md65536

I'm curious about how you feel it affects your mental state, esteem, behavior etc. Possibly relevant recent work: "Data Mining Reveals How The “Down-Vote” Leads To A Vicious Circle Of Negative Feedback" https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/aad9d49da238

Were you in grad school at the time or had a degree that was used as credentials? It seems what is important includes: - You must write clearly with correct scientific language (which includes math). - You must have a professional attitude (stuff like, as you wrote, "emails from researchers ask questions, while emails from crackpots insist they have the answer"). - You need credentials (a grad degree, or someone who can vouch for you, or build up a body of work that shows that you understand the field). Is that last point important? Vixra now allows using a pseudonym, just like these forums do, so it's probably safe to do that without ruining your career. Vixra used to not allow that. I guess they recognize the reality of the stigma. It seems like shaming open submission and making it difficult to post to arxiv is a lot to do with keeping amateurs out. I don't think that amateurs should be discouraged from trying to do science (I think the real problem is people thinking that their quack science should have an equal voice as real science, whether it's their "Einstein was wrong!" paper, or creationism in the classroom). In fact, I'd say that vixra is exactly the appropriate place for amateur science. So I think to combine advice from this thread, OP and the many of us in a similar place should do the following: 1. If you're serious about this, consider a proper education. 2. Write up your ideas as best as you can for now. Don't spend ages trying to perfect it before seeking advice on it. Post it to a blog or any document repository if you want a record of your work. 3. Seek advice on the work. Ask people to read it, post to forums, whatever. Don't pester or be arrogant or forceful. The less easy it is for others to get what you're saying, the less success you'll have. 4. Learn from what people say. Learn where the exposition of your ideas needs improvement, where there are problems with the ideas themselves, and also learn the relevant existing science that will affect the ideas. Also learn to recognize bad advice... No matter who you are or what you do you'll get plenty of discouragement. "To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing." -- Elbert Hubbard 5. If the idea is still good, go back to step 1 and repeat as many times as necessary (until you give up, or get published, or end up working on a degree).

Do you know of any case where someone's credibility was harmed by a past posting to vixra, even though the posted paper was of good enough quality to be otherwise worthy of credibility? How does one find someone to endorse on arXiv? Assuming the work actually *is* credible, which I'm guessing is the first and the biggest hurdle. I imagine one route is: post in forums; someone recognizes it as potentially useful; endorses or puts the writer in touch with someone qualified to review the paper and who can endorse. Do you have a guess what the chances of success are? Another route is write the paper and directly ask an endorser to read it. I assume this won't work unless you are in a situation where you have an opportunity to talk to someone. (I once chatted with Leonard Susskind for a minute at a conference, and he said something along the lines of "Maybe one day I'll read a paper you wrote," well I didn't take that as a promise and I didn't mention that I'm a crackpot, but I'm sure it was a better opportunity to get someone interested, than say emailing everyone in the physics department with "I have a new theory of the universe! You might become famous if read it.") Because there are so many bad crackpots pushing their theories, real physicists tend not to have the time to be cold-called by amateurs with pet theories, so I think this route is out. Another way is to go the academic route and find an advisor who can increase your exposure as you increase your writing quality while you learn.

guess:

Vixra's just like arxiv but without the reputability requirements. It's closer to the opposite... you want people to be able to use your work (otherwise the paper's useless). But it does serve as a timestamped record of the work if you ever had to try to prove that someone copied it without credit. It also makes it easier to cite the work, compared to forum postings.

If you want to discuss the ideas, you can always post them in the Speculations forum on this site. If the idea is complete and you want to write a paper and make it available, there is an alternative repository called "vixra.org". It is modelled after arXiv but is open to anyone. Because of that, there are some terrible papers (and cargo cult facsimiles) there and submitting there won't gain you any credibility. Likely no one will read your submission, but you could then try to discuss it on forums etc while having the complete idea written up in one spot in a paper. If you know how to express your ideas clearly using correct scientific language, you *might* find some success in either of the two above ways, but that's unlikely because typically those who can get their point across have studied science and had access to advisors who would steer them into the mainstream channels with peer review and away from options like the above. Which way you should go depends on how serious you are and how much work you're willing to put in. But you can always start small, and improve as you learn. Just don't get stuck for years trying to convince people of your ideas without ever learning to express them properly, as a lot of us tend to do with Speculations or vixra.

