[Halc]

in 2014 the Lorentz Transformation was proven to be fatally flawed. The entire edifice has collapsed into a pile of rubble, sorry, Einstein Fan Club. Welcome to the post Einstein Relativity era, after the constancy of light in all inertial reference frames and the Lorentz Transformation time dilation and length contraction formulae were proven fatally flawed. The gravitational theories may be valid, I don't know at the moment, gravity does appear to dilate time, at least when using atomic clocks. Whether it's caused by spacetime curvature is debatable though. How could you prove or disprove that? It can't be accepted as fact, since it can't be definitively proved, but it's an interesting theory.

Critical Error in the Formulation of the Special Relativity
Radwan M. Kassir*

Any clod can upload a pretty paper asserting no end of nonsense onto the net. This guy apparently chooses to attack not GR (which receives regular valid challenges), but special relativity, the sort of kindergarten of the theory, thus sinking any employment prospects he might have in the field.
I no doubt can point out errors in the paper. These denial clods never know even the basics, as is evidenced by
every
single
paper
referenced by the last site you referenced.

Mind you, I cannot demonstrate the mistakes to you any more than I can demonstrate them to my cat. But SR is quite simple and there's no doubt I will find mistakes.

The entire edifice has collapsed into a pile of rubble,

No, it has not.

Really, if that's all you have, is it worth posting? Of course it has not. That's obvious. Show why it does not. Just asserting a conclusion different than his is no better logic than that Centra is employing.

[Bored chemist]

Really, if that's all you have, is it worth posting?

Did you notice that it wasn't "all I had"?
It wasn't even the whole of my post.
And I disagree with you (obviously).  I think it is worth posting.  I think that just pointing out where someone has said something utterly stupid is valuable.
It forces them to consider the question of why they believe it.
And it avoids the potential  issue of him thinking it's our job to provide the evidence whereas, since he's the one making the extraordinary claim, he has to provide the extraordinary evidence.

[Halc]

And I disagree with you (obviously).  I think it is worth posting.  I think that just pointing out where someone has said something utterly stupid is valuable.

OK, I'll buy that. The comment was indeed utterly stupid, as evidenced by the fact that the edifice has in fact not even noticed this one more piece of uninformed writing suitable only for wiping ones backside. And trust me, a paper that actually found a problem would get serious attention since there are some real scientists who would love to see said edifice crumble.

It forces them to consider the question of why they believe it.

The writer of the paper lists himself as "Mechanical dept" in someplace in Beirut, so I don't think he has a physics reputation in need of protection. I don't think most of the authors believe their own tripe. It doesn't read like stupidity. It reads like deliberate salesmanship of a defective product. ​They write such papers because there is such a rich demand for such work from Centra and his ilk, fueling internet traffic to such sites that prey on them.
​

And it avoids the potential  issue of him thinking it's our job to provide the evidence whereas, since he's the one making the extraordinary claim, he has to provide the extraordinary evidence.

But of course you're not going to get that. His only evidence is deliberately misleading papers. He admits to no knowledge of his own on the subject. No, he's in it to get a reaction from us, and he is getting richly rewarded it seems. I'm guilty of it myself.

[Bored chemist]

It's always difficult to know how to deal with trolls.
If there was a satisfactory solution, we would be free of them.
My view is that there should be a 3 strike policy.
The third time they repeat something that's plainly untrue, even after it has been explained that it's wrong, we should simply ban them. They aren't here to learn, and they are not helping others to do so.

However, I also recognise that in some cases, it's impossible to explain why something is untrue, simply because the claim is meaningless- it redefines words like "energy" or whatever but doesn't say what definition they are using.
Here's a case in point:

An anti-photon is a photon turned through 180 degrees and with momentum encoded with added points of space instead of with left-out points.

The author has repeatedly failed to say what he thinks "added points of space instead of with left-out points" actually means.
You can't give a detailed rebuttal in that case.
We typically rebut an assertion by pointing out the truth instead- for example

The inside of a fiber optic cable is glass, not a vacuum

But when someone says something meaningless like  "February is purple" then trying to disprove the assertion is harder.
Since it has no meaning, you can not prove that it is false by the usual method .
You can't disprove it by saying that Thursday is green, or whatever.

All you can do is point out that it simply isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, true.
And I think that "The entire edifice has collapsed into a pile of rubble," is just as meaningless, in the real world, as "February is purple".
He could have made a less clearly absurd statement like " the whole edifice should have collapsed...".
That's easy to respond to, by pointing out that it hasn't and  asking why he thinks it is still here.

