Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
David Cooper
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Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Post by David Cooper »

Halc wrote: September 11th, 2018, 7:42 pm
David Cooper wrote: September 11th, 2018, 5:23 pm (C) Does the red light pass through that material at a higher speed relative to it than the blue light does?
This question in isolation lacks a frame definition. I had answered yes to this question, but only with a qualification that it was the frame of the axis of rotation being used. The material is moving at a constant speed in that frame.
It works for all frames, so you can pick any frame you like and the answer will be the same.
We are talking about the red light (the clockwise-moving light) moving through/past the material of the ring as a whole relative to that material piece by piece at closest approach.
Try as I might, I cannot parse this train wreck of a sentence. The first part talks about the ring as a whole, but the second part talks about one small piece of it, and asks how the red light moving through the whole relative to the piece? It just doesn't parse.
It simply means what it says - it passes the material of the ring (either through it if you imagine it being a fibre-optic cable or next to that material if it's in an empty space enclosed by a mirrored surface), and its speed relative to any piece of that material should be restricted to it's speed when it's at the closest point of approach to that material rather than when it's elsewhere in the ring. The wording is necessarily complicated, but it's there to prevent the effect you're meant to be noticing being hidden by averaging it away with inclusions of speeds relative to distant ring material.
Your arguments have been at times based on this language choice of frames making assertions, rather than on theories making assertions about frames. So this is very much a valid point Steve is making. Frames don't assert things. You manipulate meaning with all these conveniences you presume. Say it correctly when your correctness is being questioned, which it very much is.
It is not a valid point at all - all theories have the same frame rules and make the the same assertions are generated from them when those rules are applied. All theories recognise that a frame with an object at rest in it represents the speed of light relative to that object as c in all directions. That information is automatically asserted by frames. In LET, one frame's assertions are true and all others make some assertions that are false. In SR, there is no admission of this, but the assertions of the frames are the same because they represent the speed of light relative to the object at rest in them as c in all directions. That is an unavoidable assertion that frames necessarily make.
David Cooper
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Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Post by David Cooper »

Halc wrote: September 11th, 2018, 7:48 pm
David Cooper wrote: September 11th, 2018, 6:08 pm Practically each person I've discussed SR with has a radically different idea of what SR is
...
I'm attacking SR as SR is presented practically everywhere.
Another contradition.
Practically every person I've discussed SR with puts a very different slant on it, but they're still all doing some twisted version or other of SR. Here, it's SR with a denial of the existence of the dogma.
David Cooper
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Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Post by David Cooper »

Halc wrote: September 11th, 2018, 8:51 pm
David Cooper wrote: September 11th, 2018, 6:28 pm The speed of light relative to the apparatus in a specific direction doesn't change when light bounces off a mirror
It does if the apparatus is moving. The mirror changes the direction of the beam.
You're misinterpreting what I said. I said "the speed of light" and not "the speed of the light".
David Cooper
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Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Post by David Cooper »

Steve3007 wrote: September 12th, 2018, 2:48 amThe point that David seems not to recognize is that it is the speed of light as measured by a non-accelerating observer that is constant.
I fully recognise that - you're just failing to understand how the thought experiment's being used and what you're actually being asked to measure, so you're off on a journey of your own making and attacking me for sending you on it when I didn't. Part of the problem is that you see the word Sagnac and you think I'm talking about Sagnac. I'm not. Sagnac and MGP merely confirm that my thought experiment works the way I claim it does, and the rest of it is an exploration of something that Sagnac and MGP weren't looking for.
(C) Does the red light pass through that material at a higher speed relative to it than the blue light does?
Given that the way we know the speed of something is by actually measuring it, asking for the speed of light "relative to the material" can, as far I can see, only sensibly mean embedding two detectors in the material.
You're simply being asked to make a measurement from the non-rotating frame in which the centre of the ring is at rest, so that bans you from measuring anything by going round with the ring and trying to pass off a rotating-frame's measurement as a measurement made using the non-rotating frame.
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Halc
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Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Post by Halc »

