When a black hole moves: The incompatibility between gravitational theory and special relativity

[Eric Baird]

Hi Guys!
Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to ResearchGate. It's an essay that I wrote last year for the 2017 Gravity Research Foundation competition.

The gist of the argument is that the motion of a gravitational source must affect the propagation (and energy, and momentum) of light in the surrounding region, which shows up geometrically as a gravitomagnetic curvature effect ... so the "moving" gravitational body's associated relationships (e.g. between velocity and spectral shift) can't correspond to those of SR.

The application of the principle of relativity to a moving high-gravity star has to result in a different set of relativistic equations to those of special relativity, because gravitomagnetic physics (the velocity-dependent curvature components associated with moving gravity-sources) isn't a fit to SR's idealised, simplified, flat Minkowski spacetime.


It's tempting to react to this by deciding that it doesn't matter, since SR only claims validity for cases in which gravity is considered negligible. Unfortunately there's a catch:
Wave theory combined with the principle of relativity requires that //all// distant moving bodies obey a single agreed set of velocity-shift relationships, regardless of whether they are high-gravity or low-gravity. If a camera sensor images a distant galaxy and then accelerates away before taking a second picture, the change in relative velocity needs to shift //all// the components in the two galaxy images by exactly the same ratio, regardless of the different gravitational environments of the various sources. So if a distant neutron star obeys a different set of equations to those of the 1905 theory, then so must a distant hydrogen atom in the same line-of-sight. And if the same equations of motion apply to distant and nearby objects, then a nearby hydrogen atom must obey those same non-SR equations, too.


If we exist in a universe that allows gravitational masses to exist and to move, then special relativity's equations may //almost// be the real equations of motion, but they can't be quite correct.

The piece is four pages long, including pictures.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

Enjoy,

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric_Baird

[David (Lord Kronos Prime) Fuller]

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284722642_On_the_gravitational_field_of_a_moving_body_redesigning_general_relativity

10.1.Basic behaviour of acoustic metrics
A metric-compatible system of physics that includes GEMVEL effects tends to generate an acoustic metric.
The term “acoustic” in this context does not refer just to the behaviour of sound in a particulate medium, but to a wider class of nonlinear behaviour in which a signal's speed is nominally defined by the properties of a metric, but where those properties are is in turn modified by the presence of the signal – the region's nominal signal speed is not necessarily the same as it would have been if the signal was not present.
45 We might expect to find acoustic behaviour in gravitational waves * – if a gravity-wave travels at the nominal speed “c”, but its signal also represents a modification of c, it gives rise to complex behaviours and definitional complexities that can confound some traditional classical approaches, and which suggest parallels with parts of quantum mechanics.
In an acoustic-metric-based theory of gravity, the “acoustic” behaviour of a gravitational wave can then be generalised for other gravitational “signals”, including the gravitational fields associated with moving masses.
In a relativistic theory of physics that incorporates GEMVEL effects (and uses an acoustic metric), the speed of a particle can be taken as a function of the particle's mass, momentum and energy and the local speed of light, but the local properties of light are in turn modified by the effect of the moving particle.
The propagation of light in the region is then affected by the motion of the bodies within it, contra special relativity, giving us a system of mechanics whose relationships require curved spacetime. **

10.2.Comparisons with current theoryOne of Einstein's criticisms of special relativity was the “absolute” nature of its spacetime geometry –the Minkowski metric was an entity that acted (dictating inertial physics) without itself being acted upon 46.
This problem was supposed to be solved by general relativity 47, which used a new, more interactive concept of spacetime (Einstein, 11 Wheeler: “Space tells matter how to move, matter tells space how to bend” ) … but since the 1916 general theory also incorporated special relativity, the “new, improved” spacetime behaviour only applied to situations that were not already being dealt with by special relativity, so the original behaviour remained in the 1916 theory as a limiting case.
Acoustic metrics take the “dynamic” aspect of a GR-style metric and extend it to cases involving simple relative motion.
The cost of this greater interactivity is additional geometrical complexity and a reduced reliability for “test particle” calculations.
Even though a small moving particle's influence on the surrounding geometry might be thought to only be significant over a vanishingly small region of spacetime, this is a region that all of the particle's incoming and outgoing signals pass have to pass directly through.
The distortion potentially affects what a particle sees and how the particle itself is seen, so transformations derived by comparing exchanged signals and assuming flat spacetime, although easier to derive, will not necessarily generate all of the same relationships. *
Gravitational waves count as a good example of “acoustic” nonlinear behaviour without the assumption of a particulate medium.**
In special relativity, we say “the speed of a body is always less than the speed of light”, while in emission theory, we say “the speed of light is always more than the speed of the emitting body”.
In a relativistic acoustic metric the situation is more nuanced.
Page 17 of 33
On the gravitational field of a moving body, Eric Baird, 2015-10

10.3.Acoustic metrics and the measurement problemFor acoustic-metric-based calculations and transformations to be valid, the metric's shape already has to include the positions and states of motion of every particle in the system capable of making an observation, whose experiences we intend to use as a reference – we cannot start with an initial shape and populate it with physical observers with new states of motion without changing the geometry.
Acoustic metrics overlap with quantum mechanics in including an element of observer-dependence, although the philosophical basis of the dependency differs from traditional quantum theory.
Under conventional QM, the act of observation can affect the physics, suggesting non-classical behaviour … but in an acoustic system, the earlier act of preparing to make the observation – physically placing an observer at a given location with a state of motion not shared by other matter in the region – will also alter the geometry at that location and the data that can be gathered there, even before any

On the gravitational field of a moving body: redesigning general relativity (PDF Download Available).



Friedmann_equations Density_parameter

(((6.6740800122e-11)/2 (newtons / (meters^2))) / (3.71295775e-28 (kg / (meter^3))))^0.5 = 299792458 m/s


"physical mechanism" is the ( Inertial & Elastic Properties of the Medium) times the Mass Loading per cubic Meter

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/permot3.html

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Sound/souspe2.html#c1

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Sound/imgsou/soundwater.gif

(((6.6740800122e-11)/2 (newtons / (meters^2))) / (3.71295775e-28 (kg / (meter^3))))^0.5 = 299792458 m / s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann_equations#Density_parameter

To date, the critical density is estimated to be approximately five atoms (of monatomic hydrogen) per cubic metre, whereas the average density of ordinary matter in the Universe is believed to be 0.2–0.25 atoms per cubic metre

2 / ((G * c) / (((0.2235995768 AMU)^2))) = 4.99758096 AMU

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=((+(6.6740800122e-11%2F2)+Newtons+%2F+meters%5E2)%2F(3.712958e-28+kg%2Fmeter%5E3))%5E0.5+%3D

(((6.6740800122e-11)/2 N/m^2 (newtons per square meter))/(3.71295775e-28 kg/m^3 (kilograms per cubic meter)))^(1/2) = 299792458

1 / ((6.6740800122e-11 / 2) * c) = 99.958075 s / m

0.2235995768 AMU = 3.71295775e-28 kg

2.235995768^2 = 4.99967707451

((6.6740800122e-11 * (newtons / (meters^2))) / (3.71295775e-28 * 2 * (kg / (meter^3))))^0.5 = 299792458 m / s

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=((6.6740800122e-11+*+(newtons+%2F+(meters%5E2)))+%2F+(3.71295775e-28+*+2+*+(kg+%2F+(meter%5E3))))%5E0.5+%3D


((6.6740800122e-11 Pascals) / (3.71295775e-28 * 2 * (kg / (meter^3))))^0.5 = 299792458 m/s

(6.6740800122e-11 / 3.71295775e-28 /2)^0.5 = 299792458

(6.6740800122e-11 /299792458^2 /2) = 3.71295774984033219482929e-28 kg

The Schwarzschild radius (sometimes historically referred to as the gravitational radius) is the radius of a sphere such that, if all the mass of an object were to be compressed within that sphere, the escape velocity from the surface of the sphere would equal the speed of light.

(2*G*M)/c^2 = Rs

((2*G *3.712958e-28 kg/4)/c^2)^0.5 = 3.712958e-28 Meters

www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%280.5*G+*3.712958e-28+kg%29%2Fc%5E2%29%5E0.5+%3D+&x=0&y=0

[David (Lord Kronos Prime) Fuller]

12.2.Merging “gravitational” and “non-gravitational” physics
In (b→c) we eliminate special relativity from the stack and replace the 1916 general theory with a revised general theory based on an acoustic metric.

((an acoustic metric)) = (((6.6740800122e-11)/2 (newtons / (meters^2))) / (3.71295775e-28 (kg / (meter^3))))^0.5 = 299792458 m/s

This removes the distinction between “gravitational” and “nongravitational” physics, reducing the number of vertical layers from four to three.
12.3.Large scales
In (c→d) an acoustic metric then produces a single classical description for both cosmological and gravitational horizons:

(( Horizon Shape )) = https://goo.gl/photos/KZL7Uc79pXnkUkKz7 = schwartz p minimal surface

In a single observer's view of an expanding universe, a large-scale map of the universe's contents shows an apparent gravitational field intensity that increases with distance, with more distant regions seen as they were in a younger and smaller (and denser) universe.
If we turn this map inside out, it appears to show the gravitational field surrounding an unseen source that corresponds to the nominal Big Bang singularity, which is then cloaked from us by the cosmological horizon, which plays the part of a gravitational horizon (“farside black hole”
argument 60 ).

Since the cosmological horizon unavoidably fluctuates and radiates in response to events taking place behind it and has a non-zero temperature, it doesn't behave like a gravitational horizon under GR1916. It does, however, behave like the acoustic gravitational horizon of our revised general theory, removing the separation between classical cosmology and classical
gravitation on the original diagram, (a). *
In the revised system, the same cosmological redshift can be described either as a cosmological expansion shift, or as an apparent gravitational shift, or as a recession shift. ** ***

[David (Lord Kronos Prime) Fuller]

246 GeV Energy Contained in Higgs Field

3.71295775e-28 kg * c^2 * (pi *376.730313462) = 246.508252 GeV

(((246.508252 GeV) / (c^2)) / (3.71295775e-28 kg)) / pi = 376.730313

((6.6740800122e-11 * (newtons / (meters^2))) / (3.71295775e-28 * 2 * (kg / (meter^3))))^0.5 = 299792458 m / s

((2 * G * (1 kg)) / (c^2)) / 4 = 3.71295774e-28 meters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann_equations#Density_parameter

To date, the critical density is estimated to be approximately five atoms (of monatomic hydrogen) per cubic metre,
whereas the average density of ordinary matter in the Universe is believed to be 0.2–0.25 atoms per cubic metre

(3.71295775e-28 kilograms) / 1.67377e-27 = 0.221832017 Atomic Mass Units

http://vixra.org/pdf/1310.0191vD.pdf Time and the Black-hole White-hole Universe

https://goo.gl/photos/w5rt21hbeLWifDjTA

https://youtu.be/gEKSpZPByD0?t=1h3m22s


9 Cosmological constant

Riess and Perlmutter (notes 2) using Type 1a supernovae calculated
the end of the universe tend ∼ 1.7e-121 ∼ 0.588e+121 units of Planck time;
tend ∼ 0.588e+121 ∼ 0.2e+71yrs (19)
The maximum temperature Tmax would be when tage = 1.
What is of equal importance is the minimum possible temperature
Tmin - that temperature 1 unit above absolute zero, for in
the context of this expansion theory, this temperature would
signify the limit of expansion (the black-hole could expand
no further). For example, if we simply set the minimum temperature
as the inverse of the maximum temperature;
Tmin ∼ 1/Tmax ∼ 8π/TP ∼ 0.1773e−30 K (20)
This would then give us a value ‘the end’ in units of Planck
time (∼ 0.35e+73 yrs) which is close to Riess and Perlmutter;
t-end = T^4 max ∼ 1.014e+123 (21)
The mid way point (Tmid = 1K) becomes T^2 max ∼ 3.18e+61 ∼ 108.77 billion years.


http://vixra.org/pdf/1310.0191vD.pdf

(1 / ((((5.39116e-44 seconds) * 4.769959e+120 seconds)^0.5) / (4pi))) / G = 3.71295788e-28 kg/m^3


(4.769959e+120 seconds) / 0.588e+121 = 0.811217517 seconds

((246.646239305 GeV) / (3.71295775e-28 kg * (c^2))) / (((pi^2) / 6) - 1) = 1836.15

(pi^2/6)-1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_problem

The Basel problem is a problem in mathematical analysis with relevance to number theory, first posed by Pietro Mengoli in 1644 and solved by Leonhard Euler in 1734[1] and read on 5 December 1735 in The Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences.[2]
Since the problem had withstood the attacks of the leading mathematicians of the day, Euler's solution brought him immediate fame when he was twenty-eight.
Euler generalised the problem considerably, and his ideas were taken up years later by Bernhard Riemann in his seminal 1859 paper "On the Number of Primes Less Than a Given Magnitude", in which he defined his zeta function and proved its basic properties.
The problem is named after Basel, hometown of Euler as well as of the Bernoulli family who unsuccessfully attacked the problem.

The Basel problem asks for the precise summation of the reciprocals of the squares of the natural numbers, i.e. the precise sum of the infinite series:

https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/db136a2947fa2444353dcc9c5ac4a6b17bfcc648

The sum of the series is approximately equal to 1.644934 OEIS A013661.
The Basel problem asks for the exact sum of this series (in closed form), as well as a proof that this sum is correct.
Euler found the exact sum to be π2/6 and announced this discovery in 1735.
His arguments were based on manipulations that were not justified at the time, although he was later proven correct, and it was not until 1741 that he was able to produce a truly rigorous proof.

[David (Lord Kronos Prime) Fuller]

3.71295775e-28 kg /(8.85418782e-12/(c*pi)) = 246.508252 GeV

((0.208281657 GeV) / (8.85418782e-12 / pi)) / (246.508252 GeV) = 299792459

(( Horizon Shape )) = https://goo.gl/photos/KZL7Uc79pXnkUkKz7 = schwartz p minimal surface

https://youtu.be/gEKSpZPByD0?t=1h3m22s

http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/tfb/icms-poster/torus/torus-modern-large.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_torus

https://goo.gl/photos/qXkmntm467PCm5V66

http://im-possible.info/images/articles/klein-bottle/klein-bottle-double.jpg

[Poutnik]

Dne 20/05/2017 v 01:56 Eric Baird napsal(a):

>
>
> If we exist in a universe that allows gravitational masses to exist and to move, then special relativity's equations may //almost// be the real equations of motion, but they can't be quite correct.

It is known for long time that General Relativity
and Quantum electrodynamics/chemistry are not compatible.

GR extrapolation to quantum world does not work well.
Neither QED/QCH extrapolations to strong gravity world.

In some way, we are in similar situation
with QED and GR as was electromagnetism with black body radiation
in the very late 19th century just before Max Planck.

They had a good models for short enough wavelength
and long enough wavelengths.
But what with that damned region in between ?

--
Poutnik ( The Pilgrim, Der Wanderer )

A wise man guards words he says,
as they say about him more,
than he says about the subject.

[Marc Lichtenstein]

Poutnik wrote:

>> If we exist in a universe that allows gravitational masses to exist and
>> to move, then special relativity's equations may //almost// be the real
>> equations of motion, but they can't be quite correct.
>
> It is known for long time that General Relativity and Quantum
> electrodynamics/chemistry are not compatible.

What a total nonsense to spew out. Nothing in the world is saying that
those are to be compatible. _Compatible_ has no place in that sentence.
You don't know what _compatible_ stands for. Which reveals you aren't
familiar in the business.

> In some way, we are in similar situation with QED and GR as was

_we_, what _we_, young man??

> They had a good models for short enough wavelength and long enough
> wavelengths. But what with that damned region in between ?

Again, an unforgivable error. There is no demand of sharp corners, in the
industry. Or, again, you don't know what a _sharp corner_ stands for, and
what it would imply??

[danco...@gmail.com]

On Friday, May 19, 2017 at 4:56:53 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> If we exist in a universe that allows gravitational masses
> to exist and to move, then special relativity's equations
> may //almost// be the real equations of motion, but they
> can't be quite correct.

Yes, this is the conventional mainstream view, i.e., that special relativity (Lorentz invariance) is perfectly correct only in the limit of vanishing gravitational curvature, which of course is not exactly achieved anywhere, because there is non-zero gravitational curvature everywhere. However, even on a highly curved surface, if we focus on a sufficiently small region, it is approximately flat. Also, the gravitational field of a proton (for example) is 40 orders of magnitude weaker than the electromagnetic field. This is why special relativity is so successful and accurate in its description of phenomena in all situations except when there are significant differences in gravitational potential in the region of interest. In those cases we need to use the full general theory.

The summary in your paper of the history of the subject is very mistaken. Einstein was already proclaiming by about 1907 that special relativity was not compatible with gravity and the equivalence principle. Other researchers continued trying to find theories of gravity that preserved special relativity globally, but Einstein alone went down the path of abandoning global Lorentz invariance, and arrived finally at general relativity in 1915. Your paper says that no one understood that general relativity violates global Lorentz invariance until 1960, which is absurd. Also, you have badly misread Einstein's 1950 article in Scientific American. He of course did not deny that general relativity reduces to special relativity in flat spacetime (which is an plain mathematical fact), he said that physicists should not try to build fundamental theories that ignore the principle of general relativity (background independence) and gravity, as if special relativity was perfectly valid (which most physicists of the time were doing). Indeed, modern speculative ideas for fundamental theories, such as string theory, involve spacetime curvature at the most fundamental level (compactifying the extra-dimensions in accord with the generalized version of Einstein's field equations), and they strive for background independence.

But, again, no one denies that special relativity is valid within its domain of applicability. Your underlying thesis seems to be to refute special relativity in its normal domain, but that thesis is completely unfounded and contradicted by abundant experimental evidence.

[The Starmaker]

Eric Baird wrote:
>
> Hi Guys!
> Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to ResearchGate. It's an essay that I wrote last year for the 2017 Gravity Research Foundation competition.
>
> The gist of the argument is that the motion of a gravitational source must affect the propagation (and energy, and momentum) of light in the surrounding region, which shows up geometrically as a gravitomagnetic curvature effect ... so the "moving" gravitational body's associated relationships (e.g. between velocity and spectral shift) can't correspond to those of SR.
>
> The application of the principle of relativity to a moving high-gravity star has to result in a different set of relativistic equations to those of special relativity, because gravitomagnetic physics (the velocity-dependent curvature components associated with moving gravity-sources) isn't a fit to SR's idealised, simplified, flat Minkowski spacetime.
>
> It's tempting to react to this by deciding that it doesn't matter, since SR only claims validity for cases in which gravity is considered negligible. Unfortunately there's a catch:
>
>

> If we exist in a universe that allows gravitational masses to exist and to move, then special relativity's equations may //almost// be the real equations of motion, but they can't be quite correct.
>
> The piece is four pages long, including pictures.
>
> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity
>
> Enjoy,
>
> Eric Baird
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric_Baird

Without reading all your stupid post and just going by the Subject
heading of your post...


black holes didn't exist
when special relativity was written.

even galaxies didn't exist
when special relativity was written.


So, black holes having nothing to do with special relativity since
galaxies didn't even exsit in the mind of einstein then, how could black
holes exist.

There is a difference between gravitational
theory and special relativity...they were written 10 years apart.


one is physics, and the other is philosophy.



After ten years you tend to correct your mistakes...


any body who compares gravitational
theory and special relativity
is stupid.


And that is just based on the Subject heading!

why bother going beyond that?

[Eric Baird]

On Saturday, 20 May 2017 17:00:13 UTC+1, danco...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Friday, May 19, 2017 at 4:56:53 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> > If we exist in a universe that allows gravitational masses
> > to exist and to move, then special relativity's equations
> > may //almost// be the real equations of motion, but they
> > can't be quite correct.
>
> Yes, this is the conventional mainstream view, i.e., that special relativity (Lorentz invariance) is perfectly correct only in the limit of vanishing gravitational curvature, which of course is not exactly achieved anywhere, because there is non-zero gravitational curvature everywhere. However, even on a highly curved surface, if we focus on a sufficiently small region, it is approximately flat.

Yes, but the devil is in the details. SR requires the region to be //perfectly// flat, and that condition is only satisfied if the region in question doesn't contain particles whizzing past each other at relativistically significant speeds. Technically, it's only satisfied if the region contains no particles at all.
But if the region contains no particles to be watched, and no particulate observers to do the watching, it becomes an empty, null solution. The SR limit derived this way only applies metaphysically, at a time after all particles with mass capable of doing conventional old-fashioned physics have left the region, and departed sufficiently far for their associated curvature effects to have faded away.

In a fully gravitomagnetic theory of relativity, //all// physics is curvature-based, and flat spacetime represents not the limit at which curved spacetime physics reduces to Minkowski spacetime and SR, but the limit at which no actual physics is happening. It's a bit like like having a theory of kinetics that only holds when velocities are arbitrarily close to zero.

>Also, the gravitational field of a proton (for example) is 40 orders of magnitude weaker than the electromagnetic field.

But the classical radius of an electron is in the same ballpark as the event horizon radius associated with the electron's mass.

>This is why special relativity is so successful and accurate in its description of phenomena in all situations except when there are significant differences in gravitational potential in the region of interest.

That's one interpretation.

Another interpretation of why SR //appears// to be so successful would be that since the relativistic family of potential Lorentzlike solutions are separated by Lorentzlike factors ( [1-vv/cc]^x ), then, since these factors have a tendency to cancel out, most tests of special relativity would still appear highly successful even if the actual equations were //not// those of SR, but those of a different member of the family.

If the real equations were “redder and shorter” than those of special relativity by a Lorentzlike factor anywhere up to one complete additional gamma factor, then most SR testing would come out exactly the same.

The SR community do not go out of their way to tell people this – that their old SR testing regimes were almost completely insensitive to the question of whether or not SR was the correct theory of relativity.

>In those cases we need to use the full general theory.
>
> The summary in your paper of the history of the subject is very mistaken.

Nope.

>Einstein was already proclaiming by about 1907 that special relativity was not compatible with gravity and the equivalence principle.

Yep. However, he then hoped that he could retrofit compatibility with an additional layer of theory (general relativity) built on top of the 1905 theory.

>Other researchers continued trying to find theories of gravity that preserved special relativity globally, but Einstein alone went down the path of abandoning global Lorentz invariance, and arrived finally at general relativity in 1915.

Yep-ish. I'm not sure that he was the //only// guy trying this, but … whatever.

>Your paper says that no one understood that general relativity violates global Lorentz invariance until 1960, which is absurd.

No, I didn't say that. What I said was::
:: " … in 1960 we discovered a fundamental geometrical conflict between special relativity and the general principle of relativity applied to rotation, [3] the community's response being to give SR priority, and downgrade the GPoR from a rule to a guideline that was to be suspended whenever it threatened to disagree with SR-based arguments. ...”

This 1960 change to the accepted interpretation of the GPoR's validity for rotating bodies is documented in the 1960 Schild paper, cited as reference number 3. Schild says that previously (Harwell group, 1960), the GPoR was considered fundamental to general relativity, but that since the publication of the Harwell paper it had been realised that GR's SR and GPoR components were irreconcilably in conflict, making the theory internally inconsistent. To fix this, we could either downgrade the GPoR or downgrade SR, but since one couldn't remove SR without trashing the 1915/16 theory's mathematical structure and starting again, it was easier to declare SR to be inviolable and downgrade the GPoR from a law into a soft guideline.

I take the opposing view, that if one is writing a general theory of relativity, it really needs to conform fully with the general principle of relativity!
But the guys in 1960 were facing a horrible potential crisis of confidence and associated political fallout (the potential loss of //both// of Einstein's theories of relativity, with no obvious successor on the horizon) and needed a quick fix. So they further fudged GR to save face.

>Also, you have badly misread Einstein's 1950 article in Scientific American.

No, I really haven't ! :) :) :)

> He of course did not deny that general relativity reduces to special relativity in flat spacetime (which is an plain mathematical fact),

The reduction to SR was a design decision on Einstein's part.

In the Nineteenth Century, W.K. Clifford had already suggested that "all physics is curvature", and in a Cliffordian universe, a general theory of relativity actually doesn't reduce to SR physics, because in a Cliffordian world, "flat-spacetime physics" is a contradiction in terms. There's no such animal. But Einstein was in a hurry, reportedly working himself to the edge of a nervous breakdown trying to be the first person to produce a fully-functioning general theory of relativity, and he took a short-cut – it was easier to graft special relativity into the model than to have to derive all the equations of motion of inertial physics once again, from scratch, in the context of general relativity.

>he said that physicists should not try to build fundamental theories that ignore the principle of general relativity (background independence) and gravity, as if special relativity was perfectly valid (which most physicists of the time were doing).

And which he himself had done when designing his general theory!
Einstein, 1950::
:: I do not see any reason to assume that the heuristic significance of the principle of general relativity is restricted to gravitation and that the rest of physics can be dealt with separately on the basis of special relativity, with the hope that later on the whole may be fitted consistently into a general relativistic scheme.

… which is exactly what he'd done when devising his own "general relativistic scheme" in 1915/16 ...

:: I do not think that such an attitude, although historically understandable, can be objectively justified.

… so while it had been reasonable to try this approach in 1915, with the benefit of hindsight, looking back from 1950, the 1915 approach could no longer be defended.

:: The comparative smallness of what we know today as gravitational effects is not a conclusive reason for ignoring the principle of general relativity in theoretical investigations of a fundamental character. In other words, I do not believe that it is justifiable to ask: What would physics look like without gravitation? ...

… and if it's not justifiable to ask “What would physics look like without gravitation?”, then the concept of special relativity is no longer justifiable, because SR is the answer (for relativistic inertial physics) to that very question.

>Indeed, modern speculative ideas for fundamental theories, such as string theory, involve spacetime curvature at the most fundamental level (compactifying the extra-dimensions in accord with the generalized version of Einstein's field equations), and they strive for background independence.

Yes, but in order to pass peer review, C.M. Will's sets a criterion which any gravitational theory has to pass to be considered credible: that it reduce //exactly// to SR physics. This is why, although most of the mathematical machinery required for a gravitomagnetic general theory of relativity has probably already been worked out by the quantum gravity guys (for acoustic metrics), it can't be presented as a successor theory to GR1915/1916/1960, because in order to encompass proper statistical mechanics and QM, it //has// to diverge from special relativity. Which is apparently still Not Permitted by our Peer-review Overlords.

The 1905 theory is like a rotten chunk of old legacy code embedded in a modern program, screwing everything up. Einstein spotted the potential problem back in 1950, but the community didn't want to listen, and by the time that matters came to a head in 1960, Einstein was dead, and they couldn't ask him how he thought GR should be rewritten to fix the problem. So instead, they bet their reputations on SR being correct "without a shadow of a doubt", and that's why relativity theory has been stuck in the doldrums for the last half-century.

The logical and mathematical barriers to a full theory of quantum gravity really don't appear to be that difficult. The problems that we don't appear to be able to solve are the social/psychological/political ones.

> But, again, no one denies that special relativity is valid within its domain of applicability. Your underlying thesis seems to be to refute special relativity in its normal domain,

Yep. Gravitational theory forces the application of the PoR to moving gravitational sources to be an exercise in curved spacetime rather than flat spacetime, this necessarily leads to a solution other than Minkowski spacetime (even if one manually "blanks" the static gravitational field components), this means that we instead end up with a "Cliffordian" general theory of relativity in which all the masses are associated with velocity-dependent curvatures, and then … thanks to wave theory combined with the PoR … that same non-SR solution then has to apply not just to strong-gravity bodies but to everything.

If special relativity is the wrong theory of relativity for describing the simple relative motion of widely-separated strong-gravity sources, then it's the wrong theory of relativity, period.

That's the logic of it, and there doesn't seem to be a valid counterargument.

>but that thesis is completely unfounded and contradicted by abundant experimental evidence.

No, it's really, honestly not. Not if you do the math.

Maybe 95% of the experimental evidence commonly presented as supporting special relativity works equally well as evidence for the alternative equations, as-is … and in the comparatively small number of experimental cases where there may actually be a detectable difference between the SR equations and the “redder” sets used by gravitomagnetic theories … it turns out that popular C20th SR test theory instructed experimenters to treat any excess redshifts as representing theoretically unimportant experimental errors with no deeper significance, to be discarded or calibrated away.

So, I'm afraid that due to shortcomings of C20th test theory, neither of us is in a position to say for sure which theory(ies) of relativity make better or worse matches to reality. The data's essentially lost.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

On Sunday, 21 May 2017 22:07:19 UTC+1, The Starmaker wrote:
>...

>
> Without reading all your stupid post and just going by the Subject
> heading of your post...
>

> ...

>
>
> And that is just based on the Subject heading!
>
> why bother going beyond that?

I'm choosing to assume that the guy who wrote this might be about twelve years old, and that it'd therefore be mean of me to post the sort of reply that it'd otherwise seem to deserve.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Poutnik]

On 05/22/2017 05:13 AM, Eric Baird wrote:

> [...] Yes, but the devil is in the details. SR requires the region to be //perfectly// flat,

>and that condition is only satisfied if the region in question
> doesn't contain particles whizzing past each other

> at relativistically significant speeds. [...]

With this approach you can also say
the both Galileo relativity and Newton mechanics
require zero speed, otherwise there are relativistic effects.

SR does not require the region to be //perfectly// flat.

All reality models of physical theories
are better or worse approximations,
with unknown deviations hidden in measurement noise,
or known ones being at negligible level.

SR requires the deviations of space-time flatness
caused by gravity is negligible for the purpose.

Same as Newton mechanics requires
the deviations wrt its model caused by high speed
is negligible for the purpose.

Curve approximation by the tangent line requires
the curve deviation wrt the line
is negligible for given purpose.

[Poutnik]

On 05/22/2017 08:07 AM, Poutnik wrote:
>
> SR does not require the region to be //perfectly// flat.
>
> All reality models of physical theories
> are better or worse approximations,
> with unknown deviations hidden in measurement noise,
> or known ones being at negligible level.
>
> SR requires the deviations of space-time flatness
> caused by gravity is negligible for the purpose.

I.e, SR approaximates the space-time by flat space-time.

If the approximation error is within measurement noise,
it is still perfect.

If the approximation error
is out of measurement noise, but at acceptable level,
or if prediction difference is acceptable,
it is still good enough for given purpose.

[danco...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, May 21, 2017 at 8:13:35 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> On Saturday, 20 May 2017 17:00:13 UTC+1, danco...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Yes, this is the conventional mainstream view, i.e., that special relativity (Lorentz invariance) is perfectly correct only in the limit of vanishing gravitational curvature, which of course is not exactly achieved anywhere, because there is non-zero gravitational curvature everywhere. However, even on a highly curved surface, if we focus on a sufficiently small region, it is approximately flat.
>

> Yes, but the devil is in the details. SR requires the region to be //perfectly// flat...

No, that's absurd. If it were true, special relativity would be completely useless, whereas in fact it is among the best confirmed theories of modern science. It is only necessary for the spacetime curvature to be sufficiently small, which is the case as long as the gravitational potential doesn't change significantly over the region of interest.

> That condition is only satisfied if the region in

> question doesn't contain particles whizzing past
> each other at relativistically significant speeds.

Not true at all. As noted, the strength is gravity for a proton is 40 orders of magnitude smaller than the force of electromagnetism, and even when moving at relativistic speeds the gravitational curvature is negligible. Also, it's the mass-energy current that matters. You can't create a black hole simply by linearly accelerating a particle.

> In a fully gravitomagnetic theory of relativity, //all//

> physics is curvature-based...

Those words have no scientific meaning. Note that your paper is self-defeating, because you refer to tilting light cones based on general relativity, etc., but general relativity reduces to special relativity locally at every event, so you cannot use it to disprove local Lorentz invariance.

> Another interpretation of why SR //appears// to be
> so successful would be that since the relativistic
> family of potential Lorentzlike solutions are separated
> by Lorentzlike factors ( [1-vv/cc]^x ), then, since these
> factors have a tendency to cancel out, most tests of
> special relativity would still appear highly successful
> even if the actual equations were //not// those of SR,
> but those of a different member of the family.

No, tests of Lorentz invariance have long ago been precise enough to conclusively rule of the other theories you have in mind. (For example, you completely misunderstand the relativistic Doppler effect, and are unaware of how it has been tested, and how your alternate ideas were ruled out.)

> This 1960 change to the accepted interpretation of
> the GPoR's validity for rotating bodies is documented
> in the 1960 Schild paper, cited as reference number 3.

The Schild paper is just silly, and not at all significant. It merely represents another in a long series of papers in which various authors describe their understandings (and in many cases their misunderstandings) of the foundations of general relativity. The idea that it represents a watershed as you describe is preposterous.

[delete silly misunderstandings of Einstein's 1950 comments]

> The 1905 theory is like a rotten chunk of old legacy
> code embedded in a modern program, screwing everything up.

You clearly don't understand special relativity (let alone general relativity).

> The logical and mathematical barriers to a full
> theory of quantum gravity really don't appear to
> be that difficult. The problems that we don't appear
> to be able to solve are the social/psychological/political
> ones.

That's just kooky.

> If special relativity is the wrong theory of relativity
> for describing the simple relative motion of widely-
> separated strong-gravity sources, then it's the wrong
> theory of relativity, period. That's the logic of it,
> and there doesn't seem to be a valid counterargument.

There is a very strong counter-argument... it's called modern science. Again, general relativity gives the best known account of gravitational phenomena, weak and strong. And spacetime is locally Lorentz invariant in general relativity (i.e., special relativity applies).

[Dono,]

On Sunday, May 21, 2017 at 8:13:35 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
>
> Yes, but the devil is in the details. SR requires the region to be //perfectly// flat, and that condition is only satisfied if the region in question doesn't contain particles whizzing past each other at relativistically significant speeds. Technically, it's only satisfied if the region contains no particles at all.

Bullshit

Look at all the experiments executed IN THE GRAVITATIONAL FIELD of the EARTH, THEY ALL AGREE WITH SR.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/experiments.html

You have been writing this BS that no one cares about for years.

[Seki Ushisa]

Dono, wrote:

> On Sunday, May 21, 2017 at 8:13:35 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
>>
>> Yes, but the devil is in the details. SR requires the region to be
>> //perfectly// flat, and that condition is only satisfied if the region
>> in question doesn't contain particles whizzing past each other at
>> relativistically significant speeds. Technically, it's only satisfied
>> if the region contains no particles at all.
>
> Bullshit

Excellent point, SR demands no flatness anywhere.

