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Author Topic:   Speed of Light
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 61 of 268 (538145)
12-04-2009 6:28 AM
Reply to: Message 59 by cavediver
12-04-2009 5:31 AM


Re: Special Relativity and geometry
Hi Cavediver,
I started looking up the symbols and terms you used, but this is a workday and I have to move on. If you have time, the information I'm missing is an understanding of permitivity and the magnetic constant (permeability), and what the symbol E represents.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 59 by cavediver, posted 12-04-2009 5:31 AM cavediver has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 83 by cavediver, posted 12-05-2009 2:38 PM Percy has seen this message but not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 62 of 268 (538147)
12-04-2009 6:35 AM
Reply to: Message 60 by Son Goku
12-04-2009 5:40 AM


Re: Special Relativity and geometry
Thanks for the info. The explanation I once heard that I like best, maybe it was via Greene, is that we move through space/time at a constant velocity. When stationary in space you're moving through time at c, and when traveling through space at c you're stationary in time, and at velocities between 0 and c you're moving through time at a rate given by the Lorentz factor. It's been a few years, I wonder if you find the way I remember it now accurate or garbled.
So what we're interested in knowing from Viv Pope is what he finds in this that makes it a revolutionary observation, and what new predictions and advances in understanding this might bring. In other words, what are their expectations for its contributions to science.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 60 by Son Goku, posted 12-04-2009 5:40 AM Son Goku has not replied

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 Message 63 by cavediver, posted 12-04-2009 6:46 AM Percy has seen this message but not replied

  
cavediver
Member (Idle past 3643 days)
Posts: 4129
From: UK
Joined: 06-16-2005


Message 63 of 268 (538151)
12-04-2009 6:46 AM
Reply to: Message 62 by Percy
12-04-2009 6:35 AM


Re: Special Relativity and geometry
Thanks for the info. The explanation I once heard that I like best, maybe it was via Greene, is that we move through space/time at a constant velocity. When stationary in space you're moving through time at c, and when traveling through space at c you're stationary in time, and at velocities between 0 and c you're moving through time at a rate given by the Lorentz factor.
Well, you'll have heard this from me several times at EvC And yes, I think it's a great way of looking at it. But this is from your own POV as the traveller. An observer doesn't see it this way (unless he can observe a clock travelling with you and can deduce this)

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 Message 62 by Percy, posted 12-04-2009 6:35 AM Percy has seen this message but not replied

  
Viv Pope
Member (Idle past 4963 days)
Posts: 75
From: Walesw
Joined: 06-29-2008


Message 64 of 268 (538152)
12-04-2009 7:55 AM
Reply to: Message 53 by Admin
12-02-2009 7:35 PM