David Cooper wrote: September 13th, 2018, 6:51 pm On this page: http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virgi ... c_rel.html, ... the section named "you really can't tell if you're moving"):-

"Just as Galileo had asserted that observing gnats, fish and dripping bottles, throwing things and generally jumping around would not help you to find out if you were in a room at rest or moving at a steady velocity, Einstein added that no kind of observation at all, even measuring the speed of light across your room to any accuracy you like, would help find out if your room was “really at rest”. This implies, of course, that the concept of being “at rest” is meaningless.
This implies that the concept of being “really at rest” is meaningless. You significantly change the meaning by including that word in one statement and dropping it the next. There is very much meaning to being at rest, but the meaning is a relation.
If Einstein is right, there is no natural rest-frame in the universe. Naturally, there can be no “aether”
There can still be a aether, but then being at rest just means relative to that aether. It is still a relation.
"The laws of physics are invariant (i.e., identical) in all inertial systems (i.e., non-accelerating frames of reference)."

"The speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of the motion of the light source."

There's no problem with the second one because it doesn't technically say it's the same relative to them in all directions.
Misrepresenting the meaning of the statement.
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Halc
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Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Post by Halc »

David Cooper wrote: September 13th, 2018, 7:02 pm
Steve3007 wrote: September 11th, 2018, 7:24 pmAstonishingly, it now seems to be turning out that he hasn't checked the basics of what it says from any sources other than random people he's chatted to. And from that, he seeks to spread his misunderstanding to others. That's why I think it's so important for him to be willing to actually read at least a short, simple text on the subject.
I checked the basics by talking to qualified people who showed me the sources of the dogma, often by linking to Einstein's own writing. I don't have the links though as I didn't think it would ever be necessary to pass them on to anyone when everyone on the SR side seemed to agree with the dogma already. It's come as a real surprise to find people now who don't know anything about the dogma and don't believe it exists.
I saw the links you endorse. Yes, those guys consider SR to be dogma, typically sticking to SR, which was never a complete model of reality, and not GR which is. That conspiracyOfLight site is not even pseudoscience. They're just plain wrong. I wondered why you didn't use their proof that Sagnac effect contradicts SR, since you didn't produce one of your own.
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Halc
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Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Post by Halc »

David Cooper wrote: September 13th, 2018, 7:15 pm
Halc wrote: This question in isolation lacks a frame definition. I had answered yes to this question, but only with a qualification that it was the frame of the axis of rotation being used. The material is moving at a constant speed in that frame.
It works for all frames, so you can pick any frame you like and the answer will be the same.
You're apparently referring to absolute speed without specifying that (a deliberate obfuscation). Inviting one to pick a different frame is further implication that it is not absolute speed that is being requested.
Try as I might, I cannot parse this train wreck of a sentence. The first part talks about the ring as a whole, but the second part talks about one small piece of it, and asks how the red light moving through the whole relative to the piece? It just doesn't parse.
It simply means what it says - it passes the material of the ring (either through it if you imagine it being a fibre-optic cable or next to that material if it's in an empty space enclosed by a mirrored surface), and its speed relative to any piece of that material should be restricted to it's speed when it's at the closest point of approach to that material rather than when it's elsewhere in the ring. The wording is necessarily complicated, but it's there to prevent the effect you're meant to be noticing being hidden by averaging it away with inclusions of speeds relative to distant ring material.
If the ring axis is stationary, that delta-speed is the same on the other side of the ring as well, so the complicated wording is not necessary.
Your arguments have been at times based on this language choice of frames making assertions, rather than on theories making assertions about frames. So this is very much a valid point Steve is making. Frames don't assert things. You manipulate meaning with all these conveniences you presume. Say it correctly when your correctness is being questioned, which it very much is.
It is not a valid point at all - all theories have the same frame rules and make the the same assertions
Yes, the theories make the assertions as you say here. But above you have frames making assertions.
All theories recognise that a frame with an object at rest in it represents the speed of light relative to that object as c in all directions.
Wrong.
That information is automatically asserted by frames.
Really wrong.
Steve3007
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Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Post by Steve3007 »

