|
Comments for Sunday,
January 17, 2021, thru Saturday, Jan. 23,
2021:
January 22,
2021 -
Just before lunch today, I
finished reading another
book. I can't write a
review for it, however, because
the book was my sci-fi novel,
and I finished proof-reading
it. I also can't show the
cover for the book, because the
next step is to create a cover
for it, and then I'll send the
whole book to the Copyrights
office. I also have to get
an ISBN (International Standard
Book Number) and a scanner
bar-code. Then I'll
combine everything into one big
file for printing, and I'll get
a couple proof copies from
Amazon to allow me to read it
one more time before I make it
available to the public in
paperback and Kindle
formats.
The last time I went through all
those steps was 9 years ago when
I self-published "A
Crime Unlike Any Other,"
my second book about the anthrax
attacks of 2001.
I really enjoyed reading the
book. I hope others will
enjoy it, too. I think it
is very funny in
parts. And the sci-fi
aspects are mind-blowing.
The big problem will be making
people aware
of the book. I have a
budget of zero
dollars for advertising.
So, it will be a matter of
finding ways to advertise it for
free. The hope is that
when people start reading it,
they'll recommend it to others.
But I still need to find ways to
advertise it.
January 20, 2021 - Hmm.
Trump is gone! Joe Biden
and Kamala Harris have been
sworn in as President and
Vice-President. So, now we
can all take a deep breath and
wait to see what happens
next. Will some of the
nut-job conspiracy theorists
rethink their
beliefs? It's next
to impossible to change the mind
of a conspiracy theorist, but
one would think that some
conspiracy theorists might not
want to be combined with
Neo-Nazis, cop murderers and
anti-government mobs. So they
might do some re-thinking.
Hopefully.
Meanwhile, I received the first
comment about my revised papers
explaining that a truck is not
an inertial system, therefore
you can measure
the speed of a moving truck from
inside the truck. The
response was posted as a comment
after my
paper "Relativity and Radar
Guns" on Vixra.org.
Here's part of that comment:
On page 9 the author
claims that a truck is not an inertial
system. The author does not tell what
"inertial" means here so apparently he
tries to use it in its normal meaning, and
fails. By the normal meaning of the word, a truck is inertial
if its velocity with respect to some
is constant. But more
important is the Galilean principle of
relativity: laws of nature are the same
with respect to each of two reference
frames if the velocity of one with respect
to the other is constant. Therefore, no
experiment inside a truck moving with
constant velocity (i.e., without
acceleration or turning) cannot determine
the ground speed of the truck or whether
the truck is stationary.
In the part I highlighted,
it looks like he meant to write "some
object" but left out the second word.
And he used double-negative in the last
sentence. But, maybe I should
have explained what an inertial system
is. I state that the International
Space Station (ISS) is an inertial system,
but technically it is not, since an inertial
system must move in a straight line.
According to Merriam-Webster,
"inertia" is defined as
"a property of matter by
which it remains at rest or in uniform
motion in the same straight line unless
acted upon by some external force."
So, technically, the ISS is
not inertial and neither is the earth's
surface, which experiences the effects of
gravity. But, according to Encyclopedia
Britannica:
Strictly speaking, Newton’s
laws of motion are valid only in a
coordinate system at rest with respect to
the “fixed” stars. Such a system is
known as a Newtonian, or inertial
reference, frame. The laws are also
valid in any set of rigid axes moving with
constant velocity and without rotation
relative to the inertial frame; this
concept is known as the principle of
Newtonian or Galilean relativity.
A coordinate system attached to the Earth
is not an inertial reference frame because
the Earth rotates and is accelerated with
respect to the Sun. Although
the solutions to most engineering
problems can be obtained to a
satisfactory degree of accuracy by
assuming that an Earth-based reference
frame is an inertial one, there are
some applications in which the
rotation of the Earth cannot be
neglected; among these is
the operation of a gyroscopic
compass.
So, the idea that "a truck
is inertial if its velocity with respect to
some [object] is constant" is still total
nonsense, but my thinking that
an "Earth-based reference frame is an
inertial one" needed some qualifiers.
Radar guns work as if
the earth was an inertial system, measuring
speeds relative to that "inertial system."
But maybe I should have explained
more about inertial and non-inertial systems
in my papers. The problem is that you
cannot know what it is that others do not
understand or would disagree with until you
have shown them your views and get back
responses. That is what "peer reviews"
are all about. I'll have to think
about what to do next. I certainly
cannot hope to convince a mathematician that
a truck is NOT inertial if its velocity with
respect to some object is constant.
But maybe I can figure out some way to make
it clear that my truck experiment is worth
trying.
January 19, 2021 - Ah! At 11:05
a.m. this morning I received word that
the 3rd version of my paper "Relativity
vs Quantum Mechanics Experiments"
is now on-line. I'm no sure what
the delay was, but it's the latest
version. When the version I
submitted on Sunday didn't appear
yesterday (possibly because Monday was
a holiday), I made a few additional
minor changes and resubmitted it on
Monday. I was half-expecting the
Sunday revision to appear with the
Monday version as versions #3 and
#4. But it didn't happen.
The version I submitted on Sunday just
vanished into the ether somewhere.
The fact that the speed of a truck can
be measured from inside the truck by
using the speed of light as a
reference seems undeniable to
me. It can be done because the
truck is a non-inertial
system. It is a container that
moves because it is being powered by a
motor. That fact that it is
moving at a constant speed, making it
appear inertial, changes
nothing, it is still a non-inertial
system. If the power supply is
cut, the truck will slow down and
stop, becoming part of the inertial
system that is the earth's
surface.
What the truck experiment appears to
measure is the difference in speed
between the non-inertial system
(truck) and the inertial system
(earth). It has nothing to do
with the energy that is being used to
make the truck move. If you
applied the brakes and used more
energy to achieve the same speed, the
experiment would produce the same
results. The radar guns are
simply measuring the speed of the
truck relative to the speed of
light. The speed of the truck
does not add to the speed of light
emitted on the truck, but it moves the
walls of the truck toward or away from
the oncoming light. I definitely
need to find some better way to
explain that. The difference
between the way light works in
inertial and non-inertial systems is
something that I would think every
scientist needs to understand.
Maybe they do, but I do not recall
reading about it anywhere.
Meanwhile, I've gone back to work on
my sci-fi novel once again.
January 18, 2021 -
Yesterday morning, I revised my paper "Relativity and Radar
Guns" to correct the error I
described in yesterday's comment. To
my surprise, Vixra
put it on-line as version #3 within an
hour. I then looked through another
paper, "Relativity
vs Quantum Mechanics Experiments"
to see if that paper also needed to be
corrected. It not only needed to be
corrected, it needed to be overhauled.
It's only a 5-page paper, so while the
changes were major, it didn't take much
time to make them. I removed a lot
of extraneous stuff about different kinds
of radar guns and went straight to the key
issue: A moving truck is NOT
an inertial system, therefore you can
determine the speed of the truck from
inside the truck, contrary to the
unshakable beliefs of many many Quantum
Mechanics mathematicians.
I submitted the revised paper at about
1:45 yesterday afternoon, but, for some
unknown reason, it still hasn't been put
on-line as of 10:30 a.m. this morning.
The truck experiment described in those
two papers is also an important part of my
paper "Radar
Guns & Einstein's Theories."
However, that paper is also about a lot of
other things, and it doesn't focus on how
mathematicians view the issue. So,
if I change that paper, it will be just to
add a sentence, or part of a sentence,
stating that a moving truck is not an
inertial system, nor is a moving railroad
train, which is what Einstein used in his
thought experiments.
I recall arguing with mathematicians on the
sci-physics.relativity forum years
ago about how a moving truck is not an
inertial system, but I do not recall
exactly what their response was. I
saved copies of 84 of those debates, some
of them requiring as many as 20 separate
files. I can go through them to see
what their arguments were, but I'm not
sure what I'd do with the information if I
found it. Right now I feel like I
found the final piece to a puzzle that has
been bugging me for 6 or 7 years.
I'm wondering what I should do next.
Should I put it all into a book? My
papers are all on line, available for
free, why would anyone pay money to buy a
book I wrote that covers the same
subjects? If I wrote such a book, it
would be mostly to bring an end to the
whole subject by explaining things as I
now see them.
Interestingly, my
book about the anthrax attacks of 2001
is suddenly getting a "surge" in
sales. Amazon sold an e-book copy on
December 28, another on January 6, and
another on January 16. That's three
copies in three weeks! The
last time I sold a copy prior to December
28 was in August. I wonder what the
cause was for the "surge." I suspect
it is all the talk these days about
conspiracy theorists. I've probably
mentioned conspiracy theorists and their
beliefs about the anthrax case a thousand
times in comments on this site.
Perhaps even more interestingly, when I
woke up this morning I was thinking about
my sci-fi novel that I was going to
overhaul for one final time, while turning
it from manuscript format into book
format, back in December
of 2019. All that month I
moaned about how I wanted to work on it,
but radar guns kept interrupting my
thought processes.
When I woke this morning I suddenly
remembered what that book is about:
It's about some scientists using a very
unusual time machine to uncover and track
a planned attack by right-wing
Neo-Nazis on the White House and
Capitol Building in Washington.
Hmm. If I ever do get
around to self-publishing it, I'm
definitely going to have to mention the
events of January 6, 2021, somewhere in
the book. And I need to think about
whether the book would give someone
ideas. The attack is more of a
military attack than a mob attack.
Lots to think about. Maybe I should
just read a book or listen to some
podcasts until I can sort things out.
January 17, 2021 -
Among the personal matters that I had to
deal with last week was the fact that I
needed to get my driver's license
renewed. Because of Covid-19, I
dreaded the idea of sitting in the crowded
DMV for an hour or two while waiting for my
name to be called, and for some reason I
worried about the eye test, even though my
eyesight (while wearing glasses) is probably
better than 20-20.
On Friday afternoon I went to the DMV.
No line at all! No waiting!
At the entry desk I showed them the form I'd
obtained via the Internet and filled out at
home, and they told me to go straight to the
booth where they took my photograph.
There, after taking my photo, they gave me a
number, then my number was immediately
called for the final step of handing over
the form and getting my eye-sight checked.
No problem. I was out the door
in probably less than 10 minutes after
entering. I didn't even get a chance
to count how many others were there, but I
doubt it was more than three or four.
While driving home, I wondered why that
day's happenings at the DMV were so
different from past experiences. I
decided it must be the new rule which allows
most people under 65 to renew their driving
licenses on-line. Whatever it was, I
was glad to have my part complete.
On Saturday morning I awoke thinking about
science once again. It now seems to me
that most of the disagreements about Special
Relativity that I've been involved with over
the past 6 or 7 years stem from different
interpretations of just two
fundamental ideas: (1) The speed of light as
described in Einstein's Second Postulate,
and (2) Time being what clocks measure, as
stated by Einstein.
Einstein Second Postulate is:
"light is always
propagated in empty space with a definite
velocity c which is independent of
the state of motion of the emitting body."
It's a very simple and
straightforward postulate, yet, as I state
in my
paper on this subject, mathematician
physicists insist on twisting it to
fit their beliefs, and most college
textbooks use some twisted version.
All the postulate says is that, regardless
of how fast the emitter is moving (or in
what direction), light that the emitter
emits will always travel at c,
which is 299,792,458 meters per
second. (That also
says that "emission theory" is wrong,
the speed of the emitter is not
added to the speed of light that
is emitted.) What it doesn't say is
what Time Dilation is all about: Light is
actually emitted at different
speeds depending upon the motion of the
emitter, however the faster the emitter
moves the slower time
passes for the emitter, so the emitter
measures the same speed of light per
second regardless of how
fast the emitter is moving.
The reason mathematician physicists alter
Einstein's Second Postulate to fit their
beliefs is because at creates a situation
that mathematicians consider to be
impossible. That situation is
illustrated in Figures 1 & 2 below.
In Figure 1 the emitter is a light being
held by a man standing on the road as a
semi-truck passes by at 50 mph. The
man shines the light through a hole in the
side of the truck, and the light hits the
rear wall of the truck at c+v, which
is the speed of light plus the speed of the
truck. Since this is how radar guns
work (although they wouldn't use any hole in
the side of the truck) there can be no doubt
that light is emitted at c and the
light hits the rear wall of the truck at c+v.
In Figure 2 the emitter is a light being
held by a man inside the
moving truck. The man simply shines
the light at the rear wall of the
truck. Since the speed of the light
the emitter emits is still c, per
Einstein's Second Postulate, the light
still hits the rear wall at c+v.