Re: Moderator On Duty
Dear Percy (Duty Moderator)
Hide any off-topics, certainly!
This present topic is still, I hope, about ‘light velocity’. At this latest stage in the argument, it is about the alternative interpretation of 'light-velocity' c as a pure dimensional constant. And — for those who can handle it — the philosophical consequences for future physics of that radical change in interpretation.
Just to recap. on that: the issue has now progressed to the stage of comparing two different and incommensurable paradigms of physics. One is the classical one, in which the constant c is conceived in the usual way as the ‘velocity of light’ and the other is the one in which c is no more than a dimensional constant. Just to distinguish those two different paradigms, or mind-sets. the logic of it is this: if c ceases to be the speed of something inscrutably travelling in space, then it reverts to being simply what is seen — i.e., the opposite of dark — that is to say, light in its whole frequency range from deepest infrared to farthest ultraviolet and beyond, even in what, to us, is complete darkness. The mental flipover, for those capable of contemplating it, is then to think of light as just pure quantum information, hence of space and all it contains — in effect, the world in all its dimensions of space, time, mass, energy, momentum, etc. — as being in the light, as opposed to the old, pre-relativistic way, of the light being in space. The stress this places on the intellect is then to think of the light that we see — or detect instrumentally in all those ways known to the science of optics — as a purely informational character-complex of patterns and sequences of quantum pixels, like those from which the viewer projects a video scenario or the way in which depth is projected into a movie or a pointillist painting. In this way of thinking, c is simply the ratio between the conventional units of measure, metres and seconds in the way Herman Bondi describes in his book, as we have already seen.
Now, impossible as it will undoubtedly seem to some to think in that conceptually inverted way, it is a way which already exists and has been systematically explored for more than three centuries, since the time of George Berkeley. In its later phase it became the radical relativism of the nineteenth-century physics philosopher, Ernst Mach, whose philosophical vision led, quietly and stealthily, to the twentieth-century formulation of both relativistic and quantum physics (see under ‘Normal Realism’).
The way this goes is that, logically, if c is not a velocity then it has to be a constant of pure observation, as in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. In that theory, the basic dimensions of mass, length and time, energy, velocity, etc., do not exist in any absolute way, as in classical physics, but only RELATIVELY to the observer.
Unfortunately, Einstein goes only half way towards completing the relativistic revolution that Mach envisaged. This is because Einstein compromised true relativity by his altogether unnecessary inclusion of his Second Axiom of light ‘travelling in vacuo’. This produces a hybrid theory in which everything is relative to the observer but in which light ‘travels’, absolutely, in the old classical way.
This is what, right from the start, has made Einstein’s theory so notoriously incomprehensible. It works, okay, for the purposes of practical physics but, conceptually, it is a complete monster of self-contradiction. Not least among its problems is that, other than by all sorts of theoretically contrived means, it is impossible to square Einstein’s ‘speed-limit c’ with quantum physics, which demands that quantum interactions between bodies at a distance have to be instantaneous.
So Einstein’s theory keeps physics in that suspended, philosophically indecisive state between absolutism and relativism, unable to proceed beyond where Einstein left off. This is not Einstein’s fault. It is the result of the usual over-veneration, in academic Education, of The Greats. As Carl Sagan says:
‘One of the saddest lessons in history is this: if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence if the bamboozle. We are no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge — even to ourselves - that we’ve been so credulous.’
(from ‘The Fine Art of Baloney Detection’.)
Undoubtedly, it is this which has held all progress in our understanding of nature in suspension for over a century. Perhaps it is too much to say that, in Sagan’s words, we have been ‘bamboozled’. All those scientists who devoted their lives to the formation of classical absolutist physics did so in the very best of faith. But faith can be misleading. As Sagan writes:
‘You can’t convince the believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep-seated need to believe.’
However, as he adds:
‘It is better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.’
Are we, perhaps, now too far gone in our present belief in the efficacy of the contemporary Standard Model of Relativity and quantum physics, or is it that, as John Anderson of NASA says, we need a new physics. He writes as follows:
‘In the unlikely event that there is new physics, one does not want to miss it because one had the wrong mind set.’
Let those of us in this forum avoid the mistake of conceptual conservatism and freely explore that possibility of the ‘New Physics’ which follows from the Neo-Machian shift in thinking, from ‘light in space’ to ‘space in light’.
What needs to be discussed, then, is whether this conceptual flipover is truly the breakthrough it certainly seems to be.
Viv Pope.
PS.
These quotes from Carl Sagan were subscrbed by one of he members of this forum whose pseudonym I cannot now trace. I would be grateful if he would come forward here.
Edited by Admin, : Correct a few missing or incorrect quote characters.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 53 by Admin, posted 12-02-2009 7:35 PM Admin has seen this message but not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 65 by Percy, posted 12-04-2009 9:31 AM Viv Pope has replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 65 of 268 (538161)
12-04-2009 9:31 AM
Reply to: Message 64 by Viv Pope
12-04-2009 7:55 AM


Re: Moderator On Duty
Hi Viv,
How is this different from Minkowski?
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 64 by Viv Pope, posted 12-04-2009 7:55 AM Viv Pope has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 70 by Viv Pope, posted 12-04-2009 1:20 PM Percy has replied

  
Viv Pope
Member (Idle past 4963 days)
Posts: 75
From: Walesw
Joined: 06-29-2008


Message 66 of 268 (538162)
12-04-2009 9:33 AM
Reply to: Message 54 by Son Goku
12-03-2009 2:23 PM


