MacM and James R are no longer talking to each other, but at each other. Each admits / claims they have destroyed the other’s position at least 10 times, by repetition. This has been good for me as I only read carefully ~10% of the posts, so when allowance is made for fact that I sometimes read the same argument, (in words sufficiently different that I don’t immediately notice or remember it is the same) twice, I am getting about 80% of their posts content. I agree with James that Pete’s post 685616 is excellent and cuts directly to the heart of the matter.
MacM The burden of disproving SR is on you. As Pete points out in 685616, all he, James, and to a lesser extent, I must do to defend SR from your attack is show some flaw in the attack. We need not undertake the impossible task of proving SR is correct (No theory can be proven correct – only the accumulation of a lot of evidence in its favor, with no empirical evidence against, leads most people to assume it is correct.) I think you agree to this.
As I understand it, the essence of your attack is “I have given a scheme to display in B’s moving rocket ship (I am avoiding the word “synchronize” by using “display”) a clock that ticks at the same rate as Earth bound clock A.” (I also avoid immediately specifying the frame in which A’s ticking is to be “matched” by B’s display.) If this is not the essence of your attack, please state it as succinctly possible (or correct my attempt).
The difficulty with this attack, I believe, is that fundamentally your attack / argument is based on your unproven, but firmly believed and highly plausible idea: “That there can be only one reality – hence in ANY inertial frame, clock A ticks at one universal rate.” (In short, UT is the true reality.) Even if this were true (and I think not) this is wasted effort on your part until you can DEMONSTRATE it is true to us who think it is false. By assumption / firm belief, you are affirming UT and DISALLOWING the possibility that in B’s frame the real tick rate of clock A, I call it Ab, could be different from the proper rate Aa, but this is exactly what James et. al. (me included, with my muons) believe. We believe Aa – Ab is not zero and want you to PROVE that it is zero before that we congratulate you on a successful attack against SR.
The following may help you to appreciate the why your attack is meeting resistance: No matter how fervently /strongly a evangelist believes God exist, he can not use the assumption/ firm belief “He does” to convert the atheist. You can not use the “fact” Aa – Ab = 0 (even if true!) to convert us to UT any more than the evangelist can use the “fact” “God Exists” (even if true) to convert the atheist. The evangelist must demonstrate that God exists and you must demonstrate the Aa – Ab = 0.
I admit your argument has great natural appeal. It is hard to believe physical processes, like muon decay, or flexing of the 100MHz crystal controlling a moving transmitter could in truth have their process rate in frames other than their rest frame be actually changed instead of just appear to be changed, but what we find easy to believe is not always the way the world works. For example, I have never actually seen an interference pattern produced in photographic film by an exposure so weak that one can be confident that two photons rarely exist (dare I say it) “at the same time.”
I know something about the exposing of film (called the “reciprocity failure”) that makes me even willing to look skeptically upon this often-cited example of counter-intuitive nature where each photon goes through two side-by-side slits. But I have made a demonstration of the fact that each photo can go by two different paths, so I tend to believe Young’s double-slit interference is demonstrably true in very weak light at least when the photons are photo-electrically detected. (steadily scan detector, plot detection rate vs. position) What I did follows:
You can make two optical paths along different sides of a rectangle that later merge with two half silvered mirrors and two full silvered mirrors in two different ways. In one way the half-silvered mirrors are both on a side, providing a straight-line path through both from source to display screen and the other way has them at the diagonal corners of the rectangle. In this latter case both paths are always the same length and this is the way you will see the experiment described in lab manuals. In the “non-standard” geometry, the “side path” is longer by the length of the two legs perpendicular to the “straight through the half silvered mirrors” path of the standard geometry. If you keep this extra length short (I’ll quantify short in a moment) you can demonstrate interference with this non-standard geometry also, but as you make it progressively longer, the interference fades out.
In the case I actually did, the fading was noticeable with about 20 cm of extra path and the interference was gone (to my eye) by 40 cm. The exact numbers depend on the nature of the light source. It takes time for the electron to make the transition from the excited state to the lower state. During this period, you can think of the transition as pumping out cycles of the optical frequency. That is each photon wave has a finite length, called the “coherence length” (forget about LASERs, which stimulate each new photon to get into phase with those that are passing by – I am talking about relative low density gas discharge light sources) Even in these “incoherent light sources” the “head” of the photon is coherent with its own “tail,” but not with the photon emitted by some other atom.
