OSDev.org

I have to agree. Also, being autistic, depressed, manic-depressive etc. can impair your ability to rationalize certain aspects of your life, but does not "prove you a liar" when counting yourself among rational people outside the areas you have problems in. I am depressed, and have a hard time judging certain social contexts, but other than that I have no problems whatsoever with my "ability to think rationally".

I agree that David here has a rather strange set of logics to him, but that particular line of argument -- if you're neurodivergent, you cannot be rational -- can not stand.

This argument doesn't work. DavidCooper's argument explicitly references his alleged rationality. It makes no difference if some person or other on the other side of the discussion happens to have autism, as long at least one person does not. This also isn't about osdev.org versus him, it's the entire scientific establishment versus him. It would not be possible to argue that autism is causing every single physicist on Earth to make the mistakes in their reasoning, all in the exact same manner so that everyone happens to recognize each other's math as valid. Besides, he and I have both already stipulated that autism, for this discussion's purpose, is a mental illness. If, for some reason, some people feel they have autism in other parts of their body, such as their left elbow, this is not what we're discussing here. We're talking about one particular hypothesized case of autism that would specifically be located in DavidCooper's brain.


Autism is a pervasive development disorder, meaning it affects every aspect of a person's thinking. Being depressed is not. And half rational is not rational. Although they may make any number of inferences that happen to be rational, it is clearly incorrect to categorize the person as being of a sound mind in general. Besides, if you remember, the premise was that his illness would indeed be the cause of his problems with thinking, so in this case he would have been counting himself as rational in the very area that he has problems in.


Frames are ordered sets of linearly independent vectors in a vector space. They always have been. You're making up your own silly definition that has nothing to do with anything.


Yes, you did. You replaced a statement about speed being measured in an inertial frame with a statement involving some odd concept of "relative speed" that you made up, because you think the physicists' definition of relative speed is "incompetent", and proceeded to pretend to have disproven the original statement.


I never said that. I am saying that if you view the universe as a simulation, some sets of events will have been simulated in increasing x0 order for some frame, while others will not. There are also sets of events that will have been simulated in increasing x0 order according to every frame, namely those that aren't spacelike separated.


What mathematical facts? There is no math involved. All you have is a bunch of made up arbitrary redefinitions of words and false attributions of statements to people.


Wrong. It is easy to see that if an observer knows an event to be in his past, then no other observer that is spacelike separated from the first can know the event to be in their future, no matter what their rest frames are.


How so? All it does is impose a symmetry on the laws of physics. How does that entail introducing complexity? It also explains things that LET cannot, such as the decay times of fast muons.

As much as I respect your competence in the field of physics, I'd kindly ask you to refrain from attempting to make statements regarding psychology from here on in. If you live with the priviledge of believing that depression does not "affect every aspect of a person's thinking", good for you, and I hope you never lose that priviledge.

Any psychologist is going to tell you the same thing. Being depressed is not a developmental disorder, and you'll be hard pressed to find a psychologist that classifies it as such. A depressed person retains the ability to understand complex thoughts, although they may not be motivated to think about anything other than that which is making them the most depressed. If you were good at math before, you are still going to understand math when you're depressed. On the other hand, an autist is impaired in their cognitive ability from an early age, and may not understand what constitutes a valid proof, or what words even mean, even if they do manage to get things right some or most of the time. It is of course possible to both be depressed and have a developmental disorder at the same time, or to become depressed because you're living with an existing disorder.

A depressive does not become bad at math, but a person with depression does not think rationally about all things (in as much as "rationality" is objectively measurable). A depressed person might get a flat tire on the way to a job interview and their first though would not be "I should call and let them know I won't make it" but "now I'll never get a job and be miserable forever, I knew this would happen, I might as well end my life". That is not a rational line of thought, but the depressive would not necessarily identify it as irrational, and this is only one example. Certainly no psychiatrist would classify depression as a developmental disorder, however any psychiatrist would tell you that depression can present as irrational beliefs or thought processes.

