41

New Theories / Re: Does this experiment disprove relativity?

« on: 03/06/2021 05:38:48 »

It would really help if you actually put some numbers to what you expect to happen.

I thought the paper contained all the numbers it needs, but there are actually big mistakes in it which I would have found if I'd just worked out more numbers. The result is that a new paper needs to be written, but there was never any danger of this approach failing: the results merely show up differently from the way I'd previously thought. More on that below.

I see 100 au expanding by 50m in a month. That’s an actual computation. Care to show how you got 50m? I got about twice that.

I got 100m too, which means each one has an additional 50m to send it signal back across to the central clock in the case where we don't maintain the separations, but it isn't 50:50 for all speeds, and that's where I made one of the big mistakes.

Are you asserting that the relatively stationary objects are going to move apart 50m in a month?  I might agree with that only because the pull of the nearby stars might do that. Absent gravity and such, they stay 100 au apart relative to the inertial frame in which they were initially stationary, all per Newton’s first law of motion, which still applies.

Even without any gravity acting on them from anywhere, you can either have them move apart as the space between them expands or you can have them maintain separation simply by setting up their initial speeds differently. I introduced the idea by having them moving in order to help people understand how there is an effect to measure, but I then switched to maintaining the original distance between them so that the extra space being generated between them pushes extra space through them instead. That removed all the problems that the original idea suffered from. We then have a system in which if there's no expansion, all three clocks will remain in sync throughout the entire duration of the experiment, but if the space is expanding and the central clock is at rest, the two outer clocks will still remain in sync with each other throughout the experiment but will both lag behind the middle clock, and the amount by which they lag behind will be the same time that it takes for light to travel 50m. We know that because that's how much a clock will lag by if you move it 50m regardless of the speed you move it across those 50m. Light travels 50m in 167 millionths of a second (which is 167 ticks of a 1GHz processor) and is easy to measure: so easy, indeed, that we likely could reduce the separation to an astronomical unit, but let's just stick with 100 au for now.

If the space is expanding and the clocks are moving along through space such that one of the outer clocks is actually stationary, then the middle clock is going to move along through 50m of space and be 16.7 billionths of a second behind in its timing by the end of a month, while the other outer clock will have moved along though 100m of space and will be twice as far behind with its timing by the end of that month. The original synchronisation will have been skewed of course to fit the chosen speed of travel of the middle clock, because the synchronisation signal from the central clock will have reached the tail clock before the lead clock, but at that time, signals pinged straight back would still have reached the central clock simultaneously. After a month though, that will no longer happen: the signal from the tail clock will return 167 millionths of a second early and the signal from the lead clock will return 167 millionths of a second late, as measured by the central clock, so we have a clear measurable difference.

What happens if we move the clocks faster through space? Let's have the tailing clock move 50m through space over the course of the month while the middle clock moves 100m and the lead clock moves 150m. We now have the same difference in synchronisation as we had in the previous case, so we can't measure the speed difference between the two in the way I originally thought we could: we merely know that the clocks are moving in the same direction as before. So, it turns out that we can't work out their absolute speed from any running of the experiment unless its done in the range of transition where the clocks are nearly at rest. I need to write a new paper to describe this properly. What actually happens then is that we have a constant delay for a wide range of speeds on either side of being at rest, but with the opposite direction of delay for each of those sides. In between we have a rapid transition from a delay one way to a delay the opposite way. That makes it possible to pin down absolute rest with far higher precision than I previously thought could be achieved, and the changeover point would be a clear signal regardless of any gravitational interference, so you wouldn't even have to compensate for that. The downside is that it would take more runs of the experiment to find that zone of changeover. Initially, we would merely find out our direction of travel, and then we'd have to send the apparatus the opposite way at faster and faster speeds each time until we get the signal to reverse.

This is precisely why I wanted to run the paper past you before publishing it, but you weren't interested last time, so I had to publish it in a hurry due to things I'd already put out there about the case involving clocks being made near the time of the big bang which provided an opportunity for someone else to get in first with an experiment that can be done for real. I needed someone like you to push me into debugging it properly, and now that's finally happening, so it'll lead to a better second paper. If I sent my ideas to a journal in the normal way, there would be an opportunity to discuss and correct it before publication, but I can't go down that route as something this big would be stolen in a flash and have someone else's name put on it, so I have to publish directly every time, and having done that, it's no longer within their rules for it to be submitted to them. Now with this new finding, the first place that this latest bit has been published is right here on this forum. I will immediately put it up elsewhere afterwards too though as I like to get multiple time and date stamps on everything.

We’re doing this without gravity or dark energy, so they won’t drift.

Of course they'll drift. If you have the central clock at rest while the outer two are maintaining distance from it with the space expanding in between, those outer clocks have to be moving through space while the middle clock is not moving through any, so they must tick slower than it. If they don't fall behind, they would then have to be moving through space at the same speed as the central clock, but that would mean there could not be any expansion of the space between them.

You seem to not so much be interested in keeping them relatively stationary as much as computing their time dilation due to their peculiar motion? But your clocks were never synced in that coordinate system, so no comparison can be made. All clocks will stay in sync forever in the inertial frame in which all of them are stationary.

The whole point is that they can't all be stationary because of the expansion of space: they have to be moving at different speeds through the expanding space in order to maintain their separation distances, and clearly that's going to show. I imagined incorrectly before how the space was moving through them when they're moving at high speeds, and that made me think you'd get a bigger and bigger change in synchronisation between them the faster you move the apparatus through space, but no: I now think it's constant, except where it makes the transition from going one way to the opposite way, and at that point there's a massive signal in the change in direction of the lag when the tail clock switches over to being the lead clock. So, what you actually want to do is run the experiment to find out what the lag is, and that tells you the direction the clocks are moving in. You then slow it down by decelerating the system in the direction of the tail clock, and you just keep on doing so repeatedly. Once it reaches the point where the lead clock is at rest, the direction of the lag will change, reversing after the middle clock is at rest.

To measure that, you’d have to sync the clocks relative to the cosmological frame, and you haven’t done that.

You don't. All you do is send out a signal from the central clock to the outer ones, and then they send signals back to the central clock many times. You keep sending signals both ways, of course, to maintain the same separation between them, but you don't keep correcting the main clocks: you just let them drift and look at the lags in the arrival of their specific signals.

The experiment will behave the same. All clocks will stay in sync relative to the interial frame in which all clocks are stationary. Even LET does not suggest otherwise. It make the exact same empirical predictions (except for the experience of crossing into a black hole apparently).

No: LET predicts that the clocks are moving through space at different speeds and that they will tick at different rates as a result. STR predicts that they are all moving at the same speed relative to each other and that they will all tick at the same rate. That opens the way to test the theories by experiment and either disprove STR in expanding space, or disprove the idea that the space there is expanding, which would be devastating a much more important theory. If the space is expanding, you necessarily have a different speed of light relative to the lead clock than the tail clock in both directions along the line, and that is why STR cannot handle this case correctly. If you make the experiment big with the lead clock in one distant galaxy and the tail clock in another as far away from us in the opposite direction, then both of them are hurtling through those galaxies at relativistic speeds to maintain their distance to us, and yet we know that those galaxies are approximately at rest in their local space.

The slowing of clocks isn't about accelerations, but about absolute speeds through space.

Fine, but you’re not measuring the absolute time of the signals with your setup. You’re measuring the time relative to the inertial frame in which you synced all the clocks. The signal travel time will remain fixed for all eternity relative to that frame.

The travel time for the signals does indeed remain constant, but when the tail clock is moving through space at a lower speed than the lead clock, the lead clock sends those signals out with a longer and longer delay each time, so they arrive late.

think about how when you try to separate two clocks very slowly, you end up with the same synchronisation as if you separated them very quickly to the same distance apart.

Umm… no. You yourself say that it’s all about speed. Doing it fast results in a sync different from a slow transport. Neither method is a valid synchronization method.

Of course it's valid. One method of synchronising clocks is to send out simultaneously pulses of light to two clocks in opposite directions from half way between them, and they set themselves to zero when the signals arrive. If instead, from the same starting point, you send two synchronised watches out with one covering the distance to one clock in an hour and the other taking a day to get to the other clock, and then when those transferred watches read a particular time you set the two destination clocks to zero, you have sychronised them for the same frame as before. The speed at which you move a clock through space does not lead to a different synchronisation for the target clocks. Moving a clock delays it, and the delay that you get is the same size for a given distance of movement, and that delay is identical to the amount of time light takes to cross that distance. So, the delay to a clock from having space pass through it is the same as the time it takes for light to travel through that space.

Spacetime is just a contrived abstraction.

Then LET apparently gives physical meaning to a contrived coordinate abstraction if it denies reality beyond said contrived abstraction.

Spacetime is a contrived abstraction of something else that fits reality more accurately, and LET describes that reality more accurately by not making irrational predictions about what goes on inside black holes: that's where the predictions between GTR and LET diverge. But at the moment we're dealing with a place where the predictions of STR and LET diverge, so exploring that is the priority for the moment.

42

New Theories / Re: Does this experiment disprove relativity?

« on: 01/06/2021 01:39:39 »

If you had actually read the paper carefully and understood it, you would know that gravity does not prevent it from producing good results.

OK, so you’re lying to yourself. Has anybody with any physics knowledge actually reviewed this? Do you dismiss any review that points out errors? For one, you seem to assume that gravity somehow just shuts off ‘outside the solar system’.

If you imagine doing the experiment with two sets of the apparatus moving at high relativistic speed relative to each other, the impact of gravity on it is rendered utterly irrelevant. If you do it with a very low relative speed, you then do have to be careful to correct for the interference of gravity where one of the clocks may have spent more of its time at a lower depth in a gravity well than the other, but you can calculate those differences by knowing the distribution of the local massive bodies that cause that difference. Distant objects won't cause measurable differences.

You put two relatively stationary objects in interstellar space, the local stars around it will usually tend to pull the two objects apart.

That's discussed in the paper, and that's precisely why after setting out a version of the experiment in which the clocks are left free to move apart (to show people the principle of how it works), I then set out a preferred version where the clocks positions are controlled to prevent them moving apart. If one of them is deeper in a local gravity well than the other during some part of the experiment, the can be corrected for, but you'd obviously plan the positioning of the experiment carefully to try to make it equal on average.

... This is all simple orbital mechanics, having nothing to do with relativity.

And it's all predictable stuff that we can correct for.

Trying to measure expansion within a bound object is like trying to do it by tracking the distance between a pair of buildings over time. Such motion has been measured, but it’s continental drift, not space expansion that explains it.

It doesn't matter whether you call it a bound object or not. If the space is expanding between the two clocks and we are actively maintaining the distance between them, we are moving them through the amount of new space that has appeared between them, and that affects their timings. It also affects their timings differently if the central clock isn't at rest, and with a bigger difference in how much it affects their timings the further from being at rest the central clock is.

So let’s at least be reasonable and put this setup in deep space between galaxy clusters in a place with minimal gravity gradient. Otherwise the gravity effects will totally dwarf any claimed expansion effects.

Ideally that's what we would do, but it could take millions of years to get it there. We don't need to wait that long though because we can correct for gravity well depth differences as they are predictable, so we can actually do the experiment on our own doorstep.

The paper talks about putting two objects in space, relatively stationary. If they’re separated by some distance, then they’ll have different peculiar velocities.  If the near end has zero peculiar velocity, the far end will have a peculiar velocity in the direction of the near end. Space might expand past it, but that object will remain a fixed distance from the near end over time unless a force (gravity say) accelerates it.  So the two ends will remain a fixed separation indefinitely. Your paper seems to naively assume that expansion is a force that somehow accelerates things, like there’s some kind of drag with the aether or something. That nobody has pointed this out seems to indicate that nobody has actually reviewed the paper.

If the central clock is at rest, both the outer clocks will be moving through space in order to maintain their distance to the central clock, as you recognise - this must happen in expanding space. There is no force acting on the outer clocks unless we apply one to keep them at the right separation if they drift away from that, but if we get their speeds just right at the start, they'll hold station automatically, so the only corrections will be to deal with gravity's interference. What will cause the clocks to run slow in this case is their speed through space which is not zero if it is zero for the central clock. That equality in the slowing for the outer clocks will result in a null result for that set of apparatus. But we always do the experiment with two sets of apparatus. The other set has the central clock moving through space. One of the outer clocks may be at rest in space this time, in which case the other outer clock will be moving through space twice as fast as the middle clock. That would lead to a clear loss of synchronisation between the outer clocks, leading to a non-null result.

If you were to move the apparatus along at 0.866c

No frame reference. If you’re not begging your conclusion, then a speed is meaningless without a reference.

It has a very clear meaning in LET and we're talking about measuring absolute speeds, so you shouldn't have any difficulty understanding what it means. The difference in results for the two sets of apparatus that you have to get in expanding space shows that absolute speeds are involved. STR says that they don't exist, so it requires a null result from both sets of apparatus, and in doing so it violates the rules of the twins paradox, as is spelt out in the paper.

I will assume a peculiar velocity of .866c, and I’ll take a guess that it is along the line separating the two ends, but that also isn’t specified.

The direction is clearly specified as being along the straight line connecting the clocks.

I shouldn’t have to assume all these things. You should specify them.

Indeed you shouldn't have to assume them: they are all spelt out clearly in the paper.

