What if Newton was not wrong?

[DaveC426913]

Muons might very well be affected by time dilation and length contraction. However it is a dodgy theory because the muon is after all a charged particle (the claim that it has low interaction despite being a charged particle is an oxymoron surely). Isn’t it possible that muons travelling through a depth of 36,000 ft of closely packed particles ($$2.7 x 10^{19}$$ particles per cubic centimetre (i.e., the atmosphere). There is every chance that muons detected close to earth’s surface are the result of secondary interactions resulting from the original muons decay or interaction with other particles?Be that as it may and despite claims that every precaution has been made to ensure that the original muons are followed through the atmosphere, the claim lacks credibility.

So, despite having done no such experiments yourself, you simply outright reject the results because you find the claim "lacks credibility". (Have you examined the research, to see if these green newbies even considered - let alone accounted for - intermediary interactions?)

You are altering the data to fit your idea, rather than altering your idea to fit the data.
That is not science; that is the opposite of science.

Quant, if you’re standing still on earth, and then start waving yours arms about, your arms will age less than the rest of your stationary body. Do you think your arms at the end of waving, are the same arms you started with?

This is actually a very good question. I'd be interested in Quant's answer to it. It might open his eyes a little.

I started the thread but it now seems to going where plenty of men have gone before and failed.
You guys are dealing with it so I'll leave you to it.

Doh! You beat me to it. I was making one last gesture in the faint hope that Quant would say: Ah! I see my error! But he's already broken out the craft paper and pencil crayons.

One of the things the internet has done is give voice to every newbie who fancies they're thinking outside the box when in fact they haven't any idea where the box is.

Quant is among a million like him. I have no interest in helping someone who won't help themselves.

I leave it to you, James.

 

[James R]

quant:

James R thank you for your very generous and informative post, I greatly appreciate it.

Great! I hope you are open to revising your ideas as we clear up some of your misconceptions about relativity.

Imagine two people setting out from Los Angeles on the same day and at the same time, both are on the way to Las Vegas. One of the travelers reaches Las Vegas after travelling 10 kms , the other traveller reaches Las Vegas after traveling 250 km. This is not because they have taken different routes but because their speeds were different. Does this make sense?

I guess you're considering an example where the 10 km traveller moves at a speed that is significant fraction of the speed of light, while the 250 km traveller moves at a speed that it almost negligible compared to the speed of light. The second situation is an approximation. The 250 km distance from LA to Las Vegas (if that's what the distance is) must contract for anybody who travels from one location to the other, at any speed. The contraction will be small for people who travel slowly compared to light speed (e.g. you won't notice much contraction of the distance if you drive your car at 100 km/h).

As far as it all making sense goes, there's no problem. If both of the two travellers start at rest in LA and end up at rest in Las Vegas, then both times they are at rest they will agree the distance from LA to Las Vegas is 250 m (or whatever it is). It is only while they are in motion that the distance is contracted for them. Sure, while they are travelling they will disagree on how far they each have to go to reach the destination, but that's just a difference in the measurements they each make. It doesn't affect any event that happens. Moreover, they can each account for the difference in the other guy's measurements, by appealing to his velocity relative to the Earth and applying their understanding of relativity.

Surely it would make more sense to imagine that each of the travelers had reached a different version of Las Vegas.

Not to me, it wouldn't. Would the "different version" of Las Vegas have to be forever different for both of our two travellers, after they arrived at the destination and got together in the bar to discuss their plans for going to the casino? In what way would Las Vegas differ for both of them, forever after?

Also, this view postulates that every time anybody in Las Vegas takes a walk around they block, multiple Las Vegases somehow spring into existence, different from the Las Vegases that every other resident of the city experiences, and different for ever after. What a mess of "alternate realities"!

(By the way, I have a similar philosophical complaint about the 'many worlds' version of quantum mechanics, but that's a different story.)

The bottom line here is that: no evidence drives us to require any of this "different versions" stuff. People pretty much agree on what Las Vegas looks like, regardless of how many times they have walked their dogs around the block. (Note: I am fully aware that this argument doesn't rule out a possible infinite multiplication of Las Vegas's. It only says that nothing requires that in order to explain what we observe.)

