Joe Fischer wrote:
On Wed, 28 Dec 2005 John Kennaugh wrote:

Joe Fischer wrote:
Of 43,000 documents in the Einstein collection,
does the 1920 address at the college where Lorentz
had been teaching really stand out in your mind above
the hundreds of technical papers Einstein published?

You have yet to find anything in this vast collection which deals with
the physical processes which go with the maths.

Not all 43000 documents are technical papers
by him, there is personal correspondence, lecture
notes from early technical school, transcripts and
all kinds of other documents.

You find it - I'll study it. - willingly

If you don't have all the "Complete Papers"
they can only be found in a library.

My researches have uncovered a completely consistent picture. I have
presented it. If you which to challenge the picture I present it is up
to you to dig in the library and present a challenge not merely state
that I am wrong.

You find it - I'll study it. - willingly. Otherwise I will assume that
you are unable to challenge the picture I present.

The 1920 address does deal with it.

The 1920 transcript, English translated, does
not even resemble a technical document,

So? That in no way invalidates it. If he had given an unintentional
impression he had plenty of time to put that impression right. I take
what he said seriously for the very good reason that it merely confirms
the picture I get without it.

[snip lame excuse]


The 1938? statement that relativity
is a 'principle theory' - a mathematical model - indicates than anything
he said previously on the subject of physical interpretation may be
considered as speculation which led nowhere.

Him saying that in 1938 does not change the
fact that relativity was a principle theory in 1905.

In the sense that it was empirically based that may be correct but there
is no reason to assume that he wished it to remain a 'mathematical
model' rather than a complete physical theory. In 1905 maths posing as
physics was not as acceptable as it now is. That is why I would fully
expect to find him attempting to add physical meaning to what he had
done. That is what he is trying to do in his 1920 lecture though he
seems to me that he was having difficulty.

The fact that he did not get a Nobel Prize
for the three relativity papers (out of a number of
others published in 1905) is possibly evidence of
the status quo aether concept among the other
great physicists.
But that all changed with the discovery of
the recession of the galaxies and sucesses of
experiments that were in close agreement with
General Relativity.

General relativity was Einstein's main contribution to physics as it
extended Lorentz's maths while SR merely duplicated it.

Einstein's attempt to improve on Lorentz's theory failed.

I don't know when Lorentz is given credit for
LET, and you haven't mentioned Lorenz.

????!

But SR was updated in 1915, so SR has not
been a big issue for 90 years.
It is odd that most ethernuts focus on SR,
which is different from LET, and __ V E R Y ___
different after 1909 and Minkowski spacetime
removed the rigidity required by LET.

All SR is, is LET where to keep it neat you assume the
ether FoR and the observers FoR are one and the same
rather than select an arbitrary FoR as the ether frame.

No, LET requires a _rigid_ frame of reference,
and Tom Roberts is wrong in giving LET so much
merit since Minkowski spacetime changed the
original SR rigidity.

What SR rigidity? Minkowski constructed a diagrammatic representation of
Einstein's maths. It is a useful mathematical technique but does not
affect the origins of SR or its nature.


There has not been a single experiment that
gives any credence to LET,

Mathematically LET and SR are the same - they give identical
predictions. IF, as I am told, SR has never been falsified then neither
has LET.

the whole concept
of an imaginary medium is bizarre in the 2000s.

I agree. I have never argued otherwise. If an imaginary medium is a daft
idea then it was a daft idea in 1900 even if people at the time didn't
realise it. Lorenz's theory is therefore, with hindsight, daft therefore
it was daft (with hindsight) for Einstein to use it as his starting
point.
For Einstein to continue to tread the wave ether path when the MMX had
failed to detect the ether and Planck/Einstein had shown that light
wasn't waves anyway should now be considered as daft. Logic says they
should have abandoned the ether entirely. If you do that then the speed
of light is not a physical property of the ether it has to be a physical
property of the source. Light speed has to be c w.r.t the source
generating it. This is what Ritz assumed.

SR was adopted firstly because of

the status quo aether concept among the other
great physicists.

which includes Einstein. Secondly because of the untimely death of Ritz
in 1909 and thirdly because of the red herring produced by DeSitter.

If you don't accept the concept of the ether then your continued
acceptance of relativity is equally bizarre. There are only three routes
which give you the second postulate of relativity all of which require
belief that Maxwell's ether theory was correct in so far as light is a
wave in the ether:

1/ The mathematical route
Lorentz's theory requires a unique ether frame in its theoretical
structure (a classical ether). It however cannot be distinguished from
any other FoR. Note that if it were otherwise LET would not be a 'fix'
accounting for the null result of the MMX. Because of the nature of the
Lorentz transforms you may assume any FoR is the ether frame without
affecting the theories predictions. You cannot select the 'real' ether
frame because it cannot be identified. If you are going to arbitrarily
select a FoR to stand in for the ether frame you can keep the maths
tidy, by assuming the observers FoR is always the same as the ether
frame. This produces a theory indistinguishable from SR but it is purely
a mathematical approach. The theory is still Lorentz's. There is no
physical hypothesis which justifies doing this. One is simply utilising
the mathematical nature of the Lorentz transforms.

2/ The empirical route 1:
If you assume that light is a wave in the ether as per Maxwell's ether
theory then you interpret the MMX as showing that every observer is
apparently stationary w.r.t the ether. The second postulate simply
describes what an observer stationary w.r.t the ether would experience.
This is an empirical approach - no attempt to say why. i.e. 'without the
introduction of particular hypotheses' AE.

3/ The empirical route 2:
If you assume that light is a wave travelling in the ether as per
Maxwell then its speed is a property of the ether and is not affected by
the speed of the source. If you combine that with the first postulate
you can derive the second postulate. i.e. The Second postulate is simply
the first plus source independence.

All of which depend on a belief that light is a wave travelling in
Maxwell's ether, who's speed is a physical property of the ether belief
in which you tell me is now considered bizarre.
Einstein came up with no physical hypothesis to explain the MMX. The
nearest he came was speculation in his 1920 lecture, that it might be a
natural property of the ether that every observer finds himself
stationary w.r.t it.

