Farsight

Here's the "scientific paper" version of RELATIVITY+ on a publicly-available website:

http://www.relativityplus.info/

Click on the link at the bottom of the single page to download the PDF file. Personally I think it's better to then print it and read it offline, but some prefer to read material like this directly on the screen. Each to his own. Note that this is a "qualitative model", more commonly known as a "toy model". It doesn't qualify as a theory, and it certainly isn't a "Theory of Everything".

Doubtless there will be some errors in there, perhaps even a couple of howlers. Please can I have your feedback to help spot anything that's incorrect, or any other feedback, including opinion.

I hope there's at least some good value in there that advances the cause we're all rooting for.

String Theory is a dead duck now Ben. The show's over. Time to move on. There's a new kid in town.

Martin, here's that paper I referred to re the fine structure constant.

http://www.relativityplus.info/

See page 27. Yes, it's all back of a fag packet stuff, but it offers a "reasonable" concept. It's a start.

There may be some geometrical relationship between the twist associated with charge, and the turn associated with mass that sheds light on the fine structure constant α = e²/2ε0hc. This has a value of circa 1/137, and is the ratio of the energy required to push two electrons together from infinity to some given distance, as compared to the energy of a photon with a wavelength 2π times that distance. As a simple geometrical illustration, if we cut the moebius doughnut and uncurl it to form a cylinder, it would exhibit a 180o barberpole twist. If we then imagine the cylinder to be thin-walled, such that we could slice it down its length and unroll it to spread it flat, this twist is transformed into a diagonal line across a rectangle of width π and length 2π. Sine 0.5 is 30o, which is one twelfth of 360o. Let’s say that a twelfth of the 511KeV electron mass/energy is reaching out as charge. When we push two electrons together, each is coupling with a twelfth of its mass, so we have to multiply a twelfth by a twelfth to get a combined value of 1/144. This is of course not accurate, but we only need to make the twist angle 30.75687º to arrive at 1/11.7047th of 360o, and squaring this gives us the familiar 1/137.

Elas, you can read my paper on http://www.relativityplus.info

Please do. I'll be only too happy to discuss it. But do sit down and read the paper first, and raise relevant points. Hopefully Captain will ensure that good order is maintained. Best check with him first though.

You mean you actually tried it?

http:\\http://www.relativityplus.info

LOL, this thread! I'm still laughing at:

Severian: Electric fields and magnetic fields are actually the same thing - the difference is only a point of perspective. A pure electric field to one observer may be a magnetic field to a different observer.

 

MrSandman: Your getting into opinions not fact Severian.

gib65: listen up. An electric field is the same thing as a magnetic field. That's why we call it an electromagnetic field. A magnetic field is how you see an electric field if you're moving through it. Or if it's moving through you. An electric field is a "twist field". It's twisted space. A magnetic field is a "turn field".

Imagine that you’re flying through space like an aeroplane with your arms outstretched, but the space ahead of you is twisted like a catherine wheel because an electric field is present. When you encounter the twisted space, your wings will tilt. The twisted space will make you rotate. In other words it will cause you to turn. Now use Relativity to work out that if you aren’t travelling through space but you find yourself turning, then the twist must be travelling through you. That's all it is. It's as simple as that. Inside that magnet there are electrons travelling around in little weeny circles, all going the same way, and they're like the earth going round the sun. A day lasts 23 hours 56 minutes not 24 hours. There's a little bit of "turn" left over. So you get some of it spilling out, and voila you've got a magnetic field.

You can think of a battery to a clockwork spring, but where the twist is in space rather than in steel. The electric twist extends forward with a flowing current, and causes a turning motion akin to a pump-action screwdriver, so demonstrating the principle of the electric motor. But we can equally turn a screw with a manual screwdriver, extending the twist forward, so demonstrating the principle of the dynamo. Applying a forward motion to the twist achieves a turning motion, and vice versa.

Cross my heart and hope to die, that's how it is.

