Naked Science Forum

On the Lighter Side => New Theories => Topic started by: David Cooper on 03/08/2016 22:43:41

Title: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 03/08/2016 22:43:41
[Edit: This thread was resolved by page 5 - there is a hidden rotation involved when something is accelerated in one direction and is then accelerated sideways, and when that is taken into account all the issues go away, making it impossible to pin down a preferred frame of reference in the way I'd suggested. Beyond that point, the discussion turns to other matters, much of it concerning the business of whether SR can function without a preferred frame, and at the time of this edit it looks as it can't (unless you go for a model of SR in which objects take shortcuts into the future on some paths and get there sooner than other objects, at which point you have to handle event-meshing failures and need to bring Newtonian time back into the model to deal with that issue.]

I've found something I didn't think would ever be possible, but it looks as if there may be a way to pin down an absolute frame of reference.

Imagine a disc lying flat with four points marked on the circumference, N, E, S and W (for the four compass directions). We will move the disc northwards in a moment while rotating it clockwise, but let's first spin it up to speed without moving it along through space. I want to spin it until the edge is moving at 0.866c relative to the centre, a speed at which length contraction should act on the edge in such a way as to halve its length. If we also sandwich our rotating disc between two non-rotating discs of equal size we can eliminate all the non-Euclidean SR distractions by imposing a tight Euclidean metric upon our rotating disc in the middle of the sandwich and use that to lay down the law about how the rotating disc must behave in that space.

We can see that there is no longer enough material in our rotating disc to fill the whole space between the non-rotating discs, so it must stretch or break. Let's assume it splits and leaves us with gap in it, the gap being much wider the further out you go from the centre as the length contraction becomes more severe. It turns out then that we're going to  need to mend our disc once it's been spun up to the target speed so as to fill in the gap, and it's only after that that will we have a complete disc rotating at our target speed. This appears to go against some of the teachings of SR in relation to the behaviour of rotating discs, but it doesn't go against the rules as to how SR works for things moving in straight lines, and we can show that the two things are actually equivalent, which means that many of the existing ideas about how rotating discs behave are wrong.

Any rocket following a tangent to our rotating disc at 0.866c must display length contraction to half its rest length, and this must be matched by the material in the edge of the disc as they move side by side for a moment. That means that the edge of the disc must appear length contracted and cannot possibly fill the space all the way round the space demarcated for it by the two non-rotating discs. We can also eliminate most of the change in direction of the material in the disc's edge by using a disc of a diameter measured in billions of lightyears across, which means that the material in the disc's edge will be moving at the same speed and in the same direction as the material in the rocket flying past at a tangent to the disc not merely for an instant, but for many hours with the material in the disc edge and the rocket potentially being side by side and only a micron apart throughout that time - this is more than long enough to rule out any role for accelerations in breaking the normal rules of length contraction and time dilation. So, we can show that a rotating disc cannot behave the way that most SR experts claim it does: it turns out that they have been breaking some of the most fundamental rules of SR.

Our next step is to move the whole disc, and we want it to move at 0.866c northwards. By the way, our non rotating discs are transparent, so we can see the rotating disc through them, and our N, E, S, W markers are printed on the non-rotating discs, so N is always the leading point of the discs as they move through space, while S is the point most aft. Once we are moving our disc sandwich along at 0.866c, the material in our rotating disc starts to behave in unexpected ways, bunching up as it moves slowly past point W and whipping back past point E with all length contraction removed there. At point E the material is not moving in the frame of reference we're using as the base for all our measurements, but at point W it is moving northwards at 0.99c and the local length contraction is to 1/7. (To calculate this speed and length contraction at point W, I imagined a rocket moving north at 0.866c and firing a missile ahead at 0.866c from its point of view, and so in our reference frame that works out at 0.99c - that rocket must behave the same way as the material at the edge of the disc where the rocket may travel alongside it for a while as it follows a tangent to the disc at that point.) Our non-rotating discs have length-contraction applying across them exclusively in the NS direction, reducing all measurements running that way to 1/2 of their rest lengths, so the discs' shapes are now elliptical with the NS diameter half the length of the EW diameter. The rotating disc should match that shape if the idea of relativity is correct, but the length contractions on the material of the rotating disc and directions in which it contracts will be different in places, and it's in exploring this that I've found something that I thought couldn't happen.

The key thing is what happens at points N and S. The material there is moving at 0.968c (which can be broken down into two vectors: it's moving north at 0.866c, and it's moving sideways at 0.433c) which means that the length contraction will make the material sit four times as close together in its direction of travel as it would do at rest, and this contraction acts at an angle of 63.4 degrees forwards of the EW line. (I worked out the 0.433c figure by thinking about how a light clock aligned EW would work here: the light in it would actually move at 60 degrees ahead of sideways, and that reduces its progress between points E and W to half, so the same halving will apply to anything else moving from E to W and back.) The component of this contraction to 1/4 is greater in the NS direction than the length contraction in the non-rotating discs at points N and S (which is to 1/2), and that's the crucial thing here - this means it must pull the rotating disc in more at N and S than the non-rotating discs, so their shapes will no longer match up in the way they do when the apparatus is not moving along through space - the sandwich filling can no longer fill the whole space between the outer discs. On the non-rotating discs we have length contraction to 1/2 of the rest length all the way from N to S. On the rotating disc we only have that amount of length contraction at the very centre of the line NS: at all other points on the line NS we have more length contraction than that (running in the NS direction). That means that SR must have a theoretically identifiable preferred/absolute frame of referrence.

Again we can send a rocket at 0.968c over point N or S at the same angle as the material of the disc there is moving to illustrate that it must contract in exactly the same way in the disc as it does in the rocket, and by giving our disc a huge diameter measured in the billions of lightyears, we can reduce all the pesky accelerations caused by the rotation to such a low level that they can be ignored (while reducing the centrifugal forces to the point of irrelevance at the same time) - the material in the disc can now be thought of as moving in almost perfectly straight lines while we're comparing its behaviour with that of the material in the rockets which are temporarily co-moving with it.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 04/08/2016 04:08:32
I've managed to come up with a related thought experiment which eliminates the rotation altogether, and it's now ridiculously simple! How has this been missed for a century?

Imagine a long, straight monorail floating in space with a train on it, both of them being as long as you like, but this is a special monorail in which the train runs on the side of the rail instead of the top - I'm making this change to its design to make it fit in with the previous thought experiment from which it was derived. We're looking down on the track and train from "above", and we see the rail as being a metre wide while the train is also a metre wide (and I chose that width for both just for simplicity with the numbers). The rail is aligned west-east and the train is to the north of it. We're going to move the whole caboodle northwards later on at 0.866c, just like we did with the discs before. First though, let's assume that the rail is stationary, and then we'll start the train rolling eastwards. We accelerate the train until it's moving east at 0.866c, and the length of each carriage must contract to half its rest length. The width of the train is unaffected though - it is still a metre wide, matching the width of the rail.

Now let's move the rail and train northwards at 0.866c. With the rail moving north at this speed, time dilation must kick in for it, so this will affect the train's actual speed of travel relative to the rail as measured from our stationary frame of reference: we will now measure it as going at 0.433c, though to anyone moving north with the rail at 0.866c the train will still appear to be doing 0.866c from their point of view. The length contraction on the rail will now make it half a metre wide, but what is the length contraction on the train, and in which direction is that contraction applied? The train is doing 0.866c northwards and 0.433c sideways (those are the two vectors), so the actual speed is the square root of 0.866^2 + 0.433^2, and that comes to 0.968c. The angle in which the material of the train is moving is 63.4 degrees ahead of the west-east line (a bit nearer to north than north-east), and the length contraction on it (which acts in that direction) will reduce its length to a quarter. We already know that the length contraction on the rail will reduce it to a half in the north-south direction, so we now measure the rail as being half a metre wide, but the train is now going to be quarter of a metre wide and a little contorted, the northern side now trailing the side adjacent to the rail. That is a major mismatch which doesn't occur when the rail is stationary in space with only the train moving. If you are travelling with the moving rail, you will still measure it as a metre wide from that frame of reference, but you will measure the width of the train as being half a metre instead of the whole metre you expected.

Unless there's an error in the above, it means that if you're in the frame of reference in which the rail is stationary, you can tell whether you're moving or not relative to an absolute frame of reference simply by measuring the width of the train. If we send a rocket at 0.968c in the same direction, 26.6 degrees round from north, the length contraction will be to 1/4 of the rocket's rest length, and the material of the train must undergo the same length contraction as that in the same direction. The rocket will also be seen to move with the train, staying above the same carriage all the time and keeping perfect pace with it.

So, have I made a mistake somewhere (and my brain's too far gone for me to spot it), or is this finally the death of relativity? And if the latter, can we turn this into a practical experiment to pin down how fast we're moving through the fabric of space?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PmbPhy on 04/08/2016 04:50:59
I've found something I didn't think would ever be possible, but it looks as if there may be a way to pin down an absolute frame of reference.
Hi David,

This subject touches on one of the things in relativity that I've been avoiding for years because thinking about it hurts my brain. Lol! What you've touched upon here is what's known as Ehrenfest's Paradox. It has to do with the circumference of a disk contracting while the radius remains constant which ends up leaving the value of π altered. You proposed to solve this problem by sandwiching the rotating disc between two non-rotating discs of equal size. It's your proposal that this will "eliminate all the non-Euclidean," correct? If that's the case then I believe that you made an error here by assuming that something like that can be done. Exactly what action will the two non-rotating disks have on the rotating disk? There's a great deal of physics to deal with here that you haven't mentioned. You can learn more about it in the physics literature if you're interested? You can first start with Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenfest_paradox
You should also study Born rigidity while you're at it. I'd like to make it clear that I myself don't yet have a complete understanding of all the intricacies of Ehrenfest's paradox. It's something that I'm currently working to understand. It's tricky stuff and can be quite confusing.

Please let me know what you learn if you choose to study Ehrenfest's paradox. I'd be very interested.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 04/08/2016 08:26:47
If everything is in motion relative to everything else then there will be a positions that can be thought of as stationary with respect to everything else. The redshift of galaxies is a prime example. Any point in space from which all objects move away uniformly in all directions can be thought of as fixed relative to those galaxies. The problem for a preferential frame is that this point is not at infinity nor ever can be. So that some force is always acting upon it. Only if all external forces were exactly equal, creating  a perfect equilibrium point, could this stand in as a false preferential frame.

I have studied the concept of a fixed background for a while now. As Pete says it can make your head hurt. I look forward to reading more of this thread. It is a very pertinent point.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 04/08/2016 13:16:27
I've managed to come up with a related thought experiment which eliminates the rotation altogether, and it's now ridiculously simple! How has this been missed for a century?
Yeah, when people say this, it means that they are making a basic mistake.
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Now let's move the rail and train northwards at 0.866c. With the rail moving north at this speed, time dilation must kick in for it, so this will affect the train's actual speed of travel relative to the rail as measured from our stationary frame of reference: we will now measure it as going at 0.433c, though to anyone moving north with the rail at 0.866c the train will still appear to be doing 0.866c from their point of view.
And there is your basic mistake: you introduced a contradiction. The speed relative to the track is given. This means that the track relative to the train is given as the same thing, there is no conversion for that speed. If you were doing some sort of calculation based on the operation of the engine, then you would have to do a conversion with time dilation taken into account.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 04/08/2016 18:59:35
This subject touches on one of the things in relativity that I've been avoiding for years because thinking about it hurts my brain. Lol! What you've touched upon here is what's known as Ehrenfest's Paradox.
Hi Pete,

Yes, I read up on it a week or two back, and I wasn't impressed. The point of sandwiching the rotating disc between two non-rotating ones is that they force you to measure the rotating disc properly using the normal Euclidean metric without being confused by the complications of what the rotating disc is imagined to be doing in non-Euclidean geometry. The rotating disc, whatever it may be doing in the minds of physicists, still has to interface with the Euclidean metric imposed on it by the two non-rotating discs. If its radius remains the same, the circumference must still be found directly between the two circumferences of the non-rotating discs. If the circumference length contracts, it cannot complete the circuit, so there will need to be a gap or gaps in it.

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It has to do with the circumference of a disk contracting while the radius remains constant which ends up leaving the value of π altered. You proposed to solve this problem by sandwiching the rotating disc between two non-rotating discs of equal size. It's your proposal that this will "eliminate all the non-Euclidean," correct? If that's the case then I believe that you made an error here by assuming that something like that can be done. Exactly what action will the two non-rotating disks have on the rotating disk?

The non-rotating discs simply force the observer to measure the rotating disc correctly without being put off by non-Euclidean complications. Whatever the rotating disc does, it must behave in accordance with the basic rules of SR. Let me show you an alternative scenario which is directly equivalent. Imagine a stationary non-rotating disc with 36 tangents to it touching at a series of points 10 degrees apart. Each tangent has a rocket moving along it, and each rocket is travelling at 0.866c, so it's been length-contracted to half its rest length by this movement. Each rocket touches the disc for a moment and they all do this simultaneously. Each rocket also hooks up to the one ahead of it at that same moment, so they become locked together into a ring, and from this point on that ring will rotate round the disc. For each rocket, this is no different from them just looping round in a circle - there will be some differences in the length contraction on them due to the change in direction which will introduce stresses, but they won't suddenly do anything weird: they will simply go round the non-rotating disc, remain hooked together, remain length contracted to half their rest length, and they will continue to fill the space available to them round the disc as measured by the Euclidean metric. If you then slow the rockets down to a halt, they will lose the length contraction and take up twice as much space round the disc as there is room for them, so there may be a bit of a pile up. This shows that the way SR normally tries to handle rotation is wrong. Furthermore, if you repeat this with the non-rotating disc moving along at 0.866c and have the rockets all approach it at the right speeds relative to it so that they still think they're running on tangents to a stationary disc, you will have them behaving in the way I described the material of a rotating disc moving along at 0.866c through space with the rocket at point E having no length contraction on it and the one at point W being shortened to 1/7 of its rest length. These thought experiments show that the normal way of attempting to handle rotation in SR is incompetent, because we're now doing it using more fundamental rules of SR where the rotation has been eliminated up to the point where the rockets hook together, and the direction changes on them that follow are no different from normal direction changes. When we look at a rotating disc a billion lightyears across and think how gentle those direction changes will be, we have the material moving practically in straight lines throughout, so the way the material in the disc's edge must match the behaviour of rockets moving past on tangents to the disc where they are moving at the same speed and in the same direction.

However, even if you still think there's some weird complication which can somehow override all of that, you have to look at the second post of this thread where I simplified the thought experiment by removing rotation from it altogether.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 04/08/2016 19:13:20
If everything is in motion relative to everything else then there will be a positions that can be thought of as stationary with respect to everything else. The redshift of galaxies is a prime example. Any point in space from which all objects move away uniformly in all directions can be thought of as fixed relative to those galaxies. The problem for a preferential frame is that this point is not at infinity nor ever can be. So that some force is always acting upon it. Only if all external forces were exactly equal, creating  a perfect equilibrium point, could this stand in as a false preferential frame.

Hi Jeffrey,

It's important to realise that a preferred frame doesn't need to be the same thing as an absolute frame. A preferred frame at one point in the universe needn't be the same as the preferred frame at any other, but an absolute frame would have to be the same for them all. That might initially sound unlikely (or even impossible), but if you imagine the universe as being contained in the skin of an expanding bubble, the absolute frame of reference is tied to the centre of the bubble, which is a point not found inside the universe, and no frame of reference inside the universe can be the absolute frame. At every point inside the universe there is a preferred frame of reference which is different from the preferred frame at any other point, but they are all preferred frames of reference regardless, being the frame at that point which matches up closest to the absolute frame. On the local scale though, such as within our solar system, you can consider that all points in that local space have the same frame as their preferred frame of reference, even if that isn't quite true, because the errors will be too small to have any relevance.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 04/08/2016 19:52:30
Hi PhysBang,

Yeah, when people say this, it means that they are making a basic mistake.

Well, let's see how long it takes you to find that basic mistake...

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Now let's move the rail and train northwards at 0.866c. With the rail moving north at this speed, time dilation must kick in for it, so this will affect the train's actual speed of travel relative to the rail as measured from our stationary frame of reference: we will now measure it as going at 0.433c, though to anyone moving north with the rail at 0.866c the train will still appear to be doing 0.866c from their point of view.
And there is your basic mistake: you introduced a contradiction.

Where is that contradiction?

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The speed relative to the track is given. This means that the track relative to the train is given as the same thing, there is no conversion for that speed. If you were doing some sort of calculation based on the operation of the engine, then you would have to do a conversion with time dilation taken into account.

Do you understand the idea of picking a frame of reference for the analysis and sticking rigorously to it for all measurements? Let's call our chosen frame Frame A. If our rail is stationary in Frame A and our train is moving at 0.866c along the rail, there is no difficulty in labelling the two things with the speeds zero (for the rail) and 0.866c. Let's keep that rail and train so we can refer to them again, so we'll call them Rail A and Train A.

Let's now introduce Rail B (aligned west-east) and we'll have it moving northwards at 0.866c. We are still analysing it from Frame A, so a clock sitting on Rail B, and let's call this Clock B, will be ticking once for every two ticks of our clock, Clock A. If we have a distance marked out on the rail and watch train B (or one carriage of it) cover that distance, Train B may cover that distance along Rail B in one tick of Clock B, but that will be two ticks of our Clock A. We determine that in frame A, Train A is moving twice as fast along Rail A as Train B is moving along Rail B, so Train B's speed is 0.433c.

There is no error in that other than my rounded off figures. If you calculate the sine of 60 degrees you'll get a more accurate figure for Train A's speed eastwards, and it's the same figure for Rail B's speed northwards - this speed leads to length contraction to precisely a half and also slows clocks down to tick at exactly half their normal rate. Train B's speed eastwards will be half of that, but if anyone wanted to measure it using Frame B as the base for their measurements, they would calculate that it is doing 0.866c.

So where's this error/contradiction that you talk of? Even if there had been an error in the speed I'd chosen, it would have been irrelevant - any movement of Train B along rail B will necessarily lead to the material in Train B having more length contraction acting on it in the NS direction than there is on Rail B, and that is all you need to pin down a preferred frame of reference because the width of the train will be less than that of the rail (or the reverse if the rail is moving west faster than the train is moving east). It is only in the preferred frame that the train can move along the rail at any speed without it's width changing.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 04/08/2016 22:55:08
There would be a small complication if you wanted to use this experiment for real to try to work out if you're moving or not. If the rail and train are the same width, that doesn't guarantee that you aren't moving north or south because the rail could be moving west at the same speed as the train is moving east, leading to them both being the same width because they'd both have the same extra length contraction acting on them, but changing the speed of either the rail or the train would show up a width difference and demonstrate that they are also moving sideways (either north or south). In such a case, it would be possible to identify a frame that's neither moving west nor east either by finding speeds for rail and train which generate a big width difference one way and then finding speeds which generate as big a difference the other way, and then you'd average the two. If no such width differences ever show up, it means you are already stationary in the north-south direction. This could then be repeated with the rail and train aligned north south and then up down to pin down the preferred frame.

In reality though, getting a train up to relativistic speed is impractical in the extreme, so how can this be turned into any kind of experiment that can actually be carried out?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: alancalverd on 04/08/2016 23:42:16
If we have a distance marked out on the rail and watch train B (or one carriage of it) cover that distance, Train B may cover that distance along Rail B in one tick of Clock B, but that will be two ticks of our Clock A. We determine that in frame A, Train A is moving twice as fast along Rail A as Train B is moving along Rail B, so Train B's speed is 0.433c.

There is no error in that other than my rounded off figures.

The error is that by the time train B has moved unit distance along the track, it has also receded from
the observer at A, so the information that it has reached its destination will be delayed. If you ignore half the informaton, you will obviously get a wrong result from your calculation.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 05/08/2016 00:21:20
Hi Alan,

If we have a distance marked out on the rail and watch train B (or one carriage of it) cover that distance, Train B may cover that distance along Rail B in one tick of Clock B, but that will be two ticks of our Clock A. We determine that in frame A, Train A is moving twice as fast along Rail A as Train B is moving along Rail B, so Train B's speed is 0.433c.

There is no error in that other than my rounded off figures.

The error is that by the time train B has moved unit distance along the track, it has also receded from
the observer at A, so the information that it has reached its destination will be delayed. If you ignore half the informaton, you will obviously get a wrong result from your calculation.

We can put an observer to the north and another to the south such that they see the action from different sides as the apparatus races towards the former observer and away from the latter, both our observers being stationary in Frame A. By doing this, we can cancel out the Doppler effect issue and determine that the train is moving relative to the track at 0.433c (as a Frame A measurement), and this should be undisputed stuff in any discussion of relativity where the standard rules are being applied (although in a case like this it's worth exploring all possible places where and error might lie because the implications of this are so extraordinary). We can also put an observer far above the apparatus at a lightyear's distance and have a light flash as the train passes each marker. The timing between the flashes for that observer will be pretty exact as Frame A timings of the event because they are travelling the same distance to reach that observer, and if we also have a middle marker with a flash when the train passes that, if our overhead observer is directly over the apparatus when that flash is sent out, the timings between the first and second flashes will be exactly the same as between the second and third, and his timing from the whole trip will be guaranteed free of any Doppler issues. My speed for the Train B's movement along Rail B must be 0.433c as measured in Frame A.

If you are determined to assign a wrong value to it though, feel free. Use any non-zero figure of your choice as the eastward vector to combine with the 0.866c nortward vector, then see what your actual speed is (but bin it and start again if it's greater than c) and calculate the direction the material of the train is actually moving in, then calculate the length contraction that must apply for that speed in that direction, and then tell me how wide the train must be. It will always be more contracted than the rail, though you will need a fair bit of speed before it shows up clearly as being a real width difference rather than just a calculator showing a 0.9999999 that actually means 1. The 0.433 that I chose shows it very well, but any other speed of reasonable magnitude will prove the point.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 05/08/2016 02:27:41
Do you understand the idea of picking a frame of reference for the analysis and sticking rigorously to it for all measurements?
Yes. Unfortunately, I missed that you were using two trains moving orthogonal to each other.
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Let's call our chosen frame Frame A. If our rail is stationary in Frame A and our train is moving at 0.866c along the rail, there is no difficulty in labelling the two things with the speeds zero (for the rail) and 0.866c. Let's keep that rail and train so we can refer to them again, so we'll call them Rail A and Train A.

Let's now introduce Rail B (aligned west-east) and we'll have it moving northwards at 0.866c. We are still analysing it from Frame A, so a clock sitting on Rail B, and let's call this Clock B, will be ticking once for every two ticks of our clock, Clock A. If we have a distance marked out on the rail and watch train B (or one carriage of it) cover that distance, Train B may cover that distance along Rail B in one tick of Clock B, but that will be two ticks of our Clock A. We determine that in frame A, Train A is moving twice as fast along Rail A as Train B is moving along Rail B, so Train B's speed is 0.433c.
You are already confusing things. What is "Clock A" is it any clock co-moving with the rails on which Train A is on or is it any clock co-moving with Train A? What is the frame of reference that you are actually using?

If we have a system of coordinates at rest with the tracks, then saying that the speed of the train is x in a given direction sets the speed of that train. It also sets the speed of the relevant track for a frame of reference co-moving with a given train.

If we want to consider a frame of reference co-moving with train A and think about the speed of train B, then we have a somewhat more complicated question. Especially since now train B is moving south-east in the frame co-moving with train A.
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So where's this error/contradiction that you talk of? Even if there had been an error in the speed I'd chosen, it would have been irrelevant - any movement of Train B along rail B will necessarily lead to the material in Train B having more length contraction acting on it in the NS direction than there is on Rail B, and that is all you need to pin down a preferred frame of reference because the width of the train will be less than that of the rail (or the reverse if the rail is moving west faster than the train is moving east). It is only in the preferred frame that the train can move along the rail at any speed without it's width changing.
Where is the preferred reference frame here? You are merely identifying that, when one combine two translations from frame to frame, one has to take both translations into account.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PmbPhy on 05/08/2016 13:16:15
Quote from: David Cooper
Hi Pete,

Yes, I read up on it a week or two back, and I wasn't impressed.
The days of me trying to make an impression of members of forums or making attempts to correct errors they've made are long past. That last attempt that I made to correct a ridiculous error made by the newbie Lord Antares sealed if for me. Trying to correct the mistakes made by members who argue like he did in that thread was the worst waste of time that I've spent in a very long time. So when it comes to problems which have a solution such as the Ehrenfest paradox I'm only going to discuss it with those members who accept the solution, which is indeed correct. I can't see the point of rehashing physics that has already been done by first rate physicists and which is very clear and well presented.

I'm not saying that you're either right or wrong. I'm just letting you know what to expect from me on this point and in the future, that's all.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 05/08/2016 19:36:35
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Let's call our chosen frame Frame A. If our rail is stationary in Frame A and our train is moving at 0.866c along the rail, there is no difficulty in labelling the two things with the speeds zero (for the rail) and 0.866c. Let's keep that rail and train so we can refer to them again, so we'll call them Rail A and Train A.

Let's now introduce Rail B (aligned west-east) and we'll have it moving northwards at 0.866c. We are still analysing it from Frame A, so a clock sitting on Rail B, and let's call this Clock B, will be ticking once for every two ticks of our clock, Clock A. If we have a distance marked out on the rail and watch train B (or one carriage of it) cover that distance, Train B may cover that distance along Rail B in one tick of Clock B, but that will be two ticks of our Clock A. We determine that in frame A, Train A is moving twice as fast along Rail A as Train B is moving along Rail B, so Train B's speed is 0.433c.
You are already confusing things. What is "Clock A" is it any clock co-moving with the rails on which Train A is on or is it any clock co-moving with Train A? What is the frame of reference that you are actually using?

Clock A is a clock stationary in Frame A, like Rail A, so it can be imagined as sitting on Rail A just as Clock B is sitting on the moving Rail B.

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If we have a system of coordinates at rest with the tracks, then saying that the speed of the train is x in a given direction sets the speed of that train. It also sets the speed of the relevant track for a frame of reference co-moving with a given train.

If we want to consider a frame of reference co-moving with train A and think about the speed of train B, then we have a somewhat more complicated question. Especially since now train B is moving south-east in the frame co-moving with train A.

Up to now we haven't needed to do any analysis from the point of view of the frame of reference co-moving with Train A, but if we want to use it for any reason we could name it Frame A'. In the same way, we can name the frame in which Train B is stationary as Frame B', and this frame is moving at 0.968c through Frame A at an angle 26.6 degrees from north.

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So where's this error/contradiction that you talk of? Even if there had been an error in the speed I'd chosen, it would have been irrelevant - any movement of Train B along rail B will necessarily lead to the material in Train B having more length contraction acting on it in the NS direction than there is on Rail B, and that is all you need to pin down a preferred frame of reference because the width of the train will be less than that of the rail (or the reverse if the rail is moving west faster than the train is moving east). It is only in the preferred frame that the train can move along the rail at any speed without its width changing.
Where is the preferred reference frame here? You are merely identifying that, when one combine two translations from frame to frame, one has to take both translations into account.

Let's go through the whole thing looking at the four objects (two rails and two trains) from the point of view of the four different frames that we now have names for.

We start off by assuming that Frame A is the preferred frame, and if it happens to be the preferred frame, it doesn't matter what speed our train moves along the track, all length contraction on it must operate in the west-east direction and leave the train's width completely unchanged - it remains a metre wide.

If it was possible to carry out this experiment for real, we wouldn't initially know if Frame A is the preferred frame, so we could assert instead that Frame A' (the frame co-moving with Train A) is the preferred frame, and if we do that we can then assert that the rail is moving westwards at 0.866c. Again the length contraction would be acting west-east on the rail and its width will be unchanged, so we cannot tell at this stage whether Frame A or Frame A' is the preferred frame.

Let's now return to using Frame A as the base for our measurements and look at Rail B and Train B. We can see Rail B moving north at 0.866c, and we also see Train B moving along it at 0.433 relative to Rail B, but we measure all the material of Train B as moving through Frame A at 0.968c in a direction 26.6 degrees away from north. The length contraction that we measure on Rail B reduces its width to half a metre (and we're still measuring from Frame A). The length contraction on the material of the train will reduce its width to a quarter of a metre - although the length contraction is acting at an angle 26.6 degrees away from north (and 63.4 degrees away from east), this still leads to the width of the train reducing to a quarter in the north-south direction (and the same would happen with the length contracting acting at shallower angles with lower speeds because when you shorten a line drawn at an angle, both the vertical and horizontal vectors that are associated with that line will shorten by the exact same amount).

What we see then from Frame A is Rail B reduced to half a metre wide and Train B reduced to quarter of a metre wide. Before I go any further with this, I want to lock down the Euclidean metric on this in a similar way to what I did earlier with the disc. Let's put another rail in on the other side of Train B to sandwich it between the rails. This new rail is attached to Rail B by 3m poles, all aligned north-south, one metre of one end of each pole being welded across the top of Rail B, one metre of the other end of each pole being welded across the top of our new rail, and the middle metre of each pole runs over the train without touching it. We can have more poles underneath too, so the train is moving in a space a metre across between the two rails, and it's also running under the top set of our poles and over the bottom set. When we look at the apparatus now from Frame A, we see our first track contracted from a metre wide to half a metre wide, we see our poles lenth-contracted from 3 metres to 1.5m, and our new rail is contracted from one metre wide to half a metre wide. We see Train B contracted from a metre wide to quarter of a metre wide, and we see a gap quarter of a metre wide between Train B and our new rail.

We've now finished our Frame A analysis. We also looked at Rail A from the point of view of Frame A', but there's no great need to use Frame A' to analyse any of the B items (though we can do so later if anyone is keen to explore the irrelevant), so let's move on to analyse things from Frame B.

We are now co-moving with Rail B and using Frame B for our new analysis. When we measure the width of Rail B, we find it to be a metre wide. When we measure the length of the poles, we find them to be 3m long. When we measure the new rail, we find that it is a metre wide. When we measure the width of the gap between Rail B and the new rail, we find it to be a metre wide. When we measure the width of Train B, what do we find? If we find that it is a metre wide and that there is not a half-metre wide gap between it and the new rail, we are seeing something that doesn't tie in with what we saw from Frame A. If we are to see something compatible with what we saw from Frame A, we must now see a gap half a metre wide between the train and the new rail, and we must measure the train as being half a metre wide.

Bang! Relativity has just been shot dead.

Let me now spell out to you why the gap seen from Frame A cannot disappear when we look from Frame B.

How is our train attached to the rail? Let's make it some kind of mag-lev, but we'll use a T flange on each side of it to lock into the rails on either side, and the T is on its side with the sharp end attached to the train. There's a slot all the way along the side of Rail B, and the crossbar of the T is inside the rail while the stem of the T goes out through the slot and attaches to the train. The train is attached in the same manner to the new rail. (There's no actual contact, so we don't need to worry about friction or vapourisation of the material.)

What happens now? Let's return to what we see from Frame A. We are no longer going to see a gap between Train B and the new rail, so there are two options. (1) The two rails move closer together as the train accelerates up to speed and the poles bend to accommodate this, or perhaps we could make the poles telescopic so that they don't break - we can have markings on them which will show one part moving into the other and we'll know how much has become hidden. (2) The rails stay a metre apart and the train is forced to fill the whole space between them, but we can see that the length-contraction that should be acting on them is being prevented from doing so and that the train is artificially being stretched to fill the gap, to the point that it will be warping and breaking apart. We know that this must happen because we see the correct length-contraction operating on the rocket that's flying over the train, moving at 0.968c in a direction 26.6 degrees away from north, and this rocket is co-moving with the material of the train.

Either way, we have clear indications that something is up: with (1) we have poles telescoping or bending, and with (2) we have a train being ripped apart sideways by extreme forces.

Now let's return to Frame B and see what it looks like there. Do we see the poles bending or telescoping into each other? Do we see the train being ripped apart? Clearly we must see one or other of these things - it is impossible to see the train happily zipping along at a metre wide in a space a metre wide with straight, untelescoped poles and no sideways stresses acting on the train.

Relativity has broken down and the game's well and truly up.

Do I need to look at things from Frame B'? There's no need to bother, but I'll do it later if anyone thinks it's necessary - there may be a limit on how long this post can be, so it's best to stop here and post it now.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 05/08/2016 19:52:23
The days of me trying to make an impression of members of forums or making attempts to correct errors they've made are long past. That last attempt that I made to correct a ridiculous error made by the newbie Lord Antares sealed if for me. Trying to correct the mistakes made by members who argue like he did in that thread was the worst waste of time that I've spent in a very long time. So when it comes to problems which have a solution such as the Ehrenfest paradox I'm only going to discuss it with those members who accept the solution, which is indeed correct. I can't see the point of rehashing physics that has already been done by first rate physicists and which is very clear and well presented.

That's fine, but I did provide you with a precise analysis of how things must work when you form a rotating ring by sending rockets in on tangents to a circle, and they must show how a rotating ring or disc would actually behave. I also pointed out that if you make the ring a billion lightyears across, the turning forces become so small as to be irrelevant. It was a very precise, correct analysis. If what I said isn't compatible with the "correct" solution to the Ehrenfest paradox, then the "correct" solution to Ehernfest paradox needs to be looked at again. If it's compatible with it though, then what are we arguing about? I haven't studied it as deeply as you have because I was put off by Einstein's non-Euclidean voodoo at the start. Non-Euclidean voodoo does not give you permission to fail to have a rotating ring interface correctly with a Euclidean metric and to conform to the basic laws of length contraction and time dilation.

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I'm not saying that you're either right or wrong. I'm just letting you know what to expect from me on this point and in the future, that's all.

That's fine - I don't know if we even have an argument with each other here, but it would be more to the point if you moved on to discussing the thought experiment outlined in the second post of this thread where I found a way of removing all the rotation aspects from things altogether. We are now dealing with things that move exclusively in perfectly straight lines (once our trains have reached their target speeds along the rails).
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 05/08/2016 20:01:52
One correction to make from earlier: when I was describing flashing lights and an observer a lightyear above the experiment, the time between the first two flashes would actually be shorter than the time between the second and third flash, so that didn't work. What works better is to bring the Frame A observer in close, but still above the plane on which the action plays out. The middle flash should occur directly under him, so a line from the point where the flash is emitted running up to this observer will be perpendicular to the plane.

There are other ways to make the measurements though, and one would be to set up a camera of pixels all over the plane on which the action takes place. Each pixel would simply record what's happening on the plane right under it, and they would all record the action by taking pictures in accordance with their own clocks, all synchronised for Frame A. To synchronise two clocks, you simply position yourself halfway between them and have one adjusted until you see them both tick at the same time. Once you've done this for trillions of clocks governing trillions of pixels, you can take photographs of the action from the Frame A perspective with no Doppler effect complications interfering. When you look at the pictures and compare the ones taken at different times, you can then calculate the speeds of all items through Frame A as measured from Frame A.

[Edit: During the course of this thread, I wrote a piece of reference-frame camera software ( www.magicschoolbook.com/science/ref-frame-camera ) which illustrates some of the thought experiments discussed here and allows them to be explored properly. It runs in JavaScript straight off the web page, so there is nothing to install. You can load the example objects or program in your own, then change the frame of reference to see how they appear from that perspective.]
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 06/08/2016 12:51:12
Let us consider a disc trravelling flat in the x direction along the x/y plane. Let us also consider a projectile that is fired vertically upwards. From a frame of reference considered stationary with respect to the plane the projectile takes a non vertical path with its direction at an angle to the moving disc that is less that 90 degrees in the direction of motion. If the system were moving at relativistic speeds length contraction would be in both the x and z dimensions. If the projectile had a greater velocity than the moving disc then David's point becomes apparent.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 06/08/2016 15:55:23
Why would a train on B experience any additional length contraction in the direction of motion of A'?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 06/08/2016 21:43:44
I will now provide a better description of how the length contraction must be applied to Train B as viewed from Frame A.

First, let's consider the rocket flying over the train, moving at 0.968c in a direction 26.6 degrees off north. At this speed of travel, the rocket will be length-contracted in that direction to a quarter of its rest length. If, before launching the rocket, we paint a square on its top surface (this being a flat surface parallel to the plane we're running all the apparatus through) and we also align the rocket to point 26.6 degrees off north before we paint the square onto it, we can paint this square so that its edges (each a metre long) are aligned north-south and west east. Once we have sent the rocket off and it is moving at the target speed of 0.968c, the length contraction on it will act at the angle shown in the diagram below. The arrow shows the direction for the contraction, the amount of contraction will be to 0.25 of its rest length, and the end result is shown on the right: we see how the square will now appear as viewed from Frame A. I drew the diagram and it is not quite accurate as I don't have software capable of rotating by 26.6 degrees, contracting to 1/4 of the height and then rotating back by 26.6 degrees, so it may be a bit wider vertically than it should be, but it's good enough.

If we now draw lots of squares on both the trains, each a metre by a metre and with edges aligned north-south and west-east, all of the squares on Train B should look (when viewed from Frame A) exactly like the distorted, contracted square painted on the rocket flying overhead. Clearly they cannot be that shape though, because our rails force the two long sides to be horizontal, so the train will be crushed into a different shape to make those sides horizontal, and we'll be left with a buckled train a quarter of its rest width. In addition to that, it will either pull the two rails closer together to match, or if the poles holding the rails apart don't buckle or telescope to a shorter length, the train will be further buckled by being pulled apart to twice the width that the material of the train is comfortable with.

All of this destruction of the train is serious stuff which will render it a write-off, so what will it look like from the point of view of a Frame B observer standing on Rail B? Is the train running along happily in the metre-wide gap between the rails without its material being twisted and torn? Is that compatible with the devastated ruin of shattered metal that we see from Frame A?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 06/08/2016 21:58:34
I will now provide a better description of how the length contraction must be applied to Train B as viewed from Frame A.
Except that you didn't do this. Just show us the translations that you are using. Don't introduce some new object, just show us the work.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 06/08/2016 22:14:35
Why would a train on B experience any additional length contraction in the direction of motion of A'?

The length contraction on each square drawn on the train (see my previous post) should be exactly the same as for the square painted on the rocket co-moving with it, but they are prevented from taking up that shape by the rails. Once they have warped to conform to the restrictions imposed on them by the rails, they may have lost all length-contraction in the west-east direction, and even without the rails causing the train to warp, for the train to align itself comfortably it would have to change its alignment away from west-east, making it impossible to align with the rail it's supposed to be travelling along.

The problem we have here, which Lorentz, Einstein and co. were apparently too lazy to explore (or at least to do so properly by forcing things to interface with Frame A's Euclidean metric), is simply that the length contraction acting north-south and west-east vectors are not compatible with the length contraction on the angled line which the vectors add up to. I originally spotted that problem when I was looking at the rotating disc and wondered how the material at point N could retain the required length contraction in the north-south direction without having more length contraction applied to it in that direction as a result of its extra movement eastwards, and it turned out that it couldn't - it was clearly impossible for the material of the disc to spread out north-south as much as the non-rotating discs. Having also found that I could minimise the accelerations to trivial levels simply by using bigger and bigger discs, I realised that the effect must show up in a straight-line experiment too with no rotation in it whatsoever, and that indeed turned out to be the case.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 06/08/2016 22:24:06
I will now provide a better description of how the length contraction must be applied to Train B as viewed from Frame A.
Except that you didn't do this. Just show us the translations that you are using. Don't introduce some new object, just show us the work.

I did precisely what I said. What new object did I introduce? The rocket co-moving with Train B was already there - I put it there precisely to make the point that the material in the train has to behave exactly like the material in the rocket, which means that what happens to the square drawn on the rocket should happen to the squares drawn on the train, except that the squares on the train can't behave like that because the're constrained by the rails and are warped away from that shape as a result, buckling the train.

If you want to see what length contraction to 0.25 of the original length does to a square, you can look at the diagram I provided. If you don't belive the diagram, you can make your own in Microsoft Paint in the way that I did. I drew a square angled so that its sides were about 26.6 degrees off the vertical/horizontal, then I squished the picture to a quarter of the original height. I then redrew what I saw, turning it through apx. 26.6 degrees to get a close approximation of what the square on the rocket would look like from Frame A.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 06/08/2016 22:29:34
The length contraction on each square drawn on the train (see my previous post) should be exactly the same as for the square painted on the rocket co-moving with it, but they are prevented from taking up that shape by the rails.
And the reason for this is? If you would actually work this out, you would not find a problem here.
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The problem we have here, which Lorentz, Einstein and co. were apparently too lazy to explore (or at least to do so properly by forcing things to interface with Frame A's Euclidean metric), is simply that the length contraction acting north-south and west-east vectors are not compatible with the length contraction on the angled line which the vectors add up to.
Who should I believe here? On the one side, I have a number of very smart individuals who have had their work checked for over a century, work that I have gone through myself at various times, and work that has been instrumental in some of the highest precision applications in all of human history. On the other hand, there is a person who will not actually work out all the details of their example.

Who should I expect is "too lazy" to present this subject properly?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 07/08/2016 01:33:39
How have I not worked it out properly? Do you seriously imagine that the edges of the length-contracted square will still be aligned north-south and west-east after the contraction has been applied at 26.6 degrees away from north so that it will sit comfortably between the rails? Likewise, do you think the north-south component of the contraction will only be to 0.5 of the rest width? You should be able to visualise it in your head without reaching for a calculator. However, let's go through all the numbers and see if the result conforms to the diagram I drew:-

Let's name the corners of the square s top left, t top right, u bottom left and v bottom right. Before we apply the contraction, lines su and tv are aligned north-south while lines st and uv are aligned west-east. The contraction is applied at 26.6 degrees away from north (to the east of it) and reduces the length in that direction to 0.25. What angle do the lines st and uv now lie at?

Let's give the corners initial coordinates (using what I hope are convenient numbers [so you can divide any value by 4 to convert to metres if you wish]), s (0,4), t (4,4), u (0,0) and v (4,0). The contraction acts along the line from (3,4) to (1,0), and we can put a line in perpendicular to that to use as the midline for both the original square and for the new resulting shape, this midline running from (0,3) to (4,1).

To find the coordinates for point s', we can draw a line through s perpendicular to our midline, so cos(26.6)=d/1 gives us the length of this perpendicular line from point s to where it hits our midline (so d=0.923), then the vertical distance back up to the same altitude as s is calculated by cos(26.6)=a/d, so a=0.852, then we take that away from 1 and add it to 3 to get the y-coordinate for the intersection point (which is 3.147). For the x-coordinate of the intersection point, we multiply sine(26.6) by d, so the intersection point is at (-0.413,3.147). Point s' is 1/4 of the way from the intersection point to s, so s' is at (-0.31,3.36). Point v' can be calculated using the same offsets in the opposite direction, so it's (4.31,0.64).

To find the coordinates for point t', we draw a line through t perpendicular to our midline, so cos(26.6)=d/3 gives us the distance to our new intersection point, and this time d=2.682. The vertical distance back up to t is cos(26.6)=a/d, so a=2.4, then we take that away from 4 to get the y-coordinate for the intersection point (which is 1.6). For the x-coordinate of the intersection point, we multiply sin(26.6) by d and subtract from 4, so the intersection point is at (2.8,1.6). Point t' will be a quarter of the way from there to t, so t' is at (3.1,2.2). Point u' can be calculated using the same offsets in the opposite direction, so it's (0.9,1.8). Plot this out and you'll get the shape in the diagram below, which isn't far off the shape I drew before - it's a little bigger, and it's rotated a bit more.

Armed with these coordinates, we can now calculate the angles of its sides. Horizontal separation between u' and v' = 4.31 - 0.9 = 3.41; vertical separation = 1.8 - 0.64 = 1.16, so tan x = 1.16/3.41, and that means u'v' slopes down at 18.8 degrees to the horizontal. The length of u'v' is, using Pythagoras, is 3.6, but we have to divide by 4 to convert to metres, so that's 90cm. This is the correct length contraction for something moving at 0.433c, but crucially the angle is wrong and does not fit the alignment of the track. Also, The actual length west-east component of the contraction that we have on this line is to 85cm.

The horizontal separation between t' and v' is 4.31 - 3.1 = 1.21, and the vertical separation is 2.2 - 0.64 = 1.56, so the angle of t'v' is at 37.8 degrees off vertical. The length of t'v' = 1.974, which is close to the 2 required for north-south length contraction and may be out due to rounding errors (as I kept ditching digits beyond the ones I wrote down), but again the angle is wrong and the actual north-south component of the contraction here is to 39cm. Each square drawn on the train should appear the same shape as in my diagram when viewed from Frame A, but it is actually going to be forced to warp to fit the space between the two rails with enormous stresses applying to it. In the course of adapting to that space (which will destroy the structural integrity of the train), it must maintain the same area if the material isn't to be stretched overall, so simply warping it until the lines are horizontal and vertical won't do. Rotating it until the long sides are aligned with the track would give a good approximate guide as to how wide it would actually end up being once it's adapted to the space, but it will clearly be less than a third of a metre. Because we have to warp the material (and destroy its structural integrity) in order to make it conform to the space, we can argue about what the resulting width and length will end up being, but if we contrive to make the length of our buckled train 0.9m, the width will be less than a third of a metre, while if we contrive to make it half a metre wide, the length will be much shorter than the required 0.9m.

Now, you told me I'd find no problem by this point, but I think a train which has to be severely buckled to try to make it conform to the required north-south and west-east length contractions and which still fails to come close to meeting both those requirements even after you've destroyed it is more than a small problem.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 07/08/2016 01:45:43
Objects traveling at speeds very close to c can be considered to be approaching a Rindler horizon. So destruction of such objects would be similar to the destruction of objects due to the tidal forces near to small dense masses.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 07/08/2016 03:53:50
Objects traveling at speeds very close to c can be considered to be approaching a Rindler horizon. So destruction of such objects would be similar to the destruction of objects due to the tidal forces near to small dense masses.

It's not the same: we have a rocket moving at 0.968c in the direction 26.6 degrees away from north with a square painted on it which takes up the form and alignment shown below (north being up in the picture), and it is not being put under any stresses. If we take a carriage of the train and send it like a rocket at 0.968c in the same direction (with it aligned west-east when we launch it, and without rotating it at all as we accelerate it up to speed), the squares on that carriage will also look just like the square on the rocket, again without any stresses acting on them. However, the squares on Train B which is trapped between the rails cannot take up that same shape (the shape at which the material would sit naturally without stresses being applied to it), and that's the key thing here - the train has to buckle severely to fit into the space available to it, and that will destroy its structural integrity.

The camera won't lie here either: I described a camera earlier which could take Frame A pictures to show snapshots of where everything is at given points in time by Frame A's clock. These photos is required to show the square painted on the rocket as having the shape shown below on the left. The squares on the train would, if they could spread themselves into the shape where they are not under any stresses, be that same shape too, but they cannot be if they are to appear between Rail B and the new rail. There will be extreme stesses running through the material of the train which will buckle it out of shape (and wreck it), and those same forces must act on the train even if you're viewing it while standing on Rail B and measuring everything by Frame Bs Euclidean metric instead of As [I'd normally put apostrophes in those, but I don't want them to be mistaken for the other frames A' and B' tied to the two trains] - those stresses cannot magically be absent now with Train B magically being unbuckled and in perfect condition. If it's wrecked in Frame A, it must also be wrecked in Frame B, and that means the buckling would still have to occur and it would astonish the Frame B observer, unless he has read this thread and realises that he is moving through the fabric of space at relativistic speed.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 07/08/2016 06:19:40
I'm now going to restate the proof that a preferred frame is theoretically detectable, but this time with numbers to make it easier for people to state which parts they agree with or object to. If they agree with every point on this list, they are logically required to accept that the proof is valid. (Also, if they disagree with points 6 to 8 but agree with point 9, they are logically required to accept that the proof is valid and that they're wrong about points 6 to 8.) This time, the contraction is described more accurately.

1. We start using Frame A as the basis for our measurements. If it it happens to be the preferred frame, it doesn't matter what speed our train moves along the track - all length contraction on it must operate in the west-east direction and leave the train's width completely unchanged, so it remains a metre wide. No one should disagree with this.

2. When we look at Rail B from Frame A, we see it moving north at 0.866c (sideways) and its width is contracted to half a metre. We know that its rest width is one metre, so we are seeing it contracted to half that, and that is the correct amount of contraction for that speed. Again, no one should disagree with this.

3. From Frame A, we also see Train B moving along Rail B at 0.433 relative to Rail B, but we measure all the material of Train B as moving through Frame A at 0.968c in a direction 26.6 degrees away from north. We can see that Clock B (which counts out the time of Frame B) is ticking at half the rate of our own clock, so we can tell that the Frame B observer will measure Train B as passing through Frame B at 0.866c, even though we measure it as 0.433c. No one should disagree with any of this.

4. The length contraction that we see (from Frame A) on the rocket sent at an angle 26.6 degrees from north at a speed of 0.968c will reduce its length in that direction to a quarter. A square painted on it when it was at rest (with the rocket already aligned in the direction it was due to go in and with the square aligned with its sides north-south and west-east) will appear the shape shown in the picture attached at the end of this post. This rocket will, once it's up to speed, travel over the train, maintaining position over the same carriage at all times because the train is actually moving in the same direction and at the same speed as the rocket. No one should disagree with any of this.

5. If there are squares painted on the train too (covering the roof from side to side so that they are a metre across, these painted when the train was at rest in Frame A before the experiment began), then once they are moving through Frame A at 0.968c in the same direction as the rocket, they should appear to be the same shape as the square on the rocket if they are not under any stress to distort them away from that shape. Again, no one should disagree with that: the material must behave identically whether it's in the rocket or in the train when it is not being warped by stresses.

6. We see Rail B as being half a metre wide when we measure it from Frame A. We also see a gap half a metre wide between it and the new rail which we added to mark out the space in which the train operates. The required shape for the squares does not fit in the space between the rails and the angles are wrong. If all the material of a carriage ten metres long was to sit together without stresses on it, it would actually have to burst out through the rails to either side at an angle. No one should disagree with that.

7. In order to make the train fit the space between the rails, we have to warp it, and that will put stresses on it which will be so severe that they will destroy the structural integrity of the train. No one should disagree with that.

8. We are switching now to Frame B to analyse things again, so we are co-moving with Rail B. When we measure the width of Rail B, we find it to be a metre wide. When we measure the length of the poles, we find them to be 3m long. When we measure the new rail, we find that it is a metre wide. When we measure the width of the gap between Rail B and the new rail, we find it to be a metre wide. When we measure the width of Train B, we find that it has become warped and broken to fit in the space, and the material is under a weird stress that seems to have no cause. It is likely that the train is substantially less than a metre wide, though not impossible that it is that wide if it has been buckled sufficiently to force it to that width. No one should disagree with any of that because the buckling that we saw happen from Frame A must also happen when viewed from Frame B, though that damage will be much more puzzling when viewed from Frame B.