On the other hand, in some cases there's a genuine lack of understanding on the part of the OP.
They just haven't done their homework.
In those cases, a clear explanation of what current science actually says can set them straight.
And I'd like to take the opportunity to thank you (and others) who do that. I try to- it's clear that I do it better in chemistry than in physics.

Even if it doesn't set the original poster on the right path, at least it puts the real science out there for anyone who comes across the site looking for information.

[Centra (OP)]

I'll have to find a mathematician somewhere to check Kassir's article and see if his math checks out. What if it does though? What if the Lorentz Transformation really does only work if both frames stay at the zero point? That would certainly be a glitch.

[Halc]

I'll have to find a mathematician somewhere to check Kassir's article and see if his math checks out.

No need. As I said, he's not even familiar with what they teach in the first hour of relativity class. It fails right out the gate, before even getting to eqn (1).

2. Temporal Events Analysis
Consider two inertial frames of reference, K(x,y,z,t), and K'(x',y,'z',t'), in translational relative motion with parallel corresponding axes, and let their origins be aligned along the overlapped -x and -x′axes. Let v be the relative motion velocity in the -xx′ direction. K and K′ coordinate systems are assumed to be overlapping at the time t - t' = 0; so as event coordinates in K and K′ can be considered as space and time intervals measured from the initial zero coordinates of the overlapped-frames event.

So far so good. Two frames with relative linear velocity v along the x axis, sharing a common origin event. But it goes terribly wrong already at the next sentence.

2.1. Arbitrary Non-origin Events
Let’s suppose that at the frames overlapping instant, an event E₁(x',0,0,0) [E₁(x,0,0,0)] takes place at a distance x′ with respect to K′ origin (x with respect to K origin) on the x-x′ axis.

The assumption this guy is making is seemingly a Newtonian one, that the two frames share a common x axis, but the x axis and the x' axis share only one common event, which is the origin.
They would share a common axis given a Galilean transformation as Newton would have done, but not given a Lorentz transformation as relativity demands.

So let's count the errors:
1) “overlapping instant”
A given ‘instant’ (a moment in time) only overlaps at the origin event, so while there is an overlapping event (0,0,0,0) and even an overlapping plane (x=0,y,z,t=0) since y and z are invariant between two frames whose relative motion is only along the x axis, there is not an overlapping instant.
2) “an event E₁(x',0,0,0) [E₁(x,0,0,0)]”
He’s given the coordinates of two very different events and given them the same label E₁, and proceeds with the assumption that they’re the same event. If E₁ is at x at t=0 in the K frame, then relativity of simultaneity says that that same event will occur at some nonzero time t’ in the K’ frame, but Kassir incorrectly puts it at coordinate t’=0. He’s defined an absurdity and then declares the theory to be inconsistent when absurd results ensue. I didn't bother reading any further. This guy fails the easiest questions in the relativity class.
3) “the x-x’ axis”
which seems to be the base assumption upon which the other mistakes are made. The x and the x’ axes are not the same axis.


After thinking about it, I retract my comment about this being a deliberate mistake for the purpose of gaining visibility on the denial sites. The error is too obvious and it reeks of somebody who's instincts are absolutist. Kassir is really that uneducated/stupid. The ones that do it deliberately at least bury the mistake in a bit more complexity, not right in the opening remarks with a blatant error in a trivial description. Kassir actually believes relativity is inconsistent, so unlike the rest of us, when he finds a mistake he immediately assumes it is a problem with the theory and not with his understanding.
This is not unlike the way that you immediately assume all these problems you find on the net are valid evidence against the theory and not fallacious application of the theory in the papers that find a home only on the crank denialist sites, 100% of which have such errors.

[Centra (OP)]

 Let us suppose that a light emitter/receptor is traveling toward a mirror in a stationary frame at a speed of 100,000 km/s and emits a beam toward a mirror when it is 300,000 from it. In the time it took for the beam to reach the mirror the emitter unit would have moved 100,000 toward it. On the return trip from the mirror, since the beam is moving at 3 times the speed of the unit, they will meet when the unit has moved anther 50,000 km toward the mirror and the light has traveled 150,000 km from the mirror in the opposite direction. From the stationary mirror point of view, the beam would have traveled a total of 450,000 km in 1.5 seconds, 300,000 km from the emitter to the mirror and 150,000 km from the mirror back to the emitter.

