EXPERIMENTAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST SPECIAL RELATIVITY?
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From: Danny Milano on 10 Jul 2008 06:41 Hi, I recently came across a very interesting book by Eric Baird called "Life Without Special Relativity". It is 400 pages and has over 250 illustrations. The following is sample excerpt from his web site. Can someone pls. read and share where he may have gotten it wrong? Because if he is right. There is possibility SR is really wrong. Baird said: "16.1: Commonly-cited evidence for special relativity We're told that the experimental evidence for special relativity is so strong as to be beyond reasonable doubt: are we really, seriously suggesting that all this evidence could be wrong? Experimental results reckoned to support the special theory include: * E=mc^2 * transverse redshifts * longitudinal Doppler relationships * the lightspeed limit in particle accelerators * the searchlight effect (shared with dragged-light models and NM) * "velocity addition" behaviour (shared with dragged-light models and NM) * particle tracklengths * muon detection * particle lifetimes in accelerator storage rings / centrifuge time dilation / orbiting clocks * the failure of competing theories ... we'll be looking at all of these, along with a couple of important background issues. 16.2: ... E=mc^2 For a long time it seemed to be received wisdom that the E=mc^2 result was unique to special relativity, We were told that if special relativity wasn't true then nuclear bombs and nuclear weapons wouldn't work, and without SR's prediction of E=mc^2, nuclear fusion wouldn't operate as it does. Without special relativity, the Sun wouldn't shine. And while this was a good story to tell credulous schoolchildren, it was essentially pseudoscience. The idea that E=mc^2 "belongs" to SR doesn't hold up to basic mathematical analysis, and to Einstein's credit he went on to argue for the wider validity of the result by publishing further papers that derived the relationship (or a good approximation of it) from more general arguments outside special relativity. We also found in section 2.5 (with working supplied in the Appendices, Calculations 2), that E=mc^ 2 is an exact result of NM, if we ignore standard teaching and go directly to the core mathematics. Not only is the NM-based derivation of E=mc2 reasonably straightforward, it's shorter than its SR counterpart, and it's also part of every hypothetical model in section 13. Whiile it's historically understandable that the equation wasn't widely recognised and embraced until Einstein came along, its less clear why so many brilliant physicists with outstanding math skills continued to insist for so long that the equation somehow provides cornpelling evidence for the special theory. Since the math is so straightforward, how were so many clever physics people caught out? We might have expected that enough time had passed since 1905 for us to have checked the math dependencies, not iced the parallel compatibility with NK and (in a respectable field of scientific study), made a high-profile retraction so that we didn't continue to pass misinformation onto students. But perhaps "E=mc^2 proves special relativity" was just too convenient a tale for people to want to give it up, regardless of what the Mathematics really said. 16.3: *Classical Theory" vs. Special Relativity When we read about experiments that compared the predictions of SR against those of "Classical Theory", we can come away thinking that we've been told how SR's Predictions stack up against most earlier theories (for instance, Newtonian theory). This isn't usually the case. When we look at what's meant by "Classical Theory', in this context, we find that it's a sort of hybrid. It's a pairing of two sets of incompatible assumptions and math that have the advantage for experimenters of (a) being well known and standardised, and (b) making optical predictions that are so exceptionally bad that by comparison special relativity (and almost any other theory) looks very good indeed. Did "Classical Theory" ever really exist? In the context of SR-testing, "Classical Theory" refers to a mixture of two sets of conflicting assumptions that didn't work together before SR/LET: "Classical Theory" uses Newtonian mechanics for the equations of motion for solid bodies, but for light, CT is equivalent to assuming an absolute, fixed, "flat" aether stationary in the laboratory frame. The energy and momentum relationships of these two different parts are, of course, irreconcilable ... NM requires the Doppler relationship to be (c-v)/c, but " Classical Theory" gives cl(c+v). These aren't compatible. They never were. If they were, we wouldn't have needed special relativity. There doesn't seem to be any single theory that attempted to combine these two predictions before LET/SR, or at least, there doesn't seem to have been anyone prepared to lend their name to one, and in a subject where people love having things named after themselves, this should make us suspicious. If "Classical Theory" doesn't mean "pre-SR theory", then where did it come from? The phrase appears in Einstein's explanations of the basis of special relativity, as a convenient form of words to refer to two appa rently diverging predictions that special relativity then reconciled by applying Lorentz effects: to Einstein, "Classical Theory" represented incompatible aspects of earlier theories that didn't work together, but that could be reconciled using special relativity. When we're look for a historical counterpart to Classical Theory there doesn't seem to be anything that would have made these optical predictions unless we go all the way back to preGalileo, pre-Newton times, and posit an absolute aether that permeates space and is locked to the state of a stationary Earth. That would give us the "Classical Theory" prediction of "no transverse redshift" for a laboratory stationary with respect to the Earth. But every other decrepit old theory that we can dig up seems to pre dict at least some sort of transverse redshift effect, sometimes weaker than SR, sometimes stronger than SR, and sometimes swinging wildly between the two depending on the Earth's motion. The one idea that didn't seem to be considered to be credible during the Eighteenth Century was the idea that lightspeed was fixed with respect to the observer, which is presumably why Michelson had so much grief with his colleagues over his "failed" aether-drift experiment. SO, why do we persist in carrying out these "SR vs. Classical Theory" comparisons if they don't demonstrate very much? Well, to a cynic, Classical Theory is an excellent reference to test against, because its predictions are about as bad as we can get. If we set aside the theories that predicted time-variant effects, no other old predictions seem to be quite as bad at to CT when it comes to predicting real Doppler shifts, and this makes "CT vs. Theory X" experiments very much easier to carry out and analyse . Test theory authors love CT because it meshes well with the chain of arguments that Einstein used when explaining the special theory, and experimenters design tests around the test theories that are available legitimate process - as long as we don't fool ourselves into thinking that that the results represent a realistic comparison of how special relativitys predictions really compared to those of its predecessors. 