9. When we go up a ladder and look down on the rocket as it flies above the train (it will pass under us at a speed we measure as 0.866c), it's showing weird length contraction which doesn't fit in with what we have been taught about relativity. We know that there's a square painted on it with the edges running north-south and west-east when it was at rest, and we know that it hasn't rotated since. What we've been taught about relativity tells us that it should have been contracted into a rectangle half as long as it is wide, just like we expected to see the squares on the train, but what does the square on the rocket look like in Frame B? This is much better than looking at the train, because the train's been warped by stresses which mask the shape the squares on it should naturally be. The material of the rocket is unstressed, so it can't be warped and buckled, and that makes it perfect for proving my argument. Frame B can use our special camera too, but we'll have to change the synchronisation of the pixel clocks to make them operate correctly for taking Frame B pictures, although the camera itself remains stationary in Frame A. What happens now when it takes a photograph (having resynchronised it for Frame B) is that the northern pixels take their part of the picture after their southern neighbours in order to stretch out all objects that are co-moving with Frame B, but all the pixels in the west-east direction still take a picture at the same time as the relative coordination of those is unchanged. Crucially, what does the camera now do to the square on the rocket which is also moving sideways? It takes a picture of the most southern point first (the lowest part of the picture attached to this post below), then it takes the next horizontal line up from there, although our shape will have moved slightly to the right by then, and then it'll take then next horizontal line up from there, with our shape again having moved a little to the right, and it will keep doing this until the photo is complete. This will steepen the angle of all the lines, making two of them closer to the vertical not only by stretching out the image, but by moving the higher parts of it progressively further to the right. For the other two lines though, rather than heading for being horizontal, they actually become even more tilted, and in that we have our proof that Lorentz, Einstein and the rest failed to study this properly, because they would have had you believe that the shape should come out as a rectangle. It won't though. I'll try to calculate the actual shape tomorrow and produce accurate numbers for it, but it's too late to do it tonight (i.e. at six in the morning). With the picture it's easy though: it should be sufficient to stretch the picture vertically to twice the height, then push each row of pixels along to the right to a greater degree the higher you go, so if you do that in your mind now, you'll be able to see straight away that I'm right without having to wait for the numbers and exact shape: the lines that would supposedly end up aligned west-east will tilt further away from that angle than they do in the image we're starting with.

QED
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 07/08/2016 18:45:20
It turns out that you have to move each pixel row to the right more than the row below in such a way that two of the lines end up vertical, but the other two are still sloping. I haven't crunched the numbers though, so how do I know this? Well, it's all about my ref-frame camera:-

I described earlier a camera which consists of billions of pixels spread out across a plane to photograph the action. Each pixel has its own clock, but they all tick at the same rate as each other because they're all stationary in the same frame. We initially assume our camera's in the preferred frame and synchronise all the clocks on that basis.

While writing my previous post, I realised that by changing the synchronisation of the clocks in the north-south direction, I can make my camera take Frame B pictures instead of Frame A pictures, but it's actually much better than that. If I change the synchronisation in the west-east direction, I can make it take Frame A' pictures, Frame B' pictures, and indeed pictures revealing how things look as observed from any other imaginable frame (of the non-rotating variety).

Does my camera actually work properly though? Yes. If I set it for Frame B', this being the frame co-moving with the rocket at 0.968c through Frame A, lo and behold it takes pictures of the rocket which show no length contraction on it and which show the square that we painted on it as square. When we set the camera for frame A', this being the frame co-moving with Train A, it takes perfect pictures of the squares on the roof of Train A, while turning any squares on Rail A into rectangles. When we set the camera for Frame B, we see squares of Rail B as square and squares on Rail A as rectangles, but we see squares on Train A as parallelograms with two of their sides aligned parallel to Rail A and the other two sides aligned at an angle rather than perpendicular to Rail A. This is very different from what we see of Train B with the camera set to Frame A, because in that situation we see that the squares on Train B should be the same shape as the square on the rocket, as shown in the picture attached to the end of my previous post, but they can't look like that because Rail B and the new rail prevent them from taking up that form, buckling the material of the train and writing it off.

My ref-frame camera also works as a 3D camera - you just have a matrix of pixels, each of which detects whatever is at that same point and which records it, then pictures of anything can be generated from the data at any angle showing how they should appear from the reference frame of your choice - all you'd need to do is set the clock synchronisation in the three directions, north-south, east-west and up down, and you'd simply set them for the speed at which the required frame is moving in those directions.

I wonder if anyone's already written such ref-frame camera software? Perhaps no one has, because if they had they should have spotted that there's a problem with relativity: when you set the camera to Frame B and look at the square on the rocket, it should have two sides arranged perpendicular to the track while the other two are at an angle to it. I'm guessing that any existing software used to calculate the Frame B view of the square on the rocket would make an error and show it as a rectangle, because if it did the job properly someone should have found all this out long ago.

Now, how long is it going to be before anyone dares to stick their neck out and say they think I'm right...
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 07/08/2016 18:50:57
Can you actually show us the math rather than merely say things by fiat. Then we, you included, can see exactly where your errors are.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 07/08/2016 19:15:51
You should be able to see that I'm right without the numbers: the argument is more than clear enough. I've given you numbers for the shape of the contracted square on the rocket, and that should be enough in itself - the squares on Train B should look the same as that when measured from Frame A, but they can't take up that shape because the rails get in the way and warp them. What's stopping you seeing that!
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 07/08/2016 19:31:45
Here are three simple things you can do to see that I'm right.

(a) Calculate the shape of a square co-moving with Train A as observed by a Frame B observer.

(b) Calculate the shape of a square co-moving with Train B as observed by a Frame A observer.

(c) Calculate the shape of the square on the rocket as observed by a Frame A observer.

Then ask yourself, do your shapes for (b) and (c) match. If not, you've got a contradiction. Then ask if your shape for (c) matches mine. If it doesn't, you're breaking the rules of length contraction. Once you've recognised that my shape for (c) is correct and that (b) must have the same shape, your final task is to compare (a) with (c) and to ask if they are equivalent. With (a) we have a parallelogram with 2 edges aligned parallel to Rail A, but with (b) and (c) we have a parallelogram with no edges aligned parallel to the track.

That should be enough for anyone competent at maths/physics to recognise that I'm right.

Is there really no software that physics experts can use where they put in a shape, define its frame of reference, then define a frame of reference to observe from, and then see at a glance what happens to that shape?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 07/08/2016 23:04:21
You should be able to see that I'm right without the numbers: the argument is more than clear enough.
See, that's crank reasoning. You are claiming that everyone in the world, up to you, has been missing a simple problem that invalidates all of the reasoning in relativity theory. Yet you do not want to take the time to go carefully through your example to show that your numbers work out.

If you won't do the work, then I can relax and trust in the history of science since 1905. I can draw the entirely reasonable conclusion that you are making a basic error of reasoning. I won't be alone in drawing this conclusion, either. That you call everyone who every worked on relativity theory "lazy" for missing this supposed problem but you won't bother to work through the details yourself speaks to your character, not theirs.

If you want your Nobel prize, then work through the details.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 07/08/2016 23:46:11
I don't understand your attitude. I've told you exactly what to look at in post #30, but no, you can't be bothered to look. I've shown you the shape of the square on the rocket as seen from Frame A (and given you the numbers that I calculated for it), and I've explained that any unstressed square co-moving with Train B must look the same as that from Frame A. Do you at any stage get to the point where you agree with those two things? No. Why not?

There is only one more thing to do, and that is to calculate what unstressed squares travelling with Train A look like from Frame B. I have told you what shape these will be (two of their sides must be parallel to Rail A) and I have told you that this is not equivalent to the supposedly equivalent case in which we look at the shape of unstressed squares co-moving with Train B as viewed from Frame A. Are you prepared to accept that this would prove the case. No. Why ever not?

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Yet you do not want to take the time to go carefully through your example to show that your numbers work out.

There are ways to prove things that use reasoning which don't require numbers on every single irrelevant issue. What counts here is extremely simple: are two edges of the shapes parallel or not parallel with rails. I've shown you a picture of the distorted square on the rocket (and shown you the numbers I used to calculate its shape) and it is manifestly obvious that none of its edges are parallel with rail B as viewed from Rail A. No one sane should need any more numbers on that point to recognise that this is the case.

The only part I haven't put numbers on is the shape of squares co-moving with Train A as viewed from Frame B. If I do that for you, will you accept the proof, and if not, why not?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 08/08/2016 00:22:42
Key point: in all cases, the squares talked of in this thought experiment have initially been aligned with their edges lined up north-south and west-east, and a no time subsequently have any of them ever been rotated.

Those with agile minds should realise already that it's impossible for two of the edges of squares co-moving with Train A to be anything other than parallel to Rail A as seen by a Frame B observer. What will have surprised them (and it certainly surprised me) is that the reverse is not the case; that squares co-moving with Train B do not have any of their sides aligned parallel to Rail B as seen by a Frame A observer. My analysis of the appearance of the square on the rocket settles the latter point entirely, and it shows up the mistake that Lorentz and Einstein made in their analysis of that, because they failed to realise that if you analyse the Frame A shape for a square moving in the direction that the one in my example does and at that speed, it must have the same shape as a square sitting on a train moving along a path like Rail B. They would jump frame to Frame B instead, then naively apply length contraction from there on the train, then jump back to Frame A, thereby producing a parallelogram with two of its sides parallel to Rail B (a mirror image of the one that a Frame B observer will see when he looks at a square on Train A), and they'd fail to recognise that it didn't match up with the rocket's square even though it is required to do so.

Absolutely shocking that such big names could make such a fundamental error and for no one to spot it until now!
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 08/08/2016 02:04:57
I don't understand your attitude. I've told you exactly what to look at in post #30, but no, you can't be bothered to look.
Dude, you are either outright lying or you have no clue what is going on.

Let's see the actual functions you are using along with your actual numbers. Walk us through the calculations.

Absolutely shocking that such big names could make such a fundamental error and for no one to spot it until now!
Exactly. The only reasonable conclusion is that you are making a mistake. So walk through your example with actual numbers and calculations instead of fudging things with numbers you are cutting and pasting from other sources.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 08/08/2016 07:26:17
Absolute incompetence! I don't think they can ever have looked at this at all, because if they had, they'd have found another problem:-

What is the length contraction on one of our squares on the roof of Train A as measured from Frame A (through which the train is moving east at 0.866c)? This part's easy - it contracts from one metre to half a metre. But what is the east-west length contraction seen on this square by a Frame B observer (whose frame is moving north at 0.866c relative to Frame A)? The answer is that it must still be half a metre wide east-west, even though from Frame B the train is measured as moving at 0.433c, a speed which should only be able to reduce the square's width in that direction to 90cm. The observer in Frame B will also see the square contracted to half a metre in the north-south direction because of his speed of travel in that direction, but the east and west edges of the square will run at an angle.

For relativity to hold, it should be the case that the Frame A observer will see squares on the top of Train B showing the same amount of east-west length contraction on them as the Frame B observer will see on the squares on the top of Train A. The photographs they take of these squares should be exact mirror images of each other, but they aren't. Observer A 's photo of a square co-moving with Train B shows a parallelogram with no sides parallel to Rail B. Observer B's photo of a square co-moving with Train A shows a paralellogram of much shorter length and with two of its sides aligned parallel to Rail A.

I have yet to work out one detail, and that's the angle at which the east and west sides of squares on Train A will slope in Observer B 's photo, but it is clear now that no one else has ever done this either. If they had, they'd have realised that it's impossible for the strong east-west contraction on Train A to be hidden from Observer B.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 08/08/2016 07:52:31
I don't understand your attitude. I've told you exactly what to look at in post #30, but no, you can't be bothered to look.
Dude, you are either outright lying or you have no clue what is going on.

Or, I understand this stuff and you don't.

Quote
Let's see the actual functions you are using along with your actual numbers. Walk us through the calculations.

Do you know how to apply length contraction? Are you able to take a speed like 0.866c and calculate the time dilation and length contraction that is associated with it? If you understand relativity, this should be dead easy for you and you should be able to see that the numbers I use are correct. When I say that 0.866c contracts things to half their rest length, or that 0.968c contracts them to a quarter, or that 0.433c contracts things to 0.9, or that 0.99c contracts them to 1/7, you should be able to check that without anyone holding your hand and you should immediately recognise that I know how to calculate these numbers, even though I use a different method to do so that the one you would use. (I use arcsine of the speed to calculate an angle, then cosine of that angle to calculate the time dilation and length contraction. You can try that out and compare it with the formula Lorentz came up with, and then you can ask yourself how the heck I worked out a different way of doing it that produces the same results so easily, and you can wonder what the angle half way through the calculation represents and what it's relevance is.)

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The only reasonable conclusion is that you are making a mistake. So walk through your example with actual numbers and calculations instead of fudging things with numbers you are cutting and pasting from other sources.

Why would I need to cut and paste numbers when they're so ridiculously easy to compute? I have given you the numbers and they're easy to calculate - you should be able to check any part of what I've said with ease, but you don't appear to have a clue how to. You don't know how to work out how to contract a square to 1/4 of its rest length at an angle of 26.6 degrees, but I've done it here and given you numbers for coordinates to pin down its precise shape. You could check that with ease if you were able to hack the maths of it, but you don't even need to - I told you how I got my approximate drawing before that, and you could to the same thing to do a quick check without having to do any maths: I told you to draw a square tilted at about 26.6 degrees in Microsoft Paint (which is free with Windows) and to use the stretch function to reduce the height to 25%, then you'll see the same shape that I provided, and all you have to do is put the 26.6 degree rotation in to get the correct alignment for it. But no, you can't even do that. The truth of it is, you're working outside of your knowledge and pretending to understand a subject which you manifestly don't.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 08/08/2016 14:13:47
Dude, you are either outright lying or you have no clue what is going on.

Or, I understand this stuff and you don't.[/quote]
Yes, you understand it so well you can't do a few Lorentz transformations to justify your numbers.

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Quote
Let's see the actual functions you are using along with your actual numbers. Walk us through the calculations.

Do you know how to apply length contraction? Are you able to take a speed like 0.866c and calculate the time dilation and length contraction that is associated with it? If you understand relativity, this should be dead easy for you and you should be able to see that the numbers I use are correct.
Yes, see, here's the problem: you always use the same numbers in the same sloppy fashion. You won't show your work... have you done the work?
Quote
Why would I need to cut and paste numbers when they're so ridiculously easy to compute?
Because a) you haven't done the work, b) the work you've done so far is incorrect, or c) if you were to actually go carefully through this example you would see that you were wrong.

Could if be that you know c) and this is why you refuse to do the work? Is this why you say ridiculous things like that you have discovered a mathematical error that nobody has found in over 100 years?

Quote
I told you to draw a square tilted at about 26.6 degrees in Microsoft Paint (which is free with Windows) and to use the stretch function to reduce the height to 25%, then you'll see the same shape that I provided, and all you have to do is put the 26.6 degree rotation in to get the correct alignment for it. But no, you can't even do that. The truth of it is, you're working outside of your knowledge and pretending to understand a subject which you manifestly don't.
Cranks think that physics is done in MS Paint. But that's not how physics is done.

Since I have a fair bit of home repair and other work to do today, I'll probably get back on this tomorrow.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 08/08/2016 17:12:56
Well, after a little messing around with the numbers, the obvious problem with the parallelogram shape came up: the relativity of simultaneity.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 08/08/2016 17:55:21
You quite clearly haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about. In our basic scenario, we don't even need to change frame to see the problem as it shows up entirely from Frame A. Train B has different length-contraction acting on it than Rail B as soon as it starts moving relative to Rail B, and it can no longer sit in the space provided for it without stresses building up which will warp it more and more the faster it goes. You have no answer for that, and nor do the deities which you're defending in your role as part of the clergy.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 08/08/2016 18:46:30
Pretty awful that I should have to do trivial stuff this for a physics expert who can't handle the numbers in the blink of an eye, but here's a link to a page about length contraction that he might trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_contraction

The formula used there is: Length = RestLength times root(1 - v^2 / c^2)

If we make c=1 and RestLength=1, this simplifies to root(1-v^2)

Let's apply this to the values I've used and see what length contraction we get on a meter-long object moving at different speeds:-

0.866c --> root(1-0.866^2) = root(1-0.75) = root(0.25) = 0.5

[Or, arcsine(0.866) = 60 degrees; cosine(60) = 0.5]

(Note: whenever I say 0.866, the more accurate figure of sin(60) can be used instead, but it won't make any practical difference to the results.)

0.9682458366 --> root(1-0.968^2) = root(1-0.9375) = root(0.0625) = 0.25

[Or, arcsine(0.9682458366 = 75.522 degrees; cosine(75.522) - 0.25]

0.433c --> root(1-0.433^2) = root(1-0.187489) = root(0.812511) = 0.901

[Or, arcsine(0.433) = 25.658 degrees; cosine(25.658) = 0.901]

There is no need to justify the speed of Frame B relative to Frame A or the speed of Train B relative to Rail B as the values I've chosen are fully possible (in a thought experiment, at least, though accelerating the material to such speeds would be costly). However, to calculate the speed of travel of the movement of the material of Train B through Frame A, we have to combine the two vectors which are 0.866 and 0.433. We do this through Pythagoras:-

v = root(0.866^2 + 0.433^2) = root(0.75+0.187489) = root(0.937489) = 0.968

Now, anyone competent who reads this thread will have taken a minute with a calculator to check that my speeds match the amount of length contraction that I've stated for them. They will also have worked out the angle at which the material moving at 0.968c through Frame A is moving in, and again this will only have taken a moment for them to do: you simply use the two vectors and a bit of standard trig:-

tan(x) = 0.433/0.866

tan(x) = 0.5

x = arctan(0.5)

x = 26.565 degrees

The next simple step is to take a square with its edges aligned north-south and east-west, then calculate its new shape once it's been length contracted to a quarter of its rest length in the direction 26.6 degrees away from north. I have done that for you, and I've given you a simple way to check my result without you having to do the maths yourself, so it takes quite some effort for an expert reading this to fail to recognise that my numbers all stack up. Again, I have attached a picture of that shape below.

That shape is the one that any square of Train B should take up because the material of the train is all moving at 26.6 degrees to north at 0.968c, and it will not fit comfortably between the rails as a result. The only way the train can remain between the rails is by having stresses applied to it to force it to remain in that space, and those forces will destroy its structural integrity.

There is nothing there that anyone sane should dispute. It is clear that Lorentz and Einstein never looked at this at all.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 08/08/2016 18:56:58
Well, after a little messing around with the numbers, the obvious problem with the parallelogram shape came up: the relativity of simultaneity.

If we take a Frame A photo of Rail B and the new rail using my ref-frame camera, it will give us a picture of two rails aligned east-west, each with its width length-contracted to half a metre and with a half metre wide space between them. The squares on the train, if not under any stress to warp them, must come out in the image looking like the picture I attached to the end of my previous post. There is no magical adjustment to its shape that can make it fit neatly between the rails because the shape I've shown is the Frame A shape for it. If a carriage is ten metres long, for its material to be unstressed it will have to have both ends embedded deep into the rails, which is technically known as a crash.

In post #23 I gave you the angle for the long side of the parallelogram, and it was 18.8 degrees to the east-west angle. If the whole train is made in one piece, and if its material is under no warping stress imposed on it by the rails, it would have to be angled through the picture at 18.8 degrees to the east-west line all the way across the image while the rails would be aligned perfectly east-west. The train would only be seen as passing through the rails and the space between the rails at one place in the picture, while in the rest it would be further north or south of that. A person standing on the rail at any point where the train is not seen to be in the right place will be able to jump into the gap between the rails without being hit by the train no matter how long he stays there - you are not going to see him bounce off the train or be smashed to pieces by it because it is manifestly not there.

Let me just take a moment to explain to anyone slow witted that if there is an impact between any object moving at any speed through Frame A and another object, both things will always appear in the same place in any photograph taken of the event, and they will do so regardless of which Frame the photographer is working from. If the train is actually between the rails the whole way along, it will appear in all pictures to be between the rails the whole way along, and it will be seen to be there in all pictures of it taken from all frames. The only way the train can be in that space though is if it is under high stress and has been destructively warped to keep it between the rails.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 08/08/2016 19:25:17
How many times do I have to prove the case before people are prepared to come forward and say they recognise it as correct, or that they can't find any fault in it? Where are you? Where are the powerful, rational minds? We have one person so far who appears to have accepted that I have a point. Do I have to take this to the mathematicians to get some action on this? It should be on the news. Relativity has been blown out of the water and all you can say is nothing?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 08/08/2016 20:14:50
I need to go through this thread again but it is important to do so as this is a very important idea.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 08/08/2016 20:49:43
Pretty awful that I should have to do trivial stuff this for a physics expert who can't handle the numbers in the blink of an eye, but here's a link to a page about length contraction that he might trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_contraction
There are quite a few numbers here, and it pays to be careful, since you obviously have not been careful.

You are half-assing your efforts by just looking at length contraction. You are ignoring when elements on the train match up with the tracks. And because of this, you have a distorted picture of the relevant physics.

Probably 99% of the time that someone thinks they have a problem with relativity theory it is because they haven't taken relativity of simultaneity into account.
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There is nothing there that anyone sane should dispute. It is clear that Lorentz and Einstein never looked at this at all.
Nope, it is clear that you think you can get by with just adding in length contraction without considering the actual coordinates involved. Which is why I asked to see your calculations and you have revealed to us that you haven't actually done them.
Well, after a little messing around with the numbers, the obvious problem with the parallelogram shape came up: the relativity of simultaneity.
If we take a Frame A photo of Rail B and the new rail using my ref-frame camera, it will give us a picture of two rails aligned east-west, each with its width length-contracted to half a metre and with a half metre wide space between them. The squares on the train, if not under any stress to warp them, must come out in the image looking like the picture I attached to the end of my previous post. There is no magical adjustment to its shape that can make it fit neatly between the rails because the shape I've shown is the Frame A shape for it. If a carriage is ten metres long, for its material to be unstressed it will have to have both ends embedded deep into the rails, which is technically known as a crash.
You might be surprised to learn how no object is absolutely rigid. However, you are also ignoring when the different parts of the train are in contact with the different parts of the track. If you were to actually go through your scenario and work out the coordinates, you would find that you are misrepresenting what is "seen" in an instant of Frame A.
How many times do I have to prove the case before people are prepared to come forward and say they recognise it as correct, or that they can't find any fault in it? Where are you? Where are the powerful, rational minds? We have one person so far who appears to have accepted that I have a point. Do I have to take this to the mathematicians to get some action on this? It should be on the news. Relativity has been blown out of the water and all you can say is nothing?
All you have to do is make your case once. Just once. Yet you just haven't done the work. You think that you can get by in a relativity example by just incorporating length contraction and it doesn't work like that. I'm not going to use words like, "slow witted," but you might want to think twice before you do.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 08/08/2016 22:36:12
There are quite a few numbers here, and it pays to be careful, since you obviously have not been careful.
Obviously!

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You are half-assing your efforts by just looking at length contraction. You are ignoring when elements on the train match up with the tracks. And because of this, you have a distorted picture of the relevant physics.

Allow me to let you in on a secret: I know what I'm talking about. I also know, as do most people who are reading this thread [thanks, by the way, to the people who have now made comments in PMs], that you're just winging it and that you're horribly out of your depth. Take a look at the second interactive diagram on this page: www.magicschoolbook.com/science/relativity . This diagram shows the MMX apparatus with length contraction applied to it, and it gives you the Frame A view of something moving along at 0.866c. Notice that the vertical arm is straight and perpendicular to the direction of travel, just like Rail B. The only distortion is the length contraction, and it applies solely in the direction of travel. There are no complications - the pulses of light that you see running thorugh the apparatus move across the screen at all times at the same speed (until they are captured by the detector). This displays how things behave in the Euclidean metric of a frame of reference. If you click the "stop" button, you will get a "photograph" at a point in time where it is the exact same time at every single point in the picture (based on all pixels having clocks synchronised for Frame A, which is fully possible to do with the Frame A camera in my thought experiment). If there was a square in that diagram moving at 26.6 degrees down from the direction of the MMX apparatus at 0.968c, and if it's rest shape had its edges aligned up-down and left-right and it hasn't subsequently rotated) it would be the shape shown in the picture I keep attaching to posts (only rotated by 90 degrees), and each point of that shape would be exactly where it would appear on the screen, its coordinates in space and time being locked down precisely. If one of these snapshots showed it near to the vertical arm of the MMX, it would be clear to anyone who isn't blind that none of its edges are parallel to that arm. We're talking here about fundamental rules as to where and when things appear in a Euclidean metric for a single frame of reference, and there is no room for messing with what the diagram shows - things are exactly where they appear to be and not somewhere else. There is no leeway for any funny business to go on: objects always appear where they are supposed to be and the rules of length contraction dictate the separation of their component parts and dictates their effective shape as a consequence.

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Probably 99% of the time that someone thinks they have a problem with relativity theory it is because they haven't taken relativity of simultaneity into account.

That's wonderful - what you need to do is identify them carefully and tell them where they've made that mistake. When you're dealing with someone in the other 1%, it would be a good idea not to offer the same unthinking "solution" on the basis that you'll be right 99% of the time.

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There is nothing there that anyone sane should dispute. It is clear that Lorentz and Einstein never looked at this at all.
Nope, it is clear that you think you can get by with just adding in length contraction without considering the actual coordinates involved. Which is why I asked to see your calculations and you have revealed to us that you haven't actually done them.

Which calculations are you asking for now? What is wrong with you that you need to have more stuff spelt out to you that anyone competent should be able to understand already? Do you need a multitude of coordinates to understand the idea of a rail aligned east-west running north through Frame A at 0.866c and to visualise it? Do you need a multitude of coordinates to understand the idea of a train moving eastwards along that rail at 0.433c and to visualise it? Do you suffer from some kind of disability that I need to take into account? This is one of the simplest thought experiments you're likely to encounter, so I'm struggling to understand why it's causing you so much difficulty to get your head round it.

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You might be surprised to learn how no object is absolutely rigid.

There are tight constraints on how far you can flex most materials before they become damaged. The train is not made of rubber.

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However, you are also ignoring when the different parts of the train are in contact with the different parts of the track. If you were to actually go through your scenario and work out the coordinates, you would find that you are misrepresenting what is "seen" in an instant of Frame A.

That is an incorrect assertion. The shape of the warped square on the rocket is the shape that a square on the train must take if it has no warping stresses applied to it, and all parts of it are where that shape shows them to be at a single point in time in Frame A's Euclidean metric - no one competent should be arguing that any of those points are representations of different times for the same snapshot of events. These snapshots specifically show a single time throughout (by Frame A 's time).

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All you have to do is make your case once. Just once. Yet you just haven't done the work. You think that you can get by in a relativity example by just incorporating length contraction and it doesn't work like that. I'm not going to use words like, "slow witted," but you might want to think twice before you do.

No, it seems that I have to make it again and again, and every time I'm asked for numbers it's not good enough for you because you don't accept numbers as numbers and try to make out you haven't been given any! You don't understand this stuff and all you've done here is throw your own misunderstandings at me. You don't understand the functionality of a Euclidean metric and don't understand that the rules of length contraction and time dilation are related specifically to that kind of metric.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 09/08/2016 05:51:33
Dude, I had a look at your webpage. I'm sorry.

You believe what you want to believe, I'm not going to pressure you.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 09/08/2016 20:08:48
Dude, I had a look at your webpage. I'm sorry.

Well, it's a wee bit out of date now, but then so is every other page on the Net, and mine will need the least modification to correct it.

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You believe what you want to believe, I'm not going to pressure you.

Balls. Let's do it with balls (or circles in the diagrams, so I may use the words interchangeably) instead of squares, because that will reveal something beautifully clearly, and they don't have those troublesome corners on them to catch on anything. Importantly, at no point will these balls ever rotate - they'll retain their original alignment throughout, and each of them will have N, E, S and W points marked on them.

Let's use a circle of diameter 1m, and we'll draw one of these on our rocket while it's at rest in Frame A before sending it off on its journey. Instead of trains, we're going to send balls along between the rails, and crucially we're going to see which parts of them touch the rails and how far apart the rails are. We'll give Rail A a second rail to go with it (just like the one Rail B already has), so Rail A is a metre wide and runs east-west across the plane on which all the action takes place. The second rail, Rail A2, is also a meter wide, and the gap between the two rails is again one metre. The balls will be fired along in the gap between the rails. Whatever speed we send the balls at between rails A and A2, the points marked N and S on them will always be scraping against the rails no matter how much length contraction is acting on them, and that's because the length contraction will act exactly in the east-west direction as that's the way they're moving through space.

As before, we're going to use Rail B and B2, but we'll move them through Frame A at a new speed so that I can illustrate my method for cutting and pasting these numbers from random web pages. I want to apply length contraction to 1/8 of the rest length this time, and to do it at 45 degrees to north. So. I start with 0.125, then use arccos to get an angle, so that's 82.81924422 degrees [readers of my website will know what that angle means for the direction of light moving through the MMX on the arm that's perpendicular to the direction of travel of the apparatus], then I use sine to get the speed that I want the rocket to travel at, and this comes out at 0.9921567416c. So, having copied and pasted that into here, I can now collect the vectors (from a randomly selected Japanese website selling "Hello Kitty" knickers) by using Pythagoras: v^2 + v^2 = 0.9921^2, so I have to square the 0.9921, which gives me 0.984, then I halve that and find the square root, which is 0.70156076c. That means I want to move Rail B and B2 at 0.70156c northwards, and then I'll fire balls along it at 0.70156c (which will appear to Frame B observers as a much higher speed, but still a fully viable one, as it's the exact same speed as the Rocket which is going in the same direction as the material of those balls). The rocket will of course travel at 45 degrees off north at 0.9921c, so the circle painted on its top surface must match the shape of the balls fired along between Rail B and B2: the balls and the rocket are co-moving.

What is the Frame A shape for the circle on the rocket? See the diagram attached below (and note that I've used Microsoft Paint again to carry out the contraction to save time - it does a perfect mathematical job of this and it would be extremely unwise for anyone to criticise this method). At the top, we see a circle at rest (contained inside a square which I drew first both to ensure that the circle was a circle rather than an ellipse and to make it easy to draw in the north-south and east-west lines which mark out the points N, E, S and W on the ball). Underneath it, we see the contracted version, and because the balls running along between the rails must be the same shape and share the same alignment, I've added in the rails too as orange lines. The purple line XY running through the middle of the circle goes from one rail to the other, and it is aligned perpendicular to the rails. We can compare its length with the diameter of the uncompressed ball. If it's to fit between Rail B and B2, it needs to fit into 0.7126 of the length of the diameter of the uncompressed ball (because the rails and gap between them have each been contracted to 71cm wide by their speed of travel through Frame A), and if you measure it on your screen 64mm vs 92mm, so 92/64 = 0.695, so that's smaller, but close enough to say that the numbers need to be crunched properly to find out if it might actually be a good fit. We may have to move the rails closer together for the balls to touch them, so that is something that Frame B physicists may need have to do with Rail B and B2, and they won't understand why unless they've read this thread - that is something I haven't checked yet. Of course, if we use anything longer than the ball in the east-west direction, it will stick out into the rails at both sides, so this question is a side issue. More to the point is where the rails contact the balls.

The circle on the rocket and the balls running in the gap between Rail B and B2 have been contracted to an eighth of their rest width in the NE-SW direction, but are not contracted at all in the NW-SE direction. Take careful notice of the points N and S marked on the contracted ball. Will those points on the balls be in contact with the rails in the way they are on balls moving between Rail A and A2? The answer is no - the points of contact have migrated far away from there. In the preferred frame of reference, points N and S on each ball contact the rails, but in frames moving at relativistic speeds, points N and S are not the points on the balls' surfaces nearest to the rails, so they cannot touch the sides.

What we see here again, very clearly indeed, is that different frames of reference are not equivalent: objects behave differently in different frames.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 09/08/2016 20:32:59
So, now I need some advice. (1) Which Journal should I send this to? (2) How do I know they're going to look at it if I don't have a string of letters after my name? And (3) Do I have to put it into an impenetrable form in order to make it impossible for ordinary mortals to follow it, or is it socially acceptable to submit a paper written in normal language?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 09/08/2016 21:29:06
If you submit it, you have to do the math. That's it.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 09/08/2016 21:39:51
If you submit it, you have to do the math. That's it.

I've done all the maths that's needed to prove the case, assuming that it's read by someone who understands relativity.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 10/08/2016 14:52:47
Just out of curiosity: you have an education website, but you have never attended any university level education?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 10/08/2016 19:33:54
Just out of curiosity: you have an education website, but you have never attended any university level education?

I gave university a miss because my work on linguistics (I specialised in generative semantics) was already ahead of anything that was being taught in any university, and that led me on into work on AGI (artificial general intelligence). University would have held my work back by several years for no useful gain, wasting my time on such things as Chomsky's broken linguistcs (with its shallow analysis and ludicrous ideas about universal grammar).

My website exists because I am disgusted with education systems which spend most of their time pretending to teach while not actually teaching anything (and which can also provide abysmal teaching when they do finally get round to it, making it impossible to succeed in some subjects unless you can afford private tutoring to make up for the deficiencies), so I've tried to show how things could be done more efficiently. I have shown how children can learn most of the essentials in a fraction of the time they take to do so in school, but when an education system has a fixed learning schedule and doesn't reward faster learning (because it repeatedly puts children in holding pens until the rest catch up again), there is no benefit from using more efficient methods other than for children working outside the system through home-schooling. [You may want to read up on Unschooling to see what happens when children aren't systematically taught anything at all and are just left to play most of the time - on average they end up with the same level of qualifications at the same age as schooled children, so that illustrates just how bad schools are. Peter Gray's blog at Psychology Today is the best starting place for reading up on this: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn - I'm not a fan of Unschooling, but want to see something half way between that and schooling so that all children can have the best of both worlds and where they have the freedom to walk away from bad teaching and to find their own way through the work without wasting their childhood on the empty garbage that's currently inflicted on them.] I was hoping that other people might join in the effort to build the site properly, but no one has done so and the whole thing will soon be rendered completely redundant by AGI which will provide the same kind of teaching more directly while interacting intelligently with learners.

Now, what point were you trying to make by asking about this? One of the biggest problems afflicting society is that people worship status and qualifications and don't value reason. Dunning and Kruger have made this even worse by giving qualified "experts" further excuse not to bother checking that they've built their knowledge upon a sound base. Errors can occasionally be found which persist for decades or even centuries without any of the teachers or indoctrinated learners ever stopping to check. If someone does spot an error, they are simply shouted down and the establishment blunders blindly on regardless, overconfident about their rightness because they are "experts" who can't be wrong.

In this thread, I've identified such an error, and it's a monumental whopper of an error. How do you judge this though? You simply look to see if I'm saying something that goes against the "experts", and when you determine that I am, you decide that the "experts" must be right because they are "experts" and they couldn't possibly all have made the same mistake for over a hundred years. In this particular case though, they're failing to read diagrams correctly, not realising the relationship between a diagram showing two space dimensions at a fixed point in time (from the point of view of a specific frame of reference) and a Spacetime diagram which shows only one space dimension with time shown vertically, each slice showing a fixed point in time (from the point of view of a specific frame of reference). A horizontal slice of a Spacetime diagram is functionally identical to a straight line drawn through one of my diagrams: if two things are not in the same place in the diagram in one frame of reference, they cannot be in the same place in any frame of reference because they are at different Spacetime locations. When you see a parallelogram with sides that don't align with the rails in Frame A, any method of converting to a Frame B view of the same objects which shows the sides parallel with the rails is violating fundamental rules, and yet that is what the "experts" are clearly doing here. They are naively assuming that all frames of reference behave the same way, so when they shift from Frame A to Frame B they simply recalculate the positions, lengths and alignments of objects from scratch on the mistaken basis that all frames behave the same way, and in doing so they introduce distortions. They must see the misalignment in one frame, but they then carry out a translation to the other frame and the misalignment is magically gone, but they never stop to ask themselves how this can happen when they wouldn't accept the same kind of mismatch when handling Spacetime diagrams. The simple truth of it is that the translation method they're using is faulty because it's based on a false belief that all frames behave the same way.

The correct way to translate between frames is to stick with the original Frame A calculations and then convert using the ref-frame camera method where you change the clock synchronisations and run through events noting where things are when the local clock at any point hits the target time for the new frame. This is a much more computation-intense way of carrying out the translation from one frame to another, but the end result is that you get a correct translation instead of one that introduces distortions. It's clear to me now that no one has ever done these translations correctly because they've simply relied blindly on an incorrect assumption that all frames work identically. I am now writing a program to do such translations properly. I have attached a drawing showing the square on a rocket moving NW (north is up) at relativistic speed and the three different shapes it will have when viewed from frames A, B and B'. I haven't used accurate numbers for them, but it's the general shapes I want you to look at. The top row shows the kinds of shapes I calculate for them, while the bottom row shows the shapes that the "experts" would calculate for it, and it's with the middle one that you see the key difference. They simply recalculate the shape by assuming that Frame B works like Frame A, but I run the events in Frame A instead and convert by "taking a photograph" for Frame B as the local pixel clocks hit the target time for taking that picture with all clocks synchronised for Frame B.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 10/08/2016 21:09:14
Now, what point were you trying to make by asking about this?
I was curious, given that you displayed ignorance of the form of journal articles.

Like you said, people often value things other than reason. Often, the form of journal articles are what they are for a reason. Sometimes these are good reasons, sometimes these are bad.

Similarly, the details of the transformations from one system of coordinates to another are what they are for a reason. You are free to believe what you want to believe, but you should know that you will be held to a high standard if you want to publish your work and that standard will include at least recognizing what trained physicists expect from a transformation from one system of coordinates to another. This will include including the time coordinate in all translations.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 10/08/2016 23:19:26
Now, what point were you trying to make by asking about this?
I was curious, given that you displayed ignorance of the form of journal articles.

I've looked up a few things and now see that having letters after your name isn't crucial as they don't tell the reviewers who you are (although you still have to get past the first wall of persuading them to send your paper to be reviewed). That makes the system a more fair than I'd expected it to be. It's also possible to include software along with the paper, or a link to a place from which it can be downloaded, and that makes it considerably easier to show them what's going on.

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Similarly, the details of the transformations from one system of coordinates to another are what they are for a reason.

Indeed, and it's a bad reason - it's based on a belief that different frames all work the same way, but I've shown that a person in Frame B sending things along Rail B will observe them to warp and to do so more the faster they go. Any system for doing the transformations which doesn't find that result is producing errors, hiding this warping with distortions which precisely cancel out the warping that should be there.

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You are free to believe what you want to believe, but you should know that you will be held to a high standard if you want to publish your work and that standard will include at least recognizing what trained physicists expect from a transformation from one system of coordinates to another. This will include including the time coordinate in all translations.

I am the one who has the high standards here, but there's never any guarantee that people with lower standards are capable of recognising that because they tend to reject anything they disagree with instead of checking it out carefully, and it's not surprising that they do this: they are bombarded with rubbish which they need to reject without wasting time on it, and yet it means they are likely to miss those extremely rare things that look wrong because they go so much against expectations but which happen to be right. There is a high chance that they'll simply reject my proof in the same way that you have without thinking it through.

I've attached a new diagram showing the asymmetry in the way different frames behave. For the top picture, you need to imagine Frame A being stationary while Frame B is racing up the screen, and the shape shown has no sides parallel with Rail B or perpendicular to it. This shape (not drawn very accurately this time because all you need to agree with is that none of its sides are parallel with Rail B or perpendicular to the track) is the one that the square on the rocket must have when viewed from Frame A, and it's the shape that squares on Train B must show too as they are co-moving with the rocket.

For the bottom picture, we are seeing an equivalent square on Train A while looking from Frame B, and two of the sides are parallel to Rail A. According to relativity (both Special Relativity and Lorentz Ether Theory [in their current form]) those shapes should be a mirror image of each other, but they aren't. It's easy to work out what the shape of the rocket square will look like from Frame A because you simply apply length contraction at an angle and all four edges end up tilting relative to the north-south and east-west lines. At no point have you dared to commit yourself to stating whether you agree with it or not, but you ought to.

It's harder to work out the shape of a Train A square as viewed from Frame B, but using the ref-frame camera method you do the following. First you find the Frame A shape which is a rectangle, the length-contraction applying in the east-west direction. The next step is to synchronise clocks for Frame B, pick a time to "take a photo", then run all the clocks as you imagine the shape moving east along the rail. Whenever a pixel clock hits the target time, you copy whatever's at that pixel to a new diagram, and that means you'll transfer the whole southern edge in one go (because the clocks for all those pixels read the same time as each other), then you move the shape east a bit, then you work your way up the sides, each bit being copied further to the right, and eventually you reach the top edge and transfer the whole of it in one go. The only other thing you have to do is fix the north-south width of this shape to make sure the correct length contraction is being applied in that direction, but it will certainly look like the picture I've drawn for it in regard to the direction the tilted edges tilt and in the fact that the other two edges must remain parallel to Rail A.

I don't know which mistake other people have been making with this, but they are producing shapes which are mirror images of each other, either by ignoring the necessity of the square on the rocket looking the same shape as the squares on Train B when viewed from Frame A (and therefore having a contradiction in their results which they failed to notice), or they're calculating the right shape for it and are then making the mistake of calculating the shape of a square on Train A as viewed from Frame B by treating Frame B like a preferred frame and applying length contraction to that square at an angle in the way the square on the rocket is treated when calculating it from Frame A (while also failing to notice the incompatible alignments when they change frame). Either way, they're making a mistake - the two shapes should not be a mirror image of each other because the way frames behave is not symmetrical. The only reason we've missed this for a hundred years is that we trusted Lorentz, Einstein and the other pioneers of relativity - they failed to explore this properly but gave the impression that they had, and everyone has just believed them ever since without bothering to check thoroughly. I believed them too: I only stumbled upon it by accident while having a conversation with an Einsteinist about rotating discs.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jerrygg38 on 11/08/2016 12:03:08


Hi Jeffrey,

, but if you imagine the universe as being contained in the skin of an expanding bubble, the absolute frame of reference is tied to the centre of the bubble, which is a point not found inside the universe, and no frame of reference inside the universe can be the absolute frame. At every point inside the universe there is a preferred frame of reference which is different from the preferred frame at any other point, but they are all preferred frames of reference regardless, being the frame at that point which matches up closest to the absolute frame. On the local scale though, such as within our solar system, you can consider that all points in that local space have the same frame as their preferred frame of reference, even if that isn't quite true, because the errors will be too small to have any relevance.
   As I see it there is an absolute frame of reference at the center of the universe where the big bang took place. The expanding bubble of energy exploded along the bubble simultaneously billions of times to form the center of the galaxies.  the gravitational field from all the galaxies reach the center which is 13.78 billion light years from the surface of the universe. At the same time a sphere of 27.56 billion years is the outer sphere of the universe. This is a perfect sphere as well.
   So you are correct in my opinion that we have one absolutely stationary point which is not within our visible universe. It seems to me that everything else is distorted common mode but relative frame of references depends upon the gravitational field. The sun is a relative reference. The earth is another relative reference. Everything within a preferred frame of reference is distorted equally but we see a sphere as a sphere because we are distorted as well.
   
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jerrygg38 on 11/08/2016 12:11:58
If you submit it, you have to do the math. That's it.

I've done all the maths that's needed to prove the case, assuming that it's read by someone who understands relativity.
   Relativity is a best fit approximation to reality. Absolute reality has to take into account the distortions produced by all the speeds relative to the absolute reference point. This includes how fast the universe is rotating.
  The beauty of relativity is that so many of the distortions are common mode that a perfect sphere appears to us  as a perfect sphere but in truth it is an ellipsoid.  Fortunately the gravitational field of the Earth tends to equalize the distortions and we cannot readily measure them. So the real world from an absolute sense is different but upon our reference plane if seems to us that a sphere is a sphere. So you can write equations and feel you have solved a particular problem but you are dealing with a best fit approximation.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 11/08/2016 14:21:48
Indeed, and it's a bad reason - it's based on a belief that different frames all work the same way, but I've shown that a person in Frame B sending things along Rail B will observe them to warp and to do so more the faster they go. Any system for doing the transformations which doesn't find that result is producing errors, hiding this warping with distortions which precisely cancel out the warping that should be there.
I know that you believe that. But any physicist who looks at your argument will reject it because you have not actually discussed the reference frames. All reference frames used in the Special Theory of Relativity have their own time coordinate and you do not include this in your reasoning. Until you do, no physicist will take your argument seriously.

You are free to believe that the time coordinate is not important. However, since the people who work with the theory have all gone through training that demonstrates to them that the theory does not work properly without taking the time coordinate into account, they have a reason for rejecting your argument.


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At no point have you dared to commit yourself to stating whether you agree with it or not, but you ought to.
As someone trained in the use of the Special Theory of Relativity, I can't recognize your claims as an intelligible part of that theory, since they do not use the theory properly. Since your claims do not include transformations to the time coordinate, they do not meet the standard I have been trained to expect for such work. Because of this, I can't recognize your argument as one that is about the Special Theory of Relativity, instead it is an argument about David Cooper's Theory of Relativity.

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The next step is to synchronise clocks for Frame B, pick a time to "take a photo", then run all the clocks as you imagine the shape moving east along the rail.
According to the Special Theory of Relativity, one cannot have a frame without a set definition of synchronized clocks. These clocks will not be synchronized to the clocks in the other frames in your example.

Again, you are free to use David Cooper's Theory of Relativity. However, since you show that it is not consistent, most people will continue to use the Special Theory of Relativity.

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The only reason we've missed this for a hundred years is that we trusted Lorentz, Einstein and the other pioneers of relativity - they failed to explore this properly but gave the impression that they had, and everyone has just believed them ever since without bothering to check thoroughly.
Given the vast literature on relativity theory, including the prevalence of homework problems combining reference frames and the decades of crank attempts to deny relativity theory, it is extremely unlikely that someone would miss this kind of combination.

Anyone who would work through such a scenario would be trained to work from the actual Lorentz transformations, not merely use purely spatial length contractions. This means that they would include the time coordinate in their work and when considering how something looks at a certain time, they would have to consider where everything looks at the time of each frame. Since transformation the time from one frame to another depends on position, this can change the shape of objects from one frame to another.
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I believed them too: I only stumbled upon it by accident while having a conversation with an Einsteinist about rotating discs.
That one person you had a conversation with may have been mistaken. Reading your original post, it is not clear what you believe is the position on rotation taken by the Special Theory of Relativity. Talking to one person is a poor form of education. Did you read about rotation in any textbook on the Special Theory of Relativity?

How were you educated on the Special Theory of Relativity? You keep saying that you have done the work to convince, "someone who understands relativity,"  but you do not want to use the Special Theory of Relativity, you only want to use length contraction. Someone who understands the theory would like to see the theory applied in an argument that purports to be demonstrating a contradiction in the theory.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 11/08/2016 20:43:57
I know that you believe that. But any physicist who looks at your argument will reject it because you have not actually discussed the reference frames.

Sure! I haven't discussed Frames A, A', B and B' and haven't described the speeds at which they move relative to each other and the direction they're moving in relative to each other, so no one could possibly make sense of what I've said, apart from people who understand relativity and recognise that I have actually discussed those frames and defined how they move relative to each other such that they can visualise the entire setup. I don't know why you're incapable of doing so, and I don't know why you imagine that you're qualified to take part in this conversation when your understanding of the subject is so lacking.

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All reference frames used in the Special Theory of Relativity have their own time coordinate and you do not include this in your reasoning. Until you do, no physicist will take your argument seriously.

When I describe the scene from Frame A, I'm describing Frame A at a single point in time for Frame A - that is a time coordinate, and you can give it any number you like. Let's call it 0 (zero). If we then run events, we redraw the scene for time=1 and move all the things that are moving through Frame A to their new postitions. We can then do it again for time=2 and move all the objects that are moving through Frame A again. We can run all these pictures as a video too, and time will tick up as we do so. I don't know how you were incapable of working out where time comes into this because it should be obvious to anyone with even a modicum of education in the subject. With Spacetime diagrams it's the same, but they normally (due to the limitations of 2D paper) only show one space dimension, each horizontal slice through the diagram having a different time coordinate from the one above and the one below (in the time of the selected frame), while all parts of that horizontal slice have the same time coordinate by that frame. The difference with my diagrams is that they show two space dimensions, so the running of time would be shown by replacing one diagram (one layer of a Spacetime diagram) with another diagram (the next layer up), and the time coordinate is incremented as you run through the diagrams. You can imagine stacking these diagrams in a pile with time running upwards, and then they are orientated the same way as Spacetime diagrams, only with two space dimensions set out in each layer instead of one. When you switch to another frame, you are simply taking a slice through that pile at an angle, cutting through each layer at those points where the times for the new frame are identical, then you warp everything to make the new slice horizontal while keeping the time dimension straight up and down (just like changing frame in the interactive diagram half way down my webpage on relativity). It is astonishing that anyone should find it hard to understand this given that it is all bog standard stuff that anyone who knows the basics of relativity should be able to follow with ease. Look at the interactive diagrams on my webpage - every single one of them have a counter underneath which represents the time coordinate.

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You are free to believe that the time coordinate is not important.

Even Lewis Carroll would have struggled to make up a conversation this surreal! Time coordinate not important? Who the blazes thinks it's not important? What do you imagine my diagrams show if there's no time coordinate tied to them? This is getting into deeper and deeper farce now. Do you really have a qualification in this stuff? Who trained you? You attack me for discussing something I understand but don't have a qualification in, but there you are apparently with a qualification in something that you manifestly don't understand! How could that have happened?

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However, since the people who work with the theory have all gone through training that demonstrates to them that the theory does not work properly without taking the time coordinate into account, they have a reason for rejecting your argument.

I would hope they actually have qualifications that genuinely relate to the level of their understanding and that they can see exactly how time is tied up in my descriptions of things.

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At no point have you dared to commit yourself to stating whether you agree with it or not, but you ought to.
As someone trained in the use of the Special Theory of Relativity, I can't recognize your claims as an intelligible part of that theory, since they do not use the theory properly. Since your claims do not include transformations to the time coordinate, they do not meet the standard I have been trained to expect for such work. Because of this, I can't recognize your argument as one that is about the Special Theory of Relativity, instead it is an argument about David Cooper's Theory of Relativity.

Whoever trained you, I would strongly recommend that you go back and demand a refund from them. It is absolutely appalling that they can award a qualification that leads you into imagining that you have been trained in the use of the Special Theory of Relativity when you have such a shallow grasp of the subject. It is outrageous that my argument is being attacked by someone who is trying to pull rank on the basis of qualifications when he can't follow the simplest of descriptions of how objects appear in a single frame of reference at a single point in time (by the time of that frame) as they move at different speeds in different directions, to the point that he can't even commit himself to saying how a square (when at rest in the frame) will appear once it is moving at relativistic speed in a dircection not aligned with its edges. That is the most astonishing failure I have ever encountered when dealing with someone who claims to be qualified in this subject.

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The next step is to synchronise clocks for Frame B, pick a time to "take a photo", then run all the clocks as you imagine the shape moving east along the rail.
According to the Special Theory of Relativity, one cannot have a frame without a set definition of synchronized clocks. These clocks will not be synchronized to the clocks in the other frames in your example.

And your problem is? The clocks in my ref-frame camera can be set to different synchronisations depending on which frame you want to capture a picture for, and there is a different pattern of syncronisation for every frame of reference. If you set them to by synchronised for frame B, you can then run events until a target time for Frame B appears on a pixel's clock, and when it does, you copy the local content of that part of space to the "photograph" that you're trying to take. Once all the clocks have reached that point (which they don't all do at once, but progressively as you run the events by the rules of Frame A), out comes a perfect Frame B photo of the action at a specific Frame B time.

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Again, you are free to use David Cooper's Theory of Relativity. However, since you show that it is not consistent, most people will continue to use the Special Theory of Relativity.

Everything I'm describing relates directly to SR and to LET. Your failure to recognise that shows that you are not qualified to discuss this stuff.

