Physics: ICR, Speed of Light Goes You
Regarding Einsteinian misconceptions
Einstein and modeling reality
Jon over at Inflamed Cynic has just posted a must-read regarding the linked and possibly co-dependent post-War mythification of Einstein, Science™, and vaccines.
Much of his post overlaps with a case I was already writing in this post (inspired by his previous running commentary on the shortcomings of the Twin Paradox); however, I will avoid quoting Jon so as to ensure my own argument doesn’t appear to take endorsement from outside. The reader is to understand that my capability to make sense of physics and complex math is not high; I am a primate hurling bones at ideas that make me angry.
Like Jon, however, I have a strong sense that something is off with physics generally and especially with Einstein’s Special Relativity — that it is not able to “describe itself” (be described by those who claim understanding) so that one can understand whether it is purporting to be “true,” or if it is merely a system of codes that can be used to predict and “explain” reality with only occasional or situational accuracy (like astrology). Like Jon, I think this off-ness is sustained by an informal conspiracy of “lying by omission” on the part of the handful of physicists who can clearly see whether SR purports to be true (many seem to have no idea there is even a question), and that this all arose post-hoc after Americans transformed Einstein into a cultural Prometheus somehow responsible for unlocking all the secrets of the universe, conferring a prestige to physics which the field is loathe to renounce.
To illustrate the problem in typical churlish, Unglossed fashion we can consider E = mc2.
The problem with this equation is so obvious in retrospect that one wonders how it can be taken seriously, let alone proffered as cosmic wisdom. All E = mc2 describes is E = m x big whopping number. But “big whopping numbers” are all arbitrary. Every number is really just “1” in units of “as much as there is’s.” So E just = m. Which doesn’t even mean anything. If m is 1 you have 1 E. If m is 2 you have 2 E. The equation says E is literally just m.
In order to explain why Einstein’s svelte but banal mathematical construction tells humans anything they didn’t already know (“add more log, make fire bigger, grunt grunt”), we have the myth of the formula’s singular relevance to nuclear fission (“add more log, make fire 1 billion bigger, grunt grunt”).
E=mc2 does not predict atomic bombs or nuclear power because it does not describe or lead to the imagination of a chain reaction in which liberated energy liberates more energy in a controllable way; nor was it ever necessary for perceiving the energetic nature of fission which was readily measurable (“you mean what if we added more logs, grunt grunt?”). Regular chemical bombs and solid-fuel firearms clearly deserve more credit for inspiring the atomic bomb; likewise regular old, dumb fire and steam for inspiring nuclear energy.
This tangent illustrates that something seems fundamentally corrupted about physics; broadly it seems as if the field has tacitly certified some number of pop culture myths in order to avoid being reduced to a disparate collection of practical arts (nuclear energy, rocket and orbital mechanics). And humanity at large seems to suffer from this corruption in a way which is germane to the mission statement of Unglossed — I speak of the deprivation of physical mystery from human life, and how we may undo it, perhaps amusing ourselves in the process.
While “E=mc2 gave us nuclear weapons” is central to the popular myth of Einstein, it also places foot in one of the aforementioned practical arts, and as such it isn’t hard to find acknowledgement that the equation had nothing to do with the work in question. From Wikipedia’s page for the equation.
While E = mc2 is useful for understanding the amount of energy potentially released in a fission reaction, it was not strictly necessary to develop the weapon, once the fission process was known, and its energy measured at 200 MeV (which was directly possible, using a quantitative Geiger counter, at that time). The physicist and Manhattan Project participant Robert Serber noted that somehow "the popular notion took hold long ago that Einstein's theory of relativity, in particular his famous equation E = mc2, plays some essential role in the theory of fission. Einstein had a part in alerting the United States government to the possibility of building an atomic bomb, but his theory of relativity is not required in discussing fission. The theory of fission is what physicists call a non-relativistic theory, meaning that relativistic effects are too small to affect the dynamics of the fission process significantly."
Special Relativity would seem to be insulated from such frank appraisals of its inconsistencies or limitations (again, as more capably illustrated by Jon), owing to the fact that it has very little practical application.
It is seemingly far more “useful” in perpetuating the impression that a select guild of thinkers have, with their Jordan-Peterson-like walls of equations, decoded the secrets of reality, than it really is for GPS or anything else in orbital mechanics. The point of determining that “nothing can go faster than the speed of light” in my dim and primate-like estimation is merely to resolve some limitations that arise when trying to describe systems mathematically; the point is also to keep money flowing at particle accelerators (by the way, all these crackpot theories I am spouting are the subject of an amusing but very uneven documentary called Einstein Wrong).
