A Cosmology Group
Looking for alternatives to Einstein's Relativity #371
Replies: 6 comments 36 replies
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Contrary to popular belief there are a few, undertested alternatives to special and sometimes general relativity |
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critics of special relativity: https://github.com/orgs/a-cosmology-group/discussions/201#discussioncomment-9597917 other: |
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There is also an ACG discussion about the arbitrary frames of reference in Special and General Relativity and so-called fictitious forces. |
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Yesterday, I came across a non-relativistic theory that I think might interest this community. It's called Subquantum Kinetics. It was developed by Paul LaViolette and presented in his book Subquantum Kinetics: A Systems Approach to Physics and Cosmology. I managed to download a PDF copy from Anna's Archive and I'm currently working my way through it. Now, I'm fully aware that LaViolette is a controversial figure and that his Starburst Foundation has promoted some rather exotic ideas over the years, such as the galactic superwave hypothesis and his theories about mass extinctions. To be honest, I don't know how much credibility those claims deserve. However, setting those more speculative ideas aside for a moment, I find the core physics presented in this book quite stimulating for anyone interested in exploring non-relativistic frameworks. His model is intended as a complete alternative to both Special and General Relativity. Rather than relying on curved space-time, he postulates the existence of an underlying ether and treats the universe as Euclidean, static, infinite and eternal. He also puts forward a tired-light mechanism and an alternative explanation for the CMB, both of which might be of particular interest to @RedshiftDrift. So far, I'm finding the book quite interesting, but I'd really like to hear your thoughts on the theory before I get any deeper into my reading. |
I haven't studied LaViolette's book, but it's from 2010. The paper I reviewed was from 1986, so the language may have changed but it's still 'Subquantum Kinetics'. Maybe he didn't have a name for his aether particles then, so he just use the standard name 'hadron'. After reading hundreds of redshift models I am beginning to see a pattern, and to save time I reject theories and models which use "creation" or fundamental constants that are not constant. The Big Bang is readily rejected. The goal of physics is to find universal laws, both in space and time. There is no point wasting time on theories that posit ad hoc random phenomena that vary in space or time. |
I could not disagree with you more. That formulation is the mathematicist conception of physics that has prevailed over the last 50 years and it has been an abysmal failure, the absurd standard models being trenchant illustrations of that failure. The belief that "universal laws" exist, in the sense that they apply everywhere at all scales throughout the Cosmos, and we puny humans chicken-scratching in a minute corner of the Cosmos have discovered or will discover them soon by rummaging about in our mathematical tool kit is dismally unrealistic. The goal of physics and science generally is to investigate the nature of physical reality by closely examining the phenomenological world. The past 50 years of mathematicist navel gazing has produced nothing of scientific value and the vast trove of new knowledge painstakingly acquired by physical researchers over the last century has been squandered on barren model-fitting exercises. Mathematical models and "laws" are useful tools in the scientific endeavor but they are only tools, not the goal of science. Understanding is the goal of science and a fixation on mathematics has been detrimental to that goal. |
I agree with you on that point. In fact, it's the main reason that has drawn me away from LaViolette's model after looking into it more deeply. I still think it's an interesting model, no question about that, but the idea of matter being spontaneously generated is something that doesn't really appeal to me. To be fair, in his model particles aren't actually created out of nothing; they simply emerge from the ether itself. Even so, it still feels somewhat ad hoc to me, and that's one of the reasons I remain skeptical of it. |
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@RedshiftDrift writes:
The secret is that, in VM, timescales
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That was discussed here https://github.com/orgs/a-cosmology-group/discussions/281#discussioncomment-11624024 and here https://github.com/orgs/a-cosmology-group/discussions/281#discussioncomment-11814218
Sure, why not?
