Misconceptions in Relativity

Over at THE END OF EVOLUTION thread, Lucy the Ape claimed that I had stated that "mass increases with velocity", and that I was wrong. Well, if I had ever made such a vague statement, I would probably have to agree that it is wrong. But equally wrong would be the statement "mass does not increase with velocity". Both are "wrong" in their vagueness, and both can be correct given the right context.This thread is to explore and banish the myriad of misconceptions that arise in Relativity (and related physics areas). We can look at the "paradoxes" of Special Relativity, revisit Percy's favourite topic of cosmological vs doppler red-shift, and delve into black holes, wormholes and time-travel... QM could do with a thread of its own, but there could well be some overlap.The idea is for brief responses that may lead, if interest dictates, to new threads on specific topics. I would prefer not to get bogged down in any one area in this thread. My time can be limited, so hopefully Son Goku can jump in and help, plus anyone else who thinks they can clarify a situation. But as it is a thread on banishing misconceptions, I will not be pulling any punches if replies start to exacerbate those misconceptions Lucy the Ape has introduced our first misconception, so I suggest we start there...Big Bang and Cosmology, please...Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

Oh great - I log in from Heathrow Terminal 4, looking forward to something nice and simple, and I get this Russell Humphreys seems to have a bad case of Lying for Jesus(TM) or perhaps Deluded for Jesus(c). Explaining why however is rather a large topic, as is the whole Pioneer Anomaly, if we are to treat this exhaustively. Far more sensible is to just wait for better data, but that does leave the YECs room to jabber incoherently... I'll see how much time I have to put something together over my vacation this week.

We're all familiar with the three dimensions of normal existence, e.g. x,y,z or height, width, depth. Relativity introduces time as the fourth dimension, but those of us who work with Relativity almost always put time first - so (t,x,y,z) is a point in space-time, and time is the first dimension. When we start working with extra dimensions in Kaluza-Klein theory, Supergravity, or most recently String Theory, we are adding extra space dimensions, so we have (t,x₁,x₂,x₃,x₄,x₅,x₆,x₇,x₈,x₉) which is a point in 10d space-time.Rarely, we may add a second (or more) dimension(s) of time, but this is now adding another level of complexity, and opening a whole new can of worms...

Well, it's my current level of knowledge - there may be more I can find out once I am back from vacation.

Yes.The video is almost complete nonsense, so please ignore it.

Hi, sorry for late response - been diving for a week No, for the simple reason that there was no such thing as light at that point - photons did not exist. They are a result of electroweak symmetry breaking, which did not occur for around 10^-12seconds after the big bang - ages in Big Bang terms After thjat, photons were around but "light" as we think of it - free passage of photons through space - did not occur until recombination, some 380,000 years after the BB.

Wrong

See Onifre's reply

No, I'd never heard of it before reading your post. Having searched, it is saturated amongst creationist sites, yet hardly a mention anywhere else... not a good sign. I have now dug out his papers. However, first I'll turn to Carmeli: I didn't, because again I had never heard of it. Not surprising when you do a cite search on his papers... his work is ignored. I dug out this paper this morning, and I have tried to read it. I must admit that I am out of practice - I left academia over a decade ago - but even so, this reads as garbage. But I am always willing to accept that I'm losing it, so I have dug a bit deeper. I've spent a few hours on this now, and here are some pages from Carmeli's book, Cosmological relativity.I started reading, and the feeling I was reading nonsense increased until I reached page 21, example 1. My jaw was dropping, and by the time I read "It is a Higgs scalar", I was in hysterics. This is complete and utter bullshit. He is a loon. Why the f'ck should some random scalar equation (in his perverse notation) be the Higgs with absolutely zero justification??? What the hell has this to do with the Higgs mechanism? It's just a sodding scalar, and he is using the "fame" of the Higgs as a name-drop. He does the same in example 2 with his vector equation. Pathetic and immediately revealing as someone who has lost it. I've met several academics just like this - they go so far in the field, and then meltdown into gibberish and crank-status. We had a few in the maths dept, and of course over at the Cavendish they had Josephson, the archetype for this kind of behaviour. Anyway, reading further on it just gets worse...With this knowledge, some of what I had been reading earlier about Hartnett started to make sense:

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Dr. Hartnett has published two papers on the Cornell Preprint server covering the topic of extragalactic redshift periodicities. I'll refer to them as Paper I and Paper II.

