lightspeed comm

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"> v_g = infinity is not logically possible... <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Anyone that has taken Calculus knows that : Limit as V(g) --&gt; infinity and v_g = infinity are not the same. Did you not know this, or did you intentionally miss -quoted me?


guarionex

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Guarionex</i>
<br /><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">[tvf]: each time the traveler heads away from Earth in that orbit, Earth time drops back to 2000; and each time the traveler heads toward Earth, inferred Earth time becomes 2008.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">This could never happen, not under any theory but yours.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">First, you should decide whether you are here to learn or to defend your present beliefs. No teacher appreciates being accused of teaching a personal theory while trying to convey the non-intuitive aspects of a famous theory. I wrote that article because even some professional colleagues who do understand SR were unaware of some of these implications. But they follow directly from the Lorentz transformation equations, as you can easily see by plugging in the numbers.

As for my qualifications to teach relativity, it is fair for you to ask about them. See my short bio sketch at metaresearch.org/home/about%20meta%20research/vanflandern.asp and the link to my full resume and bibliography at the bottom of that page. Practical gravitation and relativity (i.e., the field of celestial mechanics) are my professional specialties.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Once a person experiences any event in year 2000, that event is gone to the end of the universe at the speed of light. You could delay (seen) it as little or as much as you want but that won't change this fact.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">It is understandable that you have this bias. Most people do. In fact, I agree that it corresponds to reality. However, that is not consistent with special relativity (SR). The distinguishing characteristic between SR and all rivals is the absence of a universal instant of "now". If you and I are at the same place (say, Washington, DC) at the same moment, but we have a high relative speed, then we will disagree about what time it is "now" in Tokyo. And SR says that neither of our opinions has a better claim to reality than the other.

So in SR, once an event emerges from the observer's light cone, it is non-reversible. And nothing the observer can do can ever reverse the sequence of events hidden inside a light cone. But SR says that, if we peer forward into a passing inertial frame, we are looking into the past (the *real* past, not just the delayed arrival of light from the present). And when we look in the opposite direction into that passing frame, we are looking into the future. Unfortunately, we cannot see the future until it becomes the past because of the delayed arrival time of light from those events (the light cone). But SR says that this "time slippage" is real nonetheless. And therefore so is my example.

If you do not "get" the fact that, in SR, other frames are now experiencing our past or future, your understanding of SR will never get beyond the paradox stage. All SR paradoxes are resolvable, but only if you accept the unintuitive physical implications of its two axioms.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">The light cone you mention has nothing to do with your statement or my previous remarks. ... Otherwise I may not have understood it either.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">The "light cone" is the area on a Minkowski space-vs-time diagram that is hidden from our view by the finite propagation speed of light. In SR, we cannot have true knowledge of events inside the light cone until they emerge from it. We can only make inferences.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I do believe that there is something wrong with SR. Before we can figure it out, "we need to have our ducks in a row" as people say.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">True enough. The late J.P. Vigier, an internationally well-known physicist who was a senior editor at Plysics Letters A and in whose honor four symposia were organized, joined me two years ago in a joint paper showing that SR was now experimentally falsified in favor of Lorentzian relativity (LR). See [“Experimental Repeal of the Speed Limit for Gravitational, Electrodynamic, and Quantum Field Interactions”, T. Van Flandern and J.P. Vigier, Found.Phys. 32(#7), 1031-1068 (2002); preprint available online under the title “The speed of gravity – Repeal of the speed limit” at at metaresearch.org/cosmology/gravity/speed_limit.asp ].

Using your euphemism, this 38-page paper consists of a lot of ducks in a row. [8D]

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">First sensible statement from you so far. That's what I'm looking for!<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Don't be patronizing. Let's stay on message.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">[tvf]: v_g = infinity is not logically possible...<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Anyone that has taken Calculus knows that : Limit as V(g) --&gt; infinity and v_g = infinity are not the same. Did you not know this, or did you intentionally misquoted me?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Because we were talking about speeds and not limits, I assumed you did not appreciate the difference yourself; but I did not make an issue of it. I simply made a correct point that seemed relevant to any possible misunderstanding you might have been harboring. My apologies for underestimating you. -|Tom|-