This depends on how you define "the present". I would define it as the division between past and future. It seems evident to me that my experience consists of some past and some future, so I would say that my experience encompasses all of the present, and also some past and some future. But if you define "the present" as consisting of an extended period of time, then it is likely that we only experience a part of the present. — Metaphysician Undercover

I would say your experience consists only of some present. Your memories and expectations are experienced in the present, and they don't necessarily reflect accurately what you did experience in the past or what you will experience in the future.

As to why I said we only experience a portion of the present, is that the present consists of the present experience of all beings, not just mine, what I experience presently is a tiny part of all that's experienced.

This appears to me to be an incoherent statement. "Consciousness" and "experience" are specific to the way that we experience time. To talk about a consciousness experiencing all of time at once doesn't really make any sense. Consider what it would be like if what we experienced as a thousandth of a second in time, would consist of the physical changes of a billion years. We don't notice the changes of a thousandth of a second because they go by so fast. So all the things which happen to the earth, the solar system, and the entire universe, in a billion years, would not be noticeable to this consciousness because they go by so fast. Now extend this to all of time. Everything which happens throughout the entirety of time would not be noticeable because it zooms by too fast. How does it make sense to talk about a scenario like this? — Metaphysician Undercover

The way I see it, our experience is limited both spatially and temporally. So for instance I don't see what's behind the wall in front of me, but someone on the other side of the wall does. Well what if all moments in time exist concurrently, and we only see a tiny portion of it as we're traveling along? This would mean that the whole future is already written, so from the highest point of view everything we are going to do is already written, but from our limited point of view we do have limited free will because we do make choices based on a set of inputs (experiences/beliefs/understanding/...)

What would it be like to experience a bigger chunk of time at once? Well we can't do it justice from our limited point of view, just like someone who doesn't see colors cannot get what it's like to see colors. It would be a higher dimension of experience.

So what would it be like to experience the whole past and future experiences of all beings simultaneously? Can't describe it. Infinite experience. And if that infinite experience is sustained forever then it wouldn't zoom by, it would just be permanent, eternal.

So of course there is a lot of speculation in what I just said, but I find it is an interesting way to view existence and I feel like there is something to it.

I would say the quest of the philosopher is to move towards understanding the whole, everything, to uncover connections that were previously unseen. And in that process I find it essential to experience as much as possible. If the philosophers limit themselves to a small subset of possible experiences, then their point of view and the understanding they can reach will be necessarily limited as well. I would say we're all explorers in a sense. But not just philosophers, everyone. In their own way.

There are two very distinct uses of "eternal". One refers to existing forever, infinite temporal existence. The other refers to existence outside of time. Aristotle demonstrated that the first, infinite temporal existence, is a faulty concept. Following this, Christian theologians accepted the second meaning, "outside of time" as the description of the eternality of God. What exactly is meant by this is a subject for speculation. — Metaphysician Undercover

From our point of view we only experience a portion of the present, which is itself an extremely small part of all that it, was and ever will be. I would say an eternal, infinite consciousness would experience it all at once forever. And maybe the whole is perfect, but it only appears imperfect from a limited point of view, especially when we're experiencing the difficult parts. But I would say also that difficulty is a part of perfection, if everything was easy there would be something missing.

Perhaps there is another way of phrasing this? Perhaps "There is no object in the physical universe that has the property of being eternal"? — EricH

"There is nothing that has the property of being eternal" yes, that's what I was getting at. But I don't subscribe to this view for various reasons. Though I now realize the reasoning I was putting forward in this thread was flawed, for I was implicitly assuming that something is eternal in order to disprove that nothing is ...

This claim does not seem to be based in any logic. If it is true that there is nothing which is eternal, this makes the statement "nothing is eternal" true. It does not make the statement "nothing is eternal" eternal. In fact, that would contradict the premise that there is nothing which is eternal. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well I thought I was showing the statement “nothing is eternal” is self-contradictory and thus false, but I think I realized my mistake.

If nothing is eternal, then at some point everything ceases to be, including time, so “nothing is eternal” would itself not be eternal.

In the view that nothing is eternal, the world appears, not even out of nothing since nothing doesn’t exist, and at some point ceases to be, and that’s it. In that view there is absolutely no reason for any “law” of physics, for any regularity observed, and these laws aren’t eternal.

The alternative view is that something was always there and always will be, and that there may be a reason behind the “laws” of physics and the regularities we observe.

If there is something that is eternal, then it is false that nothing is eternal. And this statement of false, would be eternal.
However, if there exists absolutely nothing that is eternal, then our statement is true. And this statement of true, would be eternal. — Philosophim

The point is there cannot be nothing that is eternal.

If there was nothing eternal, then “nothing is eternal” would be eternal, and “nothing is eternal” isn’t nothing, which contradicts the premise, so the premise is false. So there is something that is eternal.

We aren’t proving it is the statement “nothing is eternal” that is eternal, since the premise that led to it is false.

We are proving something is eternal, without specifying what that something is. This goes beyond statements. This applies to reality. There really is something that is eternal out there.

I’m gonna phrase it differently

Let’s assume nothing is eternal. Either this is true for a limited time, or for all eternity.

If the assumption is true only for a limited time, that means that when it isn’t true there is something that is eternal. But if there is something that is eternal then “nothing is eternal” is always false.

If the assumption is true for all eternity, then there is something that is true for all eternity, which isn’t nothing, so “nothing is eternal” is always false.

So the assumption “nothing is eternal” necessarily leads to a contradiction. Thus it is false. Proof by contradiction. So something is eternal ...

An island to the south of continental Australia exists. A large deposit of ice on the Moon is now said to exist. But the solution to the question of what two and two equals does not exist, it simply is. — Wayfarer

Why do you make this distinction? There is an island to the south of Australia. There is a large deposit of ice. 4 is a solution to 2+2=x. The island exists. The deposit of ice exists. 4 exists.

To better understand where I’m coming from : I used to see truth as relative. I made some threads on that a long while ago. The idea that my truth may not be your truth and that we can’t say one is more valid than the other because we may not have the same experiences.

But not everything can be relative, for if everything was relative then that would be an absolute. That’s a logical necessity. I’m going with a similar train of thought here. Not everything is temporary, for if it was then that itself would be eternal and not temporary. That’s a logical necessity as well.


Those who define truth as “in accordance with facts” get stuck when they go deeper. What is a true fact as opposed to a false one? What makes something truly in accordance with a fact? ...

Deep down the idea of Truth is that of something unchanging, that remains the same, that we can hang onto no matter what. And the point of this thread is that logical necessities show that there is something Absolute and Eternal. Call it Truth, call it the Absolute, call it God or whatever, the essence matters more than the label.

What is it to think something is true than to be of a state of mind such that you are inclined to act like it is true? — Pfhorrest

Do you see the difference between thinking the Sun is going to rise tomorrow, and behaving as if the Sun is going to rise tomorrow?

on my account will is a process as lawlike as any other, which is to say not completely but substantially enough. And laws of nature are not “enforced” by anything, then aren’t normative laws like those humans pass to govern each other, they are just patterns in the structure of possible ways the universe could be. — Pfhorrest

What is it that makes the Sun move in the sky? Is there something that moves it? Does it move all by itself? If you say it moves because the Earth rotates, is there something that makes the Earth rotate? Does it rotate all by itself?

The Earth might suddenly stop rotating. Yet it keeps going. What makes it keep going?

When you decide to pick a flower and you do it, what made the flower be picked? Is it just a pattern, or are you responsible for the flower being picked? Are you just a pattern?

Transcending the laws of physics is not possible because if they could be transcended they would not have been actual laws to begin with. We routinely transcend all kinds of things once thought to be laws of nature; that just shows that we were wrong about what the laws were before. — Pfhorrest

You can break the laws that society imposes on you, does that mean they aren’t laws?

You say the true laws of nature can’t be broken. How would you prove that such laws exist in the first place, considering that we “routinely transcend” apparent laws? If they exist, why would all things follow these laws and not some other laws?

as for the problem of evil, if you want to count as God something that doesn’t meet all the regular criteria that’s fine, just a matter of semantics, but still you’re basically talking about a really powerful all-good alien who’s just not powerful enough to overcome the influence of an equally powerful evil alien — Pfhorrest

An alien sounds like a being from some other planet being subjected to the same laws of nature as you are, whereas I’m talking about beings (forces, energies, or however you want to call them) who are the source of everything that you see and feel.

neither of whose existence we have an evidence of. That’s kinda crazy sounding and though on my account you’re free to believe it yourself if that really seems the most plausible interpretation of your experience of the world to you, you’re going to need some big evidence to back up any assertions to anyone else that that’s more likely than other, less outlandish accounts. — Pfhorrest

Many people have evidence of them. You wouldn’t have evidence of the sky if you were blind.

Presumably when you see a house you interpret it as evidence of other beings even if you haven’t seen them with your eyes, beings who have built that house. But you choose to not see the whole world as evidence of higher beings even if you haven’t seen them with your eyes.

You choose to believe that laws that were there for no reason at all somehow gave rise to this world. You choose to believe that laws are responsible for what you do, that choice is an illusion. You choose to believe that love and suffering and thoughts and beauty and good and evil somehow appeared out of lifeless stuff that is none of that. That’s what sounds crazy and outlandish to me.

To believe something is just to think it’s true, nothing more. — Pfhorrest

Belief is much more than that, belief changes how you see the world, how you feel, how you act and react, it is more than a thought. It would rather be behaving and being as if something is true.

Regarding the existence of God: is it laws that cause change, or will? Do laws enforce themselves, or does will enforce laws?

Regarding the problem of Evil: is it right to assume that God is necessarily all-powerful? We might have two competing gods, a Good God and an Evil God, who are extremely powerful but not all-powerful. A loving God who is the ultimate source of love and joy and hope and everything that is good and who can transcend the laws of physics (miracles) still counts as God to me.

