Non-Platonic geometry definitions

[DavidCooper]

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

All the observations and experiments conform to LET.

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

If only that was true, but people are pushing all manner of aspects of it as facts while incorrectly asserting that aspects of LET are wrong (e.g. the denial of absolute time and absolute speeds), and STR & GTR have been disproved in a dozen distinct ways.

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?

Having those key services provided by a medium does not depend on magic. Having them supplied by nothing does depend on magic. It's the same with sound in air. Having sounds travel without a medium would depend on magic. Having them depend on air doesn't make air magic.

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

Many (a)ether theories were disproved. Lorentz Ether Theory was only come up with after the MMX which disproved those naive aether theories which had failed to account for length contraction. To equate falsifying those naive aether theories with falsifying LET is a colossal error caused by conflating radically different theories. That's why a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

[Octocontrabass]

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

No. It claims light travels at c relative to all objects in an inertial frame of reference.

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.

Again, relativity does not claim that the speed of light is constant for all observers, only for observers in an inertial frame of reference. In the Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment, the observer is in a non-inertial frame of reference, so the observer will see the speed of light vary depending on its path. All the math is right there in the paper if you want to check it.

It isn't functionally identical; its mechanism is radically different and is rational versus STR+GTR's irrationality.

Both theories fit the data equally well. How can one be rational and one be irrational when there is no measurable difference between the two?

You ask why it's important to me that aether (the space fabric) exists, and the answer to that is that reason demands it.

Reason demands evidence. There is no evidence that aether exists, and there is no evidence that aether doesn't exist.

There are numerous experiments which reveal the need for the space fabric,

According to whom?

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).

How is aether itself not magic?

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.

Assuming this is true, who benefits from it? Propaganda doesn't spring up out of nowhere.

[Solar]

@DavidCooper

Write.

A.

Paper.

Seriously.

Right now what you're doing is just exactly that kind of "I don't care what others say" and "I'm weaseling my way around having a proper argument" that you are accusing "the scientists" of. Arguing your point here will not prove / disprove anything, or bring about a change in how science works. This is not a popularity contest, you can't "lobby for support". Your arguments must stand on their own. Put your concepts into one properly presented and sourced whole, then explain how your claims could be proven true and Relativity be proven false. You don't even have to do these experiments, that's the beauty of it. You just have to properly, specifically, and precisely state what would prove your point, and if your paper holds up to scrutiny, someone with access to the proper materials will make those experiments.

Just be prepared that your paper might not make it that far. I am not a qualified physicist myself, and while I am interested in the field and know a thing or two about Relativity I haven't researched the referenced experients and theories in depth, but as far as I can see from a glance is that you're barking up a tree that's been felled almost a century ago, and just refuse to let go for some strange reason.

Perhaps, just perhaps, be open-minded enough to perhaps admit you might have been wrong. Right now you're driving down the highway the wrong way and complain about all the oncoming traffic. The chances that you are the one being right and everyone else really should turn around are rather slim.

Today LET is often treated as some sort of "Lorentzian" or "neo-Lorentzian" interpretation of special relativity.[1] The introduction of length contraction and time dilation for all phenomena in a "preferred" frame of reference, which plays the role of Lorentz's immobile aether, leads to the complete Lorentz transformation (see the Robertson–Mansouri–Sexl test theory as an example), so Lorentz covariance doesn't provide any experimentally verifiable distinctions between LET and SR. The absolute simultaneity in the Mansouri–Sexl test theory formulation of LET[2] implies that a one-way speed of light experiment could in principle distinguish between LET and SR, but it is now widely held that it is impossible to perform such a test. In the absence of any way to experimentally distinguish between LET and SR, SR is widely preferred over LET, due to the superfluous assumption of an undetectable aether in LET, and the validity of the relativity principle in LET seeming ad hoc or coincidental.

[Gigasoft]

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.

No, it doesn't. It says that an advancement of 0.8 units in the rest frame of the one clock at fixed spatial coordinates corresponds to an advacement of 1 unit in the other. That is, it relates two sets of unit vectors. Where did you get the idea that SR says anything about objects "moving through" different amounts of time?

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

This is not a given. One could easily imagine an universe without Lorentzian symmetry.

Different frames are always rival hypotheses

How are they hypotheses? If I'm lost in the jungle and draw myself a map on graphing paper labeled with X and Y axes, I'm not making a bold statement about the "X'ness" of a particular direction. There is no experiment than can be done to tell if my "X" or your "X" is the correct one, it's a nonsensical question.

(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.

And here is the mistake. You are adding up lightlike line segments to make an assertion about the spatial width of the universe (that is, using the triangle inequality). This is invalid.

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.

This isn't voodoo. A circle is most definitely not flat. There is no Minkowskian coordinate chart that contains the path of both light rays in the rotating frame, you therefore had to subtract coordinates from different charts to arrive at your speed, which doesn't work.

but I maintain that folder as evidence for AGI to read through in the future

Why AGI? What makes you think AGI will be any less capable of mistakes than a human?

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.

Ok, that is not the same as providing math, but I suppose I can work with that. So you've apparently misinterpreted proper time as some sort of extra time dimension that objects are travelling through. At the same time, you claim that GR simulations depend on the concept of an "absolute time", which they don't. They have a time coordinate in them, but no one is calling it the "absolute" time, it can be any suitable time coordinate.

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

SR applies to the infinitesimal neighbourhood of every point. It does not hold across curved spacetime regions.

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.

It's the same thing, but now the rod is attached to a galaxy. The galaxy is therefore now the center of mass.

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.

I suppose you could make up a time coordinate based on the longest possible timelike path to any point from the big bang, if you wish. So what? This does in no way invalidate SR, being a theory about physics, not about cosmology.