If you could explain this. (Let me say at the outset no-one can explain the same location being both 10 km and 250 km distant under the same initial conditions with the exception of a variation in their speeds.)

Be careful. No two people with "the same initial conditions" will claim that the same location is both 10 km and 250 km away. The difference is only observed once we sufficiently alter the situation away from the equal "initial conditions" for our two travellers. We need to make a significant change to accelerate one of our travellers from speed zero to a speed close to the speed of light, for instance. While we're doing that, that observer will see the 250 km progressively shortening, until the target speed is reached and the distance is 10 km. Then, at the other end of the trip, we need to decelerate our traveller back from close-to-light-speed to zero for him to arrive in Las Vegas and be able to sit stationary in a casino somewhere.

Hopefully from a purely epistemological point of view, it remains debatable as to whether a destination can be 10 km and 250 km distant to two people starting from the same point, at the same time and travelling by the same path to the same destination.

They travel along the same path through space, but not through spacetime, as DaveC pointed out. Relativity is not a theory of a universal time and a variable space, or a theory of a variable time and a universal space. It is a theory of spacetime.

I think it is my right as a free thinker to contest this claim of SR that a destination can be 10 km away and 250 km respectively for two people starting from the same point at the same time and following the same path.. Do you see what I am getting at?

Nobody disputes your right to contest the claim.

Muons might very well be affected by time dilation and length contraction. However it is a dodgy theory because the muon is after all a charged particle (the claim that it has low interaction despite being a charged particle is an oxymoron surely). Isn’t it possible that muons travelling through a depth of 36,000 ft of closely packed particles ($$2.7 x 10^{19}$$ particles per cubic centimetre (i.e., the atmosphere). There is every chance that muons detected close to earth’s surface are the result of secondary interactions resulting from the original muons decay or interaction with other particles?

No. The point is that muons decay in a characteristic amount of time when they are at rest. They are formed in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays and they would not be able to reach the surface of the Earth's surface in the numbers that are detected if Newtonian physics applied.

Secondary interactions (if they occurred and still allowed for the muons to reach the ground) would necessarily slow the muons even more, giving them more time to decay. In other words, if there were secondary interactions, we'd expect to detect fewer muons at ground level, not more.

Be that as it may and despite claims that every precaution has been made to ensure that the original muons are followed through the atmosphere, the claim lacks credibility.

Your idea of "secondary interactions" seems to have been pulled out of thin air as an ad hoc attempt to explain how muons can reach the ground. Do you think that idea lacks credibility?

Lastly, yes, I do have a better theory than both relativity (special and general relativity) and quantum mechanics too, much better.

Are you going to present it to us?

Have you published your theory anywhere? If not, why not?

 

[quant]

You are altering the data to fit your idea, rather than altering your idea to fit the data.
That is not science; that is the opposite of science.

I do not agree no-one has seen an atom let alone a muon, how can they detect its presence or absence; through secondary effects. How good are those in the context of the figures I had quoted. Further more, all arguments that you propose seem to inevitably lead to my own lack of understanding. (Kindly note I will ignore any comment from exchemist, for what its worth.) While at the same time you are ignoring the basic core of what I had stated. Here is what I said: If you deal with this in a sensible way we can proceed too the question of muons. This is what I said and this core to what I need answered.

But that is not in the problem. The problem states that if two entities start from the same place, at the same time and travel at different speeds they will travel different distances to the destination. One will reach the destination after 10 km and the other will reach the destination after travelling 250 km. IT IS NOT AN ILLUSION. You have to face up to that, it is in now way a perception, although it may be argued that this is the case. This is where the fallacy arises, you cannot have weird theories of space and time and still live in the everyday world.

If you do not agree or still insist on talking about 'perceptions, then as I said it is my right to differ. I will go with Galileo: ""In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual" (1632).

 

[DaveC426913]

I do not agree no-one has seen an atom let alone a muon, how can they detect its presence or absence; through secondary effects. How good are those in the context of the figures I had quoted.

What figures? About the size of electons and photons? That has been explained to you as wrong several times now.

Further more, all arguments that you propose seem to inevitably lead to my own lack of understanding.

See above. You are making statements that are factually incorrect. Yes, you demonstrably lack understanding.

We can fix that. Ask questions instead of making assertions.

