Researchers at CERN break “The Speed of Light”

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Time diluation has been proven experimentally many times. And I made no "personal comments". And the speed of light is not about "light" anyway. Its about "the speed of causality". All forces (gravity, electromagnetic fields etc) move at "the speed of light".

Both Lorenz and Fitzgerald where trying to make the Michelson and Morley results compatible with the idea that light was a wave carried by a medium. I’ve already pointed out that supposing such a wave had an invariable velocity, regardless of local conditions, is suspect. Now that light is considered to consist of particles, there is even less reason to suppose it is the case.

I’ve also pointed out that, if photons are considered to act like other particles, like rubber pellets from an air gun say, then anyone reasonably competent at geometry, trigonometry or graphics (some CAD progs will do the work for you) can show that the outcome of the MM is exactly as would be predicted; assuming light has a fundamental velocity relative to its emitter, plus the vector due to whatever velocity the emitter has, relative to any reference. There is no mystery to be solved here, no need to suppose contractions or transformations of any kind, or that constants need become variables (which allows anything to be proved); the inputs by Lorenz and Fitzgerald are superfluous as is the RT that followed. All else is waffle.

Light is considered both a wave and a particle.

Fnord, thank you; a perfect example of the waffle I referred to!

Rather than erase anything physics is telling me that I either don't like or find inconvenient, I was actually having a half-debate with someone on another forum who firmly believes that Einstein and Hawking mangled physics, that time doesn't exist, insisted that I was trying to pull a fast one by suggesting that it's simply a measure of motion, and when I brought up sun dials as a blunt example he told me sun dials have absolutely nothing to do with time. It just seems self-indulgent when someone does that, ie. creating certainty by denying facts that don't fit a particular lens, and the worst part - you stop learning anything useful.

I'd much rather go with Nima Arkani-Hamed or Donald Hoffman, say if there are much simpler equations that tie through a sort of subspace or substructure that we should be using that, and then simply stop doing physics on epicycles much like we stopped doing geocentric astronomy.

How is it a "waffle"?

What is your better idea for conceptualizing the nature of light?

I never claimed to have a better idea, but will draw your attention to the following:

Particles are discrete, which is to say that they exist, independently.

Waves do not, being expressions of an exchange of energy (in fact, momentum, as far as I’m aware) between different parts of the medium which carries them.

These two states could hardly be more different, so claiming that light (or anything) is both of them is lacking in credibility. It’s a cop out which explains nothing!

We all know that in our commonsense lives particles and waves are different. Both particles and waves are just analogies anyway. All analogies are imperfect. You pointing out that obvious difference is you "waffling" yourself because you have no real way to answer. We all know that the earth looks flat from the pov of a human standing on its surface. But just because the earth being round is counter intuitive doesn't mean that it isn't round. And BTW time dilation has been proven expiramentally countless times.

Let me draw your attention to the fact that you DID say that you had a better idea. You said Einstein's notion that the speed of light is absolute and fixed is "likely to be wrong". Well how? How is likely to be wrong?

It's all been covered earlier in this thread; I've challenged you to prove that C is invariant, and you have not done so, and in fact have not even provided any argument why it should be!

I’ve pointed out that it was once presumed to be so as it was considered a wave travelling in a medium (the aether) that Einstein has since dismissed as being undetectable, and therefore of no practical value. I’ve also pointed out that even this idea is suspect as the speed of other waves, such as sound, whilst constant under a given set of conditions, are not invariant. Then Einstein demonstrated that light is particulate; discrete packets of energy.

I’ve offered several demonstrations that show that this assumption of invariance leads to paradox, which you have declined to counter.

You repeat a claim that time dilution has been proved, but do not mention by whom, when, and how, so that amounts to hearsay.

Your attempt to liken it to the question of whether the Earth is flat, or an oblate spheroid, is another fine example of waffle.

For those interested, a July 2018 article which seems to take something almost like a programmer's approach to making 'sure' that one is dealing with a single photon through the intermediary of a quantum dot:

https://phys.org/news/2018-07-physicist ... otons.html

If what's being said about the double-slit experiment being bunk based on them never actually getting a single photon or atom fired and this would at least drastically reduce the number of photons being sent out what should happen is, at least, some strong overlay of both particle and wave behavior where the particle lines jump out noticeably in the instance where they do actually get a single photon by luck or by accident.

What still seems equally fascinating, and disturbing, with the implications of the quantum eraser is that measurement seems to act retrocausally, almost as if to say that our interaction with light or certain kinds of particles reorders past trajectory and events with current observations. This is where I get much more curious about what the 'space time is doomed' folks have to say, ie. something's deeply incorrect with our literal read of it.

I am sorry to jump in this conversation, but I can't help because I spend most of my spare time studying physics. As I am not an expert I will only be able to provide some factual information, probably helpful for you to better understand this huge mess.