Re: Special Relativity and geometry
Dear Son Goku (?)
Thanks for pointing this out. I should stress that the argument was not just the usual feeding-frenzy or scrabble for precedence (I trust we are above all that). It was to demonstrate how that idea can be used in a new way, for the purpose I have described on this forum and elsewhere. Neither Minkowski nor Lorentz nor anyone has used that idea in the way Bondi and I have shown. If they had, then we would certainly have known about it. The fact, then, that to all appearances this use of the constant c is, so far, not known, suggests that the way in which Bondi and I concurred is the best and most efficient approach to relativity is unique. If, for a moment I thought, as Cavediver likes to think, that my (and Bondi’s) half-century’s work on this was wasted, then, with so many other ‘fish to fry’, Bondi and I — would have dropped our concern with it like a red hot brick.
So let's stick to the point as I described it in my previous e-mail, which is forward- rather than backward-looking. With the greatest respect for these old-world Giants, let's forget Minkowski et al and not let them stand in the way of logical progress, which, surely, is not what those honest researchers would have wanted, any more than the early pioneers of the American continent would have wanted everyone from then on to follow conservatively in their first roughly made and wandering tracks.
Thanks for your response,
Viv Pope.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 54 by Son Goku, posted 12-03-2009 2:23 PM Son Goku has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 67 by Percy, posted 12-04-2009 10:13 AM Viv Pope has not replied
 Message 90 by Son Goku, posted 12-06-2009 7:21 AM Viv Pope has replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 67 of 268 (538164)
12-04-2009 10:13 AM
Reply to: Message 66 by Viv Pope
12-04-2009 9:33 AM


Re: Special Relativity and geometry
Hi Viv,
I think Son Goku was saying that to him your ideas are not noticeably different from Minkowski. Rather than reiterating that your ideas are indeed different from Minkowski, I think what might be most helpful would be to explain how they are different.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 66 by Viv Pope, posted 12-04-2009 9:33 AM Viv Pope has not replied

  
Viv Pope
Member (Idle past 4963 days)
Posts: 75
From: Walesw
Joined: 06-29-2008


Message 68 of 268 (538169)
12-04-2009 10:36 AM
Reply to: Message 58 by cavediver
12-04-2009 4:04 AM


Re: Response to arrogance
Thanks, Cavediver, for your quick response.
There is a logical principle of scientific discourse, which is that because a thesis A works satisfactorily, it doesn’t mean that no other theses, B, C, D, etc. can work just as — or even more -satisfactorily in some entirely different way. The fact is that those diagrams and so on that you are exhibiting belong to a tradition of physics which, notoriously, has no clearly defined philosophical foundation, and is therefore epistemologically barren. But if it satisfies you to think in that way, then fair enough! But that does not logically annul all other theses any more than the fact that I prefer coffee prevents anyone else from preferring tea.
Anyway, to stick to the real point of this thread, your claim that light can interfere with light in the vacuum of space has been roundly discussed elsewhere — in the PIRT conferences at Imperial College, London, for instance — where it was generally agreed to be on very dodgy ground. Moreover, you seem to have ignored the remaining nine proofs that there is no true evidence whatsoever of light travelling on its own, ndependently of everything else, in the depths of space. This flagrant omission leaves your argument regarding the velocity of light in space wide open to the charge of what logicians call Special Pleading.
Viv Pope

This message is a reply to:
 Message 58 by cavediver, posted 12-04-2009 4:04 AM cavediver has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 69 by Percy, posted 12-04-2009 11:55 AM Viv Pope has replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 69 of 268 (538186)
12-04-2009 11:55 AM
Reply to: Message 68 by Viv Pope
12-04-2009 10:36 AM


Re: Response to arrogance
Viv Pope writes:
Anyway, to stick to the real point of this thread, your claim that light can interfere with light in the vacuum of space has been roundly discussed elsewhere — in the PIRT conferences at Imperial College, London, for instance — where it was generally agreed to be on very dodgy ground.
I can't comment on the PIRT conference, but Cavediver was only pointing out something about your point 8 from Message 34:
Viv Pope in Message 34 writes:
8. Can light be scattered by light, as some experimenters have claimed? If a powerful laser-beam is shone across the path of another, do their ‘photons’ collide or their ‘waves’ interfere? In a simple experiment devised and carried out at Brunel university, in 1980 [ ], two powerful lasers were beamed across each other’s paths and also shone head-on at each other. No blocking or interference whatever was detected. If any such interference were to take place, then that light would suffer dispersion. Considering the amount of light that is allegedly ‘criss-crossing’ around, it would be amazing if visual acuity were possible over the length of a single metre. All the light that is allegedly shooting around in all directions would be as much a barrier to vision as the densest fog that can be imagined. The fact, then, that there are photographs of the farthest galaxies that display awesome clarity militates against the validity of any such experimentalist claim.
Cavediver was pointing out that such interference is incredibly rare, so rare that light couldn't possibly interfere with itself to the degree you describe in point 8.
If as you argue in point 5 that it is meaningless to think of c as a velocity in space:
5. If c is interpreted as a ‘velocity in the vacuum of space’ (as Einstein’s Second Postulate states), then in a vacuum to what can that ’velocity’ possibly be referred, constant or otherwise? So the concept of light as having a ‘velocity in space’ is just another absurdity.
Then do you believe it is wrong to describe light traveling from the distant galaxies as having traveled the distance in a certain time, which is the definition of velocity?
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 68 by Viv Pope, posted 12-04-2009 10:36 AM Viv Pope has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 72 by Viv Pope, posted 12-04-2009 3:39 PM Percy has replied
 Message 85 by cavediver, posted 12-05-2009 3:01 PM Percy has replied