16.4:- "Transverse" redshifts Special relativity tells us that if an object moves through our laboratory, and we carefully point a highly-directional detector at right angles to its path (measured with a "laboratory" set,square), the signal that manages to register on the detector should be redshifted (section 6.7). But the popular "educational" notion that this sort of redshift outcome is something unique to special relativity is as best misleading, and at worst ... it's simply wrong. The equations of newtonian mechanics (or even the basic equations for audio, properly applied to the case of a stationary source) don't just predict redshifts in this situation, they'll often predict "aberration redshifts" that are stronger than their SR counterparts (section 6.4), so in a physical sense, the appearance of redshifts in t his situation isn't just not unique, it's not even particularly unusual. In fact, the thing that would be unusual with this sort of experimental setup would be a theory that didn't predict some sort of redshift. Although we tend to regard special relativity's transverse predictions as conceptually unique, experimenters have to know when supposed differences between theories generate physically unambiguous differences in the readings taken by actual hardware, and when the differences are more a matter of interpretation. This distinction isn't always obvious from the relativity literature. Einstein's special theory requires these sorts of "pre-SR" redshifts to exist for its own internal consistency. The theory must predict the same physical outcome regardless of which inertia] reference frame we choose to use for our calculations, so the emitter is entitled to claim that c is globally fixed for them (Einstein 1905, 7), and this means that they're entitled to claim that our relative motion makes us time-dilated, giving our view of the emitter's signal a Lorentz blueshift ... so in order for u s to be able to instead see a Lorentz redshift, propagation-based effects in this situation - light moving at a constant speed in the emitter's frame, and arriving at us at an apparent 90 degrees - must, by default, generate a Lorentz-squared redshift to allow the same final SR outcome. This is the right answer (see Calculations 3). So to fully understand the logical consistency of SR in this situation requires us to know that similar or stronger redshifts would appear in the same apparatus under other light-propagation models. Since different SR "views" can explain the same redshift component as the result of (a) conventional aberration effects, (b) time dilation, or (c) a combination of the two (we're allowed to try an infinite number of alternative views from intermediate reference frames), SR requires these two explanations to be q ualitatively indistinguishable. Although expert sources may tell us that "transverse redshifts" are unique to SR, the theory itse~f tells us otherwise. We can distinguish SR's "transverse" predictions from those of other theories by their strength, but a redshift outcome in this situation doesn't automatically need SR. The Hasselkamp test We only seem to have one experiment that set out to measure the amount of redshift actually seen at 90 degrees to moving material (Hasselkamp et. al., 1979), and it reported about twice the redshift predicted by SR, as we'd expect if the older NM equations were right. This result was nevertheless presented as supporting SR: the experimenters used a test theory that compared SR with "Classical Theory" (which predicted no redshift), and reasoned that the inexplicable excess redshift must have been due to an a ccidental detector misalignment. They were then able to use statistics to argue that, taking into account possible alignment efforts, the "SR" prediction still made a significantly better match to the data than "CT" did. But subsequent papers verifying that the presumed misalignment was real, or repeating the experiment (Perhaps with the help of clever cancellation methods to eliminate the effects of these sorts of detector misalignments from further results), don't seem to have appeared. This Makes it difficult to tell whether the result really supported the special theory, or invalidated it. 16.5: ... "Longitudinal" Doppler shifts The Hasselkamp experiment was unusual - in practice, we don't normally . try to measure SR's transverse redshift effect by really aiming a detector at the side of a moving particle bearn - we find it easier to measure the forward and rearward Doppler-shifts, and then calculate the strength of the transverse effect by comparing them against each other. This is a nice method ... because it compares two shifts, the technique makes it easier to cancel out various types of systemic error, known and unknown, and these "end-on" readings are less sensitive to the effect of small angular errors. By comparing the resulting three sign.("recession-redshifted", "approach-blueshifted", and an "unshifted" reference signal), we can derive a characteristic "signature" that lets us rule out certain relationships without having to commit to a theory-specific value for the exact velocity of the particle beam. We can select , theory, use one of the shift ratios to calculate what the velocity would have to have bee. according to that theory, use this hypothetical velocity value to "predict" the second shift ratio, and then compare this against the second set of figures to see how close we got to the real data. Ives-stilwell The best-known of these "non-transverse" transverse tests is the early 1938 test by Herbert Ives and G. R. Stilwell, which set out to compare tile predictions of Lorentz Ether Theory (and SR) against those of "Classical Theory". Ives and Stilwell's approach was simple: "Classical Theory" says that the two shifted signals (red and blue) should change in wavelength by precisely the same amount, so with all three wavelength values marked on a linear scale, we'd find perfectly even spacing between them. If the shift relationships obeyed the "redder" relationships of SR (or NM) there'd be an asymmetry. Ives and Stilwell found a definite offset in the wavelength values. The simplicity of this experiment makes it tempting to reanalyse the data for a possible agreement or disagreement with NM, and when we do this we find that the stronger offset predicted by N1M appears to lie outside the data range, by more than the experimenter's quoted experimental error. This seems to indicate that the SR predictions are significantly more accurate than NM. Further experiments There've been several more experiments of this type published since Ives-Stilwell, using more advanced equipment, more complex optics and higher relative velocities, and these have supported the predictions of SR over "Classical Theory" with increasing confidence. However, when we try to use them to cheek how well they support SR over NM, we run into difficulties: with several of these tests, the more complex setup and calibration techniques make it dangerous to attempt a safe reanalysis for possibilities t hat weren't considered in the experimenters' setup procedures ... in others the quoted error margins seem rather similar to the margins that wed need to be able to interpret an 'NM" result as a "SR" result ... or extreme accuracy when making the comparison between SR and CT is achieved by 1 technique that makes it difficult to differentiate between SR and NM ... or "excess" redshifts are explained away as the result of mirror recoil . It seems that even with this additional technological sophistication, our primary evidence for SR's superiority over NM is still that early Ives-Stilwell experiment. And since ]at . er experimenters have had trouble understanding how the test's accuracy could have been quite as good as the paper said (estimating accuracy can be difficult when using an experimental configuration for the first time), we don't yet seem to have a solid core of experimental results claiming that that the newer SR Doppler relatio nships really are more accurate than the NNI set. Perhaps if our experiments had been devised with this comparison in mind from the beginning, we might by now have significant amounts of evidence to point us one way or the other ... but they weren't, and we don't. 16.6: ... The lightspeed upper limit in particle accelerators Another of the results often trotted out as unambiguous evidence for the validity of special relativity is the fact that even our best particle accelerators can't persuade electrically charged particies to move faster than the background speed of light. As the speed of the particles approaches background lightspeed, it becomes progressively more difficult for the fixed accelerator coils to force them to move any faster. As the speed of a particle approaches accelerator lightspeed, the energy that we have to pump through our coils to get an additional background increase in speed seems to tend towards infinity. some commentators attach great significance to this result and argue that the outlandish scale ,,d sheer brute force required by modem particle accelerators is an obvious indication that tile special theory is correct. If we believed in the equations for light used by "Classical Theory" (section 16.3), we'd expect these machines to be able to accelerate particles to far higher speeds, but, in real life ... this quite clearly isn't the way that things work. Special relativity wins! And certainly, special relativity wins when compared to CT. It just doesn't necessarily win when compared to other models. From the point of view of the coils, we can argue that the particle's resistance to acceleration (and its apparent