Slashdot Mirror
Physicist Claims Time Has a Geometry
sciencenews writes to tell us that a physicist at Stanford has just recently published a peer review website for several physics lectures focusing on a single underlying idea that "time is not a single dimension of spacetime but rather a local geometric distinction in spacetime." The science is presented quite clearly and originally uses GPS systems as a point of focus. From the article: "Not too long ago, people thought the Earth was flat, which meant they thought that gravity pointed in the same direction everywhere. Today, we think of that as a silly idea, but at the same time, most people today (including most scientists) still think of spacetime as if it were a big box with 3 space dimensions and 1 time dimension. So, like gravity for a flat Earth, the single time dimension for the 'big box universe' points in one direction, from the Big-Bang into the future. A lot of lip service is given to the idea of "curved spacetime", but the simplistic 3+1 'box' remains the dominant concept of what cosmic spacetime is like."
Is available at the author's website, timecube.com.
I always knew my high school geometry teacher came from another dimension.
I suggest you read Slashdot
You know you want to se ea guy with +5, Redundant!
I agree that there aren't a lot of people who intuitively reach to the Lorentz transform to explain the progression of time, but there are plenty of obvious reasons for that. Not sure it takes a Stanford physics prof. to make what is essentially a epistemological point though.
For kicks, check out one way to visualize the spacetime wheel.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Robert Heinlein used this as the central idea of his book "Then Number of the Beast" in 1986 The Number of the Beats
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
I think this scientist doesn't quite know what is going on. The reason that spacetime is spelled together and not "space time" is preciselly because it is to be regarded as one entity : spacetime. Talking about time separately as being or not being curved is speculation, because there is no "time" separate from "space".
Perhaps someone should tell him that general relativity has already been invented. Physicists know that time has geometry---it is, after all, a part of spacetime, which has geometry. With regard to his claim that GPS has unexplained anomalies, he may be right. However, GPS is based on the Schwarzschild metric, which assumes a non-spinning, point-like mass. The earth is neither of these. Accordingly, there will be small corrections due to the combined effect of earth's spin and its density profile. At present, we are unable to calculate those corrections (we've only solved some important special cases, because the math is so hard), but they almost certainly explain the GPS deviations.
I perceive time as energy that changes form. Without this happening there is no time. Although observers will experience time different, the change is constant and proportional with each iteration.
It should be obvious to anyone who understands how an emulator works.
Ray
Is this so called, "physicist" in this picture?
http://timesafety.ytmnd.com/
The novel idea that there are an infinite number of time dimensions in the Universe revolutionizes gravitational theory and much of modern science with it. A number of outstanding scientific mysteries are definitively solved, including observations that lead to the concepts of 'dark energy' and 'dark matter'.
A number of outstanding scientific mysteries are also solved with my new unpublished theory that 1+1 = 2. Doesn't mean that the idea holds water, though.
I think that many problems in academia are because of "publish or perish" advancement. I think this is an example in point.
If time has many dimensions then I wonder why we perceive it to go forward only (though at different relative rates depending on relative speed). The reason why we perceived gravity to point down only was just a matter of not being able to see the big picture, although I would have thought more people would have noticed the Earth is round sooner, the curve is clearly visible from most mountaintops. So what's the big picture we need to see in order to see more dimensions to time? How do we step back and notice the slight curve in the horizon?
It sure seems like time goes forward only, from my own day to day observations. My mind can't even comprehend what going another direction (except for "backwards") would even mean as a concept.
Uhm...aren't there eleven dimensions according to M-Theory?
Those poor bastards, they have us surrounded. Now we can fire at them in all directions!
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so."
Not meaning to troll or anything but this has quite a few of the silly science traits. Not saying its junk but a healthy skeptical approach is necessary here.
Basically if it was the genuine article, I would expect the website to list his position with Standford (he appears not be facutly) and his previous work. I didnt see that. The power point presentation has all the signs such as lots of pretty graphs and pictures which "prove" this (although admittedly this is better than most) and a lot of big words. What I would expect to see is a bit of hard maths and maybe one example, he's coming on far too eager. Also he focuses on what it fixes, what does it break? I want some predictions for experiments to measure. Its easy to explain one or two effects with a theory, the real test is what does it predict. I would also expect a link to a preprint explaining this and its abstract. I would go so far that any serious scientist would post a preprint on xxx.lanl.gov as the first step of going public.
I'm very doubious about any werid and wonderfull theory coming from somebody who is outside the world of science, as theres a lot of chafe out there. Just go the poster session of the APS annual meeting to see what I mean. Okay its helpfull to keep an open mind, Einstein came from the outside with his really werid seemly crackpot theories but that happens rarely.
Now just to point out I'm not saying its junk, I havnt read it yet, just saying it appears to raise of a few of the warning flags.
We shouldn't forget the effect that the sun and moon's gravitation may have on the orbit of satellites. VERY, VERY minor I agree. But perhaps enough to explain some anomolies.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
In my experience, scientists who work with such issues are quite clear on this point (and, so far as I can tell, have been for eighty some years).
But for other sorts of scientists (e.g. biologists), engineers, and the rest of us, who only need to calculate things to five or ten decimal places or so, assuming that the time points in the same direction throughout the area of interest (and generally that space is flat and such) is reasonable--so reasonable, in fact, that we'd be nuts not to work with that as an assumption.
If I'm tracking the migration of some sort of beetle or planning a system of trusses to support a load or deciding if I should walk or drive to the store for milk, I would have to be mad to start out treating spacetime as a fine-grained network of plank-scale events with information flow between them determining the local geometry of space time (and thus the direction of time). Likewise with the effects of nearby astronomical bodies--if they were big enough and close enough to seriously distort spacetime I'd have a lot bigger problems to worry about. On average, to the level I'd ever need to deal with in these sorts of cases, it is now and the future is coming up later and the past is what already happened.
--MarkusQ
Don't tell me the TimeCube guy is right after all?
His tone is off. Don't gripe to us about how we're like flatearthers for using the current (empirically consistent) model. If you've got a better model show us your predictions and let us test it. Jeez, he sounds like an IDer. (ID=intelligent design)
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
"Not too long ago, people thought the Earth was flat" It's a common misconception and almost modern myth that people in the recent past believed the earth was flat. The truth is that it was generally accepted by most learned people that the earth was spherical from the 1st century onwards and many argued so much earlier. You can read more about this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth
More like the GAME CUBE!!!
Choice quote: "Sony justifies all human evil."
That would explain a few things. Or even better yet, mobius strip-like. We're traveling on the surface, without anyway to go "out" and keep going in cycles. Without a way to mark our spot (putting something in a time period, waiting to come back to it), because nothing appears to be immune to the effects of time, we'd have a hard time proving it.
Think about it, much of what we use to explain time (planetary cycles) involves spheres or elliptical rotations/paths. Our planet comes back to the same "spot" (well relatively close anyhow) every year... why should time be any different?
FLR
In 2030, when we're all agents of the Singularity, I'm sure we'll be constructing complete implementations of universes in our heads to envision/solve problems. Then you'll need to understand space(time)^D intuitively just to work the damn IDE.
Reading his paper/presentation it seems like he is throwing out the theory of relativity, and most of modern astrophysics.
I am a bit skeptical towards those who make revolutionary claims like this and publish it to the general public instead of in scientific journals.
Tor
Multidimensional representations of time do not get you to Oz. "Pantheistic solipsism" does, according to the book. The central idea of that book was that the world was all myth, and as such there's no reason you can't hop from myth to myth, as long as your particular myth was written by someone who will script you to do it. The parallel universes were only parallel in that they were all represented in works of fiction.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
It's 2006! Where's my flying car???
Only Time will tell...
teehee~ (sorry.)
"I'm a Laver, not a Phyto[plankton]"
http://www.bede.org.uk/flatearth.htm -- This is one myth that really needs to die! Even more so than that Betsy Ross was involved with the American Flag.
There is definitely a good case to be made that the past-versus-future arrow of time is not fundamental. Basically our psychological sense that the past is different from the future comes from the direction of the thermodynamic arrow of time, but the second law of thermodynamics doesn't come from the basic laws of physics (which are essentially time-reversal symmetric) but from the boundary conditions of the universe: for some reason unknown to us, we had a low-entropy big bang. The meaning of "past" is really "that way to the big bang."
It's also probably true that in a complete theory of quantum gravity, the picture of three space dimensions plus one time dimension (3+1) would break down completely at small scales. The whole idea of distance and dimensionality is probably a large-scale approximation that loses its validity at small scales. There is a strong argument to be made that for fundamental reasons, spacetime must be discrete, not continuous, at the Planck scale. The only people seriously trying to construct discrete theories of quantum gravity right now seem to be the people doing loop quantum gravity (not string theory, which uses a flat 3+1 background of spacetime). For a good popular-level account of this kind of stuff, see Smolen's Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. In loop quantum gravity, they are able to construct an infinite set of possible universes (each one is a type of knot), but the problem is that none of them can be proved to resemble flat 3+1 spacetime, even asymptotically. In other words, there's no way you can even take this tangle of events and figure out whether it has anything like time and space that you can define on it. It's like being a flea living in a world that consists of threads woven together. On your scale, can't be sure whether it's a one-dimensional piece of yarn, a two-dimensional piece of fabric, or a three-dimensional wad of wool.
Find free books.
...people never thought the world was flat. For millenia, we've noticed that you see the top of a ship in the horizon before the rest of it, which was attributed to the world's spherical shape. One of the great Greek mathematicians also accurately determined the circumference of the Earth within a couple of miles, if I recall.
The dumb shit has obviously never heard of Riemannian geometry or the fucking Riemann metric tensor
Holy fuck! My head asplode. That was seriously probably the worst website evar, not to mention the guy can't write a single full sentence. It's all run ons, and at least 1.00000000001 times as bad as the worst thing I've ever seen on slashdot. That guy used way too much LSD.
I am Spartacus
Time is abstract. A temporal dimension makes motion impossible. Why? Because (surprise) nothing moves in time or spacetime as time is not a variable by definition. This is the reason that Sir Karl Popper called spacetime "Einstein's block universe in which nothing ever happens" (Conjectures and Refutations). See Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime for more info.
