Special Relativity Bites The Big One?

[Moontanman]

Universal time, FTL, aether? I thought it was a joke at first! 

 

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/The_special_theory_of_relativity_has_been_disproved_theoretically_999.html

[CraigD]

I’m suspicious.

 

The ScienceDaily article links to Eureka Alert, an AAAS publication, which is credible, but is updated by many contributors, and bears the following disclaimer:

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

The Eureka Alert page links to NAC society webpages. NAC society is not a physics or other science organization, but appears to be related to NAC Geographic products Inc (NACgeo), a geocoding (place identifying) company.

 

The paper “Challenge to the special theory of relativity” appears to be by Xinhang Shen, the president and CEO of NACgeo. Though Shen’s linkedin profile shows he studied “theoretical physics” at Stockholm University for 2 years, his professional experience suggests he’s a primarily a software expert.

 

The paper does appear here at physicsessays.com, which is a peer-reviewed journal not on Beall’s list of predatory journals or publishers.

 

Unfortunately, there’s no arXiv preprint of the paper, and the paper at Physics Essays is behind a $20 paywall. But from its abstract, it sounds silly and unscientific to me.

 

This Wikipedia talk page suggests that Physics Essays isn’t a credible journal, noting that infamous perpetual motion machine proponent and conspiracy theorists Tom Bearden has been published in it 7+ times.

 

In short, I think this is a case of poor journal standards and overeager and credulous science journalism, rather than important or even interesting physics.

[LaurieAG]

The following link is from the comments in the article that was linked in the OP.

 

http://vixra.org/abs/1509.0272

[CraigD]

http://vixra.org/abs/1509.0272

Heeding the principle to consider the source, Notice this from from viXra.org:

About viXra

ViXra.org is an e-print archive set up as an alternative to the popular arXiv.org service owned by Cornell University. It has been founded by scientists who find they are unable to submit their articles to arXiv.org because of Cornell University's policy of endorsements and moderation designed to filter out e-prints that they consider inappropriate.

ViXra is an open repository for new scientific articles. It does not endorse e-prints accepted on its website, neither does it review them against criteria such as correctness or author's credentials.

So anybody can post papers on viXra, subject only to common-sense rules or decorum prohibiting vulgarity, racism, copyright violation, etc.

 

At his researchgate page the paper’s author, László G. Mészáros, identifies his specialty as “cardiology”

 

From a quick read of his short “Special Relativity: a contradicting theory or an account for an optical phenomenon” I found it presents the following “paradox” producing thought experiment:

1. According to SR, moving objects experience length contraction in the direction of their travel.

2. Therefore, the volume of a moving box decreases.

3. According to gas laws, decreasing the volume of a container results in the pressure and temperature of a gas in that container increasing.

4. So an observer sees an increase in gas temperature and volume related to their speed.

5. But according to SR (its “relativity principle”), the laws of physics are the same for all accelerating frames.

Thus SR is a “contradicting theory”.

 

I think this is obviously wrong, because it fails to consider the observers motion relative to the box. If the observer is at rest relative to the box, they observe no length contraction and thus no change in the boxes volume. If they are in motion relative to the box, they observe length contraction and a decrease in the volume of the box, but that length contraction applies to the individual molecules in the box, and they also observe time dilation.

 

According to SR, these effects exactly cancel, leading to no paradox between the events seen by a moving or stationary observer. It would be interesting to work this out in detail, but Mészáros doesn’t attempt this, but simply concluded that his thought experiment “reveals some major contradictions”.

 

What we’re seeing here with 2 different, apparently unrelated non-physicists finding reasons to reject SR are not, I think, scientifically valuable critiques of SR, but evidence of a psychological phenomenon. SR is a counterintuitive theory. Thing that are counterintuitive bother people. Some people thus reject the counterintuitive, and try to find “gotcha” arguments to prove that counterintuitive theories, like SR, are wrong.

[fahrquad]

A science publication should not be accepting papers that have not been properly vetted and peer reviewed.  A little experimental data wouldn't hurt either.