[The Starmaker]

Eric Baird wrote:
>
> On Sunday, 21 May 2017 22:07:19 UTC+1, The Starmaker wrote:
> >...
> >
> > Without reading all your stupid post and just going by the Subject
> > heading of your post...
> >
> > ...
> >
> >
> > And that is just based on the Subject heading!
> >
> > why bother going beyond that?
>
> I'm choosing to assume that the guy who wrote this might be about twelve years old, and that it'd therefore be mean of me to post the sort of reply that it'd otherwise seem to deserve.

galaxies weren't discovered untill 1929.

[Eric Baird]

Hi Poutnik!

On Monday, 22 May 2017 07:07:16 UTC+1, Poutnik wrote:
> On 05/22/2017 05:13 AM, Eric Baird wrote:
>
> > [...] Yes, but the devil is in the details. SR requires the region to be //perfectly// flat,
> >and that condition is only satisfied if the region in question
> > doesn't contain particles whizzing past each other
> > at relativistically significant speeds. [...]
>
> With this approach you can also say
> the both Galileo relativity and Newton mechanics
> require zero speed, otherwise there are relativistic effects.

Actually, when it comes to NM and light-propagation, I agree! Newtonian optics was never quite geometrically consistent, which is one of the reasons why we saw an explosion of aether theories in the late Nineteenth Century, followed by Special Relativity.
Newtonian physics was already considered to be “broken” with regard to light-propagation by the late C19th, which made it much easier for people to propose alternative models.

----

My view of Newtonian physics is that it wasn't so much broken as incomplete – specifically, Newtonian optics wasn't compatible with flat spacetime.

To visualise why, imagine a perfectly reflecting hollow sphere with a transponder or second reflector at the centre, and EM pulses bouncing back and forth as spherical wavefronts between the centre and perimeter reflectors. If all parts of the reflected wave returns to their origin at the same moment, in phase, then the reflector can be described as being spherical.

If we now travel past the device at high speed, without disturbing its internal physics, the reflector is now receiving pulses from a centre-source at one location in space, and refocussing it at the same centre-source, at a different position (the sphere having moved while the light was in-flight).

So the moving outer reflector is now described as having the properties of an elongated ellipsoid, receiving light from one focal point and reconverging it at the other.
The elliptical cross-section of the shape lets us read off all the angles of individual rays, giving the relativistic aberration formula, while the change in length of the individual rays gives us the Doppler shift seen at any angle.

With these two sets of information, we have enough data to construct an entire relativistic theory.


Unfortunately, while the angle-changes are fixed, the frequency/wavelength-changes depend on how the shape of the object appears to change with velocity, which is theory-dependent ...

1. If we decide that the distance between the focii is simply the distance that the sphere travels between emitting and refocusing a single pulse, then we get the old fixed-aether Doppler predictions but in a relativistic context. This doesn't correspond to any known theory. And the predictions are pretty bad.

2. If we decide that the width of the ellipse is constant, then we get the relationships of special relativity. This is the unique solution for flat spacetime – the interior volume of the elongated ellipsoid can be packed back into its original volume (the ellipse cross-section converted back to a circle) by a simple Lorentz contraction of the x-axis, which also contracts the distance between the focii so that they now correspond to the nominal distance travelled.

Every light-ray distance in (2) is longer than its counterpart in (1) by the Lorentz factor (SR's Lorentz redshift). The contraction can also be interpreted as a tilting of the moving body's definitions of simultaneity (Minkowski spacetime).

3. However, if we construct the ellipse using the relationships of Newtonian optics, then since every ray under NO is assigned a wavelength that is now longer than under SR by an additional Lorentz redshift (because NO's predictions are redder than SR's), this means that to compact the magnified ellipse (3) back into //its// original outline, you have to allow the ray-lengths to project out of the plane, forming a shape that looks like a tilted gravitational well, with the depth and strength of tilt giving the direction and magnitude of motion.

So Newtonian physics didn't work geometrically against a flat background, and it wasn't compatible with wave theory unless we used its relationships to essentially create a curved-spacetime gravitomagnetic general theory of relativity around it – which would have been difficult to do in the C19th.

Consequently, the standard C19th implementation of Newtonian physics to light was "ballistic emission theory" (“ET”, “BET”), which gave up on the idea of a consistent light-metric altogether, allowed light-signals to overtake each other along the same paths, and produced really bad signal flight-time predictions (including the apparent scrambling of signals from double-stars) that were visibly at odds with observations (deSitter, 1913).

So yes, Newtonian physics, applied to optics, in the flat-spacetime context in which it was taught in the C19th, WAS a bad theory. And if people had accepted that it was a bad theory earlier, and analysed why, we might have had a general theory of relativity by the 1890s.

Science seems to be constantly being held back by people's unwillingness to question and critically analyse and criticise popular theories. Newton originally got his whole relationship between energy and wavelength ass-backwards, but English physicists weren't allowed to suggest that the mighty Newton had screwed up without risking their careers. When experiment proved that Newton had been wrong (in around 1800), the theory was quietly modified.
Nowadays, to criticise special relativity is to risk your career, and when the case for GR being inconsistent finally became unanswerable in 1960, again, it was quietly modified.

It seems that regardless of whether you live in the 1600s or the C20th, human behaviour is a constant.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 22 May 2017 07:07:16 UTC+1, Poutnik wrote:

> On 05/22/2017 05:13 AM, Eric Baird wrote:
>
>...
>

> SR does not require the region to be //perfectly// flat.

SR's derivation depends on the condition of flatness. It's built into the theory's second postulate, that the speed of light is constant – special relativity takes this to mean that the speed of light is //globally// constant, so that the lightspeed that I measure here-and-now can be extrapolated into other regions containing bodies with different states of motion. The condition of global c-constancy for all observers creates apparent logical conflicts, which SR then resolves, with the nature of the resolution then defining the rest of the theory.

If SR hadn't assumed flat spacetime and globally fixed c, we could have implemented the principle of relativity differently, with a variable-c light-dragging model in which lightspeed was always locally measured to be c wrt any particulate body, in that body's immediate vicinity, but then transitioned to c wrt other bodies with increased proximity to those other bodies. That would have been a gravitomagnetically-regulated theory of relativity, quite different to the 1905 theory.

>
> All reality models of physical theories
> are better or worse approximations,
> with unknown deviations hidden in measurement noise,
> or known ones being at negligible level.

Yes, but a theory has to be logically consistent in its most idealised state, otherwise it's self-falsifying before you even take a single measurement. If a theory doesn't have internal logical consistency, then it arguably doesn't have logically consistent testable predictions.
A general theory of relativity that incorporates SR physics as a complete subset, without modifications, does not have internal logical consistency.


If we want to make measurement noise part of the theory, we're getting into statistical mechanics and quantum theory. Namsrai did some work on stochastic QM which basically said that if we work backwards from the uncertainty principle and treat the possible measurements of a particle's position, energy and momentum as a classical field, we can derive a hypothetical underlying field that exists below the quantisation measurement threshold, and create a classical model which, when quantised, yields QM.

The shape that Namsrai drew for the smoothed massenergy and momentum of the particle was the shape of a gravitational field surrounding the particle, with a pronounced gravitomagnetic component. A smoothed mass-field effectively //is// a gravitational field, and a momentum-field effectively //is// a gravitomagnetic field, so if we take Namsrai's interpretation literally, QM experiments are continually showing us the existence of gravitational and gravitomagnetic fields around particles.

So unifying classical and quantum theory is not necessarily all that difficult. You just can't do it if SR is part of your classical model, because SR-based theory doesn't quantise cleanly to QM. It has the wrong behaviours and generates the wrong causal structure.

>
> SR requires the deviations of space-time flatness
> caused by gravity is negligible for the purpose.

In terms of experimental physics, perhaps.

But in terms of theoretical physics, SR requires the deviations caused by the presence and/or motion of bodies to be _exactly zero_. It's based on extrapolating from the behaviour of light in a vacuum, and if you add particles, you no longer have a vacuum but a particulate medium … and as we all know, a moving particulate medium physically drags light and creates measurable lightspeed anisotropies, which breaks SR's geometrical description and definitions, and its core assumption that the motion of a source of observer has no effect on the propagation of light.

The variations in lightspeeds caused by moving clouds of gas, or blocks of glass, or the visor of an astronaut's spacesuit helmet make these technically exercises in curved lightbeam geometry, and SR doesn't deal with curvature.


The reason why Minkowski spacetime and special relativity are so revered by people who do mathematical physics, to the extent that they are considered fundamental “truth”, is because the SR/MS system is mathematically and geometrically //perfect//, with no free parameters, variables or "fudge factors". It can't be "fixed up" – it's either true or it's false.

The problem is it can't be true.

>
> Same as Newton mechanics requires
> the deviations wrt its model caused by high speed
> is negligible for the purpose.

.. and I regard the physics community as also having been apparently a bit negligent for not properly analysing Newtonian mechanics and Newtonian optics.

> Curve approximation by the tangent line requires
> the curve deviation wrt the line
> is negligible for given purpose.

Depends on "given purpose". If a theory is proposed that depends on certain geometrical idealisations which we know not to be completely correct, it's supposed to be standard practice to analyse how the structure of the theory changes when those idealisations are relaxed. Some theories turn out to be “robust” to perturbations of their idealisations, others completely self-destruct in response to the tiniest deviation from perfection (e.g., the version of Hoyle's steady-state theory famously destroyed by Hawking).

The way that special relativity reacts when you allow deviations from flat spacetime is slightly unusual. Minkowski spacetime breaks, because the system no longer works in the presence of gravitomagnetic effects – the numbers no longer match, the lines no longer meet up where they're supposed to, and the proofs are no longer proofs. In theoretical terms, it's a "hard break".

But from an experimenter's point of view, the problem isn't immediately visible because for many experiments, the breakdown has no obvious physical consequences.

Here's how this works:

Suppose that we have a hydrogen atom inhabiting a cubic lightyear of otherwise empty space, at the edge of which is a second hydrogen atom. They exchange signals.
Clearly, the vanishingly tiny region in which the atoms' gravitational fields apply is so absurdly small, that that it seems quite stupid to think of the region as not being flat. If we map out the region using signals sent between the atoms, the flight-time variations due to curvature effectively don't exist. The departure from flatness isn't measurable

However ...
… If we're calculating the energy and momentum of the signals, and how those things change with relative velocity, then a moving gravitational field is associated with gravitomagnetic curvature, which has an associated gravitational potential that ought to change the energy and momentum of light crossing it as it enters of leaves the atom, and that energy-change ought to be the same regardless of how tiny the spatial extent of the curvature happens to be. *

It changes the equations of motion.

If we take SR as our reference starting-point for relativity in flat spacetime, and refer to the SR predictions as [SR], then the addition of gravitomagnetic effects gives a modified shift prediction, of
[SR] × [1-vv/vv]^(gde/2), where the exponent (gde/2) of the additional Lorentzlike term describes the strength of the gravitomagnetic dragging effect at minimal distance from the particle.

We might expect (gde) to be vanishingly small, but for the extremal case of a moving black hole, with 100% light-dragging at its horizon we get (gde)=1, (gde/2)=0.5, the Lorentzlike modification to SR becomes a standard Lorentz factor, and we get a set of equations that are redder than those of special relativity for any given nominal velocity by an additional gamma factor.

This is no longer special relativity.

Our next obvious reaction is to say that perhaps this deviation from SR only applies for strong-gravity bodies … but the argument in that essay is that wave theory requires ==precisely the same== equations of motion to apply for any body whatsoever, irrespective of whether it's traditionally regarded as a strong-gravity or a weak-gravity body. So if the SR equations of motion aren't valid for a moving black hole (and apparently they can't be), then they are also not valid for a moving hydrogen atom surrounded by a cubic lightyear of empty space.


It seems that we have to pick a single value for (gde) that has to apply to all physics.

* If we pick a value of "zero" then we get to keep SR, but GR becomes logically inconsistent, and the resulting "crippled" GR refuses to mesh with QM. And the universe can't contain any gravitational fields.

* If we pick a value of "one" then we get a new super-duper gravitomagnetic general theory of relativity that seems to play well with QM, apparently finally giving us a theory of quantum gravity … but the price for all this wonderfulness is that special relativity is no longer fundamental foundation theory, it's just a close neighbour of the real equations.

It'd seem that, since our universe is thought to contain bodies bounded by gravitational horizons, that we have to set (gde) to exactly "one", which is the maximum possible departure from special relativity.

EXPERIMENTAL CONSEQUENCES

If the "real" equations of motion are redder than those of special relativity by an entire additional Lorentz factor, then why haven't we noticed it?

Well, in many (most?) experiments, there's no obvious physical consequence to the change. The change is really important for theoretical physics because (gde)=1 suddenly allows the existence of Hawking radiation, and we should be able to isolate the exact form of the equations and the real value of (gde) by doing composite shift comparison tests and extracting the strength of the gravitomagnetic effect … but in many experiments, the difference between SR and the replacement either has such a small effect that we'll have trouble noticing it, or there's no difference at all.

It seems counterintuitve that we could throw in an additional Lorentz redshift and see no experimental difference, but one has to remember that SR modifies the nominal distances, times and velocities in an experiment with a Lorentz remapping, and if we use the same basic rules for //re//-remapping to the new equation set, then, although there are different predicted results between theories for the same nominal velocity, the nominal velocity for a given experiment changes when we switch between theories, so the Lorentz difference in nominal velocity, and the Lorentz difference in predicted frequency for a given nominal velocity, have a habit of exactly cancelling out.

So E=mc^2 is an exact result regardless of whether we use SR, the full gravitomagnetic model or something in between, the point at which a muon with an known energy and rest mass decays according to SR is precisely the same under the gravitomagnetic model, and so on.

For a lot of physics, it doesn't actually matter whether SR is right or wrong, you'll get the same answers regardless of whether you use the "correct" equations or the SR flat-spacetime approximation.

Because of this, it's quite possible (perhaps even quite likely) that special relativity IS the wrong theory, and we've simply never noticed.


Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Tom Roberts]

On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to

> ResearchGate. [...]

You make so many errors here that I won't bother to waste more time on that.

> The gist of the argument is that the motion of a gravitational source must
> affect the propagation (and energy, and momentum) of light in the
> surrounding region, which shows up geometrically as a gravitomagnetic
> curvature effect ... so the "moving" gravitational body's associated
> relationships (e.g. between velocity and spectral shift) can't correspond to
> those of SR.

Of course not! NOBODY would expect SR to apply in such a situation. So why
bother to argue about it?

> The application of the principle of relativity to a moving high-gravity star
> has to result in a different set of relativistic equations to those of
> special relativity, because gravitomagnetic physics (the velocity-dependent
> curvature components associated with moving gravity-sources) isn't a fit to
> SR's idealised, simplified, flat Minkowski spacetime.

Yes. So what? GR applies, and seems to model that quite well.

> It's tempting to react to this by deciding that it doesn't matter, since SR
> only claims validity for cases in which gravity is considered negligible.

Yes, of course.

> Unfortunately there's a catch: Wave theory combined with the principle of
> relativity requires that //all// distant moving bodies obey a single agreed
> set of velocity-shift relationships, regardless of whether they are
> high-gravity or low-gravity.

WHAT is "wave theory"???? It seems to be a figment of your imagination, so I
cannot comment on it.

But I remark that the laws of physics must be independent of coordinates. This
does NOT mean there is "a single agreed set of velocity-shift relationships", it
just means the theories approximating those laws are independent of coordinates.

> If a camera sensor images a distant galaxy and then accelerates away before
> taking a second picture, the change in relative velocity needs to shift
> //all// the components in the two galaxy images by exactly the same ratio,
> regardless of the different gravitational environments of the various
> sources.

Hmmm. This is of course modeled as an effect on the PROPAGATION OF LIGHT, not as
an effect related to the sources in those galaxies.

> So if a distant neutron star obeys a different set of equations to those of
> the 1905 theory, then so must a distant hydrogen atom in the same
> line-of-sight.

Huh???? -- why argue against a straw-man? "the 1905 theory" is COMPLETELY
IRRELEVANT. For your example the relevant theory is GR plus classical
electrodynamics.

> And if the same equations of motion apply to distant and nearby objects, then
> a nearby hydrogen atom must obey those same non-SR equations, too.

Hmmmm. Measurement and experiment show that emissions from hydrogen atoms are
extremely well modeled by QED. How they are observed from far away depends on
how those emissions are affected by their propagation, and this is very well
modeled by GR.

> If we exist in a universe that allows gravitational masses to exist and to
> move, then special relativity's equations may //almost// be the real
> equations of motion, but they can't be quite correct.

And that is essentially what GR says.

> SR requires the region to be //perfectly// flat

Again, why argue against a straw man?

No physical theory is ever "perfect", and SR is IRRELEVANT. The real issue is:
are the conditions of this theory satisfied well enough so the approximation in
applying the theory is smaller than the resolution of the measurements. For many
experiments applying SR, the answer is a resounding yes.

> In a fully gravitomagnetic theory of relativity, //all// physics is
> curvature-based

Hmmmm. "gravitomagnetic" is the wrong word. But in any case, EVERY ONE of our
current fundamental theories of physics can be expressed via a Lagrangian that
is an integral of the scalar curvature of the relevant manifold. For GR the
relevant manifold is spacetime; for the standard model the manifold is a fiber
bundle over spacetime (and the fields are quantum).

> If the real equations were “redder and shorter” than those of special
> relativity by a Lorentzlike factor anywhere up to one complete additional
> gamma factor, then most SR testing would come out exactly the same.

This is just not true. SOME tests of SR are not sensitive to "extra factors of
gamma", but not all. Particle accelerators would not work if there were "an
extra factor of gamma". Kinematics in particle collisions would not work if
there were "an extra factor of gamma". These are among the best tests of SR we have.

And just making up theories with "extra factors of gamma"
is HOPELESS -- you need to satisfy coordinate independence,
and that imposes strong constraints on the structure of
valid physical theories. Indeed local Lorentz invariance
is the only way known today.

> in order to pass peer review, C.M. Will's sets a criterion which any
> gravitational theory has to pass to be considered credible: that it reduce
> //exactly// to SR physics.

This is another straw man. The true requirement is that a new theory has to pass
all the experimental tests that have already been performed (and that SR and GR
have already passed). The SIMPLEST way to ensure this is to have the new theory
reduce to SR and GR in the relevant limits. But that is by no means the only way
as you claim. Certainly any paper describing a new theory that did not reduce to
SR/GR could still pass muster by describing how it agrees with those experiments.

> Science seems to be constantly being held back by people's unwillingness to
> question and critically analyse and criticise popular theories.

Another straw man. ALL of the major advances in physics have come from such
WILLINGNESS. If you think abut it, there is no possible way for theoretical
physics to advance without discarding or modifying existing theories.
Criticizing existing theories is part and parcel of theoretical physics, and has
always been so.

> SR's derivation depends on the condition of flatness.

Yes, though differently than you presume (it's due to the meaning of "inertial
frame").

> If SR hadn't assumed flat spacetime and globally fixed c, we could have
> implemented the principle of relativity differently, with a variable-c
> light-dragging model in which lightspeed was always locally measured to be c
> wrt any particulate body, in that body's immediate vicinity, but then
> transitioned to c wrt other bodies with increased proximity to those other
> bodies.

Hmmm. You still focus on straw-man arguments. SR is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT -- its
ONLY use is as the local limit of GR (for which it is extremely valuable, of
course). GR does much of what you say here, but you seem hung up on "particulate
body" and "dragging", which are not essential in GR. But indeed in GR the LOCAL
vacuum speed of light is c, but over non-local distances it can vary; in the
vicinity of moving massive objects, it varies in a manner similar to "dragging".

Tom Roberts

[Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn]

The ’nym-shifting troll wrote as “Seki Ushisa”:

Its application does require flatness of spacetime, i.e. spacetime curvature
zero. That, however, does not require the region of spacetime to be void of
particles.

Fortunately, GR reduces to SR in *local* regimes where the energy density is
comparably *small* as there the spacetime is *approximately* flat. That is,
SR can serve as a good approximation then the same as Newtonian mechanics
can serve as a good approximation of mechanics where speeds much lower than
the speed of light are concerned: in those regimes, the Lorentz
transformation reduces to the Galilean transformation.

*PLONK*

--
PointedEars

Twitter: @PointedEars2
Please do not cc me. / Bitte keine Kopien per E-Mail.

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 22 May 2017 07:18:23 UTC+1, danco...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Sunday, May 21, 2017 at 8:13:35 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> > On Saturday, 20 May 2017 17:00:13 UTC+1, danco...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > Yes, this is the conventional mainstream view, i.e., that special relativity (Lorentz invariance) is perfectly correct only in the limit of vanishing gravitational curvature, which of course is not exactly achieved anywhere, because there is non-zero gravitational curvature everywhere. However, even on a highly curved surface, if we focus on a sufficiently small region, it is approximately flat.
> >
> > Yes, but the devil is in the details. SR requires the region to be //perfectly// flat...
>
> No, that's absurd.

A thing can be both absurd and true.

>If it were true, special relativity would be completely useless, whereas in fact it is among the best confirmed theories of modern science.

No, that's demonstrably wrong, see my last answer to Poutnik – if the SR relationships are modified by an additional Lorentz redshift, along with a matching redefinition of SR distances and times, most SR experiments would come out exactly the same or with differences so small that they'd usually be too small to measure.

If special relativity were wrong in this way, it'd still //appear// to be "among the best confirmed theories of modern science", as long as people didn't check the fine detail of how the experiments were carried out. Which people generally don't.

Go away and do the calculations. You'll find that I'm correct.

>It is only necessary for the spacetime curvature to be sufficiently small, which is the case as long as the gravitational potential doesn't change significantly over the region of interest.
>
> > That condition is only satisfied if the region in
> > question doesn't contain particles whizzing past
> > each other at relativistically significant speeds.
>
> Not true at all. As noted, the strength is gravity for a proton is 40 orders of magnitude smaller than the force of electromagnetism, and even when moving at relativistic speeds the gravitational curvature is negligible. Also, it's the mass-energy current that matters. You can't create a black hole simply by linearly accelerating a particle.

In the sort of universe suggested by William Kingdon Clifford (1845-1879), all physics is curvature. In a Cliffordian universe, there is no legitimate reduction from a general theory to flat-spacetime physics, because in a CU, there is no such thing as flat-spacetime physics.

A CU represents a logical counterexample to the general belief that a curved-spacetime theory //must// reduce to the physics of special relativity over small regions.
So the "inevitable reduction to SR" argument can't be regarded as a proof unless one can first show either that Cliffordian universes can't exist, or can't work, or (failing that) that we don't appear to inhabit one.

If you'd like to give me a reason //why// we can be confident that we don't live in a Cliffordian universe, then I'm listening. Otherwise ...

> > In a fully gravitomagnetic theory of relativity, //all//
> > physics is curvature-based...
>
> Those words have no scientific meaning.

> Note that your paper is self-defeating, because you refer to tilting light cones based on general relativity, etc., but general relativity reduces to special relativity locally at every event, so you cannot use it to disprove local Lorentz invariance.

Again, you seem to be showing a binary "either/or" attitude, in which someone either has to accept GR1960 as-is, or reject everything to do with it, accept SR completely, or reject all experimental results commonly associated with it.
That's the George W. Bush "you're either with us or against us" argument, and I'm not buying into it. That's not how things work.

I consider myself a relativist, a strong proponent of the general principle of relativity, and a big fan of the idea of general relativity. I consider the Mach/Einstein concept of general relativity to be one of the greatest achievements of the human species of the last hundred-ish years.

However, just as Newton messed up his system of the world by getting his energy/wavelength relationships inverted, Einstein rushed the construction of his general theory and tried to develop it as an incremental system with SR as a foundation, instead of taking maybe another decade or two to develop a proper system from scratch.

These things happen. It's one of the costs of working right at the cutting edge of theoretical physics that one can make mistakes that nobody else notices, and then they become entrenched. Mistakes are an occupational hazard of theoretical physics – as they say in touch-typing classes, if you aren't making mistakes you aren't going fast enough, and Einstein was going very, very fast.

> > Another interpretation of why SR //appears// to be
> > so successful would be that since the relativistic
> > family of potential Lorentzlike solutions are separated
> > by Lorentzlike factors ( [1-vv/cc]^x ), then, since these
> > factors have a tendency to cancel out, most tests of
> > special relativity would still appear highly successful
> > even if the actual equations were //not// those of SR,
> > but those of a different member of the family.
>
> No, tests of Lorentz invariance have long ago been precise enough to conclusively rule of the other theories you have in mind.

I only know of one experiment that was designed outside standard test theory to distinguish between "different" relativistic solutions, it supported the LET/SR relationships but it had unresolved issues, and apparently nobody ever managed to replicate it afterwards. That one experiment (by a couple of aether theorists who believed that they were validating LET) appears to be the sum total of the experimental record's clear support for SR over the other equation-set.
And on the other hand, we have the Hasselkamp SR transverse test in which the hardware reported twice the SR redshift, but the experimenters deleted half the result on the grounds that their test theory didn't allow for the legal possibility of redshifts stronger than SR's. If Hasselkamp et al had had more time to do a second run, test theory would have told them that they were quite entitled to calibrate away the "impossible" excess redshift by adjusting their mirrors until the shift came back into the "proper" range, without having to report this in their experimental writeup.

So when it comes to trying to distinguish between different relativistic solutions, any experiments that used that same test theory as Hasselkamp et al have to be discarded. With few exceptions, you normally can't safely reanalyse experiments using a different test theory to the one under which the experiment was actually carried out. That's basic experimental discipline.

> (For example, you completely misunderstand the relativistic Doppler effect, and are unaware of how it has been tested, and how your alternate ideas were ruled out.)

No, I understand the SR relativistic Doppler effect, and I've probably devised a similar number of different derivations of it to the rest of the scientific community combined. I lost count after double-digits. I've also read though the entire English language experimental literature available through the British Library and Science Museum Library collections. I used to have a bookshelf of photocopied experimental papers on this subject that was about five feet long.

You seem to be working on the assumption that you know more about this specific subject that I do. So far, the sorts of things that you've been saying do not seem to support this assumption.

>
> > This 1960 change to the accepted interpretation of
> > the GPoR's validity for rotating bodies is documented
> > in the 1960 Schild paper, cited as reference number 3.
>
> The Schild paper is just silly, and not at all significant. It merely represents another in a long series of papers in which various authors describe their understandings (and in many cases their misunderstandings) of the foundations of general relativity. The idea that it represents a watershed as you describe is preposterous.

The history of relativity theory and experimental testing seems to include a lot of things that seem preposterous and absurd, but are nevertheless documented as having happened.

In the case of the Schild paper, regardless of whether one agrees with Schild's logic, it represents a part of the historical record, like the K-T boundary in geology. I originally found it when I was trying to find out why "Machian" arguments had gone so strongly out of favour and when. I'd already narrowed the date-range down to some time in the early 1960s, between January 1960 (Harwell paper) and maybe 1963-ish. The Schild paper in late 1960 stated that the previous view recently given in the Harwell paper had been considered correct up until then, but that after behind-the-scenes debate now had to be regarded as wrong, in order to defend SR. This passed peer-review, and does seem to have marked mark a change in general peer-review policy.

So we have (a) a change apparently happening sometime after January 1960, and (b) a peer-reviewed paper in 1960 explaining that the change //was// being made and why (because of controversy after the Jan 1960 paper).

Whether the Schild paper is "silly" or not is irrelevant – it's a contemporary peer-reviewed witness statement regarding what had supposedly just been happening in the community earlier that year, on that subject.

>
> [delete silly misunderstandings of Einstein's 1950 comments]
>
> > The 1905 theory is like a rotten chunk of old legacy
> > code embedded in a modern program, screwing everything up.
>
> You clearly don't understand special relativity (let alone general relativity).

I think the general rule in these sorts of debates is that the first person who resorts to making personal remarks is considered to have lost the argument.
It's generally counter-productive to scientific argument to start calling the other person stupid. It tends to lead to slanging matches ("You're stupid!" "No, YOU'RE stupid!"), which means that the actual scientific arguments get lost in the din, which works to the benefit of the person losing the argument.

Hence the rule. The first person to say "Go read a book", "You're obviously a moron" etc. is declared the loser.

When it comes to SR, I sometimes find myself explaining some of the more obscure aspects of it to people who'd previously considered themselves experts. In engineering, there's a saying that you can't really claim to fully understand a machine until you know how to break it. I know how to break it.

>
> > The logical and mathematical barriers to a full
> > theory of quantum gravity really don't appear to
> > be that difficult. The problems that we don't appear
> > to be able to solve are the social/psychological/political
> > ones.
>
> That's just kooky.
>
> > If special relativity is the wrong theory of relativity
> > for describing the simple relative motion of widely-
> > separated strong-gravity sources, then it's the wrong
> > theory of relativity, period. That's the logic of it,
> > and there doesn't seem to be a valid counterargument.
>
> There is a very strong counter-argument... it's called modern science.

Pff. Empty posturing.

> Again, general relativity gives the best known account of gravitational phenomena, weak and strong.

That doesn't mean that it's optimal, or that it's not still a very bad theory! :) :) :)

The published assessment criteria for credible gravitational models tend to say that no theory can be accepted as "credible" unless it reduces exactly to SR physics. The argument in the essay says that any such gravitational theory then inevitably has to be logically inconsistent. And other arguments suggest that any such theory also has to be incompatible with QM.

So if the acceptance criteria only allows though "bad" and incompatible gravitational theories, the accolade of being the best and //most popular// bad and incompatible theory in not necessarily something to be proud of.

> And spacetime is locally Lorentz invariant in general relativity (i.e., special relativity applies).

That's what makes GR1960 incompatible with the GPoR and with quantum mechanics.

It's a simple choice:

* If you want SR, you can't also have a theory of quantum gravity. You can't even have a logically consistent general theory of relativity that obeys the GPoR.

* If you want QG, and a proper general theory that works – if you're a full-blown subscriber to the idea that the Principle of Relativity is fundamental and general – then you have to let special relativity go.

SR an old theory, based on idealised clunky flat geometry and outmoded, unsophisticated and obsolete concepts. //Global// c-constancy, referred to by Einstein in 1905 as "the law of the constancy of light" is simply not a law of physics. Eliminate global-c from your list of things that a theory of inertial physics needs to support, and SR disappears.

Let it die, and move on.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

... Second postulate. "Constancy of the speed of light". Interpreted by SR to mean global c-constancy rather than just local c-constancy.

Global c-constancy means that an observer's local c extrapolates out to cover the whole region, making the region's lightbeam geometry flat.

Without global-c / flat spacetime, we could have implemented the principle of relativity differently, for instance as a relativistic dragged-aether theory updating Fresnel's old model. To eliminate that sort of possibility, and leave SR/Minkowski spacetime as the only possible relativistic option, we needed to impose the condition of global flatness. Without it, we wouldn't have had a valid derivation, we'd have had to add some other additional postulate to narrow down the possibilities to just one.

Have a nice day,
Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[danco...@gmail.com]

On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 5:19:13 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> > > SR requires the region to be //perfectly// flat...
> >

> > No, that's absurd. If it were true, special relativity would be completely useless, whereas in fact it is among the best confirmed theories of modern science.
>
> No, that's demonstrably wrong...

Again, special relativity is among the best confirmed theories of modern science. Violations of local Lorentz invariance have been sought for a hundred years, and no such violation has ever been detected.

> If the SR relationships are modified... along with a

> matching redefinition of SR distances and times, most

> SR experiments would come out exactly the same...

Obviously we can always re-define variables and re-write equations in ways that are superficially different but equivalent. That's trivial, and has no physical significance. This doesn't invalidate special relativity, i.e., local Lorentz invariance.

> Go away and do the calculations. You'll find that I'm correct.

You haven't described any calculations that would be physically distinct from special relativity (and not contradicted by experiment).

> In a Cliffordian universe, there is no legitimate reduction

> from a general theory to flat-spacetime physics...

You have not defined a "Cliffordian universe" (nor, of course, did Clifford), nor a "general theory", so your words have no scientific content. (Please note that stating "everything is curvature" does not constitute a scientifically meaningful definition.)

> If you'd like to give me a reason //why// we can be confident
> that we don't live in a Cliffordian universe, then I'm listening.

Until/unless you define "Cliffordian universe" in a physically meaningful way, there's nothing to be said about it.

> You seem to be showing a binary "either/or" attitude, in which someone either has to accept GR1960 as-is, or reject everything to do with it, accept SR completely, or reject all experimental results commonly associated with it.

Not at all. First, "GR1960" is a figment of your imagination, as explained previously. The general theory of relativity has not changed in physical content since 1915. Second, my only binary attitude is in saying that you are being self-contradictory when you base your explanation of why special relativity is (locally) invalid on general relativity, which entails the local validity of special relativity.

> I only know of one experiment that was designed
> outside standard test theory to distinguish between
> "different" relativistic solutions, it supported the

> LET/SR relationships but it had unresolved issues...

Ives-Stilwell is sufficient to disprove you ideas, but that isn't the only - nor even the best - experimental refutation of your "extra gamma factor". It takes only the every-day dynamics in particle accelerators to confirm the relativistic expression for kinetic energy, which is consistent only with standard Lorentz invariance.

[snip kooky "Hasselkamp" claims]]

> I understand the SR relativistic Doppler effect...

We strongly disagree about that.

> In the case of the Schild paper, regardless of whether
> one agrees with Schild's logic, it represents a part of

> the historical record...

Sure, the paper exists, along with thousands of other papers of varying quality, but it has no significance for the modern understanding or interpretation of general relativity.

> It's generally counter-productive to scientific argument
> to start calling the other person stupid.

I haven't called you stupid. The situation I see is that you're basing this mountain of verbiage about the need for a "Cliffordian universe" in which the evil special relativity is banished (meaning local Lorentz invariance is violated) on your belief that special relativity is invalid (within its domain of applicability). Now, without getting into a big tutorial on special relativity (which you would ignore anyway), I just commented that I think you don't understand special relativity, so your whole project is not well motivated. Rather than continuing to hone your universal Cliffordian rhetoric and assuring everyone how easy it is to quantize gravity, I think your time would be better spent trying to really understand special relativity. Yes, I relatize you think you already understand it, but I see that as the biggest obstacle to you actually ever understanding it.

> The published assessment criteria for credible gravitational models tend to say that no theory can be accepted as "credible" unless it reduces exactly to SR physics.

To be more precise, no theory is credible that predicts a violation of local Lorentz invariance that exceeds to observational bounds already established, which are extremely tight. Your ideas are not even close to meeting this requirement.

> //Global// c-constancy, referred to by Einstein in 1905
> as "the law of the constancy of light" is simply not a law
> of physics.