On the other hand a person on the autistic spectrum might not understand how to construct a valid proof, but I would wager >90% of all humans could not identify or construct a valid proof. It is also undeniable that academia is full of people on the spectrum who are, if anything, hyperrational and can easily construct proofs or point out flaws in them, but cannot understand fundamental social ques, who cannot manage their own emotions well or who develop niche obsessions which they pursue to the detriment of other facets of life. Though people with severe autism may have serious learning difficulties due to social and emotional regulation problems, autism spectrum disorder is not an intellectual disability and people with ASD may have normal, above average or below average intellect, the same as people with depression.

https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/autism has some information on the modern understanding of ASD.

If there's no observable difference between special relativity and aether theory, it doesn't matter which one is correct. You should talk to a psychiatrist about why you have such strong feelings about something that doesn't matter.

While most people would not jump to that conclusion, we are still able to follow each logical step of the thinking. Never getting a job and being miserable forever is a result that might at least happen to some people, that would not have happened if it weren't for the flat tire. In everyday life, we make guesses all the time based on assumptions we find reasonable. I go about my day assuming, based on prior experience, that I will not get a surprise visit by a group of naked cheerleaders, that a nuclear war will not erupt between the Netherlands and Thailand, and that there is no strychnine in my tap water, even if I can't disprove the possibility that either will happen. I could also reasonably assume that given my skill set, I am likely to find ways to make a lot of money, and if I go to a party, there is a high chance that I will talk to beautiful girls. Someone having had a streak of poor luck might become depressed and operate on a different set of assumptions, but they won't start giving strange and outlandish definitions of what a job is, or what a car is.


That would correspond to everyone with an IQ below 119. I doubt that most people would not have some idea of what a proof is, even if they may not be sure of how to construct or verify one. At least the concept of an argument shouldn't be unfamiliar to most people, having surely argued with someone at some point in their life.


The symptoms are the most immediately noticeable in the areas of social interaction and having emotional outbursts, but they are by no means all there is to autism, or the cause of their other symptoms, such as their learning difficulties. I would be inclined to believe that their difficulty with inductive reasoning is instead the cause of their inability to interact with people, as they are unable to form an idea of other people's thoughts, beliefs and motivations. On average, their IQ is lower than that of the general population, with more cases of severe mental retardation, so it can't really be compared with being depressed.

Of course, none of this really matters, what's important is how a non-psychologist would reasonably expect other non-psychologists to estimate one's reasoning ability given evidence of autism, versus not believing that one has autism.

But there is a condition called theory-induced blindness which can be found in play in >99% of people when they allow beliefs that they're emotionally attached to to override reason. This can be seen in religion and politics, but also in science with this very specific case where people buy into Einstein's theories in order to display their superiority over people who haven't: it has a strong attraction, and when you test believers and find all manner of holes in their thinking on the issue, it confirms that they aren't motivated by any desire to test its validity, but just to wear it as a badge.


The problem you have there is that I pin down exactly what those problems are and prove the case for each and every one of them. You simply refuse to accept correct mathematics whenever it conflicts with your belief in STR because you use STR as your means of testing STR rather than testing it without that bias by using mathematics. All the evidence is here on display for all to see and test for themselves using their own mind.


You're the one rewriting history. Frames started out as hypotheses as to what the space fabric is doing relative to the other content of the system. You're trying to turn them into something more abstract for the purpose of obfuscation in the hope that you can spin your way out of this. The existence of the term absolute frame which predates STR demonstrates that I'm using and describing frames in the longest established way, while you are the one perverting them.


I didn't make any odd concept up: I used the standard definition of relative speed outside of the shackles of the theory that binds all your thinking, and again that standard definition predates STR. You're displaying time and time again that you do not know this subject. Worse though, what would it matter if I was using new terms to look at this when I've shown a way of reanalysing MGP in a non-naive manner which reveals that it shows that absolute speeds exist? Mathematics isn't restricted to doing what the bonkers rules of STR allow, but is free to analyse physics independently of any specific theory, and here we see something extremely clear come out of that more intelligent application of mathematics to the issue: the light pulse passing all the material of the ring in one direction takes less time to do so than the light pulse passing all the same material in the opposite direction, so it has to have a higher speed relative to that material. To suggest that I have some kind of mental disability on the basis that I recognise this mathematical fact while you reject it is not a good advert for your side. There is no disability involved here beyond the propensity of people who believe in a theory to blind themselves to any facts that don't fit their beliefs. It's clear and stark, and everyone reading this who isn't controlled by the theory should be able to see that.


