OSDev.org

We've gotten better at diagnosing non-obvious cases, and the latest rates reported by the CDC are around 1 in 30, so everyone is likely to know multiple autists, though they may not all be diagnosed. On a forum like this one, you're a fair bit less likely to be interested in the subject matter or to have the patience to research it in depth if you're not autistic, and considerably less likely to tolerate as rough-and-tumble of a forum culture as we have here. Accordingly, we can assume autism to be so prevalent on this forum as to make it useless on its own for explaining why any one individual takes a position on a subject that everyone else considers insane (unless maybe the issue is that the person *doesn't* have it).

EDIT: And the longer someone's been here, the more likely they are to be autistic. Me, you, and David have all been here at least a decade without getting so pissed off at everybody as to leave for good, so that's a fairly good sign that we're all on the spectrum. David's position certainly isn't sensible, but "you're probably autistic" is an ad-hominem that's irrelevant to the discussion and almost trivially true of anybody here.

Here, you exactly contradict the results of the Michelson–Morley experiment which predates Einstein's theories. Of this experiment, Albert Einstein wrote, "If the Michelson–Morley experiment had not brought us into serious embarrassment, no one would have regarded the relativity theory as a (halfway) redemption." It is an embarrasment: light does not behave like any natural physical object we can discuss and reason about. The complex and bizzarre theories of relativity would not exist without such horrible results as these: In every experiment, measurement, and use (i.e. GPS), the speed of light relative to the observer is always the same; it does not vary.

@linguofreak: I didn't see your reply as I was composing mine. I guess I wasn't thinking of all the ways my words could be taken when I corroborated Octocontrabass's suggestion that DavidCooper talk to a psychiatrist about autism. I was only hoping that DavidCooper would come to understand himself better. Here are some things I know: 1, over 50% of programmers self-identify as being on the autistic spectrum; 2, the original concept of autism was the brain paying more attention to inside thoughts than external stimuli and observations; 3, almost every programmer I've known well has at some time or other got something wedged into their mind and it won't go away; whether it's trouble finding a bug because they're sure a certain part of the code is correct or insisting that a program or library works according to a simplistic understanding of its documentation when it clearly doesn't, or, especially in less experienced programmers, insisting that attractive reasoning (such as that found in GNU propaganda) is absolute truth even though observation shows there's more to it. Doesn't point 3 look like a natural consequence of the issue crudely described in point 2? And doesn't DavidCooper's opinion on relativity look like such a consequence too?

Certainly; it leaves me wondering who the cube guy is and who gangstalking people are. I doubt google will find the former, but having just looked up the latter, it sounds like a psychologist friend of mine who sees people following him wherever he goes. He's bipolar.


I can look at the scientific consensus on a host of issues and see that in most other cases they appear to be right. Relativity is a very special case where they're clearly wrong, and I've shown how they're wrong in multiple ways, so the issue here is why no one else commenting in this thread is at all worried about a model which reduces the universe to zero size and zero duration. Does that bonkers aspect of the model not make you stop and think? And that isn't even one of the disproofs. The theory is built on magical thinking, but magical thinkers are apparently incapable of seeing the problem with that.


I do have a bulletproof understanding of it, but the problem is that no two believers interpret the theory the same way due to all the places where it's ambiguous and contradictory, so it's exactly like discussing religions with believers.


No they haven't. What they've done is argue that STR doesn't make claims that it makes.


When I use terms in ways not shackled by the ideology of STR, that doesn't make my usage of terms incorrect. Within the ideology they have warped interpretations, but when you're testing a theory for validity, you don't let it dictate the rules as to how you test it by restricting yourself to its incompetent usage of terms. For example, STR recognises no difference between acceleration and deceleration, but that's a consequence of its denial of absolute speeds, while absolute speeds demonstrably exist.


My theory? What's that? I'm commenting on STR and GTR and they aren't mine. I'm analysing them using fundamental mathematics, and that isn't a theory. I've mentioned LET a number of times as it's a superior theory to STR+GTR due to it being rational where they are irrational, but that's a side issue.


Well, the closest thing to my theory would be LET and I have done work that's advanced it, such as by pinning down the mechanism behind frame dragging. There's plenty of work still to be done.

