1. There is a pulsar that flashes once per second when viewed from Earth.  

2.  You are on Earth boiling a 3-minute egg using the pulsar as a timer.

3. I am traveling at 99.5% of the speed of light at right angles to that pulsar, and I am also boiling an egg using that pulsar as a timer.

4. Will we have counted the same number of pulses when the 3-minute egg is done?

No.

Who will have counted the larger number of pulses and why?

Should be rather obvious.

Moving at 99.5% of c inertially relative to the pulsar (at right angles,
so no Doppler, good) is equivalent to using the frame of reference where the spaceship is stationary and the pulsar is moving the opposite direction at 99.5% c.  Since moving clocks are perceived to run slow by the stationary observer, the pulsar will be seen as running slow. At 99.5% c gamma is about 10, so the pulsar will be perceived as ticking ~1 time per 10 seconds.

Me: Nope.  BZZZZZ!  WRONG!!!  Sorry.  

Why do you complicate this simple experiment by imagining the spaceship is stationary and the pulsar is moving in the opposite direction?

Him: Relative motion. Galileo. First Postulate of Relativity.

I explicitly spelled it out in more detail since I knew you'd trip yourself up responding to it. Thanks for taking the bait!

Me: So, your answer is your MISINTERPRETATION of those subjects?

Me: I assume you ignore reality in order to use some mathematical model. Well, your math is WRONG. 

Him: Sorry, reality does show time dilation (moving clocks are perceived as slowing down). Regardless of whether you like the math or not.

Me: Nope.  WRONG AGAIN.  Reality shows time dilation CAUSES clocks to ACTUALLY slow down.  In reality, you cannot "perceive" the clocks because they are a long distance away and probably traveling at very high speeds.   Plus, "perceiving clocks" like that adds problems with the time it takes light to reach the observer. 

Me: What is important to realize is that the twin on Earth will measure 180 pulsar ticks (180 seconds) while boiling a 3-minute egg.  And his local clock will also measure 180 seconds or 3 minutes.

The traveling twin will experience time dilation, i.e., the slowing of time.   

Him: So WTF do you have the pulsar speeding up?!

Me: What is WTF?  Why TF?  What TF?  When TF?

The pulsar does NOT speed up.  It just sits there pulsing away at its regular rate.  That's the whole point for using the pulsar.

Me: At 99.5% of the speed of light, one second for him will equal 10 seconds back on Earth.

Him: You'll have to deal with Mr. Doppler, but ignoring that, the traveling  twin will see the earth clock running 10 times slower.

Me: Nonsense.  There is no Doppler shift involved, and the traveling twin cannot see the earth clock.  It is trillions of miles away. The main purpose of using a pulsar is so you do not have to use MAGIC to see a clock that is
trillions of miles away.

Me: The pulsar doesn't move and it doesn't change tick rates.

Him: Doesn't move relative to whom? Are you screwing up by assuming some sort of absolute rest frame, in which the pulsar is stationary?

Me: No, I am talking about REALITY.  The pulsar just sits there spinning.  It may be moving relative to the Andromeda Galaxy, but that has nothing to do with anything.  You are adding in nonsense and complicating a situation that is really very simple.

Me: So, the twin on the space ship will measure the passing of 3 minutes or 180 seconds according to his own clocks while boiling his 3-minute egg, but the pulsar will have ticked 1,800 times during that same period.

Him: WTF with the speeding pulsar? Sounds like you have got time dilation back assward.  SR time dilation never speeds things up.

Me: THERE IS NO SPEEDING PULSAR - except in some idiotic mathematical model you seem to be obsessed with.  You clearly do not understand time dilation at all.  No one said SR time dilation speeds things up.  Where did you get that from?

The traveling twin is moving at 95% of the speed of light.  Time for him moves at 1/10th the rate that it moves for the twin on Earth.  So, because time is moving so slowly for the traveling twin, he sees the Earth orbit the sun every 36.5 days.  And he sees the pulsar pulsing 10 times per second.

Him: Sorry, I don't care for your fantasy science. Especially since you refuse to read/listen to experts in the field (called LEARNING). I'll stick with what that Einstein fellow said, no matter how many people here hate him.

Me: But your BELIEFS have nothing to do with what Einstein wrote.  That is what I am trying to explain to you.

