Join us for a fascinating episode of Real Science Radio, where we continue our discussion with Dr. Clifford Denton, an expert in the field of physics, who challenges the very foundations of Einstein’s special relativity. Delving into the hidden assumptions that have shaped modern physics, Dr. Denton explores why these may have led us down a false path. Through clear explanations and compelling arguments, he takes us on a journey that questions the very nature of time, space, and light, inviting listeners to rethink long-held scientific beliefs.
00:00:00 Introduction to Discussion with Dr. Clifford Denton
00:25:36 Calculations in the Absolute Frame of Reference
00:28:17 Closing Remarks and How to Listen Further
SPEAKER 03 :
Welcome back to Real Science Radio. We are continuing our discussion with Dr. Clifford Denton, a former Royal Air Force pilot who received his PhD from Oxford, where he was involved in government-funded research. In the first part of our conversation, Dr. Denton shared the story behind how this research began, the many discussions he and his colleague Francis Pym had over the years, as they wrestled with Einstein’s theory of relativity and the famous Michelson-Morley experiment. They believe something about that standard explanation didn’t make sense, which led them to start digging deeper into the assumptions underlying modern relativity. So on this next part of the discussion, Dr. Denton begins examining Einstein’s two key assumptions that form the foundation of special relativity and why he believes those assumptions sent physics down the wrong path. We now continue where we left off at the end of part one.
SPEAKER 05 :
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SPEAKER 03 :
Welcome back to Real Science Radio. We are continuing our discussion with Dr. Clifford Denton, a former Royal Air Force pilot who received his PhD from Oxford, where he was involved in government-funded research. In the first part of our conversation, Dr. Denton shared the story behind how this research began, the many discussions he and his colleague Francis Pym had over the years as they wrestled with Einstein’s theory of relativity and the famous Michelson-Morley experiment. They believe something about that standard explanation didn’t make sense, which led them to start digging deeper into the assumptions underlying modern relativity. So on this next part of the discussion, Dr. Denton begins examining Einstein’s two key assumptions that form the foundation of special relativity and why he believes those assumptions sent physics down the wrong path. We now continue where we left off at the end of part one.
SPEAKER 01 :
And what Einstein said was, well, we can’t detect an ether, so we’ll see if we can do it without needing to refer to it. So he was thinking, well, let’s ignore it and see if we can get around it and open the way to further progress. So what he did then was to create two axioms, which we have on two slides. two axioms of what became special relativity. First of all, number one is basically, let’s do something that ignores the existence of the ether, whether it’s there or not. Phrased as not only the phenomena of mechanics, but also of electrodynamics have no properties that correspond to the concept of absolute rest. If we have an ether, we can therefore presume that there is a place of absolute rest in the universe, which is a kind of absolute measuring point for all other motion. But he says, let’s not bother with that. Then that’s the point. Everything becomes relative. There’s nothing absolute about it anymore. He’s saying, let’s ignore the fact about an ether and move forward from there. That’s the number one And number two on the next slide was that light always propagates in empty space with a definite velocity c that is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body. This is the bit that Francis and I wanted to challenge. And it is absolutely preposterous. that whatever movement you have through the universe, however light is being shone, whether it’s bouncing back from a reflector, whether you’re moving towards it or it’s moving away from you, whatever measurement you make, you’ll always get the same answer. Nothing like that picture we saw of the sound, where when you move, you’re moving away from the sound wave or towards it, so there’s a speeding up or a slowing down related to your motion. According to Einstein, ignore it. You’ll always get the value C. Why? Because Mitchelson-Morley couldn’t detect the ether, and therefore, in their experiment, they couldn’t find any difference in the speed of a light wave coming in one direction and the direction vertically to it. So Einstein says, well, never mind. Let’s assume it then. Let’s assume whatever happens, we will always get that value. That is a massive assumption. I don’t think most people know that. how absolutely irrational it is. It’s good that there seems to be more experimental observational data now that shows that that’s not true. But it’s not logically true, it’s not intellectually true, but somehow or other, based on these couple of axioms comes special relativity and then general relativity, which refers to gravitation. Out of these simple hypotheses comes a massive error, if they are wrong. We’re talking about high speed, things that are going so fast that we don’t experience them in ordinary life, but they’re conjectures of what would happen at high speed. For example, if we were going at the speed of light, which is about 186,000 miles a second, towards something going towards us at 100,000 miles a second, we would expect the light to impinge on our spaceship at 286,000 miles a second. And yet, Einstein says, it will always hit you at 186,000 miles a second. Counterintuitive. But how do you tackle it? One thing I would say is, I know that there are some observations of light coming through the universe to see if you can measure the passage of light in one direction. But mostly, experiments to find the velocity of light measure a two-way passage of