.

 

Let me first answer the intent of the whole question:

 

Actually, after the particles bounce off, they still travel at light speed. Since light can go around the earth ~7 times in a second, don't think you're gonna notice the "echo", even though technically there is a delay you are obtusely referring to.

 

 

Now let me answer the question in BOLD:

 

Light speed is both zero and infinite depending on the perspective, so...

 

By magic of course! We gave up on that old "rational" fad back in 1905. Now we're just back to good ole' reliable "X is just too much for you to ever grasp, and how dare you try"

 

I mean look at quantum mechanics, just observing reality is what makes it happen, or separate into multiple realities... or a million other nonsensical things. Obviously, there's just no way we could be misinterpreting the data of our tests. There's no difference between data and interpretation!! It's all in the MATH!!!! No interpretation needed! (I wash my hands 7 times before writing the holy name of Math)

 

As a matter of fact you best stop asking the wrong questions, like Lious Essen, the inventor of the atomic clock and the man responsible for our current most accurate measurement of light speed. (what an idiot!)

 

"No one has attempted to refute my arguments, but I was warned that if I persisted I was likely to spoil my career prospects. …the continued acceptance and teaching of relativity hinders the development of a rational extension of electromagnetic theory." - Louis Essen F.R.S

Creation time: Jul 09, 2013 09:13 PM PDT

 

 

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Numerous quasars have been detected as travelling faster than light. They make excuses for it but then we either have to believe our way of detecting the speed of distant objects is totally wrong (blowing a huge hole in modern astrophysics) or you have to believe Einstein was wrong about light speed constancy (blowing a somewhat smaller hole in astrophysics)

 

We've never detected gravity waves. We've never seen real evidence of dark matter in 70 years of looking, why would we be worried about more evidence of GR being wrong when we're already sweeping so much under the rug? (Dark matter is fairy dust invented to explain why GR was so badly wrong about the evidence we see out in the universe such as galactic rotation rates. It's the exact mathematical amount GR is wrong by)

 

The problem starts at light speed constancy. There's plenty in relativity that can be saved but the irrational idea of "constancy" must go and when you dig there's mountains of evidence against it. Space behaves like a real medium and there are growing bodies of evidence for what the science community really really badly does not want to call aether.

 

Here's a question for you, what's the max speed of a vortex traversing water? What if it's carried along in a current? ...I think there may still be a type of speed limit but only with respect to the immediately nearby medium and quasars have created what is basically a warp field around themselves.

Creation time: Aug 12, 2013 11:06 AM PDT

 

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In laymen's terms, time is dependent upon location and motion. Therefore time is relative to a particular observer.

 

In Galilean relativity, the point is that two people in the hold of a ship that is moving can just toss a ball back and forth without having to adjust for the ship's movement. In Einstein's relativity, it's light instead of a ball that doesn't need any adjustments. It's always the same speed to an observer, regardless.

 

Why it's special is because you don't have to be on the same ship for "the ball" to seem the same. For instance, if people are tossing a ball back and forth in a car they don't need to adjust but if they throw the ball out the window to someone standing on the ground it's a whole different story.

 

The reason time is relative is related to this strange effect. If two cars are travelling toward each other down the road at 50 mph and try to toss a ball toward the other car as they pass, someone is going to get hit with a ball going 100 mph.

 

Well, lets say they each can toss a ball toward the other at 10 mph (at the same time) so they'll both be hit with 110 mph balls or the balls will hit each other at 120.

 

Here's what's special and makes all the weirdness. If the ball tossed behaved like a photon, only the travel speed of the photon matters and they'd only be hit by a 10 mph toss.

 

For this to be mathematically accounted for with respect to all the other phenomena we know, time must be altered to be different between observers. This, in combination about what we know with the orbits of planets (we used to believe gravity was instant) leads to the conclusion that time is also different based upon gravity.

 

Eventually you come to the conclusion that since time is dependent upon place but also dependent upon gravity, that gravity affects space and that time and space are one thing. That's general relativity.

 

So finally, according to special relativity, time runs slower for a someone who is moving with respect to you, and according to general relativity, time runs slower for someone experiencing more gravity than you.

Creation time: Sep 26, 2013 07:23 AM PDT

 

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At first I thought I was just misunderstanding. Then once I fully understood, I thought it was unlike everything else in the universe and combined with a lack of medium I thought it was simply a magical belief system which lacked any mechanism. I thought it was similar to spontaneous generation; a pseudo-scientific belief with accurate predictions but no underpinning.

 

I thought it was not only incorrect but literally anti-scientific, religious and it's acceptance was the herald... the death-knell for rational science.

 

But then after years of study I determined how to derive the change factor from classical physics. I was able to personally understand exactly why you would believe there was time dilation and length contraction and why there was a specific amount linked to speed. I saw something with perfect mechanism, reason and no magical underpinning.

 

I finally understood Lorentz Ether Theory to the point that I would invent it myself without outside belief systems. (this is the source of time dilation, length contraction, and the change factor used to calculate it) Creating constancy is actually the goal of the development of the theory. Finally, I understood that light speed constancy was an illusion created mathematically and that Einstein never fully realized that detail.

 

I understood that the reasoning for the change factor is completely a consequence of the "moving geometry" of wave mechanics in a stationary medium, and it utterly loses the reasoning and mechanism without said medium. I can now explain it in simple rational terms to a 8th grader. I can teach them how and why to develop the central components of special relativity themselves.

 

Unfortunately, this sort of demystification is much like revealing any magician's trick. It makes the whole thing less wondrous, magical and untouchable. Once you understand it well enough that you would invent it yourself with your new knowledge, you feel justified in criticizing it.

 

Light speed constancy was the goal of Lorentz and the aim of the change factor he developed. It has reasoning and mechanism but is an illusion in the presence of a medium and magical nonsensical faith when believed to exist without a medium

 

Lorentz purposely created a mathematical illusion and most theoretical physicists still only see the surface of that illusion instead of the underpinning. They believe the illusion is reality and then base further science on irrational beliefs about an event that is very similar to the truth.(the illusion instead of the understanding)

 

I can explain in the minutest detail, but only if you really want the knowledge and most of you don't. You want magic to be real instead...

Creation time: Oct 23, 2013 09:34 PM PDT

 

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Without the theory of relativity you'd reduce it to basic wave mechanics. Therefore it's a little like moving at the speed of sound and you have to assume a universal reference frame.

 

Looking in the direction you are travelling everything would be blue shifted tremendously. Everything would be doubled in frequency. Since the entire spectrum of visible light is only roughly an octave, most if not all of it would be moved outside your visual range past ultraviolet. On the upside you'd be visually seeing things that were infrared and possibly microwave. (didn't look up the numbers)

 

However, looking behind you, there would be nothing but a black void. Things to the side of you would be shifted in a strange nonlinear fashion so you'd watch them scroll across a rainbow of color as they passed by until they disappeared altogether.

Creation time: Jan 17, 2014 12:10 AM PST

 

 

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The constancy of light is a property, not a value. The word "constant" is used in much more broad sense in the context of relativity.

 

For instance, the speed of sound in air of a specific temperature and pressure could be thought of as a constant when attempting to calculate the combination of sound signals and moving objects (ignoring turbulence effects) but this is a wildly different usage of the word than when it is used in the context of special relativity.

 

In relativity, the word almost means its precise opposite. No matter how much you are moving, the speed of light is relative to you. Therefore from a third party perspective it is almost like light is travelling every speed simultaneously and light is, in fact, often considered to be infinite.

 

 

By "deduced from the principle of relativity" this means that when the Michelson Morley experiment showed a null even though they knew light was a wave and that the planet was moving, this meant one of two things:

 

Either

 

1) The earth was the center of the universe and light always moves according to us.

 

OR

 

2) Somehow moving has no impact on our (an observer's) perception of light's speed.

 

 

Because light was a wave, they assumed there was a medium it moved relative to but since we disregard choice 1 above, light must somehow either seem to move relative to a moving observer or actually (irrational in their opinion) move relative to a moving observer.

 

Lorentz Ether Theory (LET) produced the math for this relativity principle under the idea that light simply "seems" to move relative to a moving observer (while really moving relative to aether and creating an illusion) and Einstein decided that it really does move relative to a moving observer in SR and then just removed the aether while still using the same calculations from LET.

Creation time: Feb 27, 2014 01:04 PM PST

 

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I can give you the classical perspective from a modern viewpoint. It, of course, requires a luminiferous aether.

 

It would basically be the same thing that happens at the speed of sound with sound waves. The light waves would stack up and create Cherenkov radiation because there would be the equivalent of a sonic boom but with light. The amplitude of the light given off in a forward direction would become effectively infinite dependent only upon the length of time energy was put into the medium without being able to escape. So, all the light coming from in front of you would be converted to gamma and higher... (outgoing and incoming) and everything would be utterly black behind you.

 

The result of this stacking of waves and overstressing the medium is chaotic cavitation. There would be these strange cavitations of the medium that carried light so just like the white cones (jumping off the sides of jets) that blink in and out of existence during the transition point of a sonic boom (chaotic cavitations of the air because of the amplitude of the sound exceeding the elasticity of the medium), there would be these black cones seemingly ripping existence. It would look cool.

 

Matter would likely never be able to withstand these sort of stresses unfortunately... especially if you extend ether theory (as Maxwell et al saw it) to the atomic level at which matter is just little vortices in the first place. IE Matter is already just cavitations caused by a vortex; expose that to another cavitation and you just rip the vortex structure apart. (Matter/antimatter interaction)

 

This could be avoided through an intervening vortex field you might call warp bubble but then like a vortex ring launcher, the vortex is "gearing" against the surrounding medium and there is very little disturbance of the medium itself.

 

Then you would still have an issue from any light you are running into from the forward direction; even ultra low frequencies would be so blue shifted that it would all be transmitted into your little warp bubble as gamma and beyond so anything in the warp bubble would be getting cooked quite well...

 

...but I digress.

Creation time: Apr 05, 2014 06:56 AM PDT

 

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Though every person who believes in relativity will argue this point with me, according the constancy of light principle postulated by special relativity, it shouldn't happen with light.

 

As I said, this will be hotly contested by the believers, but watch their responses closely because they will be nonsensical and magical whereas I will give you a rational, scientific and mechanical understanding.

 

First lets talk about what a wave is in non-magical terms. It is caused by a restoring force in a medium when that medium is disturbed. It is a compression and rarefaction of that medium as it attempts to restore equilibrium and/or seek the path of least resistance. (already we've departed from relativity which has nothing but magic to offer us in explanation of electromagnetic waves)

 

What happens in the doppler effect can be easily visualized. When a sound is made, the medium is compressed and that energy/compression travels away from the source as one part of the medium interacts with the next part based upon how rigid it is.

 

When your source of sound is travelling through that medium, each wave created cannot escape as far from the source before it makes the next wave. In the opposite direction the source runs away from the wave as the wave runs from it making it so that there is a greater distance between wave peaks.

 

This is the first of two mechanisms for the doppler effect, but as you can see, it relies upon your emitter's speed being changed with respect to the travel of sound. With light however, you cannot change your emitter's speed with respect to the speed of light. Therefore there is no mechanism for doppler in light. (according to special relativity)

 

The second mechanism is, of course, when the emitter remains stationary and you approach or run away from it. Once again you find that your speed is altered with respect to the propagation speed. When moving toward it you simply run into the waves more frequently or because you are running away, the peaks have to play catch-up and therefore arrive less frequently. Once again this cannot be the mechanism in light because light's propagation speed is related to your own motion.

 

You cannot move with respect to light's speed because it is a "constant". (with constant being used in special relativity being the worst misnomer in history)

 

Now watch carefully as believers proffer nothing more than equations, confusion, ad hominem attack, appeals to authority and bluster as a counter to this irrefutable logic.

 

With all the attempts to coerce and ridicule you into humbly accepting the magic, like spontaneous generation was once defended, they will insist that it simply is a principle of the universe and they will never offer an actual mechanism, just a belief.

Creation time: Jul 25, 2014 08:23 PM PDT

 

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You find in this subject matter a great deal of descriptions which are not, in fact, explanations. Please allow me to explain.

 

If you begin first with the actual originator of the idea of constancy, Lorentz, you'll find that he initially conceived of it as an optical illusion. It began as an attempt to accurately model the Michelson Morley (MM) experiment in an aether environment.

 

If there was an aether wind, then when light went upstream and back down it while travelling between mirrors you set up, the time delay should be longer than the identical setup cross-ways to the wind. (and longer than if it were stationary) The MM reported there to be no difference even though we know the earth to be in motion. Lorentz didn't take this to mean there was no wind, he took it to mean that the wind was hidden by objects shortening just the right amount to hide it. (on the suggestion of George Fitzgerald)

 

This basically prompted him to really think the whole scenario through so it could be modeled in detail. The first thing that occurred to him is that the MM experiment would take longer. (it would longer for light to traverse the same space) The immediate next step from there is to realize that every inter-molecular force is mediated by electromagnetism and if those forces had to propagate up/downstream then they too would take longer. In this way he conceived of a classical time dilation [math](\gamma^2)[/math] effect. In this way all phenomena would take longer to elapse when in motion.

 

This means that, while in motion, your perception (and measurements) of phenomena not affected by this slowing would be that they are sped up. So while light may seem to take longer to traverse the space between some mirrors because of the wind, your perception of the traversal is inverted exactly the same amount so that you cannot measure this change. (During your slow second, light travels further)

 

If you've thought this through you should see that there would be a difference if you only saw the upstream or downstream effect and we now come to the difference added by Einstein: Instead of light's trip upstream being different from the one downstream, the time in different places is no longer the same in the newer theory. This effect is called the relativity of simultaneity.

 

In Lorentz's version, light speed would seem anisotropic because of the wind and time would be isotropic. In Einstein's version, light speed is isotropic and, because the same maths are used, it is space-time that appears anisotropic. (specifically the time-like portion)

Creation time: Aug 09, 2014 02:22 PM PDT

 

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tl;dr

 

Because light speed seemed to be the same no matter how "fast" you go according to a particular experiment: The Michelson Morley experiment. If light is constant even when you are moving then for all observers to agree there has to be some sort of conversion factor based upon time. For the experiment to be true you have to trade time for speed so your perception of "speed" changes.

 

The problem with this is, while it makes sense to have time slowed down to fix the problem of travelling in the same direction as light. (making all else appear to happen faster by comparison to equal out and make it pass you faster) It totally breaks with light travelling in the opposite direction. It just so happens that the experiments could only give the average effect of upstream and downstream trips and it just so happens that slowing time instead of speeding it up is the average adjustment needed to make up the difference.

 

In some circles they still occasionally look for tests of "light speed anisotropy" because it is known that the math was originally based on two-way tests and two way effects. One-way speed of light

 

 

The Longer Version

 

To fully understand this from a laymen's point of view, you need to understand the history of the experiments and the older theories that gave birth to the newer. You need to have that grounding to see how things go from the classical world theories to the modern era.

 

It will only make sense if you start with something that makes sense and slowly build up all the knowledge to the point at which it seems to stop making sense. Specifically you need to understand Lorentz's Ether Theory (LET). Because in principle it is mathematically indistinguishable from special relativity and is the genesis of the change factor that lies at the heart of relativity. (It used to be called Lorentz-Einstein relativity)

 

Lorentz created a theory which had time dilation length contraction and the illusion of light speed constancy and the illusion of relative simultaneity. The difference between the two theories is an ontological one. Einstein removed the aether to allow the two-way speed of light be the same as the one-way speed. If there is an aether, light speed constancy is just a rational mechanical and easily understandable illusion of two-way experiments. If there is no aether, constancy becomes a truth with no underlying greater truth and no underlying mechanics. It becomes counter-intuitive and apparently irrational which is why it is hard to understand. Two theories, same math, one "intuitive" and one not. One mechanical and the other not. One describing an illusion and the other accepting that mathematically modeled illusion as a fact of reality.

 

The reason nobody tells you because they don't know themselves. The history was forgotten. That the math was created specifically as a model of an optical illusion is almost unknown. It's purposely and specifically a mathematical illusion created by Lorentz to model a null in the MM experiment when there is a medium that light propagates in and is therefore perceived to be slower or faster depending on the direction selected in one-way experiments. Those experiments did not exist, however and therefore the effect is a perfect average of differing speeds which is then hidden by a time difference. Light speed in anisotropic in Lorentz's theory and isotropic in Einstein's.

