The speed of sound in air is sometimes said to be 343.2 metres per second or 768 miles per hour. But actually, it varies. It usually decreases with altitude up to about 11 kilometres above sea level. That’s about 36,000 feet, which is typical for a passenger jet. At that altitude the speed of sound is circa 295 m/s or 660 mph, which is one reason why passenger jets don’t fly as fast as you might like. Interestingly enough, the speed of sound typically decreases with increasing altitude, so sound tends to get refracted upwards. It’s similar for sound waves in the sea, but there the speed of sound typically decreases with depth. So a horizontal sonar wave tends to get refracted downwards:
Image from FAS and the US Navy, see course ES310 chapter 20
The sonar waves “veer” rather like a car veers when it encounters mud at the side of the road. The mud slows down the wheels on the left, so the car pulls to the left. You steer a tank to the left in a similar fashion, by slowing down the track on the left.
It’s c for celeritas which means speed
See Wikipedia and you can read that the speed of sound “is conventionally represented by c, from the Latin celeritas”. Celeritas means swiftness or speed, which varies according to the properties of the medium. The speed of sound in sea water is circa 1500 m/s or 3,355 mph. In steel it’s circa 6000 m/s or 13,421 mph. In diamond it’s circa 12,000 m/s or 26,843 mph. It’s similar for seismic waves. Wikipedia says the propagation velocity depends on the density and elasticity of the medium, and is up to 13 km/s in the deep mantle. That’s 13,000 m/s or 29,080 mph. Of course in seismology we have P-waves and S-waves. The former are “primary” longitudinal waves like sound waves. The latter are “secondary” transverse waves like light waves. The equation for the speed of a transverse seismic wave is given as csolid,s = √(G/ρ), where G is the shear modulus and ρ (rho) is the density. The equation for the speed of light in the vacuum of space is given as c = 1/√(ε0μ0) where ε0 is vacuum permittivity and μ0 is vacuum permeability. There’s a reciprocal because permittivity is a “how easy” measure rather than a “how hard” measure. Other than that, the equation takes the same general form, and the speed of light in space, in “vacuo”, is said to be 299,792,458 m/s or 670,616,629 mph.
The speed of light in space is said to be constant
Note that the speed of sound in air varies, the speed of sound in water varies, and the speed of seismic waves in rock varies. But it is said that the speed of light in space does not vary. Search the internet and you can find lots of articles saying this. See for example Luke Mastin’s article on the speed of light and the principle of relativity. He talks about the Michelson-Morley experiment, which “unexpectedly demonstrated that light travels at the same speed regardless of whether it was measured in the direction of the Earth’s motion or at right angles to it”. Mastin also says when light moves from one medium to another, its speed “can of course change depending on the new medium’s index of refraction, and this “bending” of light is essentially how lenses work”. However he doesn’t mention gravitational lensing. Instead he says regardless of the speed of a light source and regardless of your speed, the “light still travels at a steady 300,000 km/s, completely contrary to classical physics and common sense”. He also says it was the young Einstein’s genius to explain why. And that in 1905, Einstein realized that “the whole idea of aether as a medium for light to travel in was totally unnecessary”. It sounds good. Especially since “the constant speed of light was to become one of the two main planks of his Special Theory of Relativity”. Unfortunately there’s a problem. A big problem. How big? The size of Texas.
When a clock goes slower
If you had a clockwork clock that was running slow, and I told you it was because time was running slow inside the clock, you’d laugh in my face. You’d know that it was due to some issue with the mechanism. Perhaps the oil was drying out and gumming up the works. Whatever the reason, you’d know that your clock was going slower because the clockwork was going slower. So, what if I showed you an optical clock going slower? An optical clock is typically an atomic clock which employs ytterbium atoms instead of caesium atoms, and visible light instead of microwaves. It isn’t some cosmic gas meter with time flowing through it. Nor is a clockwork clock. When a clockwork clock goes slower it’s because the clockwork goes slower. And when an optical clock goes slower, it’s because the optics goes slower:
ytterbium lattice double clock image from NIST
And when does an optical clock go slower? See the interview with David Wineland of NIST: “if one clock in one lab is 30cm higher than the clock in the other lab, we can see the difference in the rates they run at”. An optical clock goes slower when it’s lower. This is said to be the hard scientific evidence for gravitational time dilation. But it’s really the hard scientific evidence for light goes slower when it’s lower.
Einstein’s postulate only lasted two years
Yes, Einstein said the speed of light is constant in 1905 when he was doing special relativity, but by 1907 he was broadening his horizons and looking into what would become general relativity. That’s when he wrote a paper on the relativity principle and the conclusions drawn from it. He used Φ (phi) to denote gravitational potential, and he said this: “These equations too have the same form as the corresponding equations of the nonaccelerated or gravitation-free space; however, c is here replaced by the value c[1 + γξ/c²] = c[1 + Φ/c²]. From this it follows that those light rays that do not propagate along the ξ-axis are bent by the gravitational field”. Only two years after his special relativity postulate, there’s Einstein talking about a speed of light that varies with gravitational potential. This wasn’t some one-off. He said the same thing in 1911. That’s when he wrote a paper on the influence of gravity on the propagation of light. He said this: “If c₀ denotes the velocity of light at the coordinate origin, then the velocity of light c at a point with a gravitation potential Φ will be given by the relation c = c₀(1 + Φ/c²). The principle of the constancy of the velocity of light does not hold in this theory in the formulation in which it is normally used as the basis of the ordinary theory of relativity”. He said the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light does not hold. And it’s clear from the context that the word velocity is as per “high velocity bullet”. It’s the common usage as opposed to the vector quantity. Einstein was talking about the speed of light, which is why he was referring to c.
Einstein’s VSL attempt in 1911
There’s a Wikipedia article on the Variable Speed of Light, which is often abbreviated to VSL. If you take a look at an old version dating from 2014, you can see a section entitled Einstein’s VSL attempt in 1911. This says Einstein first mentioned a variable speed of light in 1907 and reconsidered the idea more thoroughly in 1911. However it then goes on to say Einstein abandoned the idea in 1912 because it only predicted half the deflection of light by the Sun. However it isn’t true. Einstein didn’t abandon the idea. That’s why you can find him saying the same thing year after year:
1912: “On the other hand I am of the view that the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light can be maintained only insofar as one restricts oneself to spatio-temporal regions of constant gravitational potential”.
1913: “I arrived at the result that the velocity of light is not to be regarded as independent of the gravitational potential. Thus the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is incompatible with the equivalence hypothesis”.
1914: “In the case where we drop the postulate of the constancy of the velocity of light, there exists, a priori, no privileged coordinate systems.”
1915: “the writer of these lines is of the opinion that the theory of relativity is still in need of generalization, in the sense that the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is to be abandoned”.
1916: “In the second place our result shows that, according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity and to which we have already frequently referred, cannot claim any unlimited validity”.
1920: “Second, this consequence shows that the law of the constancy of the speed of light no longer holds, according to the general theory of relativity, in spaces that have gravitational fields. As a simple geometric consideration shows, the curvature of light rays occurs only in spaces where the speed of light is spatially variable”.
The last quote is the English translation of what Einstein said in German in 1916: “die Ausbreitungsge-schwindigkeit des Lichtes mit dem Orte variiert”. That translates to “the propagation speed of light with the place varies”. Einstein never did abandon his variable speed of light. The people who tell you that grew up before the Einstein digital papers were online. The general relativity they were taught wasn’t the same as Einstein’s.
A shift in interpretation
As to why, see Clifford M Will’s paper The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment. On page 4 he refers to a period of hibernation between 1920 and 1960, and a golden era between 1960 and 1980. On page 9 he says special relativity only became mainstream in the late 1920s. That sounds odd. Something else that sounds odd is something in the Wikipedia history of general relativity article. It says Kip Thorne “identifies the “golden age of general relativity” as the period roughly from 1960 to 1975 during which the study of general relativity, which had previously been regarded as something of a curiosity, entered the mainstream of theoretical physics”. So, special relativity wasn’t mainstream until circa 1930, and general relativity wasn’t mainstream until circa 1960. There’s more, because during this golden age, “many of the concepts and terms which continue to inspire the imagination of gravitation researchers and the general public were introduced”. All in all it would seem that something was changed, and something was lost.
The speed of a light wave depends on the strength of the gravitational potential along its path
As for when I’m not sure. But Irwin Shapiro was talking about the variable speed of light in 1964. His paper was all about what we now call the Shapiro delay. Wikipedia faithfully quotes what Shapiro said, which is that “the speed of a light wave depends on the strength of the gravitational potential along its path”. That’s in line with Einstein and the evidence of optical clocks going slower when they’re lower. And yet when you google it, you find people saying “the Shapiro delay is caused by the distance between source and emitter being longer”. And you find people saying the unchanging speed of light in a vacuum is a foundational fact of relativity. There’s a huge contradiction between what Einstein said and what many physicists say today. So much so that general relativity today sometimes feels like an ersatz imitation of the real thing, authored by people who advocate time travel.
The prevailing opinion is wrong
However with a nudge from yours truly, the Wikipedia Variable Speed of Light article now talks about Einstein’s proposals after 1911. It says this: “there is no other way to interpret the velocity of light in this usage except as a variable scalar speed”. It also says “Peter Bergmann did not agree with Einstein, but left the dispute out of his earlier book in 1942 to get Einstein’s endorsement”. Peter Bergmann was Einstein’s research assistant in Princeton between 1936 and 1941. He wrote the first textbook on general relativity in 1942. But after Einstein died “Bergmann wrote a new book in 1968 claiming that vector light velocity could change direction but not speed. This has become a prevailing opinion in science”. I’m afraid to say that this prevailing opinion is wrong.
The tautology
Of course, not all physicists say the speed of light in vacuo is constant. Two who don’t are John Moffat and João Magueijo. In their 2007 Comments on “Note on varying speed of light theories” they said this: “Can c vary? Could such a variation be measured? As correctly pointed out by Ellis, within the current protocol for measuring time and space the answer is no. The unit of time is defined by an oscillating system or the frequency of an atomic transition, and the unit of space is defined in terms of the distance travelled by light in the unit of time. We therefore have a situation akin to saying that the speed of light is “one light-year per year”, i.e. its constancy has become a tautology or a definition”. They talked about a tautology. To appreciate this, take a look at the NIST caesium fountain clock:
Image courtesy of NIST
It’s used to define the second as “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom”. The radiation is microwave radiation, which is light in the wider sense. In essence you count light waves going by, and when you get to 9,192,631,770 you say a second has elapsed. Then you use the second along with the light to define the metre as “the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1 ⁄ 299,792,458th of a second”. You use the motion of light to define the second and the metre. And then you use them to measure the motion of light. That’s why you always measure the speed of light to be 299,792,458 m/s. It doesn’t matter how fast the light is moving, you will always end up saying the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s. That’s the tautology. The speed of light is defined to be constant, and it is absolutely amazing that this is not generally recognised. Can you imagine what you’d think if somebody tried to tell you that the speed of racehorses was constant? And that the winning horse won because time flowed faster for it? You’d think they were crazy, or stupid, or both. But that’s what they tell you about optical clocks, and about light.
The reality that underlies gravitational time dilation
Imagine you repeated your definition of the second and the metre at a lower elevation. Light goes slower when it’s lower. When the light goes slower the second is bigger. Then the slower light and the bigger second cancel each other out such that the metre is unchanged. You will still say the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s. Then you might be tempted to say 299,792,458 m/s at one elevation is the same as 299,792,458 m/s at another, even though the metres are the same and the seconds aren’t. That’s clearly wrong. It’s like saying 100 metres per second is the same as 100 metres per second and a half. But people will insist that 299,792,458 m/s at one elevation really is the same speed as 299,792,458 m/s at another, even though they know the seconds are different. They insist even though they know that optical clock rates vary and there isn’t any actual time flowing through them. Even though they know that the things that move inside optical clocks are things like light. At times the resistance is dogged. At time it’s almost mindless, as if Morton’s demon is sitting on their shoulder. You have to make things extremely simple to corner the reluctant ego. The simplest thing I’ve found is the parallel-mirror light-clock. It’s employed in the simple inference of time dilation due to relative velocity, and it can also be employed to demonstrate the simple reality that underlies gravitational time dilation. See this gif:
Gif image by Brian McPherson
The two light pulses aren’t going at the same speed. If they were, the parallel-mirror light clocks would stay in time. And if they did, the NIST optical clocks at different elevations would stay in time too. Only they don’t.
The speed of light varies in the room you’re in
See Is The Speed of Light Everywhere the Same? It’s a PhysicsFAQ article by Don Koks. He talks about laser gyroscopes and the Sagnac effect, and later says “Einstein talked about the speed of light changing in his new theory”. This new theory was of course general relativity, which concerns non-inertial reference frames. The article goes on to say the room you’re sitting in right now is a very high approximation to a non-inertial reference frame. And that whilst an observer stationed at the ceiling will measure the speed of light to be c, as will the observer stationed at the floor, the “global” observer will say that light at the ceiling travels faster than light at the floor. You aren’t situated at the ceiling, or at the floor. You’re sitting in your chair. You are that global observer. What this means, is that the speed of light varies in the room you’re in. If it didn’t, your pencil wouldn’t fall down. Pick up your pencil, hold it up at head height, then drop it on your desk. The speed at which it hits the desk depends on the difference between the speed of light at head height, and the speed of light at desktop height. The speed of light varies like the speed of other waves vary. Just like Einstein said.
The ascending photon speeds up
The situation is similar to sound waves in the sea, where the speed of sound typically decreases with depth. That’s why a horizontal sonar wave bends downwards. In similar vein the horizontal light wave bends downwards because the speed of light decreases with elevation. However the vertical sonar wave does not bend downwards, and nor does the vertical light wave. Imagine you had a torch that could emit a single photon. Imagine you aimed it straight up and pressed the button. What happens to the ascending photon? It isn’t like an ascending brick. The speed of light at the ceiling is greater than the speed of light at the floor. So the photon doesn’t slow down as it ascends. Au contraire, the ascending photon speeds up. This is, of course, a matter of some gravity.
Before forming a logical conclusion on (constancy of) linear speed of light, it is essential to know what is light and its constituents? How does it move? and what is its moving mechanism?
It moves like other transverse waves moves, Nainan, due to the properties of the thing it moves through. In a few weeks I shall post an article called What is a photon? It will show you the scientific evidence that tells you that the photon has an E=hf wave nature, but is neither a wave train nor a wave packet. Nor is it an electric wave and an orthogonal magnetic wave that generate one another. Instead it’s a singleton soliton electromagnetic wave with a “quantum” nature.
Wonderful blog! I found it while surfing around on Yahoo News. Do you have any tips on how to get listed in Yahoo News? I’ve been trying for a while but I never seem to get there! Appreciate it edkccgckfbeb
Sorry John, I don’t have any tips. I’m new to this blogging game, I’m still finding my feet. I just set up the website on Godaddy then followed some instructions to allow “crawlers” to scan it, then logged onto Bing to tell them about the website. Can you give me a link to what you saw on Yahoo News? I couldn’t find anything there about it. Just a search result. (Search on Google and what comes up is the PSYCHIC detective, tsk). Thanks for the compliment by the way, much appreciated.