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* Paper I: "Galaxy redshift abundance periodicity from Fourier analysis of number counts $N(z)$ using SDSS and 2dF GRS galaxy surveys" by John G. Hartnett, Koichi Hirano (arXiv:0711.4885)

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* Paper II: "Redshift periodicity in quasar number counts from Sloan Digital Sky Survey" by John G. Hartnett (arXiv:0712.3833)

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It's interesting that the recently posted third version (v3) of paper I not only has an additional author, but seems to advocate a radically different cosmological model than the second version (v2). In the v2 paper, Hartnett advocated Moshe Carmeli's 5-dimensional cosmological model where the Hubble expansion was made part of the metric. Hartnett published several additional papers based on this model claiming it could explain Dark Matter as well. In paper v3, Hartnett has switched to another model developed by Hirano, Kawabata, and Komiya. This may be because the Hirano et al. cosmology explicitly tries to explain alleged redshift periodicities.

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From hereRed-shift periodicity is of great interest to me as it was central to some of my first research on topological compactifications of the Universe. I was sad to discover back then that there was nothing to red-shift periodicity - no the result I was looking for. It seems Hartnett wants to claim it exists to be able to posit a galacto-centric Universe, and he seems to be jumping from one comsological model to another in a hope to rescue the concept. He will be disappointed.That Hartnett was using Carmeli's work is extremely damning, and looking at Hartnett's academic profile, it appears he is simply way out of his depth, but is quite happy making money out of gullible creationists. It can't be wrong, can it, because so many other Christians do exactly the same...Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

I've been digging further as he intrigues me - he is (or was, as I've seen a comment suggetsing he died in the past 24 months) Albert Einstein Professor of Theoretical Physics, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel; author of many many books on Relativity and related subjects; and publisher of a decent (if not large) number of papers over the past few decades. But no-one talks about him, reads his books, reviews them, and he is largely ignored. Looking at his last ten year's worth of work, it is not wholly surprising. Finally, just a minute ago, I found this:

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The First Six Days of the Universe
Professor Moshe Carmeli

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Abstract
The early stage of the universe is discussed, and the time lengths of its first six days are given, as well as the age of the universe. There seems to be no contradiction with the biblical claim that the universe was created in six days.

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HmmmABE: It's not all bad Relativity Conference in the Midwest 1969:R elativity; Proceedings.
Edited by Moshe Carmeli and Stuart I. Fickler and Louis WittenLouis is the father of Ed, and as we all know, Ed is God Though who would have thought that God would have Mickey Mouse's voice!ABE2: This one is rather interesting. He was Rosen's student (of EPR and Einstein-Rosen Bridge fame) which places Carmeli just two under Einstein! But if you want to look how the greatest can lose their way, just look at Einstein himself Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

Most of his recent work is in The International Journal of Theoretical Physics, which unsurprisingly is where Harnett's work is finding a home. In the context of comsological/relativistic pubs, it ranks a little above toilet paper, on a good day...

Sorry Oni, missed this, so only a month late! But there was a few issues with the reply you received - sorry kbertsche - so better late than never...kbertsche was exactly right in saying that there is plenty of confusion over the term mass, and that the mass in which we are most interested is the rest-mass of an object.I'm sure you're aware from SR that we have time dilation and length contraction. These are purely observational effects, resulting from observing 4d space-time from a 3d perspective. But these effects will distort the results of any mechanics we calculate for an observed object travelling at relativistic speeds. If we know the rest mass of the object, the distorted time and distance measurements will make us calculate an altered "relativistc" mass. But this is purely observational and is observer dependent - we can simply match speed with the object, and the relativistic mass disappears - it has been "transformed" away. Thus it is not "real" and has no gravitational impact.Exercise 1: Can we imagine a scenario where the "relativistic" mass of something* cannot be transformed away? And so could have a gravitational effect?* hint - requires the right sort of something==============================================OT comment for Oni: Being such a Bill Hicks fan, do you like Tool?Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

Good answer - the photon's mass is zero in all frames - but not what I was thinking about. It's more about the usually erroneous idea of something gaining so much relativistic mass, it collapses into a black hole.

Yep, reads like just about every other book where the author thinks he's being revolutionary So creationist Hartnett "discovers" creationist Carmeli's amazing new cosmology, that just so happens to have been dreamt up whilst Carmeli is quite clearly undergoing meltdown, as evidenced by his nonsense in his recent books. This cosmology makes just about zero sense to any cosmologist except Hartnett, who isn't actually a comsologist anyway, and surprise surprise, it answers all of the "issues" with the standard Lambda CDM. We have been adding dimensions for the past 100 years. I have worked in every dimension from 2 to 12, and 26. The only thing interesting about Carmeli's approach is just how little sense it makes. No, it "predicts" three possible states, of which one is accelerated expansion. A bit like FLRW, except about seventy years later I would love to tear apart Hartnett's work, line-by-line, but unfortunately it makes so little sense that there's very little to work with. I'll try to find time to go through his calculations of rotation curves.

Unfortunately, these random meanderings are now published in a peer-reviewed journal and are being broadcast by the creationista as evidence of real creation research in mainstream science. I would like to be in a position where I can verbally destroy it with specifics given a few seconds notice, rather than just describe it as generic nonsense, as I do above.