Proof Minkowski Spacetime is Poorly Conceived

Discussion in 'Alternative Theories' started by danshawen, Apr 21, 2016.

  1. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    3,951
    Yeah. I wasn't demented until Miles pointed out that what we refer to as time has always been, mathematically, a relative proportional velocity. The proportional part only enters in if you use a relative velocity scale to measure time that is different from the speed of light. What you can't use is a mystic one-way variable t connected to the geometry of time vs space in a higher dimension.

    Time is not a higher dimension; it is the ONLY dimension in our space. The correct units for what we refer to as time are the same as (relative) velocity, BUT ALWAYS REFERRED TO LIGHT TRAVEL TIME (VELOCITY = c). Any equation that contains both c and t in the same expression is as redundant (in terms of the variable t) as it is wrong.

    No wonder relativity for most is incomprehensible. It doesn't really need to be. Think more clearly about which velocities are being compared. A lot of ambiguity happens because t is equivocated with t' (in the notation of Lorentz). There can be as many primed t's as there are reference frames or observers. I challenge anyone to show that there is an invariant interval of the same magnitude in any of them, even for a SINGLE event. Even if there were, it would not physically mean anything. Time dilation is different everywhere there are different relative velocities, just like Lorentz calculated.

    Demonstrate this is not the case, and I won't need to voluntarily commit myself for therapeutic treatment. How many physics profs did I have who never mentioned such a relationship? What exactly did they think they knew anything about? I don't think I am the delusional one.

    Even the length contractions now make more sense. The time dilations referred to light travel time means there is more time for a light wave to traverse the shorter light travel time (distance) in the rest frame than in the primed one. Relative proportional velocities explain everything without covariance. Any variations in length is completely described without forcing a covariant relationship between length and time, just like Lorentz did. Mink rotations still don't make any sense.

    At least, no one seems to be paying any attention. That's probably a good thing.

    Are we having fun again yet?
     
    Last edited: May 13, 2016
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  3. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    Huh?

    \( c/t = \) light travel distance
     
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  5. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    c is okay.

    t is a relative proportional velocity in the reference frame. It refers to motion with respect to the speed of light, hence your expression is redundant before you even start.

    c all by itself is what you wish to work with. Already contains t, doesn't it? Compare it to another velocity, and the t used in that velocity is already primed.

    There is no time; only relative velocities. Everything in the universe of energy transfer events is moving, a great many of them at different velocities, and different time dilations.
     
    Last edited: May 13, 2016
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  7. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    Dan, I do not speak for anyone else, but there has been nothing remotely funny in this entire thread. The unpleasant aspects of it include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following:
    1. Many of your posts are replete with what is popularly known as word salad.
    2. Even were you to successfully defend the accusation of word salad, we would be left with two problems:
      1. Use of well defined terms to mean something significantly different.
      2. Failure to define terms in a clear manner, when first introduced.
    3. You rarely address direct questions in a direct manner.
    4. You rarely address any refutation of your assertions.
    5. You continue to repeat assertions that have been adequately refuted.
    6. You fail to provide the mathematics that might support your assertions when called on to do so, yet often declare the mathematics is sound.
    7. You attack supposed claims of current theory that are not present in current theory.
    8. Your style is often snide and sarcastic.
    9. You come across as exceptionally arrogant, without providing any justification for even a touch of arrogance.
    I could go on. It may occur to you, or another reader, to ask if I have had so little fun why am I even here? Simple, I find persistent nonsense to be offensive. I believe it should be challenged.
     
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  8. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    3,951
    I do still like your attitude and your skepticism, and please don't change it. It is more appropriate to this thread than any other I have participated in on sciforums.

    I am amused at the levels of ignorance I am seeing, even from people here who previously did not remotely fit into that general category. Some sort of denial, indoctrination, or lack of an open mind? I don't know which, but it's evidencing big time right here, right now. The math, like any science, is only correct and consistent until it isn't, and that happens when someone demonstrates that it isn't. The moment that happens, it isn't valid anymore.

    Time always has the dimensions of a relative velocity. That's an issue, all by itself. Each and every time t appears all by itself in an equation, not to put too fine a point on it. Time is almost never treated as though it were a relative velocity, particularly by our illustrious Mr. Minkowski. Would anyone here care to address that issue directly? Origin gets some credit for trying.

    I do answer direct questions directly, Ophiolite, and moreover, I usually answer them as simply as a limited level of comprehension such as all of ours (mine included) makes possible, literally, and I am not trying to sound like the Guardian of Forever from Harlan Ellison's 'City on the Edge of Forever' from STTOS.

