Re: Lightspeed exceeded



John Kennaugh wrote:

PD wrote:

On Oct 4, 3:51 pm, John Kennaugh <J...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

PD wrote:
>On Oct 1, 7:29 am, John Kennaugh <J...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


[snip already-covered material]


>First of all, relativity doesn't increase complexity. It SIMPLIFIES.
>This is easy to point out.

No. The alternatives available to Einstein were to either assume EM
theory was impeccable and ditch three axioms of mechanics or assume
mechanics was impeccable and modify EM theory.


No, not quite. Take a look at the assumptions explicitly stated.
His choice was to either impose the principle of relativity as
priority over the Newtonian axioms,
or to accept the Newtonian axioms and chuck the principle of
relativity, and in so doing make the laws of mechanics behave
differently than the laws of electrodynamics among choice of inertial
reference frames.


Newton's Axioms were totally compatible with the PoR. How could they not be. To quote your own words:

"..... Einstein thought that the principle of relativity, which
certainly seemed to hold for all the laws of mechanics........"

You are trying to apply spin and I won't have it.

You hate it when your mistakes are pointed out and so of course
you try to bluster.

The only impediment to
the PoR applying to EM theory was the properties of the aether - e.g. source independence. The PoR implies that all speed is relative. If that applies to the speed of light there is no problem. Why shouldn't it apply? Why was Einstein so desperate to make light speed an exception?

No, Einstein was trying to describe the world as it is. That is
what science is about.

You cannot retrofit modern experimental evidence of source independence to the choices open to Einstein in 1905 to make what he did look 'sensible'.

Certainly you can. He was correct in his choice.

Students have a right to see history "warts and all".
Whether modern evidence is conclusive is a different subject but objectively there is nothing prior to 1964 which needs be considered.

Yes, if you wish to remain blind and indulge only in your fantasies.

As the problem had
occurred in EM theory and as EM theory was put in doubt by the discovery
that light is particulate not the continuous fields which is the basis
of Maxwell/Lorentz electrodynamics it would seem sensible to modify EM
theory - if not abandon it altogether. The two modifications needed to
EM theory were that the speed of light is source dependent and that
Coulombs law is velocity dependent.


Which would lead to predictions that are inconsistent with
measurement!


Maybe

Not, maybe, yes. That is why you are spouting nonsense.

but objectively there is nothing prior to 1964 which needs be
considered so in the context of this discussion it is irrelevant.

It shows you wrong so you choose to ignore it.

We are
discussing whether Einstein was justified in ditching 3 long established and apparently sensible axioms of physics.

Why the desire for revisionist history. Einstein was correct.



>What it does is fly in the face of common sense.

It does that too. I would go further with Dingle:

"....it has been held necessarily to symbolise truths which are in fact
sheer impossibilities but are presented to the layman as discoveries"


NOTHING that is in agreement with measured behavior in experiment is
to be taken as a "sheer impossibility". NOTHING.


How about a description of a physical phenomena which requires that an action now affects what happened in the past - would you count that as possible?

You did not understand what PD said. Read it again. You are letting your
prejudices get in the way and so you will never do any science.




>But then again, the
>Aristotelean notion of motion was common sense, and the Galilean idea
>that objects continued to move of their own accord in the *absence* of
>a force on them was completely counter to common sense.

Aristotle lived in the Mediterranean region. I somehow doubt that people
living in northern regions where people slid on ice would see it as
common sense. As I say an argument predating experimental science fails.


And thank you for making my point. Aristotle made his extrapolation
based on his limited exposure to the universe; that is, what he
considered to be so common sense as to be fundamental, was in fact
based on common experience, which is by no means exhaustive.

Likewise, our 19th century predisposition to believe that everything
physical has an underlying material reality and behaves according to
deterministic, strictly time-ordered causality, was based on an
extrapolation from a limited exposure to the universe. When in the
20th century we began to make measurements that lay outside that
domain of common experience, we learned that those extrapolations were
probably not warranted.



> But it did
>make life simpler.

>> OK so what was the justification for Einstein to ditch them?
>> Do you feel that it was reasonable justification at the time and why?

