Grimer wrote:
At 12:46 pm 22/01/2006 -0500, Terry wrote:
...
Now here is the Beta-atmosphere or Aetherial explanation in lieu of SR:
http://pages.sbcglobal.net/webster.kehr/Chapters/Chapter030-H-K.htm
or
http://tinyurl.com/bqgwm
Terry
Thanks for that Tom Van Flandern article Terry. That was very
clear. I shall have some comments to make later but I would
just like to make one point now. I think Flandern lets Albert
off far too lightly when he merely writes,
========================================
"In the original SR there was only one
type of coordinate system, the objects
in the experiment, and the "at rest"
reference frame was any of those objects.
=========================================
The fact is that this changed the original theory of relativity
completely.
(Since the "original theory" is that outlined in Einstein's 1905 paper
on the electrodynamics of moving bodies, I assume that's what you're
talking about here.)
When Einstein's 1905 "electrodynamics" paper was written tensor calculus
as it is used today had not been invented yet. Minkowski's geometry was
still years away, of course. The original paper did not deal with
rotating frames and didn't deal with acceleration, and in fact it's
still widely believed you can't deal with acceleration within the
framework of special relativity; this isn't true.
Einstein used "infinitesimals" and "infinite distances" in the 1905
paper. Those concepts were _not_ well defined and he never defined them
in the paper. He used them because they got the job done and because
using explicit limits everywhere would have been cumbersome or
impossible, and there was not, as yet, any alternative; AFAIK it was not
until the 1950's that differential geometry was finally placed on a firm
theoretical footing by redefining the term "tangent vector" to make it
synonymous with a path derivative. Before that everybody said tangent
vectors were "infinitesimal displacements" -- but up until 1960 there
was no rigorous definition of the term "infinitesimal". But what can
you do? Like everybody else, physicists work with the tools they have.
Einstein had a lot to do with creating the framework which is missing
from the 1905 paper, but in 1905 he hadn't done it yet. (Obviously.)
Minkowski's use of "i" in the geometry actually made things much worse,
IMHO; current textbooks have almost universally dispensed with it. I
wasted a lot of time, way back when, struggling to understand what it
meant that the time axis was "imaginary", only to find out later that it
isn't, after all...
The "modern" approach to special relativity is much, much closer to
Einstein's 1916 GR paper than it is to his 1905 electrodynamics paper --
the current "geometric" approach to SR is basically just GR with a flat
metric. But even in 1916 the "geometric" approach to tensor calculus
had not yet been conceived, and everything was done in terms of
coordinates. That can make it all much harder to grasp.
I'm sure that people on the periphery of physics,
as I was, are still trying to understand the original theory
Bad move. The 1905 paper is an interesting historical artifact. It's
an awful place to begin to try to understand relativity.
And any book that uses an imaginary time axis should be avoided.
which will do their heads in cos, frankly its a lot of */&^%$£*/.
No, it's not wrong, it's merely incomplete. Furthermore, the paper is a
translation from German, and the translator's use of mathematical
English is archaic in some ways; for example, the paper confuses "speed"
with "velocity", which no high school physics text would do nowadays.
Einstein's derivations in that paper are very confusing and hard to
follow but, except for the transverse mass derivation, they're
apparently correct.
There should have been the type of recall like they have with
motor cars when they prove defective and dangerous. Sometimes
one needs a good book burning, eh! Error has no rights.
As I said, it's an interesting historical artifact. But it should have
a warning label: "WARNING: Do not attempt to learn special relativity
from this document!!"
Frank Grimer