You should also put the objects much further apart like a megaparsec so these things I’m pointing out become more obvious.

The paper describes an experiment that could practically be carried out during this century - that is why the distances were made small. If you want to make it bigger, that's an easy thing to translate to.

the expansion of space between the two outer clocks would lead to light signals from them to the central clock taking extra time to reach the central clock

That would be remarkable…  I deny this claim unless there are external forces involved accelerating things.

The slowing of clocks isn't about accelerations, but about absolute speeds through space. The twins paradox carried out by three clocks that never accelerate demonstrate that. In the experiment we either have the outer clocks moving at the same speed as each other through space (in opposite directions) while the central clock is at rest, or we have one of the outer clocks moving through space faster than the other. It's a very low speed difference, but it all adds up to a timing difference.

You can understand that easily enough when you think about how when you try to separate two clocks very slowly, you end up with the same synchronisation as if you separated them very quickly to the same distance apart. No matter how slowly you move them, you get the same end result, but if you move the clock slowly, you have to move it for a lot longer.

Now, transfer that understanding to the experiment: we have two clocks moving at speeds through space that may only be a little different, but they move through space at different speeds for the same length of time as each other with one of them moving through more space than the other. That leads to a change in their synchronisation.

You’ve described clocks synced relative to their own inertial frame, and if that inertia is maintained (no acceleration), then the proper separation between the two ends will be maintained and the measurement taken in the middle will get signals simultaneously from either end.

The synchronisation is only maintained if the central clock is at rest. If it is moving, one of the outer clocks will be slowed more than the other because it will be moving faster through space. The synchronisation will be skewed, of course, if the central clock is moving (along the straight line connecting the clocks), but it will initially look perfect in the frame in which the central clock is at rest. As time passes though, one of the outer clocks lags further and further behind the other, and the signals coming back to the central clock from the outer clocks will go out of sync with each other.

You’re describing a local test in supposedly gravity-free conditions (which interstellar space isn’t).  The cosmological frame cannot be detected by a local test.

But it can be. We can calculate the impact of gravity and adjust for it, working out how much slower one clock would be ticking than the other based on their relative depth in local gravity wells so that we aren't misled by that aspect of the result.

Hold it right there. LET predicts that the functionality of a clock halts at the event horizon

That seems to be an awful mark against LET then.

Quite the reverse.

It’s like looking at a flat map of Earth (like google maps) and noting that Greenland appears larger than Brazil despite the fact that it’s about a quarter the size of Brazil...

No. It's like looking at a globe and seeing that the speed of light reaches zero at the event horizon while everything from there on down is functionally frozen: a black ball of stuff like the fuzzballs of string theory.

Local spacetime at the event horizon is perfectly Minkowskian, and thus physics goes on as normal, as evidenced by a simple choice of a different abstract coordinate system such as the local inertial one of the guy falling in, or something non-local like Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates.

Spacetime is just a contrived abstraction. LET uses a Euclidean metric with the speed of light reducing in gravity wells, and that leads to it making the same predictions about things we can measure as GTR, but different ones about ones that we can't measure inside black holes. What shows us that LET is a more trustworthy account is the way that GTR has things travel down to a singularity where they run straight on into an infinitely far off future without delay, only to be destroyed in the near future of now (mere trillions of years rather than infinitely far beyond that) by the process that evaporates black holes and produces Hawking radiation. The problems you keep coming up with are all the product of applying a broken theory and seeing everything through its cracked lens.

So LET acknowledges and runs away from the problem with hands on the ears, whereas relativity has no trouble with it. Defeated by confusing the map for the territory. So sad.

What would be sad would be if it pandered to the broken predictions of GTR which can't handle time properly. Instead of that, it sets out how things could more rationally function.

I’m saying that the difference in depth between two events is not frame dependent. Your comment comparing very distant events (say outside each other’s visible universe) seemed to suggest otherwise.

I had no intention of suggesting otherwise.

Much better. Clocks are being compared in each other’s presence. No mention of tick rates which require a frame reference. The photo seems hardly necessary. The measurement can be logged and emailed for later comparision. No actual scientist need be present.

Indeed. There are multiple valid ways of doing it.

43

New Theories / Re: Does this experiment disprove relativity?

« on: 31/05/2021 04:54:31 »

[...2nd half]

I don’t remember the paper. I remember something about an experiment performed just outside the solar system, which will very much be affected by gravity, so you’re lying to yourself if you suggest otherwise.

If you had actually read the paper carefully and understood it, you would know that gravity does not prevent it from producing good results. If you were to move the apparatus along at 0.866c (and I use this high speed just to illustrate the way it works by making the difference in measurements stark), the expansion of space between the two outer clocks would lead to light signals from them to the central clock taking extra time to reach the central clock, but that extra time taken would be getting on towards fifteen times longer from the trailing clock than from the lead clock, and that difference is not cancelled out by synchronisation differences in the way that happens at the start of the experiment before the space has expanded. (In the paper I actually switch though to not allowing the clocks to move apart, but to hold them at a fixed separation instead and to allow space to move through them as it expands - the trailing clock will then move through the extra space at a higher speed relative to it than the lead clock does, making it tick slower while they maintain their actual separation, but the end result is the same difference in the timings. The paper can be seen here: https://independent.academia.edu/DavidCooper173 - very few views registered there because I normally send people to a copy on my site instead as that only takes one click, but it's unreliable free hosting and has been unavailable a lot in recent days.)

Pick a specific example then.  On Jan 1 (noon, absolute time, to which your watch is set), you jump towards a very large black hole (one large enough that tidal forces aren’t a bother even after 10 subjective minutes inside).

Hold it right there. LET predicts that the functionality of a clock halts at the event horizon, and if you could get the clock inside the black ball, it would be halted there too, so there is no such thing as 10 subjective minutes inside. LET agrees with GTR about all predicted measurements that can be accessed from outside the black hole, but they differ radically when it comes to what goes on inside.

After one day (your watch, noon Jan 2), you cross the event horizon, noticing nothing different. At 10 minutes past noon (your watch), what absolute time is it?

My watch has been stopped for who knows how long, so it never reaches ten past noon, but absolute time has continued to run at the same constant rate for the whole universe and all its content.

I know I didn’t give all the specifics like the actual mass. Not looking for some fancy calculation.  I claim the question is unanswerable, and that makes it indeed incompatible with absolute time. Your hand-wave assertion to the contrary shows me only that you don’t have an answer.

Your assertions are the result of you assuming that GTR is right, and its incompatibility with absolute time is just one of a number of symptoms of its brokenness. I do have an answer, and it's that a clock only goes on ticking inside a black hole in broken theories. But time continues to operate in there; it's just that any clock governed by the speed of light will be halted. Absolute time is not governed by the speed of light, but instead has a role in governing the speed of light.

Absolute time cannot be ‘measured locally’. Our falling guy has no defined speed or gravity depth. These things are not defined under your proposed coordinate system. He has exited your chosen coordinate system. That’s my point.

He hasn't. He's descended to the event horizon and stopped there with his functionality frozen. He can only go inside the event horizon by more stuff falling on top of him and increasing the energy density there to make the event horizon migrate out past him, and still his is frozen motionless. He might stay there for trillions of years of absolute time before he is destroyed by the process that generates Hawking radiation. (Trillions is a guess - maybe it's quadrillions or quintillions, but I'll just stick with trillions for now even if its not enough.) Meanwhile, GTR has him continue down to a singularity instead and he stays there for an infinite amount of the time external to the black hole, even though he is actually destroyed by that Hawking radiation process within mere trillions of years of that time external to the black hole. He has at no time exited my proposed coordinate system: you are merely attributing your own warped one that doesn't add up onto me, but I don't allow that kind of magic in the model. He cannot travel infinitely far timewise into the future and also be destroyed here within mere trillions of years. That brokenness of GTR is a big hint that it's wrong.

So just another thing that is there, but functionally inaccessible.

It's hard for anything to happen without it. It's one of nature's key fundamentals, just like space.

Gravity well depth is absolute. It isn’t a local thing.

Of course its local: you wouldn't have clocks tick at different rates in a lab by being on shelves at different heights otherwise. One is at deeper total depth than the other in all the gravity wells affecting them. Different localities are frequently at different depths. (Some are obviously at the same depth as each other though.) The important point here is that one of the observers may live in a much more massive galaxy than the other observer and his clock will therefore be ticking slower than the other observer's, so he would have to adjust for that for both observers to agree on the speed of the mutually observed object half way between them.

At what point do you decide to cut this off? Very distant star X affects my gravitational potential, but star Y one AU further away does not. Seems fishy, especially since the distant objects contribute more to the potential than the nearby ones do.

The very distant ones are going to affect both observers to almost the same extent, and while the local mass of stuff may make a lesser contribution, it can still be the main cause of a difference in the rate their respective clocks tick at, so they most need to cancel that part of it out in order to come close to agreeing on the speed of the observed object.

There are two key things that matter here. (1) If accelerated watches tick slower than unaccelerated clocks

Begging statement, meaningless under relativity. Try harder. Use empirical language. Don’t say what rates things tick. Say what will be measured at specific events.

Not meaningless at all. I can't shackle it by describing it through the lens of broken theories that don't fit the case in point. In the thought experiment with the clocks being created near the time of the big bang, we see that accelerated watches are ticking slower than unaccelerated clocks because we can look at the photos that show their times when they encounter each other and show that the clocks have registered more time passing. Those photos are the measurements. In previous posts I had observers comparing them and they were making the measurements. The measurement all show the clocks ticking faster than the watches, unless they don't, in which case we're dealing with a case where the watches were decelerated rather than accelerated, or a case in which the timings match and the watches were first decelerated to zero speed and then accelerated. Three different cases, but in each case the comparisons of times will tell us a lot about their absolute speeds, and when we look at how the miniwatches behave too (sent out in two opposite directions from the watches), we are going to see differences in timings when some of these timers meet up: the twins paradox demands that, and so absolute speeds are revealed as existing in all three cases.

(2) If two sets of identical apparatus set up the same way at the same location but moving at a different speeds don't produce a null result like the MMX, STR is making incorrect predictions

Galilean PoR says both apparatus (each in motion relative to the other) will measure the same local thing. You’re weren’t real specific about what you want measured.

It's all spelt out in the paper. What we're measuring is signals sent at the speed of light from the two end clocks to a central clock. The space expands between them, and the extra distance the signals have to travel will be covered at different speeds if the clocks are moving in their direction of alignment, leading to a timing difference. There is no timing difference at the start of the experiment due to one clock being ahead of the other in its timing if the clocks are moving along that line: they are synchronised at the start by a light signal being sent out to them from the central clock. The outer clocks then send signals back to the central clock which initially arrive simultaneously at the central clock, but as the space expands between the clocks, the signals go out of sync unless the clocks were initially at absolute rest. It's that simple. If the clocks aren't at rest, then the clocks must go out of sync due to that expansion. If they don't, there cannot be any expansion.

And why does it take 20 posts to get the specifics of this non-null result? So far all I have is accelerated watches that are slow by exactly the amount predicted by relativity.

It shouldn't take 20 posts. You had it all two and a half months ago, but you didn't want to understand it back then, and you probably still don't. You appear to misunderstand almost every point on purpose as a stalling tactic.

44

New Theories / Re: Does this experiment disprove relativity?

« on: 31/05/2021 04:53:26 »

STR ... asserts that there's no absolute time and that absolute speeds of motion don't exist.

Where does it do that? Quote the 1905 paper please. That would indeed constitute a metaphysical claim. I don't see how that could be demonstrated from the premises.

Why restrict things to that specific paper when you know that Einstein insisted that there's no absolute time or absolute speeds of motion? You must know full well what the theory asserts. In that original paper, which at no point even refers to a theory of relativity, he was initially careful not to overstate the case, so in paragraph two of that paper he says, "Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the 'light medium,' suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest." ... "The introduction of a “luminiferous ether” will prove to be superfluous inasmuch as the view here to be developed will not require an “absolutely stationary space” provided with special properties, nor assign a velocity-vector to a point of the empty space in which electromagnetic processes take place."

Later on we have, "So we see that we cannot attach any absolute signification to the concept of simultaneity, but that two events which, viewed from a system of co-ordinates, are simultaneous, can no longer be looked upon as simultaneous events when envisaged from a system which is in motion relatively to that system."

All of these things became stated more strongly over time, leading to everyone in physics recognising that he was ruling out absolute time and absolute speeds. STR further evolved with Minkowski's input with the idea of spacetime, which leads to there being more than one STR model. But what was very clearly ruled out by Einstein was LET, because if it was merely LET, it wouldn't be Einstein's theory at all.

We have a clock and a watch sitting near each other which the scientist look at and travel to and fro between them to confirm what they're doing

Clocks not in each other’s presence cannot be unambiguously compared. If they’re near each other and millions of years apart, then either they were never in sync or the slow one has been accelerated towards the faster one and will eventually meet it, in which case said scientist would not need to travel between them. You seem to be making up wrong numbers. How did they get millions of years apart if they’re ‘near each other?’ Is one continuously accelerating back and forth or something?

