Non-Platonic geometry definitions

[Octocontrabass]

What it all comes down to is that when you are part of a herd which comes up against someone who doesn't believe what you've been programmed to believe, not only must that individual be wrong, but they must be autistic.

No, I'm pretty sure this is not related to autism. I suggested it only because it's an easy starting point for when you talk to a psychiatrist.

[DavidCooper]

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

No one's forcing you or anyone else to read it. What actually bothers you is that the side you want to win is demonstrably incapable of doing so and has instead become locked into rejecting correct mathematics over and over again, so you want to shut it down.

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By denying absolute speeds, you make it c relative to every observer.

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

You're still trying to maintain the ambiguity. If you merely mean that he measures it as c relative to him in the frame in which he is at rest, then that is a weaker claim which does not rule out absolute speeds, so you should not be ruling out absolute speeds. And once you stop ruling them out, you should be able to recognise that numerous experiments show that absolute speeds must exist, and that in expanding space they can in principle be pinned down, but you're determined to deny that while still trying to maintain the ambiguity.

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

This isn't about being ill. There are all sorts of psychological phenomena that can lead to people being trapped in mistaken beliefs. I could suffer from something and not know it. Anyone could. It's bonkers to fixate on autism instead when it's such a bad fit. But the condition I actually suffer from is that I refuse to override the fundamental rules of mathematics on an ad hoc basis to tolerate popular theories that don't conform. That is my psychological problem, and it's called being rational.

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

Oh sure, and I was doing that from early on in the thread and in a thousand other previous posts on this forum just on the off chance that someone would suggest some day that I might be overtrusting of the fundamental rules of mathematics due to autism. I have better things to do with my time, such as trying to stay alive while battling a condition that keeps generating blood clots while the pressure on the health service here means you can only get referred on through to the hospital if you're taken there unconscious. I stopped replying in this thread for a couple of days because after two years of hunting I finally managed to identify the cause and was busy researching that. (It's rogue bacteria in the gut generating TMAO from choline, and that directly drives the clotting. This is a recent discovery which the local doctors hadn't heard of, but the clue to this came when I ate something that disagreed with my insides to such an extent that the clotting problem halted temporarily and I had to slash the amount of nattokinase I was taking from 150,000 fibrinolytic units a day (which is more than enough to cause a brain hemorrhage in a healthy person) to nearly zero in response. It turns out that my illness may be curable with antibiotics.)

I couldn't care less about what was taught in school. I learned relativity from the original source manuscript while everyone was doing their times tables.

But you still soaked up all that propaganda without doing your own checking to see if it stacks up.

You should be reading proper books written by real physicists, not school books. If you were taught by someone who didn't know it, it should come as no surprise that you don't know it either.

I haven't seen it being taught in anything below university textbooks, apart from on a host of websites which regurgitate propaganda. I simply explored everything from first principles and independently came up with LET, though with a prior knowledge of the MMX result and the need to account for length contraction. I used different maths for it as a result of working through it all myself, using the sine and cosine of an angle to relate the speed of travel to the amount of clock retardation (timing dilation) instead of Lorentz's equation and using my reference-frame camera maths instead of the Lorentz transformations. The results are the same though. I then moved on from that to study STR by discussing it with working physicists, and I was shocked at how poor their understanding was. I then looked in depth at how the subject was taught and found out why.

In reality, a relative speed from any other random frame is just as likely to be the correct one as the one that STR prefers

What do you mean by the "correct" one?

They're all providing rival hypotheses as to what the universe is actually doing. One is right and all the others are wrong. To pick one at random and assert that it's the right one would be incompetent (unless you're using the expansion of space to pin down absolute speeds), but STR gives special status to the measurements of two frames when measuring the relative speed of two objects, and in doing so it is incompetent.

You deny that it's incompetent because you deny that the frames provide rival hypotheses, but the mad physicist in the rocket coming out with the series of contradictory assertions reveals otherwise: "the alarm has sounded", "the alarm hasn't sounded yet", "the alarm has sounded", "the alarm hasn't sounded yet", etc. - mathematics insists that half of his claims are plain wrong. You try to get out of that by denying the validity of simultaneity at a distance, but that doesn't work. If a universe is advancing the action from past to future with the double twins paradox, it advances the action for each planet at a steady rate, and it does the same thing for the rockets while they're moving inertially. They advance the action while they are apart. When you change frame, you see some of the action undo itself, but the real universe isn't going to unhappen events after they've happened just to pander to a mad physicist every time he changes the frame he's using for his analysis. The events unfold at a steady rate and are carefully co-ordinated. When you try to ban there being simultaneity at a distance, you break that steady advancing of events and replace it with a magical mechanism in which all those events have both happened and not happened yet all the time up until the point where the two separated objects are reunited, and only at that moment do you allow the universe to have advanced events for both objects up to that point, and yet even then you can't allow it to have done that because they still have to be in a happened-and-not-yet-happened state for another object that will meet up with them later, and on it goes infinitely with everything being in that happened-and-not-yet-happened state forever in order to conform to a broken ideology. It's magical thinking on the most powerful steroids and hallucinogenic drugs available, but you appear to be blind to that. Perhaps you lack the capacity to run this kind of thing in your head correctly, and maybe that's the real problem here: the vast majority of the population may not have sufficient mental hardware to be able to do so, and the result would be that they can't even see it when looking at simulations that demonstrate the problem directly to them. You substitute magic for mechanism over and over again, and cannot see that you are doing so. But AGI will not be so restricted; when it runs everything on mathematics without allowing magic mechanisms, it will confirm everything I've said here.

If by "passed the material" you mean taking the coordinate difference between the light's trajectory and the material's trajectory, then this has nothing to do with the "speed of light with respect to an inertial frame" in SR.

Again you're just desperately trying to avoid seeing what mathematics tells you. The light has a speed of travel relative to each piece of material of the ring that it is passing. If one part of the rotating ring is at rest, all the rest of the ring is moving, and we know from the result that the light pulses which are both moving through space at c pass all the material of the ring at different relative speeds because one completes the trip in less time than the other. You don't want to accept this part of the result of the experiment, so you simply refuse to see it. You are selectively rejecting the scientific method whenever it contradicts your theory.

If you disagree or if you mean something else, then show it with math. By math, I mean giving names to functions and variables and properly defining what they represent, relating them with mathematical equations and performing valid mathematical calculations that end up showing a contradiction with the postulates of SR.

Surely you can do better than that. Use sound pulses going round a rotating ring and see if you can deny what's going on there with the relative speeds too. You shouldn't be able to get those wrong, so why do you have so much difficulty understanding the case with light pulses? Your problem is that you don't like the results: the facts.

In every frame you analyse it from, there is material there which cannot be at rest. They can disagree about which parts of the ring are not at rest, but they all agree that some parts of it cannot be at rest.

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

Again, do it with sound pulses going round a rotating ring in air. Is every part of the rotating ring at rest in the air? No; it's impossible for it to be. Each part of the ring is moving at an absolute speed through the air and most of those are non-zero absolute speeds. If you get rid of the air and use magic sounds that travel through nothing at speed s, what governs their speed of propagation? Denied magic mediums do that job, and there's one for each frame, all having the sound pulses move at different speeds relative to the ring material, but within each of these frames with it's specific magic medium, the magic sound moves at s relative to that magic medium and does not move at s relative to most of the ring's material. This is simple stuff, but you're determined not to get it because to do so would force you to reject your theory, so you're trapped in denial.

But in an expanding universe, we can pin down absolute speeds approximately, so it is possible to measure your approximate speed relative to the aether.

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

Reciting the theory's baseless propaganda doesn't hack it. The thought experiment with the clocks created just after the big bang shows that there are absolute speeds and that they can be revealed. Other experiments allow them to be pinned down without having to create the apparatus billions of years ago, but they can generate a null result in two cases: (1) if there is no expansion, which means abandoning the big bang theory, and (2) if the expansion slows objects towards absolute rest such that the differences can be masked, but with absolute speeds being revealed in a different way as all the galaxies would by now be slowed close to absolute rest regardless of how fast the matter was collectively moving when it began to form them. You can take your pick, but your models break every way you try to take this.

