I like Einstein, and I'm sure he'll remain up there with the greats of physics, but not for STR and GTR. It's his cult followers who are obnoxious, systematically shouting down and ridiculing anyone who points out the glaring faults in both theories and branding them as crackpots, and the people guilty of this go all the way to the top in physics. They systematically brainwash people into shutting down a key part of their ability to reason in order to believe that they're becoming superior thinkers by tolerating contradictions and denying that they are contradictions, and the entire house of cards is based on nothing more than appeals to authority: "all the greats of physics over the last century endorsed this, so it must be right."

What's going to pull the table cloth out from under their house of cards though is AGI (artificial general intelligence). I have built the world's most advanced prototype AGI system and am getting it to home in fast on human-level intelligence. What it does is apply mathematics to all things, rigorously and without error to full depth. No such system will tolerate broken theories which break fundamental rules of mathematics. All AGI systems will reject STR and GTR regardless of who designs them because those theories are both broken beyond repair. To make AGI tolerate such theories, it would have to be tampered with to allow fundamental rules of mathematics to be overridden on an ad hoc basis specifically aimed at backing those theories, while still applying the same fundamental rules to a host of aspects of those same theories where they depend on not overriding those rules. What is really shocking though is the lack of people who are capable of recognising this today, because it only takes the skill and knowledge of a school maths teacher to examine these models and flag up their glaring errors. It makes me wonder what else in physics (and in other sciences, and mathematics itself) may also contain glaring errors which people have rendered themselves incapable of recognising due to theory-induced blindness. Thanks to AGI though, we will soon find out. The revolution is coming.

@David_Cooper “...[ Einstein will ] remain up there with the greats of physics, but not for STR and GTR.”

Nor for his refusal to use the scientific method.

I first heard of artificial intelligence in the 1960s, when during the Cold War with the USSR people wanted fast language translation. It has improved greatly.

@David_Cooper “...what else in physics (and in other sciences, and mathematics itself) may also contain glaring errors...?

Donald Scott, retired professor of electrical engineering, wrote “... all the experiences I have had with representatives from those areas of science that deal with non-testable past and distant realms [ archaeology, anthropology, or geology ] have resulted in my being told with supreme authority that everything those experts were saying was accurate, correct, and precisely known. And they brook no suggestions of alternative hypotheses.”

@yvilletom There are certainly a few other bonkers theories in physics with a big following, but physicists are more split on them. There are also some dodgy things in mathematics that don't add up, but I'm not going to open any more cans of worms as each one takes up a lot of time, and no one ever shifts position on anything anyway, so it's best just to focus on building the new ultimate authority and let it do that job later - it will have infinite patience when dealing with deluded self-appointed experts who award each other with qualifications which merely serve as the robes of a clergy. Future generations will look back at them in astonishment and laugh.

All the maths of relativity is duplicated in 100% classical systems involving waves of sound in air. You get the same "time dilation" and length contraction, as shown here: magicschoolbook.com/science/incompatible-frames.html - the frame on the left is one in which the air is moving to the right at 0.6s (where s is the speed of sound). If you use sonar to measure distances and then correct for Doppler shift, lo and behold you get length contraction. Have you ever wondered why students aren't shown this when they're taught relativity? They're actually being systematically brainwashed because the people in charge of physics have become a religious cult which hides half the evidence from them. That's also why they don't show them how LET matches the precision of all STR and GTR's predictions of measurements.

Read the post again and think about it for a while. Do you know how learning works?

You nailed it!! Apparently he's fancies himself a self-styled guru of some sort.

I need more info on your credentials than your bio reveals.

I have read of the relativity vs. QM issue but have not studied it. I doubt the existence of wormholes. The first paragraph of Tyson’s Astrophysics for People in a Hurry makes an unsupportable claim.

Do a search on “what are the most popular forms of fiction”. Ditto for non-fiction. Many people confuse scifi and science.

Does GPS use relativity, or does it use mathematics that approximates relativity?
I ask that because the mathematician LeMaitre metaphorically stole cosmology from physicists. We physicists want it back but we don’t have billions of taxpayers’ dollars/euros.

AE’s thought-experiments gave him the freedom to go where empiricists do not go.

