[Le Repteux (OP)]

There are other possibilities: it could just be that matter puts some kind of stress on the space fabric which diminishes over distance rather than matter having an extended cloud of unseen parts of itself spread out through the whole universe with the density increasing as you get nearer to the place where the matter is visible.

That's classical space-time if I'm not mistaken, which works as if the field would be able to extend outwards instantaneously. When a source of light is traveling through ether at constant speed, the light doesn't follow the source, whereas space-time does......oups..... I'm overlooking the beaming phenomenon again. When the earth travels through space, its gravitational field suffers beaming so it doesn't lag behind, and when a body crosses it, it's as if the earth wasn't moving, so it works for a body, but that field must be information, not matter, so when light crosses it, it should no more be affected by it than when two rays of light cross each other, so it still doesn't seem to work for light. In the case where that field would be matter though, it's the inverse: it could affect the trajectory of light, but it would also have to follow the angular rotation of the earth, so its tangential rotational speed would increase indefinitely with distance until it is faster than c.

Einstein could have got rid of the ether just to differentiate himself from Lorentz, otherwise he could have been accused of plagiarism. He could just as easily have gotten rid of the gravitational interaction for an unscientific reason too. It is not because we can not observe it directly that an exchange of information does not occur between massive bodies. One of the problems with that kind of interaction is that orbiting bodies would be forced to spiral away from one another since the information would always be late, which is not the case with an information that produces motion instead of just telling us about it as it is the case for my simulations, otherwise, my particles would move away from each other with time when in constant motion. I need to make a simulation of gravitation based on my small steps and see what I get, but I want to enjoy the summer before I get back to it. Are you sailing a bit this summer? Kite sailing is beginning to miss me!

[David Cooper]

That's classical space-time if I'm not mistaken, which works as if the field would be able to extend outwards instantaneously.

Spacetime has a time dimension. I was talking about a 3D space fabric. However, I'm now sure that it's something contained by the fabric that acts as the additional medium, and I'll explain why at the end of this post. The field is not affected instantly either: it takes time to it to be affected by any change at the source, the changes spreading out at the speed of light.

In the case where that field would be matter though, it's the inverse: it could affect the trajectory of light, but it would also have to follow the angular rotation of the earth, so its tangential rotational speed would increase indefinitely with distance until it is faster than c.

No; it doesn't have to go round with a rotating object at all. All it has to do is react to changes in position by moving to match, though with a delay.

It is not because we can not observe it directly that an exchange of information does not occur between massive bodies. One of the problems with that kind of interaction is that orbiting bodies would be forced to spiral away from one another since the information would always be late,

But if it's extended parts of matter forming a medium, there's no delay in the interaction. As two objects orbit each other though, their changes in direction will lead to adjustments of their extended medium transmitted at c, and that will lead to some kind of disruption to the orbit. Exactly what that disruption is, I can't yet visualise.

Are you sailing a bit this summer? Kite sailing is beginning to miss me!

No time for leisure at the moment. Too much work to do. I've finished my latest simulation though, but had already ruled out what it would tell me because the idea was founded on an error. The idea of energy rattling about in particles changing the amount of bending depending on the speed of the system through space was wrong: if the system is moving at high speed, any light or energy in a particle that's to the side of a planet will not bend any extra amount due to the longer time it is travelling through space in that position because the medium acts as if it's less dense, so that completely cancels out the effect I was exploring. Something moving the opposite way to the planet will be curved just as much even though it takes a lot less time for it to pass through that medium, but the medium seems denser to it. The result is that if you have an object going round a planet in a circular orbit with the planet at rest, effectively being lensed round it in circles, when you have the planet moving at relativistic speed, the gravity well is a different shape, but the object will still be lensed round it in the same way with the same shape distortion imposed on it as the gravity well has. So, the length contraction of the gravity well drives the length contraction of the orbit. The relativistic mass aspect of things merely controls the speed at which the object moves on any part of its orbit, but has no impact on the shape of the orbit at all, so I was wrong on both counts. We should now be looking for the source of length contraction in whatever it is that determines the shape of the gravity well, and that takes us back to ideas like LaFrenière's where he has length contraction coming automatically out of his standing waves when he has particles move through space. This makes it look as if the idea of extended matter forming a medium far out into space (and indeed all the way across the universe) is correct: you can't have that kind of length contraction acting on the more fundamental medium of the space fabric, so this is a contraction of something else which is free to move relative to that space fabric.