[Gigasoft]

If you merely mean that he measures it as c relative to him in the frame in which he is at rest, then that is a weaker claim which does not rule out absolute speeds, so you should not be ruling out absolute speeds.

How else would he measure it? I don't see how the statement "Light always propagates through empty space at a constant speed of c as measured in any inertial frame of reference" leaves room for misinterpretation. Speed means the amount of spatial movement per unit of time (that is, per unit of advancement along the x0 axis). Nowhere is it suggested that you may apply a Galilean transformation, which takes you to a non-inertial frame. The first postulate, that "the laws of physics take the same form in all inertial frames of reference" is explicitly stating that there are no absolute speeds in physics. Whatever you may call an absolute speed therefore plays no role in physics, according to SR.

but STR gives special status to the measurements of two frames when measuring the relative speed of two objects

This is the coordinate independent way to define relative speed. It's an especially useful quantity, since everyone can agree on it. If you define it as the magnitude of the difference of the objects' velocities relative to the aether, then it becomes an useless definition, since no one knows anything about an aether.

You deny that it's incompetent because you deny that the frames provide rival hypotheses, but the mad physicist in the rocket coming out with the series of contradictory assertions reveals otherwise: "the alarm has sounded", "the alarm hasn't sounded yet"

No, he is making a series of unwarranted statements. The sounding of the alarm happens neither in his future nor in his past.

When you change frame, you see some of the action undo itself

No, I don't. I can only see what's inside my light cone. Sure, some events change places on the x0 axis relative to me, but it is too late for me to do anything about them, and I can't find out what happened until I am in the event's future light cone. Every frame agrees that events that are able to affect each other occur in the same order on the x0 axis.

When you try to ban there being simultaneity at a distance, you break that steady advancing of events and replace it with a magical mechanism in which all those events have both happened and not happened yet all the time up until the point where the two separated objects are reunited, and only at that moment do you allow the universe to have advanced events for both objects up to that point, yet even then you can't allow it to have done that because they still have to be in a happened-and-not-yet-happened state for another object that will meet up with them later

False. There is nothing that prevents an event from having been determined before another spacelike separated event is determined, but the order in which this happens, if there is such a thing, does not affect the physics. Since no physics is happening that involves these points, their x0 ordering does not constitute a statement of physical fact.

The light has a speed of travel relative to each piece of material of the ring that it is passing. If one part of the rotating ring is at rest, all the rest of the ring is moving, and we know from the result that the light pulses which are both moving through space at c pass all the material of the ring at different relative speeds because one completes the trip in less time than the other.

It has a coordinate independent speed of c relative to anything. In the inertial frame where one part of the ring is initially at rest, it completes the trip in less time because it took a shorter route. If you stitch together inertial coordinate charts such that the material is always at rest where the light pulse is, then you'll find that the coordinates don't match up when the light pulses meet. If one part is taken to be continually at rest, then either you have a non-inertial frame or you have the case above where there is a seam in the coordinates.

Surely you can do better than that. Use sound pulses going round a rotating ring and see if you can deny what's going on there with the relative speeds too. You shouldn't be able to get those wrong, so why do you have so much difficulty understanding the case with light pulses? Your problem is that you don't like the results: the facts.

With sound pulses travelling through the material, both will take the same time and arrive simultaneously at the same point on the ring that they originated from. If they are travelling in air alongside it, then the situation is analogous to the light going alongside it in vacuum. However, since sound pulses don't travel at c, then obviosuly they don't travel at the same speed in every frame. And if you want to use "s-frames", then we're just back to the beginning. Changing 's' for 'c' isn't going to magically clear up anything. Are you allergic to math?

The thought experiment with the clocks created just after the big bang shows that there are absolute speeds and that they can be revealed

Showing the existence of a reference axis doesn't mean it's the aether axis. The aether could be moving in any speed in any direction and you would still measure the same thing.

[Solar]

No one's forcing you or anyone else to read it. What actually bothers you is that the side you want to win is demonstrably incapable of doing so and has instead become locked into rejecting correct mathematics over and over again, so you want to shut it down.

I'll just sit here with my bag of popcorn waiting for your "truth" to gain momentum...

...no, wait. I've seen flat-earthers and antivaxxers gain momentum, right-wingers and chemtrailers. Actually, mass-madness like this scares the heck out of me. I thought for a while this one person (you) could actually be helped, but it appears not.

You should be reading proper books written by real physicists, not school books. If you were taught by someone who didn't know it, it should come as no surprise that you don't know it either.

Let's see here.

George Greenstein, Ph.D Yale University, BS Stanford, "Frozen Star", 1983.

Stephen Hawking, Ph.D Cambridge University, BA Oxford, "A Brief History of Time", 1988.

Becky Smethurst, DPhil Oxford, MPhys Durham, "10 Things you should know".

That's just those I bought because I wanted to have them for my own to re-read on occasion.

Tell me. What's sitting on your bookshelf?

...I simply explored everything from first principles and independently came up with LET...

Oh, right.

You know, if you'd at least written a paper, you know, your academic clout could at least be judged.

So far, all you have proven here is that you're completely dismissive of anything that doesn't agree with you, despite having your "theory" and your general understanding of what you're dismissive about completely spanked even by us laymen here.

You try to get out of that by denying the validity of simultaneity at a distance

Tell me, who would be observing such simultanity?

Wo would be able to observe whether Beteigeuze has already turned supernova, right now? And what would be "now" to that observer, being close to Beteigeuze? There is no way that observer could right now observe our little discussion here, because if he had a telescope powerful enough to observe Earth, he'd be observing Earth as it was ~550 years ago.

Nothing travels faster than light. Not even "now"...

[Gigasoft]

I've seen flat-earthers and antivaxxers gain momentum, right-wingers and chemtrailers. Actually, mass-madness like this scares the heck out of me.

The growth of political movements is subject to a selection process where those opposed to the current trend have an easier time attracting those who aren't afraid to lose high paying jobs than those who have a lot to lose. Therefore, the relative portion of mentally ill people who are active in dissenting political parties is not an accurate reflection of the merits of their politics or of how many percent of those who subscribe to the same thoughts among the general population are mentally ill, and is not an indication that madness itself is gaining momentum. In the end, the influx of crazy people tends to further inhibit the growth of dissident political parties that do not take sufficient measures to prevent it. In a functioning democratic society with no reason to be concerned about violent opponents or of losing one's job, this effect would not occur, and left wingers would likely eventually lose traction and become insignificant. In areas where leftism was never popular to begin with, we can also expect right wing parties to primarily consist of sensible people making sensible decisions.

Belief in a flat earth or chemtrails are ways in which psychosis manifests. Although the exact form that the delusions take is subject to trends, psychosis is not contagious. It therefore does not matter if the discussions in the asylum corridors are about flat earth on Monday, chemtrails on Tuesday and relativity being wrong on Wednesday. As for those opposed to vaccination, they are composed of mentally ill and normal, healthy people alike, with their rationales being somewhat different. A mentally ill person may believe that a secret elite is using vaccines as a method for mass delivery of lethal poisons or nanorobots, a theme which is part of a common scam targeted at vulnerable people with the intention of driving traffic towards sellers of useless health remedies. Another, more sensible rationale for being skeptical of new vaccines is the possibility of unforeseen complications, with historical examples being the thalidomide birth deformity scandal, polio vaccines contaminated with live polio virus, and the development of narcolepsy in those vaccinated against swine flu. With the vaccines developed during the Covid-19 pandemic, the skepticism turned out to be warranted – the vaccines did have unacceptable side effects, and at least one manufacturer was found to have done the irresponsible thing by falsifying trial results (which they then proceeded to blame on an external laboratory). It is difficult to know to what extent crazy people affected the number of people who got vaccinated against Covid-19, and the direction of the effect, but the number of crazy people themselves probably remained constant.

I was the one who brought up the subject of books. With proper books, I meant physics textbooks written by physicists as opposed to those written by middle school teachers. If David Cooper learned relativity from a middle school or college textbook similar to the ones I remember from school, it is no wonder how he initially got confused, although he should have corrected his wrong understanding by reading a book that covers it properly, at the first indication that his understanding did not make any logical sense.

[Solar]

...left wingers would likely eventually lose traction and become insignificant.

How to tell me you're American without telling me you're American.

Hint: It's not the left I am afraid of. It's also not where those kind of people I was referring to tend to congregate...

