The True Nature of Matter and Mass

[surreptitious57]

We have proved that the speed of light is NOT a constant but is proportional to clock speed

I shall show this to those more learned than I to see what they make of it as I need to know

[uwot]

SR proposes not only that time dilates, but also that distance contracts.

That old trope. What happens is that observers see objects in other inertial frames as different lengths. If they actually contracted, they would appear even shorter than they do. Again, it's the difference between ontology and epistemology which even some physicists don't understand.

In the paradox, it is presumed that neither party knows which is actually moving. But in any real system, one of them accelerated, if not both. The one who accelerated more, in total, is the one who will have had the slower clock. Thus the ship that left Earth and returned, being the one what accelerated more, will be the one that did not age as much.

This is not true. What H-F et al demonstrate is that there is a measurable time dilation that is in addition to the gravitational effects, whether caused by mass or acceleration. This is the dilation due to velocity predicted by SR. If you fly an atomic clock, several in fact, just to be sure, around the world eastwards, they will lose time compared to clocks on the ground. Fly identical clocks westwards and they gain time compared to the same ground based clocks. You will tie yourself in knots trying account for that by gravity/acceleration alone.

Today, Science is merely a mask for a new dogmatic religion and although a little, not all that much different from how the other religions got going.

It's as well we have 'total' and 'bollocks' in our lexicon, otherwise this would be too ridiculous for words.

[Obvious Leo]

Obvious Leo wrote:
Clocks measure the rate of change in a physical system.


Do you mean a physical system such as a clock? All clocks are part of the system they are measuring.

Yes of course they are. Anything can be defined as a clock, including the observer himself because he also changes at a finite speed which is gravity-dependent. Since at the Planck scale the observer is nothing more than the emergent properties of energy quanta configured in a particular way then the observer is changing at the speed of light, just like any other physical entity in the universe. Therefore the observer on the moon ages more quickly than his twin on earth because the speed of light is relatively faster. ( Not that there's much in it, so migrating to the moon won't shave much off your longevity).

Obvious Leo wrote:
The rate of change in a physical system is determined by gravity.


And velocity.

This is true but entirely observer-dependent so it doesn't mean much. Only time dilation due to gravity is observer-independent and thus physically meaningful so inertial motion and accelerated motion are not the same thing.

Obvious Leo wrote:
Therefore time and gravity are simply two different metrics for the same phenomenon and both can be equated with the speed of light.


Only if you ignore the experimentally verified dilation of time due to velocity.

Once again this doesn't mean much because the amount of this dilation merely reflects a temporal relationship between only two relatively moving bodies. What holds true for these two bodies does not hold true for any other relatively moving body. The twins paradox is a myth in a spaceless universe because whereas time might appear to dilate between two bodies moving away from each other it also appears to contract in the case of two bodies moving towards each other. Although the evidence still remains rather controversial there is a growing body of work which suggests that the one-way speed of light and the two-way speed of light may not be the same in the case of relatively moving bodies, which would confirm my gravity/time continuum and blow SR to kingdom come. Luckily I am not relying on this evidence because I have a far simpler way of falsifying SR.

Obvious Leo wrote:
Obviously light cannot travel faster than time...


By which I take you to mean that change cannot occur before the agent of change gets there.

Essentially yes but it's not the way I'd put it. A fractal dimension is no more a physical "thing" than is a Cartesian one. A dimension is nothing more than a co-ordinate system for codifying the behaviour of matter and energy so I prefer to think of the gravity/time continuum as an information wave which is continuously COMING INTO EXISTENCE and thus the Planck-scale quanta which encode for physical reality can be regarded as mathematical points on this wave. Each of these mathematical points must be thought of as existing solely in its own temporal referential frame.

I freely grant that this is not an easy concept to get one's head around for somebody steeped in the Newtonian tradition of thinking the world in terms of objects moving in space but it becomes very intuitive once you get used to it. It's all about the world as it is and the world as we perceive it to be. The world as it is is a world which is changing into a new world at the speed of light but this is a speed which is inconstant all the way down to the Planck scale and it is this very inconstancy which brings our dynamic reality to life. However the world which we perceive is not this same dynamic world. What we're essentially looking at is a succession of snapshots being reflected back at us from the continuously emerging boundary of reality, rather like watching a football game on a delayed telecast. What we're looking at are events which have already occurred and thus exist no longer but we're unwittingly also doing is projecting those events onto a temporal background which also exists no longer.

