Mathematical Obscurities in Special Relativity

Hi DAVID,

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">He still always believed in an “ether”, and he said so in his 1920 book about relativity theory.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

It is common knowledge that our polaroid sun glasses block certain transverse wave components, and we all know that the concept of a wave does not make any sense without a medium to propagate through, i.e., a wave is <b>by definition</b> the collective motion of forms. Therefore, our sun glasses partially block this motion of a yet to be detected substance, which we call "light" when a wave propagates through it.

While our polaroid glasses have shown to work, why we decided to shun the "ether" is beyond me. []

Very few knowledgeable physicists would agree with your views regarding SR. These are not dumb guys - they can abstract at a very high level...where did you ever get the idea that Lorentz was kissing up to Einstein so he could acquire tag along fame - in fact, if there were any modifications to the two theories - it was Lorentz ether theory, made necessary because Lorentz's fictitous time could not explain some of the experimental results that depended from SR. As originally envisioned, Lorentz and Fitzgerald proposed length contraction alone - the time dilation that appeared in his transforms was regarded as illusory.

Einstein believed in SR after 1918 as evidenced by his 1920 address at Layten - he also believed in an ether - but SR did not need any medium in order to be a useful calculation tool - it never purported to offer a physical reason that tied it to a spatial medium. After a century, we still do not know if it is correct - and we still do not know how any of the various abstract transformations, whatever their true form, are linked to the physical world. Physics, in general, deals with relationships - SR in 1905 provided a link between magnetic and electic fields - it did not reveal how time and length are physically tied to relative velocity - but all theories are in some sense incomplete - for that matter I have yet to read a plausible explanation of why time gets modified by motion wrt to the ether or whatever.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Jan</i>
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While our polaroid glasses have shown to work, why we decided to shun the "ether" is beyond me. []

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The biggest problem with acceptance of “the ether” today is because in 1905 Einstein said there was no “ether”, and his cult leaders in physics today ridicule any professor or physicist who suggests there actually is an ether. This is the result of politics in physics and a result of the long-time political movement that has been trying to turn Einstein into the world’s supreme “god” of science. This is essentially a hoax, but the chief hoaxers are world-masters at political hoaxing and they are very experienced at carrying out major global hoaxes.

And in addition, there is, perhaps, a unique quality or property of light that caused Einstein to believe in the “no ether” concept in the first place, and that is the possible “self-propagating” nature of light.

If we take Maxwell’s model of the oscillating electric and magnetic fields that move through space, like what is shown in this JAVA animation.....

micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/science...omagnetic/index.html

.......then it is not actually a light “wave” that moves through a pre-existing “ether” of electric and magnetic fields that fill all of space, but little wiggling oscillating electric and magnetic fields themselves that are emitted by glowing atoms, and it is the tiny oscillating fields that move through space, not as a “wave” in the pre-existing fields of space, but as wiggling oscillating fields that originate at the glowing atoms and that travel through space all by themselves.

The simplest way to imagine this is to take a small magnet and wiggle it, then get in your car and drive down the highway while wiggling the magnet. There you have an oscillating magnetic field moving through space, and you don’t need any “pre-existing” magnetic field in space to make this happen. However, you do need the moving magnet to make it happen. So, the big question here is, can little oscillating electric and magnetic fields move through space without the particles that generated them moving through space with them? In other words, can a tiny little oscillating magnetic field move through space by itself with out a tiny little physical magnet moving through space that continues to generated the tiny oscillating magnetic field that is moving through space?

I’ve read that when Einstein was a teenager, he adopted this concept of Maxwell’s oscillating electric and magnetic fields, and that is why he believed that no “ether” was required to propagate them, since they were not “waves in a field” or “waves in an ether”, but autonomous moving wiggling electric and magnetic fields that traveled through “empty” space.

But later of course, at least by 1911, he began to realize that gravity fields can slow down the speed of these wiggling fields, and in 1918 and again in 1920 he speculated that the gravity fields somehow act as a kind of “ether” for light propagation.

Well, of course, we know today that light most likely travels at approximately “c” inside a moving galaxy, so there must be something inside that galaxy that travels with the galaxy and that regulates light to the approximate speed of “c” inside and relative to that galaxy. This causes an absolute necessity of some kind of light-speed-regulating “ether”, and some of the latest ideas along these lines is that the gravity fields of the galaxy somehow act as a light-speed-regulating “medium” or “local ether” for the propagation of light. So, even if light is “self propagating”, something in space must control and regulate its speed, much like air regulates the speed of sound.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by altare</i>
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Einstein believed in SR after 1918
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For several years after 1905 Einstein was plagued with doubt about the validity of his 1905 theory, especially regarding the clock paradox of section 4. In that section he made the mistake of synchronizing the clock of the k system to the clock of the K system, and he made them both synchronous, BEFORE the relative motion began. So when the relative motion began, no one could tell which clock should be the one that has a lower tick rate, since he had already stressed in the theory that he did not consider any effects of acceleration upon the clocks, both systems were totally equal, both clocks were the same, and the motion was only “relative” and not absolute. So, no one can say which clock, the k clock or the K clock should be the one that slows down.

