Is Lorentz transformation absolute

[Chrisc]

You're saying the origin of a frame is at rest with respect to itself?
I can't even imagine such a statement in physics.

I think I stated the question so poorly from the beginning it has led to clarification rather than answers.
I will start a new thread so as not to confuse anyone else with this one.

 

[Mettra]

You're saying the origin of a frame is at rest with respect to itself?
I can't even imagine such a statement in physics.

This is what the guy is trying to say:

Forget this problem you have posed. Imagine now that you are an observer. You're not experiencing any acceleration (this is SR after all). Therefore, you can plop down a coordinate system and call yourself the origin.

Since you are an observer, there is NO REASON for you to move relative to your origin. It would be entirely NONSENSICAL for an observer to move with respect to his origin. All that does is complicate matters - it adds another frame of reference to the problem.

Now let's consider a simple example problem to demonstrate what I'm going on about.

You are floating in space one day, and you see a comet moving. You think to yourself that you'd like very much to measure it's velocity and so on. So you plop down an x-y coordinate system so that the comet is moving in your x-y plane.

Now, you are observer A, and the comet is observer B. What is the comet's speed? You can check using your x-y coordinates. If there is another guy on the comet, he can also check your speed with respect to him. He has plopped down his own x'-y' coordinates to see how fast you are moving (with respect to him, obviously).

Now let's say that you accidentally hit the rocket booster on your suit for .1 seconds. What does the guy on the comet see? He sees you accelerate very slightly and then end up with a different uniform velocity. He can then measure it just fine in his coordinate system.

You, on the other hand, notice something odd about the comet's movement. It has suddenly changed its velocity (note that I'm ignoring the acceleration to simplify the problem, it isn't kosher). Then you notice that the x-y coordinates that you plopped down earlier are all wrong! They're moving! So you pick them up and plop them down again in their proper place with the origin at your feet.

----------
Measuring something with a moving coordinate system is nonsensical.

If you roll a ball across a room and want to measure its velocity, you don't string up a coordinate system from the ceiling and then fly it towards the ball so that the ball and coordinate system will intercept each other. You paint the coordinate system on the floor and you stand on the floor. You don't run past the coordinate system when the ball rolls along it either - all that silly stuff just makes it difficult to measure it.

Of course you can include an arbitrary number of reference frames and always end up with the correct answers, but there's no reason to overcomplicate a simple problem other than as a theoretical exercise.

 

[DavidWhitbeck]

It's like asking what is the velocity of the center-of-mass in the center-of-mass frame. The correct answer would be "it's zero by definition." I don't see what's so hard to grasp about being stationary with respect to one self. I appear to be stationary in my reference frame while I sit in front of my laptop, but relative to an observer in space, I appear to be moving since I'm in a frame co-rotating with the Earth. Just because that observer noticed that I am moving relative to him did not invalidate my own observation that I'm stationary relative to myself.

 

[Chrisc]

Mettra, you have just explained the "nonsensical" use of the phrase "at rest with respect to yourself"
It is nonsensical because the only alternative (if you even want to contemplate such an extraneous complication of reason) is that you are "not" at rest with respect to yourself. This would mean you are now moving with respect to yourself. Motion and rest are relative measures. You can no more be at rest with respect to yourself than you can be in motion with respect to yourself.

DavidWhitbeck, substitute "relatively, or relative to" for the phrase "with respect to" and you will find the statement now reads: "I am at rest relative to myself". Rest and motion are relative measures. To measure yourself relative to yourself in either state would not only require two of you, both with infinitesimally small rulers, but both of you would simultaneously prove the existence of two frames.
I am not unaware of what you and Mettra are trying to say, but you are misstating, and/or misunderstanding the principle of relativity. There is nothing "one" thing can have, possesses or exhibit relative to "itself"..

 

[DavidWhitbeck]

No Chris, that's simply wrong. If you can't a priori assume reflexivity then relative velocity would be ill-defined. What you wrote sounds less like a reasoned argument, and more like a paradox that you got yourself stuck in.

