Non-Platonic geometry definitions

[Gigasoft]

The universe is compatible with Euclidean 3D geometry with the speed of light reducing in gravity wells in line with √(1 - 2GM/r).

Of course you can choose a coordinate system and call it "Euclidean" if you want, and treat the metric as just another field. The point of GR is that it allows you to describe the world in any coordinate system and tells you how to translate between them (and with SR, any inertial coordinate system in Minkowski space).

And what do you imagine happens when everyone follows that approach? How can science ever self-correct when it's stuffed full of people who worship authority like in a religion and who refuse to see the faults? They are systematically brainwashed in universities by having half the facts hidden from them. Every aspect of relativity covered by STR, for example, can be recreated in 100% classical systems like sound in air, right through to length contraction and apparent length contraction, but this is deliberately not taught.

While brainwashing does sometimes take place in the education system, this is not an example of it. When it does, it is almost always the result of deliberate and persistent subversive influencing done for political purposes. There is nothing to be gained from introducing such shenanigans into physics, so why would anyone bother? Obviously, it goes without saying that we can form an analogy to SR in any medium that has a constant wave propagation velocity, I don't see why it would be necessary to mention it unless someone is slow on the uptake and probably shouldn't be looking for a career in physics anyway. No one is saying that you can't do all your calculations in one fixed coordinate system if you want, and ignore SR.

If two objects travel from spacetime location 1 to spacetime location 2 in different amounts of time, they cannot leave the first location simultaneously and arrive simultaneously at the second location. One will not get there soon enough. The only way for them to meet up successfully is if one of them is running slow relative to absolute time.

One has to be careful with wording here. We use the term "proper time" for the amount of time that has passed in a comoving frame, which is path dependent. Absolute time, however you define it, is just a spacetime coordinate. Math isn't broken just because you choose to use imprecise language to describe something.

So, what do people do when they're confronted by the facts? They say, "Oh, I'm not qualified to judge this," so they just outsource their checking to an authority which is lying to them.

You're forgetting that physicists are intelligent people who are more than able to check each other's maths. We don't have to leave it to some random college professor.

Why is the above stuff not taught in universities? Why are students deliberately starved of essential understanding of the subject?

Probably because you only took an introductory physics class, or did not pay attention in class. I'm fairly sure that a class on SR would explain how SR works.

STR denies that measurement and insists that the correct relative speed for the light and second object is c, but if the relative speed of the light to both objects is c, the two objects cannot be moving at 0.5c relative to each other: their relative speed to each other would have to be zero.

The inconsistency comes from mixing up Galilean and SR descriptions. If two objects are moving relative to each other at 0.5c in a Galilean sense, they relative speed according to SR would not be 0.5c, but would depend on how fast they are moving with respect to the reference frame in which they have the Galilean relative speed of 0.5c, and is 0.5c only if one of the objects is at rest relative to this frame. It is perfectly fine for light to be going at the speed of c relative to both objects' comoving frames, since the light vectors are precisely the eigenvectors of a Lorentz transformation.

In that new frame, the relative speed between the light and the first object is now 1.5c or 0.5c, but again he bans you from accepting that measurement. So, he mixes frames to get the two measurements which he wants to make so that they conform to his bonkers theory, and he rejects all measurements that disagree with his ideology. In the course of changing frame, he changes the speed of the light relative to both objects, or he has the light move at two different speeds relative to itself. In doing so and mixing frames, he is making an illegal mathematical move.

No, you probably misunderstood what he meant by the term "relative speed". If you do the math, everything works out correctly.

How did the two flashes of light know to travel at the same speed as each other? Did they decide to travel at c relative to one ship rather than the other ship? Did they decide to travel at c relative to the observer? They aren't going to know how the observer's moving until they reach him, so they can't do that. Also, we can have some of the light pass the first observer and be seen by a second observer further away who is moving relative to the first observer along the same line as all the rest of the action, so is the light supposed to move at c relative to that observer too?

The light is travelling at c relative to any inertial frame. Anything that travels at c relative to the one ship will automatically travel at c with respect to the other ship and both observers as well. Again, just to not cause confusion, by "relative" I mean with respect to the comoving frame of each object.

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.

In order to pass each other, they must either have originated at different places or traversed a curved region of spacetime. If they came from different places, then for your argument to hold, they must have originated on a flat spacelike boundary. However, close to the big bang, spacetime is not Minkowskian, so I don't think you can make this assumption. Therefore, this can't be used to establish an absolute time axis.

but in other situations we could measure absolute speeds by the timing differences.

And how would you go about doing that? Expanding space is described by GR, which does not admit a concept of absolute speeds, so the experiment is doomed to fail from the start. You are assuming some coordinate system to be the "absolute" one, but there is no measurement you can do that will tell it apart from other coordinate systems.

If we are at rest in our local space, the expansion of space means that the two clocks aren't, so they'll both tick slow, but they'll both tick equally slow, confirming that we are at rest in the local space. However, if one of the two clocks is the one at rest in its local space fabric, we are moving thorough our local space fabric and the other clock is moving through its local space fabric twice as fast as we are, so that clock will be ticking slower than the first clock. Our slowed functionality will lead to it looking as if the first clock is ticking fast, but the other clock will look as if it's ticking slow. Again, this allows us to pin down our absolute speed.

Space doesn't have a speed, there's no such thing as being at rest relative to space. All you can measure is the curvature. What will actually happen in a tethered setup like this is that the clocks furthest from the center of mass will always tick slower.

It isn't simpler - if fills a gap with magic and then asserts that the magic is simpler than aether, but the magic represents a complex aether built out of an infinite number of aethers which all govern the speed of light differently from each other such that every pulse of light moves at an infinite number of speeds relative to itself at all times in order to pander to the idea of equal validity for all frames of reference rather than simply having one that represents reality correctly while all the rest misrepresent it.

What do you mean by "representing reality correctly"? What is the reality that is described by one coordinate system but not by the others? They are all describing the same thing in terms of different unit vectors.

[nullplan]

And what do you imagine happens when everyone follows that approach? How can science ever self-correct when it's stuffed full of people who worship authority like in a religion and who refuse to see the faults?

And there's the mistake: I am not a scientist (or at least not a physicist). So my opinion cannot move science (or physics) as a whole closer to or farther from the truth. I expect physicists to evaluate your claims with their expertise, and if true, to change their opinion accordingly. Which is then broadcast into wider society, and then there's a new majority of physicists to follow. This model has worked great for many paradigm shifts in the past. Again the Einstein-Planck thing: Most physicists now are saying Planck was right, so that's what I'm going with.

I also lack the background in paleontology to evaluate the claim that Piltdown Man was a fraud, but paleontologists are saying that (now that they have enough data), so I'm going with that as well. The truth comes out eventually. Science is an iterative process, asymptotically approaching the truth. I'm just an outsider looking in on the process.

Essentially, this is what I'm banking on: If you show a scientist something true, they will recognize it as such, and tell people about it. At least, most will. If we have a system of science full of corrupt scientists, then we have bigger problems to solve. Far more terrestrial problems that whether Einstein was right.

[DavidCooper]

You display a profound lack of understanding of the Special Theory of Relative.

