Summary of Chapter 3
Relativity
The Michelson/Morley discovery, made just a few years before Max Planck's
founding of Quantum Physics, demanded a second departure be made, alike from the
classical paradigm of nineteenth century physics and the quotidian judgment of
commonsense. However, contrary to popular belief as nurtured by
establishment orthodoxy, the violence done to our accustomed ways of looking at
physical reality is nothing like as great. All that the indeterminacy of
the absolute velocity of light commands us to accept is that we are denied
direct access to the inertial frame from which the observed phenomena take their
origin. The doctrine of relativity takes the further -purely elective-
step of declaring that its inaccessibility provides adequate and sufficient grounds for its
dismissal as a fiction -a piece of gratuitous add-on metaphysics. However, there
are three different reasons for ruling this cavalier dismissal out of order.
First is that the doctrine replaces everyday 'process' time by a 'manifold'
alternative in which future the future is predetermined. This runs directly
contrary to our intuition of 'free will' essential if the authenticity of the
human persona is to be maintained. This is a prime example of science's bad
habit of exceeding its mandate. The canon of Natural Law is mute over all
matters of meaning and significance; it cannot even provide a
justification and raison d'être of its own presence. But second -and absolutely
noncontroversial- are the consequences of Bell's theorem, given its subsequent
disconfirmation by Alain Aspect -who designed and executed a subtle
experimentum crucis. What Bell had established (and to a degree
resurrected) in his theorem was that the phenomenon of wave function collapse
described by quantum doctrine implied an instantaneous 'action at a distance'.
To almost everyone's surprise Aspect's experiment demonstrated that this was
indeed the case. The implied
recovery of a universal time would seem, in turn, to be a very strong argument
for the reinstatement of an inertial frame -its continuing non-observability not
withstanding. The neoreality which it would bring with it would demanded
no more than minimal adjustments to the Newtonian space-time framework. Time
would become mathematically (as well as conceptually) 'real' once more, while
retaining its orthogonality to space. The
main complication would be that motion through the manifold would have physical
manifestations, length being foreshortened and time dilated. These are
refinements that commonsense has no difficulty adapting itself to, particularly
in consideration of how large velocities have to become before the
manifestations are noticeable.
Taken at face value, the equations of General Relativity predict the creation of
'black holes' whenever concentrations of mass reach the point where they move
inside their associated Schwartzchild radii. These are almost universally
acclaimed to exist, although the sole author of Relativity himself refused to accept their
possibility. Singularities should, surely, always be suspect when claimed
as real physical entities. The avoidance of black hole catastrophes would
call for a refinement in the equations of general relativity, through who's
agency matter moving inside its Schwartzchild radius would suffer some analogue
of a phase change involving high, but not infinite compression (just as when
steam condenses into water).
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