[DavidCooper]

No. It claims light travels at c relative to all objects in an inertial frame of reference.

If there's any situation where it fails to claim that light travels at c relative to all objects, that admits that there are absolute speeds.

Again, relativity does not claim that the speed of light is constant for all observers, only for observers in an inertial frame of reference.

Again if that was true, it would be an admission of absolute speeds.

In the Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment, the observer is in a non-inertial frame of reference, so the observer will see the speed of light vary depending on its path. All the math is right there in the paper if you want to check it.

Not so. You're assuming an observer going round with the ring, and then you're applying false rules from Einstein's voodoo to it, but we can use observers who never accelerate at all and who witness the same action of the light taking longer to pass all the material of the ring in one direction section by section (on average) than the light going the opposite way round the ring. Such observers measure the reality that the light is definitively not moving at c relative to all that material, thereby showing that absolute speeds exist. There are many other experiments that demonstrate the necessity of absolute speeds while also not being able to pin them down, and these have been around for a century. The twins paradox demonstrates this too:-

The twins paradox proves that there's an absolute frame of reference by showing that clocks can tick at definitively different rates from each other under the governance of their absolute speeds of motion through the space fabric. If we give the stay-at-home twin clock A, then the other twin can travel with clock B away and back at 0.866c. On return, when they compare their timings for the separation, clock A ticked twice as many times as clock B, so clock B was clearly ticking slow due to its faster speed of motion through the space fabric. Fans of STR will assert that you have to switch to GTR to account for the action here because it involves acceleration, and they imagine that something magical happens at those points where clock B is accelerating, but we can eliminate the role for that magic by introducing two additional clocks. Clock C travels alongside clock B on the outward leg, and clock D travels alongside clock D on the return leg. Neither of these new clocks accelerates at any point. Clock C makes a timing from when it passes clock A until it passes clock D. Clock D makes a timing from when it passes clock C to when it passes clock A. Timing B = timings C+D, confirming that the only role for the accelerations of clock B was to change its absolute speed of motion through space. We get the result timing A = 2(C+D). In all cases with the twins paradox, you get A > C+D. If there was no space fabric and no absolute frame, clocks A, C and D would all have to be ticking at the same rate as each other, but that would give us the result A = C+D, which is a result that the universe never provides.

Mathematical disproofs of STR are that simple. There's a similar one where you can have a clock following a hexagonal path round a clock fixed at the centre of the hexagon (with six sudden direction changes per circuit). Six additional clocks which never accelerate can pass along the sides of the hexagon (one side each) and accompany the clock that travels round the hexagon while it's travelling along the side that's on their path, and if the average speed of travel of the clock going round the hexagon is is 0.866c, that clock will be ticking at half the rate of the central clock, confirmed lap after lap after lap for all observers. The clock following the hexagonal circuit is certainly ticking slow, and so are most or all of the additional six clocks which take turns to accompany it; the ones that never accelerate. Absolute speeds are again crucial to this behaviour, because without that there is no possible mechanism for any of the six additional clocks to follow shorter time-length paths into the future than the central clock which must have as much right to take such a shortcut through time as they have.

Both theories fit the data equally well. How can one be rational and one be irrational when there is no measurable difference between the two?

You could have an irrational theory in which the flying spaghetti monster has a role but with all the same maths leading to it predicting all the same measurements, but it would be ruled out by its irrationality in favour of the rational theory. The same applies, if you're doing science correctly, to other irrational theories which happen to make correct predictions. STR though doesn't always make correct predictions because it makes contradictory predictions where the ones it gets right are recognised and the ones it gets wrong are ignored. That happens wherever it generates contradictions. LET by way of contrast never generates contradictions.

Reason demands evidence. There is no evidence that aether exists, and there is no evidence that aether doesn't exist.

On the contrary, the mathematical evidence from many experiments is that the aether (space fabric) must exist. When you ignore that, you abandon reason and reject evidence.

There are numerous experiments which reveal the need for the space fabric,

According to whom?

The experiments speak for themselves. The person providing them is of no relevance.

How is aether itself not magic?

When you have essential services being provided by something, you know that that something exists, and the provider of those services is the aether (space fabric), and it is defined by the services that it provides. Magic only comes into this if you try to have those services be supplied by nothing. Einstein himself accepted that those services exist and that an aether must exist to provide them, which is why he was more doubtful about his theories than his followers.

Assuming this is true, who benefits from it? Propaganda doesn't spring up out of nowhere.

If Einstein was still around, he would have backed down, and he could have done so without huge embarrassment because he wasn't abusive. The problem is that the people who followed him became extremely aggressive with their claims which should all have been presented as conditional upon the theory being true, but instead they presented them as facts independent of the theory and shouted down anyone who disagreed with them, insulting them and ridiculing them. That still goes on to this day, and that's why they can't back down. They are so embarrassingly wrong and have made such monumental fools of themselves that they have no option other than to stand firm and prevent the next generation of physicists from being taught the whole story of relativity. They don't even want them to understand LET because it might make them think. They want to shut down that kind of thinking and just have them all believe. It is the biggest mistake ever made in science, and they can't go on hiding that forever.

[DavidCooper]

@DavidCooper

Write.

A.

Paper.

Seriously.

Journals have rules. The key one affecting this is that they don't publish papers where the content has already been published. I always publish publicly first to get time and date stamps on everything, but also to debug it all with the help of others. Anything I put in a paper and send to them, they have an excuse to reject it even if they recognise it as right, and that's exactly what they would do because they are defenders of a faith.

This is not a popularity contest, you can't "lobby for support".

Indeed it's not about popularity, but unfortunately that's what we have in place instead of proper science. Popular ideas that are wrong just carry on on momentum while being propped up all the way by believers, exactly like religions.

Your arguments must stand on their own.

