Waiting for B ig Al; An Einstein Play

From: Jack Sarfatti (sarfatti_at_pacbell.net)
Date: 02/28/05 

Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 04:25:25 GMT

Bill Gates said that China graduated 6 times as many engineers as US did
in 2002! India also graduates more. America is 16th in science and math
compared to the 20 developed nations, which exclude China and India as
"undeveloped". China will soon control the US deficit and therefore the
stability of our currency, which is rapidly deteriorating. We
fiddle-faddle as Rome burns. Well, when booking passage on The Titanic,
go First Class!

George got his PhD in physics from UC with I think Henry Stapp or maybe
it was Geof Chew. In any case George answers Paul with more patience
than I have had and I agree with George's position that fleshes out what
I have been trying to tell Paul without success. So I let George do it. ;-)

G: Here a reply to your last points. Sorry, Jack, I guess my reply could
be called heavy on philosophy (because that's the level of Paul's
argumentation) but I hope it's not philophauzzy (or whatever term
Feynman used)

Z: As I understand it, in 1905 SR reciprocal kinematic time-dilatation
in inertial frames depends on the adoption of a *convention* for clock
synchronization using light beams, and the *a priori* identification of
the empirically measured and actual speeds of light. I agree that once
this convention is adopted, the observations with light beams will
conform to the predictions of SR. But this is still consistent with a
Lorentzian model in which the observed dilatation due to purely relative
inertial motion is only *apparent*.

G: I think Einstein's idea that the presupposition of absolute time was
at the core of the tremendous confusion and turmoil at the time is the
core idea of special relativity, and his solution to insist on an
experimental procedure to determine space-time differences between two
points was the logical method to challenge that presupposition; the
specific method he proposed (using light signals) is in my view
canonical. Or do you have an alternative suggestion for how to do it?

J: One of my main points precisely nicely put.

Z: I think I understand what Einstein was trying to do in 1905, namely,
find a way of doing electrodynamics without reference to a light medium
in empty space -- which implied a revision of Galilean kinematics in
order to make the canonical form of Maxwell's equations apply in every
inertial frame under a common set of transformations. However, the
vulgar-empiricist idea that "time" can be defined in terms of one or
another "operational procedure" is really quite problematic,
since there is then no way of separating effects that are purely due to
the behavior of, say, the light rays used for clock synchronization, and
those that are due to the objective behavior of the system under
observation.

G: Time is not defined that way; it is much too fundamental for that.
But its measurement is operationalized by Einstein's light-clock method,
and you have not answered my above challenge to suggest a suitable
alternative - presumably because you can't. Neither can I, nor Jack, nor
probably anyone. Calling something vulgar doesn't express anything but
your aversion to it; as long as you're clear on that, I won't further
comment on your characerization of the position I have been taking.

J: Indeed, I would never even try to. It's not a legitimate question! I
have also kept asking Paul for his "suitable alternative". The only
possible one would, perhaps, be "signal nonlocality" in violation of
micro-quantum theory. Paul, of course, never suggested that.

G: As to your last point, you are begging the question with your
distinction: what precisely (or even approximately) is this "objective
behavior" you are supposedly distinguishing from our observation of the
light rays and the signal values they carry (telling us how much time
has elapsed, how far away an event is from the "here and now" of the
observer, etc.)?

J: Exactly, exactly, exactly! I second, third and fourth that. I have
kept asking this same thing from Paul. It is the Achilles Heel of his
spurious argument.

G: That such an objective reality exists and, more importantly, that it
can be described in ways which are not founded on our sensory
experiences which give us supposed knowledge about "it" (assuming for
argument's sake that "it " has meaning and exists) is precisely the
presupposition that stands in the way of understanding SR, GR and
ultimately quantum theory. More, much more, on this later.

J: BINGO! Exactly, exactly, exactly! I second, third and fourth that to
the second degree! ;-)

G: Meanwhile I just challenge you to
give experiential-experimental-operational meaning to your above point!

J: The next remark is obscure so I will attribute it to Z not to G.:-)
This is a good Turing Test to see if by now you can tell who is saying
what. That tests your understanding of the text and these ideas are
important to Western Physical Science.

Z? Einstein's further supposition that such effects are *universal* does
not alter this, although from the
Machian-Poincarean-empiricist-conventionalist POV this licenses a
complete erasure of the distinction. In philosophical terms, Einstein's
1905 reduction of "time" to a particular operational definition fails to
support a fundamental theoretic distinction between appearance and
reality, which of course is the problem with this kind of empiricism.