Agreed, the goal is "universal laws" but we will never reach that goal. That's why physics will always be interesting. |
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In my model (ECSM) general relativity has been recovered as an effective limit of a finite response medium. I treat the vacuum as a superfluid-like finite response medium where matter is an excitation of that same medium. Matter also acts like a defect or burden within that substrate, causing stress on the surrounding medium. From this view gravity is not a fundamental force pulling things together, but the surrounding medium relaxing and reconfiguring around that defect. So what GR describes as curved spacetime, ECSM interprets as the large scale effective geometry produced by finite response stress in the medium. This means I am not trying to throw GR away, I am trying to explain why GR works, what it is emerging from, and why time, inertia and gravity appear so deeply connected. My GR recovery paper is here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19909690 |
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From what you've said here and in the other thread, my impression is that your model is evolutionary in nature. In other words, it still involves a physical beginning to the universe and retains some form of cosmic expansion, even if it differs from the standard Lambda CDM picture. Just as a thought experiment, do you think your model could also work in a static universe? The reason I ask is that quite a few people on this forum, myself included, tend to favor static cosmologies over evolutionary ones. So I'd be interested to know whether your framework could be adapted to that kind of setting, or whether cosmic evolution is an essential part of it. |
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No ECSM does not support expansion, it is anti dark sector.. the CMB in my theory is purely entropy based, the universe/vacuum changed from a chaotic state to a superfluid-like state. ECSM is based in a static and infinite universe. Here is my paper of redshift if you are interested.. |
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Ah, sorry, I didn't realize that. I haven't read your paper yet. What I said was based entirely on the few lines you've written here and in the other thread about the CMB. In that case, I'll read it. |
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Thats ok, it is good to interact with others who also feel that the universe is not expanding.. |
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The way I interpret GR is it works extremely well because of relationship variables. It is not exactly an equation of state, but it is a scalable relationship. More mass = more gravity = more time dilation. What Einstein did was tie time to space in order to explain gravity without a substrate or medium. In a way, he had to invent a substrate for it to work. He gave space and time properties that were indistinguishable from observations, and mathematically it works extremely well. My theory treats the relationship differently because it does not ignore the medium that Maxwell’s equations were originally pointing toward. It is better explained in my papers, but I believe time is just a rate of change. It is the rate of evolution in the medium, set by the finite response of that medium. If you alter the response rate, you alter the time rate. Matter alters the response rate, so we see altered clock rates near mass. In GR this is described as time dilation caused by curved spacetime. In ECSM I interpret it as the local medium being placed under response burden by matter, which slows the rate at which processes can evolve. So the same relationship appears: more mass, more gravitational effect, slower clocks. The difference is that ECSM gives the relationship a physical cause. It says the clock is not slowing because abstract spacetime has curved, but because the medium response state around matter has changed. GR gives the correct geometry of the effect. ECSM tries to explain what the geometry is made from. |
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... and then there is that thing where you hit the tiny speck of dust at 0.999c. |
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As I said in my previous comment, according to Einstein's Relativity, the closer a spacecraft gets to the speed of light, the more energy is required to accelerate it further. Even reaching 60 to 70% of the speed of light would require an enormous amount of energy, likely exceeding the total energy output of our current civilization. On top of that, as you pointed out, there's the twin paradox and all the complications that come with it. For these reasons, subluminal interstellar travel doesn't strike me as a particularly attractive option. The costs would be immense while the benefits would be relatively limited. Lorentz's Relativity doesn't eliminate the enormous energy requirements needed to approach the speed of light through conventional acceleration, nor does it eliminate the twin paradox. However, it does allow for the construction of a warp drive that doesn't violate causality, because a Lorentzian framework preserves an absolute reference frame and therefore removes the possibility of time travel and causality violations at their root. By contrast, an Einsteinian warp drive doesn't avoid these issues. Under Einstein's Relativity, manipulating space-time for faster-than-light travel can, at least in principle, lead to causality violations and temporal paradoxes. Couple that with the fact that Lorentz's Relativity doesn't predict singularities and is much more intuitive, and you can see why I've started preferring the Lorentzian framework over Einstein's. EDIT: Just to be clear, when I refer to Lorentz's Relativity, I don't necessarily mean Lorentz's original aether theory. I'm referring more broadly to any approach to Special and General Relativity based on a Lorentzian framework, in which relativistic effects arise from the interaction of matter with a physical medium rather than from the geometric structure of space-time. |