While at the same time you are ignoring the basic core of what I had stated.

We are not there yet. The things you are stating are based on a lack of knowledge of the subject matter. We have to correct that.

Here is what I said: If you deal with this in a sensible way we can proceed too the question of muons. This is what I said

What you said keeps talking about perception and illusions. No one here is using those words except you.

Time dilation and length contraction are neither perception nor illusion. They are objectively measurable observations.

So we can't proceed to explain further until we correct your misunderstandings. You can't discuss physics in a vacuum of knowledge.

 

[quant]

quant:

Great! I hope you are open to revising your ideas as we clear up some of your misconceptions about relativity.

I guess you're considering an example where the 10 km traveller moves at a speed that is significant fraction of the speed of light, while the 250 km traveller moves at a speed that it almost negligible compared to the speed of light. The second situation is an approximation. The 250 km distance from LA to Las Vegas (if that's what the distance is) must contract for anybody who travels from one location to the other, at any speed. The contraction will be small for people who travel slowly compared to light speed (e.g. you won't notice much contraction of the distance if you drive your car at 100 km/h).

As far as it all making sense goes, there's no problem. If both of the two travellers start at rest in LA and end up at rest in Las Vegas, then both times they are at rest they will agree the distance from LA to Las Vegas is 250 m (or whatever it is). It is only while they are in motion that the distance is contracted for them. Sure, while they are travelling they will disagree on how far they each have to go to reach the destination, but that's just a difference in the measurements they each make. It doesn't affect any event that happens. Moreover, they can each account for the difference in the other guy's measurements, by appealing to his velocity relative to the Earth and applying their understanding of relativity.

Not to me, it wouldn't. Would the "different version" of Las Vegas have to be forever different for both of our two travellers, after they arrived at the destination and got together in the bar to discuss their plans for going to the casino? In what way would Las Vegas differ for both of them, forever after?

Also, this view postulates that every time anybody in Las Vegas takes a walk around they block, multiple Las Vegases somehow spring into existence, different from the Las Vegases that every other resident of the city experiences, and different for ever after. What a mess of "alternate realities"!

(By the way, I have a similar philosophical complaint about the 'many worlds' version of quantum mechanics, but that's a different story.)

The bottom line here is that: no evidence drives us to require any of this "different versions" stuff. People pretty much agree on what Las Vegas looks like, regardless of how many times they have walked their dogs around the block. (Note: I am fully aware that this argument doesn't rule out a possible infinite multiplication of Las Vegas's. It only says that nothing requires that in order to explain what we observe.)

Be careful. No two people with "the same initial conditions" will claim that the same location is both 10 km and 250 km away. The difference is only observed once we sufficiently alter the situation away from the equal "initial conditions" for our two travellers. We need to make a significant change to accelerate one of our travellers from speed zero to a speed close to the speed of light, for instance. While we're doing that, that observer will see the 250 km progressively shortening, until the target speed is reached and the distance is 10 km. Then, at the other end of the trip, we need to decelerate our traveller back from close-to-light-speed to zero for him to arrive in Las Vegas and be able to sit stationary in a casino somewhere.

They travel along the same path through space, but not through spacetime, as DaveC pointed out. Relativity is not a theory of a universal time and a variable space, or a theory of a variable time and a universal space. It is a theory of spacetime.

Nobody disputes your right to contest the claim.

No. The point is that muons decay in a characteristic amount of time when they are at rest. They are formed in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays and they would not be able to reach the surface of the Earth's surface in the numbers that are detected if Newtonian physics applied.

Secondary interactions (if they occurred and still allowed for the muons to reach the ground) would necessarily slow the muons even more, giving them more time to decay. In other words, if there were secondary interactions, we'd expect to detect fewer muons at ground level, not more.

Your idea of "secondary interactions" seems to have been pulled out of thin air as an ad hoc attempt to explain how muons can reach the ground. Do you think that idea lacks credibility?

Are you going to present it to us?

Have you published your theory anywhere? If not, why not?

You are altering the data to fit your idea, rather than altering your idea to fit the data.
That is not science; that is the opposite of science.

