No Younger Twin in Einstein's Special Relativity

Feb 9, 2023
97
1
100
Visit site
In 1918 Einstein admitted that time dilation is contradictory in special relativity. He also informed the scientific community that only taking into account the turning-around acceleration of the traveling clock and then applying general relativity can resolve the contradiction:

"CRITIC: According to the principle of relativity the whole affair should proceed in the same way if it is represented in a coordinate system K', that is co-moving with clock U2. Then relative to K' it is clock U1 that is moving to and fro, with clock U2 remaining at rest. It then follows that at the end U1 should run behind U2, in contradiction with the above result. Surely even the most devoted followers of the theory will not assert that in the case of two clocks that have been positioned side by side, each one is running behind the other. RELATIVIST: Your last assertion is of course undisputable. However, the reason that that line of argument as a whole is untenable is that according to the special theory of relativity the coordinate systems K and K' are by no means equivalent systems. Indeed this theory asserts only the equivalence of all Galilean (unaccelerated) coordinate systems, that is, coordinate systems relative to which sufficiently isolated, material points move in straight lines and uniformly. K is such a coordinate system, but not the system K', that is accelerated from time to time...A homogenous gravitational field appears, that is directed towards the positive x-axis...According to the general theory of relativity, a clock will go faster the higher the gravitational potential of the location where it is located, and during partial process 3 U2 happens to be located at a higher gravitational potential than U1. The calculation shows that this speeding ahead constitutes exactly twice as much as the lagging behind during the partial processes 2 and 4." http://sciliterature.50webs.com/Dialog.htm

Clearly, without the acceleration (homogeneous-gravitational-field) crutch, Einstein's 1918 paper is in fact reductio ad absurdum:

An axiom (Einstein's constant-speed-of-light postulate) entails an absurdity (either clock is running behind the other) and should be rejected as false.

Einsteinians know that Einstein's 1918 paper effectively disproves special relativity, never mention it and even repudiate its main thesis from time to time:

Don Lincoln: "The Mistaken Theory on Acceleration. The common response to this paradox, even from physicists who don’t work with relativity would be that the two twins are different as one of them experiences acceleration. According to this theory, Gabby experiences acceleration to catch up the speed, decelerates to turn around, and then again decelerates to land on Earth. So, if acceleration is the answer, it means that while the spaceship is freewheeling between the stars, both twins age equally and when the acceleration turns on, there is instant aging. However, there is only one problem, this theory is incorrect. So, to resolve this, we shall presume that there are three observers: Abby, Gabby, and Tabby. As previously assumed, Abby is stationary on earth and Gabby is heading at a speed of 99.9% the speed of light to the star, Tau Ceti. Tabby, heading toward Earth at the same speed as Gabby, is 24 light years away and along the line of sight between the two stars. It is further assumed that the information on acceleration is not available and insignificant. The time Abby will experience if she were to sit on Earth and watch the clock would be 24 light years or T_Abby. As for Gabby, if she zeros her stopwatch as she passes Abby, the amount of time the clock will display when she reaches Tau Ceti would be half of T_Abby divided by gamma. This is because the total travel time is 24 years, so half the time to reach the star would be 12 years. Gamma is 22.4 and therefore, Gabby experiences a mere six and half months. Now the third person, Tabby heading toward Earth, arrives at Tau Ceti exactly the same time Gabby arrives. As Tabby heads toward Earth, she clears her clock and calculates the time duration to reach Earth from Tau Ceti. Abby finds that both Gabby and Tabby experienced only about half a year in each of their legs, which meant the total time experienced by the travelers was just about a year when Abby waited for 24 years, proving that acceleration had no role to play at all." https://www.wondriumdaily.com/is-the-twin-paradox-of-special-relativity-really-a-paradox/
 
In 1905, Einstein’s so-called annus mirabilis, he wrote six papers that laid the groundwork for relativity and quantum mechanics, which together constitute the foundation for modern physics. As Scientific American states in its September issue, “no other scientist’s legacy looms larger over the 21st century than Einstein’s.”

In 1915, Einstein published his theory of general relativity, a radical new theory of of gravity.

Although I’m an Einstein fan, I feel compelled to deplore one aspect of his legacy: the widespread belief that science and common sense are incompatible. In the pre-Einstein era, T..H. Huxley, a.k.a “Darwin’s bulldog,” could define science as “nothing but trained and organized common sense.”

Quantum mechanics and relativity shattered our common-sense notions about how the world works. The theories ask us to believe that an electron can exist in more than one place at the same time, and that space and time--the I-beams of reality--are not rigid but rubbery. Impossible! And yet these sense-defying propositions have withstood a century’s worth of painstaking experimental tests.