Unless you're editing a movie, it really doesn't make sense considering time as a an axis. It's almost as if time is a cohesion of forces expressed cumulatively across all forces in the universe. As objects move, the relative difference in forces expresses a change. That is time.
So perhaps time would be best understood not as a straight line, but as water sloshing around in a bathtub.
Another aspect of space-time may be a non-uniform fabric. We understand gravity as a curvature of space time. Perhaps there are multiple space times expressed via the three of the fundamental forces. Different fundamental particles are either affected or immune via these overlapping space-times. Particles affect one another via strong nuclear forces. These particles in turn affects the behavior of the whole as expressed across the three space times: gravity, electro-magnetism and weak nuclear.
Those were my thoughts.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
that is not true
How does this relate to the Big Bong theory again? Is it that I just have to have used one?
IIRC, if you have more than one dimension of time, everything goes to shit and we may as well just pack our bags, move back to the canopy, and fling sh*t at each other.
Spacetime perceives time as a one dimensional vector that is orthogonal to all other vectors. Because relativistic equations for time, distance, mass, etc, use a sqare root function, you get imaginary distances and imaginary time when an object exceeds C. Usually, an imaginary quantity means that you're looking at the wrong axis.
(Trivial case in point: when solving a quadratic equation, if the parabola doesn't intersect the X axis, you will get a complex number. If you break that down into real and imaginary components, the imaginary components correspond to the displacement in the Y axis for that solution's real component value in the X axis.)
Ergo, if a tachyon exists, it would experience a spacial axis as "time" and the time axis as space, UNLESS "time" is not a single axis, in which case all bets are off.
In consequence of not having a telephone-number IQ, I can only speculate wildly, but I'm going to guess that the relativistic equations do indeed refer to some measure of bleeding between space and time and that no further dimensions are required - for GPS or for any other phenomena governed by relativity. (Superstrings being about the only exception I can think of.)
I personally think that part of the problem is that time IS regarded as "special", whereas perhaps it would be better if it were regarded as special "only as far as absolutely necessary". To the extent that specialness is an extra parameter, you want to eliminate all extra parameters as far as possible (and no further).
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I was brought up in a conservative, FSM-fearing family. All my life I believed that the FSM was the one and only divine creator, and that only through His Word I could reach salvation (stripper factory and beer volcano)
/. for leading me to the path of enlightenment.
Yet, today, as I read the teachings of Dr. Gene Ray for the first time, I finally saw the TRUTH. I have been lied to all my life but my anger only feeds my love for the Cube. We are all sinn^H^H^H^H stupid and only through the glorious Time Cube can we reach the ultimate, 4-corner, polar smartness.
Thank you
"Imagine that 'the arrow of time' in the Universe, like gravity on Earth, is pretty much the same everywhere, yet also different everywhere relative to everywhere else. That means that the 'arrow of time' points in different directions in spacetime depending on where you are, so time has a geometry just like space has a geometry. The novel idea that there are an infinite number of time dimensions in the Universe revolutionizes gravitational theory and much of modern science with it. A number of outstanding scientific mysteries are definitively solved, including observations that lead to the concepts of 'dark energy' and 'dark matter'."
Heady claims. Interesting that he's publishing this first in a book and a website, rather than in a peer-reviewed journal, unless I missed mention of a journal somewhere. Such brazen moves seem to bring more scorn than regard from fellow scientists, Stephen Wolfram being a prime example. Wonder Alexander Mayer will fare with his theory...
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
This is a well crafted scam to get Department of Homeland money. Just look at the data! Our GPS satellite network is suffering from a sawtooth anomaly! The only way to fix this and restore security to our country is to give this guy DoH grant money! :)
Some of the poo poo comments I read must echo what was said about Einstein a nearly a century ago, and about string theory a generation ago. (Though one has to wonder if M-theory works if the appearance of a single time dimension is a local phenomena. It might since the extra dimensions the math describes are less than nanoscopic and themselves a local phenomena.
Of course maybe this fits better. Maybe 3-D space is the only space that is universal or maybe like the m-theory tiny dimentions even 4-D space is twisted and warped.
That would make wormholes not these odd tubes between locations as we think of them, but just places were the warped and twisted dimensions of the Universe intersect each other.
Anyway... I looked at the main presentation and while I will never get the math, the model and how it applies to some known results makes sends. Fun Fun Fun... Did we really think Einstien would be the last to redefine the universe on this scale?
Actually this is a guess... I'm calculating that this is 5 seconds after that "discovery of geometric space-time" article was posted back way in 2006.
Sorry, I did see this before posting, but re-reading the parent comment to my comment made it too easy to say "professor".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
2-dimentional space implies that you can move forward, backward, left, and right. 3-dimentional space adds the motion of up and down.
According to this physicist, the "old" notion of is that with time, we can only move in one direction -- forward. Supposing that he's right, and we have 2 or 3 dimentions in time, we'd be able to move backward, up, down, left, and right in time -- people would be able to switch between several "tracks" in time.
This might work in theory, but I've never observed it.
Sure, we may be able to achieve a "time shift" someday, but that doesn't add a new dimention to time.
Okay, why is this guy targetting the stupid masses if his theory is so conclusive? That link is like reading an ad for something that may or may not work. It danced around any factuality. Used some current terms like "dark matter" and pointed people to either being a)like those who didn't believe the Earth was round or b)part of the growing masses that believe the stuff that he didn't really explain. Something akin to a religion, really.
Let me try to sum it up:
The world doesn't work the way everybody thinks. People on a large scale can be wrong, you know? Now, are you one of the "right" people or the "wrong" people? The principles of the way the world does work haven't been included, but make your decision!
Well I read the article and went through the power point presentation using Open Office :-)
I must admit, I'm convinced that time is different depending on where a person is. I know it for a fact 'cause where I'm sitting it took FOREVER to work through that presentation! Ugggghhhhh....
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
".but at the same time, most people today (including most scientists) still think of spacetime as if it were a big box with 3 space dimensions and 1 time dimension. ..."
.000001 percent of the population.
That is, if by most people you mean
Time is flat. It's been a well established fact for thousands of years. It relates to timespace in that when you fall off the edge of the world you also fall out of time. Einstein was right in that if you could make the sun rotate in the opposite direction around the earth you'd go back in time. The updated text books including Intellegent Design will also include a passage on Flat Time Theory. With the support of the current administration the US should once again be world leaders in science and technology. Now if we can get some of those pesky laws of motion and energy conservation off the books we might get a working perpetual motion machine!
1.21 Gigawatts
I'm not that great at math but my conception of time has always been that time is our movement through dimensions that we can't directly sense. Probably a naive concept but it always worked for me and probably not as silly as the idea of flat one directional time.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
It's not that we can't excede the speed of light. It's that we can't excede the speed of time. There are no constants. Which one is fixed, space or time?
He mentioned that charged particle in a gravitational field does not radiate? What the hell is he talking about? If you leave an electron on our table top (so to speak), of course it's not going to radiate as the net force on the electron is zero. Otherwise, it'd be moving. (freshman physics) An electron in a gravitational field will acclerate, and it will move. And yes, it will radiate. Does anyone know this guy's original training? I believe the Crack Pot Detector [tm] is ringing.
The way I understand it, our universe consists of four dimentions that we can readily explain to some degree of accuracy, plus a bunch that I won't even try to understand. They are: length, width, volume (depth), and time. If you tell me that time has more than one dimention, then length, width, and volume have more than one dimention to them as well.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0507619
These guys show that dark matter comes from ignoring nonlinearities in general relativity.
--
Brian Sutin
http://skewray.com/
Thought I saw it on an old bottle of soap.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
lol.
Jump to page 25 of the second set of slides, where the author shows two time vectors at an angle to each other. If you have two observers, one with each time vector, then each observer thinks that the other is slowed down. Each sees redshifted light from the other.
This angle between time vectors can be caused by gravity or by the curvature of the universe.
In the gravity case, it is used to explain discrepancies in all sorts of measurements, from the Pioneer spacecraft, to the changes in the orbits of various celestial bodies, to discrepancies in the GPS, to the apparency that a U.S. atomic clock and a French one will each think the other is ticking slower. This is what most of the first slide show is about.
In the cosmological case, the idea is that the universe is round (see page 28 of the second presentation) and that the redshift that we think is due to the expansion of the unverse is actually due to the curvature of the universe, i.e., a galaxy around the universe from us will appear to have slower time, because its time vector is going in a different direction than ours. A galaxy ninety degrees around would appear to have time completely stopped, so it would be invisible to us (frequency of zero). Galaxies further away than that would be going backwards in time from our perspective, but we can't see them.
This is an idea I have not seen before. It seems really neat to me. It seems plausible but then (a) I can't personally verify the observations that he claims validate his theory; he could have produced fake graphs and they would fool me, but I would think it would be easy for him to get caught at that, and (b) even though I've had calculus up to differential equations, I never had non-Euclidean geometry or higher-dimensional stuff, so I can't actually follow his calculations very well. Then again, I didn't try very hard.
We shall soon see if he has made a significant error. The numbers and the observations will tell the story; either they work out, or they don't.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
You should be seeing epicycles every time coordinates are transformed in order to fit observation into theory (and not the other way around). Relativity has to be the biggest kludge ever.
F /V08N3SU2.PDF
Unlike most people believe, relativity is not the final word in physics, although it is the most popular theory, since it requires very few arbitrary constants (speed of light). Other theories exist; mostly with more constants, but the arbitrariness of redefinition of coordinates is not required. For example, taking the energy and size of the universe as arbitrary constants and speed of light as variable produces an interesting theory: http://www.redshift.vif.com/JournalFiles/V08NO3PD
The first thing that I'd like to do, is to...
Not *no-one*. Hell, the Flat Earth Society was an active group until a decade or two ago. (It never caught on as well as Young Earth Creationism did, though).
the direction of increasing entropy. Going backwards on microscopic scale is easy. Macroscopic scale time travel is impossible. Of course, time is not one of the geometric dimensions.
Canadian physicist Garnet Ord has unified Newtonian and Einsteinian spacetime models for about a decade with fractal spacetime. Fractals are numbers with fractional dimensions. By treating time as a fractional dimension, all these physical phenomena can be described accurately.