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Given the vast literature on relativity theory, including the prevalence of homework problems combining reference frames and the decades of crank attempts to deny relativity theory, it is extremely unlikely that someone would miss this kind of combination.

And yet they have all missed it, and when you realise how little understanding of the subject most people with qualifications in the subject actually have, you begin to understand how this sorry state of affairs has come about.

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Anyone who would work through such a scenario would be trained to work from the actual Lorentz transformations, not merely use purely spatial length contractions.

Anyone who knows their stuff knows that all that's needed for analysing this are the simple tools of LET. If a problem shows up when applying length contraction in the way that I have demonstrated happens, that problem will not go away for SR, no matter how many irrelevant things you try to throw at it to try to hide the problem.

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This means that they would include the time coordinate in their work and when considering how something looks at a certain time, they would have to consider where everything looks at the time of each frame.

How do you imagine the ref-frame camera is supposed to work if it doesn't handle time? The program (which I've now finished designing and will get on with writing the code after I've finished responding to your ludicrous objections) will not only show up the length contraction asymmetries, but it will also show up any similar issues with time dilation if there are any. It is possible though that the time dilation numbers will always be right even if the length contractions are calculated incorrectly by people using the wrong method (my initial investigations into this suggest that no difference will show up there), but we'll see what happens once it's up and running.

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Since transformation the time from one frame to another depends on position, this can change the shape of objects from one frame to another.

Which is exactly why you see the changes in the observed shapes of a square as observed from different frames, as I've shown you in the last two diagrams I attached to posts here.

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That one person you had a conversation with may have been mistaken.

He was mistaken alright - he was arguing your side of things, but we were discussing a different issue. I just happened to think about the vectors at point N on the disk and the length contractions not being related to the length contraction for the line that the vectors describe in the same way as the vectors relte to that line. The combined length contraction is much stronger. The anomaly there then transferred through to cases with no rotation, and it's come as a massive surprise to me that the effect is so easy to find when you look for it.

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Reading your original post, it is not clear what you believe is the position on rotation taken by the Special Theory of Relativity. Talking to one person is a poor form of education. Did you read about rotation in any textbook on the Special Theory of Relativity?

I was the one educating him - he was just robotiaclly spouting the standard piffle while being incapable of visualising anything (which is par for the course in this field).

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How were you educated on the Special Theory of Relativity?

I started out by trying to work everything out for myself, which is how I found a different way of calculating length contraction and time dilation which produces identical numbers. I simply looked to see where the light was actually going, and I found that when the MMX moves at 0.866c, the light following the arm perpendicular to the motion of the MMX is actually moving at an angle of 60 degrees forward of that through space, and time dilation comes directly out of this because it takes twice as long to complete the trip along that arm and back. For light to take the same length of time to complete the journey on the other arm of the MMX, the length had to be shortened to half (which I had heard about before), so the length contraction and time dilation are directly related. I then found out that I had rediscovered LET, and I read up on SR after that and saw that it uses exactly the same rules of length contraction and time dilation in relation to how things present themselves in Euclidean planes. If an asymmetry is found in the way things behave in different frames in those Euclidean planes, it necessarily applies both to LET and SR and there is no getting out of that - I have found exactly such an asymmetry, and that dictates that there is a preferred frame of reference which we should be able to identify.

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You keep saying that you have done the work to convince, "someone who understands relativity,"  but you do not want to use the Special Theory of Relativity, you only want to use length contraction. Someone who understands the theory would like to see the theory applied in an argument that purports to be demonstrating a contradiction in the theory.

To see the asymmetry in the way frames behave, is is sufficient to use length contraction. If you want to prove that a boat is three metres long, it is not important to consider its mass, colour, manufacturer, crew requirements etc. - what you do is you stick to the minimum amount of stuff necessary to show that the boat is three metres long. Length contraction is a key part of SR, and what I have shown is that that this key part is not compatible with the idea that all frames of reference behave the same way.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 11/08/2016 21:11:59
We can say that

L = cos(asin(v/c))
T = 1/cos(asin(v/c))

Where L is a multiplier for length and T is a multiplier for time.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 11/08/2016 21:32:02
I don't know why you're incapable of doing so, and I don't know why you imagine that you're qualified to take part in this conversation when your understanding of the subject is so lacking.
I imagine that I am qualified because I took several courses in grad school on relativity theory. It might be that I, all my professors, and all my fellow students were under some sort of delusion. You are free to believe that.

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When you switch to another frame, you are simply taking a slice through that pile at an angle, cutting through each layer at those points where the times for the new frame are identical, then you warp everything to make the new slice horizontal while keeping the time dimension straight up and down (just like changing frame in the interactive diagram half way down my webpage on relativity). It is astonishing that anyone should find it hard to understand this given that it is all bog standard stuff that anyone who knows the basics of relativity should be able to follow with ease. Look at the interactive diagrams on my webpage - every single one of them have a counter underneath which represents the time coordinate.
It is not clear that your representation of how things appear is taking the correct "slice through that pile at an angle", since you at no point do any translation of time coordinates.

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Time coordinate not important? Who the blazes thinks it's not important? What do you imagine my diagrams show if there's no time coordinate tied to them? This is getting into deeper and deeper farce now. Do you really have a qualification in this stuff? Who trained you? You attack me for discussing something I understand but don't have a qualification in, but there you are apparently with a qualification in something that you manifestly don't understand! How could that have happened?
I'm not attacking you, I'm merely pointing out that you never do a translation that includes a time coordinate. You are free to believe that this is not important.

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Whoever trained you, I would strongly recommend that you go back and demand a refund from them. It is absolutely appalling that they can award a qualification that leads you into imagining that you have been trained in the use of the Special Theory of Relativity when you have such a shallow grasp of the subject. It is outrageous that my argument is being attacked by someone who is trying to pull rank on the basis of qualifications when he can't follow the simplest of descriptions of how objects appear in a single frame of reference at a single point in time (by the time of that frame) as they move at different speeds in different directions, to the point that he can't even commit himself to saying how a square (when at rest in the frame) will appear once it is moving at relativistic speed in a dircection not aligned with its edges. That is the most astonishing failure I have ever encountered when dealing with someone who claims to be qualified in this subject.
You are being very defensive and I am sorry that you feel that you are being attacked. I am merely trying to get you to produce the most rigorous version of your argument. It is true that I believe that your argument will disappear when rigor is applied. It is also true that I do not think that you will believe me if I work out the details.
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Everything I'm describing relates directly to SR and to LET. Your failure to recognise that shows that you are not qualified to discuss this stuff.
You are free to believe this. I believe that you are missing something crucial. I hope that it is not defensiveness that prevents you from working out your argument in all the required details.

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Anyone who would work through such a scenario would be trained to work from the actual Lorentz transformations, not merely use purely spatial length contractions.

Anyone who knows their stuff knows that all that's needed for analysing this are the simple tools of LET. If a problem shows up when applying length contraction in the way that I have demonstrated happens, that problem will not go away for SR, no matter how many irrelevant things you try to throw at it to try to hide the problem.
If one looks at the history of the so-called "paradoxes" of the Special Theory of Relativity, you will find that most of them do not appear problematic when the relativity of simultaneity is properly taken into account. In all cases, properly applying the Lorentz transformations is crucial to understanding what happens in the Special Theory of Relativity, since one can produce incorrect results if one applies only a part of the transformations and not all the transformations.

Again, you are free to believe what you want. I am only trying to report how your argument will be received by someone who has training in the relevant physics.
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How do you imagine the ref-frame camera is supposed to work if it doesn't handle time? The program (which I've now finished designing and will get on with writing the code after I've finished responding to your ludicrous objections) will not only show up the length contraction asymmetries, but it will also show up any similar issues with time dilation if there are any. It is possible though that the time dilation numbers will always be right even if the length contractions are calculated incorrectly by people using the wrong method (my initial investigations into this suggest that no difference will show up there), but we'll see what happens once it's up and running.
If your calculations do not recognize that translations to the time coordinate depend upon the location, then you will be presenting incorrect pictures, since you will not be presenting simultaneous points.

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I then found out that I had rediscovered LET, and I read up on SR after that and saw that it uses exactly the same rules of length contraction and time dilation in relation to how things present themselves in Euclidean planes.
Have you consulted textbooks on the Special Theory of Relativity?

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To see the asymmetry in the way frames behave, is is sufficient to use length contraction. If you want to prove that a boat is three metres long, it is not important to consider its mass, colour, manufacturer, crew requirements etc. - what you do is you stick to the minimum amount of stuff necessary to show that the boat is three metres long. Length contraction is a key part of SR, and what I have shown is that that this key part is not compatible with the idea that all frames of reference behave the same way.
You are free to believe this. As I said before, anyone with training in SR will assume, even if they do not immediately recognize your error, that you are presenting an artefact of ignoring the change in the time coordinate. If you do not go through the rigor of actually doing the transformations to justify your argument, then your argument will be justifiably rejected on the basis that you have not done the work to establish your case.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 11/08/2016 21:35:17
Then 2*pi*L will show a contraction of the circumference of the unit circle due to gravitation during relativistic rotation. Quite a neat way to do this.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 11/08/2016 22:16:20
This conversation reminds me of this recent article: https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-for-autodidact-physicists
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 11/08/2016 22:34:43
Since the radial direction is constantly changing and itself undergoing acceleration then there can be an argument for reduction in radial length as well as reduction in circumference during relativistic rotation. Rebuttals on a postcard to ...
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 11/08/2016 22:42:29
The question is how fast does an object have to be rotating so that to the rest of the universe the radius appears to have contracted so that the mass is within its own Schwarzschild radius?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 11/08/2016 23:00:05
This conversation reminds me of this recent article: https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-for-autodidact-physicists

This is just the Dunning Kruger thing making you overconfident again. You may have done a lot of learning, but you're incapable of applying it unless the argument is presented to you in exactly the form you've been taught to understand it in. As soon as it's expressed in a clearer form designed to enable untrained people to understand it too, for some bizarre reason, you can't hack it.

You're still too scared to state whether you agree that a square which was initially at rest in Frame A with its edges aligned north-south and east-west and which has subsequently been accelerated up to relativistic speed in the direction NE (without at any stage being rotated) will now be contracted in such a way that none of its edges are aligned north-south or east-west. What is your training worth if you can't even commit yourself to an answer on that simple point? Woeful!

You're also too scared to state whether you agree that squares on the roof of Train B should, if under no stress, take up the same shape as a square painted on a rocket that is co-moving with the train. Woeful again - what an embarrassment to the people who gave you your qualificatiions!

You're also too scared to discuss the shape of an unstressed square on the roof of Train A as viewed from a Frame B observer. That's a tougher task as it involves a frame change, but you claim to be capable of doing this. I've shown you the shape that I get, but you won't say anything at all about the shape that you would get, if you really knew how to calculate it. Not quite so woeful this time, as it's a harder test, but you should be able to give it a go at least. But no - you won't, and you won't because you're out of your depth.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 11/08/2016 23:25:56
Here's another clear way to show that I'm right. The square moving NE has none of its edges aligned north-south or east-west, so how is it going to fit nicely between Rail B and B2 which are aligned precisely east-west? Every point of the rhombus that is the Frame A view of this moving shape is shown in its correct position in the two space dimensions for the same instant in time by Frame A's clock, and only someone who doesn't understand relativity could say it's a simultaneity issue that prevents the edges of this square from lining up with the rails. If you're moving with that square, you still think the edges are aligned north-south and west-east, but you'll see that they are not alligned parallel to and perpendicular to the rails in that frame: the alignment of the rails in that frame is not east-west, and the same applies to any observer travelling on a square aligned at the same angle as the rocket and dangled between the rails, if the gap between the rails has been adjusted to allow it to fit there. That observer will then see two of the corners touching the rails at either side, but he will be able to put his arm in the gaps between the edges and the rails without being harmed while you would claim he couldn't do this because the difference in alignment is an error in his judgement of simultaneity. You (physbang) still won't get it though, because you've been miseducated and you have never learned how to think for yourself.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 12/08/2016 02:13:28
This is just the Dunning Kruger thing making you overconfident again. You may have done a lot of learning, but you're incapable of applying it unless the argument is presented to you in exactly the form you've been taught to understand it in. As soon as it's expressed in a clearer form designed to enable untrained people to understand it too, for some bizarre reason, you can't hack it.
I'm glad you are being so pleasant and attempting to diagnose me. It speaks very highly of your character.
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You're still too scared to state whether you agree that a square which was initially at rest in Frame A with its edges aligned north-south and east-west and which has subsequently been accelerated up to relativistic speed in the direction NE (without at any stage being rotated) will now be contracted in such a way that none of its edges are aligned north-south or east-west. What is your training worth if you can't even commit yourself to an answer on that simple point? Woeful!
I am so glad that you have made the decision to insult me rather than actually work through your argument in detail. It again speaks very highly of your character.
Every point of the rhombus that is the Frame A view of this moving shape is shown in its correct position in the two space dimensions for the same instant in time by Frame A's clock, and only someone who doesn't understand relativity could say it's a simultaneity issue that prevents the edges of this square from lining up with the rails.
It is rather the reverse: the relativity of simultaneity ensures that the train wheels continue to stay lined up with the rails.

But don't trust me: work it out for yourself, you are the expert here.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 12/08/2016 13:40:44
Relativistic rotational speed at the circumference of a disc implies a gradient of relativistic mass increase from the centre of the disc outwards. With length contraction of the radius this indicates a longer Schwarzschild radius due to increase in mass. Therefore a larger mass black hole.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 12/08/2016 17:55:24
I'm glad you are being so pleasant and attempting to diagnose me. It speaks very highly of your character.

Nice - you can throw words like "crank" around, but I'm not allowed to tell you what your problem is.

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You're still too scared to state whether you agree that a square which was initially at rest in Frame A with its edges aligned north-south and east-west and which has subsequently been accelerated up to relativistic speed in the direction NE (without at any stage being rotated) will now be contracted in such a way that none of its edges are aligned north-south or east-west. What is your training worth if you can't even commit yourself to an answer on that simple point? Woeful!
I am so glad that you have made the decision to insult me rather than actually work through your argument in detail. It again speaks very highly of your character.

Where's the insult in there? Your tactics of avoiding the issues aren't the most attractive thing on show here.

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It is rather the reverse: the relativity of simultaneity ensures that the train wheels continue to stay lined up with the rails.

Is it going to be like this with the peer review people too? Do I have to spend many pages teaching them the basics too before I can introduce them to my proof? How did physics get itself into this mess! I've told you how these diagrams work: they show points plotted out in two space dimensions with the time being identical for each point (by the clock of that frame), but it just doesn't register with you. How far do I have to go before it dawns on you that your interpretation of them is ridiculous? Let me put you into the diagram (see the picture attached below) so that you can experience the events at specific points as objects pass you by. Here we have a parallelogram moving NE at relativistic speed which has contracted it in that direction. When it was at rest, before it was accelerated to this speed, it was a rectangle (made of four squares stuck together), the long side aligned east-west. It has not been rotated at any stage. The parallelogram shape that we see in the diagram is its Frame A shape when it's moving NE through Frame A at relativistic speed. The rails are like Rail B and B2, moving directly north at the same speed as the north vector for the movement of the parallelogram, so they move up the diagram at the same speed. Note: I have made the rails much narrower in order to keep the size of the diagram down - this allows me to use a much shorter rectangle.

Now, I want you to stand at point X and imagine this shape and the rails passing you. The parts of the parallelogram which the blue arrow passes through must all pass through point X, so you will meet them there. The parts of the track that pass you though will be the ones that are directly to the south of point X. In what order do you think you'll meet the different objects? Well, the first thing to reach you will be the longer leading edge of the parallelogram. The second point of sigificance to pass you will be the longer trailing edge of the parallelogram. Soon after that you will meet Rail B2, and lastly you will meet Rail B.

Now do the same thing at point Y: Rail B2 passes you first, then the longer leading edge of the parallelogram, then the longer trailing edge, and then rail B. Now do the same at point Z: Rail B2 passes you first, then Rail B, then the shorter leading edge of the parallelogram, and lastly the longer trailing edge of the parallelogram.

Now, can you see the problem with your stance on all this? You imagine that if you jump to a Frame B or Frame B' view of things, the whole rectangle will magically fit between the rails, but that would mean that a Frame B or Frame B' observer would see the observer at X or Z experiencing events in a different order from the one they experienced them in when viewed from Frame A. That kind of reordering of events is impossible.

To spell this out more clearly for you (because you clearly need all the help you can get), I want you to imagine that when you're standing at point X, Y or Z you are holding a piece of chalk which you're going to use to mark the objects as they pass you, but it's a special stick of chalk which is partly coloured, the top part being red and the rest being white. So, there you are at point X, marking the paralellogram with the chalk. The parallelogram wears away most of your stick of chalk, so it has a red line across it which turns white about a quarter of the way across. By the time the rails reach you, they can obviously only get marked in white. Now do the same at point Y (starting with a new piece of chalk): you mark the first rail with red, then about a quarter of the parallelogram in red too before that line turnes white, then you mark the second rail with white. Now do the same from point Z (again starting with a new piece of chalk): you mark both rails with red chalk, then you draw a line across the parallelogram which starts red and turns white before it reachs the far side.

Now let's switch to Frame B or B' and look at the events from there. I will be the observer from here. By your magical version of physics, I must see you (the X observer) mark Rail B first with white chalk, and you're holding a well-worn piece of chalk with all the red part missing. Next, I see you mark the parallelogram with red chalk, and your stick of chalk has magically grown such that all the red part is back. I watch the red erode away on the parallelogram and see the line turn white, then the stick of chalk suddenly loses a little chunk of its length while not touching anything before it marks Rail B with white. I am watching magic in action.

Everything will work fine with you working from Y, so let's jump to you as observer Z and see what you look like to Frame B and B' observers. Again, I will be Frame B/B' observer. I see the first rail reach you at point Z first, and you mark it with red. Next, I see some of the red chalk vanish without touching anything. Next, I see the parallelogram reach you and you mark it in a line that turns from red to white. Lastly, I see the chalk sprout most of its length back again so that you can mark Rail B with red, then the chalk magically shortens back down so that you aren't left with any of the chalk which must end up on the parallelogram.

That is how ludicrous your position is. How are you going to fix it now? Perhaps you'll assert that the length contraction can't be applied in the first place and that it should be a rectangle moving NE through Frame A rather than a parallelogram, but if you do that you've just eliminated length contraction from physics.

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But don't trust me: work it out for yourself, you are the expert here.

Yes - I am the expert here and I have worked it out. You're the one who's doing magic and who has been awarded physics qualifications from Hogwarts University.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 12/08/2016 18:05:33
By accelerating chocolate to relativistic speeds we may well be able to make a Heston Blumenthal chocolate fountain to die for.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 12/08/2016 18:44:05
By accelerating chocolate to relativistic speeds we may well be able to make a Heston Blumenthal chocolate fountain to die for.

You'd think the experiment would already have been done with squares of Galaxy or entire Mars Bars.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 12/08/2016 19:00:41
I am off to search for scientific papers on the matter!
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 12/08/2016 19:09:23
Where's the insult in there? Your tactics of avoiding the issues aren't the most attractive thing on show here.
You are correct: your continued failure to actually perform the relevant calculations are examples of my avoiding issues.

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It is rather the reverse: the relativity of simultaneity ensures that the train wheels continue to stay lined up with the rails.

Is it going to be like this with the peer review people too? Do I have to spend many pages teaching them the basics too before I can introduce them to my proof?
You are claiming to discuss the basics of relativity theory. It is clear to me that you are using a relativity theory other than SR. If you want to claim to be discussing SR, then you are going to have to go over the basics. This means actually performing the calculations rather than taking the shortcuts that you have been doing so far.

You are free to believe whatever you wish. You can even attack me for my refusal to simply abandon rigor and adopt your rough methods.

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How did physics get itself into this mess! I've told you how these diagrams work: they show points plotted out in two space dimensions with the time being identical for each point (by the clock of that frame), but it just doesn't register with you.
You have made claims about how your diagrams work. Yet since you do not actually show us the relevant calculations, we must take your word that your diagrams are correct. On the one hand we have you: one person who has not done all the calculations despite being asked, who claims to have found something that everyone who uses the full calculations has missed. On the other hand we have dozens of textbooks, thousands of articles, and thousands of academics who have reviewed and worked with SR. You ask us to take your authority that your diagrams are correct, but the scientific world does not work like that, it requires the demonstration mathematically.
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Now, can you see the problem with your stance on all this? You imagine that if you jump to a Frame B or Frame B' view of things, the whole rectangle will magically fit between the rails, but that would mean that a Frame B or Frame B' observer would see the observer at X or Z experiencing events in a different order from the one they experienced them in when viewed from Frame A. That kind of reordering of events is impossible.
You are actually contradicting one of the fundamental results of SR, that the order of distant events depends on the system of coordinates used. As I said, most of the time that someone thinks that they have a problem with SR, they really have a problem with the relativity of simultaneity. You have just demonstrated that you reject the relativity of simultaneity, so you are firmly with the majority of those who mistakenly think they have discovered a problem for SR.

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But don't trust me: work it out for yourself, you are the expert here.

Yes - I am the expert here and I have worked it out. You're the one who's doing magic and who has been awarded physics qualifications from Hogwarts University.
And yet you actually haven't bothered to use the Lorentz transformations.

I know that it might be painful to own up to the truth, but perhaps you have made a mistake? Won't you even consider actually using the transformations that, supposedly, you derived?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 12/08/2016 20:03:33
You are correct: your continued failure to actually perform the relevant calculations are examples of my avoiding issues.

Anyone competent can work out for themselves the shape that a square will take up when it moves through Frame A without needing to lift a calculator. You can't do it because you're incompetent to an extraordinary degree. How on Earth can you have qualifications in this if you can't even do that! Which university is responsible for this failure?

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You are claiming to discuss the basics of relativity theory. It is clear to me that you are using a relativity theory other than SR.

I am using things that are 100% parts of SR. The length contraction, the way things appear in Frame A, the direction the contraction is applied, the degree to which it is applied, the coordinates for objects in Frame A (where north-south is one space dimension, east-west is another space dimension, and the whole diagram is a slice showing how things are located in that space at a specific Frame A time. To write it off as not being SR is one of the most ludicrous things you can do.

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If you want to claim to be discussing SR, then you are going to have to go over the basics. This means actually performing the calculations rather than taking the shortcuts that you have been doing so far.

Where is your problem? Look at the diagram and apply your own coordinates to it. A child could do it. For example, we could decide that a stationary square is centered on point (0,0) and with corners at (2,2), (2,-2), (-2,-2) and (-2,2) with north being the Y-axis and east being the X-axis. We can then move it up to relativistic speed moving NE and calculate its shape when it's still centered on (0,0). Two of the corners will retain the same coordinates: (-2, 2) and (2,-2). The other two will move towards (0,0) and you don't need to know exactly how close they will get to it because the effect we're looking at applies to any relativistic speed which takes all the edges of the shape off their original north-south and east-west alignments, so (1,1) and (-1,-1) will do fine. You should understand this intuitively without needing to reach for a calculator. Now string lots of these together to represent a rectangle undergoing the same contraction and you have a parallelogram which will clearly cut across the rails and lead to observers encountering parts of these objects passing them in the order I described.

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You are free to believe whatever you wish. You can even attack me for my refusal to simply abandon rigor and adopt your rough methods.

When something is so clearly proven with visual examples, there is no need to see precise numbers to know that the numbers must fit. If someone shows you a square and tells you it isn't a circle, you don't need to see any coordinates for the corners to know that it's not a circle.

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You have made claims about how your diagrams work. Yet since you do not actually show us the relevant calculations, we must take your word that your diagrams are correct.

You have seen more than enough calculations to get well beyond the point where you should have recognised that I'm right, but you don't want to admit you're wrong, so your only face-saving tactic now is to demand an infinite number of wholly unnecessary numbers.

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On the one hand we have you: one person who has not done all the calculations despite being asked,

I've done all the calculations necessary to prove the case.

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...who claims to have found something that everyone who uses the full calculations has missed.

If you think your way of calculating things disproves my proof, it's your job to demonstrate that. I've told you what shape a moving square will be when it's travelling in a direction not aligned with its edges, but you are incapable of telling whether I'm right in saying that its edges will change their alignment with the grid. Any real expert would immediately confirm that I'm right about the shape, but you won't do that.

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On the other hand we have dozens of textbooks, thousands of articles, and thousands of academics who have reviewed and worked with SR. You ask us to take your authority that your diagrams are correct, but the scientific world does not work like that, it requires the demonstration mathematically.

I ask you to check each of my claims and to home in on specific ones that you take issue with, and if numbers are required to prove a specific point (which is so obvious that no expert should get stuck on it), I'll give you numbers for that point. What is not right is to demand an infinite supply of unnecessary numbers.

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You are actually contradicting one of the fundamental results of SR, that the order of distant events depends on the system of coordinates used.

You still appear to have no comprehension of how flimsy your grasp of this subject is. What distant events? The observer at X, Y or Z is right there at the place where the events he's observing are taking place! The other observer is also right there at the place where the events are taking place. The chalk on the objects is witness to the events taking place where they are too and to their order. The events at the single point X take place in a fixed order, and there is no frame in the universe which you can switch to to show those events taking place in a different order.

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As I said, most of the time that someone thinks that they have a problem with SR, they really have a problem with the relativity of simultaneity. You have just demonstrated that you reject the relativity of simultaneity, so you are firmly with the majority of those who mistakenly think they have discovered a problem for SR.

If this involved observing two events which are both at a distance from the observer and a frame change could change the apparent order in which those events occur, you would have a point, but that is not the case here. All the events being observed happen at point X. In a Spacetime diagram, my point X becomes a line running upwards, vertically in one frame and at an angle in others, the the events that occur in it happen in a fixed order with the first one appearing lowest on that line in every frame and the last appearing highest on that line in every frame. By trying to make the parallelogram fit between the rails when you switch frame, you are changing the order of events on that line, and that is a massive breach of the rules of SR. No one qualified in this stuff should be making such a shocking error.

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And yet you actually haven't bothered to use the Lorentz transformations.

I have used a method of calculating length contraction which I have demonstrated produces the exact same numbers and in demonstrating that I used Lorentz's formula too. If you have a problem with my results, you need to show me how you get a different shape for objects or different alignments of them from the ones I've claimed they will have (and which I've backed with more than enough numbers to prove the point). At no point have you managed to do so in any case, and the reason for that is that you have nothing to offer: you can't find any fault other than imagined ones based on your lack of understanding of SR.

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I know that it might be painful to own up to the truth, but perhaps you have made a mistake? Won't you even consider actually using the transformations that, supposedly, you derived?

I've done all the work necessary to prove the case and see no need in calculating irrelevant numbers for someone who doesn't understand the subject. If you can find a fault, show it. So far, all you've come up with is simultaneity issues which don't apply.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 12/08/2016 20:07:04
Is there no real expert with qualifications here who's going to step in and let PhysBang know he's not up to this stuff? You could do it in a PM, but he needs to be told and he won't take it from me. The best way to defend physics isn't to dig in and defend things that are wrong, but to move on and make the subject right.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 12/08/2016 23:21:45
You are correct: your continued failure to actually perform the relevant calculations are examples of my avoiding issues.

Anyone competent can work out for themselves the shape that a square will take up when it moves through Frame A without needing to lift a calculator. You can't do it because you're incompetent to an extraordinary degree. How on Earth can you have qualifications in this if you can't even do that! Which university is responsible for this failure?
So you are refusing to do the calculations necessary to show you are correct? Need I remind you that this is your argument? That you are trying to convince me and others? That you came here, asking for flaws in your argument? It was only because you asked that I pointed out that you failed to take time into account and that you have not done the calculations to make your case.

You are free to believe that you don't have to be held to the same standard that physicists are held when making their arguments. You did, however, ask for help. You are behaving as if your requests for help are not genuine.

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I am using things that are 100% parts of SR. The length contraction, the way things appear in Frame A, the direction the contraction is applied, the degree to which it is applied, the coordinates for objects in Frame A (where north-south is one space dimension, east-west is another space dimension, and the whole diagram is a slice showing how things are located in that space at a specific Frame A time. To write it off as not being SR is one of the most ludicrous things you can do.
You are, by your own admission, only using part of SR. That means that you are using your own special form of relativity.

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Where is your problem? Look at the diagram and apply your own coordinates to it. A child could do it. For example, we could decide that a stationary square is centered on point (0,0) and with corners at (2,2), (2,-2), (-2,-2) and (-2,2) with north being the Y-axis and east being the X-axis. We can then move it up to relativistic speed moving NE and calculate its shape when it's still centered on (0,0). Two of the corners will retain the same coordinates: (-2, 2) and (2,-2). The other two will move towards (0,0) and you don't need to know exactly how close they will get to it because the effect we're looking at applies to any relativistic speed which takes all the edges of the shape off their original north-south and east-west alignments, so (1,1) and (-1,-1) will do fine. You should understand this intuitively without needing to reach for a calculator. Now string lots of these together to represent a rectangle undergoing the same contraction and you have a parallelogram which will clearly cut across the rails and lead to observers encountering parts of these objects passing them in the order I described.
Note what you refused to include there: the time coordinate. This is very important since you are claiming that there are times when the wheels of the train do not coincide with the track, yet you refuse to actually work out any of these times.

Were I not willing to grant you some charity, I would conclude that you do not know how to do this and you are attempting to hide this failure. As it stands, you simply seem to hard-headed to take the time to do your work properly.

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When something is so clearly proven with visual examples, there is no need to see precise numbers to know that the numbers must fit. If someone shows you a square and tells you it isn't a circle, you don't need to see any coordinates for the corners to know that it's not a circle.
Again, we have to take your word that your diagrams are correct because you will not justify them by using the correct mathematical physics.

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You have seen more than enough calculations to get well beyond the point where you should have recognised that I'm right, but you don't want to admit you're wrong, so your only face-saving tactic now is to demand an infinite number of wholly unnecessary numbers.
All I have demanded is to see the relevant time coordinates. That is one finite set of numbers. These are necessary numbers because you are speaking of events where the train wheels do not meet the train track; all events have a location in space and a time at which they occur.

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If you think your way of calculating things disproves my proof, it's your job to demonstrate that. I've told you what shape a moving square will be when it's travelling in a direction not aligned with its edges, but you are incapable of telling whether I'm right in saying that its edges will change their alignment with the grid. Any real expert would immediately confirm that I'm right about the shape, but you won't do that.
You are claiming, without working through the calculations, that they will verify your claims. You seem to be claiming to have a very wonderful precognitive ability. And yet you still seem unable to write a convincing argument. Shouldn't your precognitive abilities allow you to know in advance what will be a convincing argument?

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I ask you to check each of my claims and to home in on specific ones that you take issue with, and if numbers are required to prove a specific point (which is so obvious that no expert should get stuck on it), I'll give you numbers for that point. What is not right is to demand an infinite supply of unnecessary numbers.
I asked you for a specific set of numbers, viz, the time coordinates and the associated calculations related to your claims. Lying about what I wrote will not help your case, and it may very well get you banned from these forums.

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You still appear to have no comprehension of how flimsy your grasp of this subject is. What distant events? The observer at X, Y or Z is right there at the place where the events he's observing are taking place!
Because the wheels of the train are not at the same spatial location, any events that happen there are distant from each other. Thus the order of events at the train wheels can differ in different systems of coordinates. This is very basic SR. I urge you to read about the relativity of simultaneity; it may save you a lot of embarrassment.

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If this involved observing two events which are both at a distance from the observer and a frame change could change the apparent order in which those events occur, you would have a point, but that is not the case here. All the events being observed happen at point X.
This cannot be the case, since you are speaking of separate wheels and separate points on two different train tracks. Again, carefully working out the actual transformations would help you realize the problems in your argument.
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I've done all the work necessary to prove the case and see no need in calculating irrelevant numbers for someone who doesn't understand the subject. If you can find a fault, show it. So far, all you've come up with is simultaneity issues which don't apply.
Sure, you can whine and repeat the same things over and over again. I understand your psychological pressure: you claim to be a self-taught expert on education and it might look bad if you fail to self-teach yourself the basics of a subject. However, everyone can make mistakes and it looks very bad if you become the example case that being self-taught means not being able to fix one's mistakes. By setting yourself up as an expert on education, you damage not only your character but also your expertise on education by refusing to actually consider a suggestion offered in good faith.

Is there no real expert with qualifications here who's going to step in and let PhysBang know he's not up to this stuff? You could do it in a PM, but he needs to be told and he won't take it from me. The best way to defend physics isn't to dig in and defend things that are wrong, but to move on and make the subject right.
I would be seriously surprised if there were an "expert" who would come forward and say that your argument is correct and SR is hopelessly inconsistent. I have no doubt that there are cranks around here who might PM you that I am incorrect because they too cannot answer the relevant questions I have offered them. If you want to side with these cranks, then so be it. You are free to believe what you want to believe. You can lie about the content of my posts and insult me if you would like, but do not be surprised if there are consequences.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 12/08/2016 23:22:28
You are correct: your continued failure to actually perform the relevant calculations are examples of my avoiding issues.

Anyone competent can work out for themselves the shape that a square will take up when it moves through Frame A without needing to lift a calculator. You can't do it because you're incompetent to an extraordinary degree. How on Earth can you have qualifications in this if you can't even do that! Which university is responsible for this failure?
So you are refusing to do the calculations necessary to show you are correct? Need I remind you that this is your argument? That you are trying to convince me and others? That you came here, asking for flaws in your argument? It was only because you asked that I pointed out that you failed to take time into account and that you have not done the calculations to make your case.

You are free to believe that you don't have to be held to the same standard that physicists are held when making their arguments. You did, however, ask for help. You are behaving as if your requests for help are not genuine.

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You are claiming to discuss the basics of relativity theory. It is clear to me that you are using a relativity theory other than SR.

I am using things that are 100% parts of SR. The length contraction, the way things appear in Frame A, the direction the contraction is applied, the degree to which it is applied, the coordinates for objects in Frame A (where north-south is one space dimension, east-west is another space dimension, and the whole diagram is a slice showing how things are located in that space at a specific Frame A time. To write it off as not being SR is one of the most ludicrous things you can do.
You are, by your own admission, only using part of SR. That means that you are using your own special form of relativity.

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Where is your problem? Look at the diagram and apply your own coordinates to it. A child could do it. For example, we could decide that a stationary square is centered on point (0,0) and with corners at (2,2), (2,-2), (-2,-2) and (-2,2) with north being the Y-axis and east being the X-axis. We can then move it up to relativistic speed moving NE and calculate its shape when it's still centered on (0,0). Two of the corners will retain the same coordinates: (-2, 2) and (2,-2). The other two will move towards (0,0) and you don't need to know exactly how close they will get to it because the effect we're looking at applies to any relativistic speed which takes all the edges of the shape off their original north-south and east-west alignments, so (1,1) and (-1,-1) will do fine. You should understand this intuitively without needing to reach for a calculator. Now string lots of these together to represent a rectangle undergoing the same contraction and you have a parallelogram which will clearly cut across the rails and lead to observers encountering parts of these objects passing them in the order I described.
Note what you refused to include there: the time coordinate. This is very important since you are claiming that there are times when the wheels of the train do not coincide with the track, yet you refuse to actually work out any of these times.

Were I not willing to grant you some charity, I would conclude that you do not know how to do this and you are attempting to hide this failure. As it stands, you simply seem to hard-headed to take the time to do your work properly.

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When something is so clearly proven with visual examples, there is no need to see precise numbers to know that the numbers must fit. If someone shows you a square and tells you it isn't a circle, you don't need to see any coordinates for the corners to know that it's not a circle.
Again, we have to take your word that your diagrams are correct because you will not justify them by using the correct mathematical physics.

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You have seen more than enough calculations to get well beyond the point where you should have recognised that I'm right, but you don't want to admit you're wrong, so your only face-saving tactic now is to demand an infinite number of wholly unnecessary numbers.
All I have demanded is to see the relevant time coordinates. That is one finite set of numbers. These are necessary numbers because you are speaking of events where the train wheels do not meet the train track; all events have a location in space and a time at which they occur.

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If you think your way of calculating things disproves my proof, it's your job to demonstrate that. I've told you what shape a moving square will be when it's travelling in a direction not aligned with its edges, but you are incapable of telling whether I'm right in saying that its edges will change their alignment with the grid. Any real expert would immediately confirm that I'm right about the shape, but you won't do that.
You are claiming, without working through the calculations, that they will verify your claims. You seem to be claiming to have a very wonderful precognitive ability. And yet you still seem unable to write a convincing argument. Shouldn't your precognitive abilities allow you to know in advance what will be a convincing argument?

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I ask you to check each of my claims and to home in on specific ones that you take issue with, and if numbers are required to prove a specific point (which is so obvious that no expert should get stuck on it), I'll give you numbers for that point. What is not right is to demand an infinite supply of unnecessary numbers.
I asked you for a specific set of numbers, viz, the time coordinates and the associated calculations related to your claims. Lying about what I wrote will not help your case, and it may very well get you banned from these forums.

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You still appear to have no comprehension of how flimsy your grasp of this subject is. What distant events? The observer at X, Y or Z is right there at the place where the events he's observing are taking place!
Because the wheels of the train are not at the same spatial location, any events that happen there are distant from each other. Thus the order of events at the train wheels can differ in different systems of coordinates. This is very basic SR. I urge you to read about the relativity of simultaneity; it may save you a lot of embarrassment.

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If this involved observing two events which are both at a distance from the observer and a frame change could change the apparent order in which those events occur, you would have a point, but that is not the case here. All the events being observed happen at point X.
This cannot be the case, since you are speaking of separate wheels and separate points on two different train tracks. Again, carefully working out the actual transformations would help you realize the problems in your argument.
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I've done all the work necessary to prove the case and see no need in calculating irrelevant numbers for someone who doesn't understand the subject. If you can find a fault, show it. So far, all you've come up with is simultaneity issues which don't apply.
Sure, you can whine and repeat the same things over and over again. I understand your psychological pressure: you claim to be a self-taught expert on education and it might look bad if you fail to self-teach yourself the basics of a subject. However, everyone can make mistakes and it looks very bad if you become the example case that being self-taught means not being able to fix one's mistakes. By setting yourself up as an expert on education, you damage not only your character but also your expertise on education by refusing to actually consider a suggestion offered in good faith.

Is there no real expert with qualifications here who's going to step in and let PhysBang know he's not up to this stuff? You could do it in a PM, but he needs to be told and he won't take it from me. The best way to defend physics isn't to dig in and defend things that are wrong, but to move on and make the subject right.
I would be seriously surprised if there were an "expert" who would come forward and say that your argument is correct and SR is hopelessly inconsistent. I have no doubt that there are cranks around here who might PM you that I am incorrect because they too cannot answer the relevant questions I have offered them. If you want to side with these cranks, then so be it. You are free to believe what you want to believe. You can lie about the content of my posts and insult me if you would like, but do not be surprised if there are consequences.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 13/08/2016 00:14:24
Joking aside. Let's not resort to insults. Argue the case by all means but a little gentlemanly behaviour wouldn't go amiss.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 13/08/2016 00:38:23
So you are refusing to do the calculations necessary to show you are correct? Need I remind you that this is your argument? That you are trying to convince me and others? That you came here, asking for flaws in your argument? It was only because you asked that I pointed out that you failed to take time into account and that you have not done the calculations to make your case.

You can assert all you like that I haven't included time in this, but when a diagram shows two space dimensions where every single point depicted in it has the same time coordinate as every other, it is unnecessary to give a specific value for it when they're all identical.

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You are free to believe that you don't have to be held to the same standard that physicists are held when making their arguments. You did, however, ask for help. You are behaving as if your requests for help are not genuine.

When someone insinuates that I'm a crank, I don't take kindly to it. If you don't want return fire, don't shoot insults at people.

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You are, by your own admission, only using part of SR. That means that you are using your own special form of relativity.

I am using the relevant parts which are sufficent for the argument.

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Note what you refused to include there: the time coordinate. This is very important since you are claiming that there are times when the wheels of the train do not coincide with the track, yet you refuse to actually work out any of these times.

you can just make Time=0 for the whole diagram (by the clocks of Frame A). Why on Earth do you have to keep asking for a coordinate when you already know they're all the same?

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Were I not willing to grant you some charity, I would conclude that you do not know how to do this and you are attempting to hide this failure. As it stands, you simply seem to hard-headed to take the time to do your work properly.

This again comes down to your lack of understanding. Any real expert on this can pin their own coordinates to everything I've said because it's all basic stuff that any expert should be able to do in his head while spreading his crackers.

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Again, we have to take your word that your diagrams are correct because you will not justify them by using the correct mathematical physics.

No, I expect you to be able to generate your own versions of the diagrams in your head in a matter of seconds and to recognise that they are right in the way that a real expert would. Which part of them do you take issue with? Where do you imagine you can produce anything different from my diagrams to show the things I've described? I could describe these things over the phone to any real expert and he'd have a diagram matching mine on his desk within seconds, all generated by him as he works through the same ideas. But for some reason, you can't do that.

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All I have demanded is to see the relevant time coordinates. That is one finite set of numbers. These are necessary numbers because you are speaking of events where the train wheels do not meet the train track; all events have a location in space and a time at which they occur.

There are no wheels. You should be able to picture the whole thing as a 2D setup with the train between the rails. The centre of the parallelogram is directly between the rails and it only sticks through them because the length contraction applied at 45 degrees (in this most recent example) requires that - as I've told you before, that is a crash, but you imagine it isn't because you wrongly think the parallelogram is somehow still all between the rails rather than sticking out. So, what numers do you need here? If you think the rails should be further apart and that they would accomodate the whole parallelogram, make the parallelogram a hundred squares long instead of four and see how long that idea lasts. You don't need any more numbers on this - you should be able to see it in your mind straight away.

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You are claiming, without working through the calculations, that they will verify your claims. You seem to be claiming to have a very wonderful precognitive ability. And yet you still seem unable to write a convincing argument. Shouldn't your precognitive abilities allow you to know in advance what will be a convincing argument?

I have worked through all the calculations necessary to prove the point and to demonstrate it to anyone competent in this field. I should not be required to make people understand it who lack sufficient understanding of relativity to be able to get their heads around it.

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I asked you for a specific set of numbers, viz, the time coordinates and the associated calculations related to your claims. Lying about what I wrote will not help your case, and it may very well get you banned from these forums.

And every time I tell you that you already have the time coordinate for the entire diagram, you demand it again and say you haven't got it. It's an irrelevant number because it's the same for every pixel of the picture. You have also had all the calculations necessary, and a whole host that you asked which you shouldn't have needed to ask for because they were too obvious for any expert to require.

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Because the wheels of the train are not at the same spatial location, any events that happen there are distant from each other. Thus the order of events at the train wheels can differ in different systems of coordinates. This is very basic SR. I urge you to read about the relativity of simultaneity; it may save you a lot of embarrassment.

The apparatus is on a 2D plane and there are no wheels. In the original train experiment it was a maglev, but considering connections to the rail is actually quite unnecessary (and was only necessary before when I was discussing a gap between the train and new rail). It is also totally unnecessary to consider the third space dimension other than for the observer's location which might be just over or under the apparatus, but he contacts it with the chalk, so his interaction with it is directly on the 2D plane. I had thought by this time that it would finally have dawned on you that you're wrong to bring simultaneity issues into this, but you're still trying to do it! You are the one who needs to read up on simultaneity - the order of events at X, Y or Z cannot change as you change frame, but you don't even recognise that!

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Sure, you can whine and repeat the same things over and over again. I understand your psychological pressure: you claim to be a self-taught expert on education and it might look bad if you fail to self-teach yourself the basics of a subject. However, everyone can make mistakes and it looks very bad if you become the example case that being self-taught means not being able to fix one's mistakes. By setting yourself up as an expert on education, you damage not only your character but also your expertise on education by refusing to actually consider a suggestion offered in good faith.

Suggestions offered in good faith don't come with insults. What you get back from me is a reflection of what you threw my way. But the key thing is that you aren't being co-operative at all - you're evasive, never answering any direct question about whether you agree with any point I ask you to commit yourself to a position on, and you keep telling me I haven't given you time coordinates for things where everything in the Frame A diagram shares the same moment in time and there is no need to have any particular number in mind for the value of t.

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I would be seriously surprised if there were an "expert" who would come forward and say that your argument is correct and SR is hopelessly inconsistent.

I wasn't asking one to. I was suggesting that one might give you a bit of help in recognising the many places where your understanding of relativity falls far below the level you think you're on so that you stop embarrassing them by association.

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I have no doubt that there are cranks around here who might PM you that I am incorrect because they too cannot answer the relevant questions I have offered them. If you want to side with these cranks, then so be it. You are free to believe what you want to believe. You can lie about the content of my posts and insult me if you would like, but do not be surprised if there are consequences.

I don't take kindly to being insulted by someone and then having that person threaten me with being banned from a forum for returning fire.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 13/08/2016 03:05:37
You can assert all you like that I haven't included time in this, but when a diagram shows two space dimensions where every single point depicted in it has the same time coordinate as every other, it is unnecessary to give a specific value for it when they're all identical.
The very first thing that Einstein proved when developing SR was that the time coordinates are not all the same.

Please see the original paper, sections 1 and 2.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/

You are denying one of the most fundamental and important results of SR. It would be funny if it were not kind of sad.

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When someone insinuates that I'm a crank, I don't take kindly to it. If you don't want return fire, don't shoot insults at people.
I'm sorry. I assumed, incorrectly, that you would be alarmed that you are using the same kind of reasoning that we see from physics cranks. I should not have used those words.
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You are, by your own admission, only using part of SR. That means that you are using your own special form of relativity.

I am using the relevant parts which are sufficent for the argument.
Again, you asked for help, specifically what you needed to complete your argument and what you needed to get it published. Your argument needs to include the time coordinates because that it an important part of SR.

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you can just make Time=0 for the whole diagram (by the clocks of Frame A). Why on Earth do you have to keep asking for a coordinate when you already know they're all the same?
The problem is that t=0 for one frame does not translate to the same value at all locations in other frames. Again, I urge you to read up on this.

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No, I expect you to be able to generate your own versions of the diagrams in your head in a matter of seconds and to recognise that they are right in the way that a real expert would.
You expect to rule by fiat that your diagrams are correct without doing the work to show they are correct.

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Which part of them do you take issue with?
I told you specifically: you claim that the wheels of the trains leave the tracks, I claim that they do not because of where and when the tracks and the wheels are. Claiming that the wheels leave the tracks depends on the timing of where the wheels are and when the track is at certain locations.

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There are no wheels. You should be able to picture the whole thing as a 2D setup with the train between the rails. The centre of the parallelogram is directly between the rails and it only sticks through them because the length contraction applied at 45 degrees (in this most recent example) requires that - as I've told you before, that is a crash, but you imagine it isn't because you wrongly think the parallelogram is somehow still all between the rails rather than sticking out.
You are still not thinking about when the rail is at a given location. In order for part of the train to stick past a track, it depends on the track being in a certain place at a certain time. You have not done the work to establish where the track is at different times or where parts of the train are at different times.

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So, what numers do you need here?
I need you to demonstrate exactly where and when a part of the train goes outside of the track.

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If you think the rails should be further apart and that they would accomodate the whole parallelogram, make the parallelogram a hundred squares long instead of four and see how long that idea lasts. You don't need any more numbers on this - you should be able to see it in your mind straight away.
I see different things in my mind than you do, because I have been trained in using SR in applications. As I said many times, taking timing into account changes issues. See the pole-and-barn paradox, for example: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/polebarn.html (This "argument" really is a modification of the pole-and-barn paradox.)

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And every time I tell you that you already have the time coordinate for the entire diagram, you demand it again and say you haven't got it.
Yeah, because you haven't. You are so ignorant of the basics of SR that you do not understand why to include the time coordinate. Which is why I asked you to do the actual SR calculations, not the rough calculations you rely upon.

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I don't take kindly to being insulted by someone and then having that person threaten me with being banned from a forum for returning fire.
I am sorry that you cannot see past your anger to actually try to use SR properly. I feel that in being aggressive in pointing out your errors I have done you psychological harm that will prevent you from ever learning SR. I hope that this is not the case and I urge you to try to actually use the full Lorentz transformations in working through your argument.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 13/08/2016 21:11:57
The very first thing that Einstein proved when developing SR was that the time coordinates are not all the same.

If we are drawing a Frame A diagram showing what is where at a specific time by the clock of Frame A, the time coordinate is the same in that diagram for every single point depicted in the diagram. It is impossible for Einstein or anyone else to prove that any of those points in a diagram in which they are all specifically tied to the same Frame A time coordinate can be tied to a different Frame A time coordinate as well - they can only have one time coordinate and it is the same one for all those locations in the diagram. If you want to use a different time coordinate, you have to use a different diagram, redrawing all the content in such a way as to take into account how far objects will have moved in between the two diagrams.

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You are denying one of the most fundamental and important results of SR. It would be funny if it were not kind of sad.

I am the one applying the basic rules of SR rigorously and not allowing them to generate contradictions through the application of illegal transformations. The funny/sad thing is that so many experts are happy to allow those contradictions to be generated and think it's not a problem, but I think it's most likely because they've never stopped to look carefully at what they're doing because they've been programmed to believe that all frames of reference produce identical physics. They don't though: I've shown that if you accelerate a square along rail A, two of its edges remain aligned parallel to that rail, but if you accelerate a square along rail B, the edges which were parallel to that rail initially drift off that alignment and do so more and more as it reaches higher speeds, and this behaviour will be fully visible to Frame B observers too.

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I'm sorry. I assumed, incorrectly, that you would be alarmed that you are using the same kind of reasoning that we see from physics cranks. I should not have used those words.

I am using AGI-type reasoning - the application of reason is my speciality and I do it with much greater care than physicists. I must apologise to you too though for using the word "timewasting" in my previous post, because you've actually been very helpful in showing me how hard it is likely to be to get through to the peer review experts who may have similar misunderstandings about relativity to yours. I now know how to present the argument to them in such a way as to head off their invalid objections from the start by showing them where their beliefs generate contradictions.

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You are, by your own admission, only using part of SR. That means that you are using your own special form of relativity.

If you pluck a violin instead of using the bow, you are still playing the violin. Where plucking the violin is sufficient to play a piece of music, you are fully capable of playing that piece of music. I use the parts of SR that are relevant to the case I'm proving and have absolutely no obligation to use the parts that aren't.

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Again, you asked for help, specifically what you needed to complete your argument and what you needed to get it published. Your argument needs to include the time coordinates because that it an important part of SR.

No, I invited people to point out any faults with the argument if they could find them, but the argument was complete from the outset. The time aspect has never been lacking from it.

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The problem is that t=0 for one frame does not translate to the same value at all locations in other frames. Again, I urge you to read up on this.

I have proved the case without needing to change frame at all (see below).

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You expect to rule by fiat that your diagrams are correct without doing the work to show they are correct.

No, I expect you to generate your own diagrams and try to generate ones that are incompatible with mine if you think I'm wrong.

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I told you specifically: you claim that the wheels of the trains leave the tracks, I claim that they do not because of where and when the tracks and the wheels are. Claiming that the wheels leave the tracks depends on the timing of where the wheels are and when the track is at certain locations.

The Frame A view of the parallelogram shows very clearly that its long sides are no longer aligned with the tracks and you can see that an observer at point X will meet both rails after the parallelogram has gone by, while an observer at point Z will meet both rails before the parallelogram has gone by. If you draw that out on a standard Spacetime diagram, you'll find that no transformation of it can change the order of events at those points (which are straight lines in the Spacetime diagram). That proves that the edges of the parallelogram are not parallel to the rails.