From 1905 to 1918 he received so much criticism about the mistakes, errors, and great blunders in the 1905 theory, he felt compelled to re-work it and add gravity fields to it, also atomic clocks, and also the effects of acceleration. But by doing this, he did away with the original form of the 1905 SR theory and converted it into the better thought-out GR theory, and as a result of that, the original 1905 SR theory ceased to exist, and he knew it.

But by 1918 he was world famous, and his original SR theory was what had made him famous in the popular media around the world, and so he dared not admit that his 1905 SR theory was completely erroneous. So he continued to maintain it was flawless, and after 1918 he maintained it and promoted it as a hoax upon the world.

In the first place, the 1905 theory contains no physical forces, no effects of acceleration, and no fields of any kind. Thus, just “relative motion” between two autonomous systems can’t possibly have any effect upon the tick rate of any clock in either system. This is what the vast majority of European physicists had complained the most about when they first read his 1905 paper. There is no physical reason in the SR theory for any clock to change rates.

And Einstein later realized that this criticism was in fact correct, and that is why he added the accelerative effects in 1918, and the atomic clocks, and the gravitational fields. This turned the SR theory into a variation of the 1895 Lorentz theory, in which Lorentz had placed a physical force upon moving atoms and that was what he said causes them to slow down their oscillation rates. In order for Einstein to place a physical force on his clocks in the SR theory, so that one of them really could slow down its tick rate, the first thing he had to do was change the clock from a mechanical “balance wheel” clock into an atomic clock, of the same kind Lorentz had used in his 1895 book, and then Einstein had to place some real force on the atoms of his atomic clock, and he did that by adding the effects of acceleration and the effects of gravity fields to the SR theory. When he did this in 1918, the original fieldless, forceless, and gravityless 1905 SR theory ceased to exist. But he never admitted this because he never admitted that his original SR theory was wrong and that all is critics had been right about it in the first place.

I wish you guys would stick with the sciernce and leave the history to other sites. And the mud slinging is distracting to be kind about how to describe it.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by DAVID</i>
<br /><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Jan</i>
<br />
While our polaroid glasses have shown to work, why we decided to shun the "ether" is beyond me. []

<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
The biggest problem with acceptance of “the ether” today is because in 1905 Einstein said there was no “ether”, and his cult leaders in physics today ridicule any professor or physicist who suggests there actually is an ether. This is the result of politics in physics and a result of the long-time political movement that has been trying to turn Einstein into the world’s supreme “god” of science. This is essentially a hoax, but the chief hoaxers are world-masters at political hoaxing and they are very experienced at carrying out major global hoaxes.

And in addition, there is, perhaps, a unique quality or property of light that caused Einstein to believe in the “no ether” concept in the first place, and that is the possible “self-propagating” nature of light.

If we take Maxwell’s model of the oscillating electric and magnetic fields that move through space, like what is shown in this JAVA animation.....

micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/science...omagnetic/index.html

.......then it is not actually a light “wave” that moves through a pre-existing “ether” of electric and magnetic fields that fill all of space, but little wiggling oscillating electric and magnetic fields themselves that are emitted by glowing atoms, and it is the tiny oscillating fields that move through space, not as a “wave” in the pre-existing fields of space, but as wiggling oscillating fields that originate at the glowing atoms and that travel through space all by themselves.

The simplest way to imagine this is to take a small magnet and wiggle it, then get in your car and drive down the highway while wiggling the magnet. There you have an oscillating magnetic field moving through space, and you don’t need any “pre-existing” magnetic field in space to make this happen. However, you do need the moving magnet to make it happen. So, the big question here is, can little oscillating electric and magnetic fields move through space without the particles that generated them moving through space with them? In other words, can a tiny little oscillating magnetic field move through space by itself with out a tiny little physical magnet moving through space that continues to generated the tiny oscillating magnetic field that is moving through space?

I’ve read that when Einstein was a teenager, he adopted this concept of Maxwell’s oscillating electric and magnetic fields, and that is why he believed that no “ether” was required to propagate them, since they were not “waves in a field” or “waves in an ether”, but autonomous moving wiggling electric and magnetic fields that traveled through “empty” space.

But later of course, at least by 1911, he began to realize that gravity fields can slow down the speed of these wiggling fields, and in 1918 and again in 1920 he speculated that the gravity fields somehow act as a kind of “ether” for light propagation.

Well, of course, we know today that light most likely travels at approximately “c” inside a moving galaxy, so there must be something inside that galaxy that travels with the galaxy and that regulates light to the approximate speed of “c” inside and relative to that galaxy. This causes an absolute necessity of some kind of light-speed-regulating “ether”, and some of the latest ideas along these lines is that the gravity fields of the galaxy somehow act as a light-speed-regulating “medium” or “local ether” for the propagation of light. So, even if light is “self propagating”, something in space must control and regulate its speed, much like air regulates the speed of sound.



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Yes, this is obvious since light speed varies in different mediums, for one reason or another. The greater confusion is in the debate of whether the speed of photons are source dependent in addition to being medium dependent if there is one, or if they only traveled at c relative to the vacuum. This issue has never been clearly resolved, either experimentally or philosophically, and is a main cause of the persistence of the SR hoax.