___________________________________________________________



A false lead? A subtle clue with nothing false about it which everyone would miss except for someone thinking about autism and thereby barking up the wrong tree (while the word had not been used in the thread up to that point). It was to save them from making the mistake of voicing that suggestion. As it happens, being an autist is now so fashionable that people are keen to claim the label if they think it fits them, and particularly when so many of them think it makes them more capable at a number of high-thinking tasks than neurotypicals, but having those abilities does not make you autistic. If I was autistic I would have no problem with saying so, but I happen not to be and it's important not to mislead people about that kind of thing.

One key thing about autistic people is obsession: they can focus on very narrow interests in ways that shut everything else out, and sometimes that's useful as it enables them to develop skills in a specialised area which go beyond those of their neurotypical rivals who spread their time much more widely, and some of my interests can be classed as obsessions, such as my interest in languages where I've worked through over a hundred language courses covering fifty languages. That's not normal in wider society, but it's considered normal in my family. Obsession isn't autism though: practically every boy I knew at school had major obsessions because it's normal. For a large number of them it was football, and they had an encyclopedic knowledge of the game. Most of them weren't autistic. There was one who could hear a car coming up the road behind him and name the make and model from the sound of its engine, and he wasn't autistic. I knew every bird in a European bird book and a number coding that could be used to represent it, but that isn't autism: it's just an interest where I noted down all the species I saw each day and used numbers instead of names to save space. I knew a boy who was actually autistic, and he spent years doing little more than hurling toy cars at the skirting board of his bedroom wall. He now runs a nuclear power station.


Indeed, but I can read people like a book. I study thinking. I study how it's done well, and I study how it fails. I study how religious dogma traps people, and I study how scientific dogma can do the same thing by exploiting the exact same vulnerabilities. The faults in people's thinking there are mainstream.


You're merely revealing your own broken thinking. What have I done here other than show a series of disproofs of a mad theory that's built on magic? What is astonishing is how you can't see that. Your model gives our universe zero size and zero duration and you think that's sane? You think I'm mad for not buying into such idiocy? But then, you're probably in denial about that aspect of the model because you haven't pushed it to the extremes to see if it's valid. I have though. You don't want to because you don't want to find out that it's broken. Everything you do is about making excuses for it instead of testing it to destruction where it falls to pieces.


Any child should know by the top of primary school how to make the measurements. Some of them know how to make them by the start of primary school. Do you expect me to insult you by telling you how to do what everyone here should be able to do?


They are measurements of relative speeds. You then end up with the result that the light going one way round the ring passed the material of the ring at a higher average relative speed than the light going the opposite way round the ring, and that difference breaks relativity: it can only be higher one way than the other if there are absolute speeds. If there were no absolute speeds, the light would have to pass all that material at c relative to it and the timings for the trip past it all would be the same for both directions. The only reason you don't want to accept that is that you are determined that STR be right and you refuse to let yourself see that it isn't. It's theory-induced blindness. We had the same thing in the expanding space scenario with all those clocks where they reveal absolute speeds through non-symmetrical results, and again you were unable to accept the facts that mathematics provides about such a situation. If there's a disability in play, that disability affects your thinking, but it's a special kind of disability which is belief-specific: you are incapable of accepting results when they're heretical. That's the exact same disability that you can find with bonkers religious beliefs.


There is no need to pin it down to show that absolute speeds must exist. That's an error in your thinking that's been programmed into you by propaganda. This is like a case where there's a long room like a corridor which takes two 90° turns, but there are no doors - no ways in or out at all. There's someone in the room and he wants to know if there's a dog in there with him. He goes along to one corner and looks to see if there's a dog hiding at that end. There isn't, so he goes to the other corner to see if there's a dog hiding round that one. There isn't. He then thinks, but it could be hiding round the other corner, so he goes back to that one to check, and of course there's no dog there, but again he isn't sure there's no dog in the room as he can't now see round the other corner, so he thinks he can't prove that there's no dog in the room because there's no place he can look from where he can see the whole room at the same time. He lacks the ability to make a more complex deduction. His thinking is affected by a disability. You're doing the same kind of thing here, but the difference is that you're refusing to make the deduction because the result is heretical. Your thinking is controlled by the theory.


A higher relative speed one way than the other shows that absolute speeds exist, and in this kind of experiment we don't have a symmetrical relationship with one frame showing a light pulse to be passing the material faster than the other light pulse while a different frame shows the latter light pulse passing the material faster than the former light pulse. In this kind of case, all frames have the same light pulse pass the material at a higher speed. The symmetry is broken, and STR breaks with it.


I'm not doing that: mixing results from different frames is a mathematically illegal move which I never make, but you make it all the time because you don't understand frame mathematics correctly.