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You are still not thinking about when the rail is at a given location. In order for part of the train to stick past a track, it depends on the track being in a certain place at a certain time. You have not done the work to establish where the track is at different times or where parts of the train are at different times.

The frame A diagram of this, which I attached to a post recently (the one with the points X, Y and Z marked in it), shows exactly where the parallelogram is relative to the track at a single point in time by the clock of Frame A. You are trying to play games with time where no such games are possible.

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I need you to demonstrate exactly where and when a part of the train goes outside of the track.

Already done - see the diagram I just referred to.

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I see different things in my mind than you do, because I have been trained in using SR in applications.

If you're seeing different things from what happens in my diagrams, you're doing it wrong.

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As I said many times, taking timing into account changes issues.

I've taken timing fully into account. The problem here is that you haven't managed to get your head around the diagrams that have been put before you and to understand the idea of every point in a diagram having the same time coordinate - you're determined to misunderstand them.

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See the pole-and-barn paradox, for example: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/polebarn.html (This "argument" really is a modification of the pole-and-barn paradox.)

The pole-and-barn "paradox" will not help you here. What it shows is that a length contracted ladder can be seen from a different frame as not being contracted while the timing of the opening and closing of doors is seen to change to accommodate this, but that is all it shows. If you apply what you should have learned from it to my argument, you will find that it fits in with my argument just fine: the contracted objects can be regarded as not-contracted when viewed from their own frame, but other things have to adjust to maintain compatibility, such as angles of rails changing relative to the edges of a square in order to maintain their misalignment. Your trouble is that you only half think things through and don't take them the full distance.

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And every time I tell you that you already have the time coordinate for the entire diagram, you demand it again and say you haven't got it.
Yeah, because you haven't. You are so ignorant of the basics of SR that you do not understand why to include the time coordinate. Which is why I asked you to do the actual SR calculations, not the rough calculations you rely upon.

There you go again - you're demanding that I add time coordinates to things that already have them, and it's your ignorance that's the problem here. The worst of it is that you don't learn when someone shows you you're wrong.

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I am sorry that you cannot see past your anger to actually try to use SR properly. I feel that in being aggressive in pointing out your errors I have done you psychological harm that will prevent you from ever learning SR. I hope that this is not the case and I urge you to try to actually use the full Lorentz transformations in working through your argument.

If I'm annoyed, it's because when a proof of something is presented, the job of those who comment on it is to address the points made within the proof and to state which ones they take issue with and to say which ones they agree with so that the discussion can home in on the points of conflict and resolve them for the person who's got it wrong. Instead of doing that, you're asking me to provide a different proof to prove the same thing, and that's not on. I want you to judge the proof that I have provided and not some other proof.

So, here again is the proof with each point numbered. If you agree with any of the points, please say so. If you disagree with any, please point to them and explain what your problem is with them. [The first one (0) is not a point, but sets the scene.]

(0) In a frame of reference called Frame A (which we will treat as if it is the preferred frame), we have a square with its edges aligned north-south and east-west. Our coordinate grid is also aligned with the Y-axis running north-south and the X-axis running east-west. This frame is the scene for all the action, so every diagram involved in it has the same time coordinate for every point shown in that diagram, though different diagrams may depict different times.

(1) If the square is then moved (without rotating it at any point) such that it is now moving through Frame A at 0.866c in the direction NE, it will become a rhombus shape with its NE and SW corners twice as close together as its NW and SW corners, while the NW and SW corner will retain their original separation (distance).

[You are free to use your own numbers for the coordinates of the corners of the square/rhombus, and you can also make the square any size you like because whatever values you use, your result will be 100% compatible with my description. That means you don't need any numbers from me other than the 0.0866c figure and you should not be demanding them. You can work out for yourself that the contraction is to 0.5x the rest length. I also don't need to tell you where the rhombus shape is in Frame A as its location will make no difference to its shape. The only thing we're concerned with here is what shape it will be in Frame A when moving NE at 0.866c, and any expert in relativity will produce the exact same shape, so no one should be disagreeing with this point.]

(2) If the square, when it was at rest, had sides one metre long, the north-south component of the separation between the NW and SE corners of the rhombus must still be one metre, as will the east-west component of their separation.

[Again this will fit whatever coordinates you have used, so you don't need to demand any from me.]

(3) The speed of travel of the rhombus is 0.866c, so the north-south and east-west components of this movement, v, can be calculated from v^2 + v^2 = 0.866^2, and that means v = 0.612. The length contraction acting on things moving at this speed reduces them to 0.791 of their rest length.

[You can do the simple maths to check this for yourself - I've shown you how to do it before, and experts in relativity don't need to be told.]

(4) If we have two rails aligned east-west separated by one metre in the north-south direction when at rest in Frame A (and attached together by one-metre long poles to hold them in place relative to each other), when we move them at 0.612c northwards through Frame A they will contract closer together to a separation of 79.1cm.

(5) If we arrange these elements such that the centre of our rhombus shares the same Y-coordinate as a point midway between our rails, the NW and SE corners of our rhombus project out of the space between the rails, the NW corner being further north than the northern rail and the SE corner being further south than the southern rail.

[This is the case for any T-coordinate, and as the rails can be considered to be infinitely long, the X-coordinates for the rhombus are unimportant - any value will do.]

(6) If we take an identical square at rest in Frame A and then move it northwards at 0.612c, it will become a rectangle with its north-south length reduced to 79.1cm while its east-west length remains one metre.

(7) If we then maintain that rectangle's northwards speed of travel and add an eastwards component of movement to it, by the time that eastward component reaches 0.612c (still as measured from Frame A), its shape must match that of our rhombus as it's now co-moving with it and neither of them have been rotated at any stage.

(8) If we place an observer at a frame A location L further north of the rails and the rhombus, we can arrange things in such a way that when we run through a series of diagrams in which we increment T for each, we will see the rails and centre of the rhombus pass through point L. One of the rails will reach point L first, then the rhombus will reach it, and the other rail will be the last to reach it.

(9) If we place more observers at points K and M to either side of L, careful placement of these can enable the objects passing through them to do so in a different order than in (8): at K we can have the NW corner of the rhombus arrive first followed by the rails, and at M we can have both rails pass through this point before the SE corner of the rhombus.

[Note: I have used letters K, L and M this time because the X, Y and Z that I used in the past could be muddled up with the idea of coordinates for some readers.]

(10) We can also have three observers called K', L' and M' who are going to do the equivalent with a square (again identical to our original square when at rest in Frame A) which we're going to send along another set of rails. These rails are aligned east-west and are stationary in Frame A. The square was sitting between them (with two of its edges touching them) while it was stationary. We now move that square eastwards at any relatistic speed you care to use and the contraction on its east-west length turns it into a rectangle. Our observers, K', L' and M' are moving northwards through Frame A at 0.612c, but no matter where we place them and no matter what speed we move our square/rectangle at along this track, we cannot find any way for our observers to encounter these objects in any order other than southern rail first, then square/rectangle (which they will see as a parallelogram with two of its edges running parallel to the rails), and then the northern rail last.

(11) We have just looked at two cases of observers encountering a pair of rails and a shape moving along between them (and in one case partly through them). Those two cases should be directly equivalent if all frames are to behave the same way, but that is not what we've found. For our L observer, the order of events, rail-shape-rail, matches up with the order of events for our K', L' and M' observers as they encounter different parts of the shape that they meet between two rails. However, for our K and M observers, we get different orders of events: shape-rail-rail; and rail-rail-shape. There is no valid transformation between frames that can change these orders, so the case it proven.

[To process this action, we simply work through a series of Frame A diagrams for a series of different time coordinates, moving our shape and observers each time we increment the time coordinate. I have given you all the information you need to do this - an expert in relativity needs nothing else and should be embarrassed if he needs to ask for more.]

That is a proof, and it's a sound one. If you want to disprove it, all you have to do is find a counterexample to any of the points made in it, but no such counterexamples can exist. Now, I'm going to get on with writing my ref-frame camera software so that I can find out what the Frame B view of our rhombus shape actually looks like (and I now think that none of its sides will be parallel to our grid lines at all). I will then post some key details of the program so that other people can write their own version of it without having to work out all the details for themselves.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 13/08/2016 22:14:14
The very first thing that Einstein proved when developing SR was that the time coordinates are not all the same.

If we are drawing a Frame A diagram showing what is where at a specific time by the clock of Frame A, the time coordinate is the same in that diagram for every single point depicted in the diagram. It is impossible for Einstein or anyone else to prove that any of those points in a diagram in which they are all specifically tied to the same Frame A time coordinate can be tied to a different Frame A time coordinate as well - they can only have one time coordinate and it is the same one for all those locations in the diagram. If you want to use a different time coordinate, you have to use a different diagram, redrawing all the content in such a way as to take into account how far objects will have moved in between the two diagrams.
If you are relying on events from another frame and translating these events to frame A, then you need to take time change into account.

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I've shown that if you accelerate a square along rail A, two of its edges remain aligned parallel to that rail, but if you accelerate a square along rail B, the edges which were parallel to that rail initially drift off that alignment and do so more and more as it reaches higher speeds, and this behaviour will be fully visible to Frame B observers too.
If you want to claim that they drift out of alignment, then you have to show where the rails are at different times. Heck, the shape has to deform in certain reference frames in order to match where the rails are, since the rails are moving and the train is moving.

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I am using AGI-type reasoning - the application of reason is my speciality and I do it with much greater care than physicists.
That is an incredibly bizarre claim, unless you are an artificial intelligence. In which case, this is a either a case of GIGO in terms of someone supplying you the rules of SR or a mistake in assigning the Bayesian updating protocols on this subject.
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I now know how to present the argument to them in such a way as to head off their invalid objections from the start by showing them where their beliefs generate contradictions.
OK, but in this case, SR has no contradiction because the train never overlaps the rails because of where and when the rails are. The rails change position in different frames as well as the train.

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If you pluck a violin instead of using the bow, you are still playing the violin. Where plucking the violin is sufficient to play a piece of music, you are fully capable of playing that piece of music. I use the parts of SR that are relevant to the case I'm proving and have absolutely no obligation to use the parts that aren't.
A better analogy would be that you have violin held upside down and have the strings of the violin pressed against your shoulder. You are complaining that the violin doesn't make the sound you expect.

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No, I invited people to point out any faults with the argument if they could find them, but the argument was complete from the outset. The time aspect has never been lacking from it.
You have big blinders on because you were never trained in SR. For whatever reason, you refuse to even consider that you have these blinders and you refuse to do any of the rigorous work that would establish your case.

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No, I expect you to generate your own diagrams and try to generate ones that are incompatible with mine if you think I'm wrong.
This is your argument. The burden of proof is on you, especially if you want to disprove a theory with scads of highly accurate applications over the last century.

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The frame A diagram of this, which I attached to a post recently (the one with the points X, Y and Z marked in it), shows exactly where the parallelogram is relative to the track at a single point in time by the clock of Frame A. You are trying to play games with time where no such games are possible.
If this is the case, then you should not have a problem completing your argument with the full Lorentz transformations.

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I need you to demonstrate exactly where and when a part of the train goes outside of the track.

Already done - see the diagram I just referred to.
I cannot trust your diagrams because you haven't done the mathematical work to justify them. All you do is repeatedly apply the same length contraction without ever showing when the parts of the train match the parts of the rail.

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See the pole-and-barn paradox, for example: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/polebarn.html (This "argument" really is a modification of the pole-and-barn paradox.)

The pole-and-barn "paradox" will not help you here. What it shows is that a length contracted ladder can be seen from a different frame as not being contracted while the timing of the opening and closing of doors is seen to change to accommodate this, but that is all it shows. If you apply what you should have learned from it to my argument, you will find that it fits in with my argument just fine: the contracted objects can be regarded as not-contracted when viewed from their own frame, but other things have to adjust to maintain compatibility, such as angles of rails changing relative to the edges of a square in order to maintain their misalignment. Your trouble is that you only half think things through and don't take them the full distance.
No angles have to change, merely when the parts of the train align with the parts of the rail. This is almost exactly the same as the pole-and-barn paradox.

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There you go again - you're demanding that I add time coordinates to things that already have them, and it's your ignorance that's the problem here. The worst of it is that you don't learn when someone shows you you're wrong.
You can claim that you have time coordinates, but until you show how you translate the time coordinates from one frame to the other, your claim is baseless.

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If I'm annoyed, it's because when a proof of something is presented, the job of those who comment on it is to address the points made within the proof and to state which ones they take issue with and to say which ones they agree with so that the discussion can home in on the points of conflict and resolve them for the person who's got it wrong. Instead of doing that, you're asking me to provide a different proof to prove the same thing, and that's not on. I want you to judge the proof that I have provided and not some other proof.
OK: your proof is hopeless lacking. What it lacks is an application of SR. An application of SR uses the full Lorentz transformations, including time coordinates, which is important since checking where things are requires knowing when those things are.

I'll have to go through this "point by point" argument later.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 13/08/2016 23:11:00
If you are relying on events from another frame and translating these events to frame A, then you need to take time change into account.

And if the entire proof can be carried out without changing frame at all, there are no such translations to be done.

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If you want to claim that they drift out of alignment, then you have to show where the rails are at different times. Heck, the shape has to deform in certain reference frames in order to match where the rails are, since the rails are moving and the train is moving.

The information from the observers at K, L and M (originally labelled as X, Y and Z) show us that the rails are not aligned with the edges of the rhombus/parallelogram. The Frame A diagram of this shape in relation to the rails shows the misalignment too, and every point in that diagram can have an observer placed at it to confirm that the diagram shows what they see.

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I am using AGI-type reasoning - the application of reason is my speciality and I do it with much greater care than physicists.
That is an incredibly bizarre claim, unless you are an artificial intelligence. In which case, this is a either a case of GIGO in terms of someone supplying you the rules of SR or a mistake in assigning the Bayesian updating protocols on this subject.

It's not a bizarre claim at all - I'm simply applying the rules of reasoning in the way that proper mathematicians do instead of the AGS way of doing things which mirrors the way which physicists do it (where contradictions are tolerated).

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OK, but in this case, SR has no contradiction because the train never overlaps the rails because of where and when the rails are. The rails change position in different frames as well as the train.

The observers at K and M are witnesses to the fact that there is a misalignment. Any transformation which changes the order of events which they witness is an illegal transformation.

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A better analogy would be that you have violin held upside down and have the strings of the violin pressed against your shoulder. You are complaining that the violin doesn't make the sound you expect.

That is certainly a good analogy for your method of reasoning.

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You have big blinders on because you were never trained in SR. For whatever reason, you refuse to even consider that you have these blinders and you refuse to do any of the rigorous work that would establish your case.

On the contrary; I'm the one who's seeing this stuff clearly while you are tolerating contradiction. You imagine that a transformation which changes the order of events on a straight line running up a Spacetime diagram can be changed by changing frame of reference, but that is completely impossible. Address that before you accuse me of not understanding this stuff.

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This is your argument. The burden of proof is on you, especially if you want to disprove a theory with scads of highly accurate applications over the last century.

It is not my job to prove the case to anyone who is incapable of going through a proof and recognising it as the proof that it is. The proof is there and if you want to attack it, you need to try to pick apart specific parts of it and to show one of them to be unsound.

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If this is the case, then you should not have a problem completing your argument with the full Lorentz transformations.

If it is not the case, you should have no problem showing it to be wrong by using whatever kind of calculations you like, and so long as you don't use any illegal transformations, your work should confirm my proof. If you use a transfromation that makes the rhombus fit between the rails without the corners sticking through them, you are using an illegal transformation which can be shown to be illegal by the way it changes the order of events for an observer taking place where he is on a straight line up a Spacetime diagram. If you expect me to apply your illegal transformation and to trust its result, then that is not acceptable.

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I cannot trust your diagrams because you haven't done the mathematical work to justify them. All you do is repeatedly apply the same length contraction without ever showing when the parts of the train match the parts of the rail.

You should be able to generate your own diagrams of all these things in order to compare them with mine and see if they are compatible. If you can produce a diagram which is not compatible with mine but which meets the same requirements (such as centre of rhombus being midway between two rails), then I want to see where you're finding incompatibilities - there can't be any unless you're making mistakes.

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No angles have to change, merely when the parts of the train align with the parts of the rail. This is almost exactly the same as the pole-and-barn paradox.

If you jump to the frame of the rhombus (B'), it becomes a square from your point of view. If you are moving with that square, you will think its edges are aligned north-south and east-west, but you'd be wrong. I've attached a diagram showing what happens to the north-south and east-west lines of the original grid in relation to this square. Observing from this frame puts you in the same frame as an observer on the train, and the rails follow the blue lines (the pair which are closer to horizontal than the other pair, except that the rails would actually cut through the corners of the square). In the equivalent case of being an observer on Train A and looking at the alignment of your train and its rails, the scene is quite different, again proving that different frames produce different physics.

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You can claim that you have time coordinates, but until you show how you translate the time coordinates from one frame to the other, your claim is baseless.

The proof doesn't depend on any frame change apart from showing why it is impossible to change the order of events on a line on a Spacetime diagram - these aren't distant events observed from that line, but events which occur directly on it.

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OK: your proof is hopeless lacking. What it lacks is an application of SR. An application of SR uses the full Lorentz transformations, including time coordinates, which is important since checking where things are requires knowing when those things are.

If you go through it applying the rules of SR the way you want to, you will be able to see that every part of it stands up. However, you are not allowed to use illegal transformations which change the order of events taking place at a location (which becomes a straight line up a Spacetime diagram) because such an order change is impossible by the rules of SR.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 13/08/2016 23:38:27
Pay particular attention to the bit in my previous post relating to the attached diagram (the paragraph containing bold text). If the Frame A view of the shape moving NE makes it appear as a rhombus, an observer on that moving shape (which appears square to him) must see any square that isn't moving through Frame A as being a rhombus too, and by extension, all the grid lines of Frame A must appear to him to follow the same angles as the angles of the square that he is seeing as a rhombus (as must the rails). That is why he must see the gridlines aligned as they are in my diagram. A traveller on train A, however, will see no such change in the angle of the grid lines as they will remain parallel and perpendicular to his train.

Edit: actually, this bit isn't so clear after all because the rails are moving relative to the grid lines, and if we apply a grid co-moving with Frame B, it will produce similar angles for the Frame A' observer, so there may be a mirror image of events with those lines and it may not show up different physics at all. We need to know how things look with the actual rails, and that's harder to visualise, but we do know that the order of observed events for observers K and M show up something radically different for Train B which doesn't occur with Train A, and that's what we need to concentrate on.

Edit 2: Ah, I've got it - they are different right enough. The north-south aligned grid lines which are co-moving with Frame B don't veer off their alignment with the north-south grid lines co-moving with Frame A when viewed by observers riding Train A (although the east-west ones do), whereas for observers on Train B, Frame A 's north-south gridlines do veer off at an angle due to the length contraction on the train acting at 45 degrees, so the view is definitely not a mirror image. The computer program will make all of this much easier to see.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 14/08/2016 02:26:50
And if the entire proof can be carried out without changing frame at all, there are no such translations to be done.
Obviously not, since you are claiming that what is seen in one frame is not seen in another. You have to establish what is seen in each frame.

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It's not a bizarre claim at all - I'm simply applying the rules of reasoning in the way that proper mathematicians do instead of the AGS way of doing things which mirrors the way which physicists do it (where contradictions are tolerated).
You admit that you are not trained in physics, yet you are making claims about how physicists reason. You also claim to reason like an artificial intelligence. Both of these claims are extraordinary and require extraordinary evidence.

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If this is the case, then you should not have a problem completing your argument with the full Lorentz transformations.

If it is not the case, you should have no problem showing it to be wrong by using whatever kind of calculations you like, and so long as you don't use any illegal transformations, your work should confirm my proof.
Again, the burden of proof is one you.

However, I am going to do this work. It's a nice exercise.


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If you use a transfromation that makes the rhombus fit between the rails without the corners sticking through them, you are using an illegal transformation which can be shown to be illegal by the way it changes the order of events for an observer taking place where he is on a straight line up a Spacetime diagram. If you expect me to apply your illegal transformation and to trust its result, then that is not acceptable.
If you just want to deny SR, then there is nothing that can be helped. It will place you in a category, however.

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If you jump to the frame of the rhombus (B'), it becomes a square from your point of view. If you are moving with that square, you will think its edges are aligned north-south and east-west, but you'd be wrong. I've attached a diagram showing what happens to the north-south and east-west lines of the original grid in relation to this square. Observing from this frame puts you in the same frame as an observer on the train, and the rails follow the blue lines (the pair which are closer to horizontal than the other pair, except that the rails would actually cut through the corners of the square). In the equivalent case of being an observer on Train A and looking at the alignment of your train and its rails, the scene is quite different, again proving that different frames produce different physics.
Sure, if we use David Cooper Relativity, then we get an inconsistency. I get that. But I and other people use SR.

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The proof doesn't depend on any frame change
Except that you are talking about the deformation of a square from a frame in which it is at rest. Do you even read what you write?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 14/08/2016 02:28:13
Edit: actually, this bit isn't so clear after all because the rails are moving relative to the grid lines
Ta da!
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Edit 2: Ah, I've got it
Nope, still don't got it.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 14/08/2016 17:35:09
OK, so we start with a reference frame, A, that we will take to be at rest.

We will then imagine a reference frame , A', moving to the NE of our original reference frame at a speed of 0.866 of the speed of light. (We will just use units adjusted so that the speed of light in a frame is 1 in our units).

Let's make this a unit square, so that the SW corner of the square rests at the origin of A'. This means that the SW corner of the square is at A'(t,0,0) for all values of t. For al corners:

SW A'(t,0,0)
NE A'(t,1,1)
NW A'(t,0,1)
SE A'(t,1,0)

Let's make things easy for ourselves and arrange frames A and A' so that the SW corner of our square passes through A(0,0,0) as the square moves through A.

Then we have to ask where the other points of the square lie?

For ease of reference, I have used the boost matrix formulation available at wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation#Boost_matrix

Our velocity is 0.866, but we have to adjust this based on our angle of motion. We can do this by multiplying by the normals in each direction, n_x=0.707 and n_y = 0.707. Our gamma remains 2. (Please note that I am using reduced significant digits in this presentation.)

This means that to translate a position from A to A':
t'=2t + (-2)(0.866)(0.707)x + (-2)(0.866)(0.707)y
x'=(-2)(0.866)(0.707)t + (1 +(2-1)(0.707)^2)x + (2-1)(0.707)(0.707)y
y'=-2(0.866)(0.707)t  + (2-1)(0.707)(0.707)x + (1 +(2-1)(0.707)^2)y

To get the inverse, we have to essential run a translation at the same speed in the opposite direction. This means flipping the sign on the normals for each direction.

This means that to translate a position from A' to A:
t=2t' + (-2)(0.866)(-0.707)x' + (-2)(0.866)(-0.707)y'
x=(-2)(0.866)(-0.707)t' + (1 +(2-1)(-0.707)^2)x' + (2-1)(-0.707)(-0.707)y'
y=-2(0.866)(-0.707)t'  + (2-1)(-0.707)(-0.707)x' + (1 +(2-1)(-0.707)^2)y'

So let's look at the unit square at time A'(t=0):
SW A'(0,0,0)
NE A'(0,1,1)
NW A'(0,0,1)
SE A'(0,1,0)

Translated to frame A:
SW A(0,0,0)
NE A(2.45,2,2)
NW A(1.22,0.5,1.5)
SE A(1.22,1.5,0.5)

We see here a problem for determining the shape of our square in frame A: our points are now at different times! This isn't much of a problem, because we know that the parts of the square are all moving at a constant rate relative to frame A. We just have to trace their path back.

This means looking at delta(t) and then figuring out the change in each coordinate and applying that (taking a negative value of delta(t) to go backwards in time). So:
delta(x) = delta(t)(v)n_x = delta(t)(-0.866)(0.707)
delta(y) = delta(t)(v)n_y = delta(t)(-0.866)(0.707)

So, looking back, we can find all the points of the square at A(t=0):
SW A(0,0,0)
NE A(0,0.5,0.5)
NW A(0,-0.25,0.75)
SE A(0,0.75,-0.25)

This gives us a nice rhombus shape, with a distance between NW and SE of sqrt(2), which is what we expect and a distance between SW and NE of 0.707, which is also what we expect from length contraction.

So what if we imagine that this square was hovering over rails? Does the distortion of the box mean that it goes over the rails?

Well, since the box was literally placed over the rails, then we should expect the rails to be in exactly the same place under the box: they undergo the same translations!

These tracks are 1 unit apart in A', but only 0.707 units apart in frame A, which we know because of length contraction. The tracks run W-E where they are at rest, but they are at rest in A', which means that they are moving NE in A.

This also means that the tracks are farther north the farther east one goes and are farther south the farther west one goes. This is a product of the relativity of simultaneity: where each frame assigns the track to be at different times. It depends on when frame A assigns the track to cross certain points. In A', we have a track sitting still, running W to E, but in A we have a track moving NE, oriented NW to SE.

But let's move the box along, say 10 units in frame A. Then the x position and the y position of every point changes by 10(0.866)(0.707)=6.123 and the t of every point becomes 10.

Now we're looking at these points:
SW A(10,6.123,6.123)
NE A(10,6.623,6.623)
NW A(10,5.873,6.873)
SE A(10,6.873,5.873)

Since the rail is moving along with the square, the square stays nicely with the rail. But can we translate back?

Here are the translated positions (3 significant figures):
SW A'(5,0,0)
NE A'(3.78,1,1)
NW A'(4.39,0,1)
SE A'(4.39,1,0)

As we can see, these are all points on the unit square in Frame A', which means that they are points on the rail.

Let's imagine a rail stationary in frame A, over which the square (rhombus) is moving, touching at the NW and SE corners. This means that the rail runs SW to NE, is sqrt(2) wide and one rail passes through A(0,-0.25,0.75) and the other through A(0,0.75,-0.25).

We already know that the square stays on this track in frame A', since the exact same translations that we used above for the other track apply for this track on the corner.

I think that's enough for now.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 14/08/2016 19:42:31
And if the entire proof can be carried out without changing frame at all, there are no such translations to be done.
Obviously not, since you are claiming that what is seen in one frame is not seen in another. You have to establish what is seen in each frame.

I have established the order of events in which an observer at K or M (who is at rest in Frame A) sees objects move past him, and that tells you everything you need to know - the order is incompatible with the rhombus being contained between the rails.

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You admit that you are not trained in physics, yet you are making claims about how physicists reason. You also claim to reason like an artificial intelligence. Both of these claims are extraordinary and require extraordinary evidence.

You tolerate contradictions, but I don't. That's a big difference between us.

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If you just want to deny SR, then there is nothing that can be helped.

An illegal transformation (which generates a contradiction) has no place in SR because it breaks more fundamental rules of SR - it is being used by your lot in error.

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Sure, if we use David Cooper Relativity, then we get an inconsistency. I get that. But I and other people use SR.

The error you make is that when you change frame, you also switch from the frame that's stationary to one that isn't and then calculate on the basis that the new one's stationary, and that's why you generate contradictions which you have yet to recognise that you are doing.

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The proof doesn't depend on any frame change
Except that you are talking about the deformation of a square from a frame in which it is at rest. Do you even read what you write?
[/quote]

What are you on about? A square at rest in Frame A is accelerated to relativistic speed in Frame A and we see its shape change in Frame A. There is no switch there.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 14/08/2016 19:45:05
Edit: actually, this bit isn't so clear after all because the rails are moving relative to the grid lines
Ta da!
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Edit 2: Ah, I've got it
Nope, still don't got it.

You're the one who hasn't got it. The angles are different - wait till you see the computer program.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 14/08/2016 19:47:58
What are you on about? A square at rest in Frame A is accelerated to relativistic speed in Frame A and we see its shape change in Frame A. There is no switch there.
And yet, there is a frame of reference in which the square is at rest! These is another very basic fact of SR of which you are completely ignorant. Yet you refuse to actually consider that you might be missing something and you lash out with insults rather than doing work.

I await your reply to my worked out example with actual coordinates and actual transformations. Or rather, I expect you to ignore it or blatantly deny the application of SR.

I do feel sorry to you, since it is apparent that you have had some learning problems in your life and may continue to have these problems. However, this does not excuse your attitude.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 14/08/2016 20:12:34
Thanks for going through the calculations and showing them to me. Your Frame A' is the one I called B' in my example, so that's something readers need to avoid tripping over - I will use your A' label the same way you have in this post.

This gives us a nice rhombus shape, with a distance between NW and SE of sqrt(2), which is what we expect and a distance between SW and NE of 0.707, which is also what we expect from length contraction.

So we agree on the same shape for the square moving NE at 0.866c through Frame A and will draw it the same way as each other in a diagram in which all points have t=0.

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The tracks run W-E where they are at rest, but they are at rest in A', which means that they are moving NE in A.

No. The tracks are moving directly north in Frame A and are not at rest in Frame A', so you're turning them into objects co-moving with the rhombus through Frame A, and that will automatically give them the same alignment as the edge of the rhombus. Have you just worded this wrongly or have you actually treated them as co-moving with the rhombus through Frame A?

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This also means that the tracks are farther north the farther east one goes and are farther south the farther west one goes. This is a product of the relativity of simultaneity: where each frame assigns the track to be at different times. It depends on when frame A assigns the track to cross certain points. In A', we have a track sitting still, running W to E, but in A we have a track moving NE, oriented NW to SE.

So you are indeed moving the rails incorrectly and it wasn't just a mistake in the wording. In Frame A, the rails are moving directly north and appear on the Frame A diagrams aligned perpendicular to their direction of travel precisely because every point of them shown in a single diagram shows them at the same Frame A time. If they were co-moving with Frame A', they would appear in Frame A diagrams with the same alignment as two of the edges of the rhombus. Your calculations are for that case and not for the one in my thought experiment where the rails are not co-moving with the rhombus.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 14/08/2016 20:21:02
No. The tracks are moving directly north in Frame A and are not at rest in Frame A', so you're turning them into objects co-moving with the rhombus through Frame A, and that will automatically give them the same alignment as the edge of the rhombus. Have you just worded this wrongly or have you actually treated them as co-moving with the rhombus through Frame A?
If you're just going to have the tracks not move with the object, then who cares? Of course a train moving in a different direction from a track can go over a track.

I tried to follow your setup from post #81 as much as possible. But I get it now, you want to see if you can move the square along the tracks.

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So you are indeed moving the rails incorrectly and it wasn't just a mistake in the wording. In Frame A, the rails are moving directly north and appear on the Frame A diagrams aligned perpendicular to their direction of travel precisely because every point of them shown in a single diagram shows them at the same Frame A time. If they were co-moving with Frame A', they would appear in Frame A diagrams with the same alignment as two of the edges of the rhombus. Your calculations are for that case and not for the one in my thought experiment where the rails are not co-moving with the rhombus.
Given that you admit that they are not moving together, who cares if they intersect or not? Where is the paradox?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 14/08/2016 20:24:17
What are you on about? A square at rest in Frame A is accelerated to relativistic speed in Frame A and we see its shape change in Frame A. There is no switch there.
And yet, there is a frame of reference in which the square is at rest! These is another very basic fact of SR of which you are completely ignorant.

Again, what are you on about? How does there being a frame of reference in which the square is at rest require any frame change when analysing events entirely from that frame?

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Yet you refuse to actually consider that you might be missing something and you lash out with insults rather than doing work.

What insults? Is "what are you on about" an insult? If you think it was, it was no bigger an insult than the "do you even read what you write" which it was replying to and which you had said when making an extremely wayward point.

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I await your reply to my worked out example with actual coordinates and actual transformations. Or rather, I expect you to ignore it or blatantly deny the application of SR.

I await your corrections to your work.

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I do feel sorry to you, since it is apparent that you have had some learning problems in your life and may continue to have these problems. However, this does not excuse your attitude.

What learning problems? I've had problems getting access to decent maths and physics teaching at school, but I just worked out my own ways of doing everything instead, and when I can produce the same results or better ones (that don't produce the contradictions that your methods do), I think that puts me some way ahead. As for my attitude, I am a mirror - whatever you fling at me, it will come back.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 14/08/2016 20:41:37
If you're just going to have the tracks not move with the object, then who cares? Of course a train moving in a different direction from a track can go over a track.

If you calculate the angle of the track in Frame A based on it co-moving with the train, it will have length contraction applied to it in the NE-SW direction and will appear in Frame A diagrams at an angle to the east-west line, just like two of the edges of the rhombus. If you have the rails moving directly north, it is aligned directly east-west on the diagram. That is a radical difference: your calculations deviated from the events described in my proof and are invalid as commentary upon it.

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I tried to follow your setup from post #81 as much as possible. But I get it now, you want to see if you can move the square along the tracks.

If you want to use the right coordinates for the track, it has to be moving through Frame A in the right direction so that you don't warp it off its correct alignment.

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Given that you admit that they are not moving together, who cares if they intersect or not? Where is the paradox?

Who cares? How slapdash do you want to be? This is shocking, and I thought the biscuit had already been taken lang syne. If I am moving north at 0.7c (or any other relativistic speed) through Frame A along with a pair of rails aligned perpendicular to my direction of travel, when I send my mag-lev squares along between them at relativistic speeds relative to me, I expect (if I have been misinformed by physicists) that square to stay happily between the rails no matter how fast it goes, just as if it is in the preferred frame, but no - it either warps and breaks or it buckles the rails because the physics of the frame I'm in doesn't work like the preferred frame.

So stop being slapdash and do the work properly.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 14/08/2016 21:06:58

If you calculate the angle of the track in Frame A based on it co-moving with the train, it will have length contraction applied to it in the NE-SW direction and will appear in Frame A diagrams at an angle to the east-west line, just like two of the edges of the rhombus. If you have the rails moving directly north, it is aligned directly east-west on the diagram. That is a radical difference: your calculations deviated from the events described in my proof and are invalid as commentary upon it.
I assumed that you were trying to create a contradiction so I did my best to recreate consistency across descriptions based on post #81. So you were pointing out that things deform differently under different transformations. How is this a contradiction for anyone?

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Given that you admit that they are not moving together, who cares if they intersect or not? Where is the paradox?

Who cares? How slapdash do you want to be? This is shocking, and I thought the biscuit had already been taken lang syne. If I am moving north at 0.7c (or any other relativistic speed) through Frame A along with a pair of rails aligned perpendicular to my direction of travel, when I send my mag-lev squares along between them at relativistic speeds relative to me, I expect (if I have been misinformed by physicists) that square to stay happily between the rails no matter how fast it goes, just as if it is in the preferred frame, but no - it either warps and breaks or it buckles the rails because the physics of the frame I'm in doesn't work like the preferred frame.
If you send it at the right speed, it should be fine. Is your problem that you are not combining the speeds correctly?
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So stop being slapdash and do the work properly.
Since I'm the only person here actually using SR, you seem like a complete jerk to be saying that I'm slapdash. Again, your learning problems are not an excuse for your poor behavior.

I showed that at least the deformation relative to one kind of track is consistent. If you want to show something else, then do what I did, use some actual Lorentz transformations, and actually make your case.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 14/08/2016 21:37:36
I assumed that you were trying to create a contradiction so I did my best to recreate consistency across descriptions based on post #81. So you were pointing out that things deform differently under different transformations. How is this a contradiction for anyone?

If you were working by post #81, the wording of point (4) was as follows:-

(4) If we have two rails aligned east-west separated by one metre in the north-south direction when at rest in Frame A (and attached together by one-metre long poles to hold them in place relative to each other), when we move them at 0.612c northwards through Frame A they will contract closer together to a separation of 79.1cm.

That, plus all previous examples, gives the direction of travel of the rails as northwards, and that is why they appear in Frame A diagrams perpendicular to their direction of travel. As you have discovered, if the rails are moving NE instead, they will appear in Frame A diagrams at a different angle. My proof depends on them moving north and you must conform to that if your calculations are to be valid. Once you have worked through the numbers, you will find that the rhombus does not fit between the rails, as I've told you all along. The Frame A diagrams do not lie and cannot lie: what you see with them is what you get.

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If you send it at the right speed, it should be fine. Is your problem that you are not combining the speeds correctly?

If you cheat by having the rails co-moving with the rhombus, you will hide the effect you're meant to be looking for because you are literally looking in the wrong place.

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So stop being slapdash and do the work properly.
Since I'm the only person here actually using SR, you seem like a complete jerk to be saying that I'm slapdash. Again, your learning problems are not an excuse for your poor behavior.

I am the one applying SR correctly - the Frame A diagrams show what's going on perfectly, but you dismiss them out of ignorance of how they work and what they mean. I tried to educate you about this, but you wouldn't listen, and now you've made a right royal fool of yourself over four pages.

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I showed that at least the deformation relative to one kind of track is consistent. If you want to show something else, then do what I did, use some actual Lorentz transformations, and actually make your case.

Are you playing games of avoidance? Did you deliberately use rails co-moving with the rhombus in order to hide something? Well, I hope not. The big question though is, will you be man enough to post your results for the rails moving in the right direction when it finally dawns on you that I've been right throughout? If you do post them though, that will be an admirable act for which you will deserve respect.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 14/08/2016 21:43:17
I'll see when I have enough time. I'm sorry that you have learning problems, but not sorry that you're a real ____.

In the end, you are a crank, so there is not much I can do to help you. I wish you the best of luck and I hope you don't waste too much time with your education website. And I really hope you have some support system to pay for your needs.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 14/08/2016 22:10:59
I'll see when I have enough time. I'm sorry that you have learning problems, but not sorry that you're a real ____.

Charming! I'm not the one with learning problems, as you'll find if you do the work properly instead of being slapdash.

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In the end, you are a crank, so there is not much I can do to help you. I wish you the best of luck and I hope you don't waste too much time with your education website. And I really hope you have some support system to pay for your needs.

I'm not the one that needs help - I don't tolerate contradictions in my model of reality, but you do, and so do hordes of other qualified "experts" who make a mockery of mathematics. The rhombus does not fit between the rails, and Frame A diagrams show that. The Frame A diagram for the numbers you provided would show the rails running at an angle like the edges of the rhombus, so of course you couldn't find the issue there - the Frame A diagram of that doesn't lie, but shows the rhombus sitting neatly between the rails. The Frame A diagram of my setup though shows the rails aligned perpendicular to their 100% northward direction of travel, and it doesn't lie about the placing of the rhombus over it where two of the corners stick outside of the rails. Just by drawing the diagram and looking at it for a few seconds, a real expert would have realised that the argument I've presented is correct: different frames of reference produce different physics. In the preferred frame you can move the squares and rails east or west at any speed and there is no problem, but for the Frame B physicist testing how the same setup works in his frame, he will confirm that Lorentz and Einstein called it wrong. Now we need to design a practical experiment to make use of this new understanding so that we can finally tell how fast we're moving through the preferred frame, and in which direction.

[Details of my ref-frame camera program will follow at some point, and then the program itself will be made available for all to use: I'll do a JavaScript version that anyone can run straight off a webpage, so watch this space.]
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 15/08/2016 14:04:30
Mr. Cooper stumbled upon an interesting feature of relativity theory. One day, if he learns to do SR, he may actually be able to incorporate this into his JavaScript program. I wish him the best of luck and health on this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner_rotation
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 15/08/2016 18:30:32
It is interesting to note the use of combined arcsine and cosine with respect to the Winger rotation. I am currently exploring similar areas but not involving relativity. I may divert my attention soon to this subject.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 15/08/2016 19:29:02
Mr. Cooper stumbled upon an interesting feature of relativity theory.

He certainly did, and he showed that different frames produce different physics.

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One day, if he learns to do SR, he may actually be able to incorporate this into his JavaScript program. I wish him the best of luck and health on this.

He's the one doing SR properly and it's other people who need to catch up with where he has moved physics on to, in particular those who imagine that an order of events at point K or M can be changed at the wave of a wand by changing frame of reference and whispering "hocus pocus".

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

Now, what's all this about? Are you trying to suggest that if I start at rest in Frame A and then race off northwards to be at rest in Frame B instead, when I then send my squares along my east-west-aligned rails which I have taken with me they will behave differently from a rocket launched from rest in Frame A to end up co-moving with my squares which are now racing along between Rails B and B2 such that they have rotated out of alignment with the rails rather than simply taking up the same rhombus shape? Well, if they do that, they're still demonstrating different physics from what we would see when running squares along between Rails A and A2 which (the rails) are at rest in Frame A - no such rotations or distortions which change the angles of square/rectangle edges occur there. However, in reality they have no choice other than to be length contracted in the NW-SW direction, no matter what kind of rotation you might be adding to them (whether rightly or more likely wrongly).

PhysBang has gone pop and is clutching at straws, but, fortunately for him, no one knows his real name so this is of no consequence - he has no need to fear about his reputation as he can discard it like a snake shedding its skin, and that leaves him free to insult and attempt to belittle a superior mind. Still, this non-collinear boost stuff is an interesting idea which we can explore properly once my program is up and running. We'll then be doing the job properly by performing all actions exclusively in Frame A before looking to see how those events appear in other frames rather than applying wrong physics in other frames in the mistaken belief that things work the same way there.

I see PhysBang hasn't shared his calculations for the arangement of things in Frame A when the rails are moving north instead of co-moving with the rhombus. I wonder if he's bothered to do them at all. Well, if not, he could always just use his existing calculations and reverse them east-west to draw the rails as they would try to align themselves if they were moving through Frame B in the opposite direction to the rhombus instead of co-moving with it - that'll make the corners stick even further out beyond the rails. Still, I'm sure he'll keep finding more voodoo to go on tricking himself into thinking that he understands how a square peg can fill a round hole. The rest of us can concentrate on doing real physics.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 15/08/2016 22:52:27
Now, what's all this about? Are you trying to suggest that if I start at rest in Frame A and then race off northwards to be at rest in Frame B instead, when I then send my squares along my east-west-aligned rails which I have taken with me they will behave differently from a rocket launched from rest in Frame A to end up co-moving with my squares which are now racing along between Rails B and B2 such that they have rotated out of alignment with the rails rather than simply taking up the same rhombus shape?
No. What happens is that the rail is no longer oriented in such a way as to produce the kind of motion that you imagine. The composition of velocities and directions is not a simple linear combination.


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Well, if they do that, they're still demonstrating different physics from what we would see when running squares along between Rails A and A2 which (the rails) are at rest in Frame A - no such rotations or distortions which change the angles of square/rectangle edges occur there. However, in reality they have no choice other than to be length contracted in the NW-SW direction, no matter what kind of rotation you might be adding to them (whether rightly or more likely wrongly).
SR is different than Galilean relativity.

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I see PhysBang hasn't shared his calculations for the arangement of things in Frame A when the rails are moving north instead of co-moving with the rhombus. I wonder if he's bothered to do them at all.
I haven't bothered, since I haven't had the time to work through the Wigner rotation required.

But if you want to make an argument about SR, then I suggest that you use SR rather than just DCR. Because if you just use DCR, then you are a crank.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 15/08/2016 23:26:30
No. What happens is that the rail is no longer oriented in such a way as to produce the kind of motion that you imagine. The composition of velocities and directions is not a simple linear combination.

You've agreed with me on the rhombus shape in Frame A and I've agreed with you on where the rails will be in Frame A if they're co-moving with the rhombus, so you've got a major problem. If you move those rails the opposite way to the rhombus through Frame B, they'll slope the other way in Frame A, and if you have the rails at rest in Frame B, they'll be aligned perfectly east-west in Frame A, so you can't fix the problem of observers K and M encountering objects in an order incompatible with the rhombus fitting between the rails. You're stuffed - you've been blown out of the water and are now an irrelevance.

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SR is different than Galilean relativity.

SR and LET deal with these frames identically when it comes to how things appear in their Euclidean metrics, and I'm doing LET (which SR is forced to conform to, and that means I'm also doing all the relevant parts of SR).

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I haven't bothered, since I haven't had the time to work through the Wigner rotation required.

All you need to do is work out how those rails are aligned in the Frame A diagram, and that's no harder than any of the other things you've already worked out. Tip: there's no double boost involved, so you're barking up the wrong tree.

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But if you want to make an argument about SR, then I suggest that you use SR rather than just DCR. Because if you just use DCR, then you are a crank.

If you can't see that SR has to conform to everything I'm doing here, you're the crank. You showed that you were unable to produce a different shape for the rhombus from mine, and the way you calculated that will work just fine for calculating that the rails will cross the Frame A diagram perpendicular to their direction of travel. All you have to do then is put the rhombus over the rails and see if the corners stick out beyond the rails, which they do, at which point the observers at K and M will tell you that the objects pass you in an order incompatible with the square fitting between the rails and you realise that that order can't be changed by any valid transformation to another frame. But still you can't see that and instead go on making yourself look more and more ridiculous. If that's your speciality though, that's great - everyone should have an ambition to be great at something.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 16/08/2016 13:08:45
if you have the rails at rest in Frame B, they'll be aligned perfectly east-west in Frame A,
Well, no. Because of the correction for time, at any moment simultaneous in Frame A the tracks will be at an angle. This is an aspect of the relativity of simultaneity that you just aren't taking into account.

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SR and LET deal with these frames identically when it comes to how things appear in their Euclidean metrics, and I'm doing LET (which SR is forced to conform to, and that means I'm also doing all the relevant parts of SR).
I'm not sure what "LET" is supposed to be, but you are using DCR.

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I haven't bothered, since I haven't had the time to work through the Wigner rotation required.

All you need to do is work out how those rails are aligned in the Frame A diagram, and that's no harder than any of the other things you've already worked out. Tip: there's no double boost involved, so you're barking up the wrong tree.
Says the person who can't work out where the rails will be because he can't work out when the rails will be. If you are speaking of trying to sync up moving W-E in a frame moving S-N in order to get a motion that is SW-NE, then you are speaking of a double boost.

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If you can't see that SR has to conform to everything I'm doing here, you're the crank.
Yes, I agree that I am being a crank by refusing to include the time parameter and refusing to do actual transformations and instead just using a series of shortcuts.

Oh, wait, I'm not the one refusing to use SR. So who is the crank again?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 16/08/2016 17:37:29
if you have the rails at rest in Frame B, they'll be aligned perfectly east-west in Frame A,
Well, no. Because of the correction for time, at any moment simultaneous in Frame A the tracks will be at an angle. This is an aspect of the relativity of simultaneity that you just aren't taking into account.

The angle's perpendicular to the direction of travel when the rails are moving north. You are determined to try to have them co-moving with the rhombus because it's the only thing you can do to keep them aligned with the edges of the rhombus, but even if I allow you to do that, what are you going to do when I send another square NW so that it becomes a rhombus aligned the other way and doesn't fit between your tilted rails? Are you going to have the rails co-moving with that at the same time as they're co-moving with the first rhombus?

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I'm not sure what "LET" is supposed to be, but you are using DCR.

LET is Lorentz Ether Theory, as you ought to have learned as part of your training. The rules of how things behave in the Euclidean metric of a frame and how they appear in other frames is described both by LET and by SR. If the LET approach is used to create diagrams, SR must produce matching diagrams if it isn't to have objects violating the rules. For example, if you want a square at rest in Frame B to be given an eastward shove such that it's co-moving with the rhombus on the rocket, it has to obey the same rules of time dilation and length contraction so as to avoid having a different speed of light operate for it, and that means it must take up the same shape (unless it has somehow rotated, but even then it must have the same amount of length contraction and time dilation applied to it).

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Says the person who can't work out where the rails will be because he can't work out when the rails will be. If you are speaking of trying to sync up moving W-E in a frame moving S-N in order to get a motion that is SW-NE, then you are speaking of a double boost.

You know full well that the rails are not moving east or west at all, but purely north, so there is no double boost. You're turning into a troll - all you're doing now is polluting a thread by dumping your garbage in it.

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Yes, I agree that I am being a crank by refusing to include the time parameter and refusing to do actual transformations and instead just using a series of shortcuts.

Oh, wait, I'm not the one refusing to use SR. So who is the crank again?

Yet again you claim I'm not including the time parameter, and yet it's inherent to the diagrams that time is identical for every point shown on them, so you're just repeating a well-worn lie, and that's trolling. You're also flinging the "crank" word again where it isn't warranted, so again you're trolling. The transformations you want me to use are not some kind of holy cow - they are derived from something, and I derive my methods from the same source and produce identical numbers as results, so again you're trolling. Everything I'm doing, SR is required to conform with it it isn't to have more than one speed of light acting within a frame, so again you're trolling. The so-called shortcuts that I'm using are used by real SR experts as well as by me: If you have a rail at rest in Frame A and you then move it northwards such that it's in rest in Frame B, it maintains its east-west alignment because every part of it is accelerated at the same time by Frame A's clocks and by Frame B's clocks which are all synchronised in the east-west direction such that no tilt can be imparted to the rail during this acceleration - you don't need to reach for a calculator to work that out.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 16/08/2016 18:06:46
The angle's perpendicular to the direction of travel when the rails are moving north. You are determined to try to have them co-moving with the rhombus because it's the only thing you can do to keep them aligned with the edges of the rhombus, but even if I allow you to do that, what are you going to do when I send another square NW so that it becomes a rhombus aligned the other way and doesn't fit between your tilted rails? Are you going to have the rails co-moving with that at the same time as they're co-moving with the first rhombus?
You aren't going to do anything, because you aren't going to work out the time coordinates. Because you are a crank.

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LET is Lorentz Ether Theory, as you ought to have learned as part of your training.
No, I have no training in being a crank; I do not know what crazy acronyms a crank is going to use.

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The rules of how things behave in the Euclidean metric of a frame and how they appear in other frames is described both by LET and by SR. If the LET approach is used to create diagrams, SR must produce matching diagrams if it isn't to have objects violating the rules. For example, if you want a square at rest in Frame B to be given an eastward shove such that it's co-moving with the rhombus on the rocket, it has to obey the same rules of time dilation and length contraction so as to avoid having a different speed of light operate for it, and that means it must take up the same shape (unless it has somehow rotated, but even then it must have the same amount of length contraction and time dilation applied to it).
And LET has to use time dilation and relative simultaneity between frames of reference just like SR does. You don't get to ignore the rules of LET.

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You know full well that the rails are not moving east or west at all, but purely north, so there is no double boost. You're turning into a troll - all you're doing now is polluting a thread by dumping your garbage in it.
The second boost is to the square, which has to get one boost to match the frame of the tracks and then to follow the tracks. Do you not realize that the square is moving relative to both frames you are imagining?

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Yet again you claim I'm not including the time parameter, and yet it's inherent to the diagrams that time is identical for every point shown on them, so you're just repeating a well-worn lie, and that's trolling.
Cranks love to claim that people asking them for the proper scientific rigor are trolling. I agree that time is inherent in the diagrams, which is why you produce bad diagrams.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 16/08/2016 19:19:45
You aren't going to do anything, because you aren't going to work out the time coordinates. Because you are a crank.

When time is the same for all objects in a Frame A diagram, the time coordinates for all points are known, and you're still trolling.

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No, I have no training in being a crank; I do not know what crazy acronyms a crank is going to use.

You clearly don't need any training in being a crank, and LET should be well known to any real expert in relativity.

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And LET has to use time dilation and relative simultaneity between frames of reference just like SR does. You don't get to ignore the rules of LET.

