The Speed of Light is Not Constant

Discussion in 'Alternative Theories' started by Farsight, Feb 23, 2014.

  1. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, but when I've asked you to show us what it is that you are interpreting, you either admit that there isn't anything in the physics that you are interpreting or you dodge the question.

    You have talked a lot about how all contemporary astronomers and physicists are wrong when they calculate galaxy rotation curves and you know that they are wrong because you interpret and understand better.

    So show us, step by step, what they are doing wrong in their calculations and show us, step by step, how your interpretation leads us directly to a different prediction.
     
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  3. Dr_Toad It's green! Valued Senior Member

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    Aw, give up.

    How about we ask Farsight to post a video of him shaving? More relevant to his ego, and we could all get a laugh!
     
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  5. lpetrich Registered Senior Member

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    Topological charge != electric charge. Topological charge is the value of a topological invariant, even if calling it a "charge" risks confusion with electric charge.

    Topological invariant = winding number, genus of a surface, etc. A value associated with some property that is unchanged by distortion.

    Farsight also makes that confusion, jumping from the term "topological charge" to his belief that electric charge is proportional to some topological invariant's value. His main "evidence" for that notion is some articles on topological charge, articles which claim no such thing.
     
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  7. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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  8. Farsight

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    Hasn't the penny dropped yet rpenner? When it comes to relativity and gravity and the speed of light and this forum, I'm the expert. And I'm afraid you're the troll.

    lpetrich: the confusion is yours. Charge is "topological" in that it's the result of an all-round curvature. There are some electron models which feature a "point charge" circulating at the speed of light. Such models are flawed, but have arguably pointed the way to better models.

    Manifold1: Carl Brannen talks about Hestenes here: http://carlbrannen.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/david-hestenes-electron-model/
     
  9. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    That opinion is far more honestly answered by your peers on this forum, and I'm pretty sure I know which way they would go.
    In summation Farsight, you are a fraud.
     
  10. lpetrich Registered Senior Member

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    Martin Gardner #1: "He considers himself a genius."

    Pure hooey. Electric charge is a simple interaction strength, not a topological invariant like a winding number. That's what it is in the Standard Model, and it's also what it is in most GUT's.
     
  11. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

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    And yet, despite these supposed roles, you have yet to show us a single equation in context that can be used to address a defined problem while rpenner has been very helpful and accurate in his mathematical physics. You always dodge the question when asked directly to defend your claims about equations.

    You have talked a lot about how all contemporary astronomers and physicists are wrong when they calculate galaxy rotation curves and you know that they are wrong because you interpret and understand better.

    So show us, step by step, what they are doing wrong in their calculations and show us, step by step, how your interpretation leads us directly to a different prediction.
     
  12. Farsight

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    3,492
    No, rpenner made a stupid mistake saying "local" is infinitesimal, which means you can't measure the local speed of light because light can't move any distance. And he's been sniping ever since. I guess compared to rpenner I am a genius, but really that ain't saying much. The guy pumps out impressive-looking maths dumps, but it's all smoke and mirrors, and his physics knowledge is actually rather poor. And his deductive/inductive logic is excrutiatingly weak. It's like he just doesn't think things through.

    Hooey yourself. Electrons have the same charge as antiprotons, which when you flip the sign is the same as that of the positron and proton. They have unit charge. It's not just a simple interaction strength. The standard model is incomplete, remember? It doesn't model the electron, or explain what charge actually is.
     
  13. lpetrich Registered Senior Member

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    Back to the original subject of this thread, Farsight has yet to show how to calculate how the speed of light varies in general relativity, to find how to calculate c as a function of space-time position from the equations of GR. I'd like to see him deliver, as opposed to arguing by quotes and arguing that it is unnecessary for him to do so.

    The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment discusses some tests of what Farsight has claimed. These tests are in Section 2: Tests of the Foundations of Gravitation Theory.

    The simplest form of the GR Equivalence principle is the Weak Equivalence Principle (WEP): the gravitational force on an object is proportional to is mass, ignoring its self-gravity. The Einstein Equivalence Principle (EEP) states
    1. WEP
    2. LLI: Local Lorentz Invariance
    3. LPI: Local Position Invariance
    Here, "local" means too small for gravity to have significant effects.

    WEP was noted about gravity by Galileo and Newton, and it has been tested to 10[sup]-13[/sup]. It may be interpreted as the absence of long-range, composition-dependent forces other than electromagnetism.

    LLI was first tested by Michelson and Morley, and since then, it's been tested down to 10[sup]-21[/sup] with a presumed cosmic speed of 370 km/s, the speed of the Solar System relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background. Experimental tests of it search for variations by direction of the speed of light in a vacuum. Also Modern searches for Lorentz violation.

    LPI has been tested to 10[sup]-6[/sup] (terrestrial) and 10[sup]-2[/sup] (Solar-System). It's usually tested with (gravitational redshift) / ((gravitational potential) / c[sup]2[/sup]) to see if it departs from 1.

    Also tested by looking for variations of various fundamental constants with time. For the Fine Structure Constant, the amount of variation is less than 10[sup]-4/[sup]/(age of the Universe), for the electron-proton mass ratio, about 3*10[sup]-3[/sup]/(AoU), and for the weak-interaction strength, about 10[sup]-1[/sup]/(AoU).