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As I said in my previous comment, you should read the book or at least skim through the references I gave you. A picture of their spacecraft with an explanation is found via the last link in chapter 5. How can you possibly think that we can have a judgement about a technology that is a few thousand years ahead of ours. |
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I understand what you're trying to do, I really do. But try to put yourself in my shoes for a moment. The book you'd like me to read is in Dutch, which means I'd have to translate it bit by bit as I go. That's a pretty significant time investment. And considering that I'm already fairly skeptical when it comes to contactees, you can probably see why I'm not exactly eager to dive into it. As for your point about how we can judge a technology that may be thousands of years more advanced than our own, I think that's looking at the issue from the wrong angle. The question isn't whether we can fully understand how a hypothetical extraterrestrial civilization might travel from one star system to another. Obviously, there are a lot of things we don't know, and what seems impossible today will probably seem totally normal in the future. But at the same time, we have to start somewhere. If we're going to speculate about civilizations traveling across the galaxy, the only sensible place to begin is with the knowledge and physics we already have. That doesn't mean our current understanding is complete or that future breakthroughs are impossible. It simply means that any attempt to imagine interstellar travel has to be grounded in something rather than nothing. Saying, "Aliens are thousands of years more advanced than us, so there's no point in even trying to understand how the hell they can get here from there," isn't a productive approach. We may not know the answer, but we still need a starting point if we want to have a meaningful discussion about the possibilities. |
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Ernest Rutherford said: "All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial." At the moment there is nothing in known physics that hint at FTL travel. Proposals of multiverses, wormholes, entanglement and other currently 'impossible' ideas seem more like science-fiction right now. Yet when the correct answer eventually comes, we will all go "Oh, ok!" A quote often attributed to Einstein, although unconfirmed: "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them". It's ok to refine our current physics from within the box but disruptions can only come from 'out the box'. That must necessarily consider everything, including today's non-physics, and mathematics that may right now seem entirely abstract. What is not ok, and here I tend to agree with @budrap00, (except for the usual barrage of personal attacks) that we cannot set an abstract as a preferred solution, and then when it empirically fails, refuse to take a step back. |
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Hi everyone, I'm new here. I've been enjoying the discussions and learning a lot from them so far. One thought: if FTL travel were actually possible, it seems likely that some alien civilization would have made it here by now. So maybe it's for the best that FTL doesn't appear to be on the table. Also, do you know the folks at DemystifySci? They think relativity is on the chopping block! https://x.com/demystifysci/status/2058690238135042429 |
I think they have. But I don't really feel like explaining why, when and where, because 1) it's not related to the topic we're discussing in this thread, and 2) we'd end up going down an endless rabbit hole. |
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I know the folks at DemystifySci and have discussions with them from time to time. Unfortunately they have difficulties distinguishing between "interpretation problems" and "foundational problems" in relativity, especially when relativity is used outside it's range of validity. |
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Tangential topic sorry but related: you should totally go on the DemystifySci show. I'm sure they'd be happy to have you, if that's something you'd be interested in. How come they haven’t invited you on yet? They already seem to agree with you on the biggest issue, that the Big Bang theory is built on some bad assumptions, and they also like tired light, so I think it could make for a really interesting conversation. It would probably also get a lot more people checking out your website. |
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I've never heard of these people. Is there a place where I can follow them? Please, don't say X because I don't have it. |
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They’re also on YouTube and they’re pretty much aligned in thinking the Big Bang doesn’t really hold up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLH2L2S_WF0. |