There's no sense of superiority or blindness in saying that mental health issues should be addressed by mental health professionals, not by strangers on a philosophy forum. — Michael

If you were to encounter someone in mental distress because they are drowning and they don't know how to swim, would you give them a hand, or would you direct them to a mental health professional, because you're a stranger and not a professional and so you can't help them?

Mental health professionals used to see homosexuality as a mental disease that should be treated. But homosexuals weren't suffering because they were homosexuals, they were suffering because of the persecution they endured. Was it the right choice then to direct them to mental health professionals so that they could be cured of their homosexuality? People who didn't see homosexuality as a disease were much more helpful towards homosexuals.

Many people have been worse off after being treated by mental health professionals. Many people have been successfully helped by strangers, or friends, or family. Both can be helpful. Philosophy can be helpful. Exercising can be helpful. All kinds of things can be helpful, mental health professionals do not have all the answers, and they do not always have the right answers.

Refusing to discuss with someone who suffers and only telling them to go see a mental health professional is often unhelpful.

Psychiatrists offer therapy as well as medication. Either way it's best to seek help from a trained professional, not random losers and one awesome person on the internet. — Michael

And modern psychiatry is based on many beliefs, some of which are false. Philosophy is partly about questioning authorities, yet psychiatry is one authority you guys blindly bow down to and don't like to philosophize about.

Maybe you should philosophize about why you don't want to philosophize about that? And maybe you should philosophize about why you see yourselves as random losers.

I don't think they are questions a philosopher can answer, be they amateur or professional. They need to be heard by a psychiatrist. — god must be atheist

Plenty of people suffering psychologically have been helped more by words than by medication.

Can't convince someone who isn't willing to listen, that's for sure. Maybe ponder some more on your belief that "the probability of an advanced, intelligent civilization within a navigable distance, who were motivated to make the long journey, is extremely low". How would you know what is a long journey to a civilization more advanced than yours? How would you know that the speed of light is a limit to them?

Realize that you are stuck in false beliefs and find your way back to the truth. We do matter, you do matter, try to see why.

Is fear really rampant among the "deplorables" who elected Trump, or among those who oppose him? Is Trump fearful? Who is really fearful?

There is a real existing threat, which most people refuse to open their eyes to, but we don't have to fear that threat. We can face it with hope and faith. Fear itself is part of the threat.

Indeed. Nothing cannot turn into something, because in order for it to turn into something it would already have to be something. In the strict sense the word ‘nothing’ doesn’t refer to anything that exists.

People used to think that the vacuum of space is empty, that there is nothing in it, but turns out there are a lot of things, a lot of stuff passing through (photons, gravity ...). So when they talk of particles popping in and out of existence in the vacuum of space, as if they appeared from nothing and disappeared into nothing, well it’s a misnomer, they don’t arise from nothing, they arise from something and they turn into some other thing. Same goes with the big bang, if it happened it came from something.

And just because some things are invisible to some instruments, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, that doesn’t mean they are nothing.

However you call that thing that you’re dealing with, and which bothers you enough that you seek help to get rid of it, you at least know that LSD helped you against it and psychiatry didn’t. If you find something else that helps, great. If you don’t, then consider going back to the one thing that did work, with an inquiring mindset, not a fearful one. I’ll stop talking about that now, good luck.

We should not have to work anywhere near as hard as we used to have to work.

But back in the 1950's...the norm was for only one person (usually the father was the provider) in the family to work...and that person earned enough for shelter, medical needs, education, transportation, food, clothing and all other needs...plus small vacations and even some savings for later years.

Today...after the introduction of billions of slave machines...both parents work...sometimes with more than one job...and basic needs are barely met.

During my lifetime, normal work went from 45 hours during 5 1/2 days a week...to 40 hours 5 days a week. That was back in the 1950's.

We should be working 2 days a week...10 hours now.

This all sucks. — Frank Apisa

This is true. The sad thing is it is not an unfortunate coincidence that we are forced to work so much. It is by design.

We don’t need much to be happy. Shelter, food, love, fun. We could have all that working 10 hours a week, if education was focused on teaching us how to get that. Instead education is focused on indoctrinating us into being pawns of a system that enslaves us through money and that progressively destroys the planet. Education doesn’t help us taking care of ourselves or being happy, it teaches us to become obedient and productive and dependent slaves who do not question the status quo. The powers that be do not want our freedom and happiness, they want our enslavement. That’s why things are the way they are.

The real powers aren’t the presidents, they are those who control money. Those who control the central banks, who can issue money out of thin air, while everyone else is struggling for it. People kill one another over money, kill themselves over money, make wars over money, struggle constantly for money, while there are some individuals out there who can create it out of thin air, while lending it with interest. We are kept in a constant state of debt. There is more debt than money in circulation, it can never be repaid! That keeps people struggling constantly, struggling while going nowhere, just struggling within a system that wants them to struggle. Why is it that pretty much all countries are in debt? Debt to whom? Debt to the central banks. They are the ones truly ruling us. The ones who rule the presidents.

The presidential candidates who want to change this system do not get elected. If they do manage to get elected, they are demonized constantly by the media who too are controlled by the same powers, and usually they end up being assassinated. That’s what we’re up against. Deep down you know that if the presidents were the ones truly in control and working for our best interest, things wouldn’t be that way. Despite all the people struggling for positive change, things don’t turn positive because on the other side there is a strong force working against us, against our happiness and against our freedom. That’s why we have to work so much just to be worse off than in the past. This isn’t some unfortunate circumstance, this is wanted, this is by design. And those who are responsible want us to stay asleep, struggling within a box against one another while they are free to enslave us more and more. We are their pawns, their slaves, and we will be slaves and things will continue to get worse as long as people don’t wake up to what’s going on.

The point is colors do not actually exist, and that is a fact in the sense that in the outside 3d person empirical reality there are only electric and magnetic fields, and they are transparent. There is no field of purple or substance of green. Therefore, we do not see colors, we "see" something else as colors. For example, colors could be mapped to magnetic density or electric voltage scales, or different orientation of molecules, or even symbols and numbers in some higher order representation mapping. — Zelebg

But how do you know there are only electric and magnetic fields? Do you see them? Or you have inferred their existence? Would you have been able to infer their existence if you didn't see colors? No? So how can you say that electric and magnetic fields exist but colors do not?

Colors exist in the sense that you perceive them. If you assume they don't exist, you're assuming a great part of your perception doesn't exist. And if they don't exist, how do you know you're perceiving anything remotely close to reality? If reality is completely different from what you perceive then why would you trust anything that you infer from what you perceive?

What i'm going to say is going to sound stupid to most people here, and it would sound stupid to most people in this modern society, but maybe it will speak to you.

This thing that you feel in your head, in your mind, does it feel alive? You say it moves around; sometimes it feels like a hand massaging your brain. I think you will agree that if we were to open your skull we wouldn't find a physical being moving around your brain, and most people would conclude that it's all "in your mind", that you're "imagining it", that you're "hallucinating".

I suggest that what you feel is real, that you feel the presence of a non-physical being. You can't see it with your eyes, but you have some sense that allows you to perceive it in a vague way. This isn't that far-fetched when you think about it: we have the ability to sense invisible things, for instance we can sense electromagnetic radiation outside of the visible spectrum, when the radiation is intense enough we feel it in a vague way, as heat.

In your case it's presumably not electromagnetic radiation, it's something else, something that materialistic science believes does not exist. And modern psychiatry being materialistic, they couldn't address your problem.

And you can tell that this non-physical being is not benevolent, as you say it is severely impiging on your quality of life, it is uncomfortable, it takes up a lot of your awareness, it is a burden. Taking acid helped you push it away, at least temporarily.

Going further than that, I suggest that these malevolent non-physical beings are all around, but most people don't perceive them the way you do. At least you're perceiving in a vague way one that is messing with you constantly; if you didn't perceive it you would have no idea where to look.

So what can you do? You know that acid worked against it, at least temporarily. You could try again, but this time while keeping in mind that you're dealing with a malevolent non-physical being, and focusing on pushing it away. In that way you will know more about what you're dealing with exactly, what that thing does to you and what it is capable of.

If you want for now you could see the "malevolent non-physical being" as a metaphor and not a real thing, but I think you will come to see that it is more than a metaphor, and that you're not just struggling with yourself.

The tendency for (closed systems in) our universe to evolve toward states of greater entropy isn't an effect of any of our specific physical laws, though. In a purely mathematical model of all of the possible instantaneous states of the universe, completely agnostic to the physical laws governing transitions from one state to another, states where energy is spread out more evenly are more common, and states where it is more concentrated are less common. Think of, for example, ways that air molecules could be arranged in a box: there's only relatively few arrangements that have them all clumped in the same corner, but a whole lot of arrangements that have them spread out pretty evenly across the whole volume of the box.

It's not that there are more high-entropy states than low-entropy ones because the physical laws make high-entropy ones more likely; the high-entropy ones are more likely because there's just more of them that are possible (and that is actually what defines them as high-entropy), so even if there was no law-like behavior at all, and the whole system just evolved randomly, you would just expect it to evolve into a higher-entropy state at random. — Pfhorrest

There are more states where energy is spread out pretty evenly, the issue is that without knowing in the first place how likely each state is (which depends on the physical laws), then you don’t know that it is more likely to end up in the high-entropy ones even if there are many more of them. If you have a universe where because of its specific physical laws the low-entropy states are much more likely even if they are less numerous, then that universe doesn’t evolve towards higher entropy.

And I gave an example of such a universe, if you have energy sources and energy sinks, the sinks suck the energy out of the sources and the entropy decreases. Instead of having the sinks and the sources spread out evenly, you would have the sinks close to the sources, and the universe might evolve in a configuration where the sinks maximize the energy that they suck from the sources.