    The Strong Equivalence Principle (SEP) states
    1. WEP extended to include self-gravity
    2. Independence of velocity
    3. Independence of position
    Tested by looking for the "Nordtvedt effect", where the Sun pulls on the Earth and the Moon differently as a result of their different self-gravities. GR predicts zero effect, but most alternatives predict some nonzero value. Observed: less than about 4*10[sup]-4[/sup].


    So outside of curvature effects, the speed of light in a vacuum is constant. With such effects, it becomes poorly defined, because different selections of reference positions give different results, as I showed earlier here. Farsight could prove everybody wrong and demonstrate that it is well-defined, but he has failed to do so.
     
  14. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

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    Farsight keeps dodging the question.
     
  15. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    While we're enumerating Farsight's errors, I would like to add that he insists on creating a conundrum by referencing c to relativity and vice versa. The question of the constancy of c was established as early as Fitzeau (ca 1850). It was specifically because of this, and the nearly immediate understanding that time and space must therefore be relative, that Einstein took up the question of reconciling Maxwell's equations with the form of relativity Lorentz & Poincare had explained by then, in reference to experiments like Fitzeau's and Michelson & Morley's.

    My point is that Farsight is off the mark leaving this exclusively to Einstein. He needs to go back and undo all of the light speed experiments conducted between the first of Fitzeau's and the last paper by Poincare or Lorentz just prior to Einstein's seminal 1905 treatment of the electrodynamics of moving bodies.

    And that just reinforces that the hallmark of pseudoscience is its abandonment of all of the experiments leading to a particular postulate or theory.

    Farsight is always wrong mainly because he is always ignoring the evidence, leaving him unable to comprehend and articulate basic science. His second most fatal flaw is that he doesn't comprehend basic math. This is a recipe for certain disaster in a thread centered around questions of basic math and science.
     
  16. river

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    So though the medium that light traverses is always the same ?
     
  17. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Light doesn't need a medium to travel in.
    It simply follows the geodesics of the topological structure of spacetime.
     
  18. river

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    True

    But the medium can change the speed at which light propagates through space
     
  19. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    The speed of light in a vacuum is constant at "c "
    The topological structure of spacetime, and the amount of curvature or warping associated with spacetime within that FoR, means that light has further to travel, and from the PoV of someone in an outside FoR, may appear to be going slower.
     
  20. Manifold1 Banned Banned

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    181

    And what's the problem? A circulating massless particle will provide a topological charge, similar to how black holes have charges.

    Topological charges have been known for a while in physics now, to get a general idea of what they are like, you must understand that charge and mass are intimately related

    A. Einstein & N. Rosen, " the particle problem in the general theory of relativity " Physical Review

    In this work, they show that massless charges can exist in nature, but they have to be bound in some way, it can be akin to thinking of particles as little wormhole loops. A circulating massless charge is however a contradiction if wherever there is a presence of charge there must be a presence of mass (all but the Higgs apparently). It's more like nature is telling us that mass emerges from bound photon topological knots and the presence of the charge will be seen by an outside observer, as they will also measure it to be pointlike, always.
     
  21. lpetrich Registered Senior Member

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    It's a limiting case, like various other limiting cases.

    Farsight, that's a big problem with your qualitative approach to physics. It does not capture the sizes of effects very well, if at all.

    Interaction strengths can have their signs reversed.

    The Standard Model *does* have a model of the electron, but it's a model that you refuse to accept.

    In the Standard Model with unbroken electroweak symmetry, there are two lepton fields:

    Left-handed lepton:
    Generations: 3
    Weak isospin: 2
    Space-time: 2 (Majorana spinor)

    Right-handed charged lepton:
    Generations: 3
    Weak isospin: 1
    Space-time: 2 (Majorana spinor)

    They interact with the Higgs particle in fashion (coupling constants).(LHL).(RHCL).(Higgs) where the coupling constants are a 3*3 matrix with both indexes for generations. Putting in the indexes gets roughly
    (CC's)[sub]gen 1, gen 2[/sub] * (LHL)[sub]gen 1, WIS, ST[/sub] * (RHCL)[sub]gen 2, ST[/sub] * (Higgs)[sub]WIS[/sub]

    With electroweak symmetry breaking, the left-handed lepton breaks in two, and we get:

    Left-handed neutrino
    Left-handed charged lepton
    Right-handed charged lepton

    All:
    Generations: 3
    Space-time: 2 (Majorana spinor)

    The Higgs particle gets a nonzero Vacuum Expectation Value, and it multiplies the interaction between the LHCL and the RHCL. This gives us
    (Higgs VEV) * (CC"s)[sub]gen 1, gen 2[/sub] * (LHCL)[sub]gen 1, ST[/sub] * (RHCL)[sub]gen 2, ST[/sub]

    The LHCL and the RHCL act as one charged-lepton Dirac spinor:
    Generations: 3
    Space-time: 4 (Dirac spinor)

    and the Higgs VEV times the Higgs CC's make a "mass matrix":
    (Mass matrix)[sub]gen 1, gen 2[/sub] * (CL)[sub]gen 1, ST[/sub] * (CL conjugate)[sub]gen 2, ST[/sub]

    One can diagonalize the mass matrix, as its called, and when one does that, one has decomposed the charged-lepton fields into an electron field, a muon field, and a tau-lepton field. Each one is a Dirac spinor, a field with 4 space-time components that transforms as a spinor under rotations and boosts.


    It does: strength of gauge interaction. Do you want for me to explain gauge theories?
     
  22. brucep Valued Senior Member

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  23. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

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    Just like Einstein did. Stupid move, Einstein.
     

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