Where SR projects reality onto a background independent space GR projects it onto a background dependent one. However in the ding an sich there simply IS no background space of any description other than that constructed in the consciousness of the observer. Einstein came very close to figuring all this out when he famously said "Bullshit, the moon is still there whether somebody is observing it or not". One of the more bizarre yet completely logical conclusions from QM is that the moon only exists if somebody is observing it and Albert was perfectly justified in his indignation at this absurd proposition. However he was only partly right. Certainly the moon still exists whether somebody is observing it or not but the space between the observer and the moon only exists when somebody is observing it because the space is a property of the consciousness of the observer of it and not a property of physical reality itself.

This is not new philosophy but very old philosophy revisited. The pre-Socratics knew all this shit, Leibniz and Spinoza were adamant about it, Kant wrote of it in great detail in his masterly "Critique", and yet the priesthood of modern physics sees fit to ignore these ancient truths even though their models make no fucking sense. However the last word must always go to the great man himself. He never figured it out but he always knew bloody well that he'd got something badly wrong and also approximately what it was.

"Space and time are modes in which we think, NOT conditions in which we exist".....Albert Einstein.

[Obvious Leo]

uwot. Thank you for ridiculing the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction notion. Such a patently obvious attempt to salvage a theory at all costs should never have got under the guard of any philosopher worthy of the name. Of all the metaphysically absurd notions in physics the "contracting" space would have to rank amongst the most ridiculous of all, although it faces stiff competition from a strong field of candidates.

[JSS]

SR proposes not only that time dilates, but also that distance contracts.

That old trope. What happens is that observers see objects in other inertial frames as different lengths. If they actually contracted, they would appear even shorter than they do. Again, it's the difference between ontology and epistemology which even some physicists don't understand.

The same could be said about the time dilation due to velocity: "It appears different". Supposedly science has proven that distance actually contracts. I have a SRT paradox called The Stopped Clock Paradox that displays the absurdity of SRT if you didn't believe any of the others. But I prefer talking about what we can know to be real rather than what others have proposed to be real yet couldn't be.

In the paradox, it is presumed that neither party knows which is actually moving. But in any real system, one of them accelerated, if not both. The one who accelerated more, in total, is the one who will have had the slower clock. Thus the ship that left Earth and returned, being the one what accelerated more, will be the one that did not age as much.

This is not true. What H-F et al demonstrate is that there is a measurable time dilation that is in addition to the gravitational effects, whether caused by mass or acceleration. This is the dilation due to velocity predicted by SR. If you fly an atomic clock, several in fact, just to be sure, around the world eastwards, they will lose time compared to clocks on the ground. Fly identical clocks westwards and they gain time compared to the same ground based clocks. You will tie yourself in knots trying account for that by gravity/acceleration alone.

I take it that you didn't read precisely what I said. I said that the acceleration issue let's the parties know who was moving, not that it determines how fast the clock is going. But the supposed orbiting test is invalid anyway, if for no other reason, they simply don't tell enough of everything for which they compensated, such as the centripetal acceleration of orbiting itself, the plane of the clock, the variation in gravity, and so on. You should know not to take anyone's word for what they have proven:
Nullius in Verba

And I already showed why a clock would slow, just a few posts back.

[Obvious Leo]

Supposedly science has proven that distance actually contracts. I

Science has proven no such thing because the notion of distance is exclusively a spatial one. In order for a physical entity to be able to perform physical work it must first have physical properties to perform it with. The Cartesian space has no such properties so to speak of it "expanding", "contracting" or "curving" is not a physical statement but a mathematical metaphor for a physical statement, something which Einstein understood perfectly well.

"Spacetime should never be regarded as physically real"....Albert Einstein

As a person who is clearly well schooled in mathematics you'll know perfectly well that this non-physicality applies to any of the dozens of different spaces which are routinely used as mathematical tools, including the Minkowski space and the de Sitter space which is nowadays mostly used in GR.