You appear to have missed the point. You don't know how the air is moving in the wind tunnel. You get results from the sound clocks with timings (though you don't get them in real time as you could cheat by using your c-governed watch to work out how slowed the ticking of any moving clocks are and thereby work out their actual speed relative to the air). You can use s-frames to speculate about what the air might be doing, and each s-frame represents a different speed of the wind in the tunnel.

We can actually have two wind tunnels side by side though with different wind speeds in each, so in one of them we have clock A1 at rest in the air while clock B1 is moving at 0.5s through the air, but in the other tunnel we can have clock B2 at rest in the air while clock A2 is moving through the air at 0.5s, or we could swap the wind speeds round so that it's the other way round. You aren't going to know, and you won't be able to tell from the measurements because what's going on in both wind tunnels will look identical to you when you study the data. And most importantly, sound pulse 1 (in tunnel 1) has an equivalent called sound pulse 2 (in tunnel 2), but they are moving at different speeds relative to each other. When we remove the air and use magic instead of a medium to govern the propagation of the sounds (and thereby use magic sounds that can operate within such a magical universe, just as you have light do in your medium-less space), you now have two identical systems but with the sound pulse moving at different speeds in each, and you can tell that they're moving at different speeds because they aren't comoving. Each frame provides a rival hypothesis about how the speed of the sound pulse is governed and they are fundamentally incompatible. That is where Einstein made a huge mistake in his thinking, and almost everyone else just blindly followed him down that path, making the same mistake due to their lack of ability to visualise what they were actually doing.


A frame is a hypothesis. When we put in the actual medium, as soon as you try to put it in more than one frame and have the sound or light pulse move at s or c relative to it, you have two instatiations of that medium moving relative to each other. That's why you try to deny them, and yet in each frame the light pulse has it's propagation governed by a magic medium nonetheless while you stick your head in the sand and pretend it doesn't need one. Your theory actually depends on an infinite number of them, and even then it's generating an infinite number of contradictions which show up when the mad physicist in a rocket asserts in sequence, "the alarm has sounded at the clock", "the alarm hasn't sounded yet at the clock", "the alarm has sounded at the clock", "the alarm hasn't sounded yet at the clock". You don't think that mad physicist is mad though. Mathematics insists that half his claims are false, but he asserts equal validity for them, and so do you. Why do you do that to yourself? You're going against the most fundamental rules of mathematics, but you blind yourself to it, and all to back a broken theory which you are determined not to test to destruction but instead defend it like any religious zealot.


I have provided you with two wind tunnels side by side with each representing the air being at rest in a different frame, and the sound pulses are not comoving. They are manifestly not moving at the same speed as each other. Take away the air and use magic mediums instead while denying that they exist, but the two sound pulses are still not comoving. Ignoring the sound pulses, they're identical systems now that they run on Einstein's magic, so we can combine them, and when we put the combined sound pulse in there, what's it doing? It's moving at 0.5s relative to itself. It's really obvious when you work with s-frames that whenever you change to a different frame, you change the speed of the sound pulse relative to the objects, but also relative to itself. But Einstein never worked with s-frames, and nor did any of his followers. They never did understand correct frame mathematics, and they never noticed that every aspect of STR could be replicated in the sound-in-air system, including length contraction which shows up so clearly with standing waves, and apparent length contraction acting on stationary objects when observed by moving observers using sound-clock governed sonar. If that had been looked at before the Michelson-Morley experiment was carried out, the null result would have been unsurprising. Lorentz wasn't the sharpest tool in the box either, because even though he came up with a theory that accounted for it by adding length contraction, he never found the mechanism for it. It was only found in the last twenty years or so when LaFrenière found it after correcting a mistake in Иванов's work.


To them, they were the scientists. Religion was their attempt to understand reality, and they were overconfident that they were right. Today's cult within physics is the same - Einstein's model runs on magical thinking and breaks fundamental rules of mathematics.


It doesn't matter who I am; issues should not be decided on the basis of the people involved in providing and examining the evidence. I provide disproofs of relativity and if you reject them, you're the one who's being wrong on the Internet.


I've shown precisely where they've made their errors.


A lot of mathematicians do notice a lot wrong with relativity. They don't speak out about it though because it causes trouble if they do, and the institutions where they work don't like that. That's why my uncle refused to discuss physics at all, even though his work on topology is used in GTR. Physics is toxic, and it's toxic because of a highly abusive cult that took it over.


