Is time travel possible, according to science? (Synopsis)

>>if you observe someone in motion relative to you, their clock will appear to run slow.

That's because, as the clock moves further and further away from you, the images of the clock take longer and longer times to get to you giving the illusion that the clock is running slow. This is taken that time is running slow for the person in motion. This is a fallacy in SR taken as gospel truth. You could say that SR is the gospel of St Einstein.

>>no matter how fast you’re moving relative to anything else — whether you’re accelerating or not — you’ll always perceive light to be moving at that one constant speed: c, the speed of light in a vacuum.

This is a physical impossibility and only happens in the mathematics of SR. Just think about the lengths that you'll be seeing. If c remains constant, then it'll take less time for light to cover the shorter lengths. Of course, there are 2 ways round this apparent paradox: time dilation and the relativity of simultaneity. In time dilation, the smaller time traversal is dilated time which is equivalent to a larger "normal" time i.e. it's as if though no time dilation occurred. I'll leave the relativity of simultaneity as a homework question.

>>Imagine a “light clock,” or a clock that works on the principle of light being bounced back-and-forth in the up-and-down direction between two mirrors. The faster the person in motion moves relative to you, the more the light’s velocity will move in that transverse (across) direction, rather than in the up-and-down direction, and hence the slower their clock will appear to run.

The diagram in the Forbes article shows the light moving with the emitter which violates Einstein's own 2nd postulate which states that the speed of light is independent of the emitting body. So, the proof is based on a fallacious fact and is therefore itself false.

>>[twin paradox]: assuming you started off in the same frame of reference (at rest on Earth, for example), and you wind up in that same frame of reference at a later time

If the Earth twin had a powerful enough telescope, he could see you all the time of his years. He will be shocked to see that you haven't aged as much as he did after all these years. That means that your ageing process was affected by the journey not that you time travelled into the future. Another way of looking at it is: did the Earth twin and the whole population travelled into the moving twin's past?

>>You can witness the evolution and destruction of humanity; the end of the Earth and Sun; the dissociation of our galaxy; the heat death of the Universe itself. So long as you have enough power in your space ship, you can travel as far into the future as you like.

Earlier, you said that you'll see your Earth twin's clock running slow; and here you're witnessing event occurring in fast motion. That's a very inconsistent explanation. Sounds like fake science to me. C'mon, admit it, it's an illusion. Besides, the "twins paradox" explanation is using a thought experiment and you're treating it as an emperical one. You don't know what's going to happen with the ageing process. Space experiments have shown that astronauts suffer from osteoporosis and muscle wasting due to the low gravity of space. These are symptomatic of increased ageing and is something Elon Musk must take into account before colonising Mars. I'm assuming the rocket will be accelerating at 1g there and back to simulate gravity. In this case, it isn't SR is it? As soon as the moving twin moves with uniform velocity he'll start ageing more rapidly. Clock dilation changes during acceleration and remains uniform with uniform velocity. Does the clock run faster during deceleration or does it get worse? The problems with relativity get worse not better.

>>[in general relativity] we treat space and time as an inseparable fabric and matter and energy is what warps it, or causes changes in that fabric itself.

If it were a fabric than it needs to be placed in a container. But it's used as container and takes part in events. When the 'fabric' of spacetime gets warped, in what container does it change shape. For example, if you had metal sheet and you arc it into a concave shape, you're doing it in space. But in what is spacetime being bent? You see it doesn't make sense. Space is a void which acts as a container for the matter and energy and also acts as a stage in which events happen. It's thus immutable. And so is time. All SR and GR is doing is mutilate space and time to preserve the fallacious notion that the speed of light is the same for all observers. It clearly isn't. When is science going to perform empirical experiments?

>>in some model Universes — in some solutions to Einstein’s General Relativity — you can loop back on yourself.

You're basing reality on a 'model universe' based on some solutions of GR. That means that there are other model universes based on different solutions of GR. In other words, we live in one of many mathematical universes; but we're not sure which one, yet. And all this to fake time travel into the past. Stephen Hawking once did an experiment to prove that time travel to the past is impossible. He invited people of the future to come to a party in the past - nobody turned up.

>>But that’s a mathematical solution; does that mathematics describe our physical Universe, though? It appears not to be the case.

Confirmation that my earlier comment is true. Thanks for agreeing with me. Now let's stop this nonsense about time travel and time dilation and just be content with clock dilation.

Kasim,
There are some serious flaws in your understanding of Special Relativity. But instead of explaining them point by point, I will just mention that in science, all theory and explanations in the world are irrelevant in the face of experimental evidence. And the experimental evidence is that Ethan's explanation of SR is correct. GPS satellites, for example, must correct for special (and general) relativistic effects in order to function properly. Muons, which do not live long enough to make it to Earth's surface unless time passes at a different rate for them than for us on the Earth, do in fact make it to Earth's surface. Muons in accelerators also live longer in our reference frame than they do in their own. There are real, experimental differences between your interpretation of SR and Ethan's interpretation, and Ethan's is the one that matches the experimental results. That is the end of the story.

The density of bullshit concerning time travel would appear to be directly proportional to the mass of cannabis fumes inhaled over a relatively small volume for the duration of the average Star Trek or Dr. Who re-run.

@Kasim Muflahi,
Interesting arguments.
I was noting the same thing about the distance between the observer and the observed clock, the information at light speed would take longer and longer to be received. Einstein always did say you had to use your local clock, not someone else's somewhere else if you wished to do measurements. Someone should pin this argument down and ask what would happen if the little space ship travelling at relativistic speeds was moving towards the observer instead of away from the observer...gee, time is magically going faster than it was for some reason...not faster than light of course...but faster at the same velocity approaching than it was when it was travelling away from the observer.
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I did take exceptional offense at the ridiculous light cone graph. It depended upon three dimensional space being depicted as a two dimensional 'hyper-surface' yet light mysteriously travels at a right angle to this surface, which is already defined by being as the t dimension as well.
So light and time move three dimensionally and independent of space except where they intersect a two dimensional plane? Neither light or time travel at a right angle, or any other 'angle' in relation to three dimensional space, as should be self evident every time the sun rises, or you turn on a light bulb, or light a candle...as light from it is obviously expanding outwards in all directions. That would hardly be possible if light behaved the way the graph depicts it.

@ketchup

I had a discussion about the correction of the GPS clocks and I was careful to point out that it was due to clock dilation because the lower gravity doesn't hinder the oscillations of the caesium atoms as the higher gravity on the ground does, hence it oscillates faster i.e. it has nothing to do with the passage of time.

This article is about time travel and you're using time dilation as to prove that time travel is possible at least to the future. Let's re-open the correction to the GPS clocks because I argued that, if time dilation happens, then the GPS satellite would disappear into the future. But, your sort argued against it. And here, Ethan and the lot of you are disagreeing with yourselves by saying that it does. You can't have it both ways: either the satellites should disappear into the future or time dilation doesn't happen. Believe me, it's clock dilation that you're witnessing. I bet that you think that I'm saying the corrections are unnecessary. I believe that the GPS corrections are necessary to correct the clock dilation.

Like I said on other forums, science is full of contradictory theories: Einstein said that energy has mass that warps spacetime and he proved that energy is quantised into photons. Hence, photons has mass and yet they claim that they're massless.

On the other hand, the Standard Model's equations fail if it's fundamental particles had intrinsic mass. So they postulated that they were created massless and invented the Higgs Mechanism to give mass to particles that interact with the Higgs field that's mediated by the Higgs boson. Now, Scientists tell us that the photon doesn't interact with the Higgs field; hence it remains massless.

See, either Einstein is right or Peter Higgs is right they can't have it both ways. See, science is very contradictory.

@Kasim Muflahi,
I'm in agreement with you on the Higg's mechanism, it's there to save face. It is functionally an ad hoc heuristic kludge slapped on the end of the gauge math which predicted particles would have zero mass.

Time is a shared construct based on the movement of things "from here to there," and we say that "it takes time," or nothing would move.
Specifically, we have the year based an orbit around our Sun and the day based on on revolution of Earth. Then we arbitrarily divide the day into minutes and seconds and fractions of seconds.
We build clocks to "keep time" by oscillating at a "steady rate" to count the arbitrary units of time. But of course it turns out that they differ in rates of oscillation as they are accelerated to different velocities or at different altitudes with variations in gravitational force.

Then we have space, which is the distance between objects, or more inclusively, the volume in which things exist and move.
So goes the epistemology of what we actually know about space and time, before we get into "special" theories with questionable epistemology. (What do we know for sure and how do we know it?)
One theory has a model of a block universe in which "spacetime" is a thing in which all events and all time exist as a kind of landscape through which one can theoretically travel to visit events that have haven't happened yet from one's "local perspective." This says that if you travel fast enough you can "visit the future," maybe a human colony on Mars, for instance, even though it doesn't exist yet.

If we all watch enough science fiction to blur the distinction with reality or believe that spacetime is an actual entity we can believe anything and call it science, just to give it credibility credibility.
Ethan is one of many leading the way into that gullible New World.

Kasim:
If you want people to take you more seriously it would not hurt to share any educational and/or scientific accomplishments you might have.

Time is a shared construct based on the movement of things “from here to there,”

Oh, great, yet another inconsistency. So time is not a "real" "entity" now, but instead a "shared [by whom?] construct?

