The interpretations of how Special Relativity works do not seem to be correct.
The problem is as I see it is that when a space craft is traveling at 99.999 % the speed of light physicists say anyone in the space craft will not be able to tell that they are traveling near the speed of light. They say that the people on board will not be able to detect that the clock on board has slowed down. This cannot be right. They say that everything they experience onboard the ship will seem normal. They will not notice a contraction in length or an increase in mass. I believe this interpretation to be incorrect. Let's talk it out and see if this interpretation is correct. My question is: "Is the modern day interpretation of Special Relativity correct?"
Comments (48)
That is not what physicists say. You would be able to know how fast you are travelling by measuring how long it takes to reach a star or planet of known distance. Your clock would be ticking away normally as far as you are concerned. What physicists say is that all the laws of physics look the same to you regardless of how fast you are travelling. So you would not know how fast you are travelling by looking for anomalies - there would be none.
Given that experiments hold up the theory, maybe it would be more interesting to discuss how to visualise it all and get a handle on it?
That is not what physicists say. You would be able to know how fast you are travelling by measuring how long it takes to reach a star or planet of known distance. Your clock would be ticking away normally as far as you are concerned. What physicists say is that all the laws of physics look the same to you regardless of how fast you are travelling. So you would not know how fast you are travelling by looking for anomalies - there would be none. -Kippo
tests have been shown in airplanes traveling for several days (P-3) that the clocks slow down or tell time slower than the clock on the earth's surface. This is due to each particle within the clock (each particle has a x vector, y vector, z vector) has vectors and when you combine the 3 vectors the sum can never exceed C (speed of light). When you increase the clock in one direction (at higher speeds over a long period time for analysis purposes) you are slowing each particle down in one or two of it's other vectors. The net result is the clock loses its ability to accurately tell time. A good book on this is "a brief history of time" by Stephen Hawking. Alot of Physicists write bad books, this is not the case with that book.
Yes. The predictions of special and general relativity come true at the scale of a space ship that goes anywhere in the universe other than inside a black whole (...in which, if a prediction goes wrong, conveniently for relativity the occupants can't come back and tell us about it), according to every experiment we have so far.
If you want to know how special and general relativity works and the experimental evidence for them, there's plenty of resources.
What might be more suitable for a philosophy forum is a short discussion of what general principles are preserved in Einsteinium relativity from Galilean relativity and which change, and sort of the general epistemological questions we can discuss.
In Galilean relativity, velocities commute. If you through anything, a ball or light particles/waves, from a moving train, what you through will move at the velocity of the train plus how hard you threw it. This is how things behave in our everyday experiences. This simple rule as developed further by Newton, leads to what's called universal time. What universal time means is that all observers will be able to agree on when two events happen simultaneously (they may need to wait for signals, but everyone can work out and will agree that two events A and B happened simultaneously or not). If we lived in a Newtonian universe, we'd also all agree on what speed something is going.
The philosophical relevance of this is first that there's no really good reason we couldn't live in a Newtonian universe, as far as I know. Not only is it consistent theoretical, it's consistent with what we experience in our part of the universe (on a planet with weak gravity where nothing goes terribly fast), and, I'd say for both these reasons, is easy to imagine. Everything that happens, happens at the same time, and the universe progresses from one instant to another like a giant film.
However, there's also a deeper relativity principle that Newtonian mechanics obeys, which is that all observers can agree on causation (what events caused other events) and what laws governed that causation (if observer A calculates a given force moved object B, observer C will calculate the same force from any other perspective). If we didn't agree on what causes what and / or we didn't agree on what laws of physics are at play in a event ... we'd be in an epistemological place that would be difficult to deal with.
We don't live in the universal time and simple velocity addition version of relativity, but we do live in a universe where observers will agree on what causes what (that A caused B, and no one will calculate B caused A) and why (that the caused event makes sense to everyone employing the same rules). What we lose from Galilean and Newtonian relativity is universal time (observers don't generally what is happening simultaneously, and if they try they end up in paradoxes) and we also lose simple velocity addition relativity (if you're on a train at 90% the speed of light relative point A, or any speed, and you shine a flash-light forward, you'll see the speed difference between you and the train as the speed of light ... but someone at point A will not see a speed of light difference, but only the 10% difference).