light, from a source to a reflector and back again. That’s two-way. so that on the outward passage and the backward passage from the source, the reflector, which you cannot actually measure, that light is going so fast you can’t keep up with it, so what you have to do is receive the beam back again and have a kind of averaging process of how long it took over a certain distance to get you that passage of light and then work out its speed. Einstein was really… using a two-way passage of light perspective and making it work for a one-way passage of light, which again is not logical. What amazes me, if he did the calculations that came into my head when I was sitting with my friend Francis Pym on that day, if he’d done those calculations, surely he would never have gone down the road of special relativity. I can hardly believe that the simple equations that we look at were not discovered by anybody else. It is just amazing, which is part of that belief that this is a real spiritual deception as well as a logical one. Anyway, the thing to do, therefore, is try to get a result that is compatible with more rational thinking. Into this comes two things. They have to enter into the investigation of light, which is different from the investigation of sound. When we have something moving very quickly through the universe, however the universe is made, I’d love that the epaula worked. So let’s imagine the epaula. We’ve got a body moving through this matrix, and surely that matrix has some effect on the moving body. There’s an interaction between the particles of the moving body and the matrix, which is the epaula. We’ll say that that’s the model we’ll look at. It’s reasonable then that something happens in that interaction and that very high speed that we’re talking about that will have a bearing on the physical movement. Now this is where the passage of light differs from the passage of sound. The passion of sound is, in the simpler examples, although you could always change matters to complicate that, but in the simple example, we’re looking at things we can see and we feel. We can gather some air and know what we’re talking about. We can analyze it and find its chemical constituency. We can work on it, but it’s very hard to work on this thing called the ether. We can’t see it. We can’t gather it in a bucket. We can’t heat it up and see if it expands. We’ve got to have a model. to try to explain what might be going on. But if it is there, it is likely to interact with the moving body. Now, when you come to the special theory of relativity, you come to two things. One is called time dilation, and the other is called length contraction. This is where we have to make sure we get our mind straight. In special relativity terms, these two things are a result of the equations of space and time. That with the changing equations of space and time, time changes and lengths shorten. And that is not what we’re talking about in this case, though. They are to do with equations which we’re challenging. But as Dr. Moore has already said, it seems that Newton said it from your quote, that it’s not that time changes in motion, it is the measurement of time changes. So that if you have a clock moving through the ether, the ether will have a bearing on the vibrations in that clock. So the clock will change in its vibrations, whatever quarter clock it is, so that the time measurement will change.
SPEAKER 03 :
This episode of Real Science Radio is brought to you by Door County Coffee. A few years ago, one of the friends I watched football with on Sunday turned me on to this coffee, and I have to admit, it may have been the best thing he ever contributed to the group. Now, if you love great coffee like I do, you’ve got to check him out. Some of my favorites are Chocolate Raspberry Truffle, which blends rich dark chocolate with fresh raspberry flavor, Highlander Grog, which I believe is their most popular coffee, and then Turtles in a Cup, which my wife and I just love, and we’ve already started this bag. It tastes like chocolate, caramel, and toasted pecans all in one mug. So if you want to upgrade your morning coffee or your afternoon coffee, or let’s be honest, your evening coffee, head over to doorcountycoffee.com. and grab a bag or two. Okay, Dr. Denton, I wanted to stop you right here because I want to make sure that people understand the whole thing about how time was redefined. Time itself Instead of the clocks being the issue, the clock slowing down, Einstein messed with time itself, something we think is just the passage of one moment to the next. He turned it into, if you will, something material, right? He basically is messing with time. And I know it was controversial at first, but for whatever reason, so many people have latched on to this part of how, you know, time itself can slow down or increase, right? And I wanted to make sure the audience is aware of what Einstein did here and what Sir Isaac Newton warned could happen in the future of messing with things like in math, messing with the time variable and saying that it’s variable instead of the clock.
SPEAKER 01 :
Exactly. It’s so subtle that you can miss it. It sounds almost the same thing, but it’s not. I am simplistic enough to think that when the Lord created the universe and he said that the sun and the stars and so on would define days and times and seasons, that’s what he meant. And constantly over all of the years since then, up until the 1960s, Time was measured by the passage of the Earth around the Sun, and the day is defined that way and divided up into hours and minutes on a simple version of a clock. But then came in the more modern clocks, which are based on crystals or other vibrations in a different medium. And if you move those through the ether, you are going to find that the crystal vibrations, for example, will change their frequency. So that will have an effect on what the clock says its time is. Time will seem to slow with motion. But in fact, it is just the measuring instrument that is changing.