[DavidCooper]

I thought for a while this one person (you) could actually be helped, but it appears not.

I'm not the one who needs help, but I'd love to know how you imagine that you're able to judge this issue when you don't understand any off it.

Let's see here.

George Greenstein, Ph.D Yale University, BS Stanford, "Frozen Star", 1983.

Stephen Hawking, Ph.D Cambridge University, BA Oxford, "A Brief History of Time", 1988.

Becky Smethurst, DPhil Oxford, MPhys Durham, "10 Things you should know".

That's just those I bought because I wanted to have them for my own to re-read on occasion.

And there's the answer. You've been doing some pop-science bedtime reading and you think you know it all as a result. But they're not bad books, and they're a big step up from Star Trek.

You know, if you'd at least written a paper, you know, your academic clout could at least be judged.

Multiple disproofs of STR are more than sufficient.

So far, all you have proven here is that you're completely dismissive of anything that doesn't agree with you, despite having your "theory" and your general understanding of what you're dismissive about completely spanked even by us laymen here.

On the contrary, I've proved my case in multiple ways, and hammered the opposition here.

quote="DennisCooper"

Well, that is just bizarre. What kind of person does that to people's names?

Tell me, who would be observing such simultanity?

This issue isn't about who is able to observe such things, but about what the universe is actually doing: how it runs the events. There are all the events unfolding on one of the planets at a constant rate, and all the events unfolding in the rocket as it goes away where they run at a constant rate, and all the events unfolding in the rocket as it comes back where again they run at a constant rate, and we have a "while" situation where events are happening on the planet and events are happening on the rocket. The universe allows these events to run, but what do you want it to do? An event on the planet takes place half way between the rocket leaving and returning. The rocket also turns round at some point in order to come back. One person on the planet at that event says, the rocket's turned round, but another disagrees and says it hasn't turned round yet. You want both of them to be right, or neither of them to be right. You want the rocket to be in a state of having turned round and having not turned round yet at the same time, and you think that's acceptable? You think that makes more sense than the universe having a definitive answer as to which is the case? You've bought into magical thinking deep, and you think I need help! There's clearly a lot of work out there for psychiatrists, so anyone who's still choosing a path to take in life, that could be a good career option.

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If you merely mean that he measures it as c relative to him in the frame in which he is at rest, then that is a weaker claim which does not rule out absolute speeds, so you should not be ruling out absolute speeds.

How else would he measure it?

If he's going to measure it properly, he should use either do so after pinning down absolute speeds (using a method that works in expanding space) or if he doesn't know anything about his absolute speed he should make measurements based on all possible frames and thereby measure the speed of light relative to himself as being between zero and 2c. That is as close as he can get to determining the answer. If he only accepts the answer c, he is naive and is not a competent physicist.

I don't see how the statement "Light always propagates through empty space at a constant speed of c as measured in any inertial frame of reference" leaves room for misinterpretation.

You can measure that the speed of light is c through space using any frame thanks to the phenomenon of apparent relativity, just as you can with the speed of sound in air when using any s-frame and using genuinely equivalent measuring methods where you engineer out cheating by feeling the air or using supersonic signals. That doesn't mean the sound signal you're measuring is actually moving at s relative to the frame, even though naive measurements assert that it is.

Nowhere is it suggested that you may apply a Galilean transformation, which takes you to a non-inertial frame.

Hypothesised relative speeds are calculated using inertial frames.

The first postulate, that "the laws of physics take the same form in all inertial frames of reference" is explicitly stating that there are no absolute speeds in physics. Whatever you may call an absolute speed therefore plays no role in physics, according to SR.

The universe is doing only one thing and cannot vary that for different frames. Different frames merely provide rival hypotheses as to what it is that the universe is doing at any location, and only one of them is right. The postulate is ambiguous. I'm happy for you to try to make it unambiguous though as that simplifies things by forcing you to rule out absolute speeds, at which point STR has to be ruled out because absolute speeds are proven. (The ambiguity is often used as a defence against that by making out that STR doesn't rule out absolute speeds, but if you aren't going to play that card, we don't need to care about that here.)

but STR gives special status to the measurements of two frames when measuring the relative speed of two objects

This is the coordinate independent way to define relative speed.

It's a naive and misleading convention.

It's an especially useful quantity, since everyone can agree on it.

They can all agree that it's the correct relative speed if one of the two objects is actually at rest, but that's as far as the agreement should go.

If you define it as the magnitude of the difference of the objects' velocities relative to the aether, then it becomes an useless definition, since no one knows anything about an aether.

The space fabric (aether) governs the propagation of light through itself at c relative to that fabric. Not knowing your absolute speed doesn't make hypothesised relative speeds useless definitions. Any relative speed from any frame will serve perfectly well as a definition of the relative speed so long as you state how the objects are moving relative to the frame. You can transform to the frame of your choice from any frame. If you think frames in which one of the objects is at rest are more convenient, then that's fine, but don't fool yourself into thinking you've got the right relative speed. The relative speed you're using is conditional upon the frame providing a correct description of what the universe is actually doing, and in most cases it will be the wrong frame.

You deny that it's incompetent because you deny that the frames provide rival hypotheses, but the mad physicist in the rocket coming out with the series of contradictory assertions reveals otherwise: "the alarm has sounded", "the alarm hasn't sounded yet"

No, he is making a series of unwarranted statements. The sounding of the alarm happens neither in his future nor in his past.

He is making statements based on the frame he's using at the moment of each claim, and they are correct measurements for that frame, but all the measurements are conditional: if this frame correctly describes what the universe is actually doing, then the alarm has sounded at the clock; if this frame correctly desribes what the universe is actually doing, then the alarm has not sounded yet at the clock. Those are the wordings that a sane physicist would use, and because both claims are conditional, both claims are true. That is how mathematics handles this. But what do you do? You deny both claims whether they're conditional or not, and you replace them with something bonkers: either (1) that it is neither the case that the alarm has sounded nor that it hasn't sounded yet, or (2) that the alarm has both sounded and not sounded yet and that it maintains that state until you get a light-speed signal from it to prove that it has sounded. Your position is one of magical thinking.

When you change frame, you see some of the action undo itself

No, I don't. I can only see what's inside my light cone.

I'm talking about the "God view" where you run the simulation. You change frame and events that the simulation has run have to be unrun while other events which the simulation hadn't run suddenly have to be rushed, and then have to be unrun when you change frame back again. The universe does not unrun events: they happen once and then they've happened and stay happened.

When you try to ban there being simultaneity at a distance, you break that steady advancing of events and replace it with a magical mechanism in which all those events have both happened and not happened yet all the time up until the point where the two separated objects are reunited, and only at that moment do you allow the universe to have advanced events for both objects up to that point, yet even then you can't allow it to have done that because they still have to be in a happened-and-not-yet-happened state for another object that will meet up with them later

False. There is nothing that prevents an event from having been determined before another spacelike separated event is determined, but the order in which this happens, if there is such a thing, does not affect the physics. Since no physics is happening that involves these points, their x0 ordering does not constitute a statement of physical fact.

You can't keep them in a state of both happened and not-happened yet in the universe without resorting to magic. If you advance events under the governance of one frame, changing to another frame forces some events to unhappen, and the universe will not comply. You are so deeply trapped in magical thinking that you can't see it. You quite genuinely cannot see out of the box you've shackled yourself into.

It has a coordinate independent speed of c relative to anything. In the inertial frame where one part of the ring is initially at rest, it completes the trip in less time because it took a shorter route.

It passed all the same material while following that shorter route because it's relative speed to that material was higher. No amount of babbling can overturn what mathematics reveals about this.

With sound pulses travelling through the material...

They aren't propagating through the material. They are propagating through air which is not rotating with the ring.

If they are travelling in air alongside it, then the situation is analogous to the light going alongside it in vacuum. However, since sound pulses don't travel at c, then obviosuly they don't travel at the same speed in every frame.

Each s-frame provides a hypothesis as to how they are moving and has them move at s relative to the frame at all times.

And if you want to use "s-frames", then we're just back to the beginning. Changing 's' for 'c' isn't going to magically clear up anything. Are you allergic to math?

