Fibre-linked atomic clocks put special relativity to the test

you may yet become world-famous as the modern-day Einstein

Maybe it's just all way over my head, eh?

The Sagnac effect in GPS, absolute simultaneity and the new meaning of time
18th International Workshop on ADC Modelling and Testing
Benevento, Italy, September 15-17, 2014

Abstract

The implementation of GPS systems has allowed the understanding of important facts about the true meaning of time and simultaneity. In fact GPS has became a fundamental source for the understanding of clock behaviour and synchronization, through the considerations of the relativistic effects affecting it. Among these, a very important role is played by the Sagnac effect, influencing the clocks readings. The correct consideration of such effect is fundamental in every synchronization process where the receiver is moving with respect to the source.

In this paper we show how GPS system demonstrates that the explanation of Sagnac effect given by the commonly accepted version of Special Theory of Relativity is not correct and the use of an alternative formulation based on Inertial Transformations must be used. This implies the adoption of a new synchronization procedure, the renunciation of the relativity of simultaneity, and a novel meaning of physical time.

V. CONCLUSIONS

A correct interpretation of light behaviour can be achieved only within a theory based on absolute simultaneity (i.e. that defined with respect a preferred inertial frame) in which, as occurs in the GPS, the clocks rates are adjusted not as a function of their relative velocity but of the velocity of each of them with respect the preferred (nearly) inertial Earth – centered non rotating inertial frame.... It has, as already shown, very deep consequences not only upon the definition of simultaneity but also on the meaning of time itself that must be considered as duration, namely as a mathematical parameter giving the numerical order of physical changes.

As you may already know, and as this article mentions, the GPS does NOT use or rely on SR. It uses, because it must, a preferred frame of reference in the theoretical foundation which it relies on to achieve accurate results

Quote:

existence/use of a "preferred frame."

Yet Lay doesn't the Twin Paradox almost imply the existence of such a frame
...something that has long puzzled me....

That said, you can find any number of ill-considered articles which claim that the GPS "confirms" SR.

It certainly does not.

It sounds like we disagree, Brandon. I have already stated, over the course of several posts, my basis for taking a different position. Is there something in them that you specifically disagree with?

He should have just acknowledged that he was the one moving, and hence that HIS clock had slowed down, instead of mistakenly contending that it was the earth's clock that was slowing down.

One might view the statement, “A sees B’s clock running slow, and also B sees A’s clock running slow,” as somewhat unsettling. But in fact, it would be a complete disaster for the theory if A and B viewed each other in different ways

One might view the statement, “A sees B’s clock running slow, and also B sees A’s clock running slow,” as somewhat unsettling. But in fact, it would be a complete disaster for the theory if A and B viewed each other in different ways.

Science
We as scientists make scientific statements. These statements are validated by the procedure we use to generate them: the scientific method. This method can be described as involving the following operations: (a) observation of a phenomenon that, henceforth, is taken as a problem to be explained; (b) proposition of an explanatory hypothesis in the form of a deterministic system that can generate a phenomenon isomorphic with the one observed, (c) proposition of a computed state or process in the system specified by the hypothesis as a predicted phenomenon to be observed; and (d) observation of the predicted phenomenon.
In the first operation, the observer specifies a procedure of observation that, in turn, specifies the phenomenon that he or she will attempt to explain. In the second, the observer proposes a conceptual or concrete system as a model of the system that he or she assumes generates the observed phenomenon. In the third, the observer uses the proposed model to compute a state or a process that he or she proposes as a predicted phenomenon to be observed in the modeled system. Finally, in the fourth operation he or she attempts to observe the predicted phenomenon as a case in the modeled system. If the observer succeeds in making this second observation, he or she then maintains that the model has been validated and that the system under study is in that respect isomorphic to it and operates accordingly. Granted all the necessary constraints for the specification of the model, and all the necessary attempts to deny the second observations as controls, this is all that the scientific method permits.

This we all know. Yet we are seldom aware that an observation is the realization of a series of operations that entail an observer as a system with properties that allow him or her to perform these operations, and, hence, that the properties of the observer, by specifying the operations that he or she can perform determine the observer's domain of possible observations. Nor
are we usually aware that, because only those statements that we generate as observers through the use of the scientific method are scientific statements, science is necessarily a domain of socially accepted operational statements validated by a procedure that specifies the observer who generates them as the standard observer who can perform the operations required for their generation. In other words, we are not usually aware that science is a closed cognitive domain in which all statements are, of necessity, subject dependent, valid only in the domain of interactions in which the standard observer exists and operates. As observers we generally take the observer for granted and, by accepting his universality by implication, ascribe many of the invariant features of our descriptions that depend on the standard observer to a reality that is ontologically objective and independent of us. Yet the power of science rests exactly on its subject dependent nature, which allows us to deal with the operative domain in which we exist. It is only when we want to consider the observer as the object of our scientific inquiry, and we want to understand both what he does when he makes scientific statements and how these statements are operationally effective, that we encounter a problem if we do not recognize the subject dependent nature of science.

As Morin notes, SR is entirely dependent on the supposed SUBJECTIVE deductions of "observers." But, as I said near the beginning of this thread, that is NOT what a theory of physical science is about. The misperceptions, delusions, or faulty logic of particular individuals do not, and can not, determine objective reality. The "subjectivist" approach relied upon by SR is really a product of solipsistic philosophy, not objective, empirically-based scientific physical theory.

What I dislike in this kind of argumentation is the basic positivistic attitude, which from my point of view is untenable, and which seems to me to come to the same thing as Berkeley's principle, esse est percipi....We represent the sense-impressions as conditioned by an "objective" and by a "subjective" factor. For this conceptual distinction there also is no logical-philosophical justification. But if we reject it, we cannot escape solipsism. It is also the presupposition of every kind of physical thinking. Here too, the only justification lies in its usefulness.

We also know about his 'defeat' at the hands of QM ( via Bell's Theorem) which places his particular take on epistemology in the 'suspect' camp. But that has nothing to do the contextual status of SR and GR with respect to their intractable place in History of Science.

Bell even suggested, in response to his theorem and relevant experiments, the rejection of “fundamental relativity” and the return to a Lorentzian view in which there is a dynamically privileged, though probably empirically undetectable,reference frame.

He remarked: “… I would say that the cheapest resolution is something like going back to relativity as it was before Einstein, when people like Lorentz and Poincare´ thought that there was an aether—a preferred frame of reference—but that our measuring instruments were distorted by motion in such a way that we could not detect motion through the aether."