 

You'll need to read my three Quora blog Relativity Demystified at the very least to understand it fully, but there are also videos that start with the very simplest laymen's terms and work up.

 

The video is long and tedious for anyone familiar with basics in classical physics but will help you understand all the hows and whys of developing the theory from scratch and it does so utterly in Laymen's terms.

 

Nobody will disagree with the truth or history behind my explanations but they'll downvote this into oblivion because of my conclusions about facts I explain better than anyone you, or they, have ever heard. Something that requires a deeper understanding. You know... the ability to explain it to a six year old?

 

"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” - Albert Einstein

 

http://youtu.be/Pxn9KGH5P1s

Creation time: Dec 03, 2014 12:16 AM PST

 

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At first glance it looks as though it's just another Group velocity thing, but further examination reveals a deeper subtlety.

 

Group velocity deals with the interference of waves. Interference patterns can create composite wave forms that appear to move faster or slower than the actual wave velocity (Phase velocity) of the component frequencies. There are many older experiments using this phenomena in which light "traveled faster than light". This is usually accomplished using differing frequencies and has been predominantly dismissed as only marginally interesting.

 

The real question here that is problematic, however, is the "realness" of the location of a photon. Are there no actual photons in the vicinity of destructive interference? Do actual photons reside within the group as it travels? (by using a single frequency this question has become more pressing)

 

Because the experimenters have used a novel way of expressing this question, (specifically reducing it to one photon) few people are commenting on how it impacts special relativity. It's not a new problem though. It's just eliminated any escape routes for those with excuse driven thinking. The issue was there in the first experiments with group velocity but just not so elegantly reduced to single photons.

 

This experiment is very much like the difference between the original dual slit experiment and the single electron dual-slit experiment. Reducing it to one unit has changed the nature of the game.

Creation time: Jan 30, 2015 02:34 PM PST

 

 

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Content: It's a mathematical illusion (and a sociological phenomenon)

 

They don't have a clue what I mean, yet in their ignorance and perfect faith they will downvote this thread without the mildest hesitation or investigation thus proving some of the points below.

 

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth." -Albert Einstein

 

Don't believe the falsehood of "Experimentally verified."

 

First, don't buy the BS story they feed you that it's been tested a million times. It's historical and technical ignorance "oft repeated."

 

First, the Michelson-Morley (MM) was NOT null (it was 7% of a reading of a second order effect and therefore the size is misleading) and second, only it and the subsequent experiments by Dayton Miller (a close colleague of Morley) were conducted with white light (ever since) which creates a vast number of difference between those experiments and all the subsequent ones, but only people proficient in optics know about things such as lock-in and the way white light holds the experiment to specific requirements not found in all the subsequent monochromatic ones. (such as perfectly equal path lengths)

 

They know nothing of the history of reputable falsification against the theory.

 

Did I mention that Dayton Miller's results also match the MM and they give a specific pattern of variation of readings (a dual sine wave) expected only of this particular experimental setup that clearly separates it from random noise and gives an actual measured wind speed of 1/3 the expectation. (Yes 7% of the reading "on the dial" converts to 1/3 of the expected effect and that's even when the expectation was faulty and full of bias in the first place)

 

While the MM was only over three nights, Miller did tens of thousands of replications with the same results of 8-12 km/sec varying reliably throughout the year over his 30 years of experimentation. (And he won the prestigious Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science for proving the aether wind and directly blocked Einstein's Nobel for Relativity: Shiva Meucci's answer to Why didn't Albert Einstein win a Nobel Prize for his work on Special/General Relativity?)

 

And while Miller specifically proved characteristic differences found in temperature variation via experiment, Robert Shankland's absurd claim that it was a temperature effect is the story told today. (That's right, one guy's experimentally refuted claim stands and holds against the earnest examination and subsequent awards from an entire committee from the most reputable scientific establishment of the day, the AAAS)

 

The Ether-Drift Experiment and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth

 

"My opinion about Miller's experiments is the following. ... Should the positive result be confirmed, then the special theory of relativity and with it the general theory of relativity, in its current form, would be invalid. Experimentum summus judex. Only the equivalence of inertia and gravitation would remain, however, they would have to lead to a significantly different theory." -Albert Einstein

 

 

Second, they don't even understand their own theory's origin.

 

"The influence of the crucial Michelson-Morley experiment on my own efforts has been rather indirect. I learned of it through H.A. Lorentz's decisive investigations of the electrodynamics of moving bodies (1895) with which I was acquainted before developing the special theory of relativity..." -Albert Einstein

 

The change factor which Lorentz created, was specifically a mathematical description of an optical illusion. It was a calculation of how motion through a medium would alter light for a moving observer. IE Yes, there is no reason for any effect to exist if there isn't a medium since the math describes the medium's effects.

 

Even Einstein started to understand there was a problem later in life.

 

"According to the general theory of relativity, space without aether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense." -Albert Einstein 1920

 

99.95% of them can't separate Lorentz's theory from Einstein's.

 

While the math is the same, the application of it is altered by the existence of a medium. Lorentz's theory is still neoclassical with fully mechanical effects that fit with the universe whereas Einstein's creates real additional dimensions and magical effects seen nowhere else in the universe. It's the same math with different results and not one of them can explain this fact to you. I can.

 

It's just science's version of religion.

 

Go to any public place on the internet or otherwise and express that you'd like to provide evidence against relativity theory. In science they're supposed to have an attitude that says "Really? Wow, let me examine this evidence" but instead they'll viciously attack you as a group and and ridicule you with vehement bile. Go ahead and try it. I double-dog dare you! You'll see all the hallmarks of rabid nationalism, fundamentalist religion and other in-group-out-group dynamics.

 

They pretend the history of contention didn't last 80 Years!

 

Nobel prize winners, inventors and the forefathers of science all found the theory untenable and fought it tooth and nail until the hive of believers overwhelmed them with punishment. Even Michelson, the first American Nobel winner, went to his grave insisting light speed constancy was false.

 

As recently as 1978 the last great warrior in this fight, the inventor of the Atomic clock and the man who gave us the method to determine a truly precise measurement of light speed, Loius Essen, was forced to give up.

 

"No one has attempted to refute my arguments, but I was warned that if I persisted I was likely to spoil my career prospects. …the continued acceptance and teaching of relativity hinders the development of a rational extension of electromagnetic theory." - Louis Essen F.R.S., "Relativity and time signals", Wireless World, oct78, p44. ‘Students are told that the theory must be accepted although they cannot expect to understand it. They are encouraged right at the beginning of their careers to forsake science in favor of dogma.’

 

“The 'principle' of the constancy of the velocity of light is not merely 'ununderstandable', it is not supported by 'objective matters of fact'; it is untenable, and, as we shall see, unnecessary. . . . Also of philosophical import is that with the abandonment of the 'principle' of the constancy of the velocity of light, the geometries which have been based on it, with their fusion of space and time, must be denied their claim to be a true description of the physical world." - Herbert E. Ives

 

When asked what he thought about relativity Ernest Rutherford, the forefather of nuclear physics and one of the most central developers of the atomic bomb exclaimed "Oh, that stuff! We never bother with that in our work." Stephen Leacock, Common Sense and the Universe

 

Wilhelm Wein: "No Anglo-Saxon can understand relativity!"

Ernest Rutherford: "No! they've got too much sense!" From The Rutherford Memorial Lecture to the Physical Society 1954 by P. M. S. Blackett, Year Book of The Physical Society 1955.

 

"The War had just ended; and the complacency of the Edwardian and Victorian times had been shattered. The people felt that all their values and all their ideals had lost their bearings. Now, suddenly, they learnt that an astronomical prediction by a German scientist had been confirmed by expeditions to Brazil and West Africa and, indeed, prepared for already during the War, by British astronomers. Astronomy has always appealed to public imagination; and an astronomical discovery, transcending worldly strife, struck a responsive chord. The meeting of the Royal Society, at which the results of the British expeditions were reported, was headlined in all the British papers; and the typhoon of publicity crossed the Atlantic. From that point on, the American press played Einstein to the maximum." Quotation from: Chandrasekhar S., (1987) Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science, University of Chicago press

 

The list goes on and on from Tesla to Mach...

 

Their answer to problems are rational but completely falsify their own theory in the process.

 

Every time they come up with something that makes sense, it's because it's full in contention with the theory itself. For instance the Sagnac effect, which was an experiment created to falsify the theory, did so behaved exactly as Sagnac expected and is the basis of thousands of modern machines, yet they will give you a completely classical explanation that is utterly and obviously contrary to the theory all the while insisting blithely that it agrees.

 

The constancy of light should obviously be preserved around a circle but in the sagnac experiment it is shown to be v+c according to a co-moving observer.

 

It is at once apparent that this result still holds good if the clock moves from A to B in any polygonal line, and also when the points A and B coincide. If we assume that the result proved for a polygonal line is also valid for a continuously curved line, we arrive at this result: If one of two synchronous clocks at A is moved in a closed curve with constant velocity until it returns to A... - Albert Einstein (section 4: On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies)

 

Or when the solve the Twin paradox, they simply select a preferred frame (completely not allowed!) which reduces the theory to Lorentz Ether Theory (LET) and creates a commutative situation in which the earth twin's time is contracted and their length is dilated which shouldn't be possible in the theory.

 

They can't understand the need for mechanism because they believe in magic.

 

The Doppler effect in air is easy to explain. In blue shift, for instance: Either you run into waves more frequently or the waves can't escape fast enough before the next is made. Simple.

 

Nothing at all can provide a mechanism for Doppler in relativity and when you include the fact that the emitter's time should also be altered and this effect is cumulative they frequently disagree what should be done or botch the calculation or don't even realize it needs consideration because they are incapable of original thought and can only run calculations like a computer.

 

They claim every proof against relativity as proof for it.

 

Stellar aberration, Doppler effect, Sagnac effect, Fizeau Experiment, Fresnel's coefficent... Every single one of these things is claimed as proof of relativity when it specifically was proposed as a proof of aether's effect and falsification of SR.

 

"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." -Albert Einstein

 

Even when they recognize falsification they propose magical fairies to fill in the gaps.

 

Over seventy years go we peered deep into the sky and used our theory of gravity which predicts stellar rotation to examine the rotations of galaxies and found it to be off by a ton. (IE Experimental falsification) So instead of accepting this evidence and going back to the drawing board like a scientist would do, we invented magical fairy dust in precisely the right amount to shore up the theory. We called this utterly "undetectable" nonsense "dark matter... ("wooOOOooo") A whopping 23% of the universe is supposedly made up of this woo compared to only 4% of real matter.

 

Instead of having any real understanding they do everything by rote.

 

"Shut up and calculate" is the cry of the machines. Any time you try to discuss the reasoning behind the physics they attempt to call it metaphysics as though that word is a pejorative. (meta means "about") They somehow can't grasp the idea that meta-language is a higher order of reasoning above mathematics. They try to claim some purity of mathematics when it is actually Godel and eventually Tarski's undefinability theorem which came out of mathematics that proved this fact of reliance upon meta language. ...the concept of deductive reasoning relying upon axioms which are inherently inductive is just beyond their capacity to grasp.

 

They argue like a grade-school child that because they have set up a math problem and solved it correctly that they have solved a word problem because they simply lack the ability to understand their own disconnect.

 

They present the ideas as though they are some holy texts you could never understand.

 

I present the whole basis of the theory, why you would develop it, how you would arrive at it, and how to differentiate it from classical in just three blog posts with no more than utterly rudimentary math here:

 

Relativity Demystified

 

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough" - Albert Einstein

 

There's so much more but this, and any other dissenting info, will sit buried 100 miles below the chorus of 10,000 voices who have a vested interest (like any religious acolyte) in keeping the information squelched and ignored.

Creation time: Mar 25, 2015 05:36 PM PDT

 

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Thanks for the A2A:

 

Modern science stays quiet on answers it does not know and the purveyors of modern theory typically attempt to give the idea that the answer to "why" cannot be known in many cases. When someone can't provide a rational underpinning they sometimes insist there isn't one. It's a normal human fallibility.

 

Because of this I'm going to give an answer that is a more rational alternative the the leading theories but is based upon neoclassical physics. (those physics which cross the borders between purely classical and newer concepts)

 

 

The first property to understand is the border condition.

 

The best demonstration of this is a tornado. When I mention a tornado, you instantly think of the funnel cloud but after a moment's thought you know that the area damaged by the tornado is much larger than the funnel cloud.

 

The funnel cloud is actually a fairly arbitrary border, but it is of some use in identification of the object. Next you must ask why there is a border at all. There are other other slower ground to air vortices called dust devils that only can be seen when they pick up dust.

 

The funnel cloud is created by an interaction with some of the physical properties of air, namely Relative humidity. As the vortex spins there is a reduction of air pressure caused by the centrifugal forces. This effect is greater near the center and becomes reduced the further you move from that center of rotation. The amount of water that can be held in the air is governed by temperature and pressure and once you cross a certain borderline of temperature or pressure, based upon the ambient level of moisture the air was already holding, droplets begin to form and you begin to see clouds.

 

Therefore what you are seeing as a border on the tornado is actually just the point at which the rotation has made the relative humidity of the air cross the point at which it can still hold water.

 

There are other more complex effects at play such as the vortical separation of temperature and separation of heavier gases, etc, but the lesson is the same. You are simply witnessing a transitional state or transitional energy.

 

We see this transitional borderline throughout nature from the formation of ice to boiling and from the start of an avalanche to neurons firing via Action potential there are borderlines of energy levels at which one force overcomes another and the transition is very sharp.

 

In the case of a tornado it causes us to see a continuous phenomena as discrete.

 

 

Next, you must understand that continuous phenomena can be treated as discrete components.

 

First let me say that the border between discrete and continuous is a subject that a large section of a book could be written upon because it is what can only be described as what Douglas Hofstadter calls a "strange loop" so I will leave some of the finer points for my book.

 

Suffice it to say that is simple for you to think of the idea of a 40,000 gallon swimming pool and you can know that there are 40,000 separate gallons in the pool but also know that it is only just a handy (if arbitrary) amount. You know there are no real and separate things called gallons with a separated discrete existence in a pool.

 

This is easy for you because the gallon is a totally arbitrary unit. What if, instead of water freezing in a continuous sheet, it always froze with fine cracks that always left chunks of exactly one gallon? Because the amount is linked to some real physical property, the question becomes muddled and slightly more difficult. Wouldn't the exact amount of energy required to raise that exact volume of water from frozen to boiling become more interesting and feel like a "real" unit with deep roots in the fabric of nature?

 

This brings us to the Phonon, which is a mathematical description of what is otherwise typical wave phenomena in solids. It is a discrete mathematical description of a continuous phenomena. It is a "particle" of energy that is also a wave.

 

We know there are no separate particles of energy called "phonons" running about in a vibrating crystal but it is particularly useful to mathematically and conceptually model just that exact thing. The reason it is useful is because it relates to a real property of that solid; it's Normal mode.

 

It's a border condition. There is a certain amount of energy which is the smallest possible to still be able to accomplish a particular kind of action. This should sound familiar if you read the description of a funnel cloud above.

 

 

Now for the neoclassical physics alternative explanation of modern theory

 

(skip to the bottom for reasons why you should even consider new models)

 

In classical physics, particles were simply local vortices described by Maxwell through fluid dynamics. In neoclassical interpretations and extensions of his theory, this basically becomes the marriage of Fluid dynamics with Knot theory and the concept of Wave-vortex duality but only in special contexts such as Magnetohydrodynamics which lead to fascinating effects such as the formation of Vortex Crystals

 

Said in another way, the newest theories (ones that only a handful of specialists even know exist) in modern physics is a multi-disciplinary approach in which complex motions of special types of fluids lead to waves and vortices (waves make vortices and vortices make waves) creating regular patterns that are self sustaining and store energy in a particular location.

 

Here's a fellow from Cambridge who sits at the heart of a small cadre (perhaps cabal?) of scientists at the bleeding edge of this field:

Ross Anderson's Home Page

 

Here's one of his most recent papers of interest:

[1502.05926] Maxwell's fluid model of magnetism

 

This means that there are meaningful volumes of energy that accomplish very particular actions which create shapes in special fluids by the way the fluid reacts to being twisted and stretched.