It seems inconceivable that Einstein was unaware of route 1. If so then
it is easy to see Einstein as a plagiarist passing off Lorentz's theory
as his own by a specific mathematical approach which by making common
the observers FoR and the ether frame removes an arbitrary FoR from the
maths and hides the ether frame under the observer's FoR. The physics is
still the same. A moving frame is subjected to physical Lorenzian
distortion because it is moving relative to the ether (relative to the
observers FoR which is now also the ether frame).

If one gives Albert the benefit of the doubt then his motivation was a
belief (a formal PoV) that the universe is essentially symmetrical. The
ether frame in Lorentz's theory, even though it existed only in the
theoretical structure and had no affect on physical observation, had to
go. He could have got symmetry by going the no-ether/source dependent
Ritz route but he clearly didn't. My answer to why he didn't is that he
retained belief that Maxwell's ether theory was correct insofar as light
was a wave travelling in the ether. He tried to reconcile that with
symmetry which requires that every observer must have an equally valid
relationship with the ether. That is easy to put in the form of a
postulate (the second) but it is impossible (as he found) to come up
with a physical hypothesis other than vague ideas regarding a
metaphysical ether which every observer finds himself stationary w.r.t.

That then is the picture I present. What you might like to try and do is
address the following questions:

1/ Can you find an alternative justification of the second postulate?
2/ Can you suggest why Einstein rejected the idea of source dependence?
3/ Can you suggest, even in the vaguest terms, what physical process
controls the speed of light if it is independent of the source and space
contains nothing which can take part in a physical process.

When did you first hear about aether theory?
I can't imagine anybody conceiving of such nonsense
after line of sight rf (FM, TV, etc.)
I first heard of it when I read the Dover paperback
"Relativity" by Einstein, Lorentz, Minkowski and Weyl.
I have to guess if the Lorentz papers were not
included in that book, there would be 90 percent LESS
ethernuts today.

Historically Einstein continued on the classic ether route. The
alternative no-ether/source dependent route (Ritz) was never properly
investigated. The status quo aether concept among the great physicists
of the day and the premature death of Ritz ensured that mainline physics
continued along the classic ether route. Physics was taken over by
mathematicians and the myth developed that Einstein had 'got rid of the
ether' because while Lorentz's theory had something called 'an ether
frame' in it Einstein's did not. That is because Einstein incorporated
the properties he required from the ether into his second postulate
which describes exactly what an observer stationary w.r.t the ether
would experience.

In the maths the observers FoR is given the *physical* properties of an
ether stationary w.r.t the observer but the observers FoR is a
mathematical abstraction mapping real physical space which is empty of
anything which can provide the physical properties the maths is
describing.

Ultimately what one finds is that modern physics is actually built on
Lorentz's ether theory yet modern physicists are totally dismissive of
the ether.

--
John Kennaugh
"The nature of the physicists' default was their failure to insist sufficiently
strongly on the physical reality of the physical world." Dr Scott Murray

On Sun, John Kennaugh wrote:

Joe Fischer wrote:
On Wed, 28 Dec 2005 John Kennaugh wrote:
Joe Fischer wrote:
Of 43,000 documents in the Einstein collection,
does the 1920 address at the college where Lorentz
had been teaching really stand out in your mind above
the hundreds of technical papers Einstein published?

You have yet to find anything in this vast collection which deals with
the physical processes which go with the maths.

Not all 43000 documents are technical papers
by him, there is personal correspondence, lecture
notes from early technical school, transcripts and
all kinds of other documents.

You find it - I'll study it. - willingly

If you don't have all the "Complete Papers"
they can only be found in a library.

My researches have uncovered a completely consistent picture.

A completely biased picture, as a result of selective
research and denial of the overwhelming number of papers
in which he said an aether is not needed.

I have
presented it. If you which to challenge the picture I present it is up
to you to dig in the library and present a challenge not merely state
that I am wrong.

Spend some of your money on the Complete Papers
and read them.
I really don't care if you are one of the forever Newton
group, or one of the antirelativity oriented liberals, or even
one of the ethernut group.
I have other interests than trying to change one opinion
of the 6 Billion different opinions on the planet.

You find it - I'll study it. - willingly. Otherwise I will assume that
you are unable to challenge the picture I present.

You don't present a picture, you only mimmick
the ethernuts.

The 1920 address does deal with it.

The 1920 transcript, English translated, does
not even resemble a technical document,

So? That in no way invalidates it. If he had given an unintentional
impression he had plenty of time to put that impression right. I take
what he said seriously for the very good reason that it merely confirms
the picture I get without it.

Of course a non-technical _translation_ is not
validated in the first place.

How about if I provide paper references by
Lorentz and Hilbert where they both praise the shaping
of physics by Einstein on relativity.

Him saying that in 1938 does not change the
fact that relativity was a principle theory in 1905.

In the sense that it was empirically based that may be correct but there
is no reason to assume that he wished it to remain a 'mathematical
model' rather than a complete physical theory. In 1905 maths posing as
physics was not as acceptable as it now is. That is why I would fully
expect to find him attempting to add physical meaning to what he had
done. That is what he is trying to do in his 1920 lecture though he
seems to me that he was having difficulty.

He did not use math so much in the period
1901-1911, he elaborated extensively in logic and
good physical discussions.

The fact that he did not get a Nobel Prize
for the three relativity papers (out of a number of
others published in 1905) is possibly evidence of
the status quo aether concept among the other
great physicists.
But that all changed with the discovery of
the recession of the galaxies and sucesses of
experiments that were in close agreement with
General Relativity.

General relativity was Einstein's main contribution to physics as it
extended Lorentz's maths while SR merely duplicated it.

Tom Roberts is way too kind in what he says
about LET and SR. LET says that the ether
causes rods to contract in their own rest frame.

SR is an extension to "The Principle of Relativity".
LET is not relativity theory, it is a mechanical theory
without a motor.

LET requires a rigid reference frame, SR only
require a Euclidean inertial frame. There is much
more.

Einstein's attempt to improve on Lorentz's theory failed.

I don't know when Lorentz is given credit for
LET, and you haven't mentioned Lorenz.

????!

There was no SR "theory", there were three papers
published in 1905 that extended the Principle of Relativity
to objects moving (some very fast) relativity to the observer,
with a _constant_ measured velocity for light.

Physics was gaining knowledge in leaps and bounds
at the time, new elements were being discovered yearly,
and it wasn't just one, or three papers, or 10, there were
hundreds of papers that established physics as it is today.
And Einstein mat have written 5 or 10 percent of them.

