Farsight

You're the one who brought up work as in a job, and you totally missed the "some ways" similarity between joblike work and energylike work. And now you accuse me of equivocation to try to cover up your sloppy mistake? It just won't do, Edthraran. See below for the relevant paragraph from ENERGY EXPLAINED, which you've forgotten about in your burning desire to discredit these essays: Another illustration is money. You can spend money like you can expend energy. But the money doesn’t disappear, just as the energy doesn’t disappear. Somebody else now has your money, just as some other thing now has your energy. Think about an old house, nestled in the countryside. It’s picturesque, worth a lot of money, and it’s built out of cob. Way back when, some guy put some energy into shifting earth and straw to make the walls of this house. He did the same with the wood, which grew out of the earth because the trees put energy into shifting water and CO2. The guy made money out of that house. They paid for the energy he put into it, through the work he did moving stuff. That’s why money and energy are similar. They get things moving, they get work done. One makes the world go round, and the other one makes the world go round too. Please do try to find flaws, I really do seek feedback. But please try to take a rational, open-minded, scientific approach so that your feedback is quality feedback with undisputed value. Then when I'm a celebrity and RELATIVITY+ is in the physics curriculum, you can say I helped. You can be proud of your contribution to 21st Century physics. The alternative will be guilt and shame for the rest of your life. Think carefully on this.

You try to pretend I know no history, that I don't know that GR is a development of SR. Because of the word united? In an essay called RELATIVITY+. Oh please. That is weak. Yes it is, because of his Princeton years with Godel. This is what Einstein might have come up with remember? It just won't do to discount everything Einstein said or thought post 1916 to protect your stance. Huh? It's a linking essay. Like I said in the essay, it's showing you that something you take for granted isn't what you thought it was. Did you actually read the essay? You haven't have you? You haven't even read it! No, you're not looking. Not at all. Where's your comment on the echalk colour perception test? Then you don't understand them. That's the whole point. And you don't understand relativity, or time, or the other things that you think you understand. Yes I do know. And what's not a photon? Are you seriously trying to make out that I don't know what a photon is and you do? You didn't quite get round to reading MASS EXPLAINED did you? No. I've tried to keep it simple. And judging from your responses so far, anything else I did include would be useless. By the way, there are no point masses, because there are no infinities in nature. Oh get out of it. You're the one full of assumptions. So full you can't be bothered to actually read the essay, and you drum up any old stuff to try to demonstrate a hatchet job on something you don't understand, and don't want to understand. That's what I meant when I said I understand people. I understand your psychology of belief. You don't. Yep. Next essay. LOL, I'll snip the fiction and abuse. Listen up: you've said nothing of value. Don't waste my time like this again.

Oh I do understand science, insane_alien. Believe me, I do. And I also understand people. Remember that this essay comes under the heading RELATIVITY+. It's my vision of how Einstein might have developed General Relativity. And remember this quote: "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)

Human work is not substantially different from physics work, Insane_alien. And "Colour force" is not colour, really. John Cuthber: I'm sure everybody will agree with your post above.

You may have given up, Klaynos, but come on, check back through this thread. You've given nothing. Edtharan: let's agree to differ and call it a day shall we?

Thanks for putting in the time, Molotov. Yes, all observers will always measure c to be the same old 300,000km/s, no problem. This is clearly the crux of the issue. If you've been following the thread you'll have spotted that it really hasn't been dealt with. If I'm experiencing gravitational time dilation such that I age one year whilst you age seven, my light has travelled one light year whilst yours has travelled seven light years. I assert that for this to happen, my c was one seventh of yours. Can you counter this? Thanks, but I'm way ahead of this. I really do understand SR beyond the postulate. You're entitled to express a view. But note that I haven't refused to show proof, experimental data or mathematics. I chose to write these essays in a layman-friendly style in an attempt to get the ideas across. And I haven't actually called it a "theory". I prefer to describe this as a "toy model". Do remember that this is only a discussion forum, not some formal scientific institution. Who disagrees with that? Not me. But try applying it to String Theory. And does the Standard Model explain natural phenomena such as gravity? See my "toy model" comment above. Obviously I beg to differ as regards these essays do a good job of explaining, but again, you're entitled to express your view. Now, can you offer any particular reason why this essay cannot be the correct explanation of gravity? Something better than "c is always constant", because that's an axiomatic rebuttal. The thrust of the argument against this essay is "c cannot be variable because c is constant, QED" and there's a seeming refusal to look into the situations I propose. Please do reply to my question above regarding gravitational time dilation. If you need to do any re-reading start with RELATIVITY+, which links all the essays together.