 

Here's a video to help you visualize the effect. This is simply water being vibrated at the correct combination of frequency and amplitude leading to particular shapes: (the first of which at 1:10 could be seen as a model for electron orbitals in hydrogen)

http://youtu.be/S4cm0bs17D8

 

 

Discussion

 

So this means that, as behaviors go, it's useful to speak of particles, but they may not physically exist in a truly, discrete form. But then again, you might begin to ask if the dichotomy of discrete and continuous is only a useful human concept like the number zero and does not actually exist in reality.

 

There are certainly borders on a tornado when seen from a distance but when examined more closely that border is much more fuzzy than it seemed before. In particles and interactions that happen in particular, there are useful "borderlines" that are borders of properties instead of normal physical borders but perhaps the two tend to become one thing.

 

 

Why look at new models?

 

Because there are some serious problems with our current interpretations that seem to lean towards magical thinking. Here's some videos and links that can show how we've begun to re-examine the more magical explanations and come up with rational mechanical models and experiments that provide a more scientific approach to modern physics.

 

[1401.4356] Why bouncing droplets are a pretty good model of quantum mechanics

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W...

 

[1305.6822] Violation of Bell's inequality in fluid mechanics

 

[1301.7351] Why quantum computing is hard

 

[1301.7540] The irrotational motion of a compressible inviscid fluid

Creation time: Apr 05, 2015 04:22 PM PDT

 

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Because the first thing you do when exploring information you don't understand is that you temporarily accept nonsensical explanations in the hope that a better one will come around.

 

Spontaneous generation is not an invalid starting point for scientific inquiry, it's just an invalid end point. We have always come up with nonsense placeholders for complex phenomena and we will continue to do so.

 

What is unfortunate is that these abstractions have the common inference that "it's just the way things are" or that it's the bottom level of reality. It's not necessarily said directly but it's certainly and strongly inferred.

 

Once we accept this bottom level superstitious explanation for something, if it is not quickly replaced by a new more complex abstraction it becomes religious in nature.

 

This has happened in physics and there is absolutely no breaking through magical thinking once it's taken hold.

 

Science has damn good reason to be arrogant since it gets most things right but that arrogance leads it into ignorance as it does to a single human being.

 

That is the reason that Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Max Planck said "Science advances one funeral at a time".

 

Each generation gives into dogmatic thinking and if a new generation doesn't break through it, the dogma becomes exponentially stronger with each passing generation.

 

Every religion is just an explanation of reality gone terribly wrong.

 

It's a Sociology Problem

 

The biggest problem faced by scientific inquiry is the human factor yet we repeatedly fail to recognize ways in which it destroys our inquiry. The very purpose of science was to remove bias and human fallibility yet the system of science has fallen prey to sociology over and over.

 

It may seem like there's no way rational individuals can believe irrational concepts but there is an interplay between consensus and individual revolutionary discovery that isn't so simple as it seems

 

Sociology of scientific knowledge

 

Wait, you're saying all those weird effects are complete BS? Are you insane??!! Wait... am I insane for asking if you're insane for not believing insanity? OMG give me the blue pill!

 

If you'd like to know how and why we arrived at all these irrational concepts from utterly rational and mechanistic concepts of 19th century physics then look no further!

 

In the link below I simply contrast the rational prior theory with the irrational one it spawned. I do so in terms that is consensus knowledge about these two theories. Nobody would disagree with me on my explanation but they hate my commentary:

 

Relativity Demystified

 

...and by the way, literally tons of nobel prize winners and reputable science have been asking your question for about 100 years now and we all keep getting squelched.

 

"No one has attempted to refute my arguments, but I was warned that if I persisted I was likely to spoil my career prospects. …the continued acceptance and teaching of relativity hinders the development of a rational extension of electromagnetic theory." - Louis Essen F.R.S., "Relativity and time signals", Wireless World, oct78, p44. ‘Students are told that the theory must be accepted although they cannot expect to understand it. They are encouraged right at the beginning of their careers to forsake science in favor of dogma.’

 

“Scientists have now become a church and I do not regard it as an honor to be part of this or of any church.” - Ernst Mach

 

"Oh, that stuff! We never bother with that in our work." -Ernest Rutherford

 

Wilhelm Wein: "No Anglo-Saxon can understand relativity!"

Ernest Rutherford: "No! they've got too much sense!"

Creation time: Apr 12, 2015 10:18 PM PDT

 

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Content: That idea comes from using the maths of SR in a non-standard fashion. (older deprecated methodologies might be involved)

 

For instance, a little known method to arrive at the change factor is this:

1 / sin(cos^-1(decimal of light speed))

 

Well, we know that the inverse cosine of a decimal approaching one leads to a number approaching 90. (because it's geometry)

 

To put it very loosely, this number is related to the concept of the angles in light cones etc which is related to the "angle" two frames are related in spacetime as the speed between them approaches C.

 

While we wont get anything meaningful at certain steps inserting this number beyond .999~, it is a simple thing to skip some steps and just go past 90 degrees. At this point the change factor starts running in reverse until you reach 180 with the change factor approaching 1 again. (Time begins to contract and length begins to dilate)

 

Kinda getting it, but that's not quite time running backwards... where'd that weird idea come from?

 

Back to the light cones then. When we speak about light cones we refer to a 45 degree swath light takes through spacetime. As you can see, that's precisely half of the 90 degrees of freedom in the formula above.

 

The reason for this is partially because of conversion to a minkowski diagram which is a rational convention for representation but not the only possible convention for representation.

 

Obviously, because the change factor can be represented in the formula above it can be represented as changes to a triangle. (and the accompanying areas etc)

 

So, finally, if you deviate from the minkowski convention, you can see how the angle between two subjects through spacetime could encompass ninety degrees of freedom or less. Once you pass ninety degrees you're no longer just travelling through spacetime at a different rate, you're traveling in opposite directions through spacetime.

 

IE: Two legs of a right triangle of less than 90 degrees is acute and therefore are both positive on the X axis whereas an obtuse triangle has one leg going negative and one going positive.

 

So that's where that idea came from and because it's old and deprecated, most modern scholars just so "NO!!"

Creation time: Apr 14, 2015 01:14 PM PDT

 

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Because Einstein (initially) didn't understand the difference between the illusion created by Hendrik Lorentz and the underlying mechanics on which it relied.

The central calculation of relativity is embodied in the Lorentz factor. Time dilation, length contraction, and even the relativity of simultaneity all flow from the central point which was loosely conceived by George Fitzgerald and then fleshed out and fully invented by Lorentz.

Fitzgerald suggested that the Michelson Morley experiment was an optical illusion and so Lorentz mathematically modeled it. Einstein didn't understand how the illusion worked (at the time of OEMB) or the mechanics used by Lorentz to create it.

It is a mathematical description of how a moving medium affects waves propagating through it and Einstein removed the medium. He removed the reason for the actions and removed what was being described.

He believed the topical false reality presented by an illusion was the deepest truth while simultaneously accepting and using the mathematics and mechanics of an underlying deeper mechanism describing how to create an illusion he didn't understand.

Galilean relativity does not lead smoothly to special relativity!

While other authors pointed out that Galilean relativity refers to things seeming unchanged by motion when in the belly of a ship, it's a hyper-naive conception nobody should be using in reference to wave mechanics. It has been a historical practice, however, to use this comparison. Galilean relativity can be extended to the idea of throwing a ball back and forth inside a passenger jet and the same is, of course true of sounds within the plane but the kicker is that relativity supposes something else entirely because it includes wave phenomena such as sound but doesn't consider the medium.

Relativity is like opening the front and back of the jet to the air and pretending that sound will still travel in a straight line across the aisle like it did when the air was being carried along. (unaffected by the wind according to a passenger) Furthermore relativity simultaneously asserts the contrary position that the sound will also be affected by the wind and travel a different path according to an observer on the ground.

Notice now that comparing Galilean relativity and Special relativity is not just misleading, it's absurd.

"Constancy" is the worst misnomer in the history of the English language.

"...we shall, however, find in what follows, that the velocity of light in our theory plays the part, physically, of an infinitely great velocity" - Albert Einstein, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", 1905

Unfortunately, a huge number of people think that the word actually reflects something that adheres to common sense but it actually refers to a behavior that, according to any normal intuition, is highly illogical and self contradictory.

The constancy of light means that every observer sees light as moving according to him and the exact same light is seen doing something else entirely by another observer if he's moving differently from the first.

Constancy means that observations of light conflict with each other.

To understand constancy you must understand the illusion.

Lorentz was modeling how light waves would have to travel a weird upstream and downstream paths in the direction of an ether wind and simultaneously they'd have to travel across an angle like a swimmer crossing a river if an observer was moving.

He was trying to find a way to make a spherical signal which had to do the weird upstream/downstream thing meet back up with the cross stream path and he found a single calculation to do this neat trick.

This neat trick was a presumed optical illusion that reality plays on us to make the Michelson Morley appear null even though a wind is really actually affecting and altering the path of the light.

That's what the math is. Remove the medium and the math makes no sense. That's why relativity makes no sense.

Light speed constancy was an optical and therefore mathematical illusion created by Lorentz.

You can get a better understanding through the articles below which have drawings etc: Relativity Demystified

Creation time: Oct 29, 2015 07:02 PM PDT

 

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I’ll give you the only answer that isn’t a circular logic description in a moment…

First, let me explain why my answer is the only one that is an actual explanation.

Unfortunately, the only way I know a person can get extremely good at recognizing circular logic is to have spent a great deal of time in rational debate with the religious. For this to occur, usually you have to have been religious yourself at one point and then defeated that mind virus. Our minds have their own immune systems and circular logic is particularly virulent. Think of overcoming religion as a sort of rite of passage that is like being vaccinated against irrationality.

You are asking for information that exists at an explanatory level more primary than the knowledge and beliefs of most people who follow mainstream physics. In each case of the other answers, they are only extending from basic axioms and returning to them as some sort of mockery of explanation. Don’t be fooled by long drawn out descriptions attempting to be passed off as explanations. (and be wary of those who don’t know the difference)

Once again, if a person defeats religion within their own mind, these sorts of mental maneuvers become easily and automatically recognized but those who have not overcome that difficulty usually do not recognize the roots of religious thought patterns within themselves.

Understanding requires information we think of as underneath and underlying.

The other answers cannot convey understanding because you have hit limits imposed by their beliefs. There is no mechanism underlying light according to mainstream consensus beliefs. There is nothing underneath or underlying.

Spontaneous generation (worms simply spring from rotting meat) was once a “scientific” sort of belief. They could tell you all the glorious conversion rates of pounds of meat to pounds of worms and subsequently number of flies. They could dazzle you with the time requires for the process and exponential curves in processing time based on the thickness of the meat.

If you asked them why worms spring from meat they would immediately begin to explain how it was because of the conversion rate and they would spin off into all the petty details. They would give you a great deal of accurate and possibly useful information while never answering the question.

One can spend a comparatively small amount of research time to discover a few facts about fundamental physics research.

1. The fundamental mathematics of relativity developed by Lorentz (the Lorentz transform) were developed to describe the way light would behave if it traveled through a medium. We still use these same calculations.

2. Einstein himself, after many years of working with General relativity, recognized the necessity of a preferred frame and lectured about this necessity as late as 1920 and referred to this preferred frame as Aether. (while stipulating that it would have to be expanded and different from previous more primitive concepts of aether)

3. Upon our discovery of the cosmic microwave background, most scientists began to refer to this as the preferred frame that Einstein spoke of and sometimes even invoke it in conversations about the twins paradox. (a problem that never appears in preferred frame mechanics)

4. Furthermore, many systems such the Lense-Thirring effect or “frame dragging” show spacetime to behave in a very fluid like fashion and there are numerous models of cosmic motions and interactions that behave like fluid dynamics.

5. Recent experiments with fluid dynamics have revealed that all the spooky quantum effects can actually be replicated in deterministic systems now that we better understand deterministic chaos. (Couder experiments & John Bush MIT)

6. Diligent study of the initial experiments that caused the removal of the aether reveal that even the oft cited null 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment showed systematic (not singular and not random) readings of an aether wind of approximately 8–12 km/sec. Readings which were later replicated tens of thousands of times by the well respected Dayton Miller and colleagues with various instruments at various times in various places. (for which he won a prize from the AAAS and personally blocked Einstein’s nobel for relativity)

An aether removes all the silly irrational magical thinking that has deeply soaked into the bones of modern physics and provides an avenue of greater research scope.

To start at the very beginning, a wave is something that cannot exist without a medium because it is simply a description of action within that medium. It takes a very childish and faith-filled mind to gloss over this very first step in irrationality. Once they get you to swallow this one on faith, you’re mind is open to gulp down any other nonsense they want to pour into it.

A person can go for a run and you can count the “runs” he’s gone on but you cannot hold them in your hand. They are a description of an action occurring to a subject and you cannot simply remove the subject.

A wave is a set of motions within a medium that allow it to disperse energy as it attempts to return to equilibrium in the balance of opposition forces.

There is a slippery-slope of faith-based thinking and the allure of consensus is something you should have learned about in high-school. Group think and peer pressure can bend you into a pretzel if you let it.

So the question is “what causes the speed of light and why does it not go faster?”

The speed of a wave is obviously a measure of a property of the medium it moves in. It deals with concepts like rigidity. So simply ask yourself why sound cannot go any faster than it does and you have the same answer. It’s a property of the medium.

Unfortunately a medium we understand very little of because we decided to ignore all the evidence that it was there simply because it acts strangely. It has behaviors we’ve only recently begun to understand through newer substances like liquid crystal and superfluids.

It being far more rigid than steel, for instance, really confused us until we were able to conceive of matter as the foam at the edges of a harder/denser substance. One we’ve thought of as nothing at all!

Given that we understand the mechanics of physical (“mechanical”) waves such as sound and can alter their mediums for certain special effects, we now have underlying mechanics that make sense for light and you can gain some level of understanding for why there is a speed of light at all. A property very strange for something that, in Einstein’s faulty version of Lorentz’s theory, basically behaves as infinite.

Yes, they can say it’s a conversion factor for time and that is actually true in aether theory as well but that gives zero reason for why such a thing would exist, what makes it that way etc. It has exactly zero explanatory power without a medium. A repetitive description is not an explanation!

There’s much more to learn and while this revolution in physics is already underway, you’ll see it slowly play out over the next 20–30 years. Consensus and groupthink are nearly impossible to overcome and scientists have very good reason to be blinded by their own arrogance. Consistent success does that to you

“A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because it’s opponents simply die off. Science progresses one funeral at a time.” -Max Planck

It’s a miserable truth that we sometimes have to be happy about the passing of the old guard who did so much for us in the past…

If aether theory is such a tiny difference that Lorentz’s theory used to be considered indistinguishable, why on earth are you arguing for it like it’s crucial or something??

Because in one cause we have a bottom level irrational “god did it” sort of explanation and in the case of aether we have this huge unknown to explore. It’s not just the job of science to explore the unknown, it’s also to identify where to look next for the unknown.

For more information check out my blog series here on quora: Relativity Demystified

Creation time: Aug 18, 2016 09:12 AM PDT

 

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According to relativity, no. Unfortunately most explanations of “why” are just assertions, not explanations.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you…

This will help you understand why you can never go faster than light according to the theory: it’s a math trick.

Let me give an example.

Let’s say that you know exactly how much acceleration and for how long is required to finally reach the speed of light according to a common sense classical (non relativistic) perspective.

Let’s also say there’s someone out there going .999 C (the speed of light) in the same direction you’re about to go. Technically, even according to relativity you could accelerate until you go a little closer to the speed of light and eventually you’d catch up to them and pass them.

Here’s the trick…

You’re thinking of your speed according to your origin. The earth or whatever. But at any moment you like, if you are travelling inertially (not currently accelerating) you get to define a new “stopped” even though you’re going nearly the speed of light according to the earth. You can just insist it’s the earth that’s actually moving nearly C and according to relativity you’re right!

Now remember the exact amount of acceleration needed to get to the point at which you caught up with that guy who was already going .999 C? You recorded that and you’ve still got enough fuel to do it a couple more times! So you do it one more time and now you are travelling nearly the speed of light faster than the guy who was already travelling nearly light speed.

