Thought Experiments whose Results do not Agree with the Prediction of Special Relativity
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Thought Experiments whose Results do not Agree with the Prediction of Special Relativity |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Koshun Suto |
| Keywords | Special Relativity, Absolute Rest System of Coordinates, Ether-Drift, Depth Rest System of Coordinates, Depth Velocity Vector, Relative Absolute System of Coordinates. |
| Published | 2001 |
| Journal | General Science Journal |
| No. of pages | 15 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Einstein changed the problem of ether from the discussion of whether or not it exists to that of whether or not it is necessary as a concept or a hypothesis. It is true that if we give the vacuum the property as a medium that transmits light, it becomes unnecessary to search for ether as substance. Even so, we have to search for an experiment to decide whether the propagation of light emitted from the light source is isotropic or anisotropic relative to the light source. An experiment like that was formerly considered nonexistent, but this paper will show it is existent. In the process of Thought experiments of this paper, we will find different results from the prediction by Special Relativity. As the cause of that, we will show the existence of an unknown velocity vector Einstein denied.
Overview
Koshun Suto's paper is an attempt to construct a gedankenexperiment that can decide, operationally, whether the propagation of light in a given frame is isotropic — something Einstein declared unobservable in principle. Suto's framing is historical: Lorentz retained an absolutely resting ether and explained the Michelson–Morley null result by contraction, while Einstein made the ether "superfluous" and denied that any experiment could exhibit ether drift. Suto's charge is that Einstein did not so much answer the question as change it, "from the discussion of whether it exists to that of whether it is necessary as a concept or a hypothesis." Because the clock settings inside a moving system are fixed operationally by light signals — the relativity of simultaneity — the internal observer can never detect anisotropy; the question is defined out of existence rather than tested.
The paper's proposal is to compare three coordinate systems rather than two, and to read off the accumulated clock offsets after the moving systems have been brought back to rest. Suto argues that the offsets predicted from the platform frame and those predicted by an observer in one of the trains — who, by the principle of relativity, is entitled to call himself at rest and use only the relative velocity — disagree. He does not conclude that special relativity is false; he calls it "an imperfect theory" and proposes that the residue is an "unknown velocity vector Einstein denied," which he then interprets in terms of the fluctuating virtual-particle content of the vacuum.
The argument
The apparatus
Three coordinate systems are set up: a station platform with x-axis, and two identical trains A and B running parallel to it. Each system carries a light source at its origin (OP, OA, OB) and two identical stopwatches placed at ±L along its own axis — SW1 and SW2 on the platform, SW3 and SW4 in train A, SW5 and SW6 in train B. Each stopwatch starts the instant light from its own source reaches it.
Suto states two readings of the light postulate that he will assume: the speed of light in vacuum does not depend on the speed of the source, and one light signal does not overtake another; and light emitted from a source reaches mirrors set equidistant at L in all directions and returns simultaneously, so that 2L/t is a universal constant.
Train A passes the observer P at velocity v and train B at velocity V, the two being related, as measured from train A, by the relativistic addition theorem V = (v + w)/(1 + vw/c2), where w is the velocity of B relative to A. The velocities are stipulated to be large enough that relativistic effects matter. When the three sources cross the y-axis together, all three emit simultaneously.
The offsets computed from the platform
To observer P, light from OA spreads isotropically from the fixed point A0 where the emission occurred. The rear wall of train A moves toward A0 while the front wall moves away, so SW3 starts before SW4. With the contracted half-length L′ = L(1 − (v/c)2)1/2, the platform-measured arrival times are t′3 = L′/(c + v) and t′4 = L′/(c − v). Suto is explicit that the (c ± v) denominators do not mean the speed of light has changed — they are closing speeds in P's frame; light still travels at c.
Converting the platform time difference into a reading difference on the train's own slowed clocks by multiplying by (1 − (v/c)2)1/2 gives the well-known result
- t3·4 = 2Lv/c2
and similarly t5·6 = 2LV/c2 for train B. The trains are then decelerated, returned to their starting point and stopped. Suto argues that although the clock rates change during the manoeuvre, both clocks on a given train are affected identically, so the differences t3·4 and t5·6 survive. After a purely calculational adjustment referring SW4 and SW6 to SW2, the surviving offsets relative to SW1 are t1·3 = 2Lv/c2 and t1·5 = 2LV/c2, and therefore
- t3·5 = 2L(V − v)/c2.