But SR was updated in 1915, so SR has not
been a big issue for 90 years.
It is odd that most ethernuts focus on SR,
which is different from LET, and __ V E R Y ___
different after 1909 and Minkowski spacetime
removed the rigidity required by LET.

All SR is, is LET where to keep it neat you assume the
ether FoR and the observers FoR are one and the same
rather than select an arbitrary FoR as the ether frame.

No, LET requires a _rigid_ frame of reference,
and Tom Roberts is wrong in giving LET so much
merit since Minkowski spacetime changed the
original SR rigidity.

What SR rigidity?

Both LET and SR required a rigid rectilinear
reference frame, and LET was even more restrictive,
and required a "fixed" reference frame, fixed in that
the aether permeated everything and was everywhere
and "stationary".

There are other things that made aether theory
objectionable and not needed, but it was the stationary
fixed character of the ether that caused it to be discarded
by Einstein and essentially all physicists who followed.

Minkowski constructed a diagrammatic representation of
Einstein's maths. It is a useful mathematical technique but does not
affect the origins of SR or its nature.

It does, because it introduced 4D spacetime to
replace just the observer at a distance and moving
rapidly fixes.
Relativity is not, in my opinion, a physics theory,
it is more of a tool to convert observation to good and
logical physics. Relativity is logical, because the speed
of light is always measured as a finite constant.

There has not been a single experiment that
gives any credence to LET,

Mathematically LET and SR are the same - they give identical
predictions. IF, as I am told, SR has never been falsified then neither
has LET.

That is obviously not completely true, else LET
would still be taught in college.

the whole concept
of an imaginary medium is bizarre in the 2000s.

I agree. I have never argued otherwise. If an imaginary medium is a daft
idea then it was a daft idea in 1900 even if people at the time didn't
realise it.

Did you ever use an outhouse? Going out in the
cold to the toilet was a daft idea, yet almost everybody did
in 1900.

Lorenz's theory is therefore, with hindsight, daft therefore
it was daft (with hindsight) for Einstein to use it as his starting
point.

He did not use it as his starting point, he was not
even aware of the 1904 paper that just happens to have
some of the concepts mentioned in the three papers
by Einstein.
Einstein was very aware of a number of the M and
MM experiments, they were old news, so ether was
questionable, and Einstein even commented while
he was still in the equivalent of high school about
ether not being needed (in several documented letters).

And he maintained that idea all his life, so don't
try to rewrite history on the basis of the translation of
the transcript of one verbal lecture, and maintain that
the transcript and the translation prove what was in
Einstein's mind.

For Einstein to continue to tread the wave ether path when the MMX had
failed to detect the ether and Planck/Einstein had shown that light
wasn't waves anyway should now be considered as daft.

It is daft to think that he favored the ether all
his life, when he repeatedly wrote that it is not needed.
Spacetime can be called anything, do you think
J. A. Wheeler thinks spacetime is an ether that enables
the "matter there tells spacetime how to curve, and
spacetime here tells matter how to move"?

Doesn't that statement alone vividly illuminate
the fact that the ether can not be spacetime, because
in that view, the ether would have to be like muscles
of infinite tensile strength, infinite compression strength,
and having infinite power, connected to all matter in
the universe, even photons.

Logic says they
should have abandoned the ether entirely. If you do that then the speed
of light is not a physical property of the ether it has to be a physical
property of the source.

That is your misconception, and others have the
same problem. Everybody needs to stop thinking
of photons as physical objects having the properties
of balloons floating in the wind (at 300000 km/sec).

Light speed has to be c w.r.t the source
generating it. This is what Ritz assumed.

Light doesn't have to be anything, light is simply
a vibrating oscillation of electric and magnetic fields,
which have their motion retarded by any medium or
material.
Just air at 300psi will prevent most spark plugs
from arcing. Any medium would retard photons,
and photons do not need a medium.

Thinking that since proof of the lack of need
for a medium for photons means that there is a
medium, is faulty thinking on your part.
Thinking that a photon moves at 300000 km/sec
is also faulty thinking. Light is measured at a
constant speed in vacuum, that does not mean
it moves at any particular speed.
Thinking of light as ping pong balls is not
correct.

SR was adopted firstly because of

the status quo aether concept among the other
great physicists.

which includes Einstein. Secondly because of the untimely death of Ritz
in 1909 and thirdly because of the red herring produced by DeSitter.

I don't see how you can think your opinions
count in physics or in the history.

If you don't accept the concept of the ether then your continued
acceptance of relativity is equally bizarre. There are only three routes
which give you the second postulate of relativity all of which require
belief that Maxwell's ether theory was correct in so far as light is a
wave in the ether:

I have no interest in either ether or SR, as far as
I am concerned, neither are needed.


1/ The mathematical route
Lorentz's theory requires a unique ether frame in its theoretical
structure (a classical ether).

I think you should research Lorentz ether theory and let
me know when it was published.
There was nothing classical about LET, it was
revolutionary and controversial.

It however cannot be distinguished from
any other FoR. Note that if it were otherwise LET would not be a 'fix'
accounting for the null result of the MMX. Because of the nature of the
Lorentz transforms you may assume any FoR is the ether frame without
affecting the theories predictions. You cannot select the 'real' ether
frame because it cannot be identified. If you are going to arbitrarily
select a FoR to stand in for the ether frame you can keep the maths
tidy, by assuming the observers FoR is always the same as the ether
frame. This produces a theory indistinguishable from SR but it is purely
a mathematical approach. The theory is still Lorentz's. There is no
physical hypothesis which justifies doing this. One is simply utilising
the mathematical nature of the Lorentz transforms.

Geometry has very little to do with physical concepts,
math is just a tool to aid in calculations.
A medium is not the same thing as a reference frame,
any more than air is a useable reference frame.

Even if air molecules were numbered like street
numbers, air would still not be a useable reference frame.

And an ether suffers the same problems.

A reference frame must itself be referenced to
whatever is in it, and that is where ether theory fails.

2/ The empirical route 1:
If you assume that light is a wave in the ether as per Maxwell's ether
theory then you interpret the MMX as showing that every observer is
apparently stationary w.r.t the ether. The second postulate simply
describes what an observer stationary w.r.t the ether would experience.
This is an empirical approach - no attempt to say why. i.e. 'without the
introduction of particular hypotheses' AE.