;) promise even more accurate models, and even better combinations of models that have each seemed to offer value, but disagreed with each other.
A simple example is how time can flow in one direction, either completely or just enough to seems so. Because time isn't even one dimensional, the motion in the negative direction (half its dimension) doesn't happen. These innovations along similar lines (puns intended
--
make install -not war
Pixel, "the cat that walks though walls" may have something to do with it.
that the Timecube is *not* a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Most likely, Timecube is the 4th dimensional manifestation of FSM (or other way around. I wonder if hyperstring ... eh, hyperspaghetti theory has to do with it)
1. Figure out how to generate nutrinos with just the right spin :-)
2. Open storefront nutrino generate based radioactive waste disposalsites
3. Profit!
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
on Internet noone knows you are a dog.
Any student could have told you this,
Time slows to a crawl whenever the class is boring, tedious and generally uninteresting. Conversing time speeds up for anything fun or interesting.
Why is T percieved differently by us than X,Y, and Z?
Why is T the ordinal axis, rather than X,Y, and Z?
If spacetime is this collection of dimensions, then why is time experienced differently by us than the way we experience length, width, and height?
If T is mathematically identical to X,Y,Z then how is it that we physically observe T in a completely different way than X,Y,Z?
What's the reason for this? What's going on? Is it because of the fact that our own brains are based on electro-chemical mechanisms which are somehow sequentially organized along the T-dimension?
Can someone please explain?
On his very first example, he talks about the distance that light travels inside a rocket. He says that if the rocket is accellerating the distance the light will have to travel is longer, and will seem like the other clocks periodicity changes. This is WRONG. Objects going close to the speed of light are foreshortened - measured by a stationary ruler a 100 foot long rocket at relativistic velocity can be only 50 feet long. His statement is wrong because the periodic time does NOT change, in fact the rocket itself gets shorter the faster it goes.
He shows he doesn't know how relatavistic space time works on his very first page.
Bzzzt - thank you for playing.
And you pick out his statement that time is relative?
He disputes the existence of a big bang, or any other kind of origin to the universe.
Paraphrasing the last page of his full paper, the universe is the manifestation of eternity and the infinite.
Personally, after reading his full paper once, I believe that I will have to re-re-re-read it before i can determine if there is a flaw in his reasoning.
However, I do think he is on to something.
There may well not have been a big bang, or any other definite "past origin" to the universe. It simply is, and always will be.
-dave-
The pig browse. With Google. Sigh is to the chicken. Chicken is fool. Giggle. The DailyWTF giggle.
And if you don't knw that T'=T/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2), with similar equations for M' and L', I can't help you. Confused? Well, having won an award on this subject, I do hope not. It would mean that there are an awful lot of very stupid professional physicists in England.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yeah, I know you meant it as a joke, but it's one of those jokes that is likely to have more than a passing resemblance to something that actually happens...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I've always marveled that there are scholars who can work well with complex subjects, but can't communicate them well to others. Sort of like a great chef who can't write a recipe down well enough to cooking students to follow. Slides: sloppy stuff. The bullet points seem choppy an not well explained. The points are unclear. Slide 2 drops what seem like weak arguements to me and I haven't touched physics in a direct way since 1988. In bullet 4 he says a pulse "implies", in the next, "therefore". "Implies" leads to "therefore"? since when? As I recall, you can't conclude what will be observed in one frame of reference from the what is observed in the other. Paradoxes can happen. What kind of bugs me is the insistant thinking in straight lines. Because an observer at rest would observe a doppler shift along the straight-line diagonal between clocks, he assumes the observer in the rocket must. However, Einstein showed that the rocket observer would see a light beam bending "down" (toward the bottom of the rocket) as the beam itself was accelerated. Thus, any light beam/photon that went from one clock to the other would be observed taking a balistic trajectory to do so, not traveling in a straight line. The trajectory would become more pronounced as greater acceleration was applied. That means that the path followed by the light that does go between clocks gets longer as acceleration increases. If acceleration stays the same, the light's path stays the same. (Hmmm, would that mean that relativistic distance perpindicular to motion increases as acceleration increases? I don't remember that in physics.) If I recall correctly, there can only be doppler shift between items along the axis of relative motion (where V is not 0) No velocity, no shift. So if there was a red shift, they must be moving away from each other at some velocity. If the acceleration stays the same, the light's path will not change to the observer on the rocket, so the distance remains constant for constant acceleration. No dopper shift. OK, I'm tired now. And only to page 5 of the intro. If there are wholes already, how can the rest be good?
Can I get a research grant now? Kthx.
Important blurb from the website:
Imagine that 'the arrow of time' in the Universe, like gravity on Earth, is pretty much the same everywhere, yet also different everywhere relative to everywhere else. That means that the 'arrow of time' points in different directions in spacetime depending on where you are, so time has a geometry just like space has a geometry. The novel idea that there are an infinite number of time dimensions in the Universe revolutionizes gravitational theory and much of modern science with it.
This didn't seem to jive with the slashdot summary, so I thought I'd post it. I get the impression time is supposed to be *a* geometry, not a dimension, or even multiple dimensions. I'm thinking of time as something like gravity, since that's the analogy used. But I wonder what that means exactly.
Is there a time force? a particle? Since time seems to generally head in one direction, are we being drawn to something? If so, is it a local phenomenon? With enough energy, can we change directions and go towards something else? Is this how small particles can seemingly travel backwards in time?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
This may seem strange... Decide for yourself.
Time is universally dimesional, hence free choice/possible time experience, i.e. both self delusion [e.g. immorality] and action agaist our physical inclinations [e.g. selfless morality], being possible: no free choice is available without time. Volition may remain from exercised free choice/will, and by new influence by inclusion of others acting upon you in time...
Time seems to move forward because the future is inclusive of the past to the degree of its truth relative to absolute reality. The past is unaware of what it does not include, but in absolute terms there's no movement, but a seeming motion due to the "future", each quality of more inclusion [moment], of each experiencing life, takes the appearance of personal motion and deveopment. This does not hinder possible choice, but does imply it's foreknown...
In sum the time experience is variable according to conciousness, so matter and mind experience time as relative cofactors. Hence some people being "ahead of their time" due to greater conciousness, and others being "behind the times" due to lesser conciousness. The more you act in full conscience, and not habit and blind adherane to the knowledge others teach, the less the time you live, physically, hinders you.
In the future perhaps people will even catch up to knowledge like Socrates and other extremely consciencious folk in due time...
If you look at his colleagues,
i ng.html
http://www.scu.edu/spo/spring_03_2.htmhttp://www.stanford.edu/dept/physics/people/visit
then cross-reference a few of them:
http://www.gf.org/lfellow.html
Douglas N. C. Lin, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz: 1991
If you look him up he is all over about Astrophysics and applied mathematics.
Betty Young, Santa Clara:
Now if you research Betty you find this:
u ng.cfm
http://www.scu.edu/cas/physics/facultyandstaff/yo
Now whatever becomes of this Alex Mayer and his credentials are yet to be determined. However, I doubt Stanford would even allow him web space under the Physics department if he didn't have the credentials to back it up.
I play with Rubics cube.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
First off, it should be obvious to anybody that space can't just be deformed into nothingness. That has no meaning. Space is actually deformed into time and time is deformed into space.
No, M is not "rest mass". Relativity doesn't have a "rest mass", or a "rest" anything. Indeed, since Newton effectively eliminated absolute space, there hasn't been a notion of "rest mass" in physics (even classical physics) for over 300 years. You're showing your age a little, there.
Of course, the simplest "trick" is to assume that space/time is uniform (but not flat), determine the shape of space/time and derive a suitable set of vectors. The vectors need not be linear, they need only be orthogonal. Once you have those vectors, then space/time will be "flat" relative to those vectors at that instant. You'll need a new set of vectors for every instant, but the problem is quite solvable. Using transforms for turning a "hard" problem into a trivial one is a firmly-established tradition and works extremely well. You should try it some time.
For those who are simply looking in and wondering what the hell is going on, my sympathies. Simply put, relativity doesn't have any absolutes - other than C, which merely happens to equal the speed of light in a perfect vaccuum. The only way to measure anything in relativity is to measure relative to something. There are no fixed points in space or in time, so that leaves measuring relative to the observer. The measurement is not a trivial one, if you want to be precise, as mass deforms space/time, so the observer and the observed (and everything else nearby) complicates the picture.
Actually, it doesn't end there. The deforming of space isn't instantaneous, nor is it's resptoring. Information, including gravity, travels at a finite velocity and state changes take a finite time to complete. Thus, the "gravity well" around any object will not be uniform but look more like a comet tail - compacted at the front, stretched at the back - where the non-uniformness is going to depend on velocity. Now, here's the gotcha. There is no absolute velocity and no absolute space. You can picture everything being relative to all of the particles in the quantum foam, but they all travel at different velocities.
In consequence, at the microscopic level, gravity will not be uniform at all. The well will not be smooth, but will have irregularities in it. The irregularities will be small - usually - and have no measurable significance outside of quantum mechanics. Such details will be of far more interest to quantum cosmologists exploring the behaviour of particles travelling near the event horizon of a Black Hole.
If you want to deal with gravity at this scale, you cannot use the trivial transform I outlined above. You'd still need to use a transform, but now you'd need to transform into a chaotic system, not merely a non-linear one. The good thing, here, is that the curvature of space becomes a consequence of having Strange Attractors and is not something you actually need to model directly. However, chaotic systems are notoriously difficult to model (because they are highly sensitive to the precision of your calculations, the initial values used, etc).
For this reason, don't expect a quantum-scale model of gravity any time soon. I'm not even convinced that the exploration that is going on is in the right direction - superstrings need an awfully large number of zero-sized dimensions. I am firmly conviced that the k
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Perhaps someone should tell him that general relativity has already been invented.
from the link: "Here you will find a preview of related 'digital lectures' that have been created to appeal to a wide global audience including topic experts as well as students, amateur astronomers and scientific professionals of all varieties." He's not claiming to have invented or discovered anything. It's just like Stephen Hawking writing A Brief History Of Time, or Feynman putting together Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces. Would you say "Perhaps someone should tell Feynman that quantum physics has already been invented" or "tell Hawking black holes have already been discovered!" No. One of them was writing for students and the other for the layman, not for physicists. And most people who aren't physicists think of time as a single uniform dimension, if they think about it at all. Hence the need for a book to elucidate the difference.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
The majority of people in Columbus' day did not think the world was flat. That myth comes from a children's book about the life of Christopher Columbus and his journey to the Americas. It was an idea perpetuated by other more recent stories and even textbooks. (History of the flat earth theory, more facts of Columbus' true story
Besides, why can't the world be round and flat anyways...spherical, now that's another story.