G: My comment above applies ditto to this. What is the "reality" which
you counterpose to mere "appearance"? I fail to support such a
distinction too :-) Of course, I am thoroughly familiar with the
physicalist-reductionist scientism that presupposes such a distinction,
and which feels it has a handle on what this physical-reality-per-se is,
even if it can't say one single fact about this supposed "Ding an sich",
since this latter is always known through the senses (and, less commonly
acknowledged, through the mind). But I see it as a childishly naive
perspective (here I'm doing it :-) ), which can be picked apart and
deconstructed in many ways cognitively, (and in quantum science, also
experimentally) and more importantly, which one can directly see to be
fatally flawed if one looks with fewer blinders. In Buddhist terms, you
would say that the "objective reality" and the "knowing subject"
codependently arise, and you cannot reduce one to the other. The classic
question Einstein was asked on this was: "Why use light?". Einstein's
best public answer was: "Because light is something we know something
about". In this sense it is misleading to call it a convention.

Z: That's what Einstein 1905 called it.

G: I don't want to argue this on the historical level of what Einstein
said or didn't say. I intuit that it's not just a convention; more on
that another time.

J: Mine too.

G: But unless one can give a very solid justification for calling the
method canonical, Einstein's concession of calling it a "convention"
avoids criticism, for how can you criticize a convention especially when
you yourself don't have an equivalently good, much less better way to
operationalize space-time measurements than Einstein did?

J: Exactly, exactly, exactly! I second, third and fourth that to the
third degree! ;-)

G: I think Einstein hit the nail on the head, and his fundamental method
used then (insistence on operational definitions of basic concepts in
physics) is one of the greatest revolutions in physics, far beyond just
the SR or even GR.

J: Of course!

Z: Except that Einstein himself gave this up -- at least in its crude
1905 form -- in the 1920s.

J: Not to the degree you have taken it Paul.

Z: Einstein repudiated the "Machian" arguments that he deployed in the
1905 paper as "rubbish". This repudiation includes the attempt to reduce
the meaning of a concept like "time" to a particular operational definition.

J: No, Paul you are distorting the facts here. It is false that Einstein
abandoned the operational method. He refined it in 1915 beyond his
immature use of it in 1905. He did not throw it away with complete
abandon as you have! You have jumped way beyond Einstein's self-avowed
"struggle" to free himself from a direct physical meaning of
"coordinates" (i.e. "dr", "dt" etc. below) as is "common sense" in the
Galilean relativity of engineering - and even in 1905 special
relativity. In the simple case of the spherically symmetric static
curved space-time

dR = dr/(1 - 2GM/c^2r)^1/2

dR is the tiny element of length OPERATIONALLY measured by resting LNIF
rods oriented radially from the source M.

dL = r(dtheta^2 + sin^2thetadphi^2)^1/2

dL is the tiny element of length actually OPERATIONALLY measured by
resting LNIF rods confined in the tangent plane to the surface of a
concentric sphere of area 4pir^2 in terms of the usual flat space
spherical polar coordinates. That is, the radially oriented measuring
rods LOCALLY SHRINK compared to the tangentially oriented ones, which
stay as they are in flat space without any gravitational field!
Puthoff's PV theory violates this LOCALLY.

dT = dt(1 - 2GM/c^2r)^1/2

dT is the actual OPERATIONALLY measured time tick-tocked off by a
resting "non-geodesic" LNIF clock. That is the LNIF clock held fixed in
the attractive gravity field slows down in the gravity redshift! It
will, in contrast, speed up in the repulsive gravity field of dark zero
point energy density with equal and opposite negative micro-quantum
pressure in the anti-gravity blue shift. Flying saucers show these
strange red/blue shift patterns around the fuselage in silent weightless
warp flight even at very slow speeds. Details of this are found in the
Robert Bigelow NIDS reports of Jacques Vallee and Eric Davis as well as
in my books "Destiny Matrix" and "Space-Time and Beyond II".

All of the above "LNIF" measuring rods and clocks are held at rest at
fixed r etc by some non-gravity force. In contrast, the LOCAL
equivalence principle is that momentarily coincident weightless
freely-falling/floating "geodesic" LIF rods and clocks show no
significant space and time warping like their LNIF non-geodesic "fixed"
twins. There will be some tidal curvature stretch-squeezing of the LIF
rods and clocks of course, but here on Earth the tidal effect is
ultra-tiny. Kip Thorne & Company at Cal Tech work very hard to try to
show these incredibly tiny stretch-squeeze tidal effects from gravity
waves in their LIGO and LISA devices.

G to Z: I'd like to know more about this later Einstein position; do you
have Internet-accessible references? So from a position of relative
ignorance of what Einstein actually said about this issue and in which
context and with which intention, I'll withhold further comment for now
except to say that the later Einstein developed a very conservative
bent; he realized that his own genius as a younger man had given
strength to an empiricist-operationalist orientation amongst many
physicists which led them to adopt positions in the emerging Great
Quantum Controversy of the mid and late twenties and thirties which
offended the objective-realist paradigm that Einstein clung to, fighting
a more and more rearguard action in the process. I venture the fledgling
hypothesis that at that point he may have regretted letting the geni out
of the lamp, and gone back to critique and try to undermine his own
method inasfar as this method had led to this for him very regrettable
orientation of Bohr, Heisenberg and others. I would like to check this
hypothesis by reading what "Einstein II" wrote.

