Relativity: Coming to Terms: Starting Assumptions

Is there a point hidden within all these sentences?

A question perhaps?

Something?

Yes.

Relativity is hard.

Relativity is hard because of wrong assumptions and undefined terms.

Subsequent posts will try to make relativity less hard.

Ask your doctor if relativity is right for you.

This would make a better blog than a topic here.

Just a thought.

sounds good. but Jorrie told me to post in the open forum. I'll move if he tells me.

Relativity is hard only in the same sense that for a Barbie doll, math is hard. A great deal of relativity can be derived from the observation that c is identical for all observers, plus the Pythagorean Theorem. Many college freshman physics courses cover this, and even an ingenious tenth-grade geometry student can figure it out.

I think the biggest problem I see with this diatribe is that you make claims, but there are no corresponding examples or citations.

For example, you say that, "Terms such as relative velocity, reality, mass, wave medium, theory, post-processing, the present, past and future mean something very different in the jargon of relativity."

How are they different? Cite specific cases where velocity means something different than it does in other circles of conversation.

What arguments and misinterpretations exist? Examples?

As far as telling if you are in motion or not, the cosmic microwave background radiation can provide you with a mechanism to determine your proper motion with reasonable or "good" results.

There are more questions and holes in this, but I am short of time right now.

I am in the process of defining the terms under their own headings so that 10 different conversations won't be going on simultaneously under 1 big post. My 1st subtopic is about the term "relative velocity" and how loosely it is used in relativity.

Yes about the CMB. I tried to make the argument stick that anything far enough in the background looks and acts for all intents and purposes as something not in motion, as an absolute background to which all motion can be absolutely referenced. I made no headway there. I've changed my tack in that the twin paradox within relativity itself allows one the ability to set the individual velocities of two inertial frames engaged in relative motion by comparing the time dilation one frame sees of the other. One frame will see the other clock moving slower than its own and the other will see it moving faster than its own. This is something relativity forbids because of its prime assumption of there's no way to determine how much of the relative velocity someone is actually moving. Relativity says that both frames will see the other frame's clock moving slower than its own. The twin paradox shows this is not true because the twin actually moving will see the other twin age faster. Relativity goes through a lot of contortions to accommodate this contradiction and make it look like it's not a contradiction. I'm saying if you make the right assumption from the start, the contradiction doesn't even exist and never needs to be dealt with.

1. The CMBR is not actually a reference inertial plane, but by measuring its temperature in different directions you can find your apparent velocity based on the variation in temperature.

Moving will blue shift the background in the direction you are traveling as well as red shift the CMBR in the direction you are moving away.

2. There is no way to see nor know what another inertial frame's clock is doing until the two inertial planes are co-moving together.

That is the gist of the twin paradox in that you can't compare clocks until they return to a common inertial frame (i.e., Earth).

So you need to be careful about stating what one observer sees of another's clock. They can't compare clocks until they are in the same inertial reference plane.

Yes that's the standard relativistic story but if you look at the twin paradox example where the twins send out a light beam to each other once a year and they compensate for the delay the light takes to reach them, they can compare the message frequency with their own clocks even if there is no turnaround point. Relativity says you can't tell if you are leaving the earth or the earth is leaving you but these annual signals are not ambiguous. The twin on the ship will see his earth twin aging faster and the earth twin will see his travelling twin aging slower even if they never meet again. Relativity says this is false but if we do the experiments I've suggested we'll know what the clocks are actually seeing during the trip.

This is my understanding of the "Twins Paradox"...

With the twins paradox, the situation is symmetrical. You can't say one is at rest and the other moving. The two are moving with respect to each other and each will perceive the other as aging slower.

However, before they can get together again and compare ages, one has to decelerate to a stop and then return. The one that does this is no longer in an inertial reference frame, and this acceleration causes the difference in the ages.

This can explain it much better than I can.

I've pretty much been saying the same thing in my representation of what relativity says. The only difference is that there is no need for the twin in the ship to turn around. It can pass a 2nd ship going at the same speed in the opposite direction. When that 2nd ship returns to earth, it magically resolves that the original twin in the ship, which is far from earth, has aged slower than the twin on earth. It's magical because relativity dictates that unless there's a reunification of some sort, there is no way to tell which twin ages slower than the other. So the twin could have kept going out into space but until he passed that ship going back to earth, the twin paradox cannot be resolved.

This is why relativity is so fishy to me and it should be to everyone else. All these caveats have to come out of the woodwork which act like bandaids to prop up Einstein's initial wrong assumption; an assumption that can be experimentally, albeit expensively, disproved as I've outlined.

So why do the twins have to reunite? There's this little thing called relativity of simultaneity. It's like a hidden bank of time that grows as inertial frames separate. Relativity dictates this bank of time has to be cashed in before any determination of who aged slower can be made. It's cashed in only if the separation between the timeframes is brought to zero. You won't find this in a textbook, you have to dig deeply for it because it sounds so logically flimsy and made up; a secret bank of time, really?