As a result, many scientists came to see common sense as an impediment to progress not only in physics but also in other fields. “What, after all, have we to show for.....common sense,” the behaviorist B..F. Skinner asked, “or the insights gained through personal experience?”

Elevating this outlook to the status of dogma, the British biologist Lewis Wolpert declared in his 1992 book The Unnatural Nature of Science, “I would almost contend that if something fits in with common sense it almost certainly isn’t science.” Wolpert’s view is widely shared. When I invoke common sense to defend or--more often--criticize a theory, scientists invariably roll their eyes.

Scientists’ contempt for common sense has two unfortunate implications. One is that preposterousness, far from being a problem for a theory, is a measure of its profundity. Hence the appeal, perhaps, of dubious propositions like multiple-personality disorders and multiple-universe theories.

The other, even more insidious implication is that only scientists are really qualified to judge the work of other scientists. Needless to say, I reject that position, and not only because I’m a science journalist (who majored in English). I have found common sense--ordinary, non-specialized knowledge and judgment--to be indispensable for judging scientists’ pronouncements, even, or especially, in the most esoteric fields.

For example, Einstein’s intellectual heirs have long been obsessed with finding a single “unified” theory that can embrace quantum mechanics, which accounts for electromagnetism and the nuclear forces, and general relativity, which describes gravity. The two theories employ very different mathematical languages and describe very different worlds, one lumpy and random and the other seamless and deterministic.

The leading candidate for a unified theory holds that reality stems from tiny strings, or loops, or membranes, or something wriggling in a hyperspace consisting of 10, or 16 or 1,000 dimensions (the number depends on the variant of the theory, or the day of the week, or the theorist’s ZIP code). A related set of “quantum gravity” theories postulates the existence of parallel universes — some perhaps mutant versions of our own, like “Bizarro world” in the old Superman comics--existing beyond the borders of our little cosmos.

These theories are preposterous, but that’s not my problem with them. My problem is that no conceivable experiment can confirm the theories, as most proponents reluctantly acknowledge. The strings (or membranes, or whatever) are too small to be discerned by any buildable instrument, and the parallel universes are too distant. Common sense thus persuades me that these avenues of speculation will turn out to be dead ends.

Common sense--and a little historical perspective--makes me equally skeptical of grand unified theories of the human mind. After seven decades of observing myself and my fellow humans--not to mention watching lots of TV and movies--I’ve concluded that as individuals we’re pretty complex, variable, unpredictable creatures, whose personalities can be affected by a vast range of factors. I’m thus leery of hypotheses that trace some important aspect of our behavior to a single cause.

Over the past century, moreover, mind-science has been as faddish as teenage tastes in music, as one theory has yielded to another. Everything we think and do, scientists have assured us, can be explained by the Oedipal complex, or conditioned reflexes, or evolutionary adaptations, or a gene in the X chromosome, or serotonin deficits in the amygdala. Given this rapid turnover in paradigms, it’s only sensible to doubt them all until the evidence for one becomes overwhelming.

Ironically, while many scientists disparage common sense, artificial-intelligence researchers have discovered just how subtle and powerful an attribute it is. Over the past few decades, researchers have programmed computers to perform certain well-defined tasks extremely well; computers can play championship chess, calculate a collision between two galaxies, juggle a million airline reservations. But computers fail miserably at simulating the ordinary, experience-based intelligence that helps ordinary humans get through ordinary days. In other words, computers lack common sense, and that’s why even the smartest ones are so dumb.

Yes, common sense alone can lead us astray, and some of science’s most profound insights into nature violate it; ultimately, scientific truth must be established on empirical grounds. Einstein himself once denigrated common sense as “the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18,” but he retained a few basic prejudices of his own about how reality works. His remark that “God does not play dice with the universe” reflected his stubborn insistence that specific causes yield specific effects; he could never fully accept the bizarre implication of quantum mechanics that at small scales reality dissolves into a cloud of probabilities.

So far, Einstein seems to be wrong about God’s aversion to games of chance, but he was right not to abandon his common-sense intuitions about reality. In those many instances when the evidence is tentative, we should not be embarrassed to call on common sense for guidance.

Kindly read: Einstein, "The Anxiety of Influence" and "The End of Science."

See: https://bigthink.com/the-past/einstein-critics/

See: See: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/einstein-and-science-s-assault-on-common-sense/

See: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/are-space-time-and-gravity-all-just-illusions/

See: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/e...later-what-about-erik-verlinde-and-his-theory

Two scientists in particular attempted to stymie the rise of Einstein’s theories. One of them was Charles Lane Poor, an esteemed astronomer and professor of celestial mechanics at Columbia University. When he first read about relativity, he reportedly quipped, “I feel as if I had been wandering with Alice in Wonderland and had tea with the Mad Hatter.”

