Farsight

LOL, it doesn't explain it at all. If you think it does, tell me in one sentence: What is Energy? See if you can match this: Energy is basically stress. Strictly speaking, stress is the same as pressure, being force per unit area, so you need a volume of stress to get the units right for energy. You can't hold pure energy in the palm of your hand, because energy is the property of a thing - you need a volume of something, and you need to stress it. You can however hold energy in your hand by squeezing a fist. Your fist has a volume, and if you touch the end of your thumb you can feel the pressure in it. Interestingly, space can be stressed, so we're getting fairly close to pure energy when we talk about light.

I agree with the sentiment, fredrik. Mathematics is a vital tool, but sometimes it seems like 'the only tool in the box and it's got no handle. So we can't get a grasp of what we're dealing with. I like to think ontologically rather than mathematically myself. Ditto, Albers. I have problems with quantization of anything to do with rotation. And when I look at action and think about energy multiplied by time, or momentum multiplied by distance, I think of energy = stress multiplied by volume, of stress = force times area, of c = a distance/time conversion factor, of kinetic-energy stopping distance, and momentum stopping time. It seems to be telling me I'm looking at the same thing from different viewpoints. I want to grasp that thing via the ontology of what's there, not get sidetracked into mathematical quanta and mind games telling me that things jigger when they rotate.

Are you being mendacious here? Take a look at the opening paragraphs of Time Explained again. We observe colour, heat, sound, et cetera, but we do not conclude that these things are fundamental properties of the world. Look again at the transverse metre rule, where you measure time t for light to travel distance s and I measure the same value. You calculate c=s/t=300,000km/s as do I, but we know that your t is different to my t by a time dilation factor. We see a similar time dilation factor on the surface of the planet. So what do we conclude Edtharan? Here's a clue: c=s/t and t ain't what it was. No it doesn't. Where did that come from? Did you even read my previous post? I always measure c to be 300,000km/s, and so do you. Come on now, pay attention, when an object falls to earth where does the kinetic energy come from? Here's a clue: E=MC2 and M didn't change. Groan. This is utterly facile. You've taken a conclusion and turned it into a measurement, then back into a conveniently "mutually exclusive" conclusion. Why do you do this? Why duck and dive with all this dishonesty that can't explain anything and doesn't want to see anything explained? Come on, show me I'm wrong. Explain to me what gives if c=s/t and the t is dilated. Does s contract even though it was a transverse metre rule? Come on Ed, think. Yours is the circular argument, and as ever it's going nowhere.

So we can't see it, we can't perceive it, it offers no freedom of motion, but we should treat all dimensions equally. And: Thud, thud, thud. That's my head banging on my desk at how people talk themselves into misunderstanding and mystery.

No I'm not. That why I stressed the difference between conclude and observe. I've forgotten nothing. You might be on earth and I might be in orbit, and because I need to keep adjusting my watch I conclude that your c is slower than mine. But if I try to measure your c I actually measure my c. This is more of the same. You will not measure a different energy. You always measure c to be the same old 300,000km/s regardless of your reference frame. You never measure 290,000km/s. But you can conclude that there is a difference in absolute terms. Time dilation and the transverse ruler tells you this. No, you won't see a difference. You conclude there's a difference. No Ed. You've gone astray from the off here. Read what I said again. Sure thing. I thought you'd assume the gravitational. The change in c is caused by a local tension gradient orthogonal to mass/energy stress. See ENERGY EXPLAINED and MASS EXPLAINED. Everybody measures c to be the same. If they end up with some mismatch in their calculations they've done something wrong. Sorry Ed, you've reached that conclusion because you've gone off at a total tangent. Try it again. Try to ask smaller questions instead of blatting out a whole proof that falls down because of a mistaken initial premise.

Huh? Tycho didn't read it because I don't say time does not exist. Look: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showpost.php?p=315981&postcount=2 And Edtharan obviously didn't read it because his reply to a post was apposite to the essay. http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showpost.php?p=316058&postcount=4 But whatever. OK you don't want any help, fine.

I thought the infinite time dilation happened when you approached the event horizon, Albers. Which takes us back to the old "frozen stars". No collapsing star has finished collapsing yet, and never will. Result = no singularities. Black holes have no hair, and no heart. I don't know much about the dimensional collapse of the quark field or transactional interpretation. Or truth be known, black holes either. But I offer what I can.

Not if they're smart they won't. Think about that cannonball travelling at 1000m/s. It has considerable kinetic energy. When you change frames to travel alongside it, the kinetic energy is now zero. But you know the cannonball didn't change at all, so you know that the energy content didn't really change. Yep, no problem. No. The amount of energy contained within the matter and antimatter masses at that location is what it is. It's like the cannonball. OK, he concludes that c is lower on the surface. You're getting confused between observed and concluded here. If observer A is smart enough to calculate a lower value of c, he will also be smart enough to calculate that the annihilation energy released on the surface is less than the annihilation energy that would have been released in orbit. He will calculate that the difference equates to the kinetic energy of the masses falling from position A to position B. He will realise that the kinetic energy doesn't come from nowhere. It doesn't come from the "gravitational field" or from the earth. It comes, via the reducing c, out of the falling masses themselves. Imagine being on earth and kicking the cannonball into orbit. You gave it kinetic energy, and this disappears into "potential energy" within the cannonball, commensurate with the higher value of c up there. The same sort of thing happens in special relativity when there's no gravity: the canonball's relativistic mass increases when you kick it to some higher velocity with respect to yourself.