David Cooper wrote:ou accuse me of misunderstanding SR, but I'm just taking it to be what it is normally described as. On this page: http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virgi ... c_rel.html, for example (from the first page of google's search results), we have the following (if you want to check it, go there and click on the plus sign there to display the section named "you really can't tell if you're moving"):-...
I did check that page. It starts by stating the principle of Galilean relativity: that the laws of physics are the same in a uniformly moving room as they are in a room at rest. And it makes it clear that when we say "moving" or "at rest", talking about such objects as ships, we mean at rest WRT the Earth. So it makes it clear how the concept of movement is meaningfully used. It then extends the idea to the laws of electromagnetism.

The part that you've quoted correctly states "the concept of being 'at rest' is meaningless", by which it means (as it made clear earlier) that the concept of "at rest" is, by its nature, a comparison. It is only meaningful if we say what we're at rest with respect to. When it says "Naturally, there can be no 'aether', no thin transparent jelly filling space and vibrating with light waves, because if there were, it would provide the natural rest frame, and affect the speed of light as measured in other moving inertial frames as discussed above." perhaps it should have instead said that the concept of aether doesn't add anything useful to physics because it doesn't affect any observations. That doesn't stop people from postulating the existence of such a thing. But a concept which doesn't, either directly or indirectly, predict a possible observation to be different than if that concept wasn't used is of no use to physics.
From Wikipedia's page on SR we have the postulates:-

"The laws of physics are invariant (i.e., identical) in all inertial systems (i.e., non-accelerating frames of reference)."

"The speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of the motion of the light source."

There's no problem with the second one because it doesn't technically say it's the same relative to them in all directions. The first one though can be interpreted in two very different ways - one to say that the action is identical when light passes an object regardless of how fast the object might be moving relative to an absolute frame (because that would be a necessary consequence of identical physics), and the other that they merely appear to be identical (while the actual physics of the event and imagined physics of it are not the same, because the laws of physics remain the same). This ambiguity covers both options and may be misleading a lot of people who are taking the wrong interpretation to be the intended one.
The first postulate is not ambiguous if you understand what laws of physics are. Laws of physics are generalizations created from observing the patterns in measurements which predict future measurements. The first postulate simply predicts that those measurements, and therefore the laws of physics that derive from them, will be found to be the same when measured against any non-accelerating reference frame.

I think misunderstandings of these kinds of explanations often come in if you read them in isolation without doing the groundwork first. They often simply say: "there is no aether" when they should really say something like what I said above. But the assumption, I guess, is that the reader knows what kind of subject physics is (an empirical science) and knows what a law of physics is.
Again, we see the aether being rejected as a problem even though it wasn't a real problem at all, but this fix for it by ditching it instilled in people the idea that the aether and the absolute frame that go with it don't exist. Everywhere we look, we find misleading information of this kind. It is no surprise that so many people have misunderstood SR when is is being taught in such a careless manner. Misinformation is ubiquitous and there is no attempt to put them right, even though people have been misunderstanding it in the same way for decades and are becoming new generations of miseducators pumping out the same lies.
I agree that aether shouldn't be rejected as a problem. It should be regarded as not necessary to the purposes of an empirical science. It isn't a problem, as such, because it always seems to ensure that it can't affect any observations.
All the bits in bold are correct, though the last one is disputed because it comes from the dogma that you deny exists but which almost everyone else in the real world applies.
I explain more about why I regard them as incorrect in this post:

viewtopic.php?p=319581#p319581
If one frame says something is stationary and another says it's moving, it is clearly impossible to tell whether something is moving or not, so your objection to that one is frankly ridiculous.
Which is perhaps one reason why frames don't say that. Movement is defined as the change in the spatial distance between two objects with respect to time. So, if you use the correct definition of the word "moving", clearly we can work out if we're moving. Since this is self-evidently true, what might somebody mean if they say "you can't tell if you're moving"? If we read their words in context we see that they mean measurements made against an intertial reference frame will be the same as measurements made against a different inertial reference frame. Measurements of movement made inside a box that is moving at constant velocity relative to the surface of the Earth (for example) will be the same as measurements of movement made inside a box that is at rest relative to the surface of the Earth.

