Proof Minkowski Spacetime is Poorly Conceived
- Thread starter danshawen
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No, that's like saying all days are months ending in "ember". "Events" are points, they have no dimension. "Time-like" and "space-like" apply to vectors in systems of coordinates.
danshawen
Valued Senior Member
That just explains a lot. This is fun.
Of course he is trolling. Notice his avatar is a crank. His nonsensical posts are just an attempt to frustrate the more serious types here. All you have to do is read his passive-aggressive responses to realize he is trying to rattle some cages.
danshawen
Valued Senior Member
Umm… it's just an antique pencil sharpener, Cheezie. I think Minkowski must have used one just like it. It does actually have a crank though.
No, I'm not trolling. Just enjoying Ophiolite's excellent word salad repartee, and wishing someone like Minkowski could have been on the receiving end of the same sort of comment, a very long time ago.
Let me try and dumb down just a tad for the benefit of the Ophiolites.
In a rock solid world completely understood by geometry, plane trigonometry and the like, you can literally apply the Pythagorean theorem between three points defining any right triangle in three or four dimensional space and all of the geometry will make perfect sense. Simultaneous events can be agreed upon in all static reference frames and are possible everywhere continuously. Time dilation and Lorentz contraction do not exist. The speed of light is for all intents and purposes, infinite. Minkowski tried for all he was worth to make all of spacetime just like that, and he failed. If, like Minkowski, you think a description of time is complete with the linear speed of light in a vacuum, some complex numbers and the Pythagorean theorem, you probably deserve your confusion. And you won't have a clue what mass and inertia are all about.
Minkowski failed because relativity never did, but not through any of his quasi-mathematical efforts to explain whatever he thought time or simultaneity was.
Sorry, I can't make the idea sound any dumber or word salad-like without the assistance of mind-altering drugs or an aborted attempted suicide. Not really much better, huh?
Maybe you can infer the epistemological tautologies from the teleologies of a triumvirate apartheid or something. ROTFLMAO
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Right. A pencil sharpener ... with a giant CRANK but no pencil. Not even a hint of a pencil. And what would a pencil mean if you never do the math. pffft.
danshawen
Valued Senior Member
You can work out more than math with paper and a good sharp pencil. Did somebody fart? No more cheese for you, Cheezie!
But you don't work out anything. This is obvious because your ideas do not pass the dimensional analysis test. You never present the math because it would be obvious that its a fraud. BTW I looked at this guy you like so much, can't remember his name but initials are MM. One of his ideas is that pi = 4. That is just so stupid that anyone that likes his reasoning is either even stupider, or a troll.
You are a troll. If I was a mod here I would banish you to post only in Alternative Theories. No way are you serious.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
danshawen
Valued Senior Member
But the idea that a measure of time is one of relative proportional velocity (the key idea of Miles Mathis I am using here) does pass the common sense test. I understand, MM is pretty much the king of physics cranks. But even so...
Choose any instrument or process you use to measure time. It moves. Is the measure of how it moves useful if it stops moving? No, that would be a broken clock. Whatever sort of clock it is, even an atomic clock, it is dependent on movement and nothing else. Hence, time as we conceive of the core idea of it is really nothing other than a relative proportional velocity as it is possible to measure it with a functional timepiece.
Whether you compute the dimension of that to be proportional to length / time, or proportional length / length or proportional time / time, it all depends on motion, and if the movement it depends on happens to be the invariant speed of light, you are only doing the best you can, in terms of crafting a useful timepiece or instrument to mark time. But fundamentally, all you are actually measuring is relative proportional velocity.
Cheezie, I can't thank you enough for cutting to the real chase here. It isn't word salad. It's something every clockmaker has always known. It's the reason there is relativity or a science of dynamics at all, and it is a core assumption that is not served by any person who fancies themselves a scientist or a mathematician, and has not worked out for themselves that the clockmaker has not reached the endpoint of a search for the nature of time until he has found and tamed the fastest thing that moves, and made it into a clock. That would be quantum entanglement currently clocked at RELATIVE PROPRTIONAL SPEEDS >= 10,000 x c.
If you think it was Minkowski who worked out the fundamental nature of time, even conceptually, think again. If there is a clock faster than v/c, AND THERE IS, you might as well be using an hour glass instead of a light cone to understand the fundamental physical or mathematical nature of time. To believe otherwise is dividing by zero, or believing that you can understand it in a superior manner by studying simultaneity, which is the study of clocks that are broken because you are only concerning yourself with time instants that are frozen in time (or space, or even spacetime, if you prefer).