A timer on the emitter/receptor would have shown that time because that was the actual time taken, the timer didn't know it had been catching up with the beam on its way to the mirror or that it had been closing in on the front end of the beam after it reflected back toward it, all it did was record the actual time elapsed between the emission and reception of the light beam and that time was the same in both frames. There was no observer traveling with the unit to think anything about the light beam, the only observer was in the stationary frame and everything made sense to him based on the postulate that the motion of a light emitter has no effect on its speed, no alterations of time or length in the emitter/receptor frame had to be invoked by the observer to explain anything appearing unusual.

Now let us consider the emitter/receptor to be stationary, with the observer, and the mirror to be moving toward it at 100,000 km/s. The light was traveling at 3 times the speed of  the mirror so this time the mirror would have been hit by the beam after the beam had traveled 225,000 km and the mirror had traveled 75,000 km. The beam would then have to travel back the same 225,000 km to reach the receptor, for a round trip distance of 450,000 km and the same elapsed time of 1.5 seconds. The observer didn't need to invoke any time or length alterations in the mirror frame to explain any apparent anomalies.

In both of the preceding scenarios, both of the frames in relative motion to each other were involved in the velocity of the light beam, so that was an example of real velocity. Now if both the light emitter/receptor and the mirror had been in the same frame then the illusion of velocity could have occurred. The only difference would be that you put the mirror in the same frame, so why would that change the situation so drastically that you would feel the need to alter time and length in whichever frame you considered to be in motion? Does a mirror have that much power?

This brings up another question, what if you have a mirror in the same frame with the emitter in addition to one in the other frame? We just saw that no time/length alterations were required when the mirror was in the other frame, so what if you had two emitters in one of the frames and had a mirror in each frame and both emitters fired at their respective mirrors at the same time? Now Einstein has a serious conundrum, because if you alter time in one frame or the other to make the apparent velocity of the light beam reflecting off the mirror in the same frame with the emitters appear to be corrected, it would obviously throw the apparent velocity of the other beam which reflects off the mirror in the other frame out of correct perceived velocity, because that one never required any correcting in the first place. Timers in each frame would show different times for the same light beam to travel the same distance, good luck resolving that.

Notice how the same times were involved even though in one case we considered the the emitter to be moving and "catching up with" and "closing in on" the light beam and in the reciprocal case we considered the emitter not to move in relation to the beam at all, just the mirror, and yet the times and light speed worked out exactly the same. That shows that the speed of light can in fact be independent of the motion of the emitter and it doesn't cause any frame relativity problems. An observer in the emitter frame can perceive the light beam to be shooting out from the
 stationary emitter and at the same time an observer in the other frame can perceive the emitter to be moving in relation to the light beam and everything still works out normally in regard to the speed of the light beam for both observers, and with no time/length alterations in either frames. All that changes is that in your own frame you consider things in the other frame to be moving in relation to the light beam and the light beam to be moving in relation to things in your frame, that's the real relativity of light.

[Halc]

I presume from your lack of comment that you concede the quackery of every single bit of negative evidence to which you've linked thus far.

Let us suppose that a light emitter/receptor is traveling toward a mirror in a stationary frame at a speed of 100,000 km/s and emits a beam toward a mirror when it is 300,000 from it. In the time it took for the beam to reach the mirror the emitter unit would have moved 100,000 toward it. On the return trip from the mirror, since the beam is moving at 3 times the speed of the unit, they will meet when the unit has moved anther 50,000 km toward the mirror and the light has traveled 150,000 km from the mirror in the opposite direction. From the stationary mirror point of view, the beam would have traveled a total of 450,000 km in 1.5 seconds, 300,000 km from the emitter to the mirror and 150,000 km from the mirror back to the emitter.

A timer on the emitter/receptor would have shown that time because that was the actual time taken, the timer didn't know it had been catching up with the beam on its way to the mirror or that it had been closing in on the front end of the beam after it reflected back toward it, all it did was record the actual time elapsed between the emission and reception of the light beam and that time was the same in both frames. There was no observer traveling with the unit to think anything about the light beam, the only observer was in the stationary frame and everything made sense to him based on the postulate that the motion of a light emitter has no effect on its speed, no alterations of time or length in the emitter/receptor frame had to be invoked by the observer to explain anything appearing unusual.