Of course it isn't. That's what Einstein pointed out in the years between 1907 and 1911. My goodness. Are you really under the impression that anyone thinks it is? The very starting point of Einstein's quest in 1907 was the realization that the existence of gravitation and the equivalence principle was incompatible with the global invariance of light speed, or, more precisely, with the existence of global flat coordinate systems.

[The Starmaker]

danco...@gmail.com wrote:

>
> On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 5:19:13 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> > > > SR requires the region to be //perfectly// flat...
> > >

> > > No, that's absurd. If it were true, special relativity would be completely useless, whereas in fact it is among the best confirmed theories of modern science.
> >
> > No, that's demonstrably wrong...
>
> Again, special relativity is among the best confirmed theories of modern science.


that's a lie.

[Poutnik]

Dne 22/05/2017 v 22:35 Eric Baird napsal(a):

> Hi Poutnik!
>
> On Monday, 22 May 2017 07:07:16 UTC+1, Poutnik wrote:
>> On 05/22/2017 05:13 AM, Eric Baird wrote:
>>
>>> [...] Yes, but the devil is in the details. SR requires the region to be //perfectly// flat,
>>> and that condition is only satisfied if the region in question
>>> doesn't contain particles whizzing past each other
>>> at relativistically significant speeds. [...]
>>
>> With this approach you can also say
>> the both Galileo relativity and Newton mechanics
>> require zero speed, otherwise there are relativistic effects.
>
> Actually, when it comes to NM and light-propagation, I agree! Newtonian optics was never quite geometrically consistent, which is one of the reasons why we saw an explosion of aether theories in the late Nineteenth Century, followed by Special Relativity.
> Newtonian physics was already considered to be “broken” with regard to light-propagation by the late C19th, which made it much easier for people to propose alternative models.
>

[...]

The relation of NM and light was not my point.

In had in mind analogies of
deviations due relativistic effect for NM
and
deviations due ST non-flatness for SR.

Both theories are considered valid in domains
these deviations are negligible.

[Poutnik]

On 05/22/2017 10:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> On Monday, 22 May 2017 07:07:16 UTC+1, Poutnik wrote:
>> On 05/22/2017 05:13 AM, Eric Baird wrote:
>>
>> ...
>>
>> SR does not require the region to be //perfectly// flat.
>
> SR's derivation depends on the condition of flatness.
> It's built into the theory's second postulate,
> that the speed of light is constant – special relativity takes this
> to mean that the speed of light is //globally// constant,
> so that the lightspeed that I measure here-and-now
> can be extrapolated into other regions containing bodies
> with different states of motion.
> The condition of global c-constancy for all observers
> creates apparent logical conflicts, which SR then resolves,
> with the nature of the resolution then defining the rest of the theory.

There is no conflict.

The situation is fully analogical to line only geometrical world ( SR )
and the world with curves ( GR ),
with local tangent line approximation of curves
( SR being the local GR approximation )

For low gravity or for not very high accuracy requirement
is the region of justified approximation quite large.

[Paparios]

Besides that, the application of SR in the LHC, with its 27 km size, and with particles circulating in a ring (and so being accelerated) is completely valid (time dilation and length contraction and the speed of light) because the curvature caused by Earth is insignificant.

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:
> On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> > Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to
> > ResearchGate. [...]
>
> You make so many errors here that I won't bother to waste more time on that.

Tom, the "rule" is that if you claim that a theory or argument contains errors, you have to be prepared to back that up with some sort of evidence or argument.

You don't get to claim that a thing is faulty, but say that you are too busy to say why. If you really don't have the time to devote to supporting a claim, then you either //don't// make the claim, or you qualify it, and present it as opinion ("I'd be surprised if this is right", "This looks terrible to me").

Unsupported claims, and claims where the author announces in advance that they won't be supplying any supporting/defending evidence or argument because they are too busy, can be indistinguishable from bullshit.

> > The gist of the argument is that the motion of a gravitational source must
> > affect the propagation (and energy, and momentum) of light in the
> > surrounding region, which shows up geometrically as a gravitomagnetic
> > curvature effect ... so the "moving" gravitational body's associated
> > relationships (e.g. between velocity and spectral shift) can't correspond to
> > those of SR.
>
> Of course not! NOBODY would expect SR to apply in such a situation. So why
> bother to argue about it?

... Because wave theory requires all distant objects to obey ==precisely the same== velocity-shift law, regardless of what local physics at the source happened to originally generate the light-signal.


So ... if the neutron star's light //does// change with relative motion by a velocity-shift formula that departs from the SR prediction (which the linked pieces seems to say is unavoidable), then it's a big deal, because wave theory then requires every other piece of particulate matter in the universe to follow exactly the same non-SR shift formula.

This doesn't seem to be negotiable or fudgeable. Either the SR relationship describes the isolated moving star's motion-shift //exactly//, or the non-SR relationship that the star follows applies everywhere, to gas clouds and galaxies and spaceships and planets and individual atoms.

Wave theory requires there to be a single, simple, universal velocity-shift relationship obeyed by all matter in the universe, and if that universal relationship is NOT the one given by SR, then SR is not correct foundation theory.

If the principle of relativity applies, but the PoR plus the assumption of flat spacetime leads to the wrong equations, then SR must be the wrong theory of relativity. Since the PoR plus flat spacetime leads //unavoidably// to SR, this tells us that in order to generate different equations, a correct theory of relativity, which generates the correct equations, must NOT use the "reduction to flat spacetime" argument. It has to apply curved-spacetime geometry right down to the level of basic inertial physics, and must apply curvature arguments "all the way down".


If you're asking "why we should bother" with these arguments, the answer is that it's because these arguments create a new generation of relativity theory that appears to be more powerful, more efficient and more logically consistent than what we currently have, and which seems to mesh with quantum theory and thermodynamics in ways that our current, creaky, patched, SR-based system can't ever hope to emulate.

> > The application of the principle of relativity to a moving high-gravity star
> > has to result in a different set of relativistic equations to those of
> > special relativity, because gravitomagnetic physics (the velocity-dependent
> > curvature components associated with moving gravity-sources) isn't a fit to
> > SR's idealised, simplified, flat Minkowski spacetime.
>
> Yes. So what? GR applies, and seems to model that quite well.

No, it really doesn't. Because wave theory plus gravity invalidates the SR relationships not just for strong-gravity bodies but for ==everything==.
So when the 1916 theory says that the physics of a small free-fall region in a larger gravitational field must reduces to inertial physics, the inertial physics that it reduces to is the //wrong// inertial physics.

GR1916 was designed around the assumption that the SR relationships were fundamentally correct, and this had knock-on consequences for other aspects of the theory ... for instance, if we used the redder gravitomagnetism-compatible equations, a body still had a horizon at r=2m, but it gave off indirect radiation in agreement with QM and thermodynamics. GR1916 has a different type of horizon whose shifts reduce to the SR shift relationships, and this is why it predicts that gravitational horizons must be perfectly black, in disagreement with QM and thermodynamics.

When I was a kid, the saying used to be that in physics you are allowed to devise a theory that disagrees with almost anything, but if it disagrees with thermodynamics, it's junk.

By that standard, GR1916/1960 is junk science.

Another mainstream-ish evaluation criterion was given in MTW's "Gravitation" in the early 1970s: if a gravitational theory doesn't mesh with QM, then (according to MTW), it's so bad that it's not even worth considering.

GR1916/1960 doesn't mesh with QM. According to Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, that automatically makes it a theoretical failure.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[danco...@gmail.com]

On Monday, July 17, 2017 at 7:20:39 AM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> The gist of the argument is that the motion of a

> gravitational source must affect the propagation of
> light in the surrounding region... so the "moving"

> gravitational body's associated relationships (e.g.
> between velocity and spectral shift) can't correspond
> to those of SR.

It goes without saying that in the near field, where curvature (i.e., changes in gravitational potential) is significant, we must use general relativity, but in the far field the curvature is negligible, so special relativity applies. (It is also true that special relativity applies over any sufficiently small region of space-time, even in the near field, but we usually work over larger regions.)

> Wave theory requires all distant objects to obey

> ==precisely the same== velocity-shift law, regardless
> of what local physics at the source happened to originally
> generate the light-signal.

Well, in the far field, where curvature is negligible, the Doppler formula of special relativity applies to all propagation, regardless of the source. We simply need to imagine control volumes enclosing the near-field regions of each object, and consider these enclosures to be the "objects". The relevant frequencies of light are the frequencies emanating from these enclosures. Studying how these waves are generated internally to each "object" is a separate subject. The point is that the Doppler formula if special relativity applies to this macroscopic behavior.

> If the neutron star's light //does// change with relative

> motion by a velocity-shift formula that departs from the SR

> prediction...

Well, it departs in the near field where curvature is significant, and where it is accurately described by general relativity (according to which the physics approaches that of special relativity over any sufficiently small region), but in the far field the Doppler formula of special relativity applies, regardless of the source.

> Either the SR relationship describes the isolated
> moving star's motion-shift //exactly//, or the
> non-SR relationship that the star follows applies

> everywhere, to ... individual atoms.

That is specious reasoning. The Doppler formula of special relativity applies to the far-field light emanated from any of those objects, and the deviations in the near field are described exactly by general relativity, according to which the physics reduces to special relativity over any sufficiently small region, or over any region of any size with sufficiently low curvature.

[xxei...@gmail.com]

On Monday, July 17, 2017 at 10:20:39 AM UTC-4, Eric Baird wrote:
> On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:
> > On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
>

> Eric Baird
> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

xxein: I agree with what you say in this thread completely. The main issue as I understand it (although you haven't said it) is the working form presented by SR/GR. It is observational theory (SR/GR) vs. a universal reality theory. The former uses proper times, distances etc. and as such it already distorts measurements inherent in observations. That and the associated, observed constancy of the speed of light. IOW, that all physics is local.

More importantly, if one considers that the GR model (curved space-time) is wrong, it invites a whole new ballgame. I have not heard of anyone challenging that assertation and wonder why not.

(I have been in communications with C. M. Will and know what you mean)

I have something wrt a model that I have been earnestly trying to disprove (despite any 'official view') for the last 27 years that I think would be entirely compatible with your thinking.

Although more than worthy enough to post, I do not wish to engage in a group discussion. If you would kindly email me at xxei...@gmail.com, I can describe it in short and simple terms. I don't know if physics@the brightonhub.com is the right way to reach you so I won't even try unless you instruct me to do so.

Keep up your good work.

[Dono,]

On Monday, July 17, 2017 at 7:20:39 AM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
>

> By that standard, GR1916/1960 is junk science.

<snip nauseating self-promotion<
>


Eric,

You are an imbecile, GR reduces to SR in the absence of gravitating bodies. Likewise, on can derive a generalized Doppler effect from the Schwarzschild metric only to see that, contrary to your crackpot claims, it reduces to the SR formula for the case of absence of gravitating bodies.

[Tom Roberts]

On 7/17/17 7/17/17 3:26 PM, xxei...@gmail.com wrote:
> The main issue as I understand it (although you haven't said it) is the
> working form presented by SR/GR. It is observational theory (SR/GR) vs. a
> universal reality theory.

As you are human, you know NOTHING about "reality", universal or otherwise; you
only know about the MODELS you have made of reality. Observation is all we
humans have about reality.

> The former uses proper times, distances etc. and
> as such it already distorts measurements inherent in observations.

NONSENSE! Proper times are what clocks observe, and they are completely unable
to measure anything else. This is not "distortion" of the measurement, but
rather of your personal fantasies and conceptions.

> More importantly, if one considers that the GR model (curved space-time) is
> wrong, it invites a whole new ballgame. I have not heard of anyone
> challenging that assertation and wonder why not.

Then you have been listening in the wrong places. Look up "string theory" or
"loop quantum gravity" or "Variable speed of light [Petit or Moffat or Albrecht
and Magueijo]" -- you'll find LOTS of them. (Beware of kooks and idiots,
especially in the last; the authors I mentioned are serious.)

Tom Roberts

[Tom Roberts]

On 7/17/17 7/17/17 9:20 AM, Eric Baird wrote:
> On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:
>> On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
>>> Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to
>>> ResearchGate. [...]
>> You make so many errors here that I won't bother to waste more time on
>> that.
>

> Tom, the "rule" is [...]

You use your rules, I'll use mine. If I tried to discuss all your errors, we'd
never get to the core of your claims. So I won't try.

>>> The gist of the argument is that the motion of a gravitational source
>>> must affect the propagation (and energy, and momentum) of light in the
>>> surrounding region, which shows up geometrically as a gravitomagnetic
>>> curvature effect ... so the "moving" gravitational body's associated
>>> relationships (e.g. between velocity and spectral shift) can't correspond
>>> to those of SR.
>>
>> Of course not! NOBODY would expect SR to apply in such a situation. So why
>> bother to argue about it?
>
> ... Because wave theory requires all distant objects to obey ==precisely the
> same== velocity-shift law, regardless of what local physics at the source
> happened to originally generate the light-signal.

First: what is "wave theory" ?????? That is a phase personal to you, and the
rest of us are not privy to your thoughts. I asked before but you did not
answer. I can only assume you mean a theory in which light propagates as a wave,
which to me means the wave-optics approximation to classical electrodynamics
(the most common way to model light in GR).

Second: nobody who understands modern physics would expect the equations of
SPECIAL RELATIVITY to apply to such a physical situation. But that's OK because
the equations of GR certainly do apply, even in situations where one might use
SR. SR is just an APPROXIMATION to GR; a much simpler and very useful one, but
still just an APPROXIMATION.

[The relationship between SR and GR is two-fold: a) SR is part
of the foundations of GR, as the local limit of any manifold,
anywhere and anywhen; and b) the Minkowski manifold of SR is
a valid manifold of GR, so all GR equations apply to it.
Thus (a) permits SR to be used as a local approximation to GR,
and (b) permits the equations of GR to be used in SR, without
any approximation.]

Third: I'm not certain what you mean by a "velocity-shift law" -- that phrase is
also personal to you, and I am not privy to your thoughts. From context I infer
that you mean what everybody else calls a Doppler-shift calculation. That's what
I assume here. Your original post has expired on my server.

There most definitely is a SINGLE way to compute Doppler shift, and it applies
to every known physical situation. It is expressed in terms of GR, but applies
to both SR and GR. This treats light in the wave-optics approximation to
classical electrodynamics:

1. obtain the 4-velocity of the source, and the proper time interval
between the wavecrests of its emitted light.
2. construct a timelike displacement 4-vector parallel to the source
4-velocity with magnitude equal to that proper-time interval.
3. parallel transport that displacement 4-vector to the detector over
the null trajectory followed by the light from source to detector.
4. obtain the 4-velocity of the detector.
5. compute the dot product of the parallel-transported displacement
4-vector with the 4-velocity of the detector.
6. the result of #5 is the proper time interval between the wavecrests
of the detected light. The ratio of it to the interval of #1 is
the Doppler shift.

Note that #2 uses the metric at the emission event, #3 uses
the metric (or its connection) all along the trajectory, and
#5 uses the metric at the detection event. If the light
follows multiple paths to the detector, the calculation must
be performed separately for each path.

Note that this calculation applies to both SR and GR, in any situation in which
the Doppler shift of the light is to be computed. That is, it applies to
relative motion, gravitational redshift or blueshift, cosmological redshift, any
other Doppler shift, and any combination. And it applies regardless of any mass
along the light path (Shapiro delay, gravitational lensing). As written it
assumes propagation in vacuum, but optical media can be handled in an obvious
way anywhere along the trajectory.

> So ... if the neutron star's light //does// change with relative motion by a
> velocity-shift formula that departs from the SR prediction (which the linked
> pieces seems to say is unavoidable), then it's a big deal, because wave
> theory then requires every other piece of particulate matter in the universe
> to follow exactly the same non-SR shift formula.

Not a problem. Why you expect SPECIAL RELATIVITY to apply is a mystery. But GR
does apply, so all is well in physics, it's just YOU who needs to adapt.

> This doesn't seem to be negotiable or fudgeable.

It isn't, as long as you use GR, not SR.

> Either the SR relationship
> describes the isolated moving star's motion-shift //exactly//, or the non-SR
> relationship that the star follows applies everywhere, to gas clouds and
> galaxies and spaceships and planets and individual atoms.

Nonsense. But change SR to GR and all is well. There is no expectation
whatsoever that SR applies to "gas clouds and galaxies", or any other massive
objects (such as planets and neutron stars). Note that for any situation in
which SR applies, GR applies also, to at least the same accuracy (nothing in
physics ever applies "//exactly//").

> Wave theory requires there to be a single, simple, universal velocity-shift
> relationship obeyed by all matter in the universe, and if that universal
> relationship is NOT the one given by SR, then SR is not correct foundation
> theory.

WHAT "wave theory"????? WHAT "velocity-shift relationship"?????

As far as I can see, the above calculation serves just fine, but I had to guess
about the meanings of your personal phrases. In any case, your fixation on SR
here is clearly misplaced, one MUST use GR.

> If the principle of relativity applies, but the PoR plus the assumption of
> flat spacetime leads to the wrong equations, then SR must be the wrong theory
> of relativity.

Hmmmm. SR clearly _IS_ the wrong theory of relativity; GR is the right one.

Why you insist on using an approximation, and think SR should apply, is a mystery.

> Since the PoR plus flat spacetime leads //unavoidably// to SR,

BUT THERE ISN'T FLAT SPACETIME IN THE PHYSICAL SITUATION YOU DESCRIBED.

> this tells us that in order to generate different equations, a correct theory
> of relativity, which generates the correct equations, must NOT use the
> "reduction to flat spacetime" argument. It has to apply curved-spacetime
> geometry right down to the level of basic inertial physics, and must apply
> curvature arguments "all the way down".

This is just plain wrong. Why you think SPECIAL RELATIVITY should apply to
"curved-spacetime geometry" [your phrase above] is a complete mystery. But all
is well because GR does apply, and does have a SINGLE calculation for all types
of Doppler shifts (see above). And GR does reduce to SR in a suitable local
limit, everywhere and everywhen.

> If you're asking "why we should bother" with these arguments, the answer is
> that it's because these arguments create a new generation of relativity
> theory that appears to be more powerful, more efficient and more logically
> consistent than what we currently have, and which seems to mesh with quantum
> theory and thermodynamics in ways that our current, creaky, patched, SR-based
> system can't ever hope to emulate.

Well, yes. It's called GENERAL RELATIVITY, and it's not "new" at all....

You seem to be traveling well-trod ground, and somehow think it is "new". It
isn't. Except, perhaps, to you personally.

>> [...] GR applies, and seems to model that quite well.

>
> No, it really doesn't. Because wave theory plus gravity invalidates the SR
> relationships not just for strong-gravity bodies but for ==everything==. So
> when the 1916 theory says that the physics of a small free-fall region in a
> larger gravitational field must reduces to inertial physics, the inertial
> physics that it reduces to is the //wrong// inertial physics.

Whatever gives you that idea???? In any "small free-fall region", GR reduces
approximately to SR, and the accuracy depends on the size of the region and the
curvature of the manifold in the region. For a small enough region the accuracy
can be arbitrarily good. So GR reduces to the //RIGHT// inertial physics.

> GR1916 was designed around the assumption that the SR relationships were
> fundamentally correct, and this had knock-on consequences for other aspects
> of the theory ... for instance, if we used the redder
> gravitomagnetism-compatible equations, a body still had a horizon at r=2m,
> but it gave off indirect radiation in agreement with QM and thermodynamics.
> GR1916 has a different type of horizon whose shifts reduce to the SR shift
> relationships, and this is why it predicts that gravitational horizons must
> be perfectly black, in disagreement with QM and thermodynamics.

Nobody knows how to couple GR with QM. Certainly YOU do not, and neither do I.
So I see no point in attempting to discuss it here.

Finding a theory that synthesizes or combines GR, QM, and thermodynamics is most
definitely a current topic of intense research. But not in this newsgroup.

Tom Roberts

[Tom Roberts]

On 7/17/17 7/17/17 2:54 PM, danco...@gmail.com wrote:
> [...]

While your reply is very different from mine, it is contained in what I wrote.
You probably know this; I am mentioning it for others around here who might not.

I gave the general algorithm for computing Doppler shift in GR. If one can
separate spacetime into a near field region where curvature is important, and a
far field region where curvature is negligible and SR applies, then in the
algorithm I described the parallel propagation and dot product in the far field
region are simply those of SR. The algorithm I gave also computes the Doppler
shift in the near field region.

A remark: for cosmological distances there is no far field region, curvature is
important everywhere (except very close to the observer on earth). Ditto if
there is gravitational lensing involved. The algorithm I gave applies in all cases.

Tom Roberts

[Ustin Veterre]

Tom Roberts wrote:

> As you are human, you know NOTHING about "reality", universal or
> otherwise; you only know about the MODELS you have made of reality.
> Observation is all we humans have about reality.

Just a minute, you are going to fast here. Observation are Reality, since
you can count on. The model is not, but the observation are.

More precisely, a transition that takes place, an event, IS reality.
(remark, not the parts involved, but the transition alone). Someone once
said "this is the journey, there is no destination".

[Ustin Veterre]

Tom Roberts wrote:

> First: what is "wave theory" ?????? That is a phase personal to you, and
> the rest of us are not privy to your thoughts. I asked before but you
> did not answer. I can only assume you mean a theory in which light
> propagates as a wave, which to me means the wave-optics approximation to
> classical electrodynamics (the most common way to model light in GR).

The wave equation is a 2nd order PDE. However EM light is going so fast
making that 2nd order insignificant. (would imply a speed higher than the
speed of light).

[Tom Roberts]

On 7/18/17 7/18/17 - 11:55 AM, Ustin Veterre wrote:
> Tom Roberts wrote:
>> First: what is "wave theory" ?????? That is a phase personal to you, and
>> the rest of us are not privy to your thoughts. I asked before but you
>> did not answer. I can only assume you mean a theory in which light
>> propagates as a wave, which to me means the wave-optics approximation to
>> classical electrodynamics (the most common way to model light in GR).
>
> The wave equation is a 2nd order PDE.

Yes. And in the wave-optics approximation to classical electrodynamics it is
used (and satisfied).

> However EM light is going so fast
> making that 2nd order insignificant. (would imply a speed higher than the
> speed of light).

NONSENSE! Apparently you don't even know what a PDE actually is. In particular,
being 2nd order is ESSENTIAL for the wave equation to describe a wave. The
coefficients of the equation determine the propagation speed, and here it is c
(in vacuum), not "higher".

Tom Roberts

[Ustin Veterre]

Tom Roberts wrote:

>> However EM light is going so fast making that 2nd order insignificant.
>> (would imply a speed higher than the speed of light).
>
> NONSENSE! Apparently you don't even know what a PDE actually is. In
> particular, being 2nd order is ESSENTIAL for the wave equation to
> describe a wave. The coefficients of the equation determine the
> propagation speed, and here it is c (in vacuum), not "higher".

I just told you what that is, so you can learn. But I'm sad to realize you
never modelled such one, a 2nd order PDE, a wave. You need TIME mister,
just to say the least. But there is no time allocate to a moving EM wave.
LOL, a photon experience no passage of time.

PLUS, that A POINT on the wave moving up and down, would unavoidable
EXCESS the speed of light (addition c + whatever frequency, faster is
worse). Just think.

Quantum Mechanically you can of course model it, as you want (I'm not an
expert), but CLASSICALLY, you just can't. (You can but is not correct, I
might be the first to say it)

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:

> On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> > Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to
> > ResearchGate. [...]

...
...

> > It's tempting to react to this by deciding that it doesn't matter, since SR
> > only claims validity for cases in which gravity is considered negligible.
>
> Yes, of course.

Follow the logical chain. Invalidation of the SR relationships for a strong-gravity star leads to a general invalidation of those relationships for all bodies, including those in which gravitational effects would normally be considered negligible.

What you're doing by setting arbitrary domains of applicability is responding to a logical contradiction by compartmentalising.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmentalization_(psychology)


We have "Argument A" which models inertia in the absence of gravitational-stroke-curvature effects, and "Argument B" that assumes that gravitation and inertia are inseparable as a matter of principle, and that inertia can't exist in the absence of gravitation. And then we have a theory based on B, which is supposed to reduce exactly to the physics of A over small regions.

Doesn't work.

The only way that you can avoid having the two sets of arguments flatly contradicting each other in some situations where we have //both// inertial physics and gravitational physics operating is by setting up artificial barriers, and saying that in such-and-such situation where you can get away with using SR, SR is obviously correct, and in these other situations where GR has to apply, we obviously //mustn't// use SR but GR ... but SR is still considered to be correct because GR reduces to it. By classifying every situation exclusively as an "SR"-specific or "GR"-specific case, we avoid making direct comparisons, and avoid seeing the conflicts.

These artificial barriers exist to stop us properly evaluating the logical consistency of the system, and finding that it's a failure. In the provided example of the neutron star and the atom, where we have to apply //both// SR //and// GR arguments, the two resulting shift relationships cannot agree, and yet HAVE to agree.

C20th textbook GR is a smorgasbord of mathematical tools and logical principles that do not all work correctly together, where the user is supposed to use their skill and training to select whichever tools look as if they might best solve the problem at hand, but where the task of avoiding obvious logical inconsistencies is left as the responsibility of the user. In other words, it's a mess.

> > Unfortunately there's a catch: Wave theory combined with the principle of
> > relativity requires that //all// distant moving bodies obey a single agreed
> > set of velocity-shift relationships, regardless of whether they are
> > high-gravity or low-gravity.
>
> WHAT is "wave theory"???? It seems to be a figment of your imagination, so I
> cannot comment on it.

Try googling:

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/wave-theory ::
:: Wave theory definition: the theory proposed by Huygens that light is transmitted by waves

"Wave theory" is a collective noun that refers to arguments based on the idea that a signal is transmitted as a wavelike undulation or variation in properties in an underlying medium or metric. It's usually applied to electromagnetic theory, but also applies to such esoterica as gravitational waves. In the 17th/18th century there was a battle between Continental wave theorists who used Huyghens' approach, and followers of Newton who believed that light was "thrown" as a corpuscle. Newton himself seemed to believe in the duality of the two descriptions, but his faulty implementation of a light-transmission model clashed with wave-theory predictions.

The general (default?) C19th implementation of Newtonian optics, ballistic emission theory, was widely regarded as not credible because it was in conflict with wave theory. According to the "wave" approach, a signal propagates through a region in a way that is entirely dictated by the region's properties and not by the properties of the signal, or its history (until we get to gnarly subjects like nonlinearity, where the existence of the signal represents such a large energy concentration that it in turn appreciably modifies the local physics, or scale interactions where the wavelength of the signal is similar to the scale size of features of the metric).

So ... wave theory says that if we have two signals, with identical frequency, phase, and amplitude (to dispose of possible nonlinearity stuff and wavelength-dependencies), they should propagate though a region in precisely the same way regardless of the original distant originating physics that produced the signals. Other than its standard EM properties, the signal has no additional "memory" of what made it.

Now ... if we are in deep space, and look at a small patch of starfield that includes a mixture of signals from neutron stars and interstellar gas, then, if we change our relative velocity wrt that patch (moving more towards or away from it), wave theory requires the whole mix of signals to be seen to change in frequency proportionally by precisely the same ratio.

We are not interacting directly with the original sources or their disparate physical circumstances, we are merely changing how we interact with a portion of electromagnetic signal stream passing through our solar system, which may be hundreds or millions of lightyears distant from the physical events that generated it. If some of that light comes from a neutron star, and and another component comes from interstellar gas, and (for argument) both signals arrive in our solar system with exactly the same wavelength, then when we change our relative velocity, and our sensors report a resulting apparent shift in the frequency of the light, then the light from the gas and the light from the star HAVE to shift by precisely the same proportion.

If we have a tight group of colleagues all watching the same patch of sky, along effectively the same line-of-sight, and the observers all have different velocities relative to that line-of sight, then the photograph that I take should be effectively identical to the photograph that my colleagues take, apart from aberration distortion and a uniform shift that applies equally to everything in the picture. It makes no difference whether we're watching the real starfield or a recorded image of the starfield shown on a giant screen some lightyears away - all the components of the image need to shift in the same way regardless of whether their original sources were isolated atoms in deep space, or neutron stars, or galactic cores. We shouldn't see different components of the image velocity-shifting differently when there's a change in relative motion depending on the surface gravities of the original bodies.


And this is why special relativity can't be fundamental – if SR doesn't apply to the simple motion-shift of a distant isolated neutron star, it must also not apply to the motion shift of a distant isolated hydrogen atom motionless wrt the star ... or to a second hydrogen atom motionless wrt the first, and in the same line-of-sight, but only 1km (or 1m!) away. If SR can't claim that its motion-shift predictions are fundamentally correct for stars or planets or distant atoms or nearby atoms, then it basically can't claim to be fundamentally correct for anything.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:

> On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> > Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to
> > ResearchGate. [...]

...
...
...

> But I remark that the laws of physics must be independent of coordinates. This
> does NOT mean there is "a single agreed set of velocity-shift relationships", it
> just means the theories approximating those laws are independent of coordinates.

Well, wave theory (and therefore presumably also a geometrical theory of gravity) does pretty much require the existence of a single universal law for motion shifts, for simple motion. If you break that rule, you no longer have a light-metric, and the theory produces the same sort of incoherent optical mess as we got with C19th ballistic emission theory. But let's move on the the coordinate system arguments ...


==DIVERGENT PHYSICAL LAWS BASED ON DIVERGENT MATHEMATICAL DEFINITIONS==

It is an assumed requirement of classical physical law that the reality underlying our experiences is the same for all observers. We all live in the same universe.
If we try to describe physics geometrically, this translates into a statement that there should be a single assumed underlying geometry whose shape and rules are the same for all observers. It might be that those observers cannot define the precise shape of their region //exactly// due to measurement limitations, but there should a single hypothetical underlying shape for the region that can explain the experiences of all observers in that region.

So far, so good.

Where "SR-based physics" and "acoustic metric-based physics" diverge is at the precise geometrical definition of the word "all" when it appears in the phrase "all observers".

* In universe [#1], "all observers" means "all possible observers".
* In universe [#2], "all observers" means "all real observers".

That innocent-looking distinction leads to two different sets of geometrical rules, and two different, divergent universes with their own sets of associated physical law. Geometrical proofs constructed in one universe aren't necessarily geometrical proofs in the other.

===UNIVERSE [#1] SR-BASED PHYSICS====

In universe #1, the rule that the laws of physics apply to "all observers" is interpreted to mean that they apply to "all possible observers". This means that the resulting logic does not distinguish between "real", "physical" observers and "hypothetical", "mathematical" observers.

Real observers are built of particulate matter, whose presence and relative motion distort the light-metric. Purely-"mathematical" observers without physical counterparts do not have these associated distortions.

For the same derived laws of physics to apply to //all// observers (both physical //and// non-physical), we need the additional distortional effects associated with "real" observers to be irrelevant, because one of our two classes of observer doesn't have them. We have to select a set of laws of physics that work in the absence of these distortions, and assume that the laws of physics for real bodies must be identical to those that we derive for purely "mathematical" observers.

In other words, we are obliged to derive the laws of relativistic physics in such a way that they work in perfectly empty spacetime, as a flat-spacetime "pure vacuum" solution, and we can then declare that these laws must also be the correct laws for physical observers. We "know" that the real laws of physics must correspond to our empty flat-spacetime derivations, and that the real-world properties of matter do not change the equations. According to our initial specification that the same laws must hold for //all possible// observers, these distortions //cannot// change the physics or the derived relationships //on principle//.

In universe #1, we are obliged to derive special relativity and Minkowski spacetime, and when we go on to derive more complex gravitational models, they HAVE to reduce exactly to Minkowski spacetime geoemtry and SR physics over small regions.

In [#1], Special relativity is provably //unavoidably correct//, as a matter of fundamental geometry.

===UNIVERSE [#2] ACOUSTIC-METRIC-BASED PHYSICS====

In universe #2, the rule that the same laws of physics apply to "all observers" is interpreted to mean that they apply to "all REAL observers". The principle of relativity then only has to apply to actual matter and material observers, and its "universality" only applies to observers that actually exist in our universe.

With this different interpretation of the phrase "all observers", we now return to the problem of light-grid distortions caused by the presence and relative motion of real-world matter. In [#1] we were forced to dismiss the importance of these effects, but in [#2], these effects define the difference between a "real" observer and one that is merely "mathematical". Focusing only on the "real" observers makes the relativistic properties of these distortions a critical piece of the physics. If a region's shape //must// include these distortions in order to be completely accurate, the region's shape does not define the set of all //conceivable// physical outcomes that could arise in the region - it defines only the set of physical outcomes that //will// arise in the region – the spacetime geometry includes distortional tracks that describe the positions and speeds of every piece of matter in the region, and therefore includes (in theory) all the information necessary to make a deterministic calculation of the region's future states.

Within [#2], the geometry does (in a sense) describe all possible outcomes in the region's future, because outcomes other than the deterministically calculated set are not "possible" – "What didn't happen, couldn't happen".

As a purely mathematical exercise we can still track a line through spacetime that might be said to represent the path of an additional observer, and note the signals intercepted by that track ... but since the track will be missing the distortions associated with a real physical observer moving along that path, the calculations will not correspond to what a "real" observer on that path would see. The signal-propagation calculations will be almost perfect, but the energetics for incoming and outgoing signals will be wrong.

In [#1], Special relativity is provably //wrong//, as a matter of fundamental geometry.

====CONCLUSIONS====

The condition that "the laws of physics must be independent of coordinates" can be used to prove either that SR is fundamentally correct, or that SR is fundamentally wrong ... depending on how we define the "target audience" for those physical laws.

If the laws of physics have to apply equally to "real" and to purely hypothetical, "unreal" observers [#1], then relativistic logic creates frame-based arguments, Minkowski spacetime, and SR (and SR-based GR) as the only possible physical solution.
If the laws of physics only have to apply to //physical// observers [#2], then geometrical disproofs of SR become more compelling, relativity theory has to be implemented using gravitomagnetic arguments instead, and we get a different type of physics, based on a relativistic acoustic metric.

So it turns out that our geometrical proofs of SR don't stem from any deep, fundamental property of nature or geometry. They are the result of a purely human design decision as to how we should best regard the philosophical status of "hypothetical" observers who aren't real. Can only real observers observe?
If "physics is for everybody", and we don't discriminate against the unreal, then we get SR. If only the "physical" get a say in how physics operates, then we get a different, non-SR system.

It all depends on how "physical" one likes one's physics to be.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:

> On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> > Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to
> > ResearchGate. [...]