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Space as a Physical Medium Underlying Reality: A Mechanistic Derivation of Special and General Relativity |
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I was initially excited by this but it is an example as @RedshiftDrift pointed out that AI is adapt at making a postulate and jumping straight to the required equations - often without even a heuristic derivation. I was hoping to see something in the geometry section but that too seems vague - could also be my lack of tensor knowledge :) The initial proposal of 'space as an elastic medium' quickly evolves to 'we only need local space ... every particle only sees its own local space'; which is tantamount to Einstein's postulate that the speed of light is equal for all observers. For a 'space as a medium' to work, it must have a frame in which 'the speed of light is constant in space'. The SR equations and Lorentz transformations work just fine with this as an outset. The energy calculation in their eq(2) is not novel as they claim, as you can see from my naive 'dynamic aether' paper of 2023. (The result is not trivial though, as it shows the particle behaviour as a result of absorbing energy. This energy is crucial to sustain Newton's first law (motion perpetual) in an aether framework without resulting in a drag effect. They did not note this) They also propose matter as a standing wave in space - where the particle continuously expel energy radially, and the energy returns along the same line to ultimately conserve energy. Return from where, Infinity? This part is weakly argued. It would wreck the model if the particle starts moving. The gravity derivation from a Although the paper is a stimulating read, its structure appears to have barely survived a train-smash. This is evidence of AI again. |
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I had exactly the same impression. It really feels like the paper was written with AI. However, I decided to share it anyway because, like you said, it's still a stimulating read, even though many of the claims made by the author are not supported by anything within the paper itself. In any case, even mainstream physicists generally agree that, if you choose to think of space as a medium (like Lorentz did), you can still build a model that reproduces the same physical phenomena described by both Special and General Relativity, like time dilation, length contraction and the constancy of the speed of light. From what I understand, the main reason mainstream physicists prefer Einstein's approach is simply that it makes the math easier, especially when you're calculating the motion of particles. |
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Hello everyone!
I realize this thread isn't strictly about cosmology, but I hope it's still acceptable to post it here. Many of the implications of what I'm about to discuss are ultimately connected to cosmology, so I think it's relevant enough for this forum.
If you remember, in this thread, I asked whether it was possible to obtain a stable static universe within General Relativity without introducing the cosmological constant. I said I wanted to stick with Einstein’s Relativity, not only because it offered a simple explanation for certain observations, but also because it seemed like the only framework that could leave the door open for faster-than-light travel, specifically through the warping of space-time.
Since then, I’ve done more reading and I’ve realized something that changed my perspective quite a bit. I've discovered that even by using some kind of warp drive, you'd still run into violations of causality. Within Einstein's framework, if you exceed the speed of light, you inevitably end up with scenarios where you can travel backward in time and break causality, regardless of whether you're moving through space or using a warp bubble to move. And this, along with other long-standing issues such as singularities and the apparent impossibility of reconciling General Relativity with quantum mechanics, made me rethink my position.
Honestly, if I have to choose between keeping Relativity and giving up the idea of interstellar travel, or moving beyond Relativity to explore alternative frameworks, I'd prefer the latter. Part of the reason is that I've always tended to have a fairly optimistic view of both the universe and the future of humanity. While I recognize that science fiction is fiction and often contains unrealistic elements, I like to think that some of its broader ideas may contain a grain of truth. I like the possibility that humanity might one day achieve faster-than-light interstellar travel, encounter extraterrestrial civilizations and become part of a galaxy populated by many intelligent species traveling between the stars. Before abandoning those possibilities altogether, I'd rather explore whether alternative theoretical frameworks might exist that could accommodate them without the causal problems associated with relativistic space-time.
So now I’m definitively more open to non-relativistic models, especially those that reintroduce the notion of an absolute time and avoid these causal paradoxes. Can anyone recommend non-relativistic theories that they consider serious and worth studying? I'm particularly interested in neo-Lorentzian theories, ether-based models, or other frameworks that could potentially replace Special and General Relativity while still providing an elegant explanation for observations that are generally interpreted as confirmations of Einstein's theory.
Thank you in advance for any suggestions.
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