If you assume anything and then base an argument
on it, it is an assumed argument.
Einstein wrote so many things, and you are being
selective because of Euclidean bias and personal novice
opinions with little exposure to the full literature.

3/ The empirical route 2:
If you assume that light is a wave travelling in the ether as per
Maxwell then its speed is a property of the ether and is not affected by
the speed of the source. If you combine that with the first postulate
you can derive the second postulate. i.e. The Second postulate is simply
the first plus source independence.

What college do you teach at?

What college did you take physics at?

All of which depend on a belief that light is a wave travelling in
Maxwell's ether, who's speed is a physical property of the ether belief
in which you tell me is now considered bizarre.
Einstein came up with no physical hypothesis to explain the MMX. The
nearest he came was speculation in his 1920 lecture, that it might be a
natural property of the ether that every observer finds himself
stationary w.r.t it.

I doubt if anybody can read this stuff and see
any logic at all.

It seems inconceivable that Einstein was unaware of route 1. If so then
it is easy to see Einstein as a plagiarist passing off Lorentz's theory
as his own by a specific mathematical approach which by making common
the observers FoR and the ether frame removes an arbitrary FoR from the
maths and hides the ether frame under the observer's FoR. The physics is
still the same. A moving frame is subjected to physical Lorenzian
distortion because it is moving relative to the ether (relative to the
observers FoR which is now also the ether frame).

Again, you are fixated in 1905, with concepts from
a thousand years ago.
The beginning of the end of ether theory was when
the chemical elements were being discovered and their
constituents and configurations were being discovered.

Physics went from [Earth] [Fire] [Water] [Ether]
to 90 chemical elements in a hundred years or so.
You talk as if there were never any experiments
done except the ones that killed the ether, and you
try to use the experiments that killed the ether to
promote it.

That has to be intentional deception or a very
confused viewpoint.
It sound like the Soviet arguments pre - 1944.

If one gives Albert the benefit of the doubt then his motivation was a
belief (a formal PoV) that the universe is essentially symmetrical. The
ether frame in Lorentz's theory, even though it existed only in the
theoretical structure and had no affect on physical observation, had to
go.

Yes, any useless unnecessary baggage slows
down the wagon.

He could have got symmetry by going the no-ether/source dependent
Ritz route but he clearly didn't. My answer to why he didn't is that he
retained belief that Maxwell's ether theory was correct insofar as light
was a wave travelling in the ether.

Your answer is biased and naive and ignores many facts.

He tried to reconcile that with
symmetry which requires that every observer must have an equally valid
relationship with the ether. That is easy to put in the form of a
postulate (the second) but it is impossible (as he found) to come up
with a physical hypothesis other than vague ideas regarding a
metaphysical ether which every observer finds himself stationary w.r.t.

Aether theory doesn't even qualify as metaphysical.

That then is the picture I present. What you might like to try and do is
address the following questions:

1/ Can you find an alternative justification of the second postulate?

Does it need one?

2/ Can you suggest why Einstein rejected the idea of source dependence?

Because light is always measured as c.

Because if light carried forward with its emission
"speed" + the source motion, spectra would totally
confused.
I don't understand why you don't understand that.

If light traveled at different speeds in vacuum,
the Doppler could not be applied to the spectra.

Don't you think that the knowledge of all the
things that were discovered in the latter nineteenth
century, the actual results of experiments, not just
the theorys, principles and postulates. are what
gave Einstein the ability to change the direction
of physics?
Even without Doppler, just that one proven
concept, without it he could not have possibly
declare c to be a measured constant.

To all ethernuts! Please stop thinking of
the speed of light as a "speed", it is a measured
ratio of the meter stick to the wavelength, and
it always has been, no matter how the constant
was defined.

3/ Can you suggest, even in the vaguest terms, what physical process
controls the speed of light if it is independent of the source and space
contains nothing which can take part in a physical process.

My ability to do that does not affect physics,
I can only state what I think could possibly produce
the existing experimental results.

When did you first hear about aether theory?
I can't imagine anybody conceiving of such nonsense
after line of sight rf (FM, TV, etc.)
I first heard of it when I read the Dover paperback
"Relativity" by Einstein, Lorentz, Minkowski and Weyl.
I have to guess if the Lorentz papers were not
included in that book, there would be 90 percent LESS
ethernuts today.

Historically Einstein continued on the classic ether route.

I skimmed what you ranted below, and I did not see
any indication of when you first heard of ether or LET.

The
alternative no-ether/source dependent route (Ritz) was never properly
investigated. The status quo aether concept among the great physicists
of the day and the premature death of Ritz ensured that mainline physics
continued along the classic ether route. Physics was taken over by
mathematicians and the myth developed that Einstein had 'got rid of the
ether' because while Lorentz's theory had something called 'an ether
frame' in it Einstein's did not. That is because Einstein incorporated
the properties he required from the ether into his second postulate
which describes exactly what an observer stationary w.r.t the ether
would experience.

In the maths the observers FoR is given the *physical* properties of an
ether stationary w.r.t the observer but the observers FoR is a
mathematical abstraction mapping real physical space which is empty of
anything which can provide the physical properties the maths is
describing.

Ultimately what one finds is that modern physics is actually built on
Lorentz's ether theory yet modern physicists are totally dismissive of
the ether.

Total misconstrued misconceptions based more
on what is being ignored and denied than on the facts.

General Relativity has no background medium
or pre-geometry, It does use past history of motion,
and pure geometry.
If there was an ether, it would have to be magical.

Aether theory is not workable for gravity.

LeSage theory is far better than LET for gravity,
but is not capable of causing both inertial motion
and observed motion due to gravity.

Joe Fischer

"Joe Fischer" schrieb
On Sun, John Kennaugh wrote:
Mathematically LET and SR are the same - they give identical
predictions. IF, as I am told, SR has never been falsified then neither
has LET.

That is obviously not completely true, else LET
would still be taught in college.

Above theories (LET and SR) do not describe gravity.
Therefore, every gravitational effect falsifies them.

A long time (until I have presented an ether theory of gravity),
only SR was the non-gravity limit of a viable theory of gravity.
This was (was!) a good reason not to raucht LET in college.

the whole concept
of an imaginary medium is bizarre in the 2000s.

The ether concept is about a real medium,
it was never bizarre and is not bizarre even today.

Aether theory is not workable for gravity.