inertial mass), goes to infinity as its speed through the accelerator approaches lightspeed, and we might blame this on the particle's additional relativistic mass at higher speeds. But the idea of relativistic mass isn't always fashionable amongst physicists, so it's handy to have another way of describing the situation, and we can do this y describing the experi ment from the point of view of the particle. Coupling efficiency Suppose that our "SR particle" is coasting through a straight section of accelerator tube at close to background lightspeed, and we throw more EM energy at it ... the particle sees the receding accelerator coils to be redshifted, reducing the frequency, energy, and radiation pressure of their signals. With the coils moving away at lightspeed, SR's Doppler relationships describe this energy and momentum of their fields disappearing altogether. So the coupling efficiency between the accelerator coils and the particle drops toward zero as their relative recession velocity approaches lightspeed, and with SR we therefore expect to be able to accelerate the particle towards the speed of light, but not to it or beyond it. This is what we see happening in our accelerators. SR wins! .. Except that, when we try a similar exercise with the Doppler relationships for other theories, similar things have a habit of happening. If we try the "Newtonian" Doppler relationships we find that with fIf = (c-v)lc, setting the recession velocity to lightspeed once again gives a frequency (and energy, and coupling efficiency) of zero. When we directly accelerate a particle, the lightspeed limit that we usually think of as a validation of SR also shows up under Nemonian mechanics, and presumably also under a range of other theories. Indirect acceleration This "direct acceleration" lightspeed barrier can have different characteristics under different Models: in the NM version of the story, an unstable particle travelling at close to background lightspeed can fragment and throw off daughter particles, some of which might travel at more than background c. This effect is related to NM's support for classical indirect radiation effects ("semi classical Hawking radiation), and wouldn't seem to be possible under SR-based Models. Unfortunately, when we start to deal with the more "particle-y" aspects of particle physics, quantum effects become relevant, allowing the appearance of particles in "impossible" situations to be explained away by ideas such as quantum tunnelling: even if we found something that looked like evidence of superluminal daughter particles, by classifying this as a quantum effect we could probably still get away with arguing that the result didn't threaten SR. 16.7: The "searchlight" effect We met the searchlight effect in section 8.2: it's the tendency of moving bodies to throw more of their signal forwards rather than trailing it behind them. Special relativity and NM both apply the same "relativistic aberration" formula, and the effect also exists (to various degrees) in different dragged-light models. This behaviour doesn't happen in the "Classical Theory" of section 16.3. 16.8: Velocity-addition Special characteristics for "velocity addition" appear in a variety of models, including NM (section 14.8), and usually suggest that the propagation of signals is being affected by the motion of intermediate objects in the signal path. Although we usually choose to interpret th Fizeau and Zeeman results as supporting SR's velocity-addition formula, the special theorye match to the data isn't supposed to be any better than Fresnel's ancient dragged-light theory. Again, this behaviour doesn't appear in the "Classical Theory" of section 16.3. 16.9: Particle tracklengths Since we've brought up the subject of daughter particles, how do we test how fast they really go? Let's suppose that we have a particle that's only supposed to survive for a nanosecond, and we measure the length of straight-line distance that it covers between being created and blowing itself to bits. If we know the particle's "official" decay time, then surely We can measure the length of its track, and divide that by the time to get the speed? If this track length was longer than the distance that particl e would travel at the background speed of light, wouldn't this mean that we'd shown that its velocity was superiuminal, disproving SR? And if the particle tracks were always shorter than this, wouldn't this support special relativity? But things aren't that easy. We're used to thinking of velocity as an unambiguous property, but since we can't be in two places at once, the properly often has to be interpreted. Since special relativity redefines all of the properties associated with velocity - energy, momentum, distance and time - fair comparisons between SR and other theories can become quite convoluted, and this can make it difficult to tell, when we're using these agreed, uninterpreted quantities, whether there's really a physical diff erence between the SR and NM tracklength predictions. Special relativity assigns greater energies and momenta to particles and signals than NM does, by a Lorentz factor: NM SR Momentum p= mv p=mv x gamma Doppler effect E'/E=(c-v)/c E'/E=(c-v)/c x gamma , so ... for a high-energy particle moving along a straight line with constant speed, with a known energy and/or momentum, Newtonian theory and special relativity will be assigning consistently different velocity values to the same particle. The nominal "SR velocity" value ("vSR") will always be less than lightspeed, while the nominal 'NM velocity" value ("vNM") will be larger than its SR counterpart by a Lorentz factor (calculated from vSR)' When we migrate from NM to special relativity, a particle's nominal velocity gets reduced by a Lorentz factor, shortening the distance that the particle would be expected to travel before decaying. But SR's "time dilation" effect then predicts an extension of the particle's lifetime by the same Lorentz factor thanks to time dilation, lengthening the particle's track by that same ratio. Because these two corrections exactly cancel, the particle's decay Position as 3 function of its energy and momentum is precisely the same for both theories. The results of both sets of calculations are necessarily identical. 16:10 Muon Showers Similar arguments apply when we try to assess evidence from "cosmic ray" detectors. High energy cosmic rays hitting the upper parts of the Earth's atmosphere create showers of short-lived "daughter particles" that survive for an incredibly short amount of time before decaying - their lifetimes are so short that even if they were travelling at the speed of light, we might think that they still shouldn't be able to reach the Earth's surface before decaying. But ground-based detectors do report the detection of muon showers, and there are two main ways that we can interpret this result: SR-based interpretation According to special relativity, we should explain the detectors' result by saying that since we "know" that nothing can travel faster than background lightspeed, the rations' ability to reach the ground shows that their decay-times must have been extended, and we interpret this as demonstrating that the special theory's time-dilation effects are physically real. We say that the muons move at a very high proportion of the speed of light and are time-dilated, and if it wasn't It for this time-dilation effect , they wouldn't be able to reach the detectors. Or ... we could adopt the muon's point of view, and suggest that the muon is stationary and the Earth is moving towards it at nearly the speed of light. In this second SR description, all of the approaching Earth's atmosphere is able to pass by the muon in time even though its speed is less than c, because the moving atmosphere's depth is Lorentz-contracted. These two different SR explanations (length-contraction and time dilation) are interchangeable. NM-based interpretation But is the success of the SR mtion calculations significant? Is it significantly different to the calculations weld have made using earlier theory? When we compare the tracklengths predicted by SR and NM, starting from theory-neutral properties, the final results seem to be identical (section 16.9): for a given agreed momentum, the mtion's decay point according to SR would seem to be precisely the same as the NM prediction - the two models don't disagree on where the muon decays, they disagree as to whether it achieves that penetration by travelling at more or less than background