In our universe air molecules repel one another all in the same way that’s why they end up being spread evenly in a box. These molecules are energy sources, they emit electromagnetic fields. Now if you picture things that absorb these fields (instead of emitting/re-emitting them), these things might arrange to have the air molecules spread in a different way.

In any case it would be wrong to say that any possible universe ends up evolving towards the high-entropy states, because the likelihood of these states depends on the very laws of the universe, which are more fundamental.

I see no evidence that the universe evolves randomly. Physical laws are not random, what we decide to do isn’t random, both dictate how the universe evolves.

To say that the universe behaves the way it does because entropy increases is akin to saying that objects fall to the ground because their potential energy is converted into kinetic energy. These aren’t causes, they are high-level descriptions which deep down do not explain anything. The correct way to put it is that things behave in a specific way, which we attempt to describe through conceptual tools such as energy or entropy, but these conceptual tools are surely not the cause of what happens. Even the fundamental physical theories are not the cause of what happens, they are also descriptions of what happens, but at least they provide a more precise description of what happens.

What I mean by "iron clad" though is precisely that that doesn't depend on any actual physical force, it's just a purely mathematical thing. Any universe with any physical laws would still obey the same mathematics, and so still be bound to that purely mathematical statistical tendency. — Pfhorrest

Well I’m thinking that there could be universes where entropy decreases as a whole. In such a universe for instance some things would suck the energy out of everything else, as opposed to this universe where things radiate energy towards other things. In our universe hot flows towards cold (fast-moving particles transmit some of their motion to slower particles), in a universe with decreasing entropy the slower particles would become slower and slower as the faster ones would become faster by sucking their energy.

In our universe all things are energy sources and they attract or repel one another. In a universe with decreasing entropy there would be energy sources and energy sinks, you could picture the energy sinks as parasites moving towards the energy sources and feeding off them.

And you know what this reminds me of something, in gnosticism there is the belief that we are eternal beings who are kept prisoners by parasites (they are called archons) who feed off our energy, that this material world is an illusion they have created to use us, and that the more we struggle and the more we suffer the more energy they suck from us.

Maybe there is increasing entropy in this illusory universe but decreasing entropy in the underlying universe that is hidden from us? Otherwise if this universe we see was all there is why does it have increasing entropy? The arrow of time is a mystery, but it stops being one when we see things that way. This universe we see is not the underlying reality, it’s a simulation, a bit like in the matrix, parasitic beings have created it to feed off our energy, they hide the reality from us to keep us imprisoned and make us struggle. And our goal is to wake up from that illusion, to uncover the web of lies and false beliefs that they have weaved before us, to uncover the truth that they prevent us from seeing and living. Which would be the ultimate goal of philosophy.

The problem with asking "what is the meaning of life?" is that there just isn't this kind of correspondence. There's nothing to point to. — BitconnectCarlos

Indeed, though usually the underlying question is “what is the purpose of my life?”, or “what is the purpose of humanity?”

At that point we have to notice that purpose stems from a desire, there is no purpose without a desire, the desire is what creates the purpose. So when one wonders “what is the purpose of my life?”, one is really asking “what is it that I desire to achieve with my life?”.

People who find their life purposeless have become disconnected from their desires, from their driving force, that’s what I call depression. These people have got lost in the darkness and they need to find their way back to the light. The desperate existential cry “what’s the point of all this??” is really asking “where have my desires gone??”.

People aren’t depressed because life is purposeless, they find life purposeless because they are depressed, it took me a long time to realize this. And part of the reason they are stuck in existential despair is that they firmly believe their life is inherently purposeless, that it really is an objective state of affairs, they fail to see the influence of their state of mind, the influence of how they feel on how they see the world. And of course when the depressive worldview stems from how we feel and we’re stuck in negative feelings, then we are unable to see that the underlying cause is how we feel and not how the world is.

And then the big question is how to get out of the depressed state? How to reconnect to our desires when we have lost them? Plenty of things can help, but the solution varies from individual to individual, it depends on the life they have had up to now, on what they have experienced that has led them to get stuck in the darkness. The materialistic view of seeing depression as being caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain is flawed, depression has a noticeable influence on brain activity but that’s a consequence, a manifestation, it’s not the cause. Many people have escaped the depressed state without any medication and without changing their diet, they have escaped depression by having experiences that made them find their way back to the light, reconnect to their desires.

Changing one’s diet can help. Ingesting some medication or psychedelic substance can help. Changing one’s environment can help. Reflecting on one’s past experiences can help. Being shown love, being listened to, being understood can help. Reconnecting with nature, spending time with animals or plants can help. Realizing that one’s life isn’t inherently purposeless can help. Speaking of all this can help. So many things can help, the right combination will depend on the individual. And at some point the individual leaves the depressed state, leaves the darkness and comes to see the light again, and realizes that they weren’t depressed because life is purposeless, but that they found life purposeless because they were depressed.

You’re worthwhile and you deserve to be loved, don’t let anyone take that away from you.

Pretty sure it is. At the very least, everything will expand until there's nothing left to harness. — Marchesk

You can be pretty sure and wrong. First of all problem of induction, you can’t know what the laws of physics will be in the future. Then if there is a continued creation of energy there is no heat death. If the universe is a closed shape and not too big then there is no heat death. If the redshift of distant galaxies has been wrongly assumed to be caused by their receding motion then maybe the universe isn’t even expanding. So no, heat death is pretty much not guaranteed at all.

The second law may be iron clad — Pfhorrest

Actually it isn’t either even for an isolated system. Let’s say an isolated system can be in N different possible states (where a state is defined by the set of positions and velocities of all the things within the system). There are many more states in which all these positions and velocities are spread out approximately evenly, than there are states where some position and velocities are very much different from the others. And as things interact with one another they tend to evolve towards the more likely states, but it does happen that some interactions lead temporarily to a less likely state (entropy decrease).

When you think about it the “second law” doesn’t dictate how things move deep down, it isn’t an additional force that attracts or repels things, it is a statistical observation that works on average.

Life sometimes appear as a struggle because we have to struggle against all the forces that move towards destroying us, but that’s the physical view, the underlying reality may be that we are eternal beings and this all is some sort of game, or lesson.

I like the idea of seeing the whole of this existence as a game because, when you think about it, we wouldn’t be so immersed in it if we were aware of it. A game can be truly good when you forget you’re playing one and you find yourself within it, as a character within a world. Also there can’t be a game without rules, and there are rules we have to play by here (the fundamental laws of physics, well maybe these laws can be broken and we haven’t found the true underlying rules yet). And in a game there are different sides with different objectives, here we have the good side and the bad side.

One might say when you’re suffering immensely it’s not a game anymore, but when it becomes too hard for us there is a way out, we can give up. But then maybe we wake up outside the game and realize that we’ve lost it, that we have made it harder for our team, that we should have kept playing because we have let the other side beat us. And then maybe we decide to go back in the game under a different character, who knows :)

But again a fundamental part of this game is not knowing it is one, so I also like to forget about it and go back to play ... ;)

Afterlife or not, what's really the value of doing anything in the grand scheme of things? — runbounder

You say that because you are in depression. By this I don’t mean to say that you have a mental illness, that there is something wrong in your brain, even though there is a correlation between the state of depression and brain activity, but there is some underlying cause you haven’t identified yet that makes you look at things that way.

A great mistake people make is to think that they are depressed because life is meaningless, while the reality is they see life as meaningless because they are depressed. When you feel the love and beauty in the universe you see precisely the value and the point of existence, when you don’t you see no point and no amount of logic can make you see the point. Words can only be used as a tool to help you get out of that hole.

You aren’t depressed because there is some chemical imbalance in your brain, rather the chemical imbalance is a manifestation of depression, it isn’t the cause. So what’s the cause? A baby isn’t born depressed. It’s the negative experiences in life that can lead to depression. That can make one lose hope, lose faith in love, in happiness, in light. You have let yourself become overwhelmed by darkness, you have let the suffering you have experienced separate you from the light.

Think about what your dreams were when you were a child, what you dreamed to do. Those dreams had meaning to you, you were connected to them. Something has separated you from them, something that happened to you, some false beliefs have taken hold of you, some darkness, depression, or however you want to call it.

Existence isn’t a prison even if it is eternal, but you feel like you are in a prison, why? What is it in your life that makes you feel imprisoned? Identify that and that will help you find a way out of the darkness.

You remind me of myself some years back!

What is true, what is real, what’s the difference between reality and imagination ... fundamental questions.

You have various experiences, which you label perception, feeling, thought, imagination, ... , more or less arbitrarily. If you don’t attempt to make a fundamental distinction between them, but instead see them all as experiences, then you don’t have to wonder what things are really like beyond experiences, because that question becomes meaningless. However you can certainly wonder what experiences you haven’t had yet, and this act of wondering is an experience too.

Electromagnetic fields exist as a thought (an experience). Based on experiences you’ve had, you construct the experience that there are a lot of things traveling all around you and through you even though you don’t see them, and you can make use of that experience to construct other experiences (through what we call technology).

Maybe there is a way to evolve and experience these things (electromagnetic fields of all wavelengths) as clearly as so-called visible light. Blind people can use tools (within their experiences) to gain information about what non-blind people see, and we use tools to gain information about electromagnetic fields we don’t see, so it might be possible to evolve and see the other frequencies more directly.

We can sense other frequencies in a rudimentary way when they are strong enough, we sense them as the experience of heat, there isn’t much information in that experience but it’s there, it might be seen as the first stage of development of our sense of electromagnetic frequencies beyond the visible spectrum, they aren’t totally invisible to us because we can feel them in some way.