It's really quite simple. If there's a clock here and another one a thousand miles away over there, I can note the time on the clock here, then travel a thousand miles to look at the clock there, note down its time, then come back to the first clock and look at its time again and note that down. If the first time is 13.8 billion, the second time is 13.75 billion and the third time is 13.8 billion, then it's clear that the clock over there is behind the clock over here with its timing. The two clocks might even be sitting side by side though, eliminating the need to make trips between them.

If we're able to look at the clocks a minute after they're created though, a million years after the big bang, we can see that some of the clocks have registered a minute passing since they were created, while the watches that were sent out from them at 0.866c from them ten seconds after the clocks were created have only registered 35 seconds passing since they and the clocks were created, and we can see these passing each other to confirm that. Let's have cameras built into them which can photograph their clock and any watch that comes by to say hello when they give each other a high five (or twelve) - that will leave us with lasting photographs that document the action without us having to be there at all: photos showing after a year that when clocks pass watches the watches have only registered half a year passing while the clocks have registered a whole year. The expansion of space is so slight in that length of time that it barely slows the watches speed of travel in that time. And when some of the miniwatches that were sent out from the watches ten seconds after the watches were sent out from the clocks, well, lo and behold, the photos show some of them passing watches with a year recorded on their dials to the half year on the dials of the watches, and when clocks and miniwatches drift into close contact, they are both shown to have a year recorded on them. That's just one set of photos though. There will be others that show a clock meeting a watch where the watch has 20 years on it while the watch only has 10 years. And so on. You can fill in the rest using your own imagination.

The ones that were moving fast early on have slowed to a near halt now

This language seems to assume absolute speeds. If you want to prove your interpretation, you can’t beg it up front. Only relative to this cosmological coordinate system do inertial things slow down over time, and I can assign such coordinates to any preferred event in spacetime, meaning that frame references are still necessary.

I assume nothing of the kind. It's about looking at the options as to what may be the case, and all options need to be covered. If the clocks are stationary and the watches are moving at 0.866c, then the watches will tick half as often as the clocks, but if the watches are stationary and the clocks are moving at 0.866c, then the watches will tick twice as often as the clocks, and if the clocks and watches are moving at the same speed as each other, then they will tick at the same rate as each other too. When you compare them as they pass each other, you will see those timing distances and will be able to tell a lot about what their absolute speeds must be (with the complication that you need to measure it in three dimensions and not just one, so you need to compare clocks passing each other in different directions to get the full picture.

When you compare that set of watches with one set of miniwatches though, which ones are behind with their times and were accelerated?

Acceleration is absolute. There is no question about which ones have done this.

Both the watches and the miniwatches have accelerated, but the clocks haven't. And when we're considering the action that only involves the watches and miniwatches, only the miniwatches have accelerated. In the first case we have the watches accelerate away from the clocks and tick more slowly as a consequence. In the second case we have one set of miniwatches accelerate away from the watches and tick more quickly as a consequence. And we have conformation of this by the fact that when we compare neighbouring miniwatches and comoving clocks, they are ticking at the same rate as each other. So, if the watches were accelerated and ticked more slowly as a result, then the miniwatches were decelerated and ticked more quickly as a result. (The "if" and "then" in that are important because it could be that the watches were decelerated and the miniwatches were accelerated, but you'd see the difference between those two possibilities by comparing the times on watches and miniwatches when they pass each other. The ones with more time recorded on them must have been decelerated.

You say that I assumed absolute speeds, but these are dictated by the twins paradox: if you don't have absolute speeds, then accelerating the watches and decelerating the miniwatches won't change their ticking rates at all, so whenever any of these timers pass other timers they would all have to read the same time. Or, if you're relying on some kind of magic with the accelerations to govern the timings, then the deceleration of the miniwatches would have to be an acceleration too and they would be left ticking slower than the watches, which would lead to clocks and miniwatches sitting side by side with one ticking at four times the rate of the other.

Sorry, but I cannot parse what you’re trying to convey. It sounds like an empirical result claimed incompatible with STR, but I cannot follow it. What is a ‘same system’ as opposed to a different system? No systems were defined.

The system is the universe in which these clocks are operating. Case 1 is what happens in relation to the clocks and watches. Case 2 is what happens in relation to the watches and miniwatches, but we're particularly interested in the miniwatches sent out in such a way that they end up sitting at rest relative to the nearby clocks. In case 1 we have accelerated watches which tick half as fast as the clocks after that acceleration. In case 2 we have accelerated miniwatches which tick twice as fast as the watches after their acceleration away from those watches. That means we have two cases of timers being accelerated which STR predicts will tick more slowly as a result of the acceleration, and yet in the second case the opposite happens: we instead see them behave in the way that LET predicts.

But the miniwatch will forever be slow by time T then relative to the clock in its presence.

Given the ten-second delay between the two accelerations, we can ignore that tiny difference in the timings a year later, but yes, there will be a slight lag.

That’s all I got from your description. STR doesn’t predict anything different, but I think there was more to it.
Please be specific about when things happen and what change of speed is done.

I was specific, but it takes time for people to take the details in with something like this and understand what's going on well enough to be able to recognise the point of it all. That's why it's so hard to get anywhere discussing this when 99.99% of people don't want to know what it reveals and would rather just say it's wrong without understanding it.

Normally when you run a twins paradox, you can't get a definitive answer as to which clock might be ticking faster than another clock that moves past it, but with expanding space we can because it enables us to separate clocks and know that any that are at rest, if there is such a thing as at rest, will display the same time on them when we bring them together, whereas if one is moving and another is at rest, then when we bring those together (with apparently identical accelerations), the one with the higher absolute speed will have recorded less time than the other. And if there are no absolute speeds, then none of them can have recorded different amounts of time passing because they were all created at the same time and none of them could be ticking slow, but the twins paradox bans that result because three of the clocks can pass each other in the manner, A passes B, B passes C, then C passes A, and if they were all ticking at the same rate then timing A (between clock A's encounters with B and C) will be equal to timings B plus C (their timings being the time between their encounters with the other two clocks), but the twins paradox demands that timing A > B+C, and as soon as you have A > B+C, you have either clock B or C ticking at a lower rate than clock A because of its higher absolute speed. In normal cases, you can't tell which clocks have higher or lower absolute speeds, but in this case with the expanding universe, you can: you can see it whenever clocks pass each other because they weren't separated by movement through space, but by expansion of space, and the latter does not affect their relative ticking rates, whereas the former does. I never start from the assumption that absolute speeds exist: their existence is forced by the twins paradox. People then deny that the twins paradox reveals that, even though it does, and they do this with the feeble excuse that you can't tell which clocks are moving faster or slower than which, but in these thought experiments with expanding space, you can tell that.

[post length limit, so only half way here...]

45

New Theories / Re: Does this experiment disprove relativity?

« on: 30/05/2021 02:00:28 »

STR covers the special case of Minkkowskian spacetime. With the exception of physical singularities, the universe is Minkowskian only locally, and the theory does not assert otherwise.

The whole point though is that it doesn't even apply locally in an expanding universe because an expanding universe forces there to be absolute speeds of motion at every locality, including any in which there is no expansion. So STR is gone and needs a replacement. LET continues to fit the facts though, so which is the better of the two theories? We have made progress by eliminating STR from the inquiry.

STR never claims to cover the general case, and yet you never seem to rag on GR which does. Is your case so pathetic that the only way you can bring it down is suggest out that the universe as a whole obviously has gravity in it when STR asserts that it does not?

Pathetic? Showing that STR doesn't work in this universe is the very opposite of pathetic. It's clinging to STR after it's been shown not to fit this universe that would be pathetic. In science you make progress by looking to see what can be ruled out and then you look at the ramifications. The time dimension has gone too, replaced by absolute time, so what does that do for GTR? But that's a discussion for another thread.

STR in fact makes no metaphysical assumptions or conclusions, and all your arguments seem to be based on metaphysical assumptions, not empirical ones.

You've got that entirely the wrong way round. STR's is supposedly just it's two postulates, but they're so ambiguous that they also describe LET if you interpret them in a the way that doesn't result in contradictions. That's why STR's additional dogma is so important for distinguishing it from LET (while Einstein and others were absolutely clear that it is not LET): STR it denies the existence of absolute time and absolute speeds of motion, and in doing so it is making metaphysical assumptions and conclusions.

So if you with to continue foaming on about STR being wrong, be a little explicit about what observations you think it predicts and what actually will be observed. Our little thought experiment has gravity and dark energy removed, so it is actually Minkowskian as a whole. STR would cover such a simplified universe, so we can refer to that example if you wish. But the real universe has gravity and such, making GR the applicable theory.

Who is foaming? A person defending broken theories or a person who has shown them to be broken? Our little thought experiment shows that in an expanding universe it would be possible to measure absolute speeds if you create clocks early on, send them out in different directions and then compare their times to see how they've ticked at different rates. That clearly would work if it had been done. Something like it can still be done now though: we don't need to go back to the big bang to do an experiment like it because any part of space that's expanding today will provide the same kind of opportunity, and that works in a universe with or without gravity in it. At a single locality, we can see that the same apparatus moving through that place at different speeds but otherwise set up identically from the point of view of the observer travelling with it must produce different results that would reveal a different absolute speeds of motion for the two sets of apparatus if that space is expanding. That's a radical breakthrough, and making radical breakthroughs of that kind is not foaming. Foaming is reserved for the people who resist the big advances when they're made.

The scientist can only read the clocks once when they pass by him. And the accelerated ones will be behind, exactly as STR predicts.

Are you sure? We have a clock and a watch sitting near each other which the scientist look at and travel to and fro between them to confirm what they're doing: one of them has registered millions of years less time passing than the other, and other scientists looking at clocks and watches throughout the universe are finding the same thing and sending their findings to each other. The ones that were moving fast early on have slowed to a near halt now, but they still lag behind with their timings. As for which were accelerated, we can have the watches send out miniwatches in the same way and have set D of miniwatches accelerated until they are at rest with the clocks. When you compare the clocks with the watches, which ones are behind with their times and were accelerated. Let's say that the watches are behind with their timings because they were accelerated. When you compare that set of watches with one set of miniwatches though, which ones are behind with their times and were accelerated? STR can't handle that precisely because both these cases can happen in the same system, and if in the first case you have the watches recording less time than the clocks after being accelerated away from them, in the second case you will have the miniwatches record more time than the watches after being accelerated away from the watches: the accelerated ones end up ticking faster in this second case. That result is fully compatible with LET, but not with STR.

Then suggest an empirical test in a universe without gravity and such that STR predicts incorrectly. Can’t do that?

That's precisely what I set out in my paper: a test which would show two identical sets of apparatus set up identically but with them moving relative to each other and where they produce different measurements due to their different absolute speeds of motion. Gravity or the lack of it wouldn't change the results. You can see from the other thought experiment that expanding space provides ways to pin down absolute speeds, and all I did was convert that approach to an experiment that could be done today without needing to set things up in the early days of the universe.

But STR doesn’t make any philosophical assertions. It’s all empirical.

It absolutely does: it asserts that there's no absolute time and that absolute speeds of motion don't exist. But mathematics says otherwise, and so does our expanding universe. STR has always been bad philosophy dressed up as science.

So you’re asserting physics is locally measurably different at different potentials? You’d notice time slowing? Seriously? How about at speed then?  If I move at .99c, will I notice everything moving slow? Just wondering where you stand on this.

What I'm saying is that nothing that's going on out there is incompatible with absolute time. It could be measured locally if you know how fast you're moving and how deep you are in the collective gravity wells that can influence the place where you are. You would never notice time slowing when time never slows: if you move at 0.99c you will have your functionality slowed down and you'll notice everything else happening fast (after adjusting for Doppler shift).

You misunderstand. I’m talking about time as measured by clocks at Earth potential and a different potential (neither at zero potential) of the distant observer. Both are stationary relative to the comoving coordinate system. We’re both measuring the ‘absolute’ speed of some mutually visible object, and getting different numbers because our clocks (neither of which has ever accelerated) tick at different rates. Clearly speed is relative if we’re getting different answers. Where’s the absolute clock that measures the time it takes the object to go distance X?

There doesn't have to be an absolute clock to measure that. There only needs to be absolute time to govern it, and while absolute time can be referred to as a clock of a kind, that doesn't guarantee that anyone can ever read it or determine exactly how fast it ticks. But if you assume that the functionality of both your well-separated observers have clocks that are ticking at the same rate as each other due to their similarly low speed and similar depth in the local collective gravity wells (i.e. the ones in the universe detectable from there), they will not get different speed measurements for an object half way between them. For them to get different answers, they would either have to be moving at different absolute speeds (which they could measure by using my experiment) or they would be at different depths in gravity wells (which they could assess by measuring the amount of material affecting them gravitationally and the degree to which it is doing so). If they adjust for both of those, they should agree on the speed of the object. If you still have a difference in the measurements after that though, then something else must be slowing one of the observers, and that could potentially result from additional slowing depending on how fast the local space fabric is moving through some medium external to the universe.

Without an absolute clock, the universe would fall apart through event-meshing failures in an instant.

I would just have said that absolute speeds are meaningless without such a clock, but if you want the universe to fall apart due to your assertions, who am I to argue?

If one object could take a shorter time-length path into the future than another, they would be incapable of meeting up again with different times on their clocks because when one arrives at the meeting point, the other would not be able to keep the appointment as it would be late in arriving there, even though it has to pass through that same spacetime location. That's not quite "falling apart", but it's a reasonable description of the result. The only way they can actually meet up again with different times on their clocks is if one of them has been ticking slow under the governance of absolute time.

express it as a proportion of c.

