What if relativistic symmetry is only an approximation?

Hello, Dr. Schmelzer & welcome to Sciforums.

Prof. X.-G Wen has also been advocating broadly related ideas — that is, getting particle physics from an underlying ''condensed matter'' medium for quite a while, so I sent him a link to your paper. See below:

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Ilja Schmeizer's article http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0205035 was published in a low-impact journal shortly after Stringer found it a new editor.

Statements like ‘In this context, the derivation of GLET, combined with the limit Ξ,Υ → 0, may be considered as “yet another way to GR”. ’ are obviously self-serving and without merit. GR was the starting point for GLET. Also, contradicting the Lagrangian density which says the stuff has no non-gravitational self-interactions, the author speaks of its ‘atoms.’ It is unclear how stuff-atomic-theory combines with stuff-no-interactions to give stuff-constant density when the nature and history of gravitation is clumping.
This is physics denial. The starting point is the assumption that GR would be better off tied to a preferred coordinate system, yet no evidence is produced to support such an assumption.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.0591 also found its way to a Springer journal.

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0001101 might be a better starting point for understanding Schmeizer's world-view.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

rpenner: get his name right. It's Schmelzer. And don't forget Ether and the Theory of Relativity by a certain Albert Einstein:

"Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether".

Also note the quote by Robert B Laughlin:

"It is ironic that Einstein's most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] The word 'ether' has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum..."

Hi Ilja, I'm John Duffield. I'm a relativity amateur, a guy who "roots for relativity". But I don't see how relativistic symmetry is in any way fundamental.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I blame auto-correct.

John Duffield wrote a vanity-press book http://www.amazon.com/dp/0956097804 and prefers to try to quote authorities rather than do physics.

 

Ilja, re the Gödel universe, and the removal of closed causal loops, have a look at A World without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein. Search inside on Wheeler and you can read this: "Wheeler, unfortunately has conflated a temporal circle with a cycle, precisely missing the force of Gödel's conclusion that the possibility of closed, future-directed, timelike curves, ie time travel, proves that space-time is a space, not a time in the intuitive sense". There is no motion through spacetime, you can't traverse a CTC. See the OP in the time travel is science fiction thread or this article.

 

The point being? Of course, the starting point for my research has been GR. Nonetheless, I have found, during my research, a derivation of the Lagrangian which does in no way start from GR. The fact that I have started in the past with GR does in no way invalidate this point.

Hm. No non-gravitational self-interactions? How does this follow? We have a completely undefined matter Lagrangian, where the derivation gives only the property of covariance. So, it can contain a lot of various non-gravitational self-interactions.

Then, even if - what would be the problem if I speak about ether atoms? The theory is obviously intended to be an effective field theory, that means, it will fail below a critical distance. This may be the distance where an atomic structure of the ether becomes important. Clearly, the continuous approximation becomes invalid at these distances, thus, it makes not much sense to construct some contradictions between the atomic picture and the continuous long distance limit.

There may be a point behind this, but I'm yet unable to see it, given that I do not see the point with your claimed no-interaction. My point is that I can recover the known equations of modern physics in an ether theory. That gravity is clumping - ok, such is life, but this will be so in the Einstein equations as well as in my equations. So, do you criticize, by the way, also GR as physics denial?

There is enough evidence for this, starting from the violation of Bell's inequalities. I think that various parts of this evidence may be discussed in different threads here. A discussion of Bell's inequalities certainly deserves a separate thread.

If there is enough scientific potential here to discuss my quantum hole argument is not yet clear to me.

Various GR quantization problems may be discussed, of course. But also deserve a seperate thread.

This is already quite old, but, ok, may be used, nothing wrong with it.

 

Which shows time is non absolute, despite your's and others babbling to the contrary.

 

Hi John,

nice quote. It is really interesting that GR is much more an ether theory than SR. Imagine the deflection of light would have been observed before GR. So, there would have to be only Lorentz ether interpretation and Minkowskis spacetime as competitors. Clearly, the deflection of light would have been interpreted as evidence for the ether - given that the completely rigid state of an ether would be unnatural anyway, but for spacetime this would have been very natural.

 

What Einstein said near a 100 years ago....
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Extras/Einstein_ether.html
concluding with......
Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. 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.

What Einstein said nearly a 100 years ago. The ether he refers to is of course the spacetime continuum.
But I suppose it's human nature that due to what Einstein was, there are always going to be those that try and usurp his work and even to the stage of claiming to invalidate GR, fabricate other misleading terms, and hypothesis plus TOE claims in that endeavour.
That of course may very well happen, but also most certainly not from any rogue individual, or anyone else from outside of mainstream.
Besides his obvious greatness and ability to follow what Newton said about standing on the shoulders of giants, Einstein was a humble man.
A quality that some of our current "would be's if they could be's" totally lack.

The other obvious point is that what Einstein referred to as the ether was near a 100 years ago, and I'm sure he would if alive today, see that the only "background is the space/time/gravity/universe in which all matter/energy exists.

 

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

I think I'd encourage our poster to have a detailed debate with Farsight, with insightful interjections from wellwisher, while we watch the great minds thrash it all out………..

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Farsight has one advantage...He has a TOE.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Here Einstein was wrong, and it is even easy to prove him wrong.

The point is that Einstein's GR allows a very easy ether interpretation. And in this ether interpretation of GR, the ether obtains a velocity in a very simple and natural way. Thus, the idea of motion can be applied to it.