Think fishing, not bridges.... and yes, I was around when we invented the term.
Ever thought of that ?
I don't know why scientists and physicists think that time is so important.
In fact, there are no universal particals or waves of time at all. This is no quanta of time.
There is no reason to presuppose that time is anything but linear as it is just duration and nothing more.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Space is the real mystery. One in the same though.
Another week, another crackpot theory trumpeted as real science. Guys, get some technically competent editors or stop accepting any "scientific breakthrough" article submissions. Or something.
Let's see, what would be easier to explain "GPS anomolies"?
Orbit drift...
OR
Time moves in different directions depending on which way you move throw space so let's completely rewrite physics and cause a paradigm shift and I'm not even really a professor of physics but I'm writing a book about it....
Hmmm...let me think about that one.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
I would just like to point the following things out:
... until you test it. See also: Columbus.
A) Time != Light
B) Time is a word, designed by Mankind to designate the passing of events in such a manner that they can be reconstructed and reviewed by others or otherwise recollected in greater detail than a simple memory without the use of such a designation.
C) Remember kids, it just THEORY. Einstein's relativity theory still remains a THEORY, seeing as how no one has actually tested the limits of it. The article refers to research based on the assumption that $Einsteins_theory = 'true'; It all seems logical
-------
Userfriendly? Sure it is, unless you aren't computerfriendly!
/me to a classmate on FreeBSD
(If wormholes exist, they are only stable so long as you CANNOT violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, strongly implying that any time-travel that is permitted is highly constrained, as wormholes certainly weren't envisaged with the laws of thermodynamics in mind. That property was unexpected, in many ways, but is reassuring in the sense that it does pass an important sanity check.)
I imagine that limited time-travel will be proven - at least in theory - but that all such methods obey those fundamental principles that appear to be universal to all points in space, time and scale. As such, totally free travel through time will likely not be possible (so, no TARDIS') but time-travel completely outside of the light-cone* of that region of space may be much less constrained.
*A light-cone is the region of space/time that is roughly cone-shaped that describes the maximum possible region of space at a given time that anything at the center of the cone could interact with, assuming no information can travel faster than the theoretical speed of light in a perfect vaccuum. Since the cone defines how far information can have travelled, NOTHING outside of the cone can have affected what lies at the center and vice versa. Thus, travelling through a non-simply-connected method from the center of the cone to ANYWHERE outside of it can NOT generate paradoxes for the traveller. As such, if connecting two points of space/time together that are distant enough to meet the requirements and in a way that is stable enough to traverse is possible, there is no obvious prohibition on where in time you could travel.
Oh, it's important to note that the cone extends in both directions in time from where you are now, so covers all of space that could have - at any time in the past - have interacted with you in the past or present.
Flatland, unfurtunately, doesn't help us here. However, with some slight modifications, Flatland CAN be used to teach students much earlier about the concepts of relativity in a way that does NOT require sophisticated equations. (Well, relativity can actually be covered at the same time as Pythagoras' theorum. I think it would be better if it was, and that if both were taught several years before they currently are.)
Imagine that Flatland were not strictly flat, but had hills and valleys. However, the inhabitants still only see along the "plane" of Flatland. Their Universe exists in the third dimension, even though they have no way of directly interacting with it.
Now, imagine that Flatland was rising through the third dimension, but not entirely evenly or at a constant rate. Thus, different parts moved through the third dimension faster than others, but which parts varied over time. Because of this, Flatland "stretches" (unevenly), so if it takes T seconds to slide from A to B at one time, it'll take T+N seconds to make the same journey at a different time.
Hmmm. Let's add a few more properties. Let's imagine that Flatland is rubbery, so that all Flatlanders create little dimples in Flatland. They can't see these dimples, because they can only see along the surface. They can't directly interact with the dimples at all. If they're observent, though, they'll notice other Flatlanders slide faster towards them than away. Flatlanders who eat more create bigger dimples.
Finally, let's sat that Flatlanders are all on speed. Even the really fat ones who weigh Flatland dow
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I started using International Packet Switch Stream in, oh, 1984 and developed a variable-speed networking protocol for a daisy-chained parallel port-based local area network maybe a couple of years earlier. Also got a crappy (but workable) speech synthesizer going on a 32K PET computer a year before that. Figured out that you could do a decent phonetic dictionary in software, even at 1MHz, and that the sound capabilities were just good enough to get usable output.
Rebuilt an R1155 in about 1977. (You ever TRY to get hold of half those valves?)
I wasn't just around. Sorry to hear there were such unfortunates.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Egyptians
Chinese
Mayans
Incans
olmec
Norsemen
Christopher Columbus even knew the earth was round...
"A lot of lip service is given to the idea of "curved spacetime", but the simplistic 3+1 'box' remains the dominant concept of what cosmic spacetime is like."
I can get on an airplane and see the curvature of the earth. However, my ass is riding such a miniscule segment of the Big Bang to Heat Death time curve, that it's safe to assume for all purposes that I'm on a straight-line trajectory to my grave.
Give me immortality and perhaps curved space-time will have more of an effect on my life.
Be heard || Be herd
It was a fun project, for a number of reasons. One of the most interesting consequences is the implication that, had Greek civilization endured, they had sufficient theory to have managed Einstein's famous early lectures 2,000 years early. Without any way of actually validating the results - had they believed them - it would have remained theory until the present day anyway, so wouldn't have changed a whole lot. It is interesting to speculate what the Greek scholars would have made of such a proof, though, given my requirement that the proof had to require no knowledge they did not possess.
If anyone does figure out how to do time-travel within one's own light-cone, I guess I could ask.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Think, McFly!
There are a bunch of observations of anomalies there, but no clear statement of the structure of the theory he proposes, either qualitatively or quantitatively. As for his Stanford address, he is an "Affiliate" of the university, not faculty or staff, and he has no bio or publication list on his pages that I can see, so we can't give him the benefit of the doubt based on past work. If you want to see how physics papers describing a new theory ought to be written, look at Einstein's papers.
Muddled as they were, I saw nothing in his slides or chapters that suggests anything higher dimensional than the spacetime physicists are currently using. Dimensions are not some esotheric concept, they have observable meaning, and any extra dimensions in the observable universe either have to be very small, or they have to be very hard to move around in.
When I was in junior high school I used to make drawings like those to figure out how you would travel in time. I never figured it out as you can see... I'm still here.
I very much agree on the String Theory and believe it will be resolved by suitably compartmentalizing each aspect in turn and mapping it into a form we can visualize. Hey, it's very difficult to imagine N-dimensional regular solids, but it IS easy to imagine a torus. It turns out that, if you use staggeringly complex mathematics and Fermat's Last Theorum, a transform does in fact exist that maps 1:1 between the two types of shape.
(In fact, the nature of the transform is quite unimportant. If there is a hypersolid that is of interest, so long as you can identify the corresponding torus, you can do all of the operations you want on the torus without ever needing to know anything about the extremely complex theories that go into the mapping.)
The same will be true of Superstrings. There WILL be something simple and elegant that we can map these 12-dimensional anti-gravitational objects to. (Superstrings have negative gravity. It's one of those factoids that stuck with me at the Newton Tercentenary Lectures at Cambridge University, along with Black Holes having an internal resistance of 33 ohms.)
Once the transform has been established, all aspects to Superstring theory will be staggeringly obvious and calculations will be reduced to an extremely simple form - simple enough to be covered by 17-18 year olds, very likely. These sorts of things temd to reduce very easily, once they start reducing. Unfortunately, we're not at that point. I don't know of any elegant transform for a superstring and I doubt one will be discovered in the next 10-15 years. After that, all bets are off.
It'll just be a matter of finding the right perspective.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I had this idea years ago.
I called the concept French time!
Time is n-dimensional. Wall clocks measure progress is one dimension of it, where as the human body experiences the length of the route taken through all dimensions. Where space has gravity as an attractor, time has boringness. Since French lessons are so utterly, utterly boring, these pose a very strong attractive force, and that's why they seem to last 3 millennia, despite only being 3 hours long.
I'm a physics student at Stanford, and I've never heard of this guy ever. The department site says he's a visiting scholar. Maybe I'll be able to track him down. Although, I tend to be skeptical of people who communicate their theories exclusively to the public through their websites. I'm open to alternative theoriers of gravity, but I'll be more inclined to listen to this when I see it in a journal.
No they didn't. Find me one reference - other than the satirical Flat Earth Society - for that. If he can't even get his blurb right, what hope for his science?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I've always had doubts about the big bang - in an intuitive way, and have always been drawn to maverick thinkers prepared to question the status quo. I have to admit that I struggle with the maths, but the work of Johan Masreliez covers similar ground and has the same consequences. I would be interested to see how much they overlap conceptually.
Take a look at http://www.estfound.org/
I'm sure this paper has some merit, but the author does not lend himself credibility by sating that people believed the Earth was flat. It's a common myth, generally believed to have been encouraged by Washington Irving in his three-volume History of the Life, among other places. In fact, the significant belief at the time, encouraged by the Catholic Church, was that the Earth was the centre of all things with the sun travelling around it. Even then, a variety of cultures had already disproven that, including the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, who had an excellent understanding of the movements of the solar system.
For more info, do what I did: Google!.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
>I would have thought more people would have noticed the Earth is round sooner
Sooner than what?
Greeks knew that earth is round, I call this quite early, they even had a good estimate of earth's size!
As I understand it, we are not looking at a new theory at all. My summary of Mayer's notes is as follows:
There are anomolies in current predictions. We know that there is a simplification in the Schwartzchild solution to Einstein's field equations: that was known at the time.
