Farsight

Edtharan, I've got to go so I'll answer just one point: Let's say that a mass is somehow going to steer left because of gravity, and will move towards a planet instead of continuing in a straight line. There is no magical action-at-a-distance "force" zapping through space like cartoon magnetism. Instead the left side of the mass experiences some different local condition to the right side of the mass. If you were to move the mass a little to the right, you'd still see a different local condition on the left and right. There is a left-to-right gradient wherever there is a gravitational "field". If there were no gradient, both sides of the mass would experience the same condition, and the motion would be in a straight line. The effect of this gradient is curved motion over time, but this "curved spacetime" is an effect not a cause. You get a better idea of the cause if you remove time and take a snapshot as at some given instant - or in mathematical terms take the the time-differential of your curved spacetime. The differential of a curve is a gradient. It's a gradient in c, akin to a refractive index. It exists because mass/energy is stress, and gravity is an orthogonal tension that decreases with distance and area. You'll have to wait for GRAVITY EXPLAINED for the full works, and I might have to write SPACE EXPLAINED and/or CHARGE EXPLAINED to set the scene. IMHO Newton and Einstein explained what gravity does, not what it is.

I used to go night fishing. You spend time on the beach looking up at the glowtube on your rodtip, so you see things in the sky. I've seen some odd things, which were definitely not conventional aircraft, or satellites, or meteors, or the planet Venus. So when I hear of reports being dismissed as such, I feel certain that there is some ongoing cover-up. I'm also certain that there's a whole pile of nutters out there faking abduction reports and photoshopping pictures, plus conspiracy theory nutters and crop-circle freaks sneaking around at night. These guys really muddy the waters. As to what the truth is, I don't know. I don't buy Nick Cook's The Hunt for Zero Point. I think "Black Ops" is too pat, too convenient an excuse. I think there's more, but I don't know what.

Jesus H Christ. Do you believe all the nonsense some workshy anarchist big brother shoves down your throat? Grow up.

Hi Albers.

I don't complain about people's critiques of my posts. Not that bah, there's no maths so it's not worth reading is a critique. And I certainly don't demand to be revered. All I want is to do is gain and offer understanding without being dismissed by somebody who doesn't.

I sigh when I see my stuff lumped into the same bucket as this.

You've perhaps corrupted the experiment already by introducing yourself, an event-driven observer measuring intervals between events - you bring your concept of time into the experiment. But I applaud your effort to devise an experiment. You earlier said no amount of thrusting in the spatial dimensions will influence your velocity in the time dimension, please review. I don't dispute the observation, merely the interpretation. Yes, we can treat space and time similarly mathematically, but a mathematical dimension is just that. It isn't necessarily a real dimension the way you consider it to be. Mathematics is a vital tool in the box, but it shouldn't take precedence over what's actually observable and testable. But it is different, the t is a negative term. I agree. I'm writing a series of essays such as MASS EXPLAINED etc. A different concept of time does seem to open some doors of understanding for these phenomena. I'm wouldn't say I'm eliminating time from the equations, but am perhaps looking at them in "time derivative" terms. For example this means gravity is no longer a curvature of spacetime, but is instead a local gradient in space, a tangent to the curve. I think there are simplifications available, but in grasp and concept rather than mathematics. No, I'm sorry, it doesn't. Your justification of motion through time is built on your axiom that it is a dimension with some kind of length that we move through. Yes, we can measure time, just as we can measure temperature, and we can plot a grid. But it's a mathematical grid, we don't in truth move along this grid. I think not. I'm reducing the dimensions and finding that things become more understandable. Try reading the other essays and see if you agree. This is something that came up in conversation, I think you introduced it, not me. I can't see it, so I don't assume it's there. Why do you assume it's there? You have no evidence whatsover for freedom of movement through time. And yet you ask me to prove a negative instead of shouldering the responsibility to prove the positive. The reasons you give to support your concept of time just don't stand up. Your justifications are built on your axioms not on observables and experiment. Try to set aside all assumptions and look at it from scratch. Whoa, wait a minute. I'm challenging your assumptions, for which you have no evidence. To deflect the pain you kid yourself that I'm the one making assumptions. It isn't me. It's you. Please can you try to write shorter posts? For example you might break up a large post into several smaller posts, and pause between them to promote better dialogue.