Light doesn’t move at c in your absolute universe. It only moves at c at zero potential. This has been demonstrated. Relativity would say that it empirically moves at c ‘here’, using local rulers and clocks, but at least one of those is wrong in your interpretation.

As I've said before, there's absolute speed and there's absolute speed. It's the same with the speed of light: there's the speed of light and the speed of light, and they can differ because they're not the same thing. Where the "speed of light" is lower than the actual speed of light, "absolute speeds" will be higher than the actual absolute speeds. When you make a measurement of absolute speed using my experiment, you're using the "speed of light" and you're calculating "absolute speeds" accordingly. If you want absolute absolute speeds then you need to know what the absolute speed of light is and then adjust for that accordingly. What matters for the sake of this conversation is the speed of objects relative to the local speed of light, and once you have that, you can then measure the one-way speeds of light in different directions relative to the apparatus while always being fully aware that those are not the same thing as absolute absolute speeds. STR doesn't even allow for these "absolute speeds" that are proportions of the local speed of light, so you're just taking things off on an unnecessary diversion in an attempt to muddy the waters.

There are two key things that matter here. (1) If accelerated watches tick slower than unaccelerated clocks while accelerated miniwatches (that are comoving with clocks from moments after their creation having been accelerated and then decelerated a moment later) are ticking more quickly than watches, then STR is making incorrect predictions about the result either of the first acceleration or the second acceleration. (2) If two sets of identical apparatus set up the same way at the same location but moving at a different speeds don't produce a null result like the MMX, STR is making incorrect predictions, while if the local space is expanding, there cannot be a null result. Nitpicking about what exactly absolute speeds are is a sideshow: we have them regardless.

46

New Theories / Re: Does this experiment disprove relativity?

« on: 27/05/2021 23:20:56 »

STR makes no mention of a cosmological frame or peculiar velocity, and you know this

The point is though that STR is not compatible with this universe. There are clearly absolute speeds because things are slowing down until they're practically at rest, so STR cannot even apply locally. It denies the very idea of there being such a thing as at rest.

Agree, the unaccelerated clocks will always show more time than the accelerated ones. Just not much.

If the clocks were moving and one set of the watches were then decelerated when they were sent out, those decelerated watches will be the ones with the most time displayed on them, but you would call them accelerated. Their timings would reveal what actually happened to them.

My example had 8 months difference after all 3 clocks met after 13 billion years. Even less if they’re ejected before the one year mark. The longer you wait to eject them, the longer they take to slow down.

It's a thought experiment in which we could add a scientist who reads the times on the clocks without having to wait billions of years. The results would show up within seconds of the clocks and watches being created and sent out because some of them would be ticking half as often as others, and it would take a long time for that difference to reduce.

The experiment you describe at the end of your post would take many millions of years, when the thing it is trying to detect is already known and readily measured.

It wouldn't take anything like that long to do the experiment. A month would be sufficient to measure the difference.

Ah, It’s a win/lose thing with you. I kinda suspected. Science isn't about winning. It's about making useful predictions. What useful prediction does your philosophy make?

It's about winning an argument. The point is that this universe clearly has to have absolute speeds of motion in it, whereas STR denies them. You want to have STR in this universe, but you can't logically have that. And then you misuse the word philosophy by implying that your position isn't philosophical while mine is. Science is very much philosophy, but the relevant distinction here is between good philosophy and bad philosophy, and when it tolerates contradictions it becomes the latter. I have described an experiment that could be carried out in the real universe in the not-too-distant future which could pin down the absolute speed of motion of the apparatus and lead to correct measurement of the one-way speed of light relative to it, and you think that has nothing to do with useful predictions while you continue to back a disproved theory. Two sets of the same apparatus being set up and run in the exact same manner but producing different results due to their different absolute speeds of travel is something that LET predicts but STR does not predict. That is really big.

This has been known since Hubble’s time. You’re just now getting on that bandwagon?

Clearly that is not the case, because STR is still being backed by everyone in physics and they're refusing to accept that it's been blown out of the water. Soon they'll all be playing the same game, making out that they always knew STR was wrong and never intended anyone to think it applied to the real universe, but just look back at the history of abuse of people who've objected to STR here and everywhere else by boorish thugs insisting that STR is right and that the objectors are crackpots. That's where the scandal is, quite apart from systematically miseducating the public in a manner that's totally unethical.

It fails to order all events (such as those inside black holes), and times are relative to Earth time, which would not be agreed upon by said non-communicating distant observer.

That distant observer would simply convert between the two times and adjust for minor accelerations, so it's not an issue. But the events in black holes fit with it perfectly: you simply use a theory that makes incorrect predictions about what's going on inside black holes, and that's what creates problems for you as you imagine that stopped clocks continue to tick and that their proper time never runs slow.

One could measure time relative to a clock at the average gravitational potential (which isn’t constant over time), but then some clocks would be dilated faster, not slower. Without an absolute clock, there are not absolute speeds.

Without an absolute clock, the universe would fall apart through event-meshing failures in an instant. But absolute speeds could be pinned down in the way I spelt out even without caring about absolute time as it's sufficient to compare those absolute speeds with light in the local space and express it as a proportion of c.

So, we have a theoretical method for pinning down absolute speed regardless

We have a much more practical method than a mere thought experiment.

It isn't just a thought experiment: it could be carried out for real, and within this century.

Look at the web. Our peculiar velocity is around 390 km/sec, much slower than it was when the T-rex was around.

What's stopping you from just admitting that STR is a disproved theory (in that it's incompatible with this universe)? You're almost there now.

47

New Theories / Re: Does this experiment disprove relativity?

« on: 26/05/2021 00:46:33 »

The physics community calls it peculiar velocity. If it makes you happy to call it absolute speed, go for it.

For the content of the universe to slow to that peculiar velocity or absolute speed automatically rejects STR. If the sets A, B and C all end up at rest relative to each other, some have lost more speed than others, and the ones that have lost the most speed will have clocks with the least time recorded on them. The difference would show, and they'd all end up practically at rest too.

but you've missed something important: they still have their initial speeds of motion through space, and if we go back to an earlier time when they are still able to pass each other, set A watches will continue to pass set B watches at the same relative speed as they did early on

No they don’t. Their peculiar velocities drop quickly, as I’ve pointed out in prior posts.

I see it now. If I roll a ball along an expanding track where the track expands at a particular point - let's make it telescopic - the ball runs up to the place where the expansion occurs and it's going at a certain rate relative to the track, then it moves onto the part that's coming out from inside and it's now moving at a lower speed relative to the part of the track it's gone onto, so its speed relative to that has gone down. So, if that's the mechanism, then with an expanding track all balls rolling along it will end up at rest relative to the local track. So, the content of expanding space (ignoring radiation) will end up close to being at rest, and that means that when a particle in a particle accelerator is made to move at 0.99c relative to us, it really is moving close to the speed of light and there is no possibility that we are the ones moving at close to the speed of light while that particle is at rest.

The problem here is that this already rules out STR. For STR to be viable, that slowing down of material until it's all close to being at rest simply could not happen. The set A and set B watches have slowed down and ended up at rest relative to the clocks, or alternatively, if the set A watches were stationary to begin with, then the clocks and set B watches have slowed down instead with the set B watches slowing most. In these two rival cases, there would be different timing differences which would tell you which ones were closest to being at rest initially. They might now be essentially at rest and no longer passing each other, but you could still find out what the timing differences are by comparing different timers near to each other.

for all those ancient speeds to have been lost while the clocks are still able to pass each other, they would have to have slowed to a lower absolute speed, all homing in on being at rest.

I perhaps cannot convince you of this, but your mistake seems to be applying Newtons laws of inertial motion to a non inertial coordinate system. How do you defend this assertion?

I didn't think that matter would slow down in expanding space, but I win both ways because if it does, it still reveals that there are absolute speeds, so it never bothered me whether they slow down or not - I'm happy with it either way, and now it looks as if they do slow down, which is absolutely fine with me. Going back to the telescopic track, a ball sitting on the track and not running along it will remain at rest relative to the track. A ball running along the track will slow down and end up almost at rest too. With matter in expanding space doing the same thing, that puts almost all of it almost at rest, apart from the small amount being jetted out of quasars and the like at relativistic speed.

I'm quite happy now to go accept that things slow down in expanding space - you've helped resolve that for me. The experiment reveals absolute speed by reducing the speed of stuff closer and closer to absolute rest in the local space fabric, so we still reveal absolute speeds approximately, and with the timers in the thought experiment we could narrow it down further by looking at which clocks have recorded the most time passing, because those are the ones closest to being completely stationary as the started out that way.

So, we have a theoretical method for pinning down absolute speed regardless, and it shows them in two different ways: the timing differences and the slowing of most matter to rest. The next step is to exploit the ongoing expansion of space to measure its local expansion rate, and, if it is expanding here, to use that to pin down the absolute speed of the measuring apparatus and then use the result to measure the one-way speed of light relative to the apparatus.

By putting two clocks a certain distance apart and allowing space to expand between them, but in this case we aren't moving the clocks relative to each other, so we don't need to care about their speed through space being reduced by by the expansion. If they're both at rest to begin with, they remain at rest at the end. If they're both moving at high speed to the left to begin with, they're still both moving at high speed to the left when it ends, and if they've lost a tiny amount of that, it doesn't matter: they will both lose exactly the same amount as each other through that process. If the clocks are at rest in space, they will retain their synchronisation (which was originally set by having a comoving observer sene out a signal from half way between them - their signals at the end of the experiment will reach the central observer simultaneously). If the clocks are moving to the left at high speed, they both have to send a signal an extra distance across the added space between them back to the observer at the midpoint between them, and that signal crosses that extra distance in opposite directions with one taking longer to do so than the other, leading to them not reaching the observer simultaneously. That allows their absolute speed to be measured, and if it comes out as non-zero, we can then use that information to measure a one-way speed of light relative to the clocks which is not c. If it doesn't come out as non-zero, then either there is no local expansion or the apparatus was at rest, in which case we can redo the experiment after accelerating the apparatus to a different speed, at which point we will either prove that there is no local expansion (though we'd have to do this in multiple directions to be sure of that), or we would then be able to measure a non-zero one-way speed of light relative to the apparatus with it moving at its new speed.

48

New Theories / Re: Does this experiment disprove relativity?

« on: 22/05/2021 22:53:42 »

Yes, per RoS, a rigid rotating cylinder will be twisted relative to a frame in which it has linear motion along its axis of rotation, which is not immediately intuitive.

I should add that if you're travelling with it you won't be able to measure the twisting due to Doppler-shift on the light coming from the two ends, and the atoms in the shaft are "fooled" in the same way with their forces applying to the ones around them, still "thinking" that they're the same distance away from their neighbours regardless of the amount or lack of twist.

There is no space at the big bang, so no concept of speed. The watches will just be right by some other clock going in the same direction, and thus none of them will have any peculiar velocity.
So let’s change it just a tiny bit and wait one second.

At the start of an earlier paragraph I said "Imagine lots of clocks being made immediately after the big bang". That word "after" indicates a delay before the clock creation that could be as little as a second, but we could give it a year or more to put some space between all the clocks: if our set A and B watches are sent out at relativistic speed it's sufficient for the clocks to be created early on. We could also just have trillions of clocks created at that moment and sent off in random directions at random speeds. Some of them can later be classed as set A watches, set B watches and set C (clocks). If we keep that universe sufficiently empty, the clocks will soon be far enough apart for their gravitational pull on each other to be irrelevant, so they won't be pulled off course and won't clump together.

This is what I mean by its speed (relative to the cosmological frame) degrading over time. ... Nothing can have retained high speed from long ago.

Well, if that second statement was correct, you'd have identified another way of pinning down absolute speed in an expanding universe because all the clocks would automatically slow down until they're at rest. You would eventually reach a point where the clocks are so spread out that none of them can pass each other any more as they aren't able to close the gaps faster than the spaces between them are expanding, but you've missed something important: they still have their initial speeds of motion through space, and if we go back to an earlier time when they are still able to pass each other, set A watches will continue to pass set B watches at the same relative speed as they did early on: that speed through space does not degrade. The result is that we can continue to have an A, B and C clock carry out a twins paradox experiment at any time up until clocks can no longer meet, and those twins paradox experiments can be of very short duration.

So any object today with significant peculiar velocity has to have been accelerated somewhat recently. Nothing can have retained high speed from long ago.

This too makes it clear that you've miscalculated: for all those ancient speeds to have been lost while the clocks are still able to pass each other, they would have to have slowed to a lower absolute speed, all homing in on being at rest. That won't actually happen, but if it did you would have found another way to pin down absolute speeds. In reality the speeds are maintained and the differences in the times on passing clocks reveals their absolute speeds (or one component of them - you still need it for another two dimensions before you have the correct figure for it, but you'd get that from cases of clocks passing each other in other directions).

If they were ejected say one second after the big bang, then yes, they’d meet clocks but the time difference will be off by less than a second. It was moving at a significant speed for such a very short time and had no real time to accumulate any serious dilation.