What Mayer is proposing is that the ramifications of not making that simplification are more profound than previously thought.
The key is in slide 25 of the second set of lecture notes. Every thing else is either leading up to why this equation needs to be looked at, or pointing what things may be affected; i.e. why we should be excited about it, and where the predictions can be made.
He certainly could make the narrative clearer, but it is interesting stuff none-the-less. I await the forthcoming peer review, but I feel certain that Stanford has a vested interest in not getting egg on its face, and so this guy probably has the central idea right.
VENKMAN:You're always so worried about your reputation. We don't need the University. Einstein did his best stuff while he was working as a patent clerk. They can't stop progress.
STANTZ: (not cheered) Do you know what a patent clerk makes?
VENKMAN: NO!
STANTZ: I liked the University. They gave us money, they gave us facilities and we didn't have to produce anything! You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results.
Didn't Picard encounter this theory in the final episode?
If not, it would make for an interesting plot!
My mind can't even comprehend what going another direction (except for "backwards") would even mean as a concept.
It's easy. Just think of Sliders, or more succinctly, the TNG episode "Parallels".
May the Maths Be with you!
otherwise how could it have a wrinkle in it?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Now, as to his claims, there are many. Most, if not all, seem to me to rely on his concept of "gravitational transverse redshift" GTR, which in turn (he claims) follows from "a simple thought experiment" on slide 6 of his first lecture, "A Correction to the Gravitational Model". A little though shows his conclusions on slides 6 and 7 to be incorrect. If A sees B's clock running slowly and B sees A's clock running slowly this leads inevitably to a contradiction - an inescapable paradox.
Say both A and B set their clocks simultaneously to zero, according to an observer at rest at a point O, halfway between A and B, while the spacecraft is at rest. The observer at O also sets their clock to zero at the same time. At this point both Mayer and Einstein would say that all three clocks are observed by A, B and O to be running at the same rate.
Let the spacecraft accelerate at rate g for t seconds according to the clock at O, which continues to be halfway between A and B. Then let the spacecraft coast - becoming an inertial frame again. Now all three clocks are again observed to be running at the same rate. According to Mayer though, O sees the clocks at both A and B to be lagging the clock at O, A sees the clocks at O and B to be lagging the clock at A, B sees the clocks at O and A to be lagging the clock at A.
We now move the observers and clocks at A and B to the location of O, taking great care to do so completely symmetrically, so that there is no reason to distinguish between A and B. Here is the paradox - according to Mayer, A continues to see B's clock lagging A, and B continues to see A's clock lagging B.
This is not the same as the twins paradox. According to O, who has been sitting in the middle all this time, the movement of A and B has been completely symmetrical and there is no reason to favour one over the other.
Since the rest of Mayer's argument, especially GTR, seems to me to depend on this thought experiment, and since his conclusions from the thought experiment are wrong, his remaining theoretical arguments will fall, unless they follow from other principles.
Correction:
B sees the clocks at O and A to be lagging the clock at A.
should say:
B sees the clocks at O and A to be lagging the clock at B.
He's going beyond special relativity by allowing both special relativity, but also the unions among geometries which, with their relativistic delays and apparencies (e.g. red shifts), explain a lot:
1) time is non-linear within the same object, when the object is accelerating (and all objects are accelerating at all times; there is no restful object in the universe--relativistically), so measurements that were thought to be predictable through redshifts are not in fact predictable through the means we've been using and
2) these new domains of time can be thought of not as time-coherency but rather non-red shift, individual object domains. Calculating domains then becomes possible, as newly defined 'red shifts among red shifts' rather than the simplistic comparison from Einstein's equations. Einstein's equations were right, but didn't consider all objects can have their own relativistic differentials in time; hence the new 'geometric' concept. I like the idea, and will mosh it through my Mathematica constructs to see what happens.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
...of the Powerpoint presentation, you can pretty much forget the rest of it. Using the John Baez Crackpot Index, this guy scores pretty highly. His first thought experiment on "transverse red shift" is simply wrong, wrong, wrong.
Certainly the reference to how people "not too long ago" believing the Earth to be flat, therefore means that Einstein is wrong trips my bullshit meter.
Oh, and its Yet Another Paper that attempt to "explain the Pioneer Anomaly" in terms of the author's favorite theory. I'm starting to roll my eyes every time the Pioneer Anomaly comes up, because every time I see it, the actual anomaly is not correctly described, before launching into the most tortuous explanation of bizarre logic ever seen outside of Usenet.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Do not taunt Happy Time Cube!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
It reminded me of this
Did you understand his claim that the dispersed energy is radiated as Electromagnetic Energy? I wondered where that claim comes from, and have not seen any statement supporting it (might be my fault: too many slides, not enough formulas...). I would trivially suspect the energy to be dispered as gravitational wave, but then again, he seems to negate the existence of GW altogether (see ligo slide) - I could not follow that point either. Anyone? Thanks, Andre.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm no astrophysicist. But Alex Mayer claims based on his explaination of the red-shift, that there has never been a big bang. He explains a number of phenomena based on his theory and he doesn't need dark energy and dark matter, which is currently needed to make the theories match observed reality.
I'm in no position to judge his radical theories, but I like the way that he tries to show, that his theories are consistent with observed facts. He will certainly have some opposition and it will be interesting to see, whether somebody could put a hole in his theories.
Again, someone who doesn't know what the word "theory" in the scientific sense means. Warning; do not substitue "guess", "hunch", or "vague clue that may not work" with the word "theory" - a theory is the best you can get because in order to hold up it should be able to describe all the phenomena you observe.
Or how comfortable would you feel knowing that there's a theory of gravitation?
Yeah, thought so.
Quite simply, time doesn't exist.
Anyone need any further info? So sorry to say that you can't tell you girlfriend that her favourite vase will jump back off the floor and repair itself in a couple googlillion years.
You may win a playboy sub. And no I don't mean by what those guys said, i mean:
Time does not exist. As a single dimension or with geometry.
please type the word in this image: invoice
random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Moving Dimensions Theory
http://physicsmathforums.com/
Questions Addressed by MDT:
Why is the speed of light constant in all frames?
Why are light and energy quantized?
How can matter display both wave and particle properties?
Why are there non-local effects in quantum mechanics?
Why does time stop at the speed of light?
How come a photon does not age?
Why are inertial mass and gravitational mass the same thing?
Why do moving bodies exhibit length contraction?
Why are mass and energy equivalent?
Why does time's arrow point in the direction it points in? Why
entropy?
Why do photons appear as spherically-symmetric wavefronts traveling
with the velocity c?
Why is there a minus sign in the following metric?
x^2+y^2+z^2-c^2t^2=s^2
What deeper reality underlies Einstein's postulates of relativity?
What deeper reality underlies Newton's laws?
What underlies the laws of Inertia?
Why does general relativity fail at short distances? Why does quantum
mechanics dominate at short distances?
Why have so many great minds, Einestin, Godel, Wheeler, Hawking, and
Penrose called for a new conception of time?
If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
--Albert Einstein
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
--Isaac Newton
Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, felt that the pioneer
scientist must have "a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are
not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination."
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually
winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the
opponents gradually die out.
--Max Planck
Moving Dimensions Theory (MDT)
Today I am writing regarding Moving Dimensions Theory-a deeper model
for explaining diverse phenomena in both quantum mechanics and
relativity.
The General Postulate of Moving Dimensions Theory:
The fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial
dimensions.
The Specific Postulate of Moving Dimensions Theory:
The fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial
dimensions at the rate of c in quantized units of the Planck length.
Relativistic, classical, and quantum mechanical phenomena, as well as
time itself, are emergent properties of this fundamental principle.
Newton's laws, the principle of Inertia, Einstein's postulates, and
the inherent wave-particle duality of QM may be explained with this
model.
A FEW YEARS BACK
A few years back, while surfing a towering wave on the Outer Banks of
North Carolina, a beautiful thought occurred to me. Suppose the wave I
was riding represented a coordinate in a dimension. Then although I was
approaching shore, I was not moving in this dimension.
The dimension itself was moving with me-I was surfing the dimension.
In a flash I saw that that is why photons never age-they are moving
along with the fourth dimension, and thus stationary relative to it. In
another flash I saw that that is why a photon's space-time interval
is represented by a null vector, or a 0, no matter how far it travels.
Indeed Einstein stated that an object's velocity through space-time
was always c-even stationary objects are traveling at the velocity c
through time! How could this be, were it not for a fourth expanding
dimension, which matter could surf as photons, giving rise to our
notion of time? And so it is that Moving Dimensions Theory was born as
the wave crested and crashed about me, thundering on down, as I fought
to remain surfing amidst the foam, facing the setting sun silhouetting
the Hatteras light.
And the waves kept on crashing that night. The nonlocal EPR
paradox/effect could be explained by the underlying nonlocality of an
expanding fourth dimension. The equivalence of mass and energy, the
wave-particle duality of all light and matter, the
Moving Dimensions Theory
http://physicsmathforums.com/ [physicsmathforums.com]
Questions Addressed by MDT:
Why is the speed of light constant in all frames?
Why are light and energy quantized?
How can matter display both wave and particle properties?
Why are there non-local effects in quantum mechanics?
Why does time stop at the speed of light?
How come a photon does not age?
Why are inertial mass and gravitational mass the same thing?
Why do moving bodies exhibit length contraction?
Why are mass and energy equivalent?
Why does time's arrow point in the direction it points in? Why
entropy?
Why do photons appear as spherically-symmetric wavefronts traveling
with the velocity c?
Why is there a minus sign in the following metric?
x^2+y^2+z^2-c^2t^2=s^2
What deeper reality underlies Einstein's postulates of relativity?
What deeper reality underlies Newton's laws?
What underlies the laws of Inertia?
Why does general relativity fail at short distances? Why does quantum
mechanics dominate at short distances?
Why have so many great minds, Einestin, Godel, Wheeler, Hawking, and
Penrose called for a new conception of time?
If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
--Albert Einstein
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
--Isaac Newton
Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, felt that the pioneer
scientist must have "a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are
not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination."
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually
winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the
opponents gradually die out.