... ... ...
... ...

> > And if the same equations of motion apply to distant and nearby objects, then
> > a nearby hydrogen atom must obey those same non-SR equations, too.
>
> Hmmmm. Measurement and experiment show that emissions from hydrogen atoms are
> extremely well modeled by QED.

I expect this to be true.

> How they are observed from far away depends on
> how those emissions are affected by their propagation, and this is very well
> modeled by GR.

Flight times, probably.
Energetics, not so much.

If wave theory says that stars and atoms MUST frequency-shift by precisely the same amount as a function of relative velocity, and GR says that gravitomagnetic shift effects appear for the moving star, but don't appear for the moving atom, then you have a fundamental logical conflict.

The two measured shifts are either the same or they're not.

If they're //not// the same, then the theory is incompatible with wave theory and presumably also incompatible with the concept of there being a light-metric. In which case all bets are off for GR1960 being credible as a geometrical theory of gravity.

If they //are// the same, then since the star's motion-shift relationship can't be that of SR, the atom's motion-shift relationship can't be that of SR either. Since the moving star's disagreement with SR can be explained geometrically as a gravitomagnetic distortion effect, the spacetime geometry around the moving atom must show an analogous geometrical distortion. The moving star drags light in its vicinity, so the moving atom must show a light-dragging effect too for its geometry to match. This means that we're no longer using Minkowski spacetime to describe small-scale physics.

We can create a QM argument that particulate matter must drag light, and that that light-dragging effect must operate right down to the scale of an individual atom, we can make the particle-dragging effect "analogous" to the neutron star effect, and we can then contrive to give both shift effects exactly the same magnitude, so that the QM effect and the gravitomagnetic effect are interchangeable. It then doesn't matter which body is said to be moving and which is said to be stationary.

If we do this, we've (in one sense) successfully reconciled general relativity with quantum theory.

However, in the process, we've also rejected the idea that //any particle in the universe// obeys the SR motion-shift predictions, so SR is no longer fundamental physics. We have a single set of non-SR relationships for the motion of "gravitational" bodies and "particulate" bodies, and SR no longer has a role to play (except perhaps in engineering).

Since SR is then not fundamental (in the sense that it doesn't correctly describe moving-body problems), residual traces of it need to be eliminated from GR, because GR1916 assumed that SR physics was a valid physical limiting case, and that assumption changed some of GR's predictions.

So the general theory that we're reconciling with QM is no longer //Einstein's// general theory. It's not the 1916 theory or the 1960 patched version, it's a rewritten and redesigned version, with some different principles, some different characteristics and some different physical predictions. In other words, a different theory.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:

> On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> > Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to
> > ResearchGate. [...]

... ... ...
... ... ...

> > If we exist in a universe that allows gravitational masses to exist and to
> > move, then special relativity's equations may //almost// be the real
> > equations of motion, but they can't be quite correct.
>
> And that is essentially what GR says.

No, the 1916 theory assumes that SR is a ==perfect== limiting-case description of inertial physics. This is what puts GR1916/1960 irreconcilably at odds with quantum mechanics regarding black holes and Hawking radiation.

Consider a Newtonian "Dark Star", a star sufficiently dense that light emitted at its surface cannot completely escape by following a ballistic trajectory. It has a horizon surface at r=2M, just like a modern black hole. However, the dark star emits a form of Hawking radiation, entirely classically. Light emitted from just below r=2m can briefly visit the outside world before being recaptured, and while outside, it can strike objects and be reflected outwards along an accelerated path. The same goes for matter - an ultrarelativistic particle emitted outwards at or just below r=2m in a dark star model can escape along a nonballistic trajectory if it's struck sufficiently hard at the right angle by an outside body (or by another particle doing the same thing). So although a "single test-particle" model of a dark star might seem to say that it has zero emissions, the statistical interaction between particles gives a dark star a a nonzero temperature.

All the really freaky things that happen with Hawking radiation according to QM, like nearby objects being illuminated by virtual radiation that's converted to real radiation by acceleration as they bounce off the object ... happen "mundanely" in a dark star model as the result of classical physics.

The reason why we haven't already embraced the dark star approach to Hawking radiation (and why the black hole information paradox is still listed as unsolved after half a century) is because classical HR requires a non-SR shift relationship, and GR1916 is committed to the idea that the SR relationships are fundamental.

If you are an initially-stationary particle created at r=2M in a dark star model and you want to escape, you only see the outside world to be ageing twice as fast. If you try to accelerate outwards then that blueshift increases, but it's a reasonable starting point.
OTOH, if we're using GR1916/1960, the gravitational blueshift on infalling light reaching you at the horizon is given by the SR shift equation, which says that freq'/freq equals infinity for a body approaching at lightspeed. So a particle created at the horizon under SR-based GR is not just intantaneously fried by an infinite inward energy flux, and an infinite inward radiation pressure, if it does somehow attempt to escape, that escape can't happen until an infinite amount of exterior time has already passed. Ignoring changes in background cosmological parameters over the hole's lifetime, the thing is utterly inescapable in anything less than an infinite amount of exterior time.

And that's why we can't make minor modifications to GR1916/1960 to make it compatible with QM. It's because the modification needed to solve the black hole informaiton paradox by turning a black hole into a dark star would amount to ditching special relativity's shift equations in favour of the older Newtonian set. And this is (politically) an utterly unacceptable suggestion, otherwise we'd have already done it! :)


For reference, if we assume that the principle of relativity is correct but don't commit to a particular spacetime geometry, then, since we're already familiar with the SR predictions, we can we can express those as [SRshift], and write a generalised prediction for a family of potential models, of
[modelshiftprediction] = [SRshift] × [1- v^2/c^2]^(gde/2), where gde is the gravitomagnetic effect expressed as the strength of the surface gravitational dragging effect (values 0 to 1, for 0%-100% surface dragging)

If you graph the dependency between the value of gde and the inward blueshift at a gravitational horizon, you find that there is no value of gde that gives a finite inward blueshift at the horizon until you get all the way up to gde=1. Beyond 1, things go crazy.

So there appears to be no "small" classical relativistic fix to the black hole information paradox, the only known relativistic solution requires us to change the shift equations by a full additional Lorentz redshift, which reverts them back to the C19th Newtonian predictions.

> > SR requires the region to be //perfectly// flat
>
> Again, why argue against a straw man?

That's the basis of the derivation of Minkowski spacetime. SR is the special, unique relativistic solution for a perfect vacuum, free from particulate matter, and SR's shift equations are only exact if spacetime's flatness isn't changed by the existence of the particles being watched, or those doing the observing. Add particulate-matter behviour to your observers and observed objects, and the predictions change.

If we use real matter for our objects and observers, the variation in energy-density associated with their localised mass makes the particles show up as dents in the metric. When those dents move, we have additional velocity-dependent distortions, in other words, gravitomagnetic effects.
If we decide that these gravitomagnetic distortions have to obey the principle of relativity just like the rest of physics, then we need a curved spacetime theory of relativity to deal with them.

That theory does not seem to be in the classical relativity texbooks. It's not SR, because SR implements the PoR by assuming that matter in the signal stream has zero effect on lightbeam geometry (it implements the principle of lightspeed constancy as the principle that lightspeed is globally constant ... which means that the lightbeam geometry is flat throughout the region). And it's also not Einstein's 1916 theory because GR1916 hands things back to SR for small-scale physics.



It turns out that we can parameterise the problem. The general shift relationship can be written as the SR shift relationship, multiplied by an additional Lorentzlike factor whose exponent is zero when spacetime is perfectly flat, but increases with the supposed strength of gravitomagnetic dragging effects.

So we have, once again
[shift] = [SRshift] × [1- v^2/c^2]^(gde/2)
, where the value of the gravitomagnetic dragging effect varies between zero (giving SR) and 1, =100%, for full dragging at the horizon of a moving black hole.

We only get special relativity when gde=0, which is the case when particles have zero associated distortion. Any variation away from particles being considered as distortionless is associated with a positive value for gde, and a Lorentzlike deviation to the red, away from the SR math.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:

> On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> > Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to
> > ResearchGate. [...]

... ... ... ...
... ... ...

> No physical theory is ever "perfect", and SR is IRRELEVANT.

Mathematically and geometrically, SR ==IS== perfect. It makes perfectly exact predictions about an idealised universe. It's deterministic, totally geometrically defined, has no free parameters, and can't be fudged or modified. In some ways, it's the perfect example of a falsifiable scientific theory.

Its problem is not a lack of perfection. Its problem is that in order to //achieve// that perfection in 1905, Einstein had to make some simplifying assumptions, and the consequences of those simplifications change the theory's predictions so that special relativity becomes a perfect description of a universe ... that no longer corresponds to ours.

In the early days, Einstein's general theory was also considered to be a perfect theory. Karl Popper held it up as the archetype of a falsifiable scientic system – GR (said Popper) was perfect, in that it had no free parameters, no ad-hoc assumptions, no fudge factors or free variables. If anything about GR1916 didn't work, then the theory was simply wrong, and we'd move on to the next theory.

In practice, GR1916 turned out to fail in multiple ways, and instead of doing the honest thing and declaring it invalidated, we just kept on patching it up, and changing the definitions of what made a good theory every time GR turned out to fail another test.

The thing that currently goes by the name "GR" now corresponds to what Popper characterised as "pseudoscience" – a supposedly scientific theory that in practice only avoids falsification with a series of retrospective /ad hoc/ special rules and exceptions.


It's the old story of physics vs mathematics. The physicist wants the correct answers even if they can't prove them rigorously, while the mathematician wants something that they can prove, even if it's wrong. Hence Hawking's comment, "I'd rather be right than rigorous", and Einstein's wry comment suggesting that perhaps if you can prove a result mathematically, the result is likely to be untrue.

>The real issue is:
> are the conditions of this theory satisfied well enough so the approximation in
> applying the theory is smaller than the resolution of the measurements. For many
> experiments applying SR, the answer is a resounding yes.

Well, some engineers will always tell you that the "real" physics is always done by people doing hardware experiments, and the only measure of a theory's worth is whether it's good enough to agree with experimental reality within the limitations of the available hardware.

The irony of using that argument to defend SR and SR-based GR is that if we'd applied this argument at the time, then neither of these theories would have been needed. Parameterised aether theory was probably perfectly capable of explaining all existing known relevant experimental data, and could be extended with additional parameters to cover any future data that didn't fit, and most of GR's better predictions can be approximated by retrofitting Einstein's general "gravitational time dilation" argument onto C19th Newtonian theory. The result wouldn't be pretty, but neither is current GR.
The reason for SR's initial ascendancy was not its accuracy in fitting data, but its efficiency and its minimalism. Even the most hardcore aether theorists were starting to get sick of the endless stream of additional optional parameters introduced by new aether models, and SR would have seemed like a breath of fresh air by comparison. Experimental evidence was of secondary importance.

A further irony is that the main organisation historically associated with the "experimentation is everything" view, that only practical physics was "real" physics and that the "real" measure of scientific theory was how well it agreed with experiment ... was the Deutsche Physik movement in 1930s Germany.

According to Deutche Physik, special and general relativity were distasteful, decadent, intellectual constructs that should have been strangled at birth (Lenard also reputedly wanted Einstein publicly hanged from a tree).

So you're championing two old theories that are now traditional and mainstream, but your value system seems to have a lot in common with that of the traditionalist reactionaries who created most opposition to the theories when they were first introduced.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:
> On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> > Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to
> > ResearchGate. [...]
... ... ... ...

... ... ... ...

> > In a fully gravitomagnetic theory of relativity, //all// physics is
> > curvature-based
>

> Hmmmm. "gravitomagnetic" is the wrong word. But in any case, EVERY ONE of our
> current fundamental theories of physics can be expressed via a Lagrangian that
> is an integral of the scalar curvature of the relevant manifold. For GR the
> relevant manifold is spacetime; for the standard model the manifold is a fiber
> bundle over spacetime (and the fields are quantum).

But gravitational theory is still a problem, because although general relativity nominally obeys certain wonderful principles (like the principle that the PoR applies to acceleration and rotation), in practice, our need to preserve special relativity's place within GR1916 means that those principles aren't actually treated as inviolable laws in practice. So if we're defending GR's status as a wonderful theory, we can say that GR1960 //obviously// applies the PoR generally, by definition ... until the PoR applied to acceleration or rotation turns out to generate a general disproof of the validity of SR, at which point we say that of course the GPoR was always really just a heuristically useful guideline, and not actually a law, and that applying the GPoR literally is "naive".

The real behaviour of current GR is moot, because it has no single logically-consistent set of agreeable behaviours. Its internal inconsistencies mean that different operators, working the theory from different starting points, can make different claims about what they believe the theory must say in a given situation to stop it crashing. This is why so many single-topic GR research papers start out by declaring that most of the rest of the community has somehow fundamentally misunderstood what the theory really says in a given situation, or how it should really be applied.

The reason why so many of our key researchers seem to believe that their colleagues are "doing it wrong" is that they believe that there IS a correct way to apply current GR. The truth is that there isn't.

The thing, in its current state, doesn't work properly.



> > If the real equations were “redder and shorter” than those of special
> > relativity by a Lorentzlike factor anywhere up to one complete additional
> > gamma factor, then most SR testing would come out exactly the same.
>
> This is just not true. SOME tests of SR are not sensitive to "extra factors of
> gamma", but not all.

Hence the use of the word "most". There are testable differences, just not that many.


> Particle accelerators would not work if there were "an
> extra factor of gamma".

Any cited analysis to support that? Nope. It's like a Christian fundamentalist saying that we know that God is real because otherwise the Sun wouldn't shine. Do they have an explanation of why the Sun shines? Yes. Does this mean that other competing interpretations and explanations are not possible? No. Can we imagine the Sun shining even if there isn't a god? Yes, we can.

Remember that SR redefines distances and times, and velocities by a gamma factor compared to the assigned values under Newtonian theory. If you're doing cross-theory analysis, you have to take into account that for an agreed energy or momentum, a particle's velocity will normally be assigned different nominal values under SR and NM, so when those two different nominal velocities are then used as the basis of different nominal shift equations (which diverge by the same Lorentz factor that appeared in the diverging nominal velocity values) ... sometimes the numerical differences simply cancel out.


> Kinematics in particle collisions would not work if
> there were "an extra factor of gamma". These are among the best tests of SR we have.

Nah. Not when you remember that SR also redefines its distances and times and velocities with a gamma factor.

Here's an entry from Cliff Will's listing of some compelling reasons why we know that Special Relativity is true "... Beyond a shadow of a doubt" (the section's subtitle)
Will ::
:: ...
:: //Evolution of the species//. One possible source of the genetic
:: mutations that permit evolution of living species is cosmic rays.
:: At sea level, the main component of the cosmic rays is the
:: unstable particle known as the mu meson or muon. But the
:: muon is so unstable that it would decay long before reaching
:: sea level from the upper atmosphere where it is created in the
:: collision of an extraterrestrial cosmic-ray proton with an atom,
:: if it weren't for the time dilation of special relativity, which
:: increases its lifetime as a consequence of its high velocity.

The argument is certainly convincing ("SR predicts X, X is known to be true, if SR wasn't true we wouldn't have X, therefore SR must be true").

Unfortunately it's also trivially wrong.


It's a fun exercise to try. We take a muon with an agreed rest-frame decay time "T", and give it an agreed momentum "E". Under Newtonian theory, this lets us calculate its velocity "vNM", and the distance that it travels before decaying is then "dNM = vNM × T"
Under SR, things change. Because of the SR remappings of distances and times, under SR we assign a lower nominal velocity "vSR" to the muon, where "vSR" is less than "nNM" by the Lorentz factor "gamma", where gamma is the reduction SQRT[1 - v^2/c^2] , calculated using "v=vSR".
Under SR, we then say that the tracklength is extended by more than we'd otherwise expect if SR was wrong, because of the SR time dilation/length contraction effect, which either extends the particle's lifetime by gamma from the perspective of an Earth observer, or from the perspective of the muon, allows it to penetrate deeper than expected because of the Lorentz contraction of the Earth's atmosphere.

so under NM we have
dNM = vNM × T

, while under SR we have
dSR = vSR × T / gamma

, but the nominal SR velocity is smaller
vSR = vNM × gamma
, so
dSR = (vNM × gamma) × T / gamma
dSR = vNM × T
dSR = dNM


Will's argument certainly //seemed// reasonable and unarguable ... until you check the math, and find that it's actually horse poo. He said that the muon wouldn't reach the ground if SR was wrong, but if you do the NM calculations using properties that are agreed across both theories, you find that the //physical// NM and SR predictions are 100% identical for the same agreed inputs. The muon decays at //precisely// the same location regardless of whether we use SR or NM.

And a lot of claims made for SR are like that. People are taught things, and also see them in textbooks, and also hear their friends saying them, and they repeat them as fact assuming that someone, somewhere //must// have checked whether the thing was true for it to be in all these sources.

And with SR, it often turns out that nobody's actually bothered doing the calculations.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:
> On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> > Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to
> > ResearchGate. [...]
... ... ... ... ...

... ... ... ...

>
> And just making up theories with "extra factors of gamma"
> is HOPELESS

Indeed.
So it's just as well that that I didn't do that, isn't it? <grins>

The existence of a Lorentlike factor separating the shift predictions of different members of the family of potential relativistc theories is //derived//, relativistically, from ellipse geometry.

Take a "stationary" perfectly-reflecting hollow sphere, emit a pulse of light in the centre, watch it bounce off the reflector and reconverge at the central position, and then spread out again, repeating.

Now fly past this sphere at high speed, being careful not to disturb its interior physics. If you regard yourself as being stationary and the sphere as moving, then the reflector surfaces are no longer collecting light from a point-position and reconverging it back at the same point, they're instead collecting light from one focus of an ellipsoid and refocussing it at the other.
The changes in angle with velocity of the rays agree with the relativistic angle-change formula (shared by SR and NM). The length-change of the rays also gives us the strength of the Doppler effect for each ray.


If we do the exercise "naively" we might assume that if the radius of the sphere is c, that the distance between the focii must be v. This gives us the shift predictions of a fixed stationary aether in in an unfamiliar relativistic context, and an ellipse major diameter that is constant with velocity. But the minor diameter and volume of the ellipsoid shrinks when the velocity increases. A bad prediction, and nasty behaviour (associating positive KE with negative curvature !), but it tells us that while the ellipse //proportions// are derivable from the principle of relativity, the ellipse //scaling// is a variable whose value is based on other assumptions, and varies between different implementations of the PoR.

If we draw the corresponding ellipse for Newtonian optics, we find that the ray-lengths are all longer than in the first ellipse, by a factor of [1- v^2/c^2], and the distance between focii is "v" magnified by a gamma-squared factor. If we draw in the wavelengths for special relativity, we get an intermediate set of wavelengths that are the geometric mean of the two flanking extremal solutions (and therefore differs from both by the root of their difference, which is the Lorentz factor). Intermediate solutions can be defined by the shift predictions of one of these three main solution, multiplied by a suitable "Lorentlike" factor, whose exponent identifies the particular solution and the particular theory.

so we get a range::
:: [CT] -> Lorentzred-> [SR] ->LorentzRed-> [NO]

The SR ellipse solution is "special" because it corresponds to an ellipse whose width is constant with velocity. This ellipse can be compacted back into its original outline with a simple Lorentz contraction along its x-axis (which also changes the elongated distance between the focii back to v metres). This is the only relativistic solution for flat spacetime.
The NO solution gives an ellipse whose rays are longer than SR's for any given angle, by a Lorentz factor, and the shape can't be fitted into its original perimeter with a uniform coordinate contraction – the Newtonian optical relationship don't work in flat spacetime, and a geometrical implementation of Newtonian relativity therefore requires velocity-dependent curvature. The solutions [CT]<-[SR] relate positive KE to //negative// curvature and can be dismissed as unphysical. [SR] is the zero-curvature solution, and as we go further to the right along [SR]->[NO], we get an increasing amount of positive curvature with KE. The range [SR]-[NO] also represents an increasing drag effect ranging from 0 to 100%, making NO the extremal "horizon" solution.

If we now ask "which set of relativistic equations is the most correct", the question can be rephrased as "how strong is the surface dragging effect at the interface between a particle and EM energy? If there's no dragging at all then we get SR, if there's full dragging we get NO, and if there's an intermediate level of dragging, we arrive somewhere in the range between them.

The natural initial reaction is to assume that inertial low-gravity physics obeys [SR], that moving black holes (with full horizon-dragging) have an additional gravitomagnetic Lorentz redshift giving [NO], and that all other gravitational bodies have an intermediate gravitomagnetic deviation from SR whose strength depends on their surface gravity. With this world-view, we still believe that SR is fundamentally correct, but agree that additional factors naturally complicate the description as gravitational effects start to dominate (which isn't SR's fault).

Unfortunately, wave theory considerations require all bodies to show //exactly the same// motion-shift relationship. All bodies have to obey a single universal shift equation, which (given the existence of gravitational bodies) can't be that of SR. If our universe contains some dense stars with gravitational horizons, and the physics of these stars, when widely spaced, obeys the principle of relativity, then at least some bodies out there MUST have a solution in that corresponds to [NO], and if everyone has to use the same solution, this then gives us the NO solution everywhere as our universal solution.

This exercise doesn't invent "extra factors of gamma" arbitrarily. It starts with the principle of relativity, derives a family of potential sets of equations, uses further arguments to rule out all solutions apart from SR and NO, and then uses universality to also rule out the SR solution leaving NO the only remaining relativistic possibility.

> -- you need to satisfy coordinate independence,
> and that imposes strong constraints on the structure of
> valid physical theories.

Yes, coordinate independence puts serious constraints on structure, but our choice of how we //define// coordinate independence allows at least two different possible structures, as explained in another post, above.

> Indeed local Lorentz invariance is the only way known today.

No ... if someone tells you that they've developed a second approach to a problem, then I'm not sure why you would try to counter that by saying that no, only one approach is known. //Of course// only one approach //was// generally known, by the mainstream, //up until now//, that's what makes the existence of the second approach is so important, and it's why someone is spending time trying, patiently, to explain it to you.


Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:
> On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> > Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to
> > ResearchGate. [...]
... ... ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ...

> > in order to pass peer review, C.M. Will's sets a criterion which any
> > gravitational theory has to pass to be considered credible: that it reduce
> > //exactly// to SR physics.
>
> This is another straw man. The true requirement is that a new theory has to pass
> all the experimental tests that have already been performed (and that SR and GR
> have already passed).

Again, you are starting from your own personal idea of what you think //ought// to happen, and asserting this to be the "true" situation. It's really not.

There are a number of issues here: Firstly, Will's criteria really //do// require an exact reduction to SR. You can look it up.
He's pretty open about it.

Will ::
:: Special relativity is so much a part not only of physics but
:: everyday life, that it is no longer appropriate to view it as the
:: special "theory" of relativity. It is a fact, as basic to the world as
:: the existence of atoms or the quantum theory of matter.

In other words, Will considers SR to be a known feature of our universe, and any gravitational theory that does not reduce exactly to SR physics can therefore be rejected, automatically, without further study, for disagreeing with reality. From inside Will's mind-set, since SR is "true", it's impossible to have a theory that agrees with experimental evidence but disagrees with SR. SR becomes an efficient way of defining the features that a theory has to agree with in order to agree with reality.
That's why the system that I'm describing to you isn't in the literature. It's been filtered out, even as an abstract conceptual possibility, by the community's requirement of full SR-compatibility.


In the 1970s there was a move to make SR not only compulsory in new theories, but to "retcon" special relativity into older principles and concepts.
So for instance in Will's PPN formalism for assessing gravitational models, it's assumed that in order to be credible and eligible for study, a theory needs to be a metric theory. And that seems like a reasonable restriction (like requiring that a theory be compatible with wave theory).

However, if we look at the small print, the definition of a metric theory has been adapted (corrupted?), to specifically exclude non-SR solutions:

MTW, page 1067 ::
:: ... " (1) spacetime
possesses a metric; and (2) that metric satisfies the equivalence principle (the standard
relativistic laws of physics are valid in each local Lorentz frame). Theories
of gravity that incorporate these two principles are called metric theories"

So a metric theory that uses an //acoustic// metric, is by this textbook definition apparently not to be considered a metric theory at all, and therefore not eligible for assessment. It's classified as a failure for not being a perfect superset of SR, regardless of how well it might agree with the physical evidence.

Now lets look at MTW's definition of the principle of equivalence. The PoE caused the relativity community some grief in 1960 when it was found to invalidate SR and SR-based physics. The community responded by putting pragmatic limits on where the PoE was and wasn't supposed to be used.
MTW's constribution to making sure that such a conflict could never happen again, was to redefine the PoE in such a way that it could l never again be used against special relativity:

MTW, page 1060 ::
38.6. TESTS OF THE EQUIVALENCE PRINCIPLE
:: Of all the principles at work in gravitation, none is more central than the equivalence
:: principle. As enunciated in 16.2, it states: "In any any every local Lorentz frame,
:: anywhere and any time in the universe, all the (nongravitational) laws of physics must
:: take on their familiar special-relativistic forms."

So again, when Will's PPN system says that a theory can't be considered credible unless it agrees with the PoE (which sounds reasonable), he'll be defining "compatibility with the PoE" as including that additional provision that a theory also has to reduce exactly to the physics of special relativity.



> The true requirement is that a new theory has to pass
> all the experimental tests that have already been performed (and that SR and GR
> have already passed).

It's not sensible to require that a theory agree with ==all== existing experimental tests, because we all know that experimental testing isn't foolproof.
For instance, there's a body of experimental testing carried out over decades until around 1960 by some of that era's best-known experimenters looking for gravitational shifts in starlight, some of which reported a confirmation of the existence of gravity-shifts, and some of which reported that gravity-shifts didn't seem to appear in the data. All of that data – for and against GR – is now considered to be bad. That's a significant body of experimental work that demanded to be taken seriously at the time, and which is now regarded as discredited.

It's reasonable to ask that a theory should be at least broadly compatible with what we think we know, and be able to explain at least some contra-reports, but the possibility of experimental errors, test theory shortcomings and experimenter bias (and occasionally outright fraud) is not zero. Theorists and journals should be allowed to say, well, there's maybe one or two experiments that //seem// to disagree with this system, but ... maybe those experiments might eventually turn out to be wrong. It's happened before.



> The SIMPLEST way to ensure this is to have the new theory
> reduce to SR and GR in the relevant limits. But that is by no means the only way
> as you claim. Certainly any paper describing a new theory that did not reduce to
> SR/GR could still pass muster by describing how it agrees with those experiments.

No, not if the journal is trying to save its reviewers' time and energy by using Will's PPN system to assess the credibility and experimental evidence for a new theory. I specifically mentioned Will's criteria.


Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:
> On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> > Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to
> > ResearchGate. [...]
... ... ... ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ...

> > Science seems to be constantly being held back by people's unwillingness to
> > question and critically analyse and criticise popular theories.
>
> Another straw man. ALL of the major advances in physics have come from such
> WILLINGNESS.

Oh come on. Read the histories.

Consider Newton, who was accused of fraud over his prism experiments and his claim that light came in a continuous range of colours, and was so upset by having to deal with all the resulting crap from supposed experts in colour theory that he essentially abandoned physics for years and took to studying bible chronology instead, until Halley lured him back. Or consider Einstein, who was considered to be insufficiently respectful of his elders to have a future as a professional scientist, and got such bad references from his lecturers that he considered himself to be unemployable in his field, and had to self-finance his "wonder year" research while working in Switzerland, at the patent office. Or consider Hawking, whose first lecture on Hawking radiation was cut short by the organiser abruptly cancelling the meeting partway through to stop any further "nonsense" being talked, and who apparently advised Nature not to publish Hawking's letter (which was too controversial to be submitted as a paper).

One of the biggest disasters in gravitational theory was the suppression of John Michell's published 1783 letter to the Royal Society outlining the properties of stars with gravitational horizons and discussing methods of measuring gravitational shifts. The gravity-shift concept should have led shortly to the prediction of gravitational time dilation, which would then have told Riemann to work in 3+1 dimensions rather than 3, which should have given us a general theory of relativity in the C19th before SR was even thought of.
However, Michell's letter made a direct reference to the passage (in Opticks?) where Newton had obviously screwed up the energy-frequency relationship for light, and that became a sore point in ~1800 when the wave theorists gained ascendancy, the Lunar Society seemed to close down, and English optical researchers seemed to slink off with their tails between their legs. So the paper essentially disappeared from his posthumous cv, and the last time I checked (late 1990s?), the Royal Society still hadn't updated his bio to include his gravity-shift work. Apparently 200 years is still too soon.


Some of the major QM guys had to put up with personal attacks up to and including their publishers being advised not to publish their books, and being reported to the Committee for Unamerican Activities. A bunch of them are //supposed// to have committed suicide, but I've never seen a list, presumably because it would been a sensitive subject for the families. People want their loved ones to be remembered for what they achieved, not for killing themselves.



> If you think abut it, there is no possible way for theoretical
> physics to advance without discarding or modifying existing theories.
> Criticizing existing theories is part and parcel of theoretical physics, and has
> always been so.

So why does criticising special relativity result in someone being put onto an internet-circulated blacklist?

Where's the healthy discussion in the mainstream literature of the problems resulting from using SR as the basis of gravitational theory?
In fifty years of discussion about the conflict between GR and QM, how many of the papers and books on the subject actually point out that the origin of GR's disagreement with QM is its adoption of SR as a limiting case?
How many mainstream papers have you seen that seriously ask whether SR is the correct implementation of relativity theory, whether a different approach might be better or worse, or what the implications might be of modelling the effects that SR idealises away?

It appears that almost nobody in the mainstream wants to be associated with any work that might be seen as even faintly critical of SR, because they have jobs and careers that they like, and reputations, and they don't want to be the subject of organised personal attacks.

Can you cite a single mainstream paper published in the last fifty years, that makes any criticisms or negative comments about SR whatsoever? Or any textbook that presents SR and GR1916/60 as anything other than incredible triumphs? It's difficult, isn't it?

> > SR's derivation depends on the condition of flatness.
>

> Yes, though differently than you presume (it's due to the meaning of "inertial
> frame").

The "functional" reason why SR derivations (//all// of them) require flatness is that if we allow the existence of objects or observers to be associated with any deviation at all from flatness, the application of the PoR in that non-flat context generates different shift equations.

The SR equations generate Minkowski spacetime. Minkowski spacetime is a "perfect" geometry, in which, if you "read off" the distances, you get back the SR relationships. The two are symbiotic - if you change the geometry //away// from Minkowski spacetime, you get a corresponding deviation away from the SR relationships.

If we want to arrive at SR as a deterministically-derived outcome, our initial assumptions therefore have to include flatness somewhere, to exclude potential alternatives. In Einstein's 1905 paper, the condition of flatness is embedded in the paper's second postulate that the speed of light is constant. With hindsight we now know that lightspeed constancy only has to apply locally, but the 1905 paper took c-constancy to mean //global// c-constancy, which gives a flat lightbeam grid (which then justifies the use of inertial frame arguments)

> > If SR hadn't assumed flat spacetime and globally fixed c, we could have
> > implemented the principle of relativity differently, with a variable-c
> > light-dragging model in which lightspeed was always locally measured to be c
> > wrt any particulate body, in that body's immediate vicinity, but then
> > transitioned to c wrt other bodies with increased proximity to those other
> > bodies.
>
> Hmmm. You still focus on straw-man arguments. SR is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT -- its
> ONLY use is as the local limit of GR (for which it is extremely valuable, of
> course).

Not only is GR1916's inclusion of SR not "COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT", it's actually one of the theory's most important defining characteristics. In a bad way. :)

It's the reason for almost everything that's wrong with current GR, all the "fudges and budgies", the artificial domain limits, the flat-spacetime limits and boundary conditions, the violations of the GPoR for rotation and acceleration, the violations of the principle of inertial and gravitational mass, the incompatibilities with statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, information theory and thermodynamics and cosmology.
If you switch from an SR base to an acoustic metric base, with the redder shift equations, then all sorts of things suddenly start to work properly. The theory becomes more nonlinear, and nonlinearity means that the dropoff in gravitational field strength can go lower in intergalactic voids than we'd otherwise expect. Running the gravity-shift argument backwards means that we then expect timeflow to run faster in those regions, an increased rate of entropic timeflow translates to faster spatial expansion, and we end up predicting a bubble-like pattern of expanding voids at cosmological scales. The enhanced rate of timeflow means that the region between galaxies is more fluid, and the coupling between galaxies and the background field is weaker, making a galaxy's inertial field more self-contained, so that the arms of a rotating spiral galaxy would be expected to show a different rotation curve to the one predicted by NM.

So where current GR has to be hand-retrofitted with exotica like dark matter and wierd expansion fields to get it to correspond to reality, a proper general theory would have predicted these classes of effect straight from the core geometry.

====
As a fun exercise, lets solve the black hole information paradox.

Start with the assumption that we live in an expanding universe with a cosmological horizon. Take a 360-degree photo of the background starfield, and note the average increase in redshift with distance. Map it. Now take that "observerspace" map and turn it inside out, so that the cosmological horizon surrounds the centre of the map facing outwards, and the observer is spread all around the perimeter, facing inwards. What you then have is an apparent description of the gravitational field surrounding a central dense mass (the presumed Big Bang singularity), censored by a gravitational horizon.
Invoke topology to argue that since the two geometrical descriptions can be transformed into each other, they have to obey the same geometrical laws.
The cosmological horizon HAS to leak and fluctuate, and to support that behaviour it HAS to use a relationship between cosmological recession velocity and red shift that is redder than the SR prediction, by an additional Lorentz factor (which gives us the C19th Newtonian optics relationship). That non-SR cosmological redshift relationship is already part of standard physics, but the topological argument requires it to also apply to gravitational horizons, so that gravitational horizons fluctuate, radiate and have a non-zero temperature, and no longer disagree with the QM predictions.

That's the whole thing solved. //That's// the problem that's occupied some of our greatest minds for forty years, solved in about two minutes, with almost no math.

The reason why this solution isn't famous, and probably doesn't appear in any mainstream paper, is because when we change the gravitational shift equations away from SR, the inverse of Einstein's "falling clocks" argument means that we're also changing the shift relationship for simple inertial motion away from SR and back to C19th NO.

The price of solving the BHIP is that we have to agree that SR is wrong physics. And that's apparently a possibility that is too terrible to contemplate (or to document) (:)), so we ignore the existence of an obvious solution, and wait a bit longer in case something else more palatable turns up. So far we've frittered away over forty years on this, "waiting for something to turn up", no palatable alternative solution has appeared, and no alternative solution ever will, because the problem is simply not solvable in the context of SR-based logic.