“the unchanging speed of light in a vacuum is a foundational fact of relativity”
The unchanging top speed through space in a vacuum, C, is a foundational principal of *Special* Relativity. General Relativity is based on a different principal: that acceleration and gravity are equivalent (crudely speaking).
It is important to be clear which theory you’re discussing in this context.
What general relativity says is that gravity affects which paths light takes. Astronomers benefit from that effect when studying distant objects through a “gravitational lens”
This is similar to the speed of light altering when it travels through, say, water. The reason for the “slow” down is not that photons are actually moving slower, but rather that they’re being absorbed and re-emitted by electrons. The Dirac equation tells you the physics.
So…the speed of light is not constant.
That’s right, Josh. Einstein said it year after year, Shapiro said it in 1964, and the NIST optical clocks say it. Those optical clocks go slower when they’re lower because light goes slower when it’s lower. Not because some unseen thing called time goes slower. Einstein made it clear that “the speed of light is spatially variable”, and that’s why the horizontal light beam curves downwards. He even talked about the refraction of light in a gravitational field. And yet none of this features in contemporary general relativity. It’s as if people like Misner Thorne and Wheeler made it up as they went along without reading what Einstein actually said.
Depends on which clock you are using. A local clock will slow down at the same rate so the speed will be calculated as the same value. However, a clock on Earth, measuring light travelling near the Sun, will show the light travelling at a lower speed. The Shapiro effect confirms this.
“the unchanging speed of light in a vacuum is a foundational fact of relativity”
Well, it isn’t a “fact”, it is a premise derived from the apparent conclusions of the Michaelson-Morley experiments. Note, these experiments did not rule out aether, they just showed that it isn’t static to some background frame in which local reality is passing through, which was the operating assumption at the time.
“The reason for the “slow” down is not that photons are actually moving slower, but rather that they’re being absorbed and re-emitted by electrons.”
Well, this is a mess. The theory goes atoms absorb photons, knocking electrons into a higher orbital, then when the electron falls back into a lower orbital a photon gets emitted. The thing is, the frequency changes. This is known as Phosphorescence. A cite to where an electron absorbs a photon would be appreciated.
This is not what is slowing the photons.
I highly recommend this paper: “Gravitational Lensing Analyzed by Graded Refractive Index of Vacuum”
arxiv.org/abs/0711.0633
It shows that “gravitational lensing” can be empirically explained by modelling an index of refraction scalar field in open space. They also come up with a constant of proportionality that relates the natural log of the index of refraction to the strength of the gravitational potential field (20). Does it look familiar?
Correction (27). (20) gives the field value definition of the index of refraction as a function of the radius to a central source according to the Schwarzchild solution of the GR equations.
Look at the gif, Cedron. It doesn’t depend which clock you’re using, Light goes slower when it’s lower, and that’s that. Anybody who uses a light clock (or similar) to measure the speed of light at various elevations, and then claim that the speed of light at all those locations is the same, is missing the tautology. Sadly many people who have been spoon-fed physics at university can be very convictional about this sort of thing, and can go into denial when you show them the Einstein digital papers. Some can even become vindictive and abusive. Such is hubris. Note that Shapiro said clearly that the speed of light varies with gravitational potential. Also note that re https://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0633, I mentioned Xing-Hao Ye, Qiang Lin in the comments here, and in the next article.
You seem to have misinterpreted. I said the numerical value will be the same when calculating the speed, not the speed itself will be the same. Shapiro is correct, IMO, and Ye and Lin give the formula. You can calculate the speed in absolute coordinates by combining (20) with v = c_0 / n. Where c_0 is the speed in a true vacuum, or the limit speed if you prefer. Ye and Lin’s “far field approximation” uses a simplified version of (20) using n = exp( -2 P_r / c^2 ) making v = c_0 exp( 2 P_r / c^2 ) where P_r is the gravitational potential.
I had not seen your references to this paper. Because of the backward sign convention, “the deeper” as you call it means P_r is larger in magnitude, yet negative, so the v is slower. Your first comment wasn’t there when I typed my first one. They are basically saying the same thing. The Ye and Lin paper is amazing to me, and why it hasn’t been more broadly recognized is a shame. You are probably aware, but others may not be, that Dicke proposed nearly the same thing in 1957.
According to this formula, which is GR based, a photon will slow down if it is heading straight towards the sun. This means the acceleration vector is pointing away from the sun, not towards it like Gravity would have. Likewise, when moving away from the sun, the photons (or I should probably say light) will speed up. Again, the acceleration is in the opposite direction of gravity. So to say the Gravity is causing the bending of light doesn’t really make sense.
What then is the magnitude of this radial acceleration in terms of the magnitude of the acceleration of gravity? When the light is passing transversely, at the closest point of approach, the acceleration is said to be twice as strong as gravity would predict. That’s what got the whole show started.
Cedron: try driving a car where the wheels on the left go slower than the wheels on the right because there’s mud on the left side of the road. Your car veers to the left. Light does the same. It’s the same for the photon. Hence I’m pleased to hear you say your photon will slow down if it is heading straight towards the sun. So many people just don’t know this. But you do. Good man!
Good stuff Cedron. The downward deflection of the horizontal light beam is like the downward deflection of sonar in the sea. That’s what happens when there’s a vertical gradient in wave speed. The deflection is twice the Newtonian deflection of matter because of the wave nature of matter. It’s a wave in a closed path, and the horizontal component is only half that path. Yes, I know about Dicke, I’ve mentioned him in various articles, such as https://physicsdetective.com/the-principle-of-equivalence-and-other-myths/. Make sure you read the next article. Once you know that “the speed of light is spatially variable”, and about the wave nature of matter, you know how gravity works. Then you will be amazed at the way people get it wrong.
Truthfully, I am more amazed at how people refuse to consider alternative views and instinctively defend the orthodoxy.
I have read your “The principle of equivalence and other myths” and “How gravity works” articles. In the latter you make this statement:
“so the height at some location on the plot depicts the real speed of light at that location. It also depicts the gravitational potential at that location.”
The mathematical version of this statement is in my prior comment, v = c_0 exp( 2 P_r / c^2 ), which comes from Ye & Lin’s approximation. The approximation matches the Schwarzschild solution to 12 significant digits at the radius of the Sun which is beyond current measurement precision by quite a significant factor.
Anybody interested in the math behind the refraction deflection can find it in my blog article “Off Topic: Refraction in a Varying Medium” at dsprelated.com/showarticle/1190.php. They aren’t the solutions you find in Academia.
If you could elaborate on “The deflection is twice the Newtonian deflection of matter because of the wave nature of matter.” and how you can conclude that as that is something I have yet to nail down. I use it as a premise.
Clocks slow down, time doesn’t. Time doesn’t exist, it occurs. We can never measure it directly. Every clock works on the principle of some quantity changing at some presumed rate and measuring the change in quantity. The Minkowski term “ct” confirms this in done in theory implicitly as well.
Good stuff Cedron. Re the deflection is twice the Newtonian deflection of matter because of the wave nature of matter, it’s pretty simple. See https://physicsdetective.com/how-pair-production-works/ and https://physicsdetective.com/the-electron/ . We can make an electron (and a positron) out of light, electron spin is a real rotation as evidenced by the Einstein-de Haas effect, and annihilation gives us the light back. So it’s pretty clear that the electron is light in a closed path, like Schrodinger said. Simplify it to closed square path, and half of the square is horizontal, so only half of the light that makes up the electron is getting refracted downwards.
I added a response under your “What is Gravity” article, seems more appropriate there.
Very efficiently written post. It will be valuable to anyone who usess it, as well as myself. Keep doing what you are doing i will definitely read more posts. gedkabaeddde
Many thanks John.
@Johnk274 – do not get your physics from this blog, because this blog says thinks like “the speed of light is not constant” which is misleading. Although beams of light might not have a constant rate of propagation through materials, that’s due to photons being absorbed and re-emitted. Photons themselves travel at C – which is measured to be constant, not a variable, to high precision.
Let me say that again – the speed of photons is constant, as is the speed of all zero-mass particles. C.
Jim: I’ve given you Einstein saying the speed of light is not constant, plus Irwin Shapiro, plus Ned Wright, plus Joao Magueijo and John Moffat, plus Don Koks. I’ve also told you that a clock is not some cosmic gas meter with time flowing through it, so an optical clock doesn’t go slower when its lower because time goes slower when it’s lower. Now if you’re going to dismiss all that and cling to notions like gravitational lensing is caused by the absorption and re-emission of photons, and then tell people they shouldn’t get their physics from this blog, you and I are going to fall out. Follow my links, read the original material by Einstein etc, and do your own research and think for yourself.
The speed of light constant in vacuum is an interesting combination of two ideas. One that the speed of light is constant and two, that there is a vacuum. There is definitely space. It is observable and obvious. The dark thing between the illuminated stuff in the sky is space. However, it is not nothing. Light goes through it, which makes it not empty. How much light goes through it? Enough to allow us to see everything visible and, presumably enough to make sure all the visible stuff stays where it is. There is a scary amount of idealism that passes for fact and masks the consideration of the real nature of things. Can there even exist a perfect vacuum devoid of light? If there is no perfect vacuum, then all of the light travelling through the near vacuum will interact locally with any other light it encounters. It will also interact with the effect of mass on space in the vicinity of the mass. Hence, gravitational lensing due to the effect of mass increasing the local energy density in its vicinity. I generally can’t find fault with the sentiments and factual direction of this blog. It chimes with both my gut feel and my interpretation of the facts of which I am aware.
Thanks Andy. When you appreciate that Einstein, Shapiro, and many others have been saying the speed of light is not constant since 1907, it more than just chimes.
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It strikes you that the speed of light is constant is a myth, and yet physicists believe in it. So much so that they don’t know how gravity works, and think a gravitational field is curved space. Then when it comes to classical electromagnetism and quantum electrodynamics, they’re lost, with no concept of the underlying reality. Worse, they don’t know that they’re lost, and won’t look beyond the streetlight.
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Google on physics detective and what comes up is a whole pile of websites about psychic detectives. Do the same on Bing and it’s fine.
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The blog uses GoDaddy and their managed WordPress facility, and the OceanWP theme provided by “Nick”. It loads up quickly because the front page is a summary of posts, and just text with no heavy images. When you go into a post there are images but most are “below the crease” and not on the initial screen area. Hence that loads fast too.
Thank you for sharing with us, this website truly stands out.
Thank you!
Thank you very much for this blog!
The past couple of months I (i.e. someone who is acquainted with natural sciences only from an “outside-look”) was devoting way too much time searching for online articles to straightening out + clarify some of the things that just would not add up for me, within the [perceived] current status quo of nowadays astrophysics; too many arrogant students regurgitating what they read, copying the “understanding” of what they’ve been taught, to then talk down on any doubter (the illusion of education = intelligence/understanding); as if being born later automatically elevates them above historical misunderstandings, and thus could not be wrong, while anyone not tied into the mysteries they were inaugurated into, was automatically wrong, an imbecile, a .
I slept quite bad, thinking about the M.Morley-experiment and the crude “conclusions” drawn from it, which seemed more like a cheat (Lorentz-transformation) than the actual relative movements of corresponding particles (maybe the misunderstanding still solely lies with me); and even though this article is more concerned with general relativity rather than special, it did help; and restored some of the respect I had for Albert Einstein and his theories… “so it really was the detractors which now pose as his heirs… huh! – how history again and again tends to repeat itself when it comes to progress and the reception of great minds and ideas…”.
So, once again: thank you!
Anyways; I often wondered: was there ever a scientific experiment to clarify, if polarized light bends differently, according to the polarization? that is to say: weaker for the light polarized transverse to the gravitational source, and weaker for the one being polarized vertically. — or in other words: do black holes polarize light, by bending some parts less so than others?!?
PS: I’m German; if anything I just said sounds crude/odd/not right (grammatically that is), attribute it to the fact that my native tongue isn’t English 🙂
My pleasure CG. I hope you find these articles useful. Yes, there are some arrogant people regurgitating what they’ve been taught without thinking for themselves. I think it’s rather sad, especially since Einstein had his “miracle year” when he was only 26.
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Sorry, I don’t know of any scientific experiment that demonstrates that polarized light bends differently. I haven’t heard of any scattering associated with gravitational lensing.
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Your English is just fine. And a whole lot better than my German!
It’s not like I have heard about that effect, either; it’s just one of those interpretations that seem natural to me to assume — given some other assumptions… — as such i’d like to falsify or verify my suspicion (clarity is a nice thing to achieve), whatever it should turn out to be!
Thanks for the answer!
PS: IQ usually is highest earlier on; it’s not entirely unusual, for any thinker, to come up with his/her best ideas in their late 20’s; even though they may only come to full fruition later on, when one has worked out all the flaws.
+ I am a bit jaded when it comes to the many who do not think for themselves, even from within the realms of higher education. Seen it too often, and albeit being strongly disappointed, it does not surprise me any more. Just makes me very, very quiet at times…”Für mich nämlich gibt es an dieser Stelle viel zu schweigen. –” (F.N.)
cheers!
Yes, there is much to be said. Once you’ve read some of the old papers I refer to here, and come to certain conclusions, I suspect you may be very very quiet for quite some time. For example, see what Schrödinger said on page 27 of his 1926 paper quantization as a problem of proper values, part II. About light rays influencing one another and showing remarkable curvature.
I think the main issue is that we assume C must refer to the speed of light. C is a constant that is embedded in our universe, it reflects a property of spacetime itself. It is only tangentially related to the speed at which light propagates, hence all the confusion on the topic.
Spacetime isn’t real, Leon. Space is real. Time is merely something we derive from motion through thst space. Gravitational time dilation is just a way of describing “the speed of light is spatially variable”. Or a way of describing light goes slower when it’s lower.
Speed of Light : Reexamination
Plane waves of light (wavelength is constant) are coming from just above. An observer is moving horizontally at different speed. Speed relative to the waves does not vary. But speed relative to photons or light ray will vary (both will be real existence). With the formula : light speed = f λ, speed of waves can be shown. However, speed of photon and light ray will not be shown. Because of large speed of light, this problem is not noticeable.
In outer space, plane waves of a star light are coming. An observer is at a standstill. Speed of light waves and photons (light ray) relative to the observer will not be the same (in general). By the way, speed of light waves and of photons (light ray) relative to the aether frame will be the same (as a physical constant : not c, maybe).
Sorry, I cannot receive E-mail. I do not have PC.
http://www.geocities.co.jp/Technopolis/2561/eng.html
The speed relative to the waves does vary, hiroji. That’s because the descending photon slows down. Optical clocks go slower when they’re lower because light goes slower when it’s lower. However you always measure the local speed of light to be the same because of the wave nature of matter. See The Other Meaning of Special Relativity by Robert Close: http://www.classicalmatter.org/ClassicalTheory/OtherRelativity.pdf.
“And that whilst an observer stationed at the ceiling will measure the speed of light to be c, as will the observer stationed at the floor, the “global” observer will say that light at the ceiling travels faster than light at the floor.”
So this is equivalent to say that the speed of light is always locally constant, i.e. in a region of space sufficiently small so that space-time can be considered flat? (it is what I understood from GR)
But then, if say I measure the speed of light at half the height of the room (which should be c0=299’792’458 m/s), and then observe a ray of light emitted at the top of the room towards the ceiling, I would deduce (using general relativity equations) that the speed of light is larger than c0 on top of me and slower beneath me ?