We're back again at the problem though of how particles don't leak all their energy out into space and thereby disappear, but this extended part of matter that spreads out through the whole of space is a kind of leakage, and yet it puts as much energy back into the particle as is lost, and it does this despite the particle often accelerating and the returning energy not being correctly aligned. That remains the big mystery, but we've narrowed down the options. Well, there's another mystery too, and that's how these waves can function when the centre of the particle is in a black hole with its functionality frozen and with the speed of light stopped there.

[Le Repteux (OP)]

I had a look at wiki on aether theories, and I discovered that Einstein wasn't so hot about totally discarding it from SR (at the end of the chapter), so why did he let the whole community discard it? Maybe because he was famous, and that admitting he was wrong about SR would have disappointed everyone. You are still trying to prevent Lafrenière's wave from escaping into space while Ivanov and I have a similar one that is already confined. What exactly prevents you from considering our confined wave as an improvement on Lafrenière's unconfined one?

[David Cooper]

I had a look at wiki on aether theories, and I discovered that Einstein wasn't so hot about totally discarding it from SR (at the end of the chapter), so why did he let the whole community discard it? Maybe because he was famous, and that admitting he was wrong about SR would have disappointed everyone.

He was a bit more rational than his followers, but having started up something with massive momentum behind the toleration of contradictions which would in every other field be recognised as invalidating a theory, it set up something like the giant red spot on Jupiter which just keeps on going as a very stable, persistent entity.

You are still trying to prevent Lafrenière's wave from escaping into space while Ivanov and I have a similar one that is already confined. What exactly prevents you from considering our confined wave as an improvement on Lafrenière's unconfined one?

How can you confine it when a wave radiates out in all directions unless you have some kind of container spread all round the outside? But also, we need the energy to leak out as well to produce that medium to produce gravity. The answer may be something QM related. Think about the two slits experiment where parts of a particle take different paths, some going through one slit, some through the other, and most hitting the surrounds.Those parts which make it through the slits then form an interference pattern which dictates where they hit the screen, but then all the energy of the particle is delivered to a single location which one of the parts hit while all the other parts deliver nothing to whatever they collided with. Something similar could be going on to keep restoring energy to the middle of a particle to make sure it keeps returning, while at the same time allowing it to travel out right across the universe.

Here's another possibility though. Suppose each particle is surrounded by associated dark particles, the middle one holding the most energy while the surrounding ones hold less and less of it, all the way out through the universe in every direction. When the visible particle accelerates, the associated dark particles will adjust their positions to maintain their connections to it, while the level of energy held by each is related to the number of other dark particles of the same set leading to the central particle. Each one moves as much as necessary to maintain synchronisation with its associates. We now have the energy reduce with distance away from the centre, but there's never any loss because we always have these associate dark particles maintaining their connections while each also continues to support its own contained standing waves. Clearly, at any point in space, there would need to be astronomical numbers of these dark particles sharing the same location, but each would remain distinct through some kind of entanglement that ties it to its central particle of visible matter. These associate dark particles can now stay linked to their accelerated visible particle and move closer together as they length-contract in accordance with LaFrenière's maths. In this way, a gravity well length-contracts and orbits contract to match.