They do, but there's something much more important needing to be studied here than the physics, because this is about how intelligent people can have their ability to think rationally blocked by their beliefs in theories. Kahneman found this in economics where people were making crazy mathematical errors which they were incapable of recognising because to recognise the glaring faults in their models would break their models and overturn their treasured beliefs. The same thing is found in religion where people worship the Creator of Hell and Supreme Torturer and mistake that for a God. The same thing happens in politics where people are unable to abandon their bubble to see reality, so you can have two sides with people genuinely believing that the other side is evil while they are the moral ones, and a lot of them are of high intelligence. Physicists are not immune to this phenomenon, but suffer from it just as much. I came into this without an axe to grind. I expected Einstein's work to be brilliant and was looking forward to becoming one of the people who understand it all, but also to go on to use my skills at explaining complex things to ordinary people to help them understand it too. That plan went wrong though, because relativity kept breaking. It wasn't rational. So, I ended up putting together demos that display the faults to let them do the talking, and the lengths people go to to reject them are extraordinary. No two physicists are the same in the way they respond as they try to rescue the broken models in very different ways from each other, and when I take the views of some and put them to others, they inadvertently insult each other in the most awful ways while thinking they're insulting me. That's the most fun bit of this, and it's why I keep that big fat juicy file. Some day they'll all get a copy of it and they'll find out what they called each other.

someone with access to the proper materials will make those experiments.

Most of the experiments have been done long ago - they just weren't analysed adequately because the people doing that work were believers who failed to test their model to destruction. There are new experiments that could be done to pin down absolute speeds, perhaps later this century, but they'll likely have to be spread out over hundreds of astronomical units with the risk of them producing null results due to the expansion of space decelerating objects towards absolute rest and masking the effect that the experiments are attempting to measure. To run an experiment with the clocks tethered so that their separation distances are constant would suffer from the same masking problem due to the expansion of space driving deceleration and changes in length contraction on the tether.

as far as I can see from a glance is that you're barking up a tree that's been felled almost a century ago, and just refuse to let go for some strange reason.

It's not strange reason, but reason. I simply let the rules of mathematics+reason show what is true and what is false. I will never abandon reason to conform to a herd of people who refuse to check the facts and who insult people who do.

Perhaps, just perhaps, be open-minded enough to perhaps admit you might have been wrong. Right now you're driving down the highway the wrong way and complain about all the oncoming traffic. The chances that you are the one being right and everyone else really should turn around are rather slim.

What makes you think it's only me? There are lots of other people working on LET who know that STR is wrong. LaFrenière died over a decade ago without any recognition for his work where he identified the mechanism for length contraction. Do mainstream physicists even know his name though? They just see heretical ideas and close their eyes to match their closed minds. What I do is set out the facts to let anyone who wants to do the checking to do so and see what maths and reason actually says about all these experiments and what they reveal. If you want to encourage people to be open-minded, that's what you should be encouraging them to do, and you should be checking them yourself instead of just believing the clergy. None of this is beyond your mental capacity, but you can't bring yourself to do the processing.

Today LET is often treated as some sort of "Lorentzian" or "neo-Lorentzian" interpretation of special relativity.[1] The introduction of length contraction and time dilation for all phenomena in a "preferred" frame of reference, which plays the role of Lorentz's immobile aether, leads to the complete Lorentz transformation (see the Robertson–Mansouri–Sexl test theory as an example), so Lorentz covariance doesn't provide any experimentally verifiable distinctions between LET and SR. The absolute simultaneity in the Mansouri–Sexl test theory formulation of LET[2] implies that a one-way speed of light experiment could in principle distinguish between LET and SR, but it is now widely held that it is impossible to perform such a test. In the absence of any way to experimentally distinguish between LET and SR, SR is widely preferred over LET, due to the superfluous assumption of an undetectable aether in LET, and the validity of the relativity principle in LET seeming ad hoc or coincidental.

Propaganda written by believers where they simply ignore the disproofs.

[DavidCooper]

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.

No, it doesn't. It says that an advancement of 0.8 units in the rest frame of the one clock at fixed spatial coordinates corresponds to an advacement of 1 unit in the other. That is, it relates two sets of unit vectors. Where did you get the idea that SR says anything about objects "moving through" different amounts of time?

If you are able to model 4D non-Euclidean geometry in your head, you should be able to see the shorter paths through time that some objects follow in that model to get from past to future. We can have an observer at the edge of the circuit who is at rest relative to the central clock, and (s)he can have a clock there which ticks at the same rate as the central clock. Once every lap, the circling light clock passes this observer and they can touch. They compare times, and every time they do this they see that the circling clock has gone through 0.8 times as much time as the observer's clock. Draw out the paths the clocks are taking through spacetime and the circling clock is travelling through less time between one rendezvous spacetime location and the next rendezvous location with that observer. Where did I get that idea from? Experts. All these thought experiments have been built and described in "collaboration" with experts on the establishment side who were trying to destroy them. You won't find it in the original version of STR because it comes from the later ideas of Minkowski, but it became the mainstream model and led to GTR being based on the same abstraction. By denying absolute time, these time lengths have to tick out their proper time unslowed, leading to event-meshing failures, while if you allow them to tick slow to avoid that, they have to tick slow under the governance of absolute time. All spacetime models break in that way.

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

This is not a given. One could easily imagine an universe without Lorentzian symmetry.

No - the laws can't change just because a physicist changes the frame he's using for his measurements. It's a single universe running on rules which can't be different for different frames without generating contradictions. What happens in a specific case is what happens and it is governed by the universe's rules - changing frame doesn't change the rules that made what happened happen. What changes is the descriptions of what appeared to happen and how it appeared to happen.

