent if it didn't agree with the data.

Tolerating contradictions is introducing magic to handle faults with the model. Depending on magic in that way is not counterintuitive, but plain wrong.

That's not a contradiction, just counterintuitive. It would be a contradiction if you could find some way to measure something the models disagree about.

It's a contradiction. When you have light moving at c relative to two observers who are moving relative to each other and all the action takes place along a straight line, that's a contradiction. There's nothing counterintuitive about it.

Again, it's not a contradiction unless it disagrees with the data.

It's a contradiction when it disagrees with reason and mathematics. For example, when you have clock A ticking twice as fast as clock C while clock C ticks twice as fast as clock A, you generate the statement 2=0.5, and that is a contradiction.

Thought experiments don't count.

Thought experiments do count: they reveal what would happen and are also confirmed by actual experiments. The twins paradox is still called a thought experiment even though it's been carried out for real countless times because it isn't any kind of lesser experiment. It's an encapsulation of how the universe behaves.

So far the only real data you've cited is from the Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment, but relativity and modern aether theory both correctly predicted the results of that experiment.

STR incorrectly predicted that the speed of the light relative to the observers that can be placed by each section is always c. The result of the experiment shows it to be wrong. You selectively choose the correct predictions that it makes while ignoring the incorrect ones that it also makes.

It's the experiments that disprove STR.

And it's the people telling you to get into arguments over disproving relativity who want to manipulate you. After all, once you've argued all your friends away, who's left for you to trust?

Who are those people? No one's telling me to do this; I'm simply doing the proper checking of models that don't fit reality. What I trust is mathematics and reason.

Mathematics says both theories (relativity and modern aether) match the available data. I don't know what more you want.

Mathematics ways that the former is invalidated by a host of faults which render it irrational, while the latter is rational. What I want is for people to stop lying to the public about "facts" which are actually wrong. I object to them claiming superiority of the inferior theory and pushing it's dogma as truth while ignoring the fact they're directly telling people that the superior model is wrong; that absolute speeds, absolute time and an absolute frame don't exist and that the universe is 4D non-Euclidean and not 3D Euclidean. They are spewing propaganda instead of doing science. What they should be saying is that according to Einstein's model, absolute speeds etc. don't exist, but warn people that there are theories that have not been ruled out that do have those things. I'm not asking them to admit that their model has been ruled out because it's mathematically bankrupt, but they should at the very least not be asserting its correctness. And they should also stop ridiculing anyone who doesn't agree with their cult, and stop encouraging the public to do likewise, because that is shocking behaviour not fitting of scientists. They have brought science into disrepute and should not be allowed to get away with it. Their behavior also causes unjustified reputational damage to anyone who correctly opposes them and negatively affect their earnings, and they can be sued for that. It's difficult to win such a case with human judges, but with AGI in charge that will change. I will certainly be taking many of them to court over this when that time comes, which is another reason why I keep that file.

[Gigasoft]

If an observer and object are comoving and light is not moving at c relative to the object, it is not moving at c relative to the observer.

This is just word play. You are juggling different coordinate systems and throwing around vague statements that hide which coordinate system you're referring to. No matter what, light is moving at c relative to any point in a Minkowskian neighbourhood of any observer measured in its rest frame. It is also impossible to cover a rotating object with a single continuous Minkowskian coordinate chart such that the object appears static.

Nevertheless, you are overriding mathematics repeatedly in order to back broken models, and there has to be a rational explanation for why you do such an irrational thing. Different people are emotionally tied to different ideologies, so their lack of ties to some ideologies doesn't impede their ability to spot the faults in those, but their ties to other ideologies selectively overrides their reasoning when their bonds to those ideologies are strong.

I am not particularly invested in SR being factually right or wrong, but it's not going to be disproven by a bunch of word salad.

In other words, if you bring in communications faster than the waves you're studying, you can break relativity and show what's actually going on. When studying the fastest waves though, that option is not available, and that leads to fairy tales being generated about that being a special case where things work differently from all the other cases.

That would be one way to falsify SR, but by no means the only way. Any means by which one could measure one's own absolute speed without an external reference (such as cosmological inflation) would be a disproof of SR. I am not sure if you can measure it even using cosmological inflation as a reference. My first attempt at resolving what happens in your space expansion experiment by assuming a naive metric of

led to the conclusion that a measurement is possible, but this might not be the right metric, and I didn't try very hard to find the actual one predicted by current cosmological models. If the metric is Lorentz invariant, then you can't use it to tell absolute speeds apart.