The problem there was the term Lorentz-invariant, because it isn't actually invariant when you're looking at the underlying reality and trying to support that in simulations, and that has led to me using the term in a wider way with a different meaning. But am I the only person in the world who can see through the incorrect maths? No: I've found lots of other people who can see it too, such as LaFrenière, although he died a decade ago with no recognition whatsoever for his work. What I do though is set it all out for anyone who wants to check it, and any rational person with a basic ability to do maths and who is not blinded by a theory acquired through brainwashing channels should be more than capable of recognising the faults in the model; the places where it goes against mathematics and runs instead on magic.


And you are unable to tell if there's a dog in the room or not because you cannot make deductions.

________________________________________________________________



Really? How? The only thing the MMX did was reveal length contraction. If you take a system of standing waves of light and move it at 0.866c, the nodes contract in the direction of travel to half their rest separation distance. We've never moved such a system that fast, but the MMX did the equivalent of that at much lower speeds, and they didn't measure any such contraction even though we know that such contraction must happen, and we predict that a stationary observer would observe such contraction - it's only an observer moving with the apparatus who fails to observe it because he and all his measuring apparatus is contracted to match, and the reason it's all contracted to match is that atoms maintain their separation distances by using wavelength to measure them. The MMX is 100% compatible with absolute speeds, so how do you think I'm contradicting its results?


Which means, without this puzzling result (which has been accounted for by Fitzgerald and Lorentz), no one would have switched away from rational science to buy into a magical theory.


It behaves just like sound in air.


The same naive measurements have a sound pulse move at s relative to every observer.

No, it's very straightforward.

SR is the theory that (1) there are frames (coordinate systems) in which the laws of physics take the same form, which shall be called inertial frames, and (2) the speed of light propagating through free space is equal to the same constant c in all directions when measured with respect to an inertial frame. That is, for any inertial frame, it is true for any point on the trajectory of any light pulse travelling through free space that . That is all there is to it. From this, it is concluded that inertial frames are related by Lorentz transformations. We can identify some quantities that are invariant under Lorentz transformations, such as the (relativistic) relative speed between two objects (as opposed to your Galilean relative speed, which is coordinate dependent). What's there to interpret differently?


The fraudulence comes from trying to show it as a disproof of having autism because it's something an autist typically wouldn't say, despite having been explicitly inserted for that very purpose. To have any evidentiary value, it would have to be a statement made spontaneously without an advance understanding that it would be playing a role in a defense against a psychiatric diagnosis. Obviously, an autist is just as capable of physically typing any sentence that anyone could type, even if they would normally consider it cringy, or dorky, or whatnot.


Ok, let's do it the primary school way then. You want to have the relative speed measured as defined by children in primary school in order to disprove a statement about relative speed as defined the SR way. This is what I mean by using vague language to pretend that you're talking about the same quantity.


It does, if you stop pretending that passing "at c relative to it" means taking the magnitude of the velocity difference in some unrelated coordinate system. If you go by what SR actually says, namely that light travels at c with respect to every inertial frame, then it becomes apparent that the supposed speed difference comes from either labeling the same spacetime point with different coordinates, or using non-inertial frames.


If you had found that there was an inertial coordinate system in which the speed of light wasn't c, then you would have a point. However, this isn't what you measured. You measured the magnitude of the difference between the light pulse velocity and some other object's velocity and made the invalid deduction that two such differing measurements implies that the same would be true of the speed of light in different inertial coordinate systems.


I may not have the data to tell me what the air is doing, but nothing about an s-frame by itself suggests anything about what the air is doing. I have an x0, x1, x2 and x3 axis, I don't have an air axis.


Not if the observer follows the real laws of physics. You can relate different "s-frames" where sound pulses move at s, but only one of them can be the rest frame of an observer, the reason being that "Air-SR" is an untrue theory. A real observer could easily determine what speed the air is going at by holding two synchronized clocks, stretching out his arms and listening to the time difference of incoming ticks as he rotates.