    I even answer in math whenever I can. t proportional to ict is now understood to be both ridiculous and redundant. Too many t's, some of them not appropriately identified as primed (from a different reference frame) would suffice as a logically valid explanation and criticism of a theory in most academic settings including defending a thesis. Somehow, no one here ever responds to something like that. And even if they could, it would mean little or nothing at all here. It's time to take the discussion and the math elsewhere.

    Many of the refutations of my core assertions do not refute them specifically, and irritatingly, attack my sanity rather than the points I raise. That's ad hominum. It is a logical fallacy. It is outlined in the introductory remarks of some of our forums. Something is not necessarily false simply because I am the one who said it.

    Answers to relativity questions frequently are incomprehensible to the uninitiated, and the math usually doesn't help matters either.

    I don't just know relativity. I learned it almost before I learned to walk. I live, eat, breath its equations and its most important conclusions. Only recently have I come to the realization, everything is not the way it was taught to me. It is principally the math that is flawed. It does not correspond to what is observed. It does not provide a basis for understanding either linear or rotational inertia or entanglement.
     
    Last edited: May 13, 2016
  9. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    27,543
    As does chinglu, rajesh, the god, Farsight, and others....

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    And yet all those interpretations differ from each other, and of course all differ from that as interpreted by the vast mainstream authority.
    Yet all the mainstream SR/GR dissenters continue with there many rants against GR and even in some cases SR, from the realms of a remote science forum, on a sliver of cyber space.
    Other than expressing delusions of grandeur, and in some cases gross misunderstandings, what they achieve is zilch, zero nada, other than to confer a warm inner glow within themselves and some illusion of credibility.
     
    Last edited: May 13, 2016
  10. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

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    2,422
    This sounds like a psychotic break. Its very sad.
     
  11. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    3,951
    Check my profile. I have posted proof of my credentials (a bachelor's degree in physics, University of Maryland, 1974) on this forum.

    I don't care if there are folks here working at the LHC and other places with more advanced physics and math degrees than mine, because the Minkowski parts of relativity I am complaining about have not really changed very much since 1974. Boost matrices were added to make it much easier to abuse them. Heck, they haven't changed at all since his death in 1908. Parts of Minkowski's flawed theory still appear in General Relativity, and that is in part because of the pressure on Einstein to publish the final version before Minkowski's star student Hilbert beat him to it. After publishing the version with Mink spacetime, Einstein did investigate the possibility of replacing it using de Sitter space-time. But for whatever reason, ultimately he decided it was not worth the effort to change it. It is possible, it would have had little impact on his result. But it is having an impact NOW.

    I have spent much more than Gladwell's requisite 10,000+ hours checking and rechecking the derivations of the Lorentz transformations. That is the reason I am so certain that those results are solid and justified. They use INSTANTS of time, not intervals, and there is no attempt to quantify covariance. Lorentz contraction and time dilation remain independent phenomena. It is only when Minkowski gets his digs into spacetime geometry and posits an invariant 4D interval that things start getting strange, and time and space get muddled into an unrecognizable and unjustifiable geometric morass.

    That qualifies me as an expert on the subject. I have studied this particular subject matter on my own for much longer than Minkowski's entire short life, in actual fact. It took a very long time for me to slowly arrive at the conclusion -- hey, what inertialess spacetime are you nailing these coordinate systems to, and who made you the G-d of ancient Greek geometry? Teaching relativity like this should have ended a very long time ago. The ancient Greeks knew nothing about relativity, and damn little geometry that wasn't static and intended for analyzing solids like a piece of granite.

    The part of Minkowski's math I am complaining about should have been fixed long before throwing in the towel on relativity and caving to influences to follow Hilbert's lead in theoretical physics on a wide range of physics problems in many key areas of the Standard Model.

    It all makes a lot more physical sense to me now than before I started this thread. I can see why no particle physicist has an understanding of what inertia is, because they never really figured out what time was.
     
    Last edited: May 14, 2016
  12. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    9,232
    I've spent more than the requisite 10,000 hours identifying and dealing with con men, over inflated egos and the self deluded. I guess that makes me an expert on them.

    I didn't think the the coordinate systems were nailed to anything. I thought that was somewhat part of the point. Could someone who actually knows something explain to me, in suitable terms for a geologist, where I am wrong.
     
  13. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    3,951
    I get that. Something else to like.

    The derivation of the Lorentz transformations is done in a pair of coordinate systems. One system has its origin in the rest frame affixed to an infinitely long straight road with no mass. The points in the rest frame are designated unprimed x0, t0 at the origin and unprimed x and t when things start moving. The other coordinates in the moving frame are designated origin x0' and t0' and when things start moving along this massless one dimensional road, the primed coordinates of the moving frame are designated x' and t', moving with constant velocity v'.

