Thanks - that's really useful confirmation that I need to tone the dialect down a lot. The Lorentz vs. Einstein bit isn't a backdrop, but is the meat of the entire book. The "gee" sounds right to me: Larry's based on a real person who uses that word a lot. Maybe my problem is that I haven't provided any other evidence of his origin the rest of his speech, but that's something that can be corrected in the fine tuning.

@David_Cooper Yes, that's a point I failed to make clear earlier -- that you are starting from the point of view of this Lorentz v Einstein dichotomy. It is very difficult to make an authentic, organic story grow from this basis in that you are "filling in" the story with action and characters in a didactic approach that maybe doesn't suit adult story-telling, more like the approach to a fable with each character representing a certain point of view, which could accidentally lend itself to cliche and stereotypes rather than real characters. That's why I asked what your target readership age range is.

I've seen it work before with Sophie's World which uses a paper-thin story (much thinner than mine) to help drag the reader through what is really just a long introduction to philosophy. The story adds just enough to keep the reader going, but it also prevents it from being a dry academic text, and it's the very fact of it being a story that makes the reader feel that they're taking a tour of all the most interesting knowledge rather than being forced to drag themselves through a dull pile of required learning. I think I can make it work with the material I want to explore too.

What the first chapter does is illustrate the nature of the conflict without the reader having to understand everything that's being discussed, and then in the next chapters we begin to go through everything slowly and make it all crystal clear, while the reader already has some idea of where the argument is going to take things. It's never going to turn into a thriller or a love story, but what it does do is give us a battle of wits between a child (who takes up the bird watcher's argument after being taught about Lorentz's theory by him) and a physicist. The reader soon starts rooting for the child, and for much of the way through the book, victory for him looks more and more as if it might be on the cards. Then the physicist switches to a model which neatly sidesteps all the mathematical objections that the child has made, and it looks as if it's all gone horribly wrong. The birdwatcher has no answer to this, but the child manages to find a missing piece of the puzzle and is then able to pull the rug out from under the physicist's feet (by demonstrating that the new model destroys causality). The physicist has nowhere left to retreat to - all models have now been explored, and none of the ones that map to Einstein's theories have survived the rigorous analysis. The mathematician declares the winner (and the physicist walks out of the artificial intelligence project in disgust).

So, it should be possible to draw the reader into the story emotionally. Chapter 1 sets the scene, but then we move on into the world of an exceptionally logical child.

The story has to be shaped by the argument, and it shouldn't be forced to become something else by trying to bolt some parallel plot onto it to make it pretend to be a conventional novel. The physics argument is the main course, and anything peripheral to it must not be allowed to become too bloated. The readers will be a self-selecting bunch who are interested in the argument, so I'm not worried about losing readers who aren't: I think they'd be better off reading something else. There is another character that I use in the story though which adds a lot of colour, and that's the place it is set in (Edinburgh).

Thanks for reading and commenting on it. (The loss of the tabs doesn't help with readability - I tried putting in a blank line after each paragraph, but the software here then threw everything into italics and lost all the existing returns, so I've restored it to the way it was.)

Using different dialects helps make it easier to know who's speaking, but I can easily tone that down a bit or a lot. I just wanted some idea of how far you can reasonably go without readers getting lost so that I can gauge how much it needs to be reduced.

The Mathematicians team consists of a linguist, a physicist and an actual mathematician. These three are working together on a project to build high-level artificial intelligence (or AGI). The birdwatcher has a continuing role in the story, but he becomes more peripheral. In chapter 2, a boy comes into the picture, a nephew of the linguist, and he is dazzlingly bright. The boy sides with the birdwatcher on the relativity issue, and the story turns into a battle between him and the physicist while the mathematician acts as a judge (which is something which mathematicians are reluctant to do publicly on this issue because it causes them a lot of trouble if they speak out against the physics establishment). It then becomes a question of whether it's the boy or the physicist who suffers from the Einstein Gap (if there is such a thing). I will come back to add more background to the characters as I go along, but my immediate priority has been to focus on getting the first draft thrown together and to set out the entire argument before broadening out the characters. The book is definitely not aimed at the general reader, but at people who consider themselves to be of very high intelligence (even if they aren't) and in particular at anyone who has an existing interest in relativity.

