[ExI] QT and SR

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Wed Jul 16 00:39:25 UTC 2008


Damien writes

> Lee wrote:
> 
>> John Clark writes
>>
>> How do you know that it's you moving and not the Milky
>> Way and the Virgo Cluster that're moving?
> 
> It doesn't matter. This is just obfuscation.

It makes the point.  The logic John put forth in that example
falls apart if you change who is "moving". Of course it's
all relative!  That's why you can't say things like

    It means that I got into my spaceship and traveled at 99% the
    speed of light to visit my friend in the Virgo Cluster a billion light
    years away. After a billion years I got there and find that a billion
    years ago what I was doing to my particle was changing what
    was happening to his particle a billion light years away a 
    billion years ago.

"Was happening" still reeks of simultaneity.

That "billion years ago what I was doing..." assumes
that the galaxies are "stationary" and JKC was moving. If
we were to adopt the moving frame (along with the 99% c
traveler), then what happened in the first galaxy happened
a short time *after* what happened in the second galaxy.
And anyone getting closer to galaxy A (safer than loose
talk about "moving") and getting further from galaxy B would
find that the measurement in galaxy B *followed* the
so-called simultaneous measurement in galaxy A.

>>>Yes, the concept of "Instantaneously" is reference-frame
>>>dependent, but the distance between 2 events in space-time is not,
>>>it's always the same,
>>
>>You're trying to think of "spacetime interval"
> 
> I understood that this is exactly what John was talking about. No 
> need for a patronizing tutorial with JKC.

Oh?  Given the definite errors, as in his usage of  "instantaneously",
and those shown in the previous paragraph, why not? 

(Besides, no one gives Keith Henson or Robert Bradbury any
heat for being patronizing, so why me?
(I know why---it's because there is a good chance I'll apologize
for mine. You can hold people like me accountable for their
statements. And yes, I do apologize. At least for part of that.
(It's the same logic that would cause demonstrations against
colonialist governments for massacres and outrages, but people
realize the total futility of protesting the actions of a Mugabe.
)))

>>>>All that's happening is that the outcome of a measurement *here*
>>>>is correlated with the outcome of a measurement *there*.
>>>All? ALL! Here is a billion light years from there!
>>
>>Not to someone moving past you at .999999999999c.  To him,
>>youse are just a few yards apart.
> 
> Unless the conjecture I posted earlier today is relevant, this 
> compression isn't to the point either, I think. The point is that (by 
> construction) once thingee A is measured, anyone measuring thingee B 
> *which is outside the first thingee's lightcone from any viewpoint*, 
> will necessarily find a single determinate result, without there 
> being any hidden determining variables inducing that outcome. Viola! 
> (as a musician might say)--weird as shit, dude.

"Once thingee A is measured"?  You're making it sound like
thingee B gets measured *after* thingee A. I hope you are
quite aware that such an implication would be wrong. Events
that happen outside each other's light cones, as you know,
aren't related by "before" or "after". 

I don't see anything particularly weird about it, *given* that we
won't find ourselves in (imaginary non-extant) universes where
the conservation laws don't apply. (To me, it's a bit ironic that
those who deploy the multiplicity of universes in MWI are
uncomfortable with EPR type experiments in principle producing
just two universes instead of four.)

Lee




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