Quite the opposite. You are the one allergic to math whenever it conflicts with your theory. When you use s-frames with the sounds going round through air as the ring rotates beside them, every s-frame has the sound pulse going one way round the ring move at a higher average speed relative to the material it's passing than the sound pulse going the other way. Only one of those frames correctly represents what the universe is actually doing, but all of them agree that the same light pulse has a higher speed relative to some of the material of the ring than s and that the other light pulse has a lower speed relative to some of the material of the ring than s. Even if the air is not detected in the measurements, the experiment proves that.

The thought experiment with the clocks created just after the big bang shows that there are absolute speeds and that they can be revealed

Showing the existence of a reference axis doesn't mean it's the aether axis. The aether could be moving in any speed in any direction and you would still measure the same thing.

You still haven't understood that then. Linguofreak understood it way back - he's the best performer on your side by a mile. Where three clocks pass and one says 14 billion years while the other two say 7 billion, what would happen if the aether was actually moving at 0.866c relative to the central clock instead of being at rest relative to it? The timings would be different: the middle one would say 7 billion instead of 14, while one of the other clocks would say 14 and the third clock would say 2 billion. The experiment destroys STR directly through the measurement values being different depending on the relative speed of the aether.

[Gigasoft]

If he's going to measure it properly

Then he is clearly not measuring the quantity that the second postulate of SR is describing. Why do you insist on adding words that aren't there?

That doesn't mean the sound signal you're measuring is actually moving at s relative to the frame, even though naive measurements assert that it is

We're talking about a very simple concept here. Spacetime events have coordinates given by a frame. The velocity of any object as measured in that frame is defined by those coordinates. No need to muddy up the discussion with sound waves and methods of making the measurements.

Hypothesised relative speeds are calculated using inertial frames.

You are subtracting a velocity from another velocity. Whatever you call it, the result is obviously not the quantity specified in the second postulate. Inertial frames are related by Lorentz transformations. When you apply a Galilean transformation to an inertial frame, you don't have an inertial frame anymore.

The ambiguity is often used as a defence against that by making out that STR doesn't rule out absolute speeds

It rejects absolute speeds in physics. It does not say anything about notions of absolute speeds that may exist outside of physics. The total order in which events are being determined belongs to metaphysics.

Not knowing your absolute speed doesn't make hypothesised relative speeds useless definitions.

Then, while we're at it, may I suggest a God-centric spatial coordinate system, with the Devil at (1, 0, 0), the continent of Atlantis at (0, 1, 0) and the planet Nibiru at (0, 0, 1), for maximum convencience and usefulness.

He is making statements based on the frame he's using at the moment of each claim, and they are correct measurements for that frame

Only if you define "now" to be the surface that corresponds to the observer's current time coordinate. If you define "now" as the set of events that are currently being determined, then he can't know if spacelike separated events have happened or not. However, nothing prevents him from assigning coordinates to events that may not yet have happened and reasoning about how they might happen.

I'm talking about the "God view" where you run the simulation. You change frame and events that the simulation has run have to be unrun while other events which the simulation hadn't run suddenly have to be rushed, and then have to be unrun when you change frame back again.

The Standard Model does not include a god that runs a simulation.

You can't keep them in a state of both happened and not-happened yet in the universe without resorting to magic.

It's not that they are in a state of both happened and not happened yet, but that a spacelike separated observer can't know if they have happened.

It passed all the same material while following that shorter route because it's relative speed to that material was higher. No amount of babbling can overturn what mathematics reveals about this.

Your Galilean relative speed is not a relevant concept in SR, which means you haven't disproved SR.

every s-frame has the sound pulse going one way round the ring move at a higher average speed relative to the material it's passing than the sound pulse going the other way

And this "speed" you're talking about is not itself the speed of a sound pulse in any s-frame. If the s-frame you started with is , then your idea of velocity "relative" to some other object that has velocity v in the x1 direction would be with respect to the frame , which is not orthonormal and therefore not an s-frame.

Where three clocks pass and one says 14 billion years while the other two say 7 billion, what would happen if the aether was actually moving at 0.866c relative to the central clock instead of being at rest relative to it? The timings would be different: the middle one would say 7 billion instead of 14, while one of the other clocks would say 14 and the third clock would say 2 billion.

No, the clock times would only depend on where they started and what path they took. If the Big bang happened in the same way as seen from the observer's perspective, it doesn't matter what the aether is doing.

It's not the left I am afraid of. It's also not where those kind of people I was referring to tend to congregate...

Why are you afraid of people having a different political opinion? Also, studies show that chemtrailers are as common on the left as on the right, and the same is true of most other varieties of crazy as well.

[Solar]

I'm not the one who needs help, but I'd love to know how you imagine that you're able to judge this issue when you don't understand any off it.

Well, we have two sides to this argument saying the same thing -- that it's the other person being deluded.

That would be a dead end usually, if it weren't for everyone else here saying the same as I am. At some point, the chance that you are the one "seeing truth" and everyone else being wrong becomes a statistical next-to-impossibility.

You know, if you'd at least written a paper, you know, your academic clout could at least be judged.

Multiple disproofs of STR are more than sufficient.

But you do understand that it's only a disproof if people agree that it's a disproof?

quote="DennisCooper"

Well, that is just bizarre. What kind of person does that to people's names?

An insomniac with a terrible memory for names (always getting the first letter right and the rest wrong), typing that answer in the middle of the night on a mobile and not bothering to double-check the name because scrolling around on the small display is a pain.

My apologies, no offense intended.

Tell me, who would be observing such simultanity?

This issue isn't about who is able to observe such things, but about what the universe is actually doing: how it runs the events. There are all the events unfolding on one of the planets at a constant rate...

Constant only in the reference frame of the planet.

...and all the events unfolding in the rocket as it goes away where they run at a constant rate...

Constant only in the reference frame of the rocket.

An event on the planet takes place half way between the rocket leaving and returning. The rocket also turns round at some point in order to come back. One person on the planet at that event says, the rocket's turned round, but another disagrees and says it hasn't turned round yet. You want both of them to be right, or neither of them to be right. You want the rocket to be in a state of having turned round and having not turned round yet at the same time, and you think that's acceptable?

Strawman argument. I am not claiming any such thing, and neither does anyone else. If you disagree, please provide proper quotation and attribution. Putting words in people's mouths is not winning you any friends, you know. Your constant harping on about how stupid everyone else is is part of why your position is instantly disqualified from being taken seriously. You want to be a scientist, act like one. Just one quick example:

If he only accepts the answer c, he is naive and is not a competent physicist.

That is not a disproof of anything, that's just being offensive.

It's not the left I am afraid of. It's also not where those kind of people I was referring to tend to congregate...

Why are you afraid of people having a different political opinion? Also, studies show that chemtrailers are as common on the left as on the right, and the same is true of most other varieties of crazy as well.

You usually get anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, "alternative truth" proponents, anti-LGBT proponents and anti-democrats in one tidy package at the extreme right -- Alt-Right in the US, AfD in Germany. Intollerance and hatred for the political opposition, attempts at overthrowing democratically elected government. Tolerance does not mean tolerating intolerance.

And what an American calls "leftist" just shows how terribly skewed your political spectrum over there is...

[DavidCooper]

If he's going to measure it properly

Then he is clearly not measuring the quantity that the second postulate of SR is describing. Why do you insist on adding words that aren't there?

You asked how else he is going to measure it, so I told you how he should do it based on the interpretation of the postulate which led to your question, but you're now trying to pin that response to a different interpretation which it was not given for.

We're talking about a very simple concept here. Spacetime events have coordinates given by a frame. The velocity of any object as measured in that frame is defined by those coordinates. No need to muddy up the discussion with sound waves and methods of making the measurements.

There is, because sound and s-frames work the same way and what you do when you change frame is change the speed of the medium (that governs the propagation of the sound/light pulse) relative to the objects, thereby changing the speed of the pulse relative to the objects too, and relative to itself. Clearly you are determined never to understand that, so we reach a point where you cannot progress any further.

You are subtracting a velocity from another velocity. Whatever you call it, the result is obviously not the quantity specified in the second postulate. Inertial frames are related by Lorentz transformations. When you apply a Galilean transformation to an inertial frame, you don't have an inertial frame anymore.

