Re: SR wrong - no.

From: Eric Baird (eric_baird_at_compuserve.com)
Date: 08/07/04 

Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 17:25:13 +0000 (UTC)

On Mon, 02 Aug 2004 21:31:10 -0500, shuba <tim.shuba@eudoramail.com>
wrote:

>Wordy crank Eric Baird wrote:
>
>[snip hundreds of lines of muddled thinking]
>
>> They don't
>> seem to take their collective responsibilities i nthis regard very
>> seriously, IMO.
>
>Eric Baird is the last person who should be lecturing about
>responsibility, given his record of abusing the arXiv system.
>
>http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3c2d63f3%240%241612%249ba61822%40news.pclink.com
>

Well, actually I'd have rather not have had to write most of those
papers.

I had really wanted to write just one paper, on the conceivability of
an alternative relativistic model to SR, and then to move on from
there to an examination of how the model impacted on the solubility of
a whole range of warp-drive problems, most of which hadn't been
attacked before because the tools weren't available. In fact, most of
the ideas that I think are necessary to tackle warp-drive issues
properly can't even be put into words yet, because the existing
language tends to assume SR-specific contexts for a lot of words, and
since SR 's notion of physics isn't properly compatible even with the
simplest descriptions of spacetime curvature that crop up with
examinations of bog-standard gravity, the assumption of an SR layer
means that to a highly-trained physicist who thinks linguistically and
has grown up thinking about physics in terms of those explicit and
implicit SR definitions, most important warpdrive concepts are not
just not /expressable/, they probably aren't /conceivable/ in terms of
the existing language.

So I wanted to change that and move the subject forward, but first I
had to get rid of SR's dependence on flat spacetime, and I found that
when I got rid of the precondition of totally flat spacetime, I didn't
just lose the conventional derivations of SR, I also seemed to lose
the entire theory.

I kinda assumed that this was why nobody seemed to have published a
non-flat derivation of SR in the last hundred years, or even published
a statement of the problem ... that this was because this sort of work
is either impossible to complete while retaining the definitions of
SR, or, if completed through side-routes, seems to end up removing our
original justification for modifying the previous "Newtonian" energy
and momentum laws to give the SR counterparts.
Basically, if you start out by assuming that SR and flat spacetime are
essentially correct, and you want the theory to still work when there
are small deviations from Euclidean geometry due to the masses and
energies of the objects being described, then you can devise a scheme
in which those "missing" effects sit on another layer overlaid on top
of SR, and in which all that new layer's /deviations/ from SR's
geometry still manage to keep local c-constancy and the PoR intact.
But once you've built that "perfectionist" version of inertial
physics, with it's "SR" and "non-SR" layers, you find that the
principles derived for the physics of the "non-SR" layer seem to be
capable of describing the entire physics (with just local
c-constancy), without the "SR" layer being needed.
So the next stage is to show how the "non-SR" layer of theory can be
used, stand-alone, to reproduce the standard SR equations. And that's
the next awkward problem. Because SR only generated the
Lorentz-Einstein modifications to NM by declaring that flat spacetime
was mandatory, and without that flat spacetime condition, the simplest
set of possible curved-spacetime equations that reduce to those of NM
at low energies are ... the original NM set.

So, it seems that by attempting to turn SR from a
"first-approximation" theory of inertia to a "full" theory of inertia
that can allow our inertial objects to support the property of having
a gravitational field, we end up losing all our initial derivations
and having to come up with some brand new justification for the SR
modifications to NM being real. And without flat spacetime, and with
local lightspeed constancy fixed, there is no obvious theoretical
justification for continuing to think such a thing. And, as far as the
experimental evidence for the new energy and momentum relationships is
concerned, it still seems ot be a bit inclonclusive ... experimenters
typically don't test the relationships of SR against those of NM, they
usually instead test SR against the results expected for a flat
nonrelativistic aether stationary in the lab frame.

So the extension of gravitational arguments to the realm normally
occupied by SR is going to be psychologically "difficult" for
SR-trained physicists, and since the result of those arguments seems
to be that we lose our main reasons for believing that SR is using all
the right basic relationships, you can see why someone embarking on
this sort of work is liable to either fail, or think that the result
-- that SR seems likely to be wrong at some deep important level ---
is unacceptable.

And I think that that's why there doesn't seem to be any trace in the
mainstream literature of any work on this subject.

(okay, perhaps there's some from Einstein, but not much else)

========

So I never did get around to doing all the nice warp-drive work that
enticed me back into the subject, I instead got bogged down at the
first hurdle, of trying to get "pro" physics people to at least accept
the remote working possibility that SR /might/ not be the right
theory, so that they might accept some of the more basic principles
that went beyond SR and were essential components that I needed to use
to build the tools that I required for the warpdrive work.
If I couldn't even get the mainstream to accept the "first principles"
stuff, then it seemed pointless even trying to work on the nice juicy
warpdrive problems that were about three stages further along from
that. I figured that even if I did proceed on my own and go on to
crack the warpdrive problem, if I was unable to explain it to anyone,
it would be a pointless and (even more) frustrating exercise.