This is where mathematicians scream and yell
and start calling me names, because the distance
between the emitter and the rear wall of the
truck doesn't change in Figure 2 as it does
in Figure 1. The rear wall is moving
toward the emitter in Figure 1, but it is not
in Figure 2. There is no disagreement
about that. The disagreement is about
the fact that in both
Figure 1 and 2 the rear wall is moving
toward the oncoming light, which is
traveling at c. The light hits
the wall at c+v which mathematicians
consider to be impossible. They argue
that it means that the light is actually
traveling at c+v, which is
absurd. How can they believe such
nonsense? Because they twist
Einstein's Second Postulate to fit their
beliefs, and their belief is that light is
always emitted and received at c.
This
morning I awoke realizing something
else. It could be the final
piece to the puzzle.
It's been knocking around in my head
for years, but now I see where it
fits.
In Figures 1 and 2 the light is received at
c+v. Why? Because
the moving truck is NOT an
"inertial system."
Experiments always work the same way in inertial
systems where one is moving and the other is
stationary, but a truck is a powered
system, it is not
intertial. If you turn off the engine,
the truck will slow to a stop on the
road. The road is part of an inertial
system, the spinning earth, and the stopped
truck becomes part of that inertial
system.
In Figure 1 above, the man with the light is
standing in an inertial system and
he is measuring the speed of a NON-inertial
vehicle. In Figure 2 the man with the
light is standing in a NON-inertial
system (the moving truck) and is measuring
the speed of a NON-inertial
vehicle (the moving truck).
I could go on and on, but I'll save it for a
paper. However, the realization that
the key to understanding how the speed of a
truck can be measured from inside the truck
results from the FACT that the truck is a
powered vehicle, NOT an inertial system,
means I have to correct an error in my paper
on "Relativity
and Radar Guns." In that
paper I envision a device that will measure
motion relative to the local speed of light,
and I wrote:
In theory, the device can
measure its own speed relative to the
local speed of light wherever it is
located. It can measure the speed of a
moving truck while inside the truck, it
can measure the speed of an airplane while
inside the airplane, and it should
even be able to measure the speed of the
International Space Station (ISS) from
inside the ISS.
The part in bold
letters is wrong. The ISS is an
inertial system. You cannot measure
the speed of an inertial system from inside
the inertial system.
I also need to find the best and simplest
way to explain all this. I realize
there is no way to penetrate closed minds,
but there are a lot of people who haven't
yet reached the point where they have closed
their minds. And by explaining things
in the simplest way, I may even get a better
understanding of it myself.
|
Comments for Sunday,
January 10, 2021, thru Saturday, Jan. 16,
2021:
January
14, 2021 -
It's a bit difficult for me to write
comments for this web site right
now. I've got a lot a personal
matters on my mind, including the
death of a nephew. Plus, it
sometimes seems like I've reached the
end of my science quest.
The quest began six or seven years ago
when I couldn't make sense of how so
many scientists could disagree with
what experiments demonstrated to be
true and real - specifically time
dilation. The argument continues
today. I just visited a Facebook
group I hadn't visited in at least 5
years, "Science,
Technology, and Society Discussion
Corner, and I found an
article titled "Time
Might Not Exist Outside of Our
Minds, Propose Scientists:
Researchers create a new theory of
time that goes against established
physics." It's an
article from 2016, but someone posted
it a few days ago.
Interestingly, although it's a science
forum with 32,500 members, I had to
dig through many interesting posts
about Trump to find that article about
science. So, the forum is mostly
about "society" these days. And
it seems to me that society these days
is showing the same two sides that a
lot of scientists show: There are
those who think emotionally, and
there are those who think
logically. And we are all
learning that while you can always use
logic to change the mind of someone
who thinks logically, there is no way
to change the mind of someone who
thinks emotionally.
And in 7 or 8 years of arguing, I
found that there is no point to
arguing with someone who thinks
emotionally. The only benefit
that can come from such an argument is
that you might learn more
about the science by looking at things
from different angles, even if the
other side is incapable of learning
anything.
January
12, 2021 -
Just before lunch this morning, I
finished reading another e-book I got
from the library. I didn't read
it on my Kindle, although that was the
expectation when I borrowed it early
yesterday morning. I assumed it
would be in Kindle format, but when I
was preparing to downloaded it, I saw
that it was going to be in .epub
format. My Kindle can't handle
.epub files. But, I downloaded
the starter file into my computer
anyway. When I did so, I was
surprised to see that it was an .acsm
file. Having no idea what an
.ascm file is, I double-clicked on it
and the book was downloaded into my
computer in .pdf
format. My Kindle can't handle
.pdf files, either. So, I
started reading in on my computer,
reading about 40% of it yesterday and
the rest this morning (it's only 238
pages long).
Anyway, the book was "Thirty-Three
Teeth" by Colin Cotterill.
It's the second book in the Dr. Siri
Paiboun mystery series. I'd
listened to the audio book of the
first book in the series two months
ago and enjoyed it very much. I
enjoyed this one, too. I already
have the third book in the series in
Kindle format. As of this
moment, there
are 15 books in the series.
The mystery series features Laotian
coroner Dr. Siri Paiboun, who is 72
years old when the story takes place,
which is in 1977, a couple years after
the Viet Nam war ended. The
crime that needs solving is what
appears to be three bear attacks, all
on women. They don't have many
bears in Laos, so the crimes are
immediately suspicious. While
the crimes are very grim, the book is
very funny in parts. The
humor is mostly satire about how
things work (or don't work) in a
country that was recently taken over
by communists and where nearly
everyone with skills or an education
has fled to Thailand. Dr.
Paiboun is the only coroner in the
country, and he was put into the job
even though had no experience as a
coroner. He was just a country
doctor when the communists took
over. Oh yes, I neglected to
mention that he is also a shaman, of
sorts. He gets weird visions
which help him understand the crimes
he is trying to solve. And he
has a nurse and some friends and
relatives who also help.
Fortunately, they all have great
senses of humor. It all takes
place in one of the most backward
countries in Asia, yet it is very
interesting and funny, like looking
into a strange, alien world. I'm
looking forward to reading the third
book in the series.
Meanwhile, the troll who posts insults
to my log file was at it again
yesterday with five new messages, all
of which are screwball arguments over
words. Sigh.
January 11, 2021 - Sigh. I
thought for a moment that my careful
explanation of what time is and how
time works might have made the troll
who posts to my web site log file
realize the error of his ways.
No such luck. This morning's log
file contained multiple copies of four
wild rants which show that he not only
didn't understand what I wrote, he
isn't interested in
understanding what I write.
The rants were posted via a web site
in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Here's the first one (highlighted in
red) with most of its log file coding
included:
51.158.171.35 - -
[10/Jan/2021:13:50:25 -0600] "GET /Imbecile Ed Lake is
too stupid to realize that with his
definition of Time he contradicts his
previous claim that 'Time is a
thing'...it turns out that he defines
TIME AS A MEASUREMENT ... AKA, an
idea, measuring is a human endeavour
not 'a thing' HTTP/1.1"
404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0;
rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0"
No, I did not
define time as a "measurement." I repeatedly
defined time as "particle spin,"
which is a thing (like
a sub-atomic particle) going round and round
continuously. That sub-atomic particle
goes round and round at a regular
rate. And that regular rate is
a measurement of time. I said it is a
"thing" because its spin can be slowed down
by motion and gravity. It is the troll
who views time as an "idea." A idea cannot
be slowed by motion or gravity.
Here's the troll's second post with all the
extra coding removed:
Imbecile Ed Lake is too stupid
to understand that his definition of Time
is-CIRCULAR:'the measured or measurable
period [OF TIME] during which an action,
process, or condition exists or
continues'---What a clueless moron!
Hmm. Yes, spin is
circular. But that doesn't make "time"
circular. It just means that spin is
part of a process that repeats itself.
Here's his third post:
Stupid Ed Lake can define Time
whichever way he wants---HE is still
measuring MOTION...NOT TIME
ITSELF- and what he is stating
is that the MEASUREMENT OF MOTION began at
the Big Bang ...NOT TIME ITSELF
Ah! That's
hilarious!! What he is saying is
what I've been saying about how NOTHING
can change the troll's mind. Here's
the quote from Paul Davies' book "About
Time" that I used in yesterday's
comment:
The
point is, rather, that the only
meaningful way to measure physical
change in Einstein's universe is to
forget time “as such” and gauge change
solely by the readings of real,
physical clocks, not by some
nonexistent notion of “time itself.”
The troll is
using "some nonexistent notion of 'time
itself'," and is arguing that that is the
only correct way to
talk about time.
I explained in detail, and included
quotes from scientists, how his definition
of "time" is meaningless when it comes to
science. In science "time" is defined
as The
Merriam-Webster on-line
dictionary defines "time":
it is "the measured or
measurable period during which
an action, process, or
condition exists or continues."
The fundamental and measurable
unit of time is one particle
spin. We use clocks which
measure that particle spin
indirectly. It is because
sub-atomic particles spin at a
regular rate that clocks of all
kinds that are constructed
of sub-atomic particles will
also tick at some regular rate.
Here's the troll's fourth and
final comment:
Imbecile Ed Lake is too stupid
to understand that for Einstein Time is a
DIMENSION--%3EA mathematical construct
used to plot the MEASUREMENT OF MOTION-and
Time Dilation is just a variation on said
dimension
That is how a
mathematical model of space-time is
constructed. It is one way of viewing
time. When you view
time as a "dimension," you are not saying
that time is a dimension, you
are saying that time can be used
or viewed as a
dimension in order to construct a
mathematical model. When Joe traveled
from Point-A to Point-B in space, he also
traveled from Moment-A to Moment-B in
time. It takes time to
go from Point-A to Point-B. Duh.
What the troll has demonstrated is that he
doesn't care how Einstein, scientists or
dictionaries define time. He's
defining time the way he believes
time should be defined by everyone.
And if anyone disagrees, then they are wrong,
because the troll (like Donald Trump and so
many other closed-minded people who think
emotionally, not logically) considers any
disagreement with his beliefs to be an
attack on on him personally. So, he
responds to an attack with name-calling and
other attacks. Like Trump, it is the
only way he knows how to argue.
Having confirmed that once
again, I'm going to try to ignore any
further crap the troll may put on my log
file.
January 10, 2021 -
At about 2 p.m. on Friday afternoon, I
finished reading another book on my
Kindle. The book was "About
Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution"
by Paul Davies.
It was a very
interesting book, while at the same time
being mindbogglingly tedious and boring in
parts. Of course, the tedious and
boring parts were the parts where the
subject was mathematics. I just loathe
going through page after page of discussions
about all the various mathematical models of
the universe. Are there multiple
universes or just one where everything is
tied together with strings? Are the
past, present and future equally real and do
they all exist at the same time? Or is
nothing real? Is it all an
illusion? How many different
mathematical fantasies about the universe
can you create?
Fortunately, the interesting parts of the
book made the tedious parts tolerable.
I have 30 pages of notes. Looking over
those notes, I see many pertain to something
I mentioned in yesterday's comment. If
time began with the Big Bang, doesn't that
mean that nothing can happen before the Big
Bang? There can be no cause
for the Big Bang, because a cause comes
before an event in time.
Things can still happen if there is no
"time" as we measure it,
there is just no way of knowing if they took
ten seconds or ten trillion years by current
methods of measuring time. We can
assume they happened in order, there was no
effect before a cause, but there is no way
to know how long it took for a cause
to produce the effect. Here's a quote
from page 17 of the paperback book version's
Prologue:
When scientists began to
explore the implications of Einstein's
time for the universe as a whole, they
made one of the most important
discoveries in the history of human
thought: that time, and hence all of
physical reality, must have had a
definite origin in the past. If time is flexible
and mutable, as Einstein demonstrated,
then it is possible for time to come
into existence—and also to
pass away again; there can be a
beginning and an end to time. Today
the origin of time is called “the big
bang.”
Here's a quote from the
bottom of page 29 and the top of page 30
that fits well with the beliefs of the troll
who posts insults into my log file:
For Aristotle, time was
motion. This is hardly
revolutionary: we perceive time through
motion, whether the movement of the sun
across the sky or the hands around a clock
face. The concept of time as an
independently existing thing, an entity in
its own right, did not emerge until the
European medieval age.
Time is not "motion," it is
particle spin, which is a very
specific type of
motion.