Events happen once, and once they've happened they don't unhappen and then rehappen every time a mad physicist changes the frame he's using to analyse the action.

Spacelike separated events are unordered, neither can cause the other, and there is no way to tell which comes first.

[Octocontrabass]

The observer is an object. If an observer and object are comoving and light is not moving at c relative to the object, it is not moving at c relative to the observer.

By definition, an observer cannot be moving relative to their frame of reference.

There are plenty of experiments that show that absolute speeds must exist,

Which ones? The only experiment you have named so far, the Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment, did not show that absolute speeds must exist.

it is fully possible to have extra observers who are not going round with the ring

Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but the Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment did not have any such observers, and so any discussion about what those observers could have seen is irrelevant. If you want to disprove relativity, you must provide actual observed data.

Relativity says it doesn't do that by denying absolute speeds and insisting that light always travels at c relative to every observer.

And in the hypothetical scenario you just described, every observer sees light traveling at c. So where is the contradiction?

I produce simulations that show it breaking and they fail to produce simulations that show it working because it's mathematically impossible for them to do so.

So far, the only impossible thing you've shown in your simulations is two-dimensional time, and relativity does not claim that time is two-dimensional.

It proves that some clocks moving inertially are ticking fundamentally slower than others, and such differences can only occur under the governance of absolute speeds.

But you can't tell whether clock A or clock D is moving, which means you can't detect the absolute speed, which means you can't prove it exists. You must be able to detect it to prove it exists.

Mode 1 is indeed a broken model, but it is an STR model.

Mode 1 has two-dimensional time, which disagrees with special relativity.

Mode 2 is another STR model and it displays contradictions by showing events unhappening and rehappening when you change frame.

No, what it shows is that events appear to happen in a different order in a different frame. You can't observe or impact events outside your light cone, so you can't see them "un-happen" when you change frames.

When you have light moving at c relative to two observers who are moving relative to each other and all the action takes place along a straight line, that's a contradiction.

But both observers see light moving at c. There is no contradiction because it matches the available data.

For example, when you have clock A ticking twice as fast as clock C while clock C ticks twice as fast as clock A, you generate the statement 2=0.5, and that is a contradiction.

You can't tell which clock is ticking faster until you bring them back together, and when you do that the supposed contradiction disappears.

STR incorrectly predicted that the speed of the light relative to the observers that can be placed by each section is always c. The result of the experiment shows it to be wrong. You selectively choose the correct predictions that it makes while ignoring the incorrect ones that it also makes.

The Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment placed the observer in a non-inertial frame of reference. The results are fully consistent with special relativity when adjusted for the non-inertial movement, exactly as predicted fourteen years before the experiment occurred.

Who are those people? No one's telling me to do this; I'm simply doing the proper checking of models that don't fit reality. What I trust is mathematics and reason.

Of course no one's telling you to do this. What they tell you is that it's some big important problem that you need to be very concerned about, and you'll decide on your own to get into arguments. And in today's age of social media and individually-tailored algorithms, you're likely to find lots of very convincing support for any viewpoint...

Mathematics ways that the former is invalidated by a host of faults which render it irrational, while the latter is rational.

Mathematics is unconcerned with whether the theory is rational, only whether it is accurate to the available data. So far, relativity fits all of the available data.

What I want is for people to stop lying to the public about "facts" which are actually wrong.

Why do you care? Why should the public care? Most people will never need to use either theory. Most people who do need it will get exactly the same results from either theory. It's only a very small minority who would even need to consider the possibility of the two theories disagreeing, and I suspect everyone in that space has heard of modern aether theory by now.

It's difficult to win such a case with human judges, but with AGI in charge that will change.

Why do you assume AGI will be unbiased? We can't even build unbiased chatbots.

[DavidCooper]

If an observer and object are comoving and light is not moving at c relative to the object, it is not moving at c relative to the observer.

This is just word play.

Hardly; it's a very precise statement which says that what is true of the object is true of the observer too as the observer can be treated as an object and an object can be an observer or be accompanied by one moving at the same speed and in the same direction.