Because of their high speed, time slows down for the traveling twin and everything on his ship.  That means he ages slower, he thinks slower, he digests food slower, etc.  And, to him, everything outside of the ship seems to be moving faster than normal.  That includes the pulsar.  It also includes his twin brother back home.  That is what time dilation means.

#1.  All motion is reciprocal.

It should be noted though, that things moving horizontally, perpendicular to you, show almost no Doppler signature. That's why you see problems like the Tesla fatality in Florida, where Tesla's system could not identify a giant truck crossing the road in front of it. With no Doppler [effect], the radar could not tell it from the regular radar returns that come from stationary objects, which are always present. (LIDAR would have of course seen the truck and braked, but taken time to figure out how it was moving.)

Sadly, many of the "nightmare" scenarios for robocars involve things that are crossing your path rather than moving along with it or towards you.

Suppose—to make things vivid—that the speed of light is a hundred miles an hour. Now suppose I am standing by the side of the road and I see a light beam pass by at this speed. Then I see you chasing after it in a car at sixty miles an hour. To me, it appears that the light beam is outpacing you by forty miles an hour. But you, from inside your car, must see the beam escaping you at a hundred miles an hour, just as you would if you were standing still: that is what the light principle demands. What if you gun your engine and speed up to ninety-nine miles an hour? Now I see the beam of light outpacing you by just one mile an hour. Yet to you, inside the car, the beam is still racing ahead at a hundred miles an hour, despite your increased speed. How can this be? Speed, of course, equals distance divided by time.

Cesium atoms have six electron shells, housing a total of 55 orbiting electrons in numbers of 2, 8, 18, 18, 8, 1.  With this distribution, each shell houses the highest possible number of electrons it can support, except for the outermost shell with its single electron. Only the latter will flip in response to radiation at the cesium’s critical frequency, while the inner shells are too stable to be affected. This critical frequency turns out to be 9,192,631,770 oscillations per second. And by international agreement, the SI second (atomic second) became the interval of time for 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the cesium 133 atom when exposed to suitable excitation.

If your claim were true, experiments could not possibly confirm the validity of SR [Special Relativity]. They do.

1. Hafele-Keating.
2. NIST aluminum ion clock experiment (1 foot change in altitude)
3. Geodesy and Metrology experiment (measuring altitude by time difference)
4. Ives-Stillwell.
5. Muon experiments

University of Maryland experiments performed between September 1975 and January 1976 involved putting three atomic clocks aboard a slow-moving aircraft and flying them around in circles for 15 hours at an altitude of 10 kilometers (32,808 feet).  The time difference was measured by direct clock comparison at the ground before and after the flight, as well as during the flight by laser pulses of 0.1 ns duration. 

Between 1975 and 1977, Japanese scientists carried a commercial cesium clock back and forth from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Mitaka, at 58 m (190 ft) above sea level, to Norikura corona station, at 2,876 m (9,436 ft) above sea level.

In 1976, Briatore and Leschiutta compared the rates of two cesium clocks, one in Turin 250 m (820 ft) above sea level, the other at Plateau Rosa 3,500 m (11,500 ft) above sea level.

In 1996, the National Physical Laboratory repeated the Hafele-Keating experiment by flying back and forth between London and Washington D.C. 

In 2005, van Baak measured the gravitational time dilation of a weekend at the top of Mt. Rainier using two ensembles of three HP 5071A cesium beam clocks.

In June 2010, the National Physical Laboratory again repeated the Hafele-Keating experiment, this time around the globe (London - Los Angeles - Auckland - Hong Kong - London). 

In 2016, van Baak repeated his experiment on Mt. Lemmon for the television show Genius by Stephen Hawking.

The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.

After Trump finished with his opening monologue, which lasted for a minute or so, I explained the nature of the material I was about to discuss and why we thought it important that he know about it. I then began to summarize the allegation in the dossier that he had been with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013 and that the Russians had filmed the episode. I didn’t mention one particular allegation in the dossier—that he was having prostitutes urinate on each other on the very bed President Obama and the First Lady had once slept in as a way of soiling the bed. I figured that single detail was not necessary to put him on notice about the material. This whole thing was weird enough. As I spoke, I felt a strange out-of-body experience, as if I were watching myself speak to the new president about prostitutes in Russia. Before I finished, Trump interrupted sharply, with a dismissive tone. He was eager to protest that the allegations weren’t true. I explained that I wasn’t saying the FBI believed the allegations. We simply thought it important that he know they were out there and being widely circulated. I added that one of the FBI’s jobs is to protect the presidency from any kind of coercion, and, whether or not the allegations were true, it was important that he know Russians might be saying such things. I stressed that we did not want to keep information from him, particularly given that the press was about to report it. He again strongly denied the allegations, asking—rhetorically, I assumed—whether he seemed like a guy who needed the services of prostitutes.