  
Viv Pope
Member (Idle past 4963 days)
Posts: 75
From: Walesw
Joined: 06-29-2008


Message 70 of 268 (538204)
12-04-2009 1:20 PM
Reply to: Message 65 by Percy
12-04-2009 9:31 AM


Re: Moderator On Duty
Thanks, Percy, for that question, which provides for me the opportunity of explaining, further, what my work (together with that of my colleagues in the Keele POAMS group) is all about.
The difference between what we do and what Minkowski did, scientifically speaking, is to show that Einstein’s Second Axiom concerning the ‘constant velocity of light in vacuo’ is both mathematically and conceptually redundant. One might validly argue that this, implicitly, is what Minkowski did, and that may well be true. But neither Minkowski nor anyone else, it seems, has followed-through with the logical implications of this for commonsense-philosophical understanding, far less in connection with the relativist philosophy of Einstein’s mentor, Mach and the commonsense philosophers following G. E. Moore, all in the widest context of that precursor of Physics, Natural Philosophy. I have already talked about the lamentable artificial divide, in academic Education, between Arts and Science — in this present context, between Physics and Philosophy — and how this inhibits progress in common understanding. I have also explained how my work breaks down that Educational barrier. None of this can be claimed for Minkowski, who was undoubtedly as unaware of what was going on in Philosophy as his contemporary philosophers were of what was going on in Physics. For my sins — for which I will no doubt be pilloried — in my work I am trying to combine expertise from the two traditionally opposite disciplines, as stressed in all my numerous books and papers over the last fifty-or-so years. Minkowski never did — or, at least, never succeeded in doing — anything like that, which means that it is still there to be achieved.
This broadens the issue from what some traditionalists might narrowly define as ‘physics’, but that, I would say, is precisely what needs to be done to meet the call for a ‘New Physics’, central to which has to be the mental ability to see light in an entirely different light.
I trust that answers your question on this particular point regarding Minkowski.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 65 by Percy, posted 12-04-2009 9:31 AM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 71 by Percy, posted 12-04-2009 2:01 PM Viv Pope has replied
 Message 91 by Son Goku, posted 12-06-2009 7:32 AM Viv Pope has replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 71 of 268 (538209)
12-04-2009 2:01 PM
Reply to: Message 70 by Viv Pope
12-04-2009 1:20 PM


Re: Moderator On Duty
Viv Pope writes:
I trust that answers your question on this particular point regarding Minkowski.
You say that Minkowski didn't go far enough, that he didn't follow the implications, but you don't describe the implications or what they lead to, so I'm still left wondering how your ideas differ from Minkowski.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 70 by Viv Pope, posted 12-04-2009 1:20 PM Viv Pope has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 73 by Viv Pope, posted 12-04-2009 5:07 PM Percy has replied

  
Viv Pope
Member (Idle past 4963 days)
Posts: 75
From: Walesw
Joined: 06-29-2008


Message 72 of 268 (538226)
12-04-2009 3:39 PM
Reply to: Message 69 by Percy
12-04-2009 11:55 AM