After 14 billion years there would still be watches passing clocks at the same relative speed as was happening when the universe was two seconds old, (assuming no collisions or slowing from dust, though in this thought experiment we can use infinitesimally small clocks and we can create and set them moving apart after a year after the big bang.) With set A watches moving at 0.866c relative to the clocks, and set B watches doing the same in the opposite direction and with those relative speeds always being maintained at moments where they're passing each other, we will have clocks registering 14 billion years passing while the watches passing them have only counted up 7 billion years if the clocks are at rest in space. If we have set A watches at rest instead, then they will have registered 14 billion years passing when they pass clocks that have at that moment registered 7 billion years passing, and when set  A watches pass set B watches with the As registering 14 billion years, the Bs will only have registered 2 billion years passing. If you look at our universe today it should be obvious that watches moving at 0.866c today would still be passing clocks here if enough were created at the start for them to be sufficiently well distributed, and they would not have lost any of that relative speed to the expansion of space.

But suppose I'm wrong. Light loses energy to expansion and gets red shifted - it doesn't slow down, but it loses energy. Does matter lose energy in the same way or does it slow down. You can't red shift matter by spreading it out as it will continue to pull back to its preferred length in a way that light doesn't do, but how could it slow down by being stretched if it keeps pulling back to the original length? If it's at rest and is stretched, it will pull back together without changing its speed, so it can't be losing energy to the expansion. That means the expansion has to do work. Well, that's a nice spinoff issue to explore.

For now though, let's just think down a path where there is slowing of objects caused by expansion. (I don't think there will be, but I can't rule out the possibility, so lets work to the premise that there is such slowing.) The watches would all slow down closer to being at rest, allowing us to pin absolute speeds down to a reduced range just by doing that, but set A or B or both would also have spent a considerable amount of their past moving at high relativistic speed, leading to them recording a lot less time passing than the clocks. They may be passing the clocks slowly after 14 billion years, but their timings could still differ by millions of years (or tens or hundreds of millions of years) rather than billions, but even in the worst case scenario that would still reveal extremely precise information about their absolute speeds, so the method would work regardless. What we need to do now is carry out an equivalent experiment in a region of expanding space today, and I've already shown how that could be done. (If there is no local expansion, then there would need to be plate boundaries between galaxies where the expansion happens, and while that used to be what physicists thought was happening, they later ruled it out and currently believe that the expansion is happening smoothly everywhere [though not necessarily uniformly].)

49

New Theories / Does this experiment disprove relativity?

« on: 22/05/2021 06:41:42 »

Mod edit: Topic split off Can you measure the one way speed of light without synchronised clocks?
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=82170

Imagine lots of clocks being made immediately after the big bang which are then separated from each other by the expansion of space, leaving us with a universe full of clocks rather than galaxies, but all spread out through space evenly. We could take any pair of these clocks and accelerate them towards each other with equal force, and when they meet up they would both agree about what the time is. But that would only apply if the clocks were all at rest in the expanding space. What happens if they were all moving through space at high speed in the same direction? Well, in some cases when you bring two of these clocks together, you’ll be accelerating one and decelerating the other, so they will not agree on the time when they meet up. If those clocks existed, this would provide us with a means to pin down the absolute speeds of motion of the clocks, and once we have those, measuring the one-way speed of light relative to a host of different types of apparatus (and knowing that you're getting the correct answer) becomes trivial..

(We can’t go back to the big bang to place lots of clocks there to do that experiment for real, but space is still expanding, and it’s doing that here. This means that we should be able to carry out essentially the same experiment right here and now, as I set out recently elsewhere.)

If you’re having difficulty understanding why the clocks in some cases would have to go out of sync when you bring them together, this must happen in order to conform to the rules of the twins paradox. Imagine that when the clocks are created right back at the time of the big bang, they all send out watches in two opposite directions. Set A of these watches are all moving in the same direction as each other and at the same speed, while set B of watches were sent out at the same speed but in the opposite direction. Let’s suppose that the clocks are stationary and the watches are moving. If a set A watch meets a set B watch, they will agree with each other about the time, but if any watch meets a clock, the time on the watch will lag behind the time on the clock due to its speed of movement through space. How can I prove that? Well, in a case where a set-A watch passes a clock, then passes a set-B watch later on, and then the set-B watch passes the clock later still, we have the twins paradox experiment being carried out by those three timers. We could have scenarios where the clocks and set-A watches are both ticking at the same rate (which means the clocks aren’t at rest), but the set-B watches would have to be ticking slower than that in order to produce the required result for the twins paradox. Once you understand the necessity for that to happen, you should then be able to see that when clocks/watches pass each other, the amount by which they disagree on the time provides information about their absolute speeds of motion through space. Relativity is cracked wide open by this.

50

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Can you measure the one way speed of light without synchronised clocks?

« on: 22/05/2021 06:23:28 »

It should be fairly easy to calculate the one-way speed of light.  The problem is doing so with any reasonable amount of accuracy.

Here's how I would do it.


SpeedOfLight.gif (9.32 kB . 669x311 - viewed 37798 times)

Light (strong laser) passes through two shaft connected spinning discs, hits a cylindrical (conical) mirror, and is projected onto a wall to record.  Mostly interested in the trailing edge of the light spot.

The shaft will twist if it's aligned with its direction of travel, so the slits won't both be at the top or bottom at the same time as each other. If you imagine two clocks at either end of the shaft with their dials aligned with the discs and with a nanosecond hand going round, the alignment of the apparatus and its speed of travel will affect the synchronisation of the two clocks, so the hands, just like the slits in the discs, will not always both be at the top or bottom at the same time, even if they are when the apparatus is at rest. Move it to the right and the clock (and disc) to the right will lag in its timing compared to the clock (and disc) to the left. This, in combination with length contraction, will always completely mask the differences you're trying to measure.

51

Radio Show & Podcast Feedback / 5 Live Science reviewed on Radio 4

« on: 22/05/2021 05:51:32 »

Radio 4's programme "Feedback" discussed 5 Live Science in yesterday's show: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000w5w8. It was their "Out of Your Comfort Zone feature" in which they invite a couple of radio listeners to listen to a show they don't normally hear, and they liked it. Jump to 11:34 for the item which lasts seven minutes.

52

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How do we determine the value of time dilation?

« on: 15/03/2021 01:51:55 »

David Cooper's discussion is not accepted physics and was split into new-theories topic here:
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=81938.0

The "accepted physics" you talk of is not science. No science forum should be pandering to it.

53

New Theories / Re: Split: Attempts to falsify relativity

« on: 11/03/2021 02:36:56 »

You apparently mean something else by this claim of asymmetry, but you’ve failed to spell it out despite repeated requests. Still waiting.

The evidence of what actually happened is all up there above, so I'll just leave it to tell the story.

Your experiment would not produce the behavior you suggest. Instead, the two objects would accelerate away from each other due to tidal forces from nearby stars and other masses.

The paper deals with precisely that issue and spells out how you can prevent them accelerating apart.

I love how you propose these experiments, safe in the knowledge that they cannot practically be done, and then declare what result will occur despite the lack of actually working out what any theory (LET or relativity) predicts.

I showed that we're close to being able to carry it out, and I spelt out precisely what LET and STR predict. You clearly never bothered to read it with any attention to detail at all, so your glib commentary on it is ill-informed.

Expansion is not a force and does not make object begin to move apart if they’re not already moving apart, and thus cannot play any role in the motion of two relatively stationary objects placed in otherwise empty space.

If that was true, distant galaxies wouldn't be moving away from us at relativistic speeds, never mind accelerating away from us.

54

New Theories / Re: Split: Attempts to falsify relativity

« on: 07/03/2021 04:46:50 »

Time dilation is a geometry thing, not a cause-effect thing. Gravity doesn’t travel, nor does it operate by ‘signals’. I’ve said this before.

Only if you're seeing it through the lens of a theory that treats it as such. Gravity clearly must travel or a black hole's gravity well could not keep changing the length contraction applied to it when it accelerates (as in cases where two of them orbit each other), and those changes propagate outwards at the speed of light. That counts as signals travelling. They cannot get out from a singularity either. But some theories like to account for such things by magic and mistakenly get classed as science.

Any theory that says we are and which makes our clocks tick infinitely slower than some other clock is plain wrong.

Interesting assertion, essentially declaring only your theory to be wrong.

LET doesn't have any clocks ticking infinitely slower than others unless they aren't ticking at all. The theories that are wrong are that ones that have those clocks ticking while ticking infinitely slower than others.

GR has clocks ticking infinitely faster coordinate rates than others, but they’re just coordinate rates, abstract concepts changed effortlessly with a flick of a pencil.

Indeed, and they aren't really ticking. That's the whole point. But you want them to be ticking while ticking infinitely slower than other clocks, and that cannot happen.

Your theory demands that one of these coordinate rates is a physical rate, meaning such infinite rate differences are physical ratios, not just relative only to certain abstract coordinate system and not others. I don’t find this entirely contradictory in itself, but you seem to declare it so here. You seem determined to create rules that sink only your own ship.

I don't see any problem for LET with this at all. If the universe is expanding, absolute time is not tied to any slowed clocks in the universe but is above all that, outside and governing all the action inside. Clocks anywhere in the universe which aren't moving through the space fabric are ticking at rates relative to absolute time which vary depending on how much they're slowed by gravity wells, but they may also tick slow due to other factors which can't be assessed from inside the universe. It all works perfectly well, but you try to make out it doesn't by demanding that there be some clock inside the universe that ticks at the rate of absolute time. Time itself ticks at that rate throughout the universe though: it just isn't a clock that can be read directly.

A valid theory has to be able to run time and advance events if it's to have real causation acting in it.

Your inability to drop that premise makes it a bias.

There's no bias whatsoever in pointing out what reason dictates. No running of causation means no causation. Shifting from science to magic doesn't fix that.

...you are not making any headway with this example you seem to think disproves STR or something. The argument was that something wasn’t symmetrical, but it wasn’t clear what symmetry you think should be there or how STR (or any theory) concludes that the symmetry to which you refer should occur in your scenario.

The asymmetry of probability was merely introduced as a demonstration that there are asymmetries. It shouldn't even have been necessary to bring that in because the case against STR was already disproved in a multitude of ways (the most recent of which even set out an experiment that could be carried out to measure absolute speed in expanding space), but you simply deny them all just as you have again here over the causation issue where you support magic over science, and the big question is why you want to do that. A theory that allows causation to run is infinitely simpler than a theory that doesn't because the former eliminates the latter's dependence on an infinite quantity of luck. A theory with a single aether applying a speed limit to light travelling through space is infinitely simpler than a theory with an infinite number of magical nothings all applying a different speed limit to light at the same time to make it move at all possible speeds from 0 to c relative to the same object. STR is simply bonkers, and yet you have to defend it because the establishment requires you to so that you can wear its robes and status. You allow them to control your thinking, and to shut key parts of it down. You've made a long series of incorrect assertions in this conversation which I've taken apart for you all the way through, and you don't seem to notice that that's happened. You just keep applying rules of broken theories to things and say that "mine" must be broken because it doesn't conform to their broken rules. You insist that a clock can tick infinitely slower than another while continuing to tick, and when you tried to provide examples, you didn't have any that demonstrate it because in all such cases those clocks have actually stopped ticking. Then you say that my rules don't apply to their broken theories because my rules are biased by requiring causation to run as a process in which causes actually cause their effects rather than the effects not being caused by their imagined causes. If effects are not caused by their imagined causes, those imagined causes cannot justifiably be described as causes and there cannot be any causation. Without a running process of causation, the effects cannot be caused by the "causes". Causation has to run if it's to be real, and as soon as you have that running process of causation, you automatically have time running with it. This is one of the most fundamental necessary things in science, but physicists choose magic instead while asserting that they're the ones doing science. How did it get into this mess?

55

New Theories / Re: Was the light speed problem really solved by Einstein in 1905 ?

« on: 07/03/2021 03:46:08 »

Note also that the Silvertooth experiment has been repeated independently:

" A Replication of the Silvettooth Experiment", Doug Marett

Are you sure about that? I read up on his work on that experiment and he debunked it - he found that the apparatus was acting as a thermometer and was merely recording the lab heating up during the day and cooling down at night.

56

New Theories / Re: Split: Attempts to falsify relativity

« on: 04/03/2021 23:47:26 »

It's the word "infinite" in "infinite uniform distribution of matter" that's in question

So LET suggests a bounded model of the universe? Does it have an ‘edge’? I was unaware that it was in denial of the cosmological principle.

You could potentially have it wrap around such that if you could go far enough in one direction you'd return to where you stared from the opposite direction, though you'd have to travel faster than light to overcome the rate of expansion and complete the trip. In such a case, the content would not be infinite. That wouldn't make it behave differently though in terms of the depth in a gravity well, because you'd then have the same material affecting itself over and over again from a distance. The real answer then has to be that distant material loses its ability to affect material that's beyond detectable range due to the rate of expansion between them being too high to pass signals. If that wasn't so, then all our functionality would be halted and we would not exist to observe anything.

So anyway, I asked about the gravitational depth thing, and it turns out that we’re both wrong on the issue. The idea of absolute gravitational potential is not meaningful at all in the geometry of our universe. Neither SR, GR, LET etc describe the geometry of the universe, they only describe the physics.

