Re: General Relativity Does Not Rescue Special Relativity.

On Wed, 6 Nov 2024 22:39:18 +0000, LaurenceClarkCrossen wrote:

Reasonable defense by a relativist: Dingle refuted the alleged cause of
relative motion for time dilation of special relativity. Time dilation
is a part of GR, not SR.

Dingle's mistake was assuming a direct cause. But it may be that
the two are merely *correlated* by a *common indirect cause*.
In physics situations like this arose many times. For example,
Maxwell's theory required equipping EM fields with their own
momentum and angular momentum (otherwise the conservation laws
would fail). Nobody knew what the seat of that momentum was.
This was only modelled much later in quantum electrodynamics.
It's very likely that time dilation, etc., are similarly conditioned
phenomena. We still don't have the right model for the underlying
causes.
Same thing happened with thermodynamics when people started to
(correctly) quantify the amount of heat despite not knowing what
heat was, or even at one point while having the wrong model of
heat (the "caloric" or "phlogiston" model).
So this is a normal (although a bit temporarily uncomfortable)
position for a physics theory to be in, it's nothing new. It only
seems such a tragedy to amateurs who ONLY know relativity but do
not actually understand PHYSICS and how science works in
particular. One standard amateur mistake here is the constant
confusion of physics with philosophy.
--
Jan