I only provided frames from frame A to frame B in my simulation of the double twins paradox, but a program of that kind could be written to consider extreme frames in which none of the action after the planets pass each other ever happens. You might try a frame in which an event that occurs soon after the planets meet after a thousand years of running the simulation, but all we have to do is pick a more extreme frame and we can delay that event for a million years of running the simulation, and a yet more extreme one can delay it for a quintillion years; we can go on doing that infinitely, so if the simulation tries to run things by all frames, it will maintain all events in a both happened and not-happened-yet state forever. It's the same with an actual universe - it can't pander to every frame, but has do co-ordinate the action using just one of them. Again this is something that everyone whose thinking isn't shackled by the theory can look at and test by running my simulation and then changing frame to see how some of the happened events have to unhappen. It's clear and stark, but theory-induced blindness prevents you from seeing it because you cannot contemplate being wrong. Those who are not so afflicted though should have no trouble seeing that you are wrong though: they only have to look at the evidence and play with the program, stopping the action with the counter at a value like 360 or 550, then click on the "-" or "+" button and hold down the return/enter key to repeat the action many times to change through a series of intermediate frames between frame A and frame B and back while watching events happen and unhappen on the screen. That's STR's contradictions on display for all who allow themselves to see them.


Two light pulses passing the same material in different lengths of time having different average speeds relative to that material while they are local to it - how is that not mathematics? Any decent mathematician will tell you that it most certainly is mathematics and that it provides a mathematical fact which you don't want to accept because it conflicts with the rules of your mind virus.


No; that's your spin and obfuscation as you desperately try to wriggle out of something where you've been shown to be plain wrong. I've shown you precisely what mathematics can do with this case to resolve the issue and prove that absolute speeds must exist. There are huge numbers of people who object to this because they have carelessly allowed their thinking to be shackled by a theory, but I'm showing you mathematics, and it's correct mathematics. Which of the following statements do you object to?

(1) Both pulses of light going round the ring pass all the same material.
(2) One pulse of light passes all that material in less time than the other (and is seen to do so by all possible observers).
(3) When two things pass the same length of material in different amounts of time, one necessarily has a higher speed relative to it than the other.
(4) The material is the same length in both directions. (Warning - if you want to object to this, consider multiple laps where the two pulses meet up after a whole number of complete rotations of the ring with one of them having passed all the material of the ring more times than the other. Any games you try to play with length contraction varying on different parts of the ring in most frames will fail.)

The options you have here are to play obfuscation games with (3) and (4). With (3) you can play games by changing frame for each measurement to make the relative speed c, then break fundamental rules of mathematics by mixing the results from an infinite number of different frames to add them all up and get the answer c for the speed the light pulses pass all the material in both directions, and then you can assert that your result must be mathematically valid because STR asserts that it is, but it's mathematically wrong regardless. With (4) you can make the arguments so bulky that it takes tens of thousands of words to discuss it fully and so you wear people down to the point that they never find out that you're wrong, although a simulation of it could be written to resolve it and automate the measurements, making millions of them, so I might write that some day, although people will then claim its done wrongly but will never write their own to demonstrate a supposedly better way but which would have to include errors to generate a different result.


You've missed the point. When in the double twins paradox one of the rockets is reunited with its planet, that becomes a time for the people there to declare that the event has definitively happened, but for people on the other planet and rocket, that event remains in a state of happened and not-yet-happened, so for your simulation running on the idea of maintaining such contradictory states, the event that has supposedly definitively happened has not definitively happened, and when all frames are taken into account, that event will never have definitively happened because there will always be extreme frames for which the matter is never settled. To imagine that a universe that runs on such mad physics is simpler than one that runs the action under the governance of a single frame is plain wrong. The universe makes things happen, and once they've happened they have definitively happened regardless of when observers in the universe see proof of that. It cannot make them unhappen, and it isn't going to keep them all permanently in a state of both happened and not-yet-happened.


I've just shown you how so.