Here's my paper Edtharan: http://relativityplus.info

Dowload the pdf file, print it, sit down, read it, then you can apologise, and then we'll talk again.

All points noted, ajb. I put "scientific paper" in quotes in my earlier post because I'm conscious that the lack of mathematics is an issue. I rather thought "toy" was being honest, but I take your point. I've spoken with some of the people in my acknowledgements, but not all. Thanks for the feedback.

Any feedback anybody can offer will be gratefully received.

Here's the "scientific paper" version of RELATIVITY+ on a publicly-available website:

http://www.relativityplus.info/

Click on the link at the bottom of the single page to download the PDF file. Personally I think it's better to then print it and read it offline, but some prefer to read material like this directly on the screen. Each to his own. Note that this is a "qualitative model", more commonly known as a "toy model". It doesn't qualify as a theory, and it certainly isn't a "Theory of Everything". Doubtless there will be some errors in there, perhaps even a couple of howlers. But I hope there's at least some good value that advances the cause we're all rooting for.

Oh, whatever, Edtharan. You ask for explanations, I offer them, you reject them because they're not "peer reviewed", then deliberately smother moot points in your mega-posts whilst accusing me of circular straw man arguments. OK, that's enough, I've given you a fair crack of the whip, again. You can wait until my paper is available. I was mistaken in thinking it might be worthwhile to engage you in dialogue. That's a mistake I won't make again.

Here's a round up from the wiki page on Unsolved problems in physics saying what I think I've covered in my paper. It's only 40 pages and 22,726 words, so much of the coverage is thin and I wouldn't say I've convincingly "dispelled" everything in this list:

Accelerating universe and the Cosmological constant.

Why is there far more matter than antimatter in the universe?

What is dark matter?

Entropy (arrow of time).

What is the mechanism responsible for generating neutrino masses?

Is the neutrino its own antiparticle?

Pioneer anomaly.

High-temperature superconductors.

Is string theory (M-theory) the correct approach?

Do black holes really exist?

Do they radiate, as expected on theoretical grounds? (I've now deleted this)

Does this radiation contain information about their inner structure?

What happens to the information stored in it?

Is there another way to probe their internal structure somehow?

Extra dimensions - Does nature have more than four spacetime dimensions?

Cosmic inflation - Is the theory of cosmic inflation correct?

Multiple universes - are there physical reasons to believe in other universes.. ?

Why is gravity such a weak force?

Magnetic monopoles - Do particles that carry "magnetic charge" exist?

Proton decay and Unification

As the lightest baryon, are protons absolutely stable?

Is there a preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics?

How does the quantum description of reality... give rise to the reality we perceive?

Are there physical phenomena... which irrevocably destroy information..?

Do "fundamental physical constants" vary over time?

Are string theory and the anthropic principle correct directions?

But I do think there's some value in the paper, even if some aspects of it are incorrect. I really do explain time, energy, mass, charge, gravity, space, and particles. For example, I know what a neutrino actually is. I'm suffering a delay in getting the paper up on the internet, so if you'd like a copy PM me and I'll mail you one.

Sorry if this is perhaps a little off topic, but somebody was talking about Planck's Constant. I know why Planck's Constant is what it is. Yes, it's a constant of action, but I know why, and why it's really something else.

Oh, and guess what, it isn't actually constant. Think Pound-Rebka.

Golden rule: there are no infinities in nature.

Spookily enough, that's where I've got to. Here's a picture of my one-trick pony.

It's like Google. It can only do one trick. But it's pretty darn brilliant.

Time to dredge up one of my essays, chaps.

Isn't that arbitrary? The only reason I have seen to define the potential at infinity as the zero point is because it removes the rather embarrassing infinity that inverse square laws tend to have at zero distance. Couldn't you just as well define the potential at infinity for a matter/antimatter system to be mc²? Also, where does all the negative potential energy of the e+/e- pair go when they annihilate?

