[guest4091]

If you learn to use graphics, the problems are greatly simplified, the solutions more obvious, and less calculation.
For typical uniform motion, a horizontal x axis for object motion, and a vertical ct axis for light motion. Using a light clock with oscillation perpendicular to x, ct equals the total distance light moved inside the clock. If an object moved at c, it would move equal distances on both axes, i.e. at 45 (blue). This restricts object motion from 0 (vertical)  to less than 45. The dark lines are objects, the light lines are for measurements.

The rest frame is U , with its description on the left.
An observer A, at the midpoint of a ship moving at .5 (c=1), is represented by the line 0-At. A measures the distance to a forward mirror as d=1. At t=0 light signals are sent from A, forward and backward. If a mirror was at the back an equal distance d, light would arrive there at event R2 and light would arrive at the front mirror at event R1. For the forward path, light returns to A, event D. Rotating the forward path 180 about the midpoint H shows both trips are equal. If A assumes a pseudo rest frame, then R1 and R2 establishes an axis of simultaneity for A, 0-Ax.
In the U-frame, the ship has contracted to s and the A-clock is running slower than the U-clock by 1/gamma. (1/g=sqrt(.75)=.866)
M is a distance marker in the U frame that is coincident with the event R1.

In the pseudo rest frame A:
Ut for event D is 2gt. Since At=Ut/g, At=2t. If s=d/g, then d=gs=1.
Event R1 occurred at At=d/c=1.
A thinks the return event occurred earlier at event D' which implies R1 and M are closer by the ratio of 2t/2gt=1/g, Based on his clock, A thinks the world outside has contracted by 1/g including his ship.
https://app.box.com/s/1dua6bzj0e4gx4aigrfb7k4pkohpr7nj

[Le Repteux]

The speed of light is also the speed of force

With aether, once a moving laser would emit a light pulse, the laser would progressively leave the place in aether where the pulse had been emitted, and it is at that place that an observer at rest would see the laser beam if it had been pointing at him at emission. This is what happens when we see a plane: we hear it where it was, not where we see it, and in the same token, we don't really see it where it is because it takes time for light to reach us, so if some laser light was sent from the plane to somewhere else than where we are, it would simply miss us. It is so for sound because sound waves go straight line in air after having been emitted, so light waves should behave the same in aether if it exists. But this is not what the inertial frame principle means:  a moving inertial frame can be considered not to be moving, in such a way that light can be considered to travel sideways through space in the light clock mind experiment, so it manifestly doesn't fit with aether. With aether, a laser beam aimed at 90 degree between our two moving cars would miss us if we would travel fast enough or if we were far enough from one another.

I understand what you mean when you say that the speed of light would affect the forces though, but to me, with no doppler effect and no aberration to account for inside the same moving frame, whatever the speed of that frame, the light waves exchanged between two observers at rest inside the frame would always appear to carry the same energy and would always appear to come from the actual position of the source. Of course, the intensity of a wave lessens with distance, so the forces should lessen a bit for bodies moving through aether, but that effect has a lot less impact on energy than frequency, and frequency would not be affected. In my theory on motion here, the frequency of the steps also stays the same while they get longer, thus while the speed increases, but light also loses some intensity while it travels from one particle to the other, and that loss cannot be accounted for by the steps, so I figured it could be attributed to gravitation because it would necessarily escape from the standing wave between the two particles. Here are those steps caused by the limited speed of the information between two bonded particles.

[GoC (OP)]

David,

   Sorry I got busy again. You were correct and I was incorrect about light going 7.461 cell lengths (length between mirrors in this case) in ratio rather than 0.7461 length in one cell. My background is analytical chemistry and Cell length  had a different thought process. And you agreed with my decimal point for the return cell length with your numbers of 0.539. The total length of 7.5 cell lengths for light to travel its cycle. This leaves us with 8.66 cell lengths for the side ways mirror. So we haven't reached the peak of the triangle at 7.5 cell lengths of time.

The speed of light is also the speed of force

With aether, once a moving laser would emit a light pulse, the laser would progressively leave the place in aether where the pulse had been emitted, and it is at that place that an observer at rest would see the laser beam if it had been pointing at him at emission. This is what happens when we see a plane: we hear it where it was, not where we see it, and in the same token, we don't really see it where it is because it takes time for light to reach us, so if some laser light was sent from the plane to somewhere else than where we are, it would simply miss us. It is so for sound because sound waves go straight line in air after having been emitted, so light waves should behave the same in aether if it exists. But this is not what the inertial frame principle means:  a moving inertial frame can be considered not to be moving, in such a way that light can be considered to travel sideways through space in the light clock mind experiment, so it manifestly doesn't fit with aether. With aether, a laser beam aimed at 90 degree between our two moving cars would miss us if we would travel fast enough or if we were far enough from one another.

I understand what you mean when you say that the speed of light would affect the forces though, but to me, with no doppler effect and no aberration to account for inside the same moving frame, whatever the speed of that frame, the light waves exchanged between two observers at rest inside the frame would always appear to carry the same energy and would always appear to come from the actual position of the source. Of course, the intensity of a wave lessens with distance, so the forces should lessen a bit for bodies moving through aether, but that effect has a lot less impact on energy than frequency, and frequency would not be affected. In my theory on motion here, the frequency of the steps also stays the same while they get longer, thus while the speed increases, but light also loses some intensity while it travels from one particle to the other, and that loss cannot be accounted for by the steps, so I figured it could be attributed to gravitation because it would necessarily escape from the standing wave between the two particles. Here are those steps caused by the limited speed of the information between two bonded particles.

Your missing the point of light being independent of the source. In the original Aether where particles were stationary in space without spin your understanding would be correct. But if there is Aether spin of c by the particles relativity has a cause while quantum mechanics has an energy pattern regulating relativity.

In this case energy is independent of mass while mass is the source.

