Farsight versus Einstein, part 5
Farsight continues to contradict Einstein:
I'm not the one in a hole here. You're the one in the hole, trying to say a gravitational field is flat.
Farsight's saying Albert Einstein is in a hole.
As Einstein explained in §13 of Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie,
nonzero gravitational fields can occur in flat spacetime.
Now pay attention and let's see if you get it this time: when all finite regions of a hill are flat, then there isn't any curvature to get off the flat and level, so there isn't any gradient, constant or not, so there isn't any hill. Take away the Riemann curvature and your gravitational field has gone.
Farsight's accusing Albert Einstein of not paying attention.
As Einstein explained in §13 of Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie,
nonzero gravitational fields can occur in flat spacetime, where the Riemann curvature is zero.
Only you can't take it away. You cannot transform away a gravitational field. That's what distinguishes it from accelerating through space. That's the limitation of the principal of equivalence. It's a principle that likens a gravitational field to acceleration, but it doesn't say the two are exactly the same.
Albert Einstein said gravity and acceleration are (locally) indistinguishable. That's the fundamental principle of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
In
Farsight general relativity (FGR), that fundamental principle becomes some kind of vague and limited analogy.
Farsight has been unable to provide any quantitative explanation of how that principle holds or doesn't hold in FGR.
The Rindler horizon just isn't in the same league as the black hole event horizon.
Are we all clear on this?
Except for
Farsight, all of us appear to be clear on this.
We have given
Farsight a concrete example of what Einstein was talking about in §13 of the most important paper he ever wrote about general relativity. In that section, Einstein identifies "the components of the gravitational field" with the connection. In our example, some of those components are nonzero, even though spacetime is (globally!) flat. Hence flat spacetime does not rule out the existence of a nonzero gravitational field.
That counterexample to FGR has already been presented in considerable detail:
As
Farsight himself admitted,
Farsight got lost at Einstein's equation (3). Einstein's paper includes 72 numbered and 115 unnumbered equations and formulas after equation (3), so
Farsight understood at most 1% of the math in Einstein's paper.
It's hard for
Farsight to convince people that he's an expert on Einstein's theory of relativity when he understands so little of what Einstein wrote, but
Farsight's doing the best he can.
Those of us who understand Einstein's theory somewhat better will continue to point out that, throughout this thread,
Farsight has been denying the two fundamental principles of Einstein's general theory of relativity:
- the equivalence principle
- the admissibility of all coordinate transformations allowed by differential geometry
Those principles are related, of course. In §13 of Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie, Einstein derived the first of those principles from the second.