But here's the difference between our situation and your thought experiment with sound: with sound in air, we can make non-naive measurements. But, assuming the ether even exists, we cannot, using light or gravitational waves or anything else that exists in our universe, make non-naive measurements with respect to the ether with anything that exists in our universe. The only observables we have access to are naive observables. We are in the same position as someone made entirely of sound waves would be in your sound thought experiment. An external observer can make non-naive measurements in the sound scenario, but an observer made of sound waves could not, and it's just the same with us in our universe, an internal observer can only make naive measurements. The only way we can get around that is if the ether has a minimum length scale (equivalent to the separation between air molecules in the sound scenario), or something else that mixes the external physics of the ether with the internal physics of our universe. If that's the case, then we'd start seeing Lorentz violations once we started probing high enough rapidities, and from that we'd be able to work out properties of the ether, like its characteristic length scale and our velocity relative to its rest frame. But we haven't observed any Lorentz violations despite having probed fairly aggressively. That could just mean that the length scale (or whatever is mixing the physics) is really small, but until we observe Lorentz violations we have no way of knowing what the rest frame of the ether is (if it exists), and so our theories have to be Lorentz invariant anyways to deal with the fact that the rest frame of the ether (if it exists) is unknown and we have no way to formulate non-naive observables. If the theories are Lorentz invariant, then they not only will work with any ether rest frame, but will work if we assume that no ether, and hence no ether rest frame, exists.

Even if Lorentz violations eventually do turn up and we are able to nail down the rest frame of the ether, the range of rapidities over which any Lorentz violations that do exist are experimentally known to be negligible is so large that relativity will continue to be an excellent approximation (just like Newtonian physics is an excellent approximation to relativity at low velocities).

Physicists aren't stuck on relativity as some unassailable pet theory. The routinely do experiments to look for Lorentz violations, and if they find any, *then* they will start working to explain them. Depending on the nature of what they find, the explanation for it might look like LET. But until they (or you!) find Lorentz violations, if you just insist that you have found the TRUE nature of reality that they are IGNORING because they are obsessed with their IMAGINARY MATH, and keep asserting that relativity asserts OBVIOUS IMPOSSIBILITIES (despite routinely delivering correct predictions about the ways that physical systems will behave), with only thought experiments as evidence, then they *will* laugh at you.

The same could be said of an observer with access to the external physics of the ether, if LET is true. But if the only measurements we can make are within the framework of the internal physics, then we can't build a clock that's guaranteed to tick true as seen by the external physics.

For an internal observer in the Air-SR scenario, it is *unknowable* and *irrelevant* whether the air exists. It forms the hardware that his universe is running *on*, but it is *not* part of his universe, unless there's mixing between the external and internal physics that allows him to make observations that break out of the sandbox. For all he knows, the "underlying hardware" could be air running one way at Mach 0.2 one minute and hydrogen moving the other way at Mach 0.5 the next minute, with snapshots of the state of the air being taken periodically, the snapshot being used to set up the same universe on a different "ether", and the evolution of the system then continuing.

A large part of the difficulty that David is having here is in failing to understand that there are multiple external scenarios (indeed multiple kinds of *kinds* of external scenarios) that could all produce the same internal physics, and that if we don't have evidence of mixing between the physics of our layer and that of the next layer up, it is absolutely useless to try to formulate theories about the physics of the next layer up (except for fun), even the existence of the next layer up is in doubt, and it is absolutely stupid to *assert* that the next layer up *exists* and takes *this exact particular form that I propose*.

For a single-threaded process without access to wall time, assuming no speculation bugs, it is utterly irrelevant whether the CPU is built on a multi-cycle microarchitecture or is a superscalar out-of-order machine with a pipeline 10 instructions wide and 30 deep, or if it's a big.LITTLE multicore with both of the above types of cores and the process is being switched between them on every time slice. It is irrelevant whether the machine has terabytes of RAM or whether it has 64k of RAM backed by terabytes of swap. These differences matter greatly to the *user*, who is likely to die of old age before a multi-cycle machine swapping terabytes of data through kilobytes of RAM gets anything accomplished, but the process is oblivious to them. Assuming no hardware failure, it's irrelevant to the process whether its wall time is a million years or a millisecond.

From my second last post on page 2:-

"Incidentally, both the postulates of STR are sufficiently ambiguous that they can be interpreted as being postulates of LET. One of them can either be interpreted as meaning that the speed of light is c relative to space (which is LET) or that light travels at c relative to every observer (which is STR). If you go by the first interpretation you are automatically bringing in absolute speeds, which is why STR is logically banned from using that interpretation. If you go by the second interpretation, you are ruling out absolute speeds. The two interpretations are incompatible. The other postulate about the laws of physics being the same for all frames is compatible with LET as the laws don't change - it's still the same universe, so of course they don't change - but what is actually going on in different situations can be very different even when it appears the same to an observer, but the rival interpretation of it (STR's interpretation) is that such situations are identical."