This is extremely difficult to imagine and no one was even pondering such a possibility until experiments started making problems for Newtonian physics. Electro-magnetic experiments and Maxwell's equations led to paradoxes. Basically 2 big ones: that light is a wave and not a particle, and so from this we predict there is a medium for the wave to vibrate in (they didn't have quantum mechanics of wave-particle duality, just electromagnetic fields where light oscillates in); this medium must be "fixed in space" and so we should expect results of experiments to change depending on how fast we're going with respect to the electromagnetic medium. For instance, if two magnets are going through the medium faster, then we'd expect the force they communicate to each other to start to miss, just like two boats side by side don't hit each other with waves if they are going fast enough (they cannot tell the other boat is there, by observing the water, after a certain speed), and so fast magnets should lose force and at some point no longer repel or attract as they can't "see" the other magnet is there. And especially the waves in this medium will be going at different speeds, relative oneself, depending on how fast one is travelling, just like a surfer can catch-up to a wave on the ocean.
It turns out magnets don't behave differently between themselves no matter how fast they go, and even more bizarre, you will always measure light at the same speed regardless of how fast you are moving or from which direction you measure.
This is bizarre, but, thinking fairly deeply, Einstein realized that it's only a really big problem if causality and physical laws don't make sense from different reference frames, and that maybe there's a way to maintain causality in this bizarre setup (this wasn't obvious, other physicists were trying to develop "fixes" to light and magnets and Maxwell's equations that would make everything work out; for instance, in my boat analogy, maybe a different kind of medium than water will have some sort of compensation effect with speed to keep the force the same, so the boats are always affecting each other the same way regardless of speed; maybe they "get less force" but going faster happens to make the affects of waves greater, so it stays the same, these sorts of ideas; for the speed of light, the experimental evidence that it went the same speed in all directions wasn't super strong, most physicists assumed it was experimental error or some similar compensation scheme would work it out).
So, keeping in mind that simple mass-particles don't have any of these wave problems, so this problem doesn't arise in Newtonian mechanics equations, and even adding fields there's no a priori reason that the electromagnetic field wouldn't be like a big fixed fabric through space and we could easily tell when we are moving or stationary to the electromagnetic fabric by observing how our magnets change.
What I find philosophically interesting is that the above Newtonian + Electromagnetic fabric is conceptually simple, but would make physics way more complicated. For instance, as your rocket ship goes faster it may just fall apart, or (even before) that your bio-chemical reactions would stop working properly. Results of experiments would change depending on what direction the earth is moving relative the medium, which would depend the earths rotation, the season as well as the sun's direction in the galaxy and the galaxy's momentum relative the medium. Astrophysics would be ridiculously more complicated as we'd need to take into account how fusion changes depending on the rotational and current velocity of gas in the start, velocity of a star in the medium etc.
So, what I find really interesting, philosophically, is that conceptually Einstein relativity is harder to grasp ... but it describes a universe in which it is far easier to understand what's happening since electromagnetic and nuclear forces don't change with speed relative a fixed frame of reference.
If they're traveling at 99.999% at the speed of light, presumably they would be going very fast towards galaxies in one direction, and very fast away from the galaxies in the opposite direction. Then considering that when we're going towards something we receive its light with higher frequency and when we're going away from it we receive its light with lower frequency (in a similar way that when a ambulance moves towards you you hear its siren with a higher frequency and when it moves away from you you hear its siren with a lower frequency), they would be able to tell that they're moving really fast
relative to the galaxies.
Now what if they don't have any window and they only observe things from within the spacecraft? I believe that they would still be able to notice gravitational effects that wouldn't be present if they weren't moving in that way relative to the galaxies, considering there is an asymmetry in the way they are moving relative to the matter around the spacecraft.
Then if these gravitational effects are small enough that they wouldn't detect them, special relativity says that they couldn't make an experiment inside the spacecraft that would allow them to know how fast they are going relative to other galaxies. Einstein postulated that this was the case, because many experiments were carried out and didn't give any different result when done at different velocities. Now you could argue that maybe there are experiments that would give a different result, and that's possible.
