thomas malloy wrote on 9-25-06: Resent-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [Vo]: faster than light speeds I've heard Tom Van Flandern discuss his exploding planet theory several times. I came across his article about Lorenzian relativity which allows for FTL speeds. http://www.metaresearch.org/cosmology/gravity/LR.asp ---------------------- Hi All, Below are some excerpts from the above reference and from an article by Thomas Phipps. Jack Smith ------------------------ ``Is faster-than-light propagation allowed by the laws of physics" (a primer on Lorentzian relativity) Tom Van Flandern Meta Research / [EMAIL PROTECTED] Abstract. As the relativity of motion is taught today, Einstein"s special relativity has been observationally confirmed so often that there is no longer reason to doubt it. However, the chief competitor theory known as Lorentzian relativity has passed those same observational tests. Whether surpassing the speed of light in classical physics will be routinely possible or not depends critically on which of these models is correct. Recent experimental evidence for faster-than-light force propagation is fully consistent with Lorentzian relativity, but is a test that special relativity cannot pass ... SR differs from LR by having two very general postulates. This first postulate of SR makes the Lorentz transformations reciprocal in that theory; i.e., they work equally well from any inertial frame to any other, and back again. So it has no meaning to ask which of two identical clocks in different frames is ticking slower in any absolute sense. The speed of light is independent of the speed of its source, as is generally true for waves in any medium. But the second postulate of SR makes the speed of light also independent of the speed of the observer, a feature unique to SR. In LR, neither inertial frame reciprocity nor the speed of light postulate holds. Today, many physicists and students of physics have acquired the impression that these two SR postulates have been confirmed by observations. However, that is not the case ... Of interest here is the point that the Global Positioning System (GPS) uses the latter [LR] synchronization convention for pragmatic reasons ... For example in GPS, all atomic clocks aboard satellites with a variety of orbital planes, and all atomic clocks all over the rotating Earth, are all synchronized with one another, and remain synchronized, despite being in many different inertial frames. This appears to be a practical realization of Lorentz"s universal time ... GPS [synchronizes] each clock ... to an imaginary, moment-by-moment co-located clock always at rest in the local gravitational potential field, the Earth-centered inertial frame. But that is precisely what LR specifies as the method of synchronizing to Lorentzian universal time. This GPS procedure is all very nice, but hardly what Einstein envisioned when speaking of two clocks in relative motion, one at a station and one on a passing train. How simple special relativity would have become all these years if physicists had realized that all they had to do was reset the clock rates so they all ticked at the same rate as the reference clock in the local gravity field! The converse situation is also revealing. Suppose we did not change the GPS satellite clock rates before launch, but instead let them tick at their design rates in accord with whatever speed and potential they experienced in orbit. Now, suppose we tried to Einstein-synchronize the system of clocks. Satellite and ground clocks would tick at different rates. And if we tried to work in any local, instantaneously co-moving inertial frame, the corrections needed to synchronize with each orbiting clock would be unique to that observer"s frame and different from moment to moment because both clocks are accelerating. The practical difficulties of operating the system would be virtually insurmountable ... ... "elysium" (the light-carrying medium) ... Historically, de Sitter, Sagnac, Michelson, and Ives concluded from their respective experiments that they had falsified SR in favor of the Lorentz theory. [[?]] In each case, subsequent re-interpretation of SR allowed that theory to survive these objections. Only the Michelson-Morley experiment was ever thought to falsify LR. But entrainment of elysium by the local gravity field means that no fringe displacement is expected by LR in that experiment, just as was observed. This author showed that Lorentz contraction is not operating in LR, and there is no contraction of physical length or length standards ... The practical difficulties for GPS of not changing the natural rates of clocks pre-launch, or with the use of SR for any frame other than the Lorentzian preferred frame, are very great. If a ring of satellites (A, B, C, ", Y, Z) circled the Earth in a common orbit, and each satellite tried to Einstein synchronize with the next in sequence, then when Z tried to complete the circuit by Einstein-synchronizing with A, the corrections required would lead to time readings for A different from the starting readings, making closure impossible. In fact a single satellite clock could not Einstein-synchronize with itself because the time for a light beam to travel forward around the orbit differs from the time for the same