President Trump, who apparently watches quite a bit of TV at the White House, saw those images of me thanking the cops [who escorted him to and from the airport] and flying away. They infuriated him. Early the next morning, he called McCabe and told him he wanted an investigation into how I had been allowed to use the FBI plane to return from California. McCabe replied that he could look into how I had been allowed to fly back to Washington, but that he didn’t need to. He had authorized it, McCabe told the president. The plane had to come back, the security detail had to come back, and the FBI was obligated to return me safely. The president exploded. He ordered that I was not to be allowed back on FBI property again, ever. My former staff boxed up my belongings as if I had died and delivered them to my home.

Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation. We all bear responsibility for the deeply flawed choices put before voters during the 2016 election, and our country is paying a high price: this president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values. His leadership is transactional, ego driven, and about personal loyalty.

I say this as someone who has worked in law enforcement for most of my life, and served presidents of both parties. What is happening now is not normal. It is not fake news. It is not okay. Whatever your politics, it is wrong to dismiss the damage to the norms and traditions that have guided the presidency and our public life for decades or, in many cases, since the republic was founded. It is also wrong to stand idly by, or worse, to stay silent when you know better, while a president brazenly seeks to undermine public confidence in law enforcement institutions that were established to keep our leaders in check.

The speed of light is not only fixed, we know of nothing that can move faster than the speed of light. That suggests that Time Dilation must be caused by some kind of “conflict” with the speed of light. Time, or something that controls or causes Time, is forced to slow down because it cannot exceed the speed of light.

It appears there is only one “thing” that can cause Time to slow down when it conflicts with the speed of light, and that is “particle spin.” That observation seems to indicate that particle spin IS Time, and Time IS particle spin.

Most of us took mathematics courses from mathematicians—Bad Idea!

Mathematicians see mathematics as an area of study in its own right.  The rest of us use mathematics as a precise language for expressing relationships among quantities in the real world, and as a tool for deriving quantitative conclusions from these relationships. For that purpose, mathematics courses, as they are taught today, are seldom helpful and are often downright destructive.

The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Many phenomena that in the past were seen as separate are now understood to be the same: Fire is a chemical reaction, not a separate element; temperature is energy; light is electromagnetic radiation; molecules are aggregations of atoms; mechanical forces are electromagnetic in origin; . . . Each of these equivalences represents a major unification and simplification of the knowledge base.  Ideas formerly occupying separate conceptual spaces now occupy the same conceptual space.  Each unification was made possible by a deeper understanding of existing facts, often triggered by the discovery of a crucial new fact.

If all goes as planned, a laser-cooled clock named PARCS will be installed on the ISS in late 2004 or 2005. Experts expect it to be the most stable clock ever, keeping time within 1 second every 300 million years (1 part in 1016).

According to Einstein's theory of gravity and space-time -- called "general relativity" -- clocks in strong gravity tick slower than clocks in weak gravity. Because gravity is weaker on the ISS than at Earth's surface, PARCS should accumulate an extra second every 10,000 years compared to clocks ticking on the planet below.    

The Primary Atomic Reference Clock in Space or PARCS was an atomic-clock mission scheduled to fly on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2008, but cancelled to make way for the Vision for Space Exploration.

The purpose of the PARCS project is to place an advanced laser-cooled cesium atomic clock in orbit and utilize it to test a variety of predictions of the Theory of Relativity. One of these predictions, made by Albert Einstein in 1915, is that clocks tick slower in strong gravity than they do in weak gravity. An orbiting satellite might place PARCS at an altitude of 220 miles (360 kilometers), where gravity is slightly weaker than that found at the Earth's surface. Thus the PARCS clock aboard the satellite ticks faster than a clock on the surface of the Earth by about 1 second in every 10,000 years.