@Kasim Muflahi,
I do agree that there are many contradictions in science. Each of these contradictions carries its own emotional baggage that makes it very difficult for the scientific community to venerate it as a historical contribution, while letting go and jettisoning it as functional theory.
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I did find the whole statement about light (a photon) having no internal passage of time quite silly. Whenever I hear the word 'instantaneous' being used to describe something in science, my bullshit detector usually goes off. Measurement ALWAYS takes some time. Process ALWAYS takes some time. Observation ALWAYS takes some time. Consider this little problem with the timeless photon. Light has a wavelength, oh damn. That wavelength would have to remain pretty constant for red or blue shift to mean a damn thing concerning direction of movement when measured spectographically, and yet Ethan wants to claim light has no internal time. Interesting, because a given photon will have the same number of 'beats' or wavelengths counted off as it travels between point a and point b no matter who is doing the observing. The distance between points a and b doesn't really matter either, as long as the light wave can be observed, all observers should be able to count the same number of waves between the two points. Measurement of the wavelength will change because of the relative position of the observer to the light wave, but the actual number of waves will not. The photon will 'experience' the same number of those waves (as it goes through them) that any observer would be able to measure. This really is no different than getting in a police car and driving around, you will hear the siren as a pulsing constant pitch, those you drive past will hear a rise and/or fall of pitch. Regardless of where you are, provided you could hear the siren, observers and the person riding in the police car should count the same number of pulses from when you started to when you stop the siren.
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For the time distortion to work the way it does in the twins paradox, a different number of ‘siren’ pulses would be counted depending on where you were. The person left behind on earth would count one number, the person on the space ship(or police car) would count a certain number, and the person who was being approached would count still a different number. If I compared notes and saw that the person in the spaceship/police car had counted fewer beats of their own siren than I had, what exactly was producing the additional pulses? Were we actually listening to the same siren or not? To me this would indicate that the assumption of time traveling at differing rates was incorrect, and was the product of a relative distortion introduced by the method of measurement.
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I would not use space time to describe anything, as it is a purely mathematical space which has very little bearing on our 'reality', except as a static block model universe of only one mass not interacting with anything . If you are going to compress the t dimension into a static spatial geometry, how could anything happen when the model itself already is the fixed geometry of everything that ever happened? Even if you wish to claim the warping of space is somehow functioning as gravity, there is 1.) nothing for it to interact with in the given space time, the model is highly non-linear and there are no known solutions to the field equations of GR for more than one mass and 2.) even if you could insert another mass into a given space time, how could it demonstrate an interaction when nothing is moving? All our working understanding of gravity comes from the observation of the movement of things in relation to one another, if we somehow lived in a space time universe that would never have been remotely possible. How would you model a mere ball being dropped or a rocket igniting its engines? The trajectory of a cannon ball? Any impulse to motion is outside of the scope of minkowski space time to model. Any movement of the point of observation inside the given space time is also not a substitute for actual motion or a valid operation of the model itself, as it also requires an observer entity entirely outside the scope of the model to even be considered.
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As to the twins paradox, the word paradox says it all. A paradox is a contradiction. That means the reasoning and/or the given assumptions are wrong. I see the whole time dilation question as I see light in a funhouse mirror. When you look at a wavy surfaced mirror, you know that you aren't actually getting thinner or fatter, or changing shape because of your reflection being distorted relative to how far you are from the mirror. In a similar manner, I think relativistic time distortion is just that, distortion. As the two twins come back closer together (as they must according to the thought experiment) any growing time dilation going one direction observed as one twin moved away would reverse and diminish as the twin returned.
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I also can simplify the Twin Paradox problem for a good laugh and consider twin A. two light years away from earth waving at his other brother, twin B who is on earth viewing a two way video monitor. The moment twin B. sees his distant brother (twin A.) waving on the monitor with the digital calendar clock on the wall behind twin A. showing, he says "OMG! It must be time travel! He's now two years younger than me!! He must have gone back in time!!!" Twin B. also has a wife who is standing right next to him as he says this. She slaps him on the back of the head and says "That image was broadcast two years ago, He's two light years away. It just took two years for that transmission you reach you."

As to the twins paradox, the word paradox says it all. A paradox is a contradiction. That means the reasoning and/or the given assumptions are wrong.

No, you simply don't understand the difference between a colloquialism and a true insolubilium.

@Narad. You said "you simply don’t understand the difference between a colloquialism and a true insolubilium."

Maybe. But, the correction to the GPS satellite clock and time travel must be explained in plain English. Ethan is using time dilation to explain time travel and people like you are using time dilation as the reason why we need to correct GPS clocks. So, either you or Ethan is wrong. Which one?

Similarly, Einstein said energy has mass and Higgs said photons are massless. One of them is wrong, but which one?

To understand the problems of using the speed of light to measure time, consider a faster-than light rocket. As it moves away from the observer, it's seen as moving away at the speed of light. But, all we're seeing are the images of the rocket because they're carried at the fastest speed information can travel at, that of light.

However, on its way back, it sends one image but the rocket beats it and sends a second image ahead of the first and it beats that and so on. When the images reach the observer, they'll arrive in reverse order i.e the rocket will be seen to be going backwards tail first. As you can see, all these are illusions like everything else in relativity.

@Narad. You said “you simply don’t understand the difference between a colloquialism and a true insolubilium.”

Maybe. But, the correction to the GPS satellite clock and time travel must be explained in plain English. Ethan is using time dilation to explain time travel and people like you are using time dilation as the reason why we need to correct GPS clocks. So, either you or Ethan is wrong. Which one?

I'm not "using time dilation" for anything; I was pointing out that CFT's explicit assertion that any name that contains the word "paradox" is an insolubilum is trivially false.* Please try to read for content rather than monomania.

* One may compare the liar's paradox, which – roughly speaking – yields Gödel's first incompleteness theorem.

Kasim Muflahi, #10:
"So, being right or wrong depends on qualification and achievements does it."

I get that a lot along with all the abuse that criticism of relativity automatically attracts from the "Mainstream" version in all the textbooks and science forms... and Wikipedia (the Last Word!)

No criticism allowed in any "discussion" of the Laws of Relativity!

@Narad,

" No, you simply don’t understand the difference between a colloquialism and a true insolubilium."
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Oh diviner of world riddles,
Neither do you apparently. A paradox is several things, and a contradiction is but one of them. If you really wish to bandy three hundred dollar words about (which tend to used primarily to alienate people from the conversation), please be specific, since you did not make it clear if you were referring to a medieval insolubilium (paradox) or a modern insolubilium (puzzle), both of which could be considered 'true' and easily be inferred from the word paradox and how it is being used in the case of the Twin Paradox. Either way you slice it, posed as paradox or puzzle, it's still a poorly worded hot mess of terms and assumptions so poorly defined you could steer the Queen Mary through the gaps without much effort.
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Now that you have thrown your hairsplitting post-modernist epistemological claim of understanding into the ring, can you actually do anything with it to illuminate the 'puzzle' of the Twin Paradox, or are you just going to drop your payload of wit and run?

Please Narad, let the team of Kasim, CFT, and MM continue to discuss their alternate idea. There's been no greater meeting of the minds since Sherri Shepherd tried to convince Whoopie Goldberg that there were on people before there were Christians.

@Kasim Muflahi & Michael Mooney,
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Narad doesn't really know anything (or care) about the subject at hand, He's just showing off that he probably wasted too much time in college, and that he aligning himself with those he thinks know better by displaying his disapproval of your questions.
His offense at my use of the word 'paradox' is unwarranted, he just wanted to snark. If he wants to be offended...I'm ok with that.

@eric,
Thank you for being so reliable in your inane comments. I can practically set my watch by your consistent inability to bring anything worth noting to the conversation. Cute insults galore, just not any actual arguments.

His offense at my use of the word ‘paradox’ is unwarranted, he just wanted to snark.

"Unwarranted"? Once again, let's review (emphasis added):

As to the twins paradox, the word paradox says it all. A paradox is a contradiction. That means the reasoning and/or the given assumptions are wrong.

Do you know what "begging the question" actually means? You attempted to construct a syllogism based on an assertion about the very meaning of the word.

@Narad,
Time travel is being seriously discussed as actual science and you wish to nag about MY circulus in probando?
Are you serious?
Oh dear.
Oh my.
Oh Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, that's funny!
Oh the irony...it burns! It burns! You sure taught me a lesson.
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Narad,
I'm also quite familiar with indignant ad populum which has been pretty much been the extent of all you've contributed, with a little ad hominem sprinkled on top.
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I'm not going to get into a semantical pissing match with someone who wastes a perfectly good education and a sharp mind on behaving like some common literary snob.
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If you have anything to actually add to the blog topic, I'll be glad to listen. If you want to look down your nose and hair-split ancient medieval philosophical terminology, then please feel free to go pound sand without me.

Kasim.. you of all people here, oh special one, are in no position to call anyone anything, especially about science

http://mpcnews.co.uk/News.php?Action=Page&Menu=About&ID=3

".... In his spare time, Kasim studies spiritual healing as he's gifted spiritually."

Thank you for being so reliable in your inane comments.

Hey, I'm not the one proclaiming that they know better than Feynman and that QM must be wrong because nature cannot be absurd..

eric,
If you are going to subscribe to the tenet that nature is absurd, then everything that follows from it, including science, including you, is absurd as well. I subscribe to a different perspective. I believe that it is not nature that is absurd, only the flawed descriptions made about it. I'm also actually in agreement with Feynman on this one:

"The shell game that we play to find n and j is technically called "renormalization." But no matter how clever the word, it is what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It's surprising that the theory still hasn't been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate. What is certain is that we do not have a good mathematical way to describe the theory of quantum electrodynamics: such a bunch of words to describe the connection between n and j and m and e is not good mathematics. "
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Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), Chap. 4. Loose Ends
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Problem is my dear eric,
You still don't know which end of the stick you are holding. Feynman himself wasn't exactly happy with it either. Maybe Dirac was cool with it...?
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"Hence most physicists are very satisfied with the situation. They say: "Quantum electrodynamics is a good theory, and we do not have to worry about it any more." I must say that I am very dissatisfied with the situation, because this so-called "good theory" does involve neglecting infinities which appear in its equations, neglecting them in an arbitrary way. This is just not sensible mathematics. Sensible mathematics involves neglecting a quantity when it turns out to be small—not neglecting it just because it is infinitely great and you do not want it!"
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P. A. M. Dirac, Directions in Physics (1978), 2. Quantum Electrodynamics
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So apparently Dirac was not peachy with it either. Oh damn. But hey, maybe I'm mis-representing their opinions on the matter...Maybe I was taking their views out of context...
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"During the Symposium on the Past Decade in Particle Theory at the University of Texas at Austin in April 1970, I had occasion to bring Dirac and Feynman together for a discussion at dinner. Dirac told Feynman that the relativistic quantum electrodynamics in its present form was an ugly theory, and before tackling the more difficult problems of elementary particle physics 'one must try to solve the problems of quantum electrodynamics. Electrodynamics is something we know most about, and we must find a consistent theory of it rather than get rid of the infinities in an arbitrary manner.' Feynman agreed with Dirac."
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Jagdish Mehra, The Beat of a Different Drum (1994), Introduction
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Then again, maybe not.
Thank you for playing. Please try again.