Skeptic, it's not as complicated as you maybe think. In pair production you need a 1022KeV gamma photon to make an electron and a positron. But if that's all you've got they don't fly apart. They just annihilate straight away. You need a bit more oomph so that they fly apart.

If you catch hold of the electron and positron and put them back close together to make some positronium, it will last a microsecond before annihilating to give you two 511KeV gamma photons. But in catching hold of them you nicked a bit of their fly-apart energy. The negative is just accounting convention. All the energy is conserved. It gets a little confusing because initially you're looking at things from the rest frame of the nucleus, and afterwards people tend to fuzz over the electron motion and the positron motion.

A theory that can not be disproved that unifies all the forces (electromagnetic, gravity, strong and weak nuclear forces) would be a major discovery. I have heard of many attempts, but I have yet to hear of one that actually does it. If you have discovered this theory, then present it to a reputable scientific journal and then stand ready for the Nobel Prize.

To my knowledge, what you are claiming does not exist (yet). I think that there might be a Grand Unified Theory, but so far you have not presented any evidence of it and so you can not use this in argument.

Do you want a copy of my paper? PM me and I'll send you one. It should be on the internet soon, maybe later today.

Yes, the Pendulum is made up of Electrons, Protons and Neutrons, but this is not the cause of the event. The event is not even a gravitational event...

 

...it's not even gravitational - it is inertial).

I don't suppose you remember MASS EXPLAINED? I've moved on a bit since then.

All these do involve movement. But we are only using movement as changes, as events. But just as the ink you use to make out points on a ruler do not determine what that ruler is made of, these events and the fact that we used motion as the marker, has nothing to say about what the underlying structure (or origin, or composition) of Time is.

Yes it does. Here you go: Time exists like heat exists, being an emergent property of motion. It is a cumulative measure of motion used in the relative measure of motion compared to the motion of light, and the only motion is through space. So time has no length, time doesn’t flow and we don’t travel through it.

Well. All movement stops at absolute 0. So does this mean that the hotter something is the faster it is moving through Time?

So your theory when applied to actual observations produces results that do not match with further observations. In other words you theory has no predictive value.

And your statement shows that you have completely misunderstood what I was saying. Yes, the Ruler is Made of light and we use the ruler to measure distance. BUT What we use to measure is not the thing we are measuring. You keep making this same mistake again and again. Just because a ruler is made of light does not mean that distance is light.

Light defines our time, and light defines our distance. The world is painted in light, Ed. And so is the canvas. It would take me too long to explain it here.

Come off it, swanson. You've never heard me talking about perpetual motion machines. Antigravity maybe, but that isn't "shielding", and there's no free lunch.

This statement is patently false. Gravity and electromagnetism have NOTHING to do with each other, other than that they're forces. IF you want, I can show you how Kaluza and Klein tried to GET electromagnetism from gravity (in 1929), and I can show you why they failed.

It isn't false, BenTheMan. They have plenty to do with each other. But note my use of quotes and my comment involving the unification of the forces that explains electromagnetism and basically blows it away like a puff of smoke. You, know, Kaluza/Klein theory was that close to getting it right, but they both missed a trick - you don't need an extra dimension. But let's park that, we're getting off topic.

They've maybe got an inbuilt compass, Lawless:

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/pmagnet.html

Mr Skeptic, here's an excerpt that may prove useful:

In terms of basic concepts however, we can understand the energy required to bring two electrons together as related to the extra energy required to separate the electron and the positron in pair production and send them flying apart. Without this, the electron and positron would immediately annihilate. In practice we do not require the 1/137th of 1022KeV which would give them a mutual escape velocity, because pair production does not occur in a total vacuum. It can be less, much less, as can be seen from binding energy. For example one binding energy level of positronium, an electron/positron “exotic atom” which usually lasts a microsecond before annihilating into two 511KeV gamma photons, is -0.0068 KeV. The binding energy is given as a negative figure because it’s a measure of how much energy might be obtained by letting an electron and a positron attract one another from infinity. The temporary positronium electron/positron configuration has less total energy than an electron and positron flying forcefully apart after pair production.