But what about particles that have descended deep into gravity wells and had their functionality stopped at the EV of a black hole? Their associated dark particles must not collapse to follow them down, and these dark particles must continue to respond to the accelerations of the black hole in order for two black holes to be able to orbit around each other. What exactly happens to a particle that has its functionality stopped by the medium density reducing the speed of light to zero? Where does that energy go if it's frozen in position? Can its associate dark particles continue to function without the frequencies harmonising with the central particle? Does the functionality really stop or might it actually be diverted into some other dimension? When an object goes down a gravity well, its functionality slows as its kinetic energy goes up, because that's where the kinetic energy is drawn from, but if it's going down to a black hole's event horizon, the slowing of the speed of light will eventually slow the object down, so where's the kinetic energy going? That's the key question. The particle stops at the EV and its functionality is stopped too, but that energy must be acting in some way, and all the associate dark particles belonging to that visible particle could still be dancing to its hidden tune.

[Le Repteux (OP)]

He was a bit more rational than his followers, but having started up something with massive momentum behind the toleration of contradictions which would in every other field be recognised as invalidating a theory, it set up something like the giant red spot on Jupiter which just keeps on going as a very stable, persistent entity.

If everything was perfect, we would be quite unhappy, so long live our mistakes! :0)

How can you confine it when a wave radiates out in all directions unless you have some kind of container spread all round the outside?

Lasers don't radiate in all directions, and they work sort of like my particles: the light only bounces back and forth between two mirrors instead of between two particles. In addition, the light emitted by one of the particles has just escaped from the steps between its components because they are always a little late from the particle's one, which helps to confine its direction, so as to be completely absorbed by interference in the line of sight between the particles. We can produce that kind of interference with lasers, and particles are a lot better tuned than them, so why couldn't they?

[David Cooper]

Lasers don't radiate in all directions, and they work sort of like my particles: the light only bounces back and forth between two mirrors instead of between two particles.

But how are your lasers held together without it built out of lasers that are built out of lasers all the way down, infinitely?

In addition, the light emitted by one of the particles has just escaped from the steps between its components because they are always a little late from the particle's one, which helps to confine its direction, so as to be completely absorbed by interference in the line of sight between the particles. We can produce that kind of interference with lasers, and particles are a lot better tuned than them, so why couldn't they?

You still seem to be exploring how two particles might interact rather than looking at how one particle works, and all these interactions between your particles are just the sharing out of energy between them as the move along while bound together in some way. The more fundamental issue is how a single particle is held together. The standing waves idea fits nicely, but you can't maintain them unless you can stop waves and bounce them back through each other again. Waves ordinarily just run through each other without bouncing back. There's something missing; something which enables the energy of a particle to be maintained while it also influences the space around it for a long way out, and given the way that galaxies attract each other, we know that this influence reaches a very long way out indeed.

We need some kind of services to be provided by the fabric of space to make all this happen. Suppose it's cellular. Waves could move in a cell of the space fabric and bounce back, producing standing waves with the right properties for particles. If you move a particle, the energy needs to be able to leak through into the next cell. An alternative to bouncing of cell walls would be to have extra dimensions aligned with the standard ones but rolled up in such a way that the energy goes round in circles and back through the energy going the opposite way over and over again, again maintaining the standing waves while also allowing other waves in the surroundings to resonate with the waves of the particle, not by taking energy from them but by changing the way the energy held in those other locations is behaving. That would provide a mechanism for maintaining particles' energy and for having the surrounding area behave as if it's connected with the particles, creating the required medium to produce gravity by holding the appropriate amount of energy in each location to harmonise with the energy of all the particles near it and far from it, all in proportion to the amount of influence those particles should have over that location according to their distance from it. Too much energy in one location would lead to the excess being released in the direction of whichever adjacent bit of space has a deficit, so you'd have a continual adjustment going on to ensure that the medium's density is correctly maintained everywhere. This could make LaFrenière's model viable.

[Le Repteux (OP)]

But how are your lasers held together without it built out of lasers that are built out of lasers all the way down, infinitely?