No, seriously! This is what they all actually believe! They’ll hem and haw about fuel requirements (irrelevant distractions) but this is totally within the expectation of the theory. The trick is that the theory now insists that the earth is moving away from you with even more 9s in the .99999whatever of C garbage.

You can add another ship that was travelling the same direction faster than the first guy you caught up to by .999 C…. catch up to him pass him and do it again to the next guy in an infinite line. All the guys behind you just get more 9s…. (IE you never seem to be going fully C according to anyone using the math of relativity)

Let me reiterate with another example:

Let’s say you have 10 ships which each have enough fuel (fully loaded with cargo) to accelerate to .999 C. It just so happens that each was made smaller than the one next to such that each can fit in the cargo bay of the previous like Russian nesting dolls.

Now the biggest ship launches from earth. It accelerates to .999 C. Then it releases the next ship from the cargo hold. That ship acts completely normally, it’s ability to accelerate away from it’s mother ship is in no way retarded or altered. It simply accelerates away from it just like it would from the earth and puts distance and speed between itself and it’s mother ship in exactly the same way.

Eventually it reaches .999 C with respect to it’s mother ship and launches the next ship.

Once all ships are launched, according to the theory they are all moving with respect to each other with some number of 9s in the .999999yaddayadda C thing.

Even when earth considers the 10th ship, it too is only moving .9999whocaresBS of C.

At this point every relativity acolyte is bursting to argue or squelch with something like the following:

“You’re leaving out all the important stuff about space and time being linked and the relativity of simultaneity. You’re not even mentioning how much the time is slowing the perceptions of each of those pilots so they aren’t really going as fast as they think they are!”

At which point I would have to try to point out the flaw in that logic and eventually run into the problem that Godel and Tarski tried to explain to the more machine-like minds.

Specifically, I’d start with the fact that you cannot say if it is the guy in the ship or the guy on the earth is the one whose time has slowed since each one of the ten guys is saying everyone else’s time runs more slowly than their own. It’s the twins paradox.

They’ll try to invoke acceleration as a reason to pick a preferred frame. They’ll try to invoke some “turn-around” idiocy as the reason to pick a preferred frame but in the end they will pick a preferred frame and break the central axiom of the theory. They’ll insist they didn’t but it’s worse than trying to argue about dinosaurs bones to a creationist… they’ll just get you following them around in a little loop. (Hence my reference to Goedel and Tarski. They create a system they believe in and cannot understand that which is outside it from inside it)

It comes down a question of light speed isotropy.

“Wait what? You’re acting like people’s intuition about this is right and all of academia is wrong? …pah, crank!”

Yes… thoughts of the truly religious. The hive cannot be wrong!! Science is TROOF! …yes and perhaps I should be burned at the stake or at least ridiculed, ostracized and censured for the past 100 years… Check.

The truth is that it’s a lot more complicated than that though. (Yes, some of the more ignorant criticisms are crap.) The truth is that it only takes one tiny little itty-bitty teensie-weensie change for every irrational, backwards idiotic idea of relativity to be completely fixed:

A preferred frame.

The problem is that people who are educated in relativity are usually not educated in history and therefore don’t understand exactly how minuscule this change is.

Time dilation, length contraction and the illusions of light speed constancy and relative simultaneity are completely preserved within the preferred frame system that Einstein took most of the theory from. (Lorentz Ether Theory or “LET”)

Everything from the fact that quasars move many times the speed of light, to the fact that other galaxies move away from us at speeds greater than light, are all trivial within a preferred frame system.

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) establishes a universally preferred frame as well and Einstein was lecturing about -not just the desirability- the absolute necessity of an aether for GR to work at all, as late as the 20s and beyond. (many many years of study of his own theory later)

We’ve been calling it fields, dark energy, dark matter and all manner of fairy dust instead of just calling it what it is: Aether

"According to the general theory of relativity, space without aether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense." -Albert Einstein 1920

And many detractors, at this point, would blurt “But the Michelson-Morley!!!”

…to which I regularly have to sigh deeply about the horrifically under-educated state of those who consider themselves highly educated in this field. It saddens me how much faith has made them not question enough to be able to understand their own field. That’s the real problem with the faith necessary to build upon knowledge and move forward. You have to have faith in the foundation to build upon it… and that strength becomes a weakness.

Oh yeah.. the Michelson? Completely irrelevant to the question of a Lorentz description of aether. There has never been a successful one way speed of light test, therefore light speed isotropy is directly and specifically metaphysical, unproven pseudoscience… an unproven assumption taken carte blanche for over 100 years.

…but the actually educated will give this response:

“Yes yes… we all know that Lorentz’s unfinished theory is mathematically equivalent to Einstein’s but it was the insight that the aether should be removed that led directly to what makes Einstein’s theory factually novel and not just plagiarism as so often intimated! It is the truly relative nature of reality that leads to the linkage of space and time into a singular thing. It is the true constant nature of light, instead of simply the illusion of it, that Einstein added!

Aether was full of contradictions and was falling apart at the time anyway. It had to be far stronger than steel and behave as a solid to propagate light so fast and produce transverse waves and had to be far lighter and more giving than air to keep orbits even working!

Aether rightfully fell to Occam’s razor and if you had any knowledge about the subject you’d know this was all put to rest long long ago by your betters.”

Right now they are thinking that I copy-pasted this because it so perfectly matches their thoughts and I couldn’t possibly already understand all this if I was still arguing. Newp… made it up on the fly.

Wanna see me now eviscerate it and leave them zero legs to stand on? Okay!

Everything that Einstein added is what is wrong with relativity. Every irrational conclusion. Every lack of commutation and every paradox come only from Einstein’s version. Everything Lorentz presented was completely rational and mechanical without the single appearance of a paradox. Furthermore, all the current real world uses of relativity are utterly insensitive to the difference between Lorentz’s version and Einstein’s.

Declaring aether irrational or impossible is just the same argument that goes against relativity so it’s not valid by your own regular assertion but let’s examine this faulty argument anyway.

• The idea of the aether was something presented at a time when we had no experience with things such as liquid crystal, superconductivity, and super-fluids. That argument is inflated from a curiosity status before relativity, to a criticism status by those who came after relativity.

• There are various arguments which were originally specifically for aether and were part of the set of reasons it was so widely accepted, which have now been flipped as against aether somehow and don’t I don’t feel like going down that list this second, but I’ll just mention stellar aberration in the hopes that an intelligent person can look it up themselves.

• All of those criticisms initially mentioned, however, are swept away by a single easy inversion of our assumptions. Those who posited quantum spin foam would likely have no problem conceiving of matter as simply the more rarefied areas of aether. In which case, when we look at matter as an effect instead of only a cause, a great deal makes perfect sense.

IE: It is a very limited perspective full of over-simplified presumption to criticize aether upon the “counter-intuitive” grounds. Sound familiar?

Preferring Einstein’s relativity over aether as an invocation of Occam’s razor is just hilariously asinine. It’s hard to keep a straight face when people regurgitate this tripe.

What we’re saying is that instead of having a little difficulty explaining the complexities of the properties of the primary substance of the universe, it’s better to swallow the following:

1. A wave… An action which occurs to a substance… A rarefaction or shifting of stresses as an elastic medium seeks equilibrium… Is now, for the first time in the universe something that can exist on its own. It’s an action that happens to nothing.

2. This magic wave is so special that no matter how fast you go, it goes faster by the same amount. It’s effectively infinite (WoooOOOoooo) while being not infinite to any perspective other than its own.

3. To support our new belief about the magic-wave, we also have to now say that time doesn’t just run differently elsewhere, but also that to be in another place is to actually be in a different time.

4. To support our belief about another place being actually a different time, we must also accept that time is already written. And furthermore, the little known consequence of time already being written, to deal with relative simultaneity, also requires that a relative perspective on this version of history be available, therefore there are infinite universes with different versions of a pre-written time.

Oh yeah… way more simple than a medium being weird….

Occam’s razor my ass.

What about experimental evidence?

There’s just oceans and oceans of experimental evidence that favor a fluid dynamics approach and Maxwell’s equations were a description of the behaviors of an inviscid fluid medium. (He referred to it like a clockwork of gears and pulleys) All of this is just called the Neoclassical Interpretation and follows smoothly into clearing up all the problems with quantum mechanics as well by extending DeBroglie-Bohm with new experimental discoveries and advances in chaos theory.

If you’d like to understand relativity better, read my three blog posts:

Relativity Demystified

If you wanna understand the Neoclassical Interpretation better, read my book when it comes out.

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Edit 1: (7/15/2019) - Quick update since people are still reading this old post (I was obviously very annoyed at the time): Here’s a history paper that clears things up a bit as well: History of the NeoClassical Interpretation of Quantum and Relativistic Physics

Edit 2: (5/21/2020) - Because of the complex history around the topic I have often simplified the context. The truth is that when you consider Einstein’s position, it’s not completely his fault that we have such absurd ideas. He tried, unsuccessfully, to cure some of the misunderstandings but he himself was also influenced by the community that supported Minkowski’s extension of Einstein’s work. It’s more Minkowski’s fault for dying an untimely death that shocked the tiny physics community and the international community’s fault for using Einstein as a puck in an internal politics game. “Side with Einstein or side with the Nazis” was everyone’s fault. Scientists are humans too and sometimes it becomes no longer about the information. It is specifically Minkowksi, however, that conjoined space with time and very few people understand that this weird metaphysical presumption is only a necessity of modeling isotropic constancy. …but not necessary for the illusion of it that Lorentz purposely designed and therefore not necessary for the mathematically equivalent theory of Poincare-Lorentz relativistic aether.

Creation time: Sep 17, 2016 01:09 AM PDT

 

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I’ll give you the only answer that isn’t a circular logic description in a moment…

First, let me explain why my answer is the only one that is an actual explanation.

Unfortunately, the only way I know a person can get extremely good at recognizing circular logic is to have spent a great deal of time in rational debate with the religious. For this to occur, usually you have to have been religious yourself at one point and then defeated that mind virus. Our minds have their own immune systems and circular logic is particularly virulent. Think of overcoming religion as a sort of rite of passage that is like being vaccinated against irrationality.

You are asking for information that exists at an explanatory level more primary than the knowledge and beliefs of most people who follow mainstream physics. In each case of the other answers, they are only extending from basic axioms and returning to them as some sort of mockery of explanation. Don’t be fooled by long drawn out descriptions attempting to be passed off as explanations. (and be wary of those who don’t know the difference)

Once again, if a person defeats religion within their own mind, these sorts of mental maneuvers become easily and automatically recognized but those who have not overcome that difficulty usually do not recognize the roots of religious thought patterns within themselves.

Understanding requires information we think of as underneath and underlying.

The other answers cannot convey understanding because you have hit limits imposed by their beliefs. There is no mechanism underlying light according to mainstream consensus beliefs. There is nothing underneath or underlying.

Spontaneous generation (worms simply spring from rotting meat) was once a “scientific” sort of belief. They could tell you all the glorious conversion rates of pounds of meat to pounds of worms and subsequently number of flies. They could dazzle you with the time requires for the process and exponential curves in processing time based on the thickness of the meat.

If you asked them why worms spring from meat they would immediately begin to explain how it was because of the conversion rate and they would spin off into all the petty details. They would give you a great deal of accurate and possibly useful information while never answering the question.

One can spend a comparatively small amount of research time to discover a few facts about fundamental physics research.

1. The fundamental mathematics of relativity developed by Lorentz (the Lorentz transform) were developed to describe the way light would behave if it traveled through a medium. We still use these same calculations.

2. Einstein himself, after many years of working with General relativity, recognized the necessity of a preferred frame and lectured about this necessity as late as 1920 and referred to this preferred frame as Aether. (while stipulating that it would have to be expanded and different from previous more primitive concepts of aether)

3. Upon our discovery of the cosmic microwave background, most scientists began to refer to this as the preferred frame that Einstein spoke of and sometimes even invoke it in conversations about the twins paradox. (a problem that never appears in preferred frame mechanics)

4. Furthermore, many systems such the Lense-Thirring effect or “frame dragging” show spacetime to behave in a very fluid like fashion and there are numerous models of cosmic motions and interactions that behave like fluid dynamics.

5. Recent experiments with fluid dynamics have revealed that all the spooky quantum effects can actually be replicated in deterministic systems now that we better understand deterministic chaos. (Couder experiments & John Bush MIT)

6. Diligent study of the initial experiments that caused the removal of the aether reveal that even the oft cited null 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment showed systematic (not singular and not random) readings of an aether wind of approximately 8–12 km/sec. Readings which were later replicated tens of thousands of times by the well respected Dayton Miller and colleagues with various instruments at various times in various places. (for which he won a prize from the AAAS and personally blocked Einstein’s nobel for relativity)

An aether removes all the silly irrational magical thinking that has deeply soaked into the bones of modern physics and provides an avenue of greater research scope.

To start at the very beginning, a wave is something that cannot exist without a medium because it is simply a description of action within that medium. It takes a very childish and faith-filled mind to gloss over this very first step in irrationality. Once they get you to swallow this one on faith, you’re mind is open to gulp down any other nonsense they want to pour into it.

A person can go for a run and you can count the “runs” he’s gone on but you cannot hold them in your hand. They are a description of an action occurring to a subject and you cannot simply remove the subject.

A wave is a set of motions within a medium that allow it to disperse energy as it attempts to return to equilibrium in the balance of opposition forces.

There is a slippery-slope of faith-based thinking and the allure of consensus is something you should have learned about in high-school. Group think and peer pressure can bend you into a pretzel if you let it.

So the question is “what causes the speed of light and why does it not go faster?”

The speed of a wave is obviously a measure of a property of the medium it moves in. It deals with concepts like rigidity. So simply ask yourself why sound cannot go any faster than it does and you have the same answer. It’s a property of the medium.

Unfortunately a medium we understand very little of because we decided to ignore all the evidence that it was there simply because it acts strangely. It has behaviors we’ve only recently begun to understand through newer substances like liquid crystal and superfluids.

It being far more rigid than steel, for instance, really confused us until we were able to conceive of matter as the foam at the edges of a harder/denser substance. One we’ve thought of as nothing at all!

Given that we understand the mechanics of physical (“mechanical”) waves such as sound and can alter their mediums for certain special effects, we now have underlying mechanics that make sense for light and you can gain some level of understanding for why there is a speed of light at all. A property very strange for something that, in Einstein’s faulty version of Lorentz’s theory, basically behaves as infinite.

Yes, they can say it’s a conversion factor for time and that is actually true in aether theory as well but that gives zero reason for why such a thing would exist, what makes it that way etc. It has exactly zero explanatory power without a medium. A repetitive description is not an explanation!

There’s much more to learn and while this revolution in physics is already underway, you’ll see it slowly play out over the next 20–30 years. Consensus and groupthink are nearly impossible to overcome and scientists have very good reason to be blinded by their own arrogance. Consistent success does that to you

“A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because it’s opponents simply die off. Science progresses one funeral at a time.” -Max Planck

It’s a miserable truth that we sometimes have to be happy about the passing of the old guard who did so much for us in the past…

If aether theory is such a tiny difference that Lorentz’s theory used to be considered indistinguishable, why on earth are you arguing for it like it’s crucial or something??

Because in one cause we have a bottom level irrational “god did it” sort of explanation and in the case of aether we have this huge unknown to explore. It’s not just the job of science to explore the unknown, it’s also to identify where to look next for the unknown.

For more information check out my blog series here on quora: Relativity Demystified

Creation time: Aug 18, 2016 09:12 AM PDT

 

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Now that the main question has ten 9s like the details did instead of the mismatched eight it had originally, the gamma factor is 70,710 and the station is ~1337987506 km long and therefore takes only about 4,463 seconds or roughly 1 hour 14 minutes. (forgive my semi random truncation)

Therefore the elapsed time on the station should be close to 5232540 minutes or (unsurprisingly) very close to but just over 10 years.

So yes, it seems like your speed starts to go exponentially faster than light as you near light speed because of the change in frames and time effects.

While the people on the station see you moving at very nearly light speed, you get to cheat the system and make the trip in a tiny period of time. If your ship started in the frame of the station, and if you look at this from the perspective of a traveler on the ship, the common sense view of things is that you made a 10 ly trip in only 1 hour and 14 minutes.