Course, you are smarter than Einstein so you correct him. Here is an experiment for you, Farsight. You have two light clocks at rest relative to each other and aligned along the x axis. One light clock is twice as long as the other, and they start off synchronized. Will the light from the short clock bounce for the second time at the same time as the light in the longer clock hits the far end?

Einstein's my hero Skeptic. For all I know it was some translator at fault. Re your experiment, if you place the light clocks back to back like this: |__||_| and start the pulse at the left of both clocks, then your bounces happen at the same location and the same time for all observers. Note though that there is a problem with "Einstein clock synchronisation", wherein the "time taken" for the light to traverse the smaller clock one way is not necessarily the same time taken to traverse the other way.

You mean you might be able to if you spent some time reading about it (which maybe you're too busy to find)?

Yes, and some time to explain it properly. Sorry, I'm a bit pushed at the moment.

Einstein appears, to me at least, to be saying that the source's velocity has to be changing (i.e. the light source is accelerating or decelerating) in order for curvature of light to occur. But perhaps I have misunderstood his meaning. Scratch that, he is talking about propagation velocity, i.e. the velocity of light. Not sure what "velocity of propagation ... varies with position" then means. The speed of light varies with position - position relative to what?

To the earth. Or some similar body. He isn't talking about light sources. He's talking about gravity.

The ticking of a pendulum is a non EM event, but we have been using pendulum clocks for over 100 years.

On the point about Movement, as I have already stated a Change is not movement (but movement is change). But we can use Change as an Event to mark out a period of Time.

Also keep in mind, that although we use Change to mark out a period of Time, that period is only a scale and not the thing we are measuring. We use a scale on a ruler to mark out distance, but that distance is not the ruler.

Edtharan: I replied at length to your long post this afternoon, but had some kind of Internet problem and lost it. I don't feel like doing a long reply again. Please can you pick one subitem to discuss, and then can we move on to the next subitem please.

Can you please illuminate the key differences for us, and why this is a relevant criticism?

It's related to the way you feel a "tidal" force in a gravitational field. If you move towards a star the tidal force increases. Ditto if the star moves towards you. And if the star is a neutron star in some fast orbit the tidal force will vary in a cyclic fashion. It's getting a little off topic, and it's only relevant because it relies on motion.

You nearly got this right. Actually the speed of light does not change. This is fundamental to Einstein's theories and explains why two observers approaching each other at 0.7c do not see the other approaching at 1.4c, not because light slows down, but because time slows down, geddit?

It does, Fred. Cross my heart and hope to die. Light slows down. Hence "time slows down". In Special Relativity both observers see the other observer with slowed-down light. It's a trick of perspective. In General Relativity it's no trick. It's absolute. And the man himself said this:

"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 (eg of light)".

I know he said velocity, but he meant speed. If he didn't, what he said translates to "light curves because it bends".

Light slows down when it passes into a different medium, like glass. Someone has managed to slow down light so much that they claim to have "stopped" or "frozen" it altogether BTW

I can't comment on "stopped light", Fred. But light doesn't slow down when it passes through a transparent medium. It's just got further to go. Trust me on this.

Sorry, I guess that's off topic too.

DH/Swanson/Severian: thanks for the advice.

Thanks for the information guys. All points noted.

Seriously though, DO NOT SUBMIT ANYTHING TIMES NEW ROMAN. Serif fonts are for headers and single lines of text. Body text should always always always be sans-serif fonts else it will be way too much effort to properly read without glazing over and getting bored.

tree: I tried arial and helvetica plus univers, including narrow/condensed versions, and none look particularly satisfactory either on-screen or as hard-copy. I've currently gone back to Times New Roman 11-point justified, the general appearance is something like this one plucked at random:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0709/0709.3248v1.pdf

Any particular advice you can offer would be most welcome.