You made a fundamental distinction between the experience of an object and the experience of pain. You say the object is “there” while the pain isn’t, but reflect on why you said that exactly. If you didn’t have the sense of touch, would you still make that distinction? Don’t you say that the object is “there” because you can correlate one experience you have (the sight of the object) with another experience you have (touching the object)?

You interestingly mentioned synesthesia. It might be possible to touch pain, to throw it away so as not to experience it anymore, in a way that would seem like magic to other people. Then you would see pain as something “there” just like the object. We already have the ability to control pain to some extent through thoughts. Through empathy we can feel the pain of others to some extent. Pain is as real as an object, it’s just a different kind of thing.

We emit electromagnetic frequencies, depending on what we think we emit different patterns, and we have created technology that can control objects through these signals that our thoughts emit. So in principle it could be possible to evolve to see the thoughts of other people without the use of technology. I believe we already have that ability, but it’s still in an early stage, though it is more developed in some people than some others.


There are plenty of phenomena and miracles that haven’t been explained, or rather we explain them away assuming that there must be some mundane explanation beneath, and we don’t look into them with an open mind. But it may be that reality is much more incredible and mysterious than we want to think. Considering there is a lot of stuff around us we don’t see, some living entities invisible to us for now might be there too...

I think if you change jobs and pick one that contributes to saving the planet, you will feel less depressed. Obviously if you do something every day that does nothing towards what you see as an issue of the utmost importance, you don't feel good.

Regarding saving the planet, we should focus less on the CO2 and more on taking care of the environment. It's not the CO2 that's killing most animals and insects and plants, it's intensive farming, pesticides, deforestation, ...

So the way to an absolute inertial frame is through ether theory. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, and first of all we need to get rid of the widespread idea that relativity is necessary to explain observations and experimental results. Then realize that what we call a vacuum isn't empty, isn't nothing, it is full of stuff, the stuff that we call light and electromagnetic radiation and the stuff that is responsible for gravitation, any volume of space has plenty of these things passing through, interacting with one another and with whatever matter is present, it cannot be ignored. We have to explain how the interaction between these things and matter can slow down the internal processes of that matter, which are electromagnetic in nature. In that way we can hope to explain why an atomic clock can run slower or faster depending on its state of motion relative to these things. An atomic clock in Earth orbit isn't moving through empty space, it is moving relative to all the stuff emitted by the Sun and the Earth, so it isn't inconceivable that the atomic clock would behave differently depending on how fast it is moving through this stuff.

That's where we have to look, instead of looking at relativity multiverses and extra dimensions and whatnot, the physicists have been at it for a century and they're stuck. Desperately stuck. Students are taught these theories, in order to become physicists they have to spend a lot of time working with these theories and applying them, these theories are so against common sense that the students are told to "shut up and calculate", and by the time they become physicists that's what they do, shut up and calculate, unable to think outside the box anymore, unable to question the assumptions at the root of relativity and quantum mechanics. Modern physics is stuck in a box. We can get out of it. I'm showing you the way.

To claim as you do, that we might just produce an absolute inertial frame from our present understanding is not realistic, because there are too many unknown factors like dark matter and dark energy. — Metaphysician Undercover

Dark matter and energy aren't incompatible with an absolute inertial frame. Also it may be possible to come up with a theory that doesn't need to invoke dark matter and energy to explain observations, since the only evidence that we have for them comes from the fact that observations do not match the predictions of general relativity, which is extremely weak evidence really. Every theory has a domain of validity, that general relativity is accurate to account for some phenomena at some scales doesn't imply that it is accurate at all scales...

I said I'm not going to be available for a while, I shouldn't be here now, but I guess the urge to respond is too strong, so I'll be quick:

I suppose that explains the hunt for the ether, even though I don't think it is posited to be detectable. — noAxioms

There really is a medium permeating all space that is detectable, the vacuum isn't nothingness it is full of electromagnetic radiation and so-called virtual particles. Now consider an atomic clock at rest in that medium (isotropic radiation coming from all around) and an atomic clock in motion (anisotropic radiation). An atomic clock is based on the behavior of atoms (and electrons), that behavior depends on their environment, why should we expect that the two atomic clocks behave the same when one receives isotropic electromagnetic radiation and the other one anisotropic electromagnetic radiation? That's the kind of thing I refer to when I talk about a constructive theory, there's something there to understand and describe, we have to take into account both the atomic clock and its environment in order to fully describe how it works. And maybe we'll realize that an atomic clock runs slower when it receives anisotropic radiation than when it receives isotropic radiation. See what I mean? There would be no need for relativity there.

Keep in mind I'm just asking here since I'm not totally familiar. If the ether moves/flows, where does the ether go when it gets to say the center of say Earth? — noAxioms

No, the question above talks about being in a dense hollow shell, a region of a flat gravitational field (no acceleration, but still in a well). Let's assume the ball is stationary so the dilation is completely due to gravity and not the ball moving through the ether or being in an acceleration field. — noAxioms

I don't know, the ether flow model works well in many cases but it seems to be problematic in the kind of situation you mention. I haven't looked too hard into it. What I described in the above paragraph seems much more promising to me.

I suppose Lorentz's theory has been generalized then? I wonder how black holes are handled since they don't seem to exist under LET. — noAxioms

I gave a link to an example of such a generalization, but it could be generalized in other ways.

No, but it is sort of one of my points. All clocks anywhere are dilated, no matter their position or velocity. They never compute how dilated these clocks are. Nothing exact is asked for. A single digit of precision would be nice. You'd think the 'time flows' proponents would want to know the objective rate of time flow, but they seem to avoid it like it's something embarrassing. — noAxioms

As I said I don't consider that time 'flows', but in order to compute absolute time dilation one would have to have detected the absolute frame in the first place, so until then that absolute dilation is unknown, but even without knowing it we can make accurate predictions, again that doesn't prove there is no absolute frame or no absolute dilation.

If the twins are approaching each other, they see the other aging faster. Yes, that's doppler, so 'sees' is a misleading choice of verbs. What each actually does is compute the age of the other, and in order to do that, each needs to select a frame, and if they select different frames (there is no reason they need to), then they're going to get different answers of course. — noAxioms

Yes strictly speaking they don't 'see', I explained that in another post, what they see is mostly Doppler not the real rate of the other clock. But when each of them assumes that light travels at c in all directions in their frame, each of them infers (computes) that in their frame the other clock is ticking more slowly.

One can do it the complicated way (the non-inertial frame in which the traveler is stationary the whole way), but then the twin back home ages mostly during the time taken to turn around. If it's instant, then the remote age change is instant. Either way, your assertion above that 'at every moment of the trip twin A sees twin B aging more slowly' is wrong. It happens during the acceleration, however long that takes. — noAxioms

Can't jump to the other ship without accelerating. — noAxioms

And that's exactly the kind of stuff that confuses people. The idea of an instant "remote age change". If there is no acceleration, there is no "during the acceleration".

Consider that we don't even need to talk about twins, we can simply talk about the clock readings. In that way there is no need to jump to another ship and accelerate, whatever reading the clock of the first spaceship indicates can be transmitted to the other spaceship going the other way when they pass by one another, and the clock of the second spaceship can be synchronized to it. In that way it is as if the clock had been transferred to the second ship without any acceleration at any point. Sure there is a change of inertial frame. But still, at any moment, it is as if from the point of view of the moving clock, the staying clock is always ticking more slowly.

Of course if we don't take into account the change of inertial frame we don't get a correct result. But consider that people don't understand why the staying clock would have ticked more if at every moment from the point of view of the moving clock it ticked more slowly! And that's the difference with the absolute frame explanation of the ether theory, in it the staying clock ticks more quickly on at least one half of the trip no matter what the true absolute frame is, and that people can understand, because it doesn't defy common sense, it doesn't leave people confused.

Oh doesn't it now. Are we in a priveleged location in space where it seems to work out to a fixed distance from us in every direction, but if we were near the edge of that, it would only work if we looked back at Earth and not further away from Earth?
If not, what do you mean by this? — noAxioms

We may be in a privileged location (how would we know we aren't), but let's assume we aren't anyway, and that the Hubble law applies from the point of view of other galaxies, that redshift of distant galaxies is proportional to their distance. Even if that redshift/distance law applies to arbitrarily large distances, the velocity/distance law doesn't, or at the very least there is no reason it should apply.

If we assume no superluminal velocity, then arbitrarily large redshift doesn't translate to arbitrarily large velocity, as the redshift increases the velocity approaches the speed of light, just like in a given inertial frame if you have a projectile with a very high redshift its velocity is close to the speed of light not above.

The thing most people don't seem to realize (even cosmologists) is that we don't need to invoke a physical expansion of space between galaxies to account for Hubble's law (like with the balloon analogy). If you have an absolute inertial frame, you can see all galaxies moving like projectiles. If these projectiles are all moving away from one another because of a huge explosion a long time ago you end up with the Hubble law, with the matter that was the furthest away from the center of the explosion moving faster as it was pushed by the matter closer to the center. Again we can explain it all in that way, there is no need to complicate matters by invoking superluminal velocities and space expansion and local inertial frames and whatnot.

Even if galaxies are accelerating away from one another (they might be, or maybe the evidence/reasoning for dark energy is flawed), that still doesn't imply superluminal velocities nor the absence of an absolute inertial frame.

All those galaxies are nearly stationary. The separation between us and them is growing at a rate more than c, but velocity is not defined as a relative change in position relative to a reference in that view. That's the SR view, and the universe is not described by SR over large distances. That's a good part of why the absolute frame cannot be inertial. — noAxioms

I answered that right above. The galaxies don't have to be seen as stationary. The separation between us and them doesn't have to be seen as growing at a rate more than c. The absolute frame can be inertial. See the problem with the mainstream narrative? Pushing beliefs as if they were truths.

