Farsight

I've got it all worked out. But I've decided not to share it for now. Sorry. An electric field is not at all like a gravitational field. Swanson: gravitational mass and inertial mass are not identical. A photon has energy but it has no inertial mass. It's mass/energy that causes gravity, not mass.

Can spacetime itself become physical and break the rod ? Yep. What do you think the rod is?

Magic? Magic? Aw forget it.

No. The portion of the bar that touches the event horizon can't really be described as "bar" any more. For one thing it's been flattened to zero height because of the radial length contraction. But the gravity just above the horizon is stronger than the nuclear forces so it doesn't much matter. The spaceship can't drag the end of the bar across the "surface" of the event horizon, the bar bends instead. If the bar is fairly brittle it will snap quickly, if it's more malleable it will stretch first like toffee before it snaps.

Because it's a total scale change. It affects everything because everything is in essence made out of light - as demonstrated by pair production, wherein a gamma photon is transformed into an electron and a positron.

There's no getting caught "inside" the horizon. Time dilation goes to infinity as you approach it. Everything stops. Utterly, absolutely. People talk about "proper time" but there's no time left. Hence as far as our metal bar is concerned the event horizon is like glue of infinite strength. The spaceship does a flyby, the end of the bar skims closer to the horizon then when it reaches it, it stops. The spaceship keeps on going. The bar breaks. There's other things happening too, such as the tidal forces pulling down on the bar, but if you imagine a small black hole and a very long bar with the spaceship zipping by real fast, the spaceship has gone and the bar is broken long before the tidal force has done its stuff. If you want to consider the tidal force, you can think of the bar as something like taffy: the end of it will be pulled downwards by the enormous gravity. Once it arrives at the location where time dilation is infinite it isn't coming back. No way, no how. If the bar was really strong the spaceship would change course and start going round and round the black hole like it was on a tetherpole, then wham, gone. But if the bar is fairly weak it'll snap and the spaceship escapes. I don't know if you know, but steel is rather like toffee. If you cool it slowly it's soft, something like fudge. If you cool it quickly it's brittle, more like butterscotch.

Huh? Of course it's science. The best science you'll see on this forum. Real science. Here's how it works. Let's look at GPS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System According to the theory of relativity, due to their constant movement and height relative to the Earth-centered inertial reference frame, the clocks on the satellites are affected by their speed (special relativity) as well as their gravitational potential (general relativity). For the GPS satellites, general relativity predicts that the atomic clocks at GPS orbital altitudes will tick more rapidly, by about 45,900 nanoseconds (ns) per day, because they are in a weaker gravitational field than atomic clocks on Earth's surface. Special relativity predicts that atomic clocks moving at GPS orbital speeds will tick more slowly than stationary ground clocks by about 7,200 ns per day. When combined, the discrepancy is 38 microseconds per day; a difference of 4.465 parts in 1010. To account for this, the frequency standard onboard each satellite is given a rate offset prior to launch, making it run slightly slower than the desired frequency on Earth; specifically, at 10.22999999543 MHz instead of 10.23 MHz. The time "runs" a little slower down here on earth, so the GPS satellite clocks are set to run a little slower than normal. It isn't much, but it's real. So you can get a metre ruler, and measure how long it takes for a beam of light to get from one side to the other. You get the same result in seconds wherever you do it, be it on the surface of the earth or in orbit. But that "same result" down here on earth is different to the value you'd get in orbit by 4.465 parts in 1010. We could do something similar if you were travelling at a relativistic speed compared to me. Remember that length contraction only applies to the direction of travel, so we hold our rulers in a transverse fashion. It's the same size metre, but the seconds are different, so c is different too. In General Relativity the length contraction is radial, akin to the direction of motion in Special Relativity. Wherever there's time dilation, it's because c is different. You can't measure it to be different, because the speed of light defines how you count time. It's a "scale change", and we're totally immersed in it. People call this "curved spacetime" without actually understanding what "curved spacetime" is. It's just all so incredibly simple. Once you see it you'll be amazed that other people can't.

Pound-Rebka, Shapiro, even GPS. The issue is interpretational, not experimental. This hidden "scale change" variation in c is what "curved spacetime" actually is. You might find that difficult to accept. but ask yourself this: What is curved spacetime? Try explaining it to your grandmother. And remember this: I agree with Einstein.

In answer to the original post, the event horizon does have a grip. But it's subtle. It sneaks up on you. Let's imagine a small black hole and a spaceship with a very long metal bar sticking out of the side of it. The spaceship does a flyby, and the metal bar makes contact with the event horizon. Spang! The bar breaks off. The reason it does this is that at the event horizon, time dilation goes infinite. The end of the metal bar cannot move anymore. It has no time in which to move. It's like hitting a brick wall. If you could walk all around it and peer closely, you'd see that the end of the metal bar had melded itself into this "brick wall" and was a part of it. And nothing but nothing is moving. This is why black holes were originally called "frozen stars". All the stars that have collapsed have in essence not finished collapsing, and never ever will. You'll hear about the "proper time" of an infalling object, but that proper time is an abstraction and not a reality. Interesting stuff.