lightspeed, which is more difficult to establish. Fast or ultrafast? Muon bursts seem to be associated with Cerenkov radiation - the optical equivalent of a supersonic shockwave - but since lightspeed is slower in air than in a vacuum, using the Cerenkov effect to show that the innuons are moving faster than lightspeed in air doesn't show that they're also moving faster than the official background speed of light, in a vacuum. So how do we find the real speed of the muons, given that we don't have advance warning of when a cosmic ray is going to strike? With additional airborne muion detectors we can try to cornpare the detection times in the air and on the ground, but interpreting this data neutrally could be difficult: one such experiment seemed to indicate that the muons were travelling at more than than Cvacuum (Clay/Crouch 1974), but subsequent experiments seem to have supported the opposite position. Frorn here on, things get muddy. Given that we know that the record of SR-trained theorists trying to interpret non-SR theory isn't exactly faultless, it's difficult to know exactly how to treat this situation ... but there's one thing here that we can be sure of. When SR textbooks tell us that ground-level muon detection gives us unambiguous evidence for special relativity, and tell us that these muons couldn't reach the ground unless SR was correct, and couldn't bay, been predicted by earlier theories ... those statements are wrong. <snip rest> 16.14: Conclusions Although we're told that the evidence for special relativity is beyond dispute, much of the supporting evidence and argument is individually so patchy that it wouldn't be taken seriously in other branches of physical science. Or at least, we should hope that this lack of sceptical scrutiny is unusual, because otherwise science in general would seem to be in a great deal of trouble. Almost every general argument for SR seems to have been missold in some way. The E=mc^2 relationship wasn't unique to SR after all, neither were transverse redshifts, and the centrifuge redshifts that we'd been told had no other explanation had been predicted from more general gravitational arguments independently of SR. Although the experimenters may well have been scrupulously honest, some of the special theory's more active proponents seemed to be badly misrepresenting the available evidence and the mathematics, and their colleagues seemed to be allowing them to get away with it. Since most of these mistakes can be found with a little basic critical analysis, this leaves us wondering whether the theory's proponents genuinely didn't realise that what they were saying was wrong or misleading (in which case the standard of cross-theory expertise 'S low), or whether they knew that evidence was being misrepresented, but chose not to raise the issue. Perhaps people thought that it wasn't so important if a few of these experiments were over-sold, because of the sheer breadth of other suppo rting evidence ... and that even if the SR. dependency of a few results had been hyped, that the exaggeration was harmless because mathematics told us that the theory was right ... but once a "casual" approach to scientific evidence is allowed to become widespread in a research subject, and once everybody starts to rely on the idea that the standards of evidence in individual cases don't matter so much, it allows the awful possibility that perhaps every piece of e vidence used to support the theory might be similarly flawed. Mistakes will tend to cancel each other out in a diverse population, but in a monoculture they'll tend to reinforce one another. If evervone believes that the number of experiments provides a solid safety margin for their own work, and if everyone depends on the existence of that assumed safety margin, then it might be that the margin doesn't exist. The experimental record may make a decent case for the principle of relativity being correct and also gives us strong evidence against a number of nonrelativistic models and against simple emission theory ... but when it comes to establishing whether SR is the correct implementation of the principle of relativity, things are less straightforward. If we believe that any relativistic model must reduce to SR by definition, we'll tend not to bother testing SR against other potential relativistic solutions, beca use we won't believe that they can exist. The misrepresentation of the evidence for SR means that we're entitled to be suspicious, but it doesn't mean that special relativity's relationships are necessarily wrong. Definitive tests of "SR vs. NM" would seem to require direct tests of the Doppler relationships themselves, and in this case we seem to have two basic experiments, both slightly problematic - One apparently favouring SR against NM (Ives-Stilwell) and one apparently favouring NM against SR (Hasselkamp etal.). If the "NM" Doppler relationsh ips are correct, it seems incredible that we wouldn't have already noticed it, but if the SR set are really better, it also seems incredible that after a century of testing, we wouldn't yet have a body of results claiming to demonstrate it. It's hard to find an ' v SR tests where experimenters claim to have compared the NM Doppler relationships against the SR set, and found the SR version better - it's just not something that people tend to do. If the SR set really is better, then the community really ought to have been able to find people able to verify it by now. A century should have been sufficient time. Which of these relationships is better than the other at describing the universe we live in? The honest answer seems to be: we still don't know. Flip a coin.
From: Sue... on 10 Jul 2008 07:18 On Jul 10, 6:41 am, Danny Milano <milanoda...(a)yahoo.com> wrote: [...] > > The honest answer seems to be: we still don't know. > > Flip a coin. Which of the experiments test: <<,,,Einstein's relativity principle, which states that: All inertial frames are totally equivalent for the performance of all physical experiments. In other words, it is impossible to perform a physical experiment which differentiates in any fundamental sense between different inertial frames. By definition, Newton's laws of motion take the same form in all inertial frames. Einstein generalized this result in his special theory of relativity by asserting that all laws of physics take the same form in all inertial frames. >> http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/em/lectures/node108.html Sue...
From: Androcles on 10 Jul 2008 07:30 "Danny Milano" <milanodanny(a)yahoo.com> wrote in message news:677cb064-f698-4e45-8d2b-5b4abed23cef(a)p25g2000hsf.googlegroups.com... Hi, I recently came across a very interesting book by Eric Baird called "Life Without Special Relativity". It is 400 pages and has over 250 illustrations. The following is sample excerpt from his web site. Can someone pls. read and share where he may have gotten it wrong? Because if he is right. There is possibility SR is really wrong. ========================================= Welcome to the real world. Q. Why did Einstein say the speed of light from A to B is c-v, the speed of light from B to A is c+v, the "time" each way is the same? A. Because he was a ranting lunatic. See http://www.androcles01.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/dingleberry.htm There is possibility SR is really totally idiotic, senseless nonsense. Androcles. ========================================= Baird said: "16.1: Commonly-cited evidence for special relativity We're told that the experimental evidence for special relativity is so strong as to be beyond reasonable doubt: are we really, seriously suggesting that all this evidence could be wrong? Experimental results reckoned to support the special theory include: * E=mc^2 * transverse redshifts * longitudinal Doppler relationships * the lightspeed limit in particle accelerators * the searchlight effect (shared with dragged-light models and NM) * "velocity addition" behaviour (shared with dragged-light models and NM) * particle tracklengths * muon detection * particle lifetimes in accelerator storage rings / centrifuge time dilation / orbiting clocks * the failure of competing theories .... we'll be looking at all of these, along with a couple of important background issues. 