I'm very cynical about the idea that we're all some figment of somebody's virtual reality. It's a cop-out that we could never prove. Interestingly, this was given prominence in the BBC Horizon "Time Trip" documentary, which I think is what got me thinking seriously about time. See transcript below. http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/timetriptrans.shtml

jck: I think we both agree that you need space and energy to make mass. Perhaps we can agree to differ for now on whether space or energy is the prime ingredient.

I really don't think there is any temporal flow, aguy. See the Time Explained essay for details: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=24050 Thanks, I'll check that out.

If they had magic instant subspace radios like in Star Trek, they would each hear the other talking slow.

jck: it's a tricky one. Things have properties, but some things are maybe nothing but properties. It all gets kinda fuzzy. Thanks alan.

I think so. If there is no movement there is no movement. You can't say there is no movement and then allow movement which then lets you say "aha but there is some time there after all." If you take this approach, it means all clocks "travel" through this time dimension at the same rate, independent of their velocity through the space dimensions. But you're just using the mathematical treatment to justify a real dimension that's not there. Yes, it could be there, but the disagreement about distance and time is explained more simply in terms of what we actually see, which is light and motion, and the light triangles and Pythagoras' Theorem in the original Special Relativity before Minkowski came along. I'd like to reiterate that the only moving going on is the movement through the three dimensions of space. The future is not a place you can visit. You're using a misunderstood interpretation of an unproven and unknowable object to justify a misunderstanding about time. Time stops at the event horizon, so no collapsing star has as yet become a singularity. Now take a look at this and compare it with no amount of thrusting in the spatial dimensions will influence your velocity in the time dimension. Huh? I've never claimed special relativity is bunk, or that time dilation doesn't happen. And of course, it could have been antimatter to begin with so an object "travelling backwards in time" can be indistinguishable. How convenient. Edtharan, you kid yourself about moving through time. You kid yourself that I haven't answered your questions, and you kid yourself that you're engaging in debate. You write huge essays trying to knock what I say and you're so keen to do it you start engaging in fiction like I have not been given much in the way of good answers... I've had enough of your kind of "debate". Try some science for a change.

Sometimes I get irritated when a carefully constructed piece of reasoning like TIME EXPLAINED gets brushed off into Speculations, and other things don't.

Thanks Janus.

I would say there is no time in this region of space. But it doesn't have a wall around it, and if you sit there watching it with your stopwatch in one hand and a torch in the other, there would be photons moving to your eyes, and your atoms and clocks would be moving. Your presence introduces motion along with your concept of time. If there really was no motion, there would be no atomic decay. I'm not sure about the "thrust" you introduce here, and can't much see why it's relevant. But look at your first sentence above. You say you can move through time when you can't. You say you can, but you're kidding yourself, because you just can't. You can't rerun Boxing Day. You can't go back to Christmas Eve to swap a present for something your wife will like better. Yet you cling to this you can move through time assumption like some article of faith. You rebuff any attempt to question it as some "competing theory" to be rejected until proven true, you use your assumption to "prove" that the competing theory cannot be true, and then declare lack of negative proof as proof positive. There's a whole pile of psychology going on here in your defence of your axiomatic position. Do look into it. And please read the essay again carefully.

Happy Christmas everybody. (Thank Christ it's over!) For the record, I don't think gravity is curved spacetime. IMHO we see a lightbeam curve because there's a tension gradient in space. I'll try to explain my thoughts here in my next essay.

Jerk. One's a later version which a mod moved.

OK guys, what do you think? If anybody could point out why this layman's explanation falls flat on its face I'll be sad, but grateful.