It is. GLET works fine, see gr-qc/0205035.

Ilja

"Ilja Schmelzer" wrote in message
...

GLET works fine, see gr-qc/0205035.
Ilja

[hanson]
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0205/0205035.pdf
December 21, 2005, Ilja Schmelzer:
page 23/37 under G "Comparison with RTG" in the
first equation/notation it says: " ..... sqrt(-g) - sqrt (-g)..."
Why is it written like that? Looks like a - a = 0.
hanson

"hanson" schrieb
"Ilja Schmelzer" wrote
GLET works fine, see gr-qc/0205035.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0205/0205035.pdf
December 21, 2005, Ilja Schmelzer:
page 23/37 under G "Comparison with RTG" in the
first equation/notation it says: " ..... sqrt(-g) - sqrt (-g)..."
Why is it written like that? Looks like a - a = 0.

Looks like xa - a = (x-1) a. AFAIR I have simply copied
a formula from an RTG paper.

Ilja

Joe Fischer wrote:
On Sun, John Kennaugh wrote:

Joe Fischer wrote:
On Wed, 28 Dec 2005 John Kennaugh wrote:
Joe Fischer wrote:
Of 43,000 documents in the Einstein collection,
does the 1920 address at the college where Lorentz
had been teaching really stand out in your mind above
the hundreds of technical papers Einstein published?

You have yet to find anything in this vast collection which deals with
the physical processes which go with the maths.

Not all 43000 documents are technical papers
by him, there is personal correspondence, lecture
notes from early technical school, transcripts and
all kinds of other documents.

You find it - I'll study it. - willingly

If you don't have all the "Complete Papers"
they can only be found in a library.

My researches have uncovered a completely consistent picture.

A completely biased picture, as a result of selective
research and denial of the overwhelming number of papers
in which he said an aether is not needed.

Which you keep stating but cannot actually quote.


I have
presented it. If you which to challenge the picture I present it is up
to you to dig in the library and present a challenge not merely state
that I am wrong.

Spend some of your money on the Complete Papers
and read them.
I really don't care if you are one of the forever Newton
group, or one of the antirelativity oriented liberals, or even
one of the ethernut group.

I belong to no group.

I have other interests than trying to change one opinion
of the 6 Billion different opinions on the planet.

Then why bother to post? It looks to me like an excuse.

You find it - I'll study it. - willingly. Otherwise I will assume that
you are unable to challenge the picture I present.

You don't present a picture, you only mimmick
the ethernuts.

How can I? I am not in favour of the ether. I merely point out the gross
inconsistency.

The 1920 address does deal with it.

The 1920 transcript, English translated, does
not even resemble a technical document,

So? That in no way invalidates it. If he had given an unintentional
impression he had plenty of time to put that impression right. I take
what he said seriously for the very good reason that it merely confirms
the picture I get without it.

Of course a non-technical _translation_ is not
validated in the first place.

How about if I provide paper references by
Lorentz and Hilbert where they both praise the shaping
of physics by Einstein on relativity.

Him saying that in 1938 does not change the
fact that relativity was a principle theory in 1905.

In the sense that it was empirically based that may be correct but there
is no reason to assume that he wished it to remain a 'mathematical
model' rather than a complete physical theory. In 1905 maths posing as
physics was not as acceptable as it now is. That is why I would fully
expect to find him attempting to add physical meaning to what he had
done. That is what he is trying to do in his 1920 lecture though he
seems to me that he was having difficulty.

He did not use math so much in the period
1901-1911, he elaborated extensively in logic and
good physical discussions.

Which was my point. A principle theory is only a mathematical model
under another name. Einstein would not intentionally have come up with
such a theory in 1905. He would look upon his 1905 paper as a starting
point to which he hoped to add physical meaning. In the end he failed to
do that. You pour scorn on his 1920 attempt to do so as it does not
accord with your prejudice but is completely consistent with what he
did.


The fact that he did not get a Nobel Prize
for the three relativity papers (out of a number of
others published in 1905) is possibly evidence of
the status quo aether concept among the other
great physicists.
But that all changed with the discovery of
the recession of the galaxies and sucesses of
experiments that were in close agreement with
General Relativity.

General relativity was Einstein's main contribution to physics as it
extended Lorentz's maths while SR merely duplicated it.

Tom Roberts is way too kind in what he says
about LET and SR. LET says that the ether
causes rods to contract in their own rest frame.

You cannot prove they don't. The predictions of both theories are the
same in terms of what can be measured. Tom is one of the few people who
has actually studied LET and I give him credit for sticking to what he
knows is correct even if others prefer the spin version.


SR is an extension to "The Principle of Relativity".
LET is not relativity theory, it is a mechanical theory
without a motor.

LET requires a rigid reference frame, SR only
require a Euclidean inertial frame. There is much
more.

Einstein objected to the 'ether frame' in the theoretical structure of
LET. He then produced a theory which put forward no theoretical
structure whatsoever. In what way is that an improvement?

"According to this theory [SR] ... the contraction of moving bodies
follows from the two fundamental principles of the theory, without the
introduction of particular hypotheses" AE


Einstein's attempt to improve on Lorentz's theory failed.

I don't know when Lorentz is given credit for
LET, and you haven't mentioned Lorenz.

????!

There was no SR "theory", there were three papers
published in 1905 that extended the Principle of Relativity
to objects moving (some very fast) relativity to the observer,
with a _constant_ measured velocity for light.

Physics was gaining knowledge in leaps and bounds
at the time, new elements were being discovered yearly,
and it wasn't just one, or three papers, or 10, there were
hundreds of papers that established physics as it is today.
And Einstein mat have written 5 or 10 percent of them.

But SR was updated in 1915, so SR has not
been a big issue for 90 years.
It is odd that most ethernuts focus on SR,
which is different from LET, and __ V E R Y ___
different after 1909 and Minkowski spacetime
removed the rigidity required by LET.

All SR is, is LET where to keep it neat you assume the
ether FoR and the observers FoR are one and the same
rather than select an arbitrary FoR as the ether frame.

No, LET requires a _rigid_ frame of reference,
and Tom Roberts is wrong in giving LET so much
merit since Minkowski spacetime changed the
original SR rigidity.

What SR rigidity?

Both LET and SR required a rigid rectilinear
reference frame, and LET was even more restrictive,
and required a "fixed" reference frame, fixed in that
the aether permeated everything and was everywhere
and "stationary".