First of all, under SR, this isn't true. The problem is that it takes infinite energy to accelerate the last bit, so it cannot be sustained. What can be done is indefinite proper acceleration of 1G like that, in which case light speed is never reached. — noAxioms

I know that isn't true, yet that's exactly what they do when they say that the recession velocities of galaxies are proportional to their distance no matter how distant they are. They don't take into account how velocity approaches the speed of light as redshift increases. They do exactly the same as saying that the car would accelerate beyond the speed of light if accelerated for long enough.

I actually tried to draw a picture of the whole universe using an inertial frame, including these 'superluminal' objects. Under SR, speeds do indeed add up using the relative rule and light speed can never be reached. The picture works fine until I attempted to work acceleration of expansion into it, and I could not do it without violating fixed light speed in the coordinate system. I don't think I can post pictures here or I'd show it to you, but it is a picture of non-absolute physics. — noAxioms

I did that too, indeed the speeds add up without reaching the speed of light, and the Hubble law becomes something like v = c*tanh(f(D)) or something like that I don't recall exactly, the recession velocity is no more proportional to distance, there is no reason that it should be proportional to distance, that's a pure belief based on nothing while being pushed as truth.

If you include acceleration there is no reason you should break the speed of light, just like the car doesn't break the speed of light, there must have been an error in your derivation.

Muons make great clocks. Accurate to at least 2 digits and easy to accelerate. — noAxioms

Muons aren't mechanical clocks.

Time that picks and chooses. Yea sure. — noAxioms

Let me know how that works out for you. — noAxioms

That sounds stupid only because you assume special relativity is true, and yet if that's the case special relativity would be shown to be false. Consider the first paragraph I wrote in this post. There is no reason that anisotropic radiation coming from all around would affect an atomic clock and an apple in the same way, their internal processes aren't the same.

Yes, it says that, despite no signal going back. Only forth.
At no point does that page say that the measurement was invalid (cannot be done to arbitrary precision today) or that it in fact involved a round trip signal of some kind. — noAxioms

Did you read the paper of Karlov? In the Rømer measurement at some point an implicit assumption is made that light travels at the same speed in both directions, it’s not easy to see.

This says that in order to know X, you already need to know X. I suppose that's arguably true in this case. — noAxioms

That would be a tautology. Without instantaneous signals we can’t measure any one-way velocity with perfect precision.

Consider how you might measure a one-way velocity. You will realize that the best precision you can attain depends on the two-way velocity of the fastest signal you have. There is no way around that.

There was no two-way measurement. That's the whole point. — noAxioms

Are you still claiming that the one-way speed of light has been measured? If so there’s something you haven’t understood. Look deeply into it, you will realize it can’t be measured with any precision, as long as we don’t have faster-than-light signals.



Well I’m probably not going to be available for a while, I’d like to discuss all of this more, but sadly we’re not being paid to discuss that, we mostly get paid to slave away while contributing to the destruction of the planet in some way, so I guess I’ll join the herd, I tried to escape it but that didn’t work. Gonna be a slave trying to buy his freedom, cause that’s what this world is about really. I wish things were different. But people don’t wake up, so things don’t change, and I can’t change it all on my own. /rant

Lorentz did not hold to the postulates of relativity. — noAxioms

I didn’t claim he did, you were saying that the Lorentz ether theory came after special relativity, I was pointing out that’s not the case.

Yes, that being why I call it a metaphysical interpretation. Physics is about what we see (said heuristics), but metaphysics is about what actually is. — noAxioms

You would have called the kinetic theory of gases a metaphysical interpretation of thermodynamics, back when molecules hadn’t been observed yet. We shouldn’t pretend that we already see everything that we can see.

That's far more of an explanation than Lorentz's story. If it derives from empirical observation, then it's fully explained. — noAxioms

So in the same way you consider that thermodynamics provides far more of an explanation than the kinetic theory? If scientists had contented themselves with apparent laws without looking to explain why these laws are accurate, science wouldn’t have advanced very far.

I am unclear if this was ever generalized to gravity. How is time dilation say here on Earth explained? — noAxioms

Some people have done that, here is an example: https://ilja-schmelzer.de/gravity/

Or if you assume that gravity is an ether flow you can recover many general relativistic predictions. So you can explain time dilation on Earth in terms of this ether flow (since in the Lorentz ether theory processes are time dilated when they are moving in the ether). That’s just an example, point is it can be done, and not necessarily in a complicated way.

Also how does it explain dilation in a gravity well with no acceleration? I'm inside a hollowed out space inside a planet and my clock runs slower here than out in space, but I'm completely inertial, not accelerating in any way. Which way is the ether going if it is the explanation of the dilation going on there? I ask because the vast majority of our current dilation (compared to a hypothetical stationary clock at zero gravitational potential) is due to this kind of thing. — noAxioms

You mean if you’re at the center of the planet? Indeed this might be a problem of the ether flow theory, I would have to think more about it. In any case not much research has been done in that direction, but I’m confident it should be possible to come up with a simple and accurate theory of gravitation without invoking curved spacetime.

Also, I don't see the LET guys explaining the twins using an ether calculation. They all do it the SR way, but keeping to one frame of their choice the whole time. — noAxioms

As I said it can be done, it’s just tedious. Once you realize that the result comes out the same no matter what the real absolute frame is, then there is no need to pick an arbitrary frame that makes calculations complicated, might as well pick one that simplifies them. Which again does not imply that there is no difference between the Lorentz ether theory and special relativity, as I explained.

I am a moderator on one such forum and the mainstream view seems defended by a small number of people who know it and by several more who don't know it very well, and questioned by countless users that either want real understanding, want to push an alternative (like you), or want to push something of their own.

Nobody pushing an alternative view gets banned for it. The bans are for abusive language or for purposes of promotion of personal websites. The crackpots often remain, relegated to the children playground. LET is not considered a crackpot view. — noAxioms

Okay, maybe I’ve been on the wrong forums then, the few ones I used were extremely dogmatic and totally not open to alternative ideas.

Treating the Earth as stationary when it isn't is valid move because of what Einstein showed. — noAxioms

The validity of doing that can be derived from the Lorentz transformation itself, which existed before special relativity.

Where is your reference process then? How dilated is your kitchen clock? Ever try to compute that? — noAxioms

That wasn’t my point, let’s say you pick the kitchen clock as a reference process, and you compare some process A to that reference process. Then you find out that under some conditions that process A runs more slowly compared to the reference process, we say that process A is time dilated, that’s all.

Hence Einstein's being the mainstream view. It indeed simplifies everything. — noAxioms

It doesn’t simplify the understanding as it confuses the vast majority of people. It’s pedagogically much simpler to retain the view that there is an absolute frame like we’re used to, then show that no matter which inertial frame is the absolute one we still get the same result, then use that to simplify the calculations, without going the next step and claim that the absolute frame doesn’t exist and give up our intuitive understanding. If Einstein’s view simplified everything, people wouldn’t still be confused about the twin paradox and others a century later. There is no such confusion when we assume an absolute frame.

It being a fallacy is not a belief or not. You have to show the logical inconsistency of it. 4-D spacetime is the constructive theory you mentioned, providing an explanation for the dilations and such. — noAxioms

I didn’t claim spacetime is inconsistent, I said that it is a mathematical concept, not a physical thing. Well there is no evidence that it is a physical thing, so there is no evidence that it is a physical thing that curves. It could be a constructive theory if we had actually detected a 4-dimensional thing that curves, but obliviously we haven’t. Stuff like gravitational lensing isn’t evidence at all of such curvature, considering that we don’t have to assume that light always travels in straight lines.

LET (or at least the theory Lorentz worked on himself) also posits time as a dimension. nLET does not. You seem to be in the nLET camp then. — noAxioms

I’m not sure in what way you distinguish LET and nLET, but as I said I consider time to be a concept of the mind, a tool of thought. I don’t see time and change as the same thing, time refers to a measure of change, it isn’t change itself.

The question of which is older is a frame dependent question. You know this, and yet you misrepresent what the theory says by omitting frame references in a statement that references multiple frames. — noAxioms

I said “at every moment of the trip each twin sees that the other is aging more slowly than themselves”, the frame references lie in the “sees”. Each twin sees, but the twins aren’t in the same frame, so it is implied that what they see is frame dependent, they see that from their own frame.

It isn't true since the turnaround time is not considered in the above statement, and also the frame references (there are multiple frames again) are omitted. You seem to do this deliberately since you know better. Are you really suggesting that the mainstream view is contradictory or are you just pretending to be stupid when it suits your purposes? — noAxioms

I said: “at every moment of the trip twin A sees twin B aging more slowly, yet when they reunite twin B has aged more”, are you really claiming that’s false? There can be zero turnaround time if you invoke triplets instead of twins.

I’m not suggesting special relativity is self-contradictory, I specifically said it isn’t, I’m merely suggesting what I’ve been saying since the beginning, that it is extremely confusing (whereas there is another theory that isn’t), and you’re the one pretending there is nothing confusing about it.

From the point of view of the traveling twin, the clock of the staying twin is ticking more slowly, on the first half and on the second half of the trip, you can even simulate an instantaneous turnaround using a second spaceship. Yet when they reunite the clock of the staying twin has ticked more. Sure you can explain that by invoking different frames, the point is it’s extremely confusing. Whereas in the absolute view the clock of the staying twin is not ticking more slowly at every moment.

If you mean the inertial frame in which the CMBR is isotropic here, that is not a valid candidate for the preferred frame of the universe since no inertial frame foliates all of spacetime. In other words, galaxies like GN-z11 (something we can see) does not even exist in that inertial frame since it is moving at well over light speed and thus hasn't yet been born. — noAxioms

As I said, there are no real superluminal galaxies, I gave a link to a paper explaining that. The Hubble law doesn’t apply to arbitrarily large distances. If you assume it does then you get superluminal velocities. Just like if you assume that the speed of a car increases by 10m/s every second eventually that car will exceed the speed of light, that doesn’t mean it ever gets there. You can very well pick a global frame in which nothing is superluminal.