I don't ignore them - everything I do conforms to those rules and to the relevant parts of SR, as you found when you calculated the shape of the rhombus and discovered that I'd got it right.

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The second boost is to the square, which has to get one boost to match the frame of the tracks and then to follow the tracks. Do you not realize that the square is moving relative to both frames you are imagining?

You do not have two boosts to pin down what Rails B and B2 are doing as they're moving north through Frame A and only take an acceleration in one direction to get them from rest to relativistic speed in that direction. Likewise, you do not have two boosts to pin down what the square does when you accelerate it from rest to relativistic speed in the direction NE. You can therefore calculate with absolute ease how these items will appear in Frame A diagrams, and to claim that you need two boosts to find the arrangement of either of those rails or the rocket (with the square on it which now appears as a rhombus) is plain wrong. For a square being sent along the rails subsequently, it's another issue, but any rotation that you imagine is magically going to appear on it is going to put it out of alignment with the rails, so again that shows different physics for different frames.

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Cranks love to claim that people asking them for the proper scientific rigor are trolling. I agree that time is inherent in the diagrams, which is why you produce bad diagrams.

When you go through your fancy maths to calculate where things appear in Frame A diagrams, you produce diagrams identical to mine, or you would do if you didn't try to cheat by having the rails co-moving with the rhombus. You are a cheat, a crank and a troll.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 16/08/2016 21:55:08
MOD Stop the childish nonsense or I will lock this thread.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 16/08/2016 22:25:24
You do not have two boosts to pin down what Rails B and B2 are doing as they're moving north through Frame A and only take an acceleration in one direction to get them from rest to relativistic speed in that direction. Likewise, you do not have two boosts to pin down what the square does when you accelerate it from rest to relativistic speed in the direction NE. You can therefore calculate with absolute ease how these items will appear in Frame A diagrams, and to claim that you need two boosts to find the arrangement of either of those rails or the rocket (with the square on it which now appears as a rhombus) is plain wrong. For a square being sent along the rails subsequently, it's another issue, but any rotation that you imagine is magically going to appear on it is going to put it out of alignment with the rails, so again that shows different physics for different frames.
The problem with this reasoning is that it assumes that the square sent off at an angle is equivalent to the square set off along the rails of the second frame. This is not necessarily the case, since no work has been done to show that they are the same; the composition of velocities in SR is not the same as the composition of velocities in Galilean Relativity, no matter how much someone invokes "Euclidean metric" over and over again.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 17/08/2016 19:25:42
The problem with this reasoning is that it assumes that the square sent off at an angle is equivalent to the square set off along the rails of the second frame. This is not necessarily the case, since no work has been done to show that they are the same; the composition of velocities in SR is not the same as the composition of velocities in Galilean Relativity, no matter how much someone invokes "Euclidean metric" over and over again.

First you need to understand why length contraction occurs, so let's look at that now and then see how it dictates the shape that the square being sent along the rails must try to take up:-

(1) Start with four rockets sitting at rest in frame A in a square configuration. We'll call these rockets C, D, E and F, and they are sitting on the corners of a square which has its edges aligned north-south and east-west. C is sitting on the NW corner of the square, D on the NE corner, E on the SE corner and F on the SW corner. Now let's move them: all of them simultaneously (by their clocks which are synchronised for Frame A) accelerate to 0.866c northwards and then maintain that speed. Even once they are up to that speed, Frame A observers will continue to measure them as being arranged in a square formation - there has been no length contraction applied to this square, although each rocket has contracted to half its rest length.

(2) The crew on the rockets now decide to take up what looks like a square configuration to them, so C and D, the front two, slow down a little while F and E (the rear two) speed up a bit until they are satisfied that they are the right distance apart, at which point C and D speed up a bit again and F and E slow down a bit so that this correct separation can be maintained from now on. Frame A observers will now measure the formation of rockets as a rectangle which is half as long north-south as it is east-west: it is only now that it has been length-contracted to half its rest length.

(3) If these rockets are extremely small and they're crewed by tiny robots, we can have them fly over the corners of one of our standard 1m x 1m squares (made of some kind of rigid material, so let's just say it's metal - the atoms of this material are in constant communication through forces which determine their separation). C, D, E and F are now holding station over the corners of one of our squares between Rails B and B2, and it's co-moving with them as they travel directly north. We'll call this square Square B. Square B has been length contracted by its high-speed movement northwards, and the rockets have been length contracted to the same extent by trying to take up what looks to them like a square configuration. We can have another set of rockets G, H, I and J doing the same thing over a square which is at rest in Frame A, sitting between Rails A and A2, and this one will be called Square A.

(4) If we send Square A eastwards, what happens to it? (We're back to looking at the square that's at rest in Frame A.) It will length contract in the east-west direction. The Frame B view of Square A will be a parallelogram with two of its sides parallel to the rails. If we send rockets G, H, I and J eastwards too, they will also have a formation which looks like a parallelogram to Frame B observers, but this formation will not length-contract until these rockets decide to make adjustments to keep their formation looking like a square to them, and then it will contract to the same shape as Square A.

(5) Now lets do the same with our square at rest in Frame B. If we send Square B eastwards without removing the northward component of its movement, we can accelerate it to a speed which results in it co-moving with our original rocket. This rocket never had a name, so I'll now call it Rocket R - this is the rocket with a square painted on it. In different versions of the thought experiment this rocket moves at different angles through Frame A, but since I've chosen 0.866c for the northward vector of its movement, the eastward one can be 0.433 again and the square painted on it will now appear to Frame A observers as having a parallelogram shape with none of its edges aligned with the rails. That shape is the one that the material in Square B should now try to take up in order to conform to the same length-contraction that is acting on Rocket R. You are suggesting though that it doesn't need to conform to that and can hold some other shape instead, but if you try to do that there will be serious consequences.

(6) We haven't looked at what our rockets C, D, E and F do when they're given the same movement eastwards as Square B (again without losing the component of their speed taking them northwards). If C, D, E and F have not resynchronised their clocks for Frame B and still have them set for Frame A, they will all accelerate simultaniously from the point of view of Frame A observers and will remain in a rectangle formation, but since these rockets have adjusted their positions to try to make their formation look like a square to themselves, they really ought to have resynchronised their clocks for Frame B. If they've done this, rockets F and E will move off first (from the point of view of Frame A observers), while C and D will move off a moment later, and the result of this will be that Frame A observers will see their formation turn into a parallelogram with its sides parallel to Rails B and B2. This will be a mirror image of what Frame B observers see of rockets G, H, I and J accelerating off from rest in Frame A, so that makes it look as if all frames behave like a preferred frame of reference. However, when rockets C, D, E and F then try to make their formation look like a square again once they're up to speed, they are dealing with length-contraction acting on them at an angle 26.56 degrees east of north - as a consequence, they will automatically take up the same formation as the corners of the shape painted on Rocket R. Square B will attempt to take up that same shape too, and if the rails prevent it from doing so it will warp and break under the stresses being applied to it. Alternatively though, if Square B is sitting over the space between the rails rather than directly between them, it will simply adjust its shape until it matches the one on Rocket R.

You want to believe that Square B can hold some other shape than the one on Rocket R, but it can only do that if it's under stress to hold it in a shape it doesn't naturally want to take up. You believe that no such stresses will be put on it though and that it will just happily maintain a different shape from the one on Rocket B, but that doesn't work because it means you need to have a different speed of light operating across these objects, and that means breaking the speed limit for light in Frame A on Square B unless it takes up the same shape as the square painted on Rocket R. The speed of light is fixed in the Euclidean geometry of Frame A and it cannot be violated by an object behaving in ways that depend on a higher speed of light for them within Frame A.

In short, you're breaking the fundamental rules of SR by trying to have Square B take up a different shape from the square painted on Rocket R. And if you're breaking those rules because you're applying other rules that are officially part of SR, then those rules are incorrect and need to be thrown out of SR on the basis that they produce contradictions relating the the speed of light in Frame A. The fundamental rules of SR are the ones that I'm applying (the ones that were taken from LET), and they are the ones that aren't going to be thrown out.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 17/08/2016 19:51:58


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(3) If these rockets are extremely small and they're crewed by tiny robots, we can have them fly over the corners of one of our standard 1m x 1m squares (made of some kind of rigid material, so let's just say it's metal - the atoms of this material are in constant communication through forces which determine their separation). C, D, E and F are now holding station over the corners of one of our squares between Rails B and B2, and it's co-moving with them as they travel directly north.
Maybe. You have to establish that this does, in fact, line up this way. The composition of velocities in Galilean relativity suggests that they do, but it is not clear that this happens in SR.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: guest39538 on 18/08/2016 08:07:00
I've found something I didn't think would ever be possible, but it looks as if there may be a way to pin down an absolute frame of reference.

Imagine a disc lying flat with four points marked on the circumference, N, E, S and W (for the four compass directions). We will move the disc northwards in a moment while rotating it clockwise, but let's first spin it up to speed without moving it along through space. I want to spin it until the edge is moving at 0.866c relative to the centre, a speed at which length contraction should act on the edge in such a way as to halve its length. If we also sandwich our rotating disc between two non-rotating discs of equal size we can eliminate all the non-Euclidean SR distractions by imposing a tight Euclidean metric upon our rotating disc in the middle of the sandwich and use that to lay down the law about how the rotating disc must behave in that space.

We can see that there is no longer enough material in our rotating disc to fill the whole space between the non-rotating discs, so it must stretch or break. Let's assume it splits and leaves us with gap in it, the gap being much wider the further out you go from the centre as the length contraction becomes more severe. It turns out then that we're going to  need to mend our disc once it's been spun up to the target speed so as to fill in the gap, and it's only after that that will we have a complete disc rotating at our target speed. This appears to go against some of the teachings of SR in relation to the behaviour of rotating discs, but it doesn't go against the rules as to how SR works for things moving in straight lines, and we can show that the two things are actually equivalent, which means that many of the existing ideas about how rotating discs behave are wrong.

Any rocket following a tangent to our rotating disc at 0.866c must display length contraction to half its rest length, and this must be matched by the material in the edge of the disc as they move side by side for a moment. That means that the edge of the disc must appear length contracted and cannot possibly fill the space all the way round the space demarcated for it by the two non-rotating discs. We can also eliminate most of the change in direction of the material in the disc's edge by using a disc of a diameter measured in billions of lightyears across, which means that the material in the disc's edge will be moving at the same speed and in the same direction as the material in the rocket flying past at a tangent to the disc not merely for an instant, but for many hours with the material in the disc edge and the rocket potentially being side by side and only a micron apart throughout that time - this is more than long enough to rule out any role for accelerations in breaking the normal rules of length contraction and time dilation. So, we can show that a rotating disc cannot behave the way that most SR experts claim it does: it turns out that they have been breaking some of the most fundamental rules of SR.

Our next step is to move the whole disc, and we want it to move at 0.866c northwards. By the way, our non rotating discs are transparent, so we can see the rotating disc through them, and our N, E, S, W markers are printed on the non-rotating discs, so N is always the leading point of the discs as they move through space, while S is the point most aft. Once we are moving our disc sandwich along at 0.866c, the material in our rotating disc starts to behave in unexpected ways, bunching up as it moves slowly past point W and whipping back past point E with all length contraction removed there. At point E the material is not moving in the frame of reference we're using as the base for all our measurements, but at point W it is moving northwards at 0.99c and the local length contraction is to 1/7. (To calculate this speed and length contraction at point W, I imagined a rocket moving north at 0.866c and firing a missile ahead at 0.866c from its point of view, and so in our reference frame that works out at 0.99c - that rocket must behave the same way as the material at the edge of the disc where the rocket may travel alongside it for a while as it follows a tangent to the disc at that point.) Our non-rotating discs have length-contraction applying across them exclusively in the NS direction, reducing all measurements running that way to 1/2 of their rest lengths, so the discs' shapes are now elliptical with the NS diameter half the length of the EW diameter. The rotating disc should match that shape if the idea of relativity is correct, but the length contractions on the material of the rotating disc and directions in which it contracts will be different in places, and it's in exploring this that I've found something that I thought couldn't happen.

The key thing is what happens at points N and S. The material there is moving at 0.968c (which can be broken down into two vectors: it's moving north at 0.866c, and it's moving sideways at 0.433c) which means that the length contraction will make the material sit four times as close together in its direction of travel as it would do at rest, and this contraction acts at an angle of 63.4 degrees forwards of the EW line. (I worked out the 0.433c figure by thinking about how a light clock aligned EW would work here: the light in it would actually move at 60 degrees ahead of sideways, and that reduces its progress between points E and W to half, so the same halving will apply to anything else moving from E to W and back.) The component of this contraction to 1/4 is greater in the NS direction than the length contraction in the non-rotating discs at points N and S (which is to 1/2), and that's the crucial thing here - this means it must pull the rotating disc in more at N and S than the non-rotating discs, so their shapes will no longer match up in the way they do when the apparatus is not moving along through space - the sandwich filling can no longer fill the whole space between the outer discs. On the non-rotating discs we have length contraction to 1/2 of the rest length all the way from N to S. On the rotating disc we only have that amount of length contraction at the very centre of the line NS: at all other points on the line NS we have more length contraction than that (running in the NS direction). That means that SR must have a theoretically identifiable preferred/absolute frame of referrence.

Again we can send a rocket at 0.968c over point N or S at the same angle as the material of the disc there is moving to illustrate that it must contract in exactly the same way in the disc as it does in the rocket, and by giving our disc a huge diameter measured in the billions of lightyears, we can reduce all the pesky accelerations caused by the rotation to such a low level that they can be ignored (while reducing the centrifugal forces to the point of irrelevance at the same time) - the material in the disc can now be thought of as moving in almost perfectly straight lines while we're comparing its behaviour with that of the material in the rockets which are temporarily co-moving with it.

Hmm , just no, the preferred frame of reference already exists, the frame is a 1 dimensional sphere of free space. i.e the ''invisible'' whole.
Title: Wild Goose Chase
Post by: David Cooper on 20/08/2016 18:41:01
It's the rotation right enough: PhysBang got that one thing right (while tripping over everything else) and it looks as if it is the key to resolving everything. So, given that I may have likely misled a few people, I will now correct things and show them what actually happens.

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(6) We haven't looked at what our rockets C, D, E and F do when they're given the same movement eastwards as Square B (again without losing the component of their speed taking them northwards). If C, D, E and F have not resynchronised their clocks for Frame B and still have them set for Frame A, they will all accelerate simultaniously from the point of view of Frame A observers and will remain in a rectangle formation,...

That bit was right, and when the rockets then reorganise to make their formation look like a square to them, they would take up the same shape as the square painted on Rocket R.

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...but since these rockets have adjusted their positions to try to make their formation look like a square to themselves, they really ought to have resynchronised their clocks for Frame B. If they've done this, rockets F and E will move off first (from the point of view of Frame A observers), while C and D will move off a moment later, and the result of this will be that Frame A observers will see their formation turn into a parallelogram with its sides parallel to Rails B and B2.

And that is the rotation happening right there with the southern rockets moving off first - I thought such rotation was impossible, but I can now see that it must happen because of the way the material is distributed. So, when they adjust position to make their formation look square to them, they do take up a different shape from the one painted on Rocket R, and it is a stable one that puts the material under no stress. It takes up the same shape that the square painted on Rocket R would have if that square was painted (when at rest in Frame A) with the edges not running north-south and east-west, but rotated anticlockwise a bit (perhaps 22.5 degrees for the version of the thought experiment that involved a rhombus). When Rocket R flies over Rails B and B2 now, the shape fits between them with two of its edges parallel to the rails. At least, I think it will, but I'll have to finish writing the program to make sure.

That leads things back to the original thought experiment in post #1 with the rotating disc. If the problem is resolved for things moving in straight lines, it seems likely that it is also resolved for the material at the edge of the disc, and that's another reason to finish writing the program - I want to start with a circle and then add a series of outer rings to it by bringing rockets in to touch the edge while following tangents to the circle, the rockets of each ring moving at a higher speed, and then I want to view it from a different frame to see how some lengthen and others contract further, while some will have length contraction applied at interesting angles. On switching frame though, the timings for the rockets kissing the edge of the circle will vary and they will no longer be in a chain of contact with each other all the way round, so they'll need to lock together and then to rotate around the inner circle for some time in order to provide views from other frames that show them all linked up too. Once that is done, it should show that twice as many are needed to complete the circle where their orbital speed is 0.866c than if they were at rest.

It looks then as if relativity survives after all and I was wrong. I'll post a link to the program when it's up and running so that people can use it to explore all the issues raised in this thread.

[The argument made on my webpage still stands though - SR needs Newtonian time added to it in order to function properly, but that's a whole 'nother issue.]
Title: Re: Wild Goose Chase
Post by: PhysBang on 20/08/2016 18:59:49
I'm happy that by asking questions and demanding rigor we got to the conclusion that there is no problem with SR here. I'm sure that whenever "Newtonian time" is rigorously defined, it too will become a phantom.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 20/08/2016 20:51:35
There's a major problem with SR all right - it either has to have a preferred frame of reference (which merely can't be identified) or it has to allow events to change over Newtonian time at individual Spacetime locations, but that is another discussion. There's an interactive exam on my webpage which will shows people the point where they lose that argument, and no one's found a fault in that. LET will win out.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 20/08/2016 20:54:18
Ah David - I see that you have come across a hurdle.  As said in pm, I didn't want to interject myself upon your thread at cross purpose to the logic of your initial concept, or put any other poster off via my involvement, but I feel that now may be the time its ok to speak.

Under the remit of reference to a Newtonian time, you say that relativity is safe.  However... SR is rather contradictory to the underlying philosophy of Newtonian time...

Since all these length contraction maths are still fresh in your mind, try this on for size if you fancy.

Dispensing with Newtonian time, create 2 scenarios where both are experiencing different SR time dilations, and state the observation each will make of the other reference frame as time frame dependent and proportional to the difference in rate of time.

With time frames missing from the observation of the other reference frame, will it appear as though a length contraction has occurred?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 21/08/2016 23:41:18
Ah David - I see that you have come across a hurdle.

It's not a hurdle - there's no way for anything to jump over it unless it can look at the universe from the outside.

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Under the remit of reference to a Newtonian time, you say that relativity is safe.  However... SR is rather contradictory to the underlying philosophy of Newtonian time...

SR and LET are both relativity theories, and any other theory wanting to compete with them will also have to be a relativity theory in order to fit in with how the universe behaves (and how we measure things in it). So long as we can't pin down a preferred frame, relativity survives (even if there is a preferred frame and some other being outside of the universe is able to tell which frame it is). SR attempts to get rid of Newtonian time, but in reality it can't function properly without it as it either generates an infinite number of contradictions or it describes universes in which the future can't be generated out of the past (depending on which version of it you want to use). There are two other models which fix these problems, but in each case they can only do so by adding Newtonian time.

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Since all these length contraction maths are still fresh in your mind, try this on for size if you fancy.

Dispensing with Newtonian time, create 2 scenarios where both are experiencing different SR time dilations, and state the observation each will make of the other reference frame as time frame dependent and proportional to the difference in rate of time.

With time frames missing from the observation of the other reference frame, will it appear as though a length contraction has occurred?

First you'll need to tell me me what a time frame is, and then you'll need to explain how they can go missing from an observation. If you have an alternative theory, you have to be able to generate the same numbers for time dilation and length contraction with it. With the program I'm writing, it will be possible to view "video" of events playing out in any frame of reference, but all the action will be be run behind the scenes in the preferred frame with time ticking at full speed there. When viewing things from other frames, you will see that events run slow in them (though no inhabitant of that universe who is at rest in that frame would realise that it's running slow), and you'll see clocks that are at rest in the preferred frame appear to run even more slowly still, even though you know they are still running at full speed behind the scenes. Whether looking at stills or "video", you will also see length contraction applied to any object that isn't at rest in the selected frame.

Everything that the program shows (or will do once it's finished) must be compatible with every viable model (even though it's based on LET under the surface), so if you want to use an SR interpretation with it, you can assert a number of different things depending on which particular SR model you want to push. With one model you can assert that time doesn't run at all, so the slowing of time in different frames is an illusion. With another model you can assert that time is running fastest for the frame you're viewing from and that all the others are running slower. With another model you can assert that time is running at full speed for all frames and that all the slowing is an illusion. All of them must agree with what appears on the screen though, the way in which time appears to run slow for other frames and how lengths appear to contract. If you have a theory of your own, it too is required to fit in with how things appear on the screen because what is shown must match up with what is measured in the real universe.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 22/08/2016 01:28:25
SR and LET are both relativity theories, and any other theory wanting to compete with them will also have to be a relativity theory in order to fit in with how the universe behaves (and how we measure things in it). So long as we can't pin down a preferred frame, relativity survives (even if there is a preferred frame and some other being outside of the universe is able to tell which frame it is). SR attempts to get rid of Newtonian time, but in reality it can't function properly without it as it either generates an infinite number of contradictions or it describes universes in which the future can't be generated out of the past (depending on which version of it you want to use). There are two other models which fix these problems, but in each case they can only do so by adding Newtonian time.
I'm sure that this bold and cranky claim will work out just as well as the last one. It certainly has less support.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 22/08/2016 03:29:09
I read about SR and GR in relation to Newtonian time and the outside of the universe observer in Lee Smolins "The Trouble with Physics"...

I'm sure that we've touched on the matter before, last year sometime.

My model brings the phenomenon of time to reside only within the confines of the universe and it is the mechanics of the universe that cause this phenomenon of time.

My model states the phenomenon of time as being energy related.  Potential energy increases the rate of time, and kinetic energy decreases the rate of time.

(The gravity field decreasing via the inverse square law, or increasing via the square law also has an energy which I attribute to the proposed Vikki Ramsay gravitational time dilation, (previously named inverted gravitational time dilation but changed due to continued misunderstanding as to this referring something existing being inverted)).

What do I mean by time frame dependency:
OK, well to create a visual - time dilation is a change in the rate that sequential events are occurring at...
Now, imagine you are drawing a straight line vertically on a piece of paper.  I ask you to start drawing at the first bell sound, and stop drawing at the second bell sound.  I currently have the first bell in relation to the second bell set to exactly 1 standard second elapsed time...  You are also magically possessed with the ability to draw straight lines, one beside the other, on paper at a constant velocity.

I am now going to extend the time period elapsed between the first bell and the second bell each time the first bell sounds.
You are now drawing a longer straight line each time the second bell sounds.  We continue this way for 25 lines and then I reduce the elapsed time period between first bell and second bell identically reversed to how I increased it for 24 lines.

Because you are computer literate, you have of course drawn these lines on your screen.  You have 49 lines drawn side by side, the beginnings of these vertical lines form a straight horizontal line at top of screen page, and the ends of these vertical lines form a v shape at bottom of screen page.  I now ask you to align your 49 vertical lines so that the ends of the lines form an identical horizontal curve shape at top and bottom of lines.  Your 49 vertical lines should now resemble the shape of an ellipse with straight sides.

Now I am going to ask you to make marks on each of these vertical lines from top of line to bottom of line at regular intervals, so that each line resembles a measuring ruler.  Although not impossible, it is highly improbable that if you laid a ruler horizontally across these marks, that each of the 49 vertical lines 'ruler' marks would join up one after the other to create a straight horizontal line.  The marks would be aligned higgledy piggledy on the horizontal plane...
If this has resulted in a visual for you, I can start explaining observational time frame dependency:

Firstly it must be understood that in my model it is not possible for any part of the universe to travel into the future, or revisit the past, or for any part of the universe to get ahead or lag behind any other part of the universe.  We observe that time runs at different rates though and this is counter intuitive to what I just previously said...

However, I am suggesting that different rates of time can occur simultaneously to each other.  We have two people in the same place.  One person can go somewhere where time is going slower, and another to a place where time is going much faster, but when they meet up again both are in the present, and the only difference is that the person that was experiencing the faster time will have aged faster... (Yes there are a million discussions concerning the effects of journey there and journey back considerations, and of rockets not time meshing properly, but what I've said is enough to continue the observational time frame dependency explanation, so we don't need to go there)...
It would in theory be possible for a mobile phone call to take place between people experiencing noticeably different time dilations, given that GPS were extended, because both parties are, and always will remain, in the present.

Back to the diagram I had you mentally create as a visualisation:
The marks you have made at  regular intervals on the vertical lines are representative of the time frames of the differing time periods that the lengths of the vertical lines represent.  These differing time periods are occurring simultaneously...  Now place your ruler across the horizontal plane and from the top of the first line you drew, draw a horizontal line straight threw to the top of the last line you drew.  Repeat the process at each marker down the first line.  You will see that every other line of differing lengths markers will be split at intervals that have proportions that are all differing with each different length of line.

I am suggesting that the reference frame of the first vertical line you drew (representing a standard second) will only be able to view a proportion of the reference frames of the longer lines, and that the observable proportion of the reference frames of the other lines is evident in the degree of the splitting these horizontal lines are indicating between the markers you made on the vertical lines.  You will be able to repeat the process for each of the vertical lines to work out the observable proportion of the other vertical lines.

With regards to length contraction, would the proportions of the time frames of the reference frame line being observed that are not observable from another reference frames line, amount to the proportion of the expected length contraction as observed from the observing reference frames line?

Right David, I know you are really busy with your AI, which sounds as though it is gaining momentum, so I'm not expecting you to answer this imminently or anything.  I'm a bit sick of off the cuff replies in any case, and to understand this concept of an observable time frame dependency, it requires a bit of thought.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 22/08/2016 16:56:31
SR attempts to get rid of Newtonian time, but in reality it can't function properly without it as it either generates an infinite number of contradictions or it describes universes in which the future can't be generated out of the past (depending on which version of it you want to use). There are two other models which fix these problems, but in each case they can only do so by adding Newtonian time.
I had no idea what "Newtonian time" is in this context, despite studying Newton a lot.

According to Magic Schoolbook, "In LET the universe has three space dimensions running under a Newtonian time (which is not considered to be a dimension)..." This is just false, since time is always a dimension. What changes in SR is the relationship between the time dimension and the space dimension when applying a metric to space and time and the translations that one applies when moving from one system of coordinates to another.

Magic Schoolbook also says this false thing: "In Einstein's Spacetime, there is no real length contraction, meaning that objects aren't physically contracted by their movement through the fabric of space, and this clearly has to be the case because they can always validly be thought of as being completely stationary as all frames of reference are really equally valid."

In SR, all inertial frames of reference are equally valid, so, yes, an object in motion is length contracted relative to its length at rest for close to the same reason as in LET.

Similarly when Magic Schoolbook says this false thing: "He plays a similar trick with time, getting rid of the slowing of moving clocks too. Because all frames of reference are equally valid, a moving clock isn't really moving, so it can't actually be running slow: this too is just an illusion."

In SR, in a frame where a clock is in motion, that clock is legitimately slow.

Here is a great mistake in understanding relativity theory: "The downside to this is that such a universe could never have had its future events generated out of its past events under these rules because many of its events would have failed to mesh together properly during the generation phase (when the block was originally being constructed): a rocket which has taken a shortcut would have been unable to land on a planet which has not taken a shortcut as there wouldn't be a future version of that planet there yet for the rocket to interact with."

One of the important things about relativity theory is the structure of causality. In SR, the speed of light places limits on how things can interact. The only events in the past of a given event are those that could possibly emit light that would reach that event. The only events in the future of a given event are those events that could be reached by light that the given event could emit. The events that reside in this "light cone" are invariant across every inertial reference frame. So there is never a problem of something reaching an event that isn't there. Nothing of this relies on or demands that there is a "block universe", despite the exhortations of the proponents of the block universe model of time. There are many formulations of becoming in time in SR and GR.

One can't simply argue that this is wrong because it doesn't work like other forms of cause and effect.

What follows on the Magic Schoolbook site is, sadly, a weak version of the twin paradox. Even more sad is the claim, backed up by no citation whatsoever, that people using SR, "simply smuggle in this Newtonian time." Time and time again people are lead astray by the twin paradox and refuse to understand its resolution. In this case, the author of Magic Schoolbook simply refuses to believe that one could identify one reference frame relative to another without having some overall, preferred reference frame.

This is the kind of things that cranks say, that have an axe to grind and would rather grind that axe than take the time to learn or correct basic mistakes in laying out their diagrams: "It is quite shocking that such irrational people can hold such sway in science and that they are allowed to drown out anyone who tries to point out the glaring error in their model, but then it must be hard for them to back down even if they can see that they are wrong because they have bought so deeply into what is undoubtedly the most embarrassing mistake in the history of science. "
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 22/08/2016 17:44:11
Physicsbang - I rate David's magic school book site and respect the fact that he is trying to do positive things with his time, and doing it quite well, rather than sit around on the net slagging people for challenging the status quo.

Wake up dude, the realm doth not need defending!  The realm standeth in all its well deserved glory, only awaitething an even better mathematical fit.

The only way to arriveth at an even more detailed explanation of pur universe is to challenge the status quo.

Newtonian time:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_time_and_space

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"According to Newton, absolute time exists independently of any perceiver and progresses at a consistent pace throughout the universe. Unlike relative time, Newton believed absolute time was imperceptible and could only be understood mathematically. According to Newton, humans are only capable of perceiving relative time, which is a measurement of perceivable objects in motion (like the Moon or Sun). From these movements, we infer the passage of time."
Unquote:

BTW, the most embarrassing mistake in the history of science has got to be the geocentric model.  Just goes to show how wrong the status quo 'can' be proven.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 23/08/2016 00:33:59
Because you are computer literate, you have of course drawn these lines on your screen.  You have 49 lines drawn side by side, the beginnings of these vertical lines form a straight horizontal line at top of screen page, and the ends of these vertical lines form a v shape at bottom of screen page.  I now ask you to align your 49 vertical lines so that the ends of the lines form an identical horizontal curve shape at top and bottom of lines.  Your 49 vertical lines should now resemble the shape of an ellipse with straight sides.

If I try doing that, I see the V shape at the bottom become half as deep as it was before, and a new V shape (upside down and also half as deep as the original V at the bottom) has appeared at the top, so the overall shape is now more like a rhombus than an ellipse, but with two short extra sides at the left and right. Perhaps that's exactly what you mean though when you say "an ellipse with straight sides".

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Now I am going to ask you to make marks on each of these vertical lines from top of line to bottom of line at regular intervals, so that each line resembles a measuring ruler.  Although not impossible, it is highly improbable that if you laid a ruler horizontally across these marks, that each of the 49 vertical lines 'ruler' marks would join up one after the other to create a straight horizontal line.  The marks would be aligned higgledy piggledy on the horizontal plane... If this has resulted in a visual for you, I can start explaining observational time frame dependency:

If these marks are made at regular intervals and there are the same number on each line, the middle ones will all fall on a horizontal line drawn across the centre of the diagram, but all the others will travel at slight angles (steeper the further away from the centre line they are) and they will be made of two straight sections with a sharp kink connecting them half way across. Perhaps that isn't how you want me to draw in these markings and lines, but the most important thing that I want to see is how these relate to actual time dilation or frames of reference.

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Back to the diagram I had you mentally create as a visualisation:
The marks you have made at  regular intervals on the vertical lines are representative of the time frames of the differing time periods that the lengths of the vertical lines represent.  These differing time periods are occurring simultaneously...

I think you'll have to draw a diagram showing it the way you want me (and others) to see it, and then label it clearly to show which parts are simultaneous. Alternatively, you need to list dimensions and actual lengths of these lines and the distances between all the marks made down each line. I very much doubt that the picture I've built in my mind is the same as the one that you have in yours.

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Now place your ruler across the horizontal plane and from the top of the first line you drew, draw a horizontal line straight threw to the top of the last line you drew.  Repeat the process at each marker down the first line.  You will see that every other line of differing lengths markers will be split at intervals that have proportions that are all differing with each different length of line.

I'm visualising the V parts of the diagram at the top and the bottom having no horizontal lines running through them at all, and there are only two or three horizontal lines in total because they have to pass through the two shortest lines at the extreme sides of the diagram.

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I am suggesting that the reference frame of the first vertical line you drew (representing a standard second) will only be able to view a proportion of the reference frames of the longer lines, and that the observable proportion of the reference frames of the other lines is evident in the degree of the splitting these horizontal lines are indicating between the markers you made on the vertical lines.  You will be able to repeat the process for each of the vertical lines to work out the observable proportion of the other vertical lines.

No part of any frame of reference is hidden from view from any other frame. At every part of space, all reference frames are present and their content is fully visible from all those frames. Nothing goes unseen.

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With regards to length contraction, would the proportions of the time frames of the reference frame line being observed that are not observable from another reference frames line, amount to the proportion of the expected length contraction as observed from the observing reference frames line?

It's hard to answer that when there isn't anything that isn't observed, but the amount of time dilation is certainly proportional to the amount of length contraction. At 0.866c you have half the number of clock ticks and a reduction of length of the object (in its direction of travel) to a half. At 0.5c you have about 0.9 times the number of clock ticks and the length is reduced to about 0.9 of its rest length. What your theory needs to do though is account for things looking the same from both frames: if one observer has less time to play with than the other and that accounts for him seeing the other observer length-contracted because he's only seeing perhaps half of it, how is that going to work the other way round when the observer with twice as much time to play with also sees the first observer contracted to half his normal length? How would he be missing half the action?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 23/08/2016 01:47:10
I had no idea what "Newtonian time" is in this context, despite studying Newton a lot.

Timey seems to have found a clear definition of it which works for me.

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According to Magic Schoolbook, "In LET the universe has three space dimensions running under a Newtonian time (which is not considered to be a dimension)..." This is just false, since time is always a dimension.

Einstein was very keen to tell people that time is a dimension. I was under the impression that before his theory, it wasn't thought of as a dimension by anyone. I may be wrong, but it was certainly a way that Einstein tried to distinguish his theory from what had come before.

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Magic Schoolbook also says this false thing: "In Einstein's Spacetime, there is no real length contraction, meaning that objects aren't physically contracted by their movement through the fabric of space, and this clearly has to be the case because they can always validly be thought of as being completely stationary as all frames of reference are really equally valid."

It isn't false: they are always completely uncontracted in their own frame and what you measure does not tell you the truth about the hidden reality. With LET it's radically different: the length contraction is either absolutely real or its merely apparent and not real, all dependent upon whether you're measuring things from at rest in the preferred frame or from some other frame.

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Similarly when Magic Schoolbook says this false thing: "He plays a similar trick with time, getting rid of the slowing of moving clocks too. Because all frames of reference are equally valid, a moving clock isn't really moving, so it can't actually be running slow: this too is just an illusion."

If a clock runs faster at rest in one frame than a clock at rest in a different frame, you must have a preferred frame somewhere in the system which has the fastest running clocks. If you don't want a preferred frame, you are not allowed to have any real slowing of clocks for different frames - it must all be an illusion because they must all be running at full speed.

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In SR, in a frame where a clock is in motion, that clock is legitimately slow.

And when you switch frame so that you're co-moving with it, magically it becomes the faster clock. So, is it both slower and faster than the other clock at the same time? Which clock is really running slower?

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Here is a great mistake in understanding relativity theory: "The downside to this is that such a universe could never have had its future events generated out of its past events under these rules because many of its events would have failed to mesh together properly during the generation phase (when the block was originally being constructed): a rocket which has taken a shortcut would have been unable to land on a planet which has not taken a shortcut as there wouldn't be a future version of that planet there yet for the rocket to interact with."

It's your misunderstanding, not mine. That bit refers specifically to an SR model in which no clocks are allowed to run slow but where they merely appear to do so when viewed from other frames. If you want to have some clocks actually run slower than others though, you need to go for a model with a preferred frame.

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One of the important things about relativity theory is the structure of causality. In SR, the speed of light places limits on how things can interact. The only events in the past of a given event are those that could possibly emit light that would reach that event. The only events in the future of a given event are those events that could be reached by light that the given event could emit. The events that reside in this "light cone" are invariant across every inertial reference frame. So there is never a problem of something reaching an event that isn't there. Nothing of this relies on or demands that there is a "block universe", despite the exhortations of the proponents of the block universe model of time. There are many formulations of becoming in time in SR and GR.

There's no point in attacking one model by attacking it on the basis that it is a different model from the one that it is. There are four Spacetime models discussed on my page (called model zero, model one, model two and model three) and it makes no sense to attack model one by demanding that it behave like model two.

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One can't simply argue that this is wrong because it doesn't work like other forms of cause and effect.

The interactive exam was designed to force people to stop mixing up the models when commenting on them. If you think there's a fault in the argument, it is there that you have to point to it.

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What follows on the Magic Schoolbook site is, sadly, a weak version of the twin paradox.

There's nothing weak about it - I've just doubled it up so that there are two sets of twins in order to show clearly what happens with different models which are normally mixed up and confused into one incompatible mess. I then show up the problems with each model.

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Even more sad is the claim, backed up by no citation whatsoever, that people using SR, "simply smuggle in this Newtonian time."

Show me how it works without this Newtonian time then. No one else has been able to do so. They say they can write programs to simulate SR which don't cheat, but they always cheat by using Newtonian time to run one frame's clocks at a higher speed than the rest: that's a preferred frame.

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Time and time again people are lead astray by the twin paradox and refuse to understand its resolution. In this case, the author of Magic Schoolbook simply refuses to believe that one could identify one reference frame relative to another without having some overall, preferred reference frame.

If your comprehension skills were up to it, you'd notice that there is no difficulty resolving the so-called "paradox", and there never has been. Each model has a different way of resolving it though. Model zero (the static block universe model where time doesn't run) "solves" it by having everything exist eternally without the future ever having been generated out of the past. Model two solves it by tolerating event-meshing failure for a while before things settle down into the same shape as model zero. Model three solves it by having a preferred frame of reference. Model two "solves" it by tolerating impossible contradictions. You can take your pick, but models one and three are the only viable ones in the set.

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This is the kind of things that cranks say, that have an axe to grind and would rather grind that axe than take the time to learn or correct basic mistakes in laying out their diagrams:

What mistakes in the diagrams? You're at it again, making false claims about my diagrams. What they show is exactly what you get if you apply the rules of SR. But you don't own up to any of your errors. I do, and that's why I'm not a crank.

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"It is quite shocking that such irrational people can hold such sway in science and that they are allowed to drown out anyone who tries to point out the glaring error in their model, but then it must be hard for them to back down even if they can see that they are wrong because they have bought so deeply into what is undoubtedly the most embarrassing mistake in the history of science."

Sometimes I word things provocatively in order to encourage a response: that has a better chance of leading to answers from annoyed people and it helps me to correct any mistakes that I've made or to improve the wording of what I've said to clarify things and show why someone's objections are wayward. If anyone does have objections, they need to stop misinterpreting the introductory section and focus their attacks instead on the interactive exam, spelling out where it informed them that they have "failed" and then explaining why they believe they haven't failed. In response to that, I can either improve the interactive exam to deal with any invalid attacks of the same kind more clearly, or if someone ever comes up with an objection that blows the whole thing out of the water, I will change the whole thing into an endorsement of SR. My original aim was to prove to myself that SR is valid and then show other people that it works, but I have been unable to do so because it falls so far short.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 23/08/2016 02:32:17
David - I'm not familiar with the term rhombus, but the shape you describe is correct...

However, the marks on the vertical lines must be made at uniform intervals on the line.  ie, the marks on all of the lines should be same distance apart. There should be more marks on longer lines...

Don't worry if the mark closest to bottom of line doesn't match the end of the line.  Its the proportionality of only 1 time frame, ie, from one mark to the next mark, being split by the horizontal lines that we use to match the markers on line 1 and line 49 that matters, and we can read this from the middle of the shape, we don't need to read the ends of lines for this part.

Although the system I'm showing you can be plugged in with numbers, we don't need to plug numbers in to understand how this works.  It doesn't matter how many vertical lines you use, or for the moment the lengths that these vertical lines are, or the distance that you make the markers apart on them, only that the shape is correct and that the distance between the markers is uniform.

When you match the markers on line 1 with the markers on line 49 and join them with horizontal lines, these horizontal lines will make divisions between the markers on every other length of line.

The divisions made between markers on each different length of line will have different proportions to each other... but the divisions made on a particular line will retain the same proportions of division from top of line to bottom. (bar any messy bottom of line marker issues)

The vertical lines are representing time periods expanding.  The markers are representing the time frames of the time period, and the divisions between markers will be representing a; the proportion of that time frame you can observe from line 1 or line 49, and b; the extent that the line, ie: rate of time you are observing, will cause the 'appearance' of a length contraction. ie: the proportion of the time frame you cannot observe from line 1 and line 49.
One side of the division will represent a, and the other b.

Some kind of fancy mathematical process of multiplying a or b by the number of spaces between the markers the line has, plus the messy remainder at bottom of line, should give the overall proportionality of a or b for an observation of that particular line, ie: rate of time, from both line 1 and line 49.

As to providing a diagram, I think I told you my laptop is broken.  Also my good phone was smashed when I got kicked by a horse last month and this one is crap.  It doesn't show me any of the diagrams you posted for instance, so if you will forgive me...
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 23/08/2016 04:46:59
I had no idea what "Newtonian time" is in this context, despite studying Newton a lot.

Timey seems to have found a clear definition of it which works for me.
Yeah, that one I get. I'm still not sure what you think you mean.

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Einstein was very keen to tell people that time is a dimension. I was under the impression that before his theory, it wasn't thought of as a dimension by anyone. I may be wrong, but it was certainly a way that Einstein tried to distinguish his theory from what had come before.
Time is a dimension in the mathematical sense; there is nothing that can be done to change this. Maxwell discussed this and Einstein explicitly built on Maxwell.

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It isn't false: they are always completely uncontracted in their own frame and what you measure does not tell you the truth about the hidden reality. With LET it's radically different: the length contraction is either absolutely real or its merely apparent and not real, all dependent upon whether you're measuring things from at rest in the preferred frame or from some other frame.
This simply more whining that you don't like SR. There is nothing holy about reference frames in which an object is at rest; these reference frames are no more "real" than frames on which they are moving. They are merely arbitrary choices made for the purposes of assigning coordinates. With LET, there is a "real" reference frame that has absolutely no effect on the world that we can detect. If you like that idea, then fine, but please don't mischaracterize it or SR.

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If a clock runs faster at rest in one frame than a clock at rest in a different frame, you must have a preferred frame somewhere in the system which has the fastest running clocks. If you don't want a preferred frame, you are not allowed to have any real slowing of clocks for different frames - it must all be an illusion because they must all be running at full speed.
Again, this is your aesthetic preference. In SR, frames of reference are arbitrary choices of coordinates, not holy metaphysics.

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And when you switch frame so that you're co-moving with it, magically it becomes the faster clock. So, is it both slower and faster than the other clock at the same time? Which clock is really running slower?
It's not magic, it's the use of a different system of coordinates for description. You might not like that SR allows for different descriptions in different systems of coordinates, but you don't get to force your aesthetic preference on everyone.

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It's your misunderstanding, not mine. That bit refers specifically to an SR model in which no clocks are allowed to run slow but where they merely appear to do so when viewed from other frames. If you want to have some clocks actually run slower than others though, you need to go for a model with a preferred frame.
And I don't want to have any clocks "actually run slower than others". I am content to accept that it depends on the system of coordinates chosen.

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There's no point in attacking one model by attacking it on the basis that it is a different model from the one that it is. There are four Spacetime models discussed on my page (called model zero, model one, model two and model three) and it makes no sense to attack model one by demanding that it behave like model two.
As far as I can tell, none of those models represents SR, so I don't really care.

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What follows on the Magic Schoolbook site is, sadly, a weak version of the twin paradox.

There's nothing weak about it - I've just doubled it up so that there are two sets of twins in order to show clearly what happens with different models which are normally mixed up and confused into one incompatible mess. I then show up the problems with each model.[/quote]
Again, if any of your models was SR, then it might be less sad.

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Show me how it works without this Newtonian time then. No one else has been able to do so. They say they can write programs to simulate SR which don't cheat, but they always cheat by using Newtonian time to run one frame's clocks at a higher speed than the rest: that's a preferred frame.
I really do not understand what you think your claim means. You seem to want some fact of the matter outside of a description in a system of coordinates. In SR, there simply is no such fact of the matter.

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My original aim was to prove to myself that SR is valid and then show other people that it works, but I have been unable to do so because it falls so far short.
Yes, surely the fault lies with the hundreds of physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers who have worked with the theory for over a century.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 23/08/2016 21:14:00
However, the marks on the vertical lines must be made at uniform intervals on the line.  ie, the marks on all of the lines should be same distance apart. There should be more marks on longer lines...

Okay, so the line at the left hand side might have only two markings on it, one at the top and one at the bottom. On the next line to the right there will be three markings on it, one at the top, one at the bottom and one in the middle, and this marking will be level with the middle of the first line. On the next line to the right there will be four markings, one at the top, one at the bottom, and two in between which are in line the top and bottom of the first line. On the next line to the right there will be five markings: one at the top, one at the bottom, and the other three will match up with the markings on the second line. If you start at the marking on any line, you can jump two lines to either side and find a marking at the same height on that line, if the line extends that far (vertically), but if you draw a line horizontally between them it will cross the line in between half way between the nearest markings on that.

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Don't worry if the mark closest to bottom of line doesn't match the end of the line.  Its the proportionality of only 1 time frame, ie, from one mark to the next mark, being split by the horizontal lines that we use to match the markers on line 1 and line 49 that matters, and we can read this from the middle of the shape, we don't need to read the ends of lines for this part.

When I put in the horizontal lines across the diagram, there are only two of them with the spacing between markings that I've used. On every second line they pass through markings and on the lines in between those they pass half way between markings. I can't see any mathematical relationship yet between this and what happens with time dilation or length contraction.

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The divisions made between markers on each different length of line will have different proportions to each other...

On my diagram the divisions are all the same size on every other line, the horizontal lines either passing through a marking or half way between two markings.

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but the divisions made on a particular line will retain the same proportions of division from top of line to bottom. (bar any messy bottom of line marker issues)

I have only two horizontal lines drawn across the diagram, each a short way above or below an imaginary centre line running horizontally through the diagram. I can't work out what's being compared with what when you talk about the proportions of division. Perhaps you could give all the lines and markings names so that you can refer to them efficiently. The vertical lines are all numbered, and the horizontal lines can also be given numbers (1 and 2), so perhaps the other markings could be given letters, the first line using A and B, the second using A, B and C, the third using A, B, C and D, and so on, A always being used for the highest marking on the line. That then enables you to refer to marking E on line 9 and to say that horizontal line #1 passes through it.

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The vertical lines are representing time periods expanding.  The markers are representing the time frames of the time period, and the divisions between markers will be representing a; the proportion of that time frame you can observe from line 1 or line 49, and b; the extent that the line, ie: rate of time you are observing, will cause the 'appearance' of a length contraction. ie: the proportion of the time frame you cannot observe from line 1 and line 49.
One side of the division will represent a, and the other b.

How is a time frame different from a unit of time like a second? If it isn't any different from that, how would some seconds go unobserved while others are seen? How do the divisions between markers represent a proportion of anything when the horizontal lines pass through some markers and half way between other pairs of markers? What is there to be a proportion of anything? This is why you need a labelled diagram or named points so that you can make it clear what bits of what you're counting as lengths to compare with each other.

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Some kind of fancy mathematical process of multiplying a or b by the number of spaces between the markers the line has, plus the messy remainder at bottom of line, should give the overall proportionality of a or b for an observation of that particular line, ie: rate of time, from both line 1 and line 49.

Given that nothing in the diagram bears any relationship to the maths of length contraction and time dilation, the fancy mathematical process will have to introduce that to it in some way, perhaps by spelling out how far apart horizontally each vertical line should really be from it's neighbours rather than having them all spaced out at fixed intervals. You need to get rid of the V shaped top and bottom of the diagram and replace it with a curve, but before you go to that much trouble, you also need to work out how entire time frames can go unseen when nothing in the real universe goes unseen in that way. If a clock flies past you at relativistic speed, you will see its every tick and every fraction of every tick, and an observer travelling with it will see the same of your clock.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 23/08/2016 22:00:09
Yeah, that one I get. I'm still not sure what you think you mean.

So you get it, and yet you don't get it at the same time. Very odd.

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Time is a dimension in the mathematical sense; there is nothing that can be done to change this. Maxwell discussed this and Einstein explicitly built on Maxwell.

With Newtonian time it can be treated mathematically as a dimension, but it is only with SR that it became a physical length of anything.

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This simply more whining that you don't like SR.

That is simply you making an invalid objection to a correct point, and in doing so it is you that is whining about SR because you don't want it to be what it is.

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There is nothing holy about reference frames in which an object is at rest; these reference frames are no more "real" than frames on which they are moving. They are merely arbitrary choices made for the purposes of assigning coordinates.

Indeed - you don't need to tell me that.

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With LET, there is a "real" reference frame that has absolutely no effect on the world that we can detect.

It has an effect in that it enables things to function rationally rather than by magic. That is a big effect.

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If you like that idea, then fine, but please don't mischaracterize it or SR.

I'm not mischaracterising it at all - when I say that in SR the true length of something is the length you measure for it when you are co-moving with it, that is the case.

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If a clock runs faster at rest in one frame than a clock at rest in a different frame, you must have a preferred frame somewhere in the system which has the fastest running clocks. If you don't want a preferred frame, you are not allowed to have any real slowing of clocks for different frames - it must all be an illusion because they must all be running at full speed.
Again, this is your aesthetic preference. In SR, frames of reference are arbitrary choices of coordinates, not holy metaphysics.

It's called reason. If a clock is running faster than another clock, it cannot also be running slower than it. As you have no preferred frame, you have no way of making any clock tick at a different rate from any other clock (where the clock appears to be running at full speed when examined by someone co-moving with it) other than it being an illusion caused by the warped picture of reality offered from any given frame. Underneath the surface, all the clocks must be running at full speed unless you have a preferred frame.

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And when you switch frame so that you're co-moving with it, magically it becomes the faster clock. So, is it both slower and faster than the other clock at the same time? Which clock is really running slower?
It's not magic, it's the use of a different system of coordinates for description. You might not like that SR allows for different descriptions in different systems of coordinates, but you don't get to force your aesthetic preference on everyone.

It is magic when it involves toleration of a contradiction. If you have a mechanism for something which involves clock A ticking faster than clock B while clock B is ticking faster than clock A, you are irrational and have entered into the realm of magic.

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And I don't want to have any clocks "actually run slower than others". I am content to accept that it depends on the system of coordinates chosen.

In which case, what you're seeing from any frame is not telling you the truth about how the ticking rates of clocks can be compared. If there is no preferred frame, none of them can be ticking faster than any others, and that's why rationalists are forced to move away from model two to model one (block universe) or three (preferred frame).

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As far as I can tell, none of those models represents SR, so I don't really care.

If you can't see that models are all versions of SR, you don't understand SR.

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Again, if any of your models was SR, then it might be less sad.

What is sad is that you don't understand SR well enough to recognise it when it's shown to you. How would you model it and make it behave differently from my versions? I'd be happy to add your version of SR to the set of models, but I don't think you'll dare to take up the offer because you know it will end up being exactly the same as one of mine (and most likely it will be model two).

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I really do not understand what you think your claim means. You seem to want some fact of the matter outside of a description in a system of coordinates. In SR, there simply is no such fact of the matter.