Not lasers, but particles that exchange information and that manage to concentrate it. If the universe is infinite, whatever the way the particles proceed to exchange information, that process cannot have an end either. Particles with no components are impossible to imagine, real things need to have a dimension, but an infinite universe cannot be understood integrally, so I can't tell what my small steps become at smaller scales. If I had no better reason to stick to that idea, I might let it down, but I have: it explains both mass and motion, so it explains why the term inertia has two opposite meanings, one for motion and the other for immobility. It seems evident that mass comes with motion, but the Higgs has nothing to do with motion, it's only a glue.

There's something missing; something which enables the energy of a particle to be maintained while it also influences the space around it for a long way out, and given the way that galaxies attract each other, we know that this influence reaches a very long way out indeed.

Nothing seems to be missing with the steps: the light escapes from them if there is any lack of synchronism, and there is some even when a particle is not accelerated since its components have to accelerate and decelerate their steps continuously to justify the much longer sinusoidal steps of the particle they belong to. My simulations do not account for that kind of behavior, but if they did, the particles could not absorb that light by interference even in the line of sight between them. It would be very weak and very penetrative, and it would travel away from their source indefinitely like any sort of light, thus binding weakly all the particles of the universe. Such a bond would only hold them at the same distance from one another though, so to justify gravitation, their frequency must vary with time, and that variation must indicate a particle that the others are all moving away from it, which means that all the particles must be blueshifted with time so as to perceive the light from others as redshifted. This way, the particles would need to accelerate constantly towards each other to stay on sync with that light.

That mechanism dovetails the cosmological redshift, but it also means that matter would be contracting with time instead of the universe being expanding, which also dovetails curved light since the sun would appear bigger than it actually is and that the light from the stars near by would appear to come from the same apparent direction. The usual interpretation is that those stars would be behind the sun and that their light would have been curved to reach us, but it neglects the fact that the sun would also look bigger, a point that is not part of the theory but that mainstream scientists did not contest when I discussed it on forums. If the sun looks bigger when we observe it, then we have to shrink it on the sky map and it doesn't hide those stars anymore, which contradicts the idea that their light has been curved. Of course, no scientist has had the self-sacrifice to go that far.

[David Cooper]

The usual interpretation is that those stars would be behind the sun and that their light would have been curved to reach us, but it neglects the fact that the sun would also look bigger, a point that is not part of the theory but that mainstream scientists did not contest when I discussed it on forums. If the sun looks bigger when we observe it, then we have to shrink it on the sky map and it doesn't hide those stars anymore, which contradicts the idea that their light has been curved. Of course, no scientist has had the self-sacrifice to go that far.

It they assume the sun to be the size that it appears to be rather than its actual size, the stars just behind the edge of that visible disc will still be seen further out than they really are, and they will be seen outside of the visible disc. There's no point in doubting the bending anyway when you can take a photograph during a solar eclipse and compare it with one showing the same background stars half a year later: their positions are different due to gravitational lensing in the former case.

[Le Repteux (OP)]

There's no point in doubting the bending anyway when you can take a photograph during a solar eclipse and compare it with one showing the same background stars half a year later: their positions are different due to gravitational lensing in the former case.

Six months later, the sun is on the other side of the Earth and its apparent size is the same as during the eclipse. Therefore, if we put this apparent sun on the map of the night sky, since the observed stars look closer to the center of the sun than during the eclipse, it will hide them, but if we consider that the sunlight has undergone the same curvature as that of the stars' light, then we know that the sun appears bigger than it really is, so we just have to shrink it on the night map and it will not hide them anymore, but it cannot hide them a day and not hide them the other day, so if I'm right about the sunlight's bending, something is wrong with this explanation. On the other hand, my small steps show that mass may not be as mysterious as we thought and that mechanism can certainly not bend space. Curved space is a mystery built over another one, and each time science took for granted that mysteries were allowed in theories, they proved wrong later on. To claim that light had the same speed regardless of the speed of the observer was a mystery that LET proves to be false, so why not assume that Einstein loved mysteries and consider that his curved space is probably equally false?

