A Case for Absolute Motion: The Dual Effects of Both Gravity and Absolute Motion on the Rate of Clocks
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | A Case for Absolute Motion: The Dual Effects of Both Gravity and Absolute Motion on the Rate of Clocks |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | James Carter |
| Keywords | absolute motion, gravity, clocks, cosmic background radiation, photons |
| Published | 2011 |
| No. of pages | 11 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
The photons the 2.7° Cosmic Background Radiation can provide and absolute rest frame in which all photons move at exactly c, as well as a frame in which all clocks run at the same rate. Time is usually thought of either as a separate entity that either exists independently from mass and space or as an integral part of an entity called space-time. Although many different kinds of clocks have been devised for measuring the passage of time, a careful look at them reveals that there are, in fact, two different arrows of time that are quite distinct from one another and can even be said to flow at different rates. It is shown that every clock records that passage of either inertial time or gravitational time. Several experiments demonstrate that the rates of inertial clocks are affected by both changes in motion and changes in gravity. Thought experiments are presented to show that the effects on the rate of clocks from both changes in motion and changes in gravity are caused by changes in the mass of the clock. The conclusion is reached that there is really no physical entity called time that is more than a metaphysical idea that is used to quantify different types of motion.
Overview
James Carter, of the Absolute Motion Institute and author of the circlon theory, argues that the 2.7 K cosmic background radiation supplies physics with something special relativity denies it: a real preferred frame. His reasoning starts from the photon. Because the CBR photons make up the overwhelming majority of all photons in the universe and hold a near-perfect blackbody spectrum, he argues they must all be moving at exactly c with respect to one another in one common frame — otherwise the spectrum would degrade. The dipole anisotropy then fixes our own motion through that frame at about 375 km/s toward Leo for the solar system, roughly 600 km/s for the Galaxy.
From there the paper builds a two-part thesis. First, clock rates are set not by relative motion but by absolute motion with respect to photon rest, and the mechanism is mass: acceleration increases a clock's mass, its oscillating parts must conserve angular momentum, and it ticks more slowly. Second, gravity does the same thing by a different route, and the two can be put on one footing by replacing gravitational potential with escape velocity. The conclusion is deflationary about time itself: "there is really no physical entity called time that is more than a metaphysical idea". Along the way Carter denies that photons are massless, assigning them m = p/c, and sketches his alternative to general relativity, the Principle of Gravitational Expansion, in which matter expands rather than spacetime curving, which he says "eliminates the need for the Equivalence Principle".
The argument
Photons and the absolute frame
Carter's opening case is that the Doppler shifts observed between a co-moving source and observer are compatible only with photons having an intrinsic wavelength that is then shifted by the observer's absolute motion. A probe decelerated by 375 km/s to CBR rest would see earthlight redshifted by 1.00125 and no CBR anisotropy at all, while earth would see probe-light redshifted by the same 1.00125 and the CBR from that direction shifted by the same amount — a coincidence he says only the absolute picture explains.
Binary pulsars and the Compton effect
Two arguments follow against source-dependent light speed, i.e. against emission theory. A binary pulsar 200,000 light years away delivers its red- and blue-shifted pulses in perfect order of emission; a velocity spread of even 1 m/s would smear them by "almost 6 hours", which is right (the delay is DΔv/c2 ≈ 5.9 h). Answering a Ritz advocate at the 2008 NPA meeting who proposed re-emission by intervening gas, Carter invokes the Compton effect: scattering shifts a wavelength by up to 2λC = 4.8526×10−12 m, negligible for visible light (one part in 105) but about a tenth of a wavelength for X-rays near the Bohr radius, so any appreciable re-scattering would blur the pulses beyond recognition.
The mass of photons
Carter holds that "Special Relativity requires that photons have no mass" and that this is "a metaphysical assumption" rather than an experimental result. His thought experiment is a flywheel carrying mirrors on its rim, spun so the mirrors move at c/3. Photons of unit wavelength, energy and mass strike an approaching mirror and a receding one. He states the approaching mirror returns them at wavelength 0.70711 with energy and mass 1.414, slowing the wheel, while the receding mirror returns them at 1.414 with energy 0.70711, speeding the wheel up. His point is bookkeeping: with massless photons, "energy remains constant but mass either vanishes into or appears from nowhere."
Clocks, escape velocity and Pound-Rebka
The probe decelerated to CBR rest loses mass by 8×10−7 — which is indeed ½(375/c)2 — and Carter argues its atomic clock must therefore speed up by that fraction, where special relativity would say the moving clock is the slow one. He presses the point with a symmetry question: if a clock slows on acceleration away and speeds up on acceleration back, "what is the mechanism by which the atoms in the clock know" which to do? His answer is that clocks run fastest at absolute photon rest, far from gravitating bodies.
Gravity is handled by converting potential into escape velocity, "the velocity that a body will attain falling from deep space", 11,179 m/s at sea level. In the Pound-Rebka experiment on the 22.5 m Jefferson Tower, the escape velocity differs between top and bottom by 0.01974 m/s, and Carter emphasises that this is not a relative velocity: as a relative velocity 0.01974 m/s would produce nothing, but as a difference between 11,178.86275 and 11,178.84301 m/s inserted into the ordinary dilation formula it gives exactly the observed 2.5×10−15 shift. He treats the photon's wavelength as unchanged in flight, with the whole effect residing in the differing clock rates of emitter and observer.