I was planning to leave the explanation as to who the Mathematicians are and what they're working on together until chapter 2, but your comment suggests that may be too late (if the reader feels the need to know sooner), so perhaps I need to put more hints about that in the first chapter. I don't want to throw that in as an information dump though, or knock the conversation off track to try to shoehorn it into the dialogue, so I'm not sure what to do about this. I would expect readers to learn something about who they are from the introduction and blurb though, so I don't know it that removes the need to try to have this information in the first chapter.

Incidentally, I don't think there's a genetic "Einstein Gap", but think it's more about brainwashing: whatever people are taught first, they tend to stick with. There may be something genetic that makes it harder for many people to change sides, but it's unlikely that it determines which side they're stuck on. What the book is designed to probe is just how far people are able to go in an attempt to defend a wrong position, and it will test the readers just as much as it tests the characters in the story. The physicists really have been playing fast and loose with mathematics, and I'm writing the book to expose some of the points where they've systematically broken the rules. There is a reason why Einstein's models have never been simulated without cheating (which they do by smuggling in components which are explicitly banned in the models in order to provide the illusion that they work as claimed).

@David_Cooper -- As I said, it's not bad for a first go, but that's coming from someone who has been writing since 1965, meaning I was able to fill in the missing parts once I got into it without too much effort.

It doesn't require an information dump to set up your characters, but it does require a bit of finesse to provide the information in easily swallowed pieces as your dialogue moves along. Also remember that the 'he said/she said' device is quite invisible to the reader and is frequently the only handle to say who is speaking. I am interested in seeing how you go about laying down this idea.

As for you position that there might be a genetic or hardwired problem, I think that could be a bit too strong and problematic, but it's worth seeing how the case is made.

Personal opinion thrown in just for sake of further discussion is that relativity is, at its core, not intuitive. The most natural thought process for humans derives from their evolutionary experience that tells them all things are essentially linear. Lion approaches, prey prepares for battle, freezes, or runs like hell. Cause followed by effect. A to B. It is incredibly difficult for the mind to contemplate things that don't follow the line. There are some, however, who have not problem with such thinking and for them the concepts of relativity are quite natural. As for those who only profess to understand Einstein's postulates resisting another approach or concept, that I would liken to a person who has purchased an expensive automobile and finds it is not at all what was expected. It is difficult to admit you were wrong or mistaken or simply mislead. Most scientists, myself included, might have an initial bit of shock, but recover quickly and welcome the new information as a springboard to further progress.

Anyway, so far you've got a good show going in the foundation.

Thanks for your further comments. I'll have a go at putting more information about the characters in near the top and see if I can find an acceptable way to do it.

I think the idea of a genetic defect is helpful as it's more likely to attract attention, but it's only the suggestion of the physicist character in the story. I think the reality is more to do with people getting entrenched in positions which they've been indoctrinated into and not having the ability or stamina to think their way out of there without a lot of help, but there may be something genetic that prevents them from trying adequately. I've come up against a long series of highly qualified opponents who simply reject points which no serious mathematician would object to, and that's what this book has to put on show. My task is to present the evidence in a gentle way with lots of sugar sprinkled over it.

The argument in the book focuses mainly on a duck pond analogy that I've constructed. This will be spread out over quite a few chapters with people actually doing a version of the twins paradox experiment for real on a pond. It's vital to cover this ground as it provides crucial understanding of how frames of reference actually work, and most people who study relativity are simply not taught this correctly, leading them to break frame rules and thereby violate the laws of mathematics. We also have enough in this analogy to prove mathematically that there has to be an absolute frame of reference in most models that supposedly don't need one - the behaviour of clock E provides that proof. What follows here is a reply to a physicist that I sent in an email (and his response, much to my surprise, was to reject mathematics and assert that physics isn't bound by it). Hopefully the software of this site won't remove all the returns and run all the paragraphs together into one (but if it does, I'll edit it in some way to show the paragraph boundaries):-

Imagine a pond with ducks swimming about on it, all of them swimming at speed q (which stands for quack). This speed q is the fastest speed that we're allowed to move anything about at on the pond, and we call it the speed of duck. It is equivalent to the speed of light c, but the speed of duck is much easier to visualise. We're also going to have a rule that ducks always swim at the speed q, just as light travels at c.