SPEAKER 03 :
The clock.
SPEAKER 01 :
And I would say it is not simplistic to go back to what the Creator made and make our clocks conform to the absolutes of the motion around the Sun. And there are many, many years of eminent scientists who have checked their time by an ordinary clock of that sort. It’s not a foolishness to suggest that. But when you go into modern sorts of clocks, they are going to change their measurements with motion. So Einstein, did he create the idea of time duration? Is that where we got the terminology from? So that it becomes a descriptor of time slowing, right? time-changing. So if you’re moving, your time is not the same as somebody else’s time. It’s just your clock is reading differently. He redefined time for that. And the other thing was length contraction, that when a body moves through the ether, it’s going to have some interaction with the ether, which will likely make it squash up a bit. That’s all very general, but we’ve got to make this work in terms of different equations that will show Einstein was wrong in his suppositions with all the consequences that follow about all that happens with light going through the universe. There’s multitudes of things going on because of this idea of special relativity. We’ve got to go back to the basics, but we’ve still got to get it right. So we also, for a different reason, come and use a constant which is usually given the Greek letter gamma. So it’s a constant that is used in special relativity. Again, be careful we don’t confuse the two. But we’ll still use the Koehn constant. If phi is the speed we are traveling through the universe, and c is the speed of light in that locality, The calculation of 1 minus square of v divided by the square of c gives you the square of a constant gamma, and gamma then being the square root of 1 minus v squared of c squared is a very familiar number in relativity theory, but we’ll still use it. But we’ve got to justify its use relating to what we are saying isn’t time dilation and length contraction in special relativity terms, but actual absolute change in time measurement and length measurement.
SPEAKER 04 :
Dr. Dillon, is this gamma the Lorenz factor? Is that what the gamma is?
SPEAKER 01 :
They come from the time of Lorenz, don’t they, Pete?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, I think it was Lorenz who first kind of familiarized us with these equations that we now call gamma.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah. And Einstein took on board the Lorentz transformation equations, and they’re a full part of special relativity. I remember sitting my friend Francis saying, well, what should we do about Lorentz? And his answer was, let’s ditch it. You know, they have some use. but they’ve been misused and they’re confused because they link space and time together rather than space and the measurement of time. So we have this constant, and then we have to tackle the idea of length contraction and time dilation. So this is where mine can be very fuzzy in this. Who is making the measurements is the big thing in this area, certainly in relativity. Who is making the measurements? There’s the observer who is moving at a different speed, and there’s the observer who’s moving at a faster or slower speed. One observer is something in the other encounter, and then you end up with frames of reference that are so-called frames of reference, which become, as it were, worlds of their own, where time and space are measured according to relative motion. And then you can end up with confusion in your mind about who’s measuring what and which equations refer to whose measurements. We need to make that simpler. But we have here, if two identical clocks record the same time event at a given instrument, but one is moving at speed v with respect to the other, the observer who’s stationary with the first clock will read the passage of time t on the stationary clock as gamma t on the moving clock. So one’s measuring at t And he notices the other one is measuring at gamma t. If he could do it, if he could observe somebody whizzing past at half the speed of light and look at their clock, it’s just hypothetical. But one observes something different of the other. And this is where we have to start uncomplicating it if we can. But that’s what’s called time dilation, that one observer sees something different on the other. And then length contraction similarly would be when there’s a body moving whose length is L, we’ll say, to a stationary observer. If it’s then moving at speed V, the stationary reverb will notice that it really looks like gamma L, a shortened version. So this is one observer to another. That’s how the gamma is applied in this idea of time dilation and length contraction. But what we need to do is make sure our mind is fixed on who’s measuring what in this whole scenario. So let’s have a look at how we can do that. If we look at the next slide, we’ll see that we’ve defined a thing called an absolute frame of reference. What we have to do in all of this is have, in the end, a comprehensive picture of what is going on in the universe, what is going on in the material of the body that’s traveling through the universe, as well as this single thing we’re looking at today, the speed of light that is… light being transmitted in a moving body. And what I wanted to say was that we had a go at time dilation and length contraction and published in a little book called Absolute Space and Time. We based it on a sort of quantum view of space, of material, and we based the clock on a simple light clock. But we realized that in order to make this viable in every area, we have to carry out a logical mathematical investigation of how time dilates and length contracts in whatever model we use. As far as I can understand, whatever we propose, we call it a model. It is not necessarily the real thing. We cannot see with our eyes or microscopes the most minute things of the universe or materials. So we have to have what we call a model, like a parable, a