Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[MARK LOFTS]

The last posting by ‘Israel’ is very insightful and I would like to help him along this productive line of thinking.

He is beginning to see that the mathematical viewpoint has hijacked, sabotaged and ultimately negated physical understanding. While Eric Lerner has of course made major strides against this mathematical domination, mathematics still rules physics – and it does so through Einstein and special relativity (SR).

SR leads to logical paradoxes when applied to any physical situation. Hence SR is worse than useless for scientific investigation and guarantees that such research will never have practical application. That this might appear not to be so is only because of the confusion of SR with other discoveries, SR parasitizing these as supposed discoveries of its own.

The classic example would be the deflection of electrons etc. in cathode ray tubes, with the discovery of so-called ‘electromagnetic mass’. Einstein used this phenomenon to justify SR – claiming by analogy with ‘electromagnetic mass’ that mass is infinite at the speed of light. This relies on the confusion between ‘electromagnetic mass’ and the actual rest mass of an object, including the non-electromagnetic phenomenon of momentum (mass x velocity). These phenomena are entirely different but the naive reader’s confusion between the two (electromagnetic mass versus rest mass/momentum) allows for an unwarranted belief that “mass is infinite at the speed of light.” Einstein wishes us to believe that ordinary mass is like electromagnetic mass in a cyclotron or beam accelerator and that if we travel into deep space some mysterious non-electromagnetic force will retard our motion to being always less than the speed of light – this speed presumably in reference to the solar system, Milky Way or nearby galaxies. Or more precisely, what is the reference frame here?

Rather we must ask “what does it mean to speak of the speed of light when there is no clear reference frame i.e. there is galactic recession throughout the observable universe?” Israel has to consider two answers to this question. Is there a universal ‘absolute reference frame’ for motion, which the Soviet physicist Vladimir Fok asserted – in Australia we call such advocates “Fokwits.” Or does the phrase “nothing can travel faster then light” really mean something solipsistic i.e. “nothing can travel faster than light relative to me, the single observer.” The Einstein view is actually the latter and is properly a solipsistic philosophy and marks rather the abandonment of science than a basis for further research. This is also clear in Einstein’s popular work on relativity where, to justify the mathematics, he imagines two investigators in mutual motion each noticing the (Fitzgerald) contraction of the other’s vehicle – the contractions being equal in each case. What is dealt with only mathematically is the time dilation paradox. B’s time is slower than A’s time for observer A. A’s time is slower than B’s time for observer B. This paradoxical outcome is not resolvable afterwards by any objective measure – unless one redefines ‘objective’ as meaning the dogmatic decision of a group of believers. That is, we cannot say objectively whose time has passed more slowly, A or B.

Einstein’s writings never deal with the paradox issues fairly and honestly. Rather he ‘justified’ the ‘apparent(?)’ paradoxes by continuing on with still more speculation, finally becoming stuck on the Unified Field Theory, a labyrinth of nonsense so beloved by mathematical ‘physicists’ today.

Yours sincerely

Mark Lofts

P.S: I had to re-edit this on 21/8 because I wrongly wrote there that momentum was mass times velocity SQUARED. (Always this problem with a missing two in an equation!)