--Max Planck
Moving Dimensions Theory (MDT)
Today I am writing regarding Moving Dimensions Theory-a deeper model
for explaining diverse phenomena in both quantum mechanics and
relativity.
The General Postulate of Moving Dimensions Theory:
The fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial
dimensions.
The Specific Postulate of Moving Dimensions Theory:
The fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial
dimensions at the rate of c in quantized units of the Planck length.
Relativistic, classical, and quantum mechanical phenomena, as well as
time itself, are emergent properties of this fundamental principle.
Newton's laws, the principle of Inertia, Einstein's postulates, and
the inherent wave-particle duality of QM may be explained with this
model.
A FEW YEARS BACK
A few years back, while surfing a towering wave on the Outer Banks of
North Carolina, a beautiful thought occurred to me. Suppose the wave I
was riding represented a coordinate in a dimension. Then although I was
approaching shore, I was not moving in this dimension.
The dimension itself was moving with me-I was surfing the dimension.
In a flash I saw that that is why photons never age-they are moving
along with the fourth dimension, and thus stationary relative to it. In
another flash I saw that that is why a photon's space-time interval
is represented by a null vector, or a 0, no matter how far it travels.
Indeed Einstein stated that an object's velocity through space-time
was always c-even stationary objects are traveling at the velocity c
through time! How could this be, were it not for a fourth expanding
dimension, which matter could surf as photons, giving rise to our
notion of time? And so it is that Moving Dimensions Theory was born as
the wave crested and crashed about me, thundering on down, as I fought
to remain surfing amidst the foam, facing the setting sun silhouetting
the Hatteras light.
And the waves kept on crashing that night. The nonlocal EPR
paradox/effect could be explained by the underlying nonlocality of an
expanding fourth dimension. The equivalence of mass and energy, the
wave-particle duality of
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http://physicsmathforums.com/showthread.php?t=56
Tied Up & Strung Out: Hollywood String Theory Movie!!! Looking For Extras!!!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
ALL TIED UP & STRUNG ALONG, a movie about String Theorists and their expansive theories which extend human ignorance, pomposity, and frailty into higher dimensions, is set to start filming this fall. Jessica Alba, John Cleese, Eugene Levie, Jackie Chan, and David Duchovney of X-files fame have all signed on to the $700 million Hollywood project, which is still cheaper than String Theory itself, and will likely displace less physicists from the academy.
"As contemporary physics is about money, hype, mythology, and chicks," Ed Witten explained from his offices at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, "The next logical step was Hollywood, although I thought Burt Reynolds should play me instead of Eugene Levy."
Brian Greene, the famous String Theorist who will be played by David "the truth is out there" Duchovney, explained the plot: "String theory's muddled, contorted theories that lack postulates, laws, and experimentally-verified equations have Einstein spinning so fast in his grave that it creates a black hole. In order to save the world, we String Theorists have to stop reformulating String Theory faster than the speed of light. We are called upon to stop violating the conservation of energy by mining higher dimensions to publish more BS than can accounted for with the Big Bang alone, and I win the Nobel prize for showing that M-Theory is in fact the dark matter it has been searching for."
Greene continues: "At first my character is reluctant to stop theorizing and start postulating, but when my love interest Jessica Alba is sucked into the black hole, I search my soul and find Paul Davies there, played by John Cleese. I ask him what he's doing in my soul, and he explains that the answer is contained in the mind of God, which only he is privy too, but for a small fee, some tax and tuition dollars, a couple grants here and there, and an all-expense-paid book tour with stops in Zurich and Honolulu, he can let me in on it. And he shows me God in all her greater glory, as he points out that we can make more money in Hollywood than writing coffee-table books that recycle Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, Feynman, and Wheeler. I am quickly converted, and I agree to turn my back on String Theory's hoax and save Jessica Alba."
But it's not that easy, as standing in Greene's way is Michio "king of pop-theory-hipster-irony-the-theory-of-everything- or-anything-made-
you-read-this" Kaku, played by Jackie Chan. Kaku beats the crap out of Greene for alomst blowing the "ironic" pretense his salary, benefits, and all-expense paid trips depend on. "WE MUST HOLD BACK THE YOUNG SCIENTISTS WITH OUR NON-THEORIES!! WE MUST FILL THE ACADEMY WITH THE POMO DARK MATTER THAT IS STRING THEORY TO KEEP OUR UNIVERSE FROM FLYING APART, OUR PYRAMID SCHEMES FROM TOPPLING, AND OUR PERPETUAL-MOTION NSF MONEY MACHINE FROM STOPPING!!" Kaku argues as he delivers a flying back-kick, "There can be ony ONE! I WILL be String Theory's GODFATHER as referenced on my web page!! I have better hair!"
But Greene fights back as he signs his seventeenth book deal to make the hand-waving incoherence of String Theory accessible to the South Park generation, senior citizens, and starving chirldren around the world. "Kaku! Kaku! (pronounced Ka-Kaw! Ka-Kaw! like Owen Wilson did in Bottle Rocket)," Greene shouts. "It is theoretically impossible to build a coffee tables strong enough to support any more coffee-table physics books!!!"
"Time travel is also theoretically impossible, but there's a helluva lot more money for us in flushing physics down a wormhole. Nobody knows what the #&#%&$ M stands for in M theory ya hand-waving, TV-hogging crank!!! Get it?? Ha Ha Ha! We're laughing at the public! We're the insider pomo hipsters! Get with the gangsta-wanksta-pranksta CRANKSTER blin
Another tinker tripping over the concept of time?
"Time" is movement over distance and I've never seen any science which suggests otherwise, although I've seen plenty of pseudo-science which has difficulty grasping the simple concept. It's just a word humans use as a shortcut so we don't have to say "movement over distance" a lot.
"Spacetime" is a reference to the same thing, movement over distance but infers larger distances and a delay in observation caused thereby (light can only go so fast, you know.)
So, in this regard, the author is correct: Time has a geometry, but only because "time" is a simple measure of space (distance between observable objects) and movement of those objects in that space and space is, by definition, geometric.
The author is also correct when he says time is relative, but also only because distance is relative to the point of origin of the measure and again, distance is space and objects in space are relative to one another.
I suspect his definition of what constitutes a "dimension" as well.
Overall, this guy is either making a rather large tongue-in-cheek joke or is seriously confused.
Best of Sundays to you all.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
I wonder what a "peer review" website is. Heard of journals like that before, not websites...
Follow-up article suggested in subject.
and raise you a Yahoo Serious
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Not strictly true. The "bede.org" page is right that flat earth cosmology was never, ever accepted by any Christian intellectuals. But pre-scientific belief in the ancient world (for example, in Greece before the 6th or 7th century bc) the idea that the earth was flat was very common, because the things that make the sphericity of the earth apparent weren't yet obvious to them (beginning with the shadow the earth casts on the moon during a lunar eclipse). This was a time when "astronomers" had a hard time understanding that "the morning star" (Phosphoros) and "the evening star" (Hesperos) were actually the same astronomical body.
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Thanks for your clear explanations. Any thoughts on the validity of the loop quantum gravity variant Heim Theory (full version in German only), and Heim's Mass Formula that quite accurately "predicts" the rest-frame masses of all known elementary particles?
it is not possible to move backwards in time
I think this statement is too strong. It's not that it is not possible to move backwards in time... or, what I think you meant, for time to flow in the opposite direction, its just that no one has ever observed this to report it. Everything we know about physics (solid-state, at the macro level, at least) is perfectly valid whether time is flowing forward or backward. Watch a film backwards, and every event you observe (waves uncrashing, bombs un-exploding, etc.) has verifyable physical properties and is physically possible (though, I think, unprobable that a bomb could un-explode from millions of particles back into a single identifiable mass.)
For some reason, call it an compusion, very often whenever I spit, deficate, dispose of a mucus filled tissue, etc., I think briefly about the time symmetry of physics, and think how gross it will be if time starts moving backwards. Though, I wonder also what it would be like to unexperience things, unlearn things, unmeet people, and unpost at slashdot. I guess that is how Merlin lived, as the future was his past.
The Admin and the Engineer
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A side note: all my old textbooks, and everything I ever learned, referred to the Lorentz-*Fitzgerald* contraction. So, has Mr. Fitzgerald been deleted from history, folks?
mark "actually, I needed to modify the Lorentz-Fitzgerald
contraction myself, recently...."
Everyone knows the earth is flat, er, don't they...
A gentleman of leisure from Florence,
Misliked his shape (like an orange).
So he lay down on a ship,
Took a relativistic trip
And observers saw him contracted by Lorentz.
mark "it's mine, I made it up, and you can shoot me for it"
The scientific inquiry into 'magnetars' http://solomon.as.utexas.edu/~duncan/magnetar.html
seems like a better approch to truth-finding. Discover magazine has an article about them, but this web site looks more informative. Crazy theories about time aside, real observations of the universe suggest interesting things are still out there to discover.
Software freedom...I love it!
Supposing I were a crank physicist. If I wanted to avoid embarrasing questions about my lack of a PhD, I could do worse than take a job as a patent examiner.
In fact, that proof (.999999... == 1) is a necessary property of decimal expansions that is integral to defining real numbers in terms of basic arithmetic axioms, see:t hereals/
http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~schectex/courses/
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
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Peter Lorey, from Beat the Devil, dir. John Huston, written by T. Capote.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Take a very accurate counter and insert it into a baby after birth. Wait 30 years and then take whatever day it is and subtract the DOB to get how old they are supposed to be. Then check the counter and compare the two times. Since the counter would always be relative with the person you would get a pretty accurate age. If the two values vary much then you can assume that all these years you have been driving like a bat out of hell really does make a difference!
Time loops in on itself and everything occurs over and over again. That is why some people keep getting that "Deja Vu" feeling because they HAVE already done whatever it is they're doing and have been whereever they are before.
At the end of the loop, all matter decays on the atomic level and drifts about in space. The particles then get pulled into the nearest black holes. Those black holes all drift towards each other and form bigger black holes upon contract until the entire universe becomes condensed into a singularity which causes a BIG BANG and the loop that is time begins again.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
And you don't get "visiting scholar" status at Stanford without a certain amount of credibility.
Shhh, let people think they're being clever. It's an even better catch that way.
Back under your bridge indeed.