I was amazed that Ethan answered one of my comments:

From Kasim Muflahi on misinterpreting relativity: ">>if you observe someone in motion relative to you, their clock will appear to run slow.

That’s because, as the clock moves further and further away from you, the images of the clock take longer and longer times to get to you giving the illusion that the clock is running slow."

So I always hesitate to tell someone that they are wrong because I worry that they will not listen if they hear that... so let's try a different approach.

Sure! When an object moves away from you, all the waves coming from it -- including light waves -- will take longer to reach you from crest-to-crest. So if your idea is correct, time should be sped-up as an object moves towards you, and it should remain constant when an object moves transverse to you.

Unfortunately, we can do the experiment, and not only is the clock really running slow (it's not an illusion), but it does so independent of the redshift/blueshift of the waves. So we can put your idea to the test and show, scientifically, that it is not the way things actually work.
--- End ---

Waves are continuous and are hence not descriptive of reality. How can you say that successive crests take longer and longer to get to the observer? I mean what does each successive crest of the wave represent? To me, a crest seems to represent a group of photons.

Photons carry information but, how do they carry it? Every time the moving clock moves forward, a different set of photons are emitted carrying the information of the different position of the clock and those of the hands of the clock. I've concluded that light is emitted as photons with the frequency being the number of groups of photons passing a given point per second; the wavelength being the distance between the groups; and the intensity being the number of photons in each group. So the group of photons represents the crest of the so-called wave. So, in a sense, you're correct about the crests of the waves taking longer and longer but only if they represent groups of photons that carry information of a temporal nature.

So, well done, Ethan for a brilliant way out of this problem but it's not scientific.

Unfortunately, it's not correct as waves and photons are incompatible because waves are continuous and photons are quantised i.e. your answer is invalid. It's like saying the amplitudes of a wave can subtract and cancel each other out in destructive interference. Experiments have shown that no actual destruction takes place - it's just that the photons that are supposedly destroyed are simply diverted to the light bands. This also means that when amplitudes add, no new photons are created - it's just those diverted photons that have been added to the existing ones. Hence, energy is conserved.

So what I described in my comment is actually correct. Can you explain it in terms of photons?

Kasim Muflahi, #10 on Feynman:

"When asked how it related to nature, he replied “shut up and calculate”.

That sums up the delusion that the math is the explanation. It isn't required to "stand for" anything in the real world, because the doctrine is that there is no real world independent of math, models and imaginary geometry.

Anything you can imagine will do for "science" these days. Example: Non-Euclidean imaginary models of never-to-be falsified theories. Also string theory. (Excellent internal integrity though, so they say, as an exercise in math modeling without a hope to confirm or falsify anything in the... real world. (If there is one) Yes, there is.

Ethan's instrumentalism denies any real world independent of what his instruments can measure. That sums it up.

@Kasim Muflahi,
I'm no longer of the opinion this this site is a good place to discuss alternative theories of sub atomic structure. That said, I would ask you this: Have you noticed all representations of the photon no matter the wavelength are always two dimensional? Do you really think photons are actually oscillating up and down two dimensionally or as two dimensional entities? Think of a cross section or three quarter view of the path of photon. Think of other types of forward motion that actually occur in three dimensions, and how they might appear if their motion was seen from only one side or compressed into a plane.
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@Michael Mooney,
What you are describing about Feynman's non mechanical approach is called heuristics. I always thought it strange that Quantum mechanics was ever called 'quantum mechanics' since it eschews the concept of mechanics entirely, instead of what it actually was, 'quantum heuristics'.

If you are going to subscribe to the tenet that nature is absurd, then everything that follows from it, including science, including you, is absurd as well

That's sort of an ad hom fallacy or argument from incredulity fallacy. How does "we humans find modern physics absurd" make it wrong?

I’m no longer of the opinion this this site is a good place to discuss alternative theories of sub atomic structure.

If you have an "alternate theory of sub-atomic structure" then tell us what your theory predicts we will see, that mainstream physics would not predict we would see.

Kasim:
What you keep trying to defend is Newton physics from 19th century. This is 21st century. Get used to it!

eric,
Please stop with your ankle biting. Go pester someone else for awhile.

So, no actual theory. Got it.

Kasim,
That is because you made it very clear that you would never accept anybody's explanation no matter what and would just keep repeating your opinions. When was the last time you actually changed your mind on anything in your life?

eric,
It really wouldn't matter what I said. If I said A, you're snarky. If I said B, you're snarky. If you said C and I agreed with you, you would still be snarky. How is that a conversation worth having? It sounds more like conversation with a cranky two year old or an online troll.
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For your sake, go find someone you actually like and say something nice to them.

@Frank

You gave me nothing to accept or deny. What your comments imply is that you don't understand SR, GR, or QM to make a reasonable desription of the facts that support the debate in question. You just jump on the bandwagon on popular theories that are accepted to be right even if they're 'counter-intuitive' and, in order to understand them, you have to leave your common sense at the door.

So, one more time, explain the following argument: a moving observer (M) is holding a rectangular block (B) is seen as a cube by a stationary observer (S). So, why can't M also see it as a cube?

Kasim:

In SR, a moving observer (M) is holding a rectangular block (B) is observed as a cube by a stationary observer (S). Now, M should also see the cube if the contraction is real like it is with gravitation length contraction.

It is real and it is not experienced by M, just like a to a dude sitting on a moving cannonball, the cannonball's momentum is real but not experienced by him.

Also your explanation for why relativity says he doesn't experience it is wrong. It has nothing to do with him 'shrinking by the same amount.' The reason he doesn't experience it is because the contraction is an effect of the relative motion between the rectangle and other things, and M is not moving relative to the rectangle. So it's a rectangle in his reference frame.

the contraction is only in the direction of motion; the width and height don’t change. Hence, M should see the change in the length compared to the unchanged width and height, the aspect ratio change.

As I said above, only people moving relative to the block will experience it. Since M is not moving relative to it, he or she experiences it in whatever shape it has in its rest frame (rectangle in this example).

At least this change in the rate of oscillation can be verified by an astronaut traveling with the clock on the satellite.

No, you're wrong on that. The non-atomic-clock timing instruments the astronaut brings with him or her will measure the atomic oscillations as occurring at the same speed as they do on the surface of the Earth. He or she will observe no change in oscillation rate, as long as he is moving with the orbiting clock at the same height above Earth.

So I take this effect as real but as proof of clock dilation not time dilation.

Well LOL I hope I didn't just get you to think its an illusion. But whether it makes you more or less accepting of the theory, you should understand what the theory says about time dilation. Time effects are exactly like space effects; they are only experienced by things moving (or under a different acceleration) relative to the object of study. Any two objects at rest in respect to each other - like an astronaut and the clock on the satellite he or she is fixing - will observe no time dilation effect occurring in the other.

CFT

It really wouldn’t matter what I said. If I said A, you’re snarky. If I said B, you’re snarky.

Okay, I won't be snarky. Just tell me some observation your alternate theory predicts that is different from what SR says, and we can discuss how we could go about performing the experiment. We can discuss whether a similar experiment might already have been done, and whether those results confirm or undermine your alternate theory (or relativity!). Ideally I'd also like to know why your theory predicts that, but if that's too much to fit into our serious conversational first exchange, I'll understand.

Addendum to my response to Kasim:

[eric said]The non-atomic-clock timing instruments the astronaut brings with him or her will measure the atomic oscillations as occurring at the same speed as they do on the surface of the Earth.

And just to be clear, this has nothing to do with astronaut and rocket having come up from the surface of the Earth. If, just for example, the astronaut were to capture a passing comet and fashion his or her timing instruments out of it, those instruments would measure the clock's atomic oscillations as being normal and not slowed down. Any instruments, from any origin, in the co-moving frame with the atomic clock, will experience and thus measure it's oscillations as normal.

@eric

Although we don't agree on relativity, I admire your input. At least you answer questions and give your side of the debate. Please encourage Frank to do the same.

I think you've got it wrong about time pieces. ALL time pieces would be affected by the lower gravity in orbit whether you grab the material from a passing comet or bring them with you from Earth. You see it's the rate of oscillation of the atoms in the atomic clock that is affected by the lower gravity i.e. the lower gravity doesn't hinder the rate of oscillation as much as the higher gravity does at sea level.

You said that the atomic clocks oscillations will be normal not slowed down. Actually, the oscillations will increase not slowed down or normal. I mean we need a mechanism that records and displays the oscillations because the softwre in the atomic clocks converts the oscillations into time units. But, an oscillation counter will show that the rate of oscillation has increased in orbit and will be seen by an astronaut.

OK, maybe we don't need an astronaut. Just get the oscillation counter to send the data to the ground where we can compare that count with a count of an earth-bound oscillation counter. This will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that atomic oscillations in orbit are faster than Earth-bound atomic oscillations.

That's what I like about gravitational clock dilation - both observers agree that a change has taken place. See the question I posed to Frank and you'll know what I mean.

we need a mechanism that records and displays the oscillations because the softwre in the atomic clocks converts the oscillations into time units. But, an oscillation counter will show that the rate of oscillation has increased in orbit and will be seen by an astronaut.

You're right I got the sign wrong, but no, an oscillation counter on the satellite would not measure more oscillations/second than normal. Again, the dilation is only experienced in things moving or accelerating relative to the satellite; if the counter is on the satellite, it is co-moving and counts the 'standard' number of oscillations per second.

That’s what I like about gravitational clock dilation – both observers agree that a change has taken place.