>Basically, Einstein thought that the principle of relativity, which
>certainly seemed to hold for all the laws of mechanics, should not be
>an arbitrary principle that applies to some laws and not others.

Galileo had the copyright on that idea. and it was restated by Newton
200 years before Albert.


Yes, indeed, and Einstein acknowledged that. For the laws of
mechanics.
But Newton and Galileo knew nothing about electrodynamics, and that's
where the fun begins.


> But
>electrodynamics apparently did not,

Get it right PLEASE. Because Maxwell had given real credibility to the
aether concept the idea that light was waves in the aether dominated
thinking in physics. BECAUSE of that it was assumed that while the PoR
held for laws of mechanics it would not hold for EM theory BECAUSE every
FoR was ASSUMED to have a unique speed relative to the aether. Several
experiments - the MMX being the most well known - should have
demonstrated the failure of the PoR and didn't. Hence the PoR did appear
to hold for electrodynamincs.


Sorta. The laws of electrodynamics obviously are not invariant under
the Galilean transformation, unlike the laws of mechanics.
And it is
THIS that tells you that something should be different about the laws
of electrodynamics, that they should not respect the PoR. And the fact
that MMX (and other experiments) did not show the failure of the PoR,
then yes, the laws of electrodynamics EXPERIMENTALLY did respect the
PoR. Hence there is an apparent problem somewhere. The Newtonian
axioms imply the Galilean transformation, and that in turn should
imply that electrodynamics should experimentally exhibit violation of
the PoR, which did not happen.


You are not saying anything different to what I am saying except that you are trying to dress it up to avoid the use of the word aether by referring to "The laws of electrodynamics". It was because the aether was assumed to have a unique FoR associated with it that meant that every FoR had a unique speed w.r.t the aether so a specific type of EM experiment where speed w.r.t the aether was a factor would be contrary to the PoR - and they weren't .


> if one held to the Newtonian
>axioms of time,
>space, and mass.

NO if one held on to the concept of the aether

> Einstein thought that requiring the
>principle of relativity to all physical laws was more fundamental and
>more important and a SIMPLER axiom than the Newtonian axioms.

Bull***. As he himself stated the second postulate is apparently
irreconcilable with PoR.


*Apparently* -- if you include the Newtonian axioms.

He ditched 3 axioms of mechanics in order to
reconcile the second postulate with the PoR.


That's correct. And then he followed the implications of a system that
ditched those axioms and preserved the PoR.
Out of that set of implications came a series of testable predictions
OTHER THAN the ones postulated. Those predictions matched experiment.
This was viewed as a success for relativity.



The second postulate simply
describes what an observer stationary with the aether would experience,
consistent with the contemporary accepted interpretation of the MMX that
it showed that one was always stationary w.r.t the aether (always had
zero relative velocity). IF he had simply accepted that there is NO
AETHER then there is no need to explain the MMX. One can hardly measure
your speed relative to a non existent aether. There would be no
justification for an assumption of source independence. IF there is no
aether then the obvious question becomes "If the speed of light is not
constant w.r.t the aether what is it constant w.r.t" and the obvious
answer to that is the source and if the speed of light is constant w.r.t
the source the PoR holds for light as it does for mechanics.

Suggesting that the ditching of three axioms of physics had anything at
all to do with the PoR is total spin. The PoR is far more at home with
no aether/source dependence than it ever was with the second postulate.


But source-dependence has been ruled out experimentally.


Objectively there is nothing prior to 1964 which needs be considered as conclusive. In 1905 there was no evidence of source independence so in the context of this discussion it is irrelevant.

We have distant sources (just to cite one example) that we know are
moving, and we can directly and independently measure the wavelength
and the frequency of the light emitted from those sources.
The product
of those two independently measured quantities is c.


One would not need magic fairies to patch up emission theory to account for that. Accepted theories can have fairies why should competing theories not benefit from the same flexibility in thinking?

We also have local sources (to cite another example) that are set up
to be moving in our local environment, and for which we can control
the motion relative to the local environment. The light from those
pions was timed in a direct time-of-flight measurement, and it was
determined that there is NO variation in the speed of the time-of-
flight of light regardless of the motion of the source.


What theory is that supposed to be disproving? Ritz's theory is silent on the subject of high energy physics - it hadn't been invented in 1908.