Poor went on to write numerous books directly attacking general relativity, including Gravitation versus Relativity, What Einstein Really Did, and the aptly titled Is Einstein Wrong? A Debate. In Gravitation, he was absolutely scathing:
“The Relativity Theory, as announced by Einstein, shatters our fundamental ideas in regard to space and time, destroys the basis upon which has been built the entire edifice of modern science, and substitutes a nebulous conception of varying standards and shifting unrealities. And this radical, this destroying theory has been accepted as lightly and as easily as one accepts a correction to the estimated height of a mountain in Asia, or to the source of a river in equatorial Africa.”

In Poor’s view, Einstein was attempting to subvert the scientific method, pushing a theory without first properly testing it. Thus, he spent much of his career delivering the skeptical scrutiny he thought the bold theory deserved.

The second scientist who spent a great deal of time attacking relativity was Ernst Gehrcke, director of the optical department at the Reich Physical and Technical Institute and a professor at the University of Berlin in Germany. Gehrcke, an aether devotee, penned numerous scientific papers challenging special relativity. In 1920, he took part in an event organized by the anti-semitic Working Group of German Natural Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Science and gave two lectures challenging Einstein’s ideas. Einstein attended and politely watched Gehrcke spout his criticisms. Later, the two scientists would intellectually (and cordially) spar in a public debate about relativity at the 86th meeting of the German Society of Scientists and Physicians.

Einstein also had to deal with criticisms from outside the scientific community that at some times seemed to come from all angles. You see, Einstein’s theories made him a superstar with the public and sparked something of a theoretical physics craze. Because relativity was so hard to comprehend and seemed so fantastical, laypersons thought they could come up with their own theories and strike it famous by proving Einstein wrong. All of these pie-in-the-sky proposals were positively addled.
https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https://bigthink.com/the-past/einstein-critics/
Today, Albert Einstein‘s theories of general and special relativity constitute the bedrock of physics. The speed of light in a vacuum is constant, and gravity is the curvature of spacetime caused by massive objects. We accept these fundamental tenets because they have stood up to more than a century of experiment. But when Einstein proffered these notions in 1905 and 1915, the reception wasn’t nearly as warm as you might expect.
After all, Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation had stood firm for more than 200 years, and the upstart Einstein sought to supersede it! Moreover, many physicists and astronomers were still beholden to the idea of luminiferous aether, an invisible and infinite material that they thought allowed light to propagate through space. Dislodging these scientific mainstays would not be easy.

Two scientists in particular attempted to stymie the rise of Einstein’s theories. One of them was Charles Lane Poor, an esteemed astronomer and professor of celestial mechanics at Columbia University. When he first read about relativity, he reportedly quipped, “I feel as if I had been wandering with Alice in Wonderland and had tea with the Mad Hatter.” Poor went on to write numerous books directly attacking general relativity, including Gravitation versus Relativity, What Einstein Really Did, and the aptly titled Is Einstein Wrong? A Debate. In Gravitation, he was absolutely scathing:
“The Relativity Theory, as announced by Einstein, shatters our fundamental ideas in regard to space and time, destroys the basis upon which has been built the entire edifice of modern science, and substitutes a nebulous conception of varying standards and shifting unrealities. And this radical, this destroying theory has been accepted as lightly and as easily as one accepts a correction to the estimated height of a mountain in Asia, or to the source of a river in equatorial Africa.”

In Poor’s view, Einstein was attempting to subvert the scientific method, pushing a theory without first properly testing it. Thus, he spent much of his career delivering the skeptical scrutiny he thought the bold theory deserved.
In Poor’s view, Einstein was attempting to subvert the scientific method, pushing a theory without first properly testing it.
A second scientist who spent a great deal of time attacking relativity was Ernst Gehrcke, director of the optical department at the Reich Physical and Technical Institute and a professor at the University of Berlin in Germany. Gehrcke, an aether devotee, penned numerous scientific papers challenging special relativity. In 1920, he took part in an event organized by the anti-semitic Working Group of German Natural Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Science and gave two lectures challenging Einstein’s ideas. Einstein attended and politely watched Gehrcke spout his criticisms. Later, the two scientists would intellectually (and cordially) spar in a public debate about relativity at the 86th meeting of the German Society of Scientists and Physicians.

Einstein also had to deal with criticisms from outside the scientific community that at some times seemed to come from all angles. You see, Einstein’s theories made him a superstar with the public and sparked something of a theoretical physics craze. Because relativity was so hard to comprehend and seemed so fantastical, laypersons thought they could come up with their own theories and strike it famous by proving Einstein wrong. All of these pie-in-the-sky proposals were positively addled.