You're used the word "you" instead of "I" by mistake. I understand it well enough to produce programs like this - http://magicschoolbook.com/science/ref-frame-camera.htm (click the first button, type "d" and enter to select the fourth set of example objects, then run the action by typing "s" (start/stop) and change frame by pressing the number keys 1-4, and you can also change direction with "d") - that program actually runs LET rather than STR, but it demonstrates that I know the field, not least because it explores length contraction through radically different mathematics while producing the same warping of shapes. You, by contrast, consider your lack of knowledge superior on the basis that an authority told you it's right and you just believed it without checking. (The objects in set d illustrate how you can fit 16 objects into the space of 8 around the edge of a disc if they're moving at 0.866c with their length contracted to half, but it also lets you see the same action through other frames where the apparent timings of closest approach vary. The first three sets of objects (a to c) were what the program was written to test: it's all about the idea of an acceleration in one direction followed by a second acceleration in a different direction causing an object to rotate, which is what happened to the orange square. I don't just take things like that on trust but check them through simulation.)

That is by the by - none of it is relevant to the OP.

Reading the link in it suggests otherwise. It agrees with my view of what mathematics is and where it comes from: nature gives us the core of mathematics. (You can explore other types of mathematics where it overrides the core and explores other possible natures though.) It also references Einstein as agreeing with that view. If that core of mathematics which comes from nature is correct, then everything you correctly derive from it will also be correct and can be used to explore nature. Where there's a mismatch and the processing is correct, there's a fault in the core rules. With relativity, we have a core of mathematics derived from nature which is used to hold theories together, but relativity then breaks some of those fundamental rules while its fans assert that it doesn't, and in doing so they err. What's the point of discussing mathematics when people who should know better are actively spitting (or worse) on it? They are incapable of correcting their own faults, so who's ever going to hold them to account? Mathematicians generally keep out of it as it causes trouble for the institutions they work for, which is why my uncle refused point blank to discuss physics, even though his work on topology is used in GTR. They know that what physicists do with their maths stinks, but they have to keep quiet.

This is one of the silliest threads I have seen on these forums. I expect mambo-jumbo pseudo-science from the sort of people who worship Donald Trump, not from what I have always thought be be reasonably intelligent people. How wrong can you be.

Well, everyone's free to demonstrate their intelligence through their opinion. I simply set out the mathematical realities, but I can't force anyone to respect mathematics.

Let's look at another of the disproofs of STR (and bear in mind that GTR depends on STR as a component, so every disproof of STR takes GTR down too). Anyone capable of programming an OS ought to have the ability to follow this, but you'll find that 99% of physicists can't (because they don't want to).

Picture a sound clock which works like a light clock, pinging sound signals rather than light between an emitter/detector and a reflector. We align this vertically, and we install a light clock in there with it too, so we have both together (the light pulse and sound pulse travelling straight up and down if the clocks are at rest). Now, let’s have a circular railway track go round our clocks, with the clocks at the centre. We introduce a train which travels at 60% the speed of sound, and on the roof of that train, we put a second sound clock, again aligned vertically and open to the air. The sound pulses on this clock follow a zigzag path due to the movement of the train, so this moving clock ticks more slowly than the central one as the pulses have to travel further through the air for each tick, and it actually ticks at 0.8 times the rate of the central sound clock. Much further away, we have a spaceship with a second light clock in it which has the same vertical alignment of its clock, and this spaceship is moving at 60% the speed of light while travelling along a circular path which is again centered on our central sound clock and lies on the same plane as the railway track. The light pulse in the spaceship’s light clock too is following a zigzag path, and that clock too unsurprisingly ticks at 0.8 times the ticking rate of the central light clock - we don’t need voodoo to explain why that happens.

In the case of the circling sound clock, we have our rational explanation as to what is going on: time isn’t behaving differently for it, but that clock is merely ticking slow due to its speed of movement and the extra distance covered by the sound pulses. In the case of the light clock on the spaceship, it’s immediately obvious to rational people that time isn’t ticking slow for that clock either, but that it is ticking slow due to its speed of movement through space. What we get from physicists though is a pile of magical thinking about how time is running differently for the light clock on the spaceship: that it’s moving through less time.

They drag accelerations into it to sow obfuscation, and yet we can put our spaceship on a circuit of double the radius, or ten times the radius, or a thousand times the radius, maintaining its speed of 60% the speed of light in each case, but we see that the acceleration force is clearly tending to zero. The light clock continues to tick on at the same rate as before due to its speed of movement through space. We can do the same thing with the sound clock, increasing the radius while maintaining its speed of 60% the speed of sound, and it likewise goes on ticking 0.8 times as often as the central clock.
Imagine a really small sound clock. We can move it in a tighter circle if we make it smaller without the sounds being able to take significant shortcuts, and this makes it easier to generate an acceleration upon the sound clock as high as or even higher than the acceleration force acting on a really distant light clock following a huge circular path. And still they both stubbornly tick at 0.8 times the rate of their central counterparts. This slower ticking of both the circling clocks is manifestly down to their speed of movement through the medium through which their bounced signals propagate; at c in one case and s (the speed of sound) in the other.

We can measure the length of the circular zigzagging path followed by the bounced signal of the sound clock all the way round a lap and determine that it is longer than the height of the clock multiplied by the number of ticks, and we can do the exact same thing with the path of the bounced signal in the light clock, showing unambiguously the dependence of ticking rate upon distance travelled by the bounced signal. Observers in all inertial frames of reference agree that this is what they measure. The only people who disagree are the ones who imagine that non-inertial, rotating frames too are valid for this and that they can use them to make the circling clocks stationary throughout such that the light doesn’t travel any greater distance than twice the height of the clock multiplied by the number of ticks, but they only apply that to the light clock and refuse to do the same for the circling sound clock even though it could potentially have many orders of magnitude more acceleration acting on it than the light clock in the spaceship. Their imagined role for acceleration in this has been comprehensively debunked. We know exactly which of our clocks are moving around which by the way some tick faster on average than others, so we know categorically that the light and sound pulses in the ones ticking slower are covering a greater distance than the distance from emitter to mirror and back multiplied by the number of ticks per lap. And lap after lap, the truth that the circling clocks are ticking slower is revealed by the fact that they just go on recording less time than the central clocks which are ticking faster because they’re moving at a lower average absolute speed. Time runs at the same rate for the whole universe and all its content. If you move, your clock ticks slow, but it still goes through exactly the same amount of time as every other clock while merely having its functionality slowed by that movement.

Draw the zigzag path for the light on the wall of the room you're in - it doesn't matter if it's square rather than round. Get rid of the spaceship and just have a bunch of lasers stuck to the walls with each zig and zag produced by its own laser. We've removed the speed of the ship from the case to focus on what the light is doing. A pulse of light starts the first zig and when it reaches the zag that follows, it passes through the pulse of light from the next laser. The same thing happens at each exchange all the way round the course. In the centre of the room you just have a vertical line representing the light in the central light clock going up and down. Measure the distance the light has to travel and count the number of up and down strokes it can make in that central clock compared to the one that's set up round the wall. The horizontal component of travel is what makes the wall clock tick slow. Try moving the room such that on one wall the light pulses are actually travelling directly up and down in space. The wall clock will tick faster while the light is running along that wall, while the clock in the middle of the room will now be ticking slower as its light pulse has horizontal distance to cover, but when the wall clock's light is moving along the opposite wall its light pulses will have to travel much further horizontally through space, leading to the wall clock ticking much slower than the central clock during that part of the lap. No matter what speed you move the room at, the distance travelled by the light pulse in the central clock will be the same distance as the distance collectively travelled by the light pulses of the wall clock, but the number of up and down strokes of the wall clock will be 0.8x as many as those of the central clock.