For instance, supposedly if we were onboard that spacecraft we wouldn't notice that the clock has slowed down, because all our biological processes would have slowed down at the same rate, but there is an implicit assumption here that hasn't been tested in experiments. We haven't conducted an experiment to see how our experience of time changes when we are traveling close to the speed of light, there could very well be effects on our consciousness itself that would allow us to say we're traveling really fast.
Then length contraction is not something that we have observed directly in experiments, and it's possible to explain experiments in a different way without invoking length contraction. But as the standard story goes, even if the spacecraft is length-contracted you wouldn't notice it from within, but there again there is the implicit assumption that it would have no effect on our conscious experience, which we haven't tested.
Good we have some agreement. You would be able to detect your absolute motion by determining your motion relative to other slower frames of reference that you are traveling toward or away from via the doppler shift. I agree.
Okay here you give me a more correct statement about what physicists say.
This is what I intend on proving is incorrect. Thank you for stating that more clearly than I did.
Here is where the the incorrect interpretations start to breakdown. We have both just agreed that you can tell you are moving at 99% the speed of light by using Doppler effect. It does not matter that you are just moving 99% the speed of light compared to some frame of reference like the planet earth you left behind. That frame of reference is moving so slow relative to the speed of light that it is essentially stationary. So in reality if you are moving at the speed of light relative to the earth you are essentially moving at the speed of light relative to everything else in the Universe. The only differences will be slight because of their relative motions relative to you and the stationary back ground of space. The Doppler measurement is the first anomaly that gives the person in the spacecraft a clear indication they are moving at 99% the speed of light.
Modern day physicists assumption there would be no other anomalies is woefully incorrect. Let us take "time" for example. The claim is that the person in the spaceship traveling at 99% speed of light would not notice anything different about their clock rate slowing down. It is assumed that the space travel would still be conscious. I doubt very seriously that he would be. The same real physical effects that are causing the clock to slow down are also effecting the brain processes of the space traveler. The inertial effects at moving at this speed relative the stationary spatial background would also be very apparent. The space traveller would be pinned to the back of his chair even if he were no longer accelerating. The space traveller and his space ship would also be flattened like a pancake and the ship would have acquired nearly infinite mass. If the space traveler could survive all of this he would very definitely notice all kinds of anomalies indicating the high rate of absolute motion relative to the stationary background of space. The original Lorentz transformations were discovered by Lorentz and his model for those transformations was based on a quasi-elastic stationary ether. If the equations are right and I assume they are in the special circumstances of Special Relativity then what is important is the relative motion versus the ether and not the relative motion relative to other moving frames of reference.
We assume that none of these things would be noticeable because the changes are so small relative to the speeds we are able to achieve using rockets and our puny thrust capabilities. This assumption is woefully incorrect. It would be fatal mistake trying to accelerate to the speed of light without taking the proper precautions. The only way to safely achieve light speed velocity is to use a spatial bias drive.
The first question in this argument is to determine whether it is time that is slowing down when we accelerate to the speed of light or is it the clock that is slowing down and not time. To me the answer is obvious. It is all of the physical processes that we use to measure time that are slowed. Time itself is not a real thing so it cannot be physically slowed or sped up.
There are many responses here and I have limited time to respond. Over time I will try and address every argument that is made. The overall point that I am going to prove is that the experiments done so far backup my interpretation of Special Relativity. Physicists have badly misinterpreted the meaning of Special Relativity. The laws of physics will not look the same regardless of how fast you are traveling. The time measurements and experiments performed have already proven what I am saying.
WhatQuoting MrCypress
Is this an anomaly though? Surely it would be a conformation that the laws of physics are holding up. I'm not sure anyone is saying that moving at near light speeds won't be calamitous to life are they?
When flying P3s for several days and having digital and non digital clocks on board. The clocks on the P-3 showed a significant or verifiable slower time than clocks on the earth's surface. Check out "A brief history of time" by Stephen Hawking, if you like.