If, for the sake of brevity, you don't make that clear in your explanation it wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that you build on that omission rather than explaining it.
You'd have told Einstein himself that he misunderstood it
No, I would have read his words in context, bearing in mind the physics that went before him and the empirical nature of physics. If he simply said "you can't tell if you're moving", since I know that statement, taken in isolation, is demonstrably untrue, I would ask him more about what precisely he means by it.
Steve3007
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Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Post by Steve3007 »

David Cooper wrote:I checked the basics by talking to qualified people who showed me the sources of the dogma, often by linking to Einstein's own writing.
To be clear: I don't just mean the basics of Special Relativity. I mean the basics of physics.
Steve3007
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Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Post by Steve3007 »

It might well be that you're perfectly well aware of the basics of physics. But I haven't seen the evidence so far. A few pages ago, when I asked you some simple questions about it, here:

viewtopic.php?p=318878#p318878

in your answers here:

viewtopic.php?p=318986#p318986

you either didn't answer the questions or answered them wrongly. This seems odd because they're simple questions. Question 1, for example, could be on a high school Physics exam. But rather than simply giving the obvious answer you started going on irrelevantly about how "the universe supports only one underlying reality". This rings alarm bells for me. Maybe you somehow just misunderstood what the question was asking. But I don't see how. I tried to make it as plain and unambiguous as possible. It was a question about how a ball, thrown upwards, moves just after it leaves the hand that throws it.

So, as I say, maybe we're just talking past each other. But the evidence so far, from your answers to questions like this, suggest to me that you need to brush up on the pre-SR basics. Otherwise the roof that you're constructing will be unsupported by any foundations or walls (to labour that metaphor again).
Steve3007
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Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Post by Steve3007 »

In a real attempt to try to ge to the bottom of this one, I've looked back at your next post about those questions, here:

viewtopic.php?p=319094#p319094

Taking just the questions about acceleration and circular motion:

Do you accept that an object in free fall in the Earth's gravitational field is accelerating towards the centre of the Earth and can be moving upwards (have its velocity vector pointing upwards), with its speed (the magnitude of its velocity) decreasing?

Do you accept that any object moving in a circle, at constant speed, is, by definition, accelerating towards the centre of that circle?

In the context of physics, do you know what kinetic and potential energy are?

I'm sorry if these are childish questions, the answers to which you obviously know, but I just need to try to check again.
Steve3007
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Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Post by Steve3007 »

Continuing my above sequence of posts, given the frustratingly long time (24+ hours) between individual iterations of this conversation, I've continued to look at the conversation which led on from my sequence of simple pre-SR, pre-LET physics questions. Unforunately, my next step was to try to explain some of the basics of classical (pre-SR) kinetic and potential energy, and then the conversation moved on to other things. So I'd like to now properly address the post to which I linked above.


Original question (paraphrased):
1. If I throw a ball upwards, neglecting air resistance, as soon as it has left my hand, is it accelerating, deccelerating or both?
David Cooper wrote:The correct answer is not dependent on the coordinate system you're using, so the answer c is wrong. The correct answer depends on whether it's accelerating, decelerating, or doing one followed by the other, and that depends on its movement relative to the space fabric.
No. the correct answer is by definition that acceleration is the rate of change of velocity with respect to time, which means that it can result in the magnitude of the velocity increasing, reducing or remaining the same. If the magnitude of the velocity remiains the same, but there is still a non-zero acceleration, then the direction of the velocity is changing and the two vectors are perpendicular to each other.

So an acceleration vector pointing in the opposite direction to a velocity vector means that acceleration is a deceleration, if we define "deceleration" as reduction in speed, which seems reasonable.