So this means that if we could accelerate to within tiny fractions of light speed we wouldn’t need suspended animation to travel huge distance that shrink up to meet us.

It’s this weird apparent exponential speed that gives us the strange counter-intuitive nature of Special Relativity. In this instance however, the price is paid in the time difference.

“Hold on, wait a gosh darn second!! I’ve seen ‘Planet of the Apes,’ where’s the huge time travel into the future thing?”

Hmm… yes, good question and now you’ve brought up the twins paradox.

“Wait, what? No I didn’t!”

Oh, but you did. You have a valid point because I was not a good careful scientist above. I picked frames willy-nilly instead of following your instructions. I went with my intuition that the ship was the one in motion but you stipulated that the space station was in motion. (the one who is traveling very fast has to do that for a long time, to have a “Planet of the Apes” situation but who is traveling?)

So, in fact, it was nearly ten years inside the spaceship and only 1 hour 14 minutes in the space station, right? But, which one is correct?

I’m not done, hold on. It gets worse.

Now we can agree that we’ve decided that the spaceship is stationary and the long station is travelling past it, we can agree that each end of the long station as been beside the space-ship at some point

So one side of the station was in the same spacetime location as the ship and then the other side was in the same spacetime location as the ship later. (relative simultaneity is distance dependent)

If we use the time we decided occurred on the super-long space station, then apparently the ship was at one end and then a little over an hour later it was at the other end. By anyone’s estimation this means that the ship appeared to travel far faster than light speed.

Normally we could solve this problem by saying that the spacetime location at the distant point is not agreed upon because relative simultaneity but in this case it is because the front and the back of the ship are moving the same speed and relative simultaneity is not different across the entire 10 ly length, so what gives?

Relative simultaneity has a twins paradox too.

Though the clocks are synchronized at each end of the station, the two ends of the station are very different in relative simultaneity according to the ship. But who is right about the relative simultaneity, the station or the ship?

At the start of the experiment, the ship is at the far end of the station but, from the perspective at the back end of the station it is moving towards, the “now” simultaneous moment is far into the future of the ship in motion at the far end of the station… And according to the ship, the far end of the station coming towards it is in a simultaneous moment far in the future for that location.

When we compare the perspectives with no reference to a dominant frame, everything falls apart. It’s the twins paradox all over again.

You simply CAN NOT gloss over picking a dominant preferred frame! One has to be right and the other wrong. Period. (but this is a very unpopular opinion about relativity)

Later in life Einstein recognized this absolute requirement of a preferred frame and latched on to Mach’s concept of a gravitationally defined frame which we now sometimes equate with the frame of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Einstein got it, but somehow the rest of the physics community just couldn’t follow or keep up and kept teaching Special Relativity as correct instead of half formed. General Relativity, while not specifying it directly, allows for a semi-absolute frame within all the variety of space, much like there is a local ocean current speed under a ship but also a grid-like uniform distance between points from one shore to another.

"According to the general theory of relativity, space without aether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense." -Albert Einstein 1920, University of Leiden

Creation time: Apr 22, 2017 11:21 AM PDT

 

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It is critical to understand what is meant by “constant” first.

…and the way you’ve stated it makes it sound like the conventional idea of “constant” which is NOTHING AT ALL LIKE constancy in relativity.

If you use the common sense idea of simultaneous everywhere, then when considering light from multiple perspectives simultaneously, it would seem completely inconsistent. (which is why that’s not allowed in relativity)

In fact, Einstein says in OEMB that light “plays the part of an infinitely great speed” because when looked at from its own perspective, (or those multiple “simultaneous” perspectives) the speed is infinite.

Constancy is not just a consistent speed. Sound can travel at a constant speed in a consistent medium just like every other mechanical wave and NO mechanical wave can have “constancy” like light!

The way you come to the conclusion that light has the relativity version of constancy is…

…by knowing that there are various ways light could be measured and that moving with respect to a given single wave should alter your perception of that wave’s speed and supposedly we can’t. You can go faster and light goes faster yet by just the right amount to escape from you at the same speed it was escaping before. (according to relativity)

We came to this conclusion because of a particular test that compared light going two different directions and measuring their return timing: Michelson–Morley experiment - Wikipedia

Consider the opposite of that wierdness; mechanical waves in air:

You should be able to speed up and eventually catch a normal wave or come very close to it. This is the reason why a jet creates a sonic boom and the weird instant cloud-like flashes in the air around them. They literally catch up to the waves that are produced so they cant escape but instead reverberate “in-place” and gain amplitude via resonance. They become so powerful that the air is ripped apart by the force and micro-cavitations appear as clouds in the bow-shock.

This could happen to waves travelling at the common sense idea of “constant speed” because you’re moving with respect to the medium and catching up to the waves. This CANNOT occur with light according to relativity.

And it’s all because of an illusion according to Lorentz

Many years before Einstein both Larmor and Lorentz came up with calculations that describe an illusion which can cause light to appear to behave in such a weird way. Objects that you measure with, simply shorten up when they move through the aether. This isn’t ad hoc but based on some interesting conclusions about elasticity developed by Fresnel and by some interesting hydrodynamic understandings about the nature of atoms which were in development at the time.

Therefore no matter how fast you go, the extra distance light would have to travel is made up by shortening your measuring stick.

But Einstein decided the illusion was reality.

And all the mechanics that the calculations describe can just be thrown away while keeping the mathematical description. Something could wave without there being something to wave. (and many other irrational ideas)

Thus, Lorentz’s illusion of constancy became Einstein’s reality of constancy.

Exact same math in both cases, but in one case all rational scientists were fine with the description of an illusion of constancy, whereas in the second case all rational scientists were up in arms over the magical thinking required to accept relativity and the idea of the “reality” of constancy the wholly new ideas about reality required to uphold that presumption such as physically real extra dimensions beyond three. The action of waving becoming a physically existent thing without anything to wave, etc etc.

They were eventually called naive or “intuitive” for requiring a mechanical basis for reality much like post-modernists now say people have “Cartesian angst” when they believe reality is in any way real outside of them. (when you’re not solipsistic)

You can learn more about the development of relativity and the consequences of constancy below:

Relativity Demystified

Creation time: Jan 19, 2018 07:25 PM PST

 

 

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As usual, nobody answering understands “constancy” in light is nothing at all like the intuitive use of the word.

For sound to propagate like light’s “constancy,” it would have to be integrated into the fabric of the universe like light is in relativity theory. Constancy literally requires an additional dimension be added.

Anyone who does not understand this, doesn’t understand the first thing about relativity. I’m not saying they don’t know it like a computer knows things, however. Computers know things down to the finest details and can run the prescribed operations of hyper-complex systems and don’t understand the faintest thing about what they are doing even though they can do it fast, accurately, consistently, and reliably.

(this happens all the time with humans in physics)

Understanding means you could come to the same conclusion on your own and the vast majority of people who are supposedly professionals in relativity theory haven’t the faintest clue why simultaneity must be relative. (they’ll often cite different clock rates which is completely wrong and a different effect)

They also cannot explain why space and time must be considered two aspects of a single thing other than to explain how to treat it under that assumption.

Do not let them tell you an operation of how to do something as an answer for why to do it. The latter is the causative mechanics and the former is the consequential mechanics. (They can fool themselves and you into thinking they’ve given an explanation by regurgitating long computer-like instructions for the treatment of the assumptions without ever giving a reason for the instructions)

If sound behaved as a constant, we’d have to rethink the very nature of sound and the whole of the universe… again.

A wave could not simply be a compression and rarefaction, or even a torsion and return to equilibrium. It, like light, would lose all mechanical causes and require that it have it’s own additional time dimension added to the universe to make up for the problems in perceiving arrival times based upon different frames.

It would require it’s own version of relative simultaneity that is separate from normal relativity and based upon the speed of sound.

Physical reality itself would have to also be conjoined with the new time dimension to explain the relative simultaneity caused.

Truthfully, I doubt it could ever fit with relativity, but if it did, it would likely require a couple more dimensions. You can pretty much “spackle over” even giant conflicts a theory proposes about physical reality by just adding more dimensions.

You don’t understand why all that’s necessary?

Then let me recommend you think through what exactly “constancy” is and means from multiple viewpoints of the same reality (since I cannot say “simultaneously”)

Below is the simplest description of constancy in relativity and if it doesn’t break your conception of physical reality then you’ve just accepted the theory without understanding the consequences upon physical reality:

When you are in a train travelling just under the speed of a bullet and pass by a man on the ground who fires a gun in the same direction as you pass, what do you see? You see a bullet slowly trying to pass your window as it falls to the ground. (basically riding beside you)

When you are in a train travelling just under the speed of sound and pass by a man on the ground who fires “sound laser” in the same direction as you pass, what do you see? If the air were foggy or you could otherwise see distortions of air, the first wavefront of the sound wave would be slowly passing your window.

When you are in a train travelling just under the speed of light and pass by a man on the ground who fires a laser in the same direction as you pass, what do you see? According to relativity you see light zoom past you at the normal speed of light.

Even though the guy on the ground thinks the light is barely eeking past your window, you see it zoom past. (you disagree about reality)

Theoretically this is explained by relative simultaneity but that’s too far beyond the scope of this question... (and because it doesn’t; it simply obfuscates and moves the problem)

If you’d like to know more:

Relativity Demystified

Creation time: Jan 24, 2018 07:28 PM PST

 

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That depends on whether you look at it from the context of the people who originated the idea or from late-comers like Einstein and Minkowski.

No one with any knowledge of history will dispute the fact that a form of light constancy, all the kinematics that lead to the occurrence, and the mathematical description of constancy, come from earlier sources: namely Lorentz in particular. It was conforming electromagnetism to these kinematics that Einstein, in competition with Poincare, provided.

Therefore the length contraction, time dilation, and apparent constancy of light, are not Einstein’s concepts, they are Lorentz’s. (…and Larmor’s and FitzGerald’s)

The issue is that the exact same math can represent either an optical illusion or a new weird property of the universe. This is the ambiguity of the meaning of the Lorentz transform. Lorentz designed an optical illusion and Einstein took that illusion to be a new basic weirdness to reality.

Lorentz’s description of constancy was a solution to a strange experimental result: the Michelson-Morley null. It was, however, a description of how the motion of aether would affect the propagation of light through that medium. That’s what the Lorentz transform originally was: the effects of aether on light.

Therefore from the perspective of the originator of the math that currently describes the effect, the property of spacetime that causes “constancy” is that it makes matter shorten up in the direction of travel through it. This alters perceptions of distance by altering our measuring sticks and alters time by making electromagnetic interactions have to travel further on an average “upstream and downstream” path. Thus the occurrence of events is slowed by the increase in time required for them to occur electromagnetically.

One small step for interpretation, one giant leap of faith!

When we instead believe that the illusion is the truth of underlying reality, it destroys a plethora of other assumptions about reality. For instance, if I watched David Blaine apparently pull his heart out of his chest I can either assume there are hidden mechanics at play, or if I presume it to be the truth, I must assume that some humans can live without hearts and can instantly close wounds. This leads to an unraveling of a wide array of assumptions about “intuitive” reality.

If one could devise an illusion such as that one, that anyone could perform without understanding the mechanics, then we could have replicability which would be a convincing “scientific” argument for changing our views of reality.

Unortunately, the term “constancy” has created this hidden culture of common misunderstanding of what exactly “constancy” in light means and the fact that it could be considered exactly the opposite at the same time. A huge number of students and even professors have begun to misunderstand exactly what constancy is because of this unfortunate nomenclature. If you do not understanding the following quote from Einstein’s original paper you too may be a victim of this ultra-common misunderstanding.

“…we shall, however, find in what follows, that the velocity of light in our theory plays the part, physically, of an infinitely great velocity.” - Albert Einstein, OEMB, section 4.

How to rearrange reality to fit “counter-intuitive” results:

If we presume that light can travel the same speed to all observers and therefore also seems as though it should travel differently to different observers, there’s only one way to make this new version of reality fit: We must destroy any reality to the common sense idea of simultaneous.

Lorentz already used a fourth dimension (a mathematical convention for just keeping up with things) to store the faulty ideas of time that the illusion would create for certain observers. If we believe the illusion is truth then those illusory times for clocks altered by the aether wind, are accurate truth as well. This means that not just your speed, but your very location in space also determines your time.

In this way, the fourth dimension of time becomes tied to and dependent upon the three other dimensions. To put this in context, this means that for each three dimensional coordinate there is a layout of the entire 3D world that is semi unique to it. There is a whole 3D world for a location and time that doesn’t match the 3D world of another location at the same time… if they are moving with respect to each other. The only way they experience the exact same layout of the 3D universe is if they are moving at the exact same speed and direction, and even then the more mundane and obvious intuitive effects of reality make the world appear different based on your location.

The important thing to understand here is that for something to move through space in a way that nothing else in the universe can, (light constancy) you must break the universe into pieces that will allow it to do so. This is what Minkowski did with his mathematical convention and what Einstein really only understood after some familiarity with the Minkowski convention which he initially rejected.

Therefore, to eliminate the aether we added infinite additional 3D realities which can, ultimately, be incongruent and add another layer to the twins paradox.

Yet, with the preferred frame mechanics of Lorentz, there is never any appearance of paradox, only a difficult to pierce illusion creating these nonsensical effects with very straight forward mechanics. Yet the math is utterly unchanged between these two viewpoints and the one experiment that can separate them, a one-way speed of light test, has never successfully been accomplished.

IE: There is no experiment-based reason to prefer Einstein’s interpretation over Lorentz’s initial reasoning. We simply discard the additional explanation, information, and mechanics provided by Lorentz.

Bonus: Understanding the extended twins paradox and relative simultaneity:

https://youtu.be/VYZQxMowBsw?t=3...

In the examples used in this video, they have a “loaf” to represent the whole of spacetime, yet there is an initial arrangement of instants on that loaf that represents a preferred frame. The initial arrangement is undefined in a universe that has no preferred frame and thus we need infinite loafs to represent truly relative simultaneity.

The mundane twins paradox is always solved by picking a frame and then preferring it arbitrarily, thus to defend purist relativity we introduce a preferred frame and break the initial thing we were defending. Yet a preferred frame is presumed to exist in Lorentz’s version and therefore there never is a twins paradox.

In the extension of the twins paradox to relative simultaneity, we can use the example of the man on the bench and the alien on the bicycle in the video above. Their starting positions on the loaf constitute a preferred frame whereas if simultaneity is truly relative then their positions on the loaf will also be relative and not truly defined. This is part of why 5 dimensional versions of relativity have been proposed.

If you’d like to better understand the reasoning for Lorentz’s Kinematics that are the underlying heart of relativity then you can read these posts which describe the impetus for those ideas and the difference between the two interpretations:

Relativity Demystified

…and if you’re feeling brave you can read this paper on the history of theoretical physics, how aether theory underpins all modern physics, and how it is making a comeback.

[1804.01846] History of the NeoClassical Interpretation of Quantum and Relativistic Physics

Creation time: Jun 25, 2018 02:31 PM PDT

 

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That is exactly correct.

Unfortunately, I cannot comment directly on Mark Barton's answer to this question because he gets both extremely angry and abusive towards anyone who doesn’t agree with consensus perfectly and has wisely blocked me since I get under his skin and we’ve fought too much for it to be useful anymore. Even though wrong, he does bring up salient points that are crucial for properly dividing this question along lines of clarification. His providing of wrong answers is instructive and practically a necessity for better understanding the answer.

The famous Michelson–Morley experiment was looking for precisely this asymmetry. So if it had given the expected non-null result, that would have falsified the idea that the one-way speed of light could be c in all frames by fiat, simply by falsifying the idea that the two-way speed of light could be c in all frames.

Yes, but a null on a two-way versus one-way is the very heart of the question which he is not addressing. His answer upholds the consensus narrative that special relativity is perfect, without his answer being within consensus itself. Once again, I find the issue is not ignorance of the workings of current theory but it is ignorance of history and the overlap between two similar theories. (hence why we fight like crazy)

First we must establish where he went wrong because it is very instructive in answering this question and avoiding the common pitfalls you will see in other technical sources

To start: Lorentz’s aether theory was designed to explain the null Michelson-Morley experiment. “The Lorentz Transform” is a description of an aether environment in which the interferometer experiment will ALWAYS BE NULL. Let me repeat: The Michelson-Morley is the entire basis of the Lorentz transform and the Lorentz transform was designed to work in aether. If it didn’t work in aether it wouldn’t work in special relativity either but somehow people who don’t read history don’t understand this. This was well known until roughly the 70s to my best estimation based on various writings of physicists.

