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Gigasoft wrote:

I don't know what you think you've demonstrated, other than that if you can't express your thoughts in ordinary language that anyone can follow, you haven't understood it.

What do you mean? It's called maths. The thing you learn in school. Which step of the derivation do you find hard to follow?

Ah - I see why this diversion came about. I described something as not being Lorentz invariant which was invariant. I used the wrong description and never went back to check that bit carefully. What I intended to say was that when you switch to viewing K as the central clock (while comparing it with J and L) to using J as the central clock (while comparing it to I and K), you don't see the same measurements being made there even though according to STR you should. That's not the same thing as Lorentz invariance breaking, but it doesn't have a name yet and I grabbed the wrong one as a result. What it shows is STR breaking though the different behaviour of clocks J and K when you view them in rest (each at rest in the relevant frame).

Linguofreak has almost completely understood it though, confirming that the scenario I set out is correct.

Incorrect.

Revealing their speeds relative to the average speed of the matter in the universe.

That's were he makes an error, because there's no such linkage to the average speed of matter in the universe. The bulk of the content of the visible universe could, for all we know, be moving at 0.866c in one direction, so if clock K is moving in the same manner such that it's approximately at rest relative to our galaxy, we could still have a reading of 14 billion years on it, but the reading on clock J or L would then be 28 billion years rather than both saying 7 billion. Absolute speeds are thus revealed by this (unless you take into account the slowing of objects towards absolute rest by the expansion of space, but that reveals absolute speeds by another method).

DavidCooper wrote:You attempt to escape from that by insisting that observers go round with the ring, but there is no such requirement, and I'm quite sure there were always people there observing who were not doing so.

In some contexts, common words take on unusual meanings. For example, a page is usually a sheet of paper, unless you're talking about computer memory management, where a page might instead be a 4kiB naturally-aligned block of memory.

The same thing happens when discussing physics. In the Sagnac experiment, the observer is the photographic plate attached to the rotating apparatus, not the person looking at the photographic plate.

Ah - I see why this diversion came about. I described something as not being Lorentz invariant which was invariant. I used the wrong description and never went back to check that bit carefully. What I intended to say was that when you switch to viewing K as the central clock (while comparing it with J and L) to using J as the central clock (while comparing it to I and K), you don't see the same measurements being made there even though according to STR you should.

No, I'm talking about the experiment where you have two clocks that both start out at rest relative to some coordinate system, sending light pulses towards one another, and try to use their relative ticking rate to determine which one is at absolute rest. I'm saying that it's possible for the universe to have a geometry that can be described with a Lorentz invariant metric, in which case this measurement will not reveal any information about absolute speeds.

DavidCooper wrote:That's were he makes an error, because there's no such linkage to the average speed of matter in the universe. The bulk of the content of the visible universe could, for all we know, be moving at 0.866c in one direction, so if clock K is moving in the same manner such that it's approximately at rest relative to our galaxy, we could still have a reading of 14 billion years on it, but the reading on clock J or L would then be 28 billion years rather than both saying 7 billion. Absolute speeds are thus revealed by this (unless you take into account the slowing of objects towards absolute rest by the expansion of space, but that reveals absolute speeds by another method).

If we're talking about space expanding, we're talking about GTR. And if we're talking about GTR, then there *is* a link between the average velocity of matter in the universe and the stress-energy tensor, and thus a link between the average velocity of matter in the universe and the shape of spacetime. Thus, even though the *physics* are Lorentz invariant, the *situation* is not (assuming there is matter in the universe), and different reference frames *will* see different proper times since the Big Bang. But this frame dependence is introduced by the frame associated with the average velocity of matter, not by some mystical preferred frame in the underlying physics.

Octocontrabass wrote:The same thing happens when discussing physics.[/url] In the Sagnac experiment, the observer is the photographic plate attached to the rotating apparatus, not the person looking at the photographic plate.

You're fabricating a false definition of what an observer is, and you're doing so to try to overturn something you cannot overturn: the results of these experiments (MGP and Sagnac) both show that the light passes the material of the ring local to it at a higher relative speed in one direction than the other, and it's a frame-independent fact. It rules out STR immediately, and the only reason you object to that fact is that you allow facts to be overruled by faith in STR. That's classic theory-induced blindness.

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Gigasoft wrote:No, I'm talking about the experiment where you have two clocks that both start out at rest relative to some coordinate system, sending light pulses towards one another, and try to use their relative ticking rate to determine which one is at absolute rest. I'm saying that it's possible for the universe to have a geometry that can be described with a Lorentz invariant metric, in which case this measurement will not reveal any information about absolute speeds.

Not if the universe is expanding (unless the expansion causes deceleration of objects towards absolute rest, which is the only way to mask the difference). Either we have the content of space expanding apart within a space that isn't expanding (which means that the CMB radiation would have shot off into the distance never to be detected by us again), or we have expanding space which is carrying the galaxies further apart (with their relative speeds increasing if the expansion rate is constant over a fixed distance). If you have three clocks spread out along a straight line at fixed separation distances with them all ticking at the same rate, they cannot be in expanding space.

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linguofreak wrote:If we're talking about space expanding, we're talking about GTR.

If STR doesn't fit our universe, it is ruled out: not fit to be part of physics.