David: yes, the speed of light is deemed to be locally constant. But that’s because when light goes slower, so does the observer, because all electromagnetic interactions go slower at the lower elevation.
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You have to be cautious about spacetime can be considered flat. Spacetime curvature is the second derivative of potential, and is associated with the tidal force. This is not detectable in the room you’re in. Spacetime can be flat and level, whereupon your pencil doesn’t fall down, or it can be flat and tilted, whereupon your pencil does fall down. See the next article where I talk more about this.
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Yes, you should deduce that the speed of light is larger than c0 above and slower below. Rather counter-intuitively, the ascending light beam speeds up. The descending light beam slows down.
In this context, what does “lower” mean?
Lower down. Closer to the surface of the Earth. Nearer to the gravitating body.
You say c = c₀(1 + Φ/c²), that is a typo error in Einstein’s paper, it should be: c = c₀(1 + Φ/ c₀²).
re: my paper: http://gsjournal.net/Science-Journals/Communications-Relativity%20Theory/Download/6740
Also according to Einstein lightspeed is not constant, and people citing him as saying it is constant, is just a translation error.
Good stuff Roger, thanks. I’ll correct that and make a note pointing to your paper.
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As for people saying Einstein said the speed of light is constant, I think it’s more than just a translation error. I think it’s 1960s physicists doing their own thing and appealing to Einstein’s authority whilst flatly contradicting the guy. Einstein said the speed of light varies in a gravitational field. He said it time and time again, year after year, starting from 1907. And yet, what do I read? I read things like Einstein showed us that the speed of light was constant.
Hi John, its a domino effect (i.e cumulative effect) where an initial mistake/error is made and more mistakes are then built on top. SRT is supposed to be his 1905 paper, and between 1905 and GRT in 1915 that is supposed to be him struggling with entwurf theory; the entwurf theory gets ignored i.e. the mindset of them is to ignore the 1907 quote you mention as not being SRT and not being GRT.
Example of Einstein being mistranslated at: http://gsjournal.net/Science-Journals/Research%20Papers-Relativity%20Theory/Download/7671 in the part two : http://gsjournal.net/Science-Journals/Research%20Papers-Relativity%20Theory/Download/7676 it all boils down to one German word being mistranslated – the German which Einstein wrote as “nun” got mistranslated as the German “nur”. Resulting in the difference that (one way) lightspeed (in vacuum) can optionally be treated as constant, versus the usual belief that it is compulsory constant.
Hi John
Now found that there are so many mistakes with what we have been told about relativity, that it must have been his wife who wrote it, and what we got from Einstein was a distortion, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QrCJg23vAE
I wonder if there was some international politics in it Roger. Or plagiarism. Einstein built on the work of Voigt, FitzGerald, Lorentz, and Poincaré, but he didn’t acknowledge them at all.
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Just you wait until you find out about the mistakes that were put into general relativity in the sixties. It makes the issues in special relativity look minor.
Of course there was politics involved. It was a group of influential scientists that called themselves the X Club that wanted science based on atheism, and so championed Darwin’s theory. I think they probably championed Einstein as well, because Newton’s theory could be viewed as God in control of a clockwork universe; thus viewed Einstein as dethroning Newton to give atheist physics. Einstein eventually started saying things like “God does not play”, and I think then they withdrew their support for what he was later saying, but kept the relativity+etc from his earlier days. (Einstein not giving references etc all helped to cut ties with what others had said in the past.)
I read somewhere that the international politics was such that German science didn’t want to acknowledge the contribution from non-German scientists. Or something like that. I’ll have to look it up.
About MM experiment
In a moving passenger car, MM experiment is being done. On the ground, an observer stands. To this observer, are constancy of light speed and Lorentz contraction compatible ? And also, are constancy of light speed and time dilation compatible ?
About speed of light
Brawnian motion shown by many particles will be a model of the real world. And a measure of time and space will be invariable. Even when a light ray is passing by.
Lorentz contraction
Plain waves of light (wavelength is constant) are coming from the upper right 45 degrees.Two bars of the same length are moving to the right and the left at the same speed. Number of waves hitting the bers is the same. Lorentz contraction is unthinkable.
You won’t find me telling people about Lorentz contraction, Hiroji. I simplify your bar to a single electron, then I simplify that to light going round in a circle, like this: O. Then I turn it sideways, so it looks like this: | . Then when you move this thing, it’s liking stretching one turn of a coil spring. You go from this | to this /\. That electron is smeared out. It gets longer. So do you. That’s why you see other things looking length contracted, even though they haven’t changed.
I believe the speed of light is a constant in a vacuum because I also believe that measurement between anything in a vacuum CAN change to keep the speed of light a constant whenever time is changed per the General Theory of Relativity. This belief is backed up by a belief that the Inflation of the universe just after the “Big Bang” was real, and that both the measurement between things in space and time changed together at a speed that seemed faster than our constant speed of light but was actually both the measurement AND time that changed together to keep the speed of light constant.
The trouble with that Doug, is that people define the second using the local motion of light. Then they use the second to measure the local motion of light. Then they say the speed of light doesn’t change. Even though optical clocks go slower when they’re lower. Even though the thing that’s moving in those clocks is light, not time.
Are you saying time is a stationary membrane and light, matter, etc moves through it? Or are you saying that the speed of “time” is an irrelevant here, as it is the thing being measured and can’t be used also to explain speed discrepancies because that is logically circular?
No. Light and matter move through space. Time is just a cumulative measure of that motion. See the nature of time. If you use the local motion of light to calibrate a clock, and then use that clock to measure the local motion of light, your definition of the local motion of light is circular.
Hi John, I just bumped onto this excellent video on VSL from Dr Alexander Unzicker.
If you haven’t seen it I suggest you have a look. It explains that the ‘curved space with constant c’ is just a different way to describe ‘flat space with variable c’.. Its just a different view of GR. Goes on to say the two different versions are equivalent :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxnFAbF9fKA
The paper he mentions from Jan Broekaert (2008) is a very nice read too.
Kip Thorne in his interviews also acknowledges that the constant speed of light is something Einstein and we simply chose to go with for simplicity / practical reasons.
So it seems that the VSL GR is not really a different thing..just maybe a harder way to compute things…compared to the model where we use a constant speed of light to do the math/computations/simulations etc.., thats also according to Kip Thorne but I am not sure if this is true though.
Now just like you say in the flat space with VLS model of the GR the space is not curved, there is no curvature of space.
On the other hand in the Constant speed of Light model of GR the space is measured to be curved. So seems both ways describe same thing in a different way so to speak depending on how you look and measure things.
Hi Akis. Unzicker is a friend of mine. I haven’t seen this video though, I’ll take a look. The 2008 paper by Ye Xing-Hao and Lin Qiang Inhomogeneous vacuum: an alternative interpretation of curved spacetime is similar. I can see a couple of Jan Broekaert papers on the arXiv including https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0405015 . Isn’t it sad that nobody ever hears about this stuff? In this case, me!
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Can you link me to something from Kip Thorne? I don’t think the two interpretations are exactly the same. If they were, guys like Kip Thorne wouldn’t believe in wormholes and time travel. Check out my black hole article, and remember this: a gravitational field is a place where the speed of light is spatially variable, at the event horizon the speed of light is zero, and light can’t go slower than stopped.
Well they are equivalent but not identical. Both approaches are claimed to be valid and can be used to accurately describe reality thats what I understood so far. Again I will refer you to the video from Unzikcker as he explains the differences of the two in quite some detail. He explains how things change in GR calculations when using VLS in practice. Please have a look before jumping into conclusions, a lot of what he mentions was really in agreement with some of the things you have said in your articles.
Kip Thorne is clearly well aware of the slowing of time near a BH, reaching zero speed at the EH…but is either confused or I ‘m missing something important here..He says that when you fall into the BH and pass the EH, ‘point of no return’,..you can still observe the universe above you…but those outside are not able to see you and you can’t send signals to them.
How could that be though if time has stopped at the EH? How do you actually observe the universe above you if time has stopped and photons do not move anymore? how do you..see?..Or in Thorne’s version of things with constant c and curved space , somehow photons do not stop moving eventhough time has stopped at the EH….Confusion is the word..
As for the VSL Thorne specifically said we/Einstein intentionally chose to use constant speed of light for ease of use. Says we basically defined it to be constant to help us..so things are easier. That was mentioned here in this interview: 3:20 onwards, but its all worth seeing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvdlN4H4T54
Thorne has also mentioned often resorting to the Einstein digital papers. So I believe he is aware of the VSL GR from Einstein as a concept. As for Wormholes..well when asked in a more serious tone, his answer is that they most probably do not even really exist. Now for film purposes (Contact, Interstellar) wormholes and other crazy ideas were entertained by him and others over the years..I guess these topics sell a lot..I believe he believes the same 😉 But they are hypothetical objects till proven otherwise and unlikely to exist as he even said himself. Anyway..also when asked about Time travel he also mentions that time travel if it were to be possible, it would have to respect the speed of light limit and since time flows towards one direction it would need,to always respect, locally, the forward flow of time..
As for how black holes fall…..
Yeah how do they when the time flow at the EH is reaching zero, well I hope I get a chance to ask him directly when I will be visiting a lecture he is giving in couple of days in a nearby Uni and will try to get some input.
But maybe the analogy on the other thread that you made with the fully crowded deck(where one cannot move in the crowd) which is on a moving ship..is a good one and maybe BH do fall /move/orbit and merge etc in a way similar to that..ie the areas closer to the BH EH will indeed be ‘frozen’ but the whole BH with its near affected surrounding space can move and drag the ‘frozen’ center along..
All points noted Akis. I’ll watch the Unzicker video. I’ve spoken to him about a few things, and I don’t think I’ve ever found myself disagreeing with him.
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I’ve never had any communication with Kip Thorne, and I find myself disagreeing with lots of things he’s said. Yes, I think he’s confused, because he doesn’t actually understand that “the curvature of light rays occurs only in spaces where the speed of light is spatially variable”. Or that at the event horizon, the speed of light is zero. That means you can’t fall though it. Yes, confusion is the word. He might be aware of Einstein’s VSL, but he hasn’t thought it through. I’m confident that the infalling body never even gets to the event horizon – we don’t see gamma ray bursts for nothing. See my Firewall! article. I’ll watch the interview. I will force myself, because I am not a fan. Interstellar was promoted as serious science, but some of it was pseudoscience junk.
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It might be best if you didn’t ask Kip Thorne about how black holes fall down. He shared a Nobel prize for saying they do: In 2017, Thorne was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”. He might give you a hard time. Or me.
Before writing and proposing such elaborate and scientifically fecund theories and opinions about light would it not help to first firmly establish what, exactly, is light ? Then, upon doing so, the things themselves which purportedly affect the speed of light would take on an entirely new meaning and application in everyday human activity…
Maybe, Michael. I struggled with the ordering of these articles. I ended up writing about the nature of light as a lead-in to some articles about electromagnetism. See https://physicsdetective.com/what-is-a-photon/ and https://physicsdetective.com/the-photon/
Speed of light
They say, it stands up on an observer in every inertial frame. Yes, when the light source shines in that frame, it is true.
Some man mistook this fact natural for a great discovery. And it is believed widely.
Surely there is confusion here between what is locally measured and what is measured from a distant point.
If I stand at the top of a hill with my standard metre rule, then go to the bottom and measure something with it, am I not correct in assuming my meter hasn’t changed? It is my standard metre, after all. The same argument can be used with time. If I use my standard timepiece at the bottom of the hill it still records seconds. But if I ask my twin on the top of the hill “What is the length of my metre and the behaviour of my timepiece”, he will tell me they have changed. If I go back to the top and check, I can confirm that they remain unchanged.
There is definitely some confusion here, David. If you stand at the top of a hill with your standard ruler and your standard parallel-mirror light clock, then measure the speed of light at that location, you measure it to be 299,792,458 m/s. Then if you go to the bottom of the hill and measure the speed of light at that location, you still measure it to be 299,792,458 m/s. That’s because both your optical clock and the light go slower at the lower location. You go slower too, because of the wave nature of matter. So you don’t notice that light goes slower when it’s lower. You have to take a step back to see the big picture. Then what you see, is this:
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It’s exaggerated of course, but clocks definitely go slower when they’re lower. Light clocks go slower when they’re lower because light goes slower when it’s lower. However your metre rule doesn’t change. The metre is defined as the distance travelled by light in 1/299792458th of a second. When the light goes slower the second is bigger, and the slower light and the bigger second cancel each other out.
I understand your argument and agree. It all depends on your idea of what a ‘standard’ is.
In general relativity for a Schwarzschild black hole, you can calculate the speed of light for a distant observer and it approaches zero at the event horizon. Since the time coordinate approaches infinity there, we cannot conclude on that basis that c=0 at the event horizon but it has to be true, otherwise photons could reach the outside world. But it can be shown that if c=0 in one frame of reference, then it is true in any frame of reference.
Someone is sure to cite Hawkins at this point; that relies on quantum mechanics but that was never considered by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler when ‘proving’ the existence of a central singularity.
That’s exactly it, David. The important thing is “the curvature of light rays occurs only in spaces where the speed of light is spatially variable”. This means the ascending light beam speeds up, and a black hole is black because at the event horizon, the speed of light is zero.
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Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates include a schoolboy error that says a stopped observer sees a stopped clock ticking normally “in his frame”. He doesn’t. The clock is stopped, and so is he. See https://physicsdetective.com/black-holes/ for more. But you might like to look at https://physicsdetective.com/how-gravity-works/ first, followed by https://physicsdetective.com/the-principle-of-equivalence-and-other-myths/.
Cconstancy of speed of light
In an area where propagation of light follows the emission theory, it is constant relative to the light source. In an area where propagation of light follows aether, it is constant relative to aether. So, it cannot be constant relative to moving observers.
It isn’t constant relative to moving observers, Hiroji. It just looks constant to them, because of the wave nature of matter. Robert Close explained it in The Other Meaning of Special Relativity, which I referred to in the previous article. Maybe I should refer to it in this article too.
Reexamination of propagation of light (I say again)
In outer space, a mirror is reflecting star light ray. Speed of reflected light relative to the mirror is constant. Speed of incident light relative to the mirror is not constant (the latter is constant relative to aether).
Light is propagated in two ways.
Propagation following the emission theory, it is propagated in vaccum space and propagation following aether, it is propagated in aether. A mirror in outer space that is reflecting star light ray shows above.
Hi John,
A question for you that occurred to me. I am happy that light goes slower when its lower. Experiments with clocks at different altitudes demonstrate this. However, with regard to vacuum they appear to separate out an important point. Clocks go faster on GPS satellites than on the ground. This is taken as a result of relativity and time dilation, but I think the point you have made has been more to do with physical effect of vacuum polarisation and the space in and around atoms increasing in density at lower altitudes. I wanted to provide a bit of context to my question but the question is basically this; Is all vacuum created equal or is vacuum affected by altitude?
The answer to this question could be investigated by using two similar atomic clocks. Each would need to be at the same altitude and located close in the vicinity of each other. One clock would need to be in a vacuum chamber that was evacuated and the other in a similar vacuum chamber but at atmospheric pressure. The experiment could be repeated at a different altitude.