16.2: ... E=mc^2 For a long time it seemed to be received wisdom that the E=mc^2 result was unique to special relativity, We were told that if special relativity wasn't true then nuclear bombs and nuclear weapons wouldn't work, and without SR's prediction of E=mc^2, nuclear fusion wouldn't operate as it does. Without special relativity, the Sun wouldn't shine. And while this was a good story to tell credulous schoolchildren, it was essentially pseudoscience. The idea that E=mc^2 "belongs" to SR doesn't hold up to basic mathematical analysis, and to Einstein's credit he went on to argue for the wider validity of the result by publishing further papers that derived the relationship (or a good approximation of it) from more general arguments outside special relativity. We also found in section 2.5 (with working supplied in the Appendices, Calculations 2), that E=mc^ 2 is an exact result of NM, if we ignore standard teaching and go directly to the core mathematics. Not only is the NM-based derivation of E=mc2 reasonably straightforward, it's shorter than its SR counterpart, and it's also part of every hypothetical model in section 13. Whiile it's historically understandable that the equation wasn't widely recognised and embraced until Einstein came along, its less clear why so many brilliant physicists with outstanding math skills continued to insist for so long that the equation somehow provides cornpelling evidence for the special theory. Since the math is so straightforward, how were so many clever physics people caught out? We might have expected that enough time had passed since 1905 for us to have checked the math dependencies, not iced the parallel compatibility with NK and (in a respectable field of scientific study), made a high-profile retraction so that we didn't continue to pass misinformation onto students. But perhaps "E=mc^2 proves special relativity" was just too convenient a tale for people to want to give it up, regardless of what the Mathematics really said. 16.3: *Classical Theory" vs. Special Relativity When we read about experiments that compared the predictions of SR against those of "Classical Theory", we can come away thinking that we've been told how SR's Predictions stack up against most earlier theories (for instance, Newtonian theory). This isn't usually the case. When we look at what's meant by "Classical Theory', in this context, we find that it's a sort of hybrid. It's a pairing of two sets of incompatible assumptions and math that have the advantage for experimenters of (a) being well known and standardised, and (b) making optical predictions that are so exceptionally bad that by comparison special relativity (and almost any other theory) looks very good indeed. Did "Classical Theory" ever really exist? In the context of SR-testing, "Classical Theory" refers to a mixture of two sets of conflicting assumptions that didn't work together before SR/LET: "Classical Theory" uses Newtonian mechanics for the equations of motion for solid bodies, but for light, CT is equivalent to assuming an absolute, fixed, "flat" aether stationary in the laboratory frame. The energy and momentum relationships of these two different parts are, of course, irreconcilable ... NM requires the Doppler relationship to be (c-v)/c, but " Classical Theory" gives cl(c+v). These aren't compatible. They never were. If they were, we wouldn't have needed special relativity. There doesn't seem to be any single theory that attempted to combine these two predictions before LET/SR, or at least, there doesn't seem to have been anyone prepared to lend their name to one, and in a subject where people love having things named after themselves, this should make us suspicious. If "Classical Theory" doesn't mean "pre-SR theory", then where did it come from? The phrase appears in Einstein's explanations of the basis of special relativity, as a convenient form of words to refer to two appa rently diverging predictions that special relativity then reconciled by applying Lorentz effects: to Einstein, "Classical Theory" represented incompatible aspects of earlier theories that didn't work together, but that could be reconciled using special relativity. When we're look for a historical counterpart to Classical Theory there doesn't seem to be anything that would have made these optical predictions unless we go all the way back to preGalileo, pre-Newton times, and posit an absolute aether that permeates space and is locked to the state of a stationary Earth. That would give us the "Classical Theory" prediction of "no transverse redshift" for a laboratory stationary with respect to the Earth. But every other decrepit old theory that we can dig up seems to pre dict at least some sort of transverse redshift effect, sometimes weaker than SR, sometimes stronger than SR, and sometimes swinging wildly between the two depending on the Earth's motion. The one idea that didn't seem to be considered to be credible during the Eighteenth Century was the idea that lightspeed was fixed with respect to the observer, which is presumably why Michelson had so much grief with his colleagues over his "failed" aether-drift experiment. SO, why do we persist in carrying out these "SR vs. Classical Theory" comparisons if they don't demonstrate very much? Well, to a cynic, Classical Theory is an excellent reference to test against, because its predictions are about as bad as we can get. If we set aside the theories that predicted time-variant effects, no other old predictions seem to be quite as bad at to CT when it comes to predicting real Doppler shifts, and this makes "CT vs. Theory X" experiments very much easier to carry out and analyse . Test theory authors love CT because it meshes well with the chain of arguments that Einstein used when explaining the special theory, and experimenters design tests around the test theories that are available legitimate process - as long as we don't fool ourselves into thinking that that the results represent a realistic comparison of how special relativitys predictions really compared to those of its predecessors. 16.4:- "Transverse" redshifts Special relativity tells us that if an object moves through our laboratory, and we carefully point a highly-directional detector at right angles to its path (measured with a "laboratory" set,square), the signal that manages to register on the detector should be redshifted (section 6.7). But the popular "educational" notion that this sort of redshift outcome is something unique to special relativity is as best misleading, and at worst ... it's simply wrong. The equations of newtonian mechanics (or even the basic equations for audio, properly applied to the case of a stationary source) don't just predict redshifts in this situation, they'll often predict "aberration redshifts" that are stronger than their SR counterparts (section 6.4), so in a physical sense, the appearance of redshifts in t his situation isn't just not unique, it's not even particularly unusual. In fact, the thing that would be unusual with this sort of experimental setup would be a theory that didn't predict some sort of redshift. Although we tend to regard special relativity's transverse predictions as conceptually unique, experimenters have to know when supposed differences between theories generate physically unambiguous differences in the readings taken by actual hardware, and when the differences are more a matter of interpretation. This distinction isn't always obvious from the relativity literature. Einstein's special theory requires these sorts of "pre-SR" redshifts to exist for its own internal consistency. The theory must predict the same physical outcome regardless of which inertia] reference frame we choose to use for our calculations, so the emitter is entitled to claim that c is globally fixed for them (Einstein 1905, 7), and this means that they're entitled to claim that our relative motion makes us time-dilated, giving our view of the emitter's signal a Lorentz blueshift ... so in order for u s to be able to instead see a Lorentz redshift, propagation-based effects in this situation - light moving at a constant speed in the emitter's frame, and arriving at us at an apparent 90 degrees - must, by default, generate a Lorentz-squared redshift to allow the same final SR outcome. This is the right answer (see Calculations 3). So to fully understand the logical consistency of SR in this situation requires us to know that similar or stronger redshifts would appear in the same apparatus under other light-propagation models. Since different SR "views" can explain the same redshift component as the result of (a) conventional aberration effects, (b) time dilation, or (c) a combination of the two (we're allowed to try an infinite number of alternative views from intermediate