signal to travel backwards around the orbit ... De Sitter argued that the forward displacement of starlight (aberration) depended on absolute, not relative, speeds because both components of a double star, each with some unique velocity, had the same aberration. Sagnac argued that the fringe shifts expected but not seen in the Michelson-Morley experiment are seen if the experiment is done on a rotating platform. Michelson argued in the 1925 Michelson-Gale experiment that the Earth was just such a rotating platform ...'' ------------------------ GPS Evidence Against the Relativity Principle, by Thomas E. Phipps, Jr.; Infinite Energy, Issue 67; May 2006; p. 22 and following. ``The Global Positioning System (GPS) compensates the running rates of its atomic clocks for their orbital motion by speeding them up so as to cancel the relativistic time dilatation. Such compensated clocks, when in orbit, run in step with each other and with an earth-surface Master Clock ... The realativity principle ... demands ... the clocks of two ... observers [to be] each running slower than the other. To avoid an inifinite logical regression to nonsense, SRT [Special Relativity] therefore needs clock rates to be appearances. Whereas to earn extra credit for predicting the observed asymetrical aging of muons (circling and stationary in the laboratory) SRT needs clock rates to be real ... SRT's event calculus [is used] to show that clock phase jumps properly account for the asymetry ... Neither actual clocks ... nor biological processes behave discontinuously in nature. The stay-at-home twin cannot reset his biological clock to accommodate the phase jumps ... A clock of the GPS when in orbit is in free fall ... Two independent relativistic effects on such clocks are recognized and compensated for by the GPS. There is an effect of location in the gravity field and a separate motional effect of "time dilatation" by a factor gamma = 1/(1-V^2/c^2)^0.5 ... This means that, when a GPS clock is moved from the earth's surface into orbit, it runs slower due to time dilatation but faster due to location change (being less deep in the earth's gravity field) ... Attention will be confined here exclusively to the phenomenon of time dilatation produced by clock motion ... Confining attention to the GPS atomic clocks, we note that in such clocks a cloud of cesium atoms is irradiated so as to stimulate in some of the atoms a ... transition at frequency No cycles per second ... The GPS engineers reasoned that if this same cloud of atoms were placed in orbit at speed V relative to ... the mass center of the earth ... then those atomic oscillations would be slowed by the time dilatation factor gamma = 1/(1-V^2/c^2)^0.5 due to the relative motion. To correct for this anticipated slowing, they pre-compensated this motional effect by speeding up the clock to be orbited. That is, they set it to run at a rate increased by the factor gamma. This was done in the simplest way by redefining the "second" to be a reduced number No' = No/gamma of oscillations of the cesium resonance. For purposes of discussion, we could picture the "clock" as serving a dual purpose -- containing two counters of the basic oscillations, one set to register a "natural" ... second ... and the other set to register a "compensated second" ... Each clock "sees" all the others as running in step with itself ... the GPS is telling us that the slow-running of orbiting clocks is not an "appearance" nor a "perception" of the earth-surface observer, but a fact verifiable by any observer ... By means of its event calculus, introducing clock phases and the Lorentz contraction of lengths, SRT correctly predicts elapsed times but leaves aside rates. If rates are considered unobservable, the relativity principle [RP] is obeyed. My claim of RP violation is based on the counter proposition, that clock rates are in fact physical observables in their own right ... SRT says explicitly that the clocks of two relatively-moving inertial observers run slower than each other. It mitigates this logical contradiction not a bit to say that reversing the motion of one of the observers and applying the event calculus resolves the "twin" problem. This does not resolve, it evades. If no turn-around event occurs, the contradiction persists indefinitely ... SRT ... as an event calculus, will give a coherent ... accounting of the GPS situation ... not only by fiddling phases but by contorting space (Lorentz contraction of the orbiting light-speed measuring apparatus) ... No experimental measurement of the Lorentz contraction has ever succeeded ... The objective reality of time dilatation [Jack writes: There are alternative explanations], indicated by the GPS evidence demands a matching objective reality of the Lorentz contraction ... To test the issue in a simple manner, it would be desirable to construct a dual-purpose clock, as defined above, put it into orbit, and use it in a suitable apparatus to measure light speed with each of the two clocks ... If the orbiting uncompensated [clock] measured c, this would be seen as confirming the objective physical Lorentz contraction of the measuring apparatus in orbit ... If the compensated [clock] measured c, this would indicate invariance of length and invalidity of the metric statements of SRT ...''