To see interference with two paths and incoherent light sources you must keep the difference in the two path lengths significantly less that the coherence length. For me, with my physicist hat on, this proves that each photon is interfering with its self, after having gone over two different paths. I have seen this with my own eyes. Thus MacM I know there are physical facts that are both self-evidently false to any human that can think clearly and yet are true. I believe SR is one, based on all the things it predicts correctly. When I take my physicist hat off, I would much prefer to believe in UT as that seems to be self evidently true.
It seems to be ridiculous that each photon can pass through two different paths, or that a moving muon’s decay rate is really different or that a 100Mhz crystal can really flex at a much lower frequency just because they are moving relative to me! We must tell them to stop this nonsense! It is disturbing to humans (even to some physicist
). At times, even as a physicist, I too want some other explanation, consistent with what is “obvious.” I too want to grasp at any straw, such as your atmospheric energy is affecting the decay rate or some “either drag resonance” is setup in the optical geometry and this is what causes the interference pattern and the photon” really goes by only one path but it is being refracted to the locations of the peaks of the pattern by the standing density variation waves of the either associated by the resonance of the geometry, etc.
A physicist, much smarter and better educated than me, (David Bohm) has written several books (the one I own is called “the undivided universe”). He, like you and me, wants nature to behave as it obviously should and he is clever enough to have redone quantum mechanics to get all the same predictions yet put the photon through only one path. (That is why I bought his book. As far as I know he accepts SR.) But even relatively dim witted me, found a fundamental problem with his theory, which I will explain privately if you like as my posts are always too long. (At least the are infrequent.)
MacM, you were pleased (Called me the most honest here etc.) when I, based on a skim of James’s first referenced thread (679604), I ventured a PRELIMINARY, opinion that James had failed to destroy your attack (by showing how your scheme fails to guarantee B’s monitor is ticking the same as A is ticking IN B’s FRAME. My opinion has now reversed. I think James has proved your attack flawed. Why the switch in next paragraph – skip it if you don’t care why.
When skimming 679604 that James said destroyed you scheme /attack, I started to read a post that compared “Newtonian Doppler” and “Relativistic Doppler,” but stopped reading it quickly because (Unless memory fails me, the first formulae of the “Newtonian Doppler section” only reduced the Doppler shift of a receding transmitter by a factor of two, even in the limit as v approached c.) I think Newton believed (or would have believed if he ever thought about it) that if you were separating from a radiation source at nearly the speed with which it waves were coming to you then the Doppler shift would be much greater than two. I am sure he would think that if you separating from the source at that speed of the waves’ advance, you would be sitting on a fixed part of one cycle (I.e. in a DC field). Thus I thought, “no point in going further in this post” and prematurely concluded that James would fail to defend SR with this type of counter attack. I now am getting the impression that some or all of you are separating out the Doppler effect from the relativistic ones. – It has been slightly more than 40 years since I understood SR – One summer I did almost all the problems in Leighton’s book, (Modern Physics – think it is called) and there is a chapter on relativity in it. Thus I do not still possess the ability to calculate with confidence nor do I care to recover it. My only interest in physics today has to do with the economic health of my still preschool grandchildren. I have tried to improve their future by using some of the physics I still remember (more at DarkVisitor.com).
Pete’s excellent post has brought the issue in to sharp focus. The ball is in your court. Show us, without assuming Aa - Ab = 0 that UT exist. I for one would love to believe this, not the nonsense about crystal flexing, muon decay rates being motion depend. But I can’t keep postulating some new mechanism ad hoc to explain each experimental fact SR successfully predicts. Occam will take his razor to me!
Now James if you are still here, thanks for the information. I thought that there was little energy transfer between the muons and the atmosphere based mainly on two things. One is the fact that Cerinkov radiation exists proves they have not significantly been slowed by this interaction. The other is the fact that radioactive decay is perhaps the most random process known. I.e. impossible to modify by electric, magnetic fields, chemicals near by on an atomic scale, etc. Ironically, only what seems totally unreasonable (movement) changes it. (Muons do get to ground, all agree when their short life does not permit this even at v=c.)