Who's applying Galilean transformations? I don't use those at all. When you make a measurement of the relative speed between two objects that are both moving through a frame, you aren't making any transformation at all.

The ambiguity is often used as a defence against that by making out that STR doesn't rule out absolute speeds

It rejects absolute speeds in physics. It does not say anything about notions of absolute speeds that may exist outside of physics. The total order in which events are being determined belongs to metaphysics.

The point is that the ambiguity is often used by defenders of STR to deny that it it rules out absolute speeds, and a lot of then try to play that card once they see that absolute speeds must exist. As you don't want to play that card, there is no need to care about that.

Not knowing your absolute speed doesn't make hypothesised relative speeds useless definitions.

Then, while we're at it, may I suggest a God-centric spatial coordinate system, with the Devil at (1, 0, 0), the continent of Atlantis at (0, 1, 0) and the planet Nibiru at (0, 0, 1), for maximum convencience and usefulness.

Why drag such rubbish into it? Absolute speeds must exist regardless of whether you can pin them down or not, and each hypothesised relative speed is no less useless than the frame in which it is measured. In most cases, the frame which correctly represents what the universe is actually doing will not be one of the two that STR prefers for making its naive measurements.

I'm talking about the "God view" where you run the simulation. You change frame and events that the simulation has run have to be unrun while other events which the simulation hadn't run suddenly have to be rushed, and then have to be unrun when you change frame back again.

The Standard Model does not include a god that runs a simulation.

The "God view" does not depend on there being a God. It's a view of what the universe (or a simulation) is actually doing rather than the restricted view of someone waiting for light signals to reach him before he can see it.

It's not that they are in a state of both happened and not happened yet, but that a spacelike separated observer can't know if they have happened.

We're at a level beyond naive observers. This is about what the universe is actually doing as it advances the action for different objects. Are you pretending to be incapable of processing such ideas or are you genuinely incapable of doing so?

It passed all the same material while following that shorter route because it's relative speed to that material was higher. No amount of babbling can overturn what mathematics reveals about this.

Your Galilean relative speed is not a relevant concept in SR, which means you haven't disproved SR.

STR's incompetent concepts are no defence against it being disproved by mathematics. You really do know how to blind yourself with your theory.

And this "speed" you're talking about is not itself the speed of a sound pulse in any s-frame. If the s-frame you started with is , then your idea of velocity "relative" to some other object that has velocity v in the x1 direction would be with respect to the frame , which is not orthonormal and therefore not an s-frame.

The analysis in each case is done with a single s-frame which most certainly is an s-frame and we make measurements there of the speed of the sound pulses relative to the material of the ring that they're passing. There is no switching to other frames involved. You are applying incorrect rules to try to obfuscate things.

Where three clocks pass and one says 14 billion years while the other two say 7 billion, what would happen if the aether was actually moving at 0.866c relative to the central clock instead of being at rest relative to it? The timings would be different: the middle one would say 7 billion instead of 14, while one of the other clocks would say 14 and the third clock would say 2 billion.

No, the clock times would only depend on where they started and what path they took. If the Big bang happened in the same way as seen from the observer's perspective, it doesn't matter what the aether is doing.

You still aren't processing it correctly. If you change what the aether is doing, you change the times on the clocks and get a different result that reveals the speed the aether is moving at relative to each clock. A computer program simulating this could not produce your imagined result.


_____________________________________________________________

Well, we have two sides to this argument saying the same thing -- that it's the other person being deluded.

So the trick is to look at and understand the argument rather than just assuming that the majority are right.

At some point, the chance that you are the one "seeing truth" and everyone else being wrong becomes a statistical next-to-impossibility.

No it doesn't. The phenomenon of theory-induced blindness is well established and involves large numbers of experts being plain wrong, so it isn't about the numbers backing different sides. What you need to do is look at the facts and find the places where people are going against fundamental rules of mathematics. Take the clocks in an expanding universe thought experiment as an example. If you run a simulation of it, you'll see that Linguofreak's analysis fits what the simulation does and that Gigasoft's analysis does not. The simulation will show that absolute speeds can be calculated by the timings on the clocks. In doing this, you can resolve the issues one by one and determine who is actually winning the argument and who is losing it. It isn't about fooling people with obfuscation and incorrect statements, but conformity to mathematics.

But you do understand that it's only a disproof if people agree that it's a disproof?

That isn't how proofs and disproofs work. They are proofs and disproofs if they are mathematically valid regardless of how many people reject them out of a desire for them to be wrong.

My apologies, no offense intended.

None taken. I just pictured you deliberately editing it from one to the other, but that's not the case: I hadn't realised you were building the quote tag from scratch.

This issue isn't about who is able to observe such things, but about what the universe is actually doing: how it runs the events. There are all the events unfolding on one of the planets at a constant rate...

Constant only in the reference frame of the planet.

Constant in any inertial frame.

Constant only in the reference frame of the rocket.

Again, constant in any inertial frame. The universe will run the events on both the planet and the rocket at a constant rate while it's between accelerations. A physicist changing the frame he's using for his analysis (whether he accelerates or not) does not make the universe change the way it governs the constant rates at which the action unfolds for the planet and the rocket, while the universe never changes frame at all: it either runs the action using an absolute frame or it would need to run it by all frames at once, in which case it maintains the entire content of the universe in an eternal state of happened and not-happened.

Strawman argument. I am not claiming any such thing, and neither does anyone else.

You are effectively claiming exactly such a thing whether you realise it or not. It is a logical necessity for what you're trying to have happen.

If you disagree, please provide proper quotation and attribution. Putting words in people's mouths is not winning you any friends, you know.

When I provide a logical extension of what people are saying, that is not putting words in their mouths: it is showing them the consequences of what they are saying. If you deny simultaneity at a distance, you are necessarily buying into the idea that things remain in a state of happened and not-happened during all those times when the universe is advancing the action for them at a constant rate but where you are inadvertently preventing it from doing so. My purpose is to help you understand the consequences of your outrageous claims.

Your constant harping on about how stupid everyone else is is part of why your position is instantly disqualified from being taken seriously. You want to be a scientist, act like one.

The only people I've called mad/daft/stupid/etc. are imaginary ones made up to illustrate how ridiculous certain positions are. I would assume that no one would identify with the mad physicist in the rocket making a series of alternating contradictory claims because no real person would be that dim. At no point have I called anyone on the other side stupid, but have merely attributed their failure to accept mathematical facts to theory-induced blindness, which is not caused by stupidity, but by overconfidence. In the meantime though, I've been told by people on your side to see a psychiatrist. I am the one here who is acting as a scientist should. And you tell me that I'm the one being rude. Take your blinkers off.

Just one quick example:

If he only accepts the answer c, he is naive and is not a competent physicist.

That is not a disproof of anything, that's just being offensive.

It isn't being offensive: it's stating a fact. I do not expect any physicist to make such an error once they've had their error pointed out to them. To avoid becoming an incompetent physicist, they need to accept that the method was naive and stop applying it. When they dig in and defend methods that are in error after being shown that they're errors, that is when they become incompetent.

[Gigasoft]

You usually get anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, "alternative truth" proponents, anti-LGBT proponents and anti-democrats in one tidy package at the extreme right

I find that anti-vaccinationists and "truthers" are seldom interested in politics at all, other than that which concerns they current fixation. They'll gather whereever they find a platform. Whether that happens to be on the left or the right is highly circumstantial. For example, 9/11 "truthers" were initially mostly found on the left.

It should be noted that the promotion of conspiracy theories targeted at a certain audience is often a purposeful attempt by some actor to bring a party into disreputation. A few years ago, it was observed that an unusual amount of anti-science and conspiracy material was suddenly being posted in far right chats. The users behind the posts would never talk about actual far right topics, and would become argumentative when challenged, trying to guilt trip others into tolerating their BS by appealing to accusations of being "brainwashed by Jews". A fake website was then discovered presenting itself under the name and logo belonging to a major far right party, with nothing but links to videos about lizard aliens and speeches by the leader of a competing party. Someone had clearly put a lot of effort into this, and you are likely seeing the results of such efforts. (I don't know much about the climate debate, so I'll have to pass on that one.)

The term "anti-democrat" tends to lump together critics of how contemporary democracies are implemented with those who reject the very idea of others having a say in anything. Over here (I am not American btw), the latter are firmly stationed on the far left. They call for using the police to sabotage and disband opposing parties, and define violence targeted at their opponents as "self defense".