You have the most bizaree view of what you think science should be.
Ritz was wrong. That is the end of the story.

Perhaps you are referring to the Alvaeger F.J.M. Farley, J. Kjellman and I Wallin experiment of 1964. Perhaps you are less familiar with previous paper by Alvager Nilsson anf Kjellman published in 1963.

Of the 1963 paper Waldron says
"From their observations Alvaeger et al concluded that the invariance
postulate was verified. However they published a set of typical
observations and my calculations from these indicated a difference in
the times of flight from the fixed and moving sources. This supports the
ballistic theory and contradicts the Lorentz- Einstein theory. The
reason for this opposed conclusion is not clear and correspondence with
Dr Alvaeger has failed to clear up the discrepancy"

Waldron was a crank.

H&K are now known to have fiddled their results to get the right answer.

It would not matter, even if true. The gps does the proof daily.

Maybe Alvaeger tried to be objective but it is perfectly clear what Alvaeger hoped to show. Even if he tried to be objective ones own bias is likely to affect the result. Of course if light is source dependent current theory is wrong.

It is not wrong so speculations are worthless.

The experiment is highly technical and draws on
current theory. The only thing one can say for sure in the Alvager et al experiment is that high energy particles hit a beryllium target and the result was gamma photons apparently travelling at c relative to the beryllium target. If you say that the beryllium target is the source then it has proved nothing at all. A pion may be an artifact of current theory. 'According to current theory' A pion, if it exists at all exists for only 8.4 x 10^-17 s which means that when it decays it does so within the atomic structure of the beryllium target and does not travel in free space at all. Ritz theory does not say exactly what constitutes a "source" under those circumstances.

OTOH there is the evidence of source dependence provided by Wallace which you no doubt instantly dismiss.

Since there is no source dependency, yes, we can dismiss it.


The idea of the aether was contrary to the PoR. Without the aether there
is no problem but what Einstein wanted was to retain most of Maxwell's
wave in aether theory while accepting the PoR as absolute. What he
wanted was an aether concept which did not imply a unique FoR. An aether
which not only provided symmetry at the experimental level (LET) but at
the level of the theoretical structure. (He objected to the asymmetry in
the theoretical structure of LET). He TOTALLY FAILED to come up with an
alternative theoretical structure to Lorentz's. What he required was an
aether which had the same relationship with all observers in order to
give symmetry. In other words an aether which every observer would
naturally find himself stationary w.r.t so that "Any ray of light moves
in the observers FoR with the determined velocity c, whether the ray be
emitted by a stationary or by a moving body". Lorentz's maths is passed
off as Einstein's theory and Einstein hailed as a genius for his
non-existent theory.



>But that was just a hunch, a motivator.

The old "Einstein was a genius - he had wonderful instincts" - crap.
Your belief system is based on spin. Get real.


Not really. Look, suppose there is a platter on a table with something
on it that is covered up with a ***. One person looks at it the
shape and says it's a loaf of bread and a cup of wine. Another person
says it's a hedgehog wearing a top hat. And someone comes up and
touches one part of it and says, "It's an intake manifold from a Chevy
short-block." Then a little while later, a corner of the *** is
lifted up and something hard and inorganic is exposed and so we can
rule out the hedgehog. And then a bit later more is exposed, and after
a bit it becomes clear that it is indeed an intake manifold. "But
that's not fair!" yell the others. "The original information we had
was consistent with bread and a cup of wine, and even consistent with
a hatted hedgehog. How could it be determined FROM THE INFORMATION at
the time that it was an intake manifold and not one of those??" And
the answer is, of course, it doesn't matter. It turned out to be the
intake manifold in the end, so the inspired guess, that was based on a
touch that no one else took, ended up being right.


My version would go something like this. Suppose there was something under a *** and one person 'A' was convinced it was a jelly and the other 'W' that it was a bell. It was poked and it felt very solid. It was hit and it rang. Despite that 'A' was convinced it was a jelly - and guess what - he managed to convince everyone else it was a jelly.

:o) :o) :o) :o) :o) :o) (o: (o: (o:

[ snip the rest - might find time to look into it later]

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