reference frames), SR requires these two explanations to be q ualitatively indistinguishable. Although expert sources may tell us that "transverse redshifts" are unique to SR, the theory itse~f tells us otherwise. We can distinguish SR's "transverse" predictions from those of other theories by their strength, but a redshift outcome in this situation doesn't automatically need SR. The Hasselkamp test We only seem to have one experiment that set out to measure the amount of redshift actually seen at 90 degrees to moving material (Hasselkamp et. al., 1979), and it reported about twice the redshift predicted by SR, as we'd expect if the older NM equations were right. This result was nevertheless presented as supporting SR: the experimenters used a test theory that compared SR with "Classical Theory" (which predicted no redshift), and reasoned that the inexplicable excess redshift must have been due to an a ccidental detector misalignment. They were then able to use statistics to argue that, taking into account possible alignment efforts, the "SR" prediction still made a significantly better match to the data than "CT" did. But subsequent papers verifying that the presumed misalignment was real, or repeating the experiment (Perhaps with the help of clever cancellation methods to eliminate the effects of these sorts of detector misalignments from further results), don't seem to have appeared. This Makes it difficult to tell whether the result really supported the special theory, or invalidated it. 16.5: ... "Longitudinal" Doppler shifts The Hasselkamp experiment was unusual - in practice, we don't normally . try to measure SR's transverse redshift effect by really aiming a detector at the side of a moving particle bearn - we find it easier to measure the forward and rearward Doppler-shifts, and then calculate the strength of the transverse effect by comparing them against each other. This is a nice method ... because it compares two shifts, the technique makes it easier to cancel out various types of systemic error, known and unknown, and these "end-on" readings are less sensitive to the effect of small angular errors. By comparing the resulting three sign.("recession-redshifted", "approach-blueshifted", and an "unshifted" reference signal), we can derive a characteristic "signature" that lets us rule out certain relationships without having to commit to a theory-specific value for the exact velocity of the particle beam. We can select , theory, use one of the shift ratios to calculate what the velocity would have to have bee. according to that theory, use this hypothetical velocity value to "predict" the second shift ratio, and then compare this against the second set of figures to see how close we got to the real data. Ives-stilwell The best-known of these "non-transverse" transverse tests is the early 1938 test by Herbert Ives and G. R. Stilwell, which set out to compare tile predictions of Lorentz Ether Theory (and SR) against those of "Classical Theory". Ives and Stilwell's approach was simple: "Classical Theory" says that the two shifted signals (red and blue) should change in wavelength by precisely the same amount, so with all three wavelength values marked on a linear scale, we'd find perfectly even spacing between them. If the shift relationships obeyed the "redder" relationships of SR (or NM) there'd be an asymmetry. Ives and Stilwell found a definite offset in the wavelength values. The simplicity of this experiment makes it tempting to reanalyse the data for a possible agreement or disagreement with NM, and when we do this we find that the stronger offset predicted by N1M appears to lie outside the data range, by more than the experimenter's quoted experimental error. This seems to indicate that the SR predictions are significantly more accurate than NM. Further experiments There've been several more experiments of this type published since Ives-Stilwell, using more advanced equipment, more complex optics and higher relative velocities, and these have supported the predictions of SR over "Classical Theory" with increasing confidence. However, when we try to use them to cheek how well they support SR over NM, we run into difficulties: with several of these tests, the more complex setup and calibration techniques make it dangerous to attempt a safe reanalysis for possibilities t hat weren't considered in the experimenters' setup procedures ... in others the quoted error margins seem rather similar to the margins that wed need to be able to interpret an 'NM" result as a "SR" result ... or extreme accuracy when making the comparison between SR and CT is achieved by 1 technique that makes it difficult to differentiate between SR and NM ... or "excess" redshifts are explained away as the result of mirror recoil . It seems that even with this additional technological sophistication, our primary evidence for SR's superiority over NM is still that early Ives-Stilwell experiment. And since ]at . er experimenters have had trouble understanding how the test's accuracy could have been quite as good as the paper said (estimating accuracy can be difficult when using an experimental configuration for the first time), we don't yet seem to have a solid core of experimental results claiming that that the newer SR Doppler relatio nships really are more accurate than the NNI set. Perhaps if our experiments had been devised with this comparison in mind from the beginning, we might by now have significant amounts of evidence to point us one way or the other ... but they weren't, and we don't. 16.6: ... The lightspeed upper limit in particle accelerators Another of the results often trotted out as unambiguous evidence for the validity of special relativity is the fact that even our best particle accelerators can't persuade electrically charged particies to move faster than the background speed of light. As the speed of the particles approaches background lightspeed, it becomes progressively more difficult for the fixed accelerator coils to force them to move any faster. As the speed of a particle approaches accelerator lightspeed, the energy that we have to pump through our coils to get an additional background increase in speed seems to tend towards infinity. some commentators attach great significance to this result and argue that the outlandish scale ,,d sheer brute force required by modem particle accelerators is an obvious indication that tile special theory is correct. If we believed in the equations for light used by "Classical Theory" (section 16.3), we'd expect these machines to be able to accelerate particles to far higher speeds, but, in real life ... this quite clearly isn't the way that things work. Special relativity wins! And certainly, special relativity wins when compared to CT. It just doesn't necessarily win when compared to other models. From the point of view of the coils, we can argue that the particle's resistance to acceleration (and its apparent inertial mass), goes to infinity as its speed through the accelerator approaches lightspeed, and we might blame this on the particle's additional relativistic mass at higher speeds. But the idea of relativistic mass isn't always fashionable amongst physicists, so it's handy to have another way of describing the situation, and we can do this y describing the experi ment from the point of view of the particle. Coupling efficiency Suppose that our "SR particle" is coasting through a straight section of accelerator tube at close to background lightspeed, and we throw more EM energy at it ... the particle sees the receding accelerator coils to be redshifted, reducing the frequency, energy, and radiation pressure of their signals. With the coils moving away at lightspeed, SR's Doppler relationships describe this energy and momentum of their fields disappearing altogether. So the coupling efficiency between the accelerator coils and the particle drops toward zero as their relative recession velocity approaches lightspeed, and with SR we therefore expect to be able to accelerate the particle towards the speed of light, but not to it or beyond it. This is what we see happening in our accelerators. SR wins! ... Except that, when we try a similar exercise with the Doppler relationships for other theories, similar things have a habit of happening. If we try the "Newtonian" Doppler relationships we find that with fIf = (c-v)lc, setting the recession velocity to lightspeed once again gives a frequency (and energy, and coupling efficiency) of zero. When we directly accelerate a particle, the