    Keeping all of this one dimensional dynamic geometry straight when things start moving relativistically is one of the greatest mathematical challenges you are ever likely to attempt, but if you are persistent and apply the rules of relativity consistently, the results will be a difference in measurements of length and measurement of time in a single dimension that contract and dilate respectively depending on how closely the relative velocity approaches (but never exceeds) the speed of light in a vacuum.

    Applying the results of this thought experiment to Newton's laws of motion yield further surprises of relativistic increases in mass. And none of the math mentioned thus far requires more than a single linear dimension combined with a dynamic variable t or t' that derive of comparing all velocities to that of the speed of light.

    The derivation is not even possible without the single assumption that the speed of light measures the same to all observers independent of reference frame. Lengths contract and time dilates, but always in a manner that keeps this particular measurement constant. No experiment you can perform in a moving reference frame will reveal relative speed with respect to a presumed aether in which light propagates.

    A beam of photons carries both energy and inertia, but in a single direction. For matter to have inertia in other directions, its internal energy must rotate. And because it takes a minimum of two such photons in order to create matter, that energy rotates faster than light propagates in a straight line in free space, relatively speaking. This last paragraph is what is new. Combined with the realization that any time INTERVAL measurement (not just c) is really a proportional velocity compared to c, it really made little sense for someone like Minkowski to equivocate the INSTANTS of time in the Lorentz transformations with INTERVALS of time which already map directly to time dilations, and to compound the error by the creation of the invariant interval crafted to work best with simultaneity. This robbed everything moving of its inertia, and rendered the entire relativistic universe into a study in solid static geometry.
     
    Last edited: May 14, 2016
  14. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    11,888
    I agree it is very sad.
     
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  15. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    3,951
    High marks for consistency, Origin. I will stop making you sad.
     
  16. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

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    2,422
    Coordinate systems are fixed, in the sense that to be useful we have to pick some kind of identifiable reference point from which we are measuring. They are also fixed in that there are certain rules (thanks to the laws of physics) that we have to incorporate into crafting (or using) a system of coordinates and in translating from one to another. They are not fixed in the sense that we are free to use whatever system of coordinates we wish, fixed to whatever point of reference we wish.
     
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  17. The God Valued Senior Member

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    3,546
    Danshaven,

    Years of work, should have been expressed properly, you know that none here would speak an iota against SR/GR or related mainstream terminology.

    I fully agree that time is not understood properly, neither by philosophers nor by scientists, and most of the stuff around SR/GR is non intuitive. Higgs got the Nobel, how ? I do not know, so your push that inertia is not yet resolved by mainstream is not far from the truth. But in real life, in all fields, in all pursuits, the human greed and desire for various materialistic and non materialistic aspects, end up in compromising the truth. Unfortunately scientific pursuits, mostly for unverifiable theories, have fallen into this trap.

    Now coming to your theory, a related aspect :

    1. The SR maths, forbids rest frame for photon, why ? because maths create divsion by zero (1/0)...a la singularity.
    2. The very same set of guys, allow division by zero in GR...why ? It gives them an unverifiable goldmine, The Black Hole Singularity?

    If there are any glitches in GR, change the coordinate to eliminate certain division by zeros, but have you seen any such efforts in SR ? No why ?
    Simply because admitting a frame moving at 'c' will screw up the entire relativity ? Goldmine gets busted...
    But the very same set of guy do not blink an eye, in telling, that our entire MW is moving towards some unknown destination with respect to CMBR at some speed.....are they not making the CMBR as reference here ? they are, because it suits them.

    since you have written so much, I give you an idea to work on, Just ignore the SR on this, and make light moving at c, as your reference frame.........start with c...
     
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  18. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    4,833
    Exactly. Look at the Euclidean plane. A whole lot of points. We are free to label those points any way we wish. The first thing we want is completeness. We want every point to have a label. But there are more points than there are names of finite length like "Spot", "Jeremy" and "Tichibowenwicz". The second thing we want is a systematic rule, not just a list of names. So we label them with a scheme -- a scheme where all the points have numbers in some systematic way. The third thing we want is uniqueness. We want every label that represents a point to represent only one point. We can do that with a singe number per point with a complex assignment of a space-filling curve. But now every point has a numeric label, but you need to know infinite detail about that label to find the point (in most cases) and infinite detail about the point to know the number (in most cases) so our scheme is not suitable for real-world use. The fourth thing we want is smoothness. We want nearby points to have nearby numbers. And this is what requires us to have two coordinates for a Euclidean plane.

    The fifth thing is one-to-one-ness. (example with polar coordinates, example with three coordinates) The sixth thing is usefulness. (introduce metric) The seventh thing is simpleness. (orthogonal basis, Cartesian verses polar, equation of a straight line) [Breakfast!]
     