Now we design a duck clock to serve as the equivalent of a light clock. This is a long box with four sides but no roof and no floor, and we can float it on the water. A duck will swim up and down the channel inside it, going from one end to the other and back, and it will do this continually, perhaps being rewarded by a bit of grain to eat at each end. Every time it returns to one of the ends, the clock registers a tick, just as a light clock registers a tick every time a pulse of light returns from the mirror to the the detector by the laser. Because length contraction is governed by the speed of light, our duck clock will not contract to zero length at the speed of duck if it's aligned with its direction of travel through the water, so we will need to keep it aligned perpendicular to any movement of the clock over the water. If we do this, it will behave just like the light clock, slowing down the ticking rate as the clock is moved faster over the water, and it will stop ticking altogether if it's moved at the speed of duck, just as a light clock would stop ticking if it was moved at c.

We can now run the twins paradox with a pair of duck clocks on water, and it is no coincidence that we get exactly the same numbers of relativity coming out of it as we get in the space case with clocks in rockets. We start with two duck clocks sitting side by side on the water and watch the two ducks swim up and down their channels at q, the speed of duck. Both clocks tick in sync with each other. Now, we're going to leave one of the clocks where it is while we take the other clock for a walk. We paddle along through the pond and take the clock with us at 0.866q to the right. After a while, we turn round and take the clock back the way at 0.866q to the left. When the two clocks are reunited, we see that during their separation, the stay-at-home duck clock ticked twice as often as the travelling duck clock, exactly as happens with light clocks when one twin moves away at 0.866c and then returns at 0.866c. The numbers are the same (but with different units for the speed).

How do we account for this version of the twins paradox on the duck pond? We can see clearly that it's the speed of the clock relative to the water that makes the moving clock run slow - the duck in clock B had to swim twice as far through the water as the duck in clock A to produce each tick. We can also analyse it from the frame B perspective though and pretend that the travelling clock was stationary relative to the water during the first leg of its trip, and that analysis appears to fit the facts too, apart from the fact that we know that it's really clock A that's stationary relative to the water, but if we ignore that reality, we can use any frame at all for our analysis and we will always predict that the travelling clock will tick half as often as the stay-at-home clock.

We can run the experiment again, this time by actually having clock A move the whole time at 0.866q to the left while clock B is stationary relative to the water during the first leg and then moves at 0.99q to the left during the second leg, and again we will see that clock B ticks half as often as clock A during its trip. And again we will be able to pretend the clock A is stationary relative to the water and crunch all the numbers on that false basis to get the same prediction yet again that clock A ticks twice as often as clock B. All frames will generate the same numbers for the clock ticks and for the relative tick rates of the two clocks regardless of which frame actually describes the reality.

We can also apply your method (this was originally a reply to a physicist in an email, so that's who the "you" is here) and claim that the accelerations have a key role. We can treat clock A as if it is in frame A, clock B as if it's in frame B during the first leg of its trip, and clock B as if it's in frame C during the second leg of its trip, and yet again we will get a prediction that clock A ticks twice as often as clock B. That is relativity in action in a system with duck clocks on a pond.

However, if we do use your method, we need to look at its explanation of events. When clock B turns around, it changes frame, and in doing so, it changes its calculation about the current time on clock A. We can see light though that comes to us from clock A so fast that we can see that these calculations of the current time on clock A are not true representations of the actual time on clock A at all. They are actually nothing more than fantasy physics using a method which makes an illegal move, and it's only a lucky accident of the maths of relativity that it provides the correct answers for some aspects of the action. Think about that carefully: the method is clearly irrational in the duck pond case, but it produces the right tick rate ratio and the right numbers of ticks for the two clocks. How can you be sure that this bonkers method suddenly becomes valid in the case of lightclocks moving through space?