SR says that local experiments would not be able to detect the speed, meaning no differences. Looking out of the window constitutes a non-.local test, but there is no way to tell if you're moving or the galaxies you see are moving fast.
Anyway, there would be no local gravity differences. There is no asymmetry. In the frame of the 'ship', the ship is stationary and the galaxies are moving incredibly fast and their clocks are the ones running slow.
Quoting MrCypressSpeed is relative to something, so this is correct. The galaxy and I have a .99c difference, but in the frame of either, it is the other that is moving.
This is totally wrong. Frames don't move relative to light. Light moves at c relative to any frame. This has been experimentally confirmed.
Again, not true. Earth moves at the same speed as only a few relatively local things. If you are going that fast relative to Earth, you're stationary relative to some other galaxy that happens to move at about that velocity. The expansion of space assures that there is a galaxy that is stationary relative to you. Hence you're not moving fast at all. You're just far away from the stuff which is also stationary.
If you were at that stationary galaxy going the same speed, the background would be isotropic: no doppler difference in any direction.
Wayfarer is right: This thread belongs in a physics forum. It has philosophical implications, but none of them were brought up by anybody.
My sentiments too :)
What are the philosophical implications of relativity? For myself, I don't see any other than the question of whether the universe is somehow a priori logically constrained to be as it is or fits some a priori expectations of simplicity, such as causality, cosmological principle and such. Though, mostly I feel the main philosophical implication is simply to refute unfounded philosophical implications of modern physics (i.e. people widely misinterpreting the theories).
I also find it interesting from a history of philosophy perspective, how world views changed from Galilean to Einsteinian relativity. You disagree that there's anything interesting philosophically there?
In the past on the physics forum it has been claimed that the inhabitant of the space craft traveling near the speed of light will not be able to notice any difference in this rapidly moving frame of reference. According to the physicists on that forum everything will appear unchanged and the only people that would notice that the Lorentz transformations are in effect is people who are stationary relative to the motion of the rapidly moving space ship.
That is exactly what I want to do in this discussion!
Already been there. Believe me when I say alternate dissenting theories to accepted main stream theories are not welcome on that website. They refuse to have this kind of discussion there. This topic really is a matter of deciding what the proper interpretation is. It is a philosophical difference I have with the physics community. At least here an open discussion is welcomed and appreciated.
I agree with this paragraph. This is an excellent description of exactly what I am saying happens. This example is a wedge that can be used to prove all of the other transformations will also be physically observable when the spaceship gets close to the speed of light. What slows down when we accelerate a frame of reference is all of the devices that we use to measure time. My spin on that is that time itself is not a real thing and cannot be affected by anything we do regarding accelerated motion. The mechanics of particle motion is affected and that causes the clocks to slow down and things will age slower as a result of the increased motion relative to a stationary spatial background. The relative motion versus some other slower moving frame of reference is not the big deal. The apparent time slowing phenomena is caused by motion relative to the stationary ether. This is just exactly what Lorentz calculated and that is really what the time dilation formula is saying. Lorentz thought this was so strange at first that he didn't believe it.
That statement is primarily what I intend on proving is not true. I think this is a misinterpretation of what is really physically happening. Nuclear forces and the motion of electromagnetic particles will be affected just as Stephen Hawking says in his book. Einstein in his speech on the "ether" in 1920 said that General Relativity proved that there is an ether. Unfortunately because of the misinterpretation of the null result of the Michelson & Morley experiment he came to believe that you cannot sense motion relative to it. Einstein said, "But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it." The confusion about this was created by the failure to detect the ether wind. The design of this experiment was incorrect. Looking for a difference in the motion of light will never be detectable relative to the emitting source motion. This is true because light moves autonomously relative only to the medium it is moving within. The density and tension of the medium is what determines the maximum velocity. It moves at this velocity and will be measured at the maximum speed no matter how fast you are moving in any particular direction. You can detect what your motion is relative to another moving frame of reference by using the doppler shift. Still it is hard to determine your velocity relative to the ether. In order to successfully determine an absolute velocity relative to a stationary ether back ground we will have to use clock motion. The fastest moving clock will determine that you are not moving at all relative to the ether. This I believe is the same conclusion that Lorentz came to many years ago. Unfortunately after the Michelson & Morley experiment people stopped listening to talk about the ether.