SR is subsumed by GR, Klaynos. But nevertheless, time dilation in SR occurs for the same reason as in GR. There's a "scale change" variation in c that you cannot measure locally. You always measure c to be 299,792,458 metres per second, because light defines your time. When you come back from a relativistic round trip and you've only aged one year while I've aged seven, it's because your speed of light was less than mine, even though we both measured it at 299,792,458 metres per second. Your seconds were different, because your c was different, even though you measured it to be the same. I am right about this. This is the real deal. Einstein was right. And that "law" is a veil of ignorance.

What most people don't realise is that Einstein buried one of the postulates of SR with GR. Look: "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. A curvature of rays of light can only take place when the velocity of propagation of light varies with position. Now we might think that as a consequence of this, the special theory of relativity and with it the whole theory of relativity would be laid in the dust. But in reality this is not the case. We can only conclude that the special theory of relativity cannot claim an unlimited domain of validity ; its results hold only so long as we are able to disregard the influences of gravitational fields on the phenomena (e.g. of light)." Albert Einstein (The General Theory of Relativity: Chapter 22 - A Few Inferences from the General Principle of Relativity) You have to read what he said. Einstein actually said the velocity of the propagation of light varies. He didn't mean spacetime is curved. Einstein didn't talk about curved spacetime. He wasn't treating velocity as a vector quantity where the speed remains the same but the direction changes. He really did mean that the speed of light changes. But this has been lost in the wash, and people are told they have to accept the constancy of the speed of light as a "law". There's no logic to this. Not when Einstein thought different.

Good stuff Albers. Take care who you show it to. You need to work on another crossover point for the muon.

I've written CHARGE EXPLAINED, Albers. I explain electric fields, magnetic fields, magnetic materials, superconductors, why the electron is stable, and why charge is not fundamental. But I'm not posting it on a public forum.

Not when you're in the box. It's simple. You're in the box. There are no windows. You're in freefall. You chuck a ball across the inside of the box and it goes straight as a die, bounces off the side, and back into your hand. You are in an inertial reference frame. You can feel no gravitational force, and you can detect no gravitational force acting upon the ball. Now one hour later you're still in the box, but you landed safely on earth. You chuck a ball across the inside of the box and... it falls in a parabola and you miss it. Because you're in a non-inertial reference frame. You can feel the gravitational force as weight, and you can detect it acting on the ball. The second situation is "equivalent" to this: You're in the box, and it's sitting on top of a rocket powering through space accelerating at 9.8m/s/s. You chuck a ball across the inside of the box and it falls to the floor. Et cetera. But they aren't quite equivalent, because when you're on earth you are in a "proper" gravitational field rather than a "uniform" gravitational field. You can detect the slight change in gravity between the top and the bottom of the box via a Pound-Rebka experiment wherein there is a measurable photon redshift. The gravitational field diminishes with distance from the earth.

I rather think photons are gravitons too. Matter/energy "causes" gravity. Typically a star will loss mass by shining and pouring out light. (Yes, there's solar wind with actual matter flying out, but let's disregard those for now). A photon has energy, or even is energy, and that means it has gravity. You just can't separate out the gravity from the mass/energy. You can't effect a change in a star's gravity without removing some matter/energy. Hence you can't expect to see any free-standing gravitons. IMHO they're a mathematical abstraction that paint the wrong picture.

Go learn some relativity.

A body in freefall is not accelerating. If you say it is, you're mixing reference frames. You're looking at it from some reference frame out somewhere in space rather than from the reference frame of the body in freefall. The principle of equivalence between gravity and an accelerating frame applies when you're standing on the planet, not when you're in freefall. There really is no force acting on that freefalling body. You can't feel any, you can't see any, you can't measure any. Because there is none. And if you look out of the window to see the moon going backwards you're mixing frames again. This is why gravity is not technically a force. Einstein called it a pseudoforce. Note that gravity is not spacetime curvature. A change in gravity is, though even that is open to new interpretation. I could say more, but people who don't know what they're talking about give me sneering abuse, say I'm talking crackpot nonsense, and kick me into pseudoscience. Not good.

Perhaps this might be of some use: http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s7-02/7-02.htm The preceding discussion makes clear the fact that general relativity is not a relational theory. Schwarzschild spacetime represents a cosmology with a definite preferred frame of reference, the one associated with the time-independent metric components. (Einstein was most disappointed when he first learned that the field equations have such an explicitly non-Machian solution, i.e., a single mass in an otherwise empty infinite universe)... If we trace along the dotted spacelike surface "t = now" we find that the black hole doesn't exist at time t = now, which is to say, it is nowhere on the t = now timeslice. The event horizon is in the future of every external timeslice, all the way to future infinity...

Sadly, you don't. You suffer from the psychology of disbelief, which so utterly convinces you that you're right, that you dismiss new ideas, you disqualify evidence that threatens your current model, and you pay only lip service to scientific principle. There are some unpleasant similarities with religious dogma. Farsight signing off.