There is assumed to be a real universe out there and SR claims to be a theory about how it works, as is evident from its claim that there is no preferred frame of reference rather than a more modest claim that we can't pin one down and that it's fully possible that there is one. That is more than just a system of coordinates, but a philosophical assertion about the way it functions. SR uses a preferred-frame mechanism for coordinating the tick rates of clocks in different frames, but it denies that there is a preferred frame, so it has to be able to use the mechanism from all frames at once, and yet the claims thus generated contradict each other and thereby fail to function as a mechanism. However, magical thinkers tolerate contradictions (even though it isn't allowed in mathematics) and they imagine what they're doing is valid even though it manifestly isn't. I have yet to find a magical thinker who can recognise their disability though, so it's a waste of time trying to get through to them.

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Yes, surely the fault lies with the hundreds of physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers who have worked with the theory for over a century.

It does indeed - they are a self-selected bunch of magical thinkers who tolerate contradictions. Fortunately though, AGI systems will not, and as soon as they take over the running of science, the old guard will be labelled as the fools that they are and will be roundly ridiculed for the rest of time. Those who want to get off the hook need to have the wit to shift ground fast before intelligent machines lay down the law to them about how things must really work, but I have every confidence that they will fail to do so because magical thinkers are deluded and blind, and the more warnings they get, the more they dig themselves into their ludicrous position, which will just make it all the more fun when it all blows up in their faces. And of course, they never like to say where they failed the interactive exam because it spell out to them the exact nature of their irrational beliefs, so all they do is look for diversions instead, but they are only making things worse for themselves by failing to beat the machines to the glaring truth that SR is built on irrationality.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 23/08/2016 23:32:00
OK - a few problems are arising in your interpretation.  I wish I could just send you a representation but I will explain the system again with what you have observed already.

When I ask you to draw vertical lines side by side, (how far apart these vertical lines are is irrelevant, space them at 1cm as you proceed across the page from left to right).

I have asked you to start drawing a line from near top of page downwards at sound of first bell, and to cease drawing that line when the second bell sounds.  ***You are magically possessed to be able to move your hand downwards at 'constant velocity'.*** I have allowed exactly (*Warning", unit blunder: see edit)...1 standard second to elapse between this initial sounding of the first bell and the second bell.  This first line you have drawn is representative of the length of 1 standard second.  It is important that you realise that all you have done here - given that you hand is moving constantly at the velocity the tip end of the second hand of the clock is - is straightened out the physical radius of one full circle that the second hand of the clock that I am timing the 1st bell and the 2nd bell by is rotating at.  Your hand can move at any velocity, so long as thevelocity remains constant throught the dtawing of each vertical line.  Clock faces come in differing radius and the velocity of the second hand is related to the radius of the clocks face. (this feature pertains to my related time theory BTW)

I now extend the time period between the sounding of the first and second bell for line 2.  This second vertical line that you have drawn is slight longer than the first.  It represents a dilated standard second.

I continue extending the time period between the first and second bell up till line 25 and then reduce the time period for 24 lines identically to how I previously had increased it.

These vertical lines represent the standard second dilating for 24 lines, and then contracting for 24 lines back to the length of a standard second

We create the shape we need the lines to be aligned by like this, from left to right:
Line 2 is longer than line 1.  Line 1 should be placed so that Line 2 should have an equal amount of its extra length at top and bottom in relation to line 1.  Each subsequent line should be placed with its extra length equally distributed between top and bottom.  The shape you get will be a house with shallow sloped roof, with an inverse shallow sloped roof at bottom.

Now for placing the markers on the vertical lines that represent the standard second, and dilated standard seconds:

The spaces between these markers are going to be representative of the time frames of a time period.  Mathematically these time frames would be most usefully derived as nano-seconds, that is if we are going to use the standard second as our standard, which we are.  But for now, using nanoseconds is untenable, so we will just divide line 1 into 10 spaces with 11 markers.

Measuring with a ruler how much length a space between markers is on line 1, replicate this measure of length between markers on each of the other lines starting at top of line, and not worrying about any remainder left over at bottom of the line.

We are now ready to understand the horizontal lines.  In this shape of 49 vertical lines, there are 2 lines each of the same length, 1 and 49 for instance, or 2 and 48, so on.  We can match any lines markers with its partner of equal length's markers and draw horizontal lines across the page to join these markers up...
Right now we will start by looking at the observation of all the other lines of different length, remembering that these vertical lines represent reference frames that are experiencing alternate rates of time relative to the observation reference frame, and we will observe these other rates of time from line 1, which is representing a standard second.

From top of line 1 draw a horizontal line to top of line 49.  Go to next marker down on line 1, draw a horizontal line to matching marker on line 49, repeating the process for each marker on line 1.


Now we are ready to look at the proportionality of what can be observed of another rate of time:
Looking at line 1 in relation to line 2, we will see that the spaces between the markers on line 2 has been divided by the horizontal line.  1 side of the division will be greater than the other.  Line 1 will be able to view the greater part of the division of that time frame, and it will be unable to view the lesser part.

Moving to line 3, we can see that the division of the space between the markers is different.  We will only be able to view the greater part of the division, as with line 2, but this greater part has become less than it was in line 2.

By line 25 we will find that the observable part of the division is much reduced, and that the greater part cannot be observed.

By multiplying the proportions of the division of the space between the markers for any line, by the number of spaces between markers of that line,(the remainder at bottom of line must be proportionally divided and calculated as a point something space.) ...This will give the correct proportionality of what you can and cannot observe of that rate of time.

This dispenses with Newtonian time.  All rates of time can be measured relative to a standard second, or indeed any length of second you fancy.

(Edit: I realise I've made a unit blunder here...  Althoug a second is tenable for drawing, ive gone on to describe a second hand of a clock tracing the radius of a minute, but you get the picture... and transposing the system to maths would of course allow for units as small as necessary.)
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 24/08/2016 15:30:25
With Newtonian time it can be treated mathematically as a dimension, but it is only with SR that it became a physical length of anything.
That is mathematically impossible.

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There is nothing holy about reference frames in which an object is at rest; these reference frames are no more "real" than frames on which they are moving. They are merely arbitrary choices made for the purposes of assigning coordinates.

Indeed - you don't need to tell me that.
It is odd for you to say that, since your entire complaint against SR is that it doesn't have a holy reference frame.

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With LET, there is a "real" reference frame that has absolutely no effect on the world that we can detect.

It has an effect in that it enables things to function rationally rather than by magic. That is a big effect.
Your "rationally" is not the "rationally" of physics or mathematics. I will stick with the latter two.

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I'm not mischaracterising it at all - when I say that in SR the true length of something is the length you measure for it when you are co-moving with it, that is the case.
No, that is a mischaracterization. If one is to measure the length of an object, then one needs to specify the frame of reference in which one is measuring it. No reference frame, no length. There is no "true length" independent of reference frame. You would like this to be the case (and you make some other conceptual errors), so you choose LET.

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It's called reason. If a clock is running faster than another clock, it cannot also be running slower than it.
And SR holds this to be true. But the rate of a cyclic physical system depends on the system of coordinates. You want a holy clock rate, so you choose to reject SR.


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It is magic when it involves toleration of a contradiction. If you have a mechanism for something which involves clock A ticking faster than clock B while clock B is ticking faster than clock A, you are irrational and have entered into the realm of magic.
And SR has none of these things. Only your desire for holy truth makes you want to create a contradiction where there is none.

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In which case, what you're seeing from any frame is not telling you the truth about how the ticking rates of clocks can be compared.
On the contrary: because of the theory of relativity, if I know the information from one well-formed frame, I have the information for every well-formed frame (and some that are not well-formed).

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Yes, surely the fault lies with the hundreds of physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers who have worked with the theory for over a century.

It does indeed - they are a self-selected bunch of magical thinkers who tolerate contradictions.
Sure they are. Keep that for your epitaph.

There is a long history of physics cranks who want to show the world. They don't produce much, but they spill a lot of ink.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 24/08/2016 23:09:44
When I ask you to draw vertical lines side by side, (how far apart these vertical lines are is irrelevant, space them at 1cm as you proceed across the page from left to right).

If these lines represent frames of reference, do you have some way of relating them to speeds at which they move relative to each other? I know you said it doesn't need numbers, but these numbers are important in order to get some idea of what's what.

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I now extend the time period between the sounding of the first and second bell for line 2.  This second vertical line that you have drawn is slight longer than the first.  It represents a dilated standard second.

How much is slightly longer? I was imagining doubling the length the first time, then the third line would be three times as long as the first, etc., but if that doesn't work, I can't see how there can be any leeway in the proportion that "slightly" represents.

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These vertical lines represent the standard second dilating for 24 lines, and then contracting for 24 lines back to the length of a standard second

Is it necessary to have the 24 lines reducing in length again? Is that just to help draw horizontal lines across the diagram or are they actually meant to be different frames of reference from the first lot?

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Looking at line 1 in relation to line 2, we will see that the spaces between the markers on line 2 has been divided by the horizontal line.  1 side of the division will be greater than the other.  Line 1 will be able to view the greater part of the division of that time frame, and it will be unable to view the lesser part.

Why don't you just simplify this whole thing down to using two lines the same length (a length which we can call L), each as long as the distance between two markers on any of your lines. If we draw these lines side by side, but start the second one slightly higher up the paper, when we draw a line across horizontally from the top of the first line (the lower line) it will cut through the second one and divide it into two lengths, one short (the length of the height difference between the starts of the two lines, so let's call this length M) and one long (whose length will be L - M).

For the third line, we can simply use 2M for the shorter length and L - 2M for the longer length. For the fourth line we can use 3M for the shorter length, and L - 3M for the longer legth. At some point, perhaps when we're dealing with L - 20M, 20M might be longer than L, so the whole thing breaks down: this is where we need to know exactly what "slightly longer" means when drawing the 49 lines, or "slightly higher up" with my simplified version when I'm putting in the second line.

Even if we get that right though and ensure that L - 24M is a positive number (or zero at worst), there's still a problem with these proportions as they bear no resemblence to the way length contraction and time dilation behave. You might have a series of ratios like these: 25:0, 24:1, 23:2, 22:3, 21:4, 20:5, 19:6, 18:7, 17:8, 16:9, 15:10, 14:11, 13:12, 12:13, etc. (Maybe I should have started at 24 rather than 25, but it's easy to take one away from them all if that's the case.) But what use are these ratios? How would they tell you anything about length contraction or time dilation?

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By line 25 we will find that the observable part of the division is much reduced, and that the greater part cannot be observed.

And again, there is nothing that goes unobserved, so what is this a theory of? Why do you want a theory to account for things going unobserved when they don't go unobserved?

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By multiplying the proportions of the division of the space between the markers for any line, by the number of spaces between markers of that line,(the remainder at bottom of line must be proportionally divided and calculated as a point something space.) ...This will give the correct proportionality of what you can and cannot observe of that rate of time.

With the numbers I've chosen, there will only be one marker more on the longest line than on the shortest, so we'll be multiplying the proportions listed earlier by 1 plus one of the following: 0/25, 1/25, 2/25, 3/25, 4/25, etc. This means that for the fourth line, I'm taking the 21:4 and multiplying each side by 1 and 4/25, so that's 1.162 times 21 = 24.36, and 1.162 times 4 = 4.64, so we now have 24.36:4.64 (which is of course equal to 21:4 and is therefore a completely unnecessary conversion).

You seriously need to put your own numbers to this, doing it the way I have by producing the numbers you want me to get rather than the ones I'm getting perhaps by doing things wrongly. I can't see any way of using this ratio for anything relating to length contraction or time dilation.

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This dispenses with Newtonian time.  All rates of time can be measured relative to a standard second, or indeed any length of second you fancy.

All I can see is a list of ratios which have any relation to the task. You're going to have to show me the ratios that you've produced, and then you'll need to show how they can be used to calculate time dilation or length contraction for objects moving through a frame of reference at relativistic speed. You also need to explain what you mean by things not being observed because the real universe doesn't hide anything in that way.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 24/08/2016 23:44:24
That is mathematically impossible.

A second can be represented as a length on a graph, so of course it's possible.

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It is odd for you to say that, since your entire complaint against SR is that it doesn't have a holy reference frame.

There's nothing odd about it. If I discuss the idea of God with someone religious, being an atheist doesn't stop me discussing the proposed nature of his deity and agreeing with his requirements about what it supposedly is and does.

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Your "rationally" is not the "rationally" of physics or mathematics. I will stick with the latter two.

Which is why you will remain irrational. What you still don't get is that the interactive diagram showing models one to three is designed to force people to think about how the future is generated out of the past without doing it by magic. With a normal Spacetime diagram you don't see this process, but just get the whole thing at once. My diagram with its three modes shows three different ways in which the future can be generated from the past in SR, and the consequences of those three methods. One of them works by bringing in Newtonian time as a means to handle event-meshing failure, another works by bringing in a preferred frame of reference so that the time of one frame can serve as Newtonian time to control the slower ticking of clocks at rest in all other frame, and the other model works by tolerating impossible contradictions (which renders it invalid). Once you understand that you have no other options (model zero's no help as it has no functionality whatsoever when it comes to generating a universe), then you'll understand why I have such a low opinion of physicists who believe in SR and who rule out Newtonian time - they cannot account rationally for the generation of the future out of the past but depend instead on magic.

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No, that is a mischaracterization. If one is to measure the length of an object, then one needs to specify the frame of reference in which one is measuring it. No reference frame, no length. There is no "true length" independent of reference frame. You would like this to be the case (and you make some other conceptual errors), so you choose LET.

Nonsense: there are different interpretations of SR on this point, and you're fully entitled to yours, but it's a trivial issue which I don't give a fig about. You can have it any way you like it, and you have to, because all lengths from zero up to the maximum (the one I say is the true SR length for the thing) have to be counted as its true length. The important point that I was making is simply that there is a radical difference between LET and SR here in that LET says there is an absolute answer to the length, and that's the one measured for it in the preferred frame (and which is not necessarily the maximum length that will be measured for it by some observers).

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It's called reason. If a clock is running faster than another clock, it cannot also be running slower than it.
And SR holds this to be true. But the rate of a cyclic physical system depends on the system of coordinates. You want a holy clock rate, so you choose to reject SR.

If you have a mechanism in which one frame has clocks that run faster than those of other frames, that is the preferred frame. You can't have more than one frame performing that role at the same location in space. If you don't want that to be your mechanism, you can't have the clocks of one frame running faster than those of other frames, so your mechanism has to involve them all running at the same speed (as with model one). If you are pinning your colours to model two, you are embracing an infinite number of contradictions.

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It is magic when it involves toleration of a contradiction. If you have a mechanism for something which involves clock A ticking faster than clock B while clock B is ticking faster than clock A, you are irrational and have entered into the realm of magic.
And SR has none of these things. Only your desire for holy truth makes you want to create a contradiction where there is none.

Some people are blind to contradictions and there appears to be no cure for this, but they are irrational. If the clock of one frame ticks faster than the clock of another while also ticking slower than that clock, that's a contradiction which any rational person should be capable of recognising. Why can't you? What is missing in your thinking toolkit that prevents you from seeing that and from seeing how it is tied to SR?

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On the contrary: because of the theory of relativity, if I know the information from one well-formed frame, I have the information for every well-formed frame (and some that are not well-formed).

What you have is a delusion - you don't really understand it at all because you can't see the glaring contradictions that you're tolerating.

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There is a long history of physics cranks who want to show the world. They don't produce much, but they spill a lot of ink.

There is a long history of religious people tolerating contradictions and being ridiculed for it, and SR is a religion built on contradictions. Now, we're not going to get any further with this as you're scared of the interactive exam and want to go off on diversions instead, so I'll get back to building the most important system of all time. Goodbye.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: puppypower on 25/08/2016 00:20:00
The preferred reference can be determine by an accurate energy balance. For example, say we had two objects, the same size and shape, moving at relative velocity, V. The hidden variable is one has mass M and the other mass 2M. We don't know if object 1 or object 2 is moving or whether each has part of the velocity. To figure that out all we need to do is let them collide. The rebound will tell us which has the energy and therefore which was the preferred reference.

The magic trick is connected to the twin paradox. This assumes both with the same mass, therefore there is no preferred reference since the collision is always the same.

The same could be true of the universe. If we knew, in advance, the exact amount of kinetic energy in the universe, we could eliminate a wide range of relative reference scenarios. Since we don't, we can pretend these are all relative. If we did know this energy, only one scenario will add up properly thereby defining the preferred reference. 
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 25/08/2016 00:55:06
That is mathematically impossible.

A second can be represented as a length on a graph, so of course it's possible.
No, your statement, With Newtonian time it can be treated mathematically as a dimension, but it is only with SR that it became a physical length of anything," is mathematically impossible.

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Which is why you will remain irrational. What you still don't get is that the interactive diagram showing models one to three is designed to force people to think about how the future is generated out of the past without doing it by magic.
You are right, I don't get it. You have made a choice: you are standing, regardless of what anyone says, against the reasoning of physicists. I am not willing to do this. I wish you all the best and I hope this won't be hard for you. I really, really hope that you ahve someone looking after you.

 
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With a normal Spacetime diagram you don't see this process, but just get the whole thing at once. My diagram with its three modes shows three different ways in which the future can be generated from the past in SR, and the consequences of those three methods.
Like all of your knowledge of SR, you are putting together a half-baked idea of what everyone in history has done based on your limited reading. Many people have made animated SR diagrams. The difference between them and you is that they are using SR and you are not, given that your animated diagrams fail to preserve the same events across different reference frames.


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No, that is a mischaracterization. If one is to measure the length of an object, then one needs to specify the frame of reference in which one is measuring it. No reference frame, no length. There is no "true length" independent of reference frame. You would like this to be the case (and you make some other conceptual errors), so you choose LET.

Nonsense: there are different interpretations of SR on this point, and you're fully entitled to yours, but it's a trivial issue which I don't give a fig about.
There is no interpretation of SR in which one can have a length without a reference frame. Again, you have a very limited, self-taught knowledge of SR. You seem to hate those people who actually had teachers and you refuse to learn from them and you refuse to read anything more about SR. You have made this choice.

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If you have a mechanism in which one frame has clocks that run faster than those of other frames, that is the preferred frame. You can't have more than one frame performing that role at the same location in space.
You seem to not understand frames of reference at all. There are an infinite number of frames where certain clocks have the same properties of their rate. And frames are not located in space, space has location by virtue of a frame.

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Some people are blind to contradictions and there appears to be no cure for this, but they are irrational. If the clock of one frame ticks faster than the clock of another while also ticking slower than that clock, that's a contradiction which any rational person should be capable of recognising. Why can't you? What is missing in your thinking toolkit that prevents you from seeing that and from seeing how it is tied to SR?
I cannot simply accept your lies about SR. There is no frame in which, "he clock of one frame ticks faster than the clock of another while also ticking slower than that clock." This is your own fabrication. Like many cranks, you fantasize how SR is based on your limited knowledge and you make a decision about how SR really is and you then reject any person or text that might say otherwise.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 25/08/2016 01:16:45
When I ask you to draw vertical lines side by side, (how far apart these vertical lines are is irrelevant, space them at 1cm as you proceed across the page from left to right).

If these lines represent frames of reference, do you have some way of relating them to speeds at which they move relative to each other? I know you said it doesn't need numbers, but these numbers are important in order to get some idea of what's what.

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I now extend the time period between the sounding of the first and second bell for line 2.  This second vertical line that you have drawn is slight longer than the first.  It represents a dilated standard second.

How much is slightly longer? I was imagining doubling the length the first time, then the third line would be three times as long as the first, etc., but if that doesn't work, I can't see how there can be any leeway in the proportion that "slightly" represents.

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These vertical lines represent the standard second dilating for 24 lines, and then contracting for 24 lines back to the length of a standard second

Is it necessary to have the 24 lines reducing in length again? Is that just to help draw horizontal lines across the diagram or are they actually meant to be different frames of reference from the first lot?

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Looking at line 1 in relation to line 2, we will see that the spaces between the markers on line 2 has been divided by the horizontal line.  1 side of the division will be greater than the other.  Line 1 will be able to view the greater part of the division of that time frame, and it will be unable to view the lesser part.

Why don't you just simplify this whole thing down to using two lines the same length (a length which we can call L), each as long as the distance between two markers on any of your lines. If we draw these lines side by side, but start the second one slightly higher up the paper, when we draw a line across horizontally from the top of the first line (the lower line) it will cut through the second one and divide it into two lengths, one short (the length of the height difference between the starts of the two lines, so let's call this length M) and one long (whose length will be L - M).

For the third line, we can simply use 2M for the shorter length and L - 2M for the longer length. For the fourth line we can use 3M for the shorter length, and L - 3M for the longer legth. At some point, perhaps when we're dealing with L - 20M, 20M might be longer than L, so the whole thing breaks down: this is where we need to know exactly what "slightly longer" means when drawing the 49 lines, or "slightly higher up" with my simplified version when I'm putting in the second line.

Even if we get that right though and ensure that L - 24M is a positive number (or zero at worst), there's still a problem with these proportions as they bear no resemblence to the way length contraction and time dilation behave. You might have a series of ratios like these: 25:0, 24:1, 23:2, 22:3, 21:4, 20:5, 19:6, 18:7, 17:8, 16:9, 15:10, 14:11, 13:12, 12:13, etc. (Maybe I should have started at 24 rather than 25, but it's easy to take one away from them all if that's the case.) But what use are these ratios? How would they tell you anything about length contraction or time dilation?

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By line 25 we will find that the observable part of the division is much reduced, and that the greater part cannot be observed.

And again, there is nothing that goes unobserved, so what is this a theory of? Why do you want a theory to account for things going unobserved when they don't go unobserved?

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By multiplying the proportions of the division of the space between the markers for any line, by the number of spaces between markers of that line,(the remainder at bottom of line must be proportionally divided and calculated as a point something space.) ...This will give the correct proportionality of what you can and cannot observe of that rate of time.

With the numbers I've chosen, there will only be one marker more on the longest line than on the shortest, so we'll be multiplying the proportions listed earlier by 1 plus one of the following: 0/25, 1/25, 2/25, 3/25, 4/25, etc. This means that for the fourth line, I'm taking the 21:4 and multiplying each side by 1 and 4/25, so that's 1.162 times 21 = 24.36, and 1.162 times 4 = 4.64, so we now have 24.36:4.64 (which is of course equal to 21:4 and is therefore a completely unnecessary conversion).

You seriously need to put your own numbers to this, doing it the way I have by producing the numbers you want me to get rather than the ones I'm getting perhaps by doing things wrongly. I can't see any way of using this ratio for anything relating to length contraction or time dilation.

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This dispenses with Newtonian time.  All rates of time can be measured relative to a standard second, or indeed any length of second you fancy.

All I can see is a list of ratios which have any relation to the task. You're going to have to show me the ratios that you've produced, and then you'll need to show how they can be used to calculate time dilation or length contraction for objects moving through a frame of reference at relativistic speed. You also need to explain what you mean by things not being observed because the real universe doesn't hide anything in that way.

Firstly these lines are not reference frames in themselves.  They are merely depicting a physical representation of the duration of a second that is dilating and then contracting again.

The purpose of these lines is to mathematically work out the proportions of the observation one length of second will be able to make of the other.

This diagram is depicting a mathematical means to a concept I'm calling observational time frame  dependency.  Although actual numbers can be attributed to this system, what I'm describing is a formula, so it doesn't 'need' them in order to work.  I just don't know how to express the formula mathematically.

*

OK - slightly longer:
Yes the lines only get slightly longer.  A shallow sloped roof on top, and same shape inverted at bottom.  In real terms, for this to be in context, a standard second will increase in length only very slightly at the kinds of speeds that are normal to us, relative to stationary.  But regstding the reference frame of an object travelling at the kinds of speeds you have been describing on this thread, of course the length of a standard second will be vastly extended.  If you were to draw a vertical line (at same constant velocity you drew the standard second), for a second dilated to that extent, the line you draw will drop off bottom of page and beyond.  Perhaps you can now see the possibility that observing that vastly lengthened second from the length of the standard second can result in not being able to actually see very much of that longer second.  Resulting in not being able to see all of the rocket travelling at that speed. ie: length contraction

*

Yes - the reason there are lines after line 25 that identically reduce to afford each line, apart from line 25, an equal counterpart is purely for ease of drawing the horizontal lines, and no other reason.

*

If you only wish to know what the observable proportions of only one other length of second are, then by all means only draw 2 lines.  So long as the lines are drawn at constant velocity, one matching the length of a second in your observational reference frame, and the other matching the length of a second in the reference frame you are observing, (be this a moving reference frame or a reference frame of differing gravity potential), and as long as you divide your 1st line into 10 uniform spaces with 11 markers, (edit: although these numbers are completly arbitary, the natural divisions would be the length of nano seconds), measure the space in between one marker and the next, and then make markers on the longer line from top to bottom that create spaces equal to this length... then centralise your 1st line in relation to your 2nd line and, for ease of creating the horizontal lines, create a copy of your 1st line centralised on other side of your 2nd line.

You don't even have to draw horizontals matching all the markers in line 1 with line 3, just a couple or so will show you that each division is identical.  It is the division that the horizontal makes in the space between 2 markers on line 2 that is significant.

This is depicting the ratio of what a reference frame with a length of second as per line 1 will and will not observe of a reference frame that has a length of second as per line 2.

Then by measuring what length one side of the division of this space in between markers is in relation to the other side of this division of the space, it is possible to multiply each by the number of spaces there are marked out on line 2, (there may be a remainder of not a whole space that will need to be counted in) ...and this will give the total proportionality of the observation... and 'hopefully' can be matched to the maths of the expected length contraction of a reference frame in relative motion as per its expected time dilation.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 25/08/2016 23:32:18
That is mathematically impossible.

A second can be represented as a length on a graph, so of course it's possible.
No, your statement, With Newtonian time it can be treated mathematically as a dimension, but it is only with SR that it became a physical length of anything," is mathematically impossible.

Nonsense: time can be treated as a time or a distance. Newtonian time treats it as a time while SR treats it as a distance, and indeed it's the only distance that isn't variable within the non-Euclidean geometry where other lengths are different depending on which frame you measure them from.

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You are right, I don't get it. You have made a choice: you are standing, regardless of what anyone says, against the reasoning of physicists. I am not willing to do this. I wish you all the best and I hope this won't be hard for you. I really, really hope that you ahve someone looking after you.

I'm only standing up for reason. If your SR model can't generate the future out of the past without generating contradictions, it's broken and needs to be modified until it works. If you're at a Spacetime location and asking questions about what's going on at another Spacetime location while the calculations using one frame of reference are telling you that some event has happened there but the calculations using a different frame of reference are telling you that it hasn't happened yet, one of those accounts is wrong. Anyone who believes they're both correct is in need of medication.

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Like all of your knowledge of SR, you are putting together a half-baked idea of what everyone in history has done based on your limited reading. Many people have made animated SR diagrams. The difference between them and you is that they are using SR and you are not, given that your animated diagrams fail to preserve the same events across different reference frames.

Where can I find an animation/simulation that does the job in a way you approve of then? How do they perform the magic trick of avoiding generating contradictions? The reality is that they don't exist, and that's why there are so many people out there who regard SR as fantasy physics. Anyone who hunts for answers will find a wall of silence because you have no answers.

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There is no interpretation of SR in which one can have a length without a reference frame. Again, you have a very limited, self-taught knowledge of SR. You seem to hate those people who actually had teachers and you refuse to learn from them and you refuse to read anything more about SR. You have made this choice.

Absolute baloney: reference frames in SR give a narrow view of a deeper reality in which objects sit in non-Euclidean space where their true dimensions don't vary in the way they appear to do to us. The maximum lengths we measure for their dimensions (by co-moving with them) are the true lengths - the rest are just warped images of them.

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If you have a mechanism in which one frame has clocks that run faster than those of other frames, that is the preferred frame. You can't have more than one frame performing that role at the same location in space.
You seem to not understand frames of reference at all. There are an infinite number of frames where certain clocks have the same properties of their rate.

If one clock has its clocks running faster than those of other frames at a specific location, there are no other frames with clocks running that fast at that location. There will be an infinite number of others there running at any given slower rate.

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And frames are not located in space, space has location by virtue of a frame.

The only reason I'm restricting things to a locality is that a frame that runs clocks fastest in one place may not do so in another place due to the expansion of space - it's just careful wording to take that into account.

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I cannot simply accept your lies about SR. There is no frame in which, "he clock of one frame ticks faster than the clock of another while also ticking slower than that clock." This is your own fabrication.

It is SR's fabrication. If you have calculations based on one frame telling you that clock A is ticking faster than clock B while your calculations based on a different frame are telling you that clock B is ticking faster than clock A, they cannot both be telling you the truth. Not all the accounts generated by the analysis based on different frames are valid.

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Like many cranks, you fantasize how SR is based on your limited knowledge and you make a decision about how SR really is and you then reject any person or text that might say otherwise.

Like many qualified cranks, you don't understand SR despite having fancy documents signed by the clergy which lead you to imagine that you do. My task in all this is to try to get to the truth and then to pass it on to others. It's all about finding the truth and trying to get it out of some very slippery characters who don't want to take a close look at the solidity of the foundations of their beliefs that they've built so much upon. That is why the interactive exam is there - it's designed to force those who are brave enough to take it on to confront the problems and to try to get useful answers from them, and yet what happens? They run away from it and snipe at other things instead because they have no answers. If they did have answers they would be able to point straight to a site that would show how their SR model can generate the future out of the past without generating contradictions, without a preferred frame, and without event-meshing failures, but there is no such site out there because they have no such model. The only models they actually have are the ones that I have shown you. What they actually do is fudge and mudge, pointing at one of those models and saying "See, there's no event-meshing failure there!", then they point at a different model and say, "See, there's no need for a preferred frame there!", and then to another model again and say, "See, there are no contradictions generated here!", but they're trying to pass three incompatible models off as a single model, and the only one that actually fits in fully with SR is the one that generates an infinite number of contradictions. And so long as they keep sticking their heads in the sand to avoid seeing the problem, armies of people will continue to regard SR as witchcraft rather than science. If you seriously think SR works, you (or some other representative of the Church of Einstein) should be able to find a point where the argument presented in the interactive exam is faulty, but hundreds of experts have already run away from it without daring to say where it told them they'd failed. Only one has said where he failed it (question #1 - he believes that time doesn't run), and he ran away from the follow-up question that I put to him because he realised that his version of the model can't generate anything at all. All I'm doing is asking the awkward questions that anyone should ask and which the SR mob don't know how to answer, and the reason they have no answers to offer is very simple: SR is broken.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 26/08/2016 00:03:54
This diagram is depicting a mathematical means to a concept I'm calling observational time frame  dependency.  Although actual numbers can be attributed to this system, what I'm describing is a formula, so it doesn't 'need' them in order to work.  I just don't know how to express the formula mathematically.

But you must be getting numbers out for the proportions on each line (which I suspect you're doing differently from me). Why not provide a list of those numbers. You must have such a list - just measure them off your diagram with a ruler.

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Perhaps you can now see the possibility that observing that vastly lengthened second from the length of the standard second can result in not being able to actually see very much of that longer second.  Resulting in not being able to see all of the rocket travelling at that speed. ie: length contraction

But one problem there is that we do observe the whole of the longer second - we see the action in slow motion. As for the contraction, that could certainly make it harder to see the detail, but none of the detail is missing - we just need to magnify it more to see it.

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(edit: although these numbers are completly arbitary, the natural divisions would be the length of nano seconds)

Nanoseconds are no less arbitrary.

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This is depicting the ratio of what a reference frame with a length of second as per line 1 will and will not observe of a reference frame that has a length of second as per line 2.

What have you actually worked out from this? Can you use it to determine how much length contraction and time dilation there will be when you observe something moving relative to you at 0.866c? Can you get the number 2 or 1/2 out of it? And, if so, can you work out why that answer comes out of it? Does it work for other speeds too? Do you own a calculator capable of doing a square root or are you just doing everything on hope and guesses? If you've found something worthwhile, you need to find out whether it stands up or not, and that means checking the numbers.

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and 'hopefully' can be matched to the maths of the expected length contraction of a reference frame in relative motion as per its expected time dilation.

Do you have the formula Lorentz uses for calculating length contraction and time dilation? If you don't have a calculator capable of handling roots, would you like someone to give you a list of a range of speeds and their associated length contractions? Feel free to post a list of a hundred speeds and I'll do the maths for you to give you the numbers you need - it'll only take a few minutes to write a little program capable of churning out thousands of them, so you can have as many as you need. You've got to check that your proportions are actually giving you something that matches up to the real numbers of length contraction, because until you've done that you can't possibly know if you've got anything relevant to this business at all.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 26/08/2016 01:01:02
Nonsense: time can be treated as a time or a distance. Newtonian time treats it as a time while SR treats it as a distance, and indeed it's the only distance that isn't variable within the non-Euclidean geometry where other lengths are different depending on which frame you measure them from.
I'm sorry that you are so limited by whatever you taught yourself and that you refuse to learn anything new. Mathematically, one could always treat time as a length and this was done well before Einstein developed SR. Again, I'm sorry to see you embarrass yourself like this.

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I'm only standing up for reason. If your SR model can't generate the future out of the past without generating contradictions, it's broken and needs to be modified until it works.
And, as everyone working on it has shown for over a century, SR is a deterministic theory for which future events are completely determined by the past. If you think otherwise, then you are making a mistake. You have a significant burden of proof, given the immense amount of study given to the fundamentals of SR.

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If you're at a Spacetime location and asking questions about what's going on at another Spacetime location while the calculations using one frame of reference are telling you that some event has happened there but the calculations using a different frame of reference are telling you that it hasn't happened yet, one of those accounts is wrong.
So you are simply choosing to believe, regardless of any argument, that there is a holy, true frame of reference. So you are just begging the question for your conclusion.
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Anyone who believes they're both correct is in need of medication.
I would be careful about making that accusation, given that you are the person up against a century of published work and that you are siding with bona fide crackpots against SR.

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Where can I find an animation/simulation that does the job in a way you approve of then?
Have you heard of google?

Here are some of the first results:
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/~ts2/Animation/special_relativity.html
http://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/einsteinlight/
http://www.kcvs.ca/site/projects/specialRelativity.html

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How do they perform the magic trick of avoiding generating contradictions?
They, unlike you, actually use the Lorentz transformations.

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Absolute baloney: reference frames in SR give a narrow view of a deeper reality in which objects sit in non-Euclidean space where their true dimensions don't vary in the way they appear to do to us. The maximum lengths we measure for their dimensions (by co-moving with them) are the true lengths - the rest are just warped images of them.
This is your spacial David Cooper Relativity theory. You are free to use your own theory, but do not lie to us and say that it is SR.

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It is SR's fabrication. If you have calculations based on one frame telling you that clock A is ticking faster than clock B while your calculations based on a different frame are telling you that clock B is ticking faster than clock A, they cannot both be telling you the truth. Not all the accounts generated by the analysis based on different frames are valid.
This is your own, special desire to have a holy frame of reference. Most other people have moved on.

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That is why the interactive exam is there - it's designed to force those who are brave enough to take it on to confront the problems and to try to get useful answers from them, and yet what happens? They run away from it and snipe at other things instead because they have no answers.
If you ask questions based on falsehoods, then people will point this out.

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If they did have answers they would be able to point straight to a site that would show how their SR model can generate the future out of the past without generating contradictions, without a preferred frame, and without event-meshing failures, but there is no such site out there because they have no such model.
Why don't you look at any of the major books by Lawrence Sklar, to pick a philosopher of physics out of a hat. It's likely that all of them go into this or at least give a citation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Sklar#Major_books You imagine that you have to answers, but you are merely poorly read and taught.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 26/08/2016 01:43:23
This diagram is depicting a mathematical means to a concept I'm calling observational time frame  dependency.  Although actual numbers can be attributed to this system, what I'm describing is a formula, so it doesn't 'need' them in order to work.  I just don't know how to express the formula mathematically.

But you must be getting numbers out for the proportions on each line (which I suspect you're doing differently from me). Why not provide a list of those numbers. You must have such a list - just measure them off your diagram with a ruler.

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Perhaps you can now see the possibility that observing that vastly lengthened second from the length of the standard second can result in not being able to actually see very much of that longer second.  Resulting in not being able to see all of the rocket travelling at that speed. ie: length contraction

But one problem there is that we do observe the whole of the longer second - we see the action in slow motion. As for the contraction, that could certainly make it harder to see the detail, but none of the detail is missing - we just need to magnify it more to see it.

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(edit: although these numbers are completly arbitary, the natural divisions would be the length of nano seconds)

Nanoseconds are no less arbitrary.

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This is depicting the ratio of what a reference frame with a length of second as per line 1 will and will not observe of a reference frame that has a length of second as per line 2.

What have you actually worked out from this? Can you use it to determine how much length contraction and time dilation there will be when you observe something moving relative to you at 0.866c? Can you get the number 2 or 1/2 out of it? And, if so, can you work out why that answer comes out of it? Does it work for other speeds too? Do you own a calculator capable of doing a square root or are you just doing everything on hope and guesses? If you've found something worthwhile, you need to find out whether it stands up or not, and that means checking the numbers.

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and 'hopefully' can be matched to the maths of the expected length contraction of a reference frame in relative motion as per its expected time dilation.

Do you have the formula Lorentz uses for calculating length contraction and time dilation? If you don't have a calculator capable of handling roots, would you like someone to give you a list of a range of speeds and their associated length contractions? Feel free to post a list of a hundred speeds and I'll do the maths for you to give you the numbers you need - it'll only take a few minutes to write a little program capable of churning out thousands of them, so you can have as many as you need. You've got to check that your proportions are actually giving you something that matches up to the real numbers of length contraction, because until you've done that you can't possibly know if you've got anything relevant to this business at all.

I haven't created a diagram... I mostly do everything in my head, and this is really very simple indeed.  Formulas are numberless mathematics.

*

If you were to view a rocket experiencing dilated time and you saw the occupants of that rocket moving around their tasks in slow motion, then the rocket itself will also be moving in slow motion.  A rocket moving in slow motion is no longer travelling at the speed that causes the time dilation.
There is no way of avoiding this contradiction.

I am suggesting that the dilated time is directly causing the appearance of the associated length contraction and that this matches the fact of the current time dilation maths being the inverse of the current length contraction maths...
The ratios that you mention appearing in the diagram you have created at my instruction are depicting the inverse and non inverse of the maths currently employed to describe length contraction in relation to the inverse of these maths being motion related time dilation, except that my version of this description is not involving Newtonian time, only one rate of local time in relation to another.

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Yes nano seconds also arbitrary - but we use the standard second to measure time in most respects.
Let's give this some numbers then... A million micro seconds to a standard second split into ten equals one hundred thousand microseconds to a time frame.  (edit: clearly a time frame of the value of 100 000 microseconds can be subdivided by power10 as many times as is necessary into smaller time frames comprised of nanoseconds)

Remembering that we created 10 spaces with 11 markers on the first line that we are saying represents a standard second, we are making markers on line 2 that depicts a longer second spaced equally to the first line.  Line 2 is longer, there will be more spaces on line 2 than line 1...

How many more spaces?  Well that would depend on how much longer the dilated second is.  We have given the length of the space between markers a value of 1 hundred thousand microseconds.  A 'time frame' has the value of 100 000 microseconds...
If you can work out by how many microseconds a standard second will be dilated by for a speed of 0.866c then this system can be checked against that speeds expected length contraction...
...But for now let's just increase the length of a standard second by 50 000 microseconds.  This is equal to half the length of a space between markers.  Line 2 will have 10.5 spaces in relation to line 1's 10 spaces.
We centralise line 1 in relation to line 2 so that line 2 is the value of 25 000 microseconds longer at top of line 2 in relation to line 1, and 25 000 microseconds longer at bottom of line 2 in relation to line 1.

We can see that if we extend the markers on line 1 horizontally to meet line 2, that the horizontal will divide a space between markers on line 2 into two spaces.  The length of these divisions of this space between markers on line 2 is the ratio we are looking at.

I am saying that it will be the greater part of this division of the space between markers on line 2 that one will observe.  The lesser part of the division 'should' be a ratio that matches the expected length contraction for a time dilation of that proportion.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 26/08/2016 12:06:54
So in adding 50 000 microseconds to the million microseconds of the standard second to create line 2, it becomes clear that the observable proportionality of an observation of line 2, from line 1, is going to be missing 25 000 microseconds over the duration of the passing of its 10 time frames...
So - to clear up the overall ratio...
1000000 microseconds divided by a 1025000 microseconds = 0.97560976.

I'm suggesting that a length contraction associated with a second that is 50 000 microseconds longer than a standard second, will be of this ratio, and the reason the length appears contracted is because it is not possible to observe this ratio of the longer second from the shorter second. ((...and visa versa of the rocket's observation of the shorter second - but this will not be so obvious because the shorter second is not moving (or not moving as fast), relative to the longer second.))
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 26/08/2016 16:16:25
Just an addition, because I hate working with numbers and I'm not sure if I'm calculating the ratio that appears using this system with the correct process anyway, so I think I should describe the scenario from the reverse perspective:

The greater part of the division of the time frame on line 2 has the value of 75 000 microseconds.  Line 1 can only see these divisions.  And line 1 cannot see the 25 000 value divisions.

The question is by what proportionality?  I have added 5℅ in length to the duration of a second, but am I looking here at something that is giving me an observation that suggests a 25% reduction in length?

Simply dividing by the addition would solve the maths, but why?  What is the physics involved in the process of that?  And would dividing by the addition always work in any circumstance?  If it did, then this would suggest that perhaps seconds that are getting slower at increasing speeds, are getting slower more slowly as the speed increases further, and that as the speed decreases, that the seconds get faster at a faster rate the slower the speed is.

...can we take the speed 0.866c (that you were using), that length contracts a rocket to half its length, where we know that each division of of a time frame would be divided equally and then work backwards?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 26/08/2016 23:33:22
Hi Timey,

If we were to plot a graph of speeds of travel against the length contraction factor that applies for each speed, we might write speeds along the X-axis and have length contraction factors shown on the Y-axis. The line would run through the point (0,1) and it would look like a horizontal line running right along the graph on the Y=1 line for a very long way out to either side. Eventually it would begin to drift a little from that line, then it would head downwards more quickly until it hits the X-axis where the speed of light is marked. It is possible to create millions of other curves which also pass through (0,1) and which gradually accelerate down to meet the X-axis in the same place, and you will find points all the way along any such line where you can read off what appear to be length contraction values, but these will not be located over the right speeds and they are therefore completely useless for the task.

You need to draw a graph of the numbers you're getting off your diagram to see if your graph is the right shape. Until you do that (and you can do it just by checking a few values, so it isn't a massive task), you aren't going to know if your graph is going to be useful or useless. What you appear to have at the moment is a notion rather than a theory, so if you want to turn it into a theory you're going to have to plot your graph. If you're scared to do this because you fear it will destroy your theory, then you're in the wrong game - you seriously need to find out the truth. If the numbers fit, you will certainly have something worth looking at, but the graph I'm getting from applying your method (in my head) appears to be horribly wrong. Perhaps I'm not doing it the right way though, and that's why I need you need to provide your numbers. Without them, no one else can justify putting in the time to explore this any further: these numbers are crucial. You have proportions that you can read off your diagram, but you can find those on any old curve on a graph. How do you read off the frame speed that goes with the contraction values? If you don't know the answer to that, you will never be able to use your diagram to provide useful answers.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 27/08/2016 00:58:55
I'm sorry that you are so limited by whatever you taught yourself and that you refuse to learn anything new. Mathematically, one could always treat time as a length and this was done well before Einstein developed SR. Again, I'm sorry to see you embarrass yourself like this.

On the contrary - I'm one of the few people who can learn and who changes position when I find out I'm wrong about things. You by contrast do not learn even though you keep tripping over things. Here, you are still missing the point and making embarrassing objections to things that really shouldn't be contested. Of course time was often treated like a length before Einstein, and time is often described as short or long just like a length, and people have always talked about lengths of time, but it was with Einstein that it ceased to be metaphorical.

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And, as everyone working on it has shown for over a century, SR is a deterministic theory for which future events are completely determined by the past. If you think otherwise, then you are making a mistake. You have a significant burden of proof, given the immense amount of study given to the fundamentals of SR.

If you weren't too scared to take the interactive exam, you'd find out that there are major problems with how SR is supposed to generate the future out of the past without shedding some of its ideological baggage.

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I would be careful about making that accusation, given that you are the person up against a century of published work and that you are siding with bona fide crackpots against SR.

It's a fully reasonable accusation to make where people are tolerating contradictions as that trashing of logic is the kind of behaviour associated with crazy religions.

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Where can I find an animation/simulation that does the job in a way you approve of then?
Have you heard of google?

Why are you wasting my time with that pile of irrelevant junk? I want you to show me something that actually shows how the future is generated out of the past in SR without using an external time to control the relative progress on different paths, using nothing other than the time of the "time dimension" and not cheating by using one frame as a preferred frame to govern the rest. The problem that my page addresses is this very specific issue of how the unfolding of time is handled on different paths through Spacetime without using a preferred frame or an external time to cheat. The reality is that all simulations cheat and fail to do SR properly unless they follow model 1, but if they do that they have to exhibit event-meshing failure.

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How do they perform the magic trick of avoiding generating contradictions?
They, unlike you, actually use the Lorentz transformations.

That isn't a valid answer because they produce contradictions.

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This is your spacial David Cooper Relativity theory. You are free to use your own theory, but do not lie to us and say that it is SR.

You may not understand SR well enough to recognise this as SR, but it is correct. Objects in SR occupy non-Euclidean space and their dimensions in that space are constant, not shifting with the wind. You are trying to claim that all the Euclidean views of them are providing equally fundamental truths about their shapes, but that is not the case - they are giving warped views of an underlying, unchanging reality.

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This is your own, special desire to have a holy frame of reference. Most other people have moved on.

It is nothing more than my refusal to accept contradictory claims about events. Where one account contradicts another, they cannot both be valid, so attributing equal validity to them is idiotic, and it's that crazy toleration of contradictions that generates the army of cranks and crackpots who attack SR in thousands of different ways, all thinking they may be doing a better job of it than the physicists because the physicists are so clearly barking mad. And that also makes it hard for anyone objecting to SR to be seen as anything other than a crank by physicists because they've had so much of their time wasted by cranks already and are fed up with it all, so they cling to their beliefs and wave their diplomas at anyone who questions them, then they chant their mantras and pray to their gods. My task in all of this is simple - I want to educate the cranks, ideally to show them how SR works and to prove to them that it is valid, but I can't do that because it has claims tied to it that simply don't stack up logically. It cannot be true that clock A ticks faster than clock B and that clock B ticks faster than clock A. Either one of them ticks faster than the other or they both tick at the same rate, and that either takes you away from model 2 in the direction of model 3 (preferred frame) or model 1 (event-meshing failure).

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If you ask questions based on falsehoods, then people will point this out.

But they are unable to show falsehoods in the interactive exam. Instead, they nitpick about things I've said elsewhere in the introductory part of my page where the aim is to get people up to speed with the subject quickly even if they have no previous knowledge of it, but even then their attacks are based on ignorance and lack of understanding of their own subject. There you are, for example, not understanding how things have a fixed shape in the non-Eucledean reality which doesn't change no matter how much you rotate them or move them around.

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Why don't you look at any of the major books by Lawrence Sklar, to pick a philosopher of physics out of a hat. It's likely that all of them go into this or at least give a citation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Sklar#Major_books You imagine that you have to answers, but you are merely poorly read and taught.

What you don't realise is that the argument I've built on my page came out of discussion with a number of experts on SR, and most of the content of it (including claims which you're objecting to) came directly from them while we collectively built the thought experiment at the centre of it. All I've done is put the whole lot together and illustrate it with a few programs, steering people towards the fundamental problems with SR. We began with models 2 and 3 and discussed the contradictions generated by mode 2. The way they tried to escape from there was by moving to modes 1 and zero, but neither of those models provides the solution they claimed because each of them had its own difficulties in trying to account for the generation of the future out of the past. Model zero is lorentz invarient, but it has no functionality as it can't run events from past to future without them pre-existing in an eternal block universe state. Model 1 is also lorentz invarient, but it has to be able to tolerate event-meshing failure during the construction phase of the block (and it only works with a block universe). Model 2 doesn't need a block universe, but it is not Lorentz invarient - when you change frame, you make and unmake events, and clearly the real universe cannot behave that way. Model 3 is Lorentz invarient and generates no contradictions, but it achieves this by having a preferred frame. There simply are no other possible SR models that can have any hope of resolving the issues, and that's why you can't point to one. All you can do is throw piles of links at me and assert that there's a model in there somewhere that fits the bill, but I've run this past more than enough experts to know that there isn't. There are only the models I've put on my page, and the ones that SR believers want to use are not viable. Look at the Twitter conversation with the cosmologist (Geraint Lewis) who thought his Spacetime diagram plotting algorithm was a simulation which would meet the challenge. There was nothing in it at all that had any relevance to the control of the unfolding of events on different paths through Spacetime. All of the modes of my interactive diagram would, if they were designed to, plot out identical Spacetime diagrams, but the way in which they do so is not stored in the end result at all, and it's that process that the whole discussion on my page is about - a process which other people simply refuse to address. Lewis's plotter simply plotted lines, calculating in ways that had no care at all about the order in which the events would have to unfold and mesh together. If we start at Spacetime location X and run events on from there, we can't have one path develop more slowly than another unless we're using the time of a preferred frame (as Newtonian time) to slow the progress on the other paths. But if we allow them all to progress with their time running at full speed, we're automatically into mode 1 and will necessarily have event-meshing failure. If anyone out there thinks they have ideas about how an SR simulation can be done without cheating though, I'm more than willing to program it with them, but it is a task that has so far had no takers for the simple reason that it's impossible: that's why you can't link to a simulation that works without cheating. The only simulations that exist either use a preferred frame, generate contradictions or produce event-meshing failure, exactly as the modes of my interactive diagram do (which are simulations).
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 27/08/2016 02:24:46
On the contrary - I'm one of the few people who can learn and who changes position when I find out I'm wrong about things. You by contrast do not learn even though you keep tripping over things. Here, you are still missing the point and making embarrassing objections to things that really shouldn't be contested. Of course time was often treated like a length before Einstein, and time is often described as short or long just like a length, and people have always talked about lengths of time, but it was with Einstein that it ceased to be metaphorical.
You are literally ignoring the mathematical discipline of geometry.

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If you weren't too scared to take the interactive exam, you'd find out that there are major problems with how SR is supposed to generate the future out of the past without shedding some of its ideological baggage.
Why do you assume that your half-baked ideas are new? They are not new, they are simply wrong. Your "exam" is as intelligent as asking someone "Did you stop beating your wife?"

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Why are you wasting my time with that pile of irrelevant junk? I want you to show me something that actually shows how the future is generated out of the past in SR without using an external time to control the relative progress on different paths, using nothing other than the time of the "time dimension" and not cheating by using one frame as a preferred frame to govern the rest.
You have this insane idea that because the information in one well-formed frame is guaranteed to give us the information in every other well-formed frame, then the first frame we described things in is the preferred frame. It is not, it is merely the one we used to provide the initial description.



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They, unlike you, actually use the Lorentz transformations.

That isn't a valid answer because they produce contradictions.
You realize that by saying this you are simply denying logical inference? The consistency of SR is not in doubt.

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You may not understand SR well enough to recognise this as SR, but it is correct. Objects in SR occupy non-Euclidean space and their dimensions in that space are constant, not shifting with the wind. You are trying to claim that all the Euclidean views of them are providing equally fundamental truths about their shapes, but that is not the case - they are giving warped views of an underlying, unchanging reality.
Again, I will side with every physicist that uses SR in saying that SR does not have a preferred reference frame and describes objects based on the frame of reference one uses. You can stand alone and be "right". Since SR is the basis of technology that makes contemporary computers possible, I feel OK being "wrong" in this way.