This is basic, basic stuff which comes before SR or LET.


Original question:
2. Do you appreciate the difference between an inertial and a non-inertial frame of reference?
Me: A non-inertial frame is one which is accelerating or is in a gravitional field. I don't know what you mean by "switches real frame continually"

You: If it's in a gravitational field, it can be a genuine frame. However, if it's something moving on a curved path, it's a pseudo frame. Such an object is at rest in one frame for a moment, then at rest in an adjacent frame the next, then at rest in another frame the moment after that, and so on. The frame that it's at rest in throughout is a pseudo frame.
There's nothing "non-genuine" about a non-inertial frame. It's simply defined as a frame which is accelerating or in a gravitational field. This is simply the definition of a term in physics. That definition has nothing to do with your own personal beliefs about some particular aspect of physics. It is true that the word "pseudo" has been used in the past. And, when you studied physics at school, you may remember centrifugal force being classed as a "pseudo force", in contrast with centripetal force. But it's only a pseudo-force when viewed from an inertial reference frame.


Original question:
3. Do you appreciate that velocity and acceleration are both vector quantities?
I couldn't see the point you were making at the time, but what you're doing is taking a very specific definition of acceleration and deceleration where they become the same thing and where they shed no light on the underlying reality in which energy is either being added or removed. You seek to make out that they are the same thing so that you can assert that something can accelerate and decelerate at the same time, and by your definition of the words, that's correct. By my definition though, it's not possible, and my definition is the one that addresses the contradiction between the object taking on additional kinetic energy at the same time as it's ditching kinetic energy. Switching to a definition that hides the issue does not make the contradiction go away from the more fundamental statement using the other definition.
For future reference: Please don't tell me what I'm seeking to do. When I ask a question I am seeking to get from you an answer to that question, as it is stated. Nothing more. I asked you if you accept the fact that velocity and acceleration are vectors. This is because I am seeking to know whether you appreciate that velocity and acceleration are vectors. If you don't, then it's really difficult to discuss any aspect of physics because we don't speak the same language as each other. I'm just trying to establish whether we speak the same language.


Original question:
4. If an object is moving in a circle (rotating), like a stone on a string, a planet in a circular orbit or the apparatus in the Sagnac Effect experiments that you have mentioned, do you accept that the object is accelerating towards the centre of the circle and is therefore in a non-inertial reference frame?
By one very specific definition of the word, yes. It isn't necessarily a real acceleration though just because it's been given a label with a misleading name.
A label with a misleading name?!?!? This, perhaps more than any other answer, appears to me to demonstrate you lack of grasp of basic physics that it is essential to grasp if you're going to tackle more advanced subjects like SR and LET. It is true by definition of the words "acceleration", "velocity" and "circle" that an object moving in a circle has an acceleration vector which points towards the centre of the circle. This a function of the definitions of those words. It's not specific to any individual aspect of physics that we might be discussing. Please tell me that I've misinterpreted you and you understand this bit of basic physics and geometry! If not, as I've said, we have no language in common in which to communicate.

Original question:
5. Do you accept that, strictly speaking, the statement: "object A is moving at 5 m/s" has no physical significance because it does not correspond to anything that can be empirically confirmed or denied? Do you accept that in order to give it such physical significance I have to say something like: "object A is moving at 5 m/s relative to object B"?

Your answer:
From the universe's point of view, it has an absolute meaning. All we can do when assigning speed descriptions to things is provide conditional truths about speeds of objects (on the basis of a particular frame being the absolute one) or give their speed relative to other objects, but we are not banned from considering what the universe must be doing and the logical superiority of it doing one single thing rather than a plurality of magical, contradictory things.
Your assertion about that answer:
It was a correct answer.
No it wasn't. Regardless of whether you think there is such a thing as aether, movement is by definition a function of the relationship between objects. If you think there is such a thing as aether then the sentence is rendered meaningful by changing it to: "object A is moving at 5 m/s relative to the aether". And, like any proposition in physics (or science generally) that proposition, to be meaningful, needs to be empirically falsifiable/verifiable, either directly or indirectly. i.e. you need to show how that statement is useful for describing and predicting possible observations.
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Halc
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Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Post by Halc »

