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Merged Does CERN prove Einstein wrong?

Anders Lindman said:
I fail because SR can't deal with having a photon as a frame of reference? :confused:
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No, you fail because instead of turning your misunderstanding into a desire to understand the theory you're purportedly disproving, you just say the theory is bunkus.
 
Even if neutrino's are going at the speed of light and not faster, it's not consistent with the theory that only massless objects can go that fast. Neutrino's have mass and count for the 'dark matter' or gravity that falsifies the BB-theory.

I wonder what the implications are if this turns out to be true.
For other theories in science.
 
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excaza said:
No, you fail because instead of turning your misunderstanding into a desire to understand the theory you're purportedly disproving, you just say the theory is bunkus.
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So if I send two photons in opposite directions then each photon will move away from me at 1c and the relative velocity between them will also be 1c. Yeah, right. Maybe I should try travel in a rocket near the speed of light and speed up the entire universe? Fairy tales. Hoax theories. Big Lie con job.
 
Anders Lindman said:
So what is it? Can a photon be used as a frame of reference in SR or not?
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Yes, but not an inertial frame.

Anders Lindman said:
How convenient. Then let's say we have two spaceships traveling in opposite directions at 0.7c. What is the relative velocity between them? I say 1.4c.
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Nobody cares that you're incredulous.

If you're looking at an ordinary Euclidean (x,y) coordinate plane, and you have a line slope 0.7 and another with slope -0.7, what's the slope in coordinates where the first line is taken to be the new x-axis? It isn't 1.4. But with a little trig and knowing that the slope is m = Δy/Δx = tan θ, where θ is the angle to the positive x-axis, you can find it's tan(atan(0.7) + atan(0.7)) = 2.8.

In spacetime, the speed is a slope v = Δx/Δt, and the answer is tanh(atanh(0.7) + atanh(0.7)) = 0.94. I deliberately put velocity addition in its trigonometric form rather than the one usually quoted so you'd see what I was talking about earlier: velocity is an orientation and speed is a slope, so it's completely natural to add speeds by adding their angles. It's exactly what happens in Euclidean geometry, only here is trigonometry is hyperbolic.

Of course, none of that proves special relativity. But it does illustrate the utter futility of trying to disprove it by any kind of internal examination, because it's just basic geometry. Any challenge to it is going to have to be experimental.
 
Vorpal said:
If you're looking at an ordinary Euclidean (x,y) coordinate plane, and you have a line slope 0.7 and another with slope -0.7, what's the slope in coordinates where the first line is taken to be the new x-axis? It isn't 1.4.
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You can rotate all you want. If two spaceships move away from each other in opposite directions at 0.7c the relative velocity will be 1.4c.
 
Anders Lindman said:
So if I send two photons in opposite directions then each photon will move away from me at 1c and the relative velocity between them will also be 1c. Yeah, right. Maybe I should try travel in a rocket near the speed of light and speed up the entire universe? Fairy tales. Hoax theories. Big Lie con job.
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The mistake you're making is using unwarranted extrapolation. You believe that because two objects moving away at opposite directions from a central point at 20 mph result in a relative velocity of 40 mph, then the same is true when you extrapolate the speed up to relativistic levels.

You are mistaken. It has been observed that things behave differently at high speeds and/or high gravitation.

ETA: Actually, they behave exactly the same; it's just that the time distortion is not measurable until you get up to relativistic speeds.
 
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Anders Lindman said:
lol. I looked it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

But my claim is a serious one in this case. Why would someone create a false theory like Einstein's relativity? As conspiracy researchers have said, there are (at least) two levels of knowledge in the world; one for the public going up to the level of professors in academia, and another level above that with different knowledge. Why? Because by keeping the true knowledge to themselves and feeding the public diversion theories they (shadow powers) can remain one step ahead all the time.
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Can I borrow your tin foil hat?


You have an, erm, interesting view of the world that borders on paranoid delusion if you seriously believe what you write.

Do you spend a lot of time in the conspiracy forums, perhance?
 
aggle-rithm said:
Anders Lindman said:
How convenient. Then let's say we have two spaceships traveling in opposite directions at 0.7c. What is the relative velocity between them? I say 1.4c.
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You are wrong. Simple as that.
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Be careful. In the frame he described, the relative velocity |v1-v2|=|.7c-(-.7c)| is indeed 1.4c. But in a frame in which one ship is at rest, the other one does not have speed 1.4c.