But you can’t get it to exactly c, because the forcibly symmetrized one-way speed has to be equal to the two-way speed, and the two-way speed won’t be c in a non-aether frame. On the contrary, it will be slower by an amount of the Lorentz factor in the transverse directions (±y, and ±z), and the LF squared in the longitudinal direction (emphasis mine)

(Edit: He’s presuming only a Newtonian classical view and ignoring the Lorentz aether view from which the entire question of whether or not one-way or two-way experiments becomes important. If there wasn’t a Lorentzian viewpoint, the question of one-way vs two-way experiments wouldn’t be brought up at all. Initially I assumed he knew this and thought he was just wrong, now, upon further examination, I see he doesn’t understand the context of the question.)

He’s forgotten that in the Lorentzian view rulers shortened in the direction of travel will measure very differently or if he does recognize this he uses modern concepts (special relativity) instead of classical concepts. In Lorentz’s version, the calculations were more convoluted than in Einstein/Minkowski and provided more information.

In the Lorentz version, the space between two -disconnected- objects along the path of motion will appear to be further apart when that observer tries to use his materially shortened ruler. (more shortened rules fit between spaced objects) In special relativity, because of the Minkowski convention and reification of the 4th dimension, the exact opposite occurs: The distance between objects shortens. Because of the virtual changes to the speed of light for moving observers in the Lorentz version, complicated interactions of time, the speed of light, and shortened rulers will come out the same -in the end- as the Einstein version, but there is both a real answer and an illusory one available in Lorentz’s picture. Einstein/Minkowski only reveal the illusory simpler answer and thus those who only know the more modern methods get tripped up by this ignorance of older methodologies and the duality of the answer Lorentz’s method gives.

In Lorentz’s picture, because you don’t know which subject is actually in motion, his treatment of a real effect is only for the object actually in motion whereas the fully inverse effect appears to occur to the other subject not in motion. (IE When you’re length-contracted and time-dilated by motion, stationary objects appear length-dilated and time-contracted. There’s never a twins paradox.)

The ignorance of the original method that spawned the Lorentz Factor leads to misunderstanding the answer to the question above about the one-way speed of light when we attempt to compare classical and relativistic concepts.

Relative simultaneity can also mathematically exist in Lorentz’s aether theory but it is an artifact of skewed perspectives and not reflective of reality. In special relativity, on the other hand, the 3D universe is laid out in a different fashion for moving observers. Therefore the actual real time at a location is different depending on the frame you choose. This is NOT the same as the difference in clock rates.

In past conversations with various academics, I’ve found that each individual tends to have some semi-classical ideas which will not work with special relativity yet they believe they are describing special relativity when they are in fact describing Lorentz aether theory. (Eg: the solution to the twins paradox) Because they can mathematically come out the same, the difference between the two was lost to history and they now, unfortunately, blend from one individual to the next. Last we spoke, Mark demonstrated some confusion about the relativity of simultaneity that is half-way between Lorentz and Einstein. Namely, he did not grasp that relative simultaneity was an actual placement in time itself and not a simple clock rate and timing issue.

The one-way speed of light is intricately tied up in relative simultaneity and is described in two radically different ways from Lorentz’s aether to Einstein/Minkowski spacetime but the math is unchanged since there is both an optical illusion and reality present in Lorentz’s version.

Relative simultaneity is a crucial divide from classical.

Only by comparing and contrasting Lorentz’s version of relativistic aether and Einstein/Minkowski spacetime can this question be understood and answered. That comparative knowledge is now almost non-existent in modern scientists.

The reason space and time are conjoined is the essense of the reason Lorentz’s theory and Einstein’s theory are very different. Lorentz uses a 4th dimension to keep up with faulty clock rates that occur from the mechanical interaction of the aether with the moving clock causing electromagnetism to travel further and therefore make phenomena take longer to occur. Light speed is fundamentally anisotropic for moving observers in Lorentz’s version. The one-way speed of light is different based on direction for a moving observer, but the two way speed of light, combined with time and shortening effects, hides this truth.

It is physically and mechanically impossible for light speed to both appear constant and have an isotropic one-way speed in an only 3D universe.

Classical physicists could have easily used a 4th dimension to track changes in a 3D world over time (and sometimes did) but this is utterly different from what Minkowski’s convention does in explicating Einstein’s no-aether postulate.

The difference between Einstein/Minkowksi spacetime and Lorentz aether theory with the exact same mathematical outcomes is that a single moment of time is only 3D in Lorentz’s theory and a single moment of time is 4D in Einstein’s.

If you do not understand the above differentiation, it is literally impossible for you to understand the answer to the question we are discussing.

We have to lay out the universe in a different way to make up for the mechanical incongruity that arises in the travel of light if we presume it to be isotropic. Lorentz’s trick for aether only works if the two one-way speeds are different and the constancy of light is just an illusion of two-way experiments like the Michelson-Morley. Reality must be broken and reassembled on a new playing field of a 4th dimension to allow light speed to be both isotropic and constant.

To understand this you must understand that sound can appear to be constant like light if we invent a material that shortens by gamma in the presence of a wind. Yet this is, of course, an illusion which can be pierced with a one-way experiment.

If create a michelson-like experiment with sound reflective material for mirrors and a speaker that also acts like a mic to detect chirp timing and construct the arms out of this weird wind-reactive material, we will produce an analog of the Michelson experiment that makes sound appear to be a universal constant. (and if you believe the illusion you also have to believe in a relative simultaneity connected to the speed of sound)

If we create clocks that work based upon reflecting sound signals and make them from that odd material, they too will suffer time dilation effects predictable with Lorentz’s theory when we simply exchange light speed for sound speed.

And here’s the final problem:

If you believe in relative simultaneity, even my example with sound will give the answer that, sound travels the same speed in all directions for all observers regardless of their motion with respect to the air. The one-way speed is the same in all directions for all observers. (because if I’m allowed a 4th dimension I can rearrange 3D reality in a way that works with constancy)

This is clearly an absurdity but under my assertion that the universe be rearranged to accommodate constancy in my theory (this time with sound as the speed), the conjugate of that operation is that you cannot falsify my theory of sound speed constancy by detecting sound speed anisotropy. Any detection of sound’s one-way speed difference will be accounted for by the alterations to the coordinate system. It will simply be explicable as an effect of their spacetime coordinate and relative simultaneity.

This requires an intimate and intricate understanding of the unified effects occurring in special relativity which most people no longer can grasp because they are ignorant of the history of the theory and have no mechanical comparison to work with. Time-dilation, length contraction, and relative simultaneity are not separate phenomena but are all just aspects of constancy.

Relative simultaneity is an aspect of the isotropy of light speed constancy.

If we believe light speed constancy is just an illusion as Lorentz suggested in his mechanical and classical version of relativistic aether, then so is relative simultaneity. Only the length contraction and interference with time-keeping is real in the classical sense.

So yes, if you believe in relative simultaneity, no experimental evidence will falsify it if Lorentz’s neoclassical view was right, even though understanding Lorentz’s classical viewpoint will reveal certain evidence as falsification. Recapitulating, one-way speed of light differences can be rationalized under the theory, even though they are falsifications outside that theory. (but not very far outside since Lorentz’s theory is mathematically indistinguishable in most ways)

If you’d like a slower and more detailed explanation with more visualizations and explanations, you can find that here: Relativity Demystified

…and if you’d like to learn more about some of the history I’m constantly harping on then read this: [1804.01846] History of the NeoClassical Interpretation of Quantum and Relativistic Physics

Creation time: Jun 28, 2018 09:02 PM PDT

 

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According to relativity it is NOT IMPOSSIBLE to travel intergalactic distances in a single human lifetime.

You could possibly travel to other galaxies, under light speed, within your lifetime, without “cryosleep,” even though they are millions of light years away!

All without having to bend or warp spacetime.

This should NOT immediately make sense unless you’re very familiar with the theory.

Here’s the thing, inside the spaceship, time and space are different. So a spaceship on its way to Andromeda might look like it’s only going 99.99999% of light speed to us back on Earth and would therefore take over 2 million years for Earth, but everything is different for the object in motion.

For the person on the spaceship, the universe shriveled up in the direction they were going to a tiny fraction of the distance it was when they first started their trip from Earth. This far smaller distance is completely “doable” in their lifetime.

The problem is this:

Let’s just skip energy requirements to get that close to light speed and pretend we have that solved.

 

Say, for instance, an alien civilization in Andromeda just developed space travel and can reach speeds very close to light. They just set out to come here by some miraculous chance. (maybe they are detecting signs of dinosaurs) They’ll make it here in their own human-like lifespan, lets say, 25 years, but it will still be over 2 million years from now before they arrive.

The closer you get to light speed, the “faster” you get there for your frame, but it doesn’t change for anyone else.

It can take just 25 years for a traveler and 2.5 million years for everyone else!

…then again, as a historian of physics I have to point out that this is just one interpretation of relativistic physics and I don’t, personally, buy into this interpretation. The less well known interpretation of the same math makes much more sense to me.

This weirdness that should immediately evoke the twins paradox for more critical thinkers while the mathematically equivalent relativistic theory of Lorentz and Poincare has no such problems.

That interpretation was, unfortunately, just lost to history in much the same way that most people only know about the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics even though “many-worlds” and “pilot-wave” are also well-established alternatives. (with pilot-wave being far more rational than the other two) Pilot wave has only just started to resurface in the past 5 years after many years of being almost utterly forgotten.

We just accidentally blur the difference between preference and experimentally supported and there is absolutely no evidence-based reason to prefer Einstein-Minkowski relativity to Lorentz-Poincare. Sometimes popularity and social factors get transformed into scientific orthodoxy over time.

[1804.01846] History of the NeoClassical Interpretation of Quantum and Relativistic Physics

Creation time: Sep 03, 2018 08:29 PM PDT

 

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That’s a lot of topics smashed together. Let me see if I can unravel it a bit by breaking it into three parts.

“Why is measurement, observation, and the speed of light linked?”

I’d guess perhaps you’ve been thinking about faster-than-light communication and entanglement, correct? It’s the thing Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”

So the linkage here goes, sort of, in opposite direction of how you’ve stated it. At least for most people’s understanding. There is a seeming breakage of the light speed limit inherent in entanglement experiments.

So the answer to this first sub-question is that it is linked culturally because of the weird disconnect between our two major theories (QM and SR) and the many strange ideas this bad fit has spawned.

You’ve touched upon one of my personal pet peeves, however so you can either enjoy my rant or skip the commentary and go to the next section.

The most common excuse why the apparent FTL signaling is okay and not a conflict of theories is because supposedly “no information is sent.” That is, of course, an easily recognized crock of BS for anyone not deeply invested in the self-delusion required to always remain within the comforting arms of consensus. Religious behavior is all about self-deluding for the purpose of dogmatically remaining within orthodoxy and really has nothing much to do with spirituality. Religiosity is a pattern of mental behaviors.

The most easily recognized fact is that “collapse” is an event which supposedly occurs and is a real change to a particle. Even if undetectable, the realness of the event requires a signal to change. Secondly, if there is really physical change then that change is detectable. We have already established something called weak measurement that doesn’t fully cause a “collapse” event, therefore information is not just sent, it’s detectable whether or not it has been sent.

It’s unfortunate that the rules, rigor, patterned behavior and other trappings of religion are found within science and it attracts the hardened minds of orthodoxy so readily. In the end however, I think it was religious thinking that captured and stored valuable information within the group and spawned culture and passed down learning. We have examples of this proto-cultural mechanism in what was unfortunately dubbed “Hundredth monkey effect” (there is real cultural learning but not a proven critical threshold, just a viral spread like memes in humans)

“Is it the basis of special relativity?”

Not at all. I’m going to assume that perhaps you don’t mean the topical and obvious question of whether or not Einstein used this information since it comes many years after special relativity… therefore I’ll interpret it as meaning to ask if this connection is responsible for the behaviors of reality that relativity describes.

Again, no from the consensus perspective. That said, according to Lorentz’s relativistic aether which was the direct predecessor of relativity and fully provided the kinematics equations at the heart of all that is strange about relativity… there is an observer effect that is created and causes light’s speed to appear constant when it factually is not.

Einstein later understood this and tried to communicate it:

According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense. - Albert Einstein, 1920, 15 years after special relativity.

Nobody listened of course…

Very few people are even aware of this interpretation of the Lorentz transform and fewer still understand it in the slightest. It was, however, why Lorentz didn’t come up with the idea of removing aether even though he created the time dilation an length contraction. Those effects were because of the motion of the aether as it was performing what is basically an observer-based optical illusion.

It’s really quite simple, straight forward, and easily understood once you know the trick. It’s just like any other illusionists trick. It looks easy when you see behind the curtain. (but there was great difficulty in developing it and it’s childish not to appreciate that fact)

Unfortunately, the whole physics community has completely discarded and forgotten that part of history since roughly the 70s. (around the time Bell inequalities and assertions of a fundamentally weird reality became orthodoxy)

Einstein starts from the hypothesis that the laws will look the same to all observers in uniform motion. This permits a very concise and elegant formulation of the theory, as often happens when one big assumption can be made to cover several less big ones... But in my opinion there is also something to be said for taking students along the road made by FitzGerald, Larmor, Lorentz and Poincaré. The longer road sometimes gives more familiarity with the country. — J. Bell

The most hilarious part is that Bell himself argued against the validity of Bell inequalities.

“But in 1952 I saw the impossible done. It was in papers by David Bohm. Bohm showed explicitly how parameters could indeed be introduced, into nonrelativistic wave mechanics, with the help of which the indeterministic description could be transformed into a deterministic one. More importantly, in my opinion, the subjectivity of the orthodox version, the necessary reference to the ‘observer,’ could be eliminated…

But why then had Bohm not told me of this ‘pilot wave’?... Why did von Neumann not consider it? More extraordinarily, why did people go on producing “impossibility” proofs, after 1952, and as recently as 1978?... Why is the pilot wave picture ignored in textbooks? Should it not be taught, not as the only way, but as an antidote to the prevailing complacency? To show us that vagueness, subjectivity, and indeterminism, are not forced on us by experimental facts, but by deliberate theoretical choice?” J. S. Bell. (1987), p. 160.

Nobody listened, of course…

(No you’re not just having Deja Vu; we all are.)

“Can an event be observed without the assistance of light?”

We can observe gravity with accelerometers so therefore yes, observations can be made through other means, but not usually (to my knowledge) without some type of interaction that alters the thing observed. Even when using gravity alone, to be within a gravitational field is to affect it.

The funny part is that if you use light to measure the event’s effect on gravity by only measuring the bending of spacetime the light passes through then yes, we can observe without alteration, but this is my own original idea I’ve noticed was possible just now and I have no idea if it’s already widespread or completely unknown. It seems like it’s obvious and should be widely known since that’s what we do in astronomy all the time, but sometimes the fields of science don’t communicate with each other much so it’s weirdly possible nobody has noticed this blatantly obvious thing. I’m frequently blown away by the obvious connections people simply never make.

“Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not yet completely sure about the universe.” - Albert Einstein commenting to Frederick Perls

Creation time: Mar 09, 2019 01:11 AM PST

 

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The universe wouldn’t really be different.

What we think about it would certainly change, however.

For instance: When we look at the rotation rates of galaxies and then have to come up with strange things like the idea that the universe is made up of 95% stuff we don’t understand, the very easy and obvious answer is that it’s simply the aether in motion that causes the difference in rotation rates further out on the galactic disc.

It’s right there in front of our faces.

Truthfully there’d be about ten thousand little incongruities throughout modern physics that would make perfect mechanical sense. We could throw away every single magical belief (instant actions at a distance etc) and instead of a perfect deterministic view of the universe with a greater understanding of the underpinning of atomic interactions that would allow us to better harness and use energy.

