Re: GR for Roberts, Carlip, Daryl, Bilge/ Tucker

Ken S. Tucker wrote:
> Daryl McCullough wrote:
> > Ken S. Tucker says...
> >
> > >Daryl McCullough wrote:
> >
> > >> >Because "s" is an invariant, we either obtain
> > >> >s=0 or s=1.
> > >>
> > >> No, you don't. s is proper time. It can be any real number.
> > >
> > >Of course and so can "c, q or h".
> >
> > No, they can't. Once you've chosen a system of units
>
> See, thats where you're misconcieving GR/GC (General
> Covariance) and the purpose of tensors. The point of
> of GC is it applies to all systems of units, it's NOT
> pre-chosen!

Ken fans the air, wildly, on a slow pitch. Well,
if the ball had been where Ken thought it was, that
might have been a hit.

>
> >c q and h are *fixed* by that choice. That isn't true of s.
> > s is invariant, but it isn't a *constant*.
>
> Well, if light-rays are the basis of our survey of
> spacetime and ds=0 for light-rays it follows "s"
> is a constant.

Ah, the mluttgens school of physics. Nothing but
lightlike intervals allowed.

>
> > s is proper time. If an ideal clock moves from point A to point B,
> > then s along the path will be the elapsed time (the time at B
> > minus the time at A). You can certainly choose a time scale so
> > that the elapsed time at B is exactly 1, but then there will be
> > points between A and B at which s is a number different from 0 or 1.
>
> Look, that's queer, you're setting an invariant
> to have different scalar quantities because of
> a transformation. There is no such thing as
> proper time measured in seconds!

Look, indeed. :-)

I'm guessing that Daryl hasn't responded yet because
he hasn't picked himself up from the floor. And he's
too polite to say ROFL himself. I can't resist filling
the vacuum, so, at risk of a spate of invective from
you know who, here goes:

Ken has no clue.

Oh sure, he can throw tensor notation and associated
buzzwords around like Zeus throwing thunderbolts, and
that's an admirable talent of sorts, one I can't hold
a candle to. But what's the good of all that if he
can't grasp a simple statement about s, but instead,
comes up with a gem like the above?

[I snip the rest because I am so fluzzy, I don't even
own a copy of Weinberg. Yeah, yeah, I know.]

.

Relevant Pages

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