Meanwhile, in order to preserve the dignity of SR, GR has to continue making the wrong horizon predictions, has to continue being topologically incompatible with cosmology, and has to continue depending on arbitrary, hand-fitted ad hoc patches and distinctions ("Cosmology uses a different shift relationship to SR and GR, but that's okay, because it's a fundamentally different type of physics" er, right).



> GR does much of what you say here, but you seem hung up on "particulate
> body" and "dragging", which are not essential in GR. But indeed in GR the LOCAL
> vacuum speed of light is c, but over non-local distances it can vary; in the
> vicinity of moving massive objects, it varies in a manner similar to "dragging".

Yes. I know. What I'm doing here is arguing for a more purist, more advanced, "fully general" general theory of relativity that takes these GR behaviours and makes them fundamental and universal, without artificially compromising how they're applied in order to create a separate space for special relativity.

If the gravitomagnetic shift associated with a velocity "v" is the same as the conventional motion shift associated with "v" (which it seems to be), we get full duality between motion shifts and gravitational shifts, and we also get a gravitomagnetic mechanism for local lightspeed constancy.
This means that the curvature-based arguments of GR can be applied right down to the level of atomic physics, and we no longer need a separate SR layer to explain lightspeed constancy in inertial physics. Einstein's attempt at a general theory was worthy, but it was a misfire. A "fully fledged" general theory designed around curvature principles from the outset has no need for a separate SR layer – SR becomes superfluous.

And at that point, your statement that SR is "COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT" becomes true. SR then ceases to be a relevant physical theory, except as an engineering approximation of the real curved-spacetime physics, or perhaps as a historical curiosity, and maybe a cautionary tale demonstrating what can happen when science goes wrong.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Sylvia Else]

On 20/05/2017 8:49 PM, Marc Lichtenstein wrote:

> Poutnik wrote:
>
>>> If we exist in a universe that allows gravitational masses to exist and
>>> to move, then special relativity's equations may //almost// be the real
>>> equations of motion, but they can't be quite correct.
>>

>> It is known for long time that General Relativity and Quantum
>> electrodynamics/chemistry are not compatible.
>
> What a total nonsense to spew out. Nothing in the world is saying that
> those are to be compatible. _Compatible_ has no place in that sentence.
> You don't know what _compatible_ stands for. Which reveals you aren't
> familiar in the business.

Compatible in this context means that they could both be correct in all
scenarios, no matter how extreme. It is known that they cannot be. At
least one will be found wanting, and will need to be modified.

Sylvia.

[Poutnik]

Dne 25.7.2017 v 00:24 Eric Baird napsal(a):

> On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:
>> On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
>>> Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to
>>> ResearchGate. [...]
> ...
> ...
>
>>> It's tempting to react to this by deciding that it doesn't matter, since SR
>>> only claims validity for cases in which gravity is considered negligible.
>>
>> Yes, of course.
>
> Follow the logical chain. Invalidation of the SR relationships for a strong-gravity star leads to a general invalidation of those relationships for all bodies, including those in which gravitational effects would normally be considered negligible.

Why, when even the first chain ring is broken ?

Physics is not math, even if advanced math is often used.

Physical theories are just models of reality behaviour.
While their residual error is below of experimental resolution,
they are fine.

SR has limited domain of validity
as well as the Newton mechanics has.

Did you stop using the famous formula F = m.a
as it is invalidated for NOT ( v << c ) ?

Or pendulum based clocks,
as both gravity and inertia models of classical mechanics
are invalidated for strong gravity or speed ?

[mlwo...@wp.pl]

W dniu wtorek, 25 lipca 2017 11:28:15 UTC+2 użytkownik Poutnik napisał:

> Physical theories are just models of reality behaviour.

They were. Now they are just models of sick imagination
of some insane halfbrains.

[Ernard Hevalier]

Poutnik wrote:

> Physical theories are just models of reality behaviour.
> While their residual error is below of experimental resolution,
> they are fine.

You have it upside down. There are no errors in theories and laws of
Nature. You are just using pompous words without having a brain.

> Or pendulum based clocks,as both gravity and inertia models of classical

> mechanics are invalidated for strong gravity or speed ?

"Strong speed"?? No, those are not invalidated in any way. You just need
to take care.

[Ernard Hevalier]

You both are fucking wrong. You guys are forcing people using profanity. I
take the bet, none of you can define "reality".

[Ernard Hevalier]

Eric Baird wrote:

> In other words, Will considers SR to be a known feature of our universe,
> and any gravitational theory that does not reduce exactly to SR physics
> can therefore be rejected, automatically, without further study, for
> disagreeing with reality. From inside Will's mind-set, since SR is
> "true",
> it's impossible to have a theory that agrees with experimental evidence
> but disagrees with SR. SR becomes an efficient way of defining the
> features that a theory has to agree with in order to agree with reality.

For a good reason. Since is logical. Logics beats everything, but NOT
itself.

> That's why the system that I'm describing to you isn't in the
> literature. It's been filtered out, even as an abstract conceptual
> possibility, by the community's requirement of full SR-compatibility.

This seems to be a good requirement.

[mlwo...@wp.pl]

How fortunate you can't define "define".

[mlwo...@wp.pl]

W dniu wtorek, 25 lipca 2017 13:16:13 UTC+2 użytkownik Ernard Hevalier napisał:
> Eric Baird wrote:
>
> > In other words, Will considers SR to be a known feature of our universe,
> > and any gravitational theory that does not reduce exactly to SR physics
> > can therefore be rejected, automatically, without further study, for
> > disagreeing with reality. From inside Will's mind-set, since SR is
> > "true",
> > it's impossible to have a theory that agrees with experimental evidence
> > but disagrees with SR. SR becomes an efficient way of defining the
> > features that a theory has to agree with in order to agree with reality.
>
> For a good reason. Since is logical. Logics beats everything, but NOT
> itself.

Of course it beats itself. But how a moron would
know.

[Eric Baird]

On Tuesday, 23 May 2017 05:31:29 UTC+1, danco...@gmail.com wrote:
...
Re: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity
...
> ... Second, my only binary attitude is in saying that you are being self-contradictory when you base your explanation of why special relativity is (locally) invalid on general relativity, which entails the local validity of special relativity.

The argument's invalidation of its own initial assumptions is pretty much the whole point of the exercise.

It's called "proof by contradiction"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_contradiction

The technique has a long history, the classic example being the disproof attributed to Hippasus of the Pythagorean fixation on integers.

The Pythagoreans are supposed to have believed that all proportions in geometrical constructions and all basic ratios in nature could be expressed as ratios between two integers.

According to this belief, it would be possible to draw a right-angled triangle with lengths [1, 1, (SQRT[2])], with integer-length sides. Okay, so nobody had ever managed to work out what that special integer ratio //was//, and the numbers involved might even be so big as to make their discovery effectively impossible, but the numbers ought to exist.


The Hippasian disproof didn't start out by arguing that the assumption was wrong. Instead, it deliberately assumed that the assumption was //correct//, and that there really //was// a special integer ratio that expressed SQRT[2] exactly, and then it set out to explore the characteristics of the unknown smallest integer, "X", that would apply to the shortest side(s) of the triangle.

From Pythagoras' law, the square of the (integer) hypoteneuse must be equal to the sum of the squares of the other two (integer) sides. Which means the square of the hypoteneuse must be even, as it's the sum of two identical integer areas. But since it's a square integer, if one side can be divided exactly in two along an integer boundary then so can the other - it must be divisible by //four//.

So the (integer) length of the hypoteneuse must be an even number.

But if the square of the hypoteneuse is divisible by four, the two smaller squares for the other sides must each be divisible by //two//, and by the previous "integer square" argument, those must then be divisible by four, too.

So X, the shortest side(s) must also be an even number.

But if the hypoteneuse and the other sides are //all// divisible by two, then we aren't using the smallest expression of the integer ratio, because we can still divide everything by two. And we can keep dividing by two until the process stops, leaving us with the smallest possible integer solution, in which X must logically now be an //odd// number (to prevent further subdivision).

So X both can't be an //even// number (because, further division) and can't be an //odd// number (because, proof it must be even).

We get two conflicting and irreconcilable results. If X is a finite integer that can't be odd //or// even, it can't exist. The basic premise of the exercise was wrong.

In the "Hippasus" disproof, the invalidation of the assumed starting assumptions was the point of the exercise.



Now lets look again at that gravitational exercise, showing the basic incompatibility of special relativity with gravitational theory (meaning that Einstein's general theory, explicitly designed to reduce to SR physics as a limiting case, must have internal logical contradictions).

Let's suppose that we have three continuous adjacent regions of space, each 100 lightyears across, and each initially representing perfectly empty "flat" vacuum.

[ 1 ][ 2 ][ 3 ]

In the centre of volume [1] we place a single strong-gravity object, such as a neutron star or maybe a mini- black hole
In the centre of volume [2] we place a single simplified and idealised hydrogen atom.
In the centre of volume [3] we add ourselves as an observer (and maybe a few colleagues), with measuring equipment.

Special relativity describes physics in flat empty spacetime, and you can't get //much// flatter and emptier than a combination of [2] and [3]. So if SR has any sensible validity, it needs to be capable of describing the motion of the atom in [2] as seen from [3]. If we photograph the atom and then change our state of motion and photograph it again, or if we ask our colleagues with different velocities to take their own, different readings of the atom and then compare notes, we should be able to derive the law for how the atom's apparent frequency changes as a function of its relative motion.
And conventionally, this must agree with the predictions of special relativity.

Directly behind the atom, in the same line-of-sight, is the neutron star.
We know that modelling this star is an exercise in //curved// spacetime, the star has an explicit gravitational field, the relative motion of the field creates a gravitomagnetic distortion, and this distortion drags nearby light changing its energy and momentum, and creating a gravitomagnetic frequency shift. If the star's "baseline" equations of motion before gravitational effects are taken into account are those of special relativity, then when we apply the additional gravitomagnetic shift, the velocity-shift law changes.
So the star's motion shift can't agree with special relativity, and we say that that's quite okay, because there's lots of other stuff going on with the star that require general relativity to properly explain and describe.

So far so good, from our location in [3] we can see GR physics operating in [1] and SR physics in [2].
Now lets invoke wave theory to describe how the signals propagate. Lets say that the star and atom have no relative velocity. By the time that both signals have left [2] and entered [3], the light no longer cares where it came from, so if we change velocity and watch the resulting change in frequency, both signals need to Doppler-shift by precisely the //same// ratio.

SR requires the atom to obey SR, and GR requires the star to obey a non-SR relationship. So a gravitational theory that reduces to and incorporates SR physics requires us to see both signals Doppler-shift by //different// ratios.


Once again, we have two conflicting and irreconcilable results. With Hippasus it's that X //must// be both odd and even ↯, and with a gravitational theory that includes an assumed reduction to SR, it's that the star's and atom's visible motion shifts //must// be identical and //can't// be identical. ↯

Normally with general relativity we avoid the resulting cognitive dissonance by "compartmentalisation" – any situation that can be dealt with reasonably using SR gets classified as "an SR problem," and any that can't get classified as "needing full GR", so we never normally get to apply both approaches in a single exercise to test for logical consistency.

Eric Baird

[Eric Baird]

On Tuesday, 23 May 2017 05:31:29 UTC+1, danco...@gmail.com wrote:

> On Monday, May 22, 2017 at 5:19:13 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> > > > SR requires the region to be //perfectly// flat...
> > >
> > > No, that's absurd. If it were true, special relativity would be completely useless, whereas in fact it is among the best confirmed theories of modern science.
> >
> > No, that's demonstrably wrong...
>
> Again, special relativity is among the best confirmed theories of modern science. Violations of local Lorentz invariance have been sought for a hundred years, and no such violation has ever been detected.

That doesn't matter in the face of a logical disproof.

If a theory is logically inconsistent or contradictory, then if we assume that reality is NOT logically inconsistent or contradictory, then the theory cannot correspond to reality. And also cannot be safely used as the foundation of further theory, without risking making that further theory also logically inconsistent.

So where some of the quantum gravity guys have been knocking themselves out, trying to find a logically consistent way of combining current GR with QM, nobody's told them that current GR isn't even logically compatible with itself.

That's just not fair to the QG community. They're being asked to fuse GR with QM and are being told by some of the GR guys that current GR doesn't need modifications because it has no known issues, and that's just not true. People are being persuaded to waste their careers working on problems that aren't actually soluble.



> > If the SR relationships are modified... along with a
> > matching redefinition of SR distances and times, most
> > SR experiments would come out exactly the same...
>
> Obviously we can always re-define variables and re-write equations in ways that are superficially different but equivalent. That's trivial, and has no physical significance. This doesn't invalidate special relativity, i.e., local Lorentz invariance.

But that's not what I'm saying here, is it?
I'm saying that if we revert the SR shift equations to the older Newtonian optics set, and also revert SR's redefinitions of distances and times, then a //lot// of experimentatal results come out precisely the same, and a fair number of other results come out so close to the SR predictions that the difference will be around the experimental noise level.
But there are a few situations where the difference is more important.


> > Go away and do the calculations. You'll find that I'm correct.
>
> You haven't described any calculations that would be physically distinct from special relativity (and not contradicted by experiment).


Danco, what I actually said was:
> > If special relativity were wrong in this way, it'd still //appear// to be "among the best confirmed theories of modern science", as long as people didn't check the fine detail of how the experiments were carried out. Which people generally don't.
> >Go away and do the calculations. You'll find that I'm correct.

Presumably you've now gone away and done a few sample calculations of the SR and NM shift predictions using theory-specific values of v, and found that I'm right.

In loads of cases where SR is touted as making unique predictiosn that wouldn't be expected if the theory wasn't right, it turns out that the "new" predictions are indistinguishable from or identical to what we get with C19th theory

This isn't some fiendish evil scheme I've invented specially to mimic SR - the closeness of the SR and NO predicitons was already a "thing" in the 1900s.

It's just that the SR testing community ... ahem ... chose not to mention this awkward detail to anybody.



> You haven't described any calculations that would be physically distinct from special relativity (and not contradicted by experiment).

Sure I have. Elsewhere. For instance, classical Hawking radiation is a consequence of the alternative equation-set, but is impossible with the SR equations applied to gravity. So with the other set we get signal leakage, while with SR-based GR, we get a silent "Wheeler" black hole and conflicts with QM.

Also, if you simualtaneously measure the forward blueshift and rearward redshift on a particle moving in a straight line with constant (unspecified) velocity, and you use the forward blueshift to generate a nominal velocity value, and use that that value to then calculate the recession redshift ... then if you do this calculation twice, once for SR and once for NO ... you'll get diverging physical predicitons for the recession redshift, that can be tested against reality.

And there's various other minor stuff, probably only interesting to folks into metric engineering.


> > In a Cliffordian universe, there is no legitimate reduction
> > from a general theory to flat-spacetime physics...
>
> You have not defined a "Cliffordian universe" (nor, of course, did Clifford), nor a "general theory", so your words have no scientific content. (Please note that stating "everything is curvature" does not constitute a scientifically meaningful definition.)

It's a really simple concept. In the sort of universe imagined by Clifford, physical matter is associated with distortion fields, and the interactions of matter with matter are expressable as the interactions of the associated fields.

In current physics we say that
:: "curved geometry reduces over small regions to arbitrarily flat geometry, so a curved-spacetime description of relativistic physics must reduce to a flat-spacetime description of relativistic physics.

That //sounds// like a proof, but it's actually not, without some additional justification for those last three words, "... of relativistic physics".

See, the limit of a reasonable physical description is not always another reasonable physical description. Some limits are the limits at which the description becomes unreasonable (or disappears altogether).


In a Cliffordian universe ... one in which all physics can be described in terms of curvature ... a curved-spacetime geometry doesn't reduce to flat-spacetime phsyics, it reduces to flat-spacetime //non//-physics.

So our proof of a physical reduction to SR physics was never actually a proof.



> > If you'd like to give me a reason //why// we can be confident
> > that we don't live in a Cliffordian universe, then I'm listening.
>
> Until/unless you define "Cliffordian universe" in a physically meaningful way, there's nothing to be said about it.

see above.


> > You seem to be showing a binary "either/or" attitude, in which someone either has to accept GR1960 as-is, or reject everything to do with it, accept SR completely, or reject all experimental results commonly associated with it.
>
> Not at all. First, "GR1960" is a figment of your imagination, as explained previously. The general theory of relativity has not changed in physical content since 1915.

A theory is more than just its associated mathematics, it's also the set of rules for how and where that mathematical machinery can and should be applied, and how the theory may be falsified.

In the case of mainstream GR, both those things have changed.

Einstein's general theory proposed the Mach/Einstein principle that inertial and gravitational arguments should be fully interchangeable, allowing us to apply the PoR to acceleration and gravitation without relying on special reference frames. It also said that the gravitational arguments ought to reduce to (SR) inertial physics over small regions.
In 1960 we found that with rotating reference systems, the inertial and gravitational descriptions generated irreconcilably different geometries, if the "inertial physics" description came from special relativity.

So either SR was wrong or the GPoR wasn't fully general. Either way, the 1916 theory was invalidated.

What we did in 1960 was to back away from the idea of "harsh" falsifiability and to say, well, we can't invalidate SR without invalidating GR1916, but perhaps we can alter the rules to weaken the GPoR a bit, so that we //now// say that the general principle of relativity isn't //quite// universal after all, and that in cases where it would otherwise clash with SR, there's no //real// conflict, it's just that the GPoR is being used outside what we now recognise to be its proper domain of applicability...


>
> > I only know of one experiment that was designed
> > outside standard test theory to distinguish between
> > "different" relativistic solutions, it supported the
> > LET/SR relationships but it had unresolved issues...
>
> Ives-Stilwell is sufficient to disprove you ideas,

That's the one.

>but that isn't the only - nor even the best - experimental refutation of your "extra gamma factor". It takes only the every-day dynamics in particle accelerators to confirm the relativistic expression for kinetic energy, which is consistent only with standard Lorentz invariance.

No, I've been through a bunch of these, and they didn't pan out. Look at that Cliff Will "atmospheric muon decay point" argument. It was presented as a "this wouldn't happen if SR wasn't correct" thing, and it was junk. A load of other common particle accelerator-based arguments have the same problem. People just make stuff up to support SR about "what would happen if SR wasn't correct", without bothering to check whether its true.

>
> [snip kooky "Hasselkamp" claims]]
>
> > I understand the SR relativistic Doppler effect...
>
> We strongly disagree about that.

Yeah, but my position on this is based on primary evidence, and yours is only based on supposition. <grin>


> > In the case of the Schild paper, regardless of whether
> > one agrees with Schild's logic, it represents a part of
> > the historical record...
>
> Sure, the paper exists, along with thousands of other papers of varying quality, but it has no significance for the modern understanding or interpretation of general relativity.


Up to 1960 it was considered correct to use the Mach/Einstein argument that inertial and gravitational descriptions of the same problem were fully interchangeable. By the 1970s that seemed to have changed, and Mach's principle had become something of a fringe subject.

Schild's 1960 paper lies on the boundary between these two positions, and says, quite explicitly (paraphrased), "Hey guys, at the beginning of this year we hit a bump in the road with general relativity, we've had discussions, and as a result we're now making changes to how we apply the theory, here's why ..."


> > It's generally counter-productive to scientific argument
> > to start calling the other person stupid.
>
> I haven't called you stupid. The situation I see is that you're basing this mountain of verbiage about the need for a "Cliffordian universe" in which the evil special relativity is banished (meaning local Lorentz invariance is violated) on your belief that special relativity is invalid (within its domain of applicability). Now, without getting into a big tutorial on special relativity (which you would ignore anyway), I just commented that I think you don't understand special relativity, so your whole project is not well motivated. Rather than continuing to hone your universal Cliffordian rhetoric and assuring everyone how easy it is to quantize gravity, I think your time would be better spent trying to really understand special relativity. Yes, I relatize you think you already understand it, but I see that as the biggest obstacle to you actually ever understanding it.
>
> > The published assessment criteria for credible gravitational models tend to say that no theory can be accepted as "credible" unless it reduces exactly to SR physics.
>
> To be more precise, no theory is credible that predicts a violation of local Lorentz invariance that exceeds to observational bounds already established, which are extremely tight. Your ideas are not even close to meeting this requirement.


Has there ever been any research on how the "Lorentz invariance" issue changes if we allow the existence of a solution that is nominally redder than SR by an additional Lorentz factor? It's a serious question, I don't know the answer.



> > //Global// c-constancy, referred to by Einstein in 1905
> > as "the law of the constancy of light" is simply not a law
> > of physics.
>
> Of course it isn't. That's what Einstein pointed out in the years between 1907 and 1911.

Agreed.

> My goodness. Are you really under the impression that anyone thinks it is?

Nope. But the mainstream appears not to have then gone back and reworked the problem in the context of our new knowledge of the real rules of light-propagation.

What are the relativistic rules for inertial physics if lightspeed is assumed, more realistically, to only be locally constant? The result is a different theory.


> The very starting point of Einstein's quest in 1907 was the realization that the existence of gravitation and the equivalence principle was incompatible with the global invariance of light speed, or, more precisely, with the existence of global flat coordinate systems.

Yep, but he didn't follow the idea through to its ultimate implementation, of a more advanced general theory that would make SR redundant. He showed signs of perhaps thinking of exploring that direction around 1950-ish, but then he died in 1955.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

On Tuesday, 23 May 2017 17:25:05 UTC+1, Poutnik wrote:
> On 05/22/2017 10:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> > On Monday, 22 May 2017 07:07:16 UTC+1, Poutnik wrote:
> >> On 05/22/2017 05:13 AM, Eric Baird wrote:
> >>
> >> ...
> >>
> >> SR does not require the region to be //perfectly// flat.

> >
> > SR's derivation depends on the condition of flatness.

> > It's built into the theory's second postulate,
> > that the speed of light is constant – special relativity takes this
> > to mean that the speed of light is //globally// constant,
> > so that the lightspeed that I measure here-and-now
> > can be extrapolated into other regions containing bodies
> > with different states of motion.
> > The condition of global c-constancy for all observers
> > creates apparent logical conflicts, which SR then resolves,
> > with the nature of the resolution then defining the rest of the theory.
>
> There is no conflict.

Well, I did say //apparent// conflict, //resolved// by SR.

That's more or less how Einstein presented the case for SR: that (global) c-constancy, plus the principle of relativity, created an "apparent incompatibility" (his phrase), but that after further consideration it had been found that "in reality there is not in the least incompatibility" between the two, and that by "holding fast" to both principles one could arrive at a rigidly defined theory, special relativity.

If the question is "Flat spacetime plus the PoR", or "Global constancy plus the PoR", then the answer is "special relativity".

But if we weaken the condition of c-constancy so that we only require //local// c-constancy (and/or allow the existence of particulate distortions), then we've changed the question and SR stops being the only possible answer. SR depends for its //uniqueness// on the assumption of flat spacetime (or globally-constant c, or an equivalent assumption) in the region being modelled.


> The situation is fully analogical to line only geometrical world ( SR )
> and the world with curves ( GR ),
> with local tangent line approximation of curves
> ( SR being the local GR approximation )

Yep, that's certainly the analogy of how things are with current GR.

But real physics isn't compelled to honor the analogy. Some complex systems don't work in lower dimensions, and adding curvature as an extra degree of freedom is in some ways similar to adding additional dimensions to a model. Strip out that curvature and some behaviours might not survive the simplification.


> For low gravity or for not very high accuracy requirement
> is the region of justified approximation quite large.

Yeah ... I'm not arguing against the use of SR as an engineering theory.

I'm saying that if we relax the artificial constraints that narrow the possibilities down to just SR, there's at least one other credible-looking relativistic theory available.


You might expect that if scientists were inquisitive, curious creatures, that they'd eagerly seize on such a thing and immediately want to study it to bits. You'd have to fight them off. It'd be like kids presented with a new toy.

And you'd think that if SR and SR-inclusive-GR were really as great as people say, that the SR/GR community would be welcoming the apparent competition, and would find it good fun to finally have a proper foil to test their favourite theory against, and to show how good the existing system really was. If their theory is genuinely correct, then this alternative isn't a threat, is it? The more the merrier! Strength through diversity!

We're also told that physicists LOVE being proved wrong, and just LIVE for the idea of scientific change, so hey, I guess the community must be really, really grateful for having it pointed out that their proof of SR isn't actually valid. Right? Because if it's not valid, it's important that they know about it, yes?

However, so far I seem to be sensing a lack of the expected boundless enthusiasm.

Eric Baird

[shuba]

Wordy crank Eric Baird wrote:

> However, so far I seem to be sensing a lack of the
> expected boundless enthusiasm.

Perhaps you missed the ringing endorsement in this thread by the blowhard crank "xxein".


---Tim Shuba---

[Dono,]

On Monday, July 24, 2017 at 4:11:22 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
>
> under SR we assign a lower nominal velocity "vSR" to the muon, where "vSR" is less than "nNM" by the Lorentz factor "gamma",

That's false, utter imbecile. You are unable to solve a simple exercise, yet you puff up yourself. A pathetic cretin masquerading as "scientist" posting on the pathetic "Research" Gate.

[xxei...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, July 30, 2017 at 6:47:19 PM UTC-4, Eric Baird wrote:
> On Tuesday, 23 May 2017 17:25:05 UTC+1, Poutnik wrote:
> > On 05/22/2017 10:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> > > On Monday, 22 May 2017 07:07:16 UTC+1, Poutnik wrote:
> > >> On 05/22/2017 05:13 AM, Eric Baird wrote:
> > >>
> > >> ...
> > >>
> > >> SR does not require the region to be //perfectly// flat.

/
/

> Yeah ... I'm not arguing against the use of SR as an engineering theory.
>
> I'm saying that if we relax the artificial constraints that narrow the possibilities down to just SR, there's at least one other credible-looking relativistic theory available.
>
>
> You might expect that if scientists were inquisitive, curious creatures, that they'd eagerly seize on such a thing and immediately want to study it to bits. You'd have to fight them off. It'd be like kids presented with a new toy.
>
> And you'd think that if SR and SR-inclusive-GR were really as great as people say, that the SR/GR community would be welcoming the apparent competition, and would find it good fun to finally have a proper foil to test their favourite theory against, and to show how good the existing system really was. If their theory is genuinely correct, then this alternative isn't a threat, is it? The more the merrier! Strength through diversity!
>
> We're also told that physicists LOVE being proved wrong, and just LIVE for the idea of scientific change, so hey, I guess the community must be really, really grateful for having it pointed out that their proof of SR isn't actually valid. Right? Because if it's not valid, it's important that they know about it, yes?
>
> However, so far I seem to be sensing a lack of the expected boundless enthusiasm.
>
> Eric Baird

xxein: Bravo. That is one way of showing an incompleteness or an incompatibility, aka wrongness. I took a different, more arduous and dangerous route without understanding how express a 1:1 detailed comparison. I didn't (and still don't) understand how yet. My approach was to assume SR was logically wrong and apply my understanding of it as a fix for it. Specifically, about light speed being c to all observers. I could handle it as being 'measured' as c but not in the actuality of it 'being' c. Long story short, I was feeling very cocky until I had to cope with the forgotten gravity. The problems seemed insurmountable and I admitted to a novice defeat just shortly before this fictitious, stupid and ugly little black duck flew into my face and said "try this". The "this" was a different model of gravity (compatible with my SR). But that couldn't be, could it? But it worked! I have been trying to prove it all wrong for the last 27 years or so and can't.

So where is 'your' boundless enthusiasm for this? As I have written in a previous reply - contact me. You haven't provided anything close to a final solution yet, have you? I mean that QG hasn't got a chance under the present understanding of it all but I think (know) I can positively open the right door. In that sense, who isn't a novice or who would know otherwise?

I have been quiet for too long while looking for a more capable person to confide in; to carry out my work before I'm dead and forgotten. I may be considered an armchair physicist by the SR-GR priests here but I take that as they only know their way and think it's legitimate by decree. Their derision and wrath is annoying.

So contact me and I'll give you the few sentences of the nutshell description. You will beg for more, I'm sure - unless you want to take the slow digestion route for yourself. Just give credit where credit is due. You won't need luck like I did.

Cheers xxei...@gmail.com

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 17 July 2017 20:54:28 UTC+1, danco...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Monday, July 17, 2017 at 7:20:39 AM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> > The gist of the argument is that the motion of a
> > gravitational source must affect the propagation of
> > light in the surrounding region... so the "moving"
> > gravitational body's associated relationships (e.g.
> > between velocity and spectral shift) can't correspond
> > to those of SR.
>
> It goes without saying that in the near field, where curvature (i.e., changes in gravitational potential) is significant, we must use general relativity, but in the far field the curvature is negligible, so special relativity applies.

But special relativity doesn't magically "undo" the gravitational frequency-shifts that have already affected a signal, once that signal enters a flatter region.

True, if you're close to a moving star, the gravitational and gravitomagnetic shifts will be altering the energy of light-signals moving across the associated gravitational gradients in your vicinity. If you're 100ly away, they won't.

But if you're 100ly away, and you're watching the star, then the gravitomagnetic shifts on the light that originated at or skimmed the star, _which_have_already_happened_, are still imprinted on the signals that you see.

The //further// gravitomagnetic effect on signals far from the region fades away to effectively nothing at great distances ... but the already-existing gravitomagnetic effect on signals that have previously passed through the region and been affected by it, and then moved away to a great distance doesn't disappear.

Do aspects of this situation appear logically unsatisfactory? Yes! Because the current theory itself is logically inconsistent. We CAN "relativise" gravitomagnetic effects so that gravitomagnetism associated with a constant-velocity source and observer pair gives the same results regardless of who is said to be moving .. but that technique doesn't exist in special relativity, because SR attacked the problem of inertial motion by choosing to assume that this class of light-dragging effects didn't happen. Relativised light-dragging isn't part of the SR toolkit.

So we have GR which has to predict the existence of light-dragging, even for bodies with uniform constant-velocity motion, and we have special relativity, our theory of uniform constant-velocity motion, which lacks the relativistic machinery to deal with light-dragging. It's unsurprising that the interface between the two is problematic.


> (It is also true that special relativity applies over any sufficiently small region of space-time, even in the near field, but we usually work over larger regions.)
>
> > Wave theory requires all distant objects to obey
> > ==precisely the same== velocity-shift law, regardless
> > of what local physics at the source happened to originally
> > generate the light-signal.
>
> Well, in the far field, where curvature is negligible, the Doppler formula of special relativity applies to all propagation, regardless of the source. We simply need to imagine control volumes enclosing the near-field regions of each object, and consider these enclosures to be the "objects". The relevant frequencies of light are the frequencies emanating from these enclosures. Studying how these waves are generated internally to each "object" is a separate subject. The point is that the Doppler formula if special relativity applies to this macroscopic behavior.

So that's the SR argument. Motion shifts have to agree with SR.

However, elsewhere we have Tom apparently saying that the motion shift of a star isn't seen to obey the special relativity relationships, and that nobody who understands the subject would suggest that it is.

Perhaps you and Tom can argue it out amongst yourselves, and I'll then take on the winner ...

> > If the neutron star's light //does// change with relative
> > motion by a velocity-shift formula that departs from the SR
> > prediction...
>
> Well, it departs in the near field where curvature is significant, and where it is accurately described by general relativity (according to which the physics approaches that of special relativity over any sufficiently small region),

If the neutron star's velocity-shift relationship departs from the SR relationship for someone fairly nearby, then it departs from it for pretty much everyone. Once the energy of the light has been changed by climbing out of the star's conventional static gravitational field, and also changed by crossing the gravitomagnetic gradient associated with the moving field's motional field distortion component, it doesn't magically change back again for distant observers. There's no cosmic eraser.


Think about it. The gravitational redshift on light coming from a high-gravity star doesn't disappear for distant observers, does it? So why should the similar shift component on the same escaping light due to the //gravitomagnetic// component mysteriously evaporate with distance? Once you've altered the energy of a photon (or wave-packet, or whatever) by making it cross a gravitational differential, that then becomes the new default energy of that signal from that point on. The signal doesn't somehow remember the energy that it used to have, and revert to the original energy once it enters a region of flatter space.

A gravitomagnetic shift is //not// associated with a compensating gravitomagnetic "anti-shift" that applies at longer distances and cancels it out. Consider a rotating star: the rotational gravitomagnetic effect causes light and matter to be pulled in the direction of the star's rotation, deflecting light-beams and particle trajectories, and changing the energy and momentum of that matter and light through momentum exchange – there's no cancelling anti-rotation field effect further away from the star that drags light in the opposite direction to try to straighten everything out again.


> > Either the SR relationship describes the isolated
> > moving star's motion-shift //exactly//, or the
> > non-SR relationship that the star follows applies
> > everywhere, to ... individual atoms.
>
> That is specious reasoning. The Doppler formula of special relativity applies to the far-field light emanated from any of those objects, and the deviations in the near field are described exactly by general relativity, according to which the physics reduces to special relativity over any sufficiently small region, or over any region of any size with sufficiently low curvature.


Except that it doesn't work.

There's no geometrically-consistent description in which this can happen. It's a nice idea, but it's geometrically unimplementable.

There's no obvious way to apply the principle of relativity to a situation with two mutually-distant bodies, one with a significant gravitational field and one without, one governed by GR and the other governed by SR, and say that we get the same results regardless of which body is said to be moving and which body is said to be stationary.

Because while both theories will agree as to the motion shift predictions when a body is nominally stationary (no shift!), they'll tend to disagree as to the motion shift expected when a body moves. If the two predictions are physically distinct, then by taking a reading we can in theory establish who is "really" moving, breaking the PoR.

To reestablish the validity of the PoR, we need the same physical relationships to be derivable for both the star //and// for the low-gravity observer, and since the relationships for the star, expressed geometrically, require curved spacetime, applying corresponding relationships to the smaller body requires that its geometrical description includes an analogous distortion of the lightbeam geometry.

So we require a curved-spacetime implementation of inertial physics in which particles are associated with fields that show relative distortion when there's relative motion. That means that we require a theory of inertial physics based on the properties of a relativistic acoustic metric, not on the properties of Minkowski spacetime.
That then also means that our general theory of relativity also has to reduce to a relativistic acoustic metric, and not to Minkowski spacetime and SR.

On the plus side, switching from Minkowski spacetime to an acoustic metric would seem to fix GR's current incompatibility with QM, so the work to restore the status of the principle of relativity isn't just a worthy-but-boring housekeeping exercise, it does also seem to give us some cool new physics to play with.