One impact of a positive result for this experiment would be that vacuum density varies and it affects the speed of light. That would mean that the definition of the speed of light would need to be be defined, in vacuum and at an altitude, not just the speed of light in vacuum. I would be interested in your thoughts.
Andy: GPS clocks are subject to an SR slowing down due to their speed, and a GR speeding up due to their altitude. See Phil Fraundorf’s graph
” rel=”nofollow ugc”>here. The GR effect predominates.
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Is all vacuum created equal? I’m not sure. But I am sure that it’s affected by a concentration of energy in the guise of a massive star. It “conditions” the surrounding space. I think of it as an outward pressure. A pressure gradient and so a density gradient. The density diminishes with altitude.
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The speed of light in air is circa 299,700 km/s, which is about 90 km/s less than c. This would show up in your two similar atomic clocks. But you can’t say that this difference is because the vacuum density varies. Here’s an analogy: imagine you walk at 4mph. If the pavement is clear of people, you walk 4 miles in 1 hour. If however the pavement is crowded with people coming at you, you have to dodge around them. You still walk at 4mph, but after 1 hour you’re only 3 miles down the street. The air molecules are like the people.
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On top of that, If you’re a big guy with big long strides your total path length is more than it would be if you were a little old lady with little steps. So longer wavelengths get refracted more than shorter wavelengths. Whenever you see this wavelength-dependent refraction, you know that the lower propagation speed isn’t just due to a variation in vacuum density.
Thanks for your thoughts. Personally, I would really like to see an experiment of the sort I described regarding confirming the properties of vacuum at different gravitational potentials i.e. local field strengths. I think it would speak to the issues supposedly addressed addressed by the Michelson-Morley experiment where they conclude the speed of light is constant in all directions and therefore there is no ether. I disagree. Apart from any other considerations I suspect that the Michelson-Morley experiment was not accurate enough to determine the speed of light sufficiently accurately to rule out the size of changes to the speed of light that might result from vacuum polarization or ether density variation. Until there is some solid evidence I need to keep an open mind but I strongly favour an ether hypothesis where density variation is a possibility.
Also, there is a comment from me visible on November 15th with an equation in it. I was just playing with the MathJax facility in your comments and I deleted the comment after I had made it at the time. I think it has been restored in error. It does not need to be removed, it is an equation from my website, but it is out of context and no relevant as a comment on this page.
I disagree too. So did Einstein. He reintroduced the aether when he did general relativity. As for Michelson-Morley, they didn’t know about the wave nature of matter. Trying to measure a different speed of light is like trying to measure your shadow using the shadow of your stick. I deleted your comment. I had found it in the bin and thought my spam filter was being too zealous. Apologies!
Glass and light (I say again)
From the right, star light is coming. Two cubes of glass are moving toward the star at the different speed. In the glass, speed of light is c/n : the same. Because in the glass, light emitted from particles follows the emission theory.
By the way, let’s see the light before arriving (from the glass). Wavelength is the same. Frequently and light speed are not the same.
Funnily enough Hiroji, the speed of light in glass is c when it’s moving between the particles that make up the glass. The particles slow down the shorter-wavelength light more than the longer-wavelength light, hence prisms. It’s similar for water droplets in the air. Hence rainbows. IMHO a crowded pavement is a reasonable analogy: imagine you walk at 4mph. If the pavement is clear of people, you walk 4 miles in 1 hour. If however the pavement is crowded with people coming towards you, you have to dodge around them. You still walk at 4mph, but after 1 hour you’re only 3 miles down the street. Then if you’re a tall young man with long strides you’re affected less than if you’re a little old lady with short strides. Anyway, the wife is calling. Merry Christmas!
It never made sense to me that ‘space’ curves. Always thought that gravity influenced movement. Also thought that ‘time’ , as an influence on anything, is an aberration, an illusion. Time is the notation, or measurement of movement. Slow down movement, time (as a constant) doesn’t change, just measurement changes. All these things you’ve mentioned made sense! (and I’m a 9th grade dropout)
Good man William!
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When you take it one step at a time, you can understand gravity. Then you realise that Einstein described a gravitational field as space that’s “neither homogeneous nor isotropic”. Not curved. Click on NEXT at the bottom of each article to read one article after the other, and hopefully it all builds up into a coherent description that does make sense.
Aether
Speed of light relative to mediums (such as water or air) is constant. Speed of light relative to aether (physical substance, will be) will be constant also. Aberrations show this.
But, such a view will have been written by not a few.
Hiroji: the speed of light in air is different to the speed of light in water. The speed depends on the medium, and when the properties of the medium changes, the speed changes. This is why optical clocks go slower then they’re lower. Because in a gravitational field, space is “neither homogeneous nor isoptropic”. Hence “the curvature of light rays occurs only in spaces where the speed of light is spatially variable”.
Propagation of light (I say again)
Light will be propagated in three ways (as follows).
1 In mediums speed of light is c/n. MM experiment will be invalid.
2 In outer space, a star light is reflected by a mirror. Speed of incident light is constant relative to aether.
3 In outer space, a star light is reflected by a mirror. Speed of reflected light is constant relative to the mirror.
In three pictures above each, speed of light to a moving observer will follow Galilean transformation.
Propagation of light (I say again)
Light will be propagated in three ways (as follows).
1 In mediums, speed of light is c/n. MM experiment (done in air) is invalid.
2. In outer space, a star light is reflected by a mirror. Speed of incident light is constant relative to aether.
3 In outer space, a star light is reflected by a mirror. Speed of reflected light is constant relative to the mirror.
In three pictures above each, speed of light to a moving observer follows Galilean transformation.
Make sure you read this, Hiroji: the other meaning of special relativity by Robert Close. When you’re made of light along with your rods and clocks, the speed of light always appears to be the same. It’s like trying to measure the length of your shadow using the shadow of your stick.
Is there any problem with the following relativity?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah35wVhzsRE
That video has been removed by the uploader, hyama.
Hi John,
It has been a while since I was in contact with you but I noticed something today that I would like your opinion on.
I guess you are aware of the redefinition of the SI system that has been taking place over the last few years resulting in absolute definitions for 7 constant values in the SI system and some second order derived values. The current values are mentioned as defined here with their values. https://www.npl.co.uk/si-units. The definition that interests me is the definition of an absolute frequency for a transition frequency for the caesium atom. The implication is that this caesium atom has a property which does not change, anywhere in the universe, under any conditions. However, we are aware of the evidence that atomic clocks go slower when they are lower in the gravitational well. I am generally of what I think is the same opinion as you that the speed of light is spatially variable and certainly varies with position in the gravitational well, or altitude as we would see it on earth. This is the reason that clocks appear to go slower when they are lower. It just strikes me that this frequency based property of the caesium atom should be subject to the same frequency variation. Unless it is such a small signal frequency variation that its magnitude of variation is below the threshold of measurement with respect to the other definitions, one of which is the speed of light in vacuum held as constant everywhere, which also seems to be a flawed assertion.
Any thoughts?
Andy: it’s like what Einstein said on page 149 of Relativity, the Special and General Theory: “an atom absorbs or emits light at a frequency which is dependent on the potential of the gravitational field in which it is situated“. The transition frequency of a caesium atom on the floor is less than the transition frequency of a caesium atom at the ceiling. It’s the same for other atoms. That’s why the NIST optical clocks go slower when they’re lower. It was David Wineland of NIST who said “if one clock in one lab is 30cm higher than the clock in the other lab, we can see the difference in the rates they run at”.
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The NIST definition you’re referring to is nonsense. It’s a Humpty-Dumpty definition. It ignores the tautology. It’s saying these two clocks are running at the same rate, even though one’s running faster than the other. We live in a cargo-cult world Andy. An idiocracy. A dark age.
100 percent agree with you. I just posted on Quora and submitted an essay to Gravity Research Foundation arguing the exact same thing as your article – the speed of c is a function of gravitational potential and therefore nets different speeds when measured across different gravitational potentials by a clock located at a fixed gravitational potential. I think everyone in physics believes c is a function of gravitational potential and realizes its probably variable but until it is proven in a lab no one is going to go against the accepted norms. To risky for their careers. Science is a show me business. You need to do an experiment and prove c is variable across different gravitational potentials. Here is a simple experiment I proposed in my articles – emit two photons simultaneously from the center of a room – one up, one down – reflect them back to their emission point at the center of the room. The top photon will arrive first. I even made a youtube vid over a year ago explaining how the Michelson-Morley experiment would have detected the variable speed of c had they simply oriented one of their apparatuses arms vertically.
Good stuff Randy. But I’d say only a few people in physics know that c is a function of gravitational potential. I’d also say that there are some people in physics think it’s a huge threat. When you know that the speed of light is “spatially variable” you know that light veers light any wave veers when there’s an orthogonal gradient in wave speed. Then when you know about the wave nature of matter you know how gravity works. Only then you know that the people who say “one of the deepest puzzles in modern physics is whether there’s a gravity particle” are talking nonsense. See the leptoquark hype. In my experience such people will censor anybody who challenges what they say, because it threatens their authority, and it threatens messenger particles and thus the Standard Model. Thence by extension it threatens particle physics, thence all physics and physicists. I’ve spoken to a lot of people over a lot of years, and as far as I can tell there’s far more active censorship than self-censorship. They will even censor your experimental results. Out of interest, please can you give me some hyperlinks to your material? And can you give me some links to mainstream physics sites where you’ve talked about this sort of thing?
@Randy: Would that experiment work? A possible theoretical objection is that while the photon emitted down would slow down (and the one emitted up speed up), when it returns it will move back into higher gravitational potential with a steeper gradient and speed up faster than the ‘up’ photon on its first leg. I just wonder whether the effects would cancel out due to the fact that we can’t perform a one-way measurement.
Go to youtube and Quora and search my name randy kubick. Only have few things posted. You’re my first physics site. thx.
@Anders – this experiment is a race – we are not measuring the speed of c – no time or clock is needed – all we care about is who wins the race – so it will work because the top photon whether going up or down is always at a higher gravitational potential than the lower photon and thus always moving faster. I have the formula posted on my Quora post. Just search my name there – I only have one post. BTW the one-way speed of light experiment can be done. Emit two photons simultaneously from the center of a spinning ring – one left, one right. If the photon hits on the spinning ring are not exactly 180 degrees apart then one of the photons was faster than the other. ?
That makes sense, and I agree.
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I wonder what length the arms of an experimental setup would have to be. LIGO dimensions, a superdeep borehole one way and a mirror on a plane the other? Or is it measurable on a much smaller scale. I suppose it’s critical to use the exact same distance both ways.
Same lengths top and bottom would be an absolute must – I estimate no higher than 10 meters – 5 meters top and bottom – LIGO reflects their beam over 200 times – just ramp up the reflection number to several thousand by scaling up width – should not be an issue. Put 500,000+ rpm spinning ring at center return point – photon hits on spinning ring will not be 180 degrees apart due top one arriving before bottom one. Compared to LIGO this experiment can easily be done. Single photon emitters are even doable with today’s technology.
The problem with that Randy, is this: “The metre is currently defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458th of a second”. So those people who swear that the speed of light is absolutely constant will NOT employ same lengths top and bottom.
That’s the problem, isn’t it: measuring delta (X) over distances that are defined by X. And science assumes X to be a priori constant. Both arms are 5m but the up arm is longer than the down arm so there will be no speed difference. (I hope I got that right, it’s a bit confusing because the exercise seems circular…)
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We may have to go back to the Prototype Metre Bar 🙂
It’s Humpty Dumpty physics, Anders. It’s like “the speed of light is constant because I define it to be constant”. You might just as well say the speed of all racehorses is the same. So for the horse that won the race, time ran faster. Not the horse. Have you ever seen the movie Idiocracy?
Yes, I am aware that main stream physics deems distance a function of gravitational potential (gp). Even though Shapiro time delay refutes this assertion proving distance is invariant and independent of gp. Because if distance were a function of gp then the elapsed time of c in the Shapiro time delay experiment would not have netted the extra elapsed time that it did. So here is another simple experiment that can prove that the distance between two points and/or the dimensions of matter is invariant and independent of gp. Take a diffraction grating with very small slits. Shine a light with a wavelength just slightly smaller than the width of the slits so that the light will pass through. Jump on a plane and start going up in altitude. The light will redshift increasing in wavelength and there will be a point when the light will no longer pass through the diffraction grating slits because its wavelength will become too big. This will prove that while we know the wavelength of light is a function of gp – distance (including the dimensions of matter) is not. Look at the grating on your microwave door with all the little holes. Microwave photons don’t escape through these holes because their wavelength is bigger than the holes. I did a similar experiment in college where we dropped chicken wire over a radio antennae and the radio lost reception because the radio waves were too big to fit through the holes in the chicken wire. ?
Randy, see what I said above:
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As for when I’m not sure. But Irwin Shapiro was talking about the variable speed of light in 1964. His paper was all about what we now call the Shapiro delay. Wikipedia faithfully quotes what Shapiro said, which is that “the speed of a light wave depends on the strength of the gravitational potential along its path”. That’s in line with Einstein and the evidence of optical clocks going slower when they’re lower.
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Also see https://physicsdetective.com/the-principle-of-equivalence-and-other-myths/ where I refer to page 149 of Relativity, the Special and General Theory. The wavelength of the upward photon doesn’t change. The upward photon is emitted at a lower frequency at a lower elevation. The frequency doesn’t reduce as the photon ascends.
The reason light bends in a gravity field is because its bottom side being at a lower gp than its top side moves slower. It’s that simple. Time and c vary in lock step as a function of gp. This means the wavelength of light MUST decrease when it ‘falls’ and increase when it ‘ascends’ otherwise light would not bend. Frequency is a function of gp because it moderates your time rate. Locate with a propagating photon and its speed and frequency is always measured as invariant. Remain stationary at a gp different from the gp of the observation point of the photon and its speed and frequency will be directly proportional to the difference in time rate between the two different gp’s. This is because time and the speed of c and its wavelength vary in lock step as a function of gp. BTW after studying The Standard Model of Physics and Quantum Field Theory I’ve come to the conclusion this thing we call ‘space’ does not exist. Our universe is made up only of quantum fields. I think space is an ‘aphysical convention’ – cerebral manifestation – invention of the mind – heuristic theory – etc etc etc. Please show me one single theory that empirically proves space actually exists? The SM model doesn’t even list space as a fundamental quantum field. GR doesn’t tell us what it is. GR is simply a derived observational theory that predicts how space and matter interact. What we call ‘space’ could actually be a caused by variable quantum field density. Do you really believe matter warping space is axiomatic?
Randy: I agree re the reason light bends in a gravitational field. But think about conservation of energy. If you drop a 511keV electron into a black hole, the black hole mass-energy increases by 511keV. In similar vein if you convert that electron into a 511keV photon, and then send that into a black hole, the black hole mass-energy increases by 511keV. Note that E=hf and if E didn’t change and h didn’t change, nor did f. So the descending photon didn’t increase in frequency. In similar vein the ascending photon doesn’t decrease in frequency. You measure it to have a lower frequency at a higher elevation because you and your clocks are running faster at that higher elevation. The photon frequency didn’t change as it ascended, you changed when you ascended. So did your clocks.