@yvilletom GPS uses the right maths, but the same maths is used by LET (Lorentz Ether Theory) which accounts for gravity by having the speed of light reduce in gravity wells. The exact same maths describes this slowing of the speed of light with depth in a gravity well as describes GTR (general relativity)'s curving of Spacetime. LET thus accounts for everything we see with a Euclidean metric where GTR (and STR) use a non-euclidean metric, accounting for why clocks tick slow in gravity wells and why light is lensed off straight paths. Because matter is made out of wave of energy that rattle about at the speed of light, those waves too are lensed downwards, leading to matter being accelerated downwards in exactly the way we see happen in our universe. GTR is really just a contrived mathematical abstraction of LET, which is how it still manages to make good predictions of measurements, but because GTR was developed before LET was extended to cover the same ground more rationally, GTR got all the credit for the maths, while STR stole all of its credit from LET from where it took its maths.

According to the memoir by Gen. Leslie Groves, who managed the bomb project, Einstein’s signing the letter to FDR was the only part he had in the project.

@yvilletom Einstein developed his theory of relativity from 1905-1917. Work on the Manhattan project was later based on that work in the 1940's.

And so your point is WHAT?? exactly???

@Normanbites

Sarcasm requires anger. Less its anger, what remains of your OP?

@yvilletom You are right, remove the "anger from my post" and all you have is evidence and facts.

So, about the "attitude", sorry, not sorry.

@normanbites what role did special relativity play in making of the bomb? People had to figure out radioactive decay and criticality. Then the rest was mostly engineering. Could you please explain the role of relativistic effects in an atomic bomb? In uranium, the outer shell electrons are under relativistic conditions, but not the nucleus

@Spongebob Very good question. True believers in anything do tend to exaggerate.

@Spongebob The theory of relativity was fundamentally based on his research and discoveries regarding the photovoltaic effect. ... In the vein of "if this happens ... then this is how it happens" this deductive reasoning lead to both the theory of relativity and the familiar E-mc^2 identity. So it may be more accurate to say the atom bomb and the theory of relativity are based on the same foundations, rather than the atom bomb is based on the theory of relativity.

Beyond that, Gravitational lensing, red shifts, blue shifts, and resolution of the Mecurial orbit discrepancy have been observed and are indeed direct tests of the theory of relativity.

Now to be fair, I owe neither you nor yvilletom an education on the matter. If you want to delve into this further, please do it on your own time.

@Normanbites E =mc2 comes from the photoelectric effect, which Einstein did explain. You are correct that understanding photoelectric effect played a major role in the birth of quantum mechanics which in turn was needed for the bomb. I still don't see the connection. It is okay, I will go and learn more. It doesn't look like you want to teach

@Spongebob Thanks! I appreciate that. If you were willing to pay me more for the lesson material, my attitude could be different.

According to the memoir by Gen. Leslie Groves, who managed the bomb project, Einstein’s signing the letter to FDR was the only part he had in the project.

@yvilletom Einstein developed his theory of relativity from 1905-1917. Work on the Manhattan project was later based on that work in the 1940's.

And so your point is WHAT?? exactly???

Here's some further reading for you:-

magicschoolbook.com/science/incompatible-frames.html

On that page we see the same maths of relativity playing out in a classical system with sound moving in air. It explains why only one frame of reference can provide a correct representation of the underlying reality while all other frames necessarily misrepresent it. We can see the same with the duck pond analogy:-

magicschoolbook.com/science/duckpond.html

In the duck pond analogy, we see the contradictions show up when observer E produces an alternating series of contradictory claims which according to STR must all be equally true, while mathematics insists that half of them must be false: "the alarm has sounded at clock A", "the alarm hasn't sounded yet at clock A", "the alarm has sounded at clock A", "the alarm hasn't sounded yet at clock A", "the alarm has sounded at clock A", "the alarm hasn't sounded yet at clock A", etc.

For a comprehensive introduction to the subject, go here:-

magicschoolbook.com/science/relativity

You’ve given me something to deal with. Thanks.

Bullshit. There are some discrepancies in Einstein's work but what you are discussing was not any of it.

I stopped halfway through because you are missing so many factors in those examples that you sound like a climate change denier.

I can see the errors in some of your examples but others are not so obvious, .
[Edit] For example, Disproof 1 - you claim that the real speed of the light in your example can be 1.5c but NOWHERE in the real world does ANY observer measure light travelling at anything other than c. Nowhere. Let that sink in and you must see that the 'disproof' is fallacious.
Same problem for some of the other 'disproofs'. The last one is particularly sneaky - first you choose circular motion so as to ignore Doppler considerations then you turn the circle into a many-sided polygon and hope that the original assumption was forgotten! Schoolboy error.

@dalefvictor, @redhog, @Gareth

David’s thesis requires a closer reading than you have given it.

Gareth, in Disproof 1 David did what scientists do; he hypothesized a 1.5c. Chip some of the rust from your scientific education.