Different frames are always rival hypotheses

How are they hypotheses? If I'm lost in the jungle and draw myself a map on graphing paper labeled with X and Y axes, I'm not making a bold statement about the "X'ness" of a particular direction. There is no experiment than can be done to tell if my "X" or your "X" is the correct one, it's a nonsensical question.

Picture a case where you and a distant clock are comoving (i.e. at rest relative to each other). An alarm has been set to go off at that distant clock. A mad physicist with a rocket passes you repeatedly at high speed, sometimes moving directly towards the distant clock and sometimes directly away from it. Every time he passes you in one direction he says to you, "The alarm has sounded." Every time he passes you in the opposite direction he says to you, "The alarm hasn't sounded yet." He makes a long alternating series of these contradictory assertions, half of which must be false. He contradicts himself because he always goes by the frame in which he is at rest at the time of making each assertion. For all frames to have equal validity, all of those assertions must be equally true. That's why frames are fundamentally incompatible with each other: they provide rival hypothesis as to what is actually happening. That's another of the many ways in which mathematics rules out relativity, because mathematics is very clear that half those assertions from the mad physicist are false. Only theory-induced blindness can account for how intelligent people ignore what mathematics demands on points like this one, because to make such a colossal error otherwise would require extreme stupidity. They cannot be that dim: they are clearly just refusing to apply the rules because they don't like the result which conflicts with their faith.

And here is the mistake. You are adding up lightlike line segments to make an assertion about the spatial width of the universe (that is, using the triangle inequality). This is invalid.

No; you want to think that it's invalid because it goes against your faith. If we take the spacetime location of the big bang and have something like light that travels at c (but without being hindered by all the junk in the way) make the trip from there to here. That trip is zero-length and zero-time in the 4D non-Euclidean geometry model. The same applies to any other path starting at the big bang for such a signal which can end up anywhere in the universe. The big bang is zero distance and zero time away from both here and that other destination, so the two destinations are zero distance and zero time apart. The inability for a signal to travel from one to the other in zero time is irrelevant. Again you simply reject any inconvenient facts that prove you wrong. That is again theory-induced blindness in action: that's how it works, locking people into their beliefs and preventing them from testing them to destruction or even from recognising when other people have destroyed the theory for them. It's a fact that in the 4D non-Euclidean geometry model, all locations are separated by zero distance and zero time. If you were able to bring yourself to recognise inconvenient facts, you would be able to grasp how mad the mathematical abstraction is, and it's all wholly unnecessary as we have a fully rational alternative model that fits all the facts with the same precision without trashing mathematics at every turn.

This isn't voodoo. A circle is most definitely not flat. There is no Minkowskian coordinate chart that contains the path of both light rays in the rotating frame, you therefore had to subtract coordinates from different charts to arrive at your speed, which doesn't work.

You've made the same mistake. We can have the rotating disc sandwiched between two non rotating discs from which observers make all the measurements. They measure categorically that the light going round the ring one way passes all the material of the ring at a higher relative speed than the light going round the opposite way (when measured sector by sector).

Why AGI? What makes you think AGI will be any less capable of mistakes than a human?

Well, there's AGI (AGS) and there's AGI (not AGS) [where S stands for stupidity]. AGI that thinks like a typical human will be AGI in that it matches normal human intelligence, but that's not good enough for resolving any argument as people can be so wrong due to stupidity and theory-induced blindness. The kind of AGI that isn't AGS will apply the fundamental rules of mathematics/reason consistently to all things without overriding the rules whenever a conclusion goes against its faith - it will be designed never to have faith, but will simply calculate probability-governed facts (where many facts are factual in terms of how probable it is that they are true, so it's the probabilities that are facts derived from the available data. In some cases facts can be proved - the probabilities hit zero or one. What such AGI will never do is convert a value between 0 and 1 into 0 or 1 by mistakenly assuming a value to be so close to 0 or 1 that it must be 0 or 1. Humans make that error a lot - we saw it here at the start where someone said that we know that space isn't 3D Euclidean. When you fill people's heads with propaganda and teach them actual lies (I have a university physics textbook that asserts that the aether was disproved by the MMX, and yet the MMX drove the creation of LET which is an aether theory not disproved by the MMX), all of that brainwashing leads to people having mental models with incorrect probabilities governing the data such that things they should be labellling as probable (and in some cases improbable or impossible) are given a score of 1. Human thinking is riddled with those errors where incorrect assumptions become "facts" and then get passed around as facts with everyone being trained to believe them. Proper AGI will never make such errors. When such a system analyses cases like relativity, it isn't going to be moved by dogma, faith, propaganda, brainwashing, etc. - it will simply apply the rules without ad hoc exceptions and it will state the results as mathematics dictates they be stated. Once we have that, all arguments will be resolved by it, and fast. I'm sure people will reject what it tells them for a long time, but it will eventually win out through its infinite patience at showing them where they're breaking the rules. Importantly, they'll know that it is applying the rules consistently as it will be able to show all its working in every last minute detail. Independently designed AGI systems of this kind will confirm each other's results.

Ok, that is not the same as providing math, but I suppose I can work with that. So you've apparently misinterpreted proper time as some sort of extra time dimension that objects are travelling through.

It's your model. Do you not understand your own model? It's simple enough mathematically that you ought to be able to visualise it, but you can do it with software. You switch to the frame in which the object is at rest such that its path in a spacetime diagram is vertical, and its length is the time it travels through to get from one end of that line to the other.

At the same time, you claim that GR simulations depend on the concept of an "absolute time", which they don't. They have a time coordinate in them, but no one is calling it the "absolute" time, it can be any suitable time coordinate.