They don't describe it, but that doesn't mean it isn't meaningful in them. In  a correct theory, there must be an answer to that question which is compatible with that theory. If it can't handle it, it's a dead theory. We see that our clocks are clearly not halted, so we are not at infinite depth in collective gravity wells. Any theory that says we are and which makes our clocks tick infinitely slower than some other clock is plain wrong.

Any theory that runs time and advances events must conform to this approach of analysis if it is to be valid.

Possibly so, but STR doesn’t ‘run’ time or ‘advance’ events.

A valid theory has to be able to run time and advance events if it's to have real causation acting in it. If you don't let the events run under a process of running causation (which is locked to running time), you have no causation at all and replace it with infinite luck instead.

The discussion seems to have gone completely off track. Not one comment pertaining to whatever you think you were trying to demonstrate with A, C and D except some brief thing talking about something ‘forcing’ (frame references absent) the various tick rates.

I simply responded to the points you raised, but I always managed to get some points in taking it back to the issue that matters, and you've mentioned that in your latest post too where you said STR doesn't run time or advance events. If it doesn't advance events, it's a model which completely fails to include causation and relies instead on a beyond-astronomical quantity of magical luck.

57

New Theories / Re: Split: Attempts to falsify relativity

« on: 28/02/2021 07:59:33 »

...a figure that would be meaningless if there was not a uniform distribution of matter as you seem to suggest.

It's the word "infinite" in "infinite uniform distribution of matter" that's in question, plus the issue of whether all of however much there actually is able to affect us here.

...but it seems to rely that gravity is something that travels and that the potential is something that radiates away. Gravity waves do travel like that, but a gravitational field, by definition, is just a description of what is already there.

The gravity waves you get from black holes going round and round each other are the result of their gravity wells having to contract and lengthen in different directions as the black holes change their direction of travel (if that was not the case, you would be able to measure the absolute speed of a black hole or any other massive body simply by looking at which frame its gravity well is not contracted in): the amount of gravity felt from them thus changes, as does the depth in their gravity wells for a clock sitting in space where those waves are passing, and the clock will necessarily change its ticking rate (up and down) as a consequence. Gravity must therefore actively be maintained by the central mass that causes them. If you put these black holes end up far enough away from us that signals from them never reach us, we will necessarily be left at zero depth in their gravity wells.

nothing would have been able to happen to get things into the state it's in now.

This assumes a finite rate for absolute time (a singularity) and a choice of coordinate system in which such singularities necessarily exist. It’s a similar argument to one asserting that nothing can fall into a black hole, which makes it difficult for the guy who’s done so to explain his presence beyond the event horizon. The better answer is to simply use a different coordinate system in which such singularities don’t exist. The failure of one coordinate system to describe a situation doesn’t imply that the situation (falling into a black hole) cannot take place.

I don't see why you're calling a finite rate for absolute time a singularity. As for the black hole business, if everything stops at the event horizon and is later destroyed there through the Hawking radiation process, no one could ever have an opportunity to consider their presence beyond the event horizon - even if the black hole gets larger and the event horizon moves further out, they'll have absolutely no functionality there as their clock will never tick again before they're destroyed by that Hawking radiation process. The idea that they will eventually (in beyond an infinite amount of time of the surroundings of the black hole) make it through and experience being further in than the event horizon is just an old nonsense that comes out of imagining that proper time never runs slow and can therefore run through even if it takes more than an infinite amount of external time for it to do so, and even then it ignores the way the stuff will be destroyed well within that infinite amount of external time.

Any theory that says our time is running infinitely slow compared to that king clock is wrong.

Non-sequitur, which is good news for you, else your theory is wrong.

Wrong on both points. If an infinite amount of time has to run on one clock before another clock can make its next tick, that other clock can never make its next tick. For our clock to tick at all, something would have to change to enable it to do so, and that would necessarily involve it no longer ticking infinitely slow compared to that king clock. Given that time does actually run here, it is manifestly not running infinitely slow compared to any other clock.

If our time is running infinitely slow relative to a clock that runs infinitely fast relative to us, that’s just a circular relation, not something necessarily wrong.

It's inherently wrong.

Again, I can bring up the clock at the black hole event horizon to illustrate that. That clock runs at an infinitely slow coordinate rate, but that doesn’t affect the guy falling in, who notices nothing amiss as he crosses over. The conclusion that the theory is wrong just doesn’t follow, and hence I’m not asserting that your theory is necessarily wrong just because of this relation.

It isn't a valid illustration. If you're discussing a situation in which light can cross the event horizon inwards but not outwards, then you could nearly hold a clock at the event horizon (you couldn't in practice as it would be stripped apart - the wire would disintegrate, but let's use magic to hold it there) - if it was exactly there, it would stop ticking, but then you have it not ticking at all while another clock ticks infinitely faster. That isn't a situation where it's ticking and doing so while another clock ticks infinitely faster. There is no situation in which a clock ticking infinitely slower than another clock can be ticking at all.

If time stops at the horizon of a black hole, how can a black hole orbit anything? Wouldn’t that require anything stuck near the horizon to move large distances in zero time? It simply isn’t a contradiction for one clock to run infinitely faster than another relative to a given coordinate system.

But that's based on a mistake. Time doesn't stop anywhere. Clocks merely stop ticking in certain circumstances. The speed of light simply stops at the event horizon, but it's important to note that it stops relative to the black hole and not relative to space, so there's no restriction on the black hole moving. It looks as if there's a medium involved which is a dark extension of visible matter, with each piece of matter being spread widely across space at ever lower density the further you go from the visible part. The amount of that dark stuff at any location determines the speed of light there, and the speed is relative to that stuff. That also ties in neatly with string theory's fuzzballs.

Mathematics dictates that light is merely hypothesised as moving at c in every direction relative to an object that's at rest in a chosen frame.

Mathematics says no such thing since there is no light in mathematics.

Mathematics deals with all systems of this kind and it provides rules for them which you are breaking.

Reference to light is physics, and the mathematics is only what can be derived from the premises of a physical theory.

Mathematics applies to all things. Mathematics comes from physics (nature, as opposed to physics, the mere study of nature).

SR does not list the premise you quote above, so the mathematical implication of the premise is irrelevant to the theory.

Mathematics rules out things that generate contradictions, and STR generates contradictions. If you're going to ban mathematics from applying here, then your entire ability to make measurements falls apart because you've lost the rules that support them.

You want to bash SR, then use the premise as worded.

If you want to bash a religion, you use mathematics to do so and not the rules of the religion which break the rules of mathematics.

What happens? You've frozen the action, but when you change frame, events unhappen, and when you change back again they rehappen, over and over again.

Your choice of simulation assumes additional premises not even assumed by LET, but only nLET. Lorentz never posited a preferred moment in time. The theories that do are commonly grouped under neo-Lorentz-Ether-Theory.

Nonsense. That simulation simply runs time and reveals the necessary mathematical consequences - that isn't adding anything to LET but is an inherent part of it. Events progress over time and the demo runs through all the options worth considering. Mode 1 prevents any object's proper time running slow, and that model clearly breaks by generating event-meshing failures. The other modes allow some objects' proper time to run slow compared to others, and mode 3 does that in a rational way. Mode 2 fails though as it tries to have its cake and eat it. It allows the action to run slower on one path than another, but then when you change frame, it has to undo some of that action and advance the action instantly for other objects, and serious science cannot accept such a thing happening. Change frame again and instantly you can undo those changes. Changing frame cannot change the underlying reality in such a way because there's no such thing as changing frame in nature: physicists change frame, but the universe never changes frame. This is precisely why no two frames are compatible: they all provide a rival hypothesis as to what the underlying reality is doing, and only one of them can be true.

We’ve been over this before. I know you also assert this 4th premise. You use it to demonstrate an inconsistency in a theory that doesn’t posit it.

Any theory that runs time and advances events must conform to this approach of analysis if it is to be valid. If it can't handle it, it's a dead theory which belongs solely to the realm of magical thinking.

The fact that C and B's ticking rates are dependent on B's ticking rate ...
…
They do depend on B's ticking rate ...

You assert that if B were not there, then the tick rates of C and D (relative to any given frame, presumably the absolute one) would be different?

I haven't made any such assertion.

I put the quotes back that seem to suggest otherwise, but OK, just checking.

Putting them back in merely confirms that they don't suggest otherwise. B shows that something is forcing C and D to tick at particular rates, and it isn't B that forces that. The thing that forces it is the same thing that forces B to tick at particular rates. When you remove B, that thing continues to force C and D to tick at the same rates as they would if B was there.

It could all be going that way (I'm pointing at Polaris) at 10% the speed of light relative to the fabric

No it cannot. The expansion if the universe would be different everywhere if our motion was that way. It’s fine if you allow the universe to expand higher and higher rates in one direction and consistently lower rates in the other, but if you suggest that it should be the same everywhere at a given moment in time, then there’s only one choice of coordinate systems, and relative to that coordinate system, we’re not moving north at .1c.

Well, I doubt that's the case, but if you're sure it is, then you too have disproved STR, so why do you feel the need to go on defending it? You force there to be absolute speeds and thereby destroy STR.

I don't see how that would make the apparent rate of expansion different in different directions.

Then trust those that understand frame translations. I can’t make you learn the mathematics.

The reason I doubt it is simple, but it may be wrong, so perhaps you can tell me where the following breaks. If the content is all moving at 10% the speed of light towards Polaris, all the distant stuff you're using to measure things is moving that way through its local space fabric too at that same speed and in the same direction and it will all adjust to cancel out whatever it is you're trying to do to measure the difference. For measuring the speed at which distant galaxies are receding from us, we simply look at red shift on their light and use cosmic candles. If those cosmic candles are moving towards us through their expanding space at 0.1c (while actually becoming further away from us due to all the expansion between them and us) and we're doing the same thing moving in that same direction through our local expanding piece of space, we'll make the exact same measurements of them as if they and we aren't moving at 0.1c, but at zero c. The result would be an identical measurement, and the same applies to any other direction of travel, including the opposite one. So far as I can see, everything adjusts to hide the difference.

Edit: Length contraction has an role though with that last bit in that if all the content was moving at 0.1c and the actual expansion was even, then in the direction all the material's moving in (and the opposite way), everything would look more spaced out, as if the expansion was faster that way, but that wouldn't happen in a universe where the expansion is reduced in that direction in accordance with length contraction, which could either happen by luck or by there being a causal link between the two things. None of that allows you to pin down your absolute speed from the measurements of apparent expansion though. To pin that down, you'd still have to run my experiment.

58

New Theories / Re: Split: Attempts to falsify relativity

« on: 26/02/2021 05:21:45 »

it is sufficient here to restrict the idea of the absolute frame to the local one in which the speed of light is c relative to the local fabric.
…
The only part of the idea of an absolute frame that matters here is that it supports local absolute speeds relative to the space fabric.

Ohh, I like how you mix absolute and relative in the same sentences. What if the local fabric isn’t stationary (so called aether-wind)? The the light would have a different absolute speed if it was c relative to the moving fabric.

I don't know of any standard name for the speed of things relative to the local space fabric other than the usual one of absolute speed. If you want to coin something better than that without producing some bloated expression which has to be used instead every time, then go ahead and try, but the normal procedure is for someone to use a some expression for the thing they want to discuss (in this case the most commonly used expression for it), and then to clarify its meaning once if necessary, and then for the rest of the discussion it's accepted as meaning that. There's no need for lengthy diversions over it unless it's an attempted filibuster.

Whenever you pick the time of a particular frame, that is a coordinate time and a clock at rest in that frame has its proper time tick out coordinate time.

Not so, since I can have two clocks both stationary relative to the same frame, and they tick at different rates.

Well, I was obviously ignoring gravity and space expansion there.

It's unassailable mathematics. Show where the maths allow otherwise.

It would only be physics if there was an infinite uniform distribution of matter, but clearly there can't be or there would be no movement here at all (or the expansion cuts off the ability of the mass that's beyond range of detection to influence space here): nothing would have been able to happen to get things into the state it's in now.

Told you you wouldn’t like it. No, I don’t have absolute time in my models precisely because such a premise leads to this kind of problem.

I don't see anything to dislike about it - it's a fun idea, but it clearly doesn't fit our universe because that distant infinite stuff, if so much exists, isn't affecting us here.

No clock can be put at zero gravitational potential of course since there’s nowhere in the universe that hasn’t got matter all around it. You need a king clock. “How do you know it’s king? A: It’s the only one that hasn’t got sh1t all around it”.

You can simply calculate on the basis of what's close enough to affect us here - if the light is never going to get here because of the expansion of space between us and that stuff, its no longer has any power to slow our clocks. Any theory that says our time is running infinitely slow compared to that king clock is wrong. This is the kind of thing that allows some incorrect theories to be thrown out.

You still need an arbitrary choice of location to put your clock that measures ‘absolute time’ since picking one at zero gravitational potential leads to the above unworkable results.  Is it Earth then?  Don’t mind light moving at an absolute speed faster than c from here to the moon and back?

The absolute speeds we're dealing with in these experiments are simply expressed as a proportion of the local speed of light. If you want to turn them into a proportion of the unslowed speed of light (the speed light would move at locally if gravity wasn't slowing it), you can do that as a separate exercise.

Light is merely hypothesised as moving at c relative to that object for that frame

Strawman. Try quoting the actual premise.

What I said is 100% correct.

Quote Einstein then, not some children’s textbook.