1.  We have two atomic clocks, A & B.  Both use 10.23 MHz as their operating frequency, meaning they both "tick" 10.23 million times per LOCAL second.

2.  We adjust Clock-B to tick slower.  We adjust it to tick 10.2299999954326 times per LOCAL second.  That is 10.2299999954326 MHz.

3.  We put Clock-B in a GPS satellite and send it into orbit at 20,200 kilometers (12,550 miles) above the Earth.  At that altitude, a LOCAL second is shorter.

4.  In that orbit, Clock-B continues to tick 10.2299999954326 times per LOCAL second.  HOWEVER, the LOCAL second at that altitude is shorter than a second on Earth.  The LONGER LOCAL SECOND on Earth includes a few more ticks. 

5.  So, Clock-B now ticks 10.23 million times per EARTH second.

6.  That means that Clock-A and Clock-B now tick at the same rate once again.

9. It is acceptable for a theory to be logically inconsistent.      

You might have the most expensive watch in the world, but if it's set to the wrong time to begin with, it's no use to you at all. Even really good quartz clocks struggle to keep time to better than a second a day; if they wander out by just a couple of seconds in 24 hours (an amazing accuracy of 99.998 percent), and the errors don't cancel out, that could add up to a minute a month or almost a quarter of an hour a year. That's why most people regularly check their watches against a reliable time signal—like the ones you hear before news broadcasts on radio stations. Now wouldn't it be neat if your watch could listen to those broadcasts and set itself to the right time automatically without you ever needing to worry? That's the basic idea behind radio-controlled clocks and watches, which set their time by super-accurate atomic clocks.

Atomic clocks are actually quartz clocks—just like the ones you have at home. The difference is that an ordinary quartz clock relies purely on the oscillations of its quartz crystal to count seconds. As we've already seen, the rate at which quartz vibrates is affected by things like ambient temperature, so although a quartz clock is generally very accurate, it doesn't necessarily keep time as well as you might think. By contrast, an atomic clock has an extra mechanism—pulsating atoms—that it uses to keep an ordinary quartz clock to time.

The quartz-crystal oscillator in turn controls some display device such as a wall clock. Of course, the wall clock runs at a much lower frequency-usually 60 hertz, like an ordinary electric kitchen clock. To produce this lower frequency, the crystal’s frequency is reduced by electronic circuitry in a manner similar to using a train of gears to convert wheels running at one speed to run at another speed.

"Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with mathematics--it's the language we use to express the precise relations of physical law. But there is an increasing tendency to mistake the language for the physics itself. Once we lose the conceptual foundations, the whole thing becomes a shell game."

Einstein, of course, was mightily influenced by what the ex–patent clerk called Mach's Principle, which Mead explained as the proposition that "the inertia of every element of matter is due to its interaction with all the other elements of matter in the universe."

We haven't fully followed that investigative road, Mead said. "Instead what we've done is we've treated isolated objects as if all their attributes were just given us, and [we] haven't asked where they came from," he said. "Things like the inertia of an object, the rest energy of an object, the velocity of light — all those things. We have a list of fundamental constants that we're not allowed to ask where they come from."

If we want to get that stalled 100-year-old revolution unstuck, Mead said, we've got to ask – and discover – where those constants come from, and not just believe in them as handed down by academics and buried in mountains of math. We need to discover their basis in the interactions and interrelationships of all matter in the universe.

6. Mathematical elegance is the most important attribute of a theory.
7. The mathematics of a theory constitutes the entire theory.
8. It is not necessary for a theory to enable conceptual reasoning.
9. It is acceptable for a theory to be logically inconsistent.

Once these prejudices are articulated, it becomes clear that not every person subscribes to all of them. Some seem self-evident, some seem irrelevant, and some seem nonsense to any given person. Yet no two people, even if they are working in the same discipline, agree on which is which. And all of these ideas are, in one way or another, effectively shaping current scientific discussion.

14. It is centrally important for a theory to be logically consistent.
15. Mathematical elegance is important in a theory when it aids conceptual reasoning. It is destructive when it obscures otherwise accessible conceptual understanding.
16. It is rare for theory to predict new physical phenomena. In most cases each new phenomenon is discovered/invented experimentally, and the current theory is quickly "adjusted" so as to "predict" the observed result.
17. The successes in technological enterprise are attributable to conceptual reasoning. "Fundamental" physical theory, as taught in universities and and propagated in the literature, has a long history of hindering conceptual reasoning, and therefore technological progress.