There are other things that made aether theory
objectionable and not needed, but it was the stationary
fixed character of the ether that caused it to be discarded
by Einstein and essentially all physicists who followed.

His approach was to assume that you could have an ether (and hence
source independence as per Maxwell's ether theory) but that an ether did
not imply a stationary fixed FoR. His logic was perfectly simple.

Maxwell showed light was a wave in the ether.
The MMX showed that every observer is stationary w.r.t the ether.
If you assume the PoR is axiomatic then the ether must be such that
every observer is naturally stationary w.r.t it.

The second postulate describes what an observer stationary w.r.t the
ether will observe.


Minkowski constructed a diagrammatic representation of
Einstein's maths. It is a useful mathematical technique but does not
affect the origins of SR or its nature.

It does, because it introduced 4D spacetime to
replace just the observer at a distance and moving
rapidly fixes.
Relativity is not, in my opinion, a physics theory,
it is more of a tool to convert observation to good and
logical physics. Relativity is logical, because the speed
of light is always measured as a finite constant.

Your logic is flawed but I will cover that later.


There has not been a single experiment that
gives any credence to LET,

Mathematically LET and SR are the same - they give identical
predictions. IF, as I am told, SR has never been falsified then neither
has LET.

That is obviously not completely true, else LET
would still be taught in college.

An educators job is to put across orthodoxy.


the whole concept
of an imaginary medium is bizarre in the 2000s.

I agree. I have never argued otherwise. If an imaginary medium is a daft
idea then it was a daft idea in 1900 even if people at the time didn't
realise it.

Did you ever use an outhouse? Going out in the
cold to the toilet was a daft idea, yet almost everybody did
in 1900.


Lorenz's theory is therefore, with hindsight, daft therefore
it was daft (with hindsight) for Einstein to use it as his starting
point.

He did not use it as his starting point, he was not
even aware of the 1904 paper that just happens to have
some of the concepts mentioned in the three papers
by Einstein.

Lorentz derived his transforms in 1892. You should check the facts your
belief system is based upon.

Einstein was very aware of a number of the M and
MM experiments, they were old news, so ether was
questionable, and Einstein even commented while
he was still in the equivalent of high school about
ether not being needed (in several documented letters).

And he maintained that idea all his life, so don't
try to rewrite history on the basis of the translation of
the transcript of one verbal lecture, and maintain that
the transcript and the translation prove what was in
Einstein's mind.

For Einstein to continue to tread the wave ether path when the MMX had
failed to detect the ether and Planck/Einstein had shown that light
wasn't waves anyway should now be considered as daft.

It is daft to think that he favored the ether all
his life, when he repeatedly wrote that it is not needed.

He said that Lorentz's 'ether frame' was not needed but he required his
version of the ether to give independence from the source.

Spacetime can be called anything, do you think
J. A. Wheeler thinks spacetime is an ether that enables
the "matter there tells spacetime how to curve, and
spacetime here tells matter how to move"?

Doesn't that statement alone vividly illuminate
the fact that the ether can not be spacetime, because
in that view, the ether would have to be like muscles
of infinite tensile strength, infinite compression strength,
and having infinite power, connected to all matter in
the universe, even photons.

Logic says they
should have abandoned the ether entirely. If you do that then the speed
of light is not a physical property of the ether it has to be a physical
property of the source.

That is your misconception,

It is a logical argument. Light is, or carries with it real physical
energy. It is the result of a real physical process. The speed it
travels at must be the result of a physical process. If space is empty
of anything physical then it cannot take part in a physical process. The
only physical process which can result in light travelling at c is that
taking place in the source.

and others have the
same problem. Everybody needs to stop thinking
of photons as physical objects having the properties
of balloons floating in the wind (at 300000 km/sec).

The logic above is totally independent of what light IS. If a source of
light is surrounded by nothing physical there is only the physical
processes taking place in the source which can have any affect on the
speed of light.


Light speed has to be c w.r.t the source
generating it. This is what Ritz assumed.

Light doesn't have to be anything, light is simply
a vibrating oscillation of electric and magnetic fields,
which have their motion retarded by any medium or
material.

What is an electric field? To Maxwell it was a stress in the ether and
that stress could propagate in the form of a wave in the medium = light.
All you are doing is renaming the 'stress in the ether', 'the field' and
then claiming you don't need an ether.

The ether was initially conceived to explain action-at-a-distance
forces. We now know that all force acts at-a-distance and one might
conclude that our instinct, which requires some sort of connecting rod,
is just plain wrong. We might accept that force acts naturally at a
distance so we can therefore dispense with the ether but if we do then a
field becomes metaphysical. It is simply the field of influence of a
charged object. It maps the direction and strength that *would* act on a
charge IF a charge were placed at a particular point. A none existent
stress cannot propagate in a none existent ether.

Just air at 300psi will prevent most spark plugs
from arcing. Any medium would retard photons,
and photons do not need a medium.

Thinking that since proof of the lack of need
for a medium for photons means that there is a
medium, is faulty thinking on your part.

I never put forward any such argument. On the contrary I suggested that
since light is made of photons there is no need for a medium but that
means that the only physical process involved is the ejection of photons
from the source. I point out that it is illogical to assume source
independence if light is particulate and there is no ether.

Thinking that a photon moves at 300000 km/sec
is also faulty thinking. Light is measured at a
constant speed in vacuum, that does not mean
it moves at any particular speed.

and you accuse me of faulty thinking D'oh! In fact light is measured at
a constant speed in vacuum on a two way path over a fixed distance. No
one has actually convincingly measured the speed of light from a moving
source to see whether it is still c as Einstein assumed or c+v as Ritz
assumed. Einstein assumed it because he assumed that Maxwell was correct
in saying that light was a wave in the ether and so interpreted the MMX
as indicating that every observer is stationary w.r.t the ether - which
is exactly what the second postulate describes.

Thinking of light as ping pong balls is not
correct.

Despite our modern multi-channel digital interactive high definition
colour television pictures we have no more idea today what it is which
travels from the transmitter to our aerial than they did a century ago.
Are you suggesting that you know what is 'correct'.


SR was adopted firstly because of

the status quo aether concept among the other
great physicists.

which includes Einstein. Secondly because of the untimely death of Ritz
in 1909 and thirdly because of the red herring produced by DeSitter.