You talk about work at length, then say money is nothing like energy. Groan.

What error? That time travel is bunk? Don't pretend you've found some error of mine, Edtharan. You haven't. And repeating the pretence won't make it real. Because you insist that c is constant, and to do that you will insist that light travelled further in the "time dilation" thought-experiment I described to Swanson. You've explained zip, Edtharan. Your only justification for the axioms you hold dear has been the dogmatic repetition of those very axioms themselves. Sadly I've been unable to make you leave out your preferred reference frame. The simple fact is that I'm away for a year whilst seven years elapse for Swanson means light travelled one light year for me and seven light years for you, which means c is different. I just can't make it any simpler. I do not misrepresent. I do not use Strawman arguments. And I explained straw man to you, remember? Theories like Time is a Length Edtharan? You have no understanding of time, or gravity, and when I offer you a total understanding of these things, you reject it all, like some religious acolyte, stooping to dishonesty to avoid an open-minded discussion. How can you sleep at night? You won't be able to sleep at night when you find out I'm right.

The world is just painted in light, Albers.

Bombus: wear a sweater. After a while you get used to cooler surroundings, and your body compensates for it. So much so that you walk into somebody else's house and it feels icky and muggy.

Yep. It's a scale change. You're in it, you can't see it. The laws of physics are the same in any inertial frame. The postulate is still good. You need something like Pound-Rebka to know something's changing.

You're clutching at very thin straws here, making a mountain out of my molehill of challenge, presumably because there's not much in the essay you can argue against. I haven't told you that yet. It'll be in the next essay. The light going round in circles leads to mass. Here's a precit: in empty space with nothing to hold it in place, a stress travels, like a ripple in a rubber sheet. We can call it a photon. It has momentum, and energy. But it’s all relative. The photon is moving, so you feel its momentum when it hits you. If however you apply a little relativity and imagine it's you moving, you'd feel its inertia when you hit it. See MASS EXPLAINED for more. A photon is travelling stress. It travels with an accompanying tension. Gravity is the tension that opposes mass/energy stress. You can't have this tension all on its own, just as you can't have stress without the tension. You can have a reduction in the tension, but you can't have a wave of it without an accompanying stress. If a planet lost some mass it would emit photons, and these would run off into space carried by stress and tension like in the rubber sheet analogy. They have their own gravity, so in this respect they are gravity waves, but we call them photons. Your rotation is missing the point of my example. Imagine you measure the length of your shadow using the shadow of your ruler. You get the same result at midday as you do at dusk. In similar vein you always measure c to be the same, even when it is actually different as evidenced by time dilation.

No, I'm avoiding frames because they're at the root of your confusion. You have to step back from these frames and look at what's happening in much simpler terms. For me, light travelled one light year. For you, it travelled seven. The crux of it it is that light defines time, and if the time experienced is different, the speed of light must have been different too. If there's time dilation, there's a difference in c, but you always measure 300,000km/s, just like you always measure sixteen ounces to the pound, even on the moon. Your light defines your time. And that's the crux of GRAVITY EXPLAINED. It is just so simple.

I've tried to simplify matters enough for you to grasp them. If I told you that I'd accelerated to .99c, you would assert that light had travelled a far greater distance in your preferred frame. You might not appreciate it, but this is creating an aether to maintain your axiom that says c is constant. Straw man? Made up? Oh that's enough Edtharan.

