a-cosmology-group/acg#371

critics of special relativity: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381755574_The_complete_set_of_proofs_for_the_invalidity_of_the_special_theory_of_relativity (note that this paper cite @RedshiftDrift father’s work on GPS and the constancy of the one way speed of light) see previous discussion https://github.com/orgs/a-cosmology-group/discussions/272 https://fs.unm.edu/UnsolvedProblemsRelativity.pdf https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Incorrectness-of-Special-Relativity-and-an-of-Cui/6dd2998fe0a36d1b65f53b81148a5c24e3f0e1a1

https://github.com/orgs/a-cosmology-group/discussions/201#discussioncomment-9597917 if interested in new theories of light/quantum physics

other: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.03104 https://arxiv.org/abs/1003.3942

There is also an ACG discussion about the arbitrary frames of reference in Special and General Relativity and so-called fictitious forces.

I debunked the redshift mechanism of Laviolette in arXiv:1801.07582, a long time ago.

@RedshiftDrift

In the paper you linked, you do indeed cite a paper by LaViolette published in 1986. However, the book I’m reading was published a full decade later and has gone through several revisions since then, the most recent one apparently being in 2012. In the book I’m reading, he’s not proposing the same tired-light mechanism he presented in the 1986 paper. Instead, he proposes an ether-based mechanism, similar to the one proposed by Walter Nernst in the 1930s.

@luisenrique-arch In that case you can debunk that book :wink:

LaViolette’s 2012 book expands the same subquantum kinetics formalism from some underlying diffusive process. It’s the same 1986 idea with a more fundamental description of his new physics.

@RedshiftDrift

Are you sure?

In your paper, you say that LaViolette’s model explains the redshift by proposing that hadrons gradually increase in mass as they age. But in his book, he doesn’t talk about hadrons at all. In fact, the term “hadron” doesn’t appear even once. What he discusses are etherons, the hypothetical subquantum particles that, according to him, make up the ether, but he doesn’t talk about hadron’s. As far as I can tell, his explanation for the redshift is based on an absorption process produced by the ether itself, something broadly similar to the mechanism envisioned by Walter Nernst in the 1930s.

That said, I’m starting to have serious doubts about LaViolette’s theory myself, mainly because some of its implications are extremely strange and counterintuitive. For example, one of the consequences of his subquantum kinetics framework is that blue giants are not young stars burning through their fuel at a rapid rate, but rather older stars.

In his model, matter is created out of nothing from time to time, causing both stars and planets to grow over time. As a result, stars and planets are born small and gradually gain mass through the spontaneous creation of matter within them. This leads to the conclusion that brown dwarfs and red dwarfs are young stars precisely because they’re smaller, while the largest stars are the oldest. It also implies that the Earth itself is gradually expanding, with its crust increasing in size over time, much like the old Expanding Earth theory proposed in the 19th century.

These kinds of things make me particularly skeptical of his ideas. When I first started reading his work, I was much more open to it, but now I’m far more doubtful. Still, the redshift mechanism he proposes in the book doesn’t involve hadrons. I’ve even double-checked to make sure I wasn’t missing something, and the word “hadron” simply doesn’t appear anywhere in the book.

@luisenrique-arch if someone is selling aether then I’m buying.

As for SR and GR, there are no observations that challenge the theories as far as causality goes. We have no evidence of anything moving FTL and I’m not buying entanglement until they can produce an experiment that does much better than a 50% prediction. I’m secretly hoping that they can but that candle is fading … So it looks like we’re stuck on earth for a bit longer. Also, we cannot seem to cooperate as a human race so that also dooms us to stay on this rock until all minerals are wasted and/or we are extinct.

SR has too many paradoxes so it must be incorrect or at the least incomplete. If you change Einstein’s postulate to: ‘Light has a constant speed in space’ (or aether) - a simple Lorentzian space - then the paradoxes go away. GR doesn’t get rid of the paradoxes but does answer smartly to a few observations: Mercury, light-curving, and it predicts black holes … but it needs dark matter and dark energy to account for others and even then still fits it badly. So again incorrect or at least incomplete.

@Francois-Zinserling

I don’t really feel qualified to question the postulates of quantum mechanics or the experimental observations behind them. It’s not a field I know well enough to speak about with much confidence. So, at least when it comes to quantum mechanics, I’m inclined to stick with the consensus. I simply prefer materialist interpretations of quantum mechanics over the Copenhagen interpretation.

As for the claim that human beings are fundamentally incapable of large-scale cooperation, that’s a much broader discussion that would quickly drift into politics, which I’d rather avoid here. Suffice it to say that I don’t agree.