I do not agree no-one has seen an atom let alone a muon, how can they detect its presence or absence; they can be inferred only through secondary effects. How good are those in the context of the figures I had quoted. Not very good or close to non-existent. Further more, all arguments that you propose seem to inevitably lead to my own lack of understanding. (Kindly note I will ignore any comment from exchemist, for what its worth.) While at the same time you are ignoring the basic core of what I had stated. If you deal with my question in a sensible way we can proceed to the question of muons. This is what I said and this is core to what I need answered.

But that is not in the problem. The problem states that if two entities start from the same place, at the same time and travel at different speeds they will travel different distances to the destination. One will reach the destination after 10 km and the other will reach the destination after travelling 250 km. IT IS NOT AN ILLUSION. You have to face up to that, it is in now way a perception, although it may be argued that this is the case. This is where the fallacy arises, you cannot have weird theories of space and time and still live in the everyday world.

If you do not agree or still insist on talking about 'perceptions, then as I said it is my right to differ. I will go with Galileo: ""In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual" (1632).

The bottom line here is that: no evidence drives us to require any of this "different versions" stuff. People pretty much agree on what Las Vegas looks like, regardless of how many times they have walked their dogs around the block. (Note: I am fully aware that this argument doesn't rule out a possible infinite multiplication of Las Vegas's. It only says that nothing requires that in order to explain what we observe.)

No-one is claiming that the two Vegases would be different, they might be identical but just end up in different places, based on how much the distances change. Why, as I asked before should location be sacrosanct when everything else is changing. Further how is it that people can agree on what Las Vegas ;looks like but can't agree that it can be accessible at different distances depending on the speed with which it is reached.

They travel along the same path through space, but not through spacetime, as DaveC pointed out. Relativity is not a theory of a universal time and a variable space, or a theory of a variable time and a universal space. It is a theory of spacetime.

This is just word salad, with no reason or sense behind it. During a lecture in 1921 Michelson, yes the same Michelson as in the Michelson & Morley experiment said: "Relativity has brought more confusion than clarity to the understanding of motion." Which is ironic since relativity was built on the null result of his experiment.

Are you going to present it to us?

Have you published your theory anywhere? If not, why not?

Of course the theory has been published, which I won't go into, as I have been warned of being Banned for any reference, apart from, I am hoping. in Alterative theories forum at this site. So we will wait and see. Hear what Nikolai Tesla had to say, (The man who enabled electricity to be sent from one end of the USA to the other in spite of Edison's violent opposition): : "Einstein's theory is a mass of errors, and it does not offer any benefit to mankind." I happen to agree with him.

n.n I had to make this a seperate post as I ran out of time for an edit.

 

[DaveC426913]

Quant: it appears you are having trouble with the quote feature. Your latest post seems to be a duplicate, except for the addition of the last paragraph.

 

[DaveC426913]

This is just word salad, with no reason or sense behind it.

And therein lies your problem. It makes no sense - to you.

I assure you, it makes sense to everyone who has studied it.

You don't get to reject it simply because you don't understand it. At least, not and expect to have a useful discussion about it.

 

[quant]

What figures? About the size of electons and photons? That has been explained to you as wrong several times now.


See above. You are making statements that are factually incorrect. Yes, you demonstrably lack understanding.

We can fix that. Ask questions instead of making assertions.

We are not there yet. The things you are stating are based on a lack of knowledge of the subject matter. We have to correct that.


What you said keeps talking about perception and illusions. No one here is using those words except you.

Time dilation and length contraction are neither perception nor illusion. They are objectively measurable observations.

So we can't proceed to explain further until we correct your misunderstandings. You can't discuss physics in a vacuum of knowledge.

I see that you are very keen, no let me change that to manic, on putting down any logic and depending solely on references (i.e., you do not do your own reasoning or use your brain) . I have to say that there is nothing wrong with that if it were not for the inability to hear anything else. Further the figures I referred to as anyone with a bit of acumen should be able to discern was to do with the density of the atmosphere and the likelihood or unlikelihood of a charged particle making it through such density without undergoing interactions. Not as you believe anything to do with the size of electrons and atoms! Statements like this highlight your own lack of knowledge, or more precisely, lack of understanding.

 

[DaveC426913]

. Further the figures I referred to as anyone with a bit of acumen should be able to discern was to do with the density of the atmosphere and the likelihood or unlikelihood of a charged particle making it through such density without undergoing interactions.