But, as with Special Relativity in general, the off-ness is not in the question of whether the statement is true but whether those claiming expertise understand that it is unclear if it is even claiming to be true. Let’s hold for experimental purposes the idea that Special Relativity is usually not claiming anything about reality; why does the Wikipedia page for the speed of light claim that it is a “universal physical constant” that nothing (not even light) can go faster than?
It’s clear that if Special Relativity is just a system of mathematical description with no influence on the rules of reality, i.e. merely a human tool, these statements mandating all sorts of limits on possibility based on the same tool would be absurd superstitions with no apparent use besides making people think physicists have figured out the secrets of reality; and it’s not clear that Special Relativity is not that thing.
Of course, that was just a thought-experiment. It’s not like somebody can easily reason out for themselves an argument that light constantly goes faster than c in reality.
Naive and probably lackluster refutation of constant c
Why bother?
To restate the point of offering an argument that the speed of light is only a “constant” for the sake of Special Relativity, not in reality, it is evident that SR may not be intended to be taken literally, but it is taken literally. In other words it may simply be confusion on my part that Special Relativity claims there is one, constant speed of light; but if so then this confusion is shared by those who speak for the subject matter.
This enduring pretense of truth allows Special Relativity to operate as the damn holding back physical mystery — it perpetuates the illusion that physicists have figured out secret laws of the universe. If we remove the damn, we restore mystery.
When I speak of restoring physical mystery, I do not mean to suggest that humans are one physics-model-revolution away from vacationing in cool vintage Star Trek pleasure planets. I mean restoration of pre-scientific awe, and renewing change in philosophical models of nature; from change stems agency and self-determination. Before the ossification of Special Relativity in the mid-20th Century, it was possible to be a “scientist” and to believe that all of the reigning ideas in physics were potentially incorrect.
The alternate model which will be offered a proof here is “emission theory” — light travels at a velocity of c plus the velocity of whatever emitted the light. Wikipedia claims that emission theory is totally refuted, again confirming that a universal constant c is meant to be taken as a literal truth.
Constant c would cause endless variations in measured c.
Earth rotates and orbits the sun; the sun swims through the Milky Way, and the Milky Way at large is understood to be part of an expanding universe. We will set the last point aside, and merely understand that at all times we are going rather quickly in the same direction as the sun through space, and that Earth’s movement around the sun, and it’s spinning, occasionally add and subtract to that movement by an unknown fraction of their discrete velocities (we would need to know what direction the sun is moving to know this fraction).
For this reason, if light traveled at a constant speed through pure space, there would be endless variation in our measurement of the speed of light at different parts of the earth, different times of day, and different seasons.
As far as I can tell this “proof” of the constant speed of light has never been offered by anyone. In fact, it doesn’t appear to be taken into consideration that a constant speed of light would even predict such a phenomenon — otherwise it would have been pointed out from the start that the Michelson–Morley experiment had already falsified this prediction (when it followed from a different model, that of the luminiferous aether).
In order for any local measurement of the speed of light to equal c, light must travel at c plus the velocity of the two points used to measure its travel.
Examples
From Sun to Earth
To help the reader understand the problem with a constant speed of light, suppose a very simplified universe in which the Sun is going “right” at a speed of 1 million whatevers per second, and this vector we will call sV. In the summer, Earth is to the “left” of the Sun, in the winter it is to the “right” of the sun. Simulation wikipedia informs us that light can only move through space at a constant speed; and our other parameters determine that Earth is running toward the Sun’s light in summer and away from it in the winter. Therefore the Suns’ light should get here sooner in the former and take longer in the latter; it shouldn’t be like the Sun can pull or push light to contradict this problem, because pushing would make light go faster than c.
Yet I have seen it claimed nowhere that the time it takes for the Sun’s light to reach Earth varies by season. Therefore it seems that physicians actually believe that the light traveling from the Sun moves at a speed relative to the Sun; c is actually c’ where c’ = c+sV. This adheres to emission theory; light travels from sources at c, meaning that light’s speed through pure space is only c if it is emitted from a “stationary object,” and nothing stationary exists as long as anything anywhere is moving.
Note that at this preliminary juncture, I will offer no firm prediction about whether constant speed of light would or would not lead to Doppler effects when Earth is running into or away from the Sun’s light; the lack of Doppler effects in objects moving relative to Earth are used to discredit emission theory, but as far as I can tell should refute any interpretation of light’s speed and therefore are not obviously relevant.
On Earth rotating with and against the Sun’s travel.
Continuing from the example above we can consider Fall and Spring, when Earth’s rotation around the Sun is either adding or subtracting from sV with the velocity 18.5 miles a second, which we will term eV. In either case we begin by considering the North Pole, where Earth’s spinning does not add to an observer’s movement through pure space, which is sV±eV.