You are juggling different coordinate systems and throwing around vague statements that hide which coordinate system you're referring to.

There's nothing vague about my precise statement whatsoever, and it's using a single coordinate system rather than juggling any.

No matter what, light is moving at c relative to any point in a Minkowskian neighbourhood of any observer measured in its rest frame.

And you're the one juggling different coordinate systems by switching to one in which the object/observer is at rest in order to manufacture the measurement of the relative speed that comes out as c. When we have two object-observers moving relative to each other along a straight path though and sent a light pulse along that path, you can only make the relative speed of the light pulse to both object-observers by using a different frame for each measurement, thereby changing the speed the light is moving relative to the object-observers to make it c. It's exactly the same as changing s-frame when measuring the imagined speed of a sound pulse relative to an object-observer: the frame change is revealed to be a mathematically illegal move when you then make statements about the relative speed being s relative to both object-observers by fiddling the books in that way, and it's just as mathematically illegal when dealing with light in space.

It is also impossible to cover a rotating object with a single continuous Minkowskian coordinate chart such that the object appears static.

There's no rotation in the example, but in examples where there is, relative speeds of light to objects other than c are again shown to exist. STR fails mathematically in all these cases.

I am not particularly invested in SR being factually right or wrong, but it's not going to be disproven by a bunch of word salad.

Indeed, but I provide precise experiments which people only describe as word salad once they've lost the argument and are trying to mislead other people by misrepresenting the precise experiments as vague. It's as outrageous as calling the twins paradox a word salad if you disagree with what it does.

If the metric is Lorentz invariant, then you can't use it to tell absolute speeds apart.

Quite clearly it can't be Lorentz invariant and there is no way to make it so. Any expansion of space destroys STR, though STR is already mathematically broken even without going that far; it's just easier to show it when measurements pin down absolute speeds, and that would certainly happen with the clocks created just after the big bang.

Events happen once, and once they've happened they don't unhappen and then rehappen every time a mad physicist changes the frame he's using to analyse the action.

Spacelike separated events are unordered, neither can cause the other, and there is no way to tell which comes first.

That's just ideological dogma flung together to justify a broken model. The reality is that for an object like the Earth, events run at a more or less constant rate as time goes by, and the same would apply to a planet passing us at 0.866c, and to another one passing us the opposite way at 0.866c, just as in the twins paradox when that relative speed is used. When the universe runs events, it runs events on those three planets at a constant rate, though a different rate for some of them dependent on their speeds of travel. If a rocket leaves the Earth to travel with one of those other planets for a year by its clocks, then comes back by accompanying the other planet for a further year by it's clocks, we have simultaneity at a distance covered by the concept "while": things happen on the Earth while the rocket is away, and things happen on those other planets while the rocket is with them. STR makes an extraordinary and quite bonkers claim that there's no actual reality as to which specific events within that while are simultaneous across a distance. LET doesn't suffer from that defect. The universe runs events for all three planets and the rocket at fixed rates for each, and if it was to stop the action at any point for all of them, changing frame would produce a mode 3 result using the same mode 3 as in my double twins paradox. STR though demands mode 2 instead where when you change frame you advance the action for some objects and reverse it for others. That is something the real universe would never do - it does not pander to magical thinking and broken models.

[DavidCooper]

The observer is an object. If an observer and object are comoving and light is not moving at c relative to the object, it is not moving at c relative to the observer.

By definition, an observer cannot be moving relative to their frame of reference.

That doesn't stop you using a different frame as the base for your measurements and calculations and thereby measuring non-c relative speeds for light relative to you. If you're going to be genuinely scientific about measuring the speed of a light pulse relative to you without knowing your absolute speed, you can use all possible frames of reference and should determine that the relative speed of the light to you is in the range 0 to 2c. It is incorrect to state that it is c unless you know your absolute speed to be zero (or some other specific speed if your direction of travel and that of the light are at angles other than 0 and 180 degrees).

Which ones? The only experiment you have named so far, the Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment, did not show that absolute speeds must exist.

It most certainly did show that they must exist, and I've shown you how other experiments do likewise. There's no point denying it when all the evidence is sitting there further up this thread. What you're doing is denying it because theory-induced blindness prevents you from seeing any evidence that goes against your beliefs. No one can fix that for you other than you, but other people who are not so shackled can look at the evidence and recognise it.

Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but the Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment did not have any such observers, and so any discussion about what those observers could have seen is irrelevant. If you want to disprove relativity, you must provide actual observed data.

The relevant measurements are frame-independent. If you have a problem with that one, try the Sagnac experiment instead which has observers not going round with the apparatus. This is essentially the same experiment as MGP, and because the key measurements are frame-independent, it is no surprise that the results aren't affected by how the observers are moving or not moving.

And in the hypothetical scenario you just described, every observer sees light traveling at c. So where is the contradiction?

You can ride the ambiguity in that two ways. First, if the light is moving at c through space, then every observer sees it travelling at c even if they measure their relative speed to the light as non-zero. Second, if you actually mean that every observer sees light travelling at c relative to them, then they're they're making naive measurements where they assume they are at rest and then measure on that basis. The same thing happens for observers in air who measure the speed of sound relative to themselves using speed-of-sound governed measuring apparatus while assuming themselves to be at rest in the air even if they aren't. Scientists should not be that naive.

So far, the only impossible thing you've shown in your simulations is two-dimensional time, and relativity does not claim that time is two-dimensional.

That's theory-induced blindness driving wishful thinking. I've demonstrated in multiple ways with the simulations where the models break. There's also one built into the light clock demo when you hit the "show 2nd frame" button. (http://magicschoolbook.com/science/Lorentz.htm) - you can watch the contradictions there directly with both clocks being stationary and moving at 0.866c at the same time to pander to two different frames at once.

But you can't tell whether clock A or clock D is moving, which means you can't detect the absolute speed, which means you can't prove it exists. You must be able to detect it to prove it exists.

Why such naivety? Mathematics tells you that clock A has to be ticking at a fundamentally faster rate than either clock C or clock D (if not both of them); that's what the twins paradox actually proves. And that difference can only be accounted for by differences in their absolute speeds. We don't need to know which of those clocks A is ticking faster than to know that it is certainly ticking faster than one of them. This is what mathematics allows us to do, and we can throw out broken theories by applying it in this way. It's extraordinary that physicists are blind to what mathematics can do, but you'd think they'd at least be able to apply probabilities to the rival theories as to which is more likely to be correct when STR suffers from that horrible problem (where clock A is supposedly ticking faster than clock C while clock C is ticking faster than clock A) while LET doesn't. They are failing to think rationally, and they ridicule anyone who doesn't join them in their irrational and naive approach.

Mode 1 has two-dimensional time, which disagrees with special relativity.

Like I said before, when you run STR, that's what you get from it and it's precisely what reveals it to be a broken model. You cannot run STR with only proper time: if you run it as mode 1, you have events changing over absolute time at single spacetime locations, but if you run it as mode 2 you have some proper times ticking slow under the governance of an absolute time which is running local to them, and worse, every time you change frame you switch to a different absolute time, so you have an infinite number of them (and generate an infinite number of contradictions at every turn).

No, what it shows is that events appear to happen in a different order in a different frame. You can't observe or impact events outside your light cone, so you can't see them "un-happen" when you change frames.

Not more of your naive observers! The universe isn't naive: it runs events once and doesn't undo and redo them. It has to use an absolute frame to run events forwards, then when you view the action through other frames you're simply using rival hypotheses as to which frame is the absolute one. Einstein's mad move was to declare the equal validity of all frames. That would have been fine if he meant equal validity as hypotheses, but he went too far and counted them all as factual. You only have to work with s-frames in sound-in-air cases to see how bonkers that is, but also you have that barmy physicist in the rocket coming out with a series of contradictory statements as to whether the alarm has sounded or not at a distant clock. No one should be taking such a crazy theory more seriously than one which accounts for all the same observations and experiments without any of that irrational baggage.

But both observers see light moving at c. There is no contradiction because it matches the available data.

Ignoring the slowing of light in gravity wells, the light is moving at c; that isn't the issue. The issue is its speed relative to them, and it cannot be moving at c relative to both of them. As soon as you accept that it isn't, you bring in absolute speeds. Theory-induced blindness kicks in though to prevent you from accepting that, so you come out with magical thinking instead and call it science.

You can't tell which clock is ticking faster until you bring them back together, and when you do that the supposed contradiction disappears.