This is the problem that anyone working out on their own at the
"bleeding edge" of physics research (or at the "fringe", depending on
your viewpoint) has to find a way of coming to terms with.
It's the Explorer's Dilemma.
Just "discovering things" doesn't count, unless you have some way of
reporting back, and the time and effort needed to report back limits
the amount of time left for further exploration, so you have to find
some sort of middle way between the extremes, between the safe option
of turning your ship around and sailing home again everytime you see a
new piece of coastline, so that you never get a chance to go inland
and make any proper discoveries, or pressing onward and concentrating
on the research side, pushing on into the interior of the new land,
and making discoveries at a much faster rate, but running the risk
getting eaten by a tiger before you get a chance to report back
anything at all.
Columbus wasn't the first person to discover the Americas - he was
probably the first person to discover the Americas with an official
government research grant, and to get back again, in one piece, with
corroborating witnesses. That's how it tends to work.

Anyhow, when I was trying to write that preliminary paper on how
non-SR relativity theory might look, I found that I was constantly
having to invoke general effects and arguments, which I had /thought/
that everyone in the field already knew about, but which turned out to
not just be apparently undocumented, but apparently unknown to the
mainstream.

I would have much preferred to simply write that main paper, wait for
everyone to catch up, and then move on to the warpdrive stuff, but
that wasn't an option. Instead of speeding through the "non-SR"
paper, briefly mentioning each of the supporting building-blocks in
turn, describing the alternative way in which they might fit together,
and giving each one a citation or two to where the reader could find a
proper discussion of each smaller subject, the lack of preceding work
meant that every time I needed to be able to invoke, say, a general
optical length-change effect, or include a throwaway mention of the
generality of E=mc^2, or chuck in a wavelength-calculation method, or
refer to the indirect escape mechanism in pre-GR physics and how it
could reproduce the modern particle-pair QM description ... almost
every essential piece of the puzzle that you'd need, in order to be
able to see how the non-SR physics could work seemed to be missing
from the literature, even when you knew damned well that some earlier
researchers must have known about at least some of them.

So I had to sit down and put together a minimal core list of results
that I'd used that might be able to stand up together and make the
argument, and then I had to go away and write a preliminary paper
myself on every damned one of them.

And that's why I ended up with so many papers on LANL.
There /were/ also a couple of quickies on warp drive theory that I
knocked out in response to papers by other people, because they were
quick and easy to write, but the majority of the papers were written
because they HAD to be written before I could tackle the main paper on
non-SR theory. It wasn't "spam" or "vanity publishing", it was a
research project ... if there had been previous work on those topics
that I could have referred people to instead of wasting precious time
and energy covering the basics myself, believe me, I would have loved
to be able to do that.

But the mainstream researchers seemingly either hadn't done the
necessary work, or hadn't published it, and this came as something of
a shock to me when I first found out, because up until then I'd been
naively believing that when experts said that SR was thoroughly tested
and thoroughly explored, and that we knew pretty much without doubt
that it was right, that this meant that at least someone out there
would have done at least some research on these sorts of topics, in
order to get the wider context of how SR's results and predictions
fitted into the wider scheme.
I didn't see how, without that background knowledge, and background
work, and without any sort of credible-looking test theory, it was
possible to have a firm opinion on SR's validity one way or the other.
And I also didn't see how any professional research group apparently
composed of really clever people could have gone on for decades
claiming that their favourite theory was unassailable, apparently
without ever going back and doing these sorts of standard, basic
sanity-checks that you'd really expect to see an any other "serious"
field of research.
If a group repeatedly makes inflated claims that can be seen on
investigation to be factually wrong, and also allows inflated claims
to be made on their behalf without at least trying to trim away some
of the more obvious bull***, then yes, I think that the /group/,
acting /as/ a group, isn't taking its collective scientific
responsibilities seriously enough.

So, in the context of all that, if you then say that the number of
papers that I put onto LANL shows that I'm an irresponsible person,
and that it means that I'm in no position to accuse others of
irresponsibility, then I don't think that's a valid criticism ... to
me, the fact that I /was/ able to run straight into so many different
apparently-unpublished results that were relevant to the validity or
importance (or otherwise) of SR just documents the fact that there's
so much relevant work out there that hasn't been done (and published)
by the mainstream. Perhaps if I was criticising them for "not getting
around" to doing this sort of work, and had "not gotten around" to
doing anything to try to fill the gap myself, you'd have had a reason
to say that I was being hypocritical ... so perhaps the fact that I
/did/ then get off my backside and get my hands dirty in order to try
to fill in some of the gaps puts me in a better position to criticise
the "professionals" for not having already done it themselves.

Like I said, it shouldn't need someone like me to walk in and start
making these sorts of corrections and gap-fills. There are supposed to
be tens of thousands of trained professionals out there, you would
hope that at least one of them would be capable of doing it.

If they really aren't capable or willing to doing this stuff
themselves then it looks as if somethng's gone awfully wrong
somewhere.

"SR-compatibility" seems to be a common prerequisite for a paper
passing peer review, because we "know" that SR is right ... and yet
after a century, we still don't seem to have a proper test theory for
it?

That's a bit crap, isn't it?

=Erk= (Eric Baird)
: " There is always an easy solution to every human problem --
: neat, plausible, and wrong. "
: -- H.L. Menken

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