[JSS]

Supposedly science has proven that distance actually contracts. I

Science has proven no such thing because the notion of distance is exclusively a spatial one. In order for a physical entity to be able to perform physical work it must first have physical properties to perform it with. The Cartesian space has no such properties so to speak of it "expanding", "contracting" or "curving" is not a physical statement but a mathematical metaphor for a physical statement, something which Einstein understood perfectly well.

"Spacetime should never be regarded as physically real"....Albert Einstein

As a person who is clearly well schooled in mathematics you'll know perfectly well that this non-physicality applies to any of the dozens of different spaces which are routinely used as mathematical tools, including the Minkowski space and the de Sitter space which is nowadays mostly used in GR.

I understand and agree with the distinction (publicly made that argument myself some 15 years ago). My point was that reports keep getting generated that "scientists have proven..." .. just about anything and everything. It is very much the same as the old, "Nine out of Ten Doctors agree..." .. to whatever we pay them to agree to. Reports from the media of having proven something in science is just sensationalism and marketing all the way from the top. Science is the new Secular dogmatic religion, no longer the altruistic method exposed, but rather disguised and distorted through anything that works.

There are things that can be safely believed, but most are no longer reliable. I believe in rational proofs that are backed up or verified by empirical evidence, not the other way around - finding some speculative evidence then rationalize it into an overly imaginative pseudo-science new theory.

[surreptitious57]

We have proved that the speed of light is NOT a constant but is proportional to clock speed

I was rather sceptical of this claim of yours Leo and with good reason too. As what you have done here is commit a
fundamental category error. The variation in temporal measurement is completely irrelevant as a photon travels in
vacuum at the same speed. How many clocks are recording it or how great the difference between their readings is
has zero effect on that. For it is always 299 792 . 458 kilometres per hour / 186 282 miles per miles no matter what

[Obvious Leo]

JSS. Although I can't agree with the overall tone of your comment I take no issue with its content. Physics in particular is a science which has become so infatuated with its own mathematical virtuosity that it has effectively defined itself as a procedure of thought exempt from the constraints of formal logic. If the theory defines a universe which makes no sense then physics assigns itself the authority to redefine what making sense means so that the new definition can conform with the theory. The breathtaking hubris of this tactic has had serious consequences for the way science is regarded in the wider non-scientific community, where many people are now of the view that scientific propositions are something which one is free to either believe or disbelieve in accordance with one's personal conceptual taste. However the consequences for the community of physics have been even more dire because this exclusive community has now evolved into an exclusive priesthood which, outwardly at least, appears to believe its own bullshit.

However, one doesn't need to scratch very far beneath the surface to see that this outward show of arrogance is nothing more than an exercise in self-justifying bravado because the true illuminati in the field of theoretical physics know bloody well that there's something seriously wrong with the science they're professing. The bravest of them are even willing to openly declare that the problem with physics is not even a problem of physics at all but a problem relating to the way they're thinking about physics and what physics can and cannot tell us about the nature of physical reality. This was quite beautifully expressed by one of the greatest of the early 20th century pioneers of physics in this arresting proclamation.

"It is NOT the role of the physicist to explain what the universe is but merely to determine what he can meaningfully say about the behaviour of matter and energy within it"....Niels Bohr.

This statement clearly delineates the limits of the scientific method as it applies to physics and it accords perfectly with the thoughts of all the great philosophers of science since the Enlightenment, starting with Leibniz and Kant and ending with Popper, Feyerabend and Kuhn. Physics is purely a descriptive and predictive discipline which has absolutely no explanatory authority. Bohr's advice to his brethren became known as the "physics is only what works" principle and thus any model of physics could be chucked out at any time if somebody came up with one "what works better". This was later translated into the vulgate as "shut up and calculate" but alas in the modern day too many geeks just won't shut up. They're playing with toys which belong in the philosophers sandbox while at the same time they ridicule philosophy. They make blanket metaphysical statements while claiming that metaphysics is some sort of mystical voodoo which has outlived its use-by date. They couldn't possibly be more wrong because the reason why the models of modern physics make no sense is because they they are grounded on a completely false a priori metaphysical assumption.

TIME IS NOT A SPATIAL DIMENSION.