My explanation doesn't need this secret bank of time, it doesn't require the concepts of relativity of simultaneity or length contraction or put any constraints on when relative aging can be determined. Relative aging is a continuous process, not filled with the hidden and sudden discontinuities relativity introduces.

My concept determines who is actually moving by comparing clocks between the timeframes. I say the relatively moving frame will see the other frame's clock moving faster, not slower as Einstein assumed. In turn this observed phenomenon will verify that this frame is indeed the one relatively moving.

You don't even need to verify this completely experimentally. If two ships are coming together at the same velocity, relativity dictates that they have no mutual time dilation because of their symmetrical spacetime paths. It's not too much of a leap of faith from this to infer that the share of relative velocity determines which twin ages slower and which ages faster.

Also you may want o look at the myriad of explanations of how the twin paradox is handled when one assumes the twin in the spaceship is in the "stationary" frame. They are so needlessly complex and all have a major hole in them. They require the earth to move at a faster velocity to catch up with the spaceship twin than the spaceship twin's velocity to get back to earth when he was in the "moving" frame. This is the hidden asymmetry that allows both derivations to have the spaceship twin age slower and preserve Einstein's basic assumption that both frames see the other timeframe's clock tick slower.

My explanation can, but has no real need to consider the twin paradox where the spaceship twin is considered stationary.

You obviously cannot consider the spaceship twin stationary, not with that acceleration at turn around.

Yes, that's another inconsistency with relativistic thinking. The one that's actually moving is the one that is supposed to feel acceleration but I don't see any way the twin on earth feels acceleration if he is considered the frame in motion. I'm sure there is some excuse card to cover this. Any belief based theory always has plenty of excuse cards.

I went back to Jorrie's book on how he handles the twin paradox from the perspective that the spaceship twin is the stationary frame. He can stay stationary for the 1st half of the journey but then he has to move at a speed to catch up with the earth that is traveling at the entire relative velocity. There is no way to make the spaceship twin truly stationary so again I don't see how Einstein's assumption that both frames see the others time as dilating slower can be valid.

I'm still putting my money on the old German guy with the bad haircut....

It's a good bet because all my objections have probably been explained away in the last 111 years; I'm just not aware of how.

The 1st assumption is there's no way you can tell if you're moving unless you change your motion and experience an inertial force (which is equivalent to a gravitational force).

Your first assumption is correct.

The 2^nd assumption is that there's a universal rate of time that passes the same for everyone.

A 3rd assumption is that while there's no speed limit on how fast you can travel from point A to point B using your own base time rate, there is a limit to how fast information can travel.

The second and third assumptions are not.

Even though I'm trying to knock down assumption 1, if you believe it then assumptions 2 and 3 are an inescapable result of it. If you don't believe assumption 1, then 2 and 3 remain independently true. Here's why:

If you can change the velocity of your timeframe and you can somehow tell time is either flying by quicker or slower in your own frame than it was before the change then you have violated the 1st assumption. So no matter how fast you're going relative to other timeframes, your own aging process when seen from your own perspective will remain unchanged in order to satisfy assumption 1.

Similarly, if you're parked on the surface of a black hole, people outside your timeframe will see your time nearly stopped while you will experience a normal lifespan and everyday activities being performed at normal speed. You still feel the gravity of a black hole but you can't feel gravity's effects on your time. (This supports one of my arguments against assumption 1 that gravity or acceleration is irrelevant to determining which frame is actually moving.)

For assumption 3, if an outside observer sees your time slowed as you speed between 2 galaxies which you both know are 1 million light years apart (when you both measured it when you were both stationary relative to each other), you will spend way less of your own time and way more of the observer's time traveling that distance. You can get to the other galaxy in a fraction of a second your time but in billions of years of your observer's time. You will not have beaten a light ray to your destination from either yours or your observer's perspective. The standard explanation for this is that the speed of light is constant for all observers but that rule doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling inside of how to reconcile the spaceship can travel 1 million light years in a fraction of a second his time. After all, it would take light 1 million light years.

The explanation is complex. It involves the concept of gamma velocity and the idea that speed is a vector of both time and space dimensions. Your speed limit is light speed in the space dimension but as you move closer and closer to light speed, more and more of your speed appears in the time dimension. This does not happen for light itself as all of its speed is in the space dimension and none of it in the time dimension so its total speed vector can't be infinite. I will cover gamma velocity Yv, in another installment but it involves some formulas and simple math which may freak some out.

OK, lets stick with inertial reference frames: no acceleration and no strong gravity fields (no black holes!)

The separation between two events in space and in time are different as measured in reference frames moving relative to each other.

This example gets to the crux of the matter:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/muon.html

Muons are created when cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere. The half life of a muon is 1.56 microseconds. Even moving at close to the speed of light, almost none should be able to reach the earth's surface, yet a substantial number do. Special relativity explains how this happens:

From the observer on the earth, the muon's reference frame is moving at close to the speed of light. The time of the muon's reference frame slows down, so that the half life is much longer than 1.56 microseconds.