Z: Einstein II's point (made forcefully to Heisenberg in 1926) was that
the theoretic model that is adopted legitimately *corrects* empirical
observations for distortions of the measuring instruments that are due
to objective physical effects, and since after ~1920 the vacuum was
considered even by Einstein to be both actively and passively physical,
motion through the physical vacuum can have effects that are
fundamentally no different from, say, thermal contraction, and can
therefore legitimately be accounted for by theoretic corrections..."

J: True.

Z ... which implies a reversion to a Lorentzian paradigm for
interpretation of the Einstein-Minkowski formalism (at least on the
metatheoretic level).

G: Can you quote a reference where HE actually said that? I would add
that since science is not an authority-based enterprise, his actually
saying the above would not prove the point

J: There you go again Z (not G). Give Z a nanometer and Z takes a
megaparsec! In fact there is no contradiction at all between the
Lorentzian and Einsteinian pictures any more than there is between the
kinetic theory of gases and thermodynamics! The two go hand-in-hand like
Love and Marriage between a Man and a Woman! ;-) Seriously, in moderns
terms from the recent work of Arcos and Pereira in Brazil, you can
equate the Lorentzian dynamical view to the gauge force method which
meets up with Einstein's geometrodynamical view in the Einstein-Cartan
tetrad mobile Cartan frame of four basic 4-vectors. The non-trival part
of the tetrad is the space-time distortion compensating gauge field from
locally gauging the global symmetry of translation group T4 generated by
the total energy-momentum of the dynamical field of the world. This
non-trivial part of the tetrad, in turn, comes primarily from the
coherent holographic Goldstone phase of the spontaneous broken symmetry
(SBS) of the electromagnetic symmetry group U(1) of Maxwell's
electromagnetic local gauge field that couples to the pre-inflationary
turbulent Dirac Sea negative energy virtual electron-positron
false-vacuum plasma in its Big Bang phase transition to the calm Higgs
Ocean. Einstein's 1915 theory of gravity emerges simply, very simply
from the non-trivial part of the Einstein-Cartan tetrad field. String
theory? "Who ordered that?" (Isador Rabi)

G: A lot of the current bull*** (some of it brilliant bull***,
admittedly) going on in physics (including the bombastic claims of
string theorists of having found the theory of all even though they
haven't made a single observable prediction) could have been avoided if
physicists had taken this basic point more to heart and insisted on
relating everything back to experience.

J: Exactly, exactly, exactly! I second, third and fourth that to the
unsolvable Galois fifth degree! ;-)

Z: While I agree with you that operational *illustrations* of concepts
and principles in physics impose a healthy discipline, I cannot agree
that 1905-style operationalism -- which supposes that the meaning of
high-level theoretic concepts like "time" can be reduced to one or
another particular operational definition -- is rationally supportable,
for reasons given by Einstein himself in the 1920s.

G: Again, please give me the reference to this supposed quote of
Einstein. And again, time is not defined that way; its measurement is.

J: G just hoisted Z by his own petard!

Z: Back to the SR situation specifically: with the 1905 paper, the
confusion surrounding Michelson-Morley and the Lorentz transformation
dissolved; and simplicity, beauty, and the accuracy of experimental
predictions reigned again. But in fact the Einstein-Minkowski formalism
can be given a perfectly coherent Lorentzian interpretation, precisely
due to the technical features of SR that are exposed in the analysis of
my revised "Polish joke" version of the two-clock problem: the 1905
theory turns out to be much more "Lorentzian" than it first seemed to
be, since the *reciprocal* effects of time dilatation on the observed
retardation of clocks
-- a hallmark of Einstein 1905 theory vis a vis Lorentz's -- always
automatically self-cancel when you bring clocks back together, exposing
the "virtual" character of the once-supposed reciprocity.

J to Z: False Paul. You still don't understand it. The retardation does
not always self-cancel when you bring the clocks back together.
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't depending on the contingent
histories of the clocks in a perfectly precise way!

G to Z: Again (I'm sorry I have to use this word so many times in this
post) I would like to see your clean and according to you unassailable
Gendankenexperimental statement of your critique of the Einstein (as
contrasted to Lorentz). It is becoming very frustrating to me to hear
statements from you to the above effect again and again, without having
seen the corresponding formulation itself from you, except in forms
which we have agreed were untenable. Please, out of consideration of my
nerves ( :-) ) refrain from such claims as above until you have
produced such a statement.

J: Agreed. Z has been playing this false hand now for several years.