No, they don't agree. For that to happen all the molecular interactions in the astronaut and in his counter would have to be occurring at the sea-level rate. And then you'd have to explain why physical laws are operating differently for the astronaut and his counter (on the one hand) and the atomic clock (on the other), when they are at rest compared to each other and operating under exactly the same forces as each other. How does your alternative physics know only to apply the dilation to the cesium atoms in the clock, but not the cesium atoms in the astronaut?

>>an oscillation counter on the satellite would not measure more oscillations/second than normal.

I say it does.

Well AIUI you are mistaken, but at least this is a testable claim. Let's just make sure I have your claims correct with a made-up example (these numbers are not accurate). We set up an experiment with an atomic clock in orbit, a frequency counter on Earth, and a frequency counter attached to orbiting clock. The "baseline" frequency rate of a Cs clock at sea level is taken to be 9.192E9/sec.
Relativity predicts: the counter on Earth will measure some higher frequency being broadcast from the orbiting clock (for illustration: 9.193E9/sec). The counter on the satellite measures the standard frequency 9.192E9/sec.
Kasim predicts: counter on Earth will measure some higher frequency (9.193E9/sec). Counter on the satellite measures the same higher frequency as the Earth counter (9.193E9/sec).

Is this an accurate description of your alternate theory's prediction?

, this is my testable prediction that atoms oscillate faster in orbit than they do on the ground.

As measured by us on the ground, that prediction is consistent with GR, so it's not a test of your theory vs. it. To be a good test, you have to think of some observable that is different between your idea and GR or SR.

However, I think your idea that a co-moving frequency counter (i.e., one in orbit with the satellite) would measure the dilation, is a good test. I will have to do some thinking and research on whether it's been directly tested or whether the principle has been tested via some indirect method. Initially though, I don't know of any direct test set up this way, mostly because scientists shy away from experiments predicted to give negative results. Typical tests of relativity measure dilation between observers at different heights or velocities, they don't intentionally put things next to each other and attempt to measure the non-difference.

I’ve given you the basis of an experiment to prove that the oscillations of all types of atom oscillate faster in lower gravity than they do in higher gravity. It’s a physicl Phenomenon not a relative one.

I believe you might have. Though obviously I disagree with your last sentence.

"popular theories that are accepted to be right even if they’re ‘counter-intuitive’ and, in order to understand them, you have to leave your common sense at the door":
You got that right!
It is not just even physics but probably all sciences have lot of counter-intuitive stuff which verified by experiments and observations, which make them irrefutable facts (at least for a smart person). Even Newton physics have counter-intuitive facts. For example people believed (I think at least over a thousand years) that heavier objects would fall faster. Newton physics proved otherwise.

If the standard second is 9,192,631,770 oscillations on the ground, the counter in orbit will count more than 9,192,631,770 oscillations.

I believe we can work with that. So if I find an experiment in which a frequency counter under the same gravitational acceleration as the timepiece, counts it running "normal," this is consistent with relativity but not with your idea. OTOH if a frequency counter under the same gravitational acceleration as the timepiece counts it running fast, this is consistent with Kasim's idea but not GR. Is that an accurate description of your prediction?

I’m not giving any precise figures because I don’t have a mathematical theory

Perhaps we can leave that problem for another day. For now, I think we just need to know that we can test your idea by setting a frequency counter in the rest frame of a clock. GR will predict that it won't observe the clock running fast or slow, while your idea predicts that it will.

So the issue for today is: do I have your prediction correct or not?

In GR, phenomena are independent of observers.

GR effects are still relativistic. Meaning that things in different frames of reference will experience time, space, etc. differently. But where SR is about differences in velocity, GR is about differences in acceleration including gravitational acceleration. Your head is time dilated compared to your feet (assuming you are standing up); this is GR, as the acceleration from gravity gets less the higher something is. Move your arm away from your body, and your fingers will be time dilated compared to your chest; this is SR, as they are moving at velocity relative to your chest (at least for a short while).

Those examples may sound ridiculous, but NIST has measured GR differences on the scale of a couple feet and SR differences on the scale of 20mph.

You’re telling me that the rate of oscillation of the Cs atom in orbit is measured from earth. That’s a new one on me.

Derivatively, that's what a GPS signal is. It's your receiver measuring the time code from four GPS satellites, while each satellite is calculating their time code from the oscillations of the onboard atomic clocks. Thus a GPS receiver getting an uncorrected GPS signal is basically an Earthbound instrument measuring a quantity derived from the oscillations of atomic clocks in orbit. This will not be a good test though, because GPS satellites have multiple atomic clocks on board, plus your receiver looks at four satellites at once, and the signal is already corrected for relativity. I will see if I can find some more direct experiment that did what we are discussing. No promises I will find it, but I'll try. If anyone else reading this knows of such an experiment, feel free to link or suggest it.

@ Kasim

"I have no idea what GR predicts..."

And yet you somehow call yourself amateur scientist and claim that the very thing you admit you're clueless about is wrong and you're right.

That's just gold.

Why do you make it so complicated?

Because GR also predicts that to us on the surface, a clock in orbit will run fast. Thus just checking whether it runs fast (to us on the surface) doesn't help us decide whether you vs. GR have it right. We must find an observation where you and GR expect something different. I'm trying to figure that out. I believe from what you've said that one difference is what a measuring device In orbit with the clock would measure; GR says it will see the clock running normally. From what I gather, you predict that it will see the clock running fast. Is that correct?

Either you misunderstand GR or I do. My understanding of GR is that it's independent of frames of reference. We don't measure a clock in orbit from earth. Instead, it has a Cs atom as oscillator, a counter that counts these oscillations, and a piece of software to translate these oscillations into time units I think the UTC standard. These time units are then broadcast to satnavs, or whatever needs them, and they make use of the time signals to determine the position by triangulation I presume.

So, how do you think the GPS system works? How do satnavs determine their position?

"Time dilation" is one of the magical math/model inventions of relativity.
It's reciprocal in the Lorentz equation is "length contraction," so when a traveling clock slows down (as well explained above) the distance traveled must be contracted. The Laws of Relativity state that "length is not invariant."
It's the Law!

So you can get to the nearest star twice as fast as light if you go 86% of the speed of light... you know... because the distance has decreased as the ship's clock runs slower than before it was accelerated to that very high speed.
Believe it or not! (Relativity not only believes it but claims it as a Law beyond criticism.

"How long will we have to wait for this relativity ghost to be given up?"

All you two clowns need to do to end the "farce" is come up with an explanation (more than simply "it doesn't make sense, which is what you're currently doing) for why it is wrong: something it predicts that we can see to be true, for example.

Based on your repeated substance-free posts, that won't happen soon.

The distance to Alpha Centauri is about 4.4 light years. It takes 4.4 years for its light to reach us. No mass can travel as fast as light. Therefore, no ship however fast can reach AC in less than 4.4 years.

The distance between stars does not shrink for such theoretical ships just because their clocks are running at half their previous (before acceleration) speed.

This is such an obvious fallacy! Evidence of complete indoctrination.

Kasim,

Then let me try this: suppose you took a clock based on a different principal onto the spaceship. According to your idea, it is only the oscillation of the Cs atoms that are affected by the change in gravitational field. If you took a clock based on another principle, it should not be affected by the gravitational field.

Of course, you may counter with the idea that this clock would likewise be affected by the gravitational field. If that's the case for all clocks based on any measurement principle, then my question is then what is the difference between saying that all possible clocks are affected and saying that time itself is affected? Keep in mind that according to our best understanding of physics the best answer we can give to the question "What is time" is that time is the quantity that is measured by clocks. If ALL clocks are affected by a change, then it certainly makes sense to say that time is affected by that change.

MM,

There you go begging questions again. The notion that spatial distances cannot change is a fallacy simply because we know that spatial distances cannot change. Plus, as measured aboard the ship, a spaceship certainly can reach AC in less than 4.4 years. In theory, there is actually no limit on how short that time can be. A ship, were it possible, travelling at the speed of light would measure a duration of zero for the trip. A clock (again were it possible) attached to a light beam would measure zero time for the trip as well.

I think much of the problem is that people start by learning Euclidean geometry in an intuitive way rather than as a purely axiomatic deductive system. This imbues a sense that Euclidean geometry is the "correct" geometry, and that any other geometry is somehow wrong. This is understandable; Euclidean geometry certainly appears to be the geometry that best describes the universe, but this is true only if we don't probe too deeply. If we look at high velocities, then we find experimentally that Euclidean geometry is NOT a good description of the universe. The invariant Euclidean distances are not truly invariant at all. The universe more accurately is described by a Minkowski space, rather than a Euclidean one. This is the underlying cause of the effects of SR. We can of course go even farther and recognize that in the presence of gravitational fields, the Minkowski space is not an accurate description and recognize that a Riemannian geometry is more appropriate. That is the underlying basis for General Relativity.

If you're just trying to get along in everyday life, none of this need concern you. You can go right ahead and believe that the universe is Euclidean, that time is absolute and that spatial distances are invariant. You will run into no problems whatsoever. This is why the other geometries seem counterintuitive; our brains evolved in a world in which the Euclidean geometry is correct to a high degree of approximation. The experimental evidence suggests otherwise, however. The universe simply is not Euclidean, time is not absolute, and spatial distance are not invariant. None of this implies, however, as you seem to think, that there is no "real world" out there. There is a real world; it just doesn't behave the way you think it does.

Sean T,
In my example, if a ship is traveling at .86c toward Alpha Centauri, SR's Lorentz transform says that the distance will shrink to 2.2 light years, in violation of the science of astronomy, which puts it at about 4.4 light years. This is based on the arbitrary dictum that length is not invariant, implying that frames of reference ("for the ship" in this case) dictate what is real, not astronomical measurements or the natural distribution of stars in space, regardless of travelers and their clocks.
Obviously no attractive force pulls the Sun and AC closer together just for the travelers' convenience.

No doubt the ship's clock will "keep time" (tick) more slowly due to the force of acceleration to reach .86c, so "for the travelers" less time will pass than "for Earthlings."

