Light speed variable – Special Relativity Wrong?

Light speed variable – Special Relativity Wrong?
Part 1

Food for thought….

I thinking the constant speed of light theory within Special Relativity might be wrong. The best way I know how to explain my thinking is to just jump into a thought experiment. So….


Suppose you have a gun connected to a clock set to fire a bullet every two seconds here on Earth. Now take this same gun/clock and put it into a gravity field much stronger like near the sun where it would go through time dilation. If the gun was pointed at Earth and shooting bullets at it...

...Would the bullets still hit the Earth at a rate of 2 seconds between the shoots, by an Earth clock, or would they hit the rate the clock was dilated to?


Sense we know that clocks run slower within strong gravity fields I think the bullets would hit at a rate a little longer then 2 seconds, Assuming the bullets had enough energy to reach Earth. First the bullets would leave there position next to the sun at the time dilated rate. This would be at a little slower rate then by the Earth clock. As the bullets exit the sun's gravity field they would start going through length/time expansion now that are getting into less gravity. However with time/length expansion there observed speed would have to increase which cause the bullets to back into length/time dilation thus the effects would cancel each other, and the bullet will hit the Earth at whatever rate the gun and clock were dilated too, compared to a Earth clock of course.

If this is case then we have a problem with the way we think of light. Suppose the bullets were photons instead. The rate between the photon packets would be the frequency of the light…kind of. So suppose that we send out a satellite named something like Pioneer and we send it outside the solar system. While within the gravity well of the solar system things would seems fine. However as Pioneer left and started making its way into a weaker gravity field the mechanism for sending out the radio signal would be going at a faster rate as compare to the Earth. For the same reasons above with the bullets we would see the signal shift to whatever the satellite was time dilated to, in this case a blue shift would happen. If the gravity was stronger out there we would see a Red shift.

Well, guess what, we do see a blue shift in both Pioneer 10 & 11 it's called the Pioneer anomaly. This is little different then the way we think light should travel. For example with stars blue and Red shift is thought to be a Doppler shift due to the motion of stars. The distance from the stars is gauged by there shift, yet there shift might have nothing to due with there distance, but what type of gravity field is in the solar system were the star is located. Thus a problem with the way we measure light.

I'm not the only one who thinks there is problem with the way we measure light. Here is link to check out from an engineer working on the GPS systems....

renshaw.teleinc.com...

Here's a few quotes from the story....

(from the paper's conclusions)

The authors of [1] state that "it is interesting to speculate on the possibility that the origin of the anomalous signal is new physics." Even the title of their paper implies an "Anomalous, Weak, Long-Range Acceleration." From the above, it appears more likely that the result is "old physics," and requires a closer look at the equations used for comparing light-times, clock rates and Doppler frequency shifts.

In the above quote the words "old physics" is referring to Newton's physics. This is explained earlier in the paper.

Part 2 is pending per how people react to part 1

Considering they slowed down and even stopped light entirely in experiments, the speed of light constant idea is already invalid.

Also Einstein wrote E = MC², allowing for C to vary in calculations.

In General Relativity, its also only stated that the speed of light is a constant of 299 792 458 m / s in a vacuum which is also its top speed, uninhibited by external forces. Nowhere does it say that this is the case when the light is influenced by external forces like gravity and the medium its traveling trough being something other then vacuum.

Well the above is talking about light in the vacuum of space.
Also Einstien did say light is influenced by gravity...
See my signature it's a real quote from one of his papers.

[edit on 2-8-2007 by ebe51]

Part 2

I also took some time today to do some google-ing to find some stuff on anomalies within the solar-system. One anomaly is general thought to prove Einstein's theory, yet it really proves another theory. That is light deflected by the Sun.

Here's a quote from library.thinkquest.org...

To help validate his theory, Einstein made other predictions that could be tested. With his calculations he showed that light rays passing near the surface of the Sun should appear to be deflected from their straight-line paths because the space through which they are moving is curved. In other words, gravity would bend light rays, an effect not predicted by Newtonian mechanics because light has no mass.


Figure above shows a beam of light from a star passing by the Sun and continuing on to the Earth. Because the light ray is bent, the star appears to be shifted from its actual location. The largest deflection (a mere 1.75 arcsec) occurs for light rays grazing the Sun's surface.
This prediction was first tested in 1919 during a total solar eclipse. During the precious moments of totality, when the Moon blocked out the blinding solar disk, astronomers succeeded in photographing the stars around the Sun. Careful measurements afterward revealed that the stars were shifted from their usual positions by an amount consistent with Einstein's theory. General relativity had passed another important test.

Now per today's thinking the light being by the sun is not slowing down, and I have another quote from a Nasa sponsored website indicating just that...
helios.gsfc.nasa.gov...

Is Light Affected By Gravity?
Is light affected by gravity? If so, how can the speed of light be constant? Wouldn't the light coming off of the Sun be slower than