It requires events to be governed differently by an infinite number of frames all at once instead of just having one frame govern the action, so STR is infinitely more complex than LET.


That is baseless propaganda which you've been taught to regurgitate mindlessly. The functionality of the muon is slowed by its high speed of movement through space just like a moving light clock, so it takes longer to decay, while the observed decay times are in exact agreement with the predictions of LET. Why do you allow propaganda to warp your mental model of reality in that way? Why don't you stop and question the validity of the disinformation that you've being taught to take on trust and just believe? You're allowing yourself to be used as a tool.

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It does matter. If it didn't matter, STR would not be making unjustifiable claims about its imagined superiority over LET when LET is actually simpler by running on rational mechanism instead of magic ones. Why are STR's unjustifiable claims so worthy of defending while LET's rational rival claims are worthy of rejection? Why is that bias so important to you? You're running a very unscientific algorithm. The psychiatrist should be looking at why you build your mental model of reality out of magical components instead of rational ones. Moreover, I've shown that absolute speeds can in principle be pinned down in an expanding universe: those clocks passing each other would, had they been created just after the big bang, be providing measurements that reveal their absolute speeds.

Special relativity makes exactly two claims:

1. The laws of physics are the same in every inertial frame of reference.
2. The speed of light in a vacuum is constant even when measured from different inertial frames of reference.

Where are you seeing a claim about superiority?


Special relativity doesn't specify any mechanism. Where are you seeing this "magic"?


Can I take that to mean you haven't set up an appointment with a psychiatrist yet? (My next appointment is in a few days.)


Okay. How can absolute speeds be measured in reality?

The term absolute frame presupposes that there is already something called a frame, so no, it doesn't.


Relative speed has never been defined as measuring the speed of an object A in the rest frame of some object B and then subtracting the speed of yet a different object C.


Of course replacing the definition of a term inside of a statement by a new, different definition matters. It makes it no longer the same statement. Take the statement "45% of dogs sleep in their owner's beds". It would be easy to disprove this by taking dog to mean a hot dog, or the Australian term for a snitch, but also completely meaningless.


It doesn't have to "do" anything in particular to make SR work. All that matters is that the laws of physics are Lorentz invariant.


As it stands, it is simply a phrase in English, with no defined meaning on its own. A mathematical description would consist of equations involving mathematical objects and operators. Translating English into maths requires assigning a definite meaning to each term.


This is only true when the distances travelled, the times taken and the speeds are all measured in the same coordinate system. If it isn't the rest frame of the material, then the situation is not what is described by the second postulate of SR, and thus does not contradict it. Since the material is rotating, no inertial coordinate system contains the paths of both light pulses. I think I've explained this a few times.


Earlier, you said "there are other naive observers elsewhere denying that those things can have happened". Now you're changing the story to "remains in a state of happened and not-yet-happened", which is something else entirely. The more accurate way to put it would be that they do not know if it happened or not, which does not preclude the first observer from knowing it happened.


There are no frames that depend on a events happening before other events when in reality they can't affect each other at all. Events may be settled in any order that is compatible with causality. Changing frames does not require you to change the order of evaluation. The set of inputs that determine the state of a subsequent event is exactly the same and looks the same no matter which frame you calculate in.


The word "govern" does not appear in the postulates of SR. It says the laws of physics take the same form in every frame. Meaning, if you describe what is happening at some place, the processes you observe are going to follow a pattern, or a law. This law is going to look the same when you do the measurements with different coordinate axes. You don't have a problem with the laws of physics being the same if you rotate a system or displace it along the x1 axis, right? Why is there then a problem with a hyperbolic rotation in the x0,x1 plane, considering there is no law of physics that requires events to happen in an orderly fashion on the x0 axis?


What does LET have to say about the functionality about a muon? Nothing. Suppose a new type of particle had been discovered before SR was published. Who is to say that this particle couldn't be supported by a different aether, or by no aether at all?

He sees magic in not having a mechanism, or in having one that is frame-agnostic at the metaphysical level. Not sure why.



Please stop.



The average velocity of matter in the observable universe can be determined by finding the frame in which the proper time since the big bang is maximal. He mistakes this for the velocity of the ether, but the existence of a frame where the age of the universe is maximal is a gravitational effect.