Edited March 15, 2016 by fahrquad

[CraigD]

A science publication should not be accepting papers that have not been properly vetted and peer reviewed. A little experimental data wouldn't hurt either.

Yet may, especially online only ones, do.

 

People who read science on the wide internet need to be mindful of their sources, much more than people who read just a small number of well-managed journals, I’ve observed that most PhDs read a few favorite journals, while less educated folk like me read all sorts of wild stuff from the web.

 

I appreciate that viXra, while arguably a crank site, makes it plain that they’re not peer reviewed or refereed. Much of what they’re promoting is pseudoscience, but unlike many other sites that do that, they don’t pretend at being a being credibly peer reviewed.

 

Academic librarian Jeffrey Beall well deserves the praise he’s gotten, IMHO, for calling out and keeping lists of such publishers. Here’s an example, from his website: Publishing Pseudo-Science. His work is a first go-to resource for me when I come across something on the internet that smells fishy.

[AnssiH]

Uh... Slightly off topic, but interesting how much of the discussion in this thread is about how credible this or that kind of source is, or what credentials people have. What difference does it make? Ideas are ideas, either they are valid or they are not. Sure, people with poor credentials generally make poor arguments, but you can judge it from the argument, not from the CV.

 

Sorry I'm a bit sensitive to this particular problem because it always reeks to me like people looking for someone else to do the thinking for them; everybody loves to choose their authority whom to believe so they don't have to bother their own brain. I guess I have always had a bit of an authority problem... :D

 

That being said, based on the abstract I'm also not going to pay money to read the paper, as its pretty obvious he is talking about an issue that is well known by those who actually understand SR (and ought to be better known by those who pretend to understand it). Special Relativity doesn't require its ontology, and Lorentz ether (aether, ether, whatever) theory is well known to be mathematically equivalent to SR. He probably just discovered this, without realizing that it was well known at the conception of SR; that is why it's called Lorentz transformation. SR doesn't use the concept of ether because Einstein felt it was useless concept as Lorentz had already removed "all of its properties". Lorentz said it's a matter of taste, and Minkowski formulated Minkowski Spacetime which everybody started to use, and most people forgot it is also just another hypothetical ontology; it's not necessary to believe in any particular one.

 

So if that's what he discovered, then his discovery is valid, already well known, and only means something to him because of a common misunderstanding of the ontological implications of SR. Without a doubt there will be bunch of internet comments sections where this guy is arguing how there must be ether, while bunch of other uneducated people are arguing how "SR disproved ether". Why is it that most of so-called "science" debates in mainstream outlets are about unobservable bullshit that can only be taken on faith? Because people just need to believe? Isn't that the opposite of science?

 

Actually I think its largely because of my first complaint; because most people just look for authority figures whom will do the the thinking for them, and because they never thought the issues through themselves, these very persistent misconceptions also will live on forever...

Edited March 25, 2016 by AnssiH

[CraigD]

Uh... Slightly off topic, but interesting how much of the discussion in this thread is about how credible this or that kind of source is, or what credentials people have. What difference does it make? Ideas are ideas, either they are valid or they are not. Sure, people with poor credentials generally make poor arguments, but you can judge it from the argument, not from the CV.

In a perfect world where one was of arbitrarily great intelligence, never aged, and could retreat to a pocket universe to read, write, and learn for arbitrary durations, I’d agree.

 

But this isn’t such a world. We’ve each of us limitations, including a limited lifespan. Using our limited resources is an optimization problem, IMHO the most personal and arguably the most important of its kind. “Consider the source” is a good screening and prep technique.

 

Ideas are ideas, but the way they’re communicated are complicated, informal, social phenomena. The more factors you can bring into this process, well, the more optimal.

 

Sorry I'm a bit sensitive to this particular problem because it always reeks to me like people looking for someone else to do the thinking for them; everybody loves to choose their authority whom to believe so they don't have to bother their own brain. I guess I have always had a bit of an authority problem... :D

I empathize. It’s natural to want to be able to do everything, and something that I and many people I’ve known have, at some point in our lives, believed at least on an emotional level was actually possible.

