Out of Pod Experience

It's not implausible that there may be other explanations. But I haven't seen any others which describe the universe, or rather the experimental data we have of it, as completely.
Which is why I was asking whether you could point me to those other explanations you've mentioned.

Of course I'd like to understand the universe using simple rules without exceptions..
Of course I want scientists to keep their minds open for all possibilities.

But keeping your mind open for all possibilities also means that the unintuitive could be possible. The complicated and hard to understand way. Which is why I find it good, when we try to not be restricted by our intuitive understanding of the part of the universe we can experience directly.
That doesn't mean we should dismiss any explanation using common sense, if it works.

I'm just saying be open for weird concepts as much as for "normal"-looking ones. Weird, complicated concepts may be a result of a lack of understanding, or the result of things actually being that complicated. We just need to constantly reevaluate this all as new evidence/experimental data and/or ideas arrive.



I still don't see where it says the Higgs field slows down particles.

This is probably the most engaging debate I have had on these forums thus far... could it be that all of this time Akita was some how sabotaging them?

At anyrate... time to answer responses one by one. Here we go!



This actually exists already. Simple google orbital decay and study it's physics a little bit. Orbits do decay over time it just so happens that it occurs over extremely long periods and a dozen physical laws tend to balance each other out.


Earth has to push through the solar wind, gravity waves, magnetic fields and various debris that ultimately cause drag. It just so happens that when a planet slows down and moves closer to sun it's angular moment causes it to speed up instead of slow down. This is the law of conservation of momentum. It is the same thing that makes an ice skater speed up when they pull their outstretched arms closer to their torso.

So the earth can be “slowed down by drag” only to be sped up do to angular momentum conservation.

There is also the Poynting–Robertson effect which describes how sloar radiation can cause forward drag on tiny dust particles. Should then the earth be exempt? Or is it that the effect is just so miniscule that no one has noticed it yet?

These same forces slow down the earth’s rotation as well. About every hundred years or so the earth takes one five-hundredth of a second longer to complete a rotation. When the earth was formed the day lasted about 14 hours compared to today’s 24 hours. These days we add leap seconds to ever couple of years to compensate for this discrepancy. Even the tidal forces of the oceans slows the earth and cause the moon's orbit to decay in the process.




Therefore:

We now know for certain that drag does exist in space and does in fact effect planetary bodies. Orbits decay, it is fact. So your presumption that a drag caused by space-time would result in a planet falling into the sun is nullified by the fact that we already are. It just so happens that physics finds a way to find equilibrium. So we will never really get there. The sun will lose it's mass first and that will ultimately result in us moving away from the sun not inward to it.


Although i do admit I cannot yet account for inertia only giving resistance during acceleration and deceleration (yet ) I am still working on it!


But your notion that an aether wind cannot exist solely based upon the drag that it may create does not stand against scrutiny when you realize how much drag is already present. Food for thought.

The reason is as follows...


On the one hand we have the standard model. It is observing photons and seeing they have a neutral charge, no mass and yet they can exert a force as if they some how have inertia. They appear to have inertia but not mass in violation of all other known physical laws.

The standard model regularly accounts for these discrepancies by coming up with terms like "virtual" or "relative". There are even terms like this in the Higgs field explanation. There are "virtual higgs bosons" too.


The term "virtual" is a mathematical function not something observable. It is something you plug into an equation in order to make your equation work, much like plugging 11 dimensions in to string theory is needed to make those equations work.

The problem than arises that you are making no real attempts to explain why a photon can seemingly gather momentum without measurable mass even at the speed of light. What is worse is you are happily contradicting all other known laws of physics in order to explain something that seems to defy normal explanation. That is a very bad thing...



Super Simplified & Summarized

"Inertial Mass" is the same as saying "Virtual Mass" because it is inertia that is coming from no where and not tied to mass like it should be. It is then violating basic universal laws inherent to all things. "Virtual" is a math function... it is not observable in reality. It is just a way of accounting for forces/things that do not exist and cannot actually be observed.

Yes, light seems to have a property that defies normal known laws of inertia.

But shall we presume that it is violating the laws of mass and inertia or can we instead presume that we are mistaking what light actually is?



Why It Matters In My Thought Experiment

According to the Higgs field theory particles either interact with the higgs field or they don't. They either have mass and thus inertia or they don't. But if photons don't interact with that field then how are they getting that inertia? Why does blue light have more than redlight? How can the same photons of light traveling at the same speed have different inertial energy, no measurable mass and yet clearly have some form of momentum?