See that’s the kind of confusing stuff with the mainstream view, on the one hand they say nothing exceeds the speed of light, on the other hand they extrapolate Hubble’s law to arbitrarily large distances, and then they get superluminal galaxies, and people get confused. Don’t make that unwarranted extrapolation and you don’t get superluminal galaxies, simple.

No. I put a clock in there and it still paces the one on the outside. That's empirical evidence against the dilation explanation of the apple rotting. — noAxioms

Or the apple is time dilated in the fridge but not the clock. Have you tried accelerating an apple to a high velocity to see if it decays more slowly? Maybe the clock gets time dilated but not the apple.

Also have we ever tested if a mechanical clock gets time dilated at high velocities? To my knowledge only atomic clocks have been tested. Sure they’re more accurate, but then maybe their time dilation has to do with their internal processes, there is no evidence that everything gets time dilated due to velocity.

The geometry method for instance explains (and is not just a mathematical convenience) why the height of a flag pole can be taller or shorter depending on your choice of the orientation of the 'up' dimension. That is physical length contraction without any change to the proper dimensions of the pole. — noAxioms

Well a flag pole can certainly appear differently depending on how you look at it, that doesn’t imply that the flag pole physically changes when you do that, unless again you’re assuming arbitrarily that there is not one reality but one reality for each frame.

Also I don’t see what that has to do with seeing time dilation as a manifestation of a slowdown of internal processes. Indeed Lorentz and others had begun looking in that direction, but not much research has been done on that since.

I want to know how the twin case is supposed to provide us with evidence that time is relative. For it seems to me that most of those who reason about these sorts of case commit egregious fallacies. — Bartricks

As for what I understand relativity to mean in this context: well, someone who held that time was relative would deny that there is an absolute now. That is, there is no 'now', there is just 'now-for-x'. — Bartricks

Indeed the twin paradox doesn’t prove that there is no absolute ‘now’. First of all it is a thought experiment based on the postulates of special relativity (not an actual experiment that has been carried out), and these postulates imply that there is no absolute ‘now’, so the description of what happens in the frame of each twin already presupposes that there is no absolute ‘now’. So concluding from the twin paradox that there is no such thing as an absolute ‘now’ would be a circular reasoning.

Another thing to keep in mind is that even if that experiment was carried out, each twin wouldn’t see exactly how fast the clock of the other twin is ticking. Because if the traveling twin sends a light pulse every second towards the staying twin, the staying twin doesn’t receive a pulse every second (even if there was no time dilation) because the traveling twin is moving away from the staying twin. And so in order to infer how fast the clock of the other twin is ticking they have to know how fast light goes in one direction, but as I explained in a post above this one-way speed of light can’t be measured without using faster-than-light signals which we don’t have.

So what each twin infers depends on what they assume about the one-way speed of light. If they each assume that this one-way speed is the same in all directions in each of their frame, then each of them infers that the clock of the other twin is ticking more slowly. If they make different assumptions they would infer otherwise, they might both say that the clock of the other twin is ticking more quickly, or they might agree that one clock is ticking more slowly than the other but they could disagree about the magnitude.

As we see the assumption they make about the one-way speed of light changes what they infer to happen, so strictly speaking we can’t say that each twin ‘sees’ time dilation. But they do see the clock of the other ticking more slowly from the mere fact that they are moving away from each other (as every successive pulse has more distance to cover).

But there are experiments that do show that an atomic clock doesn’t tick at the same rate depending on how fast it moves. Just like there are experiments that show that an apple doesn’t decay at the same rate depending on how cold it is. And indeed neither of them implies that there is no absolute ‘now’, they can both be interpreted as internal processes running at a different rate in different conditions (relative to some reference process) without contradicting absolute simultaneity.

I always wondered about this claim. The first speed of light measurement was done using a one way method. It can still be done today with far greater precision. Are you saying Romer did not actually measure light speed, or that the method he used was in some way not one way? — noAxioms

Yes the Rømer measurement isn’t a true one-way measurement either, this is actually addressed in the link I mentioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_speed_of_light (this is a good Wiki article for once, there aren’t too many like that).

The Australian physicist Karlov also showed that Rømer actually measured the speed of light by implicitly making the assumption of the equality of the speeds of light back and forth.

Link to Karlov paper:
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1970AuJPh..23..243K


As a general argument for why we can’t measure the one-way speed of light (my explanation, not taken from the above paper):

In order to measure the one-way velocity of some thing we need to know the one-way velocity of a signal that we transmit back and forth between that thing and us, but since light is the fastest signal we know and we don’t know the one-way speed of light in the first place, then we can’t measure any one-way velocity with perfect precision, even for slow-moving objects. But while for slow-moving objects the precision is very high (since the average speed of light on a round-trip is much higher), when we attempt to measure the one-way speed of light itself the precision drops to zero, meaning that the one-way speed could be pretty much anything (as long as the two-way average yields c).

you claim that your view is the truth and everybody is just being dogmatic for not seeing it — noAxioms

It is the truth that special relativity is not the only theory consistent with the experiments that are considered tests of that theory, contrary to what is usually claimed. You seem to consider that the Lorentz ether theory is not a different theory but an interpretation of special relativity, I’m going to address that.

'Relativity' is the theory, and while science is not is the business of proving anything, the evidence for the theory is overwhelming. It is effectively necessarily true. There is no competing theory.

What you seem unable to articulate is that the metaphysics behind that theory is open to multiple interpretations (preferred frame vs. any-frame-will-do, and preferred moment vs. block), and thus no one interpretation is necessarily true. With that I agree, and it isn't truth to be fought for, but rather an open-ended philosophical point left to ones personal preference. — noAxioms

Sorry, but even the interpretations with a preferred frame need to invoke relativity theory else they'd predict different things. — noAxioms

neo-Lorentz-Ether 'theory'. I put that in quotes since a view that makes no predictions isn't a theory. Not sure what name to give the mainstream view since 'relativity' is the name of the theory, not the metaphysical interpretation. — noAxioms

I consider that to be a different metaphysical interpretation of the same theory. He didn't get his name on it only because he didn't publish first — noAxioms

Lorentz needs superluminal signals? Why? — noAxioms

The Lorentz ether theory is a theory different from special relativity, it isn’t an interpretation of it. The postulates of special relativity lead to the Lorentz transformation, Einstein called it that way precisely because Lorentz had come up with it before.

It isn’t a mere matter of philosophical/metaphysical preference though. The two theories are said to be observationally equivalent, this is correct but only to a limited extent.

Consider that in the Lorentz ether theory, there is only one frame in which light travels at c in all directions, while in other frames this isn’t the case. Whereas in special relativity light travels at c in all directions in all inertial frames. Actually special relativity can be formulated in such a way that light doesn’t travel at c in all directions in all frames, but Einstein believed it didn’t make a difference which is why he and others say that it’s a matter of convention to set the one-way speed of light to c in all directions in all inertial frames.

However this is correct only as long as nothing travels faster than light! Obviously if we ever encounter superluminal signals, then the one-way speed of light would no more be a convention, it would be experimentally measurable. And it would allow to decide whether there really is an absolute frame or whether all inertial frames are truly relative. The difference wouldn’t be merely metaphysical anymore, because we would have access to new measurements that would distinguish between the two.

The mere existence of superluminal signals would disprove Einstein’s thesis that the value of the one-way speed of light is a convention.

But that’s not the only difference between the theories. Consider that special relativity is a principle theory (based on heuristic principles), while the Lorentz ether theory is a constructive theory (provides a picture/mechanism of what is actually thought to be occurring). Another example of a principle theory is thermodynamics, while a corresponding constructive theory is the kinetic theory, which gives a more detailed view and explains the laws of thermodynamics as a consequence of more fundamental phenomena. The kinetic theory can be said to offer a deeper understanding than thermodynamics.

Special relativity doesn’t attempt to explain what causes time dilation and length contraction, it merely derives them as a consequence of heuristic principles. While the Lorentz ether theory attempts to give the beginning of an explanation. It says that there is a medium that permeates all space, the ether, which represents an absolute frame, and that objects moving within that medium are length contracted and time dilated by a given factor which is a function of their velocity in that medium. The next step would be to understand what is it about that medium that generates such an effect on matter and processes, Lorentz and others had begun working in that direction.

There is much evidence today that the so-called vacuum of space isn’t empty, it is a medium. And so maybe Lorentz was really on the right track towards a theory more fundamental than special relativity, just like the kinetic theory is more fundamental than thermodynamics.

There are key differences between special relativity and the Lorentz ether theory, they cannot be said to be two mere interpretations of the same theory. Special relativity doesn’t give any hint as to where to go further towards a more fundamental constructive theory, we’re stuck with its principles (in fact Einstein was initially looking for a constructive theory, but his failure to do so was what led him to formulate a principle theory, which he considered to be something useful to have until we come up with a constructive theory that would explain the same experiments and more). Whereas the Lorentz ether theory opened the path towards a constructive theory.

And so it really is a sad state of affairs for science that the Lorentz ether theory is ignored, rarely mentioned, or presented as a mere interpretation of special relativity like you do, while it is more than that and it could be so much more than that. But it won’t be as long as it isn’t given the attention it deserves, as long as everyone keeps teaching special relativity alone, as long as everyone remains focused on the principles of special relativity and confused with all its (apparent) paradoxes.

That leaves the fairly small percentage of armchair opinion holders like ourselves on these forums, and among them, it seems split pretty evenly. — noAxioms

On most physics forums you will find that in most discussions about special relativity most people do not question the mainstream view (that only special relativity can explain all the experiments it explains), and those who do question it are usually labeled crackpots and quickly banned. So much for the scientific spirit of open inquiry.