On the contrary; that's where the contradiction is revealed. STR insists that A and C are both ticking twice as fast as each other, and it insists that A and D are both ticking twice as fast as each other, but the twins paradox shows through mathematics that A is ticking faster than either C or D (if not both), and no amount of not knowing which prevents that reality being known. You are determined not to see it because of theory-induced blindness. We can run the exact same experiment with sound clocks with C and D moving at 86.6% the speed of sound, or with one of them at rest in the air and with clock A moving at 86.6% the speed of sound and the third clock moving at 99% the speed of sound, but all possible ways of doing this have clock A ticking faster than one of the other clocks. Mathematics gives us a way to disprove STR, but you simply rule it out because you don't want STR to be wrong. You're not doing science, but ideological belief.

The Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment placed the observer in a non-inertial frame of reference. The results are fully consistent with special relativity when adjusted for the non-inertial movement, exactly as predicted fourteen years before the experiment occurred.

That's a naive analysis. The measurements are frame-independent.

Of course no one's telling you to do this. What they tell you is that it's some big important problem that you need to be very concerned about, and you'll decide on your own to get into arguments. And in today's age of social media and individually-tailored algorithms, you're likely to find lots of very convincing support for any viewpoint...

Well, no: what I find is an avalanche of nutters attacking relativity who can't follow the simplest argument about anything, so there's no support from them. There are a good many people working on LET, including some at CERN who don't want to be named, and a lot of them aren't rational either. I've encountered are a handful of people on social media who half understand it, but that's it. The reason it interests me is that the mainstream has got this horribly wrong, but it's why they've got it so wrong that's interesting because this is all about intelligence, correct/incorrect application of intelligence, and people's propensity to override it in the most extraordinary ways when reality and their beliefs are in conflict.

Mathematics is unconcerned with whether the theory is rational, only whether it is accurate to the available data. So far, relativity fits all of the available data.

Rational people are concerned with whether theories are rational or not, and mathematics (which determines what is rational) enables them to test that.

Why do you care? Why should the public care?

Why is it so important for people to be told nonsense about relativity? Why is that more important then putting it right?

Most people will never need to use either theory. Most people who do need it will get exactly the same results from either theory. It's only a very small minority who would even need to consider the possibility of the two theories disagreeing, and I suspect everyone in that space has heard of modern aether theory by now.

I doubt they have: it isn't taught in universities, leading to students being given a highly misleading overview of the subject in which they are told actual lies about how things work.

Why do you assume AGI will be unbiased? We can't even build unbiased chatbots.

The kind of AGI that will be useful in running courts, governments, science, etc. will be systems that apply the most fundamental rules of mathematics/reason rigorously and without exception. That will necessarily be unbiased.

[Solar]

Why is it so important for people to be told nonsense about relativity? Why is that more important then putting it right?

David, there is no subtle way to put this. You have painted yourself into a corner and now you're biting everyone trying to show you the way out of there. You are not right. You are argueing from a limited and flawed understanding of the subject matter, and instead of trying to find your problems and fixing them, you are attacking everyone not "on your side".

I.e., you are doing exactly what you are accusing the others of.

Write. A. Paper.

Put your arguments into formal statements. Without the accusations and the slurs, and in a way that you could be shown problems with your logic in a way that makes you actually think, and improve your argument / paper, instead of going endless circles of "that is not what I meant".

Either you end up with something that might actually hold some water in a peer review, or you actually realize where you went wrong.

This endless "no, you are wrong" without actually making any falsifiable point because you don't properly specify the scope of your statements is not scientific.

Why do you assume AGI will be unbiased? We can't even build unbiased chatbots.

The kind of AGI that will be useful in running courts, governments, science, etc. will be systems that apply the most fundamental rules of mathematics/reason rigorously and without exception. That will necessarily be unbiased.

Systems can only "apply rules" on the data they have been fed. That data comes from humans, and as such, can never be unbiased.

I shudder to think that there are people actually believing this would be a good idea.

