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...., if two beams of light were approaching each other they would not follow Galilean transformations and have a combined speed of 600,000 km per second but each beam of light would have a constant speed of 300,000 km per second.
This means that if they were 300,000 km apart, they would meet after 0.5 seconds and not after 0.25 seconds as would have been the case had Galilean transformations held good. This was extremely puzzling,
Maxwell and Faraday, had only recently shown that electromagnetic waves also possessed the same velocity as the speed of light and that their means of propagation was through self sustaining electric and magnetic fields.
Electromagnetic waves were not known to have that property. This was outside anyone's experience. How could such a thing be possible?
More important was the question what could be the reason for such seemingly impossible phenomena to take place ?
Reason - the capacity to draw conclusions based on evidence.
Argument: any group of propositions (truth claims/axioms), one of which is claimed to follow from the others.
The problem of the speed of light as constant in a vacuum, taxed the minds of physicists for several years until an Irish physicist named George Fitzgerald came up with the idea that the only way in which Light could ignore Galilean transformations was if time itself lengthened or shortened during the period of its travel, he also brought up the idea of objects getting fore-shortened as they neared the speed of light or lengthened as they moved away. Henri Lorentz, probably one of the most gifted Physicists and mathematicians of the time, came across George Fitzgerald's ideas and put them into the Mathematical form that are known today as the Lorentz transformations. to be contd.........
Where do you ever get this impressions from? It's well known by physicists that Faraday never knew of such a thing. That was due to Maxwell only. Maxwell published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865. It was in this publication that he demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space as waves moving at the speed of light. Faraday had nothing to do with it. In fact at that time Maxwell was not able to form a close relationship with Faraday who was showing signs of senility at that time.
Are you familiar with how the term reason is defined within the context of practical logic? If not then here's the formal definition from the text Practical Logic: An Antidote for Uncritical Thinking by Douglas J. Soccio and Vincent E. Barry, pages 460.
I just wanted to get these definitions out of the way in case those reading this post are not familiar with the terminology.
Robert B. Laughlin, Nobel Laureate in Physics, endowed chair in physics, Stanford University, had this to say about ether in contemporary theoretical physics:It is ironic that Einstein's most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] The word 'ether' has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum. . . . Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that any such matter must have relativistic symmetry. [..] It turns out that such matter exists. About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with 'stuff' that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo.
To understand how that's done see it on my website at:
When are you going to apologise for the blatant plagiarism?
Quote from: jeffreyH on 09/05/2016 07:40:34When are you going to apologise for the blatant plagiarism?Who are you speaking to and what is being plagiarized?