[David Cooper]

The speed of light is also the speed of force

With aether, once a moving laser would emit a light pulse, the laser would progressively leave the place in aether where the pulse had been emitted, and it is at that place that an observer at rest would see the laser beam if it had been pointing at him at emission.

Correct, and a moving observer who is for a moment at the same location as the stationary observer and who is keeping pace with the laser would see the same laser light as coming from where the laser now is rather than where the the light actually came from.

This is what happens when we see a plane: we hear it where it was, not where we see it,

It's worth remembering that if the light from the plane travelled at the speed of sound, you would see the plane further back too.

and in the same token, we don't really see it where it is because it takes time for light to reach us, so if some laser light was sent from the plane to somewhere else than where we are, it would simply miss us.

But to reach us, the laser has to be pointed slightly behind us (although planes aren't really far enough away for that to show up).

It is so for sound because sound waves go straight line in air after having been emitted, so light waves should behave the same in aether if it exists.

If you are moving in the same direction as the plane and at the same speed, you would (if you could somehow eliminate the racket from air rushing past your ears) hear the sound of the plane as coming from where you see the plane rather than from a long way behind it, even though the sound is coming to you from a long way behind where the plane now is.

If a powered "bullet" (one that can maintain speed and direction without being slowed by drag) was sent out from the plane at the speed of sound perpendicular to the direction of travel of the plane while you are moving along parallel to the plane's path and level with it, you can hold a two-layer target for the bullet to pass through (perhaps with the layers several yards apart) - the bullet will make two holes through the target, and when you look through those holes, you will see the plane. It's difficult to set out a really good parallel scenario though as the space fabric doesn't replicate the drag aspect.

But this is not what the inertial frame principle means:  a moving inertial frame can be considered not to be moving, in such a way that light can be considered to travel sideways through space in the light clock mind experiment, so it manifestly doesn't fit with aether. With aether, a laser beam aimed at 90 degree between our two moving cars would miss us if we would travel fast enough or if we were far enough from one another.

No - it would not miss. If the cars are on parallel paths and level with each other, they could be a whole lightyear apart and the laser light sent out from a perpendicular (to the direction of travel of the cars) laser would still hit the other car, as would a bullet sent out from a gun set up with the same alignment as the laser, though the bullet would follow a much more deviated angle than the light and would hit the other car the best part of a million years later. If you think the light has to follow the perpendicular just because the laser is pointing along the perpendicular, you are breaking the laws of nature by changing the momentum of the system.

I understand what you mean when you say that the speed of light would affect the forces though, but to me, with no doppler effect and no aberration to account for inside the same moving frame, whatever the speed of that frame, the light waves exchanged between two observers at rest inside the frame would always appear to carry the same energy and would always appear to come from the actual position of the source.

So why would you want to tinker with the alignment of the laser in my diagrams if you understand that?

Of course, the intensity of a wave lessens with distance, so the forces should lessen a bit for bodies moving through aether, but that effect has a lot less impact on energy than frequency, and frequency would not be affected.

Just as light is focused forwards more strongly and cancels out the difference, so must force be if the square room round a bulb is to retain the right shape for the walls to remain evenly lit. The MMX suggests that matter length-contracts in a manner consistent with forces and light behaving the same way in that regard.

In my theory on motion here[/url], the frequency of the steps also stays the same while they get longer, thus while the speed increases, but light also loses some intensity while it travels from one particle to the other, and that loss cannot be accounted for by the steps, so I figured it could be attributed to gravitation because it would necessarily escape from the standing wave between the two particles. Here are those steps caused by the limited speed of the information between two bonded particles.

I haven't read your theory yet (your links are disabled for some reason, even though one of them is to this forum - perhaps this is related to your low post count and could be part of an anti-spam mechanism), but the light intensity should adjust automatically for the speed of the system through means of the headlights effect, so there shouldn't be any apparent change to account for.

Edit:-

There's an error in what I said here:-

If you are moving in the same direction as the plane and at the same speed, you would (if you could somehow eliminate the racket from air rushing past your ears) hear the sound of the plane as coming from where you see the plane rather than from a long way behind it, even though the sound is coming to you from a long way behind where the plane now is.

In terms of the volume in each ear, it would be equal, but there would be a time delay between one ear and the other hearing it. That delay would only be cancelled out if the processing in the brain that measures the timings of the signals from each ear operated with delays of its own acting at the speed of sound, but they are not restricted to such a slow speed, and that means the plane would likely be heard some way behind where it's seen, though the equality of volume in each ear might reduce the apparent separation. Most importantly though, if we're using this case as an analogy for what happens with laser light, we don't have an equivalent case unless we introduce superluminal speeds in the processing of timings, so there is no equivalent way of detecting delays from one sensor to another one ahead of it if the signal's coming in from a co-moving source that's level with the sensors.

[David Cooper]

The total length of 7.5 cell lengths for light to travel its cycle. This leaves us with 8.66 cell lengths for the side ways mirror. So we haven't reached the peak of the triangle at 7.5 cell lengths of time.

If you 7.5 cell lengths you mean just under 75cm, then you're getting there, but where do you get your 8.66 cell length figure from for the perpendicular light clock? The distance travelled by the train during the time taken for light to go from one mirror to the other on the perpendicular light clock is only 17.32cm (because tan(60)=opp/10cm, so opp=10tan(60)cm).

[GoC (OP)]

The total length of 7.5 cell lengths for light to travel its cycle. This leaves us with 8.66 cell lengths for the side ways mirror. So we haven't reached the peak of the triangle at 7.5 cell lengths of time.

If you 7.5 cell lengths you mean just under 75cm, then you're getting there, but where do you get your 8.66 cell length figure from for the perpendicular light clock? The distance travelled by the train during the time taken for light to go from one mirror to the other on the perpendicular light clock is only 17.32cm (because tan(60)=opp/10cm, so opp=10tan(60)cm).