The most interesting parts of the book for
me were the parts where the author describes
in detail how time and light work
together. This is the area where
mathematicians (and their text books) get
things totally wrong. If light is
emitted from the sun at 300,000 kilometers
per second (kps), and if you are moving
toward or away from the sun at high speeds,
the light from the sun will still pass
you at 300,000 kps. Mathematicians
argue that this means that light travels at
c for all observers, but that is a
very bad way to state things, since it
causes crazy
misunderstandings. Here is how it is
phrased in one
college text book:
“The unusual properties of
the velocity of light are: It is a
constant for all observers, irrespective
of how they are moving. It is a universal
speed limit, which no material object can
exceed. It is independent of the velocity
of its source and that of the observer.”
That is greatly
misleading. It should probably say:
“The unusual properties of
the velocity of light are: It appears
to be a constant for all observers,
irrespective of how they are moving. It is
a universal speed limit, which no material
object can exceed. It appears to be
independent of the velocity of its source
and that of the observer.”
The speed of the observer
changes the length of a second for the
observer. So, when he measures light
passing by at 300,000 kilometers per
second while he is moving
(assuming it were possible to do so), his
second is longer than it is on the
sun. That means he is measuring a
totally different speed than what was
measured on the sun. Therefore, it
would have been even more accurate to say,
"the speed of light can be very different
for the emitter and receiver, since a second
may be longer for the receiver, yet he will
still measure the same speed of light per
second."
In the book "About Time" it says this on
page 52:
Let me try to illustrate
this point in detail. Imagine switching on
a flashlight momentarily, and sending a
pulse of light off into space. The light
will recede from you at 300,000 kilometers
per second. Now jump into a rocket ship
and zoom after it. Suppose the rocket
achieves a speed of 200,000 kilometers per
second relative to Earth. Common sense
would say that the light pulse is now
receding from you at only 100,000
kilometers per second. But, according to
Einstein, this is not so: the pulse
recedes at 300,000 kilometers per second
both when you are standing on Earth and
when you are zooming after the pulse at
200,000 kilometers per second. Whichever
reference frame you measure the speed of
the pulse from—Earth or rocket—you get the
same answer! It doesn't matter how hard
you chase the light pulse, you cannot
reduce its relative speed by a single
kilometer per second.
and
Speed
is distance traveled per unit time, so
the speed of light can only be constant
in all reference frames if distances and
intervals of time are somehow different
for different observers, depending on
their state of motion.
The "twin paradox" is also
clarified in great detail, showing that
there is no "paradox," since one twin has to
accelerate to gain speed while the other
twin stays on earth and does not
accelerate. So, contrary to the
beliefs of countless mathematicians, we know
who was moving.
Here's another quote from the book:
It is remarkable that, nearly a century
after Einstein discovered the relativity
of time, people are still thrown by the
idea and keep raising the same
objections. Even when they get a full
explanation, many nonscientists simply
don't believe it.
The book was first published in
1995, so now it has been well over a
century since Einstein discovered the relativity
of time. And many nonscientists (and many
mathematician physicists) still don't
believe it.
Here's another quote that addresses the
arguments I keep getting from the troll who
posts insults to my web site log file:
The point is,
rather, that the only meaningful way to
measure physical change in Einstein's
universe is to forget time “as such” and
gauge change solely by the readings of real,
physical clocks, not by some nonexistent
notion of “time itself.”
Among the passages I copied into
my notes file are some interesting quotes from
other authors. Here's a quote from the
famous musician Hector Berlioz:
Time is a great
teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its
pupils.
I can highly recommend "About
Time" by Paul Davies.
|
Comments for Friday,
January 1, 2021, thru Saturday, Jan. 9,
2021:
January 9, 2021 - Hmm.
The troll who posts insults into
my web site log file really went
on a rampage yesterday. He
posted multiple copies of 5 more
messages filled with
insults. But what he was
attacking me about is something
that I realized I should have
mentioned in the imaginary
discussion I created
yesterday. So, I'll create
another imaginary discussion to
address that point:
Him:
Wait wait wait. How can time
have begun with the Big Bang?
There must have been something going
on before the
Big Bang to cause
the Big Bang. So, how can time
begin with the Big Bang?
Me:
Ah. Yes. We simply have
different definitions of
"time." My definition is
Einsteins' definition: "Time is
what clocks measure."
You evidently have a more general
definition that you cannot
articulate. Whatever happened
before the Big Bang occurred when
there was no time. There were
just events. There was before
and after, there was cause and
effect, but there was no time.
That means we do not know how long
anything took. Whatever
triggered the Big Bang could have
taken 20 seconds or 20 trillion
years. There was no time,
which means there was no way to
measure how long it took for
something to happen.
Him:
But things still happened! And
they happened in time!
Me:
Yes, things happened. No, they
did not happen in time.
Or more correctly, they may have
happened in your
general definition of time, but they
didn't happen in Einstein's or my
definition of time. Your
definition of time has no meaning:
If something happened, it happened
in time. What is time?
It is where things happen.
Period.
Him:
And Event-A caused Event-B.
Me:
Yes. We speculate that there
must have been an Event-A to cause
Event-B, because something caused
particles to start to spin and
measurable time to begin. What
is "unmeasurable time"? It is
your time. It's time
without meaning. My idea of
time begins when particles started
to spin, creating measurable time
that allows clocks to work. It
is time with meaning.
Him:
I think you are just making things
more complicated than they need to
be.
Me:
Giving things meaning doesn't
complicate them. It makes them
understandable. To define time
as "when things happen" is just
mouthing words with no real meaning.
Him:
I never gave that definition.
It is something you created.
Me:
Okay. What is your definition
of time?
Him:
It's the
dictionary definition. I
just looked it up. It's "the
indefinite continued progress of
existence and events in the past,
present, and future regarded as a
whole."
Me:
That's your dictionary's
definition. My
dictionary's definition is
"the measured or measurable period
during which an action, process, or
condition exists or continues."
Him:
I like my definition better.
Me:
Yes, and that is why people argue
over the definition of time.
My definition is scientific, your
definition is general and
non-scientific. If you want to
discuss science, you have to use my
definition. All your
definition does is generate
arguments.
Him:
I still like my definition better.
Me:
If your goal is to generate
arguments, your definition is
definitely better. My goal is
to end arguments by determining what
the facts are. That's why I
prefer my definition.
Him:
It is not my
goal to generate arguments!
Me:
Do you really want to start an
argument about that?
No answer.
January
8, 2021 - As expected, the
troll who posts insults to my web site log
file responded to the comment I wrote
about him yesterday by posting more
insults to my web site log file.
There's no point in showing what he wrote,
since his attacks are basically the same
as what he wrote the previous day.
When you argue with troll, or with
conspiracy theorists and others with
closed minds, all you do is cause them to
close their minds even tighter. You
are challenging their beliefs,
which they view as a personal attack.
So, they fight back with real
personal attacks, typically in the form of
name calling.
While there is no point in arguing with
such people (except to help you organize
your own thoughts), I can still imagine
what a discussion would be like IF
it were possible to discuss things with
them. It could be very
informative for both sides. Maybe it
would go something like this:
Him:
What is time?
Me: Time is particle spin.
Him: That
cannot be.
Me: Why not?
Him: Because
particle spin is motion, and motion occurs in
time. Therefore spin cannot be
time.
Me: Using
that kind of reasoning, you are saying that
time can only be a concept, it cannot be
anything tangible that exists in time.
But we know time is not
just a concept, since motion and gravity can
slow down time. We know that motion and
gravity slow down particle spin, so time is
particle spin. We also know that
photons are particles that do not
spin, they oscillate.
And they can only exist in motion, traveling
at the speed of light. At the speed of
light, they do not experience time. You
can argue that oscillations are motion, but
oscillations are clearly not time. So,
motion and spin are not exactly the
same.
Him: But how can particle spin
cause time? Causes occur in
time, they cannot be
time.
Me: I didn't say
particle spin causes
time. I said particle spin is
time. Asking what causes
time is asking what causes particle
spin. No one knows. It appears to
simply be how the universe is
constructed. It appears that the Big
Bang produced particles which spin, and that
started time. Evidently, there was no
time before the Big Bang because everything
was so tightly compacted that nothing could
spin. When particles were released and
able to spin, time began. We can
calculate how long it has been since particles
began to spin by calculating how much time it
must have taken for the expanding universe to
reach its current state.
Him: To me it seems that you are
still saying that particle spin causes time.
Me: That is probably because you
already have some idea in your head as to what
time must be. You probably believe that
time is some kind of process,
and you want to know when that process began
and what caused it to begin. Time is not
a process. It's not an
idea. It is particle spin. Particle
spin enables processes to happen,
processes such as memory and aging and
decay. You can say that time
"causes" memories, aging and decay, or you can
say that particle spin "causes"
memories, aging and decay. Time and
particle spin are the same thing.
Him: But particle spin is
motion, and motion occurs in
time, it cannot be time.
Me: Motion slows down
particle spin, so they are not
the same thing. I suppose you could
consider them to be two different "kinds"
of motion. And neither kind can exceed
the speed of light, not separately nor
together. When a spinning particle moves
through space it slows down. The faster
it moves, the slower it spins. If it
could reach the speed of light, the spinning
would stop and time would stop.
Then we are once again in the realm of
photons. Photons are particles that do
not spin, they oscillate. And they
travel at the speed of light. They
cannot go slower. And they do not
experience time. They can travel though
space forever. Then we need to think
about muons. Muons are particles that
are created when molecules in the air are hit
by Gama ray particles. Muons exist for
only a very short time, but the faster they
move, the longer they exist.
Him: Time might slow down for a
muon, but we're talking about objects like
humans and space ships.
Me: Muons are particles
that spin. Objects like you, me and
space ships are constructed of atoms, which
are in turn constructed of particles that
spin. If I am in a space ship, all the
particles that are part of the space ship and
part of me travel together at the same speed
through space. Our motion is nearly
identical as we move through space. So,
we all experience time passing at the same
rate - a rate that is slower than what is
being experienced back on Earth.
Him: Okay. I can see
that motion and spin are not always
the same thing. I need to think this over.
Me: You do that.
Sigh. If it were
somehow possible to have such a discussion with
a troll or a conspiracy theorist, how much more
enjoyable this world would be!
January
7, 2021 - We
definitely live in very interesting
times. The election of those two
Democrat senators in Georgia is like a
great ending to a suspense
movie. And the "hero" of the
movie is Donald Trump, since those two
senators probably could not have won
if Trump hadn't been supporting their
opponents. Voters turned out in
record numbers to vote against
the candidates supported by Trump.
That is really a
great ending to a
suspense story.
And then we have yesterday's attack on
and attempted takeover of the Capitol
Building in Washington by Trump
supporters, fully encouraged by
Trump. Four of the rioters died,
including one woman who was shot by
police. And the end result, just
like in a great suspense movie, was
that Joe Biden was confirmed to be our
next President. The only question now
seems to be: Can
we afford to leave Trump remain as
President for another two weeks?
How much additional harm could he
cause during that time?
Interestingly, it would be Republicans
(Trump's cabinet) who would remove him
and replace him with Mike Pence.
They're discussing it, but will it
happen? I suspect not.
Trump seems to have finally accepted
that he won't be President after
January 20, although he will
undoubtedly believe for the rest of
life that it was all the result of a
conspiracy against him.
It has also been a truly great
demonstration of the idiocy of
conspiracy theorists and how they
think. They are totally immune
to logic and common sense. I
keep wanting to create a cartoon where
Trump is ranting, "Everyone just
needs to stop listening to people
who disagree with me and listen only
to those who agree with me, then
you will see that I am right!!!!"
That is basically what his prime
argument has been. And his
supporters agree.
Interesting stuff. I imagine
that in the next few months there will
be dozens of books written about
Trump's final days in office.
Meanwhile, the troll who posts insults
via my web site log file posted six
more of them yesterday morning via a
location in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Here's what the first one said:
107.189.10.251 - -
[06/Jan/2021:11:11:40 -0600] "GET /Stupid Ed lake does not
understand that %22Time does not tick%22
it is highly illogical and it violates
Causality HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-"
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:78.0)
Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0"
Did I say that time "ticks"?
I said that "time is particle spin."
