Arbitrary speed limit?
There's a theory forum on here Onar. Maybe you'd like to start a thread on 'Lorentzian relativity'. You're talking about an ether, yes?
Well, yeah, you could call it ether. I won't be going into that discussion in this thread. Even I don't think that's relevant to a political discussion.
I'm not going to prejudge what you might say, but I will say this as someone who has grappled with theoretical physics over the years: it is very, very easy to go wrong, to think you've understood something when you haven't. Really very easy. And I don't know how good your maths is. Mine is pretty good but not as good as it used to be, frustratingly, and the maths behind, for instance, the Dirac equation, is fucking hard. But if you're not prepared to grapple with the maths, there's really only a vanishingly small chance that you'll be right.
a) you describe my experience in economics. I've so many times thought that NOW I fully understand it only to come back and be bitten in the ass by something entirely new that I had in no way even remotely thought about. b) I have taken a lot of courses in math and it comes naturally to me, but I am no mathematician. However, I also generally think that physics is fundamentally simple and logical and can be understood without mathematics. Don't get me wrong, math is certainly important but a physical argument is different and more important. Physical concepts integrate a lot of data and explains them in an intelligible manner. Example: a long time ago people thought that the earth was the center of the universe and that the heavens rotated around the earth. With the stars and the sun this model had great explanatory power. It was possible to construct very accurate mathematical models of the positions of the stars in time based on this model. However, this model of universe-spinning-round-the-earth (which is a PHYSICAL model that in itself doesn't require mathematics to explain and understand) ran into problems especially with the planets. It wasn't until the heliocentric model that these problems were resolved. When the arbitrary mathematical assumption of circular orbits (and hence epicycles) had been abolished in favor of the inductive method the orbits of the planets could be accurately calculated from observations. So there's definitely a feedback between math and physical models, but without the physical models the math very quickly turns infertile.
Let me just very quickly state my reasons for disliking Einstein's theory of relativity. Until Einstein waves were understood and had been induced from observations to mean
propagation in a medium. It is even possible to calculate the density of a medium given the propagation speed of waves. But Einstein dismissed this carefully induced knowledge about waves and simply stated that for some mysterious reason light behaves exactly like waves (it refracts, it difracts, it slows in non-vacuum, it has a propagation speed) without being waves in a medium. This is completely arbitrary and replaces a physical understanding with an unintelligible mystery. This is non-objective, i.e. Einstein's theory is based on a premise that is not induced from reality, and I absolutely don't like that about his theory. I also don't like the notion of spacetime where time is treated as a dimension. Physically speaking a dimension is an axis of freedom. Space has three such degrees of freedom. You can actually move back and forth in space, but time is no such dimension. You can't travel in time. You an only move forwards and you have very little control over this process. Also, objectively the future and the past are non-observables. They don't exist. No-one has ever seen the future or the past. You always see *change* which we perceive as the coming of the future, but it always manifests itself in the present, whereas the past is gone forever once it's happen and only materializes itself as traces in 3D space in the present. ALL our physical knowledge about the universe, including Einstein's owns equations strongly indicate that there is no future and no past, only a present. No physical law includes the past or the future. It's all just time differentials from one instant to the next.
Now, here is what I like about the ether theory: it explains light in a physical manner as propagation in a medium. It doesn't require a mysterious speed limit and a mysterious spacetime. Gravitational bending of light is elegantly explained as refraction of light in ether with different densities, with ether density being inverse square proportional to the radius of a gravitational body. Time slowing in strong gravitational fields is explained as atomic clock slowing in a denser ether medium. In fact, the ether model produces the same equations as Einstein. Let me throw in a LeSage type model of gravity for matter and then you have a complete physical model of gravity.
Of course now I've just listed the likes and dislikes. Then comes the hard work of actually answering all the various tough questions and challenges that the model has to satisfy. I am NOT going to go into that in his thread, but I would recommend anyone interested to check out Tom van Flandern's metaresearch.org. Don't be distracted by the fact that he believes in aliens. Everyone has a nutty side. His physics is intelligible and as far as I can tell he answers all of the criticisms I've seen directed at ether models and LeSage gravity.