[linguofreak]

That is a reduced claim and it is not the normal one. If you are working with sound in air and using s-frames instead of c-frames, you can make the same kind of switches with the action being described with the same equations. That's just the phenomenon of apparent relativity which can be found in play in both types of system. The STR interpretation is that if you are looking at three apparently identical systems moving at different speeds relative to each other along a straight line (for example, light clocks aligned with their direction of travel), the underlying physics of what's happening to them is identical due to the lack of absolute speeds. If you recognise that the underlying physics of what is actually happening is different, you're bringing in absolute speeds and departing from STR. In at least two of those light clocks the light pulse takes longer to travel the length of the clock arm in one direction than the other, and at least two of them have different proportions of time spent with the light moving in one direction (the same direction for each), but in STR that is heretical.

If we were beings made of sound waves in air, our universe would be the collection of propagating sound waves within the air, and assuming that the air was a continuous gas without individual molecules, our physics would be something like Lorentz invariant and we'd have a theory something like relativity. But only interactions according to that theory would be relevant to us. Air with different properties could support the exact same physics as long as they supported sound propagation according to the same laws. The air itself would not be part of our universe, it would just provide the "hardware" that our universe was running on top of, and the same universe could be run on different "hardware".

If it was something more like real-world air, with individual molecules, then we would see Lorentz violations depending on absolute velocities relative to the air as intermolecular separation would become relevant to the physics of frames travelling close to Mach 1 absolute, and the properties and state of motion of the air itself would be relevant to our physics. There would be more properties of air that would be relevant as gasses supporting similar physics in general might have different velocities relevant to the rest frame of the air at which Lorentz violations would become apparent.

Lorentz symmetry is observed to hold up to the highest velocities we've used to test it, so if there's some underlying physics our universe is working on top of, as far as we have so far been able to determine, it's more along the lines of the first scenario than the second. Scientists do not dogmatically claim that relativity is for sure the way the universe works. They fairly routinely test for violations of Lorentz symmetry, and they haven't yet observed any, so relativity is the best explanation we have so far. If there is an underlying physics with absolute time and absolute velocities, it is completely irrelevant to every experiment we've been able to test it with, and until that changes, the simplest way to handle things is to assume that no such underlying physics exists.

False comparison. In space dimensions you can reverse your trip, but it doesn't work with time. Events happen once, and once they've happened they don't unhappen and then rehappen every time a mad physicist changes the frame he's using to analyse the action.

The physicist can only see the events in his past light cone. These events remain within the light cone (or on its boundary, if they started out there) whatever reference frame you use. They never "unhappen". Events outside of his own past lightcone are irrelevant to any observer within the universe, he can't tell if they've happened or not.

It isn't my silly two-dimentional time: it's the broken model's two-dimensional time where the fans of the model are blind to one of them, but where computer programs cannot be fooled. There is no simulation in existence that can run spacetime on its sole type of time without that second kind of time appearing. When you look at mode 1 of the STR program that shows event-meshing failures, or the GTR program that shows an event-meshing failure, in both cases when you advance objects at the rate of their unslowed proper time,
you end up with events changing over an undeclared kind of time at single spacetime locations with one object arriving there first and another arriving there later.

This demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of "proper time". Proper time is simply a measure of geometric length between timelike-separated events in a spacetime that is locally Minkowskian, and it determines the time that will be measured on a clock made of the types of particles we know about along the path between two events.

If you try to avoid the event-meshing failures though and have all the objects that reach that spacetime location arrive at it simultaneously, then you have to advance them in such a way that some proper times tick slow, and if they tick slow, they aren't ticking out the full amount of time that's actually passing, so again you have two kinds of time in the model, one of which you've failed to declare. Your models are incompetent, and I'm not the one misinterpreting them.

The amount of proper time that advances for a given object per iteration of a simulation is ***not*** a property of the physics being simulated, it is a result of the structure of the simulation and the movement of the object. If the simulations involved have been constructed properly, then two simulations that handle this differently will still yield the same events as seen by an observer inside the simulation.

[DavidCooper]

David, there is no subtle way to put this. You have painted yourself into a corner and now you're biting everyone trying to show you the way out of there. You are not right. You are arguing from a limited and flawed understanding of the subject matter, and instead of trying to find your problems and fixing them, you are attacking everyone not "on your side".

It's bizarre that you can come to that conclusion when I've proved my case in multiple ways and set it all out so that anyone competent can check the facts. I'm also not the one with a limited understanding of the subject, unlike establishment physicists who have an incorrect understanding of the maths of relativity.

I.e., you are doing exactly what you are accusing the others of.