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  19. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    9,232
    Thank you PhysBang. You've confirmed what I felt should be the case. Perhaps I was overly fixating on the phrase "nailed down". That seems to imply something close to an absolute reference frame and therefore excluded the second sense, which is how I have understood the concept.
     
  20. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    3,951
    "Nailed down" can also be interpreted as "giving inertia", if you prefer.

    A beam of photons has inertia, but you can hardly nail that to anything. If the photons strike something stationary with respect to it, say a mutually orthogonal rectilinear plane somewhere along its path of propagation, you could "nail" that point for an instant, but how would photons be able to tell in what inertial reference frame the thing it struck was actually in? It couldn't. So not actually "nailed" in any real sense.

    If you followed the conventions used in the derivation of the Lorentz transformations, the road would be massless but behave as though it were the rest frame, whether or not the whole road was moving. So, once again, actually not "nailed", which is to say, "not eligible to be considered either a preferred reference frame for a set of coordinates, nor an origin. If you think you can "nail" the value of time dilation or Lorentz contraction anywhere along that very long massless road, think again. Time dilation and Lorentz contraction of lengths can be any value relative to anything else in relative motion. Only in Galilean relativity are coordinates, relative lengths or time intervals fixed with respect to any other, and that brings back the long dead spectre of Newton's absolute space and absolute time.

    rpenner, like Minkowski, would like you to believe that absolute space and time still exists. If the geometry to support that can't be done in static 3D Euclidean (Pythagorean) space, then his mathematical solution is to simply posit an extra fourth dimension of time mutually orthogonal to the other three, set time proportional to jct, and triangulate away with the usual simple right triangle geometric relationships. Who could possibly refute the validity of such a mathematical hodgepodge as that? And the justification for inertialess light travel time (space) in every direction being equivalent to a Euclidean geometric solid is….? Don't tell me it's because it still a Euclidean vector space, because we already understand, it isn't. Velocities don't add the way you think they do mainly because they are really the same thing as your math refers to as "time". This is a reality, not an equivocation. You compare the proportional velocity of the moving hand of a stopwatch to the velocity of a runner. Time is nothing more or less than that.

    I could. Any time interval measured in any inertial reference frame is a measurement of a proportional relative velocity. This proportional relative velocity is one that RUNS AT DIFFERENT RATES at each and every one of those points in Minkowski spacetime rpenner has labeled names like: "Spot", "Jeremy" and "Tichibowenwicz". Time proceeds at different rates at "Spot", "Spot1", "Spot2" etc. The speed of light will measure exactly the same at all of those points, but none of them will be able to agree on how fast or slow anyone is aging unless they are in the same inertial reference frame. None of them will be able to report where they are or how fast they are going with respect to anything other than ONE of the other spots in relative motion. There is no absolute motion. There is no absolute time. You cannot make it conform to your ideas of absolute time by selectively dealing only with events that you consider to be simultaneous, which amounts to the exactly the same idea as freezing time so that you can do your fancy geometry in a non-existent static universe.

    In the universe of energy transfer events, EVERY QUANTUM OF ENERGY is in motion, and time as we measure it is simply a relative velocity.
     
  21. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

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    Not really.

    Inertia is, and always has been, something defined by the dynamical laws assigned to objects then described in a given system of coordinates. It is part of the definition of force; i.e., it is part of what it means for something to not be under the influence of a force.

    It is because of this that in many choices of systems of coordinates we have to introduce a pseudo-force on everything in order to preserve their motions when translating to other systems. E.g., centrifugal force.

    It is trivially easy to say what inertial reference frame the event occurred: it happened in all of them. This is part of the beauty of relativity theory: it gives us the means to assign an event to any well-formed system of coordinates and translate to any other well-formed system of coordinates in an objective manner. The photons do not need to know anything about reference frames, they do what they do without knowledge or any other sort of cognition.

    I'm going to assume that this is some weird analogy. Even then it does not make sense. Danshawen is merely demonstrating, yet again, that he really does not understand the mathematics of Special Relativity and he is acting out in his anger at his past instructors.



    I'm not sure what dnashamwen means by "inertialess light travel time" but the justification for relativity theory is that it works amazingly well and much better than any alternatives.
    This all amounts to a horrible misunderstanding of what relativity theory is and how it is ever possible to do any application in physics. Without some system of coordinates, there is no application. And we know that we can use a system of coordinates, a supposed "freezing time so that you can do your fancy geometry" and get results that accord with observations and that accord with the results of the same work done in other systems of coordinates.
     
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  22. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    3,951
    All events (simultaneous or otherwise) are "time-like" ("proportional relative velocity-like"). None are "space-like".
     
  23. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    All assertions (absolute or qualified) are "epistemological" ("declarative inferential tautology-like"). None are "teleological-like".
     

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