 

[Chrisc]

That's an interesting comment.
I never shy away from an "interesting" philosophical discussion, but you've stumped me here.
Are you implying that the principle of relativity should stand the test of reflexivity in so much as anything relative to anything else must also be relative to itself?

 

[matheinste]

Hello Chrisc.

------There is nothing "one" thing can have, possesses or exhibit relative to "itself"..-----

How about equality? Or being in the same place etc.

Matheinste.

 

[Mettra]

That's an interesting comment.
I never shy away from an "interesting" philosophical discussion, but you've stumped me here.
Are you implying that the principle of relativity should stand the test of reflexivity in so much as anything relative to anything else must also be relative to itself?

With all due respect, if you want to have an inevitably meaningless semantic argument, you should choose an audience other than physicists. You asked several questions, and others have responded in order to try to be on the same wavelength with you, even providing examples and so on.

However, with each progression, you have cherry-picked a particular wording or phrase and taken it to mean something other than what is immediately obvious in context with the rest of the posts (and all in the greater context of physics). As you can see, this leads us nowhere. If you have a physical question, you can ask it here. If you have a question about the physical ramifications of some realm of physics, there are knowledgeable people here that are willing to help you.

Even though we're not all top-notch English-major-grade psychology-mastering communicators, we make up for these failings by using everyday words along with words that mean something specific in a physics context. Try to work with others here in that regime. These aren't the philosophy forums, after all.

 

[Chrisc]

Mettra, I understand your frustration, I have been the victim of too many trolls in my time.
But I think if you read the whole thread more carefully you will see you've misjudged me.
The content of the posts on this thread are not meaningless and certainly not semantics.
Of all the physical sciences, the buck stops at physics. All other physical sciences
reach the bottom end of their realm of expertise and hand off the torch to the next.
Physics does not have such a privilege. Below the fundamentals of physics is philosophy
which is why it plays such a large role in theoretical physics.
If you are interested, read the short introduction to Carlo Rovelli's "Unfinished revolution"
http://fr.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0604045
Below is a quote from same.

"The search for a quantum theory of gravity raises once more old questions
such as: What is space? What is time? What is the meaning of “moving”? Is motion to be defined
with respect to objects or with respect to space? And also: What is causality? What is the role of the
observer in physics? Questions of this kind have played a central role in periods of major advances
in physics. For instance, they played a central role for Einstein, Heisenberg, and Bohr. But also for
Descartes, Galileo, Newton and their contemporaries, as well as for Faraday and Maxwell.
Today some physicists view this manner of posing problems as “too philosophical”. Many physicists
of the second half of the twentieth century, indeed, have viewed questions of this nature as irrelevant.
This view was appropriate for the problems they were facing. When the basics are clear and the issue
is problem-solving within a given conceptual scheme, there is no reason to worry about foundations: a
pragmatic approach is the most effective one. Today the kind of difficulties that fundamental physics
faces have changed. To understand quantum spacetime, physics has to return, once more, to those
foundational questions."

 

[DavidWhitbeck]

Mettra is right, you set up straw man arguments in all of your replies. Would you stop being argumentative and show enough respect to reply to the heart of what others say?

You don't impress anybody by quoting Rovelli, he wasn't defending your pontifications, he was defending the necessity of having mathematical physicists concerned with foundational issues of quantum gravity.

I'm going to avoid your threads in the future, and I hope that others do the same.

 

[phyti]

Today some physicists view this manner of posing problems as “too philosophical”.

...and still earn a Ph.D!

 

[Chrisc]

matheinste, I am not ignoring your last post, I've just been considering the value of continuing this thread.
As I said in post # 10, this thread has little to do with my original question, but after considering the nature of the posts it would be too easy to just walk away from them. So I'll attempt to answer yours with all the others as they are all arguing against the same point.