Except for the rare event of a collision with the nucleus (like the ones which multiply a single particle into cosmic ray shower) the atmospheric interaction would be via the electric field (This is the cause of the Cerinkov)when one comes close to an electron on N2 or O2 usually. Electric fields much stronger than any macroscopic one man can make exist within certain ionic crystals at (lattice sites) More than half of all Ph.D. granted at JHU when I working on my mine (in another area) were studies of how the energy levels of rare earth elements are shifted by these internal fields (called the Stark effect) I am sure if electric fields could modify the decay rate of a radioactive particle, then someone would have incorporated a known quantity of them insides such a crystal where the lattice site field is enormous and waited a few years (if need be) before making a chemical evaluation of how many have decayed – I.e. measured the effect of strong electric fields on decay rate. Unfortunately for the people who have tried this, the rate must not have changed and instead of at least being nominated for the Physic Nobel, they were lucky to get their negative result published in some obscure journal.
Thus MacM’ ad hoc explanation, even bolstered by a Russian journal article, which I gather only noticed a trend / change in published values of decay rates, is for me as ridiculous as the fact the muons reach the surface, but the later is fact and the former is inconsistent with the many experiments that must have tried directly to change the decay rate via electric fields. MacM this “atmospheric energy transfer” is very small (they are still faster than c in air as Cerinkov proves) and would be by the electric field, not some mystical force, which would be very weak compared to that man can make between condenser plate etc and many orders of magnitude less than nature makes inside crystals.
Thus given the disagreeable choice between something (SR) that just seems ridiculous to humans, but is confirmed in many experiments and something ad hoc cause by electric fields which are known to be many orders of magnitude less than the electric fields nature makes, that still don’t show any effect on decay rates, I think the choice is clear.
Even if protesting all the way how ridiculous it is, you should, I think, stop inventing a new ad hoc explanation to explain each of all the things SR explains at once, with one model, which has had many predictions very precisely confirmed (assuming that these ad hoc explanations are false.) Especially you should abandon this ad hoc one about weak electric field’s “mediated energy transfer” changing the decay rate when fields many order of magnitude larger ones can not. I think a good skeptic like you (I hear tell that you are even testing gravity theory!) would be find it unbelievable that each of these different ad hoc explanations just happens to make the precise effect that SR predicts.
If your previously (and I hope humorously) noted offenses against “god Einstein” don’t make you fear for your soul, then fear for your life --- Occam just called to ask me where you live.
MacM The burden of disproving SR is on you. As Pete points out in 685616, all he, James, and to a lesser extent, I must do to defend SR from your attack is show some flaw in the attack. We need not undertake the impossible task of proving SR is correct (No theory can be proven correct – only the accumulation of a lot of evidence in its favor, with no empirical evidence against, leads most people to assume it is correct.) I think you agree to this.
As I understand it, the essence of your attack is “I have given a scheme to display in B’s moving rocket ship (I am avoiding the word “synchronize” by using “display”) a clock that ticks at the same rate as Earth bound clock A.” (I also avoid immediately specifying the frame in which A’s ticking is to be “matched” by B’s display.) If this is not the essence of your attack, please state it as succinctly possible (or correct my attempt).
The difficulty with this attack, I believe, is that fundamentally your attack / argument is based on your unproven, but firmly believed and highly plausible idea: “That there can be only one reality – hence in ANY inertial frame, clock A ticks at one universal rate.” (In short, UT is the true reality.) Even if this were true (and I think not) this is wasted effort on your part until you can DEMONSTRATE it is true to us who think it is false. By assumption / firm belief, you are affirming UT and DISALLOWING the possibility that in B’s frame the real tick rate of clock A, I call it Ab, could be different from the proper rate Aa, but this is exactly what James et. al. (me included, with my muons) believe. We believe Aa – Ab is not zero and want you to PROVE that it is zero before that we congratulate you on a successful attack against SR.
The following may help you to appreciate the why your attack is meeting resistance: No matter how fervently /strongly a evangelist believes God exist, he can not use the assumption/ firm belief “He does” to convert the atheist. You can not use the “fact” Aa – Ab = 0 (even if true!) to convert us to UT any more than the evangelist can use the “fact” “God Exists” (even if true) to convert the atheist. The evangelist must demonstrate that God exists and you must demonstrate the Aa – Ab = 0.