Crank that through those badly rusted and pitted gears you all use for thinking, if they are still capable of relative proportional motion, that is.
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It is unwise to misunderstand the moderators of a forum so badly that you misstate their positions on that forum. Neither time nor space is absolute because the metric of space-time geometry is indefinite. That is the quantity $$ds^2 \equiv \sum \limits_{\rho} \sum \limits_{\sigma} g_{\rho \sigma} \, d x^{\rho} \, d x^{\sigma} $$ can be zero or have either sign in contrast to the equivalent concept from Euclidean geometry, $$d L^2 = \sum \limits_{\rho} \sum \limits_{\sigma} \delta_{\rho \sigma} \, d x^{\rho} \, d x^{\sigma} = \sum \limits_{\rho} \left( d x^{\rho} \right)^2 $$. So there is no such thing as the absolute value of a pure space or time interval in Minkowski geometry or the geometry of GR. Most of us haven't been traumatized by a physics course, so your misstatements are glaring and without reasoned support. Thus you present no persuasive argument that you even have similar definitions for common physics terms in use.
False, as the text of his 1908 lecture shows. It was just a throwaway comment, not a postulate. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Space_and_Time_(Saha)
It's obviously not a Euclidean anything because now we have complex numbers, making the norm now indefinite.
That would be one choice of coordinate time, but not a preferred choice of coordinate time. A choice of coordinate time is the opposite of absolute time, and it leads to a rejection of absolute space. The embrace of a per-trajectory notion of proper time does not endorse any sort of universal absolute time, but it is required property of a universe in which people to build sensible clocks.
By failing to distinguish between choices of coordinate time and the physical quantity known as proper time, you lose a lot of the mental scaffolding required to properly understand relativistic physics. By failing to do the work yourself, you fail to understand the velocity composition law.
Citation required.
False. You need more information than the time interval. Even if you know the ratio between coordinate time and proper time, the velocity is not proportional to that ratio. Indeed, when the ratio is unity, the relative velocity between object and choice of standard of rest is zero.
I named events, not locations. In special relativity, even location has nothing to do with the "rate of time". The rate of coordinate time is always 1 second per second. The rate of proper time is always 1 second per second. The two are only compatible notions when the clock is in the same state of motion as the choice of standard of rest.
Again you misuse language. No one is "in a frame" because a frame is an imaginary, invented system of Cartesian coordinates established about choices of a coordinate origin, a standard of rest, and orientation of the three spatial axes. They are not points, they are events, with zero extent in space and zero extent in time, so they aren't positions where a person could take time to think, discuss and agree on anything because there wouldn't be the time required to do so.
You need to read your sources better. No one has introduced absolute time into this conversation but you, and you haven't conveyed what you mean by it. No one is dealing with events which are considered absolutely simultaneous, although in coordinate time some events will be considered simultaneous given that system's choice standard of rest, obviously. Special Relativity does not describe a static universe, but a universe filled with motion.
A velocity relative to OUR choice of a standard of rest. Someone else might make a different choice of standard of rest, but describe the same universe. Understanding relativity is the ability to put oneself intellectually into the shoes of another and working out the logical consequences. Thus all of it comes as a logical whole: Lorentz transforms, velocity composition laws, Thomas precession, Minkowski norms, proper time, etc.
See The Relativity of Simultaneity, post #22
Regretfully, I again ran out of time to finish this now.
Not actually a proof of sanity or soundness of your ideas.
danshawen
Valued Senior Member
Neither is a PhD, rpenner. Your other remarks are golden, and thanks.
danshawen
Valued Senior Member
There is no preferred or "standard" of rest, including that long, massless road which Lorentz chose to compute his transformations of length and time. There is however a current preferred standard of time measure, which is the speed of light. So why not at least be consistent throughout physics and math and use time and time dilation uniformly, instead of positing things like 4D rotations and spacetime curvature? There is only light propagation time, in all three dimensions and in every direction.
Length contraction is just a bound energy spatiotemporal equivalent of a Doppler shift, something else that cannot be used to establish an absolute relative velocity for anything because of other confounding physical inertial / gravitational / rotational effects.
Relativity 101, or it used to be.
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danshawen
Valued Senior Member
Yes. A set of Cartesian coordinates with no preferred frame, no preferred standard of time, time dilation, velocity, relative velocity, relative proportional velocity, origin or length that can be applied to a "set of Cartesian coordinates", much less the math or geometry that purports to manipulate them in any number of dimensions that are carbon copies of this imaginary one. Some folks never learn, such circular logic always results in the logical and semantic equivalent of word salad. Oooopsy!
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