A QUESTION OF TIMEINTRODUCTIONEinstein begins his theory of special relativity with two principles as self evident. The first is the principle of the relativity of motion, the second concerns the speed of light. Einstein's second principle asserts, not only that the speed of light is constant, and the same in all inertial systems, but that the speed of light is independent of the movement of the source. Without this addition the principle would be correct, and in full agreement with his first principle. The addition is the problem. As shown here, this added claim results in a contradiction with the first principle. But first a historical perspective: Galileo Galilei, in 1633, at the age of 70, recanted his own scientific work, in as much as it contradicted Christian, that is to say Catholic, Dogma. He officially rejected the Copernican heresy, that the sun, and not the earth, is the unmoving center of the universe, and thereby saved himself from the persecution that had already caused him to be imprisoned. The concept that the sun is the center of the universe prevailed until early in the twentieth century, and was only superseded after about 1920 by astronomical observations, with newer instruments. These showed that the sun, along with the planets around it, is in motion in the universe. That the fixed stars are fixed and determine an underlying absolute system of reference was accepted in Einstein’s time as self-evident. Now we know better. Newton’s first axiom of motion implicitly assumes that a body can be in an absolute state of rest, and that there can also be uniform linear motion; that each of these states is preferred, and will be maintained by bodies, in the absence of forces. This is the law of inertia, from which we can derive the first principle of relativity by simply avoiding the concept of absolute rest. A body can be at rest in any suitable inertial system - and none of these inertial systems has a claim as being the one and only absolute system. Uniform linear motion is then itself, in a sense, a state of rest. For example, a man standing on a moving train is at rest on that train, even though he is also in uniform linear motion because of the train. Einstein only added that the laws of motion are the same in any two inertial systems that are in relative uniform motion – and that neither system is to be preferred, or considered asabsolute. Newton’s second axiom asserts that it takes force to change the motion of a body from rest or from that of uniform linear motion. The change is proportional to the force, and in the direction in which the force is applied. Whether the force is applied directly to the body, or whether it is action at a distance, such as the force of gravity, is left open. His third axiom concerns the reaction of the body to the applied force. It asserts that there is an equal and opposite counter force on the part of the affected body. In other words there is reciprocity, or we can call it inertia at work. Newton believed in the corpuscular theory of light and tried to explain optical phenomena without resorting to wave theory. In the beginning of the Nineteenth century, with the observations and conclusions of Thomas Young and Augustin Fresnel, the interference phenomenon of light forced the view that light had wave-like properties. But the theory required a medium for carrying these waves, and the efforts of Michelson and Morley were directed towards establishing the character of this medium, which became knows as the aether. All attempts at finding the aether failed, but the conviction that light is a wave which travels at constant speed through this medium, triggered the mathematical work of Hendrik Lorentz. Lorentz believed that the molecules of every solid substance might compress in the direction of motion, and expressed this in 1895, and in mathematical terms in 1904, in what came to be known as the Lorentz Transformation (LT). The version of the LT required for Special Relativity requires time dilation, not just length contraction. But without the LT as basis Einstein’s two fundamental principles are contradictory. That Lorentz made a fundamental error in deriving the LT, and the “Gamma Factor”, which is the essential result of the LT, is discussed at great length below. One clue, which eluded me for a long time, is in the opening sentences of his original paper of 1905. Einstein’s definition of clock synchronization is tailored to the conclusion that clocks in relative motion cannot be synchronized, and that, therefore, time can dilate. The definition is wrong, in that it invokes previously synchronized clocks to conclude that the clocks, when in motion, cannot be synchronized. To anticipate: It will be shown how to synchronize clocks that are located on two bodies in relative motion. This in turn means that time is not relative. Without relative time, the second principle, that the speed of light is independent of the movement of the source, is shown to be false, and in contradiction to the first principle. It is interesting to note that Einstein’s book, written a dozen years later, does not mention this original argument. It may well be that someone pointed out to him that it is invalid. Instead, he then (1917) bases the argument for relative time on the idea of the relativity of simultaneity. The problem with that argument, relying as it does on the ambiguity in the concept "simultaneous", is discussed at length. The underlying problem is that without the concept of the aether there is no underlying coordinate system with respect to which the speed of light can be measured. We are back in a purely Newtonian Universe in which all entities that move, even photons, are moving at constant speed - relative to the coordinate system in which the source is at rest. This is true relativity with no exceptions. In that universe the present problems of cosmology largely evaporate. That is because the Doppler shift relates to velocities, and hence to astronomical distances, in a different way than under SRT. For a given velocity, measured relative to that of the speed of light, the Doppler shift is larger than under SRT. It can be shown that for very distant objects a given shift implies only about half as great a distance as if it were calculated under SRT. This in turn means that instead of a universe that is 12 billion years old, or that has a diameter of 12 billion light years, we get one that is about 6 billion years old and has a density about an order of magnitude greater than presently assumed. The increase in density allows for the likelihood that gravity will reverse (or has already reversed) the expansion, and there is no need for hypotheses concerning early inflation. The process of creation is most likely one that repeats over and over, and may be going on, beyond all possible knowledge on our part, in parallel universes. If there is to be connection with these, it must be at far faster rates of communication than the speed of light. It is sometimes assumed that muons ‘prove’ the case for time dilation. Muons are created in the outer atmosphere but are present at the surface of the earth. To achieve this feat they must travel a distance that is ten or twenty times greater than is justified by their half-life. Since they travel at nearly the speed of light this must prove that time dilates at high speed – or so physicists argue. But the argument does not fully account for the birth and death of the muons in their journey to earth – only their death –and that extended argument leads to a different conclusion. TABLE OF CONTENTS SIMULTANEITY AND SYNCHRONIZATION THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT APPENDIX I: TYPE 1A SUPERNOVAE APPENDIX II: A EUCLIDEAN MODEL OF THE UNIVERSE APPENDIX III: MASS AND ENERGY
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