These forums are host to a great number of people of great diversity from around the world. language is going to be an issue from time to time. But language should not be used as an excuse or intentionally misused in any serious discussion of physics.
The people that disagree with me in this thread appear to to take one of two positions:
1) those that have not thought through the concepts and dismiss the argument as trivial, semantics or simply argumentative intentions.
2) those that actually think through the concepts and disagree with the physical application.

To all of you who are of the first opinion, I can only suggest you think a little longer. Dismissing concepts such as these will only limit your opportunity to be or understand the next Einstein or Newton. I thought quoting Rovelli in my last post would make this point, but clearly some of those who dismiss the concepts discussed here are just as happy to dismiss the evidence. That is unfortunate not only for them but possibly for physics as a well as no one knows who will start the next revolution. It may be someone that dropped out of school, someone with PhD, or a lowly patent clerk.

To all of you who are of the second opinion, thank you for putting in the effort to express logic, reason and examples. It's easy to dismiss or abandon your conclusions in the face of intimidation or ridicule, it's much harder to persevere and demand reason. If through reasoned argument, I change your mind or you change mine, we have both accomplished something worth the time invested.
So for those of you still as certain of your argument as I am of mine, I'll try again.

The core of this argument is the physical meaning of the concept of relativity. I have taken exception to "physics" accepting a concept that has no "physical" meaning and one that only serves to confuse a basic principle (relativity) which is too fundamentally important to let it suffer from language or be trivialized "as" semantics.

The specific error has been expressed as: an observer is at rest relative to himself.
If something is said to be relative, it is relative to something else. A person can be tall relative to their age, heavy relative to their height, or any similar comparative, dependancy or conjugation of two or more properties or attributes. A person cannot be tall relative to their height, old relative to their age, or possesses any other property expressed as a comparison to itself.
It is easy to understand how this is taken a semantics, but it is crucial to understand how this concept of relativity applies to the laws of physics. A person as an observer is a frame of reference even if not clearly geometrically defined. A person or frame of reference cannot possesses a property that is qualified or quantified relative to itself. i.e. a frame of reference cannot be large relative to its size, or fast relative to its speed. Similarly a frame of reference cannot be at rest relative to its state of motion, therefore: a frame of reference cannot be at rest relative to itself.
The only posts that have made any clarification of this statement are those that attempt to make the statement a reference to a person or frame within a frame. In this sense a person may be at rest relative to another frame that encompasses their frame. But in this case there are still two distinctly different frames which allow for the comparison of one relative to other. This is not the same as one being relative to itself.

 

[DrGreg]

The specific error has been expressed as: an observer is at rest relative to himself.
If something is said to be relative, it is relative to something else. A person can be tall relative to their age, heavy relative to their height, or any similar comparative, dependancy or conjugation of two or more properties or attributes. A person cannot be tall relative to their height, old relative to their age, or possesses any other property expressed as a comparison to itself.

By your logic, then, because 2 \neq 2 is nonsensical, then 2 = 2 is nonsensical too!

 

[Dale]

The specific error has been expressed as: an observer is at rest relative to himself.

In the context of SR, the phrase "X is at rest relative to Y" is clearly understood to mean "X is at rest in the rest frame of Y". So "an observer is at rest relative to himself" simply means "an observer is at rest in his own rest frame".

Such a statement is trivially true, but it is not ambiguous or ill-formed in any way.

 

[paw]

A person as an observer is a frame of reference

I think this may be the root of your problem in understanding what people are saying to you. A person (observer) is not a frame of reference. An observer is just that; an observer. A frame of reference is a coordinate system with certain properties that the observer uses in order to analyse a physical system. The observer can most definitely be at rest with respect to the chosen frame.

As I mentioned in a earlier post (which you didn't comment on) there are an infinite number of possible frames even when we restrict their properties to those that are inertial. The observer is free to choose any of those frames to analyse the physical system in SR. Since the observer can choose any of an infinite number of frames it only makes sense to choose one that simplifies the analysis. Therefore we usually choose a frame in which the observer is at rest.

 

[Chrisc]

No, DrGreg, you are exchanging a property for a quantity and relativity for equality which is not the argument. This is not a question of mathematical value or equivalence.