And if we're talking about GTR, then there *is* a link between the average velocity of matter in the universe and the stress-energy tensor, and thus a link between the average velocity of matter in the universe and the shape of spacetime.

What is the average velocity of the matter in the universe? It could be 0 in every location in space or it could be 0.866c in every location, at least in the visible universe. The apparent frequency of the CMB in different directions wouldn't show up the difference either as it would have been formed out of energy moving with that average speed too. If I'm wrong about that and you have a means to prove it, then you should be able to pin down our absolute speed by that method too, so please do so and I'll add it to the list of STR disproofs.

Thus, even though the *physics* are Lorentz invariant, the *situation* is not (assuming there is matter in the universe), and different reference frames *will* see different proper times since the Big Bang. But this frame dependence is introduced by the frame associated with the average velocity of matter, not by some mystical preferred frame in the underlying physics.

If the clocks were there, we (and aliens in other galaxies) could see how their timings compare to pin down our absolute speed through the local space fabric, and then we could transmit that information to other galaxies and receive similar information from them to see how the wider universe is behaving. You mention a preferred frame, but with expanding space you don't have a single absolute frame that applies at all locations (although there can still be one external to the universe which doesn't necessarily align perfectly with any frame within the universe). But we're not interested in an absolute or preferred frame here. What we're looking for is absolute speeds relative to the local space fabric, and we're finding those. The clocks that are displaying less time than other clocks that they meet can only achieve that by moving at higher absolute speed. For STR to hold, they cannot be allowed to tick slower without having an equal right to tick faster and thus to have multiple contradictory realities as to what they're supposedly doing, but this thought experiment smashes that, demonstrating that they have no such right: they have to choose one single rate to tick at relative to each other, and when they meet that rate is revealed, along with their absolute speeds of travel. To fit with STR, they would actually have to have an infinite range of contradictory times on each individual clock all at once so as not to reveal absolute speeds when they meet.

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Why the desire to defend a broken model? How many facts are people prepared to reject in order to cling to a mad mathematical abstraction which reduces the universe to zero size and zero duration? Within that model, light reduces all its journeys to zero length and zero time. All matter is made out of waves of energy that rattle about all the time at the speed of light, so they too reduce all the journeys they make in that model to zero length and zero time: there is nothing in the universe that would do anything other than follow those zero length, zero time paths. That should be a clue as to just how mad the model is, but what do you do? Does it make you doubt the model? It's as bonkers as a host of mad religions, but you just can't break yourself free of it.

Look at the simple first disproof of STR with the two objects moving along a straight line with a relative speed of 0.5c and a light pulse being sent from one to the other. We can do the same thing with objects moving at 0.5s (where s is the speed of sound) and have a sound pulse being sent from one to the other. What's the speed of the sound pulse relative to object 1? Perhaps it's s. If so, what speed is the sound pulse moving at relative to the object 2? It's either 0.5s or 1.5s. If we want it to be s instead, we have to change s-frame to make the relative speed s in that frame, but in that frame the relative speed of the sound to the first object is 1.5s or 0.5s, so it's clear that by changing frame we've changed the speed of the sound pulse relative to both objects. When we try to take the relative speed of the sound to object 1 in s-frame 1 and the relative speed of the sound to object 2 in s-frame 2 and declare that those are the true relative speeds, we then have the sound pulse moving at 0.5s relative to itself: a clear and massive contradiction which leads to us ruling that out. Different frames provide rival hypotheses as to what nature is doing. It's exactly the same for the case with the light pulse. Do people accept what mathematics tells them about this though? Heck no: a theory that they've bought into dictates their belief instead and they cannot accept reality. It's the same with all the other disproofs. And apparently it's trolling to point this out, but not trolling to defend the broken model. But that's how most human minds work. We must not replicate that defect in AGI.

DavidCooper wrote:You're fabricating a false definition of what an observer is,

How so? I don't see where my definition disagrees with the common definition used when discussing special relativity.

DavidCooper wrote:the results of these experiments (MGP and Sagnac) both show that the light passes the material of the ring local to it at a higher relative speed in one direction than the other, and it's a frame-independent fact.

Correct.

DavidCooper wrote:It rules out STR immediately,

How? Special relativity does not claim light travels at the same speed relative to every object.

DavidCooper wrote:Why the desire to defend a broken model?

I don't care about models, I'm worried about you. OS development as a hobby attracts a disproportionate number of neurodivergent people. You may be struggling in ways you didn't even realize. You should consider psychiatric evaluation. At the very least, it will help you understand how you're different from most people. (And don't try to tell me you're "normal" or whatever. No one "normal" writes an entire operating system in decimal machine code.)

DavidCooper wrote:Does it make you doubt the model?

Don't you get equally strange answers when light or energy is the observer in modern aether theory?

Octocontrabass wrote:

DavidCooper wrote:You're fabricating a false definition of what an observer is,

How so? I don't see where my definition disagrees with the common definition used when discussing special relativity.

I'm very happy with the definition given on that link: it confirms that I'm using it correctly as it provides an observer for every possible frame for every experiment at every location. When you try to insist that the observer goes round with the apparatus, you go directly against that definition.

How? Special relativity does not claim light travels at the same speed relative to every object.