[Obvious Leo]

We have proved that the speed of light is NOT a constant but is proportional to clock speed

I was rather sceptical of this claim of yours Leo and with good reason too. As what you have done here is commit a
fundamental category error. The variation in temporal measurement is completely irrelevant as a photon travels in
vacuum at the same speed. How many clocks are recording it or how great the difference between their readings is
has zero effect on that. For it is always 299 792 . 458 kilometres per hour / 186 282 miles per miles no matter what

I'm not disagreeing with this. Even in a black hole the speed of light would be measured at 186, 282 miles per second. However a second in a black hole is not the same time interval as a second in the intergalactic wilderness outside of it. Depending on the mass of the black hole a second within it might be as long as a year, a thousand years or a million years relative to a second in the almost zero gravity of intergalactic "space". The fact that this differential is not measurable is irrelevant but the fact that it is true is beyond dispute.

[Michael MD]

JSS, to address your comment about my aether theory "ever being testable."

Answering requires elaboration on how I derived my model of the aether. -It was derived from a long term study of a little-known set of codes, in an old Document, which were discovered by another cryptographer years ago.

The source of these codes also has specified a field-test, designed to generate a selectively-aetheric force-field. -The presence of aetheric energy would be demonstrated by showing a decreased density of materials inside the test system, an effect not found with known forms of energy. -However, the test would be expensive to carry out and I haven't found a financial backer for it.

Discovery of a new form of energy could reveal that it has beneficial properties.

[JSS]

JSS:

To your question "Why does an aether exist?" - My model starts with Original Space (space before the first appearance of forces, a type of space that no longer exists, but which hypothetically was more self-compatible than our present space, such that elemental point-localities of space were oscillating in perfect symmetry with each other.)

Of what is that "space" made?

Normally speaking, space is merely a mental construct (as Leo has pointed out). Points in space are merely locations, not physical objects. Something happens AT a point, not TO the point. But you have "points oscillating", as though they were physical objects with motion, momentum, and some reason to oscillate rather than merely location designaters.

I derived my model of the aether. -It was derived from a long term study of a little-known set of codes, in an old Document, which were discovered by another cryptographer years ago.

Can you reveal what that document has to say about those codes and how points in space became physical (or perhaps pre-physical) objects?

[uwot]

The same could be said about the time dilation due to velocity: "It appears different".

As Leo has already pointed out, if something is coming towards you, the action is speeded up, as it recedes it slows down. Call me old fashioned, Leo, but that is perfectly explained by Doppler. The twins paradox is meant to illustrate that although people in different inertial frames observe events happening at unfamiliar rates in frames they are moving to, it is actually the case that fewer events happen in faster moving frames, relative to a third inertial frame. This is exactly what Hafele-Keating and others have proven to. This can be expressed as 'time slows down, the faster you go', but as Leo says, time is not a spatial dimension (unless the universe is really weird.)

I have a SRT paradox called The Stopped Clock Paradox that displays the absurdity of SRT if you didn't believe any of the others. But I prefer talking about what we can know to be real rather than what others have proposed to be real yet couldn't be.

Don't know what your paradox is JSS, but if time is taken to be a sequence of cyclical events in any given frame, then clocks really would stop at the speed of light, because everything in such a frame, all the particles, are going as fast as possible in one direction and there isn't anything left in the tank to pop over to the neighbours and make something happen. Or, if you rather, if every particle in an inertial frame is travelling at the speed of light, impossible, I know, then it is necessarily travelling parallel to all the others, there is no interaction, nothing happens, time stops. (Granted the massive particles travelling at c. is a myth, but it is very well established by experiments like H-F, cosmic rays, muon decay, all sorts of gubbins in particle accelerators, that it really, really happens.)
Wake, wakey guys. It's only a paradox to physicists who happen to be fairly naïve realists and assume that because what two parties observe is symmetrical, so is what happens to them.

I take it that you didn't read precisely what I said. I said that the acceleration issue let's the parties know who was moving, not that it determines how fast the clock is going.

I did read precisely what you said and even on a second reading, it is not true. I don't think you understand the significance of H-F, or even that you have looked at the results, you really should, because you keep repeating things which are simply not the case. Here, even Wikipedia have heard the news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele%E2 ... experiment

[uwot]

However, the test would be expensive to carry out and I haven't found a financial backer for it.