I don't see how you can think your opinions
count in physics or in the history.

I believe my analysis is correct if somewhat superficial - I am really
only stating the obvious.

If you don't accept the concept of the ether then your continued
acceptance of relativity is equally bizarre. There are only three routes
which give you the second postulate of relativity all of which require
belief that Maxwell's ether theory was correct in so far as light is a
wave in the ether:

I have no interest in either ether or SR, as far as
I am concerned, neither are needed.

1/ The mathematical route
Lorentz's theory requires a unique ether frame in its theoretical
structure (a classical ether).

I think you should research Lorentz ether theory and let
me know when it was published.

According to my book he derived the Lorentz transforms in 1892.

There was nothing classical about LET,

I did not say there was. I stated that his concept of the ether was
classical in the sense that it required a unique ether frame -
Einstein's concept of the ether was not classical - his 'mobile' ether
did not imply a unique ether frame. It does however have to wrest
control of the speed of light from the physical processes taking place
in the source.

it was
revolutionary and controversial.

It however cannot be distinguished from
any other FoR. Note that if it were otherwise LET would not be a 'fix'
accounting for the null result of the MMX. Because of the nature of the
Lorentz transforms you may assume any FoR is the ether frame without
affecting the theories predictions. You cannot select the 'real' ether
frame because it cannot be identified. If you are going to arbitrarily
select a FoR to stand in for the ether frame you can keep the maths
tidy, by assuming the observers FoR is always the same as the ether
frame. This produces a theory indistinguishable from SR but it is purely
a mathematical approach. The theory is still Lorentz's. There is no
physical hypothesis which justifies doing this. One is simply utilising
the mathematical nature of the Lorentz transforms.

Geometry has very little to do with physical concepts,
math is just a tool to aid in calculations.
A medium is not the same thing as a reference frame,
any more than air is a useable reference frame.

and yet in SR the observers FoR is given the properties of a stationary
medium. The speed of light is constrained to be c in that FoR. A FoR is
a mathematical abstraction it cannot be responsible for these physical
properties.

Q - Is it the real physical space which the FoR maps which has these
physical properties?
A - Not according to relativists - it seems the real physical space is
empty so has no properties.


2/ The empirical route 1:
If you assume that light is a wave in the ether as per Maxwell's ether
theory then you interpret the MMX as showing that every observer is
apparently stationary w.r.t the ether. The second postulate simply
describes what an observer stationary w.r.t the ether would experience.
This is an empirical approach - no attempt to say why. i.e. 'without the
introduction of particular hypotheses' AE.

If you assume anything and then base an argument
on it, it is an assumed argument.
Einstein wrote so many things, and you are being
selective because of Euclidean bias and personal novice
opinions with little exposure to the full literature.

While OTOH you with your vast knowledge of the literature cannot
actually find a single quote to counter my arguments )

3/ The empirical route 2:
If you assume that light is a wave travelling in the ether as per
Maxwell then its speed is a property of the ether and is not affected by
the speed of the source. If you combine that with the first postulate
you can derive the second postulate. i.e. The Second postulate is simply
the first plus source independence.

All of which depend on a belief that light is a wave travelling in
Maxwell's ether, who's speed is a physical property of the ether belief
in which you tell me is now considered bizarre.
Einstein came up with no physical hypothesis to explain the MMX. The
nearest he came was speculation in his 1920 lecture, that it might be a
natural property of the ether that every observer finds himself
stationary w.r.t it.

I doubt if anybody can read this stuff and see
any logic at all.

You OTOH haven't managed to point out any flaws in it. Constant
assertion based on unjustified belief is not an argument.


It seems inconceivable that Einstein was unaware of route 1. If so then
it is easy to see Einstein as a plagiarist passing off Lorentz's theory
as his own by a specific mathematical approach which by making common
the observers FoR and the ether frame removes an arbitrary FoR from the
maths and hides the ether frame under the observer's FoR. The physics is
still the same. A moving frame is subjected to physical Lorenzian
distortion because it is moving relative to the ether (relative to the
observers FoR which is now also the ether frame).

Again, you are fixated in 1905, with concepts from
a thousand years ago.
The beginning of the end of ether theory was when
the chemical elements were being discovered and their
constituents and configurations were being discovered.

Physics went from [Earth] [Fire] [Water] [Ether]
to 90 chemical elements in a hundred years or so.
You talk as if there were never any experiments
done except the ones that killed the ether, and you
try to use the experiments that killed the ether to
promote it.

That has to be intentional deception or a very
confused viewpoint.
It sound like the Soviet arguments pre - 1944.

I leave others to study your little rant and to judge which of us is
being rational. I agree that chemistry has made many strides forward.
While no one believes in the ether there are those who believe in dark
matter, dark energy, virtual particles, gravitons, neutrinos, fields,
strings and god knows what else.

Physics took the wrong route.
The correct route says there is no ether which means light must be
source dependent. That allows light to be modelled primarily as photons
and poses a problem as to how a mass of photons can act as if it were a
system of waves.

What actually happened is that Einstein continued on the ether route and
photons spawned a separate branch of physics. Physicists are now trying
to unify those two branches of physics using string theory which may
provide a mathematical solution if it is assumed that the universe has
either 10 or 26 dimensions but only if the infinities cancel. Even if
they succeed it will be meaningless.

I agree the ether is absurd but no more so than virtual photons, or
strings. Physics had the chance of getting rid of the ether (Ritz) and
blew it. It now resides in cupboard with other skeletons with everyone
denying their cornerstone theory was actually based upon it when it
clearly was.


If one gives Albert the benefit of the doubt then his motivation was a
belief (a formal PoV) that the universe is essentially symmetrical. The
ether frame in Lorentz's theory, even though it existed only in the
theoretical structure and had no affect on physical observation, had to
go.

Yes, any useless unnecessary baggage slows
down the wagon.

He could have got symmetry by going the no-ether/source dependent
Ritz route but he clearly didn't. My answer to why he didn't is that he
retained belief that Maxwell's ether theory was correct insofar as light
was a wave travelling in the ether.

Your answer is biased and naive and ignores many facts.

Assertion not argument.

He tried to reconcile that with
symmetry which requires that every observer must have an equally valid
relationship with the ether. That is easy to put in the form of a
postulate (the second) but it is impossible (as he found) to come up
with a physical hypothesis other than vague ideas regarding a
metaphysical ether which every observer finds himself stationary w.r.t.