First of all I understand your physical contraction of mass and how that corrects for equilateral light paths on a 90 degree path to motion. That is what I was taught. I do not agree with what I was taught. All you are doing is force fitting the paths of light to be the same in both directions. This fudge factor is just that a fudge factor. Lets go back to the MMX. The most accurate way to measure distance is with light. So you measure the direction of travel and you get a mile. You measure the other distance perpendicular to the direction of travel and you measure a mile. When you do the test you get a null result. This is no different than measuring the same speed of light in any frame. Of course you get a null result. Your set up was meaningless to begin with. None of your tests can pass the test of significance. So your physical contraction is based on an insignificant measurement.

Now lets look at sound again as relative to the Aether. If we have the air molecules perfectly still except for the electrons moving to transfer the sound we get a ratio of sound to distance in all directions. We have a stationary observer on the ground. When the plane is physically over head the sound just starts while the plane continues to go forward. We can use the same geometry with light. When the sound reaches you the visual position of the plane is forward of the position you hear. Now if you have two planes in parallel going the speed of sound and the sound being created in back of the pilots neither pilot could hear the sound of the other pilots engine. He might hear his own engine because he carries his own air inside the plane. Its unlikely that you can carry the Aether inside of a spaceship. So two pilots can go fast enough in space not to be able to view the other right next to you. If you looked forward in the spaceship the front of you would appear to go from 7.46 meters to 0.53 meters. Not because the distance changed physically but because light only took that distance to reach you. Your view would be magnified also because of the inverse square law would change your viewing distance.   

[David Cooper]

First of all I understand your physical contraction of mass and how that corrects for equilateral light paths on a 90 degree path to motion. That is what I was taught. I do not agree with what I was taught. All you are doing is force fitting the paths of light to be the same in both directions. This fudge factor is just that a fudge factor.

If you're now agreeing with the numbers, you should say so clearly. They show that an uncontracted light clock aligned with its direction of travel ticks less often than an identical co-moving clock aligned perpendicular to it. The MMX is essentially such a pair of light clocks and it shows that the two clocks always remain in sync with each other. The tick rate of the perpendicular clock matches up to expectations. The tick rate of the other clock does not. We can account for the difference between the prediction and reality in a number of different ways, such as relying on magic, or by allowing light to go faster than c whenever something moves through space, but not allowing that faster speed to be exploited by other things in the same location for superluminal communication (which is ruddy hard when the exact same photons can be used by both systems, and even then there would be issues with things being where they manifestly aren't due to them being longer than they actually are), or you can go with the most sensible explanation and accept that objects simply contract in length in the exact manner that a full analysis of how the forces operate shows that they should contract, just as an orbit will contract due to some of the energy put in not showing up as movement, but as extra mass.

Lets go back to the MMX. The most accurate way to measure distance is with light. So you measure the direction of travel and you get a mile. You measure the other distance perpendicular to the direction of travel and you measure a mile. When you do the test you get a null result. This is no different than measuring the same speed of light in any frame. Of course you get a null result. Your set up was meaningless to begin with. None of your tests can pass the test of significance. So your physical contraction is based on an insignificant measurement.

That's just an assertion based on belief in voodoo. If you move the apparatus, you increase the distance that light has to travel to get through it, and that slows it down. If you don't have length-contraction operating on it, you won't always have a null result.

Now lets look at sound again as relative to the Aether. If we have the air molecules perfectly still except for the electrons moving to transfer the sound we get a ratio of sound to distance in all directions.

You might want to rewrite that bit so that it ties in with how sound actually propagates - no need to draw attention to electrons as you can just go with molecules of gas bumping into each other.

We have a stationary observer on the ground. When the plane is physically overhead the sound just starts while the plane continues to go forward. We can use the same geometry with light. When the sound reaches you the visual position of the plane is forward of the position you hear.

I edited a correction onto the end of post #163 which has some relevance to this. The analogy breaks down where two different speed limits are involved. With light, there is only one speed limit that can't be outgunned by any measurement apparatus which would need to use superluminal communications.

Now if you have two planes in parallel going the speed of sound and the sound being created in back of the pilots neither pilot could hear the sound of the other pilots engine. He might hear his own engine because he carries his own air inside the plane.

And this analogy breaks too because you can never get your vehicles up to the speed of light, meaning that light from behind can always catch them.

Its unlikely that you can carry the Aether inside of a spaceship. So two pilots can go fast enough in space not to be able to view the other right next to you.

That never happens - they always see each as other side by side.

If you looked forward in the spaceship the front of you would appear to go from 7.46 meters to 0.53 meters. Not because the distance changed physically but because light only took that distance to reach you. Your view would be magnified also because of the inverse square law would change your viewing distance.

That is nonsense - we would be able to detect that kind of visual change easily in the lab even at the relatively low speed the Earth goes round the sun, but no such visual warping occurs. Your problem is that you have come up with a wonderful theory of your own and you're determined to try to make nature conform to it rather than allowing nature to dictate the form of your theory. You are going against what nature does.

[Le Repteux]

The speed of light is also the speed of force

With aether, once a moving laser would emit a light pulse, the laser would progressively leave the place in aether where the pulse had been emitted, and it is at that place that an observer at rest would see the laser beam if it had been pointing at him at emission.

Correct, and a moving observer who is for a moment at the same location as the stationary observer and who is keeping pace with the laser would see the same laser light as coming from where the laser now is rather than where the the light actually came from.

Correct too, because that observer's speed in aether would produce aberration on the observed beam, and that by coincidence, that phenomenon would avoid him to know the real direction of the beam.

This is what happens when we see a plane: we hear it where it was, not where we see it,

It's worth remembering that if the light from the plane traveled at the speed of sound, you would see the plane further back too.

Of course, and in this case, we would see it where we hear it.

and in the same token, we don't really see it where it is because it takes time for light to reach us, so if some laser light was sent from the plane to somewhere else than where we are, it would simply miss us.

But to reach us, the laser has to be pointed slightly behind us (although planes aren't really far enough away for that to show up).