Particle spin is the cause of time, and time is
the effect of particle spin. Here's his
second message, stripped of all the log file
coding:
Stupid
Ed lake does not understand that Time
Dilation only occurs in
Relativity--alongside Length
Contraction-- you can NOT have
the one without the other
Time Dilation only occurs in
Relativity? That makes no sense at
all. Time dilation occurs virtually
everywhere. Relativity is just the theory
that explains Time Dilation. The third
message:
Stupid Ed lake does not
understand that in Relativity Time is a
DIMENSION not a "thing"
I understand that "Relativity
Time" is only a dimension if you want to build a
mathematical model that works that way.
Fourth message:
Stupid Ed lake does not
understand that Time Dilation is a
MATHEMATICAL TRICK courtesy of that
mathematical construct named SPACETIME
Hmm. I agree that
"spacetime" is just a "mathematical construct,"
but Time Dilation exists without
mathematics. Under the right conditions,
Time Dilation can be seen. You can see
a pulsar flashing faster when you are moving
faster through space. No mathematics are
needed. It's flashing faster because your
seconds get longer when you move faster, while
one second at the pulsar remains
unchanged. Clearly the troll and I are not
communicating. Probably because of the
stupid way he does his arguing. His fifth
message was:
Stupid Ed lake does not
understand that Time Dilation is
Mathematical Metaphysics
Its an AXIOM
Huh? Metaphysics is the
study of things that do not involve material
reality. Is he saying that Time is not
real or that Time Dilation is not real?
An axiom is something that is accepted
as being true. So, is he saying Time
Dilation is not real but it is accepted as being
real? Why can't he just say what he
means???? His sixth and final message was:
Stupid Ed lake does not
understand that its equaly as stupid to
say that space expands in space and to say
time slows down in time
I fully agree. And the troll
is the only one who has ever said such a
"stupid" thing. I've said that material
from the Big Bang expands into empty space, and
that motion and gravity slow down time, just as
many experiments have verified. Time is
particle spin. Time is the cause of aging
and decay. Everything else we know about
time is memory and records and what we learn
from memory and records.
My memory and records show that arguing with the
troll is mostly a waste of time. But, just
like showing how conspiracy theorists think,
showing how trolls argue can be also be
interesting and educational. In the end,
you just shake your head and wonder: How can
anyone think that way?
January 6, 2021 - On my Kindle,
I've been reading a book "about
time" that contains a lot
of excellent information.
At the moment, I'm only 40%
done, so I don't want to write a
review yet, but I want to
mention that the book explains
in great detail how it can be
easily determined who is moving
relative to whom. The simplest
example is that the person who
moves faster must
accelerate to get
moving faster. The
"stationary" person does not
accelerate, but remains in an
"inertial frame." The
moving person accelerates to get
moving faster, and then cuts the
engines and starts coasting in
an "inertial frame." So,
there can be no doubt that the
person who accelerated to a
higher speed is the one moving
faster.
And the book describes in detail
how time slows down for the
person who is moving faster, and
how that can be verified in
various ways. Then the
author wrote something that
directly related to what I had
written yesterday about "Time is
Particle Spin." The book
says,
A breakthrough came in
mid-1912, about the time the Einsteins
moved back to Zurich, where Albert took
the post of professor at his alma mater,
the ETH. Einstein came to the conclusion
that a fully satisfactory general theory
of relativity could be obtained only by
giving up the normal rules of geometry. It was wrong to think
that gravitation causes a distortion
or warping of time, he
realized—gravitation was a warping of
time! More generally, both
space and time must be warped. A
gravitational field is not a field of
force at all, but a curvature in the
geometry of spacetime.
I had just written that
gravitation causes particle
spin to slow down, and the slowing of spin causes
time to slow down. So, am I
wrong, or was Einstein just looking at
things mathematically? In a
mathematical model of the solar system or
the universe you can imagine
how spacetime affects gravity and
time. But we can measure
differences in time on a local scale, in
some local building. Time ticks slower
on the ground floor than on higher
floors. How can that be time causing
gravity? And if speed also causes
time to slow down, doesn't that say that
time is slowed on a local level? You
can view things from a cosmological point of
view and see thing differently, but I still
think that time is particle spin.
Besides, when Einstein was writing his
papers they didn't even know that particles
spin. Particle
spin wasn't discovered until the 1920s.
Interestingly, this also fits into the
book I'm listening to while driving to
the bank and grocery stores. Here's a
passage from that book:
Over the past decade,
airlines have also learned the
dangers of the authority bias.
In the old days, the captain was king. His
commands were not to be doubted. If a
copilot suspected an oversight, he
wouldn’t have dared to address it out of
respect for—or fear of—his captain. Since
this behavior was discovered, nearly every
airline has instituted crew resource
management (CRM), which coaches pilots
and their crews to discuss any
reservations they have openly and
quickly. In other words: They carefully
deprogram the authority bias. CRM
has contributed more to flight safety in
the past twenty years than have any
technical advances.
My mind is open to being
shown to be wrong, but I'm not going to
accept being wrong just because I disagree
with something Einstein wrote or said over
110 years ago. I don't agree with
"length contraction" either. It's
never been confirmed, and I think it could
just be an idea Einstein came up with
because he had no way to know about (or even
imagine) how particle spin is time.
Meanwhile, yesterday I did some digging
around and found what I think was my first
paper. It's titled "Time
Dilation Re-visualized," and
it's dated May 31, 2015. It's
basically just my early 2014 web page "Time
Dilation - as I understand it" turned
into a science paper. It describes how
you can tell who is moving faster through
space by using a pulsar as a
clock. The pulsar will appear to pulse
faster for the person who is
traveling fastest (assuming both are moving
at right angles to the pulsar, not toward or
away from it) because that person will count
more pulses per his longer
second.
After more than 6 years of research into
this subject, I still find it fascinating.
January 5, 2021 - When I went through
my web site log file this morning to
see how many visitors I had and who
was visiting this site, I found three
more messages from the troll who puts
personal attacks into my log
file. Mentioning those attacks
just encourages him to post more, but
this time I think they are worth
mentioning. Here are the three
messages he posted via a web site in
Roosendaal, Netherlands, which he has
used before:
77.247.181.163 - -
[04/Jan/2021:15:58:12 -0600] "GET /STUPID Ed
lake still does
not seem to
realize that ANY
type of spin
OCCURS IN TIME so
spin--of any type--can
not be TIME ITSELF
HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT
10.0; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0"
77.247.181.163 - -
[04/Jan/2021:15:59:02 -0600] "GET /STUPID Ed
lake still does
not seem realize
that PARTICLE SPIN
speeds up IN
TIME---and PARTICLE SPIN
slows down IN
TIME---so particle spin
can NOT be TIME
ITSELF HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-"
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:78.0)
Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0"
77.247.181.163 - -
[04/Jan/2021:15:59:37 -0600] "GET /STUPID Ed
lake still does
not seem realize
that particle spin
is A TYPE OF
MOTION and as
such---IT OCCURS IN
TIME so particle
spin can not be
TIME ITSELF HTTP/1.1"
404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0;
rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0"
As you can see, he's viewing time
philosophically or conceptually, as if it is
just an idea. Time is
simply something that is always there ticking
away.
But that view is OBVIOUSLY WRONG, since it
cannot account for time dilation.
Notice, too, that he does not state what time is,
he only says what it is not.
We know that time can speed up
and time can slow down, and we know what
causes that change in the
rate of time. We know that
time ticks at a slightly different rate just
about everywhere in the universe, depending
upon the speed and location of the object
that is experiencing time.
That says that time is NOT just a concept or
idea or philosophy. It is a thing
that can be affected by motion and gravity.
Remember, too, that when Einstein described
time, he simply described what was measured with
a clock. And any object which spins or
ticks at a regular rate is a clock. And
every object in the universe is constructed of
particles which tick (or spin) like tiny
clocks. That is because they are
clocks.
Memories and records are not time. They
are memories and records of what occurred in
time. So are aging and decay, which relate
to particles. Muon particles exist longer
when moving faster. Atomic clocks are
based upon the idea that particles operate at a
constant rate as long as the atomic clock is not
moved.
We also know a lot of things about "The Big
Bang" that suggest that time may not have
existed before the Big Bang, i.e, there may
have been a time when there was no time.
The theory is that there was just a
"singularity," or some highly compressed object
which had no way to measure or experience
time. Then that object exploded, beginning
with a period of "cosmic
inflation." During that brief
period, things moved much faster than the
speed of light. If there is no time,
there can be no speed of light, because "speed"
is distance over time.
The troll seems to believe that you can have
time without any means to measure time, since
time is just an idea or concept. If that
were true, then there would only be one
time. In our universe, time passes at a
different rate almost everywhere, although the
difference is usually too small to notice.
Maybe the next time the troll posts his insults
to my web site log he will explain
what he believes instead of just posting insults
and how he does NOT believe what I am
saying. What does he believe that time is
if it can be affected by motion and
gravity? It cannot just be an idea
or concept. If it can be affected by
motion and gravity, it must
be a "thing."
January
4, 2021 - We
definitely live in
interesting times.
This morning the news is mostly
about Trump's "crime
boss" phone call to
try to overturn the
election by forcing
and intimidating
people to lie and
cheat and steal for
him. I
searched around and
found that the
York News-Times
has a transcript of
the entire hour-long
call, plus a
complete audio copy
which can be
downloaded in MP3
format. I'm
listening to it as I
type this comment. (The New
York Times web site, The
Wall Street Journal's
web site and other sites have
the same thing, but you have
to be subscribers to get to
them.)
It's interesting that the
phone call was recorded, but
Trump either didn't know about
it or didn't care. The
news outlets are calling it
"unprecedented." It is
definitely an amazing example
of trying to argue with a
rabid conspiracy theorist.
Here is one bit I copied from
the transcript:
Raffensperger:
Mr. President, the problem you have with
social media, they — people
can say anything.
Trump: Oh this
isn't social media. This is Trump media. It's
not social media. It's really
not it's not social media. I don't care about
social media. I couldn't care less. Social media is Big Tech. Big Tech
is on your side. I don't even know why you
have a side, because
you should want to have an accurate election.
And you're a Republican.
Raffensperger: We
believe that we do have an accurate election.
Trump: No, no you
don't. No, no you don't. You don't have. Not
even close. You're off
by hundreds of thousands of votes. And just on
the small numbers, you're off on these numbers and these numbers
can't be just — well, why wont? — Okay. So you
sent us into Cobb County
for signature verification, right? You sent us
into Cobb County,
which we didn't want to go into. And you said
it would be open to the public. And we could have our - So
we had our experts there they weren't allowed
into the room. But we
didn't want Cobb County. We wanted Fulton
County. And you wouldn't
give it to us. Now, why aren't we doing
signature — and why can't it be open to the public? And why can't we have professionals
do it instead of rank amateurs who will never
find anything and don't
want to find anything? They don't want to
find, you know, they
don't want to find anything. Someday you'll
tell me the reason why, because I don't understand your reasoning, but
someday you'll tell me the reason why. But why don't you want to find?
There are probably a hundred
better quotes in the transcript that show how
conspiracy theorists think. They
constantly argue beliefs against facts, and they
argue that you just need to listen to people who
agree with them instead of people who disagree
with them, and then you'll see what "the truth"
is.
It is truly an amazing discussion - something
for the history books (and probably a lot of
psychology books).
January 3, 2021 - Yesterday
morning I awoke realizing
something. For weeks
I have been constantly
modifying and adding new
stuff at the beginning of
a new paper tentatively
titled "Motion Relative
to the Speed of Light,"
and it now seems what I
was really looking for to
start the paper was what I
wrote nearly 5 years ago
in another paper, "What
is Time?"
It's also something I
mentioned in my December
27 comment, when I
quoted a troll who wrote
this in my log file:
Stupid Ed lake does not
understand that when he says
*Time=Particle Spin* what he is
really saying is
*Time=Motion* Motion
occurs in Time---Motion stops in
Time---Motion slows down in Time
No, I'm not
saying that "Time=Motion." I'm
saying that "Time=Particle
Spin." I'm saying
that there is a very important
difference between particle spin
and the motion of a particle.
The basic energy of a
particle is a measurement of its
spin, while the motion of a
particle is its movement through
space (which can add kinetic
energy to the particle). But
more importantly, I'm also saying
that every sub-atomic particle
in the entire universe is a little
clock that constantly ticks off
time as it spins. And,
each sub-atomic particle ticks off
time at a slightly different rate
depending upon its motion and speed
through the universe and its
proximity to a gravitational mass.