Time unexplainable? Somebody give him a link to TIME EXPLAINED: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=24050

It was however germane to Albert Einstein during his Princeton years: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/050228crat_atlarge?050228crat_atlarge

It was you who introduced the preferred reference frame, swansont, here: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showpost.php?p=319827&postcount=55 That was before you changed the subject and delivered another snipe. Look, you won't read this essay or engage sincerely in the subject, so I'll have to go elsewhere. Perhaps one day you'll have cause to reflect upon your stance here.

Edtharan: I don't feel I've got your full attention regarding the material I've posted or linked to. And yours is just about the only attention my essays have received here. There have been other comments, but many indicate no attention to the subject or my responses. So I've decided to spend my time more productively elsewhere. Apologies.

I do so agree with Special Relativity. But I also see what it's telling us. I see why the postulates hold, what they mean, and how it evolves. To the best of my knowledge I think the same as Einstein did. Not in 1905, but in 1949. In his response to Godel's paper in the Schilpp volume, Einstein acknowledged that "the problem here disturbed me at the time of the building up of the general theory of relativity." This problem he described as follows: "Is what remains of temporal connection between world-points in the theory of relativity an asymmetrical relation (like time, intuitively understood, and unlike space), or would one be just as much justified to assert A is before B as to assert that A is after B? The issue could also be put this way: is relativistic space-time in essence a space or a time."

Yep. Let's set Twin's Paradox symmetry to one side for a minute. If we had some kind of magic instant viewscreen that showed us the inside of Swanson's black box, we'd see his light going seven times slower than yours. Yep. Look up electron volts. An electron at rest will annihilate with a positron releasing gamma rays of 511keV apiece. A relativistic electron annihiliating with a relativistic positron will release gamma rays of more than 511keV as far as the stationary observer is concerned. Don't get stuck on rest mass here - I take the view that something that has energy has mass. For example, a photon has mass of hf/c2. No they wouldn't. You're going off on one here. If a rock hit a stationery observer it would cut his head a bit, but if it hit a relativistic observer it would take his head clean off. I can only try to explain to the best of my ability. Look, here's the situation. The image below presents an illusion. The illusion is that square A is a different colour to square B. The reality is that square A is the same clour as square B. You're stuck thinking that the illusion is the reality. You can learn how to see that the squares are the same colour. And you can learn to see the simple truth of what I'm saying. See http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusions/illusions.htm and use the swatch to prove to yourself that A and B are the same colour. Maybe. But it's a lot of hard latex, and it would be easier for me to find something somebody else has already done. But you haven't read any of the papers I've linked to, so maybe not.

Let's try it another way: Swanson, I give you a metre-wide light-measuring device that you hold transversely while a black box takes you for a trip. Edtharan, you stay in the lab with a similar device. When Swanson gets back, his device shows that light went back and forth across his transverse metre a trillion times. As far as Swanson is concerned it travelled a trillion metres. Edtharan's device says the light went back and forth seven trillion times. As far as he was concerned it travelled seven million metres. Swanson and Edtharan are both here now. But Swanson's light travelled a trillion metres instead of seven trillion metres. So Swanson's light travelled slower than Edtharan's. Swanson didn't notice it during the trip, because the devices are akin to light clocks. His whole body was similarly affected. He experienced less time because his light was running slower. Like I said, you can never measure your local c to be anything other than 300,000km/s. You only see the difference when you compare frames in experiments like this. Swanson's trip might have been a ride at .99c. Or it might have been to a high-gravity area. There's not much difference between the two, but in the latter situation there's less room for dispute about how far the light "really" travelled in some absolute reference frame.

Pi: from what I've read, IMHO Einstein ended up thinking that spacetime was really space.

You always measure it to be the same whatever reference frame you're in, so in this respect it's constant. But it's actually different in different reference frames. It's just that you don't notice it. So it's not really constant. Imagine you blast off away from me and earth at .99c. I know from √(1-V2/C2) that your time experience is dilated by a factor of seven. I get you to measure the speed of light, in a tranverse direction to avoid any length-contraction complications. You find it's still the same old 300,000km/s. But your second lasts seven of my seconds. So your c is a seventh of mine. It's similar if you're in a high-gravity situation and I'm not. Your c is less than mine, but you don't notice it. And at all points between us c has intermediate values, hence the local gradient.

I do declare I think I heard the word aether mentioned there, Martin. I share the sentiment expressed by fredrik. String Theory does not offer grasp. But I wouldn't single it out, the same might be said of Quantum theories, or even the Standard Model. More generally, physics arguably suffers from a surfeit of mathematical abstraction that struggles to provide that satisfying intuitive understanding that we all seek.