Just a precision: the observer on the plane would have to account for aberration to calculate our real position, because he would see us a bit ahead of where we would really be, so as you said, he would effectively have to point its laser a bit behind where he sees us to hit us. Incidentally, the same phenomenon would occur between the two planes: because of aberration, an observer on one of the planes would see the other plane where it actually is, so if he would aim its laser directly at it, he would miss it. 

It is so for sound because sound waves go straight line in air after having been emitted, so light waves should behave the same in aether if it exists.

If you are moving in the same direction as the plane and at the same speed, you would (if you could somehow eliminate the racket from air rushing past your ears) hear the sound of the plane as coming from where you see the plane rather than from a long way behind it, even though the sound is coming to you from a long way behind where the plane now is.

Correct, and I add that it would be so because of aberration.

If a powered "bullet" (one that can maintain speed and direction without being slowed by drag) was sent out from the plane at the speed of sound perpendicular to the direction of travel of the plane while you are moving along parallel to the plane's path and level with it, you can hold a two-layer target for the bullet to pass through (perhaps with the layers several yards apart) - the bullet will make two holes through the target, and when you look through those holes, you will see the plane. It's difficult to set out a really good parallel scenario though as the space fabric doesn't replicate the drag aspect.

Your bullet would travel sideways through air because it would add the motion of the plane to its own motion, but sound doesn't, so the bullet wouldn't have to suffer aberration, and sound would. I think it is a coincidence that both would appear to come from the actual position of the plane, and I also think that light has probably something to do with the production of motion because of that coincidence, that light doesn't only wait to be observed. Here is the link to my theory's thread here, but you will have to copy/paste it since I guess I am not allowed to put links yet:
thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=53171.msg467891#msg467891
Here is the link to the animation:
hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=377553animationpetitspas.gif

But this is not what the inertial frame principle means:  a moving inertial frame can be considered not to be moving, in such a way that light can be considered to travel sideways through space in the light clock mind experiment, so it manifestly doesn't fit with aether. With aether, a laser beam aimed at 90 degree between our two moving cars would miss us if we would travel fast enough or if we were far enough from one another.

No - it would not miss. If the cars are on parallel paths and level with each other, they could be a whole lightyear apart and the laser light sent out from a perpendicular (to the direction of travel of the cars) laser would still hit the other car, as would a bullet sent out from a gun set up with the same alignment as the laser, though the bullet would follow a much more deviated angle than the light and would hit the other car the best part of a million years later. If you think the light has to follow the perpendicular just because the laser is pointing along the perpendicular, you are breaking the laws of nature by changing the momentum of the system.

It's astounding to observe the small divergences people have on certain ideas. I hope you don't mind if I insist though, because I still see contradictions when I try to apply the reference frame principle to light.

With aether, we can see very well why light cannot add the direct speed of the source to its own speed like massive bodies do, but it is less clear that it cannot add the transverse speed of the source when its own speed is perpendicular to the motion for instance, and I personally think it is probably so because we are being diverted by the use of the reference frame principle to study the motion of light. Einstein himself admitted in his introduction to his paper on SR that his two postulates were contradictory, but he didn't elaborate on the subject. Light cannot be independent from the motion of the source when it moves in the direction of that motion, and follow it when it moves perpendicular to it, and that's what the inertial frame principle means. Two moving point sources moving side by side in aether would see the light they emitted towards their future position, not the one they emitted perpendicularly to their motion, and the laser in your MM simulation sends its light perpendicularly to its motion, not towards the future position of the mirror. If we replace the laser by a point source, the light emitted perpendicularly would not reach the mirror, and the one emitted at its future position would: two directions for light, two different paths in aether, but not in the space defined by the postulates of SR.

I understand what you mean when you say that the speed of light would affect the forces though, but to me, with no doppler effect and no aberration to account for inside the same moving frame, whatever the speed of that frame, the light waves exchanged between two observers at rest inside the frame would always appear to carry the same energy and would always appear to come from the actual position of the source.

So why would you want to tinker with the alignment of the laser in my diagrams if you understand that?

Simply because I think light cannot travel this way, but I don't expect you to change your mind about that. In fact, I think our ideas are like bodies resisting to acceleration: ideas cannot change without resisting automatically to the change, thus subconsciously, no matter how intelligent we are. We will thus probably go on discussing until we get tired, or until one of us suffers an intuition, which I think are due to a random process similar to mutations happening only in human minds. Good luck to us if I am right! :0)

Of course, the intensity of a wave lessens with distance, so the forces should lessen a bit for bodies moving through aether, but that effect has a lot less impact on energy than frequency, and frequency would not be affected.

Just as light is focused forwards more strongly and cancels out the difference, so must force be if the square room round a bulb is to retain the right shape for the walls to remain evenly lit. The MMX suggests that matter length-contracts in a manner consistent with forces and light behaving the same way in that regard.

With aether, wether the room is contracted or not, it seems to me that the light would travel less distance to reach the approaching wall than the one that is getting away from it, and if it is so, the approaching wall should absorb a more intense light than the other. Would it?

but the light intensity should adjust automatically for the speed of the system through means of the headlights effect, so there shouldn't be any apparent change to account for.

The headlight effect is due to aberration, and if the source is not moving with regard to the room, precisely because of aberration, that source would always appear to be at its actual position for any observer in the room, so I don't see how any of them could observe that effect. In this citation from wiki, relativistic beaming is called doppler beaming, and there is no doppler effect to observe in your moving room example.

«Relativistically moving objects are beamed due to a variety of physical effects. Light aberration causes most of the photons to be emitted along the object's direction of motion. The Doppler effect changes the energy of the photons by red- or blue-shifting them. Finally, time intervals as measured by clocks moving alongside the emitting object are different from those measured by an observer on Earth due to time dilation and photon arrival time effects. How all of these effects modify the brightness, or apparent luminosity, of a moving object is determined by the equation describing the relativistic Doppler effect (which is why relativistic beaming is also known as Doppler beaming).»
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_beaming)

Wiki says that aberration causes the photons to be emitted in the direction of motion, but they say that to conform to the relativistic definition of aberration, which comes from the idea that we cannot differentiate if it is the source or the observer that is moving. With aether we can, and we thus can see that only the photons that would have been sent towards the future position of the observer would hit him. With aether, there is no aberration either at the observer if he is at rest in aether while the source is moving, whereas there is with SR.