Oh, but it does. If it accepts that it doesn't, it's automatically bringing in absolute speeds. That's why physicists who believe in STR refuse to accept relative speeds greater than c even though relative speeds can be anything up to 2c in non-expanding space, and more than that in an expanding universe.

DavidCooper wrote:Why the desire to defend a broken model?

I don't care about models, I'm worried about you. OS development as a hobby attracts a disproportionate number of neurodivergent people. You may be struggling in ways you didn't even realize. You should consider psychiatric evaluation. At the very least, it will help you understand how you're different from most people. (And don't try to tell me you're "normal" or whatever. No one "normal" writes an entire operating system in decimal machine code.)

I know I'm not normal, but it's because I never took anything on trust. I was actively trained to do this, starting before I was even two years old, taught to question everything and make sure that it actually stacked up before considering it to be fact. Education systems don't work that way: they actively train people to absorb and regurgitate instead, and they award points on that basis. Look at the way you operate: does this idea conform to the theory? No --> it must be wrong because conformity to the theory is the way to judge correctness of all ideas on the subject. It doesn't matter how obvious the faults in the theory are, you are simply not allowed to accept those as faults, so you have to pick imaginary faults in the disproofs in order to defend the standard that you measure facts by. You insist that the observer goes round with the ring and then justify that by linking to a definition that shows the observer is under no such restriction. And why do you even try to do that when the crucial measurements are frame-independent? You're grasping at straws to try to defend something broken.

Why did I write an operating system in x86 machine code using decimals? Because it turned out that it was easy. It wasn't my plan to work that way, but the first one I wrote was in z80 machine code and the code was initially held in data statements within BASIC which used decimal values as a default. I had no other means to program at the time (with the exception of BASIC which took up too much space in a machine with very limited memory), so the way I worked was the most rational one. Decimals also happen to be easier to read as they're more distinctive, so I stuck with that - I added a hex mode to my OS, but I only use it to type in values from device datasheets.

DavidCooper wrote:Does it make you doubt the model?

Don't you get equally strange answers when light or energy is the observer in modern aether theory?

LET doesn't go down that rabbit hole. The universe cannot run on contradictions, and LET doesn't generate any, so it's a good fit. The bit about STR providing zero-length, zero-time paths between all locations doesn't disprove STR as that doesn't produce any contradiction, but it does illustrate something of such extreme improbability that it ought to make you stop and think: can this model really be a description of the universe? But if you can blind yourself to contradictions, perhaps you can just shut out this kind of doubt too and not be troubled by it. I don't understand how you process the simple scenarios that reveal the need for the space fabric.

Take the two ships passing each other on parallel paths with two observers moving relative to each other and to both ships such that none of these four objects are comoving, and then when the ships are at closest approach they both put out a light signal that's sent towards the two observers. How do you imagine that those two pulses of light travel side by side at the same speed as each other without a space fabric governing their speed of travel? We can do the same experiment with sound pulses from ships at sea with two observers in boats and the sound pulses travelling at speed s relative to the air. What happens if we remove the air and have magic sound pulses replacing the real ones and moving side by side at the same speed as each other. How is that going to be governed without a medium to impose the speed limit of s on them relative to that medium? If you deny the medium and allow the magic sound pulses to be moving at s relative to ship 1 while also moving at s relative to ship 2 while also moving at s relative to observer 3 and also moving at s relative to observer 4 (numbers 1 and 2 are reserved for observers on the ships), then you need a different medium to govern the speed of propagation of the magic sounds for each speed they have to travel at relative to themselves, so you replace an invisible medium with an infinite number of invisible magic mediums which support an infinite number of contradictory happenings at all times (which is why they're classed as magic), but you deny all those mediums by calling them nothing, and then you call that simpler. I don't understand how you can process all that and think it works without any problems. If what you're doing is actually normal, there's some kind of mainstream/majority disability in play. Because it's selective and case-specific (you don't have the same magic beliefs about the sound-in-air cases), it can't be an actual disability with any part of the processing other than that it involves an override which kicks in to make you break the rules whenever you have to in order to avoid going against a theory that's interrupting your normal thinking capability.

DavidCooper wrote:I'm very happy with the definition given on that link: it confirms that I'm using it correctly as it provides an observer for every possible frame for every experiment at every location. When you try to insist that the observer goes round with the apparatus, you go directly against that definition.

The only measurements taken in the Sagnac experiment were performed by the photographic plate. How could those measurements be in any frame of reference other than the photographic plate's frame of reference?

DavidCooper wrote:Oh, but it does. If it accepts that it doesn't, it's automatically bringing in absolute speeds. That's why physicists who believe in STR refuse to accept relative speeds greater than c even though relative speeds can be anything up to 2c in non-expanding space, and more than that in an expanding universe.

But special relativity allows relative speeds greater than c, as long as they are not relative to the inertial frame of reference. Why do you think it doesn't? Why would that involve absolute speeds?

DavidCooper wrote:I know I'm not normal, but it's because I never took anything on trust.

I think it's more than just that. Go see a psychiatrist.

DavidCooper wrote:LET doesn't go down that rabbit hole. The universe cannot run on contradictions, and LET doesn't generate any, so it's a good fit.

Doesn't aether theory use Lorentz transformations? All of your example contradictions occur when using Lorentz transformations.