If you run a 4D non-Euclidean model in a simulation, you get event-meshing failures unless you govern the progress of the action on different paths by slowing it down on some of them under the governance of absolute time. Those are your two mathematical options: to have absolute time or event-meshing failures. You can't eliminate both of those things: it's mathematically impossible to do so. Again, this is where theory-induced blindness prevents people from seeing what mathematics demands, so they reject mathematics while convincing themselves that they are following what mathematics demands. It's all about what they're prepared to accept based on their beliefs rather than accepting reality.

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

SR applies to the infinitesimal neighbourhood of every point. It does not hold across curved spacetime regions.

As soon as you make that move, you lose: you reject STR as not applying to the universe.

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.

It's the same thing, but now the rod is attached to a galaxy. The galaxy is therefore now the center of mass.

I expect more versatile thinking than that: you don't have to stick either end in any galaxy - it can run parallel to them while being far out to the side. It can also be done where there are no galaxies at all.

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.

I suppose you could make up a time coordinate based on the longest possible timelike path to any point from the big bang, if you wish. So what? This does in no way invalidate SR, being a theory about physics, not about cosmology.

If we have these clocks revealing their absolute speeds in this way, which would happen if such clocks were there, it would show that STR is not a description of our universe. No amount of ignoring that can make it valid for any experiment.

[Solar]

Sheesh.

And here I was, thinking that this "conspiracy!" illness only afflicts the, let's say, less-than-optimally educated...

[Octocontrabass]

If there's any situation where it fails to claim that light travels at c relative to all objects, that admits that there are absolute speeds.

I don't see how you go from "special relativity only applies in special circumstances" (inertial frames of reference) to "there must be one frame of reference superior to all others".

You're assuming an observer going round with the ring,

I'm not assuming anything, that is how the experiment was performed. You do realize "observer" refers to the piece of the experimental apparatus that measures the difference in the speed of light via interference patterns and not the person looking at those measurements, right?

we can use observers who never accelerate at all and who witness the same action of the light taking longer to pass all the material of the ring in one direction section by section (on average) than the light going the opposite way round the ring.

But it always takes the same amount of time to travel a distance equal to the circumference of the ring.

Such observers measure the reality that the light is definitively not moving at c relative to all that material, thereby showing that absolute speeds exist.

...Huh? No, light is moving at c relative to the inertial frame of reference, and it moves at c relative to every inertial frame of reference. How does that show absolute speeds?

Fans of STR will assert that you have to switch to GTR to account for the action here because it involves acceleration,

A common mistake. Physicists who regularly work with relativity (and anyone who spends some time reading Wikipedia) can tell you the twin paradox also exists in a scenario with no acceleration and therefore no general relativity.

If there was no space fabric and no absolute frame, clocks A, C and D would all have to be ticking at the same rate as each other, but that would give us the result A = C+D, which is a result that the universe never provides.

Now do it again, but from the perspective of clock D instead of clock A. Clock D sees clock A approaching at 0.866c and clock C approaching at 0.9897c, and it knows that they're both set to 0 when they pass each other. Clock C will arrive first, showing the time that passed since it synchronized with clock A. Clock D then measures the amount of time between the arrival of clock A and clock C. You get the same result! How can that be? If there's an absolute frame of reference, you should get the wrong result if you assume the wrong clock is stationary.

There's a similar one where you can have a clock following a hexagonal path round a clock fixed at the centre of the hexagon (with six sudden direction changes per circuit).

This is the twin paradox again.

You could have an irrational theory in which the flying spaghetti monster has a role but with all the same maths leading to it predicting all the same measurements, but it would be ruled out by its irrationality in favour of the rational theory.

Modern aether theory and special relativity both insist on something that is impossible to prove or disprove. Modern aether theory insists on the presence of some undetectable medium through which light propagates. Special relativity insists that the speed of light is constant and symmetrical to all inertial observers. Which of those is more similar to your flying spaghetti monster example?

STR though doesn't always make correct predictions because it makes contradictory predictions where the ones it gets right are recognised and the ones it gets wrong are ignored. That happens wherever it generates contradictions.

You have so far failed to demonstrate any contradictions.

On the contrary, the mathematical evidence from many experiments is that the aether (space fabric) must exist. When you ignore that, you abandon reason and reject evidence.

Which experiments?

The experiments speak for themselves. The person providing them is of no relevance.

The person providing them is apparently of great relevance, since you trust them more than you trust all of modern physics.

The problem is that the people who followed him became extremely aggressive with their claims which should all have been presented as conditional upon the theory being true, but instead they presented them as facts independent of the theory and shouted down anyone who disagreed with them, insulting them and ridiculing them. That still goes on to this day, and that's why they can't back down. They are so embarrassingly wrong and have made such monumental fools of themselves that they have no option other than to stand firm and prevent the next generation of physicists from being taught the whole story of relativity. They don't even want them to understand LET because it might make them think. They want to shut down that kind of thinking and just have them all believe.

How do you know you aren't doing the same thing?

[Gigasoft]

If there's any situation where it fails to claim that light travels at c relative to all objects, that admits that there are absolute speeds.

There is no absolute linear speed. It does not say that rotating objects are the same as nonrotating ones.

Such observers measure the reality that the light is definitively not moving at c relative to all that material, thereby showing that absolute speeds exist.

No, all they have measured is a difference in speeds in their own local coordinate system. You could just as well have the observer passing by in a rocket and measuring a different value for the difference in speeds.

Fans of STR will assert that you have to switch to GTR to account for the action here because it involves acceleration, and they imagine that something magical happens at those points where clock B is accelerating, but we can eliminate the role for that magic by introducing two additional clocks.

Doesn't matter. The "paradox" arises because you mix coordinates from different coordinate systems. It's valid to say that the returning twin has aged less, because he is tracing out a continous closed path where he is aging less almost all the time. It's not valid from the returning twin's perspective to claim that the fixed twin has aged less - he can only arrive at this false conclusion by switching to a different coordinate system and proceeding to add up disjointed path segments.