The first point is that one needs for an ether interpretation are preferred coordinates. The natural candidate for preferred coordinates has been well-known long ago: The harmonic coordinates. They have all one would require from preferred coordinates. In particular, they essentially simplify the equations. Moreover, in harmonic coordinates one can prove local existence and uniqueness results for the Einstein equations.

But the harmonic coordinate condition looks like four conservation laws: \(\partial_m (g^{mn}\sqrt{-g}) = 0\). This looks like a natural energy-momentum tensor for the ether. But in this case, it is natural to rewrite this in the form of the energy and momentum conservation laws one knows from condensed matter theory:
\(\partia_t \rho + \partial_i (\rho v^i) = 0, \partial_t (\rho v^i) + \partial_j (\rho v^i v^j + \sigma^{ij}) = 0\)
This gives the ether density as \(\rho=g^{00}\sqrt{-g}\) and its velocity as \(v^i=g^{0i}/g^{00}\).

Of course, Einstein has not cared a lot about names. He has recognized that GR essentially describes an ether - other people have decided not to use this notion, so what. Its a name, nothing more.

Einstein would have, instead, cared a lot about Bell's inequality. Last but not least, the first half of the proof comes from his EPR criterion of reality. Given his strong support for realism, I doubt he would have proposed to give up realism to save relativity. But this is, of course, speculation.

 

Einstein was certainly wrong on occasions...Not on this occasion though.
Einstein was also a humble individual who could admit he was in error.
You could take a leaf out of the great man's book, and overcome your apparent malady of delusions of grandeur.

Just as an aside, in regards to one of your other errors in judgement and in regard to your erroneous claim that time and space are absolute........
That obvious mistake was just the accepted scenario by Newton, Lorentz and others before the development of relativity. It's like considering the Earth is flat...OK for very limited applications by a Surveyor etc, but certainly cannot be applied to wider applications, space endeavours etc.

 

Thanks for the reply, but I'd rather hear it from someone who knows what they're talking about and doesn't have a reputation for being a crank.

 

The ideas I was playing with in my earlier post to this thread are very similar to the ones found in this theory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Sitter_invariant_special_relativity

Which, according to Freeman Dyson, allows you to very nearly guess the result of General Relativity from Special Relativity without the use of something like Minkowski or Euclidean space at all. There is nothing classical or even remotely Greek about it.

This seems to be exactly the answer I was looking for. Enjoy.

 

The only two examples I know of time stopping, is at the EH of a BH, which we never see reached anyway, as any body/light etc, are red shifted to infinity and just fades from view from the point of view of an outside frame of reference.
From the PoV though of the body/light falling into the BH, he/she/it proceeds as per normal.
The other is from the frame of reference of a photon itself, and the facts that since it has a constant speed of "c", it experiences no time at all, and can pass from one end of the Universe to the other in an instant.
Still its hard to put yourself with the frame of reference of a photon!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Just a quick addition.....
With regards to the photon and the photon's frame of reference and PoV, if that photon is emitted just on the EH but this side of it, and directly radially away from the EH, it will hover there forever and a day, never secumbing to the BH's EH, but never getting away.
From another remote frame of reference though, it will be red shifted beyond the viewing capabilities of the person/instrument doing the observing and gradually fade from view.

 

That 'analysis' is abject, self-contradictory nonsense. Try thinking it through carefully next time!

 

You think so?
I prefer the following expert opinion:
My questions in blue, and the relevant passage to your erorr is in red.

A black hole is a place where space is falling faster than the speed of light.
http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/waterfall.html
The horizon is the place where space falls at the speed of light.
Inside the horizon, space falls faster than light. That is why
light cannot escape from a black hole.

Light emitted directly upward from the horizon of a black hole
stays there forever, barrelling outward at the speed of light
through space falling at the speed of light. It takes an infinite
time for light to lift off the horizon and make it to the outside
world. Thus when you watch a star collapse to a black hole,
you see it appear to freeze, and redshift and dim, at the horizon.

Since gravity also propagates at the speed of light, gravity,
like light, cannot escape from a black hole. The gravity you
experience from a black hole is the gravity of the frozen star,
not the gravity of whatever is inside the black hole.

> Or are we only allowed to assign angular momentum [frame dragging] to the ergopshere?

All the gravity, including the frame-dragging, is from the frozen star.

> Is it not logical that if we observe frame dragging, we should be able to assume that we have a rotating mass?

Indeed you have a rotating mass.

> And is not angular momentum conserved by the mass that has collapsed to within its Schwarzchild radius to give us a BH?

Yes.

> Other questions that have arisen are...
> Can we have massless Black holes held together by the non linearity of spacetime/gravity?

A black hole has mass, whatever it might have been formed from.

It is possible to form a black hole from gravitational waves
focussed towards each other. Gravitational waves propagate
in empty space, and locally cannot be distingished from empty space.
Nevertheless they do curve space, and do carry energy.

Hope this helps,
Andrew

 

Note that Einstein said space was the aether. Not spacetime. IMHO there's some issues in relativity wherein people conflate space with spacetime. Wheeler in particular seems to be responsible for some of these issues. He really missed the trick with his geons. Matter doesn't tell space how to curve. Electromagnetism is curved space, gravity isn't. It's inhomogeneous space. And yet when people talk about the strong curvature regime, they're talking about gravity.

I presume you've read J.S. Bell's Concept of Local Causality by Travis Norsen, where he quotes Bell saying things like this: "“It may well be that a relativistic version of [quantum] theory, while Lorentz invariant and local at the observational level, may be necessarily non-local and with a preferred frame (or aether) at the fundamental level".