“According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense.” - Einstein, Leiden, 1920

History of the NeoClassical Interpretation of Quantum and Relativistic Physics

So how would OUR universe be different? (if we accepted this simple easy change in perspective)

Well, on our little planet we wouldn’t be about to all go extinct in the horror of high tech war for resources. (with a side of starvation and disease) We wouldn’t be on the edge of mind control and automated weaponry annihilating the best of us and leaving only cowards and killers. (extreme people… those willing to suck up and buckle under, and those willing to shoot first …are all that are left in extreme circumstances. The best of us die first.)

And, secondly, those in power through their control of energy resources would lose some of their death-grip on the reigns by which they are aiming this planet straight into a living hell. Because when energy becomes more available the power differential changes.

https://youtu.be/RyXOYf5_JLc

So let me ask you a question you have to answer for yourself.

Is it in the interest (simpleton power-lust, not mental well-being) of those who control the planet for massive sweeping changes in energy technology to occur through fundamental revolution in physics?

Creation time: May 07, 2019 08:12 AM PDT

 

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Put on your tin foil hat…

I really think it’s possible there may be a purposeful confusion in optics going on in the past decade. It’s really weird! (but maybe not)

Why? …because of the number of people giving strange explanations for group and phase velocity has dramatically increased and optics technology is the the bleeding edge of technology advancement. (so, the sort of stuff you try to stop other governments from getting better at)

So let’s start with the fact that there are -at least- three important phenomena to consider (not just two) when talking about the speed of light: Phase velocity, group velocity and the “wiping” effect. This is the best non-conspiracy version of where the confusion is coming from.

Let’s start with talking about the many accidental “Faster than light” confusions over the years that happen because of group velocity,

Let’s use this image from “Group velocity - Wikipedia”

The green dots move with the group velocity and the red dots move with the phase velocity.

Phase velocity is the speed the actual wave moves through space. Group velocity is the speed of the packets of waves that are created via interference.

There are many circumstances where one can make waves interfere in a way to create beat patterns that can appear to propagate many times faster than C. In the visual case above it’s slower but one can make it run backwards too just like when you’re watching the rims of a slowing vehicle and it looks like it runs backwards. It’s an illusion.

However imagine super-giant space wall at a very great constant distance from earth that is many thousands of light years long (and is obviously, therefore semicircular) but it’s aimed at earth so we can shine a laser at it.

If one were to point a laser at one end and then quickly snap their hand to point at the other, how fast would the dot on the wall move along that wall? It would appear to be many times the speed of light. In the past I’ve heard this called a wiping effect, but recently I’ve seen people call it the phase velocity…

For instance this answer gives an explanation of the “wiping” phenomena that is the third of the three phenomena important to speed considerations, but it is NOT the phase velocity by any stretch. Ron Brown's answer to What is the difference between phase velocity and group velocity?

It’s simply a wrong answer that explains a real phenomena quite well and mislabels it. (I seriously recommend reading it) It’s one of many that have been repeatedly cropping up in wikipedia edits etc. People have certainly started spreading the misinformation I’ve frequently seen in the past decade.

Why? Well, make up your own mind if it’s “ignorance or malice” but I’ve been seeing a little too much misinformation recently to feel like it’s just an accident when I know how utterly central to physics optics is.

I must admit there are times when terminology begins to morph because it was inadequate beforehand and I suppose that could also be the cause here, but I’m still feeling suspicious.

But now the answer to your question.

I’m guessing someone said phase velocity when they meant a wiping effect. If you’re talking a collision along a surface then I recommend Ron Brown’s answer above. He describes the effect well even if he’s using the term phase velocity in a faulty way.

Imagine shining a light at our gigantic space-wall almost perfectly and freeze time for a moment. The peak of one wave is directly hitting one side of the wall but it’s slightly out of alignment so that at the other size of the gigantic space wall it’s the next peak in the wave train about to strike it.

Just like that laser swiped across the wall, one peak will seem to race across the surface because of the near perfect 90 degree angle to the real propagation of a wave.

Much to my chagrin, that’s actually why a wind surfer can go faster than the wind! (I initially answered incorrectly…) Shiva Meucci's answer to Can a windsurfer go faster than the wind?

Here’s the important part: Information is primarily only available in variation.

If you had a set of nothing but trillions of ones and no zeros, the information carried in that set would be very near zero even if I gave some absurd number of total ones. Perfect order like that is useless for storing info because it’s the variations that make up the information itself. Tons of undifferentiated “stuff” that you could store information in is just like a blank sheet of paper where ones represent the color white.

Now if you think about the examples I gave above, the actual wave can only change from the emitter. When talking about movement across a surface of a wall, it’s all basically just one single wave of a wave train appearing to move across that surface because of the circumstance. No information is really traveling faster than light. You’re just taking a weird slice of the wave. Instead of seeing the whole wave strike the whole surface all at once, the slight angle makes only a portion of the wave strike the surface and the “cut” through a portion of the wave just happens to show up in a “moving” pattern.

I’d like to save you another long description of interference and just say there are situations of combining waves, especially when they are going in opposite directions, that can cause the variations in the waves to look like signals are moving faster than light but it’s just like when you were a kid looking out the window at rims on a nearby car that looked like they were going backwards. Unfortunately I’m not sure that’s good enough for some inquiring minds so I’ll explain a bit further for those of you not yet fully satisfied. Please hold in mind the group velocity image above however.

The actual waves are not propagating any faster than light and now that you know variation carries data I’m sure it might seem like the variations moving faster than light can carry data FTL as well but I’l explain further why that’s incorrect.

Unfortunately you can’t change the variation faster than the total time it takes for light to traverse the distance in the normal way.

It’s an effect of waves being overlaid on top one another so you have to consider the whole ensemble of waves in space as a single “thing” to understand the problem better. It’s about group velocity and “groups” are only created by interference of more than one pure frequency.

So, think about looking at some huge long beam of waves from the side interacting with each other so there are bright spots in the beam moving in the same direction as the light’s travel through space. We’ll think of these as the FTL spots inside the whole wave train or “beam” we are imagining.

Basically it looks a little like a superlong LED bar moving through space and the bright spots on the “bar” are moving in the same direction as the bar itself. The “bar” is moving at light’s normal speed and the spots are moving FTL.

However the whole bar was spit out by an emitter and once that emitter stops, the bar ends, and it’s set in motion through space just doing its thing. The little moving dots going FTL can’t move past the front end of the “bar” that was spit out. The movement of the light is an illusion caused by he relationship of parts in the bar. An unchanged relationship is causing the neat motion illusion.

If I want to change that relationship to cause a variation in that relationship, then it’s going to move at the bar’s speed. IE I have to start spitting out a new “LED bar” at the emitter and then new faster or slower moving set of led lights inside that new bar will be constrained to be inside that new bar and its motion through space, even if it’s butted up to the previous one.

I’ll have two “LED bars” end to end moving through space. (Sets of light with phase relationships that cause interesting group velocity combinations) with the old one still having a fast moving spots at the “pre-programmed speed” and the second one will have lights moving in it at a different speed right to the end of the bar.

The point is that the additional motion is entirely an illusion and the only thing really actually moving is the original light waves whose combination in place give the interesting illusion.

Therefore the real variations propagate at the same speed as in a single beam of light. Just because you can combine a few different frequencies and create an illusion is meaningless. Think about moving alongside the light with it. The illusion is happening “in place” inside the collection of moving waves with nothing actually moving at any speed other than light’s speed.

There’s only one unchanging relationship between the combined waves in these situations where you create groups, and that equates to static data, not changing. It’s the fact that waves themselves are a type of change that is “unchanging” (reliable cycles) which causes this illusion to be possible.

Creation time: Aug 31, 2019 06:07 PM PDT

 

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It’s all about how the math of special relativity works.

That math in this context came from George Fitzgerald, Joseph Larmor, and most notably, Hendrik Lorentz. Fitzgerald and Larmor were relying on the earlier work of Fresnel while Lorentz generalized the approach for this particular purpose of dealing with the null result of the Michelson Morley experiment.

Lorentz was creating a mathematical description of how light could actually be affected by an aether behind the scenes but simply not show up on a Michelson interferometer experiment. (a mathematical description of an “optical” illusion)

To explain it as simply as possible: To do this trick you have to take away from one side of the equation what you add to the other. Unfortunately, to make it work in all directions it has to be a sort of “average” of two major effects. (and pythagorean theorem helps out when averaging something over an area.)

Imagine light being like a swimmer in a river. There’s upstream, downstream and accross that you have to consider. If you average the up and downstream and then consider the necessities of the weird upside-down V shape through the water one must swim to just go directly accross from one bank to the other and back… then you have the math of the Lorentz Transform.

The issue you have to deal with is that when you average the upstream slow-down and downstream speed-up they don’t cancel out!

This makes a non-linear progression in the math required to make the illusion.

The whole point of the Michelson interferometer experiment is to check the up/down against the cross stream paths. (of a swimmer in a running river) They should be different under normal circumstances with a swimmer that always swims the same speed through water.

Lorentz was figuring out how much to shorten the distance between the upstream and downstream “markers” to make it perfectly match the cross-stream swimmer’s real V shaped path through the water. This is dependent on the speed of the river compared to the speed of the swimmer.

At very low speeds of the river compared to the swimmer there is almost no effect and as you get closer and closer to the speed of the swimmer, the period of time it takes to swim upstream grows larger and larger before the swimmer can turn around. Therefore you have to move the markers closer and closer and closer together to get the same time for the swimmer to go accross and back as the time for going upstream and back.

If the river EVER reaches the speed of the swimmer, the time required for the swimmer to reach the turn around point upstream is infinite.

The amount one would have to shorten up the markers of distance along the upstream becomes zero. (and a divide by zero error occurs in relativity at C)

It was Herrmann Minkowski that took Einstein’s observations about the “constancy” of light’s speed (Lorentz’s mathematical illusion) and extended it to the presumption that time and space are a singular thing.

Therefore if one (in a quite ad hoc manner) assumes that time, space, and light are an inseparably related phenomena and it is the very essence of reality itself shortened up by your math instead of just the stick you measure with, then light is the universal speed limit.

However, that is an interpretation that has never been experimentally differentiated from the illusion intended by Lorentz!

Furthermore it is based entirely upon the idea of constancy. Conjoining space and time is only required to make light TRULY anisotropic constant instead of just an illusion that can be pierced by a one-way speed of light test. (which has never been accomplished)

It is crucial to understand that Einstein was pressured by Minkowksi’s sudden death, (his mentor) to use the standard developed by him just before his untimely death.

However Einstein repeatedly stressed bother before and especially after the extension of relativity by his followup “General relativity” that constancy was not correct.

Ergo, it is possible, within the framework of the alternative interpretation of relativity posed by Poincare and Lorentz, for things to travel faster than light. It is a relativistic aether.

If you’d like to learn more, this paper will help give context.

History of the NeoClassical Interpretation of Quantum and Relativistic Physics (PDF)

Creation time: Nov 11, 2019 06:05 PM PST

 

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I see from the answers coming in I’m going to have to contextualize the question more. This is not a question from ignorance; this is a question for people who really understand theoretical physics and interferometry well beyond “expert laymen” level.

Let’s first cover something: If you don’t know that GR, from Einstein’s perspective, is a preferred frame theory via Mach’s principle, please excuse yourself from answering; you can’t understand what I’m asking well enough to give a useful answer. (relevant quotes on the invalidity of constancy below)

Now, please understand that LIGO is much like a giant Michelson experiment that is getting non-null results and scientists call these sporadic events gravitational wave detections. This should already hint to you what I find strange and want to explore.

So, to explain better: The path lengths that light travels down each arm of the interferometer is compared to the other via interference. With some level of admission that I don’t know their whole technical story, the laymen’s story is easily found in nice videos like this one:

And in fact they address exactly this question in this video here at 5:22

https://youtu.be/iphcyNWFD10?t=322

He gives the following answer that is easily recognized as bogus:

“It’s sorta a matter of timing is how it works. So, the amount of time it takes for light to go down this tube and back is very short. However the wave… the gravitational wave, when it comes through it’s doing this slow thing like *hums* this noise I made, which is low. It’s a slow stretching thing. It’s only hundred times per second. And it’s true, when the wave comes through, the light which is in there, it actually does get stretched. And… and then that part doesn’t… doesn’t do he measurement for us but um… now that the space is stretched that laser light is like… come and gone. It’s out of the picture. We’re constantly shooting the laser back into the system. So the new fresh light now goes through there and has to travel a bigger distance than the light before.”

It’s all right here in the last sentence. He’s only confused himself thinking about other things. He ran us around in a circle to only just restate the initial problem in a more meandering and distracting way. His answer was a non-answer.

Here’s the easy way to explain it: If a ball point pen was made to roll at a constant rate to maintain a constant ink flow on a sheet of paper, you could crumple it up, use numerous copies of the pen and compare them and all experiments that relied on measuring the time it takes to traverse the surface of the paper would always be the same.

It doesn’t matter when you enter or how you crumple the coordinate system, the rate is decided by the actual space (paper) that has to be traversed. (just like the angle of light around a star stays straight on the bent coordinate system)

This should make it obvious to you that his understanding is wrong.

I sincerely hope that the theory, as published in peer reviewed articles, is more complex than his easily recognized circular reasoning.

That’s why my question - specifically - asks for references.

===== Einstein’s quotes on the failure of constancy in GR =====

Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912-1914 (English translation supplement): “However, the writer of these lines is of the opinion that the theory of relativity is still in need of generalization, in the sense that the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is to be abandoned”.

Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912-1914 (English translation supplement): “The theory presently called "the theory of relativity" is based on the assumption that there are somehow preexisting "privileged" reference systems K with respect to which the laws of nature take on an especially simple form, even though one raises in vain the question of what could bring about the privilegings of these reference systems K as compared with other (e.g.,"rotating") reference systems K'. This constitutes, in my opinion, a serious deficiency of this theory. These privileged reference systems are postulated as those with respect to which the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light in a vacuum is to be valid. There can be no doubt that this principle is of far-reaching significance; and yet, I cannot believe in its exact validity. It seems to me unbelievable that the course of any process (e.g., that of the propagation of light in a vacuum) could be conceived of as independent of all other events in the world. But whatever one may think of such arguments, it is in any case interesting to pose the [Go back to the top]

 

To what extent is it possible to build a theory of relativity that does not have the constancy of the velocity of light as its foundation? [..] In the case where we drop the postulate of the constancy of the velocity of light, there exists, a priori, no privileged coordinate systems.”

(clarifying the quote above, he's saying removing light speed constancy resolves the problematic issues and fixes the "serious deficiency")

Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912-1914 (English translation supplement): “On the other hand, the empirical fact that all bodies fall equally fast in a gravitational field suggests the idea that physical processes occur in exactly the same way in a gravitational field as they do relative to an accelerated reference system (equivalence hypothesis). Having taken this idea as a basis, I arrived at the result that the velocity of light is not to be regarded as independent of the gravitational potential. Thus, the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is incompatible with the equivalence hypothesis; for this reason, the theory of relativity in the narrower sense cannot be brought into agreement with the latter. In this way I was led to view the theory of relativity in the narrower sense as valid only for regions within which there are no noticeable differences in the gravitational potential.”

Volume 6: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1914-1917 (English translation supplement): “In the second place our result shows that, according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity and to which we have already frequently referred, cannot claim any unlimited validity”.

Volume 7: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1918-1921 (English translation supplement): “Second, this consequence shows that the law of the constancy of the speed of light no longer holds, according to the general theory of relativity, in spaces that have gravitational fields. As a simple geometric consideration shows, the curvature of light rays occurs only in spaces where the speed of light is spatially variable”.

Creation time: Feb 22, 2021 08:05 PM PST

 

[Go back to the top]

 

By silly popsci communicators? Probably yes.

By serious physicists and historians? Hahhaha!

Hah!

phew, ahhh… *wipes eyes*

No.

Saying that can directly infer constancy from Maxwell's equations is like presuming that giving simplified equations for sound, valid in only one frame, is “implying” the constancy of sound. It’s utterly inane but it’s a rumor passed around since about the mid aughts. Unfortunately it has made it around to some students of physics and that’s really sad, but even very smart people get fooled by intuitive rumors.

We later find Maxwell’s equations behaving according to our expectations of constancy so it seems quite reasonable that one might directly infer constancy from them.