[David Cooper]

Six months later, the sun is on the other side of the Earth and its apparent size is the same as during the eclipse. Therefore, if we put this apparent sun on the map of the night sky, since the observed stars look closer to the center of the sun than during the eclipse, it will hide them, but if we consider that the sunlight has undergone the same curvature as that of the stars' light, then we know that the sun appears bigger than it really is, so we just have to shrink it on the night map and it will not hide them anymore, but it cannot hide them a day and not hide them the other day, so if I'm right about the sunlight's bending, something is wrong with this explanation.

I can't quite work out what you're doing there, but my point is that the light from the background stars is being bent as it passes the sun and isn't being bent when the sun isn't there, so we can see that there is some bending caused by gravity. When you compare the two pictures, one of that bit of sky without the sun and the other with the eclipsed sun in it, the positions of the stars further out from the centre of the picture are in the same places in both pictures, but as you look closer in towards where the sun is, their positions no longer match up. We know that bending of light happens.

On the other hand, my small steps show that mass may not be as mysterious as we thought and that mechanism can certainly not bend space. Curved space is a mystery built over another one, and each time science took for granted that mysteries were allowed in theories, they proved wrong later on.

There are ways of bending light without needing curved space, so if you don't want curved space, you need to find some other mechanism for bending light paths, as LET has done.

To claim that light had the same speed regardless of the speed of the observer was a mystery that LET proves to be false, so why not assume that Einstein loved mysteries and consider that his curved space is probably equally false?

I do consider it to be false, but only because it's contrived and wholly unnecessary. 4D Spacetime doesn't actually work unless you add Newtonian time to it to coordinate the unfolding of events for objects following different paths, but once you've recognised the need to add that, you've got two kinds of "time" in the model, and one of them's superfluous. Removing the Newtonian one breaks the model because it brings event-meshing failures back in and invalidates the model, so the "time" to get rid of is the "time" dimension.

[Le Repteux (OP)]

I do consider it to be false, but only because it's contrived and wholly unnecessary. 4D Spacetime doesn't actually work unless you add Newtonian time to it to coordinate the unfolding of events for objects following different paths, but once you've recognised the need to add that, you've got two kinds of "time" in the model, and one of them's superfluous. Removing the Newtonian one breaks the model because it brings event-meshing failures back in and invalidates the model, so the "time" to get rid of is the "time" dimension.

I know you like that explanation, but I find it more complicated than simply showing a simulation and saying that it is impossible to make without using aether, because then, we can't move the light with regard to the screen anymore. In the SR explanation showing the light exchanged between two moving mirrors, it always moves with regard to the screen, which is the only way for it to take more time than when the mirrors are at rest. There is no other way, so why not hit that nail until it gets nailed for good. I found a guy on Quora who talks about the historical environment that helped physicists chose SR instead of LET: https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Tesla-so-adamantly-against-relativity-theory/answer/Shiva-Meucci As far as I'm concerned, he's a bit wrong about length contraction and time dilation being an illusion, but it is important to know how this drift has occurred if we want to convince. It's not only that SR is conceptually wrong, it's that it doesn't allow to get beyond.

[David Cooper]

I know you like that explanation, but I find it more complicated than simply showing a simulation and saying that it is impossible to make without using aether, because then, we can't move the light with regard to the screen anymore.

What's the difference between that and what I'm saying? I show that the "time" dimension isn't sufficient and that Newtonian time has to be added to it, then I say that one of those two kinds of "time" is superfluous and that it can't be the Newtonian one that should go as it would have to be brought straight back in again, so it's the "time" dimension that needs to be chucked. And once we've only got Newtonian time left, we're back to an aether model.

I found a guy on Quora who talks about the historical environment that helped physicists chose SR instead of LET: https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Tesla-so-adamantly-against-relativity-theory/answer/Shiva-Meucci

Have you realised who he is? He set up (and owns) the anti-relativity site. He seems to have deleted the forum. Do you know when it disappeared and whether its deletion was announced there before it went?