From the muon's point of view, the earth's reference frame is moving at close to the speed of light. The depth of the earth's atmosphere is foreshortened. It doesn't have far to go in 1.56 microseconds.

Two events, the creation of the muon and it's reaching the earth's surface, are viewed differently in the two reference frames. From the earth observer, these events are closer together in time. From the muon's point of view, the events are closer together in space.

In 4 dimensional spacetime, the two events have the same separation.

Consider two points in a plane. The x and y coordinate differences between the two points depend on how the x and y axes are oriented.

In a like manner, two inertial reference frames in relative motion are rotated with respect to each other so that the difference of the time and space coordinates differ.

Interesting, I see I have interpreted the muon experiment differently. I used to think relativity could look at our perspective of the muon travel could be either we see time slow for them or we see the distance they have to travel is length contracted from our perspective. You are saying the length contraction is only from their perspective. I think relativity is saying the muon sees our time rushing up to it is slowed which gives the muon more time or the muon sees the distance it has to travel is contracted and we see the muon's time has slowed relative to ours again giving it more time or the distance it has to travel has contracted.

Anyway, the difference between our interpretations is that I'm saying either length contraction or time dilation can be seen from the "stationary" frame of the "moving" frame (whichever is arbitrarily labelled as such) and you're saying we see only time dilation of the muon frame and the muon frame sees only length contraction of our frame.

What I'm trying to prove is only one of the frames is actually moving, there is no symmetry. If the muon frame is moving then we see its time slowing (and the muon sees our time getting shorter) such that the muons can reach the earth. If the earth frame is moving on some stationary muons, we would see their time getting shorter (and they would see our time slowing) and they would never reach the surface of the earth. Hence, the fact the muons reach the earth proves they are the only moving frame because if you assume earth is moving the muons decay even faster than 1.56 usec. I wrote this quickly. When I reread it may sound totally insane with glaring logical errors. I have to go, work time is over.

Let's clarify what I'm saying with an example. Say the relative velocity between the earth and the muons is .8c. Plugging that into the time dilation factor gamma and we get 10/6. If we assume the earth is stationary and the muons take up all the relative velocity then we shall see their half-life slowed bya factor of gamma so 1.56 usec times 10/6. So now they have 2.6 usec to reach earth instead of just 1.56 usec.

If you use length contraction, the result will be they have 1.56 usec to travel a contracted distance. Both answers come out the same, the muons reach earth before they self-destruct.

Relativity allows you to do the same calculation from he muon's perspective of the earth rushing up to the muons. Symmetry dictates that from the muon's perspective, our time is slowed. The results are the same, more muons reach earth.

I'm making a completely different assumption. If more muons are reaching earth, then their time must be slowed relative to ours. If their time is slowed, they must be moving relative to us. They are taking the entire .8c rrelative to us. From the muon's perspective our time is moving faster than theirs not slower as relativity dictates.

But let's say the muons were stationary in space and the earth was rushing towards them. We'd know we were the ones moving because no muons would reach earth. We're the ones moving so we see the muon's time speeding up by a factor of 1/gamma. So now the muons only have .936usec to reach earth instead of 1.56usec before they self-destruct. They have way less time so almost none make it.

Let's say the earth and the muons are both going .4c towards each other for a total relative velocity of .8c. The spacetime path would show that gamma would equal 1 for both the earth and muons. They would see neither time dilate. Hence the muons would only have 1.56 usec to reach the earth which is not enough but more would make it than if the earth had hogged all the relative velocity.

What I'm saying is the results of which frame has its time slowed and which has its time sped up dictates the moving frame's share of the relative velocity. This is not the same as either absolute velocity or pure relative velocity, it is a percentage share of the relative velocity between two frames.

A 3rd assumption is that while there's no speed limit on how fast you can travel from point A to point B using your own base time rate, there is a limit to how fast information can travel.
Just for the above try not to throw out logic in your concept. You can not travel faster than information because this would mean that you are there before you know it.

Tachyon Express

When it absolutely, positively, has to be there yesterday.

I thought that was chronotons

I see the inquisition is on your tail; you are going against the teachings, and run the risk of being burnt at the stake? The extent of your post suggests an in-depth interest in the subject. So, if we take it one step at a time. What is your meaning of relativity?

Relativity to me is the relationship of an observer and object, if they are the only two in the universe, then only their sensory observations, of each other, registers any meaning? Other possibilities cannot be verified? So if we have your twins in today's universe, we also have other parties observing that relation ship?

So, if we have a third party? What does that mean to relativity? Is it the relationship between the observer and object, or, is it an observation of the third party of the observer and object?

What are your thoughts with regard to the above?

I guess we have to wait for the information to arrive. It is meant to travel slower than a physical object possibly can. But then it almost seems right, because I have the feeling we have been there already.

Blink blink!