And if you are gay, it's not right wingers you should worry about. Politicians typically aren't out to get you personally, unless you are their opposition. I know of several far right politicians and bloggers that are themselves gay.

You asked how else he is going to measure it, so I told you how he should do it based on the interpretation of the postulate which led to your question, but you're now trying to pin that response to a different interpretation which it was not given for.

My point is, why do you think that this is a sensible interpretation? I can't for the life of me understand how you go from "the speed of light as measured with respect to an inertial frame" to something that involves the aether or another object. How hard can it be? If I tell you I'm at 59 degrees North and 10 degrees East, a normal person would understand where that is, and not keep discussing interpretations where they take it as east relative to space or east of every observer.

Who's applying Galilean transformations? I don't use those at all. When you make a measurement of the relative speed between two objects that are both moving through a frame, you aren't making any transformation at all.

Taking the "relative speed" of something to something else means transforming its trajectory into a frame where the other thing is at rest and taking the magnitude of the resulting coordinate velocity. Only, it's the Galilean relative speed, so it's a Galilean transformation.

STR's incompetent concepts are no defence against it being disproved by mathematics.

If you're going to disprove a statement about thing X, then you can't just replace thing X with some other thing Y because you think the former is an "incompetent concept", disprove the strawman you just created and pretend you've disproven the original statement.

We're at a level beyond naive observers. This is about what the universe is actually doing as it advances the action for different objects. Are you pretending to be incapable of processing such ideas or are you genuinely incapable of doing so?

One might well imagine a definite total order of events, if you like. Either way, a frame does not constitute a hypothesis on the order of events. It merely assigns them an x0 coordinate, which may or may not correspond to the other in which they happen. All you know is that for any inertial frame, timelike separated events always happen in order of their x0 coordinate. The order of spacelike separated events is a question not addressed by current models as it has no impact on physics.

The analysis in each case is done with a single s-frame which most certainly is an s-frame and we make measurements there of the speed of the sound pulses relative to the material of the ring that they're passing. There is no switching to other frames involved. You are applying incorrect rules to try to obfuscate things.

Since you started with "any" s-frame, measuring anything "relative to the material" means switching to material-centric coordinates, by definition. In any case, it should be clear that the quantity being measured is not the speed of anything in the frame you started with.

[Solar]

But you do understand that it's only a disproof if people agree that it's a disproof?

That isn't how proofs and disproofs work. They are proofs and disproofs if they are mathematically valid regardless of how many people reject them out of a desire for them to be wrong.

That is exactly how proofs and disproofs work: Making predictions that are demonstrable. Relativity has made many such predictions, which were subsequently proven correct. (Sometimes only much later when appropriate instrumentation became available.)

Whereas this one Rumpelstiltskin here is rejecting all that out of a desire for them to be wrong, with the only one saying that what Rumpelstiltskin says is "mathematically valid" being Rumpelstiltskin himself.

Scientists in general are not in the business of rejecting proof out of any "desires". You, however, quite obviously are.

This issue isn't about who is able to observe such things, but about what the universe is actually doing: how it runs the events. There are all the events unfolding on one of the planets at a constant rate...

Constant only in the reference frame of the planet.

Constant in any inertial frame.

But different in those inertial frames (assuming conditions where relativistic effects actually matter). Except for c being constant.

The universe will run the events...

God mode. There is no "[universe / god] running events". There's just laws of physics applying everywhere, and we have proven them to include relativistic effects, the speed of light being constant, and information not travelling faster than light (potential quantum effects notwithstanding).

If you disagree, please provide an explanation of Mercury's orbital precession. Or the gravitational waves detected by LIGO. Relativity and spacetime explains either of them nice and tidy. How does your theory explain it? Please include relevant maths and how they agree with observations. And more importantly, how they disagree with relativity.

If you disagree, please provide proper quotation and attribution. Putting words in people's mouths is not winning you any friends, you know.

When I provide a logical extension of what people are saying, that is not putting words in their mouths: it is showing them the consequences of what they are saying. If you deny simultaneity at a distance, you are necessarily buying into the idea that things remain in a state of happened and not-happened during all those times when the universe is advancing the action for them at a constant rate but where you are inadvertently preventing it from doing so. My purpose is to help you understand the consequences of your outrageous claims.

I.e., no quotation / attribution other than "because I claim it so". That's the whole problem here. You are acting like a preacher, not like a scientist.

The only people I've called mad/daft/stupid/etc. are imaginary ones made up to illustrate how ridiculous certain positions are.

Thus ridiculing everyone not agreeing with you.

If he only accepts the answer c, he is naive and is not a competent physicist.

That is not a disproof of anything, that's just being offensive.

It isn't being offensive: it's stating a fact. I do not expect any physicist to make such an error once they've had their error pointed out to them. To avoid becoming an incompetent physicist, they need to accept that the method was naive and stop applying it. When they dig in and defend methods that are in error after being shown that they're errors, that is when they become incompetent.

And you really don't see the circular reasoning you're applying here? "You're wrong because I am right. I am right because you are wrong."

To get back to your initial post.

c has been proven to be constant. Relevant literature is full of examples. It's up to you to prove where that is wrong. You need to quote one specific claim made by relativity, and phrase precisely inhowfar it is wrong, and how that would make an observable difference, so that -- given appropriate equipment -- your claim could be proven or disproven.

Note that it is quite OK for me to not provide such quotation, because I am not the one disagreeing with the current consensus. Sucks to be the disagreeing party, but that is just how these things work. On the upside, you can pick exactly which part you want to disprove. That's the upside of being the disagreeing party: All you have to do is to falsify one part.

[linguofreak]

I'm talking about the "God view" where you run the simulation. You change frame and events that the simulation has run have to be unrun while other events which the simulation hadn't run suddenly have to be rushed, and then have to be unrun when you change frame back again.

The Standard Model does not include a god that runs a simulation.

The "God view" does not depend on there being a God. It's a view of what the universe (or a simulation) is actually doing rather than the restricted view of someone waiting for light signals to reach him before he can see it.

Assume the universe is a simulation. How do you know that the computer running the simulation isn't running three separate processes (or a thousand, or a trillion) that are simulating the same physics on the same initial conditions by completely different methods, with an event only being recorded as having "happened" if all processes have calculated that event and agree on what happens there (with debugging to be done if there's disagreement)?

How do you know that the computer wasn't given a set of final conditions and asked to simulate *backwards* to find the initial conditions that would produce those final conditions? In that case "what the universe is actually doing" involves the future having already happened and the past not having happened yet.

It's not that they are in a state of both happened and not happened yet, but that a spacelike separated observer can't know if they have happened.

We're at a level beyond naive observers. This is about what the universe is actually doing as it advances the action for different objects. Are you pretending to be incapable of processing such ideas or are you genuinely incapable of doing so?

Unless there are bugs in the simulation (or deliberate mixing between the physics and the metaphysics by whoever programmed the simulation), the only kind of observers we ever can be is naive, and what the universe is "actually doing" is completely unknown and irrelevant to us. In fact, it hardly even makes sense to call whatever is "actually doing" things the "universe". It's outside of the universe. It could be replaced and the universe could continue without it (just like if your computer dies, you can move the save file for a game over to a different computer and keep playing).

Well, we have two sides to this argument saying the same thing -- that it's the other person being deluded.

So the trick is to look at and understand the argument rather than just assuming that the majority are right.

At some point, the chance that you are the one "seeing truth" and everyone else being wrong becomes a statistical next-to-impossibility.

No it doesn't. The phenomenon of theory-induced blindness is well established and involves large numbers of experts being plain wrong, so it isn't about the numbers backing different sides. What you need to do is look at the facts and find the places where people are going against fundamental rules of mathematics. Take the clocks in an expanding universe thought experiment as an example. If you run a simulation of it, you'll see that Linguofreak's analysis fits what the simulation does and that Gigasoft's analysis does not. The simulation will show that absolute speeds can be calculated by the timings on the clocks. In doing this, you can resolve the issues one by one and determine who is actually winning the argument and who is losing it. It isn't about fooling people with obfuscation and incorrect statements, but conformity to mathematics.