For instance, I've never seen the twin scenario (a realistic one with Earth not stationary) described using any absolute interpretation. — noAxioms

I had done the calculations myself some years back, I believe I’ve seen it done in a few papers, but anyway once we realize that by a specific change of coordinate we can treat the Earth as stationary and this greatly simplifies the calculations, there is no need to do the complicated ones all over again every time.

he did not see time flowing/'running' as you seem to. — noAxioms

Time is a dimension, orthogonal to space, which is why they call it spacetime. — noAxioms

Personally I consider that it is a fallacy to say that time runs/passes/flows, as if time was a physical entity. Change does occur, but time itself is a concept not a physical thing, it is a relative measure of change. For instance to say that some process takes 1 minute is to say that while it takes place, there is another process we call a clock that changes in a specific way that we call 1 minute. When we say that a process is time dilated we’re merely saying that it takes longer than it does in other conditions, relative to a reference process.

Based on that, I consider it a fallacy to treat 4-dimensional spacetime as anything more than a mathematical concept. Unfortunately many people do believe that spacetime is a real physical thing that really curves. And they believe that because that’s what they’re taught with poor analogies, like the rubber sheet analogy to describe gravity.

You're dissing an interpretation that you either don't understand or refuse to represent correctly. The theory does not say that each twin ages more slowly than the other. — noAxioms

Not far, it says that at every moment of the trip each twin sees that the other is aging more slowly than themselves.

And then the real thing that rubs people the wrong way: “at every moment of the trip twin A sees twin B aging more slowly, yet when they reunite twin B has aged more”.

You've contradicted yourself. You agreed that the inertial frame in which the CMB appears isotropic from here is a different inertial frame that the one where the CMB appears isotropic from a galaxy 8 billion light years away (science agrees with that). That isotropic CMB defines being absolutely stationary according to your definition of the preferred frame (known as the comoving frame), and here you say the distant galaxy isn't stationary. You need to fix something (like the statement immediately above) or you've been debunked yourself. — noAxioms

I concede that the frame in which the CMBR is isotropic here is not necessarily the absolute frame of the whole universe, but I already conceded that. I shouldn’t have said in an earlier post that “in practice an absolute frame can be detected”. It’s simply neat to pick that frame as the preferred frame. And it might be the absolute frame in case the cosmological principle is incorrect. But I didn’t think things through with the CMBR, so you get to win that point if you want. Still there is no proof that there is no absolute frame, personally I believe there is one and eventually we will detect it.

As you say, we can pick Earth's as the absolute frame and say the muons are time dilated, yes. — noAxioms

And so going back to the fridge example, would you say that the apple in the fridge is time dilated? After all it decays more slowly, just like the muons.

In the case of the fridge we explain it by saying that the cold slows down the internal processes of the apple. In the case of the muons the common view is to invoke the principles of special relativity, which don’t explain what’s going on but merely account for what’s going on. But now, considering the search for a constructive theory underlying the principles of special relativity, it would be interesting to explore the idea that special relativistic time dilation is a physical slowdown of internal processes due to some effect that is yet to be understood. What do you think?

the apparent contradiction that each other's clocks are running slower is just a very simple matter of perspective.

Here's an easy explanation from the book I'm currently writing:

[...] — Edgar L Owen

By the way that explanation seems to be flawed. It's not really a matter of perspective, as in practice each twin doesn't see how fast the clock of the other twin is ticking. Because in order to know how fast the clock of the other twin his ticking, they have to know how fast the other twin is traveling. And the issue is that fundamentally, each twin doesn't know exactly how fast the other twin is going.

Because how do they measure each other's velocity? By exchanging light signals. For instance the staying twin would send successive light pulses towards the spaceship and wait for them to be reflected back, and from this he would infer the velocity of the traveling twin as a function of the times of reception of the pulses and as a function of the speed of light on the way out and on the way back.

But while he can measure the times of reception, he cannot measure the speed of light in each direction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_speed_of_light), he only knows that the average speed of light on a round-trip is measured to be c, while the unidirectional speed of light could be anything. So the velocity he infers depends on the assumption he makes about the speed of light in each direction.

If the staying twin assumes that light travels at the same speed in both directions in his frame, then he infers from his measurements that the clock of the traveling twin is ticking more slowly. If the traveling twin makes the same assumption in his own frame, then he infers that the clock of the staying twin is ticking more slowly. Both on the way out and on the way back, and that's what leads to the paradox.

But if the assumption that light travels at the same speed in both directions in both frames is false, then the paradox disappears. For instance if light travels at c in both directions in the frame of the staying twin, and it travels at c+v and c-v relative to the traveling twin (depending on the direction), then the staying twins infers that the clock of the traveling twin is ticking more slowly, while the traveling twin infers that the clock of the staying twin is ticking more quickly! Both on the way out and on the way back. No more inconsistency.

And here we see clearly that it is the assumption that light travels at the same speed in all directions in all inertial frames that leads to the twin paradox (and to all other relativity paradoxes). If we don't make that assumption, if instead we assume that there is only one frame in which light travels at the same speed in all directions (just like there is only one frame in which sound travels at the same speed in all directions, the frame where the medium of propagation is at rest), then the paradox disappears, because we haven't introduced something paradoxical (the idea that light travels at the same speed relative to two frames in relative motion).


Now of course the relativists claim that it isn't a real paradox (if it was relativity would be self-contradictory and worthless), because if they manipulate some mathematical equations in some specific way then they always get the result that the traveling twin has aged less once he returns to Earth. But still there is an uneasiness about it that doesn't go away. At each moment of the trip the staying twin is aging more slowly from the point of view of the traveling twin, and yet when they reunite the staying twin has aged more.

In order to explain that, they invoke the idea that the calculations always have to be carried out from the same inertial frame all along, which seems arbitrary, and I've never seen them explain intuitively why that is necessary, other than "if we don't do it we don't get the correct result". They may come up with convoluted explanations, but the bottom line is: the postulate of the constancy of the speed of light in all directions in all inertial frames forces them to give up the idea of there being one absolute frame, instead inertial frames are all relative, so measured quantities aren't absolute, they can't be carried from one frame to the other, they are frame-dependent.

Whereas in the absolute frame interpretation, in which light travels at the same speed in all directions only in one frame, there is no such problem, both twins always agree on which one is aging more slowly than the other. If at each moment of the trip the staying twin is aging more quickly from the point of view of the traveling twin, that's what really happens, when they reunite the staying twin has aged more. We can talk of what things really are like in a frame-independent way, like we've always used to, and that's a huge benefit.

The paradoxes disappear, and things become intuitive again...

Until you falsify the other interpretation, it's opinion, not truth, and opinion isn't worth the militant fighting.
A great thing if you can, but if you do it by only showing that it contradicts your opinion, then it just makes you look the fool.
You don't come across as curious. You put up strawman arguments against the truth you believe, and don't bother to actually learn the view you're attacking. Pretty closed minded if you ask me.
But you're not questioning it. You're asserting it to be wrong. — noAxioms

So you're not reading or not understanding what I say?

I'm not saying relativity is false. I'm saying it's not necessarily true. I'm saying there is no proof it is true. I'm saying there are alternative ways to explain all the experiments that are considered tests of special relativity, without invoking relativity. Hence it is false to claim that these experiments prove relativity is true. Basic logic, yet you seem to have a hard time with it.

There are some, sure, but at a much lower percentage. — noAxioms

A lower percentage doesn't mean there are less of them, seeing as probably 1000 times more people follow the mainstream narrative without ever questioning it. Those who question the mainstream view are relentlessly attacked, just like you are doing now, without focusing on the arguments. Obviously when relativists discuss relativity between themselves they don't attack one another, usually you have those who preach and those who blindly accept what they're told. You're being willfully obtuse about what's going on.

That's not how you've worded your posts. You've asserted that the mainstream view is wrong, and hence must not be consistent with all the experiments. — noAxioms

Show me where I have asserted that relativity is wrong? Hint: you can't.

I've said it is a lie to pretend that relativity is proven true. Because, again, alternative theories account for the same experiments just as well. Do you understand this does not imply that relativity is necessarily false? What is it you don't understand about that?

You said you were fighting for the truth. So you seem to at least claim to know the truth without any proof then. — noAxioms

Look at the scientific literature if you want proofs that one version of the Lorentz aether theory is experimentally equivalent to special relativity. Which implies that there is not only one way to account for the existing experimental evidence. Which implies the experimental evidence doesn't prove relativity is true.

But if we ever find superluminal signals there would be ways to distinguish them, and then maybe relativity will turn out to be false.

It isn't. The mathematics are furiously more difficult. Imagine a speed limit sign at the side of the road if it was to state the limit in absolute terms. Nobody uses the absolute interpretation to do anything practical. — noAxioms

The nice thing is the calculations can be simplified a lot by a change of coordinates. Any inertial frame can be picked as the preferred frame to carry out the calculations, it works out the same in the end.

So in the example of the twins, we can pick the frame of the staying twin as the absolute frame, and then the traveling twin is the one aging more slowly all along. If the real absolute frame is the one of the traveling twin on the way out, then the traveling twin ages more quickly on the first half of the trip, but ages much more slowly on the second half, and the end result we calculate is the same. No matter what the real absolute frame is, the calculated outcome is the same.

And the advantage is there is no paradox. Even if you call it an apparent paradox and not a real paradox, the point remains that it confuses pretty much everyone, to the point that plenty of papers were written on it in professional journals (and there are many more other paradoxes). Whereas the absolute interpretation is clear, it's the intuitive way people are used to think, there is no "each twin ages more slowly than the other".