lightspeed limit that we usually think of as a validation of SR also shows up under Nemonian mechanics, and presumably also under a range of other theories. Indirect acceleration This "direct acceleration" lightspeed barrier can have different characteristics under different Models: in the NM version of the story, an unstable particle travelling at close to background lightspeed can fragment and throw off daughter particles, some of which might travel at more than background c. This effect is related to NM's support for classical indirect radiation effects ("semi classical Hawking radiation), and wouldn't seem to be possible under SR-based Models. Unfortunately, when we start to deal with the more "particle-y" aspects of particle physics, quantum effects become relevant, allowing the appearance of particles in "impossible" situations to be explained away by ideas such as quantum tunnelling: even if we found something that looked like evidence of superluminal daughter particles, by classifying this as a quantum effect we could probably still get away with arguing that the result didn't threaten SR. 16.7: The "searchlight" effect We met the searchlight effect in section 8.2: it's the tendency of moving bodies to throw more of their signal forwards rather than trailing it behind them. Special relativity and NM both apply the same "relativistic aberration" formula, and the effect also exists (to various degrees) in different dragged-light models. This behaviour doesn't happen in the "Classical Theory" of section 16.3. 16.8: Velocity-addition Special characteristics for "velocity addition" appear in a variety of models, including NM (section 14.8), and usually suggest that the propagation of signals is being affected by the motion of intermediate objects in the signal path. Although we usually choose to interpret th Fizeau and Zeeman results as supporting SR's velocity-addition formula, the special theorye match to the data isn't supposed to be any better than Fresnel's ancient dragged-light theory. Again, this behaviour doesn't appear in the "Classical Theory" of section 16.3. 16.9: Particle tracklengths Since we've brought up the subject of daughter particles, how do we test how fast they really go? Let's suppose that we have a particle that's only supposed to survive for a nanosecond, and we measure the length of straight-line distance that it covers between being created and blowing itself to bits. If we know the particle's "official" decay time, then surely We can measure the length of its track, and divide that by the time to get the speed? If this track length was longer than the distance that particl e would travel at the background speed of light, wouldn't this mean that we'd shown that its velocity was superiuminal, disproving SR? And if the particle tracks were always shorter than this, wouldn't this support special relativity? But things aren't that easy. We're used to thinking of velocity as an unambiguous property, but since we can't be in two places at once, the properly often has to be interpreted. Since special relativity redefines all of the properties associated with velocity - energy, momentum, distance and time - fair comparisons between SR and other theories can become quite convoluted, and this can make it difficult to tell, when we're using these agreed, uninterpreted quantities, whether there's really a physical diff erence between the SR and NM tracklength predictions. Special relativity assigns greater energies and momenta to particles and signals than NM does, by a Lorentz factor: NM SR Momentum p= mv p=mv x gamma Doppler effect E'/E=(c-v)/c E'/E=(c-v)/c x gamma , so ... for a high-energy particle moving along a straight line with constant speed, with a known energy and/or momentum, Newtonian theory and special relativity will be assigning consistently different velocity values to the same particle. The nominal "SR velocity" value ("vSR") will always be less than lightspeed, while the nominal 'NM velocity" value ("vNM") will be larger than its SR counterpart by a Lorentz factor (calculated from vSR)' When we migrate from NM to special relativity, a particle's nominal velocity gets reduced by a Lorentz factor, shortening the distance that the particle would be expected to travel before decaying. But SR's "time dilation" effect then predicts an extension of the particle's lifetime by the same Lorentz factor thanks to time dilation, lengthening the particle's track by that same ratio. Because these two corrections exactly cancel, the particle's decay Position as 3 function of its energy and momentum is precisely the same for both theories. The results of both sets of calculations are necessarily identical. 16:10 Muon Showers Similar arguments apply when we try to assess evidence from "cosmic ray" detectors. High energy cosmic rays hitting the upper parts of the Earth's atmosphere create showers of short-lived "daughter particles" that survive for an incredibly short amount of time before decaying - their lifetimes are so short that even if they were travelling at the speed of light, we might think that they still shouldn't be able to reach the Earth's surface before decaying. But ground-based detectors do report the detection of muon showers, and there are two main ways that we can interpret this result: SR-based interpretation According to special relativity, we should explain the detectors' result by saying that since we "know" that nothing can travel faster than background lightspeed, the rations' ability to reach the ground shows that their decay-times must have been extended, and we interpret this as demonstrating that the special theory's time-dilation effects are physically real. We say that the muons move at a very high proportion of the speed of light and are time-dilated, and if it wasn't It for this time-dilation effect , they wouldn't be able to reach the detectors. Or ... we could adopt the muon's point of view, and suggest that the muon is stationary and the Earth is moving towards it at nearly the speed of light. In this second SR description, all of the approaching Earth's atmosphere is able to pass by the muon in time even though its speed is less than c, because the moving atmosphere's depth is Lorentz-contracted. These two different SR explanations (length-contraction and time dilation) are interchangeable. NM-based interpretation But is the success of the SR mtion calculations significant? Is it significantly different to the calculations weld have made using earlier theory? When we compare the tracklengths predicted by SR and NM, starting from theory-neutral properties, the final results seem to be identical (section 16.9): for a given agreed momentum, the mtion's decay point according to SR would seem to be precisely the same as the NM prediction - the two models don't disagree on where the muon decays, they disagree as to whether it achieves that penetration by travelling at more or less than background lightspeed, which is more difficult to establish. Fast or ultrafast? Muon bursts seem to be associated with Cerenkov radiation - the optical equivalent of a supersonic shockwave - but since lightspeed is slower in air than in a vacuum, using the Cerenkov effect to show that the innuons are moving faster than lightspeed in air doesn't show that they're also moving faster than the official background speed of light, in a vacuum. So how do we find the real speed of the muons, given that we don't have advance warning of when a cosmic ray is going to strike? With additional airborne muion detectors we can try to cornpare the detection times in the air and on the ground, but interpreting this data neutrally could be difficult: one such experiment seemed to indicate that the muons were travelling at more than than Cvacuum (Clay/Crouch 1974), but subsequent experiments seem to have supported the opposite position. Frorn here on, things get muddy. Given that we know that the record of SR-trained theorists trying to interpret non-SR theory isn't exactly faultless, it's difficult to know exactly how to treat this situation .... but there's one thing here that we can be sure of. When SR textbooks tell us that ground-level muon detection gives us unambiguous evidence for special relativity, and tell us that these muons couldn't reach the ground unless SR was correct, and couldn't bay, been predicted by earlier theories ... those statements are wrong. <snip rest> 16.14: Conclusions Although we're told that the evidence for special relativity is beyond dispute, much of the supporting evidence and argument