[GoC (OP)]

David,

Its unlikely that you can carry the Aether inside of a spaceship. So two pilots can go fast enough in space not to be able to view the other right next to you.

That never happens - they always see each as other side by side.

If you looked forward in the spaceship the front of you would appear to go from 7.46 meters to 0.53 meters. Not because the distance changed physically but because light only took that distance to reach you. Your view would be magnified also because of the inverse square law would change your viewing distance.

That is nonsense - we would be able to detect that kind of visual change easily in the lab even at the relatively low speed the Earth goes round the sun, but no such visual warping occurs. Your problem is that you have come up with a wonderful theory of your own and you're determined to try to make nature conform to it rather than allowing nature to dictate the form of your theory. You are going against what nature does.

If an image (light) only goes 0.53 back relative to 7.46 in distance looking behind you, somehow you believe the one way distance for light is the same as the two way distance for a light image. Now that would be magic.

[David Cooper]

Incidentally, the same phenomenon would occur between the two planes: because of aberration, an observer on one of the planes would see the other plane where it actually is, so if he would aim its laser directly at it, he would miss it.

No amount of repeating that can make it true. You are changing the momentum of the system. You are also making it impossible for a perpendicular laser to function if it's moving along at high speed because the light wouldn't be allowed to travel through it without hitting the side. Quite apart from anything else, lasers send light back and forth internally for a long time before releasing it, and as that light bounces back and forth it's following a zigzag path through space. When it's finally released, it isn't suddenly going to change path to follow the real perpendicular.

Your bullet would travel sideways through air because it would add the motion of the plane to its own motion, but sound doesn't, so the bullet wouldn't have to suffer aberration, and sound would.

The sound front would be angled, but it would still hit the hearer perpendicular in the frame in which the planes are at rest, so it is just like the bullet in that regard.

thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=53171.msg467891#msg467891

I'll look at it after I've posted this.

Here is the link to the animation: ...

I gave up waiting for the adverts to disappear and for the actual gif to show any sign of existing.

It's astounding to observe the small divergences people have on certain ideas. I hope you don't mind if I insist though, because I still see contradictions when I try to apply the reference frame principle to light.

As it stands, your interpretation of things would allow you to use a ring of lasers aligned perpendicular to a rocket, all pointing out sideways in many different directions (so that they cancel each other out in terms of sideways force) to accelerate that rocket. You'd have to give it a push start to get it going though.

...and the laser in your MM simulation sends its light perpendicularly to its motion, not towards the future position of the mirror. If we replace the laser by a point source, the light emitted perpendicularly would not reach the mirror, and the one emitted at its future position would: two directions for light, two different paths in aether, but not in the space defined by the postulates of SR.

Watch the light in the laser in my MMX diagrams and see which path it follows across the screen while it is moving along inside the laser - it is not moving along the perpendicular. Why then should it suddenly change direction when it leaves the laser? If you replace the laser with a point source, which will behave like a normal light bulb, you'll find that conservation of momentum throws more of the light forward. Some light leaves on the true perpendicular, but it is light which to the moving system is regarded as being sent out behind and not directly to the side.

Simply because I think light cannot travel this way, but I don't expect you to change your mind about that. In fact, I think our ideas are like bodies resisting to acceleration: ideas cannot change without resisting automatically to the change, thus subconsciously, no matter how intelligent we are. We will thus probably go on discussing until we get tired, or until one of us suffers an intuition, which I think are due to a random process similar to mutations happening only in human minds. Good luck to us if I am right! :0)

I always question my own beliefs and try to test them to destruction. If everyone else did that, there would be a lot less disagreement. It is the case though that most ideas are driven by momentum with established beliefs carrying on no matter how irrational they are, which is why most children are still having the bulk of their childhood wasted on fake education while they actually learn no faster than unschooled children who are allowed to play all day instead, but the statistics that show them gaining the same quantity and quality of qualifications by the end of the process is steadfastly ignored. It's the same with every area in politics with everyone flogging the same old failed policies for many decades instead of adapting them to fit the real world. It's just something humans generally do. But in this particular case, you're ignoring conservation of momentum.

With aether, whether the room is contracted or not, it seems to me that the light would travel less distance to reach the approaching wall than the one that is getting away from it, and if it is so, the approaching wall should absorb a more intense light than the other. Would it?

No, because the light send out backwards is weaker, having a longer wavelength, but when the wall hits it it runs into it fast enough to boost the perceived power back up to what it would be if the room was at rest. Likewise, the light going forward has a very high frequency, but when it hits the wall that's moving away from it, its power is not felt to be higher at all.

The headlight effect is due to aberration, and if the source is not moving with regard to the room, precisely because of aberration, that source would always appear to be at its actual position for any observer in the room, so I don't see how any of them could observe that effect. In this citation from wiki, relativistic beaming is called doppler beaming, and there is no doppler effect to observe in your moving room example.

The headlights effect is caused by conservation of momentum and it is not visible to people in the moving room with the light bulb. If light behaved the way you want it to, the rear wall would become brighter and the leading wall dimmer, so the people in the room could measure the room's speed of travel through space with a lightmeter. The Doppler effect aspect of this is also hidden from them, but an observer at rest who sees some of the light escaping through holes in the wall will see considerable shifts in its frequency.

Wiki says that aberration causes the photons to be emitted in the direction of motion, but they say that to conform to the relativistic definition of aberration, which comes from the idea that we cannot differentiate if it is the source or the observer that is moving. With aether we can, and we thus can see that only the photons that would have been sent towards the future position of the observer would hit him. With aether, there is no aberration either at the observer if he is at rest in aether while the source is moving, whereas there is with SR.