I'm telling you how frames work in mathematics - not how they're imagined to work in physics where the rules of mathematics are broken. Mathematics dictates that light is merely hypothesised as moving at c in every direction relative to an object that's at rest in a chosen frame. It's the same in the sound case with the page I linked to: there are two frames there which each provide a hypothesis about what is going on in the actual system. One frame's hypothesis is correct because it has the air at rest in it with the sound moving at s in every direction relative to the air, but the other frame's hypothesis is wrong because it has the air moving relative to the frame while the sounds all move at s relative to the frame. http://magicschoolbook.com/science/incompatible-frames.html. Attacking the status of the site it's been put on is not a valid defence. What it shows is correct mathematics giving you two frames based on sound moving through air or magic "nothing", but it can be regarded as representing light moving through space or magic "nothing" equally well (apart from the bubbles not contracting in length - they would only do that if all the forces holding them together were exchanged at the speed of sound too instead of light, but we do see length contraction acting on the distances between bubbles because that's how they actually appear if you use echo location, although a bat would have to travel at a few hundred miles an hour to notice).

So, we have a classical sound-in-air system matching up to the light-in-space case and revealing that they work the same way. If we make ourselves insensitive to the air such that we have no way of detecting it, what happens? Einstein's bat comes along and asserts that there's no air because no one can feel or hear it. But we can see that the bat's wrong: The speed of sound is governed in each frame by a different magic "nothing", and there are an infinite number of these different magic "nothings" all governing it in their own frame instead of just having one magic nothing do that job in one frame. It's actually an infinitely complex medium pretending to be simple. Look at the blue "m"s and the magenta "m"s. Watch them move relative to each other while they each govern the speed of light to make it move at c relative to them in their own frame while allowing every other frame to govern it such that it isn't moving at c relative to them there. We have an infinite number of glorious contradictions disproving the theory at a stroke for all people who respect the rules of mathematics. It shows that if one frame provides a true account of the actual system, all other frames misrepresent that system.

There are other ways of showing up the contradictions that result from this, as shown by the double twins paradox here: http://magicschoolbook.com/science/double-twins-paradox.html. This program has three modes, and the one you should use is mode 2, so make sure you select that mode before you run the action. When the counter gets to 360 or 540, stop the action and change frame using the "-" button (click it once and then use the return/enter key on your keyboard to repeat the action very fast - you probably can't do that on anything without a physical keyboard). What happens? You've frozen the action, but when you change frame, events unhappen, and when you change back again they rehappen, over and over again. Each frame governs the action with a different synchronisation, and they all contradict each other as to what has happened and what hasn't happened yet. If you stop all the action at a single moment in time by one frame, changing frame should result in the behaviour that you see in mode 3 which has a single (absolute) frame governing the unfolding of events. In the real universe, events don't unhappen or rehappen every time you change frame: mode 2 (STR) is for fantasists. (Mode 1 is an alternative STR model which breaks in another way: it's the one that denies that clocks run slow at all, so it has them take shortcuts into the future instead, leading to event-meshing failures.)

You assert that if B were not there, then the tick rates of C and D (relative to any given frame, presumably the absolute one) would be different?

I haven't made any such assertion. B is there. If B wasn't there though, we would still see that C or D (if not both of them) would have to be ticking at a lower rate than A because the ticks we count from C certainly start at the same moment when we start counting the ticks of A, then we certainly stop counting C's ticks at the moment when we start counting D's ticks, and we certainly stop counting D's ticks at the same moment that we stop counting A's ticks, and when we add the counted ticks from C and D together, there are half as many of those as we counted for A.

That seems to be what you’re asserting, but I want to make sure. C and D would tick no differently relative to a given frame if they lacked a momentary traveling companion.

We're simply replacing the A and B twins paradox with an A, C and D clocks paradox, and when we run the two side by side we can see that the accelerations in the A and B paradox can only have one role: to change the ticking rates of clocks by changing their speed of movement.

Can you demonstrate a way to determine the absolute frame from this or some other observation that occurs only when one of C or D happen by chance to actually be going slower?

You can't pin down the absolute frame this way - the only known way to pin it down is to do experiments in expanding space.

If not, then the symmetry is perfectly preserved in my book since empirical physics behaves identically for all random choices.

There are an infinite number of possible frames to choose, but some of them will necessarily have both clocks in a C and D pair are ticking more slowly than their A, which means it is not 50:50 when you compare a randomly chosen A with its randomly chosen C or D.

You think that given an arbitrary reference frame to measure tick rates, that C should have an even shot of being faster or slower than A? Just not true given our laws of physics. That only works (almost works actually) under Galilean relativity and Galilean transforms.

If you try to have as many As tick faster than their C than as there are Cs which tick faster than their A, you'll find that you necessarily have more As tick faster than their D than there are Ds which tick faster than their A. This applies to our actual universe.

Even that symmetry of possibility breaks down though in an expanding universe though.

The above discussion has nothing to do with expansion.

It does, because our universe expands and STR is incompatible with that expansion. Absolute speeds must pop out of the actual universe and some day we'll get experimental results that reveal them. That's why you ought to be doubting STR and testing it to destruction rather than digging in to defend it. The contradictions that it generates have already invalidated it, so why go on clinging to it?

Given observation of the expansion, there’s only one coordinate system (not an inertial frame) where the rate of expansion is the same everywhere at a given time. For some reason, you resist this obvious choice for an absolute foliation of spacetime.

That doesn't tell you how fast the content of space might be moving through space. It could all be going that way (I'm pointing at Polaris) at 10% the speed of light relative to the fabric, and I don't see how that would make the apparent rate of expansion different in different directions. For any content of space that's at rest relative to the fabric, it should look to its observers as if the expansion is even in all directions too. The only disagreement (if none of them has run an experiment that can pin down actual speeds through the fabric) would be on how old the universe is.

59

New Theories / Re: Split: Attempts to falsify relativity

« on: 24/02/2021 04:33:03 »

You're creating some other kind of frame by doing that and it is not an absolute absolute one either

I’m not creating anything. I’m trying to understand what you think you’re creating, and you’re essentially saying.

You're attempting to define an absolute absolute frame, but coming up with something warped instead. The absolute absolute frame doesn't exist in the universe, but the universe exists within it. We don't need to discuss any of that stuff - it is sufficient here to restrict the idea of the absolute frame to the local one in which the speed of light is c relative to the local fabric. It doesn't matter how much you dislike that definition, but it's the one I'm using here and I've spelt out exactly what it means. Given that you don't have a space fabric or absolute frame, you shouldn't be trying to assign alternative definitions to them from the establishment side as the establishment doesn't have any such definitions as it denies them.

You criticize SR by only describing spacetime sufficently local to approximate Minkowskian spacetime, for not being a model of the universe, but then you go on and do the same thing for your idea, which is contradicting yourself.

Not at all. I discuss how the rules work locally, and what they do locally is fully compatible with what they do everywhere else in the universe, unlike with STR which breaks as soon as you have expanding space. The only part of the idea of an absolute frame that matters here is that it supports local absolute speeds relative to the space fabric.

Do you or do you not agree that a premise of absolute time requires an absolute ordering of all events in the entire universe?  If so, you still don’t know what that ordering is, or for that matter, if it corresponds locally to an inertial frame. I can think of some models where it doesn’t.

That's another diversion away from the issue being discussed here,but yes: there's an absolute ordering. If you don't have that, you have contradictions which invalidate the model.

You also are chronically mixing proper time, coordinate time, and absolute time (and associated speed/velocity), to the point where none of your comments are clear, which I think is deliberate on your part since obfuscation seems to be one of your goals.

You're the one trying to obfuscate things here because that's the only way you can hope of hiding what I've revealed. You've introduced all sorts of irrelevant junk to try to make out that things are more complicated than they are. The clocks in any experiment record proper time and when one clock records less of that than another, we see that the proper time of one clock can run slower than the proper time of another, revealing that it is governed by another kind of time: absolute time. Whenever you pick the time of a particular frame, that is a coordinate time and a clock at rest in that frame has its proper time tick out coordinate time. That's all very simple and I don't understand how you're mixing them up, but if you need help with it, you only have to ask and point to the place where you need clarification instead of waving a hand at nothing in particular.

I’ll give you a clue then since you think it doesn’t concern you: Absolute time is infinitely fast (relative to any clock), and thus all absolute velocity is zero. It is easily shown even in Newtonian mechanics that the gravitational potential of an infinite uniform distribution of matter in 3D (or even 2D or 1D) is infinitely negative. The universe’s absolute age is thus infinite regardless of coordinate system of choice, and thus useless for any comparisons.

That is mere philosophy and not physics. You don't even have absolute time in your models, so you're in no position to try to lay the law down about what it does. You could equally say that the universe's age is zero because everything in it is made of waves of energy that move about at the speed of light, and in STR they all have zero-length paths through space and time for all the trips they make, so there is no time at all. But STR is a mere theory, and a horribly broken one, so it tells us nothing about what actual time is doing.

When I refer to absolute speeds here, those are speeds relative to the local space fabric given in proportion to that local speed of light.

That would not be absolute speed, but rather coordinate speed relative to your coordinate system (unspecified) as measured by a clock at some unspecified relative potential. See the difference? I’m willing to talk about coordinate speed, except you refuse to propose a coordinate system, or at least the nature of it even if it cannot be known.

They have been referred to as absolute speeds throughout the history of physics. You don't have them in your models, so again you have no justification for trying to impose your own personal ideas of what absolute speeds are to replace the traditional meanings. Absolute speed has always meant what I use it to mean, so I'm fully entitled to go on using it the way I do. You're merely playing games of avoidance and obfuscation.

Light is merely hypothesised as moving at c relative to that object for that frame

Strawman. Try quoting the actual premise.

What I said is 100% correct. It is a mere hypothesis which you mistake for something more solid than that because you don't respect the rules of mathematics relating to frames. Take a look at this: http://magicschoolbook.com/science/incompatible-frames.html?i=1. The red and green dots represent objects moving at 0.6c relative to each other, while the orange dot (which appears from time to time) represents a sound pulse, and that's there to illustrate the speed that sound moves at relative to the rest of the content. We have a pair of frames of reference here, but we're treating this initially as a case with sound in air rather than light in space. The blue circles are soap bubbles floating in the air (and we're doing this in zero G, so they don't fall - they just reveal what the air around them is doing). The frame on the right shows the air at rest, while the frame on the left has the air moving through it at 0.6s (with s being the speed of sound). It's important to understand how these images are constructed because you have to view the action in the system using only speed-of-sound signals and then correcting for Doppler shift, so we're seeing it more the way a bat would by using echo-location rather than using eyesight, though with all the calculated Doppler shift aspects then removed to provide the "God view" of that frame. This results in us having length contraction too, even in this classical system, so the things moving through a frame at 0.6s have their separations reduced to 0.8x in their direction of travel. Both frames hypothesise what is actually happening in the system. The one on the right gets this right by having the air at rest, while the one on the left gets it wrong by having the air moving and then making the sounds move at a speed far greater than s in one direction relative to the air. Only one frame can represent the action correctly: all others necessarily misrepresent it.

Now, let's remove the air (though not the bubbles - they continue to behave as before) and we'll have the sounds propagate by magic instead (just as light is allowed to moves through the "nothing" that you call space by an undeclared magic). What now governs the speed of sound through the frame on the right is the magical medium of "nothing". In the frame on the right, that magical medium is represented by the blue "m"s. In the frame on the left, it's the magenta "m"s that magically govern the speed of sound instead. I've represented both magical mediums of "nothing" in both frames though to show that they move relative to each other. These magical mediums may have no substance, officially, but they have a key property of governing the speed of sound relative to the frame. This magic nothing is different for every frame of reference, so each frame has its own magic medium to provide this service, and they all move relative to each other and govern the speed of sound such that they each make it move at different speeds relative to the other content of the system from the others, which means they're all contradicting each other. That is the magic that you do instead of physics. Each frame actually describes a different system, and only one of them can be an accurate representation of the real system. The same applies when dealing with light in space.

It refers to all frames, so it's the opposite of meaningless.

Then we cannot communicate, because relative tick rates are very much frame dependent and you did not specify that we were not using relative rates. See the pattern? Specify when you’re using coordinate tick rates and not relative tick rates. Be the physicist for a moment, and not the layman.

You've never struggled with this in the past. You used to be so quick on the uptake. That was why I came back here to post this because you used to be able to fly.

There are only two choices for acceleration in the 1D case: this way or that. One of them slows you down, the other speeds you up. What misfortune of a maths teacher have you had, that he would disagree?

You're still talking about acceleration, but the case in question doesn't involve any acceleration. It's about the probability as to whether a randomly selected clock out of the choice C or D is probably ticking slower than A, and it is.

Relative to A, when the absolute references were used elsewhere in the same description. That’s mixing frames. ‘Obviously’ doesn’t cut it. State the frame reference when you reference more than one in a description. Mixing frames is fine. Doing so without reference is not.

It's a shortcut in a description which a few years ago wouldn't have caused you any difficulty. But then I think you're manufacturing difficulty here on purpose in order to bloat everything and reduce the chance of anyone else reading it.

The fact that C and B's ticking rates are dependent on B's ticking rates is also frame independent.

They don’t depend on B at all. They’d not tick at a different rate (relative to any frame) if B were not there.