Z: That doesn't mean that the Einstein model for SR is internally
incoherent, or that the 1905 theory is mathematically inconsistent; it
just means that when the technical details of the actual workings of the
1905 theory are properly understood, the *most natural interpretation*
of the Einstein-Minkowski formalism is, ironically, Lorentzian.

G: I don't think Lorentz himself would have taken the position you are
taking (once he had digested Einstein's approach), even though his name
is associated with the position you are taking now because it was
Lorentz's thinking BEFORE 1905.

Z: Actually that's not true: Lorentz never accepted Einstein's 1905
model. Here is Lorentz in 1920:

"It is not necessary to give up entirely even the ether. Many natural
philosophers
find satisfaction in the idea of a material intermediate substance in
which the
vibrations of light take place, and they will very probably be all the
more inclined
to imagine such a medium when they learn that, according to the Einstein
theory,
gravitation itself does not spread instantaneously, but with a velocity
that at the
first estimate may be compared with that of light. Especially in former
years were
such interpretations current and repeated attempts were made by
speculations
about the nature of the ether and about the mutations and movements that
might
take place in it to arrive at a clear presentation of electro-magnetic
phenomena,
and also of the functioning of gravitation. ... In my opinion it is not
impossible that in the future this road, indeed abandoned at present,
will once more be followed with good results, if only because it can
lead to the thinking out of new experimental tests. Einstein’s theory
need not keep us from so doing; only the ideas about the ether must
accord with it."

- H. A. Lorentz, "The Einstein Theory of Relativity" (1920).

In other words, there can still be an ether, but any ether model, in
order to be viable, must take account of the pragmatic-empirical
success of Einstein's theories.
I think Lorentz died in 1929. If you read Einstein's Leyden address on
the ether, you will see that by 1920 there was a convergence of the
views of Einstein and Lorentz:

http://www.alberteinstein.info/PDFs/CP7Doc38_English_pp160-163.pdf

G to Z: I haven't heard back from you regarding a defensible formulation
of the supposed contradiction within SR itself that you have been arguing.

Z: As I have said, there is no mathematical contradiction in SR even in
the two-clock case; but there is a "paradox" if you wish to treat the
*reciprocal* time dilatation of 1905 SR as an objectively real physical
effect.

G: I don't, because I don't know what that means; see above. and so
there is, for me, no paradox and no "paradox", and not even a
""paradox"" :-)

J: Agreed.

Z: The reason why 1905 SR is consistent in its predictions is precisely
because the reciprocity of time dilatation that you get in a single GIF
is lost when you use multiple matching GIFs to account for time
dilatation over more than one inertial segment -- and that is precisely
the point of my re-formulation of the traditional two-clock problem,
which IMHO exposes this "paradoxical" feature of the 1905 theory very
clearly.

J: Pretense! All one need do is calculate the classical phase world line
integrals of the path-dependent histories of the inexact differential
frame-invariant proper time element ds/c for each clock in the
space-time diagram. Nothing new here and every proper question has a
true and consistent answer. There is no paradox! No possible doubt
whatever!

G: As far as I know non-existent re-formulation (in the sense that it
would not remain a constant moving target, to be reexpressed differently
(and again vainly) the next time. If you think I am trying to provoke
you to finally produce the actual valid statement of the "paradox"
(operationally, and without reference to nebulous terms like
"obejctively real") then you are DAMN RIGHT :-)

J: I tried to do exactly that with Paul and failed. Paul Z is Tar Baby
in Uncle Remus. Arguing with Paul is like trying to struggle your way
out of quicksand.

Z: It is this precisely feature of 1905 SR that allows a coherent
interpretation of the Einstein-Minkowski formalism in *Lorentzian* terms.

G: I take it that we are then leaving it at that, and Einstein vs
Zielinsky is settled. Phew, I am relieved :-)

Z: No this is Einstein_1 vs. Lorentz, and Einstein_1 vs. Einstein_2! You
have to distinguish sharply between two quite different issues:

(1) The mathematical consistency of the Einstein-Minkowski formalism; and

(2) The question of which is the more natural physical interpretation of
the Einstein-Minkowski formalism. Alas, "natural" may turn out to be in
the eye of the beholder, or rather a funsction of his/her fundamental
paradigm (or structure. Issue (1) is settled by the existence of a
geometric model for the 1905 theory (Lorentz-Einstein transformations
in Minkowski spacetime); whereas (2) is not at all obvious -- although
it is beginning to look like the Lorentz model for the standard SR
formalism is the more useful in the present stage of development of
physics, and is the more natural physical interpretation.

G: It is beginning to look TO YOU to be more useful, maybe, but you have
been unable to clearly (that means with reference to experience rather
than metaphysical presupposed terms) state it much less substantiate it
-- Still waiting.

J: For Godot.