 

My personal turning point, when I realized on a deep emotional level that I would not (barring the possibility of living some sort of trans-human future, eg: my personality uploaded to live forever in a computer) eventually know and be able to do everything, came I think in the early 1990s, influenced largely by two very dissimilar books. The first was Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk tour de force Snow Crash. The other was Feynman’s 1985 adaptation of 4 of his 1979 lectures, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.

 

In Snow Crash, I was struck by a scene is which main character Hiro Protagonists (yeah, that’s the character’s actual name) having encountered the overwhelmingly intimidating Raven, has an epiphany in which he realize that his entire life, he had believed that if he really buckled down, dedicated his life, trained, that he could be the most badass person on Earth. Seeing Raven, he realizes he could never equal him. Rather than feeling crestfallen and disillusioned, Hiro feels liberated from his lifelong, barely conscious compulsion to be the best at everything.

 

In QED, Feynman describes the iterative perturbation techniques at the heart of the mathematical formalism of Quantum Electrodynamics, summarizing that it’s something you learn when you get a PhD in physics, making no attempt to even hint at where one might begin learning them on one’s own.

 

Somehow, these two utterances filled me with a sense of acceptance that, despite having spent most of my life learning and teaching mathematical formalism, I was not going to learn the formalism of QED, and this was OK, because others had and would. Even though I could not directly assure myself of it, I would accept that people like Feynman were not pulling some sort of Wizard of Oz hoax on me, and that they really had worked out the math. I would accept their authority on the subject.

 

That being said, based on the abstract I'm also not going to pay money to read the paper, as its pretty obvious he is talking about an issue that is well known by those who actually understand SR (and ought to be better known by those who pretend to understand it).

Note that this thread discusses two “Special Relativity must be wrong!” papers, geolocation sofrware company CEO Xinhang Shen's Challenge to the special theory of relativity, and cardiologist László G. Mészáros's Special Relativity: a Contradicting Theory or an Account for an Optical Phenomenon. Both can be read for free at these links.

 

I’ve just read Shen’s paper. I thinks it’s essentially gibberish, including such gems as “[sR’s equivalency principle that the laws of physics should be the same in all inertial reference frames] should be the same only for the fundimental laws of physics, not for all laws of physics”, then goes on to simply deny that time dilation occurs at all.

 

As I described in this post, I thing Mészáros's paper is just a misguided, misinformed attempt at a “gocha” paradox.

[AnssiH]

In a perfect world where one was of arbitrarily great intelligence, never aged, and could retreat to a pocket universe to read, write, and learn for arbitrary durations, I’d agree.

 

But this isn’t such a world. We’ve each of us limitations, including a limited lifespan. Using our limited resources is an optimization problem, IMHO the most personal and arguably the most important of its kind. “Consider the source” is a good screening and prep technique.

 

Ideas are ideas, but the way they’re communicated are complicated, informal, social phenomena. The more factors you can bring into this process, well, the more optimal.

Of course this is true; no one can be expected to know everything there is to know, and obviously we generate new knowledge faster than any single person could keep up with. I often look for various pieces of information from Wikipedia, and it's always clear I can't even hope to follow up on the underlying issues very deep because they just become far too numerous, so I too just have to accept them as probably valid in order to get anywhere.

 

However, if I don't have a personal understanding of a topic, I also take a very scientific stance towards it; the parts that are hearsay to me, also have a degree of uncertainty to me, and it's best to take that uncertainty into account. It is in fact exactly the same problem that scientific philosophy was created to alleviate; there are things we don't know, and that doesn't mean we should just choose our beliefs and pretend like we know unknowable things.

 

That being so, I also don't feel the need to defend or judge an idea that I don't understand myself. That is sadly not a very common attitude. That is why paradigm shifts are slow to occur in science.