John Stewart Bell advocated teaching special relativity in that way. He called Einstein's approach "pedagogically dangerous". I agree with him. I believe David Mermin also advocates this. Again if you deny that most people are confused about relativity and all its paradoxes (even if you call them not real paradoxes they still confuse most people even when they try hard to resolve them), you're being wilfully obtuse.

Why push people to study the hard and confusing way instead of the easy way? Especially when they lead to the same observable results? Why make it hard and leave people confused and giving up on understanding the universe? Why tell them that it's the only way to explain the universe and that they have to accept it even if it's confusing? Why tell them the universe is complicated and confusing instead of showing them how it can be explained simply? Like with quantum mechanics people are told to "shut up and calculate". I find this elitist mentality disgusting. And most people aren't aware that alternative explanations exist, because they are never told that, they're just given the confusing mainstream story.

You said you would debunk my statement, and yet when I ask a question, you evade it.. — noAxioms

The "So?" implied a yes, and again so what? If you don't say anything I have nothing to debunk.

If you say yes, then you should know that the distance between a stationary object here and a stationary object a billion LY away is increasing, which isn't true in any inertial frame. — noAxioms

Well, you should know that if there is an absolute frame, and there is a stationary object in that frame, then the object a billion light years away whose distance is increasing is by definition in motion relative to the frame, it isn't stationary...

Like I said, if there is an absolute frame, then two frames in relative motion can't both be the absolute frame, so if the absolute frame is the one in which the CMBR is isotropic here then it's not the one where the CMBR is isotropic in other distant galaxies. And even if we can't detect the true absolute frame now, that doesn't mean that we won't in the future depending on what we discover.

Obviously if you force two frames in relative motion to be the same frame then you get weird effects because that's inconsistent, but I never proposed to do that, you did for some reason.

But they have found 'superluminal' galaxies. The most distant object is something like 32 BLY away, and light from it is 13.4 billion years old. That's means the distance between us and it is increasing at well over twice light speed, despite the fact that both us and it are within a few percent of being stationary.
It isn't a superluminal signal. The thing was much closer when the light we see now was emitted. That light reaches us now at speed c. — noAxioms

Yea, well these galaxies aren't really 'superluminal', they get this result when they extrapolate Hubble's law to distances where it doesn't apply anymore. See section 2.6.1 in this paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.0380.pdf

In the muon's frame, time is not dilated at all since the muon is stationary. I also would not worded it as 'running' since I don't think time is something that 'runs — noAxioms

But you would say that in Earth's frame the muons are time dilated? And if you say time doesn't run, would you say time passes? Flows? How would you say it?

Thank you for illustrating my point. — noAxioms

So you’re saying you have a problem with people fighting for truth? Apparently in your view it’s not a good thing to point out falsehoods in the mainstream narrative. Would you say that relativists attacking ‘absolutists’ aren’t ‘militantly biased’? Personally I would converse on that subject much more calmly if I hadn’t been attacked so many times for simply being a curious and inquiring mind questioning the mainstream narrative and exploring alternative paths, which is what science is supposed to be about in the first place.

I guess you don’t have a problem with people getting attacked when they question the mainstream narrative. In this case questioning is not claiming that relativity isn’t consistent with many experiments, it is pointing out that all these experiments can be explained differently, in a much more intuitive way.

Also note that many ‘relativists’ claim that relativity proves there is no absolute frame. This is false (relativity doesn’t prove that, considering that relativity isn’t the only way to account for the experimental evidence), yet it is claimed as a truth. Meanwhile, I don’t claim that absolute frame theories prove that an absolute frame exists. However it is easier for most people to think in terms of an absolute frame (it gets rid of all the confusion surrounding the relativity paradoxes), so there is no reason to force people to believe that no absolute frame exists. Simply saying that kind of thing gets one attacked by many relativists, as if heresy had been committed. Relativity is treated as a religion by many of its proponents, that’s a problem.

Do you agree that the inertial frame in which the CMB aopears isotropic from here is a different inertial frame that the one where the CMB appears isotropic from a galaxy say 8 billion light years away? — noAxioms

So? How does that prevent us from selecting the CMBR rest frame here as a preferred frame? If a true absolute frame exists it may not be that one, but we can pick that one for now, until we get more information that may allow us to know better.

If the CMBR rest frame in a galaxy 8 billion light years away ever becomes relevant, then presumably we would have found superluminal signals by then, which would allow us to pick a more accurate preferred frame.

Anyway, I called nothing 'strange' — noAxioms

you get strange effects — noAxioms

I would never have suggested time running more slowly in a muon's own frame. — noAxioms

So how do you interpret it?

Modern Science is a religion, its God is Universal Laws, which dictate everything that happens, that has ever happened and that will ever happen. A religion that reduces a being to its material body, that negates a great part of our experiences, that isn’t self-conscious enough to realize it is based on beliefs.

The scientist says: but these Laws are tested! They are true! No. There is evidence that some things follow regularities in some specific situations, there is no evidence that everything follows these laws, no evidence that what we do is dictated by these laws, no evidence that these laws appeared out of nothing, no evidence that these laws applied in the distant past or will apply in the future, all of these are beliefs.

There is also plenty of evidence of things transcending these laws (qualia, imagination, dreams, spiritual experiences, miracles, out-of-body experiences, ...) which the religion of Science conveniently ignores, or pretends that it will explain in the future, which is a pure act of faith.

Modern Science may be the only religion that doesn’t realize it is one.

Dark matter and dark energy are posited because we see weird things happening in the universe and posit those names for the as-yet-unknown whatever it is that's causing them. — Pfhorrest

People do the same when they posit unseen entities because they have experienced things they cannot explain otherwise. Science selectivity picks (based on faith) whether some observation is evidence for invisible things, or whether to dismiss it as a mere hallucination, or to simply ignore it.

Also you don’t seem to understand how the hypothesis of dark matter and dark energy came about. There was first of all the religious faith that General Relativity is true, that it applies everywhere in the Universe at all scales. Scientists like to say again and again and again that when an observation contradicts a theory, the theory is falsified, and supposedly that makes Science different from a religion. But here we have a theory that has been contradicted by many observations, but it hasn’t been falsified, because it can always be saved by invoking invisible things. By invoking dark matter and dark energy, they can explain away pretty much any observation. How faithful they are in the sacred text of General Relativity!

And what almost no one realizes, is that we could have done exactly the same to save Newton’s Gravitation from falsification, by invoking invisible things to explain the discrepancy between the theory and observations. The religion of Modern Science arbitrarily decides which Laws are sacred, and actively prevents people from questioning them. These days people don’t get burned at the stake for heresy, they get publicly ridiculed, they don’t get funding for their research, and they are prevented from publishing in the sacred Scientific journals.

I could go on and on and on, hopefully the point is clear. But I know I will most likely get attacked for my heretical claims against the religion of Modern Science.

The absolutists tend to be militantly biased, and Bartricks and Leo fit right in with that crowd. They even hold conventions for them to help separate them from their money. — noAxioms

Never been to such a convention, you seem to have more experience with them than I do.

I fight for truth, you got a problem with that?

When people are told the lies that relativity is true, that they have to give up many of the intuitive ideas they’ve had all their life, that they have to replace them with totally unintuitive ideas because supposedly that’s how the universe really works, when as a result they give up trying to understand the universe or end up blindly believing the authority, when people who have an inquiring mind explore alternatives to relativity and get labeled derogatory names (“crackpot”, “absolutist”) simply because they have a scientific mind and they use it, when they get told more lies (“relativity proves there is no absolute frame”, “the concept of the aether was falsified experimentally”, “light is measured to travel at c in all inertial frames”), I think it’s a disgrace.

When the normality is to spew lies and when one gets attacked or scorned for correcting these lies and fighting for truth, it’s a disgrace. If you don’t see the problem with that attitude and the attitude you’re having now, that’s a problem too. This is the attitude that makes science dogmatic and stagnate.

If the two interpretations make the same predictions, why was the Michelson-Morley experiment performed? Its results seems to be a falsification of what those two predicted as an empirical test for the absolute interpretation. — noAxioms

Relativity and the Lorentz aether theory didn’t even exist back then, what are you talking about? They weren’t looking to test these theories.

The result of the experiment is inconsistent with a particular theory in which there is an absolute frame, it isn’t inconsistent with the existence of an absolute frame. Mercury’s precession is inconsistent with Newton’s theory of gravitation, that doesn’t imply gravitation doesn’t exist. Yet that’s the argument you seem to be making. Many claim the Michelson-Morley experiment disproves the existence of an absolute frame, that’s simply false, maybe you like spreading falsehoods but I don’t like seeing them being spread.

All said, most absolutists correctly do not posit an inertial frame as the preferred one — noAxioms

If there is an absolute frame then by definition there is a preferred frame, even if it may not be detected, again what are you talking about?

Also as I mentioned earlier, the cosmic microwave background radiation does select a preferred frame.

and hence you get strange effects like any moving object, in the absence of a force acting on it, will tend to slow down over time. — noAxioms

I wonder where you got that, tell me more and I’ll debunk it for you.

Also I like how you don’t bat an eye when you attempt to explain in a convoluted way why the twins are really both aging more slowly than the other, or why light really travels at c in all directions in all inertial frames, if you were consistent you would call THAT a strange effect.

And if you were consistent you would admit that muons decaying more slowly doesn’t imply that time runs more slowly in their frame, just like an apple decaying more slowly in a fridge doesn’t imply that time runs more slowly in the fridge. You can surely ignore your inconsistencies but that doesn’t make them go away.

And regarding Bartricks, I don’t know the guy, we spoke once before on a different subject and we were in disagreement, but it’s nice to see he has analyzed relativity critically, because it’s something most people don’t do, most people simply learn what they read in some book or on some website and then repeat it, without looking deeper.