Einsteins special relativity nonsense

By the way, there are a great many professers, at Harvard and elsewhere, who "teach" SR while being fully aware that it is a crock of ****.

They're not "unethical," because it is their job to teach SR and the logical implications of its premises. Fair enough.

They simply say that "If you accept the postulates of SR, then you must conclude this." They don't pretend to claim that the postulates "should" be accepted.

Are you accusing Harvard of propagating theories they don't actually recognize as valid?

It turns out (see Section 11.10) that nearly all of special relativity can be derived by invoking only the second postulate. The first postulate simply fills in the last bit of necessary info by stating that something has the same finite speed in every frame. It’s actually not mportant that this thing happens to be light. It could be mashed potatoes or something else (well, it has to be massless, as we’ll see in Chapter 12, so they’d have to be massless potatoes, but whatever), and the theory would come out the same. So to be a little more minimalistic, it’s sufficient to state the first postulate as, “There is something that has the same speed in any inertial frame.” It just so happens that in our universe this thing is what allows us to see.

• The speed of light has the same value in any inertial frame.

I don’t claim that this statement is obvious, or even believable. But I do claim that it’s easy to understand what the statement says (even if you think it’s too silly to be true)....

The truth of the speed-of-light postulate cannot be demonstrated from first principles. No statement with any physical content in physics (that is, one that isn’t purely mathematical, such as, “two apples plus two apples gives four apples”) can be proven

livinglava wrote:

Are you accusing Harvard of propagating theories they don't actually recognize as valid?

Well, yes, in a way, and no.

Logic, like math, is formal in character and impersonal.

For example, as a matter of formal logic, the following argument is completely "valid:"

1. All elephants are pink
2. This animal is an elephant.
3. Therefore, this animal is pink.

The logic here is impeccable. The question of how sound the premises are is a separate topic.

On the one hand, you can't be accused of misleading students simply because you have pointed out the logical implications of a theory. On the other hand, it seems to me that, if you're the prof., you kinda have a "duty" to point out the lack of soundness of such an argument.

So do these Harvard professors you're talking about explicitly say they don't actually believe Einstein's theories and they are only extrapolating logical implications and not actually endorsing them as valid theories?

Quote:

So do these Harvard professors you're talking about explicitly say they don't actually believe Einstein's theories and they are only extrapolating logical implications and not actually endorsing them as valid theories?

No, I not aware of any of them saying, publicly, that they flat out reject SR, but teach it anyway. But they do hint at it, as illustrated by the quote from Morin I just posted.

SR is being openly challenged in the literature, and I think it's on its way out, at least as something that in strongly endorsed in academia. But there will be continued resistance, no doubt. I'm not well-informed on that front, but SR doesn't appear to me to be nearly as strongly entrenched as it was a few decades ago.

The rejection is strong as a practical matter. Using the CMB as a preferred frame has long been practiced. That, as a theoretical matter, is tantamount to an utter rejection of SR, but that part just gets ignored. Same with the GPS being based on a model positing absolute simultaneity and absolute motion in every case.

Long ago, Bertrand Russell said the lorentz transforms ARE SR. Since alternative models also use the LT, many just call it "SR," even though it isn't.

When the LT are confirmed, the claim is always that SR has been confirmed. They never acknowledge that, in every such instance, LR is being confirmed.

maxdancona wrote:

layman wrote:

We don't feel any of this motion. Nor can we ever detect it by doing physical experiments in a closet. So what?

Exactly! I have been trying to make this point.

A "point" that is not a point at all, for purposes of this topic. I don't know the misguided and unstated premises which lead you to believe that it is somehow relevant. They're unfathomable.

A couple of days ago, I asked you a very simple physics question about one ball striking another that any student midway through a high school physics class might see on a test or in homework.

In his Nobel lecture, George F. Smoot (2006) described his own experiments on the Cosmic microwave background radiation anisotropy as "New Aether drift experiments". Smoot explained that "one problem to overcome was the strong prejudice of good scientists who learned the lesson of the Michelson and Morley experiment and Special Relativity that there were no preferred frames of reference." He continued that "there was an education job to convince them that this did not violate Special Relativity but did find a frame in which the expansion of the universe looked particularly simple."

How come we can tell what motion we have with respect to the CMB?

Doesn't this mean there's an absolute frame of reference?

The theory of special relativity is based on the principle that there are no preferred reference frames. In other words, the whole of Einstein's theory rests on the assumption that physics works the same irrespective of what speed and direction you have. So the fact that there is a frame of reference in which there is no motion through the CMB would appear to violate special relativity!

However, the crucial assumption of Einstein's theory is not that there are no special frames, but that there are no special frames where the laws of physics are different. There clearly is a frame where the CMB is at rest, and so this is, in some sense, the rest frame of the Universe. But for doing any physics experiment, any other frame is as good as this one. So the only difference is that in the CMB rest frame you measure no velocity with respect to the CMB photons, but that does not imply any fundamental difference in the laws of physics.

More modern efforts to find violations of Special Relativity look to this reference frame as the natural frame that would be special so that perhaps the suspicions [i.e. that SR was effectively under assault by Smoot's work] were not fully unfounded.

Brandon9000 wrote:

A couple of days ago, I asked you a very simple physics question about one ball striking another that any student midway through a high school physics class might see on a test or in homework.

Yeah, and I ignored you then, too. Go play around with your simplistic math problems with your high school homeboys.

I aint your pupil.

You purport to correct the world's experts on a subject in which you lack even an elementary education.

Brandon9000 wrote:

You purport to correct the world's experts on a subject in which you lack even an elementary education.

I'm not, and don't pretend to be, "correcting" the world's experts. On the contrary, I am relying on their insights (such as those of Smoot, cited above). That you think I am just shows your lack of understanding of the issues involved. Maybe you should just stick to elementary math problems, eh?

I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today - and even professional scientists - seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is - in my opinion - the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.

...my reply to instrumentalism consists in showing that there are profound differences between "pure" theories and technological computation rules, and that instrumentalism can give a perfect description of these rules but is quite unable to account for the difference between them and the theories".

layman wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:

You purport to correct the world's experts on a subject in which you lack even an elementary education.

I'm not, and don't pretend to be, "correcting" the world's experts. On the contrary, I am relying on their insights (such as those of Smoot, cited above). That you think I am just shows your lack of understanding of the issues involved. Maybe you should just stick to elementary math problems, eh?

It's not an elementary math problem. It's an elementary physics problem. Yet not so elementary that you can solve it.

I imagine I could have given you an elementary physics problem in any area of physics - electromagnetism, thermodynamics, optics, electronics and you would be equally unable to solve any of them, yet you feel that you are qualified to challenge a theory that has been accepted by virtually every scientist all over the world for over a century.