Orbiting clocks
The same device is applied to satellites. The absolute clock velocity is Vc = √(Ves2 + Vo2), escape and orbital velocities added in quadrature because they are at right angles, and the clock interval follows from Tk = To/√(1 − Vc2/c2). Sea level gives Vc = 11,198 m/s and an offset of 6.976×10−10; the GPS orbit at 4.175 earth radii gives 6,700 m/s and 2.497×10−10; the difference, 4.479 parts in ten billion, is the rate by which GPS clocks must be pre-slowed. He notes that clocks at 1.498 radii tick at the sea-level rate, that the Space Shuttle orbit at 1.046 radii is the slowest, and that geosynchronous orbit sits at 6.615 radii.
Two arrows of time
The paper's title claim is that there are two irreducible kinds of clock. Inertial clocks (earth's rotation, atomic vibrations) derive their standard from conservation of momentum or angular momentum; gravitational clocks (pendulums, hourglasses, the earth's orbit) derive theirs from the constancy of gravitational acceleration. Under acceleration these diverge: "gravitational clocks run faster and inertial clocks run slower", the former by the square root of the factor by which the latter slow. His Kinetic Earth thought experiment takes a duplicate earth to 0.866c, where γ = 2 exactly: mass doubles, surface gravity doubles, the pendulum runs 1.414 times faster, the accelerometer reads four times the force, rotation and atomic clocks halve, and the observer's weight goes from 1 to 4. Since only gravitational time is unaffected in its underlying flow, "if we are to establish a universal standard for time it must be gravitational time".
Gamma ray bursts
A closing argument: visible photons arrive with the gamma photons from bursts a billion light years away. Were gamma rays faster by 1 km/s (0.0003%), the visible light would lag by about 3000 years — a figure that checks out. Carter attributes the bursts themselves to "the rapid splitting of vastly more powerful photons" left from an early matter-antimatter bifurcation.
Assessment
Much of the numerical work here is right, and some of it is better than right. The Pound-Rebka analysis is a genuinely elegant reformulation: because ½Ves2 = GM/r identically, expressing potential as escape velocity and feeding it into the kinematic dilation formula reproduces gh/c2 exactly, and Carter's 0.01974 m/s velocity difference over 22.5 m is correct to the digit. The orbital formula is correct for the same reason: Ves2 + Vo2 = 3GM/r for a circular orbit, so his single expression reproduces the standard combined gravitational-plus-kinematic rate offset. His clock-synchronous orbit at 1.498 radii is essentially the exact 1.5 that the algebra gives, and his GPS pre-slowing of 4.479×10−10 agrees with the accepted 4.465×10−10 to within a few tenths of a percent. The binary-pulsar and gamma-ray-burst timing estimates and the Compton scattering figures also check out, and the anti-emission-theory argument is the classical de Sitter argument, correctly deployed.
Against that, several specific numbers do not survive checking. The flywheel is wrong by a square: reflection from a mirror approaching at β is a double Doppler process, giving λ′/λ = (1 − β)/(1 + β) = 0.5 at β = 1/3, not the single-pass 0.70711 Carter uses. The reflected photon's energy is doubled, not multiplied by 1.414. In the Kinetic Earth section, the gravity clock runs 1.414× faster and the inertial clock 2× slower, so their ratio is 2.828, not the "2.28 times" printed. The 4×1041 J required to accelerate an earth-mass to 0.866c should be (γ − 1)mc2 = 5.4×1041 J, and that is about 44 million years of solar output, not the ten million stated. These are arithmetic slips rather than structural failures, but in a paper whose case rests on the exactness of small numbers they matter.
The structural difficulty is that the paper's own best worked example refutes its thesis. If clock rate is fixed by absolute velocity through the CBR frame, then the absolute velocity of a ground clock or a satellite clock is dominated by the 370 km/s solar motion, not by the few-km/s orbital terms — yet Carter's GPS calculation uses only escape and orbital velocities referred to the earth's centre, with the CBR motion silently omitted. Restoring it is fatal. The cross term between the CBR velocity and the earth's 465 m/s equatorial rotation would impose a diurnal modulation of about 2×10−9 on ground clock rates, and the cross term with the satellites' 3.9 km/s orbital velocity a comparable modulation over each 12-hour orbit; the earth's 29.8 km/s orbital motion would add an annual term near 1.2×10−7. GPS maintains clock synchronisation at the 10−14 level in the earth-centred inertial frame with no such terms, which is four to seven orders of magnitude below what the absolute-motion hypothesis requires. The same conclusion follows independently from rotating cryogenic optical resonators and stored-ion Ives-Stilwell tests, which bound any dependence of clock rate or light speed on the CBR-frame velocity at parts in 1017–1018. Carter's rhetorical question — how can 24 GPS clocks moving in different directions keep the same time if motion is relative? — has a plain answer: their rates are computed in the ECI frame, each from its own velocity in that frame, which is exactly what the standard theory prescribes and what the operators do. His related claim that "Special Relativity enthusiasts said [GPS] would never work" is a piece of folklore; the relativistic corrections were designed in from the start.
The two-arrows-of-time thesis has the same problem in sharper form. A pendulum clock and an atomic clock, synchronised at rest, are said to diverge by a factor of 2.8 under uniform motion at 0.866c. That divergence would be locally detectable inside a sealed laboratory, which is precisely what the principle of relativity forbids and what no experiment has ever seen — and the divergence is not a small effect requiring delicate apparatus. Finally, the photon-mass argument mistakes a definition for a discovery. Standard physics assigns a photon zero rest mass while giving it energy E and momentum p = E/c, so E/c2 of inertia is transferred in exactly the flywheel bookkeeping Carter demands; nothing appears from nowhere, because it is mass-energy, not rest mass, that is conserved. The observation that the CBR defines a cosmologically preferred frame is entirely correct and entirely uncontroversial; what the paper does not establish is that it is a dynamically preferred one.