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As regards quantum field theory, and space, you should read what Einstein said. He said “a field is a state of space”. I think he’s right. Have a read of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories#Quantum_vacuum. Theories don’t prove that space actually exists. However Einstein did describe a gravitational field as a place where space was “neither homogeneous nor isotropic”. Light doesn’t bend for nothing. Note that matter doesn’t warp space. It makes it inhomogeneous. You should read the next article and follow the hyperlinks.
Constancy of speed of light (Reexamination)
Constancy of speed of light is not possible always. No, it will be possible limitedly in the following two events only. Btw, speed of light in mediums is not subject of this reexamination.
1) A geometric point and a light source are in the same inertial frame. Distance between the two is supposed to be within a few light seconds.
2) A geometric point is stationary in aether frame. Light propagated in aether comes to this point. Distance to the light source is supposed to be more than a few light seconds.
Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
I think the important thing is to see what’s there, Hiroji. People look at two identical light clocks at different elevations, and they see that the lower clock is going slower. But then they say that’s because time goes slower. Even though they can’t see this thing called time. They disbelieve the patent evidence they can see, because they believe in something they can’t see.
— ” The speed of light in the vacuum is constant. Amen. ”
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Perhaps it is.
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Only that there is no such thing as “the vacuum”.
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One way of thinking about it is that the speed of light is limited due to physical properties of space, akin to the aether.
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I prefer to think that the speed of light fluctuates with changes in gravitational fields.
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Zbigniew Modrzejewski — ” I prefer to think that the speed of light fluctuates with changes in gravitational fields.”
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The 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics Laureate, Gerard ‘t Hooft, wrote :
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” Einstein’s relativity theory appears to be very accurate, but at times equally puzzling.
On the one hand, electromagnetic radiation must have zero rest mass in order to
propagate at the speed of light, but on the other hand, since it definitely carries
momentum and energy, it has non-zero inertial mass. Hence, by the principle of
equivalence, it must have non-zero gravitational mass, and so, light must be heavy.
In this paper, no new results will be derived, but a possibly surprising perspective on
the above paradox is given.” — https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.06478.pdf
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Well, if light must have non-zero gravitational mass, then the speed of light will be under influence of gravitational fields. So says the theory. But what about experimental evidence ?
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Dr. Rochus Boerner, Ph.D., https://isearch.asu.edu/profile/194479 wrote :
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” The late physicist Bryan G. Wallace discovered in 1961 that radar distance measurements of the surface of the planet Venus did not support the constancy of the speed of light. There were systematic variations in the radar data containing diurnal, lunar and synodic components. Attempting to get his results published in Physical Review Letters, he encountered great resistance from referees, and eventually settled for a lesser journal (41).
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In a letter to Physics Today (42) Wallace summarizes his findings as follows: The 1961 interplanetary radar contact with Venus presented the first opportunity to overcome technological limitations and perform direct experiments of Einstein’s second postulate of a constant light speed of c in space. When the radar calculations were based on the postulate, the observed-computed residuals ranged to over 3 milliseconds of the expected error of 10 microseconds from the best [general relativity] fit the Lincoln Lab could generate, a variation range of over 30,000%. An analysis of the data showed a component that was relativistic in a c+v Galilean sense.
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Let us do a reality check here. If the speed of light in interplanetary space is non constant, how could NASA not have noticed in its robotic exploration of the solar system? Wallace makes the scandalous claim that NASA has noticed, and has been using equations with non-relativistic components to calculate signal transit times in the solar system all along: At the December 1974 AAS Dynamical Astronomy Meeting, E. M. Standish Jr of JPL reported that significant unexplained systematic variations existed in all the interplanetary data, and that they are forced to use empirical correction factors that have no theoretical foundation.(43)
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In a 1973 paper (44), Wallace describes how the Lincoln Lab introduced averaging to suppress the anomalous radar results and refused to release the raw data to him, stonewalling his investigation.
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The apparent improvement in the residuals for later years was due to the fact that the Lab interpolated the 1964 [Venus] data to 12:00 UT and the 1967 data to one observation a day from 2:12 UT to 2:21 UT. The observing time for the 1961 data ranged from 00:33 UT to 23:40 UT. The involved radar astronomers are publicly claiming nearly complete agreement between their recent radar analysis and general relativity, but my investigation reveals otherwise. At the Fourth Texas Symposium of Relativistic Astrophysics, I.I. Shapiro of the Lincoln Lab promised to send me any data I wanted. I read in an article published by the lab that they had data for the same observing dates covering a wide range of daily observing times from both the MIT and USSR radar stations. I wrote Shapiro requesting this data 2/13/69; his letters of 2/28/69 and 3/12/69 ignored my request. I made an issue of this in my letter to him of 3/20/69, and in his reply of 3/27/69 he stated, ‘Unfortunately the data do not exist in the form in which you wanted them and hence, I cannot honor your request.’
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Shapiro later sent me data that were completely worthless for making an objective test of the relative velocity of light in space. The data were from two MIT radar stations in Massachusetts. The separation between them was only 0.2′ of longitude and 20.6″ of latitude and the observations had been interpolated to 2:12 UT to 2:21 UT with only one observation per day. It seems obvious that the Lab eliminated the variations by interpolating the data for each day to the one observing time for that day that agreed with the general relativity prediction. One could use the same method to prove that a stopped clock keeps perfect time.
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A subsequent letter submitted to Physics Today on July 9, 1984 was denied publication. Wallace reproduced this letter in the chapter Publication Politics of his self-published online book The Farce of Physics (45). In it, he wrote: “During a current literature search, I requested and received a reprint of a paper [T. D. Moyer, Celes. Mech., 23, 33(1981)] published by Theodore D. Moyer of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The paper reports the methods used to obtain accurate values of range observables for radio and radar signals in the solar system. The paper’s (A6) equation and the accompanying information that calls for evaluating the position vectors at the signal reception time is nearly equivalent to the Galilean c+v equation (2) in my paper RADAR TESTING OF THE RELATIVE VELOCITY OF LIGHT IN SPACE. [B. G. Wallace, Spectros. Lett., 2, 361(1969)] The additional terms in the (A6) equation correct for the effects of the troposphere and charged particles, as well as the general relativity effects of gravity and velocity time dilation.
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The fact that the radio astronomers have been reluctant to acknowledge the full theoretical implications of their work is probably related to the unfortunate things that tend to happen to physicists that are rash enough to challenge Einstein’s sacred second postulate. Over twenty-three years have gone by since the original Venus radar experiments clearly showed that the speed of light in space was not constant, and still the average scientist is not aware of this fact! This demonstrates why it is important for the APS to bring true scientific freedom to the PR journal’s editorial policy.
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Supporting evidence comes from Ronald Hatch who finds that the NASA equations for interplanetary navigation follow his MLET theory rather than special relativity: (27) The experimental evidence is almost overwhelming in support of the MLET view. There is a large disjoint between the SRT theorists and the experimentalists. The SRT theorists continue to claim that the speed of light is automatically the velocity c and isotropic with respect to the moving observer or experiment. But the SRT experimentalists do what is necessary to explain and make sense of the measurements. The equations for tracking and navigating the interplanetary probes developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for NASA clearly follow the MLET template.”
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Mr. Wallace died on April 19, 1997, his findings ignored and thus neither confirmed nor refuted by the physics establishment. The question remains: Is the speed of light in interplanetary space subject to systematic variations in time?
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I think that relativity theory is completely mistaken at the foundation and that Lorentz’s interpretation of the Lorentz transformation is correct, meaning that the aether exists after all, and is the cause of relativistic phenomena.
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I further believe that the aether is substantially the same (or a lower aspect) of the Chi/Prana/Ki that the spiritual traditions are familiar with, and that if physics finally self-corrected and recognized the existence of the aether, scientific recognition of the existence of – and explanations for – paranormal phenomena would rapidly follow.
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A definitive experiment that could confirm this once and for all has been proposed – it’s nothing but the old Michelson-Morley experiment conducted in a gaseous medium, rather than a vacuum. The historical physical evidence suggests that when the MM experiment is conducted in a gaseous medium, there is a non-zero effect that contradicts Einstein. The physics community dismisses all the historic experiments that show this as experimentally flawed. The only way to settle this would be a new gas-mode M-M experiment, performed to exacting modern standards.
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In 2004, Italian physicist Maurizio Consoli became an advocate for the view that this experiment needs to be performed and published several papers about that in mainstream journals.
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This lead to a small breakthrough into the mainstream physics community. New Scientist ran a story on this in 2005, (“Catching the cosmic wind”, 02 April 2005 issue) that reported that the experiment might be performed by the same group of physicists in Berlin who had previously gained a reputation for delivering the definitive “null” replication of the Michelson-Morley experiment in vaccuum in 2003. To get a non-null result from them would have turned the world of physics upside down and definitely overthrown Einstein.
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The New Scientist Magazine (“Catching the cosmic wind”, 02 April 2005 issue): Two hundred thousand dollars seems a small price to pay. If the most famous null result in science was right, at least we’ll finally be sure. And if it was wrong, then Einstein is no longer king of the universe. No wonder Maurizio Consoli is keen to get started. This experiment could be dynamite. Consoli, of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Catania, Sicily, has found a loophole in the 19th-century experiment that defined our modern view of the universe. The experiment established that light always travels through space at the same speed, whatever direction it is heading in and whatever the motion of its source: there is no way to put the wind in light’s sails. Einstein used this foundation to build his special theory of relativity, but it seems his confidence may have been premature.
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Here’s what New Scientist reported back then:
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” It is not a straightforward experiment to perform, though. Experimenters have managed to produce a laser frequency stable enough to carry out experiments for hundreds of days only by cooling the cavities to close to absolute zero. If a gas is introduced at these temperatures it will freeze: it’s going to take quite some ingenuity to overcome the problem. Nevertheless, a group of physicists at Humboldt University are considering taking on the challenge. “There is a good chance we will do the experiment,” says Achim Peters, one of the group.
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It’s going to be a much-watched piece of lab work. “If someone does do it, I will be very interested in the result,” says Holger Müller of Stanford University, California, who was involved in laser cavity experiments at Humboldt before moving to the US. Müller admits that a positive result would have profound implications for physics. For a start it would mean that one of Einstein’s contemporaries Hendrik Lorentz, has been denied proper recognition. Lorentz, not Einstein, would have to be credited with the definitive theory of relativity. ”
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Unfortunately, that was the last that anyone heard about this.
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Years later, I sent a (very polite) email to Prof. Achim Peters at Humboldt University, Berlin, asking whether that experiment had been performed or was going to be performed. I received no reply. I also tried to contact the New Scientist writer Markus Chown, author of the original article – twice – suggesting a followup report. This also went nowhere.
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Still waiting for that experiment to be performed by someone.
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My personal best guess is that orthodoxy prevailed and prevented the experiment from being performed. Colleagues told Peters not to waste his time on a wild goose chase, and reminded him of the unfortunate career consequences that usually befall physicists who seriously challenge Einstein. Chown probably received a flood of scathing criticism from scientists for promoting such obviously flawed junk science and realized it was best to never talk about this again.
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If you want to be an activist, do contact — achim.peters@physik.hu-berlin.de — and ask (very politely, in reference to the 2005 New Scientist article), whether his group had performed the announced gas-mode Michelson-Morley experiment and whether a null result had been obtained. ”
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— https://www.aetherforce.energy/the-suppression-of-inconvenient-facts-in-physics-by-rochus-boerner/
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Ziggy, light is heavy was co-authored by Martin van der Mark, the same guy who co-authored Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology? His co-author on light is heavy wasn’t the Nobel prize winner, it was a guy at Phillips Eindhoven. That’s where Martin worked. He was a really nice guy. He stayed overnight at my house once, with his wife Inge. My wife and I plied them with alcohol and I cooked the most wondrous sirloin steaks. It was a great evening. Sadly Martin is no longer with us, he died of a brain tumour on 27/01/2020.
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As for the speed of light, note this in the article: But Irwin Shapiro was talking about the variable speed of light in 1964. His paper was all about what we now call the Shapiro delay. Wikipedia faithfully quotes what Shapiro said, which is that “the speed of a light wave depends on the strength of the gravitational potential along its path”..
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Constancy of speed of light (Reexamination)
Constancy of speed of light is not possible always. No, it will be
possible limitedly in the following two events only. Btw, speed of
light in mediums is not subject of this reexamination.
1) A measurement point and a light source are stationary in the same
inertial frame. Distance between the two is within a few light
seconds. Speed of light is c.
2) A measurement point is stationary in aether frame. Light
propagated in aether is coming to this point. Distance from the
light source is more than a few light sveconds. Speed of light will
not be c.
Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
That’s right Hiroji. The speed of light is not constant, even in special relativity setting, like Don Koks said:
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https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/speed_of_light.html
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But as per the evidence of the wave nature of matter, we are in essence “made of light”, along with our rods and clocks. So measuring the local speed of light is like measuring the length of your shadow using the shadow of your stick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity
Relativity has a vast quanitiy of experimental evidence.
It surely does, Blademan. I like The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment by Clifford M. Will.
About Light
Allow me to re-post as an essay.
◎ How are light waves propagated ?
1) Emission theory (for a few seconds only)
2) On aether (after the above)
◎ How are light sources visible ?
1) For celestial bodies beyond a few light-years, effect of emission theory is too small to be found (e.g. binary stars). So, every celestial body is visible to be stationary on aether (celestial sphere). Also by various aberrations.
2) Moon is by emission theory.
3) Celestial bodies in solar system (excluding moon) are depending on planetary aberrations. Also, depending on other aberrations (but, is secular aberration offset ?).
◎ Motion of light relative to observers
Same as bodies. Follows Galilean transformation. Constancy of speed of light cannot be hypothesized. By the way, light waves (speed = fλ) and photons (rays) are basically different. Especially in outer space.
Speed of light is not constant, it depends on gravity: proven experimentally.
Leonov Vladimir – Preprint: ResearchGate, December 2021, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357406248
Abstract
We obtained experimental evidence refuting well-known postulate of Einstein’s theory of relativity that “the speed of light is a constant”.
For the first time, we got evidence confirmed experimentally and new formulas showing that the speed of light decelerates in a gravitational field. Due to the influence of the Earth’s gravitational field the speed of light deceleration on the Earth’s surface is 0.1 m/s. The speed of light deceleration in the Sun’s gravitational field near the Sun is 318 m/s. The speed of light has stopped on the surface of a black hole.
These discoveries were made possible due to new quantum theory of gravity, the theory of Superunification, and a fundamentally new linear dynamic interferometer developed for detecting changes of the speed of light in a gravitational field. Such discoveries radically change our understanding of the nature of gravity and electromagnetism. The speed of light is not a constant. Physics based on the postulate “the speed of light is a constant” needs to be revised.
Sorry Vladimir, this was in the spam folder. Note that Einstein said the speed of light was constant in 1905, but by 1907 he started saying it varied with gravitational potential. He never stopped saying this. Sadly, after he died, general relativity changed, and became a rather different theory to the original.
This is an interesting paper (free PDF) on the De Witte experiment:
“The Roland De Witte 1991 Detection of Absolute Motion and Gravitational Waves”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2176784_The_Roland_De_Witte_1991_Detection_of_Absolute_Motion_and_Gravitational_Waves
From the paper:
“The intrinsic problem all along has been that the observed anisotropy of the speed of light also affects the very apparatus being used to measure the anisotropy. In particular the Lorentz-Fitzgerald length contraction effect must be included in
the analysis of the interferometer when the calibration constant for the device is calculated.”