That is also the essence of Einstein's
theories. Here's a
quote from a PBS article:
Then it suddenly hit
him, the key to the entire problem. Einstein
recalled, "A storm broke loose in my mind."
The answer was simple and elegant: time
can beat at different rates throughout the
universe, depending on how fast you moved.
Imagine clocks scattered at different points
in space, each one announcing a different
time, each one ticking at a different rate. One
second on Earth was not the same length as
one second on the moon or one second on
Jupiter. In fact, the faster you moved, the
more time slowed down. (Einstein once
joked that in
relativity theory, he placed a
clock at every point in the universe, each
one running at a different rate,
but in real life he didn't have enough money
to buy even one.) This meant that events that
were simultaneous in one frame were not
necessarily simultaneous in another frame, as
Newton thought. He had finally tapped into
"God's thoughts." He would recall excitedly,
"The solution came to me suddenly with the
thought that our concepts and laws of space
and time can only claim validity insofar as
they stand in a clear relation to our
experiences.... By a revision of the concept
of simultaneity into a more malleable form, I
thus arrived at the theory of relativity."
So, every point in the universe
has its own time, ticking at its own rate, and at
each of those points the speed of light is
measured to be 299,792,458 meters PER
SECOND according to the clock
located at that point.
That
means that motion through space is
very different from
particle spin. Einstein
evidently didn't know about
particle spin. It appears
that he believed that time slows
down the faster an object is
moving because he believed
distances and lengths shorten
when moving. That makes no
sense to me. As I see it,
one kind of motion affects the
other kind. Motion through
space slows particle spin.
And time is particle spin, which means that
motion through space slows time. A
particle that moves through space but does not
spin does not experience time. It's
called a "photon." A photon oscillates,
it does not spin. It is pure
energy. A particle that spins is
matter. Turning matter into energy
involves turning a spinning particle into a
particle that consists of pure energy and
moves through space at the speed of
light. Lengths and distances have
nothing to do with anything, and that is why
"length contraction" has never been confirmed.
Einstein once said: "I very rarely think in
words at all. A thought comes, and I may try
to express in words afterwards."
That is probably true of all of us.
Putting an idea into words that will properly
convey its meaning to others can be very
difficult. "Time is particle spin" is
something that I can visualize and it makes
perfect sense to me, but if someone else sees
no difference between motion and spin, then
explaining the idea to them can be very
difficult. What it says is that, in full
agreement with Einstein, every particle in the
universe is a little clock ticking off time at
its own rate, a rate that varies depending
upon its motion through space and its
proximity to any large mass.
And, my idea for a paper titled "Motion
Relative to the Speed of Light" hits a
snag if I try to explain that theoretically,
since every particle is a tiny clock that
ticks at its own rate, that means that every
atom that emits a photon of light emits a
photon that travels at a slightly different
speed than photons emitted by every other
atom. In practice, the difference is not
measurable because (1) it can be very very
small, and (2) because no one knows how to
measure the one-way speed of light.
So, every object in the universe is moving at
zero percent of the speed of light as the
speed of light is measured by that object, but
every other object in the universe
that is not stationary relative to the first
object, is moving at some percentage of the
speed of light as measured by the first
object. That is what Einstein's
time dilation equation says:
Unfortunately, mathematically there is no
way to tell who is moving and who is
stationary. It is simply assumed
that the observer inside the frame of reference
is stationary.
If you want to know who is actually moving, you
evidently have to use LOGIC to do that. I
may think I am stationary
and the sun, moon and stars are all in orbits
around me, and I can develop mathematical
equations to confirm that, but simple logical
experiments will show that it is not true.
The question now is: Do I continue to modify my
paper on "Motion Relative to the Speed of
Light," or should I update my paper "What
is Time?" to incorporate all these other
ideas.
Or maybe I should just lay down on my couch and
read a book.
January 2, 2021 - When I read
about that
suicide bomber in Nashville,
I could not help but think that
he was some kind of conspiracy
theorist. And the
same with the pharmacist who destroyed
more than 500 doses of the
Covid vaccine in Grafton,
Wisconsin. And, of
course, we have a Conspiracy
Theorist in Chief in the White
House who refuses to accept the
results of the election and
thinks he lost because of some vast
conspiracy to change votes for
him into votes for his opponent.
It's totally insane.
How could anyone believe that so
many people could keep such a
secret? Do they think the
thousands of election workers
are all hardened CIA agents
posing as elderly people from
the community? But it also
fits with what I read in "The
Death of Expertise,"
the book I mentioned in my
December 16 comment.
More and more people are
becoming more and more vocal
about not trusting
experts. Instead, they
think they know more than any
expert.
After finishing "The Death of
Expertise," I found a lot
of similar books going back decades.
It all seems to fit into what
I've written about before, that
there are people who mostly
think logically,
and there are people who mostly
think emotionally.
Everyone thinks both ways, but
there appear to be a large
number of people who mainly
think emotionally.
Fortunately, they do not seem to
be the majority. But they
can be the voting
majority when those who think
logically lose interest in
whatever the issue is.
Then it is the ones with the
strongest emotional reasons who
vote the most, and those with
less emotional reasons just
don't bother to vote. The
majority voted emotionally to
put Trump in office, then the
majority voted emotionally to
get rid of him. Logically,
it is insane that
he was ever elected in the first
place.
January 1, 2021 - Happy New Year!
|
Comments for Sunday,
December 27, 2020, thru Thurs., Dec. 31,
2020:
December 31,
2020 (B) - Yesterday
afternoon, I finished
reading another book on my
Kindle. It was one
of the books I mentioned
in my December 27 comment:
"Why
Does E=mc2? (And Why
Should We Care?)"
by Brian Cox and Jeff
Forshaw.
I blasted through it in two days, reading
nearly all day on Tuesday and until about
1:30 pm on Wednesday. And I've got 21
pages of notes.
But, I don't really have much good to say
about it. Mostly it was
borrrrrrring. I really had to strain
to stay awake and keep my eyes open.
Nonetheless, it was definitely worth
reading, and there were some sections that
were very thought-provoking.
It avoids using math, but it does so in an
tiresome way. It will say that it is
about to get into some mathematics and you
can skip over the next part if you want, and
then it will go through some math. I
didn't exactly skip over those parts, I
skimmed through them looking to see if there
was any text or equation that might be worth
making a note of. There weren't
many. Here are a couple:
At the simplest level, an
equation allows you to predict the results
of an experiment without actually having
to conduct it.
and
The wonderful thing about
equations, however, is that they can also
reveal deep connections between quantities
that are not immediately apparent from the
results of experiments, and in doing so
can lead to a much deeper and more
profound understanding of nature.
For some reason, the authors
do not refer to Einstein's postulates.
They call them "proposals" or "axioms"
(which I think are better terms than
"postulates"):
At the heart of Einstein’s
theory of special relativity lie two
proposals, which in the language of
physics are termed axioms. An axiom is
a proposition that is assumed to be
true. Given the axioms, we can then
proceed to work out the consequences for
the real world, which we can check using
experiments.
And they give screwball
versions of those "axioms":
The first of Einstein’s
axioms is that Maxwell’s equations hold
true in the sense that light always
travels through empty space at the same
speed regardless of the motion of the
source or the observer. The second axiom
advocates that we are to follow
Galileo in asserting that no
experiment can ever be performed that
is capable of identifying absolute
motion. Armed only with
these propositions, we can now proceed as
good physicists should and explore the
consequences. As ever in science, the
ultimate test of Einstein’s theory,
derived from his two axioms, is its
ability to predict and explain the results
of experiments. Quoting Feynman more fully
this time: “In general we look for a new
law by the following process. First we
guess it. Then we compute the consequences
of the guess to see what would be implied
if this law that we guessed is right. Then
we compare the result of the computation
to Nature, with experiment or experience,
compare it directly with observation, to
see if it works. If it disagrees with
experiment it is wrong. In that simple
statement is the key to science. It does
not make any difference how beautiful your
guess is. It does not make any difference
how smart you are, who made the guess, or
what his name is—if it disagrees with
experiment it is wrong. That’s all there
is to it.”
That first "axiom" is just a
typical distortion of Einstein's Second
Postulate, but the second "axiom" is a very
interesting version of Einstein's First
Postulate. It fits with my "truck
experiment," since the radar guns do not
detect "absolute motion," only motion
relative to the local speed of light.
There were some parts of the book which
really seemed crazy to me. When it
talks about "length contraction," it
suggests that if Joe is zipping through
space at 86.6 percent of the speed of light,
Joe will experience time passing at half the
rate that Bill back on earth experiences
it. I totally agree with that.
But then the book will suggest that it is equally
valid to say that distances
for Joe are shorter than distances for Bill,
because Joe is moving faster. That
makes no sense at all. Here is one
quote I copied:
If we could build a
spaceship that could whisk us into space
at speeds very close to light speed, then
the distances to the stars would shrink,
and the amount of shrinking would increase
the closer to light speed we could travel.
If we managed to travel at 99.99999999
percent of light speed, then we could
travel out of the Milky Way and all the
way to the neighboring Andromeda galaxy,
almost 3 million light-years away, in a
mere fifty years.
It might seem
like distances shrink because of your speed,
just as it might seem
like the distance to Walmart is shorter if
you go 50 mph than if you go 30 mph, but it
makes absolutely no sense to think of things
that way. Your motion does not
change distances. It only
changes how time passes for
you: time passes slower when you go faster,
which is something the book says many times.
While the book was often a frustrating read,
it was also thought provoking in that it
gave me insights into the screwball way that
mathematicians think, and that should help
me understand them better, and enable me to
create better arguments against their
nonsensical beliefs.
December 31, 2020
(A) - I solved another
mystery this morning. It was kind of
bizarre. Yesterday, while grocery
shopping at Walmart, I was checking out at
one of the automated lines, and when I tried
to pay with a $20 bill, the machine rejected
the bill. I tried it a second time,
and it rejected it again. So, I paid
with a $10 bill that the machine accepted
with no problem.
When I got home, I wondered why the bill was
rejected. I examined it and discovered
it didn't have a "magnetic strip" like all
the other 20s I had at home. I never
carry anything larger than a 20, and I get
all my 20s from my bank. Did the
bank give me a counterfeit $20
bill?? It looked like a new,
crisp $20, which seemed like another
indicator that it might be a counterfeit.
I thought about it overnight, and this
morning I did a little research. I
wondered how long the magnetic strip has
been in use. When I researched it, I
discovered that there is a lot of stuff I
didn't know about.
Here's what that $20 bill looks like (this
isn't mine, it's one from the internet):
Just like my $20 bill, the bill above is
"Series 1985" (stated in small letters just
above the second L in Dollars). Here's
what the rest of my 20s look like:

They didn't add the magnetic strip until
1990. Nor did they add any of the
other security features until 1990.
So, my $20 bill appears to be a good $20
bill, even though it was rejected by the
machine. Interestingly, crisp new $20
bills from 1985 are worth as much as $40 to
collectors, IF they have a
star after the serial number, as the lower
bill above has. My $20 bill doesn't
have the star.
So, I guess I'll have to get rid of my $20
bill from 1985 by handing it to a check-out
clerk instead of inserting it into a
machine.
Live and learn.
December 30, 2020 - Yesterday
afternoon, as I was driving home after
buying groceries, I finished listening
to CD #9 in the 9-CD set for the audio
book version of "Origins:
Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic
Evolution" by Neil
deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith.
While it's a great book, for some
reason my local library only had the
audio book version. I also made
a BIG mistake by putting it on CDs and
listening to it while driving.
The Covid-19 pandemic changed things
so that I drove my car only two or
three times a week, and then just to
the grocery store. So, it took a
long time to get through the
book. Worst of all, there were
many many times when I wanted to make
a note of what was being said, but
that is next to impossible to do while
driving. I should have read it
on my Kindle or bought a paper copy.
Here's one passage from early in the
book that I did manage to make a note
of:
Like
all attempts at human progress, the
scientific approach works better
in theory than in practice. Not
all scientists doubt one another as
effectively as they should. The
need to impress scientists who
occupy powerful positions, and who
are sometimes swayed by factors
that lie beyond their conscious
knowledge, can interfere with
science’s self-correcting ability.
In the long run, however, errors
cannot endure, because other
scientists will discover them and
promote their own careers by
trumpeting the news. Those
conclusions that do survive the
attacks of other scientists will
eventually achieve the status of
scientific “laws,” accepted as valid
descriptions of reality, even though
scientists understand that each of
these laws may some day find itself
to be only part of a larger, deeper
truth.