You know that energy is an intangible thing. You can’t hold energy in the palm of your hand. Because energy is to do with stress, which is the same as pressure, which is the same as negative tension, and you need a volume of stress to get the units right. Because stress is force per unit area and energy is force times distance. You know that mass is a tangible thing. You can hold a thing in your hand and feel the mass of it. You even know that E=mc2, and that the intangible thing called energy can be used to make the tangible thing called mass. But you don’t know how. I’ll explain how. The answer is all down to motion. Or the lack of it. You have to think in terms of momentum and inertia. You have to stop thinking that momentum is something that a mass has, because a thing can have momentum without having the thing you think is mass. Like a photon. You know this because you’ve read the physics. You also know this because you’ve felt it yourself, down on the beach, playing in the surf. Along comes a massive wave. You know it’s a travelling stress and you think it has no mass because it’s the water that has the mass. But the wave does have momentum, enough to knock you and your girlfriend flat on your back, laughing and screaming with salt water up your nose. You can’t grab hold of it, but it can grab hold of you. And realising this is the first step in grasping how intangible energy can become tangible mass. You can get a better feel for this with a gyroscope. Waggle it back and forth. See how light it feels. Now wind the string round the spindle, grasp it tight, and pull. You pulled tension out, so you put energy in. Your gyroscope is now humming, maybe precessing a little. When you try to waggle it you can feel the angular momentum working against you. And you’re beginning to get a feel for mass. Something that has a lot of mass is harder to move. Or harder to stop. Because it’s got a lot of inertia. Or a lot of momentum. And a lot of energy. And these things aren’t quite as different as you might think. energy E=mc2 kinetic energy KE=½mv2 momentum p=mv inertial mass=m Consider a 10 kilogram cannonball travelling at 1 metre per second in space relative to you. Brace yourself, then apply some constant braking force by catching it in the midriff. Ooof, and you feel the energy. Kinetic energy is looking at this in terms of stopping distance, whilst momentum is looking at it in terms of stopping time. The momentum is conserved in the collision because the two objects shared a mutual force for the same period of time. The kinetic energy isn’t conserved, because some of the mass-in-motion was redirected into deformation and heat and probably bruises, all of which involve mass-in-motion, but scattered motion instead of tidy vector quantities of masses moving relative to you. Or you moving relative to them, because all the while you were never too sure whether it was you moving or the cannonball. When we turn our attention from a cannonball to a photon, we have to express the energy and the momentum in a different way. There is no “mass”, so the energy is hf, and the momentum is hf/c. The h here is Planck’s constant of 6.63 x 10-34 Joule-seconds, and is an “action” which is a momentum multiplied by a distance. The f is the frequency per second, and our old friend c is distance over time, which converts a stopping-distance measure into a stopping-time measure. It’s just λ/c or wavelength over frequency, so you can also express the momentum as h/λ. And you can see how that momentum affects a mass via Compton scattering: When a photon collides with a free electron the electron gets a bump and goes flying off at an angle, while the photon is similarly deflected and its wavelength is increased. The electron has gained some kinetic energy and the photon has lost some momentum. Or vice versa. Their velocity vectors have changed, as have their relative velocities. You can play “photons” at home with a strip of carpet or better still a rubber mat. Lift one end, grip it tight, and give it a big shake. You can see a wave travelling down the length of the rubber. It’s a travelling stress that rides on the tension it creates, and you can toss “electrons” with it, be they dollies or eggs. Hours of endless fun. Better than an egg in the microwave for four minutes. Now imagine you’re the electron, only it’s you moving instead of the photon. Bump, and you’re sent flying off at an angle. It feels like you hit something solid instead of a volume of stressed space. Like a bad flight with so much turbulence it’s like riding over rocks. It would feel like the photon had inertia instead of momentum. But the photon isn’t sitting in one place, and you can’t nail it down like you can nail down your rubber mat. So how do you keep that bump of momentum in the same place? There’s only one tool in the box. More of the same. Imagine you’ve got a couple of table tennis bats and you’re good at topspin. If you bat that photon just right you can change its direction and give it some energy. It’s called an Inverse Compton, like the picture above but with the arrows going the other way. Then you can hit it with the other bat to change its direction again. Repeat in rapid succession until you’ve got a kind of hexagon going, a miniature electromagnetic vortex. Now keep batting away, but close your eyes, like you might close your eyes when you’re