So, it isn't as simple as the postulates by themselves as their ambiguity allows them to apply both to LET and to STR. To clear up the ambiguities to distinguish STR from LET, additional dogma comes into play where absolute speeds are ruled out, but the universe runs on absolute speeds. To rule out STR it is sufficient to demonstrate that they must exist, and that has been done in multiple ways.


The relative speed is not coordinate dependent, but is an absolute relative speed. Each frame provides its own hypothesis as to what that speed is, and they disagree, but there is only one correct answer. STR picks one out as preferred by treating one of the objects as if it is at rest, but that has no validity.


It wasn't put there as a disproof, but as a signal to warn people not to make an incorrect suggestion that might bite them in the @$$. And there by chance is another such expression which I wrote quite naturally without manufacturing it on purpose as an illustration. If you look back at my earlier posts you can find a host of other expressions appearing there which an autistic person would not use. I had a look to see how many I used on the second page while looking for the bit about the postulates, so I'll list a few of them here. One of them was, "They themselves were victims of the propaganda who had been misinformed and were spouting untruths as a consequence. Are they going to put it right? Hell no - they don't want to swim against the tide and risk being hounded out." Another was, "Take your blinkers off." Then there was "Not only won't it earn them a badge if they gain this deeper understanding, but it will actually lead to them being ridiculed by other badge wearers who might seek to strip badges away from them instead of them earning more. That's how these cults go on and on through momentum. People don't want to know the truth; all they want to do is defend their badge." I also spotted "You simply haven't got a leg to stand on." I use expressions like that a lot because I use them naturally and without thinking about it.


A defense? Why would there be any need to defend against such a diagnosis? When people actually have that condition and acknowledge it, that helps them as people give them more leeway. I don't need more leeway, but even if I did I wouldn't lie by playing an autistic card that I don't possess. That would be a very unpleasant fraud.


I have a demonstrable propensity to use a host of expressions that autistic people would not naturally think of deploying, or at least, I assume they wouldn't do so on the basis that I've heard so many autists commenting on neurotypicals using them. There's an experiment the autists here (ones with an official diagnosis) can do by looking through their posts (of prior date to this issue coming up here) to see what range of expressions of that kind they use in their writing at the drop of a cat.


There's nothing vague about it whatsoever. STR makes measurements in the exact same way but with a silly rule that you select a frame in which one of the two objects is at rest, while all other relative speed measurements are rejected. There's no difference in how the individual relative speed measurements are made though, even though you're always going to add zero rather than some other value. I don't use vague language; you just want to make out that I do as part of your defence by obfuscation.


You're just running away from the mathematical reality again. We work with one frame at a time for the whole experiment, and we can work with any number of frames separately for the whole experiment. The results all agree that the light passes all the same material in less time one way round the ring than the opposite way and they all agree on which light pulse was moving faster on average relative to the material it was passing. No amount of using alternative ideologies to avoid doing the correct analysis can overturn the result that this correct analysis reveals.


What I showed is that one light pulse passes at least some of the material of the ring at a higher relative speed than c while the other passes at least some of the material of the ring at a lower relative speed than c, which means that at least some of the material is not at rest, but is moving with a non-zero absolute speed. And the maths of that involves the light pulses both travelling at c throughout. This is glaringly obvious, but due to your determination for a broken theory to be right, you simply reject mathematical facts that go against it, and that's what all the STR believers do time and time again. Their thinking is shackled by their theory because they use the theory as their model of what is correct instead of testing it using mathematics properly. Whenever the two things are in conflict, the theory must be right, so they make an ad hoc exception to mathematics and pretend to themselves that they haven't done so. You've just demonstrated that right here: you simply refuse to accept what mathematics tells you about this experiment because the theory matters to you more.


Only if you're cheating by taking advantage of supersonic signals/mechanisms. If those clocks are sound clocks aligned vertically and you move them round yourself on paths that look circular to sound-clock-governed sonar, you won't measure any time difference in the arrivals of ticks from the two clocks. You will find the illusion of the sound moving at s relative to you regardless of your speed relative to the air.

What? No. It means exactly what it says: measured with respect to any inertial frame. That is, measured along the given coordinate axes, period. Not relative to some other object that has a trajectory on its own. It is not telling you to subtract another velocity.


Of course it is coordinate dependent. Your relative speed as you seem to define it is a measure of how much the trajectories of two objects advance along the x1, x2 and x3 axes relative to each other for one unit of advancement along the x0 axis. This is obviously going to depend on what those axes are. A frame is not a hypothesis of anything, it's a definition. The notion of a particular frame being "correct" is like saying there's an absolute left direction.