You're making up rules for aether (or a fabric of space) which don't apply to it any more than they apply to the Spacetime aether (or fabric). Any mechanism that throws a photon out eastwards from a stationary source would, if the source was moving north at any speed, automatically send that photon out some way to the north of eastwards such that it keeps pace northwards with the source and maintains the momentum of the system.

[David Cooper]

If an image (light) only goes 0.53 back relative to 7.46 in distance looking behind you, somehow you believe the one way distance for light is the same as the two way distance for a light image. Now that would be magic.

If you want to project an image, you'll find that forward movement at 0.866c of the projector turns a forward-pointing lens into a stronger telephoto which means that even though the image has to go nearly seven and a half times as far to hit the screen it will display the image the same size as it would with the system at rest. Turn the projector round to point at the rear screen instead and the lens serves as a wide angle lens, again automatically correcting the size of the image. You can test that by working out where the lens is when the light catches it and drawing straight lines from the corners of the original image in the projector through the centre of the lens and on to where the screen will be when the light catches up with that, at which point you'll find the image size to be unchanged (even if you forget to deal with length contraction) - all speeds of travel of the system lead to the same size of image on the screen. Everything conspires to hide the real speed of travel of the system from all observers, and that's what makes the maths of relativity so fascinating.

[David Cooper]

thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=53171.msg467891#msg467891

I'm not sure exactly what the theory is, but if you accelerate a molecule by hitting just one of its atoms, you may well get a chain reaction with different atoms in the molecule taking turns to move and passing kinetic energy about between them. Over time, the movement of the atoms may settle down and become more constant joint movement of all the atoms, which means not all of the extra energy can have been passed on from one to the next each time. If there are only two atoms, the molecule would most likely just spin and keep spinning at a constant rate, but a more complex molecule could deform repeatedly as different atoms move more than others, and that might make it possible for some energy to be radiated off as infra-red light instead of being retained as extra kinetic energy in the molecule. Whatever the case though, I can't see any great role for light in what's going on (other than that all matter is arguably made up of light because that's essentially what it decays into).

[GoC (OP)]

If an image (light) only goes 0.53 back relative to 7.46 in distance looking behind you, somehow you believe the one way distance for light is the same as the two way distance for a light image. Now that would be magic.

If you want to project an image, you'll find that forward movement at 0.866c of the projector turns a forward-pointing lens into a stronger telephoto which means that even though the image has to go nearly seven and a half times as far to hit the screen it will display the image the same size as it would with the system at rest. Turn the projector round to point at the rear screen instead and the lens serves as a wide angle lens, again automatically correcting the size of the image. You can test that by working out where the lens is when the light catches it and drawing straight lines from the corners of the original image in the projector through the centre of the lens and on to where the screen will be when the light catches up with that, at which point you'll find the image size to be unchanged (even if you forget to deal with length contraction) - all speeds of travel of the system lead to the same size of image on the screen. Everything conspires to hide the real speed of travel of the system from all observers, and that's what makes the maths of relativity so fascinating.

We are discussing 3d shapes not a projected image. If the physical shape was one cell length in the front and the same physical object in the back one cell length there would be a different view of length with the observer in the middle when at relative rest. The physical object in back would appear to be 7.461 cell lengths long because the front of the image reaches you and the rear of the image takes 7.461 cell lengths to reach you with the constant speed of a ship at 0.866 c. Now the front image would reach you and the back of the physical object takes 0.53 cell lengths so it appears compressed length wise. Physically they are the same size at relative rest. These are your numbers we agreed on for travel distances for light. Light coming towards you from the back would reflect the image for 7.461 cell lengths for depth of view. From the front only 0.53 cell lengths are reflected.

[GoC (OP)]

Lets look at it another way. We have a ship in space 10 meters long with a reflective mirror in the front and back to reflect on both sides. This ship is going 0.866 c. There is a bulb in space stationary to the ship. The ship approaches the bulb. Light reaches the front mirror and bounces back to the observer at relative rest with the bulb. The ship moves forward ~4.6 meters and reflects light off of the back mirror. The returned length of light with just one photon would measure the ship as ~5.3 meters long.

Now the ship moving away from the bulb at rest compared to 0.866c. The light reaches the back mirror and co-moves forward with the ship. Light gains 0.133 for every length of the ship. So the light reaches the front mirror in 74.6 meters compared to the observer at rest. So the observer at rest would measure the ship moving away as ~74.6 meters long.

Now what would be the perpendicular view by the observer at rest?
For that we can use the Lorentz contraction and get 0.5 relative to rest. So the view is the hypotenuse between the two legs of a created right triangle for how light actually moves through space shortens the view by Half. We can never view true perpendicular only the angle from behind our position if we are the one in motion or forward of our position if we are at rest. Its the same view from either position.

[Le Repteux]

Incidentally, the same phenomenon would occur between the two planes: because of aberration, an observer on one of the planes would see the other plane where it actually is, so if he would aim its laser directly at it, he would miss it.

No amount of repeating that can make it true. You are changing the momentum of the system.

I admit I didn't apply the conservation law yet to that idea, only logic and diagrams, so I'll try.

You are also making it impossible for a perpendicular laser to function if it's moving along at high speed because the light wouldn't be allowed to travel through it without hitting the side.

That's exactly what should happen to your perpendicular laser, only the light emitted by the atoms towards the future position of the mirrors should hit them, so contrary to what I thought, you seem to be right about its angle. :0) I already knew that light could not suffer aberration at reflection if a light clock was to work, so I could more readily apply it to the laser, and it will also help me to understand how light behaves between my two atoms. I guess our divergence was only a misunderstanding of mine then! Does that solve my momentum problem? Maybe you could add this specific explanation on what is happening into your laser to your MM page so that people like me would understand faster.

Your bullet would travel sideways through air because it would add the motion of the plane to its own motion, but sound doesn't, so the bullet wouldn't have to suffer aberration, and sound would.

The sound front would be angled, but it would still hit the hearer perpendicular in the frame in which the planes are at rest, so it is just like the bullet in that regard.