As far as I'm concerned, he's a bit wrong about length contraction and time dilation being an illusion, but it is important to know how this drift has occurred if we want to convince. It's not only that SR is conceptually wrong, it's that it doesn't allow to get beyond.

He's a useful contact as he has a detailed knowledge of the history of this.

[Le Repteux (OP)]

What's the difference between that and what I'm saying? I show that the "time" dimension isn't sufficient and that Newtonian time has to be added to it, then I say that one of those two kinds of "time" is superfluous and that it can't be the Newtonian one that should go as it would have to be brought straight back in again, so it's the "time" dimension that needs to be chucked. And once we've only got Newtonian time left, we're back to an aether model.

The first time I saw your explanation I didn't care to understand. It was enough for me to know that, with beaming, ether explained it all. Then I got back to it to be sure I didn't miss something important. In fact, what I found difficult to understand is the block universe of the relativists, and I still don't understand it. I went through a few web pages about it and it didn't help. It looks more philosophical than scientific. To me, saying that the past the present and the future are equally real is as illogical as saying that the speed of light is the same whether the observer is moving or not. There is no need to get deeper in the theory when the premise is illogical, just to find a logical way to explain the observations, and that's what LET does.

Have you realised who he is? He set up (and owns) the anti-relativity site. He seems to have deleted the forum. Do you know when it disappeared and whether its deletion was announced there before it went?

No, I didn't realise. The forum was deleted a few years ago, and then it got back on the air again, but I haven't been there lately so I don't know when it disappeared. We can ask him if we want now that we know he is still alive. I thought he was dead!

He's a useful contact as he has a detailed knowledge of the history of this.

He seems to know what he is talking about. I had a look at what he says on Quora, and I found that he was interested in AI, so here is the link to his page in case you would like to know what he thinks about that:
https://www.quora.com/profile/Shiva-Meucci 
In case you didn't know about them, here is a link to Melon University that I found in his answers. They are specialized in computer sciences, but they also try to understand human mind by reading it with a 3D scanner.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/link/mind-readers
Some questions below, Meucci is completely wrong to affirm that a windsurfer is unable to go faster than the wind, and it's an easy one, so maybe he is not that reliable after all as far as knowledge is concerned.

[David Cooper]

I've been thinking more and more about black holes, trying to narrow the options down further. There's some energy going missing in LET's gravity mechnism in that as an object accelerates downwards, the gain in kinetic energy must be less than reduction of the energy acting within the object due to its lower speed of functionality with the speed of light being lower as the object descends into the gravity well. As it heads for the event horizon, it has to slow down and halt there, and once it's done that, we have to ask how all that movement energy is stored now that there's no movement.

There's a clue though. Black holes can orbit each other. If all the functionality of the material within them was halted, there would be no way for them to influence the gravity wells and the black holes would have no pull on each other. The mechanism for pulling an object down towards another one depends on the energy in that object moving from side to side so that it can be lensed down. We know though that black holes are able to lens each other down towards each other strongly. The stored energy must still be moving, but it isn't moving far, or it isn't moving in the normal three dimensions.

By the way, I can't see any way for a black hole in GTR to control the size of its event horizon. With all the material in the singularity, the geometry there is identical no matter how much mass you throw into it. There's absolutely no means for it to maintain the distance to the event horizon. It can't communicate with it because light attempting to move outwards from inside the event horizon is effectively moving backwards towards the singularity, and it is moving at an unslowed speed of c through Spacetime, so no communication can possibly travel out faster than that. It cannot work.

With LET it's quite different. The speed of light is zero in all directions at the event horizon, but that is a slowed speed of light, just like slowing light in other materials. It needn't be the case that no communication can spread outwards across the event horizon at a higher speed than zero, and there's no guarantee that such communication throughout the black hole can't act at c, so there's no logical barrier to the shape of the gravity well being maintained continually.