As for Lorentz’s Relativity, yes, I largely agree. At the moment, I tend to prefer Lorentz’s Relativity over Einstein’s Relativity because, although the two are mathematically equivalent and experimentally indistinguishable, Lorentz’s Relativity preserves an absolute frame of reference and therefore avoids the paradoxes associated with faster-than-light travel. Also, there have been several physicists who have attempted to generalize Lorentz’s Relativity in order to construct Lorentzian theories of gravity, and many of these formulations don’t require dark matter at all.

So a Lorentzian universe is perfectly possible, and at the moment I find myself leaning more in that direction. It feels like having the best of both worlds: you retain all the empirical successes of Relativity while avoiding the paradoxes.

@luisenrique-arch .

In his model, matter is created out of nothing from time to time [ .. ]

That’s also the case with the Variable Mass theory. Quote from the ABSTRACT: a formula can be derived for mass in Orbital time $T$ as well, showing quadratic growth and a beginning for $T=-A$, meaning that there is an age $A$.

It also implies that the Earth itself is gradually expanding, with its crust increasing in size over time, much like the old Expanding Earth theory [ .. ]

Not exactly. See the ACG discussion in What mechanism(s) drives plate tectonics? With VM, the crust is shrinking, not expanding.

@HanDeBruijn

Not exactly. See the ACG discussion in What mechanism(s) drives plate tectonics? With VM, the crust is shrinking, not expanding.

Sure, that could be true for the Variable Mass theory, but I was talking about LaViolette’s model. In his book, he explicitly says that planets and stars grow in size.

LaViolette’s subquantum kinetics - @luisenrique-arch

I haven’t studied LaViolette’s book, but it’s from 2010. The paper I reviewed was from 1986, so the language may have changed but it’s still ‘Subquantum Kinetics’. Maybe he didn’t have a name for his aether particles then, so he just use the standard name ‘hadron’.

After reading hundreds of redshift models I am beginning to see a pattern, and to save time I reject theories and models which use “creation” or fundamental constants that are not constant. The Big Bang is readily rejected.

The goal of physics is to find universal laws, both in space and time. There is no point wasting time on theories that posit ad hoc random phenomena that vary in space or time.

@RedshiftDrift >The goal of physics is to find universal laws…

I could not disagree with you more. That formulation is the mathematicist conception of physics that has prevailed over the last 50 years and it has been an abysmal failure, the absurd standard models being trenchant illustrations of that failure.

The belief that “universal laws” exist, in the sense that they apply everywhere at all scales throughout the Cosmos, and we puny humans chicken-scratching in a minute corner of the Cosmos have discovered or will discover them soon by rummaging about in our mathematical tool kit is dismally unrealistic.

The goal of physics and science generally is to investigate the nature of physical reality by closely examining the phenomenological world. The past 50 years of mathematicist navel gazing has produced nothing of scientific value and the vast trove of new knowledge painstakingly acquired by physical researchers over the last century has been squandered on barren model-fitting exercises. Mathematical models and “laws” are useful tools in the scientific endeavor but they are only tools, not the goal of science. Understanding is the goal of science and a fixation on mathematics has been detrimental to that goal.

@RedshiftDrift

There is no point wasting time on theories that posit ad hoc random phenomena that vary in space or time.

I agree with you on that point. In fact, it’s the main reason that has drawn me away from LaViolette’s model after looking into it more deeply. I still think it’s an interesting model, no question about that, but the idea of matter being spontaneously generated is something that doesn’t really appeal to me.

To be fair, in his model particles aren’t actually created out of nothing; they simply emerge from the ether itself. Even so, it still feels somewhat ad hoc to me, and that’s one of the reasons I remain skeptical of it.

@RedshiftDrift writes:

I reject theories and models which use “creation” or fundamental constants that are not constant.

• Heavy elements are formed in stars by nuclear fusion. In a static and eternal universe, light elements must be formed out of heavy elements. Because only then a circular economy can exist. How is this happening? By nuclear fission? How and where?
• Are masses of elementary particles really fundamental constants? There are many different particles with different masses created in colliders. How “elementary” are these masses?
• In the Variable Mass model “creation” is a feature that is typical for Orbital time $T$. In Atomic (= your “true”) time $t$, mass is always exponentially increasing and it has never been zero.

The secret is that, in VM, timescales $T$ and $t$ are more or less defined by mass $m$ and a Hubble parameter $H$, via

$$ \large \frac{m}{m_0} = \left(1+\frac{H}{2}T\right)^2 = e^{H.t} $$

The goal of physics is to find universal laws, both in space and time.