Now let us consider the emitter/receptor to be stationary, with the observer, and the mirror to be moving toward it at 100,000 km/s. The light was traveling at 3 times the speed of  the mirror so this time the mirror would have been hit by the beam after the beam had traveled 225,000 km and the mirror had traveled 75,000 km. The beam would then have to travel back the same 225,000 km to reach the receptor, for a round trip distance of 450,000 km and the same elapsed time of 1.5 seconds. The observer didn't need to invoke any time or length alterations in the mirror frame to explain any apparent anomalies.

There is an anomaly/contradiction.  A clock at the mirror, stationary in the first frame gets hit at time t=1 after the emitter pulse takes a second to go the light second. But relative to the emitter frame, that same clock would measure ¾ seconds, half the time the beam takes to make the round trip. The clock can only log one objective value, so this constitutes a self-inconsistency with your description.

SR says that if the numbers are as you say in the designated stationary coordinate system, then relative to the emitter/receptor coordinate system, the mirror is hit 212132 km away from the stationary emitter after the mirror travels 70711 km. The mirror clock reads exactly 1 second when hit, and 1/3 seconds at time of emission. The round trip time from emission to detection is exactly √2 seconds.

The only difference would be that you put the mirror in the same frame

The motion of the mirror matters not to the elapsed time measured in either frame. It only matters where it is when the reflection event occurs. The motion of the mirror would affect light frequency detected at receptor, and also would affect the clock riding with it, so the objective value of 1 at reflection time presumes it is stationary in and synced to the first frame.

[Origin]

Let us suppose that a light emitter/receptor

I'm curious, why would you try to argue against a complicated, well tested and accepted theory on a subject you know little about?  What is your motivation?

[Bored chemist]

Let us suppose that a light emitter/receptor

I'm curious, why would you try to argue against a complicated, well tested and accepted theory on a subject you know little about?  What is your motivation?

Tha6t's probably one of the most interesting posts in this thread.
Sadly, I doubt the OP will answer.

[Centra (OP)]

Okay, I admit that last post didn't actually make sense. What really happens is that everything is exactly the same when viewed as the emitter being stationary. The light beam actually appears to move slower relative to the emitter on the way out and faster on the way back. The only difference is the mirror seems to move toward the emitter at 100,000 km/s. Why does it work that way? Because the speed of light on the earth's surface is constant in a direction 90 degrees to an imaginary line from the emitter to the center of the earth, relative to that line. If the beam goes at a different angle then the varying gravity intensity will alter the speed, but most experiments are done with light traveling parallel to the ground so light speed is practically constant. That line I mentioned doesn't move with the earth's rotation, it's like the earth's core is frozen in place relative to the light source at the time of emission.

There's no other scenario that makes sense, you can't have time, length or distance changing depending on which frame to choose to view a scenario from, it actually makes more sense for light speed to be relative to the strongest gravity source where the inertial frames are located. Apparently light and gravity are closely related, same as mass and energy are related. I shouldn't have let myself get off track with that last post, it just shows how weird things can get when you stray from the reality of gravity source based light speed. In outer space I'm not sure how it would work in the weak gravity of distant stars.

[Bored chemist]

There's no other scenario that makes sense, you can't have time, length or distance changing depending on which frame to choose to view a scenario from,

Yes you can.
And we do.

[Centra (OP)]

There's no other scenario that makes sense, you can't have time, length or distance changing depending on which frame to choose to view a scenario from,

Yes you can.
And we do.

I'm afraid you can't, not on earth, the law of gravity source constancy of light must be obeyed. Why didn't Michelson-Morley find significant fringes? Just too little rotation of the earth to show anything substantial in a crude apparatus like that.They didn't have anything sensitive enough to detect earth's rotation in those days. Of course, we do now, which is why we now know light speed varies with motion relative to earth's gravity source. That's why they had to devise the "coordinate time grid", seen as non-rotating and linked to the earth's center considered as stationary. That's exactly the same as saying time, and therefore light speed on earth, is relative to earths gravity source seen as non-rotating and centered on the earth's core. They as much as admitted that as being a scientific fact when they realized they needed that rime coordinate grid to keep time synchronized.

[Kryptid]

They didn't have anything sensitive enough to detect earth's rotation in those days. Of course, we do now, which is why we now know light speed varies with motion relative to earth's gravity source.

You mean like this? I think a sensitivity on the order of 10^-17 is plenty good enough: http://www.exphy.uni-duesseldorf.de/Publikationen/2009/Eisele%20et%20al%20Laboratory%20Test%20of%20the%20Isotropy%20of%20Light%20Propagation%20at%20the%2010-17%20Level%202009.pdf

[Bored chemist]

They didn't have anything sensitive enough to detect earth's rotation in those days.