[Le Repteux (OP)]

Black holes are a curved space-time issue, and I always had a problem with it the same way I had a problem with SR's space-time. You solved my SR's problem with your simulations, but I'm still waiting for one to explain curved space-time. With SR, I didn't understand beaming, and the thing that I don't understand with GR is the physical mechanism that explains the curving of space-time. More specifically, I need to see information getting away from a massive body and curving space-time later on. Scientists want us to believe that mass does it without showing us a mechanism for it. My small steps show that mass could be the result of synchronization being broken during acceleration, and if it was so, it could certainly not curve space-time. We can think that the two kinds of mass come from two different mechanisms, but then, we have to show both of them. The way black holes work, no information can get out of them, so nothing can inform space-time to get curved, which means that we got the same problem with the two kinds of space-time, we can't simulate them, and if it is so, I can't see how nature could produce them. You say that it's different with LET, but you assume that the speed of light would be affected by the gravity well, and you have no more mechanism to explain the gravity well than relativists have to explain curved space. We must be on solid ground before trying to build a new theory, otherwise we will have to add epicycles to epicycles indefinitely as relativists.

[David Cooper]

But we know that the speed of light is slower deeper in gravity wells. We can now put two identical atomic clocks on different shelves in a lab and watch the lower one tick more slowly. We know that if you stick enough mass together you can create an event horizon where light is slowed to zero speed. With LET though, that doesn't prevent signals from moving through that region at c, so there is no problem with maintaining the gravity well of a black hole, and there is no curving of space involved in this either. It's a much more rational explanation. The only part of the picture we're missing is the dark extension to matter which creates the medium of the gravity well and which slows light there. There is more than one kind of dark stuff out there.

I read something a couple of days ago about slowing light and even halting it in a medium. A photon once stopped actually disappears, its energy then being manifested in the arrangement of the matter that stopped it. And when that matter reverses the changes to that arrangement, the photon is reproduced and carries on. So, when a photon stops at the event horizon, the same thing must be happening to it. Moreover, when matter stops at the event horizon, its functionality is halted and the waves of energy that it's made of must also stop in the same way as the photon: the matter disappears and is recorded in the change in arrangement of something else: more dark stuff. And because that dark stuff moves through space with the black hole, that dark stuff is not the space fabric, but something else made of waves that moves through the fabric. The matter that falls into a black hole, and the light, disappears: its energy reappears as changes in the arrangement of dark stuff. And that dark stuff is highly active. If it wasn't, black holes wouldn't be able to attract each other with a lensing mechanism.

[David Cooper]

After a lot of analysis of the practical thinking abilities of people with high IQs, I've uncovered the actual cause of stupidity. Most people never learn how to reason, but simply collect beliefs instead from sources they trust, and they get on very well in life by doing this. They start out that way in childhood, just believing what their parents and teachers tell them, and that typically sets the pattern that sabotages their thinking potential for the rest of their life. When they come up against ideas that conflict with their own, they either change to those new beliefs if they trust the sources sufficiently, or they reject them if they don't trust the sources. That's it. They don't reason it out to see which ideas are actually right, but use tribal affiliation as their guide instead. This is why people get locked into a particular position on politics where they can't see that the bits they've got wrong are wrong, and it locks them into their religion too if they have one. Group beliefs only evolve gradually because it takes more than a few members of the group to develop a new belief before it gains enough momentum to spread and become the majority belief in that group. People also group up with people who have very similar sets of beliefs, and they collectively reject ideas that come from outsiders which don't harmonise with their own. What they do when challenged about a particular belief is dig in to defend it, collecting all the evidence they can find to do so while rejecting all the evidence that says the opposite. This is the normal modus operandi of humans. People like me who think rationally and change their beliefs when they test them and find them to be wrong are freaks. The key thing I've found is that the actual ability of many irrational people to reason can be really good when they're defending correct positions, but they override the rules of reasoning when their incorrect positions are attacked because they cannot accept that they are wrong, and they are incapable of recognising that they are doing so. This opens up the way to build AGS that matches the thinking behaviour of most people, and it should help AGI work out how to train these errors out of people.