I don't argue with this statement above. This fact of reality does not have any impact on what I am claiming is wrong with the interpretation of Special Relativity. What physicists say is that all the laws of physics look the same to you regardless of how fast you are traveling. I interpret that to mean as I have been told by others that you cannot tell that your clock is slowing and you cannot notice that your length in the direction of motion is shrinking and that your increase in mass is also not noticeable. The constancy of light speed is maintained regardless of anyone else's motion. While the speed of light is maintained the light incoming to your space ship is effected by your increase in speed and you can see the Doppler effect in play when you accelerate to the speed of light. It is everything else that is affected within the accelerating frame of reference. It is my belief that as one gradually accelerates and approaches the speed of light a person on board that space ship they will be flattened and pressed back into their chair. The ship length will be compressed and it will require more and more thrust to continue to accelerate to the speed of light. Eventually the human brain will not be able to function because the electrons in their brain will no longer be able to move forward in the direction of motion that the ship is traveling. This will then stop the person from aging and will freeze the clocks in their motion. It will appear to us that time has stopped for the space travelers. Time has not stopped. The motion of all the particles that exist in the clocks onboard the space ship have stopped. Now in this moment all the particles on the ship and in the people within the ship are all already moving at the speed of light in the direction that the ship is moving. Maybe a person could survive this but I doubt it. Even if they could the instruments used to slow the ship down will be frozen and in accessible. No automated timer will work unless it is programmed to run at the just below the speed of light. Then after a short duration of a second or two local space ship time the ship can be slowed down. This would most likely put them light years away from where they started.
If on the other hand if they could actually reach the speed of light there would be no escape. They would be unable to slow down. The only way to slow down would be to collide with something and that most certainly would end in a spectacular explosion.
i agree. I have my own theories but they are probably just folk explanations.
Yes but everything else accompanying the clocks aged less too. During the "fast" motion all was appearing normal on board. I think maybe the "anomaly" you are thinking of is "why should the plane/rocket be the one to have the clock with less ticks if all motion is relative.. after all one could say the Earth was moving "fast" realtive to the rocket/clock so wht don't all earth clocks show some missed ticks relative to the rocket/plane clock when the rocket/plane lands back on Earth"? I believe I read a while back the answer is something to do with the fact that the rocket/plane was the one to accelerate and not the Earth ... v confusing though!
Well I am inclined to agree with them, but I agree the huge mass thing that is implied by the equations of motion is difficult to grasp. Do they say that mass is relative somehow?
I'm just going by what i read in "a brief history of time" by Stephen Hawking and tests done in the past 30 years.
The primary one is the philosophical interpretations of time: presentism and eternalism. The former was always the default until relativity gave equal if not better footing for the latter, but scientifically (empirically), the two are not distinct. SR does not assert a block universe even if the assumption of one makes the calculations simpler. Hence the difference is philosophical.
You make it sound like speed is a property of an object. It isn't. I am not moving at some speed. I can only have speed relative to an arbitrary reference. So for instance, relative to a muon in the upper atmosphere, I am moving at .995c which is the only reason I can get to and measure that stationary muon before it decays in a couple microseconds. At that speed, the distance between myself and that stationary muon is decreased by a factor of about 10, as is my height, and yet I don't notice anything weird about that compression except that I get to the muon before it decays, something that I would no be able to do if I had to travel a 10x longer distance.
This experiment has been done countless times, and makes for a nice empirical test with a significant dilation factor.
So I agree with what you say above, despite the nonexistence of the implied property of speed.
So this is completely wrong. Again, it uses the concept of a property of speed. There is no such thing. In the frame of the ship, the occupant will notice nothing and his brain works just fine. There is no contraction at all since the occupant is stationary in this frame. He is not going fast at all, but the stuff outside the window certainly is, which accounts for its red and blue shifts.