It's really simple stuff which children in primary schools can understand. You can show them how nature works and how clocks have their ticking slowed without passing through less time. Physicists are determined to look stupid because they have too much to lose if they ever back down from their mad ideology, but you don't need to be taken along with them for the ride. Use your own mind to check the facts. Physicists try to obfuscate things by throwing fake rules about where you "have to" change frame to that of the ship and keep changing frame as it accelerates (and/or changes direction), but we can eliminate the ship and just have the light following its zigzag path. What do they do with that? Switch to the "frame" of the current light pulse? If they do that, they then have the light pulse make its trip in zero time and contract its path to zero distance. They don't like being taken there because that is the logical destination of STR: because there are zero-length and zero-time paths between any two spacetime locations in the universe, their mad mathematical abstraction actually reduces the universe to zero size and zero duration. That's how bonkers it is, but they're blind to it. If you want to let them poke your eyes out too though, that's up to you.

[DavidCooper]

...Under modern aether theory, it's impossible for any experiment to detect the presence of aether. Are you arguing a disproven version of aether theory?

I'm using LET, but I'm also looking carefully at a host of experiments that actually show that the space fabric (aether) must exist. What you find in the literature is an avalanche of propaganda rather than scientific facts where baseless assertions are made about the aether not being needed while a more careful look at the evidence says the opposite. The Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment, for example, reveals that light cannot travel at c relative to all objects because when you send light round a rotating ring it passes the material of the ring at a higher relative speed in one direction than light sent round the ring the opposite way. You have to avoid measuring that in naive ways though: to do it properly, divide the ring up into sections, let's say a, b, c, ... z. The light going round the ring one way passes through section a, then b, then c, etc., while the light going round the opposite way goes through z, then y, then x, etc. If you consider the relative speed of the light going round the first way relative to the material local to it in section a while it's passing through that section, and then the relative speed of that light relative to the material local to it in section while it's passing through that section, and so on, that's when you find the mathematical reality that a naive approach misses: you find that the relative speed of light to the material is not always c. To imagine that it is always c relative to objects is utter voodoo in the first place, but people are brainwashed into believing it through their education where propaganda is heaped on them under the label "facts", and they then have to regurgitate it to pass exams.

[DavidCooper]

The universe is compatible with Euclidean 3D geometry with the speed of light reducing in gravity wells in line with √(1 - 2GM/r).

Of course you can choose a coordinate system and call it "Euclidean" if you want, and treat the metric as just another field. The point of GR is that it allows you to describe the world in any coordinate system and tells you how to translate between them (and with SR, any inertial coordinate system in Minkowski space).

My point is that reality is fully compatible with the universe actually having that 3D Euclidean geometry. GTR merely provides a mathematical abstraction of that which attempts to keep light travelling at c at all times instead of recognising that it slows down. Event-meshing failures then disprove that mathematical abstraction as soon as you simulate the action. (They often attempt to get round that by switching to an eternal static block universe where the future already exists, but that fails too as it destroys causation.)

While brainwashing does sometimes take place in the education system, this is not an example of it.

It most certainly is. I've lost count of the number of discussions I've had with physicists where they're asserted that what happens with light in space is radically different from sound in air, and then I've shown them that the mechanisms are the same and that all the phenomena of STR can be recreated in classical systems. What happens? Some of them were on Quora and they deleted all their comments in a hurry to hide their embarrassment. None of them owned up. None of them said, we should be teaching this. 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.

There is nothing to be gained from introducing such shenanigans into physics, so why would anyone bother?

They're defending their errors. They have made the most monumental mistake in the history of science and cannot bring themselves to back down. That's why they go on miseducating every new generation of physicists to make sure they conform.

Obviously, it goes without saying that we can form an analogy to SR in any medium that has a constant wave propagation velocity, I don't see why it would be necessary to mention it unless someone is slow on the uptake and probably shouldn't be looking for a career in physics anyway.

Then why are so many people with lofty positions in physics and PhDs falling out of their backsides denying that all these phenomena of relativity occur with sound in air too? They simply don't know. They've been misinformed. What I find shocking is the number of them that try to pick me up over some correct statement I've made where they're extremely insulting about it and try to lay the law down about how relativity is different and doesn't work the same way as with things like sound in air, and then they're shocked to find out that they're wrong, but they don't have the courage to do anything about it by making sure the subject is taught properly instead of only half the story being told along with a heavy topping of propaganda. They are making a mockery of science.

One has to be careful with wording here. We use the term "proper time" for the amount of time that has passed in a comoving frame, which is path dependent. Absolute time, however you define it, is just a spacetime coordinate. Math isn't broken just because you choose to use imprecise language to describe something.

There's no imprecision in the language I use. On the contrary, I'm much more careful with it than they are. Proper time is apparent time, and that gives you a much better idea of what it actually is. Proper (meaning "own") refers to clocks having their own time, which means the apparent time that they count out. Absolute time is the amount of time that is actually passing for these slowed clocks which fail to register all of it. And these terms that I use predate STR, while STR's terms are merely theory-specific jargon.

You're forgetting that physicists are intelligent people who are more than able to check each other's maths. We don't have to leave it to some random college professor.

Then why have you all failed to check it properly? Why does that checking have to be left to outsiders? And why are you incapable of checking the maths that I put forward which shows that absolute time exists, that it can be pinned down in principle in expanding space, and that spacetime models either generate event-meshing failures or destroy causation? What do your lot do when you pretend to check it? They don't do it honestly, but just try to dig in to defend their existing beliefs instead of doing what real scientists should be doing which is to test them to destruction to see if they break. I go so far as to show them where they actually do break, but none of them actually want to know. They aren't interested in truth, but instead want is to be members of the elite club who "get it" so that they can acquire high status. Show them a proof that their theory is wrong and they just write it off as a "word salad". It's shameful how incompetent they are that they can't even follow a simple thought experiment.

Why is the above stuff not taught in universities? Why are students deliberately starved of essential understanding of the subject?

Probably because you only took an introductory physics class, or did not pay attention in class. I'm fairly sure that a class on SR would explain how SR works.

Classes on STR are like going to a Church Bible study group. I know why they're not teaching it properly and I've seen the consequences with leading experts on relativity having crucial holes in their understanding of it a mile deep. They've never been taught the subject fully and pump out misinformation about it as a result.

The inconsistency comes from mixing up Galilean and SR descriptions. If two objects are moving relative to each other at 0.5c in a Galilean sense, they relative speed according to SR would not be 0.5c, but would depend on how fast they are moving with respect to the reference frame in which they have the Galilean relative speed of 0.5c, and is 0.5c only if one of the objects is at rest relative to this frame. It is perfectly fine for light to be going at the speed of c relative to both objects' comoving frames, since the light vectors are precisely the eigenvectors of a Lorentz transformation.