I'd keep the cryptography under your hat if it's money your after.

[Obvious Leo]

Normally speaking, space is merely a mental construct (as Leo has pointed out). Points in space are merely locations, not physical objects. Something happens AT a point, not TO the point. But you have "points oscillating", as though they were physical objects with motion, momentum, and some reason to oscillate rather than merely location designaters.

This is the central flaw in the spacetime paradigm and one which Einstein himself conceded. He never claimed that his model was a replacement for the physical Newtonian space but merely a refinement of it. Therefore he could plainly see that both of his relativity models were not in fact physical models at all but merely mathematical representations of a single physical model which was yet to be elaborated. He spent the last forty years of his life searching for exactly such a model while most of his colleagues smiled indulgently and thought poor old Albert had lost the plot. HE FUCKING HADN'T LOST THE PLOT AT ALL.

It was Leibniz who first pointed out that Newton's Cartesian space was purely a mathematical object and not a physical thing at all, which means that physics was actually never a science from the day it was born. It has never been anything more than a branch of applied mathematics for this very reason, as was later pointed out by Ernst Mach in his critique of GR.

Leo says, time is not a spatial dimension (unless the universe is really weird.)

It is precisely this metaphysically flawed a priori assumption of SR which accounts for every single paradox and metaphysical absurdity in the models of modern physics. I've never once disputed the epistemic utility of these models but I hold fast to my claim that this flawed a priori assumption strips them of all possible explanatory authority. Time cannot possibly be a spatial dimension because spatial dimensions are bi-directional mathematical objects and the arrow of time is always stubbornly uni-directional. Effects cannot precede their causes and any model which seems to suggest otherwise is bullshit, plain and simple. Not necessarily useless, but bullshit nevertheless.

Time is a fractal dimension and a fractal dimension cannot be meaningfully overlaid onto a Cartesian 3-dimensional space. Therefore trying to unify the models of physics under the umbrella of the spacetime paradigm is a futile exercise of trying to force a square peg into a round hole. None of these aether theories can ever have any ontological status for the simple reason that 3-dimensional space itself has none, no matter how you choose to slice and dice it. If we take this space out of the universe and put it back into the consciousness of the observer who invented it then all these paradoxes and metaphysical absurdities of our current models vanish as if by magic. And I mean ALL of them. Furthermore such a perspective then offers us a universe which is consistent with millennia of philosophy of both east and west and also consistent with modern cognitive neuroscience.

It cannot be wrong and it can be tested very easily and cheaply.

Don't know what your paradox is JSS, but if time is taken to be a sequence of cyclical events in any given frame, then clocks really would stop at the speed of light, because everything in such a frame, all the particles, are going as fast as possible in one direction and there isn't anything left in the tank to pop over to the neighbours and make something happen.

This is why we need to think this story through properly at the Planck scale, where all we need to deal with are informational quanta which all "move" at the speed of light. If space is merely an observer construct then when we say "move" what we really mean is CHANGE. Each of these informational quanta exists purely in its own temporal referential frame where it is both ACTOR and ACTED UPON by all the other informational quanta in a continuously emerging wave of time. This can best be thought of as a wave of causality at the Planck scale which encodes for the higher-order informational structures which emerge at a scale above it, such as particles with mass, charge and spin. This is a totally different way of thinking the world than the one presented to us by physics because this is not a universe where reality is determined according to a suite of physical laws. This is a universe where reality is self-determining according to no law except the meta-law of cause and effect and it is this very self-determination which we as observers are interpreting in the language of physical laws. How we go about doing this is entirely arbitrary so all the various particles, waves, fields and forces which physics uses to model this self-organising behaviour are nothing more than testaments to our own mathematical ingenuity. They are nothing more than epistemic constructs of our own devising and once they outlive their usefulness we can simply chuck them in the bin and devise better ones.

This is John Archibald Wheeler's "it from bit" universe of sublime austerity which Albert Einstein knew in his heart must be comprehensible to a barmaid, but it is also the universe the way a child sees it. Ask a child "what is reality?" and then listen closely to the answer.

"Reality is what is happening all around me", answers the child, but the true philosopher notes the tense of the verb in this sentence.