picture, three-dimensional or more, of what we’re looking. But we have to start somewhere. And we cannot go anywhere without starting somewhere. So you have to have some suppositions. And then on those suppositions, you make your way forward, seeing how you can explain everything that needs to be explained. So there are quantum views of matter. There are views of the ether. I like the Apollo one. But whatever one we use, we have to do the maths within it to show the result that we’re looking for. So all I can say is that Francis and I knew we should do this. And so we looked at our particular model. And within our particular model, which we published in this book, it’s not in the paper that you’re reading. In the book, we did show that time dilation and length contraction can be accurately described in the way we have gamma t and gamma l. They’re accurately described in the model we chose. So we have justification for saying that when a clock moves of a certain type within the universe, it will slow according to exactly the prediction that Einstein made in special relativity. And lengths will contract to exactly the prediction he made in special relativity. It’s an overlap of results. It’s for different reasons, though. We are working with absolutes. He turned everything relative to one another. So we cannot avoid the hard work. All I can say is, in our little book, we showed it could be done for a certain model of the universe and of materials. So that is an encouragement to go forward. With that encouragement, we can then go forward and do our calculations and show something that is really very simple and encouraging in itself. But when we are making measurements in the universe and we are referring to something which is distant, we do have a difficulty of synchronization of watches and so on, synchronization of time, so there’s always going to be a difficulty in measuring the speed of light in one direction. But what we can do is set up an experiment to measure the speed of light in two directions, there and back, from a transmitter to receiver and back to the transmitter, and therefore average out find the average speed of light to and from a reflector. And I don’t think there’s any other way of finding the speed of light other than that average. It’s very annoying that we cannot chase a light beam and watch it on our clock and go a certain distance. And when we get there, we click it and we got speed over time exactly. You can’t do it with light. It’s too fast. So in any experiment, you’re going to have to have a there and back. And I think that points to the era of Einstein where he assumed that a there and back velocity of light indicated that the single direction velocity of light was always fixed. So let’s have a look at the calculation. Here we have just a simple thing, rather like that sound diagram we had to start, where there’s an emitter. In that case, it was sound going through a reflector and back. Now we have a clock. an emitter and a clock at a point A sending a light signal to a reflector at point B. We can measure the length between A and B and we can measure the time it takes for the light beam to go from A to B and back because we have a precise measurement when it starts and when it returns. Simple, you then find the speed of light in an absolute frame of reference, that is a stationary frame of reference in the ether, straightforward distance over time, you’ve got the speed. You measure the distance a to b, you’ve got the clock, it’s giving you its time, you do the calculation. That gives you the basic measurement, C, without any motion. Well, there’s a supposition that we can actually find the rest position in the aether. You can’t. Who’s moving and who’s not? We can’t see it. Maybe we can make some progress with the epaula gradually through this sort of area. But this is supposed you can do it. Find the absolute stationary position, measure the speed of light. Now we’re going to do a second experiment, rather like that sound illustration we had. We’re going to have the body moving now through the ether, which we call an absolute frame of reference here, We’re moving at speed v and then we send a light signal in the direction that we are moving. Exactly similar to the sound. I keep saying it because it helps to have that in mind because it’s no more difficult apart from this length and time change. So out the light goes and then the light returns. In Newtonian relative terms, we’re not special relative, this is how you do calculations, as far as the observer at a goes, the speed that the light is going out at speed c minus v, that is the speed of light, take away his own speed. and it’s coming back at c plus v, the speed of light plus its own speed, because the emitter is going towards the returning light. So now we’ve got light going out at speed c minus v, and light returning at c plus v. Now we start doing some calculations. The time it takes for that light to go from A to B and back is the length over the speed outwards plus the length of the speed backwards and you see that working through the calculations you’ll get to the time of the two-way journey absolute time as measured in absolute terms as what we’ve got there as 2l1c over c and then brackets 1 minus v squared of c squared. And suddenly into our equation comes that familiar term that we defined earlier that familiar special relativity one but still applies to our calculations, when we put gamma in as a square root of 1 minus v squared of c squared, we notice that we’ve got a two-way light travel and we get the time taken as twice the length of travel over gamma squared c. And then we have to note that within that, we will have a contracted length. So instead of the length that we have measured within the moving body, we are the observer measuring it. To us, the length is gamma L. Stop the tape.
SPEAKER 02 :
Stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart. We are out of time for today. If you want to hear the rest of this program, go to rsr.org. That’s Real Science Radio, rsr.org.