I admit your argument has great natural appeal. It is hard to believe physical processes, like muon decay, or flexing of the 100MHz crystal controlling a moving transmitter could in truth have their process rate in frames other than their rest frame be actually changed instead of just appear to be changed, but what we find easy to believe is not always the way the world works. For example, I have never actually seen an interference pattern produced in photographic film by an exposure so weak that one can be confident that two photons rarely exist (dare I say it) “at the same time.”
I know something about the exposing of film (called the “reciprocity failure”) that makes me even willing to look skeptically upon this often-cited example of counter-intuitive nature where each photon goes through two side-by-side slits. But I have made a demonstration of the fact that each photo can go by two different paths, so I tend to believe Young’s double-slit interference is demonstrably true in very weak light at least when the photons are photo-electrically detected. (steadily scan detector, plot detection rate vs. position) What I did follows:
You can make two optical paths along different sides of a rectangle that later merge with two half silvered mirrors and two full silvered mirrors in two different ways. In one way the half-silvered mirrors are both on a side, providing a straight-line path through both from source to display screen and the other way has them at the diagonal corners of the rectangle. In this latter case both paths are always the same length and this is the way you will see the experiment described in lab manuals. In the “non-standard” geometry, the “side path” is longer by the length of the two legs perpendicular to the “straight through the half silvered mirrors” path of the standard geometry. If you keep this extra length short (I’ll quantify short in a moment) you can demonstrate interference with this non-standard geometry also, but as you make it progressively longer, the interference fades out.
In the case I actually did, the fading was noticeable with about 20 cm of extra path and the interference was gone (to my eye) by 40 cm. The exact numbers depend on the nature of the light source. It takes time for the electron to make the transition from the excited state to the lower state. During this period, you can think of the transition as pumping out cycles of the optical frequency. That is each photon wave has a finite length, called the “coherence length” (forget about LASERs, which stimulate each new photon to get into phase with those that are passing by – I am talking about relative low density gas discharge light sources) Even in these “incoherent light sources” the “head” of the photon is coherent with its own “tail,” but not with the photon emitted by some other atom.
To see interference with two paths and incoherent light sources you must keep the difference in the two path lengths significantly less that the coherence length. For me, with my physicist hat on, this proves that each photon is interfering with its self, after having gone over two different paths. I have seen this with my own eyes. Thus MacM I know there are physical facts that are both self-evidently false to any human that can think clearly and yet are true. I believe SR is one, based on all the things it predicts correctly. When I take my physicist hat off, I would much prefer to believe in UT as that seems to be self evidently true.
It seems to be ridiculous that each photon can pass through two different paths, or that a moving muon’s decay rate is really different or that a 100Mhz crystal can really flex at a much lower frequency just because they are moving relative to me! We must tell them to stop this nonsense! It is disturbing to humans (even to some physicist
). At times, even as a physicist, I too want some other explanation, consistent with what is “obvious.” I too want to grasp at any straw, such as your atmospheric energy is affecting the decay rate or some “either drag resonance” is setup in the optical geometry and this is what causes the interference pattern and the photon” really goes by only one path but it is being refracted to the locations of the peaks of the pattern by the standing density variation waves of the either associated by the resonance of the geometry, etc.A physicist, much smarter and better educated than me, (David Bohm) has written several books (the one I own is called “the undivided universe”). He, like you and me, wants nature to behave as it obviously should and he is clever enough to have redone quantum mechanics to get all the same predictions yet put the photon through only one path. (That is why I bought his book. As far as I know he accepts SR.) But even relatively dim witted me, found a fundamental problem with his theory, which I will explain privately if you like as my posts are always too long. (At least the are infrequent.)
MacM, you were pleased (Called me the most honest here etc.) when I, based on a skim of James’s first referenced thread (679604), I ventured a PRELIMINARY, opinion that James had failed to destroy your attack (by showing how your scheme fails to guarantee B’s monitor is ticking the same as A is ticking IN B’s FRAME. My opinion has now reversed. I think James has proved your attack flawed. Why the switch in next paragraph – skip it if you don’t care why.