You were ambiguous about what figures you meant. I had to guess, and i guessed wrong. I did ask for clarification on what figures you meant.

As to your conjectures about muons, what do you base them on? It sounds very much like you made some very broad assumptions about the experiments and decided they weren't plausible.

So I asked you: did you bother to read up on the experiments to see if perhaps these hapless scientists accounted for the things that concern you? You did not answer that question

Or do you think it's OK to dismiss the findings outright, without even reading up on it?

 

[quant]

And therein lies your problem. It makes no sense - to you.

I assure you, it makes sense to everyone who has studied it.

You don't get to reject it simply because you don't understand it. At least, not and expect to have a useful discussion about it.

But it didn't make sense to Rutherford, Soddy, Michelson, Poincare, Lenard, Fizeau, Tesla and hundreds of other eminent scientists. Of course all opposition to Einstein and Relativity died away very rapidly and completely with the exploding of the atomic bomb which every one took to be a personification of his merits as a physicist and not as was really the case the end point of an ongoing discussion among eminent physicists . I am not talking about relativity, please take note, but about how the atomic bomb and the equation e = mc^2 came about.

 

[quant]

So I asked you: did you bother to read up on the experiments to see if perhaps these hapless scientists accounted for the things that concern you? You did not answer that question

Yes, why should you think I didn't. I also read up about relativity and the GPS, which was never acknowledged at the GPS site in the fifty years or so that it has been in existence. See: This link to NIST : Which is truly amazing no mention of relativity ! Who would have thought it? No Nobel prize for relativity for Einstein despite his living past the second world war and well into the fifties, I wonder why? Plenty of time surely?

 

[DaveC426913]

Yes, why should you think I didn't.

Because, if you had, you wouldn't have made the mistakes you did, such as misunderstanding the effects of secondary interactions, as James corrected you on, dozen posts back.

But it didn't make sense to Rutherford, Soddy, Michelson, Poincare, Lenard, Fizeau, Tesla and hundreds of other eminent scientists. Of course all opposition to Einstein and Relativity died away very rapidly and completely with the exploding of the atomic bomb which every one took to be a personification of his merits as a physicist and not as was really the case the end point of an ongoing discussion among eminent physicists . I am not talking about relativity, please take note, but about how the atomic bomb and the equation e = mc^2 came about.

Oh good lord, another conspiracy. Dude, we've had three quarters of a century to gather data.

Look, time dilation is a confirmed phenomenon. If you hope to put forth any alternate ideas, you have your work cut out for you throwing out the vast preponderance of uncountable experiments and measurements that demonstrate it.

And "I looked on the NIST website but couldn't find it therefore it's fake" is not going to cut it.

Here's a little primer material, but feel free to just Google 'GPS and relativity'.

Inside the box: GPS and relativity - GPS World

Clocks are at the heart of GPS. Advances in space-qualified atomic clocks that kept time to within 10 nanoseconds over a day were a key development that made GPS possible.

www.gpsworld.com

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Critical For GPS, Seen In Distant Stars - NASA

An effect predicted by Albert Einstein has been identified in a double star system about 29,000 light years from Earth.

www.nasa.gov

Error analysis for the Global Positioning System - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[exchemist]

But it didn't make sense to Rutherford, Soddy, Michelson, Poincare, Lenard, Fizeau, Tesla and hundreds of other eminent scientists. Of course all opposition to Einstein and Relativity died away very rapidly and completely with the exploding of the atomic bomb which every one took to be a personification of his merits as a physicist and not as was really the case the end point of an ongoing discussion among eminent physicists . I am not talking about relativity, please take note, but about how the atomic bomb and the equation e = mc^2 came about.

Einstein's theory of relativity was pretty well fully accepted by the end of the 1920s, long before the Manhattan Project.

Poincaré died in 1912, only 7 years after Einstein's first relativity papers, but had already worked on the Lorentz transformations that are used in relativity. He was in fact the first to describe what he called the "principle of relativity". He also predicted gravitational waves, as later also predicted by general relativity. Far from being an opponent of relativity, he was one of its fathers, as were Lorentz and Fitzgerald.