The problem is the incorrect understanding of frames that physicists have. In physics they use c-frames, but they just call them frames because they don't know any other system of frames, and the rules they apply to them are plain wrong as a result. If they were proper mathematicians, they would look at the workings of s-frames too with sound in air and explore all the same phenomena of relativity in play in that system where a pulse of sound can be measured as moving at s relative to each and every object no matter what the actual relative speed is. There are actual relative speeds and apparent relative speeds. STR denies the actual ones and only accepts the naive apparent ones while also accepting mathematically illegal frame mixing. I show that here: http://magicschoolbook.com/science/inco ... rames.html. With the case illustrated on that page, you can view the action as sound in air or light in space because they both work the same way, the only difference being that it's easy to detect air but impossible to feel the space fabric. The orange dot (when it appears) is a pulse of sound/light whose speed is governed by the medium. When you get rid of the air and have the speed of the sound pulse governed by magic instead, it's still governed by a different magic medium than the magic medium that governs it in the other frame. Whenever you change frame, you change the magic medium that you depend on and you have the sound travel at a different speed relative to the objects in the system. For two or more frames to be equally valid, you then have that pulse of sound moving at different speeds relative to itself. This is easy to see when working with sound in air, but the exact same rules apply with light in space. Physicists do not respect those mathematical rules, but override them, thereby tolerating contradictions which invalidate their theory. (Note: there's an error on the text of that page that I linked to which I've never had time to correct. The bats would only see the world through s frames if their mental clock was a sound clock aligned perpendicular to their direction of travel. Their actual clock is c based rather than s based, so they don't see any apparent contraction. However, we could make a device that would perceive the world through sound clock governed sonar which would produce s frame images.)

No, you probably misunderstood what he meant by the term "relative speed". If you do the math, everything works out correctly.

You're just defending broken mathematics because you don't want to go against the authority. What happened to the real you that you used to be as a child before you were indoctrinated with Einstein's voodoo? There must have been a time when you understood what relative speeds actually are. How did you manage to let them bury that understanding for you? If you do the math the same way with the sound in air case, guess what: everything works out just as "correctly", allowing you to deny the existence of the air and to tell people that the actual relative speeds between sounds and objects don't exist because that's somehow a faulty term. Take your blinkers off.

The light is travelling at c relative to any inertial frame. Anything that travels at c relative to the one ship will automatically travel at c with respect to the other ship and both observers as well. Again, just to not cause confusion, by "relative" I mean with respect to the comoving frame of each object.

Do it with sound in air. Go on; do it. Use s-frames instead of c-frames and see how well your argument stacks up in that situation. It becomes arrant nonsense, and it's the exact same arrant nonsense when you do it with light in space. You've only been shown half the picture by your training. They withheld the other half from you, and you don't think you need it so you're resisting it now - no one needs it to earn their badges so they're set up to reject it as worthless. 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.

In order to pass each other, they must either have originated at different places or traversed a curved region of spacetime. If they came from different places, then for your argument to hold, they must have originated on a flat spacelike boundary. However, close to the big bang, spacetime is not Minkowskian, so I don't think you can make this assumption. Therefore, this can't be used to establish an absolute time axis.

You appear to be saying that STR is incompatible with the universe then. If there are no absolute speeds, all of those clocks should be able to be passing us today at all speeds and in all directions, and it should be possible to project their paths back through a simulation all the way to the big bang. If you're putting limits on the range of speeds they can travel at past us, you're imposing absolute speeds on the universe. I'm happy for you to do that, and if we work with clocks that could exist, their timings when they pass each other (which produce frame-independent measurement facts) still serve as a means to pin down their absolute speeds. In reality something more interesting still happens, because the expansion of the universe not only redshifts the CMB (cosmic microwave background radiation), but it also slows moving objects down towards absolute rest, which leaves all the galaxies today moving at low absolute speeds regardless of how fast the material from which they're formed might collectively have been moving when it was created. Every way you look at it, absolute speeds show up again and again and again.

And how would you go about doing that? Expanding space is described by GR, which does not admit a concept of absolute speeds, so the experiment is doomed to fail from the start. You are assuming some coordinate system to be the "absolute" one, but there is no measurement you can do that will tell it apart from other coordinate systems.

It doesn't matter what GTR's ideology asserts. If space is expanding and you set up two clocks on the end of a long cable/rod which maintains their separation distance, one of them will have to tick faster than the other unless the midpoint of the rod is at rest in the local space fabric, assuming an even expansion of space (which is what physicists believe in). If a distant galaxy is moving relative to ours and we put one end of the rod where that galaxy is while the other end is locked to our galaxy, the far end of the rod will be have the expansion of space carry that other galaxy past it at the same speed relative to it as the two galaxies are moving apart. If we put an observer at the midpoint, they're going to receive signals from the clocks at the two ends of the rod, and the arrival of ticks from the clock at our end will have a higher frequency than the midpoint observer's clock, while the arrival of ticks from the clock at the far galaxy will have a lower frequency than the midpoint clock. These three clocks are not moving relative to each other, so according to STR, they must tick at the same rate as each other, but if we were to find that they all conform to STR by ticking at the same rate, then that would show that the universe cannot be expanding and destroy the big bang model, creating a horrific problem with accounting for the CMB. The expanding universe model depends on absolute speeds, but physicists are in denial - they simply refuse to think about the issue because it goes against the required beliefs of their faith. Here's the big problem you have: if you want that distant galaxy and ours to have has sufficient time to form since the big bang, you have to abandon STR and have that difference in ticking rates between the three clocks. The midpoint observer will be receiving radio/light signals of ticks which set out from the two galaxies way back in the distant past, but accompanying those signals can be images of the galaxies at the time when the signals were sent out. Both galaxies will be equally evolved in those images because they've both at approximate rest in their local space fabric. If the clocks on the rod were all ticking at the same rate, that distant galaxy would have to be operating in slow motion and couldn't be so far evolved, so it couldn't have emerged from the same big bang. You're opening up all sorts of horrors if you try to maintain STR in this universe where it so clearly cannot fit. Relativity is an illusion, and those who are not naive should not fall for it.

Space doesn't have a speed, there's no such thing as being at rest relative to space. All you can measure is the curvature. What will actually happen in a tethered setup like this is that the clocks furthest from the center of mass will always tick slower.

Mathematics disagrees with you. All I'm doing is putting the facts through proper mathematical checks and pointing out the consequences. Physicists just put their hands over their eyes and pretend they didn't hear, but they can't go on ignoring reality forever - AGI isn't going to play that game. AGI will apply all the same checks that I do and will call them out. As for clocks furthest from the centre of mass, the mass is irrelevant to our relatively massless rod and clocks where the clocks at the end can both be inside galaxies or some way to the side of them so as to be at shallow depth in their gravity wells. Whatever the situation is, we can compensate for that slowing and eliminate it from the results if we know what the masses are. (Clocks further from the centre of mass will also tick faster rather than slower.)