Re: Response to arrogance
Dear Percy,
My aim, here, is by no means to castigate Cavediver or even challenge him for his belief that contemporary quantum physics ‘says it all’. Surely my style of writing is not so difficult as to conceal what I am saying, from which, if properly read and understood, it should be clear that, so far as Cavediver is concerned, my aim is only to avoid the pikes and caltrops he insists in putting in the way of my suggestion for conceptual progress.
Anyway, all that is strictly irrelevant. So, let’s ‘cut to the chase’. You ask me if I believe it is wrong to describe light as travelling from the distant galaxies as having travelled the distance in a certain time, which is the definition of a velocity. Well, let me ask you this: do we ever see the light from those galaxies winging its way towards us over those centuries? Well of course not! So where do we get that idea from? Obviously, unless we presume to be clairvoyant, it comes from seeing the light in the first place. In other words, our first, or a priori knowledge of the existence of those galaxies, their distance from us and so on, is from the information supplied to our senses by light as we see it. All else is secondary, or a posteriori, to that immediate information.
So, from where do we get the idea that the ,light has taken that time to travel? Again, it is from nothing more than the information itself. We know that the optical distance of a body, in metres divided by the dimensional constant. c ( pace Bondi) is a time in seconds, and from that knowledge we extrapolate the time, relative to us, at the source of those quanta when we receive them, which may be millennia in some cases.
But none of that implies that light ‘travels’. All it does is to confirm that optical distance divided by the constant c are times, which is in no way contested. This leaves the onus on the reader to grasp what this implies for the prospect of the anticipated New Physics.
The difficulty of achieving this intellectual flipover is by no means underestimated. But, as POAMS members attest, it can be done.
Viv Pope.
PS,
I hesitate to say this, but I have been told, on the best authority, that for some people, attempts to think in this ’flipover’ way have been quite traumatic, so that it should come with what someone has called a ‘government health warning’. This, of course, has no bearing on the logical truth or otherwise of the argument, but experience shows tbat it’s not for the fainthearted, but for dedicated truth-chasers only.
S

This message is a reply to:
 Message 69 by Percy, posted 12-04-2009 11:55 AM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 75 by Iblis, posted 12-04-2009 5:33 PM Viv Pope has replied
 Message 77 by Percy, posted 12-04-2009 5:55 PM Viv Pope has replied

  
Viv Pope
Member (Idle past 4963 days)
Posts: 75
From: Walesw
Joined: 06-29-2008


Message 73 of 268 (538230)
12-04-2009 5:07 PM
Reply to: Message 71 by Percy
12-04-2009 2:01 PM


Re: Moderator On Duty
Dear Percy,
the whole thing is laid out in full in the websites, books and things I have liberally mentioned. They are there for anyone who would like to, to undertake a full study of them. I can't see how I can or should write out that whole fifty-year-long project, here, just for those who are too lazy to look it up. Anyway, one's hope is that further discussion on this thread will lead, eventually, to the 'Eureka' experinece on the part of the reader which other students of the Synthesis have reported.
Ideally, members should look carefully at that record and ask questions about it. That's what scientific dialectic is all about.
Viv Pope

This message is a reply to:
 Message 71 by Percy, posted 12-04-2009 2:01 PM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 74 by New Cat's Eye, posted 12-04-2009 5:20 PM Viv Pope has replied
 Message 78 by Percy, posted 12-04-2009 5:59 PM Viv Pope has not replied

  
New Cat's Eye
Inactive Member


Message 74 of 268 (538231)
12-04-2009 5:20 PM
Reply to: Message 73 by Viv Pope
12-04-2009 5:07 PM


light travels
In Message 33 you wrote:
This is because it entails a truly Copernican ‘flipover’ from thinking of light as travelling in space to the opposite logical alternative of thinking of all space and time as being in the light — not light as it is thought of as travelling in space but light as it is actually observed, optically or instrumentally, in its full spectral range.
That we can see an interference pattern when we perform the double slit experiment pretty much destroys that notion that light is not traveling as a wave.
Edited by Catholic Scientist, : appalin' spallin'

This message is a reply to:
 Message 73 by Viv Pope, posted 12-04-2009 5:07 PM Viv Pope has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 79 by Viv Pope, posted 12-05-2009 5:31 AM New Cat's Eye has replied

  
Iblis
Member (Idle past 3895 days)
Posts: 663
Joined: 11-17-2005


Message 75 of 268 (538232)
12-04-2009 5:33 PM
Reply to: Message 72 by Viv Pope
12-04-2009 3:39 PM


urgent question
Howdy! Please excuse me skipping past all the philosophy and geometry whatnot and just asking you straight out: are you asserting that there isn't any photon?
If so, this leaves an unpleasant gap in my chart of the Standard Model. It's rather as if someone pointed at my Periodic Table and said "there is no krypton". Please advise, in detail.
* special points to whoever names the comic book writer/editor I'm thinking of right now ...

This message is a reply to:
 Message 72 by Viv Pope, posted 12-04-2009 3:39 PM Viv Pope has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 76 by New Cat's Eye, posted 12-04-2009 5:45 PM Iblis has not replied
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