playing repulsion with a couple of magnets. You can feel something there between your bats. What you can feel is basically mass. You’ve made a mass. It isn’t a proper mass because if you stop batting your photon will be off like a shot. You need to bat faster and harder to get it down smaller and smaller. You’re packing more and more stress into a smaller and smaller volume. Then at 511keV, or 8.18 x 10-14 Joules, a funny thing happens. The volume will fit only a single wavelength, and the stress in your photon kind of tangles round itself like a moebius-strip bagel, spinning and rolling around itself like a smoke ring, and suddenly you’ve got yourself a self-sustaining vortex that you don’t have to bat any more. You’ve got yourself something that goes round twice to get back where it started, so it’s got spin ½. All the negative charge variation is on the outside, so it’s got negative charge. And most importantly, because it isn’t going anywhere, when you hit it, it’s you hitting the photon instead of the photon hitting you. It had momentum, and now its got inertia. It’s got mass. And you’ve got yourself an electron. It’s wrapped into tight little loop, and you can’t undo it. When you give it a little tap with a bat you can still think in terms of the Compton picture. But now the whole thing is tied into a single wavelength and since it isn’t kept in place by some atomic nucleus acting like a tetherpole, you can’t stretch it with a little tap. All you get is the deflection. That deflection is a change in the photon velocity vector, it adds to all the velocity vectors in the moebius loop. It translates into motion, so the electron as a whole moves with respect to you. You can do the same sort of thing to make a positron. It’s got the twist wrapped the other way, with the positive charge variation on the outside. But there’s no table tennis bats in particle physics. In practice you fire a mega-electron-volt photon at an atomic nucleus, whereupon it splits into two to create an electron and a positron at the same time for conservation of charge. The positron won’t last long because it will meet an electron, and the two will annihilate to create a pair of 511keV gamma-wave photons flying off in opposite directions. It’s like the electron is a twist in your fishing line and the positron is the mirror image twist. Slide them together, and voila, twang, gone. Now when we go back to your cannonball we can see how it’s a whole heap of whirling stress, a trundling bundle of energy. But is the cannonball moving or is it you moving, and what’s its mass? Is the rest mass calculated from the transverse velocity vector of those racing photons, or is it the relativistic mass of whatever path they trace through space? Take your pick, but I pick the latter. Which means in my eyes photons have momentum, and energy, and mass too. It’s all relative really, because we’re made out of these things, they’re like our light clocks. If you’re racing past me, yours look like this /\/\/\ to me and mine look the same to you. But our own look like this | to each of us. Our length contraction of 1/√(1-v2/c2) is relative, like our time dilation, and our momentum and energy, so I think our mass might as well be relative too. Anyhow. That’s why a moving mass is rather like a spring. It looks like a spring stretched out rather than a spring compressed. That’s why a moving mass has something that looks like tension, sorry negative tension volume, that thing called energy. I will talk some more about these things. I will talk about electromagnetism and space, and whether energy is a property of space or makes it the thing that it is. And I will talk about particle physics and string theory, and matter. But first, I need to try to explain a matter of some gravity... Acknowledgements: thanks to J.G. Williamson and M.B. van der Mark for Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology? see http://members.chello.nl/~n.benschop/electron.pdf to Peter M Brown for his many mass papers on his excellent website http://www.geocities.com/physics_world/ , to Robert A Close for The Other Meaning of Special Relativity A New Interpretation of Special Relativity, to R F Norgan likewise see http://www.aethertheory.co.uk/pdfRFN/Aether_Why.pdf, to all the forum guys with their relevant posts and links, Wikipedia contributors, and to anybody who I’ve forgotten or whose pictures I’ve used. And Paul Dirac. Thanks guys.

Edtharan: I'm sorry I was rude. Because nothing happens. Nothing changes, and there are no events. It's like heat. You can't have any heat at absolute zero because there is no motion. Because I can move through space. I can't move through time.

Hmmn, maybe you're going too far there jck. I think colour is something that is totally in in your imagination. Time is something you experience rather than imagine. It's a derived effect of motion like heat is a derived effect of motion. And heat burns.

Fitzgerald proposed length contraction as an explanation for the null result. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Fitzgerald I don't know if you'd class that as independent, but eiapeteides was asking for experimental evidence and that's the best I could come up with.

I think that's about the size of it carol. Though it's the other way round about the moving fast and the ageing.

How about the Michelson Morley Experiment?