That may well take the prize for the stupidest comment yet. That's quite a challenge in a thread like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sundials

Obviously, they didn't need to detect the rotation or the earth- they already knew about it. They also knew about the Earth's orbit round the Sun.
And the MM experiment was certainly sensitive enough to detect the effect they expected from it. If it hadn't been that sensitive, there would have been no point to the experiment).
The important thing is that, though they knew exactly what they expected to find, they actually found no fringe shift.
That's how they realised that there was no ether.

Of course, we do now, which is why we now know light speed varies with motion relative to earth's gravity source.

That's meaningless.

[Centra (OP)]

They didn't have anything sensitive enough to detect earth's rotation in those days. Of course, we do now, which is why we now know light speed varies with motion relative to earth's gravity source.

You mean like this? I think a sensitivity on the order of 10^-17 is plenty good enough: http://www.exphy.uni-duesseldorf.de/Publikationen/2009/Eisele%20et%20al%20Laboratory%20Test%20of%20the%20Isotropy%20of%20Light%20Propagation%20at%20the%2010-17%20Level%202009.pdf

I don't really know what they were doing in that experiment, just looked like bouncing some beams around and rotating the apparatus various ways, they didn't use two way beams, just one way beams bouncing at different angles. Maybe that's not a good way to do it if they got null results It's easy to find pages about detecting earth's rotation with ring lasers so obviously light is moving at different speeds based on earth's rotation right there.

Actually in my other post that doesn't seem to make sense at first, I showed that light can be seen to move at the same speed from the viewpoint of different frames in relative motion by simply changing the perceived distances between things when light related events occur. How do we know perceived distance isn't altered between frames rather than time or length of objects? How do we know what distances between things are? By how much time it takes for something to go between them. Perception of distances could be altered based on light as easily as time could.

[Kryptid]

Maybe that's not a good way to do it if they got null results

Or, you know, they actually knew what they were doing and got null results because special relativity is correct. If you think there is an error in their methodology, please point out what it is.

It's easy to find pages about detecting earth's rotation with ring lasers so obviously light is moving at different speeds based on earth's rotation right there.

Not necessarily. It depends on the specifics of the experiment. What was the methodology?

How do we know perceived distance isn't altered between frames rather than time or length of objects?

Because those distances and times can actually be measured.

[Bored chemist]

I don't really know what they were doing in that experiment,

That is precisely the point we keep making.

[Centra (OP)]

Here's the glaring flaw in the Lorentz transformation, it can't work on two beams in opposite directions at the same time. Einsteiin tried to get around that by suggesting that clocks on opposite ends of a moving rocket which fired two beams from the center to both ends were not synchronized, as if that makes the slightest sense. Explain how two different time zones on one rocket makes sense? It's not a rotating rocket either, it's moving straight in uniform motion, which is exactly the same as it being stationary. Would it make sense for two stationary clocks to show different times just because they're separated? Apparently not, since Einstein's suggested method for synchronizing two clocks in a stationary frame is to send light beams back and forth and it takes the same time. They would have to see both of their clocks synchronized but the other frame clock showing two different times.

You cannot have two clocks suddenly going out of synch just because somebody passes by and looks at them, and you can't have them showing the same times when the frame is considered stationary and different times when considered moving, it's completely ludicrous. You can't even make it work by saying the person in the other frame just sees them out of synch but they're really not, because the light from the two clocks takes the same amount of time to reach the observer's eyes when the rocket is right in front of him. They would have to actually be out of synch no matter which frame you observed them from. Also, by the postulate of inertial frame reciprocity, people at each end of the rocket would have to see a single clock in the other frame as showing two different times, which Einstein never even postulated could occur. hey would presumably see their own clocks synchronized but the other frame clock showing different times. Bob would yell over to Jim and say "what time is it on that clock over there in the other frame" and Jim would say something other than what Bob sees with his own eyes, it's preposterous.

[Bored chemist]

Here's the glaring flaw in the Lorentz transformation, it can't work on two beams in opposite directions at the same time.

Prove it.

as if that makes the slightest sense.

It does.
"synchronisation" is a local thing.
Anyone watching a football game will be aware of that.
If you are far from the action, there is a distinct delay between seeing the ball kicked, and hearing it.

You cannot have two clocks suddenly going out of synch just because somebody passes by and looks at them

Nobody said they did.


The problem isn't that it doesn't make sense. The problem is that it doesn't make sense to you.