If c, the speed of light, is constant, then physicists in this simplified universe ought to be able to show that it takes light longer to go from A to B in the direction “right” in the fall than in the spring, due to a difference of 37 miles per second in the direction of “right” that any A and B fixed to the ground are moving through space.
If in the simplified universe it was not known ahead of time that the Sun is traveling “right” and that this corresponds to some lucky date in winter, then repeated observations of how quickly light goes from A to B would easily reveal these facts as well as the real, absolute velocity of the Sun in space. Light would serve as an speedometer and compass in any system. As far as I am aware no one has accomplished this feat, and all estimations of the Sun’s velocity in space are just based on proxy guesses.
A truly constant speed of light would allow us to divine the real, absolute velocity of the Sun in space. Light would serve as an speedometer and compass in any system.
On Earth spinning
Finally, and most impressively, physicists should be able on command to demonstrate differences in the time it takes light to go from A to B on the North Pole versus the equator, due to the latter’s addition or subtraction of 460 meters per second (erV) of velocity at different times of the day, depending on the season. The slowest transit from A to B in our simplified universe should be at midnight on a particular date in the fall at the equator, as here, when light leaves A, B is running away from it now at sV + eV+ erV.
Michelson–Morley redux
If any of these effects have ever been demonstrated I am surely the fool who should have remained silent. However, it would seem safe to conclude that these effects have never been observed at all, given the repeated failure to find them when they were predicted by luminiferous aether. What would seem to have taken place, then, is that Einstein found it useful to consider c constant when dealing with questions of observation and measurement in constantly moving systems. By those who later confused c for an absolute of nature, it was not noticed that a constant speed of light would lead to the same predicted observations as that earlier theory, which had already been roundly dismantled.
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This is a magnificent exposition of misunderstanding, which is unfortunately common, due to relativity's non-intuitive nature (just wait for quantum electrodynamics, which is far worse). However, Einstein's realization, that c is constant in all non-accelerating reference frames, is nearly a miracle of intuition, and the surprising results, such as time dilation, mass variation, and length variation, all fall out of that assumption. All of these results have been confirmed, repeatedly, and are now built-in to systems like GPS and aircraft navigation systems - if they were not, these things would not work. Even the tiny velocity of an aircraft, over time, causes de-synchronization of the clock on the plane vs the clock on the ground. None of your conjecture about the relative speed of photons is correct, because you don't understand how fundamental relativity is. No matter how fast you move away from something else, you will never measure your speed relative to that something else as higher than c. Even if that something else is traveling, relative to a third point, at a high velocity away from you, relative to that same third point. This is because the *length* of space between you and these other points is *different*, varying with your relative velocity to each. Time is also passing differently for you, the other traveling item, and the "stationary" third point. That length change, combined with the timing you observe, changes the velocity measurement. This is what I mean by the fundamentality of the constance of c - that fundamentality alters everything else in reality that you may have expected was constant. The fundamental nature of c changes everything else. Again, this is all not only very well-tested, it's so well-tested that it's built into many mundane devices you use all the time.
E=mc^2 is also profound, because it demonstrates another facet of c's fundamentality: that light ties the universe together. Everything is energy. And a tiny bit of matter is a *lot* of energy.
As for c's "value", it's often useful in physics to set constants to different values for different operations. Sometimes it's useful to set c to its value in our "normal" view of the world, 3x10^8m/s, and sometimes the math is easier if we set c to 1. Remember, though, when you convert in this way, *everything else must also be converted*. That is, if you set c to 1, it's no longer in meters/second. :)
The real problem with physics today is the same problem with everything today labeled as "science" - it's all captured by government and institutional money. Back in the days of Einstein, science was done for its own sake, for the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Today it's only done for money. Scientific papers are a product. Almost no one is vetting them, and today's "great theories", like "superstring", aren't even testable, yet they're sold to the public as actual scientific theories. They aren't. They are mere conjecture, dressed up with a lot of hopium. Relativity and QED are two of the most thoroughly tested theories in all of science, and the entire modern world rests upon them. They deserve the awe they inspire, even though most people have almost no hope of understanding them.
Halton Arp... I was a physics student in the 90s and was told to not submit a paper quoting Arp’s theories because “you’ll never get a job”... oh well, also designed a space shuttle experiment recreating the Michelson Morley experiment using a Sagnac interferometer -and it was “shuttled” but still, it’s always good to look at the discredited theories - they might not fit the popular mindset, but still it’s fascinating to find mavericks who make sense...
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/cosmologist-halton-arp-19272013/