It is not however. Not even a little reasonable.

 

That said, a historical side note is important:

The place this came from recently seems to be Michio Kaku (the earliest source I could track down) who he was probably reading through history and beginning to understand that as early as 1889 Heaviside was working with J.J. Thomson on an aether model which uses fluid behaviors to arrive at the relativistic change factor. What I’m saying here is that Maxwell’s equations directly imply object shortening.

This is so similar to constancy that it was the reasoning used prior to 1905 to justify an illusion of constancy in a mechanical medium of aether to explain the Michelson null.

However the difference between an illusion of something and the reality of it is the difference between a stage illusionist really impaling himself on a spear and only appearing to do so. So when I say Maxwell’s equations imply an illusion of constancy it’s saying something RADICALLY different than saying in implies constancy. When someone says Maxwell's equations imply constancy, they might as well be saying “Hey, did you hear [actor’s name here] impaled himself on a spear and lived?” When very few people know the actor is also an amateur illusionist, the misunderstanding is so HUGE as to be considered very misleading.

One must make this absolutely gigantic caveat of illusion and then it becomes true. Maxwell’s equations do imply an illusion of constancy.

This is almost certainly the reason this rumor appeared and persists. It’s just a misunderstanding of history.

Creation time: Aug 10, 2021 07:03 PM PDT

 

[Go back to the top]

 

No one did. It’s a century long “telephone game” gone horribly wrong!

Though people will attempt to cite the Michelson-Morley,

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

not only was it factually, non null, it’s showed exactly the pattern of variation of results (instead of noise) specifically expected of an aether wind. These unambiguous and easily accessible historical facts (data in the published papers) are generally not allowed to be part of the discussion in public knowledge places such as wikipedia where a few well established editors use their power to hide the facts.

For instance, Dayton Miller’s page

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

had a self-publish paper cited and a whole discussion area devoted to what was called “Roberts Analysis” for many years even though, against wikipedia rules it was a self publish. (and incidentally an laughable misuse of Fourier analysis) One of the keepers of orthodoxy with immense power on wikipedia within the theoretical physics articles, who is named “DVdm,” even put the paper and section back up after it was removed for being against wikipedia rules.

This is specifically to uphold a one-sided narrative about history and avoid any subtlety in discussion about this crucial topic of the history of relativity which has become more religion than science.

However, the fact of the matter is that light has never been proven constant. That’s just interpretation, not science but too few people know the history or he fact that the math behind the Lorentz factor is directly based upon and describes the behavior of light in a medium (only constant - on average - in two directions)

https://philpapers.org/rec/MEUMMS

Yet current consensus (groupthink) of the theoretical physics community as of the 1990’s doesn’t even allow for the possibility of a one-way speed of light test.

https://youtu.be/pTn6Ewhb27k

Thus making it automatically impossible to falsify the pseudoscientific concept of constancy which Einstein himself discarded well before and long after general relativity:

Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912-1914 (English translation supplement): “the writer of these lines is of the opinion that the theory of relativity is still in need of generalization, in the sense that the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is to be abandoned”.

Volume 6: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1914-1917 (English translation supplement): “In the second place our result shows that, according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity and to which we have already frequently referred, cannot claim any unlimited validity”.

Volume 7: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1918-1921 (English translation supplement): “Second, this consequence shows that the law of the constancy of the speed of light no longer holds, according to the general theory of relativity, in spaces that have gravitational fields. As a simple geometric consideration shows, the curvature of light rays occurs only in spaces where the speed of light is spatially variable”.

There are more quotes and wide variety of ways in which Einstein repeated over and over that constancy is BS, but these excerpts are a good start.

…yet first you’d have to have some grounding in group psychology, a little primer on Kuhn’s work, and I’d have to teach you a very long history class to make you really understand how, where, and why all the political and emotional nonsense led to this dead end in physics we have today. (and I haven’t even mentioned the quantum space magic woowoo of mainstream physics theory)

I’ll do my best on the relativity and constancy issue in the preprint draft I linked above when I finally expand it for journal publication.

Creation time: Sep 14, 2021 01:07 AM PDT

 

[Go back to the top]

 

This modern argument/discussion is a bad mix of quantum and relativistic physics based on utter nonsense. It’s complete, unequivocal, metaphysical ASSUMPTION.

First let’s just poke the biggest hole in it. According to relativity light travels at C in any given frame of reference. This is a statement about physical characteristics of space and time, not just a conventional travel of something.

The normal intuition that light travels like other objects do is a complete misunderstanding everyone starts with. In the Minkowski spacetime convention: It does not. According to modern interpretation of relativity, the motion of light is an effect that is apparent from the relative arrangement of massive objects in the universe and their motion with respect to each other. Light doesn’t “travel” per se, it only appears to do so according to your perspective as a massive object progressing through some mixture of space and time.

Light, when given it’s own “frame” or perspective, has an apparently infinite “speed.” (because it’s not really normal travel)

“…we shall, however, find in what follows, that the velocity of light in our theory plays the part, physically, of an infinitely great velocity.” - Einstein, 1905, OEMB section 4

This same light frame, also collapses the distance in the universe to 0. Thus there is no separation between objects according to a photon.

Unfortunately this perspective which is undeniably part of accepted theory currently, allows for retrocausality since separation in space is what determines causality which Einstein believes remains unbroken by his theory.

So, herein, we are already deeply in muddy waters where we simply assume that causality must always be preserved in relativity, when, in fact can easily be broken by wormhole physics which are also possible within modern relativity, regardless how ridiculous the energy requirements are. Black holes do exist, thus causality is already breakable within relativity regardless what Einstein wants or believes.

There is the math and then there is opinion about the math. The math, combined with the evidence, filtered through the lens of Minkowski spacetime, allows breakage of causality. (ostensibly)

Einstein severely disliked the notion of things like retrocausality because of the mess it would make and the irrationality that would then be possible within his theory. (but remember theories are not facts, they are models which can be significantly wrong and still work very well)

When quantum theory came along with the notion of entanglement, it went against Einstein’s beliefs about the completeness and rationality of his own theory. Thus he balked at “spooky action at a distance” even though the mathematical conclusions of his theory - in Minkowski formalism - already intimate such things by the mere fact of light’s strange and exceptional existence as a phenomena wholly apart and different from other phenomena. (again, this is an artifact of Minkowski spacetime and the concept of isotropic “constancy” it codifies)

Again, it cannot be stressed enough that the “constancy of light” is absolutely not just a statement about some reliable speed of a wave; it’s a statement about the structure of reality itself and requires that the universe be 4D to accommodate the concept of isotropic constancy, which, was, in fact, later abandoned by Einstein.

[scroll to the bottom to read numerous other quotes on the topic]

Confused yet? You should be. So is everyone else and they are only pretending to really understand because it’s embarrassing to not know something so central to your belief system. Thus they think they understand disjointed beliefs which they, in fact, simply memorize (like poor AI) while they ignore incongruities.

It’s all descended from a big misunderstanding and historical hiccup that started when Einstein’s mentor Minkowski abruptly died after Einstein publicly insulted his work. Before Minkowski, the concept of constancy was known to be just a little mathematical illusion - a trick - that is played by physical shortening of objects when time is dependent upon electromagnetic signals in a moving medium. That mathematical trick is best referred to as “anisotropic constancy.” The Lorentz transform that described this trick had been around for almost 20 years when Einstein first incorporated it into his theory.

To understand this strangeness of isotropy vs anisotropy this recent video is a great primer: Just remember that anisotropic constancy from long before Einstein can work just fine as a mathematical illusion in a 3D universe but isotropic constancy as a real effect assumed in Minkowski’s 1907 convention (today’s metaphysics) requires reality to be arranged in complex way (4D) to avoid paradox. Same math, with radically different views of physical reality as their metaphysical assumptions.

https://youtu.be/pTn6Ewhb27k

Einstein abandoned the (isotropic)“constancy” concept, however, because he was aware of this ambiguity of interpretation and eventually adopted what is often known as a “Machian” universal frame (after Ernst Mach) in which the gravitational average of the universe gives a preferred frame for all light. Unfortunately he treaded lightly to honor the memory of Minkowski who was Hilbert’s best friend, especially when Hilbert was a MAJOR contributor to the finalization of general relativity after 10 years of Einstein’s unsuccessful struggling with it and many contemporary scientists already refused to give credit for GR to Einstein because they insisted Hilbert should be credited.

THIS HISTORICAL FACT OF A PREFERRED FRAME IN GR IS NO LONGER TAUGHT TODAY. …and that’s the biggest problem with this whole irrational snarl. Constancy as it’s taught in modern universities, just doesn’t work like everyone thinks. It’s all a word of mouth game of telephone and BAD METAPHYSICS being taught to people for almost a century.

And as the video above explains, it’s metaphysics without experimental basis, AKA pseudoscience.

However a few physicists still knew about this in the late 20th century:

Enter John Stuart Bell of the “Bell Inequalities” that modern people generally credit with proving that “spooky action at a distance” really does happen, contrary to Einstein’s belief.

Einstein starts from the hypothesis that the laws will look the same to all observers in uniform motion. This permits a very concise and elegant formulation of the theory, as often happens when one big assumption can be made to cover several less big ones... But in my opinion there is also something to be said for taking students along the road made by FitzGerald, Larmor, Lorentz and Poincaré. The longer road sometimes gives more familiarity with the country. — J. Bell

Guess what, that idea that Bell proved and believed in spooky action at a distance? That’s a misrepresentation too…

Here he annihilates the silly human consciousness argument that is tied up in the entanglement discussion.

“That the theory is supposed to apply fundamentally to the world as a whole requires ultimately that any 'observers' be included in the system. This raises no particular problem so long as they are conceived as not essentially different from computers, equipped perhaps with 'random' number generators. Then everything is in face predetermined at the fundamental level - including the 'late' decision whether to insert the plate. To include creatures with genuine free will would require some development, and here the de Broglie-Bohm version might develop differently from the usual approach. To make the issue experimental would require identification of situations in which the differences between computers and free agents were essential.

That the guiding wave, in the general case, propagates not in ordinary three-space but in a multidimensional-configuration space is the origin of the notorious ‘nonlocality’ of quantum mechanics. It is a merit of the de Broglie-Bohm version to bring this out so explicitly that it cannot be ignored.” ~ John Bell "Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics" page 115

And then here he discusses how absolutely ridiculous it is to continue to accept absurd ideas of instantaneous action at a distance that is just a theoretical choice descended from a probabilistic approach. (a type of mathematical treatment. An inherently fuzzy representation of reality)

“But in 1952 I saw the impossible done. It was in papers by David Bohm. Bohm showed explicitly how parameters could indeed be introduced, into nonrelativistic wave mechanics, with the help of which the indeterministic description could be transformed into a deterministic one. More importantly, in my opinion, the subjectivity of the orthodox version, the necessary reference to the ‘observer,’ could be eliminated…

But why then had Bohm not told me of this ‘pilot wave’?... Why did von Neumann not consider it? More extraordinarily, why did people go on producing “impossibility” proofs, after 1952, and as recently as 1978?... Why is the pilot wave picture ignored in textbooks? Should it not be taught, not as the only way, but as an antidote to the prevailing complacency? To show us that vagueness, subjectivity, and indeterminism, are not forced on us by experimental facts, but by deliberate theoretical choice?” - J.S. Bell, On the Impossible Pilot Wave. 1982

Again, the silly instantaneous things that cause logical errors are assumptions from models. ...from theories. They are BAD METAPHYSICS that are unnecessary confusion because the actual math can represent many various interpretations of it and people now have a 100 year tradition of confusing METAPHYSICS and interpretation for hard science.

Yet the fathers of these ideas invariably disagree with our modern consensus “telephone game” misinterpretation and popular METAPHYSICS. Schroedinger, who truly birthed quantum physics understood the problem with probabilistic mathematics and the way it confuses interpretation.

“I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.” [About the probability interpretation of quantum mechanics.] - Schrödinger from John Gribbin, "In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality" (1984)

“It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naïvely accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.” Schrödinger demonstrating the absurdity of probabilistic assumptions via his “cat” thought experiment

The math underlying these theories still work just fine with very different interpretations of their meaning about these topics.

Unsurprisingly there are interpretations that require no magical, irrational, retrocausal or other popsci clickbait nonsensical assumptions everyone is now taught since fame and social mechanics started polluting the field of physics during the era of Einstein.

There are deterministic, causal mechanics available to underpin modern magical interpretations of probability …all with exactly the same mathematical outcomes. None of the magic mumbo jumbo you’re forced to swallow carte blanche by overconfident modern acolytes of orthodox modern METAPHYSICS, is necessary.

Let us return again to the question to summarize:

How was it proven that information can’t travel faster than light?

It wasn’t. Period.

In fact, when we look at the fact that - supposedly - light is not subject to time the same way as other phenomena in the current interpretation of relativity (contrary to Einstein’s clear protests in his later years) then obviously light which is energy should be able to carry information to any point in the universe instantly, just from facts of the current consensus theory of relativity alone. (nonsense of modern interpretations)

Finally the most common discussion around it is hilariously inane: They say that something changes at a distance but it cannot carry information. That is so head-smacking wrong I feel silly explaining that any change is detectable and therefore is a signal; period. …but they’ll run you in circles with long trails of convoluted spurious logic, just like their superstitious progenitors in religion did to excuse their magical beliefs.

You should be laughing at their superstitious mumbo jumbo and religious-like belief in current METAPHYSICS. It’s a story, not science.

Laughter and ridicule is the maximum respect that should be given this sort of superstitious behavior, just like every other ruling religious group wielding social power in our past that they lorded over a populace with authoritative hats. They used to be pointy hats but now they are squares and octagons. Be impressed or be shamed by your non-eliteness, peasant!

The emperor has no clothes and it’s time to laugh uproariously.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.01846

https://philpapers.org/rec/MEUMMS

 

===== Einstein’s quotes on the failure of constancy in GR =====

Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912-1914 (English translation supplement): “However, the writer of these lines is of the opinion that the theory of relativity is still in need of generalization, in the sense that the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is to be abandoned”.

Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912-1914 (English translation supplement): “The theory presently called "the theory of relativity" is based on the assumption that there are somehow preexisting "privileged" reference systems K with respect to which the laws of nature take on an especially simple form, even though one raises in vain the question of what could bring about the privilegings of these reference systems K as compared with other (e.g.,"rotating") reference systems K'. This constitutes, in my opinion, a serious deficiency of this theory. These privileged reference systems are postulated as those with respect to which the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light in a vacuum is to be valid. There can be no doubt that this principle is of far-reaching significance; and yet, I cannot believe in its exact validity. It seems to me unbelievable that the course of any process (e.g., that of the propagation of light in a vacuum) could be conceived of as independent of all other events in the world. But whatever one may think of such arguments, it is in any case interesting to pose the [Go back to the top]

 

To what extent is it possible to build a theory of relativity that does not have the constancy of the velocity of light as its foundation? [..] In the case where we drop the postulate of the constancy of the velocity of light, there exists, a priori, no privileged coordinate systems.”

(clarifying the quote above, he's saying removing light speed constancy resolves the problematic issues and fixes the "serious deficiency")

Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings 1912-1914 (English translation supplement): “On the other hand, the empirical fact that all bodies fall equally fast in a gravitational field suggests the idea that physical processes occur in exactly the same way in a gravitational field as they do relative to an accelerated reference system (equivalence hypothesis). Having taken this idea as a basis, I arrived at the result that the velocity of light is not to be regarded as independent of the gravitational potential. Thus, the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is incompatible with the equivalence hypothesis; for this reason, the theory of relativity in the narrower sense cannot be brought into agreement with the latter. In this way I was led to view the theory of relativity in the narrower sense as valid only for regions within which there are no noticeable differences in the gravitational potential.”

Volume 6: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1914-1917 (English translation supplement): “In the second place our result shows that, according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity and to which we have already frequently referred, cannot claim any unlimited validity”.

Volume 7: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1918-1921 (English translation supplement): “Second, this consequence shows that the law of the constancy of the speed of light no longer holds, according to the general theory of relativity, in spaces that have gravitational fields. As a simple geometric consideration shows, the curvature of light rays occurs only in spaces where the speed of light is spatially variable”.

Creation time: Oct 30, 2021 08:22 PM PDT