What do you mean by "representing reality correctly"? What is the reality that is described by one coordinate system but not by the others? They are all describing the same thing in terms of different unit vectors.

Look at the sound-in-air examples with s-frames and then ask yourself if all s-frames correctly represent reality. The mathematics of it is exactly the same with c-frames where again there can only be one frame at any specific location that correctly represents reality (though due to the expansion of space there is not a single frame that serves that role at all locations).

[DavidCooper]

Essentially, this is what I'm banking on: If you show a scientist something true, they will recognize it as such, and tell people about it.

That is how it should work, but it doesn't. You show them the faults and they ignore them and carry on pumping out propaganda regardless. That should not be happening in science and it's scandalous that they're behaving the way they are. When they don't want to see reality, who should you show it to next? Everywhere I look I find people who don't want to know, and half of them back what they don't understand on the basis that it must be right because it's the view of the authority on the matter. If you aren't up to the fact checking, who is? So the world just goes on being trapped under the stupidity of a cult which is harming scientific progress. What I do is show people the other side of it and demonstrate that STR and GTR are both mathematically broken, and I also show them an older theory which fits all the same facts while doing so rationally instead of depending on magic. I get abused by people for this wherever I go, but I've never been a badge hunter. I'm only interested in truth. I check the facts and invite other people to do the same while providing tools to help them. AGI will rule on it all some day, and then a lot of people will be in for a spectacular fall from grace. I find it sad though that they need AGI to put them right instead of correcting their position through the application of their own minds. It makes our species look spectacularly dull.

[Octocontrabass]

The Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment, for example, reveals that light cannot travel at c relative to all objects because when you send light round a rotating ring it passes the material of the ring at a higher relative speed in one direction than light sent round the ring the opposite way.

Relativity does not claim light travels at c relative to all objects when measured from an inertial reference frame, and relativity correctly predicted the result of the Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment fourteen years before it was conducted.

Modern aether theory is functionally identical to relativity. Both theories have exactly the same accuracy and predictive power. So why is it so important to you that aether exists?

[Gigasoft]

The sound pulses on this clock follow a zigzag path due to the movement of the train, so this moving clock ticks more slowly than the central one as the pulses have to travel further through the air for each tick, and it actually ticks at 0.8 times the rate of the central sound clock. Much further away, we have a spaceship with a second light clock in it which has the same vertical alignment of its clock, and this spaceship is moving at 60% the speed of light while travelling along a circular path which is again centered on our central sound clock and lies on the same plane as the railway track. The light pulse in the spaceship’s light clock too is following a zigzag path, and that clock too unsurprisingly ticks at 0.8 times the ticking rate of the central light clock - we don’t need voodoo to explain why that happens.

And how the hell is this is disproof of anything? SR isn't based on voodoo either. The difference between SR and your sound example is that SR applies to all known physics, not just EM. SR is an essential part of the theoretical framework that led to the prediction of previously undiscovered particles and forces, and no one has so far been able to observe an SR violation, which would make huge headlines, as was in the case 2011 when some experimenters thought they had measured FTL neutrinos.

They drag accelerations into it to sow obfuscation, and yet we can put our spaceship on a circuit of double the radius, or ten times the radius, or a thousand times the radius, maintaining its speed of 60% the speed of light in each case, but we see that the acceleration force is clearly tending to zero.

The radius doesn't matter. What matters is that the spaceship didn't take a straight path through spacetime. The more space it passes through, the less time it has to do stuff, for any metric-preserving choice of space and time axes.

Physicists try to obfuscate things by throwing fake rules about where you "have to" change frame to that of the ship and keep changing frame as it accelerates (and/or changes direction)

No, that's not what relativity is saying. You don't "have to" do anything, it's just saying that you can switch to a different coordinate system and have the laws of physics remain the same. It's describing a symmetry in nature. Switching to a comoving frame is a tool that can make calculations easier.

because there are zero-length and zero-time paths between any two spacetime locations in the universe, their mad mathematical abstraction actually reduces the universe to zero size and zero duration

This does not follow. The triangle inequality only applies to Riemannian manifolds, and is not valid for spacetime.

The Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment, for example, reveals that light cannot travel at c relative to all objects because when you send light round a rotating ring it passes the material of the ring at a higher relative speed in one direction than light sent round the ring the opposite way. You have to avoid measuring that in naive ways though: to do it properly, divide the ring up into sections, let's say a, b, c, ... z. The light going round the ring one way passes through section a, then b, then c, etc., while the light going round the opposite way goes through z, then y, then x, etc. If you consider the relative speed of the light going round the first way relative to the material local to it in section a while it's passing through that section, and then the relative speed of that light relative to the material local to it in section while it's passing through that section, and so on, that's when you find the mathematical reality that a naive approach misses: you find that the relative speed of light to the material is not always c.

Wrong. The reason that the left moving left and the right moving light take different amounts of time to return to the starting spatial location is because they are passing through non-Euclidean geometry. See the attached spacetime diagram.

Then why are so many people with lofty positions in physics and PhDs falling out of their backsides denying that all these phenomena of relativity occur with sound in air too? They simply don't know.

And who would that be? Is this an interchange that happened in a public? Without knowing exactly what was being said and their education level, it's hard to answer this one. You can model SR using sound, but the analogy of course breaks down once you bring observers into it that are not made of sound waves. With SR however, all matter and forces are subject to it. Although Einstein did not know of the weak and strong forces, he made the assumption that there is no aether based on the fact that no one has observed an aether. He worked out the consequences of the speed of light being constant in the absence of a medium. The notion of there being a constant speed in nature places restrictions on the form that physical laws can take, and it is indeed the case that every known physical law conforms to SR.

Then why have you all failed to check it properly? Why does that checking have to be left to outsiders? And why are you incapable of checking the maths that I put forward which shows that absolute time exists, that it can be pinned down in principle in expanding space, and that spacetime models either generate event-meshing failures or destroy causation?

I am more than competent to verify that the math works out, and can tell you that it does. As for why I am incapable of checking your math, it should be pretty obvious - you haven't posted any math to check.

If you do the math the same way with the sound in air case, guess what: everything works out just as "correctly", allowing you to deny the existence of the air and to tell people that the actual relative speeds between sounds and objects don't exist because that's somehow a faulty term.

Except, it doesn't. You can touch and feel the air, it's presence is obvious and it has a speed. In contrast, there is no such thing as a vacuum moving at this or that speed (that we can measure). If there's no way to determine the "actual" relative speed between objects and it doesn't affect us in any way, why should we call it the "actual" speed?

Whenever you change frame, you change the magic medium that you depend on and you have the sound travel at a different speed relative to the objects in the system. For two or more frames to be equally valid, you then have that pulse of sound moving at different speeds relative to itself.

No, why would it? Speed depends on coordinates. The conclusion that something that has different speeds in different coordinate systems must be moving at different speeds relative to itself makes no sense.

because the expansion of the universe not only redshifts the CMB (cosmic microwave background radiation), but it also slows moving objects down towards absolute rest, which leaves all the galaxies today moving at low absolute speeds regardless of how fast the material from which they're formed might collectively have been moving when it was created.

What? No. Where did you get that idea?