Efforts on the old quantum theory persisted well into the 1920's. In the mid-to-late 1920's, the work of DeBroglie, Schroedingier, Heisenberg, Born, Pauli, and Dirac led from the old quantum theory to the quantum theory that is taught in schools today. Experiments during that formative period were still based on spectra from excited gasses, and hence were, by their very nature, only statistical in nature. The limitations of those experiments were built into the conceptual foundations of the new quantum mechanics, and remain there to this day. In fact, the limitation to statistical predictions was turned into a religion by Bohr and Heisenberg.

They championed the notion that "there was no deeper level to be understood.

 

811. Mode of Propagation. - Only three methods are known by which energy may be transmitted from one point of space to another.

First, by the movement as a whole of some medium reaching from one point to the other, as in the case of ropes, belts, or shafting.

Second, by projectiles, as in the case of a shot from a gun or a ball thrown.

Third, by waves, as in case of sound or water waves.

The velocity with which a projectile travels depends on the initial impulse.  If light is communicated by means of particles shot out from the luminous body we should expect to find the velocity depending on the source and that particles emanating from the sun would have a different velocity from those from an electric light.

On the other hand, the velocity of a wave depends only on its wave length and the nature of the wave (whether compressional or transverse, etc.) and the properties of the medium of which it is a disturbance.  Sound waves from fiddle, pipe, or drum advance with the same speed through air. If light is a wave motion we may expect to find light waves, whatever their source, traveling with the same velocity through space, and this is precisely what experiment shows to be the case. This consideration therefore points to its being a wave motion.

811. Mode of Propagation. - Only four methods are known by which energy may be transmitted from one point of space to another.

First, by the movement as a whole of some medium reaching from one point to the other, as in the case of ropes, belts, or shafting.

Second, by projectiles, as in the case of a shot from a gun or a ball thrown.

Third, by undulation of a medium, as in case of sound or water waves.

Fourth, by emission, as in the case of light photons and other forms of electromagnetic energy.

The gravitational redshift happens when light tries to escape from a gravitational field. This is actually a phenomenon that you can explain using ordinary newtonian physics. Thanks to Einstein's famous E= m c squared, and Planck's equally famous law relating the energy of light to its frequency, E = h x frequency, we can see that as a particle of light (photon) moves out of a gravitational field, it must loose energy working against the gravitational field. Since photons always travel at the speed of light, the only place where this energy loss can show up is in a change of frequency. The frequency of the photon must decrease so that the energy carries by the photon is lower, and this corresponds to a 'red shift' to longer wavelengths. This phenomenon has been confirmed in laboratory experiments carried out by Pound and Rebka at Harvard University over 30 years ago. It's not a theory, its real.

Next, Einstein calculated how gravity would affect the frequency of a light beam. If a rocket is launched from the earth and sent into outer space, the gravity of the earth acts like a drag, pulling the rocket back. Energy is therefore lost as the rocket struggles against the pull of gravity. Similarly, Einstein reasoned that if light were emitted from the sun, then gravity would also act as a drag on the light beam, making it lose energy. The light beam will not change in velocity, but the frequency of the wave will drop as it loses energy struggling against the sun’s gravity. Thus, yellow light from the sun will decrease in frequency and become redder as the light beam leaves the sun’s gravitational pull. Gravitational red shift, however, is an extremely small effect, and Einstein had no illusion that it would be tested in the laboratory any time soon. (In fact it would take four more decades before gravitational red shift could be seen in the laboratory.)

In an era of atomic clocks, lasers, and supercomputers, scientists are mounting the kind of high-precision tests of general relativity that Einstein could only dream about. In 1959, for example, Robert V. Pound and G. A. Rebka of Harvard finally confirmed Einstein’s prediction of gravitational red shift in the laboratory, that is, that clocks beat at different rates in a gravitational field. They took radioactive cobalt and shot radiation from the basement of Lyman Laboratory at Harvard to the roof, 74 feet above. Using an extremely fine measuring device (which used the Mossbauer effect), they showed that photons lost energy (hence were reduced in frequency) as they made the journey to the top of the laboratory.