David Cooper wrote: September 13th, 2018, 7:20 pm
Halc wrote: September 11th, 2018, 8:51 pm It does if the apparatus is moving. The mirror changes the direction of the beam.
You're misinterpreting what I said. I said "the speed of light" and not "the speed of the light".
There is no delta-speed of light relative to a moving apparatus. I've explained how that is meaningless. And yes, the context was delta-speed here. You have to choose 'the light' since light in general has no constant velocity in any frame.
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Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Post by David Cooper »

(Sorry about the long delay between posts - I heard some amazing things about Salisbury Cathedral and just had to take a couple of days out to go and see its spire and clock.)
Halc wrote: September 12th, 2018, 9:03 amLET also acknowledges this, but somehow LET is not wrong when it says the same thing.
That bit has nothing to do with SR being wrong. It's solely aimed at people who attempt to defend mode 2 models by misapplying frame rules, and it's important to get those models out of the way to focus on viable models instead and to stop the mode 2 models being smuggled back into play repeatedly.
The way SR is disproved is the way that all the models that are recognised as SR have faults which invalidate them, and Sagnac/MGP's role is in providing proof that my thought experiment is valid, which in turn proves that frames work by the rules I claim of them, which proves that SR generates contradictions which invalidate some models of it (while the remaining SR models are invalidated in other ways).
This rambling sentence asserts faults in SR but doesn't point them out, especially since SR predicts Sagnac effect. Not sure what rule you're talking about.
There's nothing rambling about it. You've been led through all the points that it refers to, so you should be able to follow it. There are four versions of each of the three modes shown in my simulation, each mode having 3D and 4D versions, and non-block and block versions of each of those. Mode 2 models generate contradictions which many people deny, and in defending those models they misuse frame rules to try to hide the contradictions. Other models are disproved in other ways. You agree that the mode 2 models aren't valid, so that simplifies things for this discussion by removing them from the table. The mode 0 models (3D and 4D block models which exist eternally without ever being created in order of causation) are invalidated by the impossibility of real causality existing in them - you haven't rejected them yet, but you have put yourself in an extreme position where you use dodgy rules for things that don't exist to assert that causation doesn't have to run for causality to be real. Mode 1 models all suffer from event-meshing failures, so only the block versions remain potentially viable, and even then they're far-fetched and depend on adding Newtonian time into them (which is normally considered to be banned in SR) to enable the event-meshing failures to be erased over Newtonian time. Mode 3 models need an absolute frame, and the block versions there are superfluous as they depend on the non-block versions for the block generation phase. The only models left standing are LET and a 4D "SR" model with an absolute frame (which is normally considered to be banned in SR), and if you go for any 4D version, that's revealed to be ridiculously far-fetched too once you start thinking about what happens when light reduces all of its paths to zero length. The only theory that doesn't look ludicrous by the end of it is LET, while the alternatives are either impossible or break at least one of the normal rules of SR.
There's no straw man there - there's no point in pretending there's a speed of light involved if it reduces all paths to zero length. There is only a speed of light in 3D models.
You have exhibited pretty much zero understanding of other models. This statement is a classic example. It even denies the straw man accusation as it makes one: that the model "reduces all paths to zero length". You have a picture of the model in your web page, and I notice path lengths are not zero.
I very clearly understand the range and function of the different models a lot better than you do, as you keep demonstrating. I had assumed that you understood that Spacetime diagrams don't show the proposed underlying 4D geometry accurately, but stretch it out in all cases where the lines aren't vertical. The closer they are to 45 degrees, the more shortened their paths become because those objects are moving close to the speed of light, and when you change frame to make a line vertical, you reveal its real 4D length. As you do that with more and more extreme frames, these lines shorten towards zero, demonstrating that if you could do it with light paths, they would necessarily be of zero length. Think about an object travelling just under the speed of light such that it covers ten billion lightyears (as measured by us) while its clock only ticks