Gigasoft's initial analysis of the Big Bang scenario was incorrect, but his most recent statements on the matter are consistent with what I said, showing that, unlike what you have so far demonstrated, he can adjust his views when presented with new information. And I didn't even have to address him directly! He corrected his mental model of the situation based on things I said to *you*.

Constant only in the reference frame of the rocket.

Again, constant in any inertial frame. The universe will run the events on both the planet and the rocket at a constant rate while it's between accelerations. A physicist changing the frame he's using for his analysis (whether he accelerates or not) does not make the universe change the way it governs the constant rates at which the action unfolds for the planet and the rocket, while the universe never changes frame at all: it either runs the action using an absolute frame or it would need to run it by all frames at once, in which case it maintains the entire content of the universe in an eternal state of happened and not-happened.

Frames are not relevant to whether an event has "happened" or not. For observers inside the universe only able to make "naive" observations, "has happened" means "is in my past light cone", and this is a frame-independent property. For observers outside the universe that can see what the simulation is "actually doing", "has happened" means "has been computed" or "has been committed to the output file", and nothing says that events evenly spaced in proper time along a worldline as seen from the inside need to be computed at evenly spaced wall times for the computer running the simulation, or that events evenly spaced in coordinate time according to any frame need to be computed at evenly spaced wall times. Proper time != coordinate time != simulation wall time.

[linguofreak]

so the way I worked was the most rational one

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

Stop. I take offense to the characterization of autism as a mental illness, and whether or not it is, as I stated previously, the nature of this forum is going to tend to filter out non-autists in the long term, so autism is likely to be a factor on both sides of our debate here.

[DavidCooper]

My point is, why do you think that this is a sensible interpretation? I can't for the life of me understand how you go from "the speed of light as measured with respect to an inertial frame" to something that involves the aether or another object.

Which shows that you still don't understand what frames are and how they work. I had thought that showing you how s-frames work would help you to get your head around them, because each s-frame has sounds move at s relative to the frame in the same way that c-frames have light pulses move at c relative to the frame, and yet in the real universe a sound pulse cannot be moving at s relative to every frame without moving relative to itself at an infinite number of different speeds. Because we can detect the air, we can see that only one s-frame provides a correct hypothesis for what is actually going on, while all the others misrepresent reality, and we can see very clearly what those rival s-frames are doing: they are experimenting with different speeds for the sound pulse relative to the objects in the system, and thereby disagreeing with each other. They are fundamentally incompatible, and it's exactly the same with light pulses in space with c-frames. In every frame's hypothesis, it has the sound/light pulse moving at s/c relative to the frame, but as soon as you try to make them all equally valid, you generate an infinite number of contradictions by having the sound/light pulse move relative to itself. You are incapable of accepting that though as it kills your theory, and you are not prepared to give up the theory no matter how broken it is, so you're stuck in a state of denial.

Taking the "relative speed" of something to something else means transforming its trajectory into a frame where the other thing is at rest and taking the magnitude of the resulting coordinate velocity. Only, it's the Galilean relative speed, so it's a Galilean transformation.

No it doesn't; you're just applying incorrect rules from a blinkered theory. The relative speed can be measured very simply by timing how long it takes a pulses of light to pass all the material of the ring in the two opposite directions round the ring, and one of them passes all that material in less time, therefore having a higher speed relative to that material. It's a mathematical fact that it has a higher average relative speed in that direction than the other, and that proves that the material it's passing cannot be at rest. Again, you're incapable of accepting that fact as it kills your theory and you are not prepared to give it up no matter how broken it is shown to be.

STR's incompetent concepts are no defence against it being disproved by mathematics.

If you're going to disprove a statement about thing X, then you can't just replace thing X with some other thing Y because you think the former is an "incompetent concept", disprove the strawman you just created and pretend you've disproven the original statement.

Agreed, which is why I never do that. I simply show you how STR is wrong and you then try to obfuscate things to pretend it isn't. It's what all followers of STR do as they try to wriggle their way out of a checkmate, or they wham all the pieces off the board and pretend it didn't happen, but it did.

One might well imagine a definite total order of events, if you like. Either way, a frame does not constitute a hypothesis on the order of events. It merely assigns them an x0 coordinate, which may or may not correspond to the other in which they happen. All you know is that for any inertial frame, timelike separated events always happen in order of their x0 coordinate. The order of spacelike separated events is a question not addressed by current models as it has no impact on physics.

You're denying the universe the ability to run events, and yet it clearly does run them. When you run a simulation, it has to run the events too, just as the universe must, and when you look at how the events unfold, they can't unhappen the events to pander to a frame change. The universe does one thing and all those frames hypothesise what it's doing, but at any specific location, only one of those hypotheses is correct. We see that clearly with the double twins paradox simulation when you change frame and see events unhappening: it is another way of disproving STR. Your answer to it is to deny the universe the right to run the action at all, which means you're destroying causation as no cause can ever take place before the effect it causes.

Since you started with "any" s-frame, measuring anything "relative to the material" means switching to material-centric coordinates, by definition. In any case, it should be clear that the quantity being measured is not the speed of anything in the frame you started with.

By "any" s-frame, I mean each and every s-frame in turn: the same result comes from all of them, that the sound pulse going round the ring one way passes the material in less time than the sound pulse going the opposite way round the ring and therefore has a higher speed relative to it. Again you have no way out of this other than to obfuscate things in the hope that people won't see the game you're playing (including yourself) and will be conned into thinking a mathematical fact is not a fact.


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But you do understand that it's only a disproof if people agree that it's a disproof?

That isn't how proofs and disproofs work. They are proofs and disproofs if they are mathematically valid regardless of how many people reject them out of a desire for them to be wrong.

That is exactly how proofs and disproofs work: Making predictions that are demonstrable. Relativity has made many such predictions, which were subsequently proven correct. (Sometimes only much later when appropriate instrumentation became available.)

You've gone from your statement that it's only a disproof if people agree that it's a disproof to my counterclaim that a disproof is a disproof even if no one recognises it, and then from there you've said that that's exactly (in bold) how proofs and disproofs work, so does that mean you're doubling down on your incorrect claim or are you recognising that my counterclaim is exactly right?

You then shift to something entirely different as if it's the same issue: predictive power. A contrived mathematical abstraction can make a lot of good predictions despite being wrong in how it goes about it.

Whereas this one Rumpelstiltskin here is rejecting all that out of a desire for them to be wrong, with the only one saying that what Rumpelstiltskin says is "mathematically valid" being Rumpelstiltskin himself.

It's mathematical facts that are showing the theory to be wrong, but people don't respect what mathematics tells them when it goes against their treasured theories. Trying to ridicule the people who reject theories when mathematics disproves them doesn't heap ridicule on the people you're targeting, but instead becomes an act of self-ridicule.

Scientists in general are not in the business of rejecting proof out of any "desires". You, however, quite obviously are.

Scientists should not be in that business, and yet it's exactly what they do regardless. My only desire in this is to look at what mathematics actually says about these theories and how they stand up to that test or break. When a theory fails that test, it's gone. You can keep it going as a zombie theory for as long as you like, but it isn't science. It's become akin to a religious belief.

But different in those inertial frames (assuming conditions where relativistic effects actually matter). Except for c being constant.

Different yes, because each is a rival hypothesis. But c is not constant in that two rival frames have the same pulse of light moving at two speeds relative to itself. Each frame merely hypothesises that the light is moving relative to the objects in the frame such that it is moving at c relative to the frame. It's exactly the same with the sound pulses in s-frames.

God mode. There is no "[universe / god] running events".

You're denying the universe there. That's a pretty big error to make.

There's just laws of physics applying everywhere, and we have proven them to include relativistic effects, the speed of light being constant, and information not travelling faster than light (potential quantum effects notwithstanding).

The same has been "proven" with the speed of sound being constant in s-frames.

If you disagree, please provide an explanation of Mercury's orbital precession.

The cause of that is that the speed of light reduces in gravity wells in line with √(1 - 2GM/r).

Or the gravitational waves detected by LIGO.

Gravitational waves are the propagation of changes to the length contraction acting on the gravity well of an object that accelerates. Not allowing those changes to take place would allow you to pin down absolute speeds by having incorrect length contraction acting on many gravity wells.