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It is nothing more than my refusal to accept contradictory claims about events. Where one account contradicts another, they cannot both be valid, so attributing equal validity to them is idiotic, and it's that crazy toleration of contradictions that generates the army of cranks and crackpots who attack SR in thousands of different ways, all thinking they may be doing a better job of it than the physicists because the physicists are so clearly barking mad.
To be clear, you generate a contradiction only by claiming that one can compare lengths between two frames of reference in some manner independent of frames of reference, in violation of geometry. I will stick with geometry.

 
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It cannot be true that clock A ticks faster than clock B and that clock B ticks faster than clock A.
And in SR, this is never the case: descriptions depend on frame and one cannot make comparison claims outside of a frame. To quote someone who should know better, your behavior matches someone like:"they've been taught the basics badly, leading them to imagine that it's okay to mix incompatible versions of the model into one faulty mess which they think works".


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But they are unable to show falsehoods in the interactive exam.
OK, let's look at your falsehoods:

1. "the static block universe model... does not allow a universe to be generated in the first place as it allows no change whatsoever"

No, this model simply establishes a certain metaphysical relationship between events. It does not change the physical relationships: the physical limitations on cause and effect are just as strong in the block universe model, perhaps even stronger. 

SR is compatible with a block universe model, but does not require this model.

2. Your "Mode 1" represents SR. Your SR doesn't use the Lorentz transformations, so it is not SR. This is a horrible, obvious lie. The entire scenario of the "diagram" tries to mix the locations from one system of coordinates in another system of coordinates without using the transformations.

At this point, it is useless to continue further, as anyone who bothered to learn SR would see.

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Why don't you look at any of the major books by Lawrence Sklar, to pick a philosopher of physics out of a hat. It's likely that all of them go into this or at least give a citation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Sklar#Major_books You imagine that you have to answers, but you are merely poorly read and taught.

What you don't realise is that the argument I've built on my page came out of discussion with a number of experts on SR, and most of the content of it (including claims which you're objecting to) came directly from them while we collectively built the thought experiment at the centre of it.
You are right, I don't realize this. I suspect that you are lying. If you did speak with people, they were likely cranks that you should know better than to call "experts".

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Model 1 is also lorentz invarient,
No, you are simply lying: you combine two frames into one without applying the transformations. I cannot believe you are so incompetent.

 
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All you can do is throw piles of links at me
You asked for links to animations of SR! Thanks, crank, for acting in so dishonest a way as to take away my feelings of pity once I saw your horrible website.  You have had no substantial interaction with "experts" since if you had, at least one would tell you to stop letting your education reform website look like it was designed by a ten-year old.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 27/08/2016 04:16:52
Hi Timey,

If we were to plot a graph of speeds of travel against the length contraction factor that applies for each speed, we might write speeds along the X-axis and have length contraction factors shown on the Y-axis. The line would run through the point (0,1) and it would look like a horizontal line running right along the graph on the Y=1 line for a very long way out to either side. Eventually it would begin to drift a little from that line, then it would head downwards more quickly until it hits the X-axis where the speed of light is marked. It is possible to create millions of other curves which also pass through (0,1) and which gradually accelerate down to meet the X-axis in the same place, and you will find points all the way along any such line where you can read off what appear to be length contraction values, but these will not be located over the right speeds and they are therefore completely useless for the task.

You need to draw a graph of the numbers you're getting off your diagram to see if your graph is the right shape. Until you do that (and you can do it just by checking a few values, so it isn't a massive task), you aren't going to know if your graph is going to be useful or useless. What you appear to have at the moment is a notion rather than a theory, so if you want to turn it into a theory you're going to have to plot your graph. If you're scared to do this because you fear it will destroy your theory, then you're in the wrong game - you seriously need to find out the truth. If the numbers fit, you will certainly have something worth looking at, but the graph I'm getting from applying your method (in my head) appears to be horribly wrong. Perhaps I'm not doing it the right way though, and that's why I need you need to provide your numbers. Without them, no one else can justify putting in the time to explore this any further: these numbers are crucial. You have proportions that you can read off your diagram, but you can find those on any old curve on a graph. How do you read off the frame speed that goes with the contraction values? If you don't know the answer to that, you will never be able to use your diagram to provide useful answers.

The speed associated with a length contraction 'should' be indicative in the 'length' of its associated dilated second..
 Why include a graph line for the related speed?  It would be simple enough to include by tagging each line representing the length of a second with a label stating its time dilated related speed of motion.  But what point?  There would be vastly more point to including info of the gravity field that a rocket travelling at relativist speeds would be obliged to encounter.

If you have paid attention - which you haven't, because you are looking at these lines as being length contracted themselves, rather than representing a phenomenon of differently dilated seconds that is causing an observation that negates one from viewing portions of time frames of a dilated second from a differently dilated second - the diagram that you have created 'in your head' would be correct...

It's just that you are entirely conditioned to view the fact of a length contraction as being caused by speed of motion, (although physics has no idea why this should occur)...
...and this system I am proposing further defines the situation as being that speed of motion causes dilated seconds - and that dilated seconds are causing the appearance of length contraction, when observed from a reference frame of seconds that are differently dilated.

...But before I leave you to argue in length and breadth with the realm defender as would seem you're preference, can you tell me by how much a second 'is' dilated, (relative to a standard second), to cause a length to contract to half its length?

I found something online that might tell me, but it's a PDF and I can't open these documents, or view a lot of the diagram stuff that is available online on my phone, my phone being the only form of internet connection available to me for quite some considerable time now.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 27/08/2016 15:40:37
For anyone who can appreciate the system of using lines and spaces in the way that I suggest to create a visual representation of my concept of observational time frame dependency that seconds of differing dilations may make of each other...

I understand that using local time of observation reference frame in relation to observation of length contraction in a frame moving at speed relative to observation reference frame is not the usual approach.  I also can appreciate that dispensing with the Newtonian time that the usual calculations refer back to as the observation point, will cause a proportionality between length contraction and time dilation that may be unrecognisable in relation to the current maths.

The proportionality that I expect to be apparent in my concept of observational time frame dependency directly relates to the Bekenstien Hawkings temperature conundrum...
A black holes temperature reduces by the inverse square law with addition of mass.  I am suggesting that the additional mass is causing an increase in the difference between the rate of time between observation and observed, and that this is causing the observation point to observe less of the black holes temperature, which as per usual physics would increase by the square law with additional mass. (the fact that my related theory states time running faster for black holes is neither here nor there, if a black holes time runs slow, the concept still holds)

Therefore I am expecting the proportionality of my concept of observational time frame dependency to follow this proportionality.  As a second is increased in length relative to the observation reference frames second, via motion related time dilation, the observation should decrease via the inverse square law.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 27/08/2016 18:19:36
I'm surprised that nobody picked up on my earlier comment:

"If the occupants of a rocket are observed to be moving about their tasks in slow motion due to time dilation, the rocket must also be moving in slow motion. If the rocket is moving in slow motion it cannot be travelling at the speed causing the time dilation.
There is no way to avoid this contradiction"
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 27/08/2016 19:58:14
A solution to this contradiction is to state the observation of the dilated time as time frame dependent...

Matching the number of time frames of an observation reference frame up with the greater number of time frames of an extended second in the observed reference frame, and stating the extra as unobservable from the observation reference frame, or proportionally unobservable, solves this contradiction.

A rockets occupants would be observed as missing frames of .movement in their tasks around the rocket, ie: the guy who was using the exercise bike seems to have passed through a wall and is now on the toilet, or the maintenance woman fixing a solar panel appears to have disappeared from the panel and appeared at the hatch... (doesn't this sound a bit like quantum?)

The rocket itself would be observed to have missing frames of its form, ie: length contraction, and clearly, under the remit of missing frames of observation, this appearance of length contraction would only occur inline motion.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 27/08/2016 20:44:55
I'm surprised that nobody picked up on my earlier comment:

"If the occupants of a rocket are observed to be moving about their tasks in slow motion due to time dilation, the rocket must also be moving in slow motion. If the rocket is moving in slow motion it cannot be travelling at the speed causing the time dilation.
There is no way to avoid this contradiction"

Yes that is a very interesting point. Maybe someone will address it once all the arguing stops.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 27/08/2016 23:59:02
I'm surprised that nobody picked up on my earlier comment:

"If the occupants of a rocket are observed to be moving about their tasks in slow motion due to time dilation, the rocket must also be moving in slow motion. If the rocket is moving in slow motion it cannot be travelling at the speed causing the time dilation.
There is no way to avoid this contradiction"
Yeah, that's just wrong. The motion of the rocket is stipulated, it is the physical events "within" the rocket that appear to be slowed. If the "rocket" was just a pocket watch, the entire watch would be moving at the stipulated speed, it is just the motion of the hands and gears of the watch that change.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 28/08/2016 00:22:10
I'm surprised that nobody picked up on my earlier comment:

"If the occupants of a rocket are observed to be moving about their tasks in slow motion due to time dilation, the rocket must also be moving in slow motion. If the rocket is moving in slow motion it cannot be travelling at the speed causing the time dilation.
There is no way to avoid this contradiction"
Yeah, that's just wrong. The motion of the rocket is stipulated, it is the physical events "within" the rocket that appear to be slowed. If the "rocket" was just a pocket watch, the entire watch would be moving at the stipulated speed, it is just the motion of the hands and gears of the watch that change.
Lol - if I say potato...aye!

To stipulate that objects experiencing speed are time dilated relative to the stationary frame, and to then say that only the occupants are experiencing the time dilation and that the rocket that is moving with the occupants does not experience the time dilation is both illogical and entirety contradictory.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 28/08/2016 00:47:38
I'm surprised that nobody picked up on my earlier comment:

"If the occupants of a rocket are observed to be moving about their tasks in slow motion due to time dilation, the rocket must also be moving in slow motion. If the rocket is moving in slow motion it cannot be travelling at the speed causing the time dilation.
There is no way to avoid this contradiction"

Yes that is a very interesting point. Maybe someone will address it once all the arguing stops.

Why wait? Let's look at it now.

Suppose an alien planet flies past the Earth at 0.866c. We see clocks on that planet running at half the speed of ours, but there is absolutely no requirement for the planet to move slower relative to us as a result of the action taking place upon it being slowed to half speed. For the aliens living on it, it will still feel as if it's moving perfectly normally while we are rushing past it. If it has a moon with it, both will flash past us at ridiculous speed, but the moon will appear to us to orbit its planet in slow motion, and if they're part of a solar system, that entire solar system will appear to be functioning in slow motion too, all of that appearing to behave fully normally to them while we appear to be rushing past them at ridiculous speed while ourselves operating in slow motion (and with our moon is going round us in slow motion, etc.). If that still sounds improbable, you then have to look at how the observations are made and the complications which come into it because of the Doppler effect and the visual complications of the headlights effect.

Imagine two planets flying past each other in opposite directions, the speed of each being measured at 0.866c relative to the other. At the point of closest approach when they look at what's going on on the other planet, they will both see clocks on the other planet ticking at exactly the same rate as on their own planet and not running at half speed, but they will not see that as being the moment of closest approach because of the optical effects.

If two spaceships are moving along side by side but some way apart, light has to travel at an angle to get from one to the other rather than going straight across perpendicular to their direction of travel. If someone on one ship points a laser directly sideways at the other ship, the light from that laser will move within the laser as the laser moves forwards with the ship, and that movement of the laser sends the light out at a different angle from the one the laser is pointing in. When the light is received at the other ship, a camera or eye collecting it will also be moving and will therefore determine that the light has come from directly sideways, even though it actually came from some way behind. This tells us something important about what happens with our two planets example, because the way the light is received will make it appear to have come from much further ahead than its actual source, and that means the whole planet will appear to be further ahead than it actually is. As a consequence, at the point when the people on each planet actually see the other planet as being directly to the side (90 degrees away from their direction of travel), they will then see each other running in slow motion, their clocks producing half as many ticks as the clocks on their own planet, but it's the Doppler effect that is causing the observed slowing and the clocks on the two planets are actually ticking at the same rate.

It's different if one planet is stationary and the other is moving past at 0.866c (rather than both moving at 0.433c in opposite directions) because in this case the clocks on one planet really are running slow, ticking half as often as the clocks on the stationary planet. However, things still look the same to the people on the planets as they observe the other planet - what changes is the point where they see themselves as being at their closest to the other planet. At the point of closest approach, observers on the stationary planet will see the action on the other planet running at half speed, and this time they're seeing the truth of what's going on. But they can't know their planet is stationary, so they don't know if they're being fooled by optical effects and if the real point of closest approach occurred earlier.

Things look different again when you work with diagrams. With the reference-frame camera program that I'm writing (nearly finished, though it won't work on Timey's phone - minium screen size requirements are more in the Netbook computer range), you don't have any Doppler effects getting in the way because you're always looking at the "God view" where all the delays in seeing the action are removed, but what then happens is that which ever frame you set it to view events from, all clocks moving through that frame are slowed in proportion to how quickly they're moving through it. If you follow the travelling twin (in the twins paradox) by setting the camera to the frame he's at rest in during the first leg of his trip, you will see the clock of the stay-at-home twin run slow, and the same applies to the return leg of his trip, and yet the stay-at-home clock will rack up more ticks by the time the twins are reunited - this is possible because at the point when the travelling twin changes direction and we switch the frame we're using to analyse his trip, the stay-at-home clock jumps forwards in time and we completely miss a massive chunk of the action. The travelling twin doesn't miss the action in that way because he's seeing it all, but he's seeing it with the Doppler effect spacing out the ticks on the away leg and then cramming masses of them together on the return leg. With the "god view" of the diagrams (which can be played through as video), we see less of the action because we jump past a lot of it at the turning point where we change frame.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 28/08/2016 01:18:50
I'm surprised that nobody picked up on my earlier comment:

"If the occupants of a rocket are observed to be moving about their tasks in slow motion due to time dilation, the rocket must also be moving in slow motion. If the rocket is moving in slow motion it cannot be travelling at the speed causing the time dilation.
There is no way to avoid this contradiction"
Yeah, that's just wrong. The motion of the rocket is stipulated, it is the physical events "within" the rocket that appear to be slowed. If the "rocket" was just a pocket watch, the entire watch would be moving at the stipulated speed, it is just the motion of the hands and gears of the watch that change.
Lol - if I say potato...aye!

To stipulate that objects experiencing speed are time dilated relative to the stationary frame, and to then say that only the occupants are experiencing the time dilation and that the rocket that is moving with the occupants does not experience the time dilation is both illogical and entirety contradictory.

You are making a very pertinent point. Well done!
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 28/08/2016 01:36:32
I'm surprised that nobody picked up on my earlier comment:

"If the occupants of a rocket are observed to be moving about their tasks in slow motion due to time dilation, the rocket must also be moving in slow motion. If the rocket is moving in slow motion it cannot be travelling at the speed causing the time dilation.
There is no way to avoid this contradiction"
Yeah, that's just wrong. The motion of the rocket is stipulated, it is the physical events "within" the rocket that appear to be slowed. If the "rocket" was just a pocket watch, the entire watch would be moving at the stipulated speed, it is just the motion of the hands and gears of the watch that change.
Lol - if I say potato...aye!

To stipulate that objects experiencing speed are time dilated relative to the stationary frame, and to then say that only the occupants are experiencing the time dilation and that the rocket that is moving with the occupants does not experience the time dilation is both illogical and entirety contradictory.
That's not what I said in the slightest.

If you state that, in frame A, the rocket has speed x, then that's the speed in frame A. Time dilation applies when we speak of events in some other frame and then convert back to frame A. Note that in the frame that is co-moving with the rocket, the rocket is moving at speed 0.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 28/08/2016 01:51:18
I don't think I'll have time to post replies to all posts today, and as I'm going through them in inverse-crank order it means PhysBang's going to get a day off.

Hi Timey,

The speed associated with a length contraction 'should' be indicative in the 'length' of its associated dilated second.

It is if you have a way of calculating it, but it isn't clear that you do. What do your proportions represent if they aren't relating time dilation and length contraction to speed? You can't just be relating time-dilation to length contraction because the values are the same (or reciprocals of each other, depending on how you want to use them) and there is therefore no need for your proportions to do any conversion.

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Why include a graph line for the related speed?  It would be simple enough to include by tagging each line representing the length of a second with a label stating its time dilated related speed of motion.  But what point?  There would be vastly more point to including info of the gravity field that a rocket travelling at relativist speeds would be obliged to encounter.

So do the proportions relate time dilation and length contraction to gravity in some way? I have no idea how to calculate these gravity fields that rockets encounter in deep space while moving at relativistic speed, so you're taking things a long way beyond my knowledge of the subject.

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If you have paid attention - which you haven't...

I need to know what things represent before I can get my head round them. You have proportions, and I don't understand what the proportions are. Are they just giving you fractions such as 1/2, 1/4, etc.? If so, why do you need the diagram to generate these fractions when you can just pick them out of the air more easily without the diagram? The diagram's only of use for something if the sideways aspect of it tells you something, so I want to know what it tells you. If the 20th line gives you the fraction 1/2, for example, what does the 20 represent? If it doesn't represent anything, why do you need the diagram to give you the 1/2 when you can just pluck it out of the air instead whenever you want a half?

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It's just that you are entirely conditioned to view the fact of a length contraction as being caused by speed of motion, (although physics has no idea why this should occur)...

Physics does have ideas as to why it should occur. If you accelerate a rocket from rest to 0.866c by shooting a laser at its rear end, it will take you a certain amount of energy to get it to that speed. If you start out at 0.866c though and do this though, the rocket will only be accelerated up from 0.866c to 0.99c (which is clearly not twice as fast as 0.886 - there is no possibility of it moving at 1.7x the speed of light). As you add more energy to the rocket, there is more energy in the rocket that itself needs to be accelerated, and that's the "relativistic mass". If we then imagine a moon orbiting a planet with the planet racing through space at 0.866c, how does the moon behave? It goes round in an elliptical orbit, length-contracted in the direction of travel of the planet, and this happens because of the way the energy is acting - the moon's forwards speed (at the point of its orbit where it's moving fastest) is much lower than you might expect because a lot of the energy becomes tied up as relativistic mass instead of a higher forward speed. Length contraction of orbits is thus driven by this impossibility of things moving faster than the speed of light and the extra energy that objects have to carry as they get closer to it. How it also causes length contraction in small things, I don't know, but we don't altogether know what electrons are doing as they operate around the nucleus of an atom, but it's easy to imagine the same issue applying to them when they move forwards relative to the nucleus, thereby length contracting the atom and allowing atoms to sit closer together in their direction of travel.

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...and this system I am proposing further defines the situation as being that speed of motion causes dilated seconds - and that dilated seconds are causing the appearance of length contraction, when observed from a reference frame of seconds that are differently dilated.

But you don't appear to have any way to link the amount of dilation to speeds other than using someone else's theory to do so.

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...But before I leave you to argue in length and breadth with the realm defender as would seem you're preference, can you tell me by how much a second 'is' dilated, (relative to a standard second), to cause a length to contract to half its length?

The realm I'm defending is the observed universe and our measurements of it, these being independent of theory but being the things which a theory needs to account for. If you don't believe the measurements of experiments and want to create a theory of some other universe that no one can access to measure, then that's great, but it's not my field. I've already told you the relationship between length contraction and time dilation - there is no conversion required unless you want to work with the reciprocal. Length contraction to 0.5 times the rest length means that clocks will also tick 0.5 times as often as at rest. The increase in "relativistic mass" (if you ever want it as well) is the reciprocal of that, meaning you divide 0.5 into 1 to get 2.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 28/08/2016 02:17:46
If you don't believe the measurements of experiments and want to create a theory of some other universe that no one can access to measure, then that's great, but it's not my field.
Sadly, it's exactly your field, since that is what the LET demands: a system of measurements that can never be identified and thus never used to make measurements.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 28/08/2016 02:55:35
I'm surprised that nobody picked up on my earlier comment:

"If the occupants of a rocket are observed to be moving about their tasks in slow motion due to time dilation, the rocket must also be moving in slow motion. If the rocket is moving in slow motion it cannot be travelling at the speed causing the time dilation.
There is no way to avoid this contradiction"
Yeah, that's just wrong. The motion of the rocket is stipulated, it is the physical events "within" the rocket that appear to be slowed. If the "rocket" was just a pocket watch, the entire watch would be moving at the stipulated speed, it is just the motion of the hands and gears of the watch that change.
Lol - if I say potato...aye!

To stipulate that objects experiencing speed are time dilated relative to the stationary frame, and to then say that only the occupants are experiencing the time dilation and that the rocket that is moving with the occupants does not experience the time dilation is both illogical and entirety contradictory.
That's not what I said in the slightest.

If you state that, in frame A, the rocket has speed x, then that's the speed in frame A. Time dilation applies when we speak of events in some other frame and then convert back to frame A. Note that in the frame that is co-moving with the rocket, the rocket is moving at speed 0.
So basically you are saying that the occupants of the rocket are not moving in slow motion, they just look as though they are from the observation reference frame...

So how do you tell what speed the rocket is moving at?

How do you know that its not moving in slow motion?

If the occupants are not really moving in slow motion, how can one say the length of the rocket is really contracted?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 28/08/2016 04:33:55
I'm surprised that nobody picked up on my earlier comment:

"If the occupants of a rocket are observed to be moving about their tasks in slow motion due to time dilation, the rocket must also be moving in slow motion. If the rocket is moving in slow motion it cannot be travelling at the speed causing the time dilation.
There is no way to avoid this contradiction"
Yeah, that's just wrong. The motion of the rocket is stipulated, it is the physical events "within" the rocket that appear to be slowed. If the "rocket" was just a pocket watch, the entire watch would be moving at the stipulated speed, it is just the motion of the hands and gears of the watch that change.
Lol - if I say potato...aye!

To stipulate that objects experiencing speed are time dilated relative to the stationary frame, and to then say that only the occupants are experiencing the time dilation and that the rocket that is moving with the occupants does not experience the time dilation is both illogical and entirety contradictory.
That's not what I said in the slightest.

If you state that, in frame A, the rocket has speed x, then that's the speed in frame A. Time dilation applies when we speak of events in some other frame and then convert back to frame A. Note that in the frame that is co-moving with the rocket, the rocket is moving at speed 0.
So basically you are saying that the occupants of the rocket are not moving in slow motion, they just look as though they are from the observation reference frame...

So how do you tell what speed the rocket is moving at?

How do you know that its not moving in slow motion?

If the occupants are not really moving in slow motion, how can one say the length of the rocket is really contracted?

The question you need to ask yourself is, "How would I find out what the accepted answer is to this conundrum?" When you find the answer come back and tell us.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 28/08/2016 11:08:30
I'm surprised that nobody picked up on my earlier comment:

"If the occupants of a rocket are observed to be moving about their tasks in slow motion due to time dilation, the rocket must also be moving in slow motion. If the rocket is moving in slow motion it cannot be travelling at the speed causing the time dilation.
There is no way to avoid this contradiction"
Yeah, that's just wrong. The motion of the rocket is stipulated, it is the physical events "within" the rocket that appear to be slowed. If the "rocket" was just a pocket watch, the entire watch would be moving at the stipulated speed, it is just the motion of the hands and gears of the watch that change.
Lol - if I say potato...aye!

To stipulate that objects experiencing speed are time dilated relative to the stationary frame, and to then say that only the occupants are experiencing the time dilation and that the rocket that is moving with the occupants does not experience the time dilation is both illogical and entirety contradictory.
That's not what I said in the slightest.

If you state that, in frame A, the rocket has speed x, then that's the speed in frame A. Time dilation applies when we speak of events in some other frame and then convert back to frame A. Note that in the frame that is co-moving with the rocket, the rocket is moving at speed 0.
So basically you are saying that the occupants of the rocket are not moving in slow motion, they just look as though they are from the observation reference frame...

So how do you tell what speed the rocket is moving at?

How do you know that its not moving in slow motion?

If the occupants are not really moving in slow motion, how can one say the length of the rocket is really contracted?

The question you need to ask yourself is, "How would I find out what the accepted answer is to this conundrum?" When you find the answer come back and tell us.
I'm not asking him these questions because I do not know the answers.

Frame A cannot know what speed frame B is travelling at, and frame B wouldn't know if they were moving in slow motion.  As far as frame B is concerned nothing has changed, but if the time they are experiencing is slow, then their speed per second is a speed per slower second and frame B's rocket and occupants are moving in slow motion.

The word stipulated is the key.  Stipulated by whom?  Not by frame A, not by frame B, but by an observer who ***hasn't got a reference frame***, and deals with Newtonian time, that's who.

Referring to Newtonian time when calculating time dilation is an illogicality and constitutes another contradiction...

So... The solution:

David - I was referring to physbang as being the defender of the realm, not you.  You are a challenger of the realm IMO...

...And thanks - you have caused me to realise the maths for observational time frame dependency are simplicity itself.   To calculate a length contraction of 50%, the dilated second of that reference frame  will have twenty 100 000 microsecond value time frames in relation to the standards second ten time frames of same value.  Divide 10 time frames by 20 and this will divide each time frame into 2 equal parts, giving us a figure of 0.5, or half.  The standard second will only view half of the time frames of the second that is dilated by the speed of 0.866c.
The maths, I think (scratches head) are just a case of dividing the shorter second by the longer second.

10/15=2.5. Length contraction = quarter...and so on.

So to coin a "naked scientists" phrase:
"What do you think?"
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: puppypower on 28/08/2016 11:46:08
There are preferred distances. For example, the diameter of a proton or the bond length of the hydrogen molecule is the same in all references. The laws of physics are the same in all references, therefore these need to be same in all references. The universal red shift is inferred by changes in the wavelength of energy, stemming from atomic emissions; same atomic sizes. Energy changes between references but matter does not. What we see; energy, may not reflect that which is; matter.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 28/08/2016 14:20:09
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If you state that, in frame A, the rocket has speed x, then that's the speed in frame A. Time dilation applies when we speak of events in some other frame and then convert back to frame A. Note that in the frame that is co-moving with the rocket, the rocket is moving at speed 0.
So basically you are saying that the occupants of the rocket are not moving in slow motion, they just look as though they are from the observation reference frame...
No, again, you are simply not reading what I write and substituting your own imagination.

If a rocket ship is moving at extremely high speed, x units/units, in frame A, then:
1) it is moving through space at x units/units
2) the physical systems of the rocketship are time dilated relative to what they would be at rest

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So how do you tell what speed the rocket is moving at?
In this case, the speed was given. In general, the speed is determined by what two clocks in a given frame would read when the ship passes by.

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How do you know that its not moving in slow motion?
I don't know that. Rather, I know the reverse because of the principles of SR. Again, we can look at what clocks read at given events.

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If the occupants are not really moving in slow motion, how can one say the length of the rocket is really contracted?
By looking at the distance between events when the ship passes by at certain times as given by clocks.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 28/08/2016 14:35:34
Timey you have the uncanny ability to deflect learning opportunities. Maybe that is inverted learning.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 28/08/2016 15:49:22
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If you state that, in frame A, the rocket has speed x, then that's the speed in frame A. Time dilation applies when we speak of events in some other frame and then convert back to frame A. Note that in the frame that is co-moving with the rocket, the rocket is moving at speed 0.
So basically you are saying that the occupants of the rocket are not moving in slow motion, they just look as though they are from the observation reference frame...
No, again, you are simply not reading what I write and substituting your own imagination.

If a rocket ship is moving at extremely high speed, x units/units, in frame A, then:
1) it is moving through space at x units/units
2) the physical systems of the rocketship are time dilated relative to what they would be at rest

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So how do you tell what speed the rocket is moving at?
In this case, the speed was given. In general, the speed is determined by what two clocks in a given frame would read when the ship passes by.

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How do you know that its not moving in slow motion?
I don't know that. Rather, I know the reverse because of the principles of SR. Again, we can look at what clocks read at given events.

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If the occupants are not really moving in slow motion, how can one say the length of the rocket is really contracted?
By looking at the distance between events when the ship passes by at certain times as given by clocks.

Are you making a distinction between the frame the rocket is in and the rocket itself? *

If so then it is the rocket that is the factor that is experiencing the speed, not the frame it is in!!!

Clearly the physical mechanisms of the rocket operating slower will physically result in a slower speed, but this aside for the mo.

I can comprehend what may physically cause the fact of a rocket experiencing an 'actual' length contraction in atmosphere, but not in the vacuum of space.

Are you considering this length contraction to be actual, or just perceived from the observing frame?

If actual then:
What causes the length contracted rocket in the vacuum of space to be physically length contracted?

And if you are using distance as a measure, are these distances constant?

And what about these other clocks you are using?  Where are they?  And how do you know what time dilation they are experiencing?

Clearly under the remit of SR and GR one cannot pin anything to any location with any certainty.  Hence there being no preferred frame.

If that is good enough for you physbang, then fair enough, but its not good enough for me, nor rather a lot of physicists who are currently working to unite quantum and gravity.

The general consensus, despite the costly attempts of String Theory, is that GR and SR are the best we have so far.  I don't think anyone here disagrees with this, certainly not me... but I do think that a better description of our universe can be achieved, but only by challenging the status quo.

This is 'New Theories' board of the forum.  Can we not juggle things around a little to see how they would work as such?

* (The frame the rocket is moving through is an interesting point as, in my model, it will be experiencing Vikki Ramsay gravitational time dilation.  Where I have described vertical lines drawn across a page of different lengths that cause the shape of the straight sides of a house with shallow sloped roof and inverted shallow sloped roof at bottom, now place 2 masses of earths mass at each side and you have a visual description of how Vikki Ramsay time dilation dilates in the weaker gravity field.)
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 28/08/2016 16:09:45
Timey you have the uncanny ability to deflect learning opportunities. Maybe that is inverted learning.

I really do think that as a moderator you should give explanation of such comments...

What have I not learned this time? ...or have you misinterpreted again?

And would this be inverted comprehension?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 28/08/2016 17:03:55
Are you making a distinction between the frame the rocket is in and the rocket itself? *
Of course. The rocket is in every frame! Objects are not frames, frames are systems of coordinates required to make descriptions in physics.

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If so then it is the rocket that is the factor that is experiencing the speed, not the frame it is in!!!
Speed is a property assigned to objects. When we speak of frames, we also speak of speed, but, properly, we refer to the way that the origin (and other points) of one frame has a certain relationship to the origin of another frame.

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Clearly the physical mechanisms of the rocket operating slower will physically result in a slower speed, but this aside for the mo.
No. The speed is something that is set in a given frame. We then point out that this speed, once set, has an influence on the physical systems (or subsystems) that are at that given speed.

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I can comprehend what may physically cause the fact of a rocket experiencing an 'actual' length contraction in atmosphere, but not in the vacuum of space.
OK. But length contraction has to do with how events are arranged and how electromagnetic forces propagate, not with resistance forces or friction relative to motion.

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Are you considering this length contraction to be actual, or just perceived from the observing frame?
It is an actual effect.

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If actual then:
What causes the length contracted rocket in the vacuum of space to be physically length contracted?
There are a number of things that contribute. The most important is the time when we expect parts of the rocket to be in certain locations space. But you can think of how the electromagnetic forces that otherwise separate the parts of the rocket behave at that speed.

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And if you are using distance as a measure, are these distances constant?
By the definition of a frame, the distances between constant points of space are constant.

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And what about these other clocks you are using?  Where are they?  And how do you know what time dilation they are experiencing?
They are ideal clocks. See http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 28/08/2016 17:52:30
Are you making a distinction between the frame the rocket is in and the rocket itself? *
Of course. The rocket is in every frame! Objects are not frames, frames are systems of coordinates required to make descriptions in physics.

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If so then it is the rocket that is the factor that is experiencing the speed, not the frame it is in!!!
Speed is a property assigned to objects. When we speak of frames, we also speak of speed, but, properly, we refer to the way that the origin (and other points) of one frame has a certain relationship to the origin of another frame.

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Clearly the physical mechanisms of the rocket operating slower will physically result in a slower speed, but this aside for the mo.
No. The speed is something that is set in a given frame. We then point out that this speed, once set, has an influence on the physical systems (or subsystems) that are at that given speed.

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I can comprehend what may physically cause the fact of a rocket experiencing an 'actual' length contraction in atmosphere, but not in the vacuum of space.
OK. But length contraction has to do with how events are arranged and how electromagnetic forces propagate, not with resistance forces or friction relative to motion.

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Are you considering this length contraction to be actual, or just perceived from the observing frame?
It is an actual effect.

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If actual then:
What causes the length contracted rocket in the vacuum of space to be physically length contracted?
There are a number of things that contribute. The most important is the time when we expect parts of the rocket to be in certain locations space. But you can think of how the electromagnetic forces that otherwise separate the parts of the rocket behave at that speed.

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And if you are using distance as a measure, are these distances constant?
By the definition of a frame, the distances between constant points of space are constant.

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And what about these other clocks you are using?  Where are they?  And how do you know what time dilation they are experiencing?
They are ideal clocks. See http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/
OK - I am in fact familiar with all that you mention.  I've read extensively on GR and SR, including the for's and against's...

Now we can look at an alternative means to the same observations.  The reason for doing so is because this alternate reason of a phenomenon of observational time frame dependency not only gives physical reason for length contraction observations, but when translated to the remit of gravitational time dilation, (both GR and my proposed additional Vikki Ramsay gravitational time dilation), it becomes interesting when related back to the uncertainty principle and Bekenstien Hawking temperature entropy conundrum regarding black holes...

This being because it makes explanation of all 3 phenomenon - and having these phenomenon explained under this remit leads to a fully described cyclic universe that finds its beginnings and ends of cycles within the black hole phenomenon without relying on any unobserved phenomenon to balance the books.

If this doesn't stir your curiosity in the slightest, then I just don't know what's the matter you!

You mention that distances are held constant, but this is not reflected in the concept that galaxies receding away from us at faster than the speed of light are doing so because space is expanding...  Nor does it reflect the fact that the experience of the rocket is that it is not itself that is contracting but the frame its travelling through that is doing so.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 28/08/2016 18:25:09
OK - I am in fact familiar with all that you mention.  I've read extensively on GR and SR, including the for's and against's...
And yet you seem to, again and again, deny the basics.

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If this doesn't stir your curiosity in the slightest, then I just don't know what's the matter you!
If you could marshal any measurement evidence, I might be interested. Otherwise, no.

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You mention that distances are held constant, but this is not reflected in the concept that galaxies receding away from us at faster than the speed of light are doing so because space is expanding...
But we're talking about SR, not GR! The "expansion of space" is a phenomenon on GR.

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  Nor does it reflect the fact that the experience of the rocket is that it is not itself that is contracting but the frame its travelling through that is doing so.
Actually, we can only understand this difference if we have some constant measurement of distance within each frame. That's what a system of coordinates is.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 28/08/2016 18:55:12
Timey you have the uncanny ability to deflect learning opportunities. Maybe that is inverted learning.

I really do think that as a moderator you should give explanation of such comments...

What have I not learned this time? ...or have you misinterpreted again?

And would this be inverted comprehension?

In pseudo mathematical terms.

L(subject) = learn subject
L^-1(subject) = forget subject

C(subject) = comprehend subject
C^-1(subject) = ? This function does not appear to have an inverse.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 28/08/2016 19:31:19
OK - I am in fact familiar with all that you mention.  I've read extensively on GR and SR, including the for's and against's...
And yet you seem to, again and again, deny the basics.

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If this doesn't stir your curiosity in the slightest, then I just don't know what's the matter you!
If you could marshal any measurement evidence, I might be interested. Otherwise, no.

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You mention that distances are held constant, but this is not reflected in the concept that galaxies receding away from us at faster than the speed of light are doing so because space is expanding...
But we're talking about SR, not GR! The "expansion of space" is a phenomenon on GR.

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  Nor does it reflect the fact that the experience of the rocket is that it is not itself that is contracting but the frame its travelling through that is doing so.
Actually, we can only understand this difference if we have some constant measurement of distance within each frame. That's what a system of coordinates is.

I'm not denying the basics in the slightest, I'm making an alteration to them.

I'm asking questions that require you think about process, because I want to talk to you about these process in context, not because I'm ignorant of the premise.

There is no point in having a new theory board at this forum if any new idea is met by the answer. That isn't GR, that isn't SR...of course it bloody isn't, its a new idea...

Aren't the Lorentz transformations a feature of the GR field equations?

And isn't a system of coordinates geometry related?

And doesn't it transpire that coordinates aren't helping in determining both the position and velocity of an electron without resorting to probability,  ie: perturbation theory?

So by what 'value' of a second are you measuring the distances in order to understand the difference between a contracted frame and a contracted rocket?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 28/08/2016 20:17:21
David - you made comment about my apearing to be using the value of maths from other theories.

Fact is that any physics theory that supersedes a previously held theory must embrace all that works of the theory it supersedes.  Any theory that supersedes GR is going to have to maintain mathematical proportionality to GR.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 28/08/2016 22:43:43
...And thanks - you have caused me to realise the maths for observational time frame dependency are simplicity itself.   To calculate a length contraction of 50%, the dilated second of that reference frame  will have twenty 100 000 microsecond value time frames in relation to the standards second ten time frames of same value.  Divide 10 time frames by 20 and this will divide each time frame into 2 equal parts, giving us a figure of 0.5, or half.  The standard second will only view half of the time frames of the second that is dilated by the speed of 0.866c.
The maths, I think (scratches head) are just a case of dividing the shorter second by the longer second.

I hope you realise that I just chose line 20 at random to link to the 1/2 figure and so I could easily have said 19 or 13 instead. I don't know which fractions you're reading out of proportions on which lines. That's why it would be useful if you'd supply a list of line numbers and the fractions you're getting from them. If you're associating 0.866c with the line that's giving you the 1/2, what speed are you associating with the line that gives you 1/4?

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10/15=2.5. Length contraction = quarter...and so on.

I'm not sure your arithmetic is sufficiently precise there, but what I'm still trying to find out is how you're getting anything useful from your diagram other than fractions which you could get just as easily by plucking them out of the air. If I find the fraction 1/3 on a fridge magnet, for example, that's a length contraction and time dilation figure which seems to work just as well if I get it from there as if I take it off your diagram, so what information does the diagram provide you with that my fridge door doesn't?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 29/08/2016 00:22:02
You are literally ignoring the mathematical discipline of geometry.

You are simply arguing about this trivial issue as a diversion to avoid taking on the real issues. I say Newtonian time isn't a dimension, but you appear to want it to be a dimension and want to deny my right to say it isn't a dimension, and this appears to be because you want time to be the time dimesion of SR even when time is being discussed in relation to other theories which don't have a time dimension. We can argue about this till the cows die of old age, but it's just a side issue which really isn't worth the trouble. In my introduction, I simply want to provide people who are new to the subject with something to hang their coat on so that they can get their head around things quickly, and if you have a problem with me correctly stating that Newtonian time isn't a dimension, that's a problem for you to discuss with a psychologist.

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Why do you assume that your half-baked ideas are new? They are not new, they are simply wrong. Your "exam" is as intelligent as asking someone "Did you stop beating your wife?"

I don't know if they're new, but they're certainly important because there is no evidence that they're wrong. If you want to account for how the future is generated out of the past, you need to look at how events progress on different paths and how they are coordinated in such a way that you avoid event-meshing failures (unless you are prepared to tolerate such failures, as you can do with model 1).

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You have this insane idea that because the information in one well-formed frame is guaranteed to give us the information in every other well-formed frame, then the first frame we described things in is the preferred frame. It is not, it is merely the one we used to provide the initial description.

That's you just misunderstanding things, as always. We can't tell which frame is the preferred frame, but what we can do is determine that because the accounts generated from the analysis based on different frames are in conflict with each other, they cannot all be correct, and that means they can't all be valid: there has to be a preferred frame, and the fact that we can't pin down which frame that is does not negate the need for there to be a preferred frame (unless you use model 1 which manages without one at the cost of having to tolerate event-meshing failures).

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You realize that by saying this you are simply denying logical inference? The consistency of SR is not in doubt.

I'm simply refusing to tolerate contradictions in a model. Anyone who does tolerate them is making a mockery of mathematics.

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Again, I will side with every physicist that uses SR in saying that SR does not have a preferred reference frame and describes objects based on the frame of reference one uses. You can stand alone and be "right". Since SR is the basis of technology that makes contemporary computers possible, I feel OK being "wrong" in this way.

Computers work just fine on LET, as does everything else, but if we're pretending that SR is reality, the Eculidean views of things that we get from frames of reference are not the fundamental reality - the fundamental reality is found in the non-Euclidean space in which the lengths are constant.

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To be clear, you generate a contradiction only by claiming that one can compare lengths between two frames of reference in some manner independent of frames of reference, in violation of geometry. I will stick with geometry.

The contradictions are very clear if you use mode 2 of my interactive diagram. If you run it till the counter hits 360 and then change frame from A to B and back, you'll see events happening and unhappening as you change frame. That can't be allowed to happen when you're generating the future out of the past. If your mechanism for coordinating the progress of objects along two paths involves running events on one path with their clocks ticking half as often as on the other path, changing frame should result in the behaviour you get with mode 3 (where there's a preferred frame). With mode 2 though, when you change frame you're changing the way the objects moved along the paths, e.g. making the clocks tick twice as much on the first path rather than half as often, and that's not compatible with the original coordination that was being applied. One can be true or the other can be true, but not both at once. Anyone who thinks model 2 is viable is plain irrational, and there's no way of getting away from that.

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And in SR, this is never the case: descriptions depend on frame and one cannot make comparison claims outside of a frame.

Yes you can, and must: the accounts of the action generated from different frames are in conflict as they directly contradict each other. If you ban yourself from comparing them, you are shutting down your rational thinking capability and training yourself to be blind to contradictions.

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To quote someone who should know better, your behavior matches someone like:"they've been taught the basics badly, leading them to imagine that it's okay to mix incompatible versions of the model into one faulty mess which they think works".

No, I'm just trying to deprogram you, but it's hard to achieve this because once people have had their thinking shut down by a religious ideology, they become strongly fixed. You can't see contradictions any more in this context, and I don't know if that can be cured. If clock A is ticking faster than clock B in one frame and clock B is ticking faster than clock A in another frame, that's a direct contradiction which no one rational can fail to recognise. The way to deal with it if you don't want to accept a preferred frame is to shift over to model 1 and decide that neither clock is ticking faster than the other, and with SR they have no right to do so - time must run at full speed on all paths and can't slavishly run slow under the governance of the time of another frame.

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1. "the static block universe model... does not allow a universe to be generated in the first place as it allows no change whatsoever"

No, this model simply establishes a certain metaphysical relationship between events. It does not change the physical relationships: the physical limitations on cause and effect are just as strong in the block universe model, perhaps even stronger.

The static block universe is model zero - it doesn't have running time, so it just exists fully built (both past and future) eternally without ever having been generated in cause-and-event order, which means that there was no causation involved in the patterns of apparent causation written through the "events" in the block.

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SR is compatible with a block universe model, but does not require this model.

Models zero and one require a block universe, but models 2 and 3 don't, although they are compatible with it.

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2. Your "Mode 1" represents SR. Your SR doesn't use the Lorentz transformations, so it is not SR. This is a horrible, obvious lie. The entire scenario of the "diagram" tries to mix the locations from one system of coordinates in another system of coordinates without using the transformations.

Fail. My diagram displays exactly what yours would if you wrote a simulation of it for mode 1, so the horrible, obvious lie is all yours. The paths that the objects follow are exactly the same as on the Spacetime diagrams which are identical to the ones that you would produce if you apply your maths to it correctly, and all I've done with it is allow those objects to follow their paths without their clocks being slowed under the governance of the time of any other path.

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At this point, it is useless to continue further, as anyone who bothered to learn SR would see.

You're running away from it and you're trying to stop other people looking, but they do look and they see the truth of what I'm telling them. They see you lying and they stop and wonder what's going on. This is sad, because we should be allies in search of truth. I want to silence all the cranks and so do you, but there's a bit of crank in everyone and so it's important to look in the mirror every once in a while to check for delusions. What I want to do, if my argument is wrong, is find out where it is wrong and then rework it until it is right, and if that means it ends up supporting SR then that'll be great. However, it doesn't appear to be wrong, and a whole string of SR experts who know the subject considerably better than you have failed to put a dent in it. Model 2 is impossible due to the contradictions, so you've got little choice other than to accept that there's a preferred frame or to shift the other way to a model that doesn't run any clocks slower than others, but when you do that you either get stuck in something static that doesn't allow a universe to be generated at all or you have to deal with event-meshing failures which can only be resolved by bringing in Newtonian time to allow events to change (over Newtonian time) at individual Spacetime locations. If anyone can find a way out of this, I'd be delighted because it would mean that SR is viable even with its dogma about there being no Newtonian time and no preferred frame, but nobody has ever found a way round the problems I've set out. My objections are obvious ones that anyone who's tried to simulate SR in a computer should automatically make, and that means there should be a guide available somewhere as to how to do it without cheating which every SR expert should know about and should be able to link to at the drop of a hat whenever a "crank" questions its ability to work without a preferred frame. I have not found any expert who can provide such a link - all I get from these experts are links to garbage where the programmer has either cheated or has simply not bothered to consider the coordination of events at all (like the Twitter cosmologist).

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You are right, I don't realize this. I suspect that you are lying. If you did speak with people, they were likely cranks that you should know better than to call "experts".

You're probably right about them being cranks, because most of them were pushing the same line as you, although their understanding of the basics of SR was a lot more solid and they didn't spend half their time arguing about the validity of correct diagrams.

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Model 1 is also lorentz invarient,
No, you are simply lying: you combine two frames into one without applying the transformations. I cannot believe you are so incompetent.

How do you imagine my program produces the diagram and changes the way it looks as you change frame? It's doing maths behind the scenes which will produce the same numbers as you would if you wrote a version of the program using your maths. The only difference between my maths and yours is that you use Lorentz's maths where he used Pythagoras while I use my own which relies on trig, but the fundamental thing that we're doing is the same and that's why the numbers produced at the end are identical. Look at the shapes the objects would plot out if they left a line behind them - you'll see that they produce the same Spacetime diagram as the other modes, and the same as the static Spacetime diagrams for Frame A and B further up the page. Draw your own diagram and see if you can get it to look different. Again, the incompetence is yours because you can't see that my diagrams are right, but any expert in SR should be able to see straight away that they are correct.

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You asked for links to animations of SR!

I asked for a link so something that does the job without cheating. You provided a pile of links to cheats, although most of the things there don't even attempt the job at all.

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Thanks, crank, for acting in so dishonest a way as to take away my feelings of pity once I saw your horrible website.  You have had no substantial interaction with "experts" since if you had, at least one would tell you to stop letting your education reform website look like it was designed by a ten-year old.

Why would you pity me on the basis of a website that works fine? It's certainly far from complete, but the parts of it that are there do the job beautifully and enable Unschooled five-year-olds to get through the whole of primary maths in a year if they spend just a few minutes a day working at that. (Sadly, most of them aren't encouraged to do this because the Unschooling movement has a philosophy of not bothering to try to teach anything, leaving many children unable to read until their age is into double figures simply becuase they've never been encouraged to try.) There are plenty of websites out there that look awful to me, and others that look good, but you have to spend time using them before you find out the truth, and often the ones that looked best turn out to be the least helpful because the writer put everything into how it looks and neglected to provide good content. But that's the internet game - attract eyes by providing something pretty and then let people down, or provide quality and go relatively unnoticed. If you try to do both, you're then up against changing fashions and you keep having to redesign the look of everything to appeal to idiots. Well, I don't care about attracting idiots - I'm after the geniuses who don't need to be spoon-fed every step of the way and who are able to think far beyond what they're told to think, although most children could become geniuses if they weren't systematically shut down by the wrong kind of education, the kind that shackles and disables minds.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 29/08/2016 00:59:47
You are literally ignoring the mathematical discipline of geometry.

You are simply arguing about this trivial issue as a diversion to avoid taking on the real issues. I say Newtonian time isn't a dimension, but you appear to want it to be a dimension and want to deny my right to say it isn't a dimension, and this appears to be because you want time to be the time dimesion of SR even when time is being discussed in relation to other theories which don't have a time dimension. We can argue about this till the cows die of old age, but it's just a side issue which really isn't worth the trouble. In my introduction, I simply want to provide people who are new to the subject with something to hang their coat on so that they can get their head around things quickly, and if you have a problem with me correctly stating that Newtonian time isn't a dimension, that's a problem for you to discuss with a psychologist.
Yeah, I'll discuss with a psychologist how messed up I am by having had a full education on mathematics and physics rather than having self-taught myself part of it and imagining that there is nothing beyond my limited reading.

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I don't know if they're new, but they're certainly important because there is no evidence that they're wrong. If you want to account for how the future is generated out of the past, you need to look at how events progress on different paths and how they are coordinated in such a way that you avoid event-meshing failures (unless you are prepared to tolerate such failures, as you can do with model 1).
Of course there is proof that you are wrong: in any given reference frame, the events of the past determine the events of the future without difficulty. This is something established a century ago.

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That's you just misunderstanding things, as always. We can't tell which frame is the preferred frame, but what we can do is determine that because the accounts generated from the analysis based on different frames are in conflict with each other, they cannot all be correct, and that means they can't all be valid: there has to be a preferred frame, and the fact that we can't pin down which frame that is does not negate the need for there to be a preferred frame (unless you use model 1 which manages without one at the cost of having to tolerate event-meshing failures).
That the frames disagree about event order is not a conflict: we have a guaranteed way to generate the information for any frame from the information from any other frame, the Lorentz transformations. Any frame provides the objective information to determine physical events. You don't seem to acknowledge this.

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Computers work just fine on LET, as does everything else, but if we're pretending that SR is reality, the Eculidean views of things that we get from frames of reference are not the fundamental reality - the fundamental reality is found in the non-Euclidean space in which the lengths are constant.
Please provide a source to support this claim.

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The contradictions are very clear if you use mode 2 of my interactive diagram.
Sure, if one uses David Cooper relativity, then there are contradictions. But do not lie to us and claim that David Cooper relativity is SR. Your animations put the events of two different frames in one frame without transformation. It is part of a deception to make false claims about SR. Perhaps you don't even realize this, since you seem to have a number of cognitive difficulties. However, your character is so poor here that it doesn't seem out of line to identify your statements as lies.

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And in SR, this is never the case: descriptions depend on frame and one cannot make comparison claims outside of a frame.

Yes you can, and must: the accounts of the action generated from different frames are in conflict as they directly contradict each other. If you ban yourself from comparing them, you are shutting down your rational thinking capability and training yourself to be blind to contradictions.
So, if we take your crazy scheme, we get contradictions. This is a great day for David Cooper relativity.

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If clock A is ticking faster than clock B in one frame and clock B is ticking faster than clock A in another frame, that's a direct contradiction
In David Cooper relativity, not in SR, where one cannot compare events in different frames without using a transformation to consider the events in the same frame. Just like in Galilean relativity, where one cannot compare different frames without translation. It would be absurd to say that the mast on a ship is never in motion because it is never moving relative to the ship, even in a frame where the ship is in motion.

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The static block universe is model zero - it doesn't have running time, so it just exists fully built (both past and future) eternally without ever having been generated in cause-and-event order, which means that there was no causation involved in the patterns of apparent causation written through the "events" in the block.
And yet every cause-and-effect chain exists in the model. It is a lie to say that these chains do not exist.