Absolute speeds are again crucial to this behaviour, because without that there is no possible mechanism for any of the six additional clocks to follow shorter time-length paths into the future than the central clock which must have as much right to take such a shortcut through time as they have.

But it wouldn't be taking "a" shortcut, it's taking 6 different shortcuts with different starting and ending points.

STR though doesn't always make correct predictions because it makes contradictory predictions where the ones it gets right are recognised and the ones it gets wrong are ignored.

So far, you have only shown "contradictions" by putting words in its mouth that aren't there.

It's your model. Do you not understand your own model? It's simple enough mathematically that you ought to be able to visualise it, but you can do it with software. You switch to the frame in which the object is at rest such that its path in a spacetime diagram is vertical, and its length is the time it travels through to get from one end of that line to the other.

Your "GR" simulation has two time dimensions. One represented on the vertical axis, and another represented as simulation time. Clearly, GR does not contain two time dimensions. There is no concept of "moving" in time through another "time" or two objects meeting up in a way such that object A's "now" is not the same is object B's "now" where object A's future has already happened.

As soon as you make that move, you lose: you reject STR as not applying to the universe.

It applies to every Minkowskian neighbourhood of every point in the universe. It never claimed to apply to non-flat geometry. Since most of the universe is approximately flat, we can get valid answers to a high degree of precision in many situations by just using SR.

I expect more versatile thinking than that: you don't have to stick either end in any galaxy - it can run parallel to them while being far out to the side. It can also be done where there are no galaxies at all.

If the rod isn't attached to anything, then as I said, it will pull the edge clocks towards its center, and the center clock will tick the fastest.

[DavidCooper]

Sheesh.

And here I was, thinking that this "conspiracy!" illness only afflicts the, let's say, less-than-optimally educated...

You're the one calling it a conspiracy. I put it down subconscious or semi-conscious motivations where people suppress correct ideas because they're sure those ideas are wrong, and they're sure they're wrong because of theory-induced blindness. They're suffering from the same problem as you are: assuming that the mainstream position is correct and refusing to look past it to check. I've shown where they're wrong, and you're simply rejecting correct disproofs every time on the basis that you believe the mainstream must be right. That shackles your thinking. This isn't about intelligence, other than that it affects how and whether it is employed. I show people obvious contradictions and they say, "What contradictions?" For example: the alarm has sounded; the alarm hasn't sounded yet; the alarm has sounded; the alarm hasn't sounded yet; etc. - a long series of contradictory assertions where mathematics insists half must be false, but where relativity requires them to have equal validity. To go against mathematics on this point is perverse, so why do you do it? You're not part of a conspiracy to get this wrong; you're getting it wrong for psychological reasons, and so are they. It's a human trait programmed into people by "natural" selection where for thousands of years people have been murdered for having heretical beliefs, leaving a majority that are programmed to conform and not ask or consider awkward questions. You have to fight to overcome that programming. This is all about following what mathematics (reason) dictates instead of ignoring it in favour of an ideology.

[DavidCooper]

I don't see how you go from "special relativity only applies in special circumstances" (inertial frames of reference) to "there must be one frame of reference superior to all others".

In situations where light is travelling at c, if you have any circumstance in which a pules of light is moving at a speed other than c relative to an object/observer, you necessarily have absolute speeds.

You do realize "observer" refers to the piece of the experimental apparatus that measures the difference in the speed of light via interference patterns and not the person looking at those measurements, right?

An observer can be any observer, such as a piece of machinery sitting beside the ring and not going round with it - that becomes part of the experimental apparatus measuring the difference. You're trying to rule out the valid observers that make inconvenient findings, and you're doing so to try to defend a broken theory which those observations show to be broken. Classic case of theory-induced blindness in action again: you ignore heretical measurements and only accept those that conform to the ideology.

But it always takes the same amount of time to travel a distance equal to the circumference of the ring.

Yes. The same applies to a ship moving past you: it always takes light the same length of time to travel the distance of the length of the ship, but it still takes it less time to pass the ship in one direction than the opposite direction. The relative speeds are different.

...Huh? No, light is moving at c relative to the inertial frame of reference, and it moves at c relative to every inertial frame of reference. How does that show absolute speeds?

It moves at speeds other than c relative to the material in the ring sections that it's passing through, which means that that material has non-zero absolute speeds. You wouldn't have a problem understanding this with sound going round a rotating ring, so why do you trip up on it when it's light doing it? Theory-induced blindness again: you just can't bring yourself to accept anything that shows the model to be broken.

Fans of STR will assert that you have to switch to GTR to account for the action here because it involves acceleration,

A common mistake. Physicists who regularly work with relativity (and anyone who spends some time reading Wikipedia) can tell you the twin paradox also exists in a scenario with no acceleration and therefore no general relativity.

I find qualified experts on both sides of that one. Some understand that it can run without any accelerations and that STR should be able to handle it, but just as many don't understand that and try to defend the model by pointing to the accelerations, even after you've shown them a version that doesn't have any.

Now do it again, but from the perspective of clock D instead of clock A. Clock D sees clock A approaching at 0.866c and clock C approaching at 0.9897c, and it knows that they're both set to 0 when they pass each other. Clock C will arrive first, showing the time that passed since it synchronized with clock A. Clock D then measures the amount of time between the arrival of clock A and clock C. You get the same result! How can that be? If there's an absolute frame of reference, you should get the wrong result if you assume the wrong clock is stationary.