[danco...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, July 30, 2017 at 2:36:17 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> Lets say that the star and atom have no relative velocity.
> By the time that both signals have left [2] and entered [3],
> the light no longer cares where it came from, so if we change
> velocity and watch the resulting change in frequency, both
> signals need to Doppler-shift by precisely the //same// ratio.

Right, and indeed they do. This was explained in the previous message, in terms of the macro behavior of the control volumes enclosing regions of significant curvature. See below for a more detailed explanation.

> SR requires the atom to obey SR, and GR requires the
> star to obey a non-SR relationship. So a gravitational
> theory that reduces to and incorporates SR physics
> requires us to see both signals Doppler-shift by
> //different// ratios.

Not true. You've fallen prey to the same misconception that misleads people into thinking (for example) that light from binary stars as seen on Earth must appear at widely different positions due to aberration, since the light was emitted from stars with different relative velocities. You've just substituted different sized objects (with different gravitational fields) for different relative velocities. The explanation of the fallacy is as follows.

In your example, the light waves arriving at a point in [3] are essentially plane waves, normal to the line from the star and atom to the observer in terms of the inertial coordinates in which the hydrogen atom and star are both at rest. The waves have particular frequencies f1 and f2 in that same coordinate system. Now, if the observer in [3] is at rest in those same coordinates, the waves will have the same direction and frequencies f1 and f2, but if the observer is at rest in a different system of coordinates, moving with some speed and at some angle relative to the first system, the angle of incidence and the frequencies of the waves will be given by the simple relativistic Doppler formulas of special relativity. It doesn't matter how the planes waves originated. The will both have the same Doppler shift factor and aberration angle.

> If we revert the SR shift equations to the older
> Newtonian optics set...

But the Newtonian optics has been demonstrated to be wrong, which is why it was discarded.

> ...and also revert SR's redefinitions of distances and times...

It isn't a matter of definitions of distances and times, because we can express any theory in terms of any system of space and time coordinates we like. The measures of distance and time conventionally used in special relativity are the unique measures that constitute inertial coordinate systems, i.e. systems in which the equations of physics hold good in their simple homogeneous and isotropic form. The insight of special relativity is that these unique coordinate systems are related by Lorentz transformations, not Galilean transformations. The Lorentz invariance of all physical phenomena has been experimentally established to great precision.

> Presumably you've now gone away and done a few
> sample calculations of the SR and NM shift predictions
> using theory-specific values of v, and found that I'm
> right.

I've certainly made that comparison, as have countless others, but found that you are not right. The relativistic Doppler effect is measurably different than the non-relativistic (Galilean) Doppler effect, and measurements have confirmed the relativistic effect.

> In loads of cases where SR is touted as making
> unique predictiosn that wouldn't be expected if
> the theory wasn't right, it turns out that the
> "new" predictions are indistinguishable from or

> identical to what we get with C19th theory.

Not true. Whenever claims like this are raised, providing specific examples based on Galilean relativity, they are always easily debunked. Of course, the term "C19th theory" is ambiguous, and one could argue that Lorentz invariance was already implicit in Maxwell's equations, and hence special relativity (at least for optics) should be classified as 19th century theory. But the point is that the relativistic Doppler relations are correct.

> The closeness of the SR and NO predicitons was

> already a "thing" in the 1900s.

Of course. Special relativity gives many results that differ from pre-relativistic predictions by only small amounts (e.g. second order) in many circumstances. That goes without saying, since it took a long time for special relativity to be discovered, because the pre-relativistic predictions base on Galilean worked "pretty well" in many circumstances. But they are incorrect to higher orders, and this makes a huge differences for the understanding of many of the most fundamental physical phenomena.

> If you simualtaneously measure the forward blueshift

> and rearward redshift on a particle moving in a straight

> line...

You're just describing Ives-Stillwell, which gave results consistent with special relativity. This is one of the (many) experimental refutations of your beliefs.

> > You have not defined a "Cliffordian universe"...

>
> In the sort of universe imagined by Clifford, physical
> matter is associated with distortion fields, and the
> interactions of matter with matter are expressable as
> the interactions of the associated fields.

Sure, that's the dream of a unified field theory, but your enemy is not general relativit, it is quantum field theory (and the lack of an equivalence principle for non-gravitational forces). Actually, general relativity accomplished Clifford's dream for the force of gravity, representing it as curvature related to each particle of mass, but no one has been able to duplicate that success for the other forces of nature. But more fundamentally, please note that Clifford's conception of a continuous manifold reduces to flat tangent spaces at each point. He did not contemplate a non-Riemannian or discontinuous surface, so he cannot be cited in support of your belief in a discontinuous manifold.

> In a Cliffordian universe ... one in which all physics
> can be described in terms of curvature ... a curved-spacetime
> geometry doesn't reduce to flat-spacetime phsyics, it reduces
> to flat-spacetime //non//-physics.

When you talk about describing things in terms of curvature, you need to give at least some hint as to what you mean. For example, Clifford imagined, in a vague sort of way, that particles might consist of regions of high curvature, and those regions might propagate along extremal paths (i.e., geodesics) in the ambient curved space due to other "particles", so the curvature of the space would affect the motions of "particles", and the entire universe is a single continuous space with curved regions propagating here and there. In general relativity the gravitational interaction is modeled in just this way, except that the fold is spacetime instead of space.

But you can't be referring to anything like this, because both of these entail flat tangent space (or spacetime) at every point (event). So, since you aren't talking about Clifford's idea, and you aren't talking about Einstein's idea, you need to say what YOU (Eric) are talking about.

> In 1960 we found that with rotating reference systems,
> the inertial and gravitational descriptions generated
> irreconcilably different geometries, if the "inertial
> physics" description came from special relativity.

That is simply not true. The issue of rotating frames was one of the main areas of focus when Einstein was developing general relativity in 1911-1915, and the criticisms of the equivalence principle related to rotating coordinate systems were fully resolved. The incidental little paper by Schild that you have fixated on does not contain any significant or novel insights, and has no effect on the meaning or interpretation of general relativity. Schild would never have dreamed of denying the obvious fact that the tangent space at any point on a smooth manifold is flat.

> So either SR was wrong or the GPoR wasn't fully general.
> Either way, the 1916 theory was invalidated.

Not true at all. Einstein's 1915 theory of relativity is still the current best theory of gravity, and has passed all experimental tests. It was neither changed nor re-interpreted in 1960 or any other time. Again, Schild's banal and unoriginal little comments did not invalidate general relativity, and he never claimed that they did.

> People just make stuff up to support
> SR about "what would happen if SR wasn't correct",
> without bothering to check whether its true.

Not true at all. Beginning in the early 1900's there were tests with accelerating particles, and the predictions of various competing theories were compared closely with the data. All the theories gave very similar predictions, so the experiments had to be made more and more precise in order to distinguish between them. Eventually they were able to establish that the predictions of the Lorentz-Einstein theory were correct, i.e., they found that the phenomena were Lorentz invariant.

> Has there ever been any research on how the "Lorentz
> invariance" issue changes if we allow the existence of
> a solution that is nominally redder than SR by an
> additional Lorentz factor?

Yes, there has been. Abundant experimental evidence (such as discussed above) confirms that all phenomena are Lorentz invariant, ruling out any additional Lorentz factor.

> What are the relativistic rules for inertial physics
> if lightspeed is assumed, more realistically, to only
> be locally constant? The result is a different theory.

Right, the result is general relativity, in which special relativity is valid on the tangent space of the spacetime manifold at any point.

> Classical Hawking radiation is a consequence of the

> alternative equation-set, but is impossible with the
> SR equations applied to gravity. So with the other set
> we get signal leakage, while with SR-based GR, we get
> a silent "Wheeler" black hole and conflicts with QM.

This is really a separate subject, but the very prediction of Hawking radiation arises from the combination of general relativity and quantum field theory, so it's ridiculous to claim that Hawking radiation, per se, "is impossible" under either general relativity or quantum field theory. Analog models with acoustic metrics mimic some, but not all, of the features of Hawking radiation and gravitation, but do not represent a viable realistic model of the phenomenon, unless modified and refined to the point that it becomes general relativity combined with quantum field theory.

[danco...@gmail.com]

On Monday, July 31, 2017 at 6:43:12 AM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> > It goes without saying that in the near field, where
> > curvature (i.e., changes in gravitational potential)
> > is significant, we must use general relativity, but
> > in the far field the curvature is negligible, so
> > special relativity applies.
>
> But special relativity doesn't magically "undo" the
> gravitational frequency-shifts that have already
> affected a signal, once that signal enters a flatter
> region.

Of course not, but that isn't how the Doppler and aberration formulas work. All that matters is that we have (say) a plane wave at a certain location with a certain frequency and direction in terms of one system of inertial coordinates, and we want to determine the frequency and direction in terms of another system of inertial coordinates. It doesn't matter how the plane wave was produced.

> Elsewhere we have Tom apparently saying that the motion

> shift of a star isn't seen to obey the special relativity

> relationships...

Your paraphrase seems garbled. I think Tom agrees that at any point in a vacuum region with negligible curvature the relationship between frequencies and directions of a wave of light for two inertial coordinate systems are given by the special relativistic Doppler and aberration equations.

> If the neutron star's velocity-shift relationship
> departs from the SR relationship for someone fairly
> nearby, then it departs from it for pretty much everyone.

Again, you misunderstand how the Doppler and aberration formulas work and what they do. At any given point in a vacuum region with negligible curvature the relationship between frequencies and directions of a wave of light for two inertial coordinate systems are given by the special relativistic Doppler and aberration equations. How the wave was produced ay some distant location, and whether it was in a strong gravitational field, etc., is irrelevant.

Of course, if we want to know the frequency of the light at the surface of the star when it was emitted, in terms of (say) the Schwarzschild coordinates, we can compute that using general relativity, but this doesn't invalidate the special relativistic relations for light in the far field.

[Tom Roberts]

On 7/24/17 7/24/17 6:24 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:
>> On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
>>> Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to
>>> ResearchGate. [...]
> ... ...
>>> It's tempting to react to this by deciding that it doesn't matter, since
>>> SR only claims validity for cases in which gravity is considered
>>> negligible.
>>
>> Yes, of course.
>
> Follow the logical chain. Invalidation of the SR relationships for a
> strong-gravity star leads to a general invalidation of those relationships
> for all bodies, including those in which gravitational effects would normally
> be considered negligible.

Nonsense. Invalidation of SR IN A REGIME WHERE SR DOES NOT APPLY does nothing at
all.

> What you're doing by setting arbitrary domains of applicability is responding
> to a logical contradiction by compartmentalising.

No. Not at all. THIS IS PHYSICS, NOT LOGIC.

In physics, every theory includes a domain within which it is valid, and outside
of which it is either invalid, or at least not known to be valid. In the
presence of gravity, SR is KNOWN to not be valid.

This is very basic, and fundamentally simple: SR is based on some postulates,
and in regimes where those postulates do not hold, SR simply is not valid. That
is, the mathematical derivation of its equations are IRRELEVANT because in that
physical regime the postulates don't hold.

> * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmentalization_(psychology)

Completely irrelevant -- this is PHYSICS. Applying theories ONLY within their
domain of applicability is MANDATORY.

> The only way that you can avoid having the two sets of arguments flatly
> contradicting each other in some situations where we have //both// inertial
> physics and gravitational physics operating is by setting up artificial
> barriers,

They are NOT "artificial". The "barriers" represent boundaries between regimes
in which the assumptions of one or the other theory hold.

SR is the local limit of GR. SR is NOT valid throughout the universe, but only
in limited regions. This is unavoidable. Live with it (you have no choice).


> and saying that in such-and-such situation where you can get away
> with using SR, SR is obviously correct, and in these other situations where
> GR has to apply, we obviously //mustn't// use SR but GR ... but SR is still
> considered to be correct

NONSENSE! SR is NOT "considered to be correct" in the sense you mean. SR is
considered to be VALID (not "correct"), and its domain of validity is LIMITED.
Validity of a theory does NOT mean "it is how nature actually behaves", but
rather "it APPROXIMATES how nature behaves is this regime ...". There are limits
to the accuracy of such APPROXIMATIONS, and that determines the domain of
applicability for the theory.

To one part per 1000, SR is valid throughout the solar system (yes,
ALL the effects of gravity are smaller than that). But to parts
per million is it valid only in much smaller regions. In the
experimental halls of the LHC, for the measurements of elementary
particles, SR is valid to parts per billion, which is MUCH smaller
than their measurement resolutions -- so they can and do use SR in
their analyses.

> [... repetitions]

You need to learn what science ACTUALLY is. Your GUESSES are wrong.

Tom Roberts

[Tom Roberts]

On 7/31/17 7/31/17 12:11 PM, danco...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Sunday, July 30, 2017 at 2:36:17 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:

>> [...] In the sort of universe imagined by Clifford, physical matter is

>> associated with distortion fields, and the interactions of matter with
>> matter are expressable as the interactions of the associated fields.

Hmmmm. "Distortion fields" could be interpreted as the particle fields of the
standard model. Remember Clifford was writing long before QFT was applied to
particle physics, and the nomenclature was not yet settled.

> Sure, that's the dream of a unified field theory, but your enemy is not

> general relativity, it is quantum field theory (and the lack of an

> equivalence principle for non-gravitational forces). Actually, general
> relativity accomplished Clifford's dream for the force of gravity,
> representing it as curvature related to each particle of mass, but no one
> has been able to duplicate that success for the other forces of nature.

Actually the standard model does this. The standard model can be considered as
a fiber bundle over spacetime, with the fibers being the various particles'
quantum fields; the usual fields are of course slices of the bundle. The SM
Lagrangian is just the scalar curvature of the bundle.

The problem comes when one attempts to include gravity, which affects the
underlying spacetime, and it is not clear how to reconcile the curvature of
spacetime with the bundle curvature. Of course in the tangent space of a given
point in spacetime there is no spacetime curvature, and the standard model is
locally Lorentz invariant.

Tom Roberts

[danco...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, August 6, 2017 at 7:45:38 AM UTC-7, tjrob137 wrote:

> On 7/31/17 7/31/17 12:11 PM, danco wrote:
> > On Sunday, July 30, 2017 at 2:36:17 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> >> [...] In the sort of universe imagined by Clifford, physical matter is
> >> associated with distortion fields, and the interactions of matter with
> >> matter are expressable as the interactions of the associated fields.
>
> Hmmmm. "Distortion fields" could be interpreted as the particle fields of the
> standard model. Remember Clifford was writing long before QFT was applied to
> particle physics, and the nomenclature was not yet settled.
>
> > Sure, that's the dream of a unified field theory, but your enemy is not
> > general relativity, it is quantum field theory (and the lack of an
> > equivalence principle for non-gravitational forces). Actually, general
> > relativity accomplished Clifford's dream for the force of gravity,
> > representing it as curvature related to each particle of mass, but no one
> > has been able to duplicate that success for the other forces of nature.
>
> Actually the standard model does this.

Clifford wrote about the spatial manifold, i.e., the space of ordinary positions and movements, and the possibility that it is curved locally, and that matter might just be highly concentrated regions of spatial curvature, surrounded by regions of diminishing curvature, and that the concentrated regions moved along geodesics. This was accomplished by general relativity for gravity, but crucially replacing space with spacetime, and dispensing with the commitment to a particular model of matter (which evidently requires other forces). However, it can't be done for the other forces in a similar way due to the fact that the other forces don't satisfy the equivalence principle. It's true that theories of the Kaluza-Klein type can postulate one or more additional curled up dimensions, but it's now understood that these are no more than formal unifications, since there is no operational link between the extra curled up dimensions and the 3+1 dimensions of space-time.

> The standard model can be considered as a fiber bundle

> over spacetime...

Right, a fiber bundle OVER spacetime, not as part of the structure of spacetime itself, at least not in a physically meaningful sense.

> The SM Lagrangian is just the scalar curvature of the bundle.

Yes, but that's not spacetime curvature, it is curvature of the abstract fiber bundle. The Cliffordian dream was to give a purely geometrical account of all phenomena, using the word 'geometrical' in the sense of the 3-dimensional (or perhaps extended to the 3+1 dimensional) manifold in which the classical positions and motions of objects are defined, not in the sense that any set of variables can be considered to define an abstract "space" with its own "geometry". General relativity (arguably) fulfilled Clifford's dream for gravity, but it has not been possible to subsume the other forces into that kind of geometrical model.

> The problem comes when one attempts to include gravity, which

> affects the underlying spacetime...

Right, because the standard model does not affect the underlying spacetime, whereas general relativity does. That's another way of saying general relativity embodies the Cliffordian dream, whereas the standard model does not.

The standard model was "more or less" completed by the work of Weinberg, who noted that Einstein regarded the effects of the gravitational field as producing changes in the geometry of space and time. "At one time it was even hoped that the rest of physics could be brought into a geometric formulation, but this hope has met with disappointment...". He is using the word "geometric" here in the Cliffordian sense of referring to the 3+1 dimensions of space and time, not to arbitrary abstract "spaces".

The common misconception arises because space(time) geometry was the first context in which variational principles and the associated concepts of "metric", "affine connection", "curvature", etc., were considered. So people sometimes fail to distinguish the latter from the former.

The issue here isn't quantizing gravity. Even at the classical level, electromagnetism (for example) was not able to be meaningfully unified with gravitation into a "Cliffordian" space-time model, not surprisingly.

[Ross A. Finlayson]

See, that's specifically what Dono can reject, it's simple.

Then he uses the chance to spit to efface excusing himself.

Or "sarcasm", which could be interpreted as humble reserve.

Baird this is interesting and for you
to explain it as "General Relativity".

I'd look at that and go on.

(After making enough understanding that
"all science works together" or what.)


I am discussing this kind of thing itself
with "SR as the local effect" for mass relations.

This is also here "GR letting SR" instead of
"SR letting GR", i.e. with SR as the local effect,
GR or General Relativity established constructively
as the geodesy that is then the around with SR as
conserving time of the travel of light.

[Ross A. Finlayson]

On Monday, July 17, 2017 at 2:20:09 PM UTC-7, Dono, wrote:
> On Monday, July 17, 2017 at 7:20:39 AM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> >
> > By that standard, GR1916/1960 is junk science.
> <snip nauseating self-promotion<
> >
>
>
> Eric,
>
> You are an imbecile, GR reduces to SR in the absence of gravitating bodies. Likewise, on can derive a generalized Doppler effect from the Schwarzschild metric only to see that, contrary to your crackpot claims, it reduces to the SR formula for the case of absence of gravitating bodies.


"Affine gravitation *must* reduce to metric gravitation when the EP
holds, as GR becomes SR when Newton's G=0. One may not contradict
empirical observation with proposed theory."

"Uncle Al", Alan D. Schwartz

news:433EC5E6...@hate.spam.net

[Eric Baird]

On Saturday, 20 May 2017 11:49:25 UTC+1, Marc Lichtenstein wrote:
> Poutnik wrote:
>
> >> If we exist in a universe that allows gravitational masses to exist and
> >> to move, then special relativity's equations may //almost// be the real
> >> equations of motion, but they can't be quite correct.
> >
> > It is known for long time that General Relativity and Quantum
> > electrodynamics/chemistry are not compatible.
>
> What a total nonsense to spew out. Nothing in the world is saying that
> those are to be compatible. _Compatible_ has no place in that sentence.
> You don't know what _compatible_ stands for. Which reveals you aren't
> familiar in the business.

MTW (~1971) list the three criteria that a theory has to meet in order to be viable as (1) "Self-consistency", (2) "Completeness", and (3) "Agreement with past experiment".

They define "Completeness" as::
:: To be complete a theory of gravity must be capable
:: of analyzing from "first principles" the outcome
:: of every experiment of interest. It must therefore
:: mesh with and incorporate a consistent set of laws
:: for electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, and all
:: other physics.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 17 July 2017 22:20:09 UTC+1, Dono, wrote:
> On Monday, July 17, 2017 at 7:20:39 AM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> >
> > By that standard, GR1916/1960 is junk science.
> <snip nauseating self-promotion<
>
> Eric,
>
> You are an imbecile,

Well then, in that case I'm an imbecile that seems to be able to run intellectual rings around you guys. :)

>GR reduces to SR in the absence of gravitating bodies.

That's a fair description of the architectural design specification of the current system, yes.

> Likewise, on can derive a generalized Doppler effect from the Schwarzschild metric only to see that, contrary to your crackpot claims, it reduces to the SR formula for the case of absence of gravitating bodies.

References, please! :) :) :)

See, the changed wavelength-distances predicted by special relativity for a moving body can be directly read off from the distances in a slice through Minkowski spacetime. The special theory's wavelength-distances for different hypothetical observers can be used to construct Minkowski spacetime in 4D, and MS then contains all possible SR wavelength-changes for all possible SR-legal observers, predefined. So the SR physics and the MS geometry are mutually-defining.
In the words of the Frank Sinatra song (van Heusen/Cahn), "Ya can't have one without the o-ther".

If we now treat relatively-moving particles as having little-gravity-wells, the associated gravitomagnetic effects mean that the Minkowski approach to spacetime geometry no longer works, because the intrinsic curvature associated with a pair of particles now physically changes as a function of their relative velocity. We're no longer taking differently-angled slices through the same underlying spacetime geometry depending on how things move, we're instead describing //different// underlying spacetime geometries, depending on how things move.

I'm going to try not to use the word "impossible" here, but it would be "very difficult indeed" to imagine how these two stylistically different geometrical approaches could possibly generate the same shift relationships.


My investigations suggest that they actually don't, and that the gravitomagnetic effects missing from the SR description are associated with an additional nominal Lorentz-factor redshift. This turns the SR Doppler relationships into those of C19th Newtonian optics.

----

Where there's a potential cause for confusion is that in cases where people have //attempted// to derive the SR relationships from gravitational arguments, and ended up with the NO relationships instead, then //I'd// class that as a failure to derive SR, and a success in deriving the NO acoustic-metric "competitor" equations instead.

But to a community that doesn't really //know// about NO-based acoustic metrics, that failed attempt to derive SR could be interpreted and presented as a successful //partial// derivation of SR, that reproduces the SR relationships _to_a_Newtonian_first_approximation_.



What I'd suggest is going back to your sources and looking for that key phrase, "Newtonian approximation". If you can find a derivation that claims to derive the SR equations //exactly// (without cheating by saying that we "know" that things must reduce to SR, or invoking Newtonian approximations), then please do post a reference, because I'd be very pleased to find out about it.

But I suspect that no such work actually exists.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Tom Roberts]

On 7/24/17 7/24/17 5:24 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:

>> WHAT is "wave theory"???? It seems to be a figment of your imagination, so I
>> cannot comment on it.
>
> Try googling:
> https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/wave-theory ::
> :: Wave theory definition: the theory proposed by Huygens that light is transmitted by waves

OK. Then we KNOW it is wrong -- light is NOT "transmitted by waves". Such waves
cannot account for many observed properties of light, but the photons of QED do
account for them.

There's no point in continuing to discuss "wave theory".

Tom Roberts

[Tom Roberts]

On 7/24/17 7/24/17 5:26 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> Well, wave theory (and therefore presumably also a geometrical theory of
> gravity) ...

Hmmm. GR is a geometrical theory of gravity, but it has no light waves.

> ... does pretty much require the existence of a single universal law for
> motion shifts, for simple motion.

And GR has exactly one that applies to all physical situations -- that's as
"universal" as it gets. I gave it earlier in this thread.

Tom Roberts

[Tom Roberts]

On 7/24/17 7/24/17 5:34 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:

>> On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
>>> If we exist in a universe that allows gravitational masses to exist and
>>> to move, then special relativity's equations may //almost// be the real
>>> equations of motion, but they can't be quite correct.
>>

>> And that is essentially what GR says.
>
> No, the 1916 theory assumes that SR is a ==perfect== limiting-case
> description of inertial physics.

This is just plain not true -- there's nothing "perfect" about it. Applying SR
in a local region of spacetime is an APPROXIMATION.

> This is what puts GR1916/1960 irreconcilably
> at odds with quantum mechanics regarding black holes and Hawking radiation.

No. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the problems relating QM with GR,
BECAUSE IT IS WRONG. The difficulties in merging QM with GR are much more subtle
and fundamental.

Tom Roberts

[Tom Roberts]

On 7/24/17 7/24/17 6:16 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> Will: Special relativity is so much a part not only of physics but
> everyday life, that it is no longer appropriate to view it as the
> special "theory" of relativity. It is a fact, as basic to the world as the
> existence of atoms or the quantum theory of matter.

>
> In other words, Will considers SR to be a known feature of our universe, and
> any gravitational theory that does not reduce exactly to SR physics can
> therefore be rejected,

That "exactly" is YOURS, not Will's. Every physicist knows that SR is only a
local APPROXIMATION to GR. But yes, SR is so solidly established as a (local)
property of our world that it would be perverse to deny its validity WITHIN ITS
DOMAIN OF APPLICABILITY. (Yes, there are many perverse people around here.)

Note, however, the PUN on "theory": Will uses it in the sense of creationists
and science deniers: a "theory" is not established fact -- that's why he put the
word in quotes. But that is not really the appropriate meaning in science: a
theory is a MODEL of the world we inhabit. Once one understands this, your
claims and arguments are clearly either naive or nonsensical.

Tom Roberts

[Eric Baird]

On Tuesday, 25 July 2017 10:28:15 UTC+1, Poutnik wrote:
> Dne 25.7.2017 v 00:24 Eric Baird napsal(a):

> > On Monday, 22 May 2017 22:53:08 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:
> >> On 5/19/17 5/19/17 - 6:56 PM, Eric Baird wrote:

> >>> Just a short post to let you know that I've uploaded something to
> >>> ResearchGate. [...]
> > ...
> > ...
> >
> >>> It's tempting to react to this by deciding that it doesn't matter, since SR
> >>> only claims validity for cases in which gravity is considered negligible.
> >>
> >> Yes, of course.
> >
> > Follow the logical chain. Invalidation of the SR relationships for a strong-gravity star leads to a general invalidation of those relationships for all bodies, including those in which gravitational effects would normally be considered negligible.
>

> Why, when even the first chain ring is broken ?
>
> Physics is not math, even if advanced math is often used.

But theoretical physics //is// largely logic-based.

Without logic, we don't know how to construct experiments properly, or properly understand the significance of the results.

> Physical theories are just models of reality behaviour.

> While their residual error is below of experimental resolution,
> they are fine.

Not if you're a theorist and you're actually talented.

The talented guys are the ones who nit-pick the tiny details and logical discrepancies that others ignore, until they come up with a better logical structure than what came before. That can give us a hell of a lead on what the experimenters can manage on their own.

For instance, John Michell not only predicted gravitational shifts and the r=2m gravitational horizon radius back in the 1780s, he also suggested measurement hardware and an astronomical survey project to get an estimate of the amount of additional unilluminated matter in the universe by compiling statistics on double stars, and noting the cases where one partner wasn't visible.

He was trying to work out the details of experimental techniques in gravitational physics about 150 years before the real hardware became available.

> SR has limited domain of validity
> as well as the Newton mechanics has.
>
> Did you stop using the famous formula F = m.a
> as it is invalidated for NOT ( v << c ) ?
>
> Or pendulum based clocks,

> as both gravity and inertia models of classical mechanics
> are invalidated for strong gravity or speed ?

Actually, somewhere in Principia or Opticks, Newton points out that pendulum clocks are expected to tick at different rates as a function of where you put them in the Earth's gravitational field, and cites someone's experiment (where they'd had an expedition up a mountain?) that had verified the existence of the expected variation.

So a theory of these pendulum variations had already been worked out in the Seventeenth Century, and also experimentally tested. Newton was a nit-picker, too.

Also Einstein. That's why he was able to derive the existence of gravitational time dilation, while all the really clever math guys before him missed it. Einstein spotted a logical discrepancy that couldn't be resolved unless timeflow was a function of gravitational field strength. Earlier guys probably spotted the same discrepancy, but thought, "oh well, its such a tiny mismatch that it's probably not that important" ... or "Well, logically the only way to solve this would seem to be by making the rate of timeflow a variable, and THAT can't be right..."

Also, with Einstein and E=mc^2, he already knew about the anomalous energy-output of radium, but measuring the associated predicted weight-loss E/c^2 of a speck of radium may not have seemed a credible experimental proposition. This research was not motivated by a desire to create jobs for experimenters!

If you want to produce a new theory, and you don't have access to new experimental data that wasn't available to your predecessors, then quite a good way to get the jump on everyone else is to focus on small logical "kinks" in existing theory that your rank-and-file physics person would simply ignore. If you're //not// unreasonably demanding as to what you expect a theory to do, then you're unlikely to develop a better theory than what we already have.

If we have a bunch of physics guys arguing that the current system is just fine, and that we don't need/want anything better, then we risk never //getting// anything better.

The price of constant progress is eternal dissatisfaction.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

Under C19th Newtonian theory, p=mv, so if we know the rest mass and momentum, the velocity of a particle can be defined as v=p/m .

Under special relativity, the relationship between "relativistic" momentum, rest mass and and velocity is p=mv / [1-v^2/c^2]^0.5
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Relativ/relmom.html
, so for a known (measurable) momentum and rest mass, we get the smaller v=gamma p/m

The nominal velocity assigned to the particle by SR is lower than the one we use in the NM calculation by a gamma factor, where gamma is based on the SR velocity. In older textbooks, this increased momentum for a given velocity would typically be explained with the idea of "relativistic mass", a concept that is now less in favour.

With the lower nominal velocity and an agreed rest-frame decay time, we might naively expect the muon decay path to be shorter under SR than NM, by the Lorentz factor ... except that SR //also// time-dilates the muon by the same gamma factor, extending the decay time and the decay path as seen by Earth observers (or, the muon reckons the approaching Earth atmosphere to be length-contracted, so it manages to travel through more of it before it decays, by a Lorentz factor) ...
...the two opposing Lorentz factors then cancel exactly (lower velocity value shortens the calculated distance, time dilation lengthens the calculated distance), so for an agreed rest mass, momentum and rest-frame decay time, the physical end result of the NM and SR calculations is _precisely_the_same_.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Earline Loar]

Eric Baird wrote:

> They define "Completeness" as::
> :: To be complete a theory of gravity must be capable :: of analyzing
> from "first principles" the outcome :: of every experiment of interest.
> It must therefore :: mesh with and incorporate a consistent set of laws
> :: for electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, and all :: other physics.

nonsense. If a requirement, I doubt, then only inside a domain of
applicability. I strongly suspect you escaped a few things.

[Dono,]

On Sunday, August 6, 2017 at 1:38:22 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> On Monday, 17 July 2017 22:20:09 UTC+1, Dono, wrote:
> > On Monday, July 17, 2017 at 7:20:39 AM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> > >
> > > By that standard, GR1916/1960 is junk science.
> > <snip nauseating self-promotion<
> >
> > Eric,
> >
> > You are an imbecile,
>
> Well then, in that case I'm an imbecile

Yep

[Tom Roberts]

On 8/6/17 8/6/17 5:27 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> With the lower nominal velocity and an agreed rest-frame decay time, we might
> naively expect the muon decay path to be shorter under SR than NM, by the
> Lorentz factor ... except that SR //also// time-dilates the muon by the same
> gamma factor, extending the decay time and the decay path as seen by Earth
> observers (or, the muon reckons the approaching Earth atmosphere to be
> length-contracted, so it manages to travel through more of it before it
> decays, by a Lorentz factor) ... ...the two opposing Lorentz factors then
> cancel exactly (lower velocity value shortens the calculated distance, time
> dilation lengthens the calculated distance), so for an agreed rest mass,
> momentum and rest-frame decay time, the physical end result of the NM and SR
> calculations is _precisely_the_same_.

This is just plain wrong. You used "length contraction" where it does not apply.
SR predicts a relativistic unstable particle can travel MUCH further than NM
predicts.

A muon has a (proper) lifetime of 2.19 microseconds. When traveling at a speed ~
0.9999 c it could, on average, travel 685 meters. In practice high-energy muons
can AND DO travel MUCH further than that (e.g. from the upper atmosphere to the
surface, ~ 12 km.

For pions the measurements are more striking: c*lifetime = 7.8 meters, but both
CERN and Fermilab have pion beams over a kilometer long, in which > 90% of the
pions survive. These pions have kinetic energies > 100 GeV, so v = 0.999999 c,
and gamma > 714.

Tom Roberts

[mlwo...@wp.pl]

W dniu niedziela, 6 sierpnia 2017 23:21:43 UTC+2 użytkownik tjrob137 napisał:

> That "exactly" is YOURS, not Will's. Every physicist knows that SR is only a
> local APPROXIMATION to GR. But yes, SR is so solidly established as a (local)
> property of our world that it would be perverse to deny its validity WITHIN ITS
> DOMAIN OF APPLICABILITY.

A lie, as expected from relativistic trash. GPS shows clearly
- time (as defined by your idiot guru himself) is galilean,
with the precision of an acceptable error.

[Earline Loar]

W dniu niedziela, 6 sierpnia 2017 18:48:27 UTC+2 użytkownik * _mlwozniak_
* napisał:

You omit a CRUCIAL intercalation. An atomic clock cannot POSSIBLY output
that kind of errors. Would imply having a better clock, which is something
you don't have.

[mlwo...@wp.pl]

W dniu poniedziałek, 7 sierpnia 2017 10:38:31 UTC+2 użytkownik Earline Loar napisał:
> > A lie, as expected from relativistic trash. GPS shows clearly - time (as
> > defined by your idiot guru himself) is galilean,
> > with the precision of an acceptable error.
>
> You omit a CRUCIAL intercalation. An atomic clock cannot POSSIBLY output
> that kind of errors.

And a heavier-than-air machine cannot POSSIBLY fly.

[Tom Roberts]

On 7/30/17 7/30/17 - 3:10 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> [... long, convoluted argument containing confusions and errors ...]

How silly. OF COURSE Special Relativity is incompatible with gravitation --
that's what "special" means in its name, and why Einstein embarked on the long
and difficult road from SR to GR (1905 - 1916).

We now know that SR is the local limit of GR, and is thus APPROXIMATELY valid in
a sufficiently small region of spacetime. The accuracy of the approximation
depends on both the curvature in the region and the size of the region.

Tom Roberts

[Ross A. Finlayson]

In some ways the '70's is still state-of-the-art.

Good luck with that, I concur with the general notion
of theoretical sufficiency.

One big theory of everything also needs a constant,
consistent, complete, concrete mathematics.

That and to explain all the effects in the numbers,
here again back to first and least principles as
ultimate and final cause.

That's a rather usual diatribe since antiquity, but
these days there's the luxury (and onus) of the modern
for the super-classical.