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Fail. My diagram displays exactly what yours would if you wrote a simulation of it for mode 1, so the horrible, obvious lie is all yours. The paths that the objects follow are exactly the same as on the Spacetime diagrams which are identical to the ones that you would produce if you apply your maths to it correctly, and all I've done with it is allow those objects to follow their paths without their clocks being slowed under the governance of the time of any other path.
Not true. Sadly obviously not true. Try again.

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This is sad, because we should be allies in search of truth.
No, I do not need self-taught selfish jerks to be on the search for truth. You want to make yourself look better than other people, that's why you "search for truth". Your entire website is a horror: you have absolutely no experience with education, yet you want to revise all of it. You don't want to learn any of the mathematics of physics or of SR, yet you think that without this knowledge you can raise yourself above a century of work of academics and practicing scientists. So, no, please stay away from my search for truth: I don't need your attitude and nor does anyone else.
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You asked for links to animations of SR!

I asked for a link so something that does the job without cheating. You provided a pile of links to cheats, although most of the things there don't even attempt the job at all.
You are a liar.

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Why would you pity me on the basis of a website that works fine?
Because it looks horrible. It is essentially unreadable. It is definitely reflective of the fact that you are self-taught and not really interested in getting to know other people: you simply want to vomit information at them and you expect them to "get it". It gets your intellect across fine.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 29/08/2016 01:52:08
...And thanks - you have caused me to realise the maths for observational time frame dependency are simplicity itself.   To calculate a length contraction of 50%, the dilated second of that reference frame  will have twenty 100 000 microsecond value time frames in relation to the standards second ten time frames of same value.  Divide 10 time frames by 20 and this will divide each time frame into 2 equal parts, giving us a figure of 0.5, or half.  The standard second will only view half of the time frames of the second that is dilated by the speed of 0.866c.
The maths, I think (scratches head) are just a case of dividing the shorter second by the longer second.

I hope you realise that I just chose line 20 at random to link to the 1/2 figure and so I could easily have said 19 or 13 instead. I don't know which fractions you're reading out of proportions on which lines. That's why it would be useful if you'd supply a list of line numbers and the fractions you're getting from them. If you're associating 0.866c with the line that's giving you the 1/2, what speed are you associating with the line that gives you 1/4?

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10/15=2.5. Length contraction = quarter...and so on.

I'm not sure your arithmetic is sufficiently precise there, but what I'm still trying to find out is how you're getting anything useful from your diagram other than fractions which you could get just as easily by plucking them out of the air. If I find the fraction 1/3 on a fridge magnet, for example, that's a length contraction and time dilation figure which seems to work just as well if I get it from there as if I take it off your diagram, so what information does the diagram provide you with that my fridge door doesn't?

I too just used the 0.866c figure for ease of calculation as you do.

It doesn't matter which line you choose, what matters is by how much longer or shorter a second is.  The lines are representing seconds that are getting longer and then shorter again.  The spaces created on the line's are representing time frames of that second.  The lines are not all equal in length.  The spaces are equal in length for all the lines.

I have stated line 1 and line 49 as being representative of a standard second.  Line 1 and line 49 both have only 10 spaces.  Each space has the value of 100 000 microseconds.
You may make your sloping roof and inverse sloping roof top and bottom of shape as acute or obtuse as you wish and calculate, but as will become clear the ratio of angle is an important factor, and to calculate each and every length of dilated or contracted second relative to the standard second, we will need this angle to be as obtuse as is possible.
You can, having marked your standard second at the original sides of this shape, extend the lines away from the sides of the shape to points to resemble shorter seconds than a standard second, where the shortest second resembles only one microsecond and has a time frame comprised 0.000001, which can be divided further into nanoseconds.

If you divide 0.000001 microsecond value of this second, by the 1000000 microseconds of a standard second, the this will afford very little observation of the reference frames from each other.

If you look at a couple of lines in towards the centre where let's say the line is a second that has the value of 0.0000011 microseconds - dividing 0.000001 by 0.0000011, it becomes clear that this is not going to alter the observation one makes of the other with this miniscule amount of fractions of fractions of time frames missing noticeably.

So you see that this method could be very precise if the proportionality were to be apportioned correctly.

What was interesting to me about what you said was the confirmation that a 50% reduction in length contraction is equal to a 50% dilation of the related time dilation as per current physics.

(Now this may be where you are saying I am being imprecise, I appreciate, and maybe I am.) This told me that 'according to my system' a second dilated by 50% of a standard second is equal to 20 times 100 000 microseconds, this being double the length of a standard second.
(Perhaps I need to calculate this as 15 times 100 000 instead of 20 and realign my shape as bottom of all vertical lines being aligned on a straight horizontal and a more acute point, to now resemble a flat based triangle.)
I'm trying to give the system mathematical proportionality and the angle of slope between the top of line of a standard second and a second dilated by 50% to be established and extended in both directions to indicate dilations that are lesser than a standard second and greater than a 50℅ (relative to a standard second) dilation.

However, before I give in to logic and realign the shape, let's look at the possibilities involved in doubling the length of a standard second for a 50% dilation of a standard second...
If the length of a standard second is increased by 100%, this second is going to be twice as long.  But isn't a second that is twice as long as the standard second 50% of itself longer than the standard second? (this is where maths and I start unravelling)...
In any case, if the rocket was caused to be moving in slow motion due to its speeds affiliated time dilation, then we could say that the affiliated speed of a 50% length contraction appears to the references frame as 0.866c, but could be of a greater speed, remembering that a the speed of light associated with a 100% dilation of a standard second results in a zero observation of the rocket.
If a 50% reduction in length is now associated with a 100% increase in a standard second, then a100% reduction in length associated with the speed of light, is a standard second times 4.

What I'd like this type of ratio to represent is a second dilating via the inverse square law with addition of speed.  Does it?

(Edit: I realise that I need to be clearer: the relationship I'm look for increases the length of a second by the square law as speed, (or energy) is increased, for an observation that decreases by the inverse square law)

If not then changing the shape the vertical lines are aligned to a flat based triangle will give me a direct proportionality of 15 spaces for a 50% dilation of time divided by 10 spaces of the standard second for a 50% reduction in length. ie 50% reduction in observable frames from the reference frame of a standard second.

Again, I'm looking for the ratio of a seconds dilation in relation to speed to follow the (I've edited in the correction) square law as speed is added... for an observation that decreases by the inverse square law.

P.S.  I am unable to view any of your diagrams, simulations, etc, on this crappy phone I'm using at mo, but I can tell physbang that I have read most of the stuff you are saying in books written by physicists who hold degrees in physics and maths, and also positions in well respected universities and institutions. 
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 29/08/2016 11:57:52
I just want to state for the record that David Cooper's linking of the trig functions to the gamma functions answers a lot of questions. Never mind frames of reference. This is a biggie. It shows that the gravitational field acts like a medium through which light passes and exactly how the wave is affected. I have been thinking about this since he first posted it. I am working on the mathematics and will post them here.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 29/08/2016 21:40:27
Yeah, I'll discuss with a psychologist how messed up I am by having had a full education on mathematics and physics rather than having self-taught myself part of it and imagining that there is nothing beyond my limited reading.

I should really put out a warning about psychologists here: be aware that many of them are parasites who mess with their customer's minds in order to go on and on making more money out of them, so don't get sucked in too deep.

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Of course there is proof that you are wrong: in any given reference frame, the events of the past determine the events of the future without difficulty. This is something established a century ago.

You're missing the point again as you have no ability to analyse properly. This is all about the coordination of how events play out on different paths. If you're running time slower on one path than another in order to make events mesh, you can't also be running time more quickly on the former path than on the other. You can either do one or the other, but not both.

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That the frames disagree about event order is not a conflict: we have a guaranteed way to generate the information for any frame from the information from any other frame, the Lorentz transformations. Any frame provides the objective information to determine physical events. You don't seem to acknowledge this.

Yes, you have a guaranteed way to generate useful information, but it's a preferred-frame method of generating that information. The point you're still missing is that the universe actually has to run on rules itself, and if it's going to run on a preferred-frame method, it needs to have a preferred frame.

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Computers work just fine on LET, as does everything else, but if we're pretending that SR is reality, the Eculidean views of things that we get from frames of reference are not the fundamental reality - the fundamental reality is found in the non-Euclidean space in which the lengths are constant.
Please provide a source to support this claim.

If you don't believe there's a non-Euclidean reality there which trumps the naive Euclidean views we get of it, how can you believe in SR at all? You're arguing against SR.

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Sure, if one uses David Cooper relativity, then there are contradictions.

And since model 2 is SR, you're acknowledging that SR generates contradictions.

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But do not lie to us and claim that David Cooper relativity is SR.

Well, what on Earth do you imagine SR is if it's different from the models I've provided? All I've done is take SR and show it off using its own rules, forcing it to conform to them instead of cheating by ignoring the issue.

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Your animations...

They're computer simulations.

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...put the events of two different frames in one frame without transformation.

Spectacular fail again! When you change frame with those buttons that offer frame changes, they apply the transformations using maths, and that maths generates the same results as anyone else who simulates the same frame changes.

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It is part of a deception to make false claims about SR.

You're the one making false claims, and it's a shocking hatchet job that you're attempting to carry out. I ask the moderators to allow this to continue though as it is very revealing.

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Perhaps you don't even realize this, since you seem to have a number of cognitive difficulties.

It is always hard for the inferior mind to recognise the superiority of the superior mind, and that's why the world's in such a mess.

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However, your character is so poor here that it doesn't seem out of line to identify your statements as lies.

Anyone who wants to identify the liar here can do the maths and see if my diagrams are correct or not. PhysBang will never provide any of his own for the scenario my interactive diagram covers because if he ever does work through the maths, he'll find that they are fully correct in every detail.

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So, if we take your crazy scheme, we get contradictions. This is a great day for David Cooper relativity.

My "crazy scheme" here is called SR.

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In David Cooper relativity, not in SR, where one cannot compare events in different frames without using a transformation to consider the events in the same frame.

And a fully correct transformation has been used, so your attack is off target. Take your teeth out of your foot.

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Just like in Galilean relativity, where one cannot compare different frames without translation. It would be absurd to say that the mast on a ship is never in motion because it is never moving relative to the ship, even in a frame where the ship is in motion.

An inadequate analogy is an inadequate analogy which sheds no light on the issue.

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And yet every cause-and-effect chain exists in the model. It is a lie to say that these chains do not exist.

In the static block model, the chains are of apparent causation rather than real causation - the block exists eternally by magic having never been generated. As soon as you try to account for the generation of the block in cause-and-effect order, you have to add more laws of physics to the model in order to allow that, at which point it becomes one of the other models.

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Not true. Sadly obviously not true. Try again.

You can say it's not true all you like, and now you've trapped yourself in a position where that's all you can do unless you're prepared to own up to being wrong (and thereby demonstrate that you're not a crank). My diagrams are correct and you cannot create a model of your own to show a better way of doing the job which will make SR work - the models I've provided are as good as it gets.

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No, I do not need self-taught selfish jerks to be on the search for truth. You want to make yourself look better than other people, that's why you "search for truth".

Again I ask moderators to allow PhysBang to go on displaying himself in full. Some day we will all find out who he is, because AGI will be able to trace everyone who hides behind a fake name and it will not hold back from exposing anyone who has been abusive of others.

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Your entire website is a horror: you have absolutely no experience with education, yet you want to revise all of it.

It has the backing of someone who used to work at a very high level in education, in charge of most of the schools in a large region of scotland. He actually insists on paying for the webhosting costs.

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You don't want to learn any of the mathematics of physics or of SR, yet you think that without this knowledge you can raise yourself above a century of work of academics and practicing scientists.

I keep on learning more and more, but this is just a hobby for me, so I don't have as wide a range of physics knowledge as you do, but I certainly know how to apply what I know a lot better than you do, and I seek out knowledge that's directly related to the issue I'm looking into, finding people who know their stuff in order to make sure I've covered the necessary ground. What I'm doing is looking to see if the experts have done the job properly, and pointing at places where it doesn't look as if they have. In some areas I've found incompetence, but in other's I've found things that look like incompetence that turn out not to be. You've seen for yourself that I am able to recognise where I'm wrong and change position on things. With this other issue though (which I had no intention of discussing here), we're dealing with something that's been put to the test continually for many years and which hasn't cracked at all. I'm looking for someone (anyone) who can prise open a crack in it and destroy it, but the argument has proved to be too robust for anyone who's come up against it. Most importantly though, I'm simply asking the awkward questions which everyone should be asking and which the experts are running away from answering.

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So, no, please stay away from my search for truth: I don't need your attitude and nor does anyone else.

You just don't want to be exposed as someone who believes in magic, and like all religious people you have an attitude problem when your irrational beliefs are challenged.

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You are a liar.

No - your interpretation skills are terrible. What I said was,

"Where can I find an animation/simulation that does the job in a way you approve of then? How do they perform the magic trick of avoiding generating contradictions? The reality is that they don't exist, and that's why there are so many people out there who regard SR as fantasy physics."

The key part of the first sentence is "that does the job", and the second sentence spells out exactly what that means. None of those links led to anything that did the job without cheating. There is no program anywhere out there that does the job without cheating because the job is impossible. It is equally impossible for the real universe to do the job without using a preferred frame or having a means of tolerating event-meshing failures.

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Because it looks horrible. It is essentially unreadable. It is definitely reflective of the fact that you are self-taught and not really interested in getting to know other people: you simply want to vomit information at them and you expect them to "get it". It gets your intellect across fine.

Some people like to learn inefficiently by having their time wasted with a hundred tons of sugar for every gram of pill. Other people find it easier just to take a moment to swallow the pill and then get on with other things. As people grow up, they learn to avoid the sugar and go straight for the pill, but it's better to learn that at the start instead of wasting the most important part of your life on empty and fake education which teaches next to nothing for years before suddenly vomiting information over them at a late stage in a highly indigestable and defective form far inferior to anything I'm providing. My aim was simply to prove the principle and hope that other people would get involved to improve the site, adding content and building alternative paths for all of it too so that it would suit different people's learning preferences, but most people are stick-in-the-muds who simply trust the experts who run schools and allow their children to be abused there for over a decade. But you attack me for trying to do something really positive to change the world for the better, and that sums you up nicely.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 29/08/2016 23:10:44
Test post due to the forum software objecting to a blacklisted term without telling me what it is. Perhaps it's a number, so what I'll do is edit this post repeatedly and keep adding paragraphs until I find out what this blacklisted term is.

It doesn't matter which line you choose, what matters is by how much longer or shorter a second is.  The lines are representing seconds that are getting longer and then shorter again.  The spaces created on the line's are representing time frames of that second.  The lines are not all equal in length.  The spaces are equal in length for all the lines.

At the moment I can't be sure I've got my diagram right because you're not giving me the numbers I need to see if mine matches up. I want to know what proportions you're reading off each line. Without that, it's like trying to wrestle an octopus in the dark - I just can't get a proper picture of it and I can't tell what you're getting from your diagram or how it tells you anything useful.

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So you see that this method could be very precise if the proportionality were to be apportioned correctly.

I can't see it at all at the moment, and I can't see how you're getting anything useful out of the proportions on just 25 lines where one of them can be tied to the speed 0.866c without shedding any light on the speeds that might be tied to any of the others. You need to provide a list of 25 sets of numbers, each set containing the proportion (which I assume comes from two measurements made there, so you could give both of those numbers instead), and any other number that you can generate from that that you think is useful for anything. Without this information, it continues to be a wrestle with an invisible octopode.

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(Now this may be where you are saying I am being imprecise, I appreciate, and maybe I am.)

It was actually your 10/15=2.5 that I had in mind. The old cobblers' division method of adding the 10 and the 15 together before moving the decimal point one place to the left shouldn't be trusted as it doesn't always work.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 29/08/2016 23:19:19
Right, it seems to be a list of deeply offensive numbers like as 0.99875 that caused the problem, so I can't post them, although that particular one can't have been quite so unacceptable. (By the way, none of them have a six followed by, dare I say it, a nine.) I'll see if I can send them in a PM instead as no one else will need them. Here's the rest of my post then, beyond all those disgusting numbers:-

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If a 50% reduction in length is now associated with a 100% increase in a standard second, then a100% reduction in length associated with the speed of light, is a standard second times 4.

If one second is linked to 100% length and 100% of the length of a standard second, then your 50% length is associated with 200% of the length of a standard second (which is you 100% increase), so a 75% reduction in length is associated with 400% of the length of a standard second, and an 87.5% reduction in length is associated with 800% of the length of a standard second, etc. By the time you've reached a 100% reduction in length, your second is not 4 times longer than a standard second, but is infinitely long.

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What I'd like this type of ratio to represent is a second dilating via the inverse square law with addition of speed.  Does it?

No. Inverse square law will get you nowhere with this. In any case, all we're actually doing here is calculating reciprocals. My previous paragraph can be turned into: 1 is associated with 1 (because 1 = 1/1), 0.5 is associated with 2 (because 0.5 = 1/2, 0.25 is associated with 4 (because 0.25 = 1/4), 0.125 is associated with 8 (becaue 0.125 = 1/8), and 0 is associated with infinity (because 0 = 1/infinity).

Copy out the numbers I've given you in my fourth and fifth paragraphs [edit: now relegated to a PM, or an email if the PM system takes a dislike to them too] and don't lose them. See if you can match them usefully with your diagram, because that's what you need to be able to do if it is to be of any use for your theory.

[Edit: the PM system let all those filthy numbers through without objecting.]
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 29/08/2016 23:25:28
Dispense with the diagram...

Let's approach a different way and just in bits.

You can tell me that a speed of 0.866c causes a length contraction of 50%, and a time dilation of 50%.  The occupants in that rocket are supposed to be moving in a slow motion of half the speed.

What length of a second is this extended length of second, that is associated with a speed of 0.866c, held relative to?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 29/08/2016 23:41:36
Dispense with the diagram...

Let's approach a different way and just in bits.

You can tell me that a speed of 0.866c causes a length contraction of 50%, and a time dilation of 50%.  The occupants in that rocket are supposed to be moving in a slow motion of half the speed.

What length of a second is this extended length of second, that is associated with a speed of 0.866c, held relative to?

The observer's clock (at rest in that frame of reference) ticks out two seconds while the clock in the rocket only ticks out one second, so you can say that the second in that rocket is twice as long as the second of a clock at rest. I usually work with the relative number of ticks, so I use the exact same number for time changes as for length contraction, but if you want to think in terms of longer seconds being stretched out (which is what "time dilation" refers to), then you should use the reciprocal of the length contraction factor, which means you divide it into 1.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 30/08/2016 00:18:52
Hey thanks David.  I'll look out for the pm, my email is locked since my phone got smashed and my long forgotten password is written in my phones notes, so I won't be receiving emails.

Given that you have taken the trouble, I'll get my graph paper out and get cracking.  I told you before I haven't actually made a physical diagram of what I'm describing.  I'm just working from what I'm creating in my head, and the basis of another diagram I have physically made that is far more complex describing Vikki Ramsay gravitational time dilation in relation to mass and distance, rather than SR related time dilation, and speed, in relation to an observational time frame dependency that is proportional to the difference in rate of time between reference frames.

I'll get back to you with my results.

In the meantime concerning the different approach, in answer to your post above:

So let's state the frame of reference where the observers clock ticks at 2 ticks to the rockets 1 tick at speed of 0.866c as having the length of a standard second.

A standard second can be broken down into time frames of subdivisions of a second.  We'll work in divisions of 100 000 microseconds.  A standard second will have ten of these divisions.  The rocket will therefore have 20 divisions.

What I'm doing is standardising the standard second so that we may take measurement of all other time dilations, (GR, SR and VR*), from this standard.

Are we all good so far?

(*Vikki Ramsay gravitational time dilation)
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: Dmitri Martila on 30/08/2016 04:24:15
Please let me know what you learn if you choose to study Ehrenfest's paradox. I'd be very interested.
So interested, what we would study some cases together? Nice. Very nice! I have the T.E.Phipps experimental paper, he has photographed the rotating disk to test the Ehrenfest paradox. I have the theoretical explanation of his result.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 30/08/2016 14:00:02
I should really put out a warning about psychologists here: be aware that many of them are parasites who mess with their customer's minds in order to go on and on making more money out of them, so don't get sucked in too deep.
Now how did I guess that you had experience with psychologists and didn't like what they had to say?

David, you are an angry person who is, briefly, fooling himself that he has found a contradiction in something that has been discussed in incredible depth for over a century. You need some help.

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Of course there is proof that you are wrong: in any given reference frame, the events of the past determine the events of the future without difficulty. This is something established a century ago.

You're missing the point again as you have no ability to analyse properly. This is all about the coordination of how events play out on different paths. If you're running time slower on one path than another in order to make events mesh, you can't also be running time more quickly on the former path than on the other. You can either do one or the other, but not both.
Paths exist in frames of reference, or it is better to say that one cannot describe a path without also given the frame of reference for one's description. There is no problem coordinating paths: this is an artefact of you continuing to make aphyisical comparisons between frames that have no consistent meaning.

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That the frames disagree about event order is not a conflict: we have a guaranteed way to generate the information for any frame from the information from any other frame, the Lorentz transformations. Any frame provides the objective information to determine physical events. You don't seem to acknowledge this.

Yes, you have a guaranteed way to generate useful information, but it's a preferred-frame method of generating that information.
This is just more of your crazy talk. No frame is preferred, each one is equally legitimate and one can start from any state at any time in one frame and evolve a physical system and get the same results (taking the proper translations into account) in any other frame. The only way that you generate a contradiction is by pointing out that different frames assign different coordinates to events. It takes no great intellect to do this and one can equally show that Galilean relativity is incorrect in the same way.

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Computers work just fine on LET, as does everything else, but if we're pretending that SR is reality, the Eculidean views of things that we get from frames of reference are not the fundamental reality - the fundamental reality is found in the non-Euclidean space in which the lengths are constant.
Please provide a source to support this claim.

If you don't believe there's a non-Euclidean reality there which trumps the naive Euclidean views we get of it, how can you believe in SR at all? You're arguing against SR.
Please provide a reference to support your claim that in SR, "the fundamental reality is found in the non-Euclidean space in which the lengths are constant". You either read this somewhere or you made it up yourself. Did some crank tell you this?

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And since model 2 is SR, you're acknowledging that SR generates contradictions.
None  of your models are SR< since they show multiple locations for events in one frame. That is not SR. So, please, stop lying to us.
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Your animations...

They're computer simulations.
Please. You are creating little animations. They are little cartoon lies that you use to mislead others and yourself.
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Just like in Galilean relativity, where one cannot compare different frames without translation. It would be absurd to say that the mast on a ship is never in motion because it is never moving relative to the ship, even in a frame where the ship is in motion.

An inadequate analogy is an inadequate analogy which sheds no light on the issue.
It is not an analogy: applying your reasoning, Galilean relativity fails because the locations in one frame do not equal the locations in another frame.

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In the static block model, the chains are of apparent causation rather than real causation - the block exists eternally by magic having never been generated. As soon as you try to account for the generation of the block in cause-and-effect order, you have to add more laws of physics to the model in order to allow that, at which point it becomes one of the other models.
People always misunderstand the block universe model like this. Cause and effect does not need to be weaker in the block universe model: the same restrictions on event order can be in place. Some people even argue that cause and effect is stronger in the block universe model. Regardless, this is not required for SR.


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It has the backing of someone who used to work at a very high level in education, in charge of most of the schools in a large region of scotland. He actually insists on paying for the webhosting costs.
I am glad that you have supporters to help you make your way through life, but I worry that their indulgence will do you harm.

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Most importantly though, I'm simply asking the awkward questions which everyone should be asking and which the experts are running away from answering.
Except that they have answered: one can't compare values from different frames without applying the correct translation. Only you refuse to listen.

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"Where can I find an animation/simulation that does the job in a way you approve of then? How do they perform the magic trick of avoiding generating contradictions? The reality is that they don't exist, and that's why there are so many people out there who regard SR as fantasy physics."

The key part of the first sentence is "that does the job", and the second sentence spells out exactly what that means. None of those links led to anything that did the job without cheating. There is no program anywhere out there that does the job without cheating because the job is impossible. It is equally impossible for the real universe to do the job without using a preferred frame or having a means of tolerating event-meshing failures.
So, by "cheating", you mean that they merely applied the transformations and did not try to combine the events of two frames in one frame?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 30/08/2016 23:07:00
So let's state the frame of reference where the observers clock ticks at 2 ticks to the rockets 1 tick at speed of 0.866c as having the length of a standard second.

A standard second can be broken down into time frames of subdivisions of a second.  We'll work in divisions of 100 000 microseconds.  A standard second will have ten of these divisions.  The rocket will therefore have 20 divisions.

But from the rocket's point of view, its only going to have 10 of your divisions while the "standard second" will look as if it has 20. Can you handle that?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 31/08/2016 00:15:52
Now how did I guess that you had experience with psychologists and didn't like what they had to say?

My knowledge of psychologists comes only from what I've heard from others, including someone I know who was talked into hating all his relatives while his shrink systematically undermined him in order to take more and more cash from him. Having initially mentioned them as if they're a positive thing (and I'm sure many of them are), I thought I ought to put the other side for balance.

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David, you are an angry person who is, briefly, fooling himself that he has found a contradiction in something that has been discussed in incredible depth for over a century. You need some help.

Angry? No one who knows me would describe me that way - I certainly am angry about many things, but everyone moral should be. As for needing help, no - there are billions of people out there who need help, and I'm doing everything I can to get it to them.

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Paths exist in frames of reference, or it is better to say that one cannot describe a path without also given the frame of reference for one's description. There is no problem coordinating paths: this is an artefact of you continuing to make aphyisical comparisons between frames that have no consistent meaning.

I'm simply doing what you are unable to do: I'm running through the events of a simple scenario with planets and rockets and looking to see how it's arranged that a rocket can be reunited with its planet when its clocks tick half as many times as clocks on the planet while it's away. That takes coordination, and there are different ways of trying to do it which are not compatible with each other. If you are running events such that the rocket's progress is slowed equally along both legs of its path in order to avoid event-meshing failure at the reunion point, you are using the planet's frame as a preferred frame as a mechanism for how the universe runs and not merely as a way of analysing the events that play out in it (where you don't care about whether you're getting a true account or not). There's a big difference between those two things.

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That the frames disagree about event order is not a conflict: we have a guaranteed way to generate the information for any frame from the information from any other frame, the Lorentz transformations. Any frame provides the objective information to determine physical events. You don't seem to acknowledge this.

This is just more of your crazy talk. No frame is preferred, each one is equally legitimate and one can start from any state at any time in one frame and evolve a physical system and get the same results (taking the proper translations into account) in any other frame.

That doesn't work for the universe. It has to have events play out in one single way and not in an infinite number of different ways that contradict each other. This is totally different from naive analysis by observers who don't care which account of events is true because it makes no difference to them. The universe has to have a true account of what it's doing which doesn't involve contradictions when a frame is changed. Changing the frame you're using to analyse things can't change what's actually happened and what has yet to happen.

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The only way that you generate a contradiction is by pointing out that different frames assign different coordinates to events. It takes no great intellect to do this and one can equally show that Galilean relativity is incorrect in the same way.

If the stay-at-home twin is half way between the parting point and reunion point, his travelling twin may or may not have made the turn, but changing the frame of reference he's using for his analysis isn't going to change what's happened for his twin. The universe has done something definite with the travelling twin and doesn't make and undo his progress past the turning point every time his brother flips the frame in his calculations. The accounts generated by the calculations from different frames are not all valid - only one of them can be true and the rest are wrong. We can't know which account is true, but the universe must have a true answer that it is working with. To claim that all the accounts are valid is ludicrous - it means that every time you change the frame you're using for analysis, the universe unmakes events while hurrying to make others in order to conform with the frame you're now using, and that's magic rather than physics. The only sane way out of that if you don't want to accept that there's a preferred frame is to switch to model one which is Lorentz invariant.

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Please provide a reference to support your claim that in SR, "the fundamental reality is found in the non-Euclidean space in which the lengths are constant". You either read this somewhere or you made it up yourself. Did some crank tell you this?

I heard it from a more rational SR expert than the majority who said it was contested, but it is also clear that it is correct. He then introduced me to model zero (the eternal static block). There is a non-Euclidean reality in SR which involves a 4D Spacetime in which there should be no frames of reference because the model is supposed to be Lorentz invariant. The frames of reference only come into play when looking at that non-Euclidean reality it in ways that make it appear Euclidean. If you want the Euclidean geometry to have prededence over the non-Euclidean one, why on Earth are you pushing SR? It appears that you don't trust the non-Euclidean part of the theory.

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Please. You are creating little animations. They are little cartoon lies that you use to mislead others and yourself.

It can generate the diagram for hundreds of different frames of reference and you call it an animation! It's a simulation that crunches all the numbers. If it could be done without all that maths, it would have to run on magic to produce what it shows. You call it lies, but you are foolishly attacking the very thing you're supposedly defending, because the diagram shows you SR.

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It is not an analogy: applying your reasoning, Galilean relativity fails because the locations in one frame do not equal the locations in another frame.

It is only if you have are generating contradictions and assert that all the accounts are true that you have a problem. If you have a preferred frame, the contradictions merely tell you that some accounts are false, and they do this even if you assert that there is no preferred frame (although you can escape into model one).

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People always misunderstand the block universe model like this. Cause and effect does not need to be weaker in the block universe model: the same restrictions on event order can be in place. Some people even argue that cause and effect is stronger in the block universe model. Regardless, this is not required for SR.

Model zero, the static, eternal block universe, has no causality involved in it because it was not generated in cause-and-effect order, or indeed in any order at all as it was never generated in any way but has simply existed forever. Model one though is a different block universe model in which the causation works fine, and model 3 can also work fine as a block universe, so defending model zero on the basis that some block universe models are viable just doesn't hack it. Model zero cannot do causality.

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I am glad that you have supporters to help you make your way through life, but I worry that their indulgence will do you harm.

I have a lot of backing from people who have worked in education and spent their lives trying to improve things only to have others come along behind them to dismantle everything they've built and bin it all. My site is only one part of a much larger project involving a number of other people which is still coming together.

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Except that they have answered: one can't compare values from different frames without applying the correct translation. Only you refuse to listen.

All the correct translations are being done. You try to make out that they aren't, so how come they work? For example, do you imagine that this program works by magic rather than doing proper maths?

http://magicschoolbook.com/science/ref-frame-camera.htm

It isn't complete and doesn't work properly as a result, but click on the first button to load the example shapes, then click on the third and select different frames of reference. Try the values 0.866 and 0 first, then try 0 and 0.866, and then try 0.433 and 0.866. These are the squares form the thought experiment in post #2, and now we can see them from Frames A, A', B and B'. No doubt you'll say it isn't doing proper maths and that it works by magic.

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So, by "cheating", you mean that they merely applied the transformations and did not try to combine the events of two frames in one frame?

I mean that they're using a preferred frame mechanism where the time of that frame governs all the others, making their clocks run slow.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 31/08/2016 01:21:12
I'm simply doing what you are unable to do: I'm running through the events of a simple scenario with planets and rockets and looking to see how it's arranged that a rocket can be reunited with its planet when its clocks tick half as many times as clocks on the planet while it's away.
You may be trying to do this, but you are using David Cooper relativity, not SR. In SR, these tasks are accomplished relatively straightforwardly by the Lorentz transformations.
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That takes coordination, and there are different ways of trying to do it which are not compatible with each other.
Again, you are free to use whatever mean you wish, but do not lie to use and claim that David Cooper relativity is SR.

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If you are running events such that the rocket's progress is slowed equally along both legs of its path in order to avoid event-meshing failure at the reunion point, you are using the planet's frame as a preferred frame as a mechanism for how the universe runs and not merely as a way of analysing the events that play out in it (where you don't care about whether you're getting a true account or not). There's a big difference between those two things.
In SR, one is free to use whatever frame of reference one wishes; no frame of reference is preferred and all frames produce consistent results (they are identical under transformation). You do not like this but we are not bound by your aesthetic preferences.

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That doesn't work for the universe. It has to have events play out in one single way and not in an infinite number of different ways that contradict each other.
This is your aesthetic preference. The evidence is that the universe doesn't particularly care about event order for spatially separated events.

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Changing the frame you're using to analyse things can't change what's actually happened and what has yet to happen.
Nobody thinks that the choice of reference frame changes the actual world, it only changes the description. You want to prevent people from using certain descriptions without offering any actual alternative.

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If the stay-at-home twin is half way between the parting point and reunion point, his travelling twin may or may not have made the turn, but changing the frame of reference he's using for his analysis isn't going to change what's happened for his twin.
When you say this, you are assuming that there is some absolute frame of reference. According to SR, what has "happened" for a certain even is only those events in the past light cone of that event. This set of past events is invariant and is definitely causally connected to the given event. You are demanding, against all evidence, that there is some preferred reference frame where, even though there is no possible causal connection between two events, there is nonetheless a fact of the matter with regards to their time order. The evidence does not support that there is such a link.

You are just making a circular argument: there must be a preferred reference frame because there is a preferred reference frame.

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Please provide a reference to support your claim that in SR, "the fundamental reality is found in the non-Euclidean space in which the lengths are constant". You either read this somewhere or you made it up yourself. Did some crank tell you this?

I heard it from a more rational SR expert than the majority who said it was contested, but it is also clear that it is correct.
So, you "heard" it. That's exactly the sort of scholarship I expected.

 
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Model zero, the static, eternal block universe, has no causality involved in it because it was not generated in cause-and-effect order,
Saying that over nad over again does not make it true. You are simply repeating that the block universe is a block universe.

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So, by "cheating", you mean that they merely applied the transformations and did not try to combine the events of two frames in one frame?

I mean that they're using a preferred frame mechanism where the time of that frame governs all the others, making their clocks run slow.
Why are you lying about all those links. None of them do that. They all begin with an arbitrary frame, not a preferred frame. If one were to apply an inverse translation, then one could recover the original information from the secondary frame. You just can't understand how people can be content without a preferred reference frame, so you just say that they are using one when they start from an arbitrary frame. Real good reasoning.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 31/08/2016 02:44:47
So let's state the frame of reference where the observers clock ticks at 2 ticks to the rockets 1 tick at speed of 0.866c as having the length of a standard second.

A standard second can be broken down into time frames of subdivisions of a second.  We'll work in divisions of 100 000 microseconds.  A standard second will have ten of these divisions.  The rocket will therefore have 20 divisions.

But from the rocket's point of view, its only going to have 10 of your divisions while the "standard second" will look as if it has 20. Can you handle that?

Yup, absobloominlutely!

The remit of my concept of observational time frame dependency being proportional to the difference in rate of time relies on this observation.

That each will observe the other as being twice as slow, and half as long, or every other time frame missing.

The rocket does not know how long a second is when it is observing a standard second of our observation point from its own.  It just views relative to it's own experience.  But we know how long a standard second is as per our observation point (or any variable of this standard second), and we also know how long the second on the rocket at speed 0.866c is.

An observation that is proportional to the difference in rate of time will be 50% whether twice as long, or half as long.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 31/08/2016 03:05:59
This means that you can keep the speed of the rocket relative to a standard second, and move your observation point to a reference frame that is of a different gravity potential and time dilation to the standard second, but at rest relative to earth, (or not for more complexity), and calculate what this length of seconds proportions are in relation to the rockets and the observable  proportions will no longer be 50% each way.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: timey on 31/08/2016 03:25:18
...and then, adding in Vikki Ramsay gravitational time dilation that my time theory proposes, this affords longer seconds in the weaker gravity field that the rocket must travel through.
The rocket will be travelling at mph as per standard second.  As seconds get longer in the locations of space, the percentage of the speed of light that the rocket is travelling at will increase as per reference frame of increasingly longer seconds, and the rockets rate of time will further slow.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 01/09/2016 00:06:09
You may be trying to do this, but you are using David Cooper relativity, not SR. In SR, these tasks are accomplished relatively straightforwardly by the Lorentz transformations.

You're attacking SR again, because that's what I'm using.

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Again, you are free to use whatever mean you wish, but do not lie to use and claim that David Cooper relativity is SR.

You're the one lying by claiming that it isn't. I'm simply putting SR to the test and finding that it generates contradictions.

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In SR, one is free to use whatever frame of reference one wishes; no frame of reference is preferred and all frames produce consistent results (they are identical under transformation). You do not like this but we are not bound by your aesthetic preferences.

The universe is not free to use a preferred frame mechanism without having a preferred frame.

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This is your aesthetic preference. The evidence is that the universe doesn't particularly care about event order for spatially separated events.

It has nothing to do with aesthetics, but about things confroming to the norms of logic.

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Nobody thinks that the choice of reference frame changes the actual world, it only changes the description. You want to prevent people from using certain descriptions without offering any actual alternative.

I'm simply refusing to be fooled into thinking that the universe can run itself on a preferred frame mechanism without a preferred frame. If it tries to do it with all frames being preferred at once (or even more than one) it is contradicting itself in terms of what it's done and what it's yet to do.

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When you say this, you are assuming that there is some absolute frame of reference. According to SR, what has "happened" for a certain even is only those events in the past light cone of that event. This set of past events is invariant and is definitely causally connected to the given event. You are demanding, against all evidence, that there is some preferred reference frame where, even though there is no possible causal connection between two events, there is nonetheless a fact of the matter with regards to their time order. The evidence does not support that there is such a link.

The universe cannot play such ludicrous games of not knowing how much it has allowed the action to play out on different paths. It has to commit to allowing events to run and pick a rate to run them at, and it is not possible for it to conform to the accounts generated from more than one frame at a time when it does this as they contradict each other. To believe that it can is to believe in magic.

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You are just making a circular argument: there must be a preferred reference frame because there is a preferred reference frame.

Contradictions, therefore something's false. That's how reasoning works and it is not circular. You should not tolerate 2=3.

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So, you "heard" it. That's exactly the sort of scholarship I expected.

From someone a lot better at this stuff than you. But I actually think you may have a point - he may have been wrong. It may be that all models require a preferred frame.
 
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Saying that over nad over again does not make it true. You are simply repeating that the block universe is a block universe.

You keep misrepresenting what I've said - I was talking very specifically about the static, eternal block model in which time doesn't run.

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Why are you lying about all those links. None of them do that. They all begin with an arbitrary frame, not a preferred frame. If one were to apply an inverse translation, then one could recover the original information from the secondary frame. You just can't understand how people can be content without a preferred reference frame, so you just say that they are using one when they start from an arbitrary frame. Real good reasoning.

They are using a preferred frame mechanism regardless of which frame they choose to work with, and that's where they're cheating. If they run the whole thing using a different frame, it will develop events in a way that contradicts the original version. The universe cannot contradict itself in that way, and that's where you're failing to get your head round the problem - you've been brainwashed into ignoring the problem and pretending it isn't there. The universe cannot extend the action on path A more quickly than on path B while also extending the action more quickly on path B than on path A. To believe that it can is to have a mental disability.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 01/09/2016 00:17:45
And in case anyone missed it, my reference-frame camera software is now online, and although it's not complete, it does enough to justify putting it there now. The bug that was still in it yesterday (due to incompletion - it couldn't handle frames where one vector was negative and the other positive) has gone, so what you see should now be correct in every aspect.

http://magicschoolbook.com/science/ref-frame-camera.htm

Click on the first button to load the example shapes, then click on the third button to select different frames of reference. Try the values 0.866 and 0 first (two vectors to select a new frame), then try 0 and 0.866, and then try 0.433 and 0.866. These are the squares from the thought experiment in post #2, and now we can see them from Frames A, A', B and B'.

I will add more functionality to it over time, such as being able to run time (at the moment all you get is t=0 for everything by the time of the selected frame, though that means you are seeing a range of different Frame A times for different parts of the scene as you change away from Frame A, for the only point that's the same in all frames is the origin, and even that is only the case when t=0). I may also add edges to the shapes and allow objects to be accelerated. I plan to show time passing differently for different objects too, perhaps by using periodic colour changes.

Edit: as of now, the program allows you to run events like video, and the keyboard can be used to control it in a more convenient way than clicking on screen buttons, so "S" is used to stop and start, while "D" is used to change direction (to run things forwards/backwards in time).
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: GoC on 03/09/2016 15:48:18
There is only one fixed frame where mass is concerned and that being c. Mass can never reach c so a fixed frame for the position of mass is impossible. Moving 0.4 c in one vector while moving 0.8 c in another vector violates relativity postulates unless they are in opposite directions on the same vector.

Assuming contraction is actually physical rather than just a visual interpretation caused by the finite speed of light is a exercise in futility. The same reason why you cannot measure the position and the speed of an electron applies to all objects in motion. All things are always in motion so there is no fixed frame.

Why would you believe the image produced is the physical description when there is no frame of reference. the faster an object moves the greater the angle of view past 90 degrees. Even when two trains are moving at the same speed there is no 90 degree view. If you just follow the math without understanding the process causing the math your conclusions will remain invalid.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 03/09/2016 23:18:57
There is only one fixed frame where mass is concerned and that being c. Mass can never reach c so a fixed frame for the position of mass is impossible. Moving 0.4 c in one vector while moving 0.8 c in another vector violates relativity postulates unless they are in opposite directions on the same vector.

The vectors 0.4c east and 0.8c north combine to a speed of 0.8944c (at an angle 26.56 degrees east of north), so where's the problem with that? Matter is fully entitled to move at such a speed and does so with ease in particle accelerators (a search result tells me that 0.99999999c has been achieved in this way), and there's nothing in mathematics that bans you from describing that speed using two vectors (each bigger than the ones you've provided).

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Assuming contraction is actually physical rather than just a visual interpretation caused by the finite speed of light is a exercise in futility. The same reason why you cannot measure the position and the speed of an electron applies to all objects in motion. All things are always in motion so there is no fixed frame.

You're merely parroting assertions. Logic tells you though that the first and third of those assertions are wrong. The universe has to use a preferred frame of reference in order to coordinate events without generating contradictions, just as all computer simulations have to.

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Why would you believe the image produced is the physical description when there is no frame of reference.

You shouldn't believe that the image produced is the correct physical description of the object as you can't know which frame is the preferred frame, but that doesn't remove the need for there to be a preferred frame. The universe has to pick one to use to control events, and if it wants to use another frame to do it at the same time it will produce contradictions in what's happened and what has yet to happen, with the problem getting worse the more frames it tries to use as the base for coordinating the action.

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the faster an object moves the greater the angle of view past 90 degrees. Even when two trains are moving at the same speed there is no 90 degree view. If you just follow the math without understanding the process causing the math your conclusions will remain invalid.

Given that I understand and have fully taken into account all the optical effects with angles changing and not being as they appear to be to observers, you shouldn't be aiming that objection my way at all, quite apart from the fact that it has no bearing whatsoever on the argument I've set out.

The issue is really simple. If I write a computer simulation to deal with how objects behave in relativity with Spacetime, I have three choices: I can use model 3 and have a preferred frame of reference whose time is used to govern time for all other frames, or I can use model 1 and allow time to run at the same rate on all paths (which allows the frame of reference to be changed without changing anything in relation to which events have taken place and which have yet to happen), or I can pretend to use model 2 while actually using model 3 and just assert that it is model 2 even though it isn't. It's exactly the same for the real universe: it can use model 3 as its mechanism or model 1, but it cannot use model 2 because to do so would mean it has to use every frame as a preferred frame and govern all other frames under the time of the preferred frames, and that means having an infinite number of copies of each frame so that events can develop at different rates in each copy depending on which frame they're governed by. It actually means having an infinite number of duplicate universes each with a different preferred frame, all duplicating the same action but with all that action playing out with a different pattern of coordination in each copy of the universe in order to be doing all of them at once, and all this for the sole purpose of backing some monkeys' dogma about there being no preferred frame of reference. Even then it fails though, because each copy of the universe is still using a preferred frame of reference.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: guest39538 on 04/09/2016 04:51:52
Light is the reference frame of space!
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: GoC on 04/09/2016 16:18:02
David,

   I understand your dilemma with SR. I was confused also until I followed Euclidean geometry in all frames. A photon travels the same distance through space at a constant speed. Lets term that a light second and round off to 186,000 miles per second. Whose second? Lights second in lights frame. Now we have to ask whose distance? Lights distance/lights second. Now the confusion starts. When using light and time as a measuring stick between different speeds both the distance of the stick and the to measure the speed of light tick rate of time change in a confounding way to measure the speed of light the same in every frame. Lets take two frames one moving at 1/2 the speed of light and one at rest. Here is the confusion the observer at rest views the 1/2 speed of light object as contracted by 13.3075% which is the Lorentz contraction of 0.866025. Lets look at the Euclidean geometry. A 90 degree view would measure 186,000 length and a 90 degree observer lets say 93,000 length centimeters, miles it does not matter as long as the space distance for each direction are the same. This gives us a right triangle so we can use Pythagoras to measure the actual view. It creates a 30,60,90 triangle. Cos 30 = 0.866025 same as the Lorentz contraction. So we can now understand that we view objects using light as the hypotenuse rather than the leg in differences of speed. The angle of view reduces the objects length by 13.3075% at half the speed of light.

Here there is the question relative to what? A light second and light length in lights frame.

Now lets take the view from the space ship inside the ship going 1/2 the speed of light. Lets look at the light on the ship as Euclidean space from the light frame and lets use the length of the ship to determine the length of your measuring stick. Light starts from the back in the direction of the ship. The light reaches the front by two lengths of the ship. It hits a mirror and returns to the back in 0.66... length of the ship. So relative to a light second and length through space the measuring stick becomes 2.66... in the two way length. We divide by two  and get 1.33.. length relative to Euclidean light length trough space. But wait 0.33... length of space the ship traveled without light or 1/3 the length. So the length of your measuring stick is 2 2/3 - 1/6 because light did not follow in the second direction we get a Euclidean relative to a light second and distance of 2.5 ships length divided by 2 = 1.25 length for the change in your measuring stick.

So your measuring stick is increased by 0.25 total length. Lets look at the light clock. First we have to follow relativity's light being independent of the source. The vector direction of the light wave fires and the mirror moves forward following the same measurements through space so the length of a second in your frame is the same 1.25. 1.25/1.25 = 1. The longer tick rate is confounded with the longer distance of your measuring stick causing you to measure the same speed of light in every frame. This is a increase in the visual length of your measuring stick matching your change in tick rate.

Since the mechanical and light clock remain synchronous in every frame there must be a control mechanism in space that affects both the electron and photon equally suggesting an energy state of space.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: GoC on 04/09/2016 16:52:58
Continuing from above we can never measure our speed through space using light. The ratio between frames is our only reference. Rather than finding a fixed frame we only have a moving frame of the photon as a constant.

Energy of space would suggest a photon is just a wave sphere of vector directions rather than a single particle we describe as a virtual photon. A wave on energy independent of the source is the very definition of a virtual photon.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: jeffreyH on 04/09/2016 17:26:01
Ah GoC! The hypotenuse to measure light. There you have the problem of deflection from a straight line path even moving directly away from a source. How can the path be recovered?
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: GoC on 04/09/2016 19:06:33
jeffreyH,

   Depending on what you believe is a photon your understanding of light will change. I suspect light to be a wave on energy particles expanding as a sphere from a light bulb. So any vector will be a straight line of view. The size of the  image will be the inverse square of the distance with the Lorentz contraction.

Any direction the clock is placed in the ship will give the same increased distance for light to travel from perpendicular to the same direction of the ship. This can be proven with synchronization of clocks and Euclidean geometry for travel distance of light. Mechanical clocks stay in synchronization with light clocks in the same frame. Is that a coincidence in every frame or are the two (photons and electrons) controlled by the same energy source.

While you cannot ever recover the same path the same measurement will be recovered in all frames.

There is no stationary frame of value zero relative to motion. The spin motion (energy) of space to propel electrons and photons has the value of c. Electrons travel in a cork screw motion confounded with the vector speed of light wave rippling through the energy of space.

I will need a specific issue in math or mechanics to understand your questioning my math results or mechanics.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 04/09/2016 22:30:12
Hi GoC,

I suspect that we're talking at cross-purposes here. My original question related to something I'd found that appeared to show a way of identifying the preferred frame, but I'd missed the hidden rotation that occurs when something is accelerated one way and then accelerated sideways off that path, and once that is taken into account, the preferred frame remains unidentifiable. That was resolved by page 5 of this thread, and then it moved on into a discussion of another argument after PhysBang read a webpage of mine (that I'd linked to to illustrate a point) and attempted to rubbish it. That page can be found at www.magicschoolbook.com/science/relativity and it makes the argument that SR and GR both depend either on a preferred frame of reference or on Bringing in Newtonian time to work in combination with the time dimension. So, where you're trying to show that the preferred frame can't be detected, there is no need to do so as it is not contested. I questioned it for a short time when I thought there might be a way of pinning it down, but have since "unquestioned" it. That means this thread has served its purpose and provided the answer "no" (or at least, not by the method I had proposed). The remaining issue then is not the one of the thread title, but of whether there has to be a preferred frame of reference, and I have shown that the only models that make it possible for there not to be such a frame require Newtonian time to be added to them to enable them to generate the future out of the past and/or to handle event-meshing failures.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: GoC on 05/09/2016 02:40:55
Thanks David I came to the party late.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: guest39538 on 05/09/2016 09:50:36
Hello!  You all seem to be off track, light IS the frame of reference, nothing to do with the speed either, the inverse square law relative to the size of mass dictates the length of a visual universe and reference frame whole.
Have you  never sat in a field at night that is really dark with a small amount of illumination such as a candle, your universal reference frame becomes really small.



Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: guest39538 on 05/09/2016 10:08:53
I drew it you to save me some time in discussion.





Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: PhysBang on 05/09/2016 13:42:36
This is the fitting end to this thread and I am done with this forum forever.
Title: Re: Can a preferred frame of reference be identified?
Post by: David Cooper on 05/09/2016 19:34:40
I've added another set of example objects to the reference-frame camera program to give a few hints of what happens with a rotating disc. Click on "load example objects" and select the new set by typing in "d". If you're using a machine with a keyboard, you can switch between four pre-programmed frames using the number keys 1 to 4 and use "s" and "d" to start/stop the action and change the direction in which it runs time.

( www.magicschoolbook.com/science/ref-frame-camera ).

The red and yellow objects are long rectangles, all length-contracted to half their rest length when you first see them. Once you view them from the other frames you can see how they would look if the disc was moving through space at relativistic speed, and you can get a good idea from this of how the red and yellow objects would behave if they were going round the blue disc rather than merely passing it on tangents. Notice how the width of the moving shapes always matches up with the width of the blue shapes where the moving ones touch the edge of the disc, so a rotating disc will length-contract to exactly the same extent as a non-rotating one (thereby resolving the issues I presented in post #1).

I didn't know how time would behave in the program, but it's clear now that it's written - when you change from the preferred frame to extreme frames you see objects moving across the screen more quickly, and the reason for this is that time is still being run by the preferred frame and the action for objects at rest in the preferred frame don't show up as running slow. If you click on "reset" and then load example objects "a", switch between frames 1 and 2 and watch the progress of the red shape, then switch between frames 1 and 3 and watch the progress of the green shape - in each case they progress at the same speed up/along the screen while the other one (the green or the red) jumps and changes speed. The objects that jump and move faster when you change frame are showing what they will do far in the future of frame 1's time, so they're showing action that hasn't happened yet, and they show that future action running at a faster rate too.