If a distant galaxy is moving relative to ours and we put one end of the rod where that galaxy is while the other end is locked to our galaxy, the far end of the rod will be have the expansion of space carry that other galaxy past it at the same speed relative to it as the two galaxies are moving apart. If we put an observer at the midpoint, they're going to receive signals from the clocks at the two ends of the rod, and the arrival of ticks from the clock at our end will have a higher frequency than the midpoint observer's clock, while the arrival of ticks from the clock at the far galaxy will have a lower frequency than the midpoint clock. These three clocks are not moving relative to each other, so according to STR, they must tick at the same rate as each other

No, SR does not apply in curved spacetime, you have to use GR. That, however, does not imply that there is such a thing as absolute speeds or space having a speed. The clocks are ticking at different rates because the fixed clock is moving straight and the other clocks are on a curved path.

As for clocks furthest from the centre of mass, the mass is irrelevant to our relatively massless rod and clocks where the clocks at the end can both be inside galaxies or some way to the side of them so as to be at shallow depth in their gravity wells. Whatever the situation is, we can compensate for that slowing and eliminate it from the results if we know what the masses are. (Clocks further from the centre of mass will also tick faster rather than slower.)

I am not talking about the gravitational effect of the rod's mass. The rod is constantly pulling the clocks toward its center by its tension so as to counteract the expansion of space. Since the clocks at the edge are taking a curved path through spacetime while the center is traveling straight, the clocks at the edge must be going slower.

Look at the sound-in-air examples with s-frames and then ask yourself if all s-frames correctly represent reality.

Nothing prevents you from describing reality in terms of coordinates that keep the sound in some fixed region of air constant, rather than the speed of light. As long as you also change the metric tensor accordingly, the laws of physics give the same answer. An assignment of numerical values to things carries no meaning by itself. What matters it that you can plug those numbers into physics equations and derive measurable facts.

[Solar]

The really sad thing is that, once down the path of "everyone else is wrong" and the onset of confirmation bias, even such a great answer as the one by Gigasoft here will likely not help.

[DavidCooper]

Relativity does not claim light travels at c relative to all objects when measured from an inertial reference frame,

But it does claim that light travels at c relative to all objects.

and relativity correctly predicted the result of the Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment fourteen years before it was conducted.

Relativity makes contradictory predictions. You simply ignore the ones it gets wrong, and in the case of MGP its dogma insists that the relative speed of the light to every part of the ring is c, while the actual result shows that it cannot be, thereby revealing that absolute speeds must exist.

Modern aether theory is functionally identical to relativity. Both theories have exactly the same accuracy and predictive power. So why is it so important to you that aether exists?

It isn't functionally identical; its mechanism is radically different and is rational versus STR+GTR's irrationality. You ask why it's important to me that aether (the space fabric) exists, and the answer to that is that reason demands it. Why is it important to believers in STR+GTR to make false claims about there being no space fabric, no absolute speeds, no absolute time, and that space is 4D non-Euclidean spacetime rather than 3D Euclidean when reason disagrees on all four of those points? Truth matters, and the indoctrination that results in an army of qualified experts pumping out those incorrect assertions is deeply damaging for science.

I've shown you that those four points are wrong. There are numerous experiments which reveal the need for the space fabric, quite apart from which, it provides essential services: it imposes a speed limit on the propagation of light, it provides separation distances (if there is literally nothing between two objects, they must be touching), and it provides directions through dimensions. If you try to deny the space fabric, these key services that it supplies remain in place and prove you wrong: they cannot be supplied by nothing unless this is done through magic (which is much more complex than an aether). Scientific theories should not be built on magic. There are ways to pin down absolute speeds in expanding space. Absolute time is essential to avoid event-meshing failures. 4D non-Euclidean geometry provides zero-length, zero-time paths between all points in the universe, revealing it to be nothing more than a mad, contrived mathematical abstraction. It's a fun idea, but it isn't real. What we have though is an entire branch of science bringing itself into disrepute by pushing that model with endless propaganda about that model being right and its superior rival being wrong, and that's totally unacceptable.

[DavidCooper]

The really sad thing is that, once down the path of "everyone else is wrong" and the onset of confirmation bias, even such a great answer as the one by Gigasoft here will likely not help.

Mathematics and reason show who is right, so it isn't a matter of which of us monkeys are on which side. Follow the maths without breaking the rules to back your beliefs. Arguments are there to be tested quite independently of the people providing them, but they need to be tested impartially without your confirmation bias interrupting the process. The sad thing is the human mentality of assuming that majorities are right and then trashing maths to try to maintain that belief. I write programs to demonstrate what the maths actually does. They don't run on bias.

[Solar]

Follow the maths without breaking the rules to back your beliefs. Arguments are there to be tested quite independently of the people providing them, but they need to be tested impartially without your confirmation bias interrupting the process.

That is quite true. The number of elementary mistakes and misrepresentations you made in this thread alone, in combination with the explanations given to you by others here, should be enough motivation to go back to square one and have your arguments be tested, impartially.

Write a paper. Don't argue in an internet forum, write a paper. Build a consistent model, provide the math and the arguments. Have it published, and peer-reviewed. That is the very "independent and impartial testing" you are asking for. Scientists welcome this kind of thing.

Rambling on in social media about how you are right and everybody else is wrong is called "nurturing a conspiracy theory". Also, it gets annoying pretty quickly.

[thewrongchristian]

Modern aether theory is functionally identical to relativity. Both theories have exactly the same accuracy and predictive power. So why is it so important to you that aether exists?

It isn't functionally identical; its mechanism is radically different and is rational versus STR+GTR's irrationality. You ask why it's important to me that aether (the space fabric) exists, and the answer to that is that reason demands it. Why is it important to believers in STR+GTR to make false claims about there being no space fabric, no absolute speeds, no absolute time, and that space is 4D non-Euclidean spacetime rather than 3D Euclidean when reason disagrees on all four of those points? Truth matters, and the indoctrination that results in an army of qualified experts pumping out those incorrect assertions is deeply damaging for science.

I don't know much about relativity, beyond what I've picked up from the documentaries and the odd article (though I've not read any actual papers on the subject,) and I'm willing to cede to authority based on the fact there is such a consensus that relativity, if not describing the actual physics (it's widely acknowledged it cannot describe all of physics,) is such a good predictor of results that we have empirically tested and verified widely that is provides a good model for what we see in the universe at the large scale, in a manner that any ether theory does not.

It makes no common sense to me that objects increase in mass as they get faster, and that their passage through time slows down accordingly, because my common sense is based solely on real world experience.

But those effects have been predicted and observed, and unequivocally verified numerous times.

I can't reason those arguments based on my real world experience, it therefore follows that my common sense and reasoning have no bearing on a rigorous analysis of the SR/GR and its outcomes.

You might also argue against quantum physics models, as those theories are even less common sense and unintuitive.

We know SR/GR is not absolutely correct, as it cannot be reconciled with quantum physics theories, but as a model and a predictor of measurable and verifiable results, it has been bang on whenever its been tested.

Nobody is pushing SR/GR as a fact. Relativity is a theory, which has yet to be disproved.