It's been over a decade but way back when, there was a specially crafted double major in mathematics and computing science where I went. It attracted some of the smartest people I knew. While looking for jobs, some of the most interesting options, including an aerospace company and a movie special effects software company, were specifically looking for only the few who had top grades in math. I would suggest that if you want to do something like that, and can handle the math and be among the top, then combining math and comp sci would be good. I suspect that the comp sci side would be the easier part. From there you can head in any direction that you want, write your own future etc. It's fairly easy/common I think to put off choosing the practical training and just add it on to a solid foundation, sometimes even learning that part on the job. If you're an average achiever or just want a normal job, and the interest in math is only an interest but not an obsession you're dedicated to greatness in, then comp engineering is probably the best for low-level stuff.

Seems to be Rene Auberjonois. "He even had a motivational poster of Albert Einstein (which actually "came to life" and "talked" to him in one episode!)." http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/DoogieHowserMD?from=Main.DoogieHowserMD "Rene Auberjonois ... Einstein" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0564400/

It's still curved pieces projected onto a flat image. It is a projection. You can see distortion closer to the edges of the pieces. There is less distortion of size compared to the usual Mercator maps. It can be improved. If you look at the Dymaxion map that Acme posted, you'll see that the surface gets "split" along water. Yours handles Australia really well but cuts up many land masses, making it a poor map along those cuts. You could move where the cuts are, and you can also join the cut pieces differently. For example, instead of joining the main South America piece on a corner over water, if you join it to the rest of the continent then it reduces the extreme distortion of distances between the two pieces. That's an easy fix. Perhaps harder is something that Fuller solved, is getting optimal cuts or whatever. A lot of your pieces are part land, part water. Is it possible to get more pieces that are all water, and others that more closely fit the land, as Fuller's does? This might require more effort than you're willing to spend though. Also it assumes that a land map is what's important, and that distortion and breaks over the ocean are acceptable. A tool would make this easier. Perhaps a wire polyhedron that could be rotated over a physical globe. There are also downloadable polyhedrons that can be added to Google Earth. I'm sure it would be possible to create one for a rhombic dodecahedron, and to have it fixed in space so that you could rotate the globe underneath and try out different mappings. While trying to find something like that, I came across this related info: http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/ProjPoly/projPoly.html

If you're counting negative parts of a wave, you might count temporary effects of particles increasing their separation due to gravitational waves (not "gravity waves", which means something else) as "anti-gravity". I wouldn't do that, unless you expressed the effect mathematically and if the maths still fit the intended meaning of "anti-gravity". See the first few animations at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave Particles oscillate as gravitational waves pass, alternatively brought closer together and farther apart. The particles follow the distortion of spacetime, so there should be no force or pseudo-force pushing them apart at any moment, so that probably shouldn't be counted as anti-gravity.

Do you know what calculations you might use? Such a black hole is about 11.5 times the mass of the Earth. The rod wouldn't fall to Earth. I'm not sure how you'd keep those separated. There isn't sharp separation between an area where time is measured as "normal" and one where time is very dilated. If you dangled a very long rod into a black hole, preventing your end from falling in, the rod would necessarily break. Along the length of the rod the farther parts would look increasingly dimmer, redder, and slowed. I guess that if the break happened when you could see it, you'd see the broken part fall in and seem to shrink or "pile up" near the event horizon without ever crossing it from your distant viewpoint.

Alright I see what you're saying now, but I don't agree with how you're saying it. With that type of explanation, if someone asks "Can an observer change reference frames by accelerating?" you could explain that if an observer accelerates, an object still remains in its own frame, so no the object's frame doesn't change. That too is true (you don't change an object's reference frame by accelerating another observer) but like length and time and density, it depends on whose frame of reference you're speaking of, and this explanation puts too much emphasis on one frame (the object's) without capturing the essence of relativity, which is that any other frame is equally valid. The solution to the main problem here isn't that density is invariant (which it isn't), nor that "the object's own frame is the one that's important", but that the relation between density and black hole formation also isn't invariant, so you can't use calculations that apply to one frame (like the object's rest frame) to calculate if an object will collapse using measurements from another frame. I think this is the main point that SamBridge is missing.

What relativistic effects are you excluding? Does it depend only on density, independent of relativistic effects? If it were independent of relativistic effects why do you need to exclude them? Or is it possible that density alone doesn't tell you whether gravitational collapse will occur, allowing density to be different in different frames of reference without implying a collapse in one frame but not another? Edit: Also, is it the Schwarzschild metric that lets you calculate if a mass will collapse based on its density? And it's the same regardless of charge? Regardless of rotation? Density is really all that matters?