And how do you come to that conclusion? I don't tolerate contradictions, but they do. Do you imagine that I'm suffering from theory-induced blindness due to my trust in the most fundamental rules of mathematics (which relativity breaks while also depending on them)?

Write. A. Paper.

What for? They refuse to publish what they consider to be heresy. They are a cult that rejects correct science whenever it conflicts with their ideology. This can only be done from the outside.

Put your arguments into formal statements. Without the accusations and the slurs, and in a way that you could be shown problems with your logic in a way that makes you actually think, and improve your argument / paper, instead of going endless circles of "that is not what I meant".

They are already in clear statements without accusations and slurs, and where are all the imagined "that is not what I meant" things that you speak of? All of it has been tested repeatedly on experts, and the language is precise. People's failure to interpret precise language is not a fault with the wording. When I point out where theory-induced blindness is in play, that is not a slur or accusation: it's a pointer to a place where a fact is being rejected and it is the explanation for that fact being rejected.

Either you end up with something that might actually hold some water in a peer review, or you actually realize where you went wrong.

Arguments are either right or wrong and they do not need to be blessed by a church to be right. When a church is in charge of science and is misusing its position, you have to tear it down from the outside by showing the public what that church is determined to stop them seeing.

This endless "no, you are wrong" without actually making any falsifiable point because you don't properly specify the scope of your statements is not scientific.

I have shown multiple disproofs of relativity which are fully clear for people who look at them honestly. You're not doing that because you are motivated by a drive to conform to the mainstream instead of checking the facts and accepting what mathematics actually requires.

Systems can only "apply rules" on the data they have been fed. That data comes from humans, and as such, can never be unbiased. I shudder to think that there are people actually believing this would be a good idea.

Data comes from many sources, including machines making measurements. Each source of data comes with its own record of (un)reliability which should be kept with the data. By running checks on data for how (il)logical it is, you can score sources for credibility and pin down which information must be incorrect, which might be correct, and how likely it is to be correct, while the probabilities for that may be adjusted as information on the same issue comes in from other sources. People are poor at making such judgements, as is illustrated by the way the majority of a population can be fooled by a rogue leader (e.g. Putin) or by a religious ideology, or a pseudo-scientific cult. Intelligent machines which have no bias programmed into them will be completely immune to that: no amount of only feeding them biased information will make them believe that biased information. I shudder to think that anyone can think this isn't a good idea when it is our only hope of coping in a future world where misinformation becomes a bigger and bigger problem with fake video fooling the masses at ever turn. It's all we're going to have to defend against that, while anything less than that will be inferior.

Anyway, there is little point in continuing with this here as it's reached a point where it's only going to go round and round in circles until mathematical AGI steps in to judge it, but I must thank everyone involved in it for discussing it in a civilised manner. It is a very good advert for the forum that this didn't turn toxic in the way discussions here used to do as standard.

[linguofreak]

Second, if you actually mean that every observer sees light travelling at c relative to them, then they're they're making naive measurements where they assume they are at rest and then measure on that basis.

This is the claim that relativity makes. Unless we observe Lorentz symmetry violations in physical experiments, the assumption that the observer is at rest is the most natural and useful assumption available, because the state of motion with respect to the hypothetical aether frame is unknown and unknowable.

Relativity doesn't claim that an aether does or doesn't exist. It claims that the existence of an aether is entirely unnecessary to explain current observations and assumes that no aether exists until such time as physical observations make it relevant (if that ever happens).

[DavidCooper]

A post came in while I was writing that, so I'll respond to it.

This demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of "proper time". Proper time is simply a measure of geometric length between timelike-separated events in a spacetime that is locally Minkowskian, and it determines the time that will be measured on a clock made of the types of particles we know about along the path between two events.

You're misunderstanding it. Either you have time that runs (as with original STR) or you don't (later STR). If you don't, your "time" dimension isn't time and your model is a static block which replaces causation with infinite coincidence (i.e. magic) where it contains apparent causation but where no apparent cause was ever able to cause its apparent effect. If you do run time in the model though, you have to run that proper time, and that (according to Einstein) is what clocks tick. If the model is to be run, that proper time has to tick and do so at the only rate it is allowed to when it doesn't defer to any superior kind of time.