No need for rest frames with aether, we clearly see why it is so, but what a coincidence that light appears to follow the motion of bodies while it has no mass!

Here is the link to the animation: ...

I gave up waiting for the adverts to disappear and for the actual gif to show any sign of existing.

Sorry! I have Adblock so I didn't know about the adverts. I tried to attach it but it doesn't work either. I guess we will have to wait for my fiftieth message then.

With aether, whether the room is contracted or not, it seems to me that the light would travel less distance to reach the approaching wall than the one that is getting away from it, and if it is so, the approaching wall should absorb a more intense light than the other. Would it?

No, because the light send out backwards is weaker, having a longer wavelength, but when the wall hits it it runs into it fast enough to boost the perceived power back up to what it would be if the room was at rest. Likewise, the light going forward has a very high frequency, but when it hits the wall that's moving away from it, its power is not felt to be higher at all.

I was talking about the intensity of light, not its frequency. But you seem to mean that doppler effect would also take care of the intensity, so I'll try to figure out how.

The headlights effect is caused by conservation of momentum and it is not visible to people in the moving room with the light bulb. If light behaved the way you want it to, the rear wall would become brighter and the leading wall dimmer, so the people in the room could measure the room's speed of travel through space with a lightmeter. The Doppler effect aspect of this is also hidden from them, but an observer at rest who sees some of the light escaping through holes in the wall will see considerable shifts in its frequency.

The law of conservation of momentum is not a mechanism, and the way waves travel in a medium is, so if a wall is approaching the light source and the other is fleeing away, the approaching wall should still receive more light. Do you have a mechanism to provide or just a law?

Any mechanism that throws a photon out eastwards from a stationary source would, if the source was moving north at any speed, automatically send that photon out some way to the north of eastwards such that it keeps pace northwards with the source and maintains the momentum of the system.

If I understand well, the internal mechanism that produces photons would be influenced by the motion of atoms through aether, and the mechanism that produces water waves would not. Is that it?

[GoC (OP)]

Light waves are probably tornado and cyclone for entangled pairs. A trick used by light to make us consider super luminal speeds as possible. But the real speed limit is c. Spring type waves rather than pebble and water.

[David Cooper]

We are discussing 3d shapes not a projected image.

Best not to use the word "image" then if you aren't talking about an image.

If the physical shape was one cell length in the front and the same physical object in the back one cell length there would be a different view of length with the observer in the middle when at relative rest. The physical object in back would appear to be 7.461 cell lengths long because the front of the image reaches you and the rear of the image takes 7.461 cell lengths to reach you with the constant speed of a ship at 0.866 c. Now the front image would reach you and the back of the physical object takes 0.53 cell lengths so it appears compressed length wise. Physically they are the same size at relative rest. These are your numbers we agreed on for travel distances for light. Light coming towards you from the back would reflect the image for 7.461 cell lengths for depth of view. From the front only 0.53 cell lengths are reflected.

No matter what speed the system's moving at, there will be no such visual distortions - it will always look as if there is no greater delay one way than the other and the difference in the distance light has to travel has no impact on how either end is seen from the other. The way a projector and lens works should act as a clue to that. The eye works exactly the same way - if you're looking forward, the lens acts more like a wide-angle lens (because the distance light has to travel from lens to retina is reduced) and if you're looking backward it acts like a telephoto (because the distance light has to travel from lens to retina is increased). The same thing happens with mirrors. If you have a light bulb in the middle of a moving room and you put a mirror to one side of it to reflect some of the light (that was going sideways) forwards, the curved wave front hits a moving mirror and makes the mirror interact with it as if the mirror was curved (concave), thereby projecting the light forwards in a less spread out form. If the same mirror's used to bounce the light to the rear instead, it acts as if it's curved the other way (convex), leading to the light spreading out more after it's been reflected. Everything automatically adjusts to hide the movement of the system through space from anyone co-moving with it.

[guest39538]

Ok, before I start , you do realise that if the train travels down a  slope it makes it easier to measure the light?

No, I don't realise that, and your numbers don't appear to realise it either.

Now I have given the answer to the angle I provided without knowing the speed of the carriage, however I am sure with it being maths, I can get the results to fit a speed of the carriage.

How can you possibly calculate the angle without involving the speed of the carriage in the calculation?

However before we move on from the last assignment , you still avoided my question, I am still waiting for the proof of the physical contraction you claim exists.  I have not observed anything of the wow factor thus far, this is pretty basic stuff.

I've answered that many times before, but you clearly weren't ready to take it in. Remember the five points that I made in post #134:-

(A) A moving clock records fewer ticks than a stationary one in a given length of time, so it is not recording time, but is merely counting cycles. That is what all clocks do.

(B) A light clock aligned perpendicular to its direction of movement therefore records fewer ticks than a stationary clock.

(C) An uncontracted light clock aligned with its direction of travel (rather than perpendicular to it) will record fewer ticks than a light clock co-moving with it which is aligned perpendicular to their direction of travel.

(D) A correctly length-contracted light clock aligned with its direction of travel will record the same number of ticks as a light clock co-moving with it which is aligned perpendicular to their direction of travel.

(E) The null result of the MMX shows that the real universe length-contracts things in their direction of travel.

Once you have generated the right numbers for assignment 2, you'll be able to compare the two moving light clocks and see that the perpendicular one ticks more often than the other. The MMX shows that this is not how the universe works because real light clocks which move along together always tick at the same rate as each other regardless of their alignment. We also know that the slowing of real clocks matches up to the perpendicular clock's predicted behaviour and not to the predicted behaviour of uncontracted light clocks aligned with their direction of travel.

p.s the answer to assignment 2 is a variate relative to the dimensions of the carriage.