I've shown you that those four points are wrong. There are numerous experiments which reveal the need for the space fabric, quite apart from which, it provides essential services: it imposes a speed limit on the propagation of light, it provides separation distances (if there is literally nothing between two objects, they must be touching), and it provides directions through dimensions. If you try to deny the space fabric, these key services that it supplies remain in place and prove you wrong: they cannot be supplied by nothing unless this is done through magic (which is much more complex than an aether). Scientific theories should not be built on magic.

Why is there a need for the space fabric? Why is your space fabric not an instance of the magic you said shouldn't be used to build theories?

The ether theory of the 19th century provided falsifiable predictions, and those predictions were duly falsified.

[DavidCooper]

And how the hell is this is disproof of anything?

STR claims that the light clock on the ship is travelling through less time than the central light clock during each lap: only 0.8 times as much in this example. It does not make the same claim of the sound clock on the train which has its ticking slowed by the exact same mechanism of the lengthening of the path of its bounced signal. The light pulse and sound pulse in those moving clocks have to travel additional distance and are forced to tick slow as a result. Nothing there is moving through less time than anything else.

SR isn't based on voodoo either. The difference between SR and your sound example is that SR applies to all known physics, not just EM.

There is no difference in the mechanism: lengthened paths for the signals to follow at their respective speeds of c and s result in slowed ticking with the clocks rendered incapable of registering all the time that is actually passing for them. They both measure apparent time while both run slower than actual time. STR brings in voodoo by insisting that the moving light clock is moving through less time, and that's daft. We can measure the light path and the number of upward and downward zigzags of that path which produce the number of ticks. It takes more time for the light and sound pulses to travel between the top and bottom of their light and sound clock when the clocks are moving, and that means they depend on more time passing than they are registering as passing.

SR is an essential part of the theoretical framework that led to the prediction of previously undiscovered particles and forces...

You can use broken mathematical abstractions of many things to make correct predictions about the behaviour of systems. The problem comes when you then declare those broken mathematical abstractions to be correct. The same correct predictions could have been made from a better theory which represents what the universe actually does rather than a broken abstraction of it, and that makes STR very much not essential.

The radius doesn't matter. What matters is that the spaceship didn't take a straight path through spacetime. The more space it passes through, the less time it has to do stuff, for any metric-preserving choice of space and time axes.

I have to cover all the many ways that people try to defend STR regardless of how many need to be covered in any specific discussion. The role of accelerations is simply to change the absolute speed or the direction of travel of the ship, while absolute speeds determine how slow a clock ticks. We can also send clocks along many tangents to the circular path the ship follows, and we know from this experiment that some of those clocks which are moving along straight paths must be ticking at a lower rate than the central clock due to their higher absolute speed of travel. This is a mathematical necessity.

No, that's not what relativity is saying. You don't "have to" do anything, it's just saying that you can switch to a different coordinate system and have the laws of physics remain the same. It's describing a symmetry in nature. Switching to a comoving frame is a tool that can make calculations easier.

I have seen no shortage of qualified experts who assert that you do have to switch to the frame in which the ship is at rest. 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. For example, if three ships are moving along a straight line at different speeds, at least one of them is actually physically contracted in length, whereas one or both of the others might not be, and when you run a light clock in them aligned with the direction of travel, the light pulse may take an equal amount of time to travel along the clock arm in both directions in one ship, but it will have to take longer to travel one way along the arm than back the opposite way in the other two ships. STR insists that what is happening in all three ships is identical, but if you have a proper understanding of frames by studying s-frames with sound in air, you can see that this is not the case. Different frames are always rival hypotheses which cannot have equal validity, but practically no one in physics has that correct understanding of frames because they've never explored it; all they have to go on is a broken understanding taught to them by people who don't understand the mathematics of frames. They are tolerating an infinite number of contradictions.

because there are zero-length and zero-time paths between any two spacetime locations in the universe, their mad mathematical abstraction actually reduces the universe to zero size and zero duration

This does not follow. The triangle inequality only applies to Riemannian manifolds, and is not valid for spacetime.[/quote]
It does follow. In STR, the faster an object moves, the more it contracts the distance it travels, and by the time you're getting to very fast moving particles, the distances become ridiculously short. Look at faster and faster particles and the contraction leads to all paths tending to zero length. For light, those distances all become zero. STR demands that these zero-length paths exist for journeys between any two spacetime locations in the universe (for some of these you need two zero-length paths to combine for that, but they still add up to zero length). You can't get away from that: it renders the universe zero size. Light also has to follow those paths in zero time, and yet if light follows such a path from here to Andromeda and back, it gets there in zero time, then returns in zero time, but a couple of million years have gone by here before it returns. That's how mad the mathematical abstraction is: the light sets off and returns taking zero time while taking millions of years to do so. It's very clear that the "zero time" is actually just apparent time, and the contracted distances are an illusion too. We see the exact same apparent contracted distances with the sound in air case where we can use sound-clock governed sonar to view space: move this apparatus at 86.6% the speed of sound and the images produced appear to contract distances through space to half just as happens with our view of space if we move at 86.6% the speed of light. Same maths; same mechanism.

Wrong. The reason that the left moving light and the right moving light take different amounts of time to return to the starting spatial location is because they are passing through non-Euclidean geometry. See the attached spacetime diagram.

You can imagine it to be any kind of geometry you like, but that doesn't alter the fact that the light going round the ring one way takes less time to travel from section a to section a via sections b to z than the light going the opposite way from section a to section a via sections z to b. The light sets out from section a simultaneously, but it doesn't arrive back at a simultaneously, and yet both lots of light have passed through all 26 sections. One of them had to do so at a higher speed than the other relative to those sections. Voodoo does not provide you with any way out of that.

And who would that be? Is this an interchange that happened in a public?

Many of these conversations involved genuine qualified experts who are well known on Quora - not the many nutters that are on there, but working physicists of high status. I've got a folder stuffed full of conversations of this kind with experts, some through email and some through social media (Quora being best suited to that as that's where genuine experts are available and where long posts are practical). My aim is not to ridicule any of them though, so I don't name them openly, but I maintain that folder as evidence for AGI to read through in the future.

You can model SR using sound, but the analogy of course breaks down once you bring observers into it that are not made of sound waves. With SR however, all matter and forces are subject to it.

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. Why would you want to allow yourself to be fooled in that one case? Why do you want to bring in additional, superfluous physics to account for them when they can be accounted for more simply without that? There are a dozen experiments that show that absolute speeds must exist, but you just ignore what mathematics says about them.

Although Einstein did not know of the weak and strong forces, he made the assumption that there is no aether based on the fact that no one has observed an aether. He worked out the consequences of the speed of light being constant in the absence of a medium. The notion of there being a constant speed in nature places restrictions on the form that physical laws can take, and it is indeed the case that every known physical law conforms to SR.

There cannot be any speed or even transmission of light without a medium. There has to be something there for light to travel through which provides the vital services of distance, direction, and governance of speed. For light to have a speed limit of c, it has to be relative to space, and that means a space fabric. Go back to the two ships thought experiment and you can see that it's space imposing that speed limit on the light passing through it.

I am more than competent to verify that the math works out, and can tell you that it does. As for why I am incapable of checking your math, it should be pretty obvious - you haven't posted any math to check.