• There does not exist something like the “universal laws” of physics. All laws of physics have limited validity.
• The goal of physics is twofold: (1) enhance our understanding and, as a consequence, (2) to make technology possible.

In a static and eternal universe, light elements must be formed out of heavy elements. Because only then a circular economy can exist. How is this happening? By nuclear fission? How and where? - @HanDeBruijn

That was discussed here https://github.com/orgs/a-cosmology-group/discussions/281#discussioncomment-11624024 and here https://github.com/orgs/a-cosmology-group/discussions/281#discussioncomment-11814218

Are masses of elementary particles really fundamental constants?

Sure, why not?

There does not exist something like the “universal laws” of physics. All laws of physics have limited validity.

Agreed, the goal is “universal laws” but we will never reach that goal. That’s why physics will always be interesting.

@asheldrick-research

From what you’ve said here and in the other thread, my impression is that your model is evolutionary in nature. In other words, it still involves a physical beginning to the universe and retains some form of cosmic expansion, even if it differs from the standard Lambda CDM picture.

Just as a thought experiment, do you think your model could also work in a static universe? The reason I ask is that quite a few people on this forum, myself included, tend to favor static cosmologies over evolutionary ones. So I’d be interested to know whether your framework could be adapted to that kind of setting, or whether cosmic evolution is an essential part of it.

No ECSM does not support expansion, it is anti dark sector.. the CMB in my theory is purely entropy based, the universe/vacuum changed from a chaotic state to a superfluid-like state. ECSM is based in a static and infinite universe. Here is my paper of redshift if you are interested.. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20129337

@asheldrick-research

Ah, sorry, I didn’t realize that. I haven’t read your paper yet. What I said was based entirely on the few lines you’ve written here and in the other thread about the CMB. In that case, I’ll read it.

Thats ok, it is good to interact with others who also feel that the universe is not expanding..

@asheldrick-research

Your theory is very similar to the one proposed by Lorentz, in the sense that he also postulated that it’s the medium that alters the properties and behavior of matter rather than the geometry of space-time.

Yes, that is a fair comparison. ECSM does have some overlap with Lorentz type thinking in the sense that it does not treat geometry as the final physical explanation. It asks whether the observed geometry could be an effective description of how a real underlying medium changes the behaviour of matter, clocks and light. I guess the difference is that I am not trying to simply return to the old luminiferous ether. ECSM treats the vacuum more like a finite response coherent medium, where Lorentz behaviour, Maxwell constants and GR like gravity emerge as effective limits of the medium response. So yes, I agree there is a Lorentz like flavour, but ECSM is trying to update that idea with a modern finite response substrate rather than the old ether picture.

@asheldrick-research

As I said in my initial post, one of the reasons I started this thread, and one of the reasons I’m looking for alternatives to Einstein’s Relativity, is that I’ve always been interested in the possibility of faster-than-light interstellar travel. However, Einstein’s Relativity seems to make that outright impossible.

In Einstein’s Relativity, objects can’t travel through space-time faster than light because, as their velocity approaches the speed of light, the energy required to accelerate them increases without limit. Reaching or exceeding the speed of light would therefore require an infinite amount of energy. Moreover, faster-than-light travel creates situations in which different observers can disagree about the order of events, leading to violations of causality.

One theoretical attempt to circumvent this problem is the Alcubierre warp drive. Rather than moving a spacecraft through space faster than light, the idea is to manipulate space-time itself. In the original proposal, space-time is contracted in front of the spacecraft and expanded behind it, creating a “warp bubble” that carries the ship along. Since the spacecraft remains locally at rest within the bubble, it never actually exceeds the speed of light in its immediate surroundings, even though the bubble itself can effectively move faster than light relative to distant observers.

However, many physicists have noted that even this approach appears to run into causality problems. In fact, although the spacecraft itself never locally travels faster than light, the large-scale manipulation of space-time can give rise to closed timelike curves, effectively allowing information or objects to travel into their own past.

From what I understand, your model retains an absolute temporal reference frame and therefore should, at least in principle, avoid the causality problems associated with Einstein’s Relativity. However, there’s one thing I don’t quite understand: does ECSM leave any room, even in principle, for something analogous to a warp drive? In other words, if the medium is physically real and possesses its own response properties, could a sufficiently advanced civilization manipulate those properties locally to produce an effective faster-than-light transportation mechanism?