After
I find a Kindle or paper copy
somewhere, I'm going to try to find
the time to read the
book so that I can make notes.
It is the process of making notes that
really sticks things into my
memory. And there are a lot of
things in this book I really want to
remember. I don't agree with
everything in the book, but I also
want to remember the things I don't
agree with. Those are the things
I really want to learn more about and
understand better.
I've already thrown the CDs into the
trash. I also threw out the 450
other audio book CDs I had
accumulated. It seems such a
waste. And its probably bad for
the environment to throw CDs into the
trash. But there doesn't seem
any way or place to recycle plastics
anymore. It's really a crazy
world where it is against the law to
give away things others want, so you
have to help destroy the world by
turning those wanted objects into
trash.
December 29, 2020 - Yesterday afternoon
I finished reading another library
book on my Kindle. The book was
"Neither
Here Nor There: Travels in Europe"
by Bill Bryson.
Bill Bryson is one of my favorite
non-fiction authors, and this book was
as enjoyable as many other books of
his that I've read. It's a
travel book, the story of Bryson's
journey alone through most of
the countries of Europe sometime
around 1990, beginning in the winter
with a 30-hour bus trip from Oslo to
Hammerfest, Norway, which is about as
far north as you can go in
Norway. Here's a quote from that
point in the book:
The
Meridianstøtten was an obelisk on a
small elevation in the middle of a
graveyard of warehouses. I later
learned that it was a memorial
erected to celebrate the completion
in 1840, on this very spot, of the
first scientific measurement of the
earth’s circumference. (Hammerfest’s
other historical distinction is that
it was the first town in Europe to
have electric street lights.) I
clambered up to the obelisk with
difficulty, but the snow was blowing
so thickly that I couldn’t read the
inscription, and I returned to town
thinking I would come back again
another day. I never did.
This
morning I took a look around the same
spot using Google Maps. It shows how
things looked in June of 2015.
Google also has views of parts of that
area in March 2020. Here a
winter-time snapshot I found:
While I enjoyed my trips to Europe, I
never got to Norway. But I did
spend a lot of time wandering around
alone. Most of my trips were
"tours," where you travel with a
group. But the trips I took
always left a lot of time to explore
alone. The tour would go by bus or
train to some city, then there would
be a half-day tour of the city, and
for the rest of the day and maybe one
or two days after that, you'd be on
your own until it was time to get on
the bus again to go to the next
country or city.
For much of this book Bryson was
basically repeating a trip he made
with a friend in 1972. It's a
back-pack trip. No
schedule. Just decide where you
want to go next, and go. Only
this time he's alone. Both times
it was a trip where the first thing
you have to do when you reach a new
city is find a hotel room. Then
you have to find some place to
eat. And when you leave you have
to try to get the ticket clerk at the
bus or train station to understand
what you are saying and where you want
to go. But you can spend as many
days as you like wandering around.
While Bryson does visit places like
Paris and Geneva and Rome and Florence
and Capri, he also goes to places like
Sofia, Bulgaria, which in 1990 was
still communist and still run by a
dictator. Bryson describes how
people were constantly looking for
things they could buy, mostly food but
also for things they could use to
trade for food. In one country
he gets his pocket picked, and all of
his travelers checks are stolen.
That means he has to deal with a lot
of people, including the police, who
he cannot understand and who do not
understand English. So, it's not
only a travel book, it is somewhat of
an adventure story.
I enjoyed the book very much.
While eating breakfast this morning, I
started reading a science book.
December 28, 2020 - Sigh!
I awoke this morning thinking about
something else I probably need to add
to my new paper "Motion Relative to
the Speed of Light." Only
this addition won't go near the
beginning of the paper, it will go
somewhere near the end. Or I
might not add it into the paper at
all, since it's something I explained
in detail in my
paper about Einstein's Thought
Experiments. It's Einstein's
thought experiment about motion
relative to the speed of light,
as described in his paper "The
Principle Ideas of the Theory of
Relativity."
In the thought experiment, Einstein
has a man traveling away from the sun
at 1,000 kilometers per second
(kps). Light from the sun
travels at 300,000 kps, and the
question is: at what speed does light
from the sun pass the traveler?
Logically, it would be 299,000 kps,
since the traveler is moving at 1,000
kps away from the sun. But, as
Einstein explains in the paper, the
traveler would actually measure
the sun's light to be traveling by at
300,000 kps. Why? Because,
due to the traveler's speed relative
to the speed of the sun, a second is
slightly longer for him than on the
sun due to time dilation. And because
his second is longer, he will measure
the light as passing by at 300,000
kilometers per second.
Moreover, if the traveler were to emit
light in any direction as he his
traveling, that light will travel at
300,000 kps as he
measures the length of a second.
Does this mean that the speed of the
light that is passing the traveler
from the sun is actually traveling at
the same speed as the light the
traveler is emitting? NO.
The traveler measured the speed of the
light that was passing him, and that
light is actually traveling faster
than the light the traveler emits,
even though he measures them both to
be traveling at 300,000 kps.
When viewed from the sun, using
time and the length of a second as
it is measured on the sun, the
light from the sun passes the traveler
at 299,000 kps. When viewed by
the traveler, using the length of
a second as he measures it, the
light passes at 300,000 kps.
In short, the light emitted from
the sun is traveling 1,000 kps
faster than light emitted by the
traveler, even though both emitted
light at 300,000 kilometers per
LOCAL second.
In his paper, Einstein goes into
considerable detail to explain all
this. Here's a key part of the
paper:
There is no audible
tick-tock everywhere in the world that
could be considered as time. If physics
wants to use time, it first has to define
it. In this endeavor it is apparent that
this definition necessarily requires a
body of reference, and that this
definition makes sense only with respect
to this chosen body of reference. It
turns out that one can define time
relative to this body of reference such
that the law of the propagation of light
is obeyed relative to it. This
definition of time can be realized for
bodies of reference in any state of
motion. But it turns out that the times of
differently moving bodies of reference do
not coincide. A more detailed
justification of this is found in my
popular book about the theory of
relativity.[3] If two events occurring at
different locations are judged
simultaneous from a body of reference,
then they are not judged so from a body of
reference that is moving relative to it.
And here's another
translation from another source:
There is no omnipresent
tic-tac audible in the universe that we
could regard as time. If physics wants to
make use of time, it first has to define
it. In an effort to do this, it becomes
clear that a reference body is needed for
this definition, and that the definition
only makes sense relative to this
reference body. It turns out that one
can define time in relation to this
reference body in such a way that,
relative to it, the laws governing
light’s velocity are valid. This
definition of time can be made for
reference bodies in any state of velocity.
However, it so happens that the times of
differently moving reference bodies do not
coincide. There is a more detailed proof
of this matter in my popular book about
the theory of relativity.[3] If two events
happen simultaneously in two different
locations judged from a reference body,
they are not simultaneous if judged from
another reference body moving relative to
the first.
Those quotes fit well with
the truck experiment I described in two
papers and argued endlessly about on the
sci.physics.relativity forum. The
quotes both say that the speed of light will
be measured to be the same inside a
moving truck and on the ground outside the
truck, even though the speed of light is
actually different in the two
locations.
In the truck experiment, however, the
experiment is about measuring kinetic
energy, not the speed of light.
No "laws of electrodynamics and optics" are
broken when the results inside the moving
truck are seen to be different than results
outside of the truck. You're just measuring
something that is different inside the truck
than outside the truck. You find there
is a difference when you compare
experiment results. If you could compare
time as it is measured inside and outside
the truck, there would be a difference
there, too.
It's not that complicated. Physicists
just make it complicated by including a lot
of unnecessary information about what was
believed in the past by respected
scientists. If you just describe how
things work without constantly going into
lengthy discussions about how it is
different than what was believed in the
past, almost everything becomes easier to
understand.
Unfortunately, that causes a different
problem: Tomorrow someone might make a
discovery that shows that what is currently
believed is not entirely true.
There could be a misunderstanding
somewhere. That is probably why, in
schools, they do not simply teach how things
work, instead they teach what was believed
in the past and how those misconceptions
were corrected over the centuries. Hopefully, out of all that
you will learn how things are currently
believed to work, and if you see a
problem, maybe you'll know enough to explain
how to correct the problem.
December 27, 2020
- Groan! Last week I wrote
that I wasn't going to write any more
comments for this web site about what
progress (or lack of progress) I'm making
(or not making) in the writing of my latest
paper "Motion Relative to the Speed of
Light." I figured that no one
wants to read about how I keep re-starting
the paper when I realize there is something
I hadn't previously thought about that I
need to explain before I explain everything
else. But, I also think the readers of this
web site might want to know what I just thought
about, like last week's comment about kinetic
energy and how it can be used to determine which
space ship is moving fastest. That's a
"mind-blowing" realization!
Last week, when I restarted the paper to include
information about kinetic energy before getting
into other matters, I began doing some research
to see who else may have written about the
subject (other than Albert Einstein), and that
led me into my collection/library of
e-books. And that led me into a different
problem. Months ago, someone on
a Facebook forum asked me if I knew of any
good books about Time Dilation. I
responded,
Good books about time
dilation are hard to find. I probably have the
names of a few filed away. I'll check
tomorrow.
Then a day or so later, I wrote:
There might be books
on time dilation somewhere, but mostly there
are just scientific papers.
What I should have done is tell
them that books about Time Dilation are really
books about Relativity, of which Time
Dilation is just one interesting part. I
realized that a couple days ago as I was
browsing through my library of e-books. I
decided I needed to create an index for my
e-books. So, I set everything else aside
and began doing that. It took about three
days, since I had to examine each book to give
it a "priority" ranking. I gave a top
ranking to some books by my favorite physicist,
Brian
Cox. (Brian Cox is also one of the
hosts of my favorite podcast, "The
Infinite Monkey Cage.) At the top of
the list I put his book, Why
Does E=mc2? (And Why Should We Care?).
Chapter 3 of that book is about Special
Relativity, and it goes into a lot of
detail about Time Dilation.
Yet, somehow, I've never read it!
I obtained a copy somewhere, I put it at the top
of my reading list, but then I just kept adding
more books at the top of the list, pushing that
book downward.
Right now I'm reading a
travel book!
I can't just stop reading that book and switch
to Brian Cox's book, I'm 83% done
with the travel book. And it's a very
interesting and funny travel book by one of my
favorite authors, which is how it got to the top
of my reading list. Groan!
But I'm definitely going to put Brian Cox's book
at the top of my reading list once again.
I'll start it as soon as I finish the travel
book. And I'll move God
and the New Physics by Paul Davies
to second place on the list. Chapter 8 in
that book is all about Time. Maybe I won't
read the whole book, but I definitely want to
read that chapter. And I'll move How
to Teach Relativity to Your Dog by
Chad Orzel to third place. It's a strange
title for a physics book, but the idea is that
the author is explaining things in very simple
terms, which means he doesn't use
mathematics. Chapter 3 is titled "Time
Slows When You're Chasing Bunnies:
Relativistic Time Dilation." It
looks to be very funny while at
the same time being informative and
educational. I wrote a long comment about
it on August
21, 2017, when I first learned about the
book. In that comment I stated that I was
going to put the book in the middle
of my reading list, since I didn't like some of
the things the author was teaching his
dog. But, maybe I just needed to read it
more carefully.
There are probably other books which describe
Time Dilation in simple terms, but I've got
enough to keep me reading for awhile.
Just skimming through those three posed some
questions I can't stop thinking about.
Meanwhile, back on November 26, that troll who
posts insults to my web site log file posted
some messages that I wanted to respond to, but I
just never found the time. Here are his
posts, edited to make them easier to read:
Stupid Ed lake does
not understand Causality when he claims that
*the cause of time will also occur in
time* utterly stupid
Stupid Ed lake does not understand that he can
sit on other peoples lap but HE CAN NOT SIT ON
HIS OWN LAP
Stupid Ed lake does not understand his claim
that *the cause of time will also occur in
time* is like saying that TIME SITS ON IT'S
OWN LAP utterly stupid
Stupid Ed lake does not understand that when
he says *Time=Particle Spin* what he is really
saying is *Time=Motion* Motion
occurs in Time---Motion stops in Time---Motion
slows down in Time
If time is particle spin, as I
stated in my
paper on that topic, then everything else
about Time is just effects, memory and
records. The "cause" of Time is
particle spin, and the effects are aging, decay,
memories and records. That probably needs
better phrasing and a longer explanation.