The contradiction
Now let the observer in train A apply the same reasoning to train B, which he sees receding at w. By the principle of relativity he may treat his own system as the rest system, and the only velocity available to him is the relative one. His prediction is t3·5 = 2Lw/c2. But V − v is not w — the addition theorem guarantees V − v < w — so the two computations of the same physical clock offset disagree. Suto tabulates the mismatch and notes that it arises whether the isotropic (ether-denying) or anisotropic (ether-supporting) propagation is assumed relative to OP: in the first case only t3·5 disagrees with the relativistic prediction, in the second both t3·5 and t1·3 do.
He therefore proposes the measurement as a decision procedure: if the observed t1·3 equals 2Lv/c2, propagation relative to OP is isotropic and there is no ether drift; if not, propagation is anisotropic and drift exists. This, he says, "gives a final reply to the Michelson–Morley experiment."
The Depth Velocity Vector
The residual velocity v is then extracted algebraically. Setting α = t3·5c2/2L and comparing with 2Lw/c2 yields a quadratic v2α + wv − (1 − α)c2 = 0, of which the positive root is taken as the x-component of the unknown velocity.
For its physical interpretation Suto turns to quantum electrodynamics: the vacuum is filled with virtual particle–antiparticle pairs which, by the uncertainty principle, are never at rest. He defines the Depth Velocity Vector (DVV) as the mean of the relative velocities, at a given moment, between a point of physical space and the countless coordinate systems of the virtual particles occupying the same coordinates. The origin of that vector is the Depth Rest System of Coordinates (DRSC) — "Depth" because origin and end share the same spatial coordinates — which Suto states plainly is "a virtual concept. It does not really exist." The DVV is equal in magnitude and opposite in direction to what he calls the extent of the space-dragging effect by mass. Because a massive body drags the virtual particles belonging to it, light propagates isotropically within that region, and distant DRSCs may have relative velocities among themselves; hence they cannot be Newton's absolute rest system, but can serve as the ether rest system in Lorentz's sense — a "Relative Absolute System of Coordinates."
Assessment
The attractive part of the paper is its diagnosis of the operational problem rather than its solution. Suto has correctly identified the point at which the ether question was closed rather than settled: because the internal observer synchronises by light signals, isotropy relative to his own frame is built into his clock settings and cannot be tested from inside. His device for evading this — accumulate the desynchronisation while the trains move, then stop them and read the clocks side by side at rest, so that all comparisons are local — is an ingenious way of trying to convert a convention into an observable. The 2Lv/c2 offset he derives is the standard relativity-of-simultaneity result, correctly obtained, and he is careful to note that the (c ± v) closing speeds do not violate the light postulate.
The trouble is in the step that produces the contradiction. Suto compares an offset computed in the platform frame, 2L(V − v)/c2, with one computed in train A's frame, 2Lw/c2, and treats their inequality as a defect in the theory. But these are not the same quantity expressed twice: the first uses L, the platform's measure, and platform-simultaneous emission; the second uses train A's rest length and train A's simultaneity, and the two emissions are not simultaneous in A's frame. Within special relativity the transformation between the two accounts also carries a length and a simultaneity change, and the naive subtraction V − v compared to w is exactly the comparison the theory forbids. The paper asserts, rather than derives, that the two expressions must be equal; nothing in the text carries out the Lorentz transformation between the platform and train A that would test the claim. The same objection applies to the acceleration phase, where Suto assumes the offsets are unchanged because both clocks on a train share a rate — true for rate, but the deceleration is not simultaneous in the train frame, which is where the offsets are defined.
A second difficulty is that the proposal is not in fact an experiment. Nothing is measured; t1·3 and t3·5 are computed from assumptions on both branches of the argument, so the decision table between isotropic and anisotropic propagation is never fed with data. And the anisotropy in question has been searched for with far greater sensitivity than any train could offer: modern optical and cryogenic microwave resonator experiments of the Michelson–Morley and Kennedy–Thorndike type bound the direction dependence of the one-way and two-way speed of light at the 10−17 level in the standard test frameworks, and the time dilation the argument depends on is confirmed directly by muon storage-ring lifetimes and by Ives–Stilwell measurements. A residual velocity of the kind Suto extracts would have to be smaller than those bounds allow.
The Depth Velocity Vector section is the most speculative. The identification of a Lorentzian rest frame with the mean velocity of virtual vacuum fluctuations is offered as a definition, not a derivation; no calculation connects the QED vacuum to a preferred frame, and indeed the QED vacuum state is constructed to be Lorentz invariant, so its "mean velocity" is not a well-defined quantity. Suto's own admission that the DRSC "does not really exist" leaves the reader unclear what would be measured. To his credit he does not overclaim: he explicitly declines to say special relativity is wrong, only incomplete, and the ambition of the paper — to find some arrangement in which the conventional element of clock synchronisation becomes an observed number — is a legitimate and long-standing question in the foundations of the subject.