[TML] White Dwarfs, Black Holes & 100 Diameters

[Timothy Little]

On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 10:38:14AM -0500, Jeff Zeitlin wrote:
> Ummm... No.  This is specifically giving up relativity; the whole point
> of relativity was that there IS no preferred frame of reference.  You're
> trying to establish one here.

The short form: the preferred frame would be a historical 'accident',
not a relativity-violating physical law - but one that is almost as
far beyond the power to modify as a law would be.


It's no more a violation of relativity than the fact that the cosmic
microwave background universally defines a preferred frame.  A
historical symmetry breaking rather than a fundamental symmetry
violation.

Suppose that jump were made possible by some dark energy field
generated by ultra-high-energy processes in the Big Bang.  Call it a
tachyon sea, or something.  Such a field would have a preferred frame
in which the energy is minimal.  If the field is self-interacting it
could have an extremely *sharp* minimum - a common transcendence frame
analogous to a solid's common rest frame.  Then the idea is that jump
operates in the common transcendence frame.

Nothing in such a model violates relativity.  The laws of physics
would allow the transcendence frame to have any velocity, just as a
solid mass could have any rest frame.  However, the self-interaction
will prevent a given spacetime region from having *multiple*
transcendence frames - just as a piece of solid matter doesn't have
multiple rest frames.

Relativity would require the possibility of locally manipulating the
field to give a different local transcendence frame, but in practice
this would not affect anything.  Any local variations that could be
made would be instantly swamped by the FTL nature and literally
astronomical inertia of the rest of the field.


> My problem with the entire relativity-causality-ftl problem has been
> that C, the speed of light in vacuum, has been treated as
> privileged, without an adequate explanation as to WHY.

In relativity that's (in a way) the wrong question.  C is just a
conversion factor between historically badly-chosen units.

By analogy, suppose that for most of human history people used
kilometres for horizontal distance and feet for vertical, without ever
realising that they were related.  Then some bright spark comes up
with the idea that maybe they really *are* related, and there's a
special ratio of 3281 feet per kilometre that figures prominently in
his theory.  This ratio had come up in other theories such as the
comparatively recent theory of ballistics, but what's so privileged
about that number?  Nothing, it's just a conversion factor based on
the previously incorrect assumption that height is unrelated to
distance.

Someone with a full understanding of this newfangled "geometry" theory
would know that the two scales should have the same unit, and that
3281 ft/km is really just the dimensionless ratio 1 (km/km).


In relativity, time has an almost identical relation to space as
height does to distance - there is just one minus sign in one
important relation.  Velocities are almost exactly analogous to
gradients which are tangents of angles in gemoetry - except due to the
minus sign in relativity, they're hyperbolic tangents.

>From this view, c isn't an odd-looking unit with no explanation - it's
just 1, with no units.  Relativity was inspired by the behaviour of
light and usually explained that way, but the theory in itself accords
light no special place.  If you accept the theory's premise that time
and space are almost as interchangeable as height and distance, the
observed fact that the speed of light in vacuum is constant (1, or c
if you prefer to persist in thinking of time and space as independent)
is an *outcome* of the theory.

The idea of c as a *maximum* speed isn't even an outcome of
relativity.  All the theory says is that the causality and dynamics of
objects freely interacting in a spacelike manner (faster than light)
are very different from timelike (normal, slower than light)
interactions.  The differences are still only due to the minus sign,
but very important - like the difference in behaviour between sqrt(1)
and sqrt(-1).


- Tim