LOL Klaynos, I'll copy your response so you can squirm about it later.

No, no goalpost shifting here. You have the videotape. It shows me sitting there with my metre rule lightclock, for a whole year, with a running timestamp in the bottom corner. There's a little action at the start of the tape and at the end, where you feature. You just don't know where I've been or what I've done. That's deliberate, to avoid any confusion about frames.

The word dimension originally meant "to measure out", Cap'n. Temperature used to be considered a dimension, when the word was used to talk about anything you could measure. But there's a huge difference between this sort of dimension and the sort that offers freedom of movement. If you have no freedom of movement within a "dimension", you really shouldn't put it in the same camp as those where you do. Hence people talk about 3+1 dimensions rather than 4 dimensions. I'm not arguing for the nonexistence of time. Time exists like heat exists, as a derived effect of motion. We talk about heat flowing, and that's reasonable because there's a spatial motion going on. But there's no actual height to a high temperature, there's no motion through heat. In similar vein there's no actual length to time, and no motion through time. These are just concepts we grew up with, and find difficult to analyse. If you boil down what I'm saying, my view is basically that Time Travel is impossible. But sadly my full explanation is rather dismissed as speculation.

I'm familiar with this. The paradox is that each twin considers the time for the other twin to be going slower than his own. It sounds counterintuitive, but it's isn't really a paradox. If you and I are separated by distance, our sizes look smaller to one another. We don't have a problem with that. The thing is, if we're separated by velocity, our times look smaller to one another. When the travelling twin turns round, he "skips some simultaneity", so when he comes back he has aged less than the one who stayed on earth. Look up "bricks and ticks" for an analogy that might explain it to your satisfaction. I'm afraid this is speculation. Personally I'd go so far as to say it's wild speculation, or worse.

You've got two events here - two motions, two changes. When you say "apart" you're assigning a notional "distance" between them based on other events, starting with the seconds as indicated by your watch. These are calibrated against an atomic clock, such that: Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0K… So one second is circa nine billion little atomic events, and the word "radiation" tells you these events are associated with light. If these events didn't happen, and nothing changed, you'd have nothing to count, and there would be no time. The only distance associated with these event is the distance travelled by something electromagnetic within the caesium atom during the event interval. It's a spatial distance, not a time distance. Hence a light year is a spatial distance, not a time distance. When you realise this you realise that The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second. ..is circular. Both seconds and metres are defined using the distance travelled by light, which is why we always measure c to be the same value. When you say "apart" there's no actual time distance in there. It's just what you grew up with, and it's difficult to think any other way. Really, really difficult.

The bowling ball analogy is wrong. Because it uses gravity to explain gravity. It's better to think in terms of gravitational time dilation. If the gravity keeps on increasing, the time dilation becomes total. In terms of analogy, the space doesn't rip. It freezes solid. That's why black holes used to be called "Frozen Stars". Check them out via google. Here's a link selected at random: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00012DEF-46AA-1F04-BA6A80A84189EEDF

You have no evidence of it. I stepped out the room and did something unknown to you that meant my time lasted one year whilst yours lasted seven. I say light travelled one light year whilst you say light travelled seven light years. Come on Swanson, what does this mean for c? I can't make it any simpler.

Like I said in the essay: "Since May 2006, all circulation Canadian pennies from 1942 to 1996 have an intrinsic value of over $0.02 USD based on the increasing spot price of copper in the commodity markets...”

Noted.

No, you are not moving through time. That's a fantasy. A second is not a length. That's a fantasy too. You can hold up your arms a metre apart. The distance between them is a length. You can step sideways by one metre, so you can move through space. But you simply can't do that with time. You are kidding yourself that you can. A second is a unit measure of change as compared to other change. If nothing changes, you have no time. And you cannot move through a measure of change.

All of the above is arguably speculative, but don't let that be a reason to ignore it. This is how the world works. This is what you'll be teaching or talking about in years to come. It'll take a while. Give it.. time.