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 17 July 2017 20:54:28 UTC+1, danco...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Monday, July 17, 2017 at 7:20:39 AM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:

> > The gist of the argument is that the motion of a
> > gravitational source must affect the propagation of
> > light in the surrounding region... so the "moving"
> > gravitational body's associated relationships (e.g.
> > between velocity and spectral shift) can't correspond
> > to those of SR.
>

> It goes without saying that in the near field, where curvature (i.e., changes in gravitational potential) is significant, we must use general relativity, but in the far field the curvature is negligible, so special relativity applies. (It is also true that special relativity applies over any sufficiently small region of space-time, even in the near field, but we usually work over larger regions.)

>
> > Wave theory requires all distant objects to obey
> > ==precisely the same== velocity-shift law, regardless
> > of what local physics at the source happened to originally
> > generate the light-signal.
>
> Well, in the far field, where curvature is negligible, the Doppler formula of special relativity applies to all propagation, regardless of the source. We simply need to imagine control volumes enclosing the near-field regions of each object, and consider these enclosures to be the "objects". The relevant frequencies of light are the frequencies emanating from these enclosures. Studying how these waves are generated internally to each "object" is a separate subject. The point is that the Doppler formula if special relativity applies to this macroscopic behavior.
>

> > If the neutron star's light //does// change with relative
> > motion by a velocity-shift formula that departs from the SR
> > prediction...
>

> Well, it departs in the near field where curvature is significant, and where it is accurately described by general relativity (according to which the physics approaches that of special relativity over any sufficiently small region), but in the far field the Doppler formula of special relativity applies, regardless of the source.

>
> > Either the SR relationship describes the isolated
> > moving star's motion-shift //exactly//, or the
> > non-SR relationship that the star follows applies
> > everywhere, to ... individual atoms.
>
> That is specious reasoning. The Doppler formula of special relativity applies to the far-field light emanated from any of those objects, and the deviations in the near field are described exactly by general relativity, according to which the physics reduces to special relativity over any sufficiently small region, or over any region of any size with sufficiently low curvature.

=="BOXING" ISSUES==

If a gravitational theory //does// reduce naturally and organically to special relativity, then drawing a box around a star and saying that the interior obeys GR but the exterior obeys SR, is okay. The box isn't actually changing any physics, it's an explanatory or expositionary tool.

On the other hand, if a gravitational theory //doesn't// reduce naturally and organically to special relativity, then drawing a box around a star and saying that the interior obeys GR but the exterior view must obey SR, is //not// okay. It's imposing a different physics on the exterior space to what would naturally happen.

----
So let's take a look at the box:

If we draw the box centred on one star, at a distance at which "in effect" all of the star's significant field is contained within the box (giving the box no "significant" external field), and in such a way that the box perimeter has no motion wrt the star, then the signal reaching the box walls has no gravitomagnetic component (because the star isn't moving wrt the box), and if the motion of the entire box and its contents wrt outside observers is then considered to be a matter of relativity in flat spacetime, the box can be treated as a conventional SR source, with the fact that it happens or have a tiny gravity-source in the centre being irrelevant.

This would be the SR-centric viewpoint. If we lived in a pure SR, gravity-free universe, we could box //any// object or any region (or even draw boxes-within-boxes-within-boxes, with arbitrary constant relative motions), and the final physics won't change.

However, in order to get this result with sources that have gravitational fields, the box needs to be drawn "just so", perfectly stationary wrt the star, so that the physics frozen into the box perimeter surface signals don't include any gravitomagnetic effects at all. If the star has any motion at all within the box, then the signals that the box perimeter intercepts and forwards contain a non-SR gravitomagnetic component, and that non-SR component then propagates through flat SR space, so that distant external observers then have to see //non//-SR physics operating. The star has a non-SR motion-shift relationship.

Drawing the box is supposed to be an exercise in clarification - it's supposed to reveal the existing physics without changing the outcome. But a box drawn stationary wrt the star, and a box drawn moving wrt the star, with the external physics described using SR, generate different physical outcomes. If the way that we draw the mathematical box affects the physics seen by a distant observer, the exercise is pathological.

----

There are also going to be situations in which, even as an artificial exercise, we can't draw a box around a curved-spacetime region to make SR work. We can't "box" our solar system, so that all the contents are stationary wrt the box walls - if we define the box wrt the Sun, then Jupiter's signals will reach the box walls with a gravitomagnetic component, and if we define the box wrt Jupiter, then the Sun's signals show gravitomagnetism. If we define a rotating box so that the Sun-Jupiter axis has no motion in the box frame, then Saturn's signals show gravitomagnetism at the box walls. Again, this only seems to be a problem with "hybrid" physics – if we use a pure SR approach ("no such thing as gravity"), then we can box compound systems to our heart's content and they're always consistent (although the solar system in that situation would be in the process of flying apart).


If "boxing" is supposed to be a purely logical exercise that shouldn't change the physics, then the inconsistency of boxing's results in a hybrid "SR+GR" universe indicates that this sort of universe is, once again, logically inconsistent.

On Monday, 17 July 2017 20:54:28 UTC+1, danco...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Monday, July 17, 2017 at 7:20:39 AM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:

> > The gist of the argument is that the motion of a
> > gravitational source must affect the propagation of
> > light in the surrounding region... so the "moving"
> > gravitational body's associated relationships (e.g.
> > between velocity and spectral shift) can't correspond
> > to those of SR.
>

> It goes without saying that in the near field, where curvature (i.e., changes in gravitational potential) is significant, we must use general relativity, but in the far field the curvature is negligible, so special relativity applies. (It is also true that special relativity applies over any sufficiently small region of space-time, even in the near field, but we usually work over larger regions.)

>
> > Wave theory requires all distant objects to obey
> > ==precisely the same== velocity-shift law, regardless
> > of what local physics at the source happened to originally
> > generate the light-signal.
>
> Well, in the far field, where curvature is negligible, the Doppler formula of special relativity applies to all propagation, regardless of the source. We simply need to imagine control volumes enclosing the near-field regions of each object, and consider these enclosures to be the "objects". The relevant frequencies of light are the frequencies emanating from these enclosures. Studying how these waves are generated internally to each "object" is a separate subject. The point is that the Doppler formula if special relativity applies to this macroscopic behavior.
>

> > If the neutron star's light //does// change with relative
> > motion by a velocity-shift formula that departs from the SR
> > prediction...
>

> Well, it departs in the near field where curvature is significant, and where it is accurately described by general relativity (according to which the physics approaches that of special relativity over any sufficiently small region), but in the far field the Doppler formula of special relativity applies, regardless of the source.

>
> > Either the SR relationship describes the isolated
> > moving star's motion-shift //exactly//, or the
> > non-SR relationship that the star follows applies
> > everywhere, to ... individual atoms.
>
> That is specious reasoning. The Doppler formula of special relativity applies to the far-field light emanated from any of those objects, and the deviations in the near field are described exactly by general relativity, according to which the physics reduces to special relativity over any sufficiently small region, or over any region of any size with sufficiently low curvature.

"Boxing" issues

If a gravitational theory //does// reduce naturally and organically to special relativity, then drawing a box around a star and saying that the interior obeys GR but the exterior obeys SR, is okay. The box isn't actually changing any physics, it's an expositionary tool.

On the other hand, if a gravitational theory //doesn't// reduce naturally and organically to special relativity, then drawing a box around a star and saying that the interior obeys GR but the exterior view must obey SR, is //not// okay. It's imposing a different physics on the exterior space to what would naturally happen.

----
So let's take a look at the box:

If we draw the box centred on one star, at a distance at which "in effect" all of the star's significant field is contained within the box (giving the box no "significant" external field), and in such a way that the box perimeter has no motion wrt the star, then the signal reaching the box walls has no gravitomagnetic component (because the star isn't moving wrt the box), and if the motion of the entire box and its contents wrt outside observers is then considered to be a matter of relativity in flat spacetime, the box can be treated as a conventional SR source, with the fact that it happens or have a tiny gravity-source in the centre being irrelevant.

This would be the SR-centric viewpoint. If we lived in a pure SR, gravity-free universe, we could box //any// object or any region (or even draw boxes inside boxes, with arbitrary relative motions), and the final physics won't change.

However, in order to get this result with sources that have gravitational fields, the box needs to be drawn "just so", perfectly stationary wrt the star, so that the physics frozen into the box perimeter surface signals don't include any gravitomagnetic effects at all. If the star has any motion within the box, then the signals that the box perimeter intercepts and forwards DO show a non-SR gravitomagnetic component, and the external observers then have to see //non//-SR physics operating.

Drawing the box is supposed to be an exercise in clarification - it's supposed to reveal the existing physics without changing the outcome. But a box drawn stationary wrt the star, and a box drawn moving wrt the star, with the external physics described using SR, generate different physical outcomes. If the way that we draw the mathematical box affects the physics seen by a distant observer, the exercise is pathological.

----

There are also going to be situations in which, even as an artificial exercise, we can't draw a box around a curved-spacetime region to make SR work. We can't "box" our solar system, so that all the contents are stationary wrt the box walls - if we define the box wrt the Sun, then Jupiter's signals will reach the box walls with a gravitomagnetic component, and if we define the box wrt Jupiter, then the Sun's signals show gravitomagnetism. If we define a rotating box so that the Sun-Jupiter axis has no motion in the box frame, then Saturn's signals show gravitomagnetism at the box walls. Again, this only seems to be a problem with "hybrid" physics – if we use a pure SR approach ("no such thing as gravity"), then we can box compound systems to our heart's content and they're always consistent (although the solar system in that situation would be in the process of flying apart).


If "boxing" is supposed to be a purely logical exercise that shouldn't change the physics, then the inconsistency of boxing's results in an "SR+GR" universe indicates (once again) that this sort of hybrid universe is logically inconsistent.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[danco...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, August 8, 2017 at 2:21:12 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> If we draw the box centred on one star... the box can be

> treated as a conventional SR source, with the fact that
> it happens or have a tiny gravity-source in the centre
> being irrelevant.

Right.

> However... if the star has any motion within the box, then

> the signals that the box perimeter intercepts and forwards
> DO show a non-SR gravitomagnetic component, and the external
> observers then have to see //non//-SR physics operating.

Not true. The enclosure just needs to enclose the region of significant space-time curvature. In any region with no significant curvature, it doesn't matter where the signals came from or how they were produced. Signals don't carry with them any memory of how they were produced, they are fully characterized by their properties, e.g., direction, frequency, and polarization, all of which behave according to special relativity at a given location, provided the curvature of space-time is negligible at that location.

> A box drawn stationary wrt the star, and a box drawn

> moving wrt the star, with the external physics described
> using SR, generate different physical outcomes.

Not true. Drawing boxes doesn't affect anything, it's just a way of helping someone grasp the irrelevance of the near field effects, such as around the center of an electron or a neutron star, to the macroscopic behavior of our interactions with those entities. Special relativity makes local assertions (e.g., the Doppler and aberration formulas), and it applies in any region where curvature is negligible.

> If we define the box wrt the Sun, then Jupiter's signals
> will reach the box walls with a gravitomagnetic component...

No, you misunderstand completely. Signals from Jupiter satisfy the equations of special relativity in any region where spacetime curvature is negligible. For example, electromagnetic signals are fully characterized at a given location by their direction, frequency, and polarization. All these things behave in accord with special relativity in any region where spacetime curvature is negligible.

Your idea is very similar to a discussion here awhile back, in which someone was convinced that if someone standing on a rotating platform throws a ball outward, the ball will follow a spiral path (in the rest frame of the ground), because it will "remember" that it was thrown from a rotating platform. Likewise you seem to imagine some kind of gravitomagnetic memory carried by a light signal after it has departed from a region of high space-time curvature. Needless to say, that's not true.

Your basic problem is that you think the propositions of special relativity are global, rather than local. You've fallen prey to the same misconception that misleads people into thinking (for example) that light from binary stars as seen on Earth must appear at widely different positions due to aberration, since the light was emitted from stars with different relative velocities. You've just substituted different sized objects (with different gravitational fields) for different relative velocities. The explanation of the fallacy is as follows:

Light waves arriving at a given point (in a region with negligible space-time curvature) from a distant neutron star and an atom are essentially plane waves, with particular directions and frequencies in terms of an inertial coordinate system S at that point. The Doppler and aberration formulas of special relativity tell us the frequency and direction of those waves, at the same point, in terms of a different inertial coordinate system S', moving with speed v in terms of S. This has nothing whatsoever to do with how those waves were created at the atom or the neutron star. Understand?

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 31 July 2017 18:11:41 UTC+1, danco...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Sunday, July 30, 2017 at 2:36:17 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> > Lets say that the star and atom have no relative velocity.
> > By the time that both signals have left [2] and entered [3],
> > the light no longer cares where it came from, so if we change
> > velocity and watch the resulting change in frequency, both
> > signals need to Doppler-shift by precisely the //same// ratio.
>
> Right, and indeed they do. This was explained in the previous message, in terms of the macro behavior of the control volumes enclosing regions of significant curvature. See below for a more detailed explanation.

Okay. So you, me and Tom all seem to agree that there must be a single motion-shift relationship for different bodies regardless of their obvious macroscopic gravitational field strength (or lack therof). We just disagree on what that relationship ought to be.
You think all simply-moving bodies must obey SR, while Tom seems to be saying that SR is only an approximation, that the motion-shift of a moving star is not an SR problem, and that nobody who understands GR would expect its shift to agree with the SR predictions. My position is that the shift on a moving star is not an SR problem and the star's relationship must be non-SR, but ... since all moving bodies have to obey the same shift law, this means that SR doesn't just not correctly describe the star's behaviour, it also doesn't correctly describe the behaviour of any other moving bodies (except as an approximation). IOW, it's a useful simplified "engineering theory", but not Fundamental Truth, or a correct foundation theory for gravitational physics.

> > SR requires the atom to obey SR, and GR requires the
> > star to obey a non-SR relationship. So a gravitational
> > theory that reduces to and incorporates SR physics
> > requires us to see both signals Doppler-shift by
> > //different// ratios.
>
> Not true. You've fallen prey to the same misconception that misleads people into thinking (for example) that light from binary stars as seen on Earth must appear at widely different positions due to aberration, since the light was emitted from stars with different relative velocities. You've just substituted different sized objects (with different gravitational fields) for different relative velocities. The explanation of the fallacy is as follows.
>
> In your example, the light waves arriving at a point in [3] are essentially plane waves, normal to the line from the star and atom to the observer in terms of the inertial coordinates in which the hydrogen atom and star are both at rest. The waves have particular frequencies f1 and f2 in that same coordinate system. Now, if the observer in [3] is at rest in those same coordinates, the waves will have the same direction and frequencies f1 and f2, but if the observer is at rest in a different system of coordinates, moving with some speed and at some angle relative to the first system, the angle of incidence and the frequencies of the waves will be given by the simple relativistic Doppler formulas of special relativity. It doesn't matter how the planes waves originated. The will both have the same Doppler shift factor and aberration angle.

Actually, I'm agreeing with you that that argument and its conclusion seems logically correct under SR-GR ... but I'm also pointing out that in the same framework, arguments for the //opposite// result also seem similarly logically unavoidable. Hence the logical inconsistency. It's not that I don't understand the arguments, it's that I understand that there are too many of them, with conflicting outcomes! We can't solve the inconsistency by picking the result that we like, declaring it correct, and saying that the other one is therefore wrong, because someone else can come along and look at the same logical framework and make the opposite logical argument with similar validity. A theory needs to make the same predictions regardless of who's in the driving seat, otherwise the predictions belong to the operator and not the theory.

----
One of the problems with pathological logical systems is that the local logic can be absolutely faultless at every point in the system, but the global logic can still be screwy.

Imagine that you're given a Moebius strip and told that (1) it's a specific looped strip of clear flexible plastic with an unspecified number of twists in it, and that (2) the surface is orientable. This would mean that the total number of twists is an even number when viewed from any angle, and if we attach a letter "d" to the strip, and slide it all the way around and back to its starting point, it's still a "d". If the strip has an even number of twists then statement (2) is true, but if the twist number is odd, the surface is //not// orientable, and the shape returns to its start-point on the wrong side of the strip, with a mirror reflection (the "d" becomes a "b"). Given that the strip is twisty, that the twists don't have fixed locations, and that the strip may spontaneously generate or lose pairs of adjacent twists with opposite senses, how do we check that statement (2) is correct in the context of the provided physical strip (1)?

Our normal method of checking logical consistency is to use an incremental approach ... but in this case, if the strip is non-orientable, the error doesn't show up until we look at the entirety of the strip. Every single individual piece of the strip looks like simple two-sided section of plastic, there's no fault or disjoint anywhere, and we can reason (wrongly) that if we've checked every inch of the strip and found that it's toplogically two-sided, that obviously the entire strip must have two sides.

Someone pins our original location on the strip to the table with a drawing-pin, does the same to a second location on the strip, an unspecified number of twists away from our letter's start position, and asks, "will your letter, moved to that position, be "d" or "b"? "

We slide the letter around, and find that it's still a "d" – we can then "prove", faultlessly (assuming orientability), that the letter at that position must always appear to be a "b" regardless of route taken. But the proof is wrong if (2) is wrong.

Our friend repeats the exercise, but slides the letter around to the second location using the other route. Because the total number of twists is odd, and the number of twists along //our// path was even, the path between the two positions through the remaining section of strip must have an odd number of twists, and the letter arrives at the destination as a "b".
Our friend, assuming orientability, can "prove" that the letter will always appear //reversed// at that location, regardless of route taken. They can argue that because the total number of twists is defined as even, then our path, like theirs, must have an odd number of twists.

The logic that both we and our friend apply is utterly faultless, but both of us manage to prove different and physically incompatible results, which is a giveaway that something is wrong globally. We've been told that the strip has been made in such a way as to create an orientable surface, and it hasn't. But we can examine up to 99.99'% of the strip's length ... //any// 99.999'% of the length ... and find nothing wrong. The giveaway is that it's possible for two people, provided with the same strip, the same challenge and the same received information, to faultlessly prove two different outcomes.

In the case of you and Tom, you both seem reasonably experienced at dealing with SR and GR problems, you both seem to agree that the theory is "good" and has no real faults and that you know how to apply it, and you both agree that strong-gravity and weak-gravity bodies should show the same shift relationship.

But //you// apply the theory and prove that since SR must be correct, both objects clearly HAVE to obey the SR shift relationship, while Tom starts from the gravitational angle and seems to be saying that the shifts follow a //non//-SR relationship (Tom: "SR IS IRRELEVANT!").

So either one of you isn't doing it right, or you both inhabit a theory that's similar to a Moebius strip or a Penrose triangle ... in which case, the problem is not that you can't both //prove// that your conflicting positions MUST be correct ... the problem is that you both //can//.

In the exercise with the strip, the "reasonable but wrong" statement was that if we take two sections of flat paper and join them together, with flat joins, the resulting loop must be double-sided.
In the case of "SR+GR", the "reasonable-but-wrong" statement was that if we take a gravitational curved-spacetime theory of physics, it must perfectly mesh with and reduce to a flat-spacetime theory of physics.

Both statements seem obviously correct, until you're presented with a counter-example.

> > If we revert the SR shift equations to the older
> > Newtonian optics set...
>
> But the Newtonian optics has been demonstrated to be wrong, which is why it was discarded.

No, the "Newtonian optics" Doppler relationships hadn't been demonstrated to be wrong in 1905, and (as mentioned) in many cases give indistinguishable or even identical physical results to the SR predictions. So there are limits to how wrong the NO relationships //could// be, experimentally, without the SR set also failing to agree with experiment.

The main "implementation" of Newtonian theory applied to light – Ballistic Emission Theory ("BET") – //was// soundly disproved thanks to its lousy signal flight-time predictions, but it wasn't the only possible implementation. We can also implement NO using an acoustic metric, in which case we get wave-theory compatibility: light is still emitted at cEmitter, but it's now received at the receiver at cReceiver, with the SoL at all points in between determined by local environmental factors.

Trying to disprove the NO Doppler equations themselves without relying on flight-time arguments is surprisingly difficult. Einstein apparently still hadn't managed to come up with a proper disproof by 1913, and was pleased that the DeSitter experiment gave a disproof of BET, because it meant that he thought he could finally put the competing equations away and stop worrying about them.

Part of the SR experimental community also seemed to realise that in many comparisons of the SR and NO Doppler predictions, it would often be difficult or impossible to obtain a convincing result showing which shift predictions were best. The response seems to have been _to_choose _not_to_make_that_comparison_ – to instead pick a less adequate reference test theory that said there was no theory in the range SR<=NO that required testing, that the legal range to test was therefore just CT-SR, and that any data falling in the "impossible" SR-NO range could be safely corrected for or calibrated away as experimental error and treated as supporting SR.

Excluding the range that included NO meant that more experiments could now be claimed to validate SR to very high accuracy and significance, even where there was no actual difference between the SR prediction and its C19th Newtonian predecessor. We used the choice of test theory to eliminate Newtonian predictions from the analysis, with Darwinian natural selection favouring the SR test theory that would allow experimenters to present their results as having maximum significance, over other test theories that might have been more credible.

It's a little bit like what happened at Enron. The Enron board probably never explicitly conspired with their lower management to get their internal financial data misreported ... They simply created a structure that rewarded people financially and socially for over-reporting, and made it clear that everyone was doing it, that this made the board happy, that it counted as loyalty to the company, and that there was no obvious downside. Within Enron, you got social disapproval of your peers and career blight for //not// inflating figures. With a lot of SR testing, all one normally had to do to enhance the claimed significance of one's results was to cite the same test theory papers that one's colleagues were already using.

> > ...and also revert SR's redefinitions of distances and times...
>
> It isn't a matter of definitions of distances and times, because we can express any theory in terms of any system of space and time coordinates we like.

Yep, but to do comparative analysis between two theories, we can't always plug an SR-derived velocity value into a Newtonian-style calculation or vice versa. That would involve disproving one theory by //presupposing// that the other was correct. That argument could be used in either direction.

> The measures of distance and time conventionally used in special relativity are the unique measures that constitute inertial coordinate systems, i.e. systems in which the equations of physics hold good in their simple homogeneous and isotropic form. The insight of special relativity is that these unique coordinate systems are related by Lorentz transformations, not Galilean transformations. The Lorentz invariance of all physical phenomena has been experimentally established to great precision.

But Newtonian optics doesn't use the "Galilean" Doppler relationships. Those seem to be "bluer" than SR by a Lorentz factor, while the "NO" Doppler shifts are redder than SR by a Lorentz factor. The NO set are actually redder than the Galilean set by a Lorentz-//squared// factor.

> > Presumably you've now gone away and done a few
> > sample calculations of the SR and NM shift predictions
> > using theory-specific values of v, and found that I'm
> > right.
>
> I've certainly made that comparison, as have countless others, but found that you are not right. The relativistic Doppler effect is measurably different than the non-relativistic (Galilean) Doppler effect, and measurements have confirmed the relativistic effect.

Then you're using the wrong Doppler equations <g>
Depending on the setup, sometimes there are measurable differences between NO and SR, sometimes there aren't. For instance, if you take Einstein's 1905 calculation of E=mc^2, and you swap out the SR definitions and relationships for the NO set, you get precisely the same final answer.

I'm emphatically not arguing for the non-relativistic Galilean Doppler effect. Those predicitons are awful, and they're not what Newtonian optics predicts.

I'm a relativist. I do relativity theory. The relativistic effects normally present in SR are if anything //nominally stronger// under the alternative system, not weaker. SR predicts a Lorentz transverse redshift? The alternative a Lorentz-squared redshift. It's textbook relativity's bigger, stronger, brighter brother.

----

What Einstein described as "classical theory", which SR was supposed to be compared against, assumed the validity of Newtonian theory for calculations involving matter (because, SR postulate #1, relativity), but tyhe equations of a stationary aether (wrt the observer) for light (because, SR postulate #2, "we know that the SoL is globally constant for the observer"). Those two sets of predictions were always logically incompatible, because the Newtonian energy and momentum relationships, applied to light, give a predicted recession Doppler shift of
[1] f'/f = (c-v)/c

, while the corresponding Doppler prediction for a speed of light globally fixed wrt the observer is
[2] f'/f = c/(c+v)

These are two physically different predictions: if a body recedes at half background lightspeed, the first equation (NO) predicts a halving in viewed frequency, while the second equation predicts a frequency that is two-thirds the rest frequency. The first predicts f'=0 for lightspeed recession, the second predicts a viewed frequency only halving for lightspeed recession. [1] is associated with a Lorentz-squared transverse redshift ("aberration redshift"), [2] is associated with no transverse redshift at all.

What SR does is to takes these two conflicting halves of "classical theory" and resolve the conflict by taking their geometric mean, so that we end up with
[3] f'/f = SQRT[ [1]×[2] ] = SQRT[ (c-v)/(c+v) ]
, which deviates from both earlier predictions by the same ratio, the Lorentz factor. By consistently multiplying in or dividing out this Lorentz factor we've reconciled the apparent conflicts produced by the two SR postulates, and we have the equations of special relativity.

> > In loads of cases where SR is touted as making
> > unique predictiosn that wouldn't be expected if
> > the theory wasn't right, it turns out that the
> > "new" predictions are indistinguishable from or
> > identical to what we get with C19th theory.
>
> Not true. Whenever claims like this are raised, providing specific examples based on Galilean relativity, they are always easily debunked.

And as mentioned, I'm emphatically not trying to do anything "Galilean"!
You're the one introducing the word. Googling "Galilean Doppler" throws up a bunch of pages that seem to use equation [2]. The suggested alternative system instead uses equation [1].

You're claiming superiority for mainstream theory by misrepresenting the predictions of the alternative. That's no way to win a scientific argument.

>Of course, the term "C19th theory" is ambiguous, and one could argue that Lorentz invariance was already implicit in Maxwell's equations, and hence special relativity (at least for optics) should be classified as 19th century theory. But the point is that the relativistic Doppler relations are correct.

But you don't //know// that. Because the SR and NO Doppler equations are often very, very difficult to tell apart.
Remember, for all its faults, the Doppler relationships associated with nasty old ballistic emission theory were //also// technically "relativistic". Ballistic emission theory didn't assume a preferred frame for light. And it successfully predicts transverse redshifts and the particle accelerator lightspeed limit, results that members of the SR community often claim to be SR-specific.

> > The closeness of the SR and NO predicitons was
> > already a "thing" in the 1900s.
>
> Of course. Special relativity gives many results that differ from pre-relativistic predictions by only small amounts (e.g. second order) in many circumstances. That goes without saying, since it took a long time for special relativity to be discovered, because the pre-relativistic predictions base on Galilean worked "pretty well" in many circumstances. But they are incorrect to higher orders, and this makes a huge differences for the understanding of many of the most fundamental physical phenomena.

Again, forget about anything Galilean, those relationships suck.
And that's presumably one reason why they're the standard reference that SR is compared against. Because compared to //them//, almost anything looks good! :D

It's a piece of sleight-of-hand. You've being encouraged to think that the only choice here is between relativity theory (represented by SR), and theories that don't obey the PoR, and that's not the actual choice.

If you're suddenly using terms like "Galilean" (which I don't think anyone else has used in this discussion), then it sounds to me as if you may have recently been reading up on SR testing. I think I ought to warn you that a lot of that material is junk. It's designed to show off SR in the best possible light, it compares SR to the worst possible alternatives, and a load of the purported analysis is simply mathematically and historically wrong (especially when you go back to the stuff written in the ~1920s).

Some of this is Einstein's fault: he carefully crafted narratives to explain the case for SR, where he presented a bad initial system or a bad initial argument with problems, and then presented SR as the solution to those problems ... but the "previous" system often seems to have been artificially constructed by him as an expositional tool, or conveniently skips past a generation of better historical theory. These explanations shouldn't be taken as representing what most people really believed before special relativity came along, or the actual range of possibilities.

> > If you simualtaneously measure the forward blueshift
> > and rearward redshift on a particle moving in a straight
> > line...
>
> You're just describing Ives-Stillwell, which gave results consistent with special relativity. This is one of the (many) experimental refutations of your beliefs.

No, it's about the only one. And it was done by a couple of guys who didn't believe in SR, and who considered their experiment to be validating Lorentz aether theory instead. And AFAIK there's never been a successful replication.

Now, flip to a hypothetical alternative reality. If //current// theory had just one clear conflicting result, and that result had never been replicated, and had been carried out by a couple of aether theory guys, the SR community could say, "Pah, the guys were obviously non-SR fringe researchers, and the lack of replication just shows that it was a rubbish experiment!")

We also have the Hasselkamp transverse shift experiment (also apparently unreplicated!), which found double the transverse redshift predicted by special relativity. The key thing to me about the Hasselkamp test is that the hardware reported twice as much redshift as expected, the standard SR test theory said "but that's not a legitimate result", and the experimenters basically had to invent a half-degree detector misalignment to explain away half the effect, and then use statistics on the remaining half to argue that the remaining result was compatible with SR to a few percent. If they'd had more time, they'd have been entitled by their test theory to redo the test with half the redshift manually calibrated out, to bring the results into the "proper" range. The fact that they were short of time meant that they had to put the "correction" into the analysis phase where it was visible, rather than the experimental phase where it could have remained hidden.

So what the experiment established was that C20th SR test theory let experimenters override hardware results and manually change a ~100% overshoot into a ~6% agreement, and still pass peer review. And that makes any test that used that same test theory unreliable when it comes to comparing SR with NO. Any tests carried out under those rules would be allowed to convert pro-NO hardware readings into a pro-SR result after adjustment.

In fact, since any experimental measurement is going to be liable to a certain amount of noise and error and statistical scatter, we can argue that perhaps we'd get the best pro-SR results in a test assuming the range CT-SR if the real shift relationships //weren't// those of SR, but were somewhere in the forbidden range, SR-->NO.

> > > You have not defined a "Cliffordian universe"...
> >
> > In the sort of universe imagined by Clifford, physical
> > matter is associated with distortion fields, and the
> > interactions of matter with matter are expressable as
> > the interactions of the associated fields.
>
> Sure, that's the dream of a unified field theory, but your enemy is not general relativit, it is quantum field theory (and the lack of an equivalence principle for non-gravitational forces). Actually, general relativity accomplished Clifford's dream for the force of gravity, representing it as curvature related to each particle of mass,

My understanding was that nobody had ever managed to derive the SR equations of motion as an exact solution for particles with gravitational fields.
I seem to remember someone derived equation [1], "the Newtonian optics" equation that I'm suggesting is the correct solution for moving gravitational masses, applicable everywhere ... and then //presenting// it as a derivation of the the Newtonian approximation of SR's equation[3].

> but no one has been able to duplicate that success for the other forces of nature. But more fundamentally, please note that Clifford's conception of a continuous manifold reduces to flat tangent spaces at each point.

Yeah. Flat tangent spaces containing zero particles capable of acting as observers or observed masses, and also sufficiently far from any point-masses for their fields not to measurably intrude. So in a Cliffordian physics, the flat tangent spaces aren't just the limit at which the number of available particles to do physics with drops to //zero//, it's beyond that ... it's the limit at which there are not even any particles available to do physics with //nearby//.

In a Cliffordian universe where all-physics-is-curvature, the geometry of a flat tangent space is geometry-but-not-physics. Pretty much by definition.

>He did not contemplate a non-Riemannian or discontinuous surface, so he cannot be cited in support of your belief in a discontinuous manifold.

I have no such belief.
I most emphatically DO NOT believe in, suggest, or promote the idea of a discontinuous manifold. If someone's told you otherwise, you should stop listening to them, and stop repeating what they tell you, in public, as fact.
Choose your sources more wisely.

If you're confidently making declarations of what I supposedly believe and getting //those// wrong, then I have to assume that your similarly confident statements on other things that are more difficult for me to check may be similarly wide of the mark.

> > In a Cliffordian universe ... one in which all physics
> > can be described in terms of curvature ... a curved-spacetime
> > geometry doesn't reduce to flat-spacetime phsyics, it reduces
> > to flat-spacetime //non//-physics.
>
> When you talk about describing things in terms of curvature, you need to give at least some hint as to what you mean. For example, Clifford imagined, in a vague sort of way, that particles might consist of regions of high curvature, and those regions might propagate along extremal paths (i.e., geodesics) in the ambient curved space due to other "particles", so the curvature of the space would affect the motions of "particles", and the entire universe is a single continuous space with curved regions propagating here and there. In general relativity the gravitational interaction is modeled in just this way, except that the fold is spacetime instead of space.

Pretty much. The suggested alternative system "steals" most of existing GR but rejects the SR component as incompatible with Clifford's idea (because it models particle interactions in the //absence// of curvature), and then instead of SR's global c-constancy , it uses GR-style principles to create local lightspeed constancy at the level of inertial physics, as a curvature-regulated effect.

> But you can't be referring to anything like this, because both of these entail flat tangent space (or spacetime) at every point (event). So, since you aren't talking about Clifford's idea, and you aren't talking about Einstein's idea, you need to say what YOU (Eric) are talking about.

I'm talking about Clifford's idea that all physics is curvature (but as you say, in space and time rather than just space), and Einstein's ideas about general relativity (apart from the part about reduction to SR, because SR describes physics //without// curvature, which doesn't correspond to Clifford's concept).

I'll try to explain it again:

... In a "Cliffordian" physics, every particle of matter that exists in a region and is capable of participating in meaningful physics, is associated with a "dent" in the shape of that region's light-geometry. If we zoom in so far on a part this surface that our field of view appears "effectively flat", then the region that we are looking at will by definition contain no dents, and will therefore contain no particles.
There will //by geometrical definition// be no physical matter inside that region to observe, and also //by geometrical definition// also no physical matter capable of acting as an observer. So there's no meaningful observer-physics taking place there. A flat zoomed-in region represents not the geometrical properties of physics, but the geometrical signature of an absence of physics. There's nobody home.

In theory we could still populate the flat region with hypothetical "purely mathematical" objects and observers that don't have associated bumps like the "real" particles, and derive the relationships of these abstract mathematical beings as special relativity. But the geometrical laws of physics that that we derive for these beings will then be different to the geometrical laws that we derive for the //real// observers that //do// have relatively moving bumps.

So the SR relationships derived this way (in a Cliffordian universe) don't apply to matter, and do not correspond to physical law. There's still an obvious geometrical reduction to //flat spacetime//, but there's not an associated reduction to flat-spacetime //physics//, so the Cliffordian description is a logical counter-example to the idea that gravitational theory has to reduce to the physics of special relativity.