In Lorentz’s ether theory, at least conceptually, you could imagine manipulating the ether around a spacecraft and using the motion or properties of the ether itself to achieve effective faster-than-light travel. But I’m not sure whether your model allows anything comparable.

Yes, but I would phrase it slightly differently. ECSM does not really use absolute time in the old Newtonian sense of one universal clock ticking the same everywhere. Local clock rates can still change, because time is treated as the rate of change/evolution within the medium, and that rate depends on the local response state of the medium. But ECSM does allow something closer to an absolute causal ordering, because the medium is physically real and has a real response state. So there is a preferred substrate reference in the background, even though local observers still recover Lorentz behaviour. On the warp drive question, I think ECSM leaves the door open in principle, but not in the simple travel through space faster than light sense. Nothing should locally outrun the response limit of the medium. But if the medium itself can be coherently reconfigured, then an advanced technology might not be accelerating a ship through space so much as changing the response state or domain structure around the ship. That would be more like moving with a controlled medium deformation than violating local light speed. So I would not claim ECSM predicts a warp drive. But it does make the question more physical I guess.. instead of asking whether spacetime geometry can be arbitrarily shaped, it asks whether the underlying medium has manipulable response modes, domain gradients, or coherence structures that could produce an effective shortcut while preserving causal order. That is speculative, but it is exactly the kind of thing a real medium theory would make thinkable. I haven’t given it a massive amount of thought as I’ve been concentrating on other things..

@luisenrique-arch . Is a warp drive really necessary? With (Special) Relativity you have length contraction, which makes all distances shorter. And with the same SR you have time dilation, which makes that you have more time to accomplish your journey. The only problem is that it is problematic to go back home, due to the twin paradox. And of course we have to develop a much better rocket science.

… and then there is that thing where you hit the tiny speck of dust at 0.999c. “Forward shields are depleted, captain. Captain? Captain!!”

@HanDeBruijn

As I said in my previous comment, according to Einstein’s Relativity, the closer a spacecraft gets to the speed of light, the more energy is required to accelerate it further. Even reaching 60 to 70% of the speed of light would require an enormous amount of energy, likely exceeding the total energy output of our current civilization. On top of that, as you pointed out, there’s the twin paradox and all the complications that come with it. For these reasons, subluminal interstellar travel doesn’t strike me as a particularly attractive option. The costs would be immense while the benefits would be relatively limited.

Lorentz’s Relativity doesn’t eliminate the enormous energy requirements needed to approach the speed of light through conventional acceleration, nor does it eliminate the twin paradox. However, it does allow for the construction of a warp drive that doesn’t violate causality, because a Lorentzian framework preserves an absolute reference frame and therefore removes the possibility of time travel and causality violations at their root. By contrast, an Einsteinian warp drive doesn’t avoid these issues. Under Einstein’s Relativity, manipulating space-time for faster-than-light travel can, at least in principle, lead to causality violations and temporal paradoxes.

Couple that with the fact that Lorentz’s Relativity doesn’t predict singularities and is much more intuitive, and you can see why I’ve started preferring the Lorentzian framework over Einstein’s.

EDIT: Just to be clear, when I refer to Lorentz’s Relativity, I don’t necessarily mean Lorentz’s original aether theory. I’m referring more broadly to any approach to Special and General Relativity based on a Lorentzian framework, in which relativistic effects arise from the interaction of matter with a physical medium rather than from the geometric structure of space-time.

@luisenrique-arch .

As I said in my previous comment, you should read the book or at least skim through the references I gave you. A picture of their spacecraft with an explanation is found via the last link in chapter 5. How can you possibly think that we can have a judgement about a technology that is a few thousand years ahead of ours.

@HanDeBruijn

I understand what you’re trying to do, I really do. But try to put yourself in my shoes for a moment. The book you’d like me to read is in Dutch, which means I’d have to translate it bit by bit as I go. That’s a pretty significant time investment. And considering that I’m already fairly skeptical when it comes to contactees, you can probably see why I’m not exactly eager to dive into it.

As for your point about how we can judge a technology that may be thousands of years more advanced than our own, I think that’s looking at the issue from the wrong angle. The question isn’t whether we can fully understand how a hypothetical extraterrestrial civilization might travel from one star system to another. Obviously, there are a lot of things we don’t know, and what seems impossible today will probably seem totally normal in the future.

But at the same time, we have to start somewhere. If we’re going to speculate about civilizations traveling across the galaxy, the only sensible place to begin is with the knowledge and physics we already have. That doesn’t mean our current understanding is complete or that future breakthroughs are impossible. It simply means that any attempt to imagine interstellar travel has to be grounded in something rather than nothing.