Thanks Rich. It amazes me that most physicists continue to believe that the speed of light is constant, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
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PS: It looks like there’s some GoDaddy issue at the moment, wherein comments are blocked. I saw this:
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Access Denied – GoDaddy Website Firewall
If you are the site owner (or you manage this site), please whitelist your IP or if you think this block is an error please open a support ticket and make sure to include the block details (displayed in the box below), so we can assist you in troubleshooting the issue.
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It looks like all IP addresses are blocked. I had to go into my “edit site” facility to leave this comment. Apologies. I have raised a ticket with GoDaddy.
In his book “Relativity: The Special and the General Theory” (Three Rivers Press, 1961), Einstein again asserts light’s variability. But he never reverses his position on its constancy. Exactly the opposite. He maintains that both are true despite the nullifying contradiction.
For his explanation of starlight’s displacement observed during the 1919 eclipse that supposedly confirmed relativity, he correctly concludes that: “A curvature of rays of light [near the Sun] can only take place when the velocity of propagation of light varies with position.” This is nothing more than refraction. But it fundamentally invalidates relativity’s founding premise, light’s fixed velocity.
He tries to argue after the fact that special relativity is still valid despite light’s variability because “its results hold only so long as we are able to disregard the influences of gravitational fields.” But wait. How would that work?
Where are the locations or conditions under which the effect of gravitational fields can be ignored? Whether it’s at the subatomic level or the self-gravity of our entire (presumed) finite universe, aren’t gravitational fields everywhere? Don’t they surround and permeate every object and extend indefinitely? So how can they be disregarded? They can’t.
Which means light’s velocity has no possibility of ever being fixed. It has to vary everywhere. (And that’s in addition to its compounding.) Without its underlying premise, how can relativity, or any of its ancillaries like the Lorentz transformation have any validity? They all become nothing more than theoretical contrivances that have no practical relevance.
Einstein would not disagree. He qualifies his assertion of light’s variability: If we’re unable to disregard the influences of gravitational fields [as we just reasoned] then “the special theory of relativity and with it the whole theory of relativity would be laid in the dust.”
Our entire cosmology, including the big bang, is rooted in a theory whose own author reasons is altogether untenable. But mesmerized by relativity’s metaphysical mysticism and rendered impotent by groupthink, we continue rushing headlong like lemmings completely blind to our folly.
That’s pretty much spot on, Ken. Apart from the “we” at the end. Plenty have people have known about the variable speed of light. For years and years. However it is censored by academics. Censorship is a way of life for these guys. For them it is normal. It’s how they operate. They are brazen about it. Unfortunately for them the dam is leaking, everywhere. People now know how they operate, and they do not like it.
I couldn’t agree more. But I don’t see the dam breaking any time soon. The human personality being what it is isn’t prone to self-reflection or change. Admitting their foolishness and that they’ve been duped by relativity’s implicit “Emperor’s New Clothes” ruse (only the wise and intelligent are capable of comprehending it) is not possible for an arrogant elitist academia. And if they can’t accept light’s variability, they certainly won’t concede that its constancy is conceptually impossible either even though it’s just as obvious.
Imagine you’re in one of Einstein’s thought experiments riding a train with a flashlight that you’re pointing directly forward. He’d have us believe that the speed of its light would be 186,000mi/s less the train’s speed, that the train’s rate of time would be running slightly slower, and that it and you would be physically contracting but only in the direction of its motion all to satisfy his assumption of light’s fixed velocity. We all (generalizing) believe this to be true.
But what would happen if you then pointed another flashlight perpendicular (or at any angle) to its motion? With no contraction or motion in that direction, and with time’s “slower” rate, that light’s velocity would not only differ from the forward pointing light but it’d exceed 186,000mi/s, the universe’s supposed maximum speed limit.
This ordinary circumstance, that should be obvious to everyone but isn’t, reveals the unresolvable conflict inherent in light’s presumed constancy. Conceptually, in our real three-dimensional world, it cannot be fixed. It’s mechanically required to compound with the motion of its source, which completely undermines any argument for its constancy, just like with its variability, that in turn also completely invalidates relativity.
Apparently, Einstein’s “genius” failed to perceive light’s, and time’s, inherent three-dimensionality but confined his reasoning only to the one abstract dimension of linear motion. He does concede though that if it were found that light’s velocity was not constant in all cases then relativity would out of necessity completely unravel.
I don’t think it’s relativity’s Emperor’s New Clothes. I think it came from the likes of John Wheeler and Dennis Sciama, who were instrumental in the “golden age” in the 1960s. See Wikipedia where you can read this: Kip Thorne identifies the “golden age of general relativity” as the period roughly from 1960 to 1975, during which the study of general relativity,[35] which had previously been regarded as something of a curiosity, entered the mainstream of theoretical physics.. Also see the links in my article above. Einstein only believed in a constant speed of light for two years, between 1905 and 1907. When you forget about gravity that’s fair enough, because light has a wave nature, and the speed of a wave depends on the medium, not the emitter or absorber. Then if you’re riding the train and you have a beam of light coming at you, you still measure it to be 186,000 miles a second because of the wave nature of matter. It’s like measuring the length of your shadow with the shadow of your stick. Einstein didn’t know that in 1905 or 1907, he thought light was corpuscular. But he should have known it in 1925. However he seems to have totally lost his mojo in 1920.
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Whilst I’m generally OK with Einstein’s relativity (apart from the fact that he didn’t credit guys like Poincare, Fitzgerald, Lorentz, and Voigt and was involved in a number of “priority disputes”), I have never liked length contraction. The wave nature of matter means an electron is smeared out along its direction of travel. So it is length extended, not length contracted. Hence if it could see and think, it would think that some other electron at rest was length-contracted. Another thing I don’t like is the notion that there is no absolute frame. The CMBR gives us the rest frame of the universe, and that’s absolute enough for me.
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PS: the speed of light does not compound with the motion of its source, but it does vary even in special relativity. See https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/speed_of_light.html by Don Koks the PhysicsFAQ editor.
Thank you so much for your research and insights. It’s crucial.
Thanks Rich. I’ve been under pressure this year, so I haven’t done much of late. But I hope that is now in the past.
Thank you for very interesting blog.
I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about Michelson-Morley experiment and how could variable speed of light explain it and then I found this paper:
Michelson-Morley experiment proves light speed is not constant
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262925968_Michelson-Morley_experiment_proves_light_speed_is_not_constant
I think they made very precise calculations and showed fundamental problems in the experiment and even showed that the experiment actually supports the theory of variable speed of light.
However, it amazes me that if the experiment was so inaccurate that no one noticed it much sooner.
Thanks Vit. I took a look at the paper, and I liked this: “If we accept this last derivation, then it will mean they have used parallelogram law in y-direction and constant velocity approach in x-direction. This is clearly wrong and inconsistent.”. However I would have to check that. Particularly since I didn’t like this: “Our analysis shows that MM experiment validates the nonconstancy of light velocity. When we disregard gravity, light moves through space. The speed of that light depends on the properties of that space. Not on the motion of the Earth, or on any abstract thing called a frame of reference.
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Something I should have included in this article is The Other Meaning of Special Relativity by Robert Close. It’s in the previous article, not this one. See : http://www.classicalmatter.org/ClassicalTheory/OtherRelativity.pdf. The bottom line is that we always measure the local speed of light to be the same because of the wave nature of matter. It’s like measuring the length of your shadow using the shadow of your stick. PS: apologies for the delayed reply.
I don’t intend to be rude, John, I certainly do appreciate original thinkers, revolutionary thinkers, but I don’t think you understand the physics. Einstein had problems with curvature of light in a gravitational potential precisely because he thought he had eliminated the Aether. The speed does vary, but it’s due to refraction by the vacuum – the Aether. Light travels at the same speed but it takes a longer path, a roundabout route you might say. This is what I believe anyway. If you read Hestenes’ paper, Zitterbewegung Structure in Electrons and Photons, starting on the bottom of page 21, it’s all about the path density:
“Duane was the first to offer a quantitative explanation for electron diffraction as quantized momentum exchange [63]. A more general argument using standard quantum mechanics has been worked out by Van Vliet [64, 65]. These explanations suffer from the same disease as Old Quantum Mechanics in failing to account for the density distribution in the diffraction pattern. However, we now have the possibility of curing that disease with relativistic Pilot Wave theory. We only need to explain how the momentum exchange is incorporated into the Pilot Wave guidance law.
[T]his provides a promising mechanism for quantized momentum transfer in diffraction. For we know that quantized states in QM are determined by boundary conditions on the phase. Successful calculation of diffraction. patterns along these lines would provide strong evidence for the following claim: the vacuum surrounding electromagnetically inert matter is permeated by a vector potential with vanishing curl. Remarkably, the same mechanism would explain the extended Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect [66]. Evidently, then, the causal agents for diffraction and the AB effect are one and the same: a universal vector potential permeating the vacuum (or, Aether, if you will) of all spacetime, much as proposed by Dirac
[67].
Considering the similarity of electron and photon diffraction patterns, we should expect the same mechanism to explain both, especially if photons are composed of electron-positron pairs as proposed in Section V. Indeed, the evolution of path density for the electron is determined by the Dirac equation which gives
^2Φ = −m_ecz˙ · ln ρ. (226)
For a photon with propagation vector k, the analog is
k · ln ρ = ^2Φ/hbar, (227)
where, of course, ρ is the path density for photons, just as it is for electrons. Accordingly, we conclude that diffraction is “caused” by the vacuum surrounding material objects. In other words, diffraction is refraction by the vacuum!
We have seen that the Blinder form for the vacuum density ρ = ρ(x), which was originally introduced to generalize the Coulomb potential, is actually determined by the momentum at each vacuum singularity independent of any charge. Evidently it applies to photons as well as electrons and protons, so it should be regarded as a universal property of the vacuum. This suggests association with a gravitational field. That possibility is best approached by a gauge theory as proposed in Section VB.”
End Quote
Now I don’t necessarily agree with their idea of the Aether as a conserved fluid, rather, I embrace William Tiller’s PsychoEnergetics approach, where the Aether is a frequency domain and there is a coupling constant, an alpha variable, between the distance/time dependent domain – spacetime, and this frequency domain. I primarily embrace Tiller due to empirical results in many, many areas, which Tiller can explain but no one else can – they just ignore the data (plus Tiller, with the help of a wealthy patron, gathered a significant amount of his own data). But Hestenes’ work is fully compatible with Tiller’s bi-conformal approach, and the very interesting thing, to me anyway, is these gauge theory gravities based on the Poincare group all have a Torsion element due to particle spin! Here’s the paper on the arxiv from Doran, Lasenby, and Gull, all at Cambridge University: https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0405033. Take that in conjunction with Will Tiller’s paper where he mathematically models the torsion experiments conducted by the Russian astrophysicist Kozyrev: https://www.tillerfoundation.org/_files/ugd/bbbea2_bed227a1416c43b7a43ffdf9b2f4082f.pdf?index=true. And I am of the opinion that Tiller provides a better explanation for the source of spin than either Hestenes or Consa. But that’s me . . .
In my humble opinion, light propagates at a constant rate in vacua.
I don’t intend to be rude, John, I certainly do appreciate original thinkers, revolutionary thinkers, but I don’t think you understand the physics.
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I do Wes. Sorry.
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Einstein had problems with curvature of light in a gravitational potential precisely because he thought he had eliminated the Aether. The speed does vary, but it’s due to refraction by the vacuum – the Aether. Light travels at the same speed but it takes a longer path, a roundabout route you might say. This is what I believe anyway
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What you believe doesn’t match what Einstein said. He said repeatedly that the speed of light varied with gravitational potential. In 1920 he spoke of space as the aether of general relativity. What you believe is an ersatz cargo-cult version of General Relativity where light follows the curvature of spacetime. It doesn’t. Light curves where there’s a gradient in gravitational potential.
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If you read Hestenes’ paper, Zitterbewegung Structure in Electrons and Photons, starting on the bottom of page 21, it’s all about the path density:
“Duane was the first to offer a quantitative explanation for electron diffraction as quantized momentum exchange [63]. A more general argument using standard quantum mechanics has been worked out by Van Vliet [64, 65]. These explanations suffer from the same disease as Old Quantum Mechanics in failing to account for the density distribution in the diffraction pattern. However, we now have the possibility of curing that disease with relativistic Pilot Wave theory. We only need to explain how the momentum exchange is incorporated into the Pilot Wave guidance law.
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IMHO the curvature of light in electromagnetism is due to the curvature of space. Light moving through such space will follow a curved path. This is a far more intense effect than gravity, but is not part of mainstream physics. Not yet anyway. Even though the idea dates back to the 1920s.
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This provides a promising mechanism for quantized momentum transfer in diffraction. For we know that quantized states in QM are determined by boundary conditions on the phase. Successful calculation of diffraction. patterns along these lines would provide strong evidence for the following claim: the vacuum surrounding electromagnetically inert matter is permeated by a vector potential with vanishing curl. Remarkably, the same mechanism would explain the extended Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect [66]. Evidently, then, the causal agents for diffraction and the AB effect are one and the same: a universal vector potential permeating the vacuum (or, Aether, if you will) of all spacetime, much as proposed by Dirac.
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As above. Curved spacetime is not the same thing as curved space. Curved spoacetime is non-linear inhomogeneous space.
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Considering the similarity of electron and photon diffraction patterns, we should expect the same mechanism to explain both, especially if photons are composed of electron-positron pairs as proposed in Section V…
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Well they aren’t. Dirac didn’t have a clue. Moreover he wilfully ignored people like de Broglie, Schrodinger, Darwin, and Born and Infeld, who described an electron as a photon in a closed path. Hestenes knows about Williams and van der Mark, authors of Is the Electron a Photon with Toroidal Topology?. See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273418514_Is_the_electron_a_photon_with_toroidal_topology#
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Now I don’t necessarily agree with their idea of the Aether as a conserved fluid, rather
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As far as I can tell it’s a gin-clear ghostly elastic solid. Not a fluid.
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I embrace William Tiller’s PsychoEnergetics approach, where the Aether is a frequency domain and there is a coupling constant, an alpha variable, between the distance/time dependent domain – spacetime, and this frequency domain. I primarily embrace Tiller due to empirical results in many, many areas, which Tiller can explain but no one else can – they just ignore the data (plus Tiller, with the help of a wealthy patron, gathered a significant amount of his own data).
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PsychoEnergetics? I’m afraid that sounds like something I want to ignore!
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But Hestenes’ work is fully compatible with Tiller’s bi-conformal approach, and the very interesting thing, to me anyway, is these gauge theory gravities based on the Poincare group all have a Torsion element due to particle spin! Here’s the paper on the arxiv from Doran, Lasenby, and Gull, all at Cambridge University: https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0405033. Take that in conjunction with Will Tiller’s paper where he mathematically models the torsion experiments conducted by the Russian astrophysicist Kozyrev: https://www.tillerfoundation.org/_files/ugd/bbbea2_bed227a1416c43b7a43ffdf9b2f4082f.pdf?index=true. And I am of the opinion that Tiller provides a better explanation for the source of spin than either Hestenes or Consa. But that’s me . . .