Aether theory doesn't even qualify as metaphysical.

That then is the picture I present. What you might like to try and do is
address the following questions:

1/ Can you find an alternative justification of the second postulate?

Does it need one?

No! Not if you are happy with mine. I rather assumed you weren't.

2/ Can you suggest why Einstein rejected the idea of source dependence?

Because light is always measured as c.

As all speed measurements were over a two way path over a fixed distance
the speed of light would still be 'always measured as c' whether the
speed of light is constant w.r.t the source or the observer. The
simplest way of reinstating the PoR was to assume there was no ether and
light is source dependent. The reason Einstein rejected source
dependence is because Maxwell's ether theory says the speed of light is
a property of the ether not the source. There was not, and there is not
any other justification. To this date no one has convincingly measured
the speed of light from a moving source to see whether it is c or c+v.

Because if light carried forward with its emission
"speed" + the source motion, spectra would totally
confused.

This is the argument put forward by DeSitter re Double stars. This was
discredited by Fox in 1965. Keep up!

I don't understand why you don't understand that.

Because unlike you I have checked the facts and don't simply believe
what others tell me.


If light traveled at different speeds in vacuum,
the Doppler could not be applied to the spectra.

The mathematics of Doppler shift as for example sound in water has a
formula which takes account of the sources speed relative to the water
and the observers speed relative to the water. SR is simply the same
formula if you assume the observer is always stationary w.r.t the medium
(plus a factor which is change of frequency due to time dilation giving
a small transverse Doppler shift).

Source dependent theory is also the same formula as water but this time
with the source always stationary w.r.t the medium. The difference is
negligible. You even get the same transverse Doppler shift as predicted
by relativity although the explanation is different.

How is Doppler shift explained in terms of SR without a propagating
medium? It goes like this

A S
B--v

Observers A and B. A stationary w.r.t the source. B moving at B towards
the source. For A (in A's FoR) light leaves the source at c relative to
the source (as that is c relative to A). For B light leaves the source
at c-v relative to the source (as that is c relative to B). Doppler
shift is caused by the 'fact' that the same light leaves the same source
at two different speeds to go to A and B respectively through the same
physical space.

Don't you think that the knowledge of all the
things that were discovered in the latter nineteenth
century, the actual results of experiments, not just
the theorys, principles and postulates. are what
gave Einstein the ability to change the direction
of physics?

Specifically what?

Even without Doppler,

???????

just that one proven
concept,

?????????

without it he could not have possibly
declare c to be a measured constant.


Maxwell discovered that c is a constant with units of speed. He assumed
it was the speed relative to the ether. So did Einstein except that he
assumed every observer is stationary w.r.t the ether. If you assume no
ether then Maxwell's equations are a solution to an unknown problem but
can only be describing light leaving the source at c relative to the
source because there is no other reference for c.


3/ Can you suggest, even in the vaguest terms, what physical process
controls the speed of light if it is independent of the source and space
contains nothing which can take part in a physical process.

My ability to do that does not affect physics,
I can only state what I think could possibly produce
the existing experimental results.

I take that as a 'No' then.


When did you first hear about aether theory?
I can't imagine anybody conceiving of such nonsense
after line of sight rf (FM, TV, etc.)
I first heard of it when I read the Dover paperback
"Relativity" by Einstein, Lorentz, Minkowski and Weyl.
I have to guess if the Lorentz papers were not
included in that book, there would be 90 percent LESS
ethernuts today.

Historically Einstein continued on the classic ether route.

I skimmed what you ranted below, and I did not see
any indication of when you first heard of ether or LET.

The question was irrelevant - About 45 years ago I should think.
I was not happy with what I was taught. I was taught about Newton's
corpuscular theory and how that was rejected in favour of the wave ether
theory. Even at that age the idea of the ether seemed implausible to me.
The MMX and the discovery of photons seemed to indicate that Newton was
right and that the speed of light is constant w.r.t the source. I left
school and studied electronics picking up the occasional physics text
book to find that without exception they used clever and dishonest
semantics to justify relativity.

My suspicions regarding physics were strengthened by a series of
articles by Dr Scott Murray "The heretics guide to physics".

Having completed a successful career in Electronics design I came on
this NG to find some answers. I assumed that there must have been some
monumental experiment which ruled out the obvious no ether source
dependent theory and forced Physics to accept the bizarre and totally
counter intuitive ideas of relativity. I found that there was no such
experiment. I find those writing in this NG to have all sorts of
illusions which when I try to pin them down melt away. You are typical
in that respect. You are full of misconceptions and you cannot justify
your beliefs.

I came across Ritz by accident. The conclusion I had reached was
perfectly reasonable it was the basis of Ritz's theory. Ritz's
credentials were fine but he seems to have been written out of history.
If you look at the history objectively then relativity was accepted
because it was a continuation of 200 years of belief in the ether - yet
today no one believes in the ether. The more I know about modern physics
the dafter it becomes. It suggests to me that physics did indeed take a
wrong turning with Einstein. That the logical route was that suggested
by Ritz.


The
alternative no-ether/source dependent route (Ritz) was never properly
investigated. The status quo aether concept among the great physicists
of the day and the premature death of Ritz ensured that mainline physics
continued along the classic ether route. Physics was taken over by
mathematicians and the myth developed that Einstein had 'got rid of the
ether' because while Lorentz's theory had something called 'an ether
frame' in it Einstein's did not. That is because Einstein incorporated
the properties he required from the ether into his second postulate
which describes exactly what an observer stationary w.r.t the ether
would experience.

In the maths the observers FoR is given the *physical* properties of an
ether stationary w.r.t the observer but the observers FoR is a
mathematical abstraction mapping real physical space which is empty of
anything which can provide the physical properties the maths is
describing.

Ultimately what one finds is that modern physics is actually built on
Lorentz's ether theory yet modern physicists are totally dismissive of
the ether.

Total misconstrued misconceptions based more
on what is being ignored and denied than on the facts.

General Relativity has no background medium

This may be in accord with your belief but you are re-writing history.

"According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is
unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of
light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and
time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals
in the physical sense. 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." AE 1920

--
John Kennaugh
"The nature of the physicists' default was their failure to insist sufficiently
strongly on the physical reality of the physical world." Dr Scott Murray