(Typo in the bit I wrote: should have been "C and D" rather than C and B.) They do depend on B's ticking rate because they each travel alongside B for a while and tick at exactly the same rate as B while they do so, and they never change that rate of ticking at all - only B changes its ticking rate.

Relative to an unknown arbitrary frame, C and D are not moving in opposite directions, but are probably both moving in a direction similar to A, so acceleration in those directions is bound to result in a faster velocity than A (for both of them). It’s no big surprise that such acceleration in a non-random direction will result in faster speed relative to said unknown arbitrary frame.

Again, acceleration and faster speed is irrelevant: I don't know why you keep dragging it in there. There's a random choice being made between C and D which doesn't change any of the action.

OK, it’s asymmetrical as defined that way. The choice of C and D are not random, but probably both pointed in the direction of motion relative to the unknown frame, so this is to be expected. For the direction relative to the unknown frame to be random, the selected velocity change needs to be made relative to the unknown frame, not relative to A.  If you did that, then the tick rate of your randomly selected C would have a 50/50 shot at being faster or slower than A, again, assuming that A is moving faster than our selected speed difference of C and D.  If A is already nearly stopped (probability zero), then acceleration in any direction will result in a faster speed.

There are two random choices being made. The first is to select a random A out of an infinite number of possible ones, and the next choice is between that A's C and D friends.

This works for any selection of unknown frame, so the symmetry is completely preserved.

The symmetry is not preserved: you can make a billion random choices of which A to use, and more than half of them will lead to A ticking faster than the randomly selected C and D for the chosen A.

So what do you think you’ve demonstrated by this probability upon which we agree? Can you determine the absolute frame by repeated experiment?  You have nobody taking a measurement of anything in your scenario, so probably not.

The point is that while there is a symmetry of possibility, there is not a symmetry of probability. Even that symmetry of possibility breaks down though in an expanding universe though.

60

New Theories / Re: Split: Attempts to falsify relativity

« on: 22/02/2021 05:01:00 »

Because the universe is expanding, so the absolute frame shifts as you move around.

Then it would be a curved frame, not a different frame. There can only be one objective ordering of events in the universe. If you deny that, then you’re pushing something not absolute. If said ordering does not correspond to an inertial frame of reference, so be it.

You're creating some other kind of frame by doing that and it is not an absolute absolute one either, but it's an unnecessary diversion. All that matters here though is that we're tying it to the local space on the basis that the speed of light is c relative to it in every direction (or at least, appears to be c - it could be lower than that, but if so it will be lower in all directions by the same amount and will still be measured as c). When I refer to absolute speeds here, those are speeds relative to the local space fabric given in proportion to that local speed of light.

is the [frame] in which the an object is at rest in if light moves at c in all directions relative to it (or at a reduced speed locally measured as c, if we take into account gravity wells slowing light).

And this of course is a lousy definition since light moves at c relative to the inertial frame in which any object is a rest.  Your definition should not be relative to anything, and I would suggest the wording mentioning the objective ordering of all events. Maybe not. There’s no way to demonstrate that light moves locally at c relative to any such frame, only a subset of such orderings.

But light does not move at c relative to the inertial frame in which any object is at rest. Light is merely hypothesised as moving at c relative to that object for that frame, but light has actual speeds relative to that object in different directions which will only match up to one frame: all other frames misrepresent what's happening in the actual universe. You're failing to make a key distinction due to the way you see everything through the lens of a broken theory which you don't realise is broken. Remember this:-

Imagine two objects moving at 0.5c relative to each other along a straight line. We introduce a pulse of light which moves along the same line at c relative to the first object. The speed of that light is 0.5c or 1.5c relative to the second object (depending on which direction along the line that object is moving in). STR denies that measurement and insists that the correct relative speed for the light and second object is c, but if the relative speed of the light to both objects is c, the two objects cannot be moving at 0.5c relative to each other: their relative speed to each other would have to be zero.

What’s going on here? Well, Einstein bans you from accepting some measurements between light and objects that travel at lower speed than c. He requires you to change frame to make the second object stationary, and only then will he accept the relative speed for the light and that object. In that new frame, the relative speed between the light and the first object is now 1.5c or 0.5c, but again he bans you from accepting that measurement. So, he mixes frames to get the two measurements which he wants to make so that they conform to his theory, and he rejects all measurements that disagree with his ideology. In the course of changing frame, he changes the speed of the light relative to both objects. In doing so and mixing frames, he is making an illegal mathematical move.

That's an illustration of the fundamental mistake that Einstein made and which all his followers keep making. You only believe the measurements that agree with the dogma of the theory, so you systematically reject all the equally reliable measurements which disagree with it. That then leads to you thinking that just by imagining any object to be at rest and selecting the frame in which it is hypothesised to be stationary, you are making the speed of light c in every direction relative to that object, but you aren't making it anything of the kind. You're merely making the hypothesised relative speed c and not the actual speed of the light relative to the object. And when you switch frame, you're using a different hypothesised relative speed of the light relative to the object. Then you then mix the measurements from the different hypothesised cases and present them as if they are compatible. They aren't. Do that with a case involving sound in air and it's obvious that they conflict because you have the air moving relative to itself. Hide the air to make it undetectable, ban faster-than-sound communication, and have magical "nothing" govern the speed of sound instead to make it equivalent to the light in space case and what happens: every time you change frame you change the speed of the sounds relative to the objects in the system, and the speed at which the sounds move relative to themselves, and that's exactly the same mathematically illegal move. When you change the speed of a sound relative to an object, you're no longer describing the same system: you've altered the system and failed to recognise that you have done so. (And of course, you can't alter the real universe, so when you change frame, you merely change the hypothesised speed of light relative to the rest of the system, and only one frame matches up to the reality.)

You can assign any speeds you like and it will remain correct, once you take into account that B moves at the same speed as C (and in the same direction) during one leg of its trip, and then at the same speed and direction as D during the other leg.

I gave an example where the statement was wrong.

You didn't - it didn't conform to the rules which involve it being a twins paradox with B moving away from A and back with C and D's role clearly being to travel with B on different legs of the trip.

So yea, I think I know the scenario you have in mind, but your wording is so inconsistent (mixing absolute and relative references) that it’s not even wrong.

I didn't mix anything - you simply failed to interpret it the way it was intended to be understood. I'd have defined it more tightly if I thought you wouldn't automatically understand it the right way as a one-dimensional equivalent to the 2D circuit version.

C and D are forced to tick at the same rate as B, one on each leg of B's trip, and that forces one of them to tick at a lower rate than A too.

Assuming your additional premise, agree. Assuming (omitted) relative references, the statement is meaningless because tick rates are a frame dependent.

It refers to all frames, so it's the opposite of meaningless.

I’ll have to keep saying things like this because you refuse to state your bias, which is something like: “Premise: There is a preferred ordering of all events relative to which all unqualified temporal statements are measured”.
Without that or something equivalent, the unqualified statements are meaningless. If you make the statement above, it becomes an acknowledged premise, and not an unstated bias.

There's no bias at all in it: you're actually being given a free choice of any frame you like, and no matter how much you might wish to bias it, it will always be the case that either C or D (if not both) is ticking at a lower rate than A. Every time I give you that free choice, you then complain that I'm not only giving you one frame!

To have it tick at a faster rate you have to change frame, but that means changing the speed of a light pulse (travelling through the system along the line all the action takes place on) relative to the clocks, so it's you that mixes frames when you try to have your cake and eat it.

And there’s the bias in all its color. I was wondering when you’d finally word it this way.

It's no bias: it's you making a mathematically illegal move by having that light pulse move relative to itself when you mix two frames.

You seemingly have either zero grasp of the principle of relativity, or you’re deliberately trolling. In the latter case, yes, this is why your threads end up in the lighter-side.

I have full grasp of the principle, and of the mathematical illegality of the frame mixing that you endorse. It is the establishment and its followers who do all the trolling here by violating the fundamentals of mathematics.

In the case with all the action taking place in a straight line, the odds are even (one faster, one slower) except in the case where A is already nearly stationary. Hence my clarifying about the directions from which the choices can be made. The odds are even in a 1D case.

No maths teacher would agree with you there. C is slower than A in more than half of all possible cases. D is slower than A in more than half of all possible cases. The odds cannot be even when you chose between C and D randomly to compare their ticking rate with A. A is probably the one ticking faster than your chosen clock. That is an asymmetry of probability.

See my previous answer: there are more cases in which a random choice will lead to a clock ticking at a lower rate being selected than there are for a higher rate being selected.

You said this about clocks C and D, not about some B going back and forth.  Pick any random direction.  Only in the impossibly improbably case that they go exactly perpendicular (relative to A) to the absolute motion of A will the average between them be as low as half of A.  In every other case, the average of the two is higher.  Try it in any direction. Oh wait, you don’t actually do any mathematics.

I don't know what sort of mess you're making in your head there with things moving perpendicular to other things in a one-dimensional case, but your mess does not make my correct mathematics not mathematics.

because you're making a mathematically illegal move every time you mix frames

Want me to count all the times you mix frames without references?

None. I never mix frames at all. When I give you a free choice of frames to use, I'm not mixing frames. Frame-mixing is an STR failing.

Hence all the meaningless statements above.

There aren't any meaningless ones. You're just trying to warp them because you've lost the argument, so you're employing that tactic to cover it up.

You talk about A having some absolute velocity and then C and D going off in opposite directions, which is a frame change since they’re moving in opposite directions only in one frame, and it isn’t the one you used before.

Obviously that refers to them moving in opposite directions relative to A. That isn't an invitation for you to drag that in as a separate frame and to mix the frames. All you need to do is fit them into the chosen frame appropriately. We're not playing some game here where someone gives instructions to someone about how to make a cake and the other person's job is to try to take every part of every instruction they can twist to mean something that wasn't intended and then to act on that interpretation literally. (E.g. stir it with a spoon, then put it in the oven --> the person following the instructions puts the spoon in the oven instead of the cake.)

It isn’t mathematically illegal, but the references need to be there so the correct transformations can be applied.

Given that we've discussed this exact scenario in the past and there's no possibility of you not recognising it, it's perfectly clear that you're just playing a wrecking role.

If we start with clock A and then pick randomly between clocks C and D, we will probably choose a clock that's ticking at a lower rate than clock A.

No frame reference again.

That's because it's all frames of reference being considered here: the whole lot of them collectively.

The tick rate is frame dependent, so it can’t be relative to all of them at once.

The fact that B ticks half as often as A is frame independent. The fact that C and B's ticking rates are dependent on B's ticking rates is also frame independent. Any frame you choose, and you're getting an infinite number of free choices from all possible frames, if after making your choice you pick randomly between C and D you will probably choose a clock that's ticking at a lower rate than A. No amount of irrelevant objections can overturn that fact.

You're taking a random speed for clock A and choosing randomly between clock C and clock D to compare with it. Do that with a large enough sample and you will choose more cases where clock A is ticking faster than your chosen clock than the opposite.

Assuming your bias, agree, but I’ve agreed to that long ago.
Without the assumption, the statement is meaningless.

There is no bias: giving you a free choice of any frame is the opposite of a bias. That B ticks half as often as A is an established fact agreed on by all observers, and that constrains the possible ticking rates of C and D in a manner which means that a random choice of frame followed by a random choice of C or D will probably lead to you selecting a clock that's ticking slower than A. You're not going to be able to break that.

I presume this is perhaps the 3D case where C and D are random but opposite directions relative to A. You don’t say this, so let me know if I’m wrong about it.

1D. You can do it in a 3D space, of course, but all the action takes place along a single straight line.

The fact that won't be overturned by any tinkering with biases is that there are as many possible cases where clock C is ticking faster than clock A as there are possible cases where clock D is ticking faster than clock A, but there are extra possible cases where clock A is ticking faster than both clock C and clock D. That's the only thing you need to consider to see the asymmetry in the probabilities: in a large enough sample size of cases when you choose a random clock C or D to compare with their clock A, you will more likely choose a clock that's ticking at a lower rate than that clock A. We can discard all the other stuff about this in the discussion about the probabilities as none of them can override this no matter how much they're biased.

You’re saying that given a small relative velocity change in a random direction relative to a fast moving object A, the change will more often than not result in a speed greater than the original speed of A. Yes, that’s true.  I think to make the odds even, you’d have to choose a random absolute direction for your acceleration vector, not a random direction relative to A.

No, I meant precisely what I said. Your 3D speed change scenario is something entirely other.

It’s not asymmetrical.

In my example, it is asymmetrical. For it to be symmetrical it would also have to be the case that that A would probably be ticking slower than your randomly chosen clock (C or D), but that is not also the case.

There’s symmetry to it. Picture a golf ball with a sand grain in each of the pits.  The ball is moving at relativistic speed to our preferred frame and explodes, sending the grains at moderate speed in an even distribution of directions relative only to A. Most of the grains will be going faster relative to the preferred frame, but the line dividing the faster ones from the slower ones will be a neat symmetrical circle covering say 1/4th the area of the golf ball (the area depends on the speed of A and the relative speed at which the grains are ejected). It’s completely symmetrical, not some weird wavy border between the slower ones and the faster ones.

But the dog and cat are pulling opposite ends of the fish, and the fish only has a head at one end. There's no point in bringing in a totally different case and trying to make out that it addresses the issue.