out one second. What is the contracted length of that path? Now do it again with the clock only ticking up a millionth of a second over that same distance (as measured by us) - what is the contracted length for that? Repeat with the clock only ticking up a quintillionth of a second during the trip. You can go on infinitely with shorter and shorter times and more and more compressed distance, both time and length clearly tending to zero. The path that light travels cannot be longer in length than the shortest of the paths these fast-moving objects take, and therefore it must be zero length and zero time (by the "time" of the "time" dimension). The 3D alternative, LET, is clearly much more sensible as light simply moves through space at c without the distance being shortened at all.
Indeed - that is not a contradiction at all. It only becomes a contradiction in cases where a clock is claimed to be ticking faster than another clock that is claimed to be ticking faster than the first and when both are asserted to be true
Again you leave off the frame references when you want to make a point, knowing that it makes your statement sound contradictory instead of just deliberately misleading. SR does not claim what you say. It claims that it will be measured thus in respective frames where each clock is slower than the other. LET asserts the same thing.
The frame references are so damned obvious that no one competent needs help in working out that two different frames are being used there. There are two frames which both exist at the same place at the same moment as each other, and the two frames are making contradictory assertions. No theory can just wish those contradictions away. LET accepts that they are contradictions and says that at least one of them is misrepresenting reality. SR fails to do that and tolerates the contradiction. If SR was to be rational, it would not tolerate the contradiction and it would say that at least one of them is misrepresenting the underlying reality, but it doesn't do that because SR denies the existence of an underlying reality.
What law of logic would be violated by A faster than B relative to one frame, and B faster than A relative to another? Never mind the measurement business. By what valid law of logic is this a contradiction?
There is no contradiction there in the way those statements have been made. The contradiction only comes in when both frames are asserted to be true representations of the underlying reality.
A[re?] you perhaps invoking law of non-contradiction in an invalid way? Or is it something else? You seem to accept an object having different speeds relative to different frames, but a second example has you crying contradiction.
It is correct to say that one frame asserts that A is faster than B (obviously in that frame) and that another frame asserts that B is faster than A (obviously in that other frame), which is an alternative way of phrasing what you said. You don't get a contradiction there (in the main statement) because what's being reported is true. You only get a contradictions when you compare the two assertions and look to see if they are compatible. This is equivalent to a case where someone says 1=2 and where someone reports that: "John says that 1 equals 2". That sentence is true as its truth is not dependent on 1 being equal to 2. In the same way, John might say that x=1 while Gertrude says x=2, and there's no contradiction in a claim that "John says x=1 and Gertrude says x=2". There is a contradiction hidden there at a different level though, but that contradiction is not being made by the person who produced the sentence. The contradiction is in the idea that x can be 1 and 2 at the same time, and that becomes a serious contradiction if someone is stupid enough to claim that John and Gertrude are both right.
This seems like classic confirmation bias. You accept facts that seem to support your view, but find nearly similar facts to be nonsense if you feel it threatens your view. If we really get close to pointing out your errors, then the accusations of 'magic' and 'dogma' come forth. I must be doing something right because I've driven you to that point on a number of occasions.
The errors are on your side - you've been failing to handle logic correctly, taking a case where there's no contradiction and a case where there is a contradiction to be the same thing so that you can deny the contradiction in the latter case. Let's go through it again to make sure you've got it now:-

Frame A says that clock A is ticking more quickly than clock B.

True.

Frame B says that clock B is ticking more quickly than clock A.

True.

Frame A says that clock A is ticking more quickly than clock B AND Frame B says that clock B is ticking more quickly than clock A.

True. (They do say that.)

Now compare the actual claims made by the frames:-

Clock A is ticking more quickly than clock B AND clock B is ticking more quickly than clock A.

Contradiction, therefore that sentence is false, and that means that at least one of the two statements within it is false.