Close enough I guess. Yes, I'm adding nothing new to the resolution of the train tunnel paradox. The resolution is straightforward special relativity. It's just that the description of it can be reasonable and straightforward in relativistic terms, or weird and confusing with classical ideas treated as what should be expected.

Why? Does density alone determine whether something becomes a black hole or not? Are you basing this on the Schwarzschild solution, and does that solution work for moving bodies? DaleSpam and snoopies622 explain this better than I can, here: http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=247484

From a thread in the astronomy forum: I just want to disagree with the statement that "the reason why they agree that the train doesn't get smashed is different," which I've seen stated before in these forums. The reason the train doesn't get smashed is the same in all frames: The front guillotine comes down before the front of the train reaches it, and the the back guillotine comes down after the back of the train passes by. Each of these two things describes an event that happens at a single respective location (the location of the respective guillotine), and all observers agree on those statements. The fact that the two events are simultaneous in the tunnel observer's frame is beside the point, and is NOT a necessary part of the reason that the train isn't smashed. It is merely circumstantial. The only way that observers would disagree on what is happening, is if they describe it in a frame-dependent way (such as relying on the two causally unconnected events occurring "at the same time"). But describing the reason something happens is describing causality, which isn't frame-dependent. The cause of the train's survival is not frame-dependent. That type of statement, that the reason is different depending on frame, fits with the interviewer's incredulity, and with other statements like "If you get a stupid answer you've probably done it right because the results of special relativity are so bizarre." It's only bizarre if you're holding on to the concepts of absolute time and length, and thinking along the lines of "measuring things differently means the reasons that things happen are different". I feel that such statements are detrimental to understanding relativity because they suggest that it is incomprehensible, and that incorrect outdated notions still "make sense" even if they're wrong, and so there is less incentive to let go of those wrong notions while learning. The description of what happens is different, but the reason why it happens is the same. Just 2 cents.

I don't think this is stated correctly (though I agree SamBridge is mistaken, but not Delta1212. I also agree that different frames "agree" only as in "are mutually consistent" but not as in "have the same measurements"). If an object's density is relative, then its measured density depends on the frame of reference in which it is measured. An object's density can be different in different frames, and that doesn't require that it changes in its own frame. Of course the object's density (or length etc) doesn't change due to relativistic effects in its rest frame. So for example this statement is perfectly sensible: 'Heavy ions that are spherical when at rest should assume the form of "pancakes" or flat disks when traveling nearly at the speed of light. And in fact, the results obtained from particle collisions can only be explained, when the increased nucleon density due to length contraction is considered.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_contraction Doesn't that mean that density is frame DEPENDENT? Its "rest density" would be frame independent (vacuously I guess, because it specifies the frame in which to measure).

There's always the Speculations forum, which would be more appropriate. http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/29-speculations/ I think your ideas and questions would fit in well there. If you're going to reject relativity theory, you'll probably never get satisfactory answers in the Relativity forum.

I agree with the idea. My own ideas and science news blurbs I've read seem to fit well, though not all of my own ideas make sense. Yes, black holes were once called "frozen stars" because time at the Schwarzschild radius is infinitely dilated, and light that is directed outward doesn't move in our coordinates. However, locally, to an inertial observer that light is traveling outward at the usual speed of light. If I understand that correctly it means that a black hole that is roughly fixed-size in our coordinates, can be expanding at the speed of light to an observer who enters, and maybe even faster to observers closer to the center. This is similar to how we measure the size of our universe. That alone suggests that from the inside, the observable size of the black hole is the same as that of their observable universe.

'No' was to your first question. 'Yes' was to your other question. To repeat, the twins do NOT agree on how long half of the experiment is. You can't describe "half the experiment" as a universal duration and make sense of that from everyone's perspective. To repeat, yes THAT situation is symmetric. I don't know of any way to understand relativity without learning about relativity. If you want shortcuts, to somehow get understandable answers to situations you can't make sense of, then ignore my posts. I don't think they're helping. I think it would be more productive to research the basics of special relativity first.