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I read the Doran, Lasenby, and Gull abstract. There’s about six different errors in it. A flat background spacetime pays no attention to the way Einstein described a field as a state of space. They don’t know what a gauge field is, and with no electron model they don’t know what a matter field is. Einstein also said space can’t have two different states at one location, so it’s wrong to talk of physical fields. It’s also wrong to say “all properties of the background spacetime are removed from physics”, especially since they confused spacetime with space. There’s nothing wrong with a spin-torsion interaction, but that’s electromagnetism, not gravity. And this is total junk “the properties of field lines inside the horizon due to a point charge held outside it”. There are no field lines. There are no point charges. And inside a black hole time dilation goes infinite, so nothing happens. Hawking temperature is junk too. Have a look at the articles I’ve written about that.
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In my humble opinion, light propagates at a constant rate in vacua.
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It doesn’t. It varies in the room you’re in. Read the Einstein quotes.
Hey thank you for this. I’m no physicist but I find it fascinating but a little confusing. I’m commenting to say you should make YouTube videos about it, package it in a super accessible way to get the word out. Thanks!
My pleasure Sarah.
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Noted re the videos. I wish I had more time for that sort of thing.
This is how I found this site first in the queue using Brave, speed of light constant time gravity elevation electromagnetic
Vacuums don’t exist, even black holes have a secondary output relational to the primary input. Black holes are the heavens electromagnetic step up transfomers.
Light is Propagated in Two Ways
In outer space, a starlight is reflected by a mirror. There is a formula c = f λ. Statings below on this formula are from viewpoint of the mirror.
P.S. Light will follow the emission theory for a few seconds only, after leaving light source. And then, light follows aether.
Now, the mirror is stationary. In comparing of incident light and reflected light, f is the same. And usually, c & λ are different.
Now, the mirror moves in the direction of the light path of incident light. In the formula on incident light, λ is constant. And c & f will be variables. And in the formula on reflected light, c is constant. And f & λ will be variables.
Hiroji: I think it’s important to distinguish the light from your measurement of the light. In gravity-free space the speed of light is constant, and the frequency and wavelength of a photon doesn’t change. But if you move towards that photon, you will observe the frequency and wavelength to change, even though it doesn’t. As for the speed of light, you always measure it to be the same because of the wave nature of matter. Because you are, in essence, “made of light”. So it’s like measuring the length of your shadow with the shadow of your stick. You always measure it to be the same, even though as Einstein said, the speed of light varies with gravitational potential. See The Other Meaning of Special Relativity by Robert Close: http://www.classicalmatter.org/ClassicalTheory/OtherRelativity.pdf.
Why in the world did Einstein keep working on relativity after 1911?
I don’t know Steve. If he had stopped in 1911 maybe I’d have my hoverbike by now. Because people would have understood that a gravitational field was a place where the speed of light was spatially variable.
Not only this article (and the Einstein quotes) is mindblowing, more mindblowing is the crystallization of people’s mind (and nowaday’s “scientists”).
One can truly believe how distorted can the scientific community views be.
Anyway, the fact that light speed varies with the gravitational potential is a strong smoking gun for the real existance of an aether and various degrees of density of this aether around solid matter.
Here ! Here ! John made a believer out of me years ago.
And it is all in the accurate historical documentation laid out beautifully by John’s essays of what was really, actually said, not the twisted convoluted deadends that are mainstream SM/Copenhagen lies.
Instead of ” Turtles all the way down “, according to Them it’s actually ” Quarks/Higgs/Gravitons all the way down ” .
Many thanks Davide. I am amazed at how different the original Einstein material is to contemporary general relativity. The latter bears very little resemblance to the original.
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Thanks again Greg.
” and various degrees of density of this aether around solid matter.”
Not necessarily. The apparent preferred frame of reference shown by MMX has since been confirmed to much higher accuracy. The Fizeau experiment has to do with how tightly the ether would be bound to the water it is flowing with vs the much more massive Earth it is near.
Whether the slowdown of light due to gravitational potential is a property of the aether (like density, or pressure) or something riding in it, like microscale waves, is what I am trying to tease apart in this topic:
https://physicsdiscussionforum.org/fizeau-follows-fresnel-s-fractional-formula-favori-t2558.html
These are the actual empirical equations for the relationship.
$$ |v| = c0/n $$
$$ n = exp( -2/c0^2 Phi ) $$
$$ |v| = c0 exp( 2/c0^2 Phi ) $$
I find the idea of aether vs no aether very interesting. But as we discovered many years ago, you cannot detect the aether, there is no way to detect it, or what reference frame the aether is stationary in.
This does not prove aether doesn’t exist, but until somebody figures out an experiment to find the rest frame of the aether (if it exists), it’s pointless to talk about it.
I do not know why people keep harping that MMX actually proved something else, there are many of these type of experiments. There is also lots of additional evidence it’s not detectable. Such as binary stars, we see them as though there is no aether. If there was aether bound to the star as you suggest, it would take longer for light to reach us when the binary is going away from us, and less time when the binary is coming towards us. But we see no delay like this.
You need a novel experiment nobody has ever tried that would prove aether exists and what rest frame it is in. If I grab a MMX experiment and run fast with it, it doesn’t change, so it doesn’t show there’s a rest frame bound to earth.
“But as we discovered many years ago, you cannot detect the aether, there is no way to detect it, or what reference frame the aether is stationary in.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_theories_of_special_relativity#Experiments_with_RMS
According to this article, using a model independent framework, there does appear to be an Earth bound reference frame that is direction independent. MMX didn’t say there was no aether, it merely said if it existed it was basically Earth bound. Their limit was a few centimeters per second relative motion. Since then, that margin has been reduced significantly, down to 12 significant figures. The “time dilation” due to velocity along the surface seems to be around eight significant digits. The article explicitly states the SR effect has been discounted from this. Did you follow the link in my prior post?
I read it now, interesting take but your entire premise is only valid if that wiki article with the 2010 experiment really isn’t 0 and as you say 4*10^-8. I mean their results are less than 2 standard deviations form 0 right, cause there uncertainty was high, at 3
Also checkout the more recent experiments which put at less than 10^-21, here’s the archive link but it’s also published in nature.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00570
Also the whole friction against the waves, then what are the waves traveling in, if they aren’t going with the aether anymore but feel friction from it?
Well, I hope you agree with me that the probability of a value on the other side of zero is zero and not what a normal distribution would suggest.
The purpose of the inquiry in that thread is to try to get to the nature of what it is that slows light down in gravity vs what slows down light in a transmissible material. If you accept that light is slowed down my gravitational potential, what is the nature of that restriction? That is a valid question whether you presume light can travel on nothingness, or some sort of aether.
I am trying to go beyond the static gravitational premise that I use in my physics article, which can be found at https://www.dsprelated.com/showarticle/1445.php. The title is “Off-Topic: A Fluidic Model of the Universe”, where I employ the word ‘fluid’ because ‘aether’ has so much baggage and induces knee-jerk effects upon certain readers. It starts with the notion that it is refraction bending the light around the sun, not gravity. Unlike the Physics Detective, I bring the math, and they are novel equations. I then go on to the math of aggregating the refraction equation to make a gravity equation. It is also novel.
There are two coefficients in the referenced wiki article where the 2010 data comes from. One pertains to directionality of the speed of light, and the other to a ‘slow down effect due to velocity’, which is also direction independent. The former is the MMX related one, and confirms it.
If there is an aether, and this is locally the frame of reference for the local speed of light, then the Fizeau experiment somehow demonstrates the aether in the water gets ‘gripped’ by the water and moved along, but the grip isn’t anywhere near 100%, but is given by the Fresnel drag coefficient (1-1/n^2). That makes sense. If n is near one, like in air, there won’t be any grip hardly at all. While with water, at 1.33, the grip is significant. M & M also measured the Fizeau effect on air, and confirmed it.
In the development of my theory, an ideal scalar field of n is introduced. It is presumed to be a fundamental. But when I introduce a candidate physical model to fit the equations, it becomes apparent that the n is somehow an emergent property. It is the nature of the emergence that I am trying to show. It is sort of prequel to my article where I show gravitational acceleration, strong & weak forces, and ‘EM’ forces emerge from refractive action.
You can find a diagram, equation sheet, and my original derivation of the refraction equation at this posting: https://physicsdiscussionforum.org/graphical-representation-of-the-refraction-steerin-t2529.html
C D., John has consistently described the Aether as ” an elastic, gin clear liquid- like polarizeable medium ” ; if that is any help.
Thanks, yes, I’m aware. I’m a little less inclined to try to specify its properties. What is at fault in this article, from my perspective, is how he accounts for the refractive acceleration adding up to the gravitational acceleration, and why a photon feels 2g, instead of 1g. I explain it clearly in the “adding up reference” in my other comment. Briefly, if you lay his square horizontal, you get 2g. In my calculations, vertically it’s 0g, while he claims 1g. He counts the vertical travel as zero, whereas there is actually outward acceleration. Photons slow down heading into the sun, and speed up heading away. That’s an acceleration.
He also insists that photons are waves. I disagree with that as well. He is also a proponent (I’m pretty sure) of the “standing wave” theory of particles. I explicitly refute that here:
https://physicsdiscussionforum.org/can-mass-be-made-out-of-standing-waves-t2569.html
I should clarify that, “closed loop wave” is what he calls an electron. In the tradition of Born, I think it is. Still, as an expert on waves (see my blog) the math just doesn’t work that way.
Thanks for the explanation, can’t wait for the article showing all the forces!
I hope you enjoy it. The best place to have a discussion is probably here:
https://physicsdiscussionforum.org/a-summary-of-my-theory-in-twelve-steps-t2581.html
I am still waiting on a reply from the Physics Detective here, where the factor of two issue is involved:
https://physicsdiscussionforum.org/summing-refraction-accelerations-to-get-a-gravity–t2525.html
I find his explanation faulty, and I think he needs to backpedal. Hard to do when you speak in the authoritative voice.
Cedron, you are a “my theory” guy. I’m not, I tell you about what EInstein said, or what Schrodinger said, or what Williams and van der Mark said, or what the evidence says. Only a small portion of the physics here is original material from me. As such I would be grateful if you refrained from using this website to promote yourself and your ideas. Which do not always match the hard scientific evidence of, for example, the wave nature of light and matter.
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Edit: see https://physicsdetective.com/a-worble-embracing-itself/ for some history of waves in closed paths.
Here Einstein explains his full field theory bending of light. I can’t decipher the tensor math but he references Huygens principal which implies, I do believe, “lower is slower”
Also brief definition of matter as a contraction of the energy tensor.
Also the factor of two is addressed.
https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol6-trans/125
Apologies if this is mentioned elsewhere on this site.
PS don’t worry that the above reference is mainly about Mercury, he does discus light bending, Grav redshift and the infamous factor of two
Many thanks Steve. I’ll take a look at that. I’m guessing I’ve seen it before but maybe I was distracted by the Gerber controversy. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gerber#Controversy .
As far as I’m aware there is factor of 2 for photons in the Einstein equations because… It works. I have never been aware of any actual explanation of why until I read this blog, … which blew my mind! .. and in hindsight of course seems obvious… Which only convinces me more about the electron as a closed path photon wave.
Thanks Doug.
Doug,
Don’t buy into the Physics Detective explanation so quickly. To be sure we are talking about the same argument, I am referring to his argument using a square at the end of: https://physicsdetective.com/how-gravity-works/
There are three major flaws in this argument, none having to do with any conjecturing of mine, aka “My Theory”.
1) Using a square as a representation assumes separability of the accelerations due to the component velocities. That is, that the acceleration formula is linear. It is not. The conventional governing equation is called the eikonal.
2) Assuming the orientation of the square is vertical to the field of gravity. There is no reason to assume the orbits are oriented this way. If you lay the square on its side you will get quite a different result.
3) He counts the vertical sides as zero acceleration when, in fact, there is outward acceleration in these arms. Photons speed up moving away from the sun, and slow down moving towards. That is outward acceleration in both those directions.
Concerning “electron as a closed path photon wave”, that is loosely correct, IMO, as is saying “matter is made out of light.” Loosely. Change “photon wave” to “refractive particles” (yes, plural) and you get a more justifiable answer. Waves simply can’t do that kind of thing. Waves are the solution to “wave equations” which are second degree linear differential equations. The solutions to linear differential equations are linearly independent. That means any solution is a linear combination of all the possible solutions, coefficients selected to match initial conditions. How much you use of one has no impact on the validity of another as a solution. Thus when wave pass each other, they will ‘interfere’ in the sense they add up, but they will not, and can not, steer each other.
I don’t have an answer for the 2, either. It is better to say that than give a false answer.
I should modify #1, slightly. Separability can occur in aggregate in symmetric closed loops, but that doesn’t mean the amounts will be correct. Also, there is no reason to assume a planar orbit, nor that a planar orbit is representative.
OK that’s enough of the straw-man spam. Please peddle your evidence-free personal theories on your own website.
Don’t be so harsh, there is evidence, I even sent the link, it’s just evidence his theory has no basis in reality. It’s impressive how he kept going and didn’t even address it.
It’s not the first time, Doug.
Back to variable speed of light please, if light waves travel from a slow region to a fast region (up) does the freq shift to conserve energy? This would be separate from the shift at emission due to gravity.
Steve: since photon energy E=hf and h is constant, conservation of energy means f does not change.
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Imagine we have a series of identical photons being emitted upwards, and you measure their frequency at some initial elevation. When I lift you up to some higher elevation, I add energy to you and your clocks. Thereafter all your processes, including those in your body, brain, and clocks, run faster. So whilst the frequency of the ascending photons do not change, your measurement of their frequency does change. You measure the photon frequency to be reduced. But the photons did not change. Instead, you did.
Thanks so much for taking the time. Let me run this you please: If we use the wavelength version E=hc/wavelength ( I know I said freq the first time) my thinking was if the lightwave / photon, as it rises, travels through medium (vacuum, aether, etc) that has a faster speed of light, so as c gets bigger wavelength also has to get bigger in order for E to remain constant. Apologies for the grammar, I’m American. 🙂 Cheers, its a long weekend.
Steve: as far as I know, yes. See the edit on the end of the principle of equivalence and other myths. We say photon energy is E=hc/λ, so if c increases with elevation and h is constant, then for the ascending photon conservation of energy means wavelength λ must be increasing.
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PS: I see no problems with the grammar, and happy Easter!
I suppose there could be some issue with E=hc/λ, and the wavelength of the ascending photon isn’t really increasing: c is both the speed of light, and a conversion factor between our measures of distance and time. Maybe there should be some distinction between those two things.
The problem with the “light speed is constant in vacuum” is that there is no perfect vacuum in the universe, yet they’re still teaching this until today.
Yes, they’re teaching something that is not in line with what Einstein said, and which is contradicted by the hard scientific evidence provided by optical clocks. I find it amazing that supposedly rational scientists can do this.
They have two names for the speed of light, and the coordinate frame is where is slows down. However it seems like everyone has been working in relativity for so long, where c is constant, to make the math easier, that they have all forgotten that c is actually slower in gravity.