> > In 1960 we found that with rotating reference systems,
> > the inertial and gravitational descriptions generated
> > irreconcilably different geometries, if the "inertial
> > physics" description came from special relativity.
>
> That is simply not true. The issue of rotating frames was one of the main areas of focus when Einstein was developing general relativity in 1911-1915, and the criticisms of the equivalence principle related to rotating coordinate systems were fully resolved.

Well, according to the American Journal of Physics, some new criticisms appeared in early 1960.

> The incidental little paper by Schild that you have fixated on does not contain any significant or novel insights, and has no effect on the meaning or interpretation of general relativity.

Except that the paper stated that the interpretation of general relativity ==was== specifically being changed from that point forwards. Am.J.Phys agreed. And that's what seems to have then happened.

> Schild would never have dreamed of denying the obvious fact that the tangent space at any point on a smooth manifold is flat.

Not all mathematics is physics.

> > So either SR was wrong or the GPoR wasn't fully general.
> > Either way, the 1916 theory was invalidated.
>
> Not true at all. Einstein's 1915 theory of relativity is still the current best theory of gravity,

It's probably the simplest of a bad batch of theories, all of which suffer from the same inherent design flaw.
If our current peer-review standards require that all classical theories of gravity reduce exactly to SR as a limit, then every textbook theory that meets that condition will have the same incompatibility with QM, and the same basic internal logical defects.

It's like, Einstein's general theory is a three-legged horse, and it's the fastest horse in a race whose entrance requirements are that four-legged horses aren't allowed to participate. Being the best in that field is really nothing to boast about.

> and has passed all experimental tests.

<cough>darkmatter</cough>

>It was neither changed nor re-interpreted in 1960 or any other time.

States you. The historical record suggests otherwise. Were you a participant in the 1960 discussions? If not, where are you getting your information?

> Again, Schild's banal and unoriginal little comments did not invalidate general relativity, and he never claimed that they did.

No, Schild said that after some non-unanimous discussion, with GR as it had previously been understood, _the_invalidation_was_already_generally_accepted_as_having_happened_.
However, he then argued that since the theory couldn't or shouldn't self-invalidate, that the arguments that led up to the invalidation must be considered invalid within the context of the theory, and that from that point on, we had to adopt a different attitude to the validity of the principle of equivalence in rotating-body problems.

Schild didn't take credit for the arguments himself, or say who else had been involved in the discussions. I'd rather like to know who else was involved, and whether Schild was acting as a mouthpiece for someone else.
IMO it's a very strange paper, but Am.J.Phys. (whose aim is partly to document the "correct" way to apply and teach physics theory) decided that it should be published.

A post-1960 viewpoint that I sometimes come across is that GR's mathematical machinery is correct, but the original principles that generated that machinery were "naive", and now we were in a better position to say with hindsight how the theory //should// have been defined. I was in conversation with a math guys some years ago and whingeing that current GR no longer seemed to attempt to conform exactly to the general principle of relativity, and he basically shrugged and said, "Yes, but who cares?" – according to him, the concept of the GPoR was naive and only a rough guide, the mathematical core of modern GR was not the GPoR but the principle of covariance, covariance was much more important, and by rights the theory would be better off called "the theory of covariance", but we were stuck with the name GR for historical reasons.

> > People just make stuff up to support
> > SR about "what would happen if SR wasn't correct",
> > without bothering to check whether its true.
>
> Not true at all.

You've just had an example. Cliff Will stated that atmospheric muons wouldn't reach ground level unless special relativity was right, the Newtonian calculation has the muons reaching exactly the same depth as they do under SR.

> Beginning in the early 1900's there were tests with accelerating particles, and the predictions of various competing theories were compared closely with the data. All the theories gave very similar predictions, so the experiments had to be made more and more precise in order to distinguish between them. Eventually they were able to establish that the predictions of the Lorentz-Einstein theory were correct, i.e., they found that the phenomena were Lorentz invariant.

Well, Will's confident assertion that we knew that SR was correct because of known muon behaviour was badly wrong ... how do you know that the other pro-SR analysis is any more reliable?

> > Has there ever been any research on how the "Lorentz
> > invariance" issue changes if we allow the existence of
> > a solution that is nominally redder than SR by an
> > additional Lorentz factor?
>
> Yes, there has been.

So you can give me a reference to the paper or book section that examines this question?

>Abundant experimental evidence (such as discussed above) confirms that all phenomena are Lorentz invariant, ruling out any additional Lorentz factor.

Well the test theory under which the data was collected will be kinda important.

> > What are the relativistic rules for inertial physics
> > if lightspeed is assumed, more realistically, to only
> > be locally constant? The result is a different theory.
>
> Right, the result is general relativity, in which special relativity is valid on the tangent space of the spacetime manifold at any point.

But the geometry of a tangent space does not necessarily describe the real-world laws of physics for particulate matter.
It might be more like the Phantom Zone in the Superman comics, a place that exists outside normal time and space, and has its own different laws (and where bad people are sent as a punishment!).

The tangent space argument makes lightspeed nominally //globally// constant across the artificial tangent space.
If (as I said) lightspeed is assumed to //only// be locally constant, we can suggest that a lightsignal has a velocity of cEmitter at the emitter and a velocity of cObserver at the observer (local c-constancy), that the velocit(ies) between are a function of local geometry, that the change in velocity between moving particles can then be described as being due to a gravitomagnetic dragging effect, and at that point we get a relativistic acoustic metric rather than a Minkowski metric, and a different set of equations of motion.

In that context, the "tangent" arguments and "zooming" arguments just aren't that relevant to physics. I know that mathematicians enjoy using those methods, but this doesn't make them physically meaningful.

> > Classical Hawking radiation is a consequence of the
> > alternative equation-set, but is impossible with the
> > SR equations applied to gravity. So with the other set
> > we get signal leakage, while with SR-based GR, we get
> > a silent "Wheeler" black hole and conflicts with QM.
>
> This is really a separate subject, but the very prediction of Hawking radiation arises from the combination of general relativity and quantum field theory, so it's ridiculous to claim that Hawking radiation, per se, "is impossible" under either general relativity or quantum field theory.

It's impossible under current general relativity, without externally-applied fudges (like an artificial, retrofitted, quantum field theory overlay). Hawking radiation requires a causal structure and definitions that disagree with those of current GR. The causal definitions of quantum theory (before you get to the quantum bit!) and those of SR-based GR are philosophically different. As Einstein explained to Heisenberg, according to SR's logic (which SR-based GR inherits) "what's measured defines what's real", whereas with QM's logic, "what's real defines what's measured". Heisenberg had originally expected to try to give QM the same definitions as SR, but Einstein corrected him and said that his own SR approach shouldn't be applied to QM, because the approach was "nonsense".

Heisenberg credited the conversation with having inspired him to come up with the uncertainty principle.

> Analog models with acoustic metrics mimic some, but not all, of the features of Hawking radiation and gravitation,

Can you suggest one feature of Hawking radiation that doesn't have a counterpart under an acoustic metric? I thought the feature-set seemed to be pretty complete. You even get the occasional additional prediction that the QM guys appear not to have made yet. :)

Also consider that cosmological Hawking radiation – a description of how information leaks through a cosmological horizon and how the horizon has a non-zero temperature – is typically described entirely within the classical domain, using a non-SR Doppler shift relationship for cosmological recession and cosmological redshift.
An observerspace description of the appearance of a cosmological horizon, using classical physics, would seem to have to be a feature-complete manifestation of the statistical mechanics of quantum field theory. Because that horizon behaviour is presumably physically real and actually out there, it would seem to have to obey statistical laws, and we know that a cosmological horizon is an acoustic horizon, whose physics obeys the rules of acoustic metrics.

So with the cosmological horizon as a physical system that appears to have to obey both sets of laws, it's actually quite difficult for an acoustic metric NOT to have a 100% (or nearly 100%) correspondence to quantum field theory.

...

> but do not represent a viable realistic model of the phenomenon, unless modified and refined to the point that it becomes general relativity combined with quantum field theory.

If a cosmological horizon //in real life// has to obey both acoustic metric rules of physics and quantum field theory statistics, then the acoustic metric behaviour has to generate the QFT statistics in a "viable and realistic" manner. Because we're no longer talking about mathematical abstraction, we're talking about something that is thought to be real physical behaviour.

If we take general relativity and delete all the SR-based content, then the mechanism that we get for local lightspeed constancy, where light passed between relatively moving particles only shows local c-constancy, is essentially a GR-style description of gravitomagnetic lightspeed regulation. The resulting physics then obeys acoustic metric rules rather than Minkowski spacetime rules, the nominal shift relationships become redder than SR because of the additional gravitomagnetic curvature, the system becomes more nonlinear, the observerspace logic corresponds to the definition that Einstein gave Heisenberg for QM instead of the version he used for SR, we get indirect radiation through a gravitational horizon, the horizons become "effective" horizons rather than "event" horizons, particles get "bumped" out through the horizon along non-inertial paths, a naive back-extrapolation of the escaping particles' trajectories that ignores the acceleration then gives an artificial description in which the particles were created outside the horizon as particle-pair production events, and we have the "popular" 1970s QM-based description of Hawking radiation, from purely classical principles.

This modified version of general relativity does not then need to be "combined" with quantum field theory, because it's already producing the same basic physical behaviours. The two descriptions become dual descriptions of the same physics.


The only really difficult thing here is the psychological wrench of "letting go" of the safety-net of special relativity's comfortingly flat geometry, and fully embracing the vertiginous concept of a physics entirely based on curved-spacetime principles. We're used to breaking big problems down into smaller stages, and then trying to fit those fairly self-contained parts together to build a bigger picture. With this system you can't use that incremental approach so much, you have to find the common principles that work across multiple fields of physics, and allow an entire structure to emerge naturally from those principles, more or less as a single piece.

Once you have the structure right, the rest kinda follows.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[danco...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, August 8, 2017 at 4:35:31 PM UTC-7, Eric Baird wrote:
> ... there must be a single motion-shift relationship for

> different bodies regardless of their obvious macroscopic

> gravitational field strength ...

Your phrase "motion-shift relationship" is meaningless. It's crucial to base your thinking on clearly defined concepts, not vague undefined phrases. Again, given the frequency and direction of a wave in terms of one system of inertial coordinates at a given point, the relativistic Doppler and aberration formulas give the frequency and direction of the same wave at the same point in terms of a relatively moving system of inertial coordinates. These formulas apply in any region of negligible space-time curvature. Please note that waves propagating in a flat region do not have any memory of how they were formed. They follow the laws for flat space-time when in regions of flat space-time.

> Actually, I'm agreeing with you that that argument and
> its conclusion seems logically correct under SR-GR ...

Right.

> ... but I'm also pointing out that in the same framework,
> arguments for the //opposite// result also seem similarly
> logically unavoidable.

Not true. The unassailable logical reasoning leading to the correct conclusion has been described here in detail, and you've agreed with it. You then claim that equally valid logical reasoning also leads to the opposite conclusion, but you haven't provided that reasoning. Of course, if such reasoning existed, special relativity would be the least of our worries, since you would have proven that rational thought itself is invalid.

> It's not that I don't understand the arguments,
> it's that I understand that there are too many of
> them, with conflicting outcomes!

Yes, and even simple arithmetic contains subtleties that it takes a brilliant mind like mine to perceive. For example, if you add a column of numbers from the top down, and then from the bottom up, the result is always different!

But seriously, only one of the arguments is correct, and all the others (that give conflicting outcomes) are logically flawed. The correct argument has been given here, and the flaws in the contrary arguments that you've put forward have been pointed out. What more needs to be done?

> ... it's possible for two people... to faultlessly prove
> two different outcomes.

Not true. (And, again, if it were true, special relativity would be the least of our worries, because you would have proven the invalidity of rational thought.)

> So either one of you isn't doing it right...

No, you're just mixing up different answers to different questions. Remember, your thesis was that light from a hydrogen atom and neutron star can't both obey the special relativistic Doppler and aberration formulas at some distant location, but this has been disproven. The light from both sources satisfies the special relativistic formulas for different coordinate systems at the distant location. Everyone (except you) agrees with this. Now, as explained previously, if you want to talk about the frequency of the light near the surface of the neutron star, or how the ray was deflected as it emerged from that region, we would use general relativity, just as we would use quantum field theory to examine the microscopic attributes of the radiation emerging from the hydrogen atom, but this is irrelevant to the far-field behavior and the fact that the relativistic formulas apply at the distant location.

> We can also implement NO using an acoustic metric...

Before embarking on a discussion of acoustic metrics, I think it would be best to first reach agreement on simple things like the special relativistic Doppler formula. Do you agree that your atom/neutron star argument has been debunked, and that the special relativistic Doppler formula applies to the light from both sources in any local region and on a scale where the space-time curvature is negligible?

> What SR does is to takes these two conflicting
> halves of "classical theory" and resolve the

> conflict by taking their geometric mean...

That isn't valid reasoning. By simple logic it can be shown that there is only a single degree of freedom in the form of the relationship between relatively moving systems of inertial coordinates, namely a single constant with units of squared inverse speed. And an overwhelming abundance of empirical evidence shows that the value must be (to the precision that we can measure) 1/c^2. Only this value is consistent with the inertia of energy, not to mention Maxwell's equations, etc. Hence, special relativity. There is no ambiguity here. At no point do we reason by saying, hey, let's take the geometric mean of the classical resting-source and resting-receiver Doppler effects. We use the FAR more efficient ways of deriving special relativity from the available empirical facts.

> The SR and NO Doppler equations are often very, very
> difficult to tell apart.

Of course they are. That's why we didn't deduce special relativity from (e.g.,) measuring the difference between sin(theta) and tan(theta) for the aberration of stars. You have it all backwards. We know which kinematics is relevant to inertial coordinate systems based on the relativity principle and the inertia of energy with the conversion factor of c^2. It is quite feasible to unambiguously establish this empirically, and from this everything else follows.

> > You're just describing Ives-Stillwell...This is one of the (many)

> > experimental refutations of your beliefs.
>
> No, it's about the only one.

No, you misunderstand. Again, measuring Doppler shifts is one of the least efficient ways of discriminating between different theories that differ only in the second order. (By the way, one valid refutation is sufficient.) But we know which one is correct because we know energy has inertia, with the conversion factor of c^2. There is only one degree of freedom in the space of logically viable relativistic theories, and there are many ways of showing empirically which one is correct, and they all point to Lorentz invariance. There is no ambiguity here.

> My understanding was that nobody had ever managed to
> derive the SR equations of motion as an exact solution
> for particles with gravitational fields.

Not true. It's been shown that test particles move along geodesics in space-time, and this reduces to the special relativistic equations of motion (local conservation of energy and momentum) in regions with negligible curvature.

> I most emphatically DO NOT believe in, suggest, or
> promote the idea of a discontinuous manifold.

Then your beliefs are self-contradictory, because you deny that the spacetime manifold is asymptotically flat (i.e., for a given region the ratio of the deviation from a flat plane to the radius of the region can be made arbitrarily small by considering a sufficiently small region) at each point, which is true by definition for a smooth continuous manifold.

[Ross A. Finlayson]

"[VELOCiTY of LiGHT has "constancy" per CONSTANT COUNT].!!"

--Stuckless, Brian A.M.

"Velocity of light has constancy, per constant count,
of area surface (in volume surfaces) flow of light."

Here BAMS introduced "Velocity of Light", which
everyone knows is a constant for everyone and
from all observer frames, as to each other.

He references its constancy.

[Tom Roberts]

On 8/8/17 6:35 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> [to dancouriann] Okay. So you, me and Tom all seem to agree that there must

> be a single motion-shift relationship for different bodies regardless of
> their obvious macroscopic gravitational field strength (or lack therof).

OK. Moreover, in this context there is no doubt about what it is: it is the
algorithm I gave earlier in this thread.

> We just disagree on what that relationship ought to be.

Only if you disagree with my previous statement. (I doubt very much that
dancouriann disagrees with it.)

> You think all simply-moving bodies must obey SR, while Tom seems to be
> saying that SR is only an approximation, that the motion-shift of a moving
> star is not an SR problem, and that nobody who understands GR would expect
> its shift to agree with the SR predictions.

That is a rather poor summary of what I have been saying.

First, your "motion-shift" is obscure -- such private vocabularies are hopeless.
I assume you mean the Doppler shift from source to receiver. Such Doppler shifts
can arise from relative motion, and also from gravitation and the cosmic
expansion of the universe. The algorithm I gave handles them all. Indeed, in
general it is not possible to separate such different aspects of Doppler shift,
one can only compute it in its entirety (no matter, that is what one measures).

SR is MANIFESTLY an approximation to GR -- within any manifold to which GR
applies, SR is approximately valid in a small enough local region of any point
in the manifold, with the accuracy of the approximation depending on the size of
the region and the curvature of the manifold in the region.

That is a physicist's description. A mathematician would say
that SR applies only in the tangent spaces of the manifold.

In some cases that "local region" can be quite large. For instance, consider the
emission of an atom on the surface of a very massive star, which propagates to a
receiver on earth without passing near any other massive objects. To reasonable
approximation we can consider the region from earth to near the massive star to
be flat, and apply SR in this region. That is, a box around the star can enclose
the region of large curvature near it, and serve as a boundary between a region
in which GR must be applied, and a region in which SR can be applied with
acceptable error. In the algorithm I gave, that corresponds to a region in which
the parallel-propagation of the signal is complicated to compute, and a much
larger region in which it is easy to compute (because SR applies).

> My position is that the shift on a moving star is not an SR problem and the
> star's relationship must be non-SR, but ... since all moving bodies have to
> obey the same shift law, this means that SR doesn't just not correctly
> describe the star's behaviour, it also doesn't correctly describe the
> behaviour of any other moving bodies (except as an approximation).

Hmmmm. GR applies to all such objects, and one can apply the algorithm I gave
earlier to compute the Doppler shift.

SR _MIGHT_ apply in some situations, but only those for which its approximation
is valid. So yes, SR is not universal -- no matter, as GR is (in this context).

I have no idea why you are so fixated on SR. Switch to GR and all is well. Apply
SR only in regions where its approximation gives acceptable errors.

> IOW, it's a useful simplified "engineering theory", but not Fundamental
> Truth, or a correct foundation theory for gravitational physics.

This is physics, not mysticism -- YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING AT ALL about
"Fundamental Truth, or a correct foundation theory". So attempting to discuss
them is ridiculous.

But we do know that GR is a better theory than SR, in that is it more accurate
in a much larger domain than is SR.

> [... 'way too many repetitions of the same confusion]

I have no idea why you are so fixated on SR. Switch to GR and all is well. Apply
SR only in regions where its approximation gives acceptable errors.

Tom Roberts

[Ross A. Finlayson]

GR is either built from SR or some alternative principles
(here that GR holds). Those alternative principles aren't
so much the axiom of SR and constancy of light, but they
still are.

So, model-fitting might follow from accommodation of "GR
without contradictions following SR" but without a unified
explanation there's still the deduction of one for the
other and talking points (or rather, planks of the platform
of what should be the foundation) at odds with each other
in the combined explanation.

For some "rule 1 applies, rule 2 except where it doesn't",
doesn't say much.

Here this is as well some 'GR minus SR plus some "local" SR',
but, without the minus or the plus, from where GR -> SR.

[Tom Roberts]

On 8/10/17 8:24 PM, Ross A. Finlayson wrote:
> GR is either built from SR or some alternative principles
> (here that GR holds). Those alternative principles aren't
> so much the axiom of SR and constancy of light, but they
> still are.

I don't know what you are trying to say. Fundamental to GR is the assumption
that SR applies locally (i.e. in the tangent spaces).

> So, model-fitting might follow [...]

Hmmmm. There is no "room" for "model fitting" in GR. GR has three parameters
that are in principle free to be varied, but in practice they are HIGHLY
constrained by experiments:
c is the symmetry speed of the local Lorentz transform.
Experimentally it is constrained to be within a few parts
per billion of the vacuum speed of light.
G is Newton's gravitational constant.
Experimentally it is known to about 50 parts per million.
/\ (\Lambda) is the cosmological constant.
Experimentally it is constrained to be zero by experiments
in the solar system; cosmological observations imply it is
about 1.5E-25 kg/m^3 (far too small to be observed in the
solar system).

> but without a unified
> explanation there's still the deduction of one for the
> other and talking points (or rather, planks of the platform
> of what should be the foundation) at odds with each other

> in the combined explanation. [... more of the same]

That's just word salad without meaning.

Bottom line: GR is the physical theory, SR is merely a useful approximation to it.

Tom Roberts

[Ross A. Finlayson]

Then, what's physics' problem?

About SR to GR, SR is built from its own assumptions,
there's GR following SR or GR preceding some "local" SR,
here to say GR is the physical seems to break it from that
it was derived from SR.

It seems "GR the physical theory" and "GR as extending SR"
aren't the same thing, here.

Because, SR is about "all reference frames" not just "locally".

[Tom Roberts]

On 8/11/17 8/11/17 8:31 PM, Ross A. Finlayson wrote:
>> Bottom line: GR is the physical theory, SR is merely a useful approximation to it.
>

> Then, what's physics' problem?

There isn't any here, in the relationship between SR and GR.

QM is a completely different situation....

> About SR to GR, SR is built from its own assumptions,

RIGHT! And so SR is valid ONLY when those assumptions are valid. In the presence
of gravitation (curvature) those assumptions do not hold, and SR is not valid.

> It seems "GR the physical theory" and "GR as extending SR"
> aren't the same thing, here.

GR doesn't really "extend SR". Rather, SR approximates GR in local regions.

> Because, SR is about "all reference frames" not just "locally".

YES, SR assumes its inertial reference frames can be extended throughout the
(infinite) manifold. In the presence of gravitation (curvature) that simply is
not possible.

Tom Roberts

[Eric Baird]

On Sunday, 6 August 2017 22:21:43 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:
> On 7/24/17 7/24/17 6:16 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> > Will: Special relativity is so much a part not only of physics but
> > everyday life, that it is no longer appropriate to view it as the
> > special "theory" of relativity. It is a fact, as basic to the world as the
> > existence of atoms or the quantum theory of matter.
> >
> > In other words, Will considers SR to be a known feature of our universe, and
> > any gravitational theory that does not reduce exactly to SR physics can
> > therefore be rejected,
>
> That "exactly" is YOURS, not Will's.

Will states that the special theory is true,:
: "... Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt"
He's not hedging his bets, or allowing any wiggle room. He's stating, quite explicitly, that the special theory is no longer to be considered just a theory, but must now be considered to be "a fact".

How much clearer could the guy have been about what he believes?

> Every physicist knows that SR is only a
> local APPROXIMATION to GR.

Will, 2005::
:: For most applications in atomic or nuclear physics,
:: this approximation is so accurate that special relativity can be assumed :: to be exact.

Claimed geometrical results and proofs are assumed to be exact, unless stated otherwise.

Also, Will, 2005::
:: In his remarkable 1905 paper ... he established
:: what we now call special relativity as one of
:: the two pillars on which virtually all of physics
:: of the 20th century would be built (the other
:: pillar being quantum mechanics)

So Will is characterising special relativity as foundation theory upon which general relativity is built. He's not characterising GR as a free-standing theory that incidentally "just happens" to reduce to SR as an approximation, he's presenting the assumed fundamental nature of special relativity as having priority over that of GR: SR gets awarded its own pillar, GR doesn't.

If you don't think that Will's characterisation corresponds to how a general theory of relativity //ought// to be thought to relate to SR, then hey, I agree with you. But that means that you, like me, are now technically an inhabitant of the physics "Fringe".
Let me go fetch you a membership badge ...

> But yes, SR is so solidly established as a (local)
> property of our world that it would be perverse to deny its validity WITHIN ITS
> DOMAIN OF APPLICABILITY. (Yes, there are many perverse people around here.)

But //any// godawfully-bad theory can be said to be 100% "valid within its domain of applicability" ... if that domain is defined retrospectively, according to the known degree of agreement with experiment.

For instance, if I have a terrible theory that predicts that it always rains on Tuesdays, you might object that it didn't rain //last// Tuesday, so the theory is invalidated. I could respond that the theory has been found to be incredibly accurate for days on which there is high precipitation, that this is therefore its appropriate domain of applicability, that last Tuesday was not one of those days (because it didn't rain), and the theory still has a perfect match to experimental reality, once you take into account its correct domain of applicability.

So any Tuesday when it //does// rain gets counted as a success for the theory, while every Tuesday when it //doesn't// rain gets removed from the dataset used to evaluate the theory. Result – thanks to "domain of applicability" arguments, a perfect scorecard for an awful theory.


Arbitrary "domain of applicability" arguments can be used to make a bad theory unfalsifiable, and are a recipe for junk science. If you ever find yourself relying too much on "domains" that are defined by experimental data rather than by fundamental theory – domains that are established by experimentation rather than predicted theoretically from within the theories concerned – you should be wary about the scientific validity of what you're doing.

> Note, however, the PUN on "theory": Will uses it in the sense of creationists
> and science deniers: a "theory" is not established fact -- that's why he put the
> word in quotes. But that is not really the appropriate meaning in science: a
> theory is a MODEL of the world we inhabit. Once one understands this, your
> claims and arguments are clearly either naive or nonsensical.

But Will STATES that special relativity isn't a theory, but a ==fact==. He doesn't use the word "model", that's your word, not his. He makes a series of apparently clear, explicit, unmistakable arguments about what he believes to be true.

There's really no obvious supporting evidence that he's "joking" here, his position on this subject has remained pretty much constant over decades. He characterises SR as accepted by pretty much everyone except crackpots and nazi anti-semites.
:: ... during the late 1920s and after, special relativity was
:: inexorably accepted by mainstream physicists (apart from those
:: who participated in the anti-Semitic, anti-relativity crusades
:: that arose in Germany and elsewhere in the 1920s, coincident
:: with the rise of Nazism), until it became part of the standard
:: toolkit of every working physicist.
Will 2006::
:: Special relativity has been so thoroughly integrated into the
:: fabric of modern physics that its validity is rarely challenged,
:: except by cranks and crackpots.

He's obviously a big fan of SR! So when he states in print that the status of the theory now has to be considered as being beyond mere theory and should now be considered as fact, there's no obvious reason to suspect that he doesn't truly believe what he's writing.


The core of Will's professional career wrt relativity testing seems to be PPN, and PPN //presupposes// that special relativity is fundamentally correct.
Will, 2015::
:: The Einstein equivalence principle is the heart
:: and soul of gravitational theory, for it is
:: possible to argue convincingly that if EEP is
:: valid, then gravitation must be a “curved
:: spacetime” phenomenon, in other words, the
:: effects of gravity must be equivalent to the
:: effects of living in a curved spacetime. As a
:: consequence of this argument, the only theories
:: of gravity that can fully embody EEP are those
:: that satisfy the postulates of “metric theories
:: of gravity”, which are:
::
:: 1. Spacetime is endowed with a symmetric metric.
::
:: 2. The trajectories of freely falling test bodies
:: are geodesics of that metric.
::
:: 3. In local freely falling reference frames, the
:: non-gravitational laws of physics are those
:: written in the language of special relativity.

So Will is committed to the way that the principle of equivalence is implemented under Einstein's general theory ("Einstein Equivalence Principle", "EEP"), in which "gravitational" physics reduces over smallish regions to "nongravitational" inertial physics, and in which that inertial physics is assumed to be properly described by special relativity.

In a general theory in which all particles have mass-fields, and inertial physics is described by an acoustic metric rather than the Minkowski metric, the "non-gravitational" (sic) laws of physics are ==NOT== "written in the language of special relativity", so to Will, an acoustic solution must conflict with "the heart and soul of gravitational theory", and doesn't have to be handled by his assessment criteria.


In recent papers, Will does talk about the experimental search for "violations" of SR, but presents this not as a serious attempt to see if SR is correct, but instead as the search for possible "additional physics" to be superimposed on the SR foundation, such as possibly violations of the PoR arising at quantum scales:
Will 2006::
:: The motivation for this effort is not a desire to
:: repudiate Einstein, but to look for evidence of new
:: physics “beyond” Einstein, such as apparent violations
:: of Lorentz invariance that might result from certain
:: models of quantum gravity

So it doesn't seem if anyone has checked whether SR is the //right// theory of relativistic inertial physics, and it doesn't seem as if anyone is planning on checking any time soon, even after a hundred years.

Einstein presented "reduction to SR" as part of his general theory, it was generally assumed to be a matter that didn't need to be examined in any depth, and I'm not sure that anyone ever wrote a separate mainstream paper asking whether the reduction was necessary. The 1916 theory's approach to implementing the EP with SR (EEP) then became standardised, we said that all other competing theories had to use it, EEP-compliance became a prerequisite for any gravitational theory being considered credible, and now the thing is dug in so deeply that it doesn't occur to people to ask whether it's actually correct.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

Nope. It's in MTW, near the start of Chapter 39, "Other theories of gravity and the post-Newtonian approximation", starting on page 1066. The above quote was from p.1067.

Page 1066 starts as a "love letter" to the 1916 theory::
:: Amongst all bodies of physical law none
:: has ever been found that is simpler or
:: more beautiful than Einstein's geometric
:: theory of gravity [ref], nor has any
:: theory of gravity ever been discovered
:: that is more compelling.
::
:: As experiment after experiment has been
:: performed, and one theory of gravity after
:: another has fallen by the wayside a victim
:: of observations, Einstein's theory has stood
:: firm. No purported inconsistency has ever
:: surmounted the test of time.

(I thought that the galactic rotation-curve problem had already been reported by this time, but whatever).

:: //Query// Why then bother to examine
:: alternative theories of gravity?
:: //Reply// to have "foils" against which
:: to test Einstein's theory.
::
:: To say that Einstein's geometrodynamics
:: is "battle-tested" is to say that it has
:: won every time it has been tried against
:: a theory that makes a different prediction.
:: How then does one select new antagonists
:: for decisive new trials by combat?
::
:: Not all theories of gravity are created
:: equal. Very few, among the multitude in the
:: literature, are sufficiently viable to be
:: worth comparison with general relativity
:: or with future experiments. The "worthy"
:: theories are those which satisfy //three
:: criteria for viability: self-consistency,
:: completeness and agreement with past
:: experiment.//

Pages 1066-1067 then define how those three criteria are defined. The entry for "completeness" starts::
:: //Completeness:// To be complete a theory

:: of gravity must be capable of analyzing
:: from "first principles" the outcome of
:: every experiment of interest. It must
:: therefore mesh with and incorporate a
:: consistent set of laws for electromagnetism,

:: quantum mechanics, and all other physics. ...
:: ...

No weaselly talk of "domains of applicability".

Of course, this was back in the very early 1970s (my copy has copyright notices for 1970, 1971 and 1973), so it probably wasn't yet fully appreciated that Stephen Hawking's (1971?) prediction of radiation from non-rotating black holes was correct under QM, and that Einstein's general theory itself therefore didn't "mesh" with quantum mechanics, failed MTW's test for "completeness", and therefore, under the MTW criteria, wouldn't be considered sufficiently viable to be worth testing if it was a new theory.

Now, admittedly MTW is slightly quirky in places, and isn't accepted by all mainstream GR people as a "GR Bible" (although it's heavy enough!) ... but when you hear GR people //nowadays//, //still// saying that Einstein's theory has passed every test ever of gravitational theory with flying colours, then ... they've either never read those MTW criteria, or have chosen not to mention it. Because ... if the 1916/1960 theory failed MTW's test, then the test //must// have been inappropriate, right? So once again, we hand-set a "domain of applicability", contract it to now //exclude// "meshing with QM" as a criterion, declare QM-compatibility to be a silly thing for classical theory to be expected to conform to, and once again claim that Einstein's theory has a 100% success rate.

It's public relations image-management.

Eric Baird
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316981511_When_a_black_hole_moves_The_incompatibility_between_gravitational_theory_and_special_relativity

[Eric Baird]

On Monday, 7 August 2017 02:34:07 UTC+1, tjrob137 wrote:
> On 8/6/17 8/6/17 5:27 PM, Eric Baird wrote:
> > With the lower nominal velocity and an agreed rest-frame decay time, we might
> > naively expect the muon decay path to be shorter under SR than NM, by the
> > Lorentz factor ... except that SR //also// time-dilates the muon by the same
> > gamma factor, extending the decay time and the decay path as seen by Earth
> > observers (or, the muon reckons the approaching Earth atmosphere to be
> > length-contracted, so it manages to travel through more of it before it
> > decays, by a Lorentz factor) ... ...the two opposing Lorentz factors then
> > cancel exactly (lower velocity value shortens the calculated distance, time
> > dilation lengthens the calculated distance), so for an agreed rest mass,
> > momentum and rest-frame decay time, the physical end result of the NM and SR
> > calculations is _precisely_the_same_.
>
> This is just plain wrong.

No, it's correct. You just have to remember that the nominal velocity that SR applies to the muon for an agreed energy and momentum, and the nominal velocity that SR applies to the same situation for the same energy and momentum, are different.

The Newtonian relationship is p=mv
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum

, while the corresponding SR relationship is p=mv gamma
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Relativ/relmom.html

So if momentum p and the particle's rest mass m are known, then the calculated SR and NM velocities will be different, vNM=p/m, vSR=p/(m gamma), where gamma is an increase calculated using vSR as its velocity value.

If the particle survives for t seconds in its own frame, then the distance d that it travels before decaying will traditionally be d=vt.
In the Newtonian calculation we then have the distance
: dNM = t vNM = t p/m

In the SR calculation we have the distance
: dSR = t gamma vSR
, where gamma is an increase in distance travelled at a given nominal velocity, due to time dilation. We now replace vSR (using the previous relativistic momentum equation) and get
: dSR = t gamma p/(m gamma)
Since the two identical gamma factors cancel, we have
: dSR = t p/m
, just like we did in the NM calculation. So, for theory-neutral agreed parameters such as rest mass, rest frame decay time and impact momentum,
: dSR=dNM
, and both calculations give precisely the same final physical prediction.

> You used "length contraction" where it does not apply.

No, I provided a second SR explanation for how the muon penetrates the distance it does under SR, reasoned from the muon's point of view. This is a standard argument that appears in a stack of SR textbooks (I just checked, using Google Books).

For instance, Wikipedia, it say::
:: The atmosphere has its proper length in the Earth frame,
:: while the increased muon range is explained by their
:: longer lifetimes due to time dilation (see Time dilation
:: of moving particles). However, in the muon frame their
:: lifetime is unchanged but the atmosphere is contracted
:: so that even their small range is sufficient to reach
:: the surface of earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_contraction


So congratulations, by saying that //that's// wrong you just failed introductory special relativity.

Eric Baird