No. Put it in numbers. Write down the times of these events in your example, so that calculations can actually be done to determine the answers. Is there any example with actual numbers where what you wrote makes sense? A caveat, everyone will agree on how much time has passed for B at the time of B's turnaround. Different observers will not agree on the time at A that is simultaneous with B's turnaround. Yes, with no turnaround the situation is symmetric. They'll both observe the other symmetrically. The relativistic effects will be symmetrical. Careful with the word "yet" because it is different for different observers. If you add an event at B's location, it has a definite time on B's clock, but does not have a definite time on A's clock.

Well, no, I think what SamBridge said is consistent with what I said. Say twin A ages 4 years over the experiment and B ages 2, with the usual setup. Twin A's clock measures a proper time of 4 years between separation and reuniting, and B's clock a proper time of 2 years. The situation is symmetrical up to 1 year by either clock. But the turnaround doesn't happen until year 2 on A's clock, as observed by A. So it is not fully symmetrical right up until the turnaround. Another way to put it is that each twin observes the turnaround happening halfway through the experiment, but the duration of half the experiment isn't symmetrical.

No. Try again using some actual maths that correspond with SR. If you get stuck, post what you've got so far. Otherwise I'll just be repeating.

Essentially yes, you can set it up that way. In your set up it is that way. On the other hand, if for example you had specified a long period of acceleration for one of the twins, then that involves a different velocity profile for the twins. That will make the situation more complicated but it won't change who ages more in the end. Here's how to prove that the one who accelerates away doesn't matter: First, take Earth out of the picture, and call the twins A and B. Suppose one will turn around half-way through the experiment, and the other will remain inertial (other than any initial separation acceleration). Calculate the results you get if A accelerates away but B turns around, or if B accelerates away and B turns around, or if they both accelerate away symmetrically and B turns around. Once they have that initial departing velocity, twin A now remains inertial for the rest of the experiment and will age more over that time, regardless of who accelerates in the beginning. If you assume a negligible acceleration time, then "who accelerates away" makes a negligible difference, and you can see that in the Lorentz transformation. You can ignore this part or really any answer until you understand the basics, but if the twins start symmetrically with a relative velocity, and one turns around after a proper time of tau, then the situation is symmetrical up to a proper time of tau for either of the twins. For example with gamma=2, and twin B turning around at tau=1 unit of time, up till then B calculates A aging 0.5. Symmetrically, up till A ages a proper time of 1, it has that B ages 0.5. But for A the situation isn't symmetrical "up until the time of the turn around", because for A that happens at local time 2, when B has aged 1. Twin A experiences aging from 1 to 2 without a turnaround, and B never experiences that in this setup, so it is not symmetrical beyond local time of 1. As an example, if the setup is "the twins depart symmetrically with relative velocity v=0.866c. At local time of 1, exactly one of the twins will receive a signal to turn around. Who will turn around is unknown at the start." Up until time 1, there is no distinguishing features between the twins; the situation must be symmetrical. However if a twin passes a time of 1 and hasn't got the signal, it knows that it isn't the twin that turns around, EVEN THOUGH the other twin has only aged 0.5 units of time and it is only halfway to the time that it will receive the turn-around signal. There is nothing odd about any of this unless you reject relativity of simultaneity. Also this is not "flip-flopping", it is "relativity". The various different points of view are mutually consistent.

No. For one thing, they calculate the timing differently regardless of the travel time of light (due to relativity of simultaneity). For another thing, (only) the twin who turns around sees the change in relative velocity immediately. The situation is asymmetric, as explained in many ways. It is measured differently, seen differently, felt differently, timed differently. The symmetrical slowing of clocks and the resulting "paradox" is only a partial application of SR. You know the situation is asymmetrical, but you think that applying a part of SR keeps it symmetrical. However, a full application of SR (considering time dilation, length contraction, and relativity of simultaneity) resolves the paradox and shows you where the differences are. You are fighting every explanation that involves SR, yet you keep demanding an explanation of SR. I don't think you'll get much further without understanding the theory a bit more. Keep in mind that you're so sure that the other twin's clock ticks slower, but why? Just because it is predicted by SR? Do you see the physical mechanism for it? If so, what is it? And if not, then why do you require a physical mechanism for the other predictions of SR while rejecting the other theoretical predictions and explanations? Eg. the traveling twin does not remain in an inertial frame, so the "slowing of other clocks" doesn't apply without relativity of simultaneity. If you work through some examples with numbers, it might give you a concrete understanding of the important concepts and make it impossible to brush them aside.