However, any theory or its math that claims the ship can travel faster than light (4.4 years for the trip) and make the 4.4 ly trip in, say, 3.8 years (at .86 c)... is blatantly bullshit.

Math "typo": By Earth time (an orbit is a year, remember*) the ship will take 14% more time than light to reach AC, not 3.8 yrs, ... faster than light.
* When you dump variable clocks as real "time dilation," an Earth orbit (now precisely refined by atomic clocks) is the standard year for time reckoning.
And slow clocks still don't make space shrink in the actual cosmos.

Eric is arranging a test for my statements but he keeps cocking up the details by putting words in my mouth that I didn’t say.

I apologize if I'm misrepresenting your opinion. I'm not trying to. I'm trying to understand what different predictionyour idea makes compared to relativity. This attempt is complicated by the fact that you don't seem to understand what GR predicts. A time dilation effect that depends on gravitational acceleration means that a counter at the same gravitational acceleration as a Cs clock will count it working normally. Not fast. Because the counter will be "counting fast" along with the clock "oscillating fast."

So, rather than put words in your mouth, let's start out with a question - does your idea predict this same behavior by the counter? Or some different behavior by the counter?

My prediction is that, after 14.3 years (the half-way point), the crew will still be 2.5 million light years away from Andromeda because the ship’s time is an illusion not real.

Accoding to SR, after 14.3 Earth years they will still be less than 14.3 ly from Earth. However the passengers will have aged a small fraction of 14.3 years. By the time they reach the halfway point, 1.25 million years will have passed on Earth, but the crew will only have aged 14.3 years. And their Cs clocks will have only ticked 14.3 years' worth of oscillations. And their frequency counters will agree with their clocks in having recorded 14.3 years' worth of Cs oscillations in 14.3 years of ship time. IOW, the frequency counters will tell the ship's observers that Cs is oscillating at the standard rate. Because time dilation affects all three things - clocks, humans, and frequency counters.

That is what relativity says. Since you think I keep cocking up your idea, why don't you tell us what part of that description your idea would say will happen differently.

[Aside - my ability to respond may be limited for a while due to personal conflicts, though I'll try and login once every day or two.]

eric,

Here's hoping for a satisfactory resolution to those issues.

Kasim,

I think you are missing the point. So far, your theory predicts exactly the same thing about the rate that clocks run as GR does. If you want to test your theory and show that it's right and that GR is wrong, you must come up with a case where your theory predicts a result that is different from what GR predicts. Can you do so? If so, perhaps you may turn out to be right and GR may turn out to be wrong; the experiment would have to be performed to find out. I wouldn't bet on you, though. GR''s predictions have been experimentally tested, and whenever a competing theory has predicted something other than what GR does, it's always been GR that has been shown to make the correct prediction.

Kasim,

Just to expand: suppose you come up with an alternative theory to GR. Let's assume that it makes all the same predictions for measured values that GR does. In a scientific sense, your theory IS GR. IOW, your theory is just an alternative formulation of the existing theory, not something new, no matter how the interpretations might appear.

The question "which of these two theories is correct?" can only be scientifically settled by experiment and observation. To settle the question, the competing theories must both make predictions and those predictions must, in at least one potential set of circumstances, differ. If you can find a set of circumstances in which your theory predicts something different from GR, then we can test your theory.

P.S., a little better understanding of physics can go a long way to having people take you seriously. It is well known, and experimentally verified that we cannot get relative velocities by addition. If body A and body B move in opposite directions, their relative velocity is NOT given by Va + Vb, but by a rather more complex formula that you can look up if you're interested.

Further, you may want to look up and learn about a subatomic particle called the muon. Like humans, muons only "live" for a finite amount of time. Also like people, there is a range of expected "life spans" for the muon. The muon can only last a certain amount of time, after which it "dies", or decays into lighter particles.

Now, muons are formed by collisions between incoming energetic cosmic rays and the molecules of gas in the upper atmosphere. The speed at which the muons are moving relative to the earth's surface at the time they are formed is known (from a measurement of their energy). The time it takes for the muon to travel from the upper atmosphere to the surface of the earth can be calculated from the known distance and the velocity of the muons. The real point is that this time is far in excess of the expected muon "lifespan".

Now your theory is that time dilation is really just clock dilation, and that the muon experiences the same passage of time as we do on the earth's surface. Since this is the case, no muons should survive to reach the surface of the earth. The velocity of the muons is such, however, that relativity predicts that the time it takes for them to reach the earth will be, IN THEIR REFERENCE FRAME, short enough that some of the muons will survive to reach the earth's surface. We now do have a situation where relativity and your theory make different predictions. Relativity predicts we should observe muons coming from cosmic ray collisions with the upper atmosphere. Your theory predicts that the muons should "die" en route from the collision location to the detector. Care to take a guess whether or not muons are detected?

Sean T #76

>>I think you are missing the point.

I'm not missing the point at all; you're implying that I'm saying that GR is wrong about the data. I'm not. In fact I agree that the rate of oscillation of cs atoms increases when in orbit because of the lower gravity. The point of difference is the interpretation of the result: Einstein says it's the rate at which time ticks by; and I'm saying it's just the rate at which the cs atom oscillates i.e. it has nothing to do with the passage of time. Otherwise, it'd be time travel which is what Ethan's post is about. IOW, Einstein and Ethan are wrong about time travel not the data.

>>So far, your theory predicts exactly the same thing about the rate that clocks run as GR does.

Of course my theory predicts the same DATA as GR; but we differ in its interpretation. Einstein implies it's time travel and I'm saying it's clock dilation not time travel.

>>If you want to test your theory and show that it’s right and that GR is wrong, you must come up with a case where your theory predicts a result that is different from what GR predicts.

My theory differs from GR only in interpretation of the data observed. The test has already been done. If time travel is possible then the GPS satellites would be somewhere in the future and would be unable to communicate with the satnavs that they guide. Game, set, and match to me. Remember, time dilation is about time travel i.e. moving along the time axis at different rates which doesn't happen.

I also gave an example of a spaceship going to Andromeda by accelrating at 1g for half of the way and decelerating at 1g for the other half. The trip would take 28.6 years ship's time because of time dilation. I agree with that; but the crew would've died 2.5 million years earlier as relativity doesn't affect the crew in the same way it affects the atomic clock. I'm saying that the effect on the clock is real that the crew would notice the clock is running slow. At one point, they'd think it had stopped working because relativity has no effect on the passage of time, just the way it's measured.

Sean T #77

>>a little better understanding of physics can go a long way to having people take you seriously.

If current physics teaches that time dilation is about time travel and I disagree with it, how can it go a long way to making me understand physics better? The data that supports time dilation is just clock dilation not time travel.

>>If body A and body B move in opposite directions, their relative velocity is NOT given by Va + Vb, but by a rather more complex formula

All I could find is the Doppler frequency shift when viewed head on or directly from behind and, yes, the classical methods don't seem to work. But, no mention of time travel - all observers see the same data that classical mechanics doesn't predict. You're forgetting one thing: I'm not disagreeing with the data; I'm disagreeing with its interpretation.

>>Like humans, muons only “live” for a finite amount of time. Also like people, there is a range of expected “life spans” for the muon. The muon can only last a certain amount of time, after which it “dies”, or decays into lighter particles.

Yes, I studied this and came up with several explanations in addition to the 1 or 2 relativists use. Relativists exclude the effect of relativity on mass i.e. it increases. Hence, there would've been more mass to decay. This is more logical because particles in accelerators DO gain mass when accelerated close to light speed. When muons are produced in the upper atmosphere, they're accelerated to near light speed and this acceleration cause the rate of decay to slow down in the same way the high gravity causes cs atoms to oscillate at a lower rate than in a lower gravity. Remmenber that, according to the equivalence principle, gravity is a form of acceleration. This one is more satisfying as we don't have to consider the other forms of relativity.

>>Now your theory is that time dilation is really just clock dilation, and that the muon experiences the same passage of time as we do on the earth’s surface. Since this is the case, no muons should survive to reach the surface of the earth.

The first sentence is correct. The second one isn't. Do you know how many muons are produced in the upper atmosphere? Do you know if any muons are produced lower down? Do you know how the half-life is defined? My understanding of the last question is that you start with a population of N particles. After a given time (the half-life), half the population decays. In the next half-life, another half decays and so on. So, it could be that gazillions of muons were produced and a huge number of the population survived to sea-level.

Of course, my favourite solution is that the acceleration reduces the rate of decay of the muon. This is more acceptable as there's already a precedent for it. This can be tested with radioactive elements.

>>Your theory predicts that the muons should “die” en route from the collision location to the detector. Care to take a guess whether or not muons are detected?

Wrong again. My theory uses the same method that slows the rate of oscillation of the cs atoms i.e. acceleration of the muons causes the rate of decay to slow down thus enabling them to survive till they reach the detector (presumably at sea-level). Again, it's not time dilation, just decay dilation.

a spaceship going to Andromeda by accelerating at 1g for half of the way and decelerating at 1g for the other half. The trip would take 28.6 years ship’s time because of time dilation. I agree with that; but the crew would’ve died 2.5 million years earlier as relativity doesn’t affect the crew in the same way it affects the atomic clock.

This is definitely a prediction different from GR. But impossible to test as stated. But perhaps we can explore why one and not the other, according to your theory, and find something else that doesn't experience the time dilation under your idea (like the crew), and test that instead.

So, why don't humans experience this dilation? What is it about us (in your idea) that causes our molecular electron-electron interactions to not undergo a slowing effect the way an electronic transition in a Cs atom does? And is it only humans that age according to the Earth's reference frame? Or only animals? Or only living things? Or what?

Here's a thought: right now, there are microscopic amounts of C14 and I131 in my body (and yours, and everyone's). They are radioactive isotopes. Under your theory Kasim, does the C-14 in our crew's body decay at the Earth rate, or at the slower ship rate?

If time travel is possible then the GPS satellites would be somewhere in the future and would be unable to communicate with the satnavs that they guide.