The four fundamental forces are described by two different and mutually incompatible frameworks: General Relativity for gravitation, and Quantum Field Theory for the electromagnetic and nuclear forces. Einstein’s theory on its own is just fine, describing how matter-and-energy relate to the curvature of space-and-time. Quantum field theories on their own are fine as well, describing how particles interact and experience forces. But where gravitational fields are strongest, and on the smallest of scales, we have no way of describing nature. The physics of our greatest theories breaks down.

Under conventional circumstances, quantum field theory calculations are done in flat space, where spacetime isn’t curved. We can do them in the curved space described by Einstein’s theory of gravity as well, although the calculations are far more difficult. This semi-classical approach gets us far, but it doesn’t get us everywhere. In particular, there are a few strong-field situations where we simply cannot obtain sensible answers using our current theories:
  • What happens to the gravitational field of an electron when it passes through a double slit?
  • What happens to the information of the particles that form a black hole, if the black hole’s eventual state is thermal radiation?
  • And what is the behavior of a gravitational field/force at and around a singularity?
These questions all go unanswered without a quantum theory of gravity.

The assumption we normally make is that there is a quantum theory of gravity, and we just haven’t found it yet. Perhaps it’s string theory; perhaps it’s an alternative approach like loop quantum gravity, causal dynamical triangulations, or asymptotic safety. But since 2009, a new, exciting, and assumption-challenging approach has taken the scene by storm: the idea that gravity itself isn’t a real, fundamental force, but an illusory, emergent one.

Pioneered by Erik Verlinde, the idea is that gravity emerges from a more fundamental phenomenon in the Universe, and that phenomenon is entropy.

Sound waves emerge from molecular interactions; atoms emerge from quarks, gluons and electrons and the strong and electromagnetic interactions; planetary systems emerge from gravitation in General Relativity. But in the idea of entropic gravity — as well as some other scenarios (like qbits) — gravitation or even space and time themselves might emerge from other entities in a similar fashion. There are well-known, close relationships between the equations that govern thermodynamics and the ones that govern gravitation. It’s known that the laws of thermodynamics emerge from the more fundamental field of statistical mechanics, but is there something out there more fundamental from which gravity emerges? That’s the idea of entropic gravity.

Verlinde has been the major proponent working on this idea, with a few interesting avenues of progress. Verlinde’s approach is to start from the entropy and Hawking temperature of a black hole, and then, using ideas from String Theory, to show there’s a relationship between quantum information theory and the emergence of gravity, space, and time. But there are also some large open questions (or problems) with no satisfactory answers. Based on the work presented in his most recent paper, here are three:
  1. His model allows gravitational mass to emerge, but there is no mention of inertial mass, or why those two are the same. (This is Einstein’s equivalence principle.)
  2. Many of the intricate assumptions that Verlinde makes can only get the numbers to work out for our Universe if they apply the Hubble expansion rate as it is today, despite the fact that the Universe’s expansion rate has changed dramatically over its history.
  3. The model assumes that dark energy was always the dominant form of energy in the Universe in order to make this framework valid, but the truth is that for billions of years, dark energy was negligible.
But the basic idea, that fundamental quantum bits (or qbits) possess temperature and information, and that everything else about gravitation, including perhaps even space and time, can be derived from it.

Thirteen years after its introduction, the controversial idea of Erik Verlinde on gravity is still a hotly debated topic, and is still surrounded by a cloud of scepticism. Scepticism in which the media have played a major role, theoretical physicst Koenraad Schalm says in an article by NWO. ‘The media simply do not understand that nuance, all they want is the next Einstein or Eddington on the front page.

For Schalm, the scepticism is justified. ‘But don’t misunderstand me, it is incredibly difficult to have a really good idea in this discipline. So I have a lot of respect for Verlinde, because he has definitely given the field a new direction.’

Meanwhile, Verlinde keeps having faith. ‘I am seriously considering rewriting my story from 2009, but now formulated much more precisely. I think that could remove some of the scepticism that still exists.’

Skepticism always exists when trying to remove Albert Einstein from the head of the table.
Hartmann352
 
Feb 9, 2023
97
1
100
Visit site
David Morin, Introduction to Classical Mechanics, Chapter 11, p. 14: "Twin A stays on the earth, while twin B flies quickly to a distant star and back...For the entire outward and return parts of the trip, B does observe A's clock running slow, but enough strangeness occurs occurs during the turning-around period to make A end up older." https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/david-morin/files/cmchap11.pdf

"Enough strangeness occurs" is a euphemism and still it sounds idiotic. The original is immeasurably more idiotic (one of the greatest idiocies in the history of science):

Albert Einstein 1918: "A homogenous gravitational field appears..." http://sciliterature.50webs.com/Dialog.htm