What's the problem, h4tt3n? If you take this a little further, you can find something that tells you the energy of a photon is hf and its momentum is hf/c, so: energy E = hf momentum P = hf/c To get from mass m to momentum P=mv you have to multiply by velocity, which is c. And to get from momentum P to energy E you have to multiply by velocity c again. So to get from mass to energy you have to multiply by c squared. Which gives you: E=mc2 Great fun!

No, the speed of light in one place is what it is. Your velocity means the light in your atoms and clocks is having to travel further, and your time experience is reduced. You measure c to be the same, but your seconds last much longer. Hang on, I've already said all this but you've paid no attention. You've written another long essay without checking up on anything I've said. What are you playing at? Are you even interested in physics, or are you just playing debating societies? http://members.chello.nl/~n.benschop/electron.pdf http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0512/0512265.pdf http://home.att.net/~SolidUniverse/Relativity/Relativity.html http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/0204044 I suggest you print out the above papers, sit down, and read them all. Also read MASS EXPLAINED. Also follow up the google link I posted earlier. Do some research then we can talk some more. All that's happening at the moment is that I'm doing the research, and you're sitting there in your blinkered ignorance saying no no no and telling me the earth is flat.

Now imagine the situation where you take an object from the surface of the moon, and place it a million miles from the moon. With no kinetic energy involved. An ongoing displacement in space that can be measured against other ongoing displacements in space. I think it's futile to discuss this further until you examine the axioms that you interpret as explanation and proof. They do change their velocity. But remember it's a vector quantity. They swerve. As you approach the gravitational object it's like you're accelerating, moving gradually from one inertial reference frame to another one where c is different. However this different c dictates your local time experience so you don't measure any local difference. You have to mentally step out of the frames and look at what distinguishes one frame from the other. Remember your relativity, c has a local value of 300,000 km/s. It always has, and nothing can move faster than the local value of c. Your electron is basically a ring of light - it can never move faster than light. Your misunderstanding is what's causing you problems, see above. Come on, check out those links instead of spending all your time trying to find something to argue about.

In a nutshell I'm saying motion defines time, not the other way around. Let's park it there and agree to differ. No, the change of c is the gravitational field. You need to check out those links and that google page before making a pronouncement. If you have a mass on the surface of a planet it takes energy to take it out of the gravity well. Think about it.

Edtharan: I don't understand the first portion of your post above. You seem to be saying motion is displacement in time therefore time is not dependent on motion, QED. You seem to be using an axiom to give a proof. Please clarify. It's constant in any one frame, but it isn't constant when you look at the big picture across multiple frames. Imagine you're in a spaceship travelling at .99c. You measure the speed of light to be the same as ever, but your time is dilated by a factor of 7. Now step outside that frame and ask yourself what is c inside that frame? The situation is similar to one where you're standing on the surface of a neutron star. The local c is lower than it is a light year out in space, and there's a gradient in the value of c between the two places. I said akin to a refractive index. It isn't quite the right term. I'm not sure what is. I am, and it does, truly. That's what you get when you take time out of the equation. It's the cause of the "curved spacetime" effect. Search google and check up on this, you should be able to find something to vindicate what I'm saying. http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22speed+of+light%22+%22gradient%22+%22gravity%22+%22c%22+&btnG=Search&meta= It isn't really my theory. Have a read of Mass Explained and follow the link at the bottom for the Robert Close paper: http://home.att.net/~SolidUniverse/Relativity/Relativity.html The curvature is the effect of a gradient which is the effect of mass/energy. Read Energy Explained before you read Mass Explained, because that's where I introduce stress and tension. Energy is a volume of stress, and Mass is this tied down into one place. Gravity is an orthogonal tension. Get a "rubber" (a pencil eraser) and squeeze it in the middle. You're putting it under stress. The ends bulge out a little, because of the orthogonal tension you've introduced via that stress. As I said I've got to write it up properly, so that's all I can really offer for now.

Swansont, if you're going to dismiss questions like What is Gravity? as mere metaphysics please do it somewhere else. Edtharan: 1) If the existence of time is dependant on motion, then the object in the centre of the experiment will not experience Time until the influence of the experimenter reaches it. Yes I agree with this. 2) If Time is not dependant on motion then the object in the centre of the experiment will experience time normally regardless of whether the influence of the experimenter has reached it or not. I don't think I agree with this. If there is no motion I can't see how there can be any time experience. There's no incoming photons, no oscillations, no weak force decay, nothing. I guess it's rather like being knocked unconscious. You have no time experience, then you wake up and find you've skipped five minutes. If you repeated this ad infinitum there would be no time experience while you were unconscious, eg while nothing was moving, but you could gain a time experience by looking at the clock every time you woke up. You'd see that the clock had moved. Which brings me back round to what I was saying. Something's got to move somewhere, and time is the measure of it.