Granted, Newton did posit an absolute reference frame, but he also posited the symmetry of the laws of physics with respect to change of reference frame.

But in any case, frames are not hypotheses about what the universe is doing. They are sets of coordinates to describe the locations of things in the universe and to describe numerically what it's doing. They are mathematically related to each other such that a description in one frame can be transformed into an equally valid description of the same situation in another frame.



You seem to be under the impression that the boundary between events that have happened and events that have not needs to be a flat hypersurface at a constant coordinate time ("now") in some reference frame. This is not the case. The only requirement is that the boundary be spacelike everywhere (so that for all events that have happened, all events in their past lightcones have also happened), but its shape is otherwise arbitrary. In different frames, the boundary will look different, but which events are on either side of the boundary won't change between reference frames, only the coordinates of those events will change. The only thing that will move events from one side of the boundary to the other is the simulation advancing.

This all assumes that we don't have a block universe going on, in which case talking about events that have happened or not is useless, but I'm willing to accept the stipulation that we do not live in a block universe for the time being.

@DavidCooper: I'm sorry, I had no idea you have experience with mental health patients. I'm curious about your view of higher-functioning autism, but concerned that you seem to be excluding people who need some degree of help. I once read that neurons in autistic brains making unusually long connections and and also strange connections. Those two details explain so much of the unusual characteristics of my childhood, more than is explained by far more obvious problems. I recall occasionally finding comfort in meaningless repetitive activities, but it never dominated my childhood. There were many metaphorical expressions I couldn't understand even when they were explained to me. On the flip side, I quickly learned to understand some, such as "You haven't got a leg to stand on," and I used them regularly while still in my early teens. This is in accord with the commonly accepted understanding that people who have higher-functioning autism can learn to do many things which don't come to them naturally. The diagnosis was necessary because, despite all the things I could do, I suffered extremely badly from people demanding that I understand and explain things I couldn't, and punishing me due to my lack of ability.


I am aware of scientists making strange claims at odds with some evidence, but such claims always have a purpose. Usually, the purpose is to support science as a belief system, claiming that the human species is doing better than ever before. A year or two before COVID-19, the World Health Organization claimed "We are sicker than ever before." The response from those who really believe in science has been to question the World Health Organization's motives, to challenge the concept of disease itself by claiming it has meant different things at different points in history, and to misunderstand and misapply statistics on life expectancy. Some are apparently ignorant of evidence that paleolithic human remains show little sign of disease. All this is understandable; the notion that science has failed us so badly is horrifying! But, from this point of view, acceptance of Einstein's theories of Relativity is entirely the opposite position: few if any scientists want to believe in the universal speed limit postulated by General Relativity. It opposes the progress of the human species in leaving the cradle (Earth). Worse, science has uncovered quite a number of threats to the continued existance of complex life on Earth, so this restriction against fast escape is rather disturbing.

Physicists believe in Relativity because no usable alternative theories have been found. If you can prove that your alternative theory explains applicaple observations, then physicists will adopt it. ADDEDDUM: I wrote that (and most of this post) before I read Solar's post in which he explains scientific proof. I didn't realise @DavidCooper needs an education on the difference between mathematics and physics. In brief: Mathematical proofs rely solely on logical reasoning, requiring little to no relationship to the universe we are a part of. Scientific proofs must conform to real-world observations or they are worthless. (It should be noted that leading mathematicians made serious efforts to remove any dependence mathematics has on the physical world. They weren't happy that, for example, the number 3 can only be defined by reference to 3 physical objects such as 3 sheep in a field. David Hilbert was a leading figure in this. Kurt Goedel proved their chosen method wouldn't work.)
@DavidCooper: You need to show how your theory connects to the physical world because mathematics alone doesn't do that. For example, a draft paper such as I described MUST explain the precession of Mercury's orbit; it's one of the most easily-made observations which aligns with Relativity and (so far) no other theory.

