Recent content by fhisicsstudnt

A visualization does not have decimal places. It's qualitative, not quantitative. An example may help communicate what's in my mind. I measured the velocity of A to be 5 and B to be 4 ; quantitative A moved faster than B, A hit the wall before B; qualitative The 2nd statement doesn't care...

But no mathematical formalism does. It may match to the 10th, 14th, 20th, etc. decimal place. Where one draws the line is subjective. 14 seems incredible right now, but the Borg are laughing at us, their instruments measure to 50 decimals and they can tell we're WAY off from the 15th decimal on...

Thanks Justin. Any insight into the justification for the last step of the derivation? Is this the way Einstein did it, by setting the variables that way? I agree with the idea of a medium, i.e. I am opposed to "action at a distance" and I think there must be some entity which conveys...

You don't see the difference between that which you can visualize and make a movie of to explain a phenomenon, vs. a set of equations that gives you the result of an experiment?

Thanks Kev, got it. So the derivation directly from the interferometer is fairly straighforward. I am trying to follow the "theoretical" derivation and I am with it up to the last step: T*(x'+vt') = [1/(1+av)]*[(x'/T)+(vt'/B)] B*(t'-ax') = [1/(1+av)]*[(t'/B)-(ax'/T)] With T as gamma...

Concepts are inherently a description. Objects "are what they are". A theory of "what it is" has to present an object (particle, fluid, string, etc.) first before it can describe the behaviors. In older times, everything was explained in terms of discrete corpuscles. Atoms and light were all...

The length-contraction of the parallel arm is not time-dependent, it's velocity dependent. Like I did in my last post, the pulses arrive back at the same time (no fringe effect) by simply making L'=T*L, with no x-vt. The v contained in the function T accounts for the relative motion.

So I've derived gamma empirically to match the MM result. According to my calcs the light pulses now traverse the same distance in the same time (L = T*L' instead of L). What is the purpose of x-vt in the equation for x'? I know it's a "Gallilean xformation" but I don't understand how it's...

A description/characterization is not unique, it doesn't guarantee understanding. I can describe the ball's motion as 9.8 without understanding. I can describe all the motions of the planets without any understanding. In fact, I can do so with a completely wrong understanding. So yes, a...

QED describes how light behaves, it does not tell you what light is. It tells you the quantities you will measure in experiments, it does not let you visualize light propagating in these experiments so that you can answer whether it is propagating "straight" or not.

Interesting thought. In the experiment where Cesium clocks were flown around the world one might say they didn't technically measure "time". A HF transition is a release of energy. Two cesium clocks have identical energies E0 and are losing energy at the same rate dE due to HF transitions when...

Travel straight with respect to what?

There are a few issues here. Firstly, "straight" has no meaning without "not straight". You have to define two conceptual opposites and explicitly define how they are different. In a world where everything is straight, there is no concept of straight, and vice versa. The second issue is that...

Assuming an underlying aether, the distance a light pulse must traverse through the aether in the perpendicular arm is: (c2-(v/c)2)1/2/2*L And the distance a light pulse must traverse through the aether in the parallel arm is: (c-(v/c))/L + (c+(v/c))/L These two equations are not...

Well, it seems to me that the stationary aether theory was ill-conceived from the start, even in the context of the time. Everyone from Galileo to Newton to Mach insisted on only relative motion. So the experiment (re)established that motion is only relative (at the very least, inertial motion)...