I will Swanson, but not here. I've wasted enough time here. And: ..proves it. OK some of the other contributors here are young and don't know so much. But you're a physicist. A former physics teacher. A "physics expert". But groan. You don't understand relativity. You won't study these essays. You won't be looking at any "foundations" that I might offer. All you will be doing is chucking out discredits like "pseudoscience" instead of offering sincere feedback. I'm busy, I've got work to do, and I've had enough of this silly nonsense. I've already deleted scienceforums from my favourites at work, and now I'm deleting it from my favourites at home. Goodbye, Doubting Thomas.

All: I've just read Edtharan's post. This rather stands out: I think that says it all. Most of the contributors to this forum have not even considered these essays. Most haven't even read them. Molotov jumps in with same old axiomatic defence. If he'd have actually read this essay instead of skimming it, he would have expressed surprise at the A and B squares in the echalk image. If he'd have actually read TIME EXPLAINED he'd recognise his axiomatic argument as what it is - no argument at all. I have concluded that there are no rational open-minded scientists here who can offer me any feedback of value. You hold concepts that you won't examine and won't talk about. I've tried to engage you. Only Edtharan has put in any effort, but I consider this to have been less than honest. Since I'm busy, I'm going to call it a day here. You will have ample opportunity to reflect hereafter on your contribution to RELATIVITY+. Ciao.

I've read some history, and seen the things Einstein said long after he did GR. Wrong. You cannot move through time. I can move through space. Would you like to prove me wrong? Easy. OK I've just hopped back back a metre. Now you hop back a second. A lot. The point is that the optical illusion is that A and B are different when in fact they're the same. There's another illusion going on with your concept of time, and it's so total, you take it so much for granted, that you can't even think about it. All you can do is repeat the mantra that you've been taught from an early age. This ppsychology of belief is why we have suicide bombers, and it's actually more prevalent thank you might think. No you can't, and no they haven't. All they've done is repeated the same old tired old stuff. It goes like this: "Farsight, you're wrong about time because time is a dimension just like the dimensions of space, it does flow, it does have length and we can travel in it, so QED I've proven you wrong".

We observe gravitational redshift. The amount of energy released in the core of the star looks the same locally because the matter that is being "burned" is in its barest essence made out light, as are we. And we do observe black holes, or things that appear to be black holes. I haven't predicted any limit. You know I haven't. c simply changes based on your speed? No. It's subtle, it's the Twins Paradox. Imagine you and I are in two identical spaceships. We each have a light clock and a high speed TV camera trained upon it. Our cameras emit a signal. We zip past one another and just as we do, we press RECORD. We both record our own signal, and each other's signal. Then we play them back side by side. I see your light clock going slower than mine, and at the same time you see my light clock going slower than yours. The problem here is at the same time. Our ships definitely passed, there was definitely some motion through space, but there wasn't any time passing. That's just a figure of speech. What do you mean travelling at an appreciable fraction of c in their own frame ??? There is no traveling in their own frame. Oops. Their own c still looks like 300,000km/s. The answer is in MASS EXPLAINED. All these particles are "in barest essence" circles of light. It doesn't matter what the value of c is. The collision is translating forward-travelling stress into circular stress that's forward-travelling less. Your problem here is that you're hanging on to mass as some fundamental quantity. Think of a photon. It's moving and you aren't. It has momentum. But if we took a leaf out of our relativity book and said it was you moving instead of the photon, it would have inertia. Mass.

That looks like good feedback Swanson. Yes, it is up to me to provide proof. But it's a question of priorities. Do I push forward with the "toy model" or do I consolidate what I've done so far? I've chosen the former to date, and probably will do the same for another three months. Sorry, but work calls, so I have to go now. As I speak I'm thinking that both of the points you raised are based on misunderstanding of how total the scale change is. But I'll check that and get back to you properly later. Meanwhile I recommend that you read MASS EXPLAINED too.

LOL! No. It means you have no counter arguments to mine. And this is supposed to be a science forum, not a debate forum. You just don't pay attention to the science. All you do is parrot the very axioms that these essays challenge, as if those axioms prove themselves. You say "Farsight you are wrong about time because time is the fourth dimension, QED". Or you say "Farsight you are wrong about variable c because c is a constant, QED". You never get your teeth into the detailed logic, and the science of why I challenge the axioms that you take for granted. We've spoken about this at length. And here you go again, you refuse to study the logic, and then you assert that you've been given none or that you've proved it wrong. Stop kidding yourself. Yes there are knock on effects. Gravity! It's there, as obvious as the nose in front of your face. That's where the kinetic energy of a falling object comes from, from the reduced c. Not from some magical alternative source that you can't explain. Read the essay again. Reread the thread. Yep, light defines time, but have you forgotten about Pound-Rebka? The energy of a photon changes with height. And read MASS EXPLAINED to understand how pair production converts a photon (E=hf) into an electron and positron with mass. Yet again you refuse to look at the science, and then pronounce in your best debating style that you've proved it all wrong. Sigh.