DaleSpam, Yes, your first statement is true as I and others have stated. I have no argument with specifying an observer at rest in a frame. But as for your second comment that this is not ambiguous in any way, that is what has become the ambiguity and specifically in error.
From post # 11 on, the idea of an observer at rest in a frame, has become "a frame at rest with respect to itself."
If that was just a momentary laps of reason (as I have had many times) I would not be still posting in this thread. When I asked in #15 for an explanation, the thread took a turn where a number of people insisted the principle of relativity refers to the property of a frame ...(fine)...with respect to itself...(NOT FINE).

paw, what I said above is the root of my problem. You're right, an observer is not a frame, but this method is commonly used to avoid the kind of confusion seen in this thread, If you define an observer "in" a frame as opposed to the frame itself, you then must define the observer at rest in the frame. To be at rest in a frame requires all the concepts and constructs of SR necessary to define the frame of the observer with respect to the frame they are in, as is necessary to then define that frame with respect to another. If an observer is not at rest relative to the frame they are in ... what's the point of putting them in the frame? That is why we use the term - frame of "reference".

 

[Dale]

DaleSpam, ... But as for your second comment that this is not ambiguous in any way, that is what has become the ambiguity and specifically in error.

Sorry, I just don't see any ambiguity whatsoever here. All of the following equivalent statements are well-defined and trivially true:

"an observer is at rest relative to himself"
"an observer is at rest in his own rest frame"
"the velocity of an observer is zero in the frame where the observer's velocity is zero"

Do you see any ambiguity or confusion in any of the following three concepts:

1) The velocity of reference frame A wrt reference frame B
(The first time derivative of the transformation equation from B to A)

2) The velocity of object A wrt reference frame B
(the first time derivative of the position of A in reference frame B)

3) The velocity of object A wrt object B
(the first time derivative of the position of A in the reference frame where the first time derivative of the position of B is 0 - a.k.a. the rest frame of B)

In all cases if A=B the velocity is trivially 0 and is not ambiguous or poorly-defined in any way.

 

[phyti]

It seems to be semantics.
Motion is defined as the change of position of one object relative to that of another. The definition cannot apply to a single object (the observer), therefore the statement
'the observer is at rest relative to himself' is meaningless.
An inertial frame by it's definition cannot contain any motion.
If you want to start with first principles, begin with the definitions.

The observer/(detection device) is a frame of reference,it's what the relativity theory is all about, the transformation of one observers description to that of another. He could be in a spacesuit floating in remote space, there is no need of a physical 'frame'.

 

[Dale]

'the observer is at rest relative to himself' is meaningless.

No it isn't. It means "the first time derivative of the position the observer is 0 in the reference frame where the first time derivative of the position of the observer is 0". It is trivial, not meaningless.

I have a hard time believing that you and chrisc really want to turn this ridiculous assertion into an argument. It is simply stunning to me that you seem to have so much trouble with such a trivial matter after it has been explained to you.

You both do realize that 0+0=0, right? And that d/dt 0 = 0 also, right?

 

[paw]

...but this method is commonly used to avoid the kind of confusion seen in this thread...

Your definition of a 'frame of reference' is clearly different to what I was taught. I'd respectfully submit that your definition is the one that's causing the confusion. I guess you can use whatever definition you like but then don't be surprised when you get contradictory results.

 

[Chrisc]

No it isn't. It means "the first time derivative of the position the observer is 0 in the reference frame where the first time derivative of the position of the observer is 0". It is trivial, not meaningless.

This is a meaningful statement because you have made use of two frames.
Your statement is a statement of "rest" when the first time derivative of position is 0, or it is motion when the first time derivative is >0.
It would not have been a meaningful statement if you had only made use of one frame.
This is more clear when you make the time derivative of position >0.
The first time derivative of position of the observer is 2 with respect to the observer.
In this case you are stating the observer is in motion with respect to himself.
This is meaningless or nonsensical.

 

[Doc Al]

Enough, already. This thread is done.