Posted on 03/07/2010 2:11:48 PM PST by LibWhacker
God liked Einstein and Einstein liked God.
“I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.”
“I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice.”
“God is subtle but he is not malicious.”
Me too. I was never comfortable with the concept of relative motion. A simple thought experiment makes the problem clear. A friend of mine in physics class raised this and the teacher simply ducked it. If you have a bar, say 200 million light years long, and you push it, assuming incompressibility, you will get the same amount of motion on the other end. This becomes an argument for motion as absolute, not relative. As stupid and silly as this simple experiment appears, put in the frame of light years, it becomes different.
Also, dark matter brings back the idea of an ether.
Me too. I was never comfortable with the concept of relative motion. A simple thought experiment makes the problem clear. A friend of mine in physics class raised this and the teacher simply ducked it. If you have a bar, say 200 million light years long, and you push it, assuming incompressibility, you will get the same amount of motion on the other end. This becomes an argument for motion as absolute, not relative. As stupid and silly as this simple experiment appears, put in the frame of light years, it becomes different.
Also, dark matter brings back the idea of an ether.
Hallelujah! I always figured there was an aether. How does matter distort the fabric of something that isn’t there.
Next, maybe the Big Bang can get a new look. How in the world do you know that the original singularity was the size of the head of a pin. Could have been the size of darn bowling ball. Or maybe even a star. Inabilities to measure the gaps between the non-simultaneity of events, doesn’t prove there is no non-simultaneity.
parsy, doubts the Big Bang anyhow
Yes it's all in the assumptions...
Get outta heah;)
Why?
ping.
...
Ignoring compressibility in your example is like saying “Suppose for a moment that water flowed up hill...”.
If you have a bar 200 million light years long, it’s impossible for it to be uncompressible, so your example is not really relevant. Because of compressibility (there may be deeper physics at work), almost any “bump” can be modeled in wave theory. Incompressibility rules out using wave theory which I would guess, make large parts of physics as we know it invalid as well. Luckily for us, incompressibility is not a real property of anything.
When matter reaches a true state of incompressibility, things either bounce off of it, or the matter in question will reorganize at the nuclear level (like fusion), and shed energy, and form something more dense -— which is really saying you compressed it :)
The soonest that the other end of the bar can move in response to the pressure you exert on your end depends on the speed of sound in the material the bar is made of. Sound is a pressure wave propagating through a medium.
The speed of sound in an incompressible bar would be infinite....that isn't the universe we live in.
Take a long laser beam, several light-years long. Now sweep the beam across an equally long screen. The projected spot will move with a velocity that could be greater than the speed of light itself.
The correction was that the laser beam is actually made up of photons, and no individual photon acquires a speed greater than that of light.
As for Einstein, his god was not the same god most here are familiar with. He was more of an agnostic than anything else.
“When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe, everything else seems so superfluous.”
- Albert Einstein.
Its depressing how often Einstein’s view of God comes up. He knew little of theology. Newton, Faraday and Lemaître were well versed in religion. Interestingly enough, Lemaître didn’t find cosmology theologically interesting at all. He said psychology, not his Big Bang theory, inspired him to think of the divine.
That’s great, but unfortunately the C in Einstein’s most famous equation isn’t constant.
Could you elaborate?
Recent theory and observations about the origins of the universe would appear to back up his belief. For instance, theories of the origin of the universe — the “Big Bang”- suggest that very early in the universe's development, its edges were farther apart than light, moving at a constant speed, could possibly have travelled in that time. To explain this, scientists have focused on strange, unknown and as-yet-undiscovered forms of matter that produce gravity that repulses objects.
Moffat’s theory - that the speed of light at the beginning of time was much faster than it is now - provides an answer to some of these cosmology problems. “It is easier for me to question Einstein's theory than it is to assume there is some kind of strange, exotic matter around me in my kitchen.” His theory could also help explain astronomers’ discovery last year that the universe's expansion is accelerating. Moffat’s paper, co-authored with former U of T researcher Michael Clayton, appeared in a recent edition of the journal Physics Letters.
End quote.
Of course, it's all theory and I don't even qualify as an amateur physicist.
parsy!
No! No! Don’t go near the ether! Stay in the 21st century, please. Enough knuckleheads around already.
The Variable Speed of Light even has it’s own Wikipedia page. Of course that’s not necessarily the highest degree of peer review.
“The variable speed of light (VSL) concept states that the speed of light in a vacuum, usually denoted by c, may not be constant in some cases. In most situations in condensed matter physics when light is traveling through a medium, it effectively has a slower speed. Virtual photons in some calculations in quantum field theory may also travel at a different speed for short distances; however, this doesn’t imply that anything can travel faster than light. While it is usually thought that no meaning can be ascribed to a dimensional quantity such as the speed of light varying in time (as opposed to a dimensionless number such as the fine structure constant), in some controversial theories in cosmology, the speed of light also varies by changing the postulates of special relativity. This though would require a rewrite of much of modern physics, to replace the current system which depends on a constant c.”
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