The amount of proper time that advances for a given object per iteration of a simulation is ***not*** a property of the physics being simulated, it is a result of the structure of the simulation and the movement of the object. If the simulations involved have been constructed properly, then two simulations that handle this differently will still yield the same events as seen by an observer inside the simulation.

The simulation has its iterations dictated by proper time which is very much a property of the physics being simulated, so the model drives the simulation and provides its time. The result of that event-meshing failures. The GTR simulation is very simple, so if you think you can write a properly constructed simulation that doesn't produce an event-meshing failure while running that trivially simple scenario with one object spending time closer to a black hole than the other, show it to me. Dozens of leading physicists have failed to do so (or point to any existing simulation that can do it) throughout the ten years I've been asking them to point to such a simulation. They simply don't have one. If you're trying to pass off a pseudo-GTR simulation as GTR (which is what they actually use as they have no mathematical alternative) where the proper time of the object closer to the black hole ticks slower than the proper time of the other object in order to keep them in sync under the governance of absolute time, then that's not GTR, and to claim that it is GTR is fraud.

[linguofreak]

-
It proves that some clocks moving inertially are ticking fundamentally slower than others, and such differences can only occur under the governance of absolute speeds.

In the twin paradox, the travelling twin is not an inertial observer! He accelerates (impulsively, in the simplest version of the problem) from the outbound moving frame to the inbound moving frame. If he doesn't do that, he never meets up with the Earth twin again and they can't compare their clocks to each other to determine which is running slower. If the travelling twin doesn't turn around, and instead the Earth twin waits a while and then accelerates to overtake the travelling twin, then the Earth twin will be the one with less elapsed time when they meet up again.

The lesson of the twin paradox is that an inertial path between two timelike-separated events is the path with the longest proper time. All accelerated paths have a shorter proper time.

[DavidCooper]

Relativity doesn't claim that an aether does or doesn't exist. It claims that the existence of an aether is entirely unnecessary to explain current observations and assumes that no aether exists until such time as physical observations make it relevant (if that ever happens).

Yes it does make that claim: it claims that there are no absolute speeds, and that is a denial of the space fabric. And it's claim that it's unnecessary is incompetent because rigorous analysis of many experiments rather than naive analysis shows that absolute speeds must exist. The contradictions rule out STR without needing absolute speeds to be pinned down. They are clear contradictions when you work with sound clocks in air, and they remain the same clear contradictions when you work with light clocks in space.

[DavidCooper]

In the twin paradox, the travelling twin is not an inertial observer!

I replaced him with clocks C and D to remove the acceleration and demonstrate that acceleration does not provide you with the way out you think it does.

[linguofreak]

Let me show you that absolute speeds exist, because once you have those, you necessarily have absolute time too. Picture lots of clocks being created just after the big bang, and these can move in random directions at random speeds. What would those clocks be doing today? They'd be passing other clocks just as the cosmic microwave background radiation continually passes through every point in the universe from all directions all the time. Take a clock sitting out in space near us. What happens when another clock born just after the big bang passes it at 86.6% the speed of light? One clock says that the universe has been around for nearly 14 billion years (because that's the time on that clock), but the other clock says it's only been 7 billion years since the big bang. These timings are measures of their absolute speeds. Another clock goes past the opposite way at 0.866c and it too says the universe is 7 billion years old. Other clocks go past even faster and they give lower figures for the age of the universe. Relativity simply falls to pieces when you do the work to check it for validity. For relativity to be valid, those clocks would need to agree on their timings when they pass each other, but if they were to do that, you could use them to break the normal results of the twins paradox.

An expanding universe with a definable age will contain matter (which is also necessary to explain our observation that the universe contains matter ). That matter will have an average velocity, and will gravitationally influence the shape of spacetime. Spacetime will be curved in such a way that the proper time since the big bang will be largest in the average rest frame of the matter of the universe, but this will be a result of the properties of the matter within the universe, not the underlying physics. Lorentz symmetry is spontaneously broken (the physical arrangement of the universe breaks Lorentz symmetry, because the matter has to have some average velocity or other), but not explicitly broken (the underlying laws of physics still respect Lorentz symmetry).

This is no different than the scenario on the Earth's surface, where the underlying physics doesn't care about absolute velocities, but where the velocities of the ground, air, and water dominate the physics of everyday life.