As an aside, I hate the name "Relativity" for Einstein's theories. Newton understood all motion is relative and he understood frames of reference, but believed God has his own frame of reference. Einstein tried to reconcile physics with an invariant speed of light, initially calling his work the Theory of Invariance. His friends, influenced by the then-prevailing political climate of moral relativity, persuaded him to call it Relativity. The name Relativity induces such confusion that just the other day, I read a historian seriously claiming that a medieval monk had an inkling of General Relativity! I'm sure the monk just understood relative motion in the way that Newton did; it's a far simpler concept, but popular science and even schoolteachers confound the two to the point where things like this happen; a historian doing his job as well as he knows how makes this staggeringly impossible claim because he doesn't know.


Due to health, it's been a couple of weeks since I started writing this reply so the following text is a little old. I'm omitting the specific quote I replied to, but I really was fascinated by the paper I mention and I think I have a strong point in my explanation that the universe is not obligated to conform to the notions of our brains.

Well! I had a fascinating time reading Harvey R Brown's 2003 paper, Michelson, FitzGerald and Lorentz: the origins of relativity revisited. I had no idea that Einstein had second thoughts about the aparatus of his thought experiements; the rods and clocks. He regretted treating these rods and clocks as primitive objects not made up of smaller particles, even calling it a "sin". But as interesting as that is, the paper goes on to explain that length contraction is insufficient on its own, time dilation is also required:

The footnote on the end of this sentence is curious. (#17 on page 7.) It states that the Kennedy and Thorndike experiment doesn't imply time dilation unless you restrict length contraction to the direction of motion. Interesting... But I'm getting into this well over my head. To really understand the paper, I'd have to familiarize myself with a tremendous number of other papers.

So, now I know that Einstein himself was not entirely comfortable with Relativity, my opinion is a little bit more flexible than before this discussion. It's only "a little bit" not due to theory alone, but because I see no reason to believe such deep details of the universe must be comprehensible to humans. Imagine a very simple universe governed by only the most straightforward and pure mathematical laws. To understand this simple universe, the most complex mathematical function you ever have to apply is the square root. Already, there's a number which cannot be fully comprehended by humans: the square root of 2 is easily proven to be an irrational number. A finite being cannot hold within its memory a full representation of the square root of 2 because it has infinite digits. This shows humans can't handle everything even in a purely mathematical universe, and one we've designed at that.

More on this later.



The required order is a partial order, not a total order (note that this is true even for Newtonian physics; simultaneous events in that case can be processed in any order, though relativity is more flexible as far as that goes).







As stated before, this is a calculable gravitational effect, unrelated to the ether (if it exists). At first, he denied that the proper time since the big bang would be different in different frames. Then I pointed out that it would be, but due to the effect of the gravity of the matter in the universe, rather than due to the motion of the (notional) ether, and his subsequent statements have demonstrated an understanding of that.



Yes, and this has nothing to do with frames.



The internal perspective is strictly a matter of what you know.

You know that the event you're currently experiencing has happened. By extension, you know that every event in your past lightcone has happened. This is frame independent. Everything else is "here be dragons" territory (others may know about it, but you don't). But from an external perspective, everything in "here be dragons" territory for a given observer has either happened or not, and this is also frame independent.



[citation needed]



1) Select an event at random whose predecessors have all happened.
2) Calculate what happens at that event.
3) Mark that event as completed.
4) Lather, rinse, repeat.

This "freezes" the action for all objects except whatever is at the event selected in step 1 in the current iteration of the algorithm, but is a simple four step loop.



Remember where I said "more on this later?"



If SR breaks, then it *is* about observable differences in measurement. If it doesn't, don't say that it does.

On the complexity issue, STR makes the fewest assumptions possible, so that as little as possible of the theory has to be completely thrown out when new discoveries are made about the underlying (meta)physics. It only explains enough to be consistent with current observations, and explains things in terms of the kinds of observables that are accessible to current observations. The simplicity is not in what kind of underlying (meta)physics is assumed, but in that no underlying (meta)physics is assumed.

Proper time is a property of a trajectory, and is indeed frame independent. What I actually said was that you can't establish an absolute time axis using clocks that were created just after the big bang and later converge at a point. The reason being, even though they are travelling at a particular speed now, there is no telling what they have been doing before. All we know is that they have not been travelling in a straight line through flat space, or they wouldn't be converging. I don't think I ever said that a cosmological time axis doesn't exist at all.