That much should be obvious. You're trying to argue that everyone else is wrong, with you being the lone defender of rationality. You yourself wrote:



Clearly, having a psychiatric illness would prove you a liar every time you make references to "rational people", "the ability to think rationally" etc., and would punch another huge hole in your argument.


This is such a silly line of reasoning. Obviously, if you think hard enough, you are going to be able to come up with lots of expressions you wouldn't normally use. Everyone wants to sound as eloquent as possible when arguing on the internet, especially when the argument crucially relies on the assumption of the speaker being of a rational, sound mind.


And that's clearly different from what you're doing. You can't just add some arbitrary value and then claim it as a inconsistency in SR.


There is only one frame that is relevant when trying to disprove that the light is travelling at c with respect to some inertial frame, that being the same frame in which you are trying to disprove that light is travelling at c. If you measure something in another frame you need to convert it properly to the correct frame, not just subtract the velocity that corresponds to being at rest in the first frame, which taken together would correspond to a measurement in a non-inertial frame (as it is non-Minkowskian).


Being "at rest" is a frame dependent term. The opposite of being at rest is having a non-zero velocity in that frame. An absolute speed would be one that is distinguishable from other speeds in an absolute, measurable sense.


Why would I move them on paths that "look circular" to a sonar, and how could I even, when I don't know the air velocity? I am not made out of neither sound waves nor light, but notice how in the sound case, I have to go out of my way not to "cheat" and I need to know the air velocity in order to keep myself from measuring the air velocity, whereas with SR, I can't measure an aether velocity no matter how hard I try.

You assume, but you don't know. You should talk to someone who does know, such as a psychiatrist.

Indeed, but such an observer would still be able to apply the disproofs of relativity and determine that a medium must exist to govern the propagation of sound waves and that there are absolute speeds of travel relative to the local medium, so he isn't going to be fooled into thinking that he can do away with the medium and replace it with an undeclared magic, unless he's a magical thinker who's happy to use such magic to make broken models while denying that he is doing so.


Well, there is supposed to be a minimum length, but relativity would allow it to be contracted to a shorter length, and to do so infinitely. It's possible for an average location for a spread-out fuzzy object to be somewhere in between two locations which are the minimum distance apart without any part of the object being in any in-between locations, so there's no telling how much precision might be needed to show up absolute speeds through that approach.


For some purposes, but we can still see that STR is wrong.


But it's entirely surplus to requirements. There's no excuse for preferring a disproved irrational theory over a rational one with the same predictive power.


Well, more fool them. It won't be me that future generations are laughing at. They have brought science into disrepute, and that's deeply damaging at a time when we need to tackle climate change. We need people to be able to trust scientists on important issues like that instead of being able to point to clear examples of their gross stupidity.


The difficulty is not mine, but yours: you keep failing to recognise that your model is dead.


It is stupid to assert that it doesn't exist when experiments show that it must do so. The vital services provided by the aether most certainly do exist, and something more substantial than your magic nothing has to exist to supply them. Even Einstein recognised that, which is why he doubted his theories much more than his followers do. If he was still around, I expect he would accept all the disproofs and switch to LET.

You can try to put that spin on it, but it won't wash. By denying absolute speeds, you make it c relative to every observer. If you then deny that you're doing that, you need to accept absolute speeds. You're trying to have your cake and eat it, but then that's what relativity is all about: the toleration of contradictions.


No, it's not coordinate dependent. You're mixing up apparent relative speeds with actual relative speeds. The actual relative speeds are the ones measured in the local absolute frame, while the ones measured in all other frames are apparent relative speeds. In cases where we don't know which frame is the one providing the correct hypothesis as to what is actually happening in the universe, all of them need to be treated as apparent relative speeds. However, in expanding space we can pin down the local absolute frame approximately and then measure actual relative speeds approximately.


I've proved they're wrong, and in multiple ways. That doesn't make me ill, so you should be looking at what's wrong with them.


Someone with an illness would not be lying as they'd believe themselves to be telling the truth, but I don't have such an illness. You aren't suffering from such an illness either, but a psychological condition which is mainstream: an inability to see past a theory that you've bought into and which shackles your ability to see its faults. It's the exact same condition that leads people to kill on behalf of imaginary Gods. Most people are not rational on specific issues even if they are rational on other issues where they are not shackled by their beliefs, but those places where they override rationality do render them irrational, and it is no error to say so.