First, there is no such things as particles and waves, physically speaking. Particles are a representation tool from our classical physics model and framework, invented by us humans, to describe something we didn't understand better at the time it was discovered. We have a better theory now, Quantum fields namely, that explains much more precisely what happens at very small scale. This QFT is now part of our standard model, which implies that it was thoroughly tested, verified, studied etc. by many great minds. In this theory, "particles" are simply excitations of fields, and there are 25 fields in total. To paraphrase a correct Quora answer on the subject:


Now, some general comments:

• - About the "speed of light": first, it has nothing to do with light, really (light is just an electromagnetic radiation, it has no magical property). It just happens that light is one of those things that can achieve the maxium possible speed in our universe, but it's certainly not the only thing capable of reaching those 299,792 kilometers per second: we know (and verified recently) that gravitational waves are also reaching C in a vacuum, and in fact, any "particle" that is massless should travel at C in a vacuum.
• - Nothing that can carry information can travel at C (but for example, shadows and lasers can!). This has very profound causes and impacts, but to make the long story short, it's what sustain causality. If you were to remove the C limit, causality would break and, basically, nothing we know in our (visible) universe would exist.
• - You say "Then Einstein demonstrated that light is particulate; discrete packets of energy.". Einstein didn't demonstrated that at all, in fact he demonstrated exactly the opposite, that light can be BOTH seen as particles or as waves. That's the photoelectric effect which gave him his Nobel many years later (SR&GR took so much time for other physicists to understand that he was not awarded for it...).
• - You say "a claim that time dilution has been proved, but do not mention by whom, when, and how, so that amounts to hearsay.". Please Google this yourself, it's very easy, time dilation was proven a LARGE number of times, and in fact there are even demonstrations you can do at home. Note that there are 2 things that can dilate time: Speed (special relativity explains how) and gravity fields (general relativity explains how).

Now to be clear. If you are looking for a real, deep demonstration (or even an explanation) of all this, you are going to need a LOT of heavy maths. Type of maths you won't simply read and understand, no matter how smart you think you are. There is a reason why the paradoxes you refer to a lot are hard to grasp and resolve mentally: this is not JUST philosophy. This is PHYSICS. It's hard, harsh, ungrateful and very long to start to understand. But please do not ever say again you might prove Einstein's wrong without going through those maths and physics. The way you answer to techstepgenr8tion clearly shows you have only a very basic understanding of those 2 topics.

Which leads to my conclusion: be humble. You speak in a way like you know anything, but I'm sorry to inform you that you don't, and it's obvious to even non-physicists like me.

Also, go back to Quora: you obviously didn't have a good experience there but I can assure you that you can find there some very very smart information. Read Viktor Toth answers and Richart Mueller, to cite just 2.

Have a nice day everyone, it's sunny where I live, which is rare in december.

I also want to say that preventing a new user from using text formatting and URL tags is absurd, I think.

Also, when I submitted my post, there were many PHP error messages briefly showing. You should check your logs.

I can help on this topic if you need.

synack, you remind me of an interviewer who asked me what the principle was behind the acceleration of rockets, to which I offered “action and reaction”, to which he replied “no it isn’t, it’s rate of change of momentum!”. It is just different ways of dealing with the same phenomenon, some being better suited to different situations; none are “wrong”.

I don't know which part of my post is related to this, but at the end, yes, there is a right or wrong. The "right" is the one that comes out the maths and can be verified, falsified, used to make predictions etc. (all the science test stuff). If you were refering to the particles/waves and field stuff, of course there's a right and wrong. Particles AND waves are the wrong. Thinking of them as such will often lead to confusion and apparently contradicting science. Fields are what we consider right at the moment, and we have reasons to think there's no "more fundamental level" than that. And it's not just a perspective, as your analogy seems to imply, because it has consequences in the reasoning and the conclusion of such thoughts. To get back to your example, you were both right (interviewer and you), but you were mostly wrong too. Describing the principles behind rocket science (+ acceleration) with such few words is at best misleading, and more frequently is plain wrong. Action and reaction is not something that caracterizes rockets. It can be applied to anything, it's some general high-level reasoning, but certainly wouldn't be of any help to a rocket scientist or engineer. Same goes for physics: there are topics where you have to go in details, and be very precise, otherwise it is just philosophy.

We could discuss years about those consequences, but for what I believe is interesting to you, it boils down to causality. The only caveat left here is about the non-observable part of our universe, we have 0 idea what's going on there, nothing indicates that the same laws of physics apply there or not, so we might consider that causality does not work there.

Now, if after you've done your homeworks (the real one, with the maths and physics, not just the thinking and philosophy) you are still left with questions or disagrees with Einstein, you should post the set of equations that troubles you and we can take a look at it, here or on Quora. And as I live less than 1km of CERN, there's a bunch of physicists I can contact nearby to help too.

And to be clear, I also apologize because my first post was aggressive, that was stupid.

Something that goes back to the question of how one would fire a 'single photon':

https://phys.org/news/2018-07-physicist ... otons.html

It makes sense, I can also see why framing and definition is so confusing - ie. it's difficult to think of such a thing intuitively as a particle and especially with no mass it seems like it's better thought of as just congealing at certain points to particle-like behavior. I can also see why it would make more sense for many to consider that the structural terrain that the photon is traveling through would be what's changing with measurement rather than the photon itself.

I bookmarked those two Quora pieces that you might find very interesting:

• Viktor Toth answer to "What is the speed of light relative to me if I am travelling at the speed of light?"
  
• Ron Davis answer to: "Is there any explanation for why c is invariant?"