 

As an example of the same problem, just look at the comments at the original link;

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/The_special_theory_of_relativity_has_been_disproved_theoretically_999.html

 

So many people clearly just regurgitating stuff they've heard somewhere thinking it is somehow related, without understanding the fundamental issues behind Relativity. Of course in the age of social media you tend to mostly see comments from people who don't know enough to know what they don't know... It is almost impossible to understand these theories correctly without thinking about the logical circumstances leading to them.

 

And it's not just in science, most people avoid thinking all of their lives. I was just watching the documentary The Look of Silence, which along with its prequel The Act of Killing is just another example of mass suffering in the scale of the Holocaust, also created by large groups of people just believing authority without bothering their own head. It is interesting to what lengths people go to avoid thinking, and how they always get agitated when pushed to think about the issue; because they are afraid of what they might find if they thought a little (very common reason for people to get angry...)

 

And it's not just the Indonesian perpetrators to blame, there is also large responsibility in the thoughtless politics of the western world. Even to this day somehow we don't really hear much about the events that took place in Indonesia (compare to the Holocaust), because people who got killed were "godless communists". Voices of rationality get quickly silenced by thoughtless masses.

 

It really is amazing how hell-bent some people are on avoiding thinking. There becomes a point where thinking is seen as dangerous; when intellectuals are targeted because their thinking is seen as dangerous. The world is full of cultures where most people actually believe thinking is dangerous. Because it is dangerous to their authorities, who of course teach them so. Mass religions still have that idea deeply embedded to them as a relic from times when that was the best way to control people. In fact that is why they are mass religions; they teach people that we humans have impure thoughts, and we simply cannot know as well as divine authorities. They contain the idea of thought crimes for this reason. It's just unbelievable how easy it is to convince most people that their own sensibility is not to be trusted and useless to even try to use it.

 

I could go on and on forever, and I'm sure you can just as easily think of examples of this. I do think that the reason we have so many examples all around us is because of the attitude that most people have towards thinking. Thinking is hard, and most people instantly decide things are simply over their head if they can't figure something out at first glance. And most people who pose as scientific people, still have no idea what scientific philosophy entails; they still regurgitate what they believe their chosen authorities mean, rather than waste time understanding some fundamentals.

 

On a related note, there is this truly amazing account on Youtube of someone explaining extremely well the amount of thought that went into him changing his world view fundamentally. The playlist of the series is here. (It's long but interesting)

 

His entertaining explanation demonstrates extremely well how much hard thinking really goes into questioning one's own beliefs in meaningful manner. I think it is clear most people would not have a snowball's chance in hell to go through what he went through.

 

Note that this thread discusses two “Special Relativity must be wrong!” papers, geolocation sofrware company CEO Xinhang Shen's Challenge to the special theory of relativity, and cardiologist László G. Mészáros's Special Relativity: a Contradicting Theory or an Account for an Optical Phenomenon. Both can be read for free at these links.

 

I’ve just read Shen’s paper. I thinks it’s essentially gibberish, including such gems as “[sR’s equivalency principle that the laws of physics should be the same in all inertial reference frames] should be the same only for the fundimental laws of physics, not for all laws of physics”, then goes on to simply deny that time dilation occurs at all.

 

As I described in this post, I thing Mészáros's paper is just a misguided, misinformed attempt at a “gocha” paradox.

Thanks for the links, I checked them out...

 

I think they are probably honest in their presentations; they honestly believe their papers are valid because they have pretty elementary misconceptions about the theories they are discussing. Since I already went so far off the tangent in this post, I guess it was only fair I went through the trouble of identifying what their misconceptions are... :D

 

First Xinhang Shen's paper. Look at his description of "Lorentz invariance in the clock time" starting from page 8;

 

He establishes Frame A and Frame B, where a clock is stationary in frame B.

He establishes that Frame B would see for objects in Frame A as slowed down in time.

That leads him to assume that the opposite is true for opposite transformation; that Frame A sees the clock in Frame B as sped up.

That misconception (together with not understanding how "speed" and "frequency" also require definition of "time") is why he is making assertions such as;

 

"After a Lorentz transformation from a moving inertial reference frame to a stationary inertial

reference frame, the time in the moving frame is dilated by a factor [math]\gamma[/math], but the frequency of a clock in the moving frame decreases by the same factor [math]\gamma[/math], leaving the resulting product (i.e., the time displayed by the moving clock) unchanged."