Why would accelerated time cause something to disappear and reappear later? That makes no more sense to me than someone claiming that if you increase your velocity, you will teleport across the room. The response to that is: no, even if you move faster through space, you still travel across every bit of it. For any position x along your path, I can find a time t when you were there - no matter how you acclerate or decelerate. For time dilation, we can just make the exact same statement, only reversing the order of the clauses: for any moment t in an object's reference frame, I can find a position x where it is - no matter how you dilate it. So it won't simply disappear and reappear somewhen else, ever.

Of course, my favourite solution is that the acceleration reduces the rate of decay of the muon.

The big problem with that assertion is that atmospherically produced muons never accelerated. They are produced at a certain velocity and it doesn't significantly change over their lifetime.

Kasim,

Then your theory IS General Relativity. ANY theory that makes the identical predictions that GR does is identical with GR. There is no difference between your theory and GR, at least from a scientific basis. It makes no sense, therefore to argue your theory on a science website. Try a philosophical one instead.

Also, if all physical processes that depend on time are affected by gravity or by velocity, then why would you not just state that time is affected by these things. If there is NO WAY to measure the passage of time that remains unaffected, by what scientific basis can you claim that the rate of passage of time is not affected, but only that these physical processes are? What is the difference IOW, between muon decay dilation, or Cs atom oscillation on the one hand and time dilation on the other? Again, since the idea that time dilates PREDICTS that these "other" dilations occur, time dilation IS oscillation dilation or decay dilation (or any other time-dependent physical process dilation). Unless, of course, you can come up with a time-dependent physical process that is unaffected by time dilation. I just don't see you giving up on your idea, though, even if it were proven to you that humans could make the trip from earth to AC and back, surviving while millions of years passed on earth. You'd just call it "aging dilation" rather than admit that time is not an absolute, invariant quantity in the universe.

Again, your lack of physics knowledge is showing, BTW. By what process does an increased mass inhibit the decay of an unstable elementary particle? Typically, heavier particles are less stable and therefore decay faster than lighter ones. Also, we know the incoming flux of cosmic rays and we know the process by which muons are formed due to cosmic ray collisions. We know that they are travelling distances too great for them to survive in the numbers we see without relativistic time dilation. We also can form muon beams in particle accelerators and measure their apparent half lives as a function of their velocity relative to the lab reference frame. We find that half life, as measured by lab-stationary clocks, increases with increasing velocity, just as predicted by relativity.

In short, relativity predicts the observable phenomena of the universe unerringly, at least within its applicable domain. You don't like the interpretations of relativity, but that doesn't mean they are wrong. It most likely means you've never really carefully considered questions such as "what is time" or "what is the actual geometry of the universe". You merely have assumed you knew the answers to those questions. I might suggest that you actually do not.

it’s just the rate at which the cs atom oscillates i.e. it has nothing to do with the passage of time

This must be some usage of the word "rate" I was previously unaware of.

Narad, the word rate depends on time being constant. If you have variable time, then you wouldn't know what the rate is. The cs atom oscillates faster in orbit because the low gravity doesn't hinder it as much as the higher gravity on the ground. It has nothing to do with the passage of time,

Also velocity is the rate of change of distance. Here, distance as well as time need to be invariant so that you can consistently measure velocity. It looks as if though relativity is manipulating space and time to give the illusion that the speed of light is the same for all observers.

Sean T #84

My theory ISN'T GR. My there interprets differently the same data that GR comes up with. You could say that I use GR to calculate the data then I interpret that data in my own way i.e. differently.

So, whereas Ethan and other scientists use it to prove the possibilty of time travel, I'm saying that time travel is impossible because the change in the rate of ocillation is a change to the physical properties of the clock i.e. it's clock dilation, not time dilation and certainly not time travel.

Einstein uses 4-dimensional spacetime where the 4th dimension is the time axis. All axes have coordinates. If you and me are moving along them at different rates, then you will be at a different time coordinate than me i.e. you'll be at a different time position than me - this is time travel. I'm saying that this is not the case. This is the difference between my theory and GR, and SR for that matter.

In conclusion, GR is about time travel; my theory isn't i.e. my theory holds space and time invariant which means that the speed of light is not the same for all observers. The speed of light maybe constant in any one uniform medium but is relative to everything else including other photons.

eric #82

>>Why would accelerated time cause something to disappear and reappear later?

Einstein uses 4-dimensional spacetime where the 4th dimension is the time axis. All axes have coordinates. If you and me are moving along them at different time rates, then you will be at a different time coordinate than me i.e. you’ll be at a different time position than me either in my past or my future – this is time travel. I’m saying that this is not the case. So, if your clock is ahead of mine, according to GR, it means that you're in my future and I shouldn't be able to see i.e. you should disaapear from my view because we can't see into the future, nor can you see into the past.

But because the satellites whose clocks are running faster, are still visible to earth, it means that theyve moved along the time axis at exactly the same rate as the ground crew i.e. time is invariant. The fact that there's a change in the waythey record time, means it's clock dilation not time dilation.

Also velocity is the rate of change of distance.

Why, no, it's not.

Your non sequitur in response to the observation that you misstated the definition of freaking velocity is duly noted.

Do you mean that velocity is the rate of change of displacement? If not, please enlighten us.

"Us"? You're Gollum using the Royal We now? Velocity is the rate of change of position. If you swing a rock on a string around your head, its distance doesn't change. This is so trivial as to precede the rest of your babbling.

You’ve just proved you’re ignorant. Relativity uses the speed of light which travels in a rectilinear fashion i.e. it doesn’t swing about your head (or maybe it does in your world).

Your habit of trying to change the question is also duly noted: Δ(Δx)/Δt ≠ Δx/Δt. Try reading for content rather than projection some time.

I would add that the atoms and molecules in the human body are also affected by relativity. But this doesn’t affect ageing the way you think.

Why not? Aging requires biochemical reactions. If biochemical reactions are occurring half as fast for some reason, then you'll age half as fast.

I totally agree that different individuals suffer the effects of age differently. Dilate time by a factor of 2, and the guy who would die surprisingly young 10,000 heartbeats from now (roughly 2 hrs 19 minutes) is still going to die surprisingly young 10,000 heartbeats from now, while everyone else attends his funeral and remarks about how crazy it was that marathon Bob died so young. Nevertheless, if time is dilated by a factor of 2 on a starship, then the people on the ship will see Bob die 2 hrs and 19 minutes later, while the people watching the ship zoom by will see Bob die 4 hrs and 38 minutes later.

So I'm still trying to figure out why you think humans age according to Earth time even even as you accept that the interactions of electrons with nuclei and other electrons, etc. slows down. And I'm still trying to come up with something simple that you think won't experience time dilation at relativistic speeds - i.e., something that acts like a human, in your theory.

If you and me are moving along them at different time rates, then you will be at a different time coordinate than me

This is not hard. If A is traveling 0.87c (gamma = 0.5) compared to B, then B will watch A cross 1m in 3.8E-10 seconds (assuming I did the math right; the number's not really important). A will not teleport across the meter, he'll just move really fast across it in B's perspective. Now because of SR, A will measure himself crossing 0.5m in half of that 3.8E-10 seconds. Which from a Newtonian perspective is counter-intuitive, but nothing in that description requires teleportation. It's simply not needed to explain how A and B can be interacting with each other despite one moving relativistically compared to the other.

Ethan’s article is about time travel and he claims that science says it’s possible and he uses time dilation as proof.

Ethan used the phrase 'time travel' as an attention grabber. He doesn't mean relativistic travelers suddenly disappear, then reappear in Andromeda 250 million years later. He means they travel the entire distance in a fast ship, but because of relativity they and everything on the ship only experience a few years of time.

Lay people’s interpretation of relativity is completely different from the actual interpretation.

You realize you're a lay person, right? A self-admitted amateur. Have you considered the possibility that what's going on here is that your interpretation of relativity is completely different from the actual theory?

>> He doesn’t mean relativistic travelers suddenly disappear, then reappear in Andromeda 250 million years later.

This is better than cryogenics. I don't think relativity would have an effect on longevity - the crew would've lived for 2.5 million earth years for the price of 28.6 ship years. What about fuel consumption? Would the 2.5 million light years be used for calculating fuel needs or just for the 28.6 years? I suspect it's the 2.5 million light years. In which case the crew will see the fuel being depleted at an astronomic rate. I know that it won't be practical to take all the fuel for the entire journey on board; it's just a thought.

>>your interpretation of relativity is completely different from the actual theory

Absolutely. And so is Einstein's which you've adopted. I don't accept things until I fully understand it. Long ago, I used to take people's word for granted until I found that most of them are based on lies. So, I even doubted alleged scientific facts. Most of my doubts of science were groundless; but the act of questioning them and finding out that they're right, increased my confidence in science and, above all, I learnt the art of scientific investigation. However, my reasoning, based on previous knowledge, led to me finding inconsistencies in some theories that depend on the interpretation of experimental data. Notice that experimental data is not evidence; it's the analysis of such data that can turn it into evidence. But analysis of data is subjective.

One of the rules of scientific investigation is repeatability. Is the evidence for the Higgs boson repeatable? Or is it based on 2 detectors of the same experiment? While they were at it, they could've built 10 or more detectors. This would've been prohibitively expensive to do. So, we're dependent on one experiment that uses 2 detectors. The important thing is that the existence of the Higgs boson is inferred rather than directly detected.

Now, I'm not using the lack of repeatability of the Higgs boson experiment but the very theory that led to its supposed existence. I actually don't believe in theories that have fields that permeate the universe especially an expanding one which means that the Higgs mechanism is baloney.

This would also mean that QFT and the Aether theories are baloney as well because fields require a source, diminish as the inverse square law, have equipotentials, and perpendicular forces. The curvature of spacetime may have a source and it diminishes by the inverse square law but it doesn't have equipotentials nor perpendicular forces. A better explanation of gravity is that mass generates a gravitational field which diminishes inversely as the square of the distance, has equipotentials and perpendicular forces; the latter being the gravitational force. Poor Einstein mistook the equipotentials of the gravitational field for the curvature of spacetime. I blame Minkowski for putting words in his mouth.