Your perpendicular light clock should be the same length as the one used in assignment 1 so that you can easily compare the numbers you get from the two assignments. Your job here is to work out how far the train moves at 0.5c while the light travels from mirror A to the far mirror (B') and back to the first one again (A"), and you need to know how to calculate the angle that the light moves away from the perpendicular. I told you how the angle can be calculated and I was hoping that you'd let me know whether you understand that method or not. If you want to find your own method for doing it, that's fine, but for it to be valid it will need to generate the same numbers. We will be stuck here until you understand the method I've spelt out to you, so I'll go through it again with a new diagram.

We want to calculate the angle x. We have a right angled triangle, but the only side of that triangle with a known length is the vertical line B'A' which has a length of d [= 299,792,458m]. However, we do know the ratio of the lengths of AA' to AB' because we know the ratio of the speed of the train to the speed of light, and that ratio is 0.5:1.

The trig rule soh tells us that sine(x) = AA'/AB'. We don't yet know the lengths AA' or AB', but we do know their ratio, so we can simply use the numbers from that ratio: sine(x) = 0.5/1. Because we're dividing a number by 1, the result will be unchanged, so we now have sine(x) = 0.5. All we need to do now is use a calculator to find x by typing in a sequence such as 0.5 inv sin or shift sin 0.5 (depending on the order the calculator wants you to press the keys in.

Having done that and got the number 30 degrees from the calculator, we can now set about working out the actual lengths of the lines AA' and AB'. The only real length we know for the triangle is the vertical line A'B', but that's enough to do the rest now as we also have an angle to work with. All we need to do is apply more trig: tan(x) = AA'/A'B', and cosine(x) =  A'B'/AB'. We can rearrange those a little before we pick up the calculator (and note that I'm going to use an asterisk for the multiplication symbol to avoid confusion with the angle x): AA' =  tan(x) * A'B', and AB' = A'B'/cos(x). Now the calculator is used: AA' = 0.57735, and AB' = 1.1547. Note that I have used 1 as the length of A'B' because my length unit is d, and d = 299,792,458m. To fit with all your previous calculations, you should use 299792458 instead of 1 so that your answers come out in metres.

If you double 0.57735, you'll get 1.1547, so these answers fit with the 0.5:1 ratio that we expect them to. The lower mirror has moved from A to A" by the time the light returns to it from the top mirror, so the train has moved 1.1547d and the light has moved 2.3094d. To convert those to metres, again you'd need to multiply them by 299792458. One tick of this moving clock will take 2.3094t, and as my time unit is a second long, that's 2.3094s.

We now have three tick rates. The stationary clock ticks once every 2 seconds. The moving clock from assignment 1 ticks once for every 2 2/3 seconds of the stationary clock. The moving clock from assignment 2 ticks once for every 2.3094 seconds of the stationary clock.

Now, lets see how many pages of posts it takes you to get up to speed with that. On the up side though, it looks as if you might reach the finish line before GoC, which no one reading this thread at the start would ever have predicted.

I already understand what you are on about in intricate detail, I might not know the calculations but it is not as if I can't do them as proved in your first assignment.   However as the first assignment the second assignment is a rather ''pointless'' exercise...the biggest flaw being that light doe's not behave this way, especially in the zig zag scenario, quite provable by experiment.

Are you objective enough to realise why Einstein was wrong?

[guest39538]

laser.jpg (11.16 kB . 421x458 - viewed 4410 times)

[David Cooper]

Lets look at it another way. We have a ship in space 10 meters long with a reflective mirror in the front and back to reflect on both sides. This ship is going 0.866 c. There is a bulb in space stationary to the ship. The ship approaches the bulb. Light reaches the front mirror and bounces back to the observer at relative rest with the bulb. The ship moves forward ~4.6 meters and reflects light off of the back mirror. The returned length of light with just one photon would measure the ship as ~5.3 meters long.

Is the bulb just putting out a single flash of light? If so, the observer with the flashbulb would see two flashes come back with a time gap between them of 2 times ~5.3 units of time (with one time unit being the time light takes to travel one metre). However, if your 10m length is the rest length, the actual length is 5m, so the time gap will only be ~5.3 units of time.

Now the ship moving away from the bulb at rest compared to 0.866c. The light reaches the back mirror and co-moves forward with the ship. Light gains 0.133 for every length of the ship. So the light reaches the front mirror in 74.6 meters compared to the observer at rest. So the observer at rest would measure the ship moving away as ~74.6 meters long.

Again it would be double that unless you apply length contraction.

Now what would be the perpendicular view by the observer at rest?

The observer at rest will see the ship appear to be highly contracted as it approaches and highly extended as it moves away. These contractions and extensions are not the length-contraction of relativity though and should never be confused with it. What the stationary observer should do is work out what the delays should be for the speed the ship is moving at and then correct for them to measure the correct length, at which point he will produce the answer that the ship is 5m long (assuming that it is 10m long when at rest).

Importantly though, if you give your stationary observer an identical 10m ship and have the original one send out flashes too, the observer on the moving ship will get the exact same timing delays between the returned flashes, and if he takes his own ship to be the one that's stationary, he will determine that the other ship must be 5m long.

For that we can use the Lorentz contraction and get 0.5 relative to rest. So the view is the hypotenuse between the two legs of a created right triangle for how light actually moves through space shortens the view by Half.

You're barking up the wrong tree when you drag the hypotenuse into this - if we use glass rather than mirrors, all the light involved in the experiment can be moving on a single straight line, just as if we're using a one-dimensional universe. There is no hypotenuse. Light does not travel on the hypotenuse when it goes fore and aft.

We can never view true perpendicular only the angle from behind our position if we are the one in motion or forward of our position if we are at rest. Its the same view from either position.

If you want to see the length contraction, you have to look from the side rather than from ahead or behind. If you view from ahead or behind, you see apparent contraction or extension due to communication delays which have nothing whatsoever to do with relativity's length-contraction. The observer must calculate the length by allowing for the expected visual distortions caused by relative movement. (A co-moving observer does not see any such distortions though and cannot detect the length-contraction at all, so it's vital that you don't mix up the two cases and try to have visual distortions in cases where they do not apply.)