We can also introduce duck clock E and have it operate in the area where clock B turns round at the half way point of its trip, and clock E keeps changing direction, moving at 0.866q to the right, then at 0.866q to the left, then at 0.866q to the right, etc. over and over again. We can see clock E changing the frame it's using to calculate the time on clock A, and we can see that it is wildly wrong with at least half of its claims. Only an idiot would say that this clock is producing true statements about the time on clock A because clock E provides an alternating series of contradictory claims about an event that might or might not have happened yet at clock A. I'm quite sure that yYou would not claim that all of its statements about the time on clock A are true - you would recognise that at least half of them as false, and indeed, in most cases you would recognise that almost all of them as false. Importantly though, clock E in the lightclock case also reveals that half of its claims about the time on clock A cannot be true either. Here's the key point: any method that changes frame mid-analysis (and thereby mixes frames) is changing the asserted speed of water relative to clock A, but the actual speed of water relative to clock A never changes. In the light case, a change in frame changes the asserted speed of light relative to clock A. That's why it's an illegal move - just as illegal as a frame change in the duck pond analogy.

This analogy is designed to help you see the reality of what's going on with light travelling through space too. The maths is the same, and the mechanisms are the same. All the duck clocks are actually in the same absolute frame all the time, while all other frames are misrepresenting reality. The clocks are in all those frames too all the time, but those frames are simply proposed realities that happen to be untrue.

Now, what sort of magic do we have to introduce to make an illegal move in the duck analogy valid in the lightclocks-in-space case? Einstein wanted to get rid of the space fabric, so let's try to do the same thing for the duck analogy by getting rid of the water. We now have to make the ducks swim through nothing instead of through water, so let's allow them to do that by magic. We can tolerate a bit of magic, but we cannot tolerate contradiction. So, what do we now have left to control the speed of the duck in clock A now that there's no water? What is it moving at q relative to? This clock is in frame A, so we make this duck move at q relative to clock A. That's simple. What about the duck in clock B though. During the first leg of clock B's trip, clock B is in frame B, so let's have our duck in clock B move at q relative to clock B. And during the second leg of clock B's trip, clock B is in frame C, so let's have our duck in clock B move at q relative to clock B again throughout the second leg. But let's now hide the clocks by making them invisible and look carefully at how the ducks are behaving in a single frame. We find that one of the ducks is moving at a speed >q half the time.

That's what you're doing in the lightclocks-in-space case too. Make the clocks invisible and study how the light is behaving. You have light travelling faster than light. Your method is revealed to be mathematically illegal.

That's why mixing frames is banned. We need to do the analysis with all three clocks in the same frame for valid analysis, and that means we can do one of the following things. (1) Use frame A and have both the ducks move at q relative to that frame. When we do that, clock B is running slow throughout both legs of its trip. (2) Use frame B and have both the ducks move at q relative to that frame, in which case we have B ticking twice as fast as A during the first leg, and about three and a half times more slowly than A during the second leg. (3) Use frame C and have both the ducks move at q relative to that frame, in which case we have B ticking about three and a half times more slowly than A during the first leg, and twice as quickly as A during the second leg. Those are just three out of an infinite number of frames that we could use for the analysis.

If case (1) is a true representation of reality, then (2) and (3) are necessarily false. If case (2) is a true representation of reality, then (1) and (3) are necessarily false. If case (3) is a true representation of reality, then (1) and (3) are necessarily false. We know that if one frame is the true representation of reality, all other frames are misrepresentations of reality. Clock E's alternating contradictory assertions prove that: we know for certain that at least half of its claims are false, even in a case where we have thrown away the medium and pretended that we can manage without it. Whether the existence of the medium is accepted or denied, an absolute frame is required as a key part of the mechanism for the events that we see happen (and the denial of the medium is also daft in any case).

@David_Cooper -- Sounds a good deal of fun.

I have a suggestion for you. You might be interested in going to the medium.com site where you can store your writing as you go, edit it as you need. I keep a few old junk stories on the site as well. You can refer people to that site as you wish and not worry about the formatting here.

[medium.com]

I'll be watching.