DavidCooper wrote:How do you imagine that those two pulses of light travel side by side at the same speed as each other without a space fabric governing their speed of travel?

I don't imagine it at all. Special relativity says nothing about why light behaves that way, and special relativity works despite not explaining it, so whatever governs the speed of light isn't important.

Octocontrabass wrote:The only measurements taken in the Sagnac experiment were performed by the photographic plate. How could those measurements be in any frame of reference other than the photographic plate's frame of reference?

How are you still stuck on that? The measurements that matter here are frame-independent - there is no frame of reference that sees a different result.

But special relativity allows relative speeds greater than c, as long as they are not relative to the inertial frame of reference. Why do you think it doesn't? Why would that involve absolute speeds?

Because all the experts in STR insist that when you have two objects moving past you in opposite directions at 0.866c, their relative speed is 0.99c and not 1.732c. They say that you have to use relativistic velocity addition because there are no absolute speeds, so the 1.732 figure is not valid: it is a heretical measurement.

I think it's more than just that. Go see a psychiatrist.

Being rational is not something that interests psychiatrists, or psychologists, but the capacity of people to be taken in by relativity will fascinate psychologists for centuries to come.

Doesn't aether theory use Lorentz transformations? All of your example contradictions occur when using Lorentz transformations.

In LET, the transformations take you from one hypothesis to a rival hypothesis, so there is no contradiction: if one provides a correct representation of the underlying reality, the other misrepresents that underlying reality. In STR the contradictions are the result of the assertion that all the infinite number of rival hypotheses are equally correct representations of the underlying reality, but they cannot be. When you work with s-frames you can see the fundamental incompatibility of rival frames where only one can be a correct representation of what is physically happening in the universe, and the maths of c-frames is identical, but with s replaced with c.

DavidCooper wrote:How do you imagine that those two pulses of light travel side by side at the same speed as each other without a space fabric governing their speed of travel?

I don't imagine it at all. Special relativity says nothing about why light behaves that way, and special relativity works despite not explaining it, so whatever governs the speed of light isn't important.

That's the problem: you're failing to imagine (visualise) it, so you can't see that you're running it on a magic mechanism that tolerates contradiction. You have the two lots of light travel side by side at the same speed as each other through "nothing" by magic, even though they came from ships moving at different speeds. This is one of the things that will most astonish psychologists, because the problem is so obvious that anyone who hasn't been brainwashed can see it, but once they've been taught to see everything through the lens of STR, they're blinded by it.

How are you still stuck on that? The measurements that matter here are frame-independent - there is no frame of reference that sees a different result.

Anyway, the Sagnac experiment does not measure a speed. It measures a phase difference. In order to have a speed you must be working in some coordinate system. If you are working in an inertial coordinate system, the speed of light is c, and the light either took a longer path to get to the destination, or it passed through funny spacetime geometry and got displaced in time. If the speed of light works out to be something other than c, then the coordinate system is not inertial.

Because all the experts in STR insist that when you have two objects moving past you in opposite directions at 0.866c, their relative speed is 0.99c and not 1.732c. They say that you have to use relativistic velocity addition because there are no absolute speeds, so the 1.732 figure is not valid: it is a heretical measurement.

In the context of SR, the term "speed relative to an object" without further qualification means the speed as measured in the object's rest frame. If that's not what one means, one would say so. One is of course also free to express speeds according to some other, non-inertial frame and have them exceed c.

Being rational is not something that interests psychiatrists, or psychologists, but the capacity of people to be taken in by relativity will fascinate psychologists for centuries to come.

Most everyone is rational according to their own description, including the psychotic and schizophreniacs. If that were true, psychiatrists would be out of a job. How would you tell if your thoughts are rational? If you found your thoughts to be irrational, you wouldn't be having them in the first place.

When you work with s-frames you can see the fundamental incompatibility of rival frames where only one can be a correct representation of what is physically happening in the universe, and the maths of c-frames is identical, but with s replaced with c.

That's a property of physics, not the math. If you start from incorrect postulates, the result will be a false description of the world. When expressed in terms of sound, the postulates of SR are obviously not true, sound does not propagate through empty space, and the laws of physics do not take the same form after a Lorentz transformation with s in place of c, only the very specific phenomenon of sound wave propagation through air continues to appear to be described by the same equation while everything else doesn't.

DavidCooper wrote:Because all the experts in STR insist that when you have two objects moving past you in opposite directions at 0.866c, their relative speed is 0.99c and not 1.732c.

When measured from your frame of reference, the difference in speed between the two objects is indeed 1.732c. When measured from one object's frame of reference, the difference in speed between the two objects is 0.99c. It sounds like the actual problem here is a miscommunication about which frame of reference is being used to take these measurements.

DavidCooper wrote:Being rational is not something that interests psychiatrists, or psychologists, but the capacity of people to be taken in by relativity will fascinate psychologists for centuries to come.

Even if your complaints about relativity are completely rational, I'm sure many psychiatrists would like to hear about how you wrote an entire operating system in decimal machine code.

DavidCooper wrote:In LET, the transformations take you from one hypothesis to a rival hypothesis, so there is no contradiction: if one provides a correct representation of the underlying reality, the other misrepresents that underlying reality. In STR the contradictions are the result of the assertion that all the infinite number of rival hypotheses are equally correct representations of the underlying reality, but they cannot be.