Anders Lindman said:
So if I send two photons in opposite directions then each photon will move away from me at 1c and the relative velocity between them will also be 1c.
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As you've been told repeatedly, that is not what SR says.
 
Anders Lindman said:
A theory that claims all velocities are relative and no velocity can exceed the speed of light?
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No...nothing can accelerate past the light-speed barrier. There is nothing in the theory preventing a particle from moving permanently faster than light, as long as it never slows to a point below the light barrier...although this has never been observed. (Until now, perhaps.)
 
We have two scenarios:

1. Einstein's special relativity cannot deal with having a photon as the reference frame, which means the theory cannot deal with reality.

2. Einstein's special relativity can deal with having a photon as a reference frame, and then the relative velocity between it and another photon traveling in the opposite direction is calculated to 1c, which means the theory is false since the relative velocity in reality is 2c.
 
aggle-rithm said:
The mistake you're making is using unwarranted extrapolation. You believe that because two objects moving away at opposite directions from a central point at 20 mph result in a relative velocity of 40 mph, then the same is true when you extrapolate the speed up to relativistic levels.

You are mistaken.
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Again, you need to be more careful. Both you and Anders are conflating two different quantities.

One quantity is |v1-v2| in some particular frame where neither v1 nor v2 are zero. The other is |v1'-v2'| = |v2'| in a different frame - a frame where v1'=0 (that's the rest frame of one of the objects). Those two definitions of relative velocity coincide in a Galilean world, but not in a Lorentzian one like the one we live in.

You could regard either of those as the definition of relative velocity, but the second cannot be applied to two photons, while the first can... and the result is indeed 2c if the photons are moving in opposite directions.
 
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Anders Lindman said:
And look at the superstring theories and M-theories and whatnot. What a mess! Wouldn't be fair to say that Occam's Razor in this case indicates that Einstein's theories are false, rather than the need for umpteen dimensions and incredible mathematical acrobatics?
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Ah, right, now I'm up to speed. You're working off 'If I can't understand it, it can't be true'.

I'm afraid you have to accept, like so many people before you, that you (like me) are just not smart enough to understand it instinctively. That doesn't make it false though. If you really want to understand it, learn the maths that underpins it all and start from there. If you're not prepared to do that then you really are arguing from a position of gross ignorance.
 
Anders Lindman said:
We have two scenarios:

1. Einstein's special relativity cannot deal with having a photon as the reference frame, which means the theory cannot deal with reality.
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That is literally nonsense. It's like saying "No pancake can ever be Marxism." A "reference frame" is a coordinate system. How can a photon - a particle - be a coordinate system?

A correct statement is "According to Einstein's special relativity, no photon is ever at rest in any inertial reference frame."
 
sol invictus said:
Be careful. In the frame he described, the relative velocity |v1-v2|=|.7c-(-.7c)| is indeed 1.4c. But in a frame in which one ship is at rest, the other one does not have speed 1.4c.
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But neither ship will observe the other moving faster than light, or even approaching the speed of light, because time dilation and Doppler distortion will always make the other ship appear to be moving much slower than it is relative to a common point in space.

Some physicists seem to take the viewpoint that the observation of time and velocity is the reality of time and velocity.
 
aggle-rithm said:
But neither ship will observe the other moving faster than light, or even approaching the speed of light, because time dilation and Doppler distortion will always make the other ship appear to be moving much slower than it is relative to a common point in space.
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That's true, but it doesn't change the fact that the relative velocity - defined as vrel=|v1-v2| - is obviously 1.4c in a frame where v1=.7c and v2=-.7c.

Some physicists seem to take the viewpoint that the observation of time and velocity is the reality of time and velocity.
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No, not really. The whole point of relativity is that there is no such fixed reality - velocity is relative, and even the flow of time is relative. The only physical (i.e. measurable) quantities are those that are independent of reference frame, and velocity is not one of them.

Moreover, while you may know this, in one of your previous posts it sounded as though you might be confusing Doppler shift with time dilation. They are not the same - time dilation is in addition to the Doppler shift you'd have in a non-relativistic world.
 
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