The Gravity Probe A payload was launched in 1976 from the NASA-Wallops Flight Center in Virginia. It followed an elliptical flight trajectory over the Atlantic, attaining an altitude of 10,000km (6,200 miles) above the Earth before crashing into the Atlantic Ocean. During this short trip, GP-A transmitted accurate measurements of slight changes in the clock's rate in lower gravity, and provided the best test of this portion of Einstein's theories that has been performed to date.

At the peak height of 10,000 km the clock should run 4.5 parts in 10¹⁰ faster than on the Earth's surface according to general relativity. The MASER clock's accuracy was reported to be 1 part in 10^-15. The observed effects matched the prediction to an accuracy of about 70 parts per million.

Light changes speeds	Light emitted at different speeds

The Pound–Rebka experiment is a well known experiment to test Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. It was proposed by Robert Pound and his graduate student Glen A. Rebka Jr. in 1959,^[1] and was the last of the classical tests of general relativity to be verified (in the same year). It is a gravitational redshift experiment, which measures the redshift of light moving in a gravitational field, or, equivalently, a test of the general relativity prediction that clocks should run at different rates at different places in a gravitational field. It is considered to be the experiment that ushered in an era of precision tests of general relativity. 

The gravitational redshift of a light wave as it moves upwards against a gravitational field (produced by the yellow star below).

Robert Pound and Glen Rebka performed their historic experiments here at Harvard in the Jefferson Physical Laboratory. They were able to demonstrate that the frequency of gamma radiation measured at its source (on the building's roof) differed from the frequency measured in the basement. The incredibly small shift (about 1 part in a million billion) showed that clocks run slower in the basement than the roof because, being closer to the Earth, the gravitational field, and hence the space-time curvature, is larger there. The faster clock on the roof would read a lower frequency of gamma radiation and thus the wavelength would be longer, or red-shifted.

Photons are excess energy moving from atom to atom until they are observed or consumed. 

Photons are excess electromagnetic energy moving from atom to atom until they are transformed into a different form of energy. 

o

Photons are the smallest measure of light, and no, they don't have mass. So that's easy, right? Light is composed of photons, which have no mass, so therefore light has no mass and can't weigh anything.

Not so fast. Because photons have energy -- and, as Einstein taught us, energy is equal to the mass of a body, multiplied by the speed of light squared. How can photons have energy if they have no mass?

Does light have mass?  The short answer is "no", but it is a qualified "no" because there are odd ways of interpreting the question which could justify the answer "yes".

Light is composed of photons, so we could ask if the photon has mass.  The answer is then definitely "no": the photon is a massless particle.  According to theory it has energy and momentum but no mass, and this is confirmed by experiment to within strict limits.  Even before it was known that light is composed of photons, it was known that light carries momentum and will exert pressure on a surface.  This is not evidence that it has mass since momentum can exist without mass. 

Well if you read a textbook, you will find out that light can be thought of as being made up of particles called photons. These photons have no mass! So there is the simple answer, light has no mass and no weight. This is a lot like knowing the name of the bird, you know that light has no mass and no weight, but you don't know how light behaves.

Well it turns out that even though light has no mass, it is attracted by gravity. This effect is so small that we are not aware of it in ordinary light, but astronomers must keep this in mind, because there are certain situations when this effect will be observable. Now in order to see this effect, you need a large body with a lot of mass which will bend the path of light due to its gravity. One example of a big body is the Sun, but since the Sun gives off so much light itself, it is often difficult to see this. It turns out that during a total eclipse of the Sun, scientists can see the effect of the Sun's gravity bending starlight from distant stars. Incidentally, this effect was first predicted by Einstein, but scientists had to wait several months for the next eclipse to see if he was right. (He was, of course, correct.)

Light does not have mass, and therefore there is nothing for the force of gravity to pull on, so light doesn't have weight either.  However, light does have energy.

If you find it hard to understand quantum physics, theory of relativity, dark matter & dark energy, Unruh effect, standard model e.t.c...just know that...

That is a VERY IGNORANT thing for Mr. Tyson to say. It basically tells people that they shouldn't TRY to make sense of the universe. It also echoes what some university physics professors teach when they tell their students that physics doesn't have to be logical. They are just telling their students to BELIEVE what they are being told and don't ask questions!