is individually so patchy that it wouldn't be taken seriously in other branches of physical science. Or at least, we should hope that this lack of sceptical scrutiny is unusual, because otherwise science in general would seem to be in a great deal of trouble. Almost every general argument for SR seems to have been missold in some way. The E=mc^2 relationship wasn't unique to SR after all, neither were transverse redshifts, and the centrifuge redshifts that we'd been told had no other explanation had been predicted from more general gravitational arguments independently of SR. Although the experimenters may well have been scrupulously honest, some of the special theory's more active proponents seemed to be badly misrepresenting the available evidence and the mathematics, and their colleagues seemed to be allowing them to get away with it. Since most of these mistakes can be found with a little basic critical analysis, this leaves us wondering whether the theory's proponents genuinely didn't realise that what they were saying was wrong or misleading (in which case the standard of cross-theory expertise 'S low), or whether they knew that evidence was being misrepresented, but chose not to raise the issue. Perhaps people thought that it wasn't so important if a few of these experiments were over-sold, because of the sheer breadth of other suppo rting evidence ... and that even if the SR. dependency of a few results had been hyped, that the exaggeration was harmless because mathematics told us that the theory was right ... but once a "casual" approach to scientific evidence is allowed to become widespread in a research subject, and once everybody starts to rely on the idea that the standards of evidence in individual cases don't matter so much, it allows the awful possibility that perhaps every piece of e vidence used to support the theory might be similarly flawed. Mistakes will tend to cancel each other out in a diverse population, but in a monoculture they'll tend to reinforce one another. If evervone believes that the number of experiments provides a solid safety margin for their own work, and if everyone depends on the existence of that assumed safety margin, then it might be that the margin doesn't exist. The experimental record may make a decent case for the principle of relativity being correct and also gives us strong evidence against a number of nonrelativistic models and against simple emission theory ... but when it comes to establishing whether SR is the correct implementation of the principle of relativity, things are less straightforward. If we believe that any relativistic model must reduce to SR by definition, we'll tend not to bother testing SR against other potential relativistic solutions, beca use we won't believe that they can exist. The misrepresentation of the evidence for SR means that we're entitled to be suspicious, but it doesn't mean that special relativity's relationships are necessarily wrong. Definitive tests of "SR vs. NM" would seem to require direct tests of the Doppler relationships themselves, and in this case we seem to have two basic experiments, both slightly problematic - One apparently favouring SR against NM (Ives-Stilwell) and one apparently favouring NM against SR (Hasselkamp etal.). If the "NM" Doppler relationsh ips are correct, it seems incredible that we wouldn't have already noticed it, but if the SR set are really better, it also seems incredible that after a century of testing, we wouldn't yet have a body of results claiming to demonstrate it. It's hard to find an ' v SR tests where experimenters claim to have compared the NM Doppler relationships against the SR set, and found the SR version better - it's just not something that people tend to do. If the SR set really is better, then the community really ought to have been able to find people able to verify it by now. A century should have been sufficient time. Which of these relationships is better than the other at describing the universe we live in? The honest answer seems to be: we still don't know. Flip a coin.
From: Pentcho Valev on 10 Jul 2008 08:50 On Jul 10, 2:18 pm, Ian Parker <ianpark...(a)gmail.com> wrote in sci.physics.relativity: > On 10 Jul, 11:41, Danny Milano <milanoda...(a)yahoo.com> wrote:> Hi, I recently came across a very interesting book by > > Eric Baird called "Life Without Special Relativity". It > > is 400 pages and has over 250 illustrations. The > > following is sample excerpt from his web site. Can > > someone pls. read and share where he may have gotten it > > wrong? Because if he is right. There is possibility SR > > is really wrong. > > Salaam alekum! > > This seems to read very like a buzzword generator. The only > substantive thing that you have said is the SR is an aether theory. In > fact Relativity got rid of the aether. > > You say "Experimental tests" yet on the basis of aether you seem to be > talking in a prely philosopical way. > > I would ask you > > WHAT EXPERIMENTS CONTRADICT SR? > > What experiments would tell you the difference between the different > theories? Michelson-Morley and Pound-Rebka contradict special relativity. Michelson-Morley directly confirms Newton's emission theory of light but you can still save relativity by introducing, ad hoc, miracles - time dilation, length contraction etc. So in Einstein zombie world a single experiment can confirm two incompatible theories and Einsteinians subtract the number of such experiments from the "enormous" number of experiments that gloriously confirm Divine Albert's Divine Theory and refute the emission theory. Up until recently the Pound-Rebka experiment belonged to the latter group but now Einsteinians suspect that this experiment, like the Michelson- Morley experiment, confirms the emission theory as well. A dispassionate and disinterested analysis would show that Pound-Rebka unambiguously confirms Newton's emission theory of light and refutes Divine Albert's Divine Theory. Pentcho Valev pvalev(a)yahoo.com
From: PD on 10 Jul 2008 09:16
On Jul 10, 7:50 am, Pentcho Valev <pva...(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > On Jul 10, 2:18 pm, Ian Parker <ianpark...(a)gmail.com> wrote in > sci.physics.relativity: > > > > > On 10 Jul, 11:41, Danny Milano <milanoda...(a)yahoo.com> wrote:> Hi, I recently came across a very interesting book by > > > Eric Baird called "Life Without Special Relativity". It > > > is 400 pages and has over 250 illustrations. The > > > following is sample excerpt from his web site. Can > > > someone pls. read and share where he may have gotten it > > > wrong? Because if he is right. There is possibility SR > > > is really wrong. > > > Salaam alekum! > > > This seems to read very like a buzzword generator. The only > > substantive thing that you have said is the SR is an aether theory. In > > fact Relativity got rid of the aether. > > > You say "Experimental tests" yet on the basis of aether you seem to be > > talking in a prely philosopical way. > > > I would ask you > > > WHAT EXPERIMENTS CONTRADICT SR? > > > What experiments would tell you the difference between the different > > theories? > > Michelson-Morley and Pound-Rebka contradict special relativity. Michelson-Morley in no way contradicts special relativity. You might say it contradicts special relativity if you take out time dilation and length contraction, but then again, that ain't special relativity, is it? > Michelson-Morley directly confirms Newton's emission theory of light The emission theory of light is consistent with Michelson-Morley, but the emission theory of light is inconsistent with OTHER experimental results. It is not proper to consider experiments in isolation when evaluating the evidence in support of or against a theory. > but you can still save relativity by introducing, ad hoc, miracles - > time dilation, length contraction etc. So in Einstein zombie world a > single experiment can confirm two incompatible theories and > Einsteinians subtract the number of such experiments from the > "enormous" number of experiments that gloriously confirm Divine > Albert's Divine Theory and refute the emission theory. Up until > recently the Pound-Rebka experiment belonged to the latter group but > now Einsteinians suspect that this experiment, like the Michelson- > Morley experiment, confirms the emission theory as well. A > dispassionate and disinterested analysis would show that Pound-Rebka > unambiguously confirms Newton's emission theory of light and refutes > Divine Albert's Divine Theory. > > Pentcho Valev > pva...(a)yahoo.com |