When skimming 679604 that James said destroyed you scheme /attack, I started to read a post that compared “Newtonian Doppler” and “Relativistic Doppler,” but stopped reading it quickly because (Unless memory fails me, the first formulae of the “Newtonian Doppler section” only reduced the Doppler shift of a receding transmitter by a factor of two, even in the limit as v approached c.) I think Newton believed (or would have believed if he ever thought about it) that if you were separating from a radiation source at nearly the speed with which it waves were coming to you then the Doppler shift would be much greater than two. I am sure he would think that if you separating from the source at that speed of the waves’ advance, you would be sitting on a fixed part of one cycle (I.e. in a DC field). Thus I thought, “no point in going further in this post” and prematurely concluded that James would fail to defend SR with this type of counter attack. I now am getting the impression that some or all of you are separating out the Doppler effect from the relativistic ones. – It has been slightly more than 40 years since I understood SR – One summer I did almost all the problems in Leighton’s book, (Modern Physics – think it is called) and there is a chapter on relativity in it. Thus I do not still possess the ability to calculate with confidence nor do I care to recover it. My only interest in physics today has to do with the economic health of my still preschool grandchildren. I have tried to improve their future by using some of the physics I still remember (more at DarkVisitor.com).
Pete’s excellent post has brought the issue in to sharp focus. The ball is in your court. Show us, without assuming Aa - Ab = 0 that UT exist. I for one would love to believe this, not the nonsense about crystal flexing, muon decay rates being motion depend. But I can’t keep postulating some new mechanism ad hoc to explain each experimental fact SR successfully predicts. Occam will take his razor to me!
Now James if you are still here, thanks for the information. I thought that there was little energy transfer between the muons and the atmosphere based mainly on two things. One is the fact that Cerinkov radiation exists proves they have not significantly been slowed by this interaction. The other is the fact that radioactive decay is perhaps the most random process known. I.e. impossible to modify by electric, magnetic fields, chemicals near by on an atomic scale, etc. Ironically, only what seems totally unreasonable (movement) changes it. (Muons do get to ground, all agree when their short life does not permit this even at v=c.)
Except for the rare event of a collision with the nucleus (like the ones which multiply a single particle into cosmic ray shower) the atmospheric interaction would be via the electric field (This is the cause of the Cerinkov)when one comes close to an electron on N2 or O2 usually. Electric fields much stronger than any macroscopic one man can make exist within certain ionic crystals at (lattice sites) More than half of all Ph.D. granted at JHU when I working on my mine (in another area) were studies of how the energy levels of rare earth elements are shifted by these internal fields (called the Stark effect) I am sure if electric fields could modify the decay rate of a radioactive particle, then someone would have incorporated a known quantity of them insides such a crystal where the lattice site field is enormous and waited a few years (if need be) before making a chemical evaluation of how many have decayed – I.e. measured the effect of strong electric fields on decay rate. Unfortunately for the people who have tried this, the rate must not have changed and instead of at least being nominated for the Physic Nobel, they were lucky to get their negative result published in some obscure journal.
Thus MacM’ ad hoc explanation, even bolstered by a Russian journal article, which I gather only noticed a trend / change in published values of decay rates, is for me as ridiculous as the fact the muons reach the surface, but the later is fact and the former is inconsistent with the many experiments that must have tried directly to change the decay rate via electric fields. MacM this “atmospheric energy transfer” is very small (they are still faster than c in air as Cerinkov proves) and would be by the electric field, not some mystical force, which would be very weak compared to that man can make between condenser plate etc and many orders of magnitude less than nature makes inside crystals.
Thus given the disagreeable choice between something (SR) that just seems ridiculous to humans, but is confirmed in many experiments and something ad hoc cause by electric fields which are known to be many orders of magnitude less than the electric fields nature makes, that still don’t show any effect on decay rates, I think the choice is clear.
Even if protesting all the way how ridiculous it is, you should, I think, stop inventing a new ad hoc explanation to explain each of all the things SR explains at once, with one model, which has had many predictions very precisely confirmed (assuming that these ad hoc explanations are false.) Especially you should abandon this ad hoc one about weak electric field’s “mediated energy transfer” changing the decay rate when fields many order of magnitude larger ones can not. I think a good skeptic like you (I hear tell that you are even testing gravity theory!) would be find it unbelievable that each of these different ad hoc explanations just happens to make the precise effect that SR predicts.
If your previously (and I hope humorously) noted offenses against “god Einstein” don’t make you fear for your soul, then fear for your life --- Occam just called to ask me where you live.