Relativity doesn't say anything about the underlying reality. In both theories, all of the rival hypotheses are consistent with each other once the appropriate transformation is applied, so they are all equally valid. Aether theory says one hypothesis is correct, and relativity says it doesn't matter which one is correct. It sounds like this is another miscommunication.

DavidCooper wrote:That's the problem: you're failing to imagine (visualise) it, so you can't see that you're running it on a magic mechanism that tolerates contradiction. You have the two lots of light travel side by side at the same speed as each other through "nothing" by magic, even though they came from ships moving at different speeds.

Maybe that "magic" is aether. Relativity doesn't attempt to explain why light behaves that way. But how is aether any different from magic? We can't detect its presence. We can't measure its speed. We can't remove it from a space and observe light failing to travel without it. We can't separate it into its constituent ingredients.

Gigasoft wrote:Anyway, the Sagnac experiment does not measure a speed. It measures a phase difference.

Like a lot of other experiments involving tiny timing differences, phase differences are measured to show up changes in timings which are caused by speed differences. You can play games of obfuscation all you like but the fact remains that if you send two pulses of light round a rotating ring, one of them returns to the emitter-detector before the other, and that is a frame-independent measurement. It's a fact that cannot be overturned, and in the course of going round the ring in opposite directions, those light pulses travel at different average speeds relative to the material of the ring local to them as they go round. The key thing to note is that it is not a symmetrical relationship with both light pulses having a frame in which they get back before the other: one of them definitively loses.

the light either took a longer path to get to the destination,

Which is exactly what it did in one direction round the ring while passing the same amount of material.

or it passed through funny spacetime geometry and got displaced in time.

In spacetime, the light would actually have reduced the path to zero length and taken zero time to travel it, so it's very funny geometry indeed.

In the context of SR, the term "speed relative to an object" without further qualification means the speed as measured in the object's rest frame. If that's not what one means, one would say so. One is of course also free to express speeds according to some other, non-inertial frame and have them exceed c.

Then you are more enlightened than the experts. If you set up a course a light nanosecond in length (about 30cm) and then send light pulses along it to measure the speed of light relative to the course, you need to synchronise the clocks on the start and finish line. If you assume the course is at rest, you will synchronise it in such a way that the light will take a billionth of a second to travel the 30cm. However, if you assume the course is moving at some other speed, you will synchronise the clocks accordingly (and allow for contraction of the course, and allow for slowed ticking of the clocks), and then you will find that the light takes less or more than a billionth of a second to travel the course, thereby confirming non-zero relative speeds for the light relative to the course with the exact same robustness as the original measurement that had it take exactly a billionth of a second. In STR, that original measurement is given special status with no mathematical-rational justification for it whatsoever, and all such experiments are trumpeted as proofs that the speed of light is always c relative to the observer. You are dabbling in heresy by accepting alternative relative speeds, and that's good because it means you haven't been entirely conned. You might yet manage to escape the shackles.

How would you tell if your thoughts are rational? If you found your thoughts to be irrational, you wouldn't be having them in the first place.

You can ask yourself the same question. Are you proved rational by agreeing with everyone else in a church? Are people rational when they worship the Creator of Hell / Supreme Torturer / Supreme Narcissist as their God? Majorities don't hack it: being right is not democratic. Being right is conforming to reason and not making ad hoc exceptions whenever you need to to comply with the faults in the theories you've been sold people who failed to think them through before promoting them as facts.

That's a property of physics, not the math.

It's the same maths and the same physics: a wave propagating through a medium. What is a contradiction in one case is a contradiction in the other case too.

If you start from incorrect postulates, the result will be a false description of the world.

Which is exactly what STR does, except that it cunningly uses ambiguous postulates so that they can be correct under one interpretation while being applied under the other in which they are incorrect. When you then use that theory as your standard for judging what is correct or incorrect, you cannot then test your theory to see if it's correct because it will always assert that it is, and that's what drives theory-induced blindness. You're using the wrong standard. The standard you should be using is reason.

When expressed in terms of sound, the postulates of SR are obviously not true, sound does not propagate through empty space, and the laws of physics do not take the same form after a Lorentz transformation with s in place of c, only the very specific phenomenon of sound wave propagation through air continues to appear to be described by the same equation while everything else doesn't.

The postulate that the speed of sound in air is always s relative to the observer is backed by naive experiments using the same setup as for light in space, while the apparent physics is the same regardless of how fast the sounds are actually moving relative to the observer: we can show that with the measurements from a wind tunnel experiment with sound clocks physicists are only allowed to access the timing data and cannot pin down the speed of the wind. If they can't pin it down, they insist that the physics is the same. Even if we knew nothing of air, we wouldn't need to be able to detect the air to know that the speed of a sound pulse is s relative to a medium and that it varies relative to the clocks. To make it s relative to all the clocks, the sound pulse has to be moving at multiple speeds relative to itself, and it's exactly the same with a light pulse. That's why if you want psychiatrists to get involved in this, it's the people tolerating contradictions that they should be working on.

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Octocontrabass wrote:It sounds like the actual problem here is a miscommunication about which frame of reference is being used to take these measurements.