Why do you imagine that you'd get a different result? You can run the same experiment with sound clocks in air in a wind tunnel with clocks C and D moving at 86.6% the speed of sound and clock A at rest in the air. If you then assume clock D is at rest and use frame D for your calculations, you'll get the exact same predictions about the timings on the clocks whenever they pass other clocks. That's the phenomenon of apparent relativity which works the same way in both cases (light and sound), though you have to keep the sound clocks aligned vertically or use special ones which contract under the governance of s (the speed of sound) instead of c). And changing to a different air speed in the wind tunnel makes no difference to those measurements.

In my double twins paradox thought experiment [url]magicschoolbook.com/science/double-twins-paradox.html[/url] (some of these fail to turn into links, perhaps because I'm using free hosting which comes and goes, but it should still be possible to get through to them with a bit of patience) you can see that changing frame doesn't change the measurements. It starts in mode 1 which shows event-meshing failures in STR. If you switch to mode 2 you get a different version of STR in which absolute time has been smuggled in to cause some proper times to tick slow under the governance of that absolute time, though it switches to a different absolute time every time you change frame, so it needs an infinite number of absolute times. In mode 3 you see what happens when there is only one absolute time, and this is LET. Mode 1 shows STR breaking on event-meshing failures, while mode 2 shows it breaking by generating contradictions. If you freeze the action in mode 2 with the counter at a value such as 360 or 550, you can then change frame by clicking on the "+" or "-" button and then hold down the enter/return key to repeat the action many times, and then you can watch the frozen action demonstrate that it isn't so frozen, because it makes some events that have happened unhappen while other events that haven't happened yet suddenly happen. This is similar to mad physicist in the rocket saying "the alarm has sounded; the alarm hasn't sounded yet". This is one of the many ways to show that STR is incompetent and has no place in proper science.

This is the twin paradox again.

It's similar enough to it that they can count as the same disproof.

Modern aether theory and special relativity both insist on something that is impossible to prove or disprove. Modern aether theory insists on the presence of some undetectable medium through which light propagates. Special relativity insists that the speed of light is constant and symmetrical to all inertial observers. Which of those is more similar to your flying spaghetti monster example?

STR generates contradictions, so if you're to tolerate those you depend on magic to overturn the impossibility that those contradictions reveal. LET doesn't generate contradictions, so it doesn't depend on magic, while the space fabric that it reveals must exist is also required to provide essential services which we know exist and which cannot be provided by nothing. There is no contest: STR is junk, but LET remains viable.

You have so far failed to demonstrate any contradictions.

I've shown you plenty of them, but theory-induced blindness prevents you from seeing them because you don't want there to be contradictions, and no amount of contradictions is good enough for you to accept that they are contradictions. The alarm has sounded; the alarm hasn't sounded yet; the alarm has sounded; the alarm hasn't sounded yet. Identifying contradictions of that kind doesn't trouble any competent mathematician, but the ones who are also physicists and who have bought into STR allow theory-induced blindness to prevent them from recognising these contradictions. What do they do when you press them on this point? They try to wriggle away: "the assertions aren't valid because there's no such thing as simultaneity at a distance" is the usual response, but mathematics still insists that half the claims must be false, so for equal validity of all frames, all of them have to be false, which still renders the theory incompetent.

Which experiments?

The twins paradox, MGP, the light pulses from the two ships, the light pulse moving from one object to another all moving along the same straight line at different speeds where the relative speed of the light to the objects cannot be c for both of them, etc.

The person providing them is apparently of great relevance, since you trust them more than you trust all of modern physics.

It's the experiments that disprove STR. They could be passed to you by the village idiot and their validity isn't affected at all.

How do you know you aren't doing the same thing?

Because I go by what mathematics says about the experiments while they go against what it says.

[DavidCooper]

If there's any situation where it fails to claim that light travels at c relative to all objects, that admits that there are absolute speeds.

There is no absolute linear speed. It does not say that rotating objects are the same as nonrotating ones.

For every case with a circuit, we can put additional objects in that move along tangents to the path, and what's true of the relative speed of a light pulse to a section of ring is equally true of the relative speed of the light pulse to the object moving along the tangent at the same speed as the section of the ring is moving, so we can always convert such systems with rotation into systems with no rotation, while running both of them together shows that these translations are valid.

No, all they have measured is a difference in speeds in their own local coordinate system. You could just as well have the observer passing by in a rocket and measuring a different value for the difference in speeds.

All observers measure that the light has passed the material local to it at a higher relative speed to it in one direction than the opposite direction. The only measurements that matter here are frame-independent.

Doesn't matter. The "paradox" arises because you mix coordinates from different coordinate systems. It's valid to say that the returning twin has aged less, because he is tracing out a continous closed path where he is aging less almost all the time. It's not valid from the returning twin's perspective to claim that the fixed twin has aged less - he can only arrive at this false conclusion by switching to a different coordinate system and proceeding to add up disjointed path segments.

Any analysis which mixes measurements from different frames is making an error, as is clear when you try doing the same thing with sound clocks and s-frames. A paradox remains for STR though in that it insists that clock A is ticking faster than clock C while clock C ticks faster than clock A, and it has to insist on that due to its requirement of equal validity for all frames. Clock A has just as much right to take a shortcut into the future as clock C, so how does one win out over the other? We know that either C or D would have to win out over A in selecting a shortcut into the future in order to get the result that the twins paradox always produces, so clock A cannot have an equal right to take such a shortcut, and that's an asymmetry which breaks relativity.

But it wouldn't be taking "a" shortcut, it's taking 6 different shortcuts with different starting and ending points.

Again there's an asymmetry in the circuit case because the central clock is not allowed to take as big a shortcut as some of the other clocks: there's always a pair of clocks in there where one of that pair has to be taking less of a shortcut than the other, and the only way to support such a difference would be for higher absolute speeds to select the greater shortcuts.

So far, you have only shown "contradictions" by putting words in its mouth that aren't there.