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You know when you fall down? Well, the part when your head hits the ground, you know that part, that comes after you're mostly done falling? Well, that part confuses me. And there's some kind of relationship to distance, because the further I fall, the more confused I get when my head hits the ground. I have verified this through empirical testing, although lately, I've been unable to commit all the resulting data thus obtained to long term storage.
Well, uh, I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newletter.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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It seems to me that divergent time directions should make things look faster, not slower. Perhaps I'm ignoring speed-of-light effects somehow? Suppose Bob and I are in different parts of the universe, and therefore have different time directions (ie. our time vectors diverge). Suppose, for instance, that our time dimensions differ by 60 degrees. When I observe Bob's clock, and assuming my eyes are limited to looking in a spatial direction (as seems to be implied by the diagrams in TFA), my observation would be at right angles to my time direction, and would be 30 degrees to Bob's time dimension. This forms a 1,2,sqrt(3) right-triangle. Therefore, every second of my time, I observe 2 seconds of Bob's time. Can someone tell me why this is wrong?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
The use of the word "theory" in science is somewhat different than other part of the English language. "Theory" means a comphrensive system of explanation, often based on experimental data. Common Enlish uses another meaning fromt he legal field- a hypothesis.
Anti-evolutionist frequently mix up the two different usages. The "theory of intelligent design" is practically a scientific theory now in its elaboration. However not in experimental data.
I'd like to see them! Thanks.
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"time is not a single dimension of spacetime but rather a local geometric distinction in spacetime."
... :)
Tcsha. obviously
Would this mean that you could be in more then one place at the same time. In fact could you be everywhere at once.
Problems: when A and B approach the middle, they must accelerate towards each other, and move towards each other, which will produce a blueshift for each relative to the other, and relative to O. There may be additional comments to be made, and I haven't worked out the mathematics to see if this compensates, but the thought experiment is not conclusive one way or another until the math is checked, if there is any logical possible contradiction.
... he thought the Earth was significantly smaller than was known at the time, and if it wasn't for the sheer good luck that there was a landmass unknown to either him or his detractors in the way, and that it was so much closer to the European than the Asian side of the "world ocean", he'd have just been another leader of an ill-fated expedition.
Time is just our way of measuring our journey through the universe. It's a complete fabrication on our part, and is not an innate natural phenomena. The only time is what those machines on our wall, on our desktops, and in our machines tell us it is. If they're talking about motion, form, change, etc... to call it 'time' is selling the whole natural phenomena of change short.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Please stop harping about Lorenz and time.
In his paper "On the Cause of Geodetic Satellite Accelerations and Other Correlated Unmodeled Phenomena", via the American Geophysical Union in December 2005, he outlined specific modifications to general relativity. The paper's Abstract begins:
"An oversight in the development of the Einstein field equations requires a well-defined amendment to general relativity that very slightly modifies the weak-field Schwarzschild geometry yielding unambiguous new predictions of gravitational relativistic phenomena."
The result of this amendment is an additional relativistic effect. As you may know, in general relativity, the velocity of light is a constant. Thus one's velocity relative to a photon can result in a shift of measured frequency, i.e. the red-shift, or blue-shift of spectra. Also, since the theory claims that accelerated reference frames are identical, this shift is also observed due to gravitational acceleration.
The author claims that gravitationally induced red-shifting is also dependent on the angle through which a photon travels in a gravitational field. In addition, the theory discusses gravity and angular momentum. An accelerating electric charge emits electromagnetic energy. Though long theorized, a similar gravity wave has never been observed. The author suggests that angular momentum, e.g. spinning and orbiting masses emit electromagnetic energy as well. Thus, orbits even in a perfect vacuum will decay. As a spinning body slows, or orbital momentum decays, this energy will be balanced by radiation in the microwave range.
The additional source relativistic red shift, and the additional changes with respect to conservation of momentum, have profound cosmological import, if true. The theory passes the simplicity and beauty tests admirably. What I particularly like about his presentation has to do with testability.
He discusses numerous problems with the GPS and geodetic satellite systems, various puzzling data from several deep space missions, the orbits of planets and moons, and show how his equations account for the discrepancies in the data. He also proposes a number of simple experiments which could prove or disprove his theory. He predicts what to look for in terrestrial microwave radiation, and suggests experiments that could be run using existing satellites which could prove or disprove his theory. He also suggest that other scientist look at data which has already been collected but which he has never seen, and predicts what patterns might confirm the theory.
From the ground up, the ideas are well reasoned, and his approach seems scientifically sound.
Time gets into the mix, because the broader ramifications of the theory are large. Imagine a space ship under constant acceleration. On the floor (aft bulkhead) place two clocks communicating via pulses of light. He shows how each clock (even though they share the same acceleration reference frame) will each view the other as slow. By virtue of general relativity, pairs of clocks on earth should likewise each view the ticks of another clock as slow. Thus, there is no common, universal time. The rate of time is a local attribute at each location.
The cosmological implications if this theory are also impressive.
There is no need to posit dark matter or dark energy. They are discussed only to account for missing matter and the expansion of the universe. However, if this theory is true, the universe is not expanding, thus removing the need to postulate dark energy. The matter needed to keep galaxies from flying apart is no longer needed. Rotating galaxies are radiating microwaves and slowing down, not being gripped by dark matter. The universe finite and unbounded. It is neither expanding nor contracting.
No big bang would have happened. Remember the history of the theory? It was attempting to account for red shifted stellar spectra and for the microwave background. If the red shift is a relativistic phenomenon (not the result of unive
heading twards hell defenetly hell
hi,
...
[disclaimer: i am an experimental high-energy physicist -- i am not an "expert" on GR but it's a sucker bet that i know more about GR than most of y'all do]
i've gone through the lengthy lecture presentations and mayer meets the (or at least my) criteria for good science from a theorist -- he makes specific predictions which can be tested against empirically obtained datasets -- however, i didn't do the nasty integrals required to be done to see if he was simply lying and i will have to take him at his word that he has done them
essentially, the kernel of his hypothesis is contained at page 32 of his "lecture 1" pdf -- it is a small correction (in the weak-field approximation if i grok correctly) of the underlying metric which is the differential element which is used in standard GR calculations
*everything* in GR depends on the metric -- if mayer's metric can be empirically (or theoretically) motivated and, while using the differential geometry/GR mathematical machinery accrued over the last century or so, it can provide a more close approximation to empirical results than standard GR, then it is valid and more than worthy of further consideration
mayer provides a *very* long list of predictions about phenomena where standard GR predictions have failed to match the data and each of his predictions seems more or less rigorously derived from his singular assumption -- whether he has published or not (and a spires search did not yield any publications), and whether he is a post-doc, professor, grad student or invertebrate, he makes no appeal to authority (as i somewhat do in this posting) -- he only asks that his predictions be tested against unbiasedly observed reality
yo, gotta go --- i see it's super bowl time, chips and beer are waiting
cheers,
kevin
The observed invariance of lightspeed with respect to frame of reference.
Verdict: crackpot. NEXT!
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Time is a local geometric distinction in spacetime? I thought time is money!
Who knew?
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
see my sig
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
I had this exact thought some time ago while trying to build a mental picture of GR and 4d space, I thought it was an obvious conclusion. Is this really a new idea?
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
In GR, the direction of the time axis depends also on the gravity or stress-energy distribution around the observer.
What's new about this theory is that the direction of the time axis also depends on the position of the observer relative to the origin.
I think it is compatible with GR. Most our ideas about cosmology would have to be thrown away, but not relativity.
Please get out your copy of "Spacetime Physics", by Taylor and Wheeler, section 5.8 "Stretch Factor" -- or any equivalent. In my original post, I have A, O and B approach each other after the inital acceleration has ceased. At this stage of the thought experment, A, O and B are each inertial frames. According to Mayer, A says that the clocks at O and B lag the clock at A, and B says that the clocks at O and A lag the clock at B. According to Einstein, the clocks at A and B agree with each other and with the clock at O.
If we now move A and B symmetrically towards O, while O will see a blueshift for A and B, O must still infer that the clocks at A and B are running slowly, at an equal rate. Similarly, while A sees a blueshift for O and a larger blueshift for B, A infers that the clocks at O and B are running slow, with the clock at B running more slowly than the clock at O. Each of A, O and B agree on each of the three proper times for A, O and B, between the events where each of A, O and B begin to move towards each other and the event where A, O and B coincide. The agreed proper times are equal for A and B and longer for O. (As an aside, it is only in O's frame that A and B begin to move towards O simultaneously.)
Since each clock measures proper time and since the proper time at A and B increases by the same amount when A and B are brought to O, if the clocks disagreed before they were bought together, they will still disagree and by the same amount. Symmetry, Einstein and commonsense says that the clocks will agree. Mayer seems to be saying that they will disagree, but he gives no reason to say whether A will lag B or B will lag A. This is the essesnce of the unresolvable paradox.
In any case, the blueshift is a red herring.
Except you gave us no reason to believe that you provided a representative sample of his work, and given a sample size of one, it's possible you're making a hasty generalization. If his hypothesis was rooted in the misconception that the earth was commonly believed to be flat in the past, then perhaps your observation would be relevant. But if you draw your conclusions from a sample size of one, what hope for your logic?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
this would explain why I'm always constantly late!
I'm the author of the comment above. Sorry for not logging in previously, but I had problems logging in yesterday.
The axioms on which the theorems are built are explicitly part of the theorems, leading to a logically self-consistent system.
Counterexample --- Add to the axioms of ZFC the following axiom:
There exists a set B such that for all ordinals x, x is an element of B.
There is a proof in ZFC that that statement is false. Therefore, this mathematical system is not self-consistent. Go back to school.
Given that caveat, I found Mayer worth a serious look. He's got a number of references showing measurements that GR does not explain. The most convincing stuff is from GPS satellite measurements which show an unexplained sawtooth pattern with a period of two cycles per day and an amplitude of several feet (or nanoseconds). GPS satellites and ground stations explicitly correct for the general relativistic effects of the earth's gravity well, so any anomalies would be very interesting. But he's also got anomalies in measurements of hydrogen 21 cm radiation and in the effect of Ganymede on signals sent from the Galileo spacecraft.