You don't see obvious contradictions there?


I have demonstrated that I can change the momentum of a particle that has no mass (and presumably has no normal interaction with the Higgs field) without changing it's velocity. This is in direct violation with the premise of the Higgs field theory which states matter can only have mass, momentum and inertia via this field.

I have presented this thought experiment as evidence that the Higgs field theory is in fact wrong.

I'm afraid now you've completely lost me.
If the light is the observer, what does it observe? Because any observer moving just as fast as the light would be unable to observe the light, obviously, as it never reaches him. This is assuming photons with mass, since if they don't have mass and thus moves at c, I don't think it's even possible for an observer to move like that.
And I don't want to even start with the relativistic effects like time stopping and space contracting to zero length in the direction of movement when you move at the speed of light, as it makes my head hurt.

Yet, if you talk about the light being doppler-shifted, it has to be the light which is being observed.

And you don't add the speed of the mirror to the speed of light, precisely because of that "speed of light is fixed" principle you were mentioning. No matter how the mirror moves, light moves at the speed of light is exactly the same speed from the mirror's perspective. Or any other perspective as well.

To me it sounds like you want to introduce some "global reference frame" of special importance you can say the mirrors move in relation to, but there is no such thing.
You can always find a reference frame in which the mirrors don't move (given they aren't accellerating).

And even if you have an observer moving with the light, then it moves towards mirror A prior to it being reflected just the same as it moves toward mirror B after the reflection from A, prior to being reflected by B. Even then I wouldn't see any difference.


Edit: I seriously regret the absence of whiteboards to draw some diagrams on so I might be able to understand this better or make myself understood better.

Not if you assume the mass is so small, that you can accellerate it to a speed which is so close to c that we can't (yet) experimentally tell the difference, without needing a lot of energy. Presumably whenever light is created, the energies involved accellerate the massive photon to such a speed, and it continues to move with that speed, until it hits something.

How about an all pervasive field that affects all matter in the universe... aka the Higgs field? Shouldn't that be more noticeable too by your reasoning?





Well i did say that I did not think such a wind existed.

But did you know that the momentum of light bouncing between two mirrors can be lessened if the light is bouncing vertically vs the force of gravity? This is to do the gravitational gradient in between the reflectors. Would this constitute "light against the wind" in your eyes? Personally I don't think so... but it is there.

I can elaborate on this more if you like later on.

An interesting idea yes, but it is an also an abstract imaginary one being that we cannot make a photon stationary.




Care to explain?

Neutrinos have mass.. can they be brought to rest?

That is a pretty good counter argument, you surprised me with that one

But light can lose or gain inertia in the form of frequency. It however cannot be slowed down by any known interaction. You are neglecting the most important part of all of this, light is the only thing in the universe that can change it's momentum without changing it's velocity.

Stating that you could some how slow it down is like saying you can slow down sound (without changing the density of the medium it is traveling in)


Light is like this. Water waves can deliver more inertia without changing their velocity too. Waves do not weigh more than the medium they are in. If you were to measure that wave it would be indivisible in mass from the medium that made it up. Waves can carry variable inertia without a change in velocity or mass.

Light behaves more like this than any other known phenomena and that should be telling us something.

That's true, but there is nothing special about that reference frame.
What special relativity says is that no matter the reference frame, the laws of physic are the same.

So whether you are at rest compared to the CMB, or moving with constant velocity compared to it, you won't be able to tell without looking at the CMB.
Specifically, two mirrors stationary to each other and stationary to the CMB behave and experience exactly the same as if they were moving relative to the CMB.



Your example with the radar gun works precisely because the reflecting car moves relative to the emitting radar gun.
If radar gun and car don't move relative to each other, it doesn't matter one bit how both of them are moving relative to the CMB or any other reference frame: The radar gun will not see any doppler shift and report a speed of zero.

Nice website for the doppler effect btw: http://astro.unl.edu/classaction/animations/light/dopplershift.html you can drag emitter and receiver of the wave around and watch how the received wave changes.

You need both emitter and receiver for doppler shifting, and they have to move relative to each other.



In both examples you are observing the light beam from a certain reference frame, and it has a certain wavelength in that reference frame.
As in your second example the mirror is moving relative to that reference frame, yes, it will experience the light beam red-shifted.

But if you place another mirror (or let's maybe just take a normal receiver, a photo cell or something) stationary relative to the first mirror (which in the second example means moving in the same direction at the same speed) where the first mirror reflects the light towards, then that receiver will see the exact same wavelength as the mirror.