I just need to find the time for that.
Groan!!! Finding
time can be more problematic than
understanding time!!!!
|
Comments for Sunday,
December 20, 2020, thru Sat., Dec. 26,
2020:
December 25,
2020 -
I wish everyone a very merry
(and safe) Christmas!
December 23, 2020 - Sigh!
I think I need to stop writing
comments about the paper I've
been working on, the paper which
I've tentatively titled "Motion
Relative to the Speed of Light."
I haven't stopped working on the
paper, but I keep revising it as
I think of new and better ways
to explain what I want to
explain. Writing comments
about it here is just going to
get people upset, because it
will seem like I'm telling them
about something I'm going to do
that it also seems like I never
get done.
So, I'm going to have to find
something else to write
about. That's another
problem, because looking for
something else to write about
just slows down my work on that
new paper.
One thing I can write about is how
I'm wondering about how Covid-19
vaccine shots will be given.
Right now, it seems that people from
Walgreen and CVS are going to
nursing homes and hospitals to
vaccinate "front line workers" and
the elderly with "pre-existing
conditions." I suppose they
might also go to fire stations and
police stations to give shots
there. But how will things
work when it comes time for people
to go to Walgreen and
CVS to get their shots?
There's a Walgreen Drug Store within
walking distance of where I live,
but it's also on the other side of a
major intersection with no
cross-walk, so I'll probably drive
there. But how will I know
when to do so? Plus, there's a
drug section in a grocery store on
my side of that intersection, and
they have been giving free flu shots
every fall for years. Will
they also be giving Covid-19 shots?
I guess I'll just have to wait and
find out. What I'll need to do
to get my shots will probably be all
over the news when they finally
start to inform people.
Meanwhile, there was another mystery
that had me wondering for the past
couple weeks. What
happened on December 10?
I've been keeping track of the
Covid-19 pandemic, mostly to compare
cases in Wisconsin to cases in
Virginia, where my sister
lives. I've been saving the
graphs produced by Johns Hopkins
University every day. On
December 10 there was a strange jump
in the number of cases. Here's
today's version of a graph that they
produce. It shows the strange
jump, with data about the jump
appearing when I put the cursor over
that uptick:
The spread-sheet under the graph was created by
me this morning. I created it by looking
at the "Global Cases" for each day. On the
morning of December 12 there was a big jump in
the number of "Global Cases," a jump of
1,467,390 cases for December 11, which is very
close to the 1.493 million Johns Hopkins shows
for the 10th. Only the "Global Cases"
data shows it was almost certainly some kind of
error, since the next day there was a big drop
in the number of cases. And the next day
there was another jump. Yet
something strange was going on, since the
average for those three days is 870,628, which
is significantly higher than the days before the
11th and after the 13th when the numbers were
all under 700,000.
It looks like another mystery that I'll never
solve. Such mysteries are very annoying,
even if they are my fault for looking at things
that no one else seems to look at or care about.
December 21, 2020 - Groan!
Once again it seems I need to add
something to the beginning of my new "Motion
Relative to the Speed of Light"
paper - or near the
beginning - something that needs to be
explained in order for the rest of the
paper to make total sense.
When arguing with mathematicians, I
sometimes argue that Einstein's Second
Postulate says that light travels at
the same speed, regardless of whether
the light is emitted from a moving or
a "stationary" emitter. While
somewhat true, that is not
exactly what Einstein's Second
Postulate says. It says,
light is always propagated
in empty space with a definite velocity c
which is independent of the state of
motion of the emitting body.
A "stationary only" radar
gun is never truly
stationary. A radar gun in Chicago is
moving at about 750 mph with the earth as
the earth spins on its axis, it is moving at
about 67,000 mph with the earth as the earth
moves in its orbit around the sun, it is
moving at about 486,000 mph with the earth
as the sun moves in its orbit around the
center of the Milky Way Galaxy, and it moves
at about 1,342,161 mph with the earth as the
Milky Way Galaxy moves toward the Hydra
constellation.
And mathematicians will tell me all that
when I explain how a "stationary only" radar
gun works. With all that motion going
on, they ask, how can a radar gun measure
the speed of a target relative to a
"stationary" radar gun?
The answer seems to be in the main topic of
Einstein's 1905 paper on Special Relativity:
Time Dilation. Time slows down for an
object when it moves, and the faster it
moves, the slower time passes. Plus,
time slows down depending upon how close you
are to a gravitational mass. The
closer you are, the slower time will pass
for you. So, when a radar gun emits a
photon that travels at the speed of light,
299,792,458 meters per second, the length of
a second at the location of the gun is
determined by all those speeds at which the
gun is traveling through the universe and
its location relative to the center of the
earth. That means that, at the
location of the gun, "one second" has a
different value than "one second" almost
anywhere else in the universe. And
when measuring a speed relative to the speed
of light, you are measuring a speed relative
to the speed of light per the unique length
of a second at the location of the gun.
But there's more to it. When I started
writing this comment, I thought that I would
have it all figured out by the time I
finished the comment. I don't.
There are still some pieces that have to be
fitted together, and it's almost lunch
time. I could continue after lunch,
but I have other things I need to do after
lunch. So, I'm going to end this
comment here, and I'll write another comment
on this topic when I've identified those
missing pieces. The pieces seem
to have something to do with how light
"fringes" work. Or maybe not.
Figuring out which pieces are missing will
determine that.
TTFN.
December 20, 2020
- Last week I was mostly focused on writing
my new paper, tentatively titled "Motion
Relative to the Speed of Light." I think it's coming along fairly
well. I've mostly finished with doing
research, and I'm almost totally focused on just
writing it. I suppose I should have
started with an outline, but I didn't, and as a
result I'm constantly reorganizing the paper.
And, as I write, I'm analyzing what I'm
writing. When writing about radar guns,
for example, I'll write about how the
oscillation frequency of a photon is altered
when the photon hits an oncoming target.
An atom in the moving target adds kinetic
energy to the photon, sending a new photon back
to the gun that has more energy than the photon
the radar gun originally emitted.
By
definition, kinetic energy is a "form
of energy that an object or a particle has by
reason of its motion." Also,
"Kinetic energy is a property of a moving object
or particle and depends not only on its motion
but also on its mass." That poses the
question that mathematicians continuously ask: "Motion
relative to what?"
Suppose you have two rocket ships encountering
each other in outer space with a closing speed
of 10,000 mph. Mathematicians will argue
that, since all motion is relative to some
object, it can be argued that Rocket-A is moving
at 10,000 mph toward Rocket-B, or
that Rocket-B is moving at 10,000 mph toward
Rocket-A.
But what happens if they don't notice each other
and collide head on?

Answer: Their kinetic energy will show who is
moving fastest. It will be like billiard
balls on a table. The fast moving Ball-A
will hit a stationary Ball-B with great kinetic
energy, causing Ball-B to absorb nearly all of
the kinetic energy from Ball-A and go shooting
off to the corner pocket while Ball-A comes to a
stop, because it transferred its kinetic energy
to Ball-B.
With the two rocket ships, their kinetic energy
will determine in which direction the collision
debris will travel. If they are both
moving at the same speed, the debris will go
in all directions. If Rocket-A
is the one that is moving, as is shown in the
illustration above, all the debris will continue
to travel in the direction that Rocket-A was
traveling. Then you have to ask
mathematicians: if both Rocket-A and Rocket-B
were moving relative to one another, why did all
the debris move in the direction Rocket-A was
traveling?
The answer is that they were NOT moving
relative to one another, Rocket-B was stationary
relative to the speed of light, and Rocket-A was
moving at 10,000 miles per hour relative to the
speed of light. To put it another way,
atoms at the location of the collision in space
will emit photons that travel at 670,616,629
miles per hour, and Rocket-B was moving at 0% of
that speed, while Rocket-A was moving at
0.001492% of that speed.
My original intent when I wrote the above part
of this comment yesterday was to end the comment
at this point. But, when I woke up this
morning my mind was going through a whole list
of interesting things that happen when you have
a situation like the one described above, with
two space ships meeting in space where one is
traveling at 10,000 mph and the other is
stationary.
For example, if the ships were not flying blind
but had radar, what would their radars
show?
It depends upon what kind of radar they
have. If they have the kind of radar used
in weather observations and forecasting, that
kind of that radar does not measure
speeds. It measures distances. It
can calculate speeds by measuring the change in
distance over time. So, if both ships had
that kind of radar, both would measure the
other ship as getting closer and closer. Neither
ship would be able to tell who was
moving, which is why Lidar guns are not
supposed to be used while moving. Lidar
guns also measure changes in distances.
If the two ships have the kind of radar that is
used in police radar guns, i.e, radar guns
that measure differences in kinetic energy and
photon oscillation frequencies (but with the
capability to measure much higher speeds), and
each gun is pointed at the other ship, the radar
gun in Rocket-A would measure its
own speed as being 10,000 mph, and
the radar gun in Rocket-B would measure Rocket-A's
speed as being 10,000 mph.
But most interesting is something I hadn't
thought about before: What if the two ships didn't
have radar? What if they only
had headlights pointed ahead of the ships to
light their way through empty space? In
that situation we are not talking about
measuring speeds or distances, we are talking
about the shifting of light frequencies,
i.e. "red shifting" and "blue shifting."
In one situation, Rocket-A is a moving emitter
and Rocket-B is a stationary receiver, in
the other situation Rocket-B is a stationary
emitter and Rocket-A is a moving receiver.
Obviously, when moving Rocket-A receives light
from Rocket-B, that light will be blue
shifted. It's not blue shifted because
Rocket-B is moving toward Rocket-A, it is blue
shifted because Rocket-A is moving toward
Rocket-B and Rocket-A is thus receiving
the light "waves" at a faster rate than at which
they were emitted by Rocket-B.
But what will Rocket-B observe? It appears
that, according to Einstein's Theory of Special
Relativity, Rocket-B will observe the light from
Rocket-A as being RED shifted.
How is that possible? How can light from
an object coming toward you
be RED
shifted? First, according to Einstein's
Second Postulate, “light is always propagated in
empty space with a definite velocity c
which is independent of the state of motion of
the emitting body.” In other words, light
is emitted at the same speed per second
regardless of the speed of the emitter.
So, that seems to say that there should be NO
shifting in the emitted light frequency due to
the speed of the emitter. But the purpose
of Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity was
to explain TIME DILATION.
Rocket-A is moving at 10,000 mph. Time
runs slower at that speed than it does for
stationary Rocket-B. That means a
second is longer for Rocket-A. That
means that if the light Rocket-A emitted has a
frequency of 520 Terahertz, or 520 trillion
oscillations per local second,
when that light travels to a location where
seconds are shorter (like on Rocket-B), light at
that receiving location will appear to have a
longer wavelength than what was created by the
emitter.
One key point: Time dilation at 10,000 miles per
hour is VERY small. 10,000
mph converts
to just 4.47 kilometers per second. And 1
second when stationary is 1.0000000001112 seconds when moving at
10,000 mph.
Nevertheless, I think I'll have to add the
"Moving Rocket-A Stationary Rocket-B thought
experiment" to my paper. It's
certainly interesting.
|
Comments for Sunday,
December 13, 2020, thru Sat., Dec. 19,
2020:
December 19,
2020 -
While I haven't been posting any
new comments for the past few
days, that doesn't mean I
haven't been thinking about
it. I'm still working on
my "Motion Relative to the
Speed of Light" paper, but
meanwhile there have been a
bunch of other things I've
wanted to write a comment
about. One topic was the
many recent attacks on my web
site.
During the month of October,
there were 3 strange attempts to
POST files to my web site.
They were blocked, of course,
but what was strange was what
they were trying to post.
It was a file with the name
"/xmlrpc.php". Researching
that file name, I found it
is a type of file used by
WordPress, that allows one web
site to communicate with
another. WordPress is a
system for building web sites,
and about 40 percent of all web
sites on the Internet use
it. Not mine, though.
I'm not sure how concerned I was
with having three attempts to
post that WordPress file to my
web site, but in November there
were about 170 of them, and so
far this month there have been 350
of them, and the month is only
about 2/3rds done. Then,
just as I was thinking about
writing a comment about them,
they stopped! On Tuesday
there were 15, on Wednesday
there were 13, on Thursday there
were 3, and yesterday there were
none.