No; the problem is that STR gives special status to those naive measurements where you measure the speed of light or another object relative to the observer and insist that that is a superior answer.

Even if your complaints about relativity are completely rational, I'm sure many psychiatrists would like to hear about how you wrote an entire operating system in decimal machine code.

I would show them how it's done and they'd then say, "Oh, that's surprisingly simple then. It's just like assembler, but without the assembly process, and you don't have any of those hard-to-spot punctuation errors that they have with assembler."

Relativity doesn't say anything about the underlying reality. In both theories, all of the rival hypotheses are consistent with each other once the appropriate transformation is applied, so they are all equally valid. Aether theory says one hypothesis is correct, and relativity says it doesn't matter which one is correct. It sounds like this is another miscommunication.

It isn't a miscommunication: the underlying reality is what the universe is actually doing, and the frames are fundamentally incompatible. If you try to detach the theory from what the universe is doing, you are departing from physics.

Maybe that "magic" is aether. Relativity doesn't attempt to explain why light behaves that way. But how is aether any different from magic? We can't detect its presence. We can't measure its speed. We can't remove it from a space and observe light failing to travel without it. We can't separate it into its constituent ingredients.

You're totally blinkered; blinded by a theory which you can't see past. Experiments prove that absolute speeds must exist, and you resort to undeclared magic to override that on the basis that you can't directly feel the medium. Why are you so determined to be naive instead of doing physics properly? Why do you reject inconvenient facts? You're controlled by a broken theory, just as religious people are controlled by their broken religions and can't see past them. This isn't something psychiatrists can fix though as it's the way people evolved to (mis-)think, so it's normal. But we should be better than that: we should be applying reason as the standard for judging theories rather than getting stuck inside theories that go against reason and then using those theories as the standard instead. You have every pulse of light moving at an infinite number of different speeds relative to itself all the time in order to pander to all possible frames, and you're incapable of recognising your error because the theory you've bought into won't let you see it. I doubt you'll ever get beyond there because I've never found anyone caught in that trap who's able to extract themself from it. I keep testing them, but none of them ever make it out; they just go on rejecting proof after proof after proof. It's a sad finding for our species that it has such a propensity to be conned by authority, permanently.

In spacetime, the light would actually have reduced the path to zero length and taken zero time to travel it, so it's very funny geometry indeed.

This is obviously not the "time" I'm talking about. I mean the fact that the rotating frame is not globally Minkowskian. If you try to make it Minkowskian everywhere around the circle, there will always be a seam where the time coordinates do not match up.

However, if you assume the course is moving at some other speed, you will synchronise the clocks accordingly (and allow for contraction of the course, and allow for slowed ticking of the clocks), and then you will find that the light takes less or more than a billionth of a second to travel the course, thereby confirming

the exact same speed according to the coordinate system you're now using, since the distance travelled will also change together with the time taken. You're insisting on using the wrong definition of relative speed. In SR, the relative speed of two objects travelling at speeds v and w along the same direction is and nothing else.

You are dabbling in heresy by accepting alternative relative speeds, and that's good because it means you haven't been entirely conned.

No one ever said you can't express speeds in terms of funny unit vectors. Working with arbitrary coordinate systems is what GR is all about. However, the laws of physics will no longer take the same form when expressed in a non-inertial coordinate system.

Majorities don't hack it: being right is not democratic.

That's right. As for the general public there would be no reason that assume that the majority is right about anything in particular. But if you're pitting the world's leading physicists whose job it is to study physics against some random guy on the internet who doesn't know what the heck he's talking about (for example, someone who believes that SR contains two time dimensions), obviously it's much more likely that the physicists are going to be right.

If some future experiment would show a violation of SR, it is natural that people would be skeptical at first, but I know one thing that wouldn't happen. People wouldn't go on social media and make emotional rants about how the experimenters are bad people for disrespecting their grandparents who witnessed SR-verifying experiments on the news. You wouldn't have Leonard Susskind calling for laws making SR denial a crime to be punished with jail time. That's because physics is a science, not a church.

It's the same maths and the same physics: a wave propagating through a medium. What is a contradiction in one case is a contradiction in the other case too.

The math doesn't contradict itself. But one theory is consistent with known physics, and the other is not. The first postulate of SR applies to all of physics, not just light propagating through empty space.

When you then use that theory as your standard for judging what is correct or incorrect, you cannot then test your theory to see if it's correct because it will always assert that it is

Yes you can, by performing experiments. A theory of physics will give predictions about the world, that can be measured. If the result of the experiment is inconsistent with the theory, then the theory has been falsified. For example, we can falsify SR by discovering some new force of nature that does not behave like SR predicts. If the experiment is only inconsistent with some delusional misrepresentation of the theory that you made up in your head, then it hasn't been falsified.

To make it s relative to all the clocks, the sound pulse has to be moving at multiple speeds relative to itself, and it's exactly the same with a light pulse.

Light has no rest frame, there is no such thing as a speed relative to light or the speed of light relative to itself. SR does not define such a concept.

I would show them how it's done and they'd then say, "Oh, that's surprisingly simple then. It's just like assembler, but without the assembly process, and you don't have any of those hard-to-spot punctuation errors that they have with assembler."