If Mayer faked the anomalies (but I believe they're real), he would be shot down in no time. Assuming the anomalies are real, then any theory that can explain them in addition to the rest of the effects explained by GR (precession of Mercury's orbit, redshift of a gravity well, etc) deserves a serious look.
One other point. In grad school, when we students complained about the many annoyances involved in writing and publishing our work, my advisor would say "50% of science is communication." There's alot of wisdom in that. There are plenty of cranks (or not so cranky folk) out there tugging on physicists' sleeves and saying "Einstein was wrong and I have a notebook full of equations to prove it!" I know such a fellow myself, but it would take weeks to examine his equations and maybe months to explain his errors. What he and his ilk lack is the ability to communicate like a scientist. Anyway, where I'm going with all this is that Mayer suffers no such lack. His 'Lecture 1' document is much better than average writing by a scientist. While this doesn't prove his equations are better than Einstein's, it is further reason why he deserves a serious look.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Furthermore, parent writes:
But although Mayer's two clocks are at rest relative to each other, they are in an accelerated frame of referance (his rocket is accelerating). And as we all know, the Special Theory is specialized exactly because it doesn't apply to accelerated frames of reference or to gravitational fields. In those cases, you need instead the General Theory, which assunes "the complete physical equivalence of a gravitational field and a corresponding acceleration of the reference system." (Einstein, 1907, via wikipedia)This in no way proves Mayer right, but it's a glaring error in how the parent tried to prove Mayer wrong. What Mayer did is provide a correction to Einstein's spacetime metric for General Relativity. Meyer then inserted that metric into the the rest of the GR machinery, and came out with slightly different results. Mayer claims his metric does a better job of explaining the so far unexplained periodic variations in GPS measurements and several astrophysical anomalies. Meyer's theory also predicts some specific testable effects that aren't even all that expensive to test.
I don't know whether Mayer's metric is better than Einstein's or not; Mayer may very well be wrong. But if so, I claim he's wrong in the way of a scientist; not in the way of a crank. Mayer starts with measurements poorly explained by existing theory, proposes a correction to the theory, and predicts specific testable results. This is the way science actually works, even if Mayer turns out to be wrong. Now the question is: who is willing to allocate a few resources and test Mayer's theory.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bi bcode=2005AGUFM.G41B0363M&db_key=PHY&data_type=HTM L&format=&high=43e8a348db18655
2 001-March/002577.html
Affymetrix?
http://www.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/sunmanagers/
Anyone we know? Database Administrator you say?
I thought about this overnight, and I don't believe it is actually a paradox. By the time all three clocks (A, B, and O) arrive at O's final position, all of the light pulses from each clock will also have arrived at O's final position - and thus all three clocks should agree. No paradox!
As noted in more general ways in other posts, at least two relativistic effects are not dealt with in the crucial thought experiment.
Consider a pulse train from A to B:
- There will be difference in time contraction from when the pulses are sent from A to when the are received at B; since the frame is accelerated it's traveling faster when reception at B occurs, so time is slowed as compared with the time when the pulses were sent from A, resulting in an INCREASE in the apparent pulse frequency of reception.
- Length contraction may also play a role: as shown in the diagrams, even though the pulses are sent orthogonal to the direction of motion, they also have some travel in the direction of motion, and there is a difference in the amount of such contraction between the time they're sent and received, again due to the accelerated frame. THis will also INCREASE the apparent frequency.
My suspicion is that these effects cancel out completely the RTR effect, but it's clear they should at least be considered in the thought experiment.
1) By "O's final position", do you mean a location in space or an event in spacetime? In my version of Mayer's thought experiment, I bring A and B together and they coincide with O at an event in spacetime. The only light pulses which arrive at this event are those which lie on the backward light cone from this event. Since we suppose that the spaceship and the objects within it cannot travel at the speed of light, there are no light pulses from A, B or O on this backward light cone.
2) You say "all of the light pulses from each clock will also have arrived at O's final position - and thus all three clocks should agree". I do not follow your reasoning. It seems to me a non-sequitur. How does the "and thus" work? What is the connection between the light pulses arriving at the same point (in space? in O's inertial frame?) and the clocks agreeing?
Actually I don't think that's correct. Firstly I'm unclear as to where "O" comes from and where that is located. You say it is "at rest" and "between A and B" but I'm having a hard time reconciling that. If "O" is at rest then are you saying it is a clock not aboard the spaceship or are you using the words "at rest" to imply inertial motion. I don't think the phrase "at rest" really has any meaning in a relativistic thought experiment.
Then the whole "moving the observers and clocks from A and B to O, doing so completely symetrically". The verbage is unclear. Actually I don't think you're doing the same experiment.
What I read was that "A" would see "B" as lagging under acceleration and that "B" would see "A" as lagging while under acceleration. There was nothing about the clocks continuing to see each other as slow once acceleration was turned off and inertial motion was reestablished. That doesn't follow. The point was that "A" and "B" are not moving in respects to each other. They are at fixed positions relative to each other, "A" is not accelerating away from "B" nor vise versa. The acceleration is transverse to both of them.
The question is whether or not the clocks would actually measure the difference. If so then the argument for a transverse redshift has legs. He states (in slide 7) that "Numerous empirical observations imply that this effect does, of course, occur". So if he has empirical proof (although he doesn't state the nature of said proof) then it would seem difficult to declare that proof to be paradoxical and impossible. I mean if he has empirical evidence for this "thought experiment" then he's solid.
The question I'm left with is "what are those 'numerous empirical observations'?". In slide 8 he says that the transverse effect is too small to be measured in the laboratory. So if he can give the detail to the fourth bullet point on slide 7, then he's got something real here.
Actually I'd be relieved. Cosmology really hasn't made any sense in years.
I'm adding some things to Mayer's thought experiment, before his thought experiment starts and after it ends. I'm sorry if my description is unclear. I don't know how to add diagrams to Slashdot comments.
By "an observer at rest at a point O, halfway between A and B", I meant "initially at rest". Sorry for the confusion. O remains halfway between A and B for the duration of my extended thought experiment. I explain further below.
In Mayer's original experiment, A and B are fixed to an accelerating spaceship, and the direction from A to B is at right angles to the direction of acceleration.
My additions *do not change this* during the period of acceleration. I just imagine that *before* the period of acceleration, the spaceship is at rest, so that A and B are inertial frames, and that *after* the period of acceleration, the spaceship is coasting, and A and B are again inertial frames.
To emphasize the point that Mayer's interpretation is incorrect, I add an observer at O, halfway inbetween A and B. O is fixed to the spacecraft and *stays* halfway inbetween A and B for the duration of the experiment.
*After* the period of acceleration and *after* a period where A, O and B are inertial frames, I bring A and B together symmetrically at O. This last step is not strictly necessary to my additions to Mayer's thought experiment, but I want to make the clocks at A, O and B coincide in spacetime so that the comparison between their clocks is simple and direct. By A and B moving "completely symmetrically" towards O, I mean that from O's point of view, at any time, A and B are in opposite directions and at the same distance. Remember that *after* the period of acceleration, O is an inertial frame.
Finally, I can't understand why you don't see my point about clocks.
If you have two clocks A and B which initially agree, then clock B runs slowly for a period of time T according to clock A, then at that time clock B will have recorded a time less than T. If the two clocks then and forever afterwards run at the same rate, clock B will still lag clock A by a fixed amount.
Ah, OK. That clears a lot up for me. I still don't think I agree with your conclusion though. The clocks at A and B perceive each other as slow while under acceleration due to the transverse redshift. The time dilation is the result of the light being "streched" across increasing distance. Without acceleration, back in an inertial frame, this perceived delay would go away. Nobody is looking at the clocks in terms of previous recorded times. The question is only whether or not they have identical rates. Under inertial motion they do, under acceleration they each perceive a decrease in the rate of the other.
In fact when deaccelerating, as the distance covered along the ship's axis is constantly decreasing over time, there would be a blue shift and the clocks would see each other as too fast. Again, only during the reverse acceleration.
Since Einstein's Equivalence Principal (EEP) equates the effects of a gravitational field with the experience of acceleration we would expect to see some sign of this behavior if we have sensitive enough instruments. Mayer points out that we actually do have such instruments. Slide #50 of Lecture-1 shows the situation with two atomic clocks, one in Paris (the BIPM) and the other in Washington, DC (the USNO). To quote, "Therefore, after correcting for known effects, a clock ensemble at the BIPM in Paris is found to record time somewhat slower in direct comparison to a clock ensemble at the USNO in Washington, DC. However, the opposite is also true; the USNO clock ensemble is found to record time somewhat slower in direct comparison to a clock ensemble in Paris. This seemingly paradoxical empirical fact is a reflection of the geometric properties of time." (italics mine)
So, it is paradoxical, but it is also empirically observable. Actually the only reason to take this at all seriously is the large number of empirical tests and supporting data he offers.
He may be wrong, but he has put up a plausible theory that must be dealt with.
Alexander Mayer's website at Stanford has been administratively locked. Also, his email address has been suspended.
I've read through both lectures now and I think Mayer may actually have a strong case. With the empirical tests he offers I think he has to be taken seriously.
Or, in the case of Stanford, muzzled.
For example, he is apparently an MIT graduate, but at MIT Community Home Pages only his alumnus email address is listed, not a web page. More significantly, a search for his name on the MIT web site turns up nothing.
Finally, a thesis search for his name on Barton, the MIT library catalog, also turns up nothing.
So let's assume he didn't submit a thesis at MIT. Where did he get his PhD to qualify as a visting scholar at Stanford? And why isn't there any trace of it available via the web? Maybe he doesn't have one. Just speculation on my part... Maybe Alexander F. Mayer does have a PhD in physics, but there is no trace of it on the web.
PS. We are not talking about Alexandre Mayer.
Stanford has erased this home page, and removed Alex Mayer from their list of "Visiting Scholars". I'm sorry to see him go! I hope he shows up somewhere else. Was it just the slashdotting/traffic? Probably not, I'm sure the traffic had dwindled before they pulled the plug. Inquiring slashdotters want to know!
I think his ideas were solid. Where do interested parties go now?
His work can be found at http://www.alexandermayer.com/