I had to bring gravity into this because it cause time dilation as well. Just keeping it relevant.

Consider the graph of an ideal gas on volume v temperature. The volume decreases linearly with temperature and reaches zero volume at absolute zero. How many real gases achieve zero volume? That’s why I don’t believe in singularities (points of zero volume).

It's almost as though it's called the ideal gas law for a reason.

kasim @98:

By the principle of equivalence, A’s behaviour would be exactly the same i.e. they should age at the same rate proving that time is invariant by SR’s rules.

You are again confusing SR with GR. The equivalence principle means that the dilation from 1g acceleration will be the same as the dilation of someone at sea level on earth, true. The greater dilation of the starship passengers comes from their relative speed, not their acceleration.

Einstein claims that because the moving person (B) experiences time dilation because he/she experiences g-forces during the acceleration to uniform velocity which A doesn’t.

If you're talking about SR, then no, that's not what Einstein said. That is in fact the thing you and MM keep claiming, but it's not relativity theory. Actual SR says deltaT(ship) = deltaT(observer)/gamma, where gamma is the square root of 1-v(ship compared to observer)^2/c^2. You'll note that acceleration appears nowhere in that equation; only velocity. In the theory of relativity, SR effects do not come from acceleration. You can certainly disagree with the theory, but please try and represent what it says correctly.

As you can see, I do consider relativistic effect but from a different perspective. I may be eventually persuaded to accept the ageing process is affected as predicted by SR, but until empirical proof is obtained, it’s all conjecture.

We have given you that empirical proof: short half-life muons not under any acceleration reach the earth when their physical properties say they shouldn't. This is fully consistent with SR - which again, has NO dependency on acceleration when properly understood - and is not consistent with either yours or MM's claims. MM got around this problem by claiming all our experimental measurements of muon half-life must be wrong. How are you going to get around it?

I hope that you’ll agree that my clock dilation and Einstein’s time dilation are alternatives to each other.

I do not agree that they are alternatives in any formal sense. You have an idea that appears to be different, but honestly after weeks of asking you for some observation we could use to tell the difference, you have yet to come up with one. You have no physics equations that could be used instead of SR or GR to predict how objects will behave at high speeds and accelerations. An 'alternative' will require those things to be an alternative.

You have a long way to go to have an alternative. From 'idea,' you need to quantitate it. Then you need to find some prediction it makes that differs from the predictions relativity makes. Then you need to test it. Then you need to publish the results and show that the world agrees with your alternative, not relativity. Then scientists will start paying attention to your alternative.

the point to take away from this is that reality deviates from idealism and the graph based on the Lorentz factor is an idealised one as it hasn’t been proven empirically.

Well, relativity and QM have yet to be combined. I think many scientists expect that they eventually will be, and that this combination will take care of some of the calculated singularities and infinities in relativity, the same way QM took care of the ultraviolet catastrophe in classical physics.

However if you are expecting such a revision to overturn concepts like time dilation, I would not get your hopes up. A quantum relativity is most likely going to fully agree with current relativity in any domain where the current equations don't 'go to infinity.'

Put another way, expect the next 'scientific revolution' to resolve problems we currently don't know how to solve and don't have data for - but do not expect that new theory to disagree (with relativity) on observations that have already been taken and currently support it.

Is it just me or everybody on this website seem to be increasing their argumentation skills. Very nice! :-)

I also put together some ideas about time travel recently if anyone interested:
http://fb36blog.blogspot.com/2017/05/time-travel.html

"From ‘idea,’ you need to quantitate it. Then you need to find some prediction it makes that differs from the predictions relativity makes. Then you need to test it. Then you need to publish the results and show that the world agrees with your alternative, not relativity. Then scientists will start paying attention to your alternative."

This is very well put. And it is the crux of the matter! Not for Relativity.. but for ANY and ALL scientific debate.

Just thinking about "scientific" things doesn't make one a scientist... professional or amateur. It's APPLYING the SCIENTIFIC METHODOLOGY to thinking that makes one a scientist. And it's not easy.

In fact... even people who are scientists can reach a point where they start doubting some theories because they are just to hard to grasp in a quantitative way.

I have a very close friend who's a mechanical engineer (works in R&D for big international mechanics company), who really thinks QM and everything that CERN does is just a pile of hogwash! When we talked about it and I tried to find out why he thinks that way.. he explained to me how hard and how much he had to study to be able to really understand all the mathematics that go into modeling every-day things in his field of work... like fluid dynamics, stress calculations etc etc... And he said.. well.. after 6 years.. I finally got it.. It just dropped into place.. and I understood it. Then we had a semester about QM, he said, and I saw what kind of mathematics is used to get things from QM... and that math just doesn't make any sense at all. It's not real, he said! It's some over-the-top, incredibly convoluted, twisted statistics, that's not used anywhere else, and for good reason! There is NO WAY you can get any sensible thing out of it!
I didn't want to argue further, of course. But I realized that he reached his limit. He probably forgot more math and physics then I will ever learn or know... but yet it seemed it's that precise volume of knowledge that in turn seemed to hold him back from going forward.
It's hard, it's complicated... it takes an army of top notch mathematicians and physicists to get things out of it... but just because it's hard or un-intuitive, doesn't mean it's not true. Just one experiment is enough. Making sense of it is something else.

@Frank 106

I read your blog and agree with your conclusion that time travel to the past is not possible because of the 'Butterfly Effect' and the Grandfather Paradox among other things such as causality. Although I have qualms with time travel to the future, it's logical and I'm glad to hear it because it invalidates the Many Worlds Interpretation (WMI) of QM which states that all possible futures have happened. Perhaps going to the future is one of the possible futures; but this introduces infinities which cannot exist - my conjecture.

What I found interesting was travelling to the future (WMI excepted) as it's devoid of paradoxes and seemingly possible. However, if a spaceship was travelling at close to c, it'd experience time dilation and the crew would appear to be moving in slow motion. However, light will not be affected by relativity. I find it incredible that the speed of light would remain constant while they're moving slowly in time. Shouldn't the light also be moving slowly in time? I mean how does this work?

What I'm asking is what speed will an extrernal observer see the light moving inside the ship relative to the crew? To me this is a paradox. Einstein gets round this the relativity of simultaneity. An external observer will see the photons hitting a crew person less quickly than the crew person would. This is supposed to be explained by the relativity of simultaneity. I think this is an epicycle to mitigate a false theory.

I bet that the light is also moving slowly in time but the crew won't notice because they're also moving slowly through time. This means that the crew's perception of the speed of light is illusory as they only perceive it as c because they're moving in slow motion which is normal to them.

@ Kasim

"...I’m saying that these affect the way clocks record time i.e. clock dilation. They don’t affect the passage of time."

There is no such thing as "clock" or ticking of clocks in fundamental physics. In other words... physics (classical or relativistic) knows just one "time". It is us, who in everyday use, talk about clocks.. or some periodic oscillations.. or some way of measuring the passage of sequences of events.

Like it was said over and over again.. in SR it's about simultaneity of events in different reference frames. You do not need a clock or any other device in order to experience that effect. You might need some way of counting if you wanted to explain to someone just how much apart in time are two events. But that's beside the point. Two events happen... two observers disagree on when they happened. They don't need clocks... One will say.. A and B happened at the same time. The other will say.. no.. A happened, then I went to the bathroom, then I came out, continued watching.. then B happened.

No clocks.. no ticks.. no nothing... just a series of events.

Your original statement does in fact propose a new theory. That of a "ticking clock".. which is NOT the same as "passage of time" like the rest of us think. Such a fundamentally different view of the Universe requires a huge body of proof and explanation on your part.

You are the one claiming something about "recording" or ticking and all that... The burden of proving that is entirely on you. Because SR doesn't need any clocks nor cares about recording the time.

p.s. in the above, it should say .."two observers, IN TWO DIFFERENT REFERENCE FRAMES, .... "

just so there is no confusion.

Kasim,

You find it incredible that light travels at a constant speed when time is slowed, but the fact that light travels at constant speed is the CAUSE of the time dilation in the first place. Relativity is based on a couple of assumptions, namely that no observer is special and that the same laws of physics apply regardless of your state of motion.

I trust that those statements don't seem too unbelievable to you. Why should we on earth think our measurements are correct and those that some alien race in another star system (pardon the sci-fi here, it's just to make a point) are incorrect. We have no reason to think our frame of reference is special. We also have no reason to think that those aliens live in a place where different physical laws apply. These two assumptions are really not particularly wild or controversial.

The thing is that these two assumptions lead to special relativity in a mathematically deductive way. One thing to keep in mind is that Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism apply to light. Light is an oscillating electromagnetic field. A changing electric field will (according to these equations) produce a magnetic field. Likewise, a changing magnetic field produces an electric field. By definition, an oscillating electric field is changing. This changing field produces a magnetic field, which also is changing and in turn produces an electric field. These changing electric and magnetic fields self-reinforce as they propagate through space. Maxwell's equations tell us that this is possible, but only if the propagation speed is equal to the inverse square root of the product of the vacuum permittivity and the vacuum permeability. These are electromagnetic quantities inherent to the universe; their definition is not really important here. The important thing is that the speed given by this formula is exactly equal to the speed of light. Thus, it is a physical law that light travels at the speed c.

In the late 18th Century, before SR, this led to quite a bit of consternation. Much like you, nobody could imagine how light could travel at constant speed when moving detectors and emitters were involved. If a source is moving toward you at 0.5c, would not the speed you measure for the emitted light be 1.5c? An attempt was made to get around this problem by postulating that there is a medium called the aether through which light moves. Light then always moves at c with respect to this medium, in full accord with Maxwell's equations. If you happen to move at 0.5c with respect to the aether, then, it's no problem that you observe light moving at 1.5c.