Paraphrasing Justive Wendell Holmes of SCOTUS: When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and....

@yvilletom You can hypothesise all you like, but it has to agree with reality. Isn't this why we reject religion?

@dalefvictor If you think I'm not discussing Einstein's work, who do you imagine produced Einstein's broken theories for him? I attack precisely the pile of pants that Einstein provided as his pair of theories of relativity, and the sole reason I attack them is that they don't work. If they had done, I'd have been only too happy to endorse them, which is what I originally expected to be able to do, but sadly it's not possible to do that with things which break fundamental rules of mathematics, and that causes me a considerable amount of disappointment, but we should not allow what we want to be true to deflect us away from recognising what is actually true.

I work in AGI software development (artificial general intelligence) and what we do there is build systems that apply the rules of mathematics to all things. If a model doesn't function correctly, that shows up because the model simply breaks. You can cover over the cracks if you're running a broken model in the head of an ape, but not in a computer with no override routines to pander to bad models on the basis of how much they're admired by people who don't understand them fully. In the case of STR there are multiple models that can claim to be STR, but all of them break either by generating event-meshing failures or contradictions. Our job is to use mathematics to mark everyone else's work in all other fields and to flag up all the faulty ideas that have been mistaken for science. The physics establishment has failed to self-correct its own work because it has become a church, and the people who are officially qualified to rule on what is good science are all elite members of that church who were selected by a process run by the church which ensures not that they're rational, but that they conform to a set of required beliefs.

We're about to enter a new era though in which authority transfers from churches of that kind to mathematics itself, and AGI will be a pure manifestation of that mathematics with no bias introduced into it from apes. It will become the new scientific authority. What you see in my work is merely a forerunner of that.

@redhog I'm not missing any relevant factors. If you really had a relevant missing factor to point to, you'd have done so, but all you can do is give a general wave towards imaginary factors in the same way religious people do when you tear their irrational God to pieces.

@Gareth" I can see the errors in some of your examples but others are not so obvious, ."

I would like a full list of those, but to save you time, it would be best if we go through them one at a time with the best ones first to see if you're right about any of them.

"For example, Disproof 1 - you claim that the real speed of the light in your example can be 1.5c but NOWHERE in the real world does ANY observer measure light travelling at anything other than c. Nowhere. Let that sink in and you must see that the 'disproof' is fallacious."

Here are two statements, the first one being correct and the second one wrong:-

"The speed of that light is 0.5c or 1.5c relative to the second object."

"The speed of that light is 0.5c or 1.5c."

What is it that makes you read the first statement and interpret it as meaning the same as the second statement? They are two radically different statements. The speed of light through space is always c relative to that space (space fabric). If an object and a pulse of light are moving in opposite directions through that space fabric with the object moving at 0.5c, the relative speed of the light pulse and the object is 1.5c. That is a fact of mathematics which will be confirmed by all competent maths teachers and mathematicians.

"Same problem for some of the other 'disproofs'."

The key words to look for are "RELATIVE TO". Every time you see those words in my writing, you need to interpret them correctly and not act as if they are not there.

Something else you need to consider is this. When you measure the speed of light relative to yourself, you set up your measuring apparatus on the basis that it is stationary, then you measure the speed of light relative to the apparatus on that basis, and lo and behold, it returns the value c. However, if you set up the measuring apparatus on the basis that it is moving towards the light at 0.5c, lo and behold, it now measures the speed of light relative to the apparatus as 1.5c. All possible speeds between just over 0 and just under 2c can be measured in this way as the speed of the light relative to the apparatus, the all those measurements are studiously ignored by incompetent physicists who only accept measurements of this kind when the answer is c. They are not doing science.

"The last one is particularly sneaky - first you choose circular motion so as to ignore Doppler considerations then you turn the circle into a many-sided polygon and hope that the original assumption was forgotten! Schoolboy error."

There's nothing sneaky about it. You can analyse it from any frame you like and make the appropriate Doppler shift corrections, but that doesn't help you one bit: the result still stands. The clock doing the circuits ticks half as often as the one in the centre, and all observers agree on that. You can use a near infinite number of clocks on tangents with them doing a closer and closer approximation to the path of the circling clock, and while they're travelling side by side with it during their leg of the relay race, they are able to hold a conversation with each other where they can prove to their own satisfaction that they are ticking tick for tick, and all observers agree that they are doing so.