Quoting noAxioms
This is a problem with even the earliest forms of relativity theory. In relativity, velocity is not a statement concerning a property of an object, it is a statement concerning the object in relation to something else. So it is possible that there is something moving at 99.999% the speed of light relative to yourself right now, and therefore we could model you as moving at 99.999% the speed of light relative to this thing.
As I said, it's a problem with relativity theory, and that's because it robs us the capacity to determine real motions. Notice that relativity theory arose from the realization that the motions of the sun and planets could be modeled equally as heliocentric, or as geocentric. In reality, one model is more accurate than the other, and that's the case with all motions, and why relativity is deficient in its capacity to give us an accurate modeling of motions.
If you believe in real motions then you will have a problem with relativity theory. It is your problem, not the theory's problem.
That depends on your ontological perspective, doesn't it?
I don't know what "absolute motion" would be, perhaps you mean absolute rest? In any case, it's a matter of a preferred perspective, the preferred rest frame. Do you agree that it's better to model the movement of the planets as movements relative to the sun as the rest frame, rather than as movements relative to the earth as the rest frame? If the preferred rest frame makes sense to you, then why not allow that there is an ideal, or best rest frame (absolute rest)?
'Preferred' is a function of someone's mind - the person that prefers it. It is not ontological. For a given calculation there will often be a frame that makes the calculation simplest. Indeed, in GR, the biggest challenge is often in finding a frame that makes the calculations manageable. Again, that is a pragmatic, rather than an ontological consideration. There will be no universally preferred frame because a frame that is best for one purpose may be terrible for another. A laboratory-based frame is best for lab-based experiments. An Earth-centred frame is best for satellite management. A sun-centred frame is best for long-range space missions and predicting movements of solar system bodies other than the moon.
For a cabin attendant serving meals in a commercial jet, the preferred frame is that of the jet, but for an air traffic controller directing the flight paths for the jet and other planes, the preferred frame is that of the control tower. Neither would want to use the frame of the other.
The point though, is that "rest" is an ontological principle. Therefore the reason why one rest frame is preferred over another ought to be ontological rather than pragmatic. In scientific endeavours we ought to choose the best in relation to determining the truth, rather than what makes the calculations easiest..
Quoting andrewk
Now you base "best" in what "makes the calculations simplest" rather than true ontology. As I said, the easiest is not necessarily "the best". Your use of "best" here is not based in the intent of finding truth, but in the intent of making calculations easier.
Quoting andrewk
In many of our day to day procedures we settle for less than the best, that is obvious. But science ought to strive for nothing less than the best understanding of nature, and that is the truth. This requires adherence to solid ontological principles rather than pragmatic principles.
"Rest" is not a scientific principle. What rest is, has never been demonstrated empirically. That "rest" is relative to a frame of reference is an ontological principle adopted by relativity theorists, for the purpose of ease in calculations (as you described). That this is what "rest" really is has never been scientifically proven and therefore it is false to claim that this is a scientific principle.
Perhaps what you are challenging is whether it is ever possible for two objects to be perfectly at rest relative to one another. If so, fair enough. There will always e some tiny degree of relative movement, albeit imperceptible. All that matters in physics is whether such imperceptible movement can affect the predictions made by calculations based on an assumption that the object is at rest. In almost all cases, it doesn't.
Yes, that's the issue, the inertial frame of reference is essentially arbitrary. Yet it is extremely important because inertia under Newton's first law represents the temporal continuity of existence, i.e. things that do not change as time passes. Newton's concept assumes that there is such a thing as an object with no forces acting on it, and this object will continue in time to be as it was. This a completely unrealistic assumption.
The opposite perspective (which I believe is more realistic), is that the temporal continuity of existence requires an acting force (traditionally that would be God). So the law of inertia, upon which the "scientific" definition of rest is based, takes what had been attributed to the act of God, the temporal continuity of existence (things which stay the same as time passes), for granted. This taking inertia for granted, assumes that the temporal continuity of mass is necessary (cannot be otherwise), requiring no forces, while the opposite perspective assumes that a force is required for temporal continuity. But if the temporal continuity of mass is not necessary, (and there may be good evidence that it is not, in QM), then this so-called "scientific" definition of rest is completely off track. And so we would need to assume some force to fill the place of "the Will of God", in order to account for what we observe as rest.