[Le Repteux (OP)]

Hi David,

Of course, I still think you're wrong, and I still think it's because of your work in artificial intelligence. I already told you that the only reason why I changed my mind about relativity was that I was already looking in the right direction, and that I am the only one I know who has changed his mind since I am on the Internet, which means to me that I didn't changed my mind because I think more rationally than others, but because I was very lucky. Let's lay the groundwork before going any further: can you admit that as a possibility or do you think I'm plain wrong?

[David Cooper]

I don't think you're plain wrong. I was talking about the general way in which people think: they are primarily belief buckets which collect beliefs from sources they trust. That's why it's so tribal and it accounts for the way they dismiss correct arguments out of hand while going against fundamental rules of mathematics even though they claim to work 100% within the rules. It's that extraordinary phenomenon that needs to be accounted for, and it is explained neatly by this idea that people are primarily belief buckets which use trust as a guide to what's right rather than reason. Of course, they do sometimes go against the herd and break the locks off their thinking, and then other members of their tribe may pay attention, but it's inordinately less likely that new thinking will be let in from an opposing group.

Some individuals are more open to the possibility that their beliefs are wrong than others, and not all individuals attach the same emotional ties to their beliefs as others. I don't know what belief you started out with and how much of it there was for you to reject once you saw the mechanism for clocks running slow. You actually say that you were already looking in the right direction, so you're exactly the kind of person who's ready to recognise the rightness of what you then found. I've now had hundreds of discussions with people who have dug in and turned into gibbering idiots when confronted with clear proof that one of their treasured beliefs is wrong, and that's a phenomenon that needs to be explained. The proof that I set before them is correct, so why are they rejecting it? They'll tell you it's wrong, but every time they change frame they're changing the speed of light relative to objects in the system. It would be impossible for their belief to be tolerated by an AGI system which applies mathematics correctly and systematically to all things. They are shackled in their thinking by the algorithm they run on which leads them to collect beliefs based on trust. It is a childish algorithm, and most people never grow out of it. What is amazing is that despite that, it's still been possible for great advances to be made by a few people making a few good moves here and there, but then the same thing happened with evolution when it produced NGI through a long series of lucky accidents.

[Le Repteux (OP)]

In my opinion, the only way to explain our resistance to change our mind is that what we call reason is not what we think. We all feel that our reasons are reasonable, but in reality, they only serve to justify what we feel. The woman where I live looses her memory, but she doesn't loose her speech, so it doesn't show when she speaks, but when we talk together, she doesn't understand what I say if she has to rely on her memory, so she has to rely on what she feels to answer me, and since she feels trapped, she attacks me if I insist like any animal does when it is trapped. All her arguments then has only one sens: attacking what seems to be attacking her. Anything I say to explain what I mean is useless. We had those words in the beginning, and then I understood that she didn't understand even if it didn't show, so now, I just have to stop discussing as soon as she raises her voice and everything is fine. My mum was like that too, but I didn't know what I now know when I was taking care of her, so we had words all the time for nothing. Knowing how mind works helps to behave properly, but it doesn't help to overcome resistance.

I now know that I look as resistant as anybody else, and I know I can't avoid it. I know that the reasons I give to defend my ideas are only pretexts to justify what I subtly feel. This kind of behavior is quite far from artificial intelligence, so I know you're not going to dwell on that either, resistance to change obligates, not because you're not logical, but because logic is not what we think. If I'm right though, your AGI would be programmed to do something nothing can do: overcome its own resistance to change. If bodies could do that, they wouldn't resist to their acceleration anymore. Ivanhov thinks like that, he thinks he can build a ship that will accelerate without a force being applied on it. His theory looks like mine, so I know he would need a faster than light device to do that and he doesn't have it. Of course, since I'm actually only trying to justify what I feel, I can't be sure that I'm right, but I'm almost sure it's a possibility. :0)