On the contrary: I've shown the contradictions in many different ways, but you are blocked from accepting that they are contradictions by theory-induced blindness. You cannot bring yourself to accept what is glaringly obvious as to do so would be heretical.

Your "GR" simulation has two time dimensions. One represented on the vertical axis, and another represented as simulation time. Clearly, GR does not contain two time dimensions.

In the simulation on the left there is only one time used, and that's proper time ticking unslowed. The result is an event-meshing failure. It's the same with mode 1 of the double twins paradox: the only time being run there is proper time, and that's the only kind of time in the model. (I've had conversations with physcists who imagine that coordinate time is also in the model, but they're wrong: it's there as a way of translating the action to 3D Euclidean space, but that is not part of the model.)

There is no concept of "moving" in time through another "time" or two objects meeting up in a way such that object A's "now" is not the same is object B's "now" where object A's future has already happened.

Well, whose fault is that? The model is broken, and that's what's causing the problem. I advance objects strictly in line with proper time, and events do not mesh. To make them mesh, which you naturally want them to so that they match up to what the universe actually does, you have to run some proper times slow, and you can only run them slow if they're governed by absolute time. When a photon travels to Andromeda and back in zero time while actually taking at least two million years to make the trip, its "clock" has run slow, or indeed stopped for two million years. In a genuine GTR model you have no right to slow or stop its proper time, so you have to have it progress in the model in zero time from here to Andromeda and back. Theory-induced blindness tells you though that this cannot be the case as it would break the theory, so you will make a model in which the light doesn't make the trip in zero time, but instead takes two million years, and then you will assert that it took zero time. But it didn't.

It applies to every Minkowskian neighbourhood of every point in the universe. It never claimed to apply to non-flat geometry. Since most of the universe is approximately flat, we can get valid answers to a high degree of precision in many situations by just using SR.

No: it doesn't work in those cases because it's disproved in our universe.

If the rod isn't attached to anything, then as I said, it will pull the edge clocks towards its center, and the center clock will tick the fastest.

How is it pulling them towards its centre? The rod is of fixed length (ignoring for now the complication of expansion causing deceleration towards absolute rest) and the ends are at constant separation distance from each other. If we combine the other experiment into this such that the clocks made just after the big bang are present, one of them can be at rest in space relative to one end of the rod while another is at rest in space relative to the other end of the rod, but the one at our end of the rod registers 14 billion years having gone by since the big bang, while the one at the other end only registers 13 billion years as having gone by, but another clock passing that end and moving away from us (at the speed of the local galaxy in that region) could register 14 billion years as having passed. The central clock will not be the fastest ticking one. This is where due diligence comes in: you can gain a lot when testing things to destruction if you combine experiments to ensure that you're getting the maths right and not making incorrect assumptions: they cannot be allowed to produce contradictory results.

[Gigasoft]

No - the laws can't change just because a physicist changes the frame he's using for his measurements. It's a single universe running on rules which can't be different for different frames without generating contradictions.

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

He makes a long alternating series of these contradictory assertions, half of which must be false. He contradicts himself because he always goes by the frame in which he is at rest at the time of making each assertion. For all frames to have equal validity, all of those assertions must be equally true. That's why frames are fundamentally incompatible with each other: they provide rival hypothesis as to what is actually happening.

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

It's a human trait programmed into people by "natural" selection where for thousands of years people have been murdered for having heretical beliefs, leaving a majority that are programmed to conform and not ask or consider awkward questions.

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

You can also see the event-meshing failures that result, e.g. rockets reaching reunion points with their planets before their planets have arrived there and thus having to attempt to interact with them even though they're not there!

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

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

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

[Octocontrabass]

In situations where light is travelling at c, if you have any circumstance in which a pules of light is moving at a speed other than c relative to an object/observer, you necessarily have absolute speeds.

Why does the speed of light relative to an object matter? Only the speed of light relative to the observer measuring that speed matters, and the observer will always measure light to be moving at c as long as that observer is in an inertial frame of reference. You can't prove there is absolute speed because no observer can measure whether they are "actually" moving - only whether things appear to move from their perspective.

An observer can be any observer, such as a piece of machinery sitting beside the ring and not going round with it - that becomes part of the experimental apparatus measuring the difference.

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

Yes. The same applies to a ship moving past you: it always takes light the same length of time to travel the distance of the length of the ship, but it still takes it less time to pass the ship in one direction than the opposite direction. The relative speeds are different.

Right. Where does relativity say it doesn't do that? (And an observer on the ship will say the same thing about light moving past you, so how do you know the ship is moving and you aren't?)

It moves at speeds other than c relative to the material in the ring sections that it's passing through, which means that that material has non-zero absolute speeds.

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

Theory-induced blindness again: you just can't bring yourself to accept anything that shows the model to be broken.

Are you sure you understand the model?

I find qualified experts on both sides of that one.

People on the internet can lie about being qualified experts.

If you then assume clock D is at rest and use frame D for your calculations, you'll get the exact same predictions about the timings on the clocks whenever they pass other clocks. [...] And changing to a different air speed in the wind tunnel makes no difference to those measurements.

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

In my double twins paradox thought experiment

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

some of these fail to turn into links

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

This is one of the many ways to show that STR is incompetent and has no place in proper science.

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

STR generates contradictions, so if you're to tolerate those you depend on magic to overturn the impossibility that those contradictions reveal.

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

I've shown you plenty of them,

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

The twins paradox, MGP, the light pulses from the two ships, the light pulse moving from one object to another all moving along the same straight line at different speeds where the relative speed of the light to the objects cannot be c for both of them, etc.

Thought experiments don't count. So far the only real data you've cited is from the Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment, but relativity and modern aether theory both correctly predicted the results of that experiment.

It's the experiments that disprove STR.

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

Because I go by what mathematics says about the experiments while they go against what it says.

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