What defence do you have against this argument? That frames don't make assertions, perhaps. Fine - just translate from my wording to something you're happy with where it becomes clear that those claims must be generated by anyone who analyses the events through the lens of those frames and makes correct statements about the relative ticking rates of the two clocks. The two claims are necessarily generated in such a situation (which is why I say that the frames make those assertions), and when they're compared, they contradict each other.

Quite why you're objecting to that though when you've already accepted that mode 2 models have been invalidated by these contradictions, I do no know. All the above is based on correct reasoning of the kind any logician would understand. Your objection here was based on a flawed understanding of logic which I suggest you should fix now.
or where an event is claimed to have happened by one frame and claimed not to have happened yet by another and when both claims are asserted to be true.
No model claims that.
Those claims are made by those frames and they are asserted at a single point in space at a single moment in time. Mode 2 models make exactly those claims. So do mode 3 models, but in mode 3 models the contradiction is recognised rather than denied. (Frames in mode 1 models don't make such obvious contradictory claims because changing frame doesn't change the events asserted to have happened.)
This presumes an interpretation where there is a current state of the universe and all events are in exactly one of a category of (happened, happening, and will-happen), and only the happening events are real.
Any model with running time will necessarily have such current states, even if they're lost once you get into the alternative physics of the block universe that's being built this way.
I know of no scientific theory that asserts the second premise: that of a preferred moment. It certainly is absent from Lorentz's theories. The theories don't deny it either, but they deny its detectability.
If you have running time (which is necessary in all models that don't magically exist in completed block form from the start), at any point where something happens, there is a time before it happened in which it had not happened, and a time after it in which it is a past happening. Such an event is not happened and unhappened repeatedly, but happens once and remains as happened ever afterwards. Changing frame at one location does not change events at other locations, and all non-magical theories are bound by this regardless of whether a theory states that it's bound by it or not.
So when I say no valid model claims that, I mean interpretations with the premise of there being a preferred moment do not claim that other events have both happened and not happened. This is why your mode 2 doesn't depict any known valid interpretation since it is contradictory exactly for the reasons you state. Interpretations without the premise of there being a preferred moment do not have a concept of those three states, and any reference to the states is meaningless mixing of models, not contradictory.
Mode 2 represents some models that are often presented as SR, though people typically use a mixture of a variety of incompatible models, borrowing from mode 2 whenever it suits them. I insist when people set out their model that they tell me where it belongs in the set of 14 models that I've identified. Usually they are unable to do so because they want it to be a mixture of several models, but the 14 models are mutually incompatible. (Note: it's possible to subdivide some of the 14 models into variant versions too, but there's usually no need to do so - the option's always there though when needed.)
You deny that you do this mixing of interpretations, but I'm trying to be quite explicit about pointing out where you very much do.
And again you're wrong to do so - I have put the models in fully distinct compartments and never mix them, but I frequently have to argue against people who insist on mixing them. There is no place anywhere here or anywhere else where I have mixed models. You may find places where I have said things that apply to multiple models at once, but that isn't mixing them.
David Cooper
Posts: 224
Joined: April 30th, 2018, 4:51 pm

Re: Time: is time a concept or a physical force and can we prove the arrow of time

Post by David Cooper »

Eduk wrote: September 12th, 2018, 9:28 amMisusing the term dogma means an argument is poor so must be defended using Schopenhauer techniques, or the person making the argument is fundamentally illogical to the point that they can't make a logical point, leaving the only chance that they are right down to randomness. Personally I find the argument that I might be randomly correct to be unconvincing (even if technically true).
I haven't misused the term dogma - the dogma is out there, as I pointed out in a recent post. I hope Steve takes it upon himself to get in touch with all the people behind those sites to tell them to read physics textbooks because they don't understand what SR is. Eduk - you are the most ridiculous person here. You have no idea what a logical point even is - all you ever do is trust in the rightness of the herd that bows to authority, and that has rendered you completely useless.
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