It isn't. Your determination to bark up the wrong tree (and indeed to bark up any tree) is what's silly here. I'm not trying to win any argument about this issue, but to show you the folly you're pursuing by trying to make out I have some medical condition on the basis that you can't recognise clear disproofs of a theory you've been brainwashed into swallowing hook, line and sinker. You're getting to the point where you're eliminating autism as a condition of any note because you're giving autists the ability to do anything that a neurotypical person can do, and with the same ease. Your only "evidence" for me having that condition is that I'm pointing to mathematical facts and insisting that they are facts, while you don't want them to be correct because they conflict with a daft cult belief that you've bought into due to the way a dire mis-education system has programmed you.


I didn't say that was an inconsistency in STR: I said that STR gives special status to some measurements without justification. It's simply applied ideology. In reality, a relative speed from any other random frame is just as likely to be the correct one as the one that STR prefers, so STR's preferences are incompetent.


You are still playing a game of avoidance there. The experiment shows up something crucial about the speeds of two pulses of light relative to the ring material, while the analysis from any frame automatically takes the speed of light relative to the frame as c. When you do the measurements using a different frame, of course you convert properly to that frame, but you then get the same result: that one light pulse passed the material at a higher average speed than the other, and that absolute speeds therefore exist. The only rational explanation for your failure to accept that is theory-induced blindness: you don't want it to be true and you are determined never to accept that it is true no matter how clearly true it is.


In every frame you analyse it from, there is material there which cannot be at rest. They can disagree about which parts of the ring are not at rest, but they all agree that some parts of it cannot be at rest. If you try to have all of it at rest, the two light pulses will complete their circuit in the same length of time, but that conflicts with all experimental results.


If you're going to use c-governed length contraction instead of s-governed length contraction, you will be cheating. When you hold out the clocks and then rotate, your arms are not going to contract under the governance of s, but of c. If you move them on paths that look circular to sound-clock-governed sonar, you will move them round an ellipse contracted from a circle in line with s-governed length contraction, and that will mask the difference in ticking that you hope to detect.


If you had access to superluminal communications, you could pin it all down with ease. But in an expanding universe, we can pin down absolute speeds approximately, so it is possible to measure your approximate speed relative to the aether.

You're another one diminishing what autism is to the point that it would cease to be a condition of any note, at least for the high-functioning autists. What it all comes down to is that when you are part of a herd which comes up against someone who doesn't believe what you've been programmed to believe, not only must that individual be wrong, but they must be autistic. You're grasping at straws, and with an embarrassing degree of desperation. How long are you going to keep following that ridiculous line? I even tried to save you from making that mistake before you even started, but you just dived straight into it regardless.

Geez, can we close this thread already? It's quite obviously leading nowhere...

Yes, as he measures it, that is, in his rest frame. There is no ambiguity there, that's what condition 1 implies.


But it would at the very least make them wrong. Of course you know that, and therefore you have an interest in countering any accusations of being ill, whether true or not.


No, I'm saying it is easy to construct fake proofs of not having autism behind a computer where you have access to unlimited resources and can take as long as you like to type a reply. For example, you could be using a dictionary of common English idioms. Or you could have asked a friend to give you a list of expressions you don't normally use and tape it to your desk, and I would have no way of checking.


I couldn't care less about what was taught in school. I learned relativity from the original source manuscript while everyone was doing their times tables. The only time relativity was mentioned in one of our school textbooks, they got it completely wrong before turning the attention to quantum mechanics and getting it even more wrong. You should be reading proper books written by real physicists, not school books. If you were taught by someone who didn't know it, it should come as no surprise that you don't know it either.


What do you mean by the "correct" one?


If by "passed the material" you mean taking the coordinate difference between the light's trajectory and the material's trajectory, then this has nothing to do with the "speed of light with respect to an inertial frame" in SR. If you disagree or if you mean something else, then show it with math. By math, I mean giving names to functions and variables and properly defining what they represent, relating them with mathematical equations and performing valid mathematical calculations that end up showing a contradiction with the postulates of SR.


Obviously, but what does this have to do with absolute speeds?


And if my grandmother had a ****, she would be my grandfather.


How so? All you're measuring is how space is expanding. The expansion of space follows laws of physics that do not reference an aether or absolute speeds. Therefore, the outcome of such an experiment does not tell you anything about what the supposed aether is doing.