That is a metaphysical perspective, not a physical one, and what you refer to as a force there is completely different from what a force means in physics.
What you describe is Aquinas' belief that objects require a constant act of will to sustain their existence. I have no objection to that belief, but it is a belief that some hold and some do not, and that cannot be proved or disproved. Further, the act of will to which it refers is nothing like what Newton means by a force.
The two distinct perspectives of temporal continuity, which I described, are both metaphysical perspectives, that's the point. That "inertia" is the one adopted by physics doesn't make it any less metaphysical.
I agree it's interesting what historical philosophical trends changed moving from Galilean to Einsteinian relativity.
I wouldn't go as far as to say presentism and eternalism are philosophies that are impacted in anyway. Both philosophies predate any mathematical physics at all, and we can view Newtonian physics as a block universe just as easily as SR, just wasn't the habit.
I would agree that lot's of people build philosophies with an (generally completely unfounded) belief SR, GR, QM and/or QFT* supports their ideas. I find it philosophically relevant to refute such arguments (at least the part connecting to modern science).
However, I don't see how SR, or GR and QM for that matter, displacing Newtonian physics had a big impact on presentism and eternalism, the debate pre-existed both and continues.
Though I agree there is impact on historical trends, I don't think anything's resolved. Even for questions such as the start of the universe, we can posit eternal inflation and similar (non-refutable) ideas that provide an eternal universe compatible with GR. Though it was a shock, to Einstein and others, that our universe as we see it isn't stable, in the end every philosophy requires only trivial updating to account for the new sciences.
*Special Relativity, General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory (for anyone unfamiliar with these abbreviations).
Quoting noAxioms
The reasoning you are using to claim what I said is wrong is not consistent. Of course the property of speed is correct. There is evidence that objects moving through space is everywhere you look. Inertia is evidence that objects possess the property of speed. This is already common knowledge known to all. Further more if an object is moving relative to some other object then it has a speed. You can tell it is moving relative to the other object because its clock will move slower than the object you are comparing to. This is more evidence that objects are moving through space. The speed at which your clock ticks is real hard evidence that you have motion within space. The action is really not about ones relative motion to some other thing in space. It's really about the relationship of the moving object and its interaction with the space it is moving through. This is especially true when the motion is accelerated. Surely you believe in General Relativity. When a spaceship accelerates, inertia is demonstrated. Are you proposing that the accelerating object does not possess the property of acceleration which is a 2 dimensional representation of speed. All the evidence supports what I am saying. It's time for you to wake up and smell the coffee.
Here are some of the evidences that proves that all objects have a property of motion through space.
. Clocks on orbiting satellites move slower
. Atomic clocks on planes move slower
. Michelson-Morley experiment - Proves the constancy of light independent from the emitting source.
. Muon particles decay more slowly while falling
. The fact that particle accelerators work the way they do is evidence that speed of an object is a real thing that can be measured and has effects. When scientists have tried to apply more energy to the particles in the accelerator they will not move beyond the speed of light. The question is, What is holding the particles back? Obviously, the particles must be interacting with something. The only thing the particles can interact with is the space they are moving within. So space in someway is impeding the acceleration of the particles beyond the speed of light.
The point is that there is a huge pile of evidence that supports the concept that particles moving through space possess a real absolute speed not only as it relates to other moving frames of reference but to the stationary background of space itself. In all honesty there is no evidence that supports what you are saying when you say this. "Quoting noAxioms
That statement is the classic incorrect assumption about Special Relativity. That is what needs to be fixed in the realm of the current scientific community. If you have a speed relative to one arbitrary reference then by default you now have a speed relative to all other moving frames of reference including the stationary substance of space. This is an inescapable conclusion that has to be arrived at. The alternative is to assume an inconsistent unsupported notion that speed only exists relative to something else we compare to. This is a very limited point of view.
Clearly the best example of absolute motion is light. It has a speed that is the same to all other moving frames of reference. That is a real speed and a property of light. Light possesses autonomous motion and that is a real absolute velocity that can be compared to everything else.