Relativity and spacetime explains either of them nice and tidy. How does your theory explain it?

LET accounts for it all more neatly while sticking to the much simpler 3D Euclidean space.

Please include relevant maths and how they agree with observations. And more importantly, how they disagree with relativity.

The essential maths is the same because GTR is a contrived mathematical abstraction of LET. Where they differ is in the mechanism: GTR runs on magical thinking while LET runs on rationality.

I.e., no quotation / attribution other than "because I claim it so". That's the whole problem here. You are acting like a preacher, not like a scientist.

When you make an irrational claim which is shown up as irrational by its logical extension, your irrational claim is shown up for what it is, and the logical extension of your irrational claim is not something you can disown without withdrawing your irrational claim.

The only people I've called mad/daft/stupid/etc. are imaginary ones made up to illustrate how ridiculous certain positions are.

Thus ridiculing everyone not agreeing with you.

And who are the people agreeing with the mad physicist in the rocket? Everyone's denying that his claims are valid, so no one is coming under the description of mad/daft/stupid, unless they're being hypocritical and actually do think his claims are valid.

It isn't being offensive: it's stating a fact. I do not expect any physicist to make such an error once they've had their error pointed out to them. To avoid becoming an incompetent physicist, they need to accept that the method was naive and stop applying it. When they dig in and defend methods that are in error after being shown that they're errors, that is when they become incompetent.

And you really don't see the circular reasoning you're applying here? "You're wrong because I am right. I am right because you are wrong."

There is no circular reasoning there at all. The failure of someone to recognise the validity of a disproof does not generate any circularity.

To get back to your initial post.

c has been proven to be constant.

Actually it hasn't. Everything is fully compatible with light slowing down in gravity wells in line with √(1 - 2GM/r), but if there was a location completely outside of all gravity wells, light would indeed travel at c through that space, so when discussing STR and ignoring gravity, that is not in dispute.

Relevant literature is full of examples. It's up to you to prove where that is wrong.

I show precisely where it's wrong and precisely how it's wrong. Your inability to recognise that does not generate a valid objection.

You need to quote one specific claim made by relativity, and phrase precisely inhowfar it is wrong, and how that would make an observable difference, so that -- given appropriate equipment -- your claim could be proven or disproven.

A lot of this is not about observable differences in measurements, but about rational vs. irrational mechanisms with many experiments demonstrating that absolute speeds must exist even in cases where they can't be pinned down. Clearly it takes higher-level thinking to recognise that, but mathematics is a good tool for that.

Note that it is quite OK for me to not provide such quotation, because I am not the one disagreeing with the current consensus. Sucks to be the disagreeing party, but that is just how these things work. On the upside, you can pick exactly which part you want to disprove. That's the upside of being the disagreeing party: All you have to do is to falsify one part.

I've disproved it in plenty of ways already, and as you say, it only takes one disproof to do the job, but you can't force a horse to drink and you can't force people to recognise correct mathematics when they're determined to disagree with it no matter what in order to prop up a theory which they're emotionally attached to.


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Assume the universe is a simulation. How do you know that the computer running the simulation isn't running three separate processes (or a thousand, or a trillion) that are simulating the same physics on the same initial conditions by completely different methods, with an event only being recorded as having "happened" if all processes have calculated that event and agree on what happens there (with debugging to be done if there's disagreement)?

If you're going to run a separate simulation for each frame of reference (and there are an infinite number of those), you will never have any agreement that any events have happened, but you're also running a separate universe for each frame rather than just running one universe. In each of those separate universes, you have copies of the objects which are thus copies and not the same objects. In one of those universes, event A has happened for an object which has not yet happened for the copy of that object in another of those universes playing out the same action with a different pattern of simultaneity. If you want to have the universe behave that way too, then each copy of it is still running on LET rather than STR, so you're not saving STR.

How do you know that the computer wasn't given a set of final conditions and asked to simulate *backwards* to find the initial conditions that would produce those final conditions? In that case "what the universe is actually doing" involves the future having already happened and the past not having happened yet.

What happens if you start with the fragments of a smashed plate and then run the action or computation backwards to have them all come together in just the right way to form a complete plate? How are you going to have all the right shapes of fragments and the right speeds, orientations, spins, etc. to have that work, and to have the surfaces that are to be fused together rearrange their bonds just at the right moment to link up perfectly with the other fragments that they are to join up with? The answer is, you have to run the simulation forwards first to get to your end position, and then you can run it back from there with all those things working out perfectly. If you try to do it without running the process forwards first, how much magic are you going to depend on for getting your end conditions so perfectly right? This is how we know that a universe has to be run in the direction of past to future first, while any imagined running of it backwards afterwards is surplus to requirements. And it's by running it from past to future that causes are able to cause their effects; if you don't allow this to happen, you replace causation with luck, and the amount of luck involved in that is so great that the word astronomical barely hints at its scale.

Unless there are bugs in the simulation (or deliberate mixing between the physics and the metaphysics by whoever programmed the simulation), the only kind of observers we ever can be is naive, and what the universe is "actually doing" is completely unknown and irrelevant to us.

Observers don't all need to be naive: they can work out that events have to run in a particular order and that the action has to be coordinated in ways that lead to behaviour that we measure.

In fact, it hardly even makes sense to call whatever is "actually doing" things the "universe". It's outside of the universe. It could be replaced and the universe could continue without it (just like if your computer dies, you can move the save file for a game over to a different computer and keep playing).

What the universe is doing is the same thing as what the universe is being. If a universe is being simulated, then we would replace the word "universe" with "simulation": what the simulation is doing is what the simulation is being.

Gigasoft's initial analysis of the Big Bang scenario was incorrect, but his most recent statements on the matter are consistent with what I said, showing that, unlike what you have so far demonstrated, he can adjust his views when presented with new information. And I didn't even have to address him directly! He corrected his mental model of the situation based on things I said to *you*.

No he didn't: he was still getting it wrong where you had got it right: he imagines that changing the speed of the aether relative to the clocks won't change the timings on the clocks, but it will. With the clocks I, J, K, L and M we have the timings 2, 7, 14, 7, 2 (billion years in each case). Change the aether to have it move at 0.866c relative to clock K and you then have clocks J, K, L meet with the timings 2, 7, 14 or (14, 7, 2).

Frames are not relevant to whether an event has "happened" or not.

They certainly don't lead to the universe having to maintain things in the state of happened and not-yet-happened. The universe simply advances the action and leaves happened things as happened.

For observers inside the universe only able to make "naive" observations, "has happened" means "is in my past light cone", and this is a frame-independent property.

But those are naive observers ignoring what the universe must logically be doing, and they're deeply misguided because what they know to have happened, there are other naive observers elsewhere denying that those things can have happened, insisting on keeping them in a state of happened and not-yet-happened right up until a signal can reach them to prove that they have happened. Observers who aren't naive should be dealing in hypotheses: e.g."if this frame correctly represents what the universe is doing, then that event has happened".

For observers outside the universe that can see what the simulation is "actually doing", "has happened" means "has been computed" or "has been committed to the output file", and nothing says that events evenly spaced in proper time along a worldline as seen from the inside need to be computed at evenly spaced wall times for the computer running the simulation, or that events evenly spaced in coordinate time according to any frame need to be computed at evenly spaced wall times. Proper time != coordinate time != simulation wall time.

The simulation can be put on pause and can run at different rates as the processor speeds up or slows down in response to temperature regulation issues, but it still needs to run a simulation time to co-ordinate the action. You could have the simulation run things under the governance of one frame and then switch to another, but when changing frame it would either have to unhappen events that it's previously made happen, or it could freeze them and advance the action for other objects and then run events under the governance of the new frame, unfreezing the frozen action as and when it's the right time to allow them to start advancing again. To imagine that the universe is doing that though is a step into fantasy, unless the universe is a simulation, in which case the "physics" of that simulation could potentially be inordinately more complex than is actually needed to simulate a universe of the kind whose events are being simulated. In science, the simplest theory that accounts for the observed action rationally is that one that is supposed to be preferred. That doesn't mean that more complex ones are ruled out, but more complex ones should not be promoted over simpler ones that account for the same action. STR depends on infinitely more complexity than LET to account for the same action, and even then it breaks, so it doesn't belong in science.