If these psychiatrists had any idea, then "surprisingly simple" would most definitely not be their preferred choice of words. You removed an automated step that takes less than a second and replaced it with minutes, maybe hours of tedious, frustrating manual labour every time you want to insert or delete anything. Want to change this "add ecx,120" to "add ecx,130"? Changing a single byte in a source file and running the assembler would be too mainstream. No, in order to do it the simple way, we need to make enough room to accommodate the new instruction which is now 3 bytes longer, either by making a jump to a new location and back, or by moving existing code out of the way, while taking care to update all offsets that have now changed. Made a mistake with the calculations or forgot to update something? Good luck figuring out where the mistake is.

DavidCooper wrote:It's a fact that cannot be overturned, and in the course of going round the ring in opposite directions, those light pulses travel at different average speeds relative to the material of the ring local to them as they go round.

But relativity does not say the speed of light will be constant relative to the rotating ring. The speed of light is only constant in an inertial frame of reference, and rotation is non-inertial motion. There is no inertial frame of reference here.

DavidCooper wrote:In STR, that original measurement is given special status with no mathematical-rational justification for it whatsoever, and all such experiments are trumpeted as proofs that the speed of light is always c relative to the observer.

No, it's pretty well-known that all such experiments are limited by clock synchronization and cannot measure anything that might disagree with special relativity.

DavidCooper wrote:No; the problem is that STR gives special status to those naive measurements where you measure the speed of light or another object relative to the observer and insist that that is a superior answer.

No, that's just convenience. In special relativity, all measurements are equally valid, but not directly comparable unless they're all within a single frame of reference. It's exactly the same as in aether theory.

DavidCooper wrote:I would show them how it's done and they'd then say, "Oh, that's surprisingly simple then. It's just like assembler, but without the assembly process, and you don't have any of those hard-to-spot punctuation errors that they have with assembler."

No, they would be surprised that you not only memorized x86 machine code but that you're able to easily spot errors in your giant array of numbers. Those things are simple for you, but extremely difficult for most people. There are probably some things that are easy for most people but extremely difficult for you. You might not even realize that most people don't have the same difficulties that you do. A psychiatrist will have the resources to help you find those situations and come up with solutions that work for you. (I'm speaking from personal experience here!)

DavidCooper wrote:It isn't a miscommunication: the underlying reality is what the universe is actually doing, and the frames are fundamentally incompatible. If you try to detach the theory from what the universe is doing, you are departing from physics.

If the theory disagrees with what the universe is actually doing, it will produce incorrect predictions. So far, special relativity has made correct predictions every time it has been tested. (And modern aether theory has made exactly the same predictions!)

DavidCooper wrote:Experiments prove that absolute speeds must exist,

Which experiments? So far you haven't listed any where the result disagreed with special relativity.

DavidCooper wrote:we should be applying reason as the standard for judging theories rather than getting stuck inside theories that go against reason and then using those theories as the standard instead.

The universe has no obligation to be reasonable.

Gigasoft wrote:This is obviously not the "time" I'm talking about. I mean the fact that the rotating frame is not globally Minkowskian. If you try to make it Minkowskian everywhere around the circle, there will always be a seam where the time coordinates do not match up.

Rotating frames are fake ones, as are accelerating ones - they involve continually changing the speed of a pulse of light relative to objects in the system, but even when you consider fake frames you still have the same key measurements for all observers, so the entire business of trying to obfuscate things with frames when the measurements are frame-independent is nothing more than a diversion. The light passes all the material at a higher relative speed in one direction round the ring than the light going the other way does, and that's the end of the matter. It's a fact, and it reveals that absolute speeds exist.

the exact same speed according to the coordinate system you're now using, since the distance travelled will also change together with the time taken.

You "confirm" whatever speed you assume, so your measurements tell you precisely nothing, and yet what to STR believers do? They accept the relative speed of c and reject the infinite number of rival measurements providing non-c values, and having done that by applying the bias of the theory, they then use their biased result as "confirmation" of the theory. That's theory-induced blindness in action, and we see it time and time again because they use the theory as their standard for testing the theory instead of using correct mathematics.

You're insisting on using the wrong definition of relative speed.

On the contrary, I'm the one using the correct definition while you're insisting on using a bogus one from the theory, resulting in theory-induced blindness.

But if you're pitting the world's leading physicists whose job it is to study physics against some random guy on the internet who doesn't know what the heck he's talking about (for example, someone who believes that SR contains two time dimensions), obviously it's much more likely that the physicists are going to be right.

The problem there is that I do know what I'm talking about, whereas they break fundamental rules of mathematics that reveal that they don't know what they're talking about. All they do is pass the brainwashing on down the generations without stopping to check if it's right. Mathematics reveals how many kinds of time STR actually depends on: it becomes clear as soon as you build simulations of the broken model, and it's very telling that no one has working models of it that don't show up those faults.

If some future experiment would show a violation of SR, it is natural that people would be skeptical at first, but I know one thing that wouldn't happen. People wouldn't go on social media and make emotional rants about how the experimenters are bad people for disrespecting their grandparents who witnessed SR-verifying experiments on the news. You wouldn't have Leonard Susskind calling for laws making SR denial a crime to be punished with jail time. That's because physics is a science, not a church.