I wonder if you could be made to move at 99% the speed of light using just thrust power without the protection of a spatial bias drive and you could see for yourself the effects of moving at that speed would you then accept that the spaceship has a real absolute speed? Would you believe it's true when when you arrive at 99% the speed of light and you find its impossible to get up out of your chair? Would you believe it's true when you look out the front window of your spaceship and see nothing but blackness because all of the starlight is blue shifted and is now no longer visible? Would you believe it's true when you look at the clock on the control panel and see that it has stopped counting? You will believe then but by then it will be too late. There won't be a thing you can do to slow down and if the rockets are still accelerating your ship things will only get worse.
We have been tricked into believing that we would not notice anything different because in our frame of reference within the spaceship while traveling at relatively slow speeds compared to the speed of light we cannot perceive a difference. This is a folly. This belief system is similar to when scientists believed the earth was flat and the earth was the center of the Universe.
I think relativity moved a lot of people (those who thought about such things and understood it) to the less intuitive camp of eternalism. It certainly did for me, even if I continue to defend the opposite stance as not being in contradiction.
I have though of my own 'proof' of presentism being wrong, but I think it is invalid like the attempts others have made. If time on Earth is dilated (running slow) due to its motion and gravity well, how much faster does time actually flow? If my Earth clock says a million seconds went by, how many seconds actually went by as measured by a clock measuring absolute time, stationary and at zero gravitational potential? Gravitational potential is negative, so zero is 'in no gravity well', as high as one can possibly be.
The complete lack of an answer to this in the absolutist web sites (like conspiracyoflight.com for example) seems to be my evidence against their position. They avoid it, like it's embarrassing or something.
Suppose an object is moving relative to space, and some sort of ether occupies this space. Suppose also that the object is emitting light, and the movement of the light is a property of the space (ether). Wouldn't is be possible to track that object's movement relative to the ether based on the wave patterns?
Have you read MrCypress' posts?
Quoting MrCypress
What I think is that there must be detectable motion of the emitting source of light, relative to the medium (ether).
The observer in Special Relativity inertial frame of reference is fooled into thinking that nothing has changed because the changes at speeds well below the speed of light are undetectably small for the observer in the inertial frame of reference. This fact has been used to completely misinterpret Special Relativity.
The flaw in our current day understanding of Special Relativity comes from this postulate: “the laws of physics are invariant (i.e. identical) in all inertial systems.”
* An inertial frame of reference in classical physics and special relativity is a frame of reference in which a body with zero net force acting upon it is not accelerating; that is, such a body is at rest or it is moving at a constant speed in a straight line.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_frame_of_reference
The flaw imbedding is subtle. There needs to be a distinction made in the concept or definition of what an inertial system is. I believe that if there is an “ether medium” then the laws of physics will be different when a body is at rest relative to the ether and when it is moving at a constant speed in a straight line relative to the “ether”. This makes sense because these are two different states of motion. If in fact the ether did not exist then the statement would be correct as is. But the evidence from experiments proves there is an ether medium. When you increase the velocity of an object through space its clock slows down. If the ether did not exist a change in velocity would have no effect on the speed at which the clock ticks. It would have no effect because we would be accelerating through a non-existent medium. Accelerating through nothing will have no effect on the rate of the ticking clock. Why? It would have no effect because the accelerating object would have nothing to interact with. It’s just that simple.
The evidence for the ether is strong and it comes from experimental verification of Special Relativity.
* Special relativity implies a wide range of consequences, which have been experimentally verified, including length contraction, time dilation, relativistic mass, mass–energy equivalence, a universal speed limit, the speed of causality and relativity of simultaneity.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity
In particular the verification of the existence of an ether comes from length contraction, time dilation, relativistic mass increase and Universal speed limit.
General Relativity also supplies evidence of the existence of an ether as General Relativity was built upon special relativities length contraction principle. Einstein’s happiest thought which explains the origin of mass.
Doesn't the Michelson-Morley experiment show that if there is an ether, bodies do not move relative to the ether? This would mean that possibly bodies are a function of the ether, and their movements are changes in the ether.