I'll ask questions until I find answers that are logical and make sense. And if those answers do not fit with what Mr. Tyson or physics textbooks say, then I'll ask more questions and do research to find out which is correct.

that is what Einstein said. He cannot accept anything that to him is not logical. Therefore he never accepted Quantum Theory even though he had mathematically proven it he disregarded it. Who really knows?? They say you can mathematically prove almost anything but maybe our math is not the end it all.

Ed Lake, No No!!! You have to hear it in the right context!!

Mr Tyson was talking about things like quantum mechanics and the "bizarre things that molecules do"...Some of the things we find to be true about the universe are FRIGGIN BIZARRE and make NO sense whatsoever...he was saying that the nature of the universe is under no obligation to make sense!

He wasn't trying to say we shouldn't try to make sense of it.

Yes, Quantum Mechanics is a problem in that it argues things which defy logic and common sense. To me (and Einstein), that means QM cannot be trusted to be true. And, as Mike Noreika stated, "They say you can mathematically prove almost anything." I agree. Solving science problems with math tends to begin with an answer and then they develop equations that produce that answer.

Until I see solid proof to the contrary, I think the universe makes perfect sense and is entirely logical. And if there is something that SEEMS illogical or contrary to common sense, then it is a near certainty that there is something about it that we just do not yet fully understand.

well then...you never asked the universe to make sense and Mr Tyson wasnt talking about you

August 2, 2018 - I've been trying to organize the digitized books about physics I have in my computer.  I seem to have at least 400 different books scattered through a library of 1,031 items, more than half of which are scientific articles.  I keep track of everything on a computerized spreadsheet, but I haven't been making any detailed notes about what is contained in each book.  Below is a list of just 15 books (the spreadsheet also contains the file name, a ranking, the document type, the number of pages, whether it is digitally searchable or not, and a space for a brief note):



The only note I made about the book by Carl Ramirez was "Very heavy in mathematics, but might contain something worthwhile."  The notes also say that a couple others seem to be self-published, so they wouldn't make good references.

One book I browsed through this morning was the 3rd edition of "Physics for Scientists and Engineers - With Modern Physics" by Paul M Fishbane, Stephen Gasiorowicz and Stephen T Thornton (one of two books I have with that exact title).  When I read the underlined sentences below, I had to stop to make an image of them:

 

To me, the underlined sentences illustrate the insanity of what is being taught in many colleges today.  They say the particle theory of light cannot explain certain observations, so the book is going to promote the wave theory of light, which can explain those observations.   What is not mentioned is that the wave theory of light cannot explain other observations, primarily that light definitely consists of particles, not waves.  As Richard Feynman put it on page 14 of his book "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter":

Newton thought that light was made up of particles—he called them “corpuscles”—and he was right (but the reasoning that he used to come to that decision was erroneous). We know that light is made of particles because we can take a very sensitive instrument that makes clicks when light shines on it, and if the light gets dimmer, the clicks remain just as loud—there are just fewer of them. Thus light is something like raindrops—each little lump of light is called a photon - and if the light is all one color, all the “raindrops” are the same size.

I want to emphasize that light comes in this form—particles. It is very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you who have gone to school, where you were probably told something about light behaving like waves. I’m telling you the way it does behave—like particles.

 

“What actually happens on a microscopic level is that the incoming photon is absorbed by the electrons of the mirror, which are set into oscillation by the photon’s oscillating electric field. The result is, for some materials (shiny ones), that the electrons’ oscillation creates a new photon that moves away from the mirror in the opposite direction. The incoming and outgoing photons are free and move at speed c, but they are not the same photon…”[

Also, in the radar gun circuitry, it is NEITHER photon nor waves. It is
electrical signals going from some sort of antenna likely in a waveguide, down a copper circuit trace here, an IC package lead, a
transistor gate etc. Here we have a signal from the continuous wave signal generator at 23 GHz to the transmitter circuit. The receive circuit amplifying a weak Doppler shifted signal, this plus a small amount from the CW oscillator are combined in a mixer circuit and lowpass filter and now we have a much lower frequency which is the difference between the transmitter frequency and the (Doppler shifted) received frequency from the radar target. This frequency can be directly displayed as a speed by (virtually) multiplying it by a constant. Again, inside the gun there are NO photons involved, no waves, it is all electronic signals.

