The victorious truther

Lately I've been interested in investigating the more intricate parts of special relativity beyond what is readily apparent on wikipedia or physics 101 videos. So, besides mathematical treatments, I want to investigate the extensive experimental support that has been built up for special relativity over the 20th and 21st centuries.

I have had my eyes on Y.Z. Zhang's Special relativity and its experimental foundation seen here on amazon.

Does anyone else have any other suggestions on further choices (Books and Papers alike) or comments on the viability or quality of the book above?

Dear mordred, if time is just a concept we use to measure duration then how would you interpret time dilation close to the speed of light or in a strong gravitational field.

Thanks again, Mordred.

 

 

What do you mean, what is it made of?

 

Why should it be made of anything? What sort of answer do you expect? "Oak, with brass trimmings and inlaid mother of pearl"?

 

What is distance made of? What is speed made of? What is energy made of?

 

 

Of course it does. Next you will be telling us that a ruler doesn't measure distance.

"What do you mean, what is it made of"?

So is it immaterial, is it like invisible undetectable squirrels that are causing things to decay.

Distance is just a word we use to describe the separation of two physical objects. I could say these objects are a meter apart or a few yards but these are concepts we use to relate certain distances. So as with the second which is used to distinguish a certain scale to measure the changes in the position of an object. Speed is the change in position over the change in the oscillation of a physical object which you continue to suppose some metaphysical field is causing.

When I say that time is not measured by a clock, I mean that there isn't a metaphysical presence that warps or causes it or allows it to change. We have two different views on a clock, you say it is time that is causing the change and thus a measurement of it while i'm saying that the clock is changing and thus we use this oscillatory motion to compare other changing objects to. You say it is dependent while I say it is independent.

We need something with discrete units to count time but time itself is a smooth continuum.

So time is physical? What is it made of? A clock does not measure time it is a device that has replicable oscillatory capabilities.

Yes. (What is the difference?)

Well, one is something that can and possibly does have physical consequences in the known world. While the other is just an abstract concept used to describe or help in calculating certain variables.

 

 

(Change, maybe. But not movement.)

 

More importantly, don't confuse the way we measure time with the way we define what it is. The use of time as a dimension in relativity, for example, does not require change or movement.

But the measurement of a second does require the counting of a number of changes in the position of a cesium atom. How else do you measure time or know the units of time without measuring it from what you consider an objective clock which changes at a set rate which you can then use to compare certain processes.

Thank you modred for some common sense.

Do you mean a dimension as in a literal sense or in a mathematical way?

And so what is time?

Is it the measure of change or the cause of change?

I agree with Eise that time and space do not deserve the place of what we would consider real physical presences. Time is only relevant when we can observe change and compare that to a set value of change from a certain physical oscillator, like a cesium clock or a pendulum, to better record or compare the phenomenon. When we say that something took a whole day to complete, we can imagine that, as we have experienced and have a set value to how long that would be. If I said that someone was very tall, you wouldn't be able to imagine a concrete and absolute view of it. Although, if I said that he was four meters tall, using this set scaling system allows me to compare and contrast with other objects that I know of to get a good grip on the reality of it.

The fact that we have these set SI units allows us to create concrete pictures of the world around us using these concepts which could be abstract, physical, or emergent of other physical phenomenon.

The meter is a length scale that is now defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second. Where a second is defined as 9,192,631,770 periods of the hyperfine state of the ground state in a cesium atom which is in turn, once again, a measure of the change or movement of an object.