What's also strange about them
is that virtually every one of
the 350 was from a different IP
address, and they were from
about 30 different countries,
everywhere from Roubaix, France
to Singapore, from Los Angeles
to Dhaka, Bangladesh, from
Berlin, Germany to Auckland, New
Zealand. That tells me it was
no small enterprise. Plus, I
assume that mine was just one of
maybe thousands of web sites
they tried to hack. I was just
one that they failed to get into.
And, of course, I have to wonder if
there is some connection to the
hacking that was done to some of
America's government agencies and
thousands of companies around the
world.
December 16, 2020 - While eating
breakfast this morning, I finished
reading another book on my
Kindle. The book was "The
Death of Expertise: The Campaign
Against Established Knowledge and
Why it Matters" by Tom
Nichols.
Wow! What a book!
I'd heard about it on a Big
Picture Science podcast where
they interviewed the author, and I was
luckily able to find a copy. It's a book
that explains why Americans elected someone
like Donald Trump to be President. The
explanations verify my thoughts on the
subject, but also go into a lot more detail
that I hadn't thought about. I've got
32 page of notes (copied passages) that I'd
like to just display here, but that would
probably violate copyrights. Plus,
when taken out of context, the passages can
seem like attacks on "average Americans."
Here's a passage that hits the mark for me:
The Internet is a
magnificent repository of knowledge, and
yet it’s also the source and enabler of a
spreading epidemic of misinformation. Not
only is the Internet making many of us
dumber, it’s making us meaner: alone
behind their keyboards, people argue
rather than discuss, and insult rather
than listen.
I've probably tried a
thousand times to start an intelligent
discussion about some science subject on the
Internet, but all I encounter is closed
minds and insults. If you disagree
with someone on the Internet, they take it
as a personal insult. You are saying
you are smarter than they are. No, I
just disagree with them, and I'd like to
discuss the subject intelligently in order
to find out who is right and who is
wrong. But they know
they are right, so they just state their
beliefs as if they are beyond dispute, and
if you question something in what they said,
they will not explain, they will just repeat
word for word what they said and insult you
for not being able to understand.
The book explains why:
We all want to be taken
seriously and to be respected. In
practice, this means we don’t want anyone
to think we’re dumb, and so we pretend to
be smarter than we are. Over time, we even
come to believe it.
The book also gets into
conspiracy theories and why conspiracy
theories are so firmly believed by some
people. When I was investigating the
anthrax mailings of 2001, I encountered many
conspiracy theorists. It was like
arguing with a phonograph record. The
book says,
Arguing at length with a
conspiracy theorist is not only fruitless
but sometimes dangerous, and I do not
recommend it. It’s a treadmill of nonsense
that can exhaust even the most tenacious
teacher. Such theories are the ultimate
bulwark against expertise, because of
course every expert who contradicts the
theory is ipso facto part of the
conspiracy.
I can testify to that.
The facts said that a
lone American scientist was behind the
anthrax attacks, but the conspiracy
theorists saw only some vast
conspiracy to cover up for who really
did it. It was Dick Cheney,
trying to start a war. It was
Muslims. It was Jews. It
was someone's next door
neighbor. There
were times when I feared for my life because
I was arguing with people who believed that
Muslim terrorists were behind the attacks,
and if I disagreed, I must believe as Muslim
terrorists believe. I must be one of
them. Even though the attacks happened
almost two decades ago, there are still web
sites where conspiracy theorists argue the
same beliefs they argued in 2001.
The book explains:
Unable to see their own
biases, most people will simply drive each
other crazy arguing rather than accept
answers that contradict what they already
think about the subject. The social
psychologist Jonathan Haidt summed it up
neatly when he observed that when facts
conflict with our values, “almost everyone
finds a way to stick with their values and
reject the evidence.”
But mostly the book is about
how it is becoming much more common to
reject the advice and findings of experts,
even if the subject is something you know
absolutely nothing about.
it’s normal for people to
avoid saying they’re bad at something. As
it turns out, however, the more specific
reason that unskilled or incompetent
people overestimate their abilities far
more than others is because they lack a
key skill called “metacognition.” This is
the ability to know when you’re not good
at something by stepping back, looking at
what you’re doing, and then realizing that
you’re doing it wrong. Good singers know
when they’ve hit a sour note; good
directors know when a scene in a play
isn’t working; good marketers know when an
ad campaign is going to be a flop. Their
less competent counterparts, by
comparison, have no such ability. They
think they’re doing a great job.
and
Doctors routinely tussle
with patients over drugs. Lawyers will
describe clients losing money, and
sometimes their freedom, because of
unheeded advice. Teachers will relate
stories of parents insisting that their
children’s exam answers are right even
when they’re demonstrably wrong. Realtors
tell of clients who bought houses against
their experienced advice and ended up
trapped in a money pit. No area of
American life is immune to the death of
expertise. The American public’s declining
capabilities in science and mathematics
are enabling multiple public health crises
from obesity to childhood diseases.
Meanwhile, in the worlds of politics and
public policy—where at least some
familiarity with history, civics, and
geography is crucial to informed
debate—attacks on established knowledge
have reached frightening proportions.
The last part of the book
mentions Donald Trump quite often, since he
is a prime example of an ignoramus nut-job
who thinks he's smarter than everyone
else.
At a Wisconsin rally in
early 2016, Republican candidate Donald
Trump unleashed an attack on experts. In
earlier debates, Trump had often been
caught at a loss for words over basic
issues of public policy, and now he was
striking back. “They say, ‘Oh, Trump
doesn’t have experts,’ ” he told the
crowd. “You know, I’ve always wanted to
say this… . The experts are terrible. They
say, ‘Donald Trump needs a foreign policy
adviser.’… But supposing I didn’t have
one. Would it be worse than what we’re
doing now?” Trump’s sneering at experts
tapped into a long-standing American
belief that experts and intellectuals are
not only running the lives of ordinary
people, but also doing a lousy job of it.
and
Consider the various ways
in which Trump’s campaign represented a
one-man campaign against established
knowledge. He was one of the original
“birthers” who demanded that Barack Obama
prove his American citizenship. He quoted
the National Enquirer approvingly as a
source of news. He sided with antivaccine
activism. He admitted that he gets most of
his information on foreign policy from
“the shows” on Sunday morning television.
He suggested that Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia, who died from natural
causes in early 2016, might have been
murdered. And he charged that the father
of one of his opponents (Ted Cruz) was
involved in the Mother of All Conspiracy
Theories, the assassination of John F.
Kennedy.
and
Worse, voters not only
didn’t care that Trump is ignorant or wrong,
they likely were unable to recognize his
ignorance or errors.
We're all doomed!
Unless we've somehow learned a lesson from
having elected Trump. How could we do
something so stupid? If you
want the answer, talk with people who still
support Trump and think he's the greatest
President America ever had. Why?
Because they're just as bigoted and ignorant as
he is. And that is what they want an
American President to be.
December
14, 2020 -
Yesterday I finished converting to MP3
files all 192 of my cassette tapes of
jazz and blues that I recorded off the
radio and other sources over 25 years
ago. The listings I produced of
what songs are on the cassettes
indicate that I had 150 tapes on
January 10, 1996. On November
14, 1996, I produced another list of
tapes #151 through #180, which I must
have recorded during those 11
months. The last numbered tape
in the collection is #242, but I never
got around to printing a listing that
contained the final batch. And I
have no idea what happened to the
missing tapes, since I have only
192. Presumably, 50 tapes
snagged and were destroyed in the tape
player, since I have vague memories of
ripping tapes out of some cassette
player. I don't recall that ever
happening in recent years, although
one tape snagged when I was copying it
to an MP3 file. I simply
unsnagged it and copied it again.
And, of course, about a week ago I
figured out what was wrong with my
cassette player's connection to my
amplifier and large speakers, so I am
now listening to the cassettes instead
of listening to the MP3 files.
That means I have to turn around and
change or flip cassettes every 45
minutes, but it is good
exercise. I listen to the MP3
files when I'm reading in the
afternoon, something I haven't had
time to do recently. And they'll
be there when my cassette player
finally goes blooey. I've
probably had it for nearly a quarter
century.
I also have 9 cassette tapes left to
copy. They are pre-recorded
cassettes I purchased many years
ago. A box containing 2 of those
cassettes is shown in the photo below
along with the MP3 converter.

I'm going to try
to copy them song by song,
instead of creating one MP3 file
for an entire tape as I did with
the other 192 cassettes.
That will require that I listen
to the tapes as I copy
them. So, it will require
two or three full evenings of my
time, instead of just a few
minutes every hour and a half
while I'm watching TV or
listening to podcasts.
Meanwhile, I have another chore
to perform. I need to get
rid of about 475 CDs I burned
from audio books I got in MP3
format from the library.

They are all the audio books I
listened to while driving in the
past few years. It's
illegal to sell them or to give
them away, so I'll have to dump
them in the trash.
I'm a guy who hates to throw
anything away that once provided
me with entertainment.
That's why I still have them
all. However, I'm
determined to throw them away
this week as part of some
long-overdue house cleaning.
And today we'll all do a bit of
housecleaning as the Electoral
College votes to validate and
designate Joe Biden as our 46th
President. That means that
on January 20, 2021, America
will finally throw out the heap
of trash that has been fouling
up the system since 2016. That's
a day I'm really looking forward
to.
December 13, 2020
- Groan! I've been working on
my new paper, which is tentatively titled "Motion
Relative to the Speed of Light," but
it is very slow going. I just
spent about two days
downloading, organizing and glancing through
dozens of science papers about the Sagnac
Effect, and then I spent more time studying
the papers to see if they contained anything
at all of value to me.
Some did, but it was usually part of
something larger, making it difficult to
quote it in my paper. For example, the
quote below is
from page 217 of a book titled "Frontiers
of Fundamental Physics," a
book of scientific papers presented at
a 1993 International Conference on
Frontiers of Fundamental Physics, held
in Olympia, Greece. The quote is
from a paper titled "What is and
what is not essential in Lorentz's
Relativity" by Jan Czerniawski
of Jagellonian University in Krakow,
Poland:
The principle of
relativity is another such concept.
Negative attitude of some Lorentzians with
respect to it is the result of confusing
of this physical principle with the
philosophical principle of relativity of
motion. While the first one, stating
that the laws of nature have the same
form in all inertial frames of
reference, is quite sound and
empirically well confirmed, the second
one, stating that
it only makes sense to speak about
motions of bodies relative to other
bodies, is not only wrong, but also
incompatible with the very theory of
relativity!
The part I highlighted in
red is what I keep telling the
mathematicians I argue with on the
sci.physics.relativity forum.
They adamantly insist
that the motion of an object can only
be relative to another object. But,
from Einstein's point of view (and mine),
such a belief is totally incompatible with
Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity,
since that theory says that all motion is
relative to the speed of light.
This is from the next page:
Thirdly, almost all
Lorentzians reject Einstein's second
postulate. Some points need to be
clarified in this context. First of all,
literally understood, this postulate
states nothing more than the
independence of light velocity of the
motion of its source, which is common to
the relativity theory and all ether
theories, contrary to "ballistic"
theories, like the one of Ritz. Unfortunately, this
rather weak assumption is often
confused with the so-called "constancy
of light velocity hypothesis" (CLV),
according to which the value of light
velocity is always equal to the
universal constant c in any inertial
frame of reference. It
is CLV that is usually contested under
the misnomer "Einstein's light
postulate". In fact, it is not
identical with the second postulate, but
it is a consequence of both postulates,
taken in conjunction.
Is it "Lorentzians" who
reject Einstein's second postulate? I
always thought of them as Quantum Mechanics
mathematicians. Could it be
both? Unfortunately, it is unclear if
the author is stating in the section I
highlighted in red that it is also
the Lorentizians who confuse the "constancy
of light velocity hypothesis" with
Einstein's Second Postulate. It
sometimes seems like half the papers I read
contain a claim that Einstein's Second
Postulate is his "constancy of the speed of
light" postulate. It is nothing of the
kind, and the authors of the papers NEVER
actually quote Einstein when they write
their nonsense.
Another problem I'm having is that I will
write something, and then I'll realize I
need to explain something else before anyone
reads that part. So, I then add
something in front of the first thing I
wrote. And while doing that I realize
that I need to explain something else
before that part, so I'd add a third
part in front of the second part which is in
front of the first part. It's like
writing a book of 15 chapters by starting on
chapter 15, then writing chapter 14, then
13, etc.
But its all part of the writing process, and
so is staring at a paragraph and modifying
it again and again and again for an hour or
more because it just doesn't look right, but
you're unsure of how to fix it.
|
|
|