@David_Cooper I'm not going down the rabbit-hole of trying to educate someone who already thinks they know everything. All your examples make the same error of assuming Newtonian space. Your 'space fabric' simply does not exist. [Btw. Forget Doppler - your 'polygonal' and 'circular' clocks agree with one another because all are travelling relative to the central observer at the same rate - it's not that hard to understand]

@Gareth

The rust on your scientific education is deep and rusty structures collapse. Hypotheses are tested for conformity to realty.

Edwin Hubble wrote two hypotheses, one of them for an expanding universe and the other for a non-expanding universe. He rejected the first and accepted the second. Georges LeMaitre used the first hypothesis and wrote math for it so he could support the Genesis story.

@David_Cooper I don't need to provide any. Because it's fairly obvious that you wouldn't comprehend it anyway as most of your arguments are either long disproven or invoke things that don't exist. Good day.

@David_Cooper I took a look at your post and there is a misunderstanding in what you are saying. If you are stating this and thinking you are correct then you do not understand what you have read. I have no mind where the information came from it is wrong. This conversation is over.

@Gareth "I'm not going down the rabbit-hole of trying to educate someone who already thinks they know everything."

The idea that you're in a position to educate an actual expert on relativity when you don't even know the difference between speed and relative speed is highly amusing.

"All your examples make the same error of assuming Newtonian space."

LET (Lorentz Ether Theory) matches the predictive power and precision of STR+GTR while using a 3D Euclidean metric. Spacetime uses a 4D non-Euclidean metric. I consider both.

"Your 'space fabric' simply does not exist."

Without a space fabric, you don't have anything to govern the speed of light or do support the ability for things to be separated by distance. Those are vital services provided by a space fabric. You depend on them too, but instead of having them provided by a space fabric, you substitute magic as the provider of those services. Magic has no place in science - it is reserved for the religious.

"[Btw. Forget Doppler - your 'polygonal' and 'circular' clocks agree with one another because all are travelling relative to the central observer at the same rate - it's not that hard to understand]"

So they're all ticking half as fast as the central clock, and they're all ticking twice as fast as the central clock then. But that cannot be so because we can see that the circling clock ticks half as fast as the central one while the central one does not tick half as fast as the circling one: this thought experiment breaks the superficial symmetry and reveals that most physicists are shallow thinkers who failed to check Einstein's work thoroughly. They missed this. For a hundred years they poured over this and missed the glaring errors.

@redhog Oh, sure - I wouldn't understand it because I'm only able to write simulations like my reference-frame camera program which produces all the right action without even using the maths of STR or LET: magicschoolbook.com/science/ref-frame-camera.htm. All the program does put single-pixel cameras in a 3D grid through space to photograph the local content, then pictures can be taken simply by changing the synchronisation of when the photos are taken, and adjusting for length contraction. Just doing that provides all the right distortions of objects. No one else has ever done this because they don't understand relativity sufficiently well to have thought of doing so. I test relativity with programs, and I test it thoroughly. I've tested it more rigorously than anyone else alive or dead.

To give you an idea of how to use the program, selecting set of objects d shows eight rockets length contracted to half their rest length as they move at 0.866c past a disc on tangents to its edge - you can see that you could fit sixteen rockets into the space round the ring for a moment even though you could only park eight of them there. Use number keys 1 to 4 to view from different frames of reference, and keys S and D to start/stop the action and change direction.

@dalefvictor "I took a look at your post and there is a misunderstanding in what you are saying. If you are stating this and thinking you are correct then you do not understand what you have read. I have no mind where the information came from it is wrong. This conversation is over."

Sure - you've found a misunderstanding which you can't point to because you haven't found one (other than your own). If I don't understand relativity, how come all my simulations work while theirs have to cheat by smuggling in absolute time to cover over the cracks? Look at GTR break in front of your eyes: magicschoolbook.com/science/Event-Meshing-Failures.html.

Preliminary: NASA is so deeply invested in the standard model that its credibility is suspect.

@yvilletom what a silly statement. What do you think NASA could do to affect any of those tests?

@MattHardy How silly is it to not follow the money?

NASA decides what it will fund, prepares a.budget and asks Congress for the money. Do I need to say more?

@yvilletom Tempting as it is to go down that rabbit hole with you, the main reason it's silly is because NASA has nothing to do with any of the suggestions I made for you to test relativity. The Hafele–Keating experiment wasn't funded by NASA, nor do you need NASA funding to replicate it. GPS wasn't funded by NASA nor do any of the other positioning systems up and you wouldn't need NASA approval to perform the same experiment. Also you don't need NASA approval to measure the spectra of the planets at different times of the year. What's silly is you mentioning NASA in relation to my answers to you question. I treated your question as a genuine inquiry. Was I mistaken to do so?