Saying, “Aliens are thousands of years more advanced than us, so there’s no point in even trying to understand how the hell they can get here from there,” isn’t a productive approach. We may not know the answer, but we still need a starting point if we want to have a meaningful discussion about the possibilities.

Ernest Rutherford said: “All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.”

At the moment there is nothing in known physics that hint at FTL travel. Proposals of multiverses, wormholes, entanglement and other currently ‘impossible’ ideas seem more like science-fiction right now. Yet when the correct answer eventually comes, we will all go “Oh, ok!”

A quote often attributed to Einstein, although unconfirmed: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”. We are stuck in this paradigm of our own making, yet we (I actually mean journals and mainstream academia!) insist we must fix it by continuing in the same way that we created the problem.

It’s ok to refine our current physics from within the box but disruptions can only come from ‘out the box’. That must necessarily consider everything, including today’s non-physics, and mathematics that may right now seem entirely abstract.

What is not ok, and here I tend to agree with @budrap00, (except for the usual barrage of personal attacks) that we cannot set an abstract as a preferred solution, and then when it empirically fails, refuse to take a step back.

@ericcosmos

if FTL travel were actually possible, it seems likely that some alien civilization would have made it here by now.

I think they have.

But I don’t really feel like explaining why, when and where, because 1) it’s not related to the topic we’re discussing in this thread, and 2) we’d end up going down an endless rabbit hole.

I know the folks at DemystifySci and have discussions with them from time to time. Unfortunately they have difficulties distinguishing between “interpretation problems” and “foundational problems” in relativity, especially when relativity is used outside it’s range of validity. Relativity is not on the chopping block, and FTL is not possible based on everything we know today.

Tangential topic sorry but related: you should totally go on the DemystifySci show. I’m sure they’d be happy to have you, if that’s something you’d be interested in. How come they haven’t invited you on yet? They already seem to agree with you on the biggest issue, that the Big Bang theory is built on some bad assumptions, and they also like tired light, so I think it could make for a really interesting conversation. It would probably also get a lot more people checking out your website.

@ericcosmos

I’ve never heard of these people. Is there a place where I can follow them? Please, don’t say X because I don’t have it.

They’re also on YouTube and they’re pretty much aligned in thinking the Big Bang doesn’t really hold up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLH2L2S_WF0.

I was initially excited by this but it is an example as @RedshiftDrift pointed out that AI is adapt at making a postulate and jumping straight to the required equations - often without even a heuristic derivation.

I was hoping to see something in the geometry section but that too seems vague - could also be my lack of tensor knowledge :)

The initial proposal of ‘space as an elastic medium’ quickly evolves to ‘we only need local space … every particle only sees its own local space’; which is tantamount to Einstein’s postulate that the speed of light is equal for all observers. For a ‘space as a medium’ to work, it must have a frame in which ‘the speed of light is constant in space’. The SR equations and Lorentz transformations work just fine with this as an outset.

The energy calculation in their eq(2) is not novel as they claim, as you can see from my naive ‘dynamic aether’ paper of 2023. Introduction_to_a_dynamic_aether I was not the first to derive that relation either.

(The result is not trivial though, as it shows the particle behaviour as a result of absorbing energy. This energy is crucial to sustain Newton’s first law (motion perpetual) in an aether framework without resulting in a drag effect. They did not note this)

They also propose matter as a standing wave in space - where the particle continuously expel energy radially, and the energy returns along the same line to ultimately conserve energy. Return from where, Infinity? This part is weakly argued. It would wreck the model if the particle starts moving.

The gravity derivation from a $$1/r$$ field to a $$1/r^2$$ force is as old as the mountains. It also doesn’t bring anything new and just seem to retrieve what we already know.

Although the paper is a stimulating read, its structure appears to have barely survived a train-smash. This is evidence of AI again.

@Francois-Zinserling

I had exactly the same impression. It really feels like the paper was written with AI. However, I decided to share it anyway because, like you said, it’s still a stimulating read, even though many of the claims made by the author are not supported by anything within the paper itself.

In any case, even mainstream physicists generally agree that, if you choose to think of space as a medium (like Lorentz did), you can still build a model that reproduces the same physical phenomena described by both Special and General Relativity, like time dilation, length contraction and the constancy of the speed of light. From what I understand, the main reason mainstream physicists prefer Einstein’s approach is simply that it makes the math easier, especially when you’re calculating the motion of particles.