 

(he thinks the first time dilation means the clock goes faster)

 

"Eq. (10) shows that a time dilation occurs after the Lorentz transformation from Frame B to Frame A, but Eq. (18) indicates that there is also a slowdown of the rotation speed of the arm of the clock upon the transformation from Frame B to Frame A, leaving the angle of the arm (i.e., the product of time and the rotation speed) unchanged after Lorentz transformation"

 

(i.e. Slowdown of the clock arm cancels the supposed speedup of the clock, which he also calls "time dilation")

 

He is also suggesting a one-way speed of light measurement, which implies misconceptions about the fundamental issues behind relativity (the simple fact that one-way speed of light is unmeasurable quantity because you can't synchronize clocks without already knowing the result).

 

And same confusion about how time dilation comes about;

 

"When the travelling twin is observed in the Earth reference frame, although the abstract time of the moving frame transformed into the Earth frame will dilate by a factor [math]\gamma[/math], the ageing rate of the travelling twin as observed on Earth will also decrease by the same factor [math]\gamma[/math], leaving the biological age (i.e., the product) unchanged"

 

And so on. His idea of time transformations leads into obvious inconsistency issues as he is basically arbitrarily choosing whether time dilation is a slow down or a speed up. That is why he thinks that Lorentz transformation cancels itself out, as he analyzes the same system twice with different arbitrary choices. That's a pretty critical error.

 

For László G. Mészáros I saw your comments on it earlier, and I would just add that had he established an understanding of the fundamentals of SR, it would have been extremely trivial for him to figure out that coordinate transformation does not in any shape or form imply pressure increase. We can freely choose what reference frame to describe a situation from, and it is precisely the point of a self-consistent coordinate transformation (such as Lorentz transformation), that describing the same system from different frames doesn't yield any changes to its expected behaviour.

 

If it did, we would have a theory that makes different predictions for the same system, when described from different coordinate systems; we would think reality changes behaviour when we choose to describe it from different point of view. That is exactly the opposite of self-consistent coordinate transformation. And it is pretty easy to establish that Lorentz transformation is indeed self-consistent. A length contracted desccription of the same system is indeed just that; length contracted description (which is in fact just a side effect of choosing to use different notion of simultaneity, which is also just a convention)

 

Finally I would comment on one item that László touches in his argument;

 

"When the question of reality in connection to length contraction was raised (6), Einstein

responded (7): "the question as to whether length contraction really exists or not is misleading. It doesn't 'really' exist [... for] a co-moving observer; though it 'really' exists [... for] a non-co-moving observer". Instead of questioning the scientific legitimacy of a view that advocates the existence of "multiple, observer-determined realities..."

 

This is a good example of an issue (one of many in SR) that is almost impossible to understand correctly without first understanding where the theory came from, why, and what does it mean. And also one that usually generates a lot of useless horseshit debates between people who don't know what they are talking about. Einstein said the question is misleading because it's not exactly correct to call the effect illusionary, nor to call it real; either comment would easily lead into misconceptions. It's not correct to assume it is a visual illusion created by time delay of light signals, and it's equally incorrect to assume that reality is impacted by our choice of a coordinate system where we describe some system.

 

I personally think it's best to simply view it as an epistemological convention, as these "effects" are a consequence of a self-consistent coordinate transformation scheme, in the case that we define simultaneity separately for each inertial frame; a convention that is available for us as a direct logical consequence of maximum information speed being finite for us. That is very very rare view taken on mainstream publications, which rather tend to paint some kind of ontological picture, because, I guess people just "need to believe". I think they are also greatly confusing great many people, including Xinhang and László I guess...  :unknw:

 

Moderation note: later replies to this thread were moved to this Strange Claims thread, because they’re not a discussion of credibility of the claims made in the papers reference from this thread, but a defense of one of them by its author.