I can find no evidence of positions on relativity taken by Rutherford or Soddy (who was in any case a radiochemist). Michelson does indeed seem to have been reluctant to let go of the earlier Poincaré/Lorentz aether model.

Tesla was mad as a March hare and understood nothing about such things. (Tesla is of course a favourite scientist of cranks.)

More here on who initially opposed relativity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_theory_of_relativity

What is striking about it is how rapidly and completely it was accepted, compared to so many scientific theories in science. Both relativity and quantum theory were developed largely over the same 2 decades of the c.20th and both were taken up amazingly rapidly, because of their success in resolving outstanding conundrums and in making successful predictions. Einstein was well to the fore in both fields of course, though with QM he was just one of many.

 

[James R]

Also worth mentioning: science isn't a popularity contest.

Even if a lot of famous men believed that the theory of relativity was wrong, that doesn't necessarily mean it was wrong. It could be that the famous men were all wrong, instead.

What we know for sure is that nobody has shown that the theory of relativity is wrong* any time in the past 120 years. On the contrary, all the available evidence points to the theory being among the best verified theories in science.

We can probably cut some slack to the famous men who were trying to get up to speed with the theory of relativity when it was just new, like back in the 1900s through to 1920ish. Not all of them understood it very well before they started publically expressing opinions about it. But bear in mind that they didn't have the benefit of 100 years of people working out how best to teach the theory to others. Nor did they have the benefit of 100 years of solved problems in relativity.

---
*Caveat: when I say relativity isn't wrong, I'm talking about being wrong in its domain of applicability, which tends to be on scales that are "large" compared to, say, the scales of particles or atoms. Physicists are well aware that relativity is not (yet) a quantum theory. They are also well aware that it is unable to explain certain things that happen in "extreme" conditions on small scales (e.g. at the centre of a black hole). In other words, relativity isn't comprehensive or complete, but then again, few - if any - physical theories are. It does the job. It has a proven track record of success after success.

 

[quant]

Also worth mentioning: science isn't a popularity contest.

Even if a lot of famous men believed that the theory of relativity was wrong, that doesn't necessarily mean it was wrong. It could be that the famous men were all wrong, instead.

If I'm wrong at least I am in very good company, including the nobel prize committee which surely had ample time to assess the merits and demerits of relativity!

 

[Pinball1970]

If I'm wrong at least I am in very good company, including the nobel prize committee which surely had ample time to assess the merits and demerits of relativity!

Drawn back in because this is getting more bizarre. Relativity has been demonstrated to work using very sophisticated experiments many performed after Einsteins death. It is not wrong.

Will it get refined, upgraded or quantized at some time in the future? Most probably.

However, it is totally pointless saying a scientific theory is wrong when A. It clearly is not w.r.t. to the domain it operates and B. It will be subject to scientific enquiry and therefore change in the future.

 

[Pinball1970]

If I'm wrong at least I am in very good company

They wont be, they are Nobel prize winners.

 

[exchemist]

If I'm wrong at least I am in very good company, including the nobel prize committee which surely had ample time to assess the merits and demerits of relativity!

Einstein got his Nobel prize in 1921, when relativity had yet to prove itself.

The committee wanted to give it to Einstein, but decided on the photo-electric effect and the resulting principle of “quanta”, a term which Einstein was the first to use in a physics context, as the photo-electric effect and what followed from it were by then better established.

 

[exchemist]

Drawn back in because this is getting more bizarre. Relativity has been demonstrated to work using very sophisticated experiments many performed after Einsteins death. It is not wrong.

Will it get refined, upgraded or quantized at some time in the future? Most probably.

However, it is totally pointless saying a scientific theory is wrong when A. It clearly is not w.r.t. to the domain it operates and B. It will be subject to scientific enquiry and therefore change in the future.

The funny thing is, quant is trying to have it both ways here. On the one hand he says scientific orthodoxy demands unthinking acceptance of the doctrine of relativity, but at the same time he says the Nobel committee was never convinced the theory was sound!

So which is it, one wonders. It can’t be both.

 

[DaveC426913]

The funny thing, quant is trying to have it both ways here.

So which is it, one wonders. It can’t be both.

Interestingly, CE over in the Aquatic Ape thread is trying the same thing. "Don't listen to all those so-called experts and their published papers! Listen to my expert and her book! "