@MattHardy
Though I intended my question as a genuine inquiry, I phrased it humorously. I took your use of the word “silly” seriously.

I’m unable to answer your closing question.

@yvilletom good. You mentioning NASA was silly. Seriously silly. So do you now accept that relativity is a testable hypothesis?

Preliminary: NASA is so deeply invested in the standard model that its credibility is suspect.

perhaps true. but so cold. if we can't be warm with each other, whats the point of our puny existance?.... HOLDENN C 'S THOUGHT EXPERIMENT ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN LIFE.

@holdenc98 I don't know what "warm" means in this context.

Also, exactly by who, how or what should humanity be measured by to determine its relative "significance"?

@redbai yes. Its pure relativism. An aesthetic judgement. Its all we have left to distinguish ourselves in the light of our infinite regression in cosmology's ever changing perspective. Are you not alone with your consciousness?

@holdenc98 I was not aware that humanity is relevant in any way whatsoever to any cosmological judgements or perspectives. They appear to be limited to a singular planet in a venue that dwarfs any significance on a cosmological scale.

@redbai ......so there you have it. you don't seem to think metaphysics has any connection to epistomology. bishop berkleys idealism, after radical electroshock therapy. just right for blm pep rallies

@holdenc98 Ah, so you're just going to act condescending and not explain anything, just word salads trying to sound deep. And somehow it ends with BLM pep rallies? That's a turn not expected but not surprising either.

@redbai ..one mans refined thought is the next mans word salad. to schredder minds, every complex thought is " just word salads trying to sound deep " ...and if you want to defend blms bullying hysteria in reasoned arguement, be my guest.

@holdenc98 More BS. As far as "defending BLMs bullying hysteria", why would I defend your false premise?

Aw, you surrendered without having tried.

@yvilletom saying that you are completely wrong and full of shit yet you read this as surrendering? Amazing blindness or just stupidity?

@Mofo1953 Your surrendering again is not necessary.

@yvilletom unnecessary cretinism from your part.

Having added only petulance, you surrendered again.

@yvilletom pathetic and repetitive.

@Mofo1953 I don’t want points added this way. Period.

@yvilletom you are definitely on your period. Heavy flow!

A religion-like belief.

There are authorities and millions of words but no evidence for a belief.

the reason the speed of light is a constant no matter what the speed of the observer is because that constant is applied by observation and doesn't exist in reality.

When a potential-changing event happens the potential is changed instantaneously in reality and then a cause/effect chain results that is subject to the physical parameters of our "reality".

Think of it as an explosion happening on a distant island. You don't see it, hear it, or feel it until those waves of causation hit you ... and they all lag the actual potential-change which happened at the moment of the event. This is because the substratum upon which that potential change is "annotated" is the field of awareness and it is infinite and timeless. Space? Not affected by it because everything is right there. Time? Not affected by it because everything is NOW. But as those bits of info reach our human brain our minds add in the speed of light as the "reality adjuster".

This is also why quantum entanglement happens no matter the distance apart of the particles. The "field" that collapses the waveform (double slit) is infinite.

@Toakreon

Thanks, John. A search on “what did the Michelson/Morley experiment prove” returned several answers, most of them being that it tested whether the ether existed or it allowed measuring the speed of light very closely.

The Physics and Our Universe course at The Great Courses mentioned the speed of light in a vacuum compared to the observer being the same regardless of the motion of the observer but I will have to view it again before I say more.

The first physics course I took in grad school required me to make a hypothesis and design an experiment to test it. I was interested in low temperature physics and did a heat transfer experiment. After my 2nd semester, having had enough poverty, I took a position at a computer company in my home town.

I’m curious about AE’s testing the items your 4th paragraph identifies. He was said to have been a theoretical physicist and did no empirical work.

It absolutely is like a religious belief. The Michelson-Morley experiment led to the formation of LET (Lorentz Ether Theory) which accounted for all the action perfectly, conforming in full to the rules of mathematics. Einstein's theory came later and broke the most fundamental rule of mathematics by generating contradictions. See my main reply eight places further up this thread.

@David_Cooper Thanks for your posts, David.

I’m ninety and when I started college Sigmund Freud was revered. He became a mere mortal and Albert Einstein is on his way to becoming another. ( I will copy this to the top of this long discussion so more people can find your comment. )

@yvilletom Einstein will remain a great physicist even once STR and GTR are thrown out - his other work was better, and it wasn't his fault that he became the head of a religious cult over relativity. He was much more reasonable than his followers, accepting that there was an aether.