If you drop a hammer in a well, it falls down into the well, it doesn't fall up from the bottom of the well to the Earth's surface. ... Things fall in the direction of where time runs slower... that's WHY things fall.  If you don't understand this, you don't understand the first thing about general relativity.

In classical mechanics, the gravitational potential at a location is equal to the work (energy transferred) per unit mass that would be needed to move the object from a fixed reference location to the location of the object.  It is analogous to the electric potential with mass playing the role of charge. The reference location, where the potential is zero, is by convention infinitely far away from any mass, resulting in a negative potential at any finite distance.

   

A Lagrange point is a location in space where the combined gravitational forces of two large bodies, such as Earth and the sun or Earth and the moon, equal the centrifugal force felt by a much smaller third body. The interaction of the forces creates a point of equilibrium where a spacecraft may be "parked" to make observations.

General relativity is a *local* field theory.  There is no spooky action at a distance.  Objects do not sense the direction of the lowest clock rate anywhere in the universe, they merely sense the *local* direction of reducing clock rates, and move in that direction.

   

#10.  Singularities are real.

#9.  The Big Bang didn't occur at  any spot, it happened everywhere.

There is a theorem, famous among cosmologists, showing that an inflationary state is past-timelike-incomplete. What this means, explicitly, is that if you have any particles that exist in an inflating Universe, they will eventually meet if you extrapolate back in time. This doesn't, however, mean that there must have been a singularity, but rather that inflation doesn't describe everything that occurred in the history of the Universe, like its birth. We also know, for example, that inflation cannot arise from a singular state, because an inflating region must always begin from a finite size.

#2. Scientists routinely LIE to the public.

The mathematicians point of view makes no sense unless you inexplicably believe the universe operates like a mathematical equation and there is no such thing as "cause and effect."

It appears that, to mathematicians, cause and effect are alien concepts.  Time Dilation is just an "illusion."

How can any scientist ignore cause and effect?   Answer: a scientist can't, but a mathematician can. 

Their beliefs are INSANE in any world where cause and effect are an important part of science. And their Prophet, Neils Bohr, didn't believe that cause and effect could explain the universe the way mathematics can.

In reality (and in SCIENCE), of course, HOW the clocks got to be moving is the key to everything.  But science is very much about CAUSE and EFFECT, which the mathematicians consider to be meaningless, worthless and just part of some philosophy.

If you CAUSE one of the clocks to move, you KNOW that that clock is moving and the other is still stationary.  And you know the "relative" speed is actually one clock's speed away from the other.  Therefore the clock that is moving will experience Time Dilation and the clock that is stationary will not.  It's as simple as that.  Yet, it seems incomprehensible to mathematicians. They can only view situation A and situation B, they cannot think about how one situation developed into the other. 

I was rather surprised to see this absurd belief stated so emphatically by mathematician physicists.  They equate understanding "cause and effect" to asking why 2 plus 2 equals 4.  They claim it is philosophy, not physics.  Cause and effect is all about why things happen.  The mathematician physicists do not care why things happen.  In one argument I was told that once the mathematical model is found, "cause & effect" becomes obsolete.  We understood this 2000 yrs ago!"

#3. "Cause and effect" has no meaning in science.

Consider two rows of clocks in relative motion, such as one row of clocks sitting along an embankment and another row of clocks on a moving train. (Each row of clocks has been synchronized using the usual physical processes in its frame.) We find that the readings on each clock on the train advance at a slower rate than the readings on the successive clocks on the embankment as it passes them, BUT we also find that the readings of each clock on the embankment advance at a slower rate than the readings on the successive clocks on the train as they pass it. So, which clocks are running faster? 

The crucial fact is this: When compared with the clocks on the embankment, the clocks on the train are not just ticking at a slower rate, their values are offset from each other by different amounts. When the clock at the middle of the train reads 12:00, the clock at the front of the train reads (say) 11:59 and the clock at the back of the train reads 12:01. (The clocks in between are all offset in proportion to their distance from the center).

It's standard in introductory texts. See for example Figure 2.4 in Rindler's "Essential Relativity".

There is a free copy of that book on-line, so I looked it up.  It's on page 40.  Below is a screen-capture of that page:

--------------------- start screen capture of page 40 -------------------

------------------------ end screen capture of  page 40 ----------

It's a bizarre theory that between any two reference frames (S and S') there will be another reference frame