That's the shocking lie that I often get thrown at me by experts when they lose this argument: "You haven't given us any maths!" My programs all run on the maths that you claim I'm not providing. I give you the numbers to work with, such as speeds of travel and the slowing of apparent times. I give you all the necessary numbers and you just deny them. It's shameful.

Except, it doesn't. You can touch and feel the air, it's presence is obvious and it has a speed.

When the wind tunnel experiments are run with sound clocks and all you see is the data from the clocks, you cannot feel the air. You find all the big effects of relativity playing out in that system at inordinately lower speeds. Why would you let yourself be fooled in the light in space case when you can't feel the fabric of space? And then there are all those experiments that show that absolute speeds must exist. Most of them don't allow them to be pinned down, but some (in expanding space) do, so you have even less excuse for rejecting them

In contrast, there is no such thing as a vacuum moving at this or that speed (that we can measure). If there's no way to determine the "actual" relative speed between objects and it doesn't affect us in any way, why should we call it the "actual" speed?

Those ships moving towards and away from us which send out light signals towards us as they pass each other show that the "vacuum" (aether, fabric of space) imposes the speed limit on both light signals, forcing them to travel side by side at the same speed as each other. That co-ordination cannot be provided any other way.

No, why would it? Speed depends on coordinates. The conclusion that something that has different speeds in different coordinate systems must be moving at different speeds relative to itself makes no sense.

I showed you two frames in the link where you can see the speed of the light/sound pulse relative to the two magic mediums. In one frame it is c or s relative to one of them and not c or s relative to the other, while in the other frame it's the other way round. The light/sound pulse cannot be moving at c or s relative to both magic mediums.

because the expansion of the universe not only redshifts the CMB (cosmic microwave background radiation), but it also slows moving objects down towards absolute rest, which leaves all the galaxies today moving at low absolute speeds regardless of how fast the material from which they're formed might collectively have been moving when it was created.

What? No. Where did you get that idea?

I actually hope it's wrong, but it looks right. It came from a discussion on Cambridge University's science forum where I first outlined a method of pinning down absolute speeds in expanding space. That experiment sets up a clock in space and another one which has to move towards or away from it in such a way as to receive what sounds like one beep (radio signal) per second coming from the first clock. Due to the expansion of space, if one clock is at rest in its local space fabric, the other must be moving through its local space fabric due to the expansion if the two clocks are initially comoving. So, if the the clock sending the signal is at rest in its local fabric, the other clock will be ticking slow and will have to move away from it in order to perceive the arrival of one beep per second. However, if the clock sending out the signal is moving through its local space fabric and the receiving clock is initially at rest in its local space fabric, the slow ticking of the emitting clock will cause the receiving clock to have to move towards it to perceive the arrival of one beep per second. That is a radical difference which could pin down absolute speeds, but there are complications involved in setting it up which can mask the effect if the expansion of space slows the clocks' speed of travel through space. If such slowing is not caused by the expansion, then the experiment will pin down absolute speeds in expanding space. If such slowing is caused by expansion though, the experiment will produce a null result, but that can only happen in expanding space if the expansion slows objects towards absolute rest, providing another way to pin down absolute speeds (by slowing galaxies down close to rest in their local space fabric), so absolute speeds are pinned down either way, just so long as you are sure that the space is expanding. I too was skeptical about the idea that the expansion would decelerate objects towards absolute rest, but the expansion applies accelerations which are only balanced if the object is at rest; each end is pulled slightly away from the centre. If the object is moving, the expansion applies less acceleration to the leading end of the object than it does to the rear, so the object decelerates. Unlike with red-shifted photons being stretched and staying stretched, objects ping back to their normal length after each of these stretches, but the stretches are impossible without accelerations.

No, SR does not apply in curved spacetime, you have to use GR.

It has to apply if it's imagined to have any validity in our universe.

I am not talking about the gravitational effect of the rod's mass. The rod is constantly pulling the clocks toward its center by its tension so as to counteract the expansion of space. Since the clocks at the edge are taking a curved path through spacetime while the center is traveling straight, the clocks at the edge must be going slower.

That won't account for their behaviour where the one at one end will be ticking fastest and the one at the other end ticking slowest.

Nothing prevents you from describing reality in terms of coordinates that keep the sound in some fixed region of air constant, rather than the speed of light. As long as you also change the metric tensor accordingly, the laws of physics give the same answer. An assignment of numerical values to things carries no meaning by itself. What matters it that you can plug those numbers into physics equations and derive measurable facts.

In expanding space, the disagreement of clocks passing each other as to the age of the universe demonstrates that they are operating in different circumstances due to their different absolute speeds. Without that, they would all have to agree on the same timing for the age of the universe. If you look at CMB photons, they are frozen clocks which say that no time has passed for them since they were created way back near the big bang. If we were dealing with particles with speeds slightly slower than light, such as neutrinos which change type repeatedly over time, they are timers, though with no memory of how many times they've switched form, but if they could keep count they would register very little time passing since the big bang (if they were created way back near the start). The faster things move, the lower their timing will be for how long they have existed. With the clocks moving at random speeds, the ones moving slowest (i.e. at rest) will have the longest recorded timing for the age of the universe. When these pass each other, they necessarily reveal their absolute speeds. You don't have any escape route out of that: they show that STR is incompetent in our universe. You simply haven't got a leg to stand on.

[DavidCooper]

The number of elementary mistakes and misrepresentations you made in this thread alone, in combination with the explanations given to you by others here...

None. You clearly aren't even trying to understand any of it, but I've put enough there for people who actually think for themselves to test every part of this. You just assume I'm wrong because I don't agree with the herd, and that's the mentality that traps the herd in its own bubble, preventing them from doing proper testing of their models to try to break them to see if they really stand up.

Write a paper. Don't argue in an internet forum, write a paper. Build a consistent model, provide the math and the arguments. Have it published, and peer-reviewed. That is the very "independent and impartial testing" you are asking for. Scientists welcome this kind of thing.

Oh yes - send it to the clergy and ask them to judge it. It doesn't work when all the judges there are biased. That's why this has to be put out to other people outside of the clergy to find independent minds that can process the data impartially and see what the maths actually says.

Rambling on in social media about how you are right and everybody else is wrong is called "nurturing a conspiracy theory". Also, it gets annoying pretty quickly.

I provide proofs, and I hunt for people who are capable of processing proofs correctly. I do this as part of a long ongoing study into human intelligence, and it's the best test of that out there. It shows how people systematically override their capacity to apply the rules in order to conform to their biases, and the fact that this applies to physicists explains a lot about what's so wrong with the world and the way it's run. If physicists can't process things correctly, what chance do politicians and others have? It's a known phenomenon though: theory-induced blindness, and that's the big thing being studied here. I search for people who ought to be up there amongst the best minds on the planet to test them. Operating system writers - they're supposed to be a special breed, so this is actually one of the more suitable places to discuss this, or would be if it wasn't for this mentality of looking to and trusting an establishment which is a product of education systems that program people to absorb and regurgitate fashionable "facts" rather than to think for themselves. And what does it confirm: bias, bias, bias. It shackles your thinking and you completely fail to recognise cast iron proofs.