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Kinda like Schrodinger’s cat showed how insane QM is, you can’t describe a cat as alive or dead, or as just a few QM numbers, there’s obviously a ton of hidden variables, the cat still exists. But everyone has forgotten it and followed the shut up and calculate for so long they don’t even remember.
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Anyway, I really appreciate this blog since you are reminding everyone what the problems are and point to paths of future research, hopefully someone will follow it and figure out something new.
I meant 50 percent alive and 50 percent dead at the same time
What’s worse is that there is no evidence for quantum entanglement. Somebody asked me to write about it, and I didn’t get round to it until earlier this year. Then I did my usual thing and dug into the history and read all the various papers. It ended up being a three-parter, because it was a big subject. See https://physicsdetective.com/quantum-entanglement-i/
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I was shocked at what I learned. Bell’s paper basically said “if you plot a curve, there must be instantaneous spooky action at a distance”. But you get a curve from Malus’s Law. It’s just the way polarizing filters work. They alter the light going through them. That means quantum entanglement is baloney, and so are quantum computers.
Oh I really loved that three parter. I was actually in a QM class where the Prof said, “sure you might think there’s no entanglement and it’s just two particles created at the source but let me show you Bell’s inequality, and look, it’s this curve, so therefore entanglement must exist.
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And being a young naive student I believed him and thought there was a ton more evidence backing entanglement up…. Until I started reading your stuff and also the years of following entanglement, which clearly states you can’t send anything faster than c, which makes.me doubt the whole premise that measuring the spin of one forces the spin of the other to be opposite.
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And I think it’s even worse than that right, for example, you have a random source emitting photons, the wave function spreads out symmetrically in a spherical shell. Then when you detect the photon the wave function collapses to wherever you detect it.
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I think this is the most obvious example that the wave function isn’t real and that there was an actual photon moving in a particular direction the whole time, and the wave function can’t be considered reality. And this is also spooky action at a distance since the wave function collapse is instant, faster than c.
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Here’s a confusing talk by freeman Dyson on it, he’s done other great videos saying how they always knew QM was insane and just hacked together to be useful but they all thought they would figure out the real physics soon. He never forgot, https://youtu.be/-HjF4yvgOlo
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I actually got to see him give a talk at a shitty tech university in new Jersey, he just loved to give talks even though there wasn’t even a physics degree there but we were only an hour from Princeton.
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I left physics many years ago so am no longer around all those insane egos, I don’t miss the company.
It blew my freaking mind that’s it’s the same f’ing curve as a single photon going through the polarizer, it’s insane I read it here first and it was never mentioned in all my classes. Were they trying to hide it?, I mean that would be better if they hid it than if all my professors fell for it, but I’m sure they all drank the sauce a long time ago and no longer can think clearly
Doug: i have my own reservations on Bell’s theorem, mostly because it’s taught badly everywhere. Yes, the curve looks exactly like the polarizer curve, but that’s because the macroscopic polarization is a RESULT of the microscopic cosine rule, which applied to single photons holds a fundamentally probabilistic phenomenology. I’ll explain the issue with there being a pre-determined photon polarization below.
Imagine two “entangled” photons are emitted at two different detectors. Here entangled just means that whatever polarization you measure for one photon, the other will ALWAYS have opposite polarization. When you measure one photon, if the polarizer is aligned with the secret polarization you’ll always measure it passing through, and so will the other photon. So far so good. But think now about a photon NOT aligned with the polarizer: you can reasonably say, well that photon will pass through with a probability of cos^2a, where a is the angle between the polarizer and the secret photon polarization. But then you must also say the same for the other photon: this means that there will be a chance (cos^2 a × cos^2 b, with angle a=b+π) that one photon will pass, while the other won’t. This gives rise to a probability distribution that is different from what we observe, because in entangled pairs the two photons will ALWAYS give the same result for the same measurement angle, i.e. either both pass or both don’t pass. You won’t have one yes one no. There is NO WAY to avoid this consistently invoking secret variables on the photons. You can’t say there’s a hidden variable in the detectors either, because the result is the same regardless of the angle you set the polarizers at.
Hi Sandra: Hopefully my other comment went through, but the other thing I wanted to add is where you/Bell say “…photon will pass through with a probability of cos^2a, where a is the angle between the polarizer and the secret photon polarization. But then you must also say the same for the other photon:”
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I think this is where QM goes wrong, if the photon is actually a more complex 3d wave (continuous, no longer quantum, rotating/waving on multiple axes, not a simple linear sin wave), we cannot assume this simple symmetry on off axis measurements.
Hi Sandra,
You are wrong in your assumptions about the photon passing or not. The whole particle aspect of QM is NOT TRUE, the photon is a wave packet, that is affected by whatever it passes or come close to (that is why speed of light is not constant). I suggest you look at the very simple experiment with 3 polarizers and you will see with your own eyes that a polarizer is not like a gate that lets photons through or not (which yes, this is what all Bell experiments refer to as the classical solution including yourself):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-8tQlOhCBA&ab_channel=UMDPhysicsVideos%21
I will go a bit deeper on this at the right location (entanglement is a fraud)…
So I’m not an expert but here’s my two cents. I think the premise is where it goes awry. Sure if you state the photon can be described by just a few quantum numbers, adding any hidden variables (other quantum numbers) doesn’t help. This also assumes QM is still the correct theory after you add the hidden variables.
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But that assumes the photon has no structure at all!, surely it has some interesting shape and it is a complex continuous wave, and cannot be described by just a few QM numbers. I think QM is basically an approximation of something more complex. For example, look at the articles on this site about the electron and proton. I think that’s a much more realistic idea of what those particles are, and if we could actually see what’s going on at time scales at the frequency of the electron (i.e. the freq. of a 511 kEv photon), perhaps we would figure it out. Do you really believe the electron is some symmetrical point particle that we can never understand, never really understand why the gryomagnetic ratio is what is it, or the mass ratio between the proton and electron is what it is.
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There was a recent article saying the mass and charge are in different places for the proton, like it was surprising. But of course, how else would it have such a high gyromagnetic ratio. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/protons-mass-radius-is-apparently-shorter-than-its-charge-radius/
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Assume a photon is a complex wave rotating in 3d space, and an interesting wave since it’s not just a sin wave in E, since there is also a sin in B (or equivalently twisting/rotating in E), so it’s quite complex. I think 3d computer modeling of ‘entangled’ photons will eventually show that at the source the photons were created and simply travel to the detectors and there is no spooky action at a distance. The Dyson video I linked above tries to poke some holes in QM but it’s a little beyond me.
P.S. If you happen to be good at modeling 3d field interactions in E/B I have some ideas to try.
Doug: I think the electron g factor is 2.002 because it’s a photon trapped in a double loop “trivial knot” configuration. In similar vein I think the proton g factor is 5.585 because it’s a photon trapped in a “trefoil” configuration comprised of nearly three double loops. But I don’t think of E and B as separate. See what I said about the canoe analogy in the theory of everything. E is the spatial derivative of the electromagnetic wave, B is the time derivative. IMHO electromagnetic waves come in the form of solitons called photons, such that the wavefunction is the wave. Also see what I said in the double slit experiment about work by Jeff Lundeen et al. They said this: “We hope that the scientific community can now improve upon the Copenhagen Interpretation, and redefine the wavefunction so that it is no longer just a mathematical tool, but rather something that can be directly measured in the laboratory”.
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I’ll get back to you later about your other comments. Note that when it comes to entanglement, the latest ploy is to say that both the classical result and the QM result map out a cosine curve, but the latter is twice the magnitude of the former. Fool me once…
That still does not solve the issue. Unless your inner photon structure is non-local, you can’t get the same results. Hidden variable is not a short hand for quantum number, it’s a short hand for any property (be it simple or complex) that is inherent to the single photons as isolated entities. The whole Bell argument doesn’t even use quantum mechanics, it’s simply a logical statement. No type of local hidden property can give you “both photons pass polarizers at angle a” and the cosine square law (Malus’ law) at the same time (i fear the Detective is completely missing this point in his blog posts).
The crux of the matter is that in principle your detectors can be at any distance apart, even light years, and if you are adamant in saying that each photon is fundamentally independent from the other then you need some kind of faster than light influence during measurement to explain the correlations.
OR, you can say that the fundamental structure of the entangled photons is inherently non local, i.e. their structure in spacetime is not as trivial as we tend to think. Which honestly sounds completely in line with the “electron vortex” theory, since we are actually talking of vortexes of the fundamental structure of the universe. And yes, I’m aware the detective makes a distinction about space and spacetime, but a structure in the first inevitably maps itself onto the latter.
I’ll get back to you on that, Sandra. I really do not feel that I’ve missed the point on this. Instead I feel that advocates of quantum entanglement are moving the goalposts to continue to promote myth and mystery. Do take a look at some of the papers I refer to at the foot of Quantum entanglement is scientific fraud. And please can we continue this conversation on that article rather than this one?
Thanks for your wisdom and voice of reason Sandra, really appreciated. So are you 100% percent convinced there is no way to get any of the Bell test results without spooky action at a distance or nonlocal hidden variables?
Doug: Clauser and Freedman’s photons were produced 5 nanoseconds apart. By the time the second photon was emitted, the first photon was already through one of the polarizers. Those photons weren’t even entangled. Ditto for Aspect’s photons.
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PS: I’d be grateful if the conversation on this subject was conducted on the relevant article.
The speed of light is not a constant as once thought, and this has now been proved by Electrodynamic theory and by Experiments done by many independent researchers. The results clearly show that light propagates instantaneously when it is created by a source, and reduces to approximately the speed of light in the farfield, about one wavelength from the source, and never becomes equal to exactly c. This corresponds the phase speed, group speed, and information speed. Any theory assuming the speed of light is a constant, such as Special Relativity and General Relativity are wrong, and it has implications to Quantum theories as well. So this fact about the speed of light affects all of Modern Physics. Often it is stated that Relativity has been verified by so many experiments, how can it be wrong. Well no experiment can prove a theory, and can only provide evidence that a theory is correct. But one experiment can absolutely disprove a theory, and the new speed of light experiments proving the speed of light is not a constant is such a proof. So what does it mean? Well a derivation of Relativity using instantaneous nearfield light yields Galilean Relativity. This can easily seen by inserting c=infinity into the Lorentz Transform, yielding the GalileanTransform, where time is the same in all inertial frames. So a moving object observed with instantaneous nearfield light will yield no Relativistic effects, whereas by changing the frequency of the light such that farfield light is used will observe Relativistic effects. But since time and space are real and independent of the frequency of light used to measure its effects, then one must conclude the effects of Relativity are just an optical illusion.
Since General Relativity is based on Special Relativity, then it has the same problem. A better theory of Gravity is Gravitoelectromagnetism which assumes gravity can be mathematically described by 4 Maxwell equations, similar to to those of electromagnetic theory. It is well known that General Relativity reduces to Gravitoelectromagnetism for weak fields, which is all that we observe. Using this theory, analysis of an oscillating mass yields a wave equation set equal to a source term. Analysis of this equation shows that the phase speed, group speed, and information speed are instantaneous in the nearfield and reduce to the speed of light in the farfield. This theory then accounts for all the observed gravitational effects including instantaneous nearfield and the speed of light farfield. The main difference is that this theory is a field theory, and not a geometrical theory like General Relativity. Because it is a field theory, Gravity can be then be quantized as the Graviton.
Lastly it should be mentioned that this research shows that the Pilot Wave interpretation of Quantum Mechanics can no longer be criticized for requiring instantaneous interaction of the pilot wave, thereby violating Relativity. It should also be noted that nearfield electromagnetic fields can be explained by quantum mechanics using the Pilot Wave interpretation of quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (HUP), where Δx and Δp are interpreted as averages, and not the uncertainty in the values as in other interpretations of quantum mechanics. So in HUP: Δx Δp = h, where Δp=mΔv, and m is an effective mass due to momentum, thus HUP becomes: Δx Δv = h/m. In the nearfield where the field is created, Δx=0, therefore Δv=infinity. In the farfield, HUP: Δx Δp = h, where p = h/λ. HUP then becomes: Δx h/λ = h, or Δx=λ. Also in the farfield HUP becomes: λmΔv=h, thus Δv=h/(mλ). Since p=h/λ, then Δv=p/m. Also since p=mc, then Δv=c. So in summary, in the nearfield Δv=infinity, and in the farfield Δv=c, where Δv is the average velocity of the photon according to Pilot Wave theory. Consequently the Pilot wave interpretation should become the preferred interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. It should also be noted that this argument can be applied to all fields, including the graviton. Hence all fields should exhibit instantaneous nearfield and speed c farfield behavior, and this can explain the non-local effects observed in quantum entangled particles.
*YouTube presentation of above arguments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sePdJ7vSQvQ&t=0s
*More extensive paper for the above arguments: William D. Walker and Dag Stranneby, A New Interpretation of Relativity, 2023: http://vixra.org/abs/2309.0145
*Electromagnetic pulse experiment paper: https://www.techrxiv.org/doi/full/10.36227/techrxiv.170862178.82175798/v1
Dr. William Walker – PhD in physics from ETH Zurich, 1997
William, you should read this article, and the next article. Plus others. For myself, I’m happy enough with the pilot wave idea, with one difference – it isn’t piloting anything, it’s th eonly thing that’s there.
Speed of Starlight
A glass cube is floating horizontally in outer space. Two rays of starlight coming from the left and right are passing through the glass horizontally. Below is the difference between the two rays of light as seen from viewpoint of the glass (difference in formula v = f λ).
Difference inside the glass c/n = c/n f ≠ f λ ≠ λ
Difference just before entering the glass c ≠ c f ≠ f λ = λ
Difference just after leaving the glass c = c f ≠ f λ ≠ λ
Speed of Light
The defined value of speed of light is based on measurements (with wavelength and frequency) done by Evenson et al. in 1973. Error is 1.1 m / s in pramai. Now, measuring instrument is separated into a measuring part and a light source part. When one of them is moved at a constant speed higher than above error (in the direction of light path), different value will be obtained.
Hiroji, the important point to note is that the speed of light is based on measurements that use the second and the metre, and both of these are defined using the motion of light. That’s why you always measure the speed of light to be the same. Like Don Koks said, an observer stationed at the ceiling will measure the speed of light to be c, as will the observer stationed at the floor, but the “global” observer will say that light at the ceiling travels faster than light at the floor. Because it does. If it didn’t, your pencil wouldn’t fall down.
Thanks, Physics Detective,
Thanks, Physics Detective.
Speed of Starlight (Supplement)
Allow me to add to latest post. When the glass cube moves left and right….
Inside the glass, c/n is constant, and the other two are variable
Just before entering the glass, λ is constant, and the other two are variable
Just after leaving the glass, c is constant, and the other two are variable
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/08/researchers-figure-out-how-to-keep-clocks-on-the-earth-moon-in-sync/
Thanks Steve. What a shame the author said this: “Time literally flows faster at the altitude where GPS satellites are than it does for clocks situated on Earth’s surface”.. And what a pity the speed of light c features repeatedly in those equations.
There are no constants in nature. Constants are a human construct for Man’s convienience and to fit to his preconceptions and for mathmeticians to fuel their megalomania. What works on paper does not represent or reflect reality.
I was just having a look, Ron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_physical_constants.
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Maybe there are some true constants in that list. But c is not one of them.