When it comes to STR, it's a vicious cult and its behaviour is criminal. AGI will deal with that in due time. Emotional rant though? No - I'm simply telling it how it is while showing disproofs and getting a pile of crap from people who are so emotionally tied to broken theories that they are incapable of following the most fundamental rules of mathematics.

The math doesn't contradict itself. But one theory is consistent with known physics...

The theory is in contradiction with the most fundamental rules of mathematics.

When you then use that theory as your standard for judging what is correct or incorrect, you cannot then test your theory to see if it's correct because it will always assert that it is

Yes you can, by performing experiments.

It doesn't work, because you simply ignore the predictions made by the broken theory where it conflicts with the results of experiments, such as all the ones that reveal absolute speeds to exist.

A theory of physics will give predictions about the world, that can be measured.

Yes, when it predicts that there are no absolute speeds while experiments reveal that there are, the theory is broken and should be thrown out in favour of one with the same predictive power which doesn't make the duff predictions.

If the result of the experiment is inconsistent with the theory, then the theory has been falsified.

That's how it's supposed to be done, but you break that rule.

If the experiment is only inconsistent with some delusional misrepresentation of the theory that you made up in your head, then it hasn't been falsified.

Experiments showing that absolute speeds must exist are not delusional misrepresentations. Your ignoring them is the delusion, and it comes straight from theory-induced blindness.

Light has no rest frame, there is no such thing as a speed relative to light or the speed of light relative to itself. SR does not define such a concept.

You're failing to grasp the mathematics of frames. It doesn't need a rest frame: the issue is that you are changing the speed of a light pulse relative to objects in the system and relative to itself whenever you change frame. That becomes obvious when you work with s-frames and sounds, but it's exactly the same with light. Perhaps most people are too lacking in their ability to visualise that kind of thing due to lack of the necessary hardware in the brain, but that doesn't alter the fact that they are in error.

If these psychiatrists had any idea, then "surprisingly simple" would most definitely not be their preferred choice of words. You removed an automated step that takes less than a second and replaced it with minutes, maybe hours of tedious, frustrating manual labour every time you want to insert or delete anything. Want to change this "add ecx,120" to "add ecx,130"? Changing a single byte in a source file and running the assembler would be too mainstream. No, in order to do it the simple way, we need to make enough room to accommodate the new instruction which is now 3 bytes longer, either by making a jump to a new location and back, or by moving existing code out of the way, while taking care to update all offsets that have now changed. Made a mistake with the calculations or forgot to update something? Good luck figuring out where the mistake is.

Are you out of your tree? I automated all the updating to produce a faster system than assembler. I can add a nop into any piece of code and shift all the code after it up memory by a byte without anything breaking and then run the modified code immediately without any assembly process. I can take a stretch of code of any length and change its alignment with memory (or swap round instructions which don't depend on each others results) several times a minute to test how that affects the speed performance of the code. I can edit code while it's running, including interrupt routines. The system was designed to make low-level programming faster and more efficient while throwing out all the mess.


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Octocontrabass wrote:But relativity does not say the speed of light will be constant relative to the rotating ring. The speed of light is only constant in an inertial frame of reference, and rotation is non-inertial motion. There is no inertial frame of reference here.

There are an infinite number of inertial frames there, and all of them measure that the light travels faster relative to the material of the ring in one direction than the opposite one. The result of that analysis is the discovery that what happens depends on absolute speeds. Ignoring facts in favour of a broken theory is willful ignorance.

No, it's pretty well-known that all such experiments are limited by clock synchronization and cannot measure anything that might disagree with special relativity.

Regardless of how well known that is, believers in STR still insist that results where the measured speed of the light relative to the apparatus is c are the right answers while all other measurements are wrong: they have to do this so as not to contradict the dogma that absolute speeds don't exist.

No, that's just convenience. In special relativity, all measurements are equally valid, but not directly comparable unless they're all within a single frame of reference. It's exactly the same as in aether theory.

No, in STR you are not allowed to accept absolute speeds. You're trying to have your cake and eat it, but then that's what relativity is all about.

No, they would be surprised that you not only memorized x86 machine code but that you're able to easily spot errors in your giant array of numbers. Those things are simple for you, but extremely difficult for most people.

They've never tried, so how would they know it's difficult? There's a difference between something looking difficult and actually being difficult.

There are probably some things that are easy for most people but extremely difficult for you. You might not even realize that most people don't have the same difficulties that you do.

I doubt that. I put it to the test with various things from time to time and find that it's all just algorithms. If someone sets those out clearly I can simply learn them and apply them, so long as I want to, and so can most people: the barriers to them learning are invariably caused by bad teaching and faulty education systems which repeatedly push them into building on incomplete foundations.

If the theory disagrees with what the universe is actually doing, it will produce incorrect predictions. So far, special relativity has made correct predictions every time it has been tested. (And modern aether theory has made exactly the same predictions!)

STR makes contradictory predictions where experiments fail to resolve which were right and which were wrong, but the very fact that it makes contradictory predictions rules it out. It is mathematically bankrupt.

Which experiments? So far you haven't listed any where the result disagreed with special relativity.

I was referring to experiments that prove that absolute speeds must exist while STR predicts incorrectly that they don't.

The universe has no obligation to be reasonable.

The universe is not being unreasonable though: STR and GTR are being unreasonable, but they are surplus to requirements as a better theory is available.