The problem with this was experimental. Nobody could measure light moving at any speed other than c, regardless of how fast either the detector or the emitter was moving. Experimentally, it was found that light has constant speed regardless of the motion of the source or detector. The only way to make sense of this is to grant that the fact that light moves at c is a physical law and that this physical law, just like all the others, applies to all observers. The first person to realize this and work out the consequences, of course, was Albert Einstein. The consequences are the time dilation, length contraction, mass-energy equivalence, etc., i.e. Special Relativity.

Kasim,

Again, I challenge you. Does your idea predict ANYTHING different from relativity? If not, then as different as your interpretation seems, your idea IS relativity. If there is no difference in the predictions that two ideas make, then the two ideas are scientifically equivalent. You dislike the interpretation that time dilation occurs, preferring instead to think of it as clock dilation. I cannot say you're wrong in this, so long as your idea of clock dilation makes exactly the same predictions as relativity. Of course, should this not be the case, we can see which prediction agrees with reality, and thereby prove whether you're right or relativity is.

The main problem I see with your interpretation is simplicity. Your interpretation is needlessly complex. Essentially, your interpretation is that all imaginable time-dependent physical processes are affected by the relative velocity and/or acceleration of the observers measuring them. Like I said, I cannot say this in wrong, but it would be incumbent on you to explain WHY these processes are so affected. Why would a clock based on atomic oscillations slow when it moves rapidly? Why would a clock based on measuring the abundance of an unstable isotope slow down at high speed. Why would a clock based on a mechanical oscillator be affected? I'm not saying that there couldn't be explanations found, but it seems to me that there would have to be a different explanation for each possible type of clock you might imagine. Isn't it just simpler and easier to say that the rate of passage of time slows instead? That explains the slowing of ALL possible clocks.

Sorry Kasim, not gonna work.. You've been given a chance and given an explanation... Your misconseptions are clear to any high-school kid with basic algebra knowledge..

"‘Time’ has existed for eons whereas physics is a relative newcomer. ....Time is under no-one’s control and nothing’s control..."

ROOOFL!!!... yeah.. go to some new age shaman group and talk there, you have no place in a physics forum... and just like MM.. your a crazy lunatic who doesn't care one bit for science or reason. Adios muchacho

"You make it sound that SR is beyond reproach."

far from it... but it's eons and eons beyond reproach from looneys like you.

" As far as I’m concerned, more people disbelieve in SR and GR timwe dilation than those who believe in it."

AHAHAHAHAAHAH... And who cares what you're concerned about. Show some proof dumbass!

@ Sean T

he's not claiming anything or can prove anything, nor thinks anything along the lines of established scientific lines. He's arguning his fantasy just so he can seem important to himself. So he can tell himself... I can do science me!

It's not that he's prevented from thinking, it's just that he's too lazy. His need for self-importance faaaaar outweighs any real care or concern about science.

He wants to seem smart... like he found something... when in fact all he found is his ass instead of his head. He will change his stances and words depending on who replies what.. just so he can keep the conversation, because that's all he wants.. to feel he's doing science...

Sad part is that he would be doing more science if he stayed quiet and actually took to study something, instead of arguing from ignorance.

"C’mon, admit it, you just studied SR and GR and believe evrything that was put before."

some more LOLing... nope Kasim... nothing like that. But then again.. I guess I'm living proof of how misguided you are.

I'm not a physicist. And when I came to this blog years back.. I too had wild notions of how most of the theories probably could be changed tweaked... that you can put any old crap up and as long as you could write some fancy formulae that most won't understand.. that it might fly. I thought that if my ideas where exotic or insightfull enough that I could overthrow some extablished thought and become so clever over night. And I don't consider myself special and gifted.. and my ego is ok enough that I can freely admit all that.

But I didn't use the comments to promote my ideas... instead i read and read... and slowly started to realize that real actual physics isn't what you learn in highschool or on discovery channel. It's cold, sterile and doesn't care of what one "feels" or some argument from authority or any of the crap that idiots like you think. It only cares about data and prediction. And no amount of crying or shouting from whacks is gonna change that. But since my desire to learn is much greater than my desire to prove anyone wrong, i read some more, and watched and learned... Not from here only, but form hundreds of sources online. You have whole university semesters online, for free, you just have to want to learn. So I did. And the more I learned, the more I understood. All the little small nuances... and realized that no idea (including SR) is born in a vacuum.. but in fact is continuation of previous works... Every great physicist is standing on the shoulders of other great ones before him. When you talk about Einstein... it just shows how ignorant you people are. You can derive SR from Maxwell... just noone before Einstein really cared to or thought along those lines. But if it weren't in 1916... it would have happened couple of years later... You see.. this isn't religion where we repeat words others said and deem them the ONLY TRUTH. Experiment and data... only things important.

So yes.. after some 6-7 years... I can say that I understand much more than when I started. I understand that you can't just pull crap from your ass and call it science. I understand that GR is much more than an idea.. it's a framework that has in dozens of elements.. and if you change even one.. the rest of them crumble. That's why GR is beyond reproach of common laymen.. and even seasoned professionals for over a century. Because it's so solid and so correct and dependant on so many factors.. than if you modify something, you simply don't get correct results.

At the end of the day, it's you who is digging your own figurative grave here. You're like a spoiled child on the playground who lost in game of marbles and now blames everyone else.. marbles must have been crooked, wholes must have been too small etc... but no Kasim.. it's your ignorance.

That’s the problem with SR. You ignore how the object got from zero to the uniform velocity and/or from one uniform velocity to another.

That's because many particles are produced with an intrinsic velocity; they never 'accelerate from' 0 m/s in Kasim's rest frame to their v in Kasim's rest frame.

But the other, more important reason is because we have no way of telling which object accelerated; them or us. Or for how long. Or under what force. And compared to what? The Earth is revolving. And rotating around the Sun. Which is rotating around galactic center. The milky way itself is also moving in relation to other galaxies. That particle you think is moving towards us may have not had any force applied to it, ever - and instead, the Milky way and thus the Earth is simply moving towards it. An equation that depends on v handles this easily, because the two descriptions make no difference to it. But your idea requires we know exactly how much force was applied to each object throughout it's history, and we don't know that. We probably can't know that.

So, they [atmospheric muons] must accelerate from the lab velocity to the atmospheric velocity and this is where clock dilation happens.

This never happens; atmospheric muons are "born" with a high velocity relative to us standing on the Earth (the lab ones are also produced with a velocity in our rest frame; but a different velocity, and you're right, it's much lower). Pretty much every physical reaction is like that; the products originate with some inherent velocity with respect to some other object.

The scenario you're proposing would actually violate the laws of conservation of momentum and energy, twice over. It would violate them once when the products of the reaction don't contain the same momentum and kinetic energy as the reactants. And it would violate them again moments later when the muon suddenly accelerates without any force acting on it.

This is another problem: I’m not putting forward an alternative theory, just an alternative interpretation of the same data. You’re putting me in the same boat as those who don’t accept relativity data.

You keep saying that, but then you make claims that contradict the theory. Like your idea that humans on a relativistic starship would die of old age based on the rate time passes on Earth rather than the rate it passes on the ship. This is not a different interpretation of the same data; this is claim that relativity theory's math and physics is wrong - that it makes wrong predictions.

You cannot have it both ways. If yours is just a different interpretation of the same data, then you should agree the passengers age slowly. OTOH if you disagree that the passengers age slowly, then you are not simply interpreting the math and data differently, you are saying it is incorrect.

So which is it?

Somebody challenged me on this by claiming that muon in the upper atmosphere don’t undergo acceleration but they last longer than lab muon. However, for SR time dilation to be different, the 2 types of muon must have different velocities. So, how did the atmospheric muon increase from the lab velocity to the atmospheric velocity? I’m still waiting for an answer.

To repeat (ad nauseum, it seems).
1. That was me.
2. Yes they have different velocities (compared to a given human observer's rest frame)
3. They don't get created at 0 m/s in our our rest frame and then accelerate to some v in our rest frame. That simply does not happen. Rather, the products of the reaction, whatever they may be, begin their existence at v, as required by the laws of conservation.

Sean T

My idea is not about making predictions; it's about interpretation of the relativity predictions e.g. relativity says time dilation is about the passage of time and I say it's about how time measuring devices work whether it's the rate of oscillation of atoms in atomic clocks or the rate of decay of muons.

The atomic clock has been presented, by relativists, as proof of gravitational time dilation; and the longevity of muons as prove of SR time dilation.

All I'm saying is that the rate of oscillation of cs atoms in atomic clocks is affected by gravity so it's clock dilation and has nothing to do with the passage of time. Similarly, the rate of decay of muons in the upper atmosphere are affected by acceleration to humongous speed. But eric has claimed that muons are born with a speed presumably close to c; it's just their speed relative speed to us that's different - that's my understanding anyway.

If muons are born with relativistic speeds then they shouldn't be any difference in longevity between lab muons and atmospheric ones. The only quantum particles that I know of that are born with relativistic speed are photons and these are born with velocity c and are allegedly massless. Muons, on the oyther hand, are around 200 times more massive than electrons. It's inconceivable that they're born with relativistic speeds only in the atmosphere but not in the lab.

It’s inconceivable that they’re born with relativistic speeds only in the atmosphere but not in the lab.

Inconceivable? I do not think it means what you think it means.... :)

Mass and other factors being equal, faster moving projectiles create faster moving reaction products. This is even Newtonian physics, - no QM or relativity needed - so I'm quite surprised you have a problem with it.

Though I suspect in the lab vs. atmospheric case, the bigger factor is the number of product particles carrying away momentum. More particles (in the lab case) means less momentum, on average, per particle.

Although I have qualms with time travel to the future, it’s logical and I’m glad to hear it because it invalidates the Many Worlds Interpretation (WMI) of QM which states that all possible futures have happened.

This is a rather crude interpretation of MWI, although the pop-sci feeder probably shares some of the blame. There's only one wholesale wavefunction. The unobservability of certain relative phases doesn't mean what you assert that it does.

My idea is not about making predictions; it’s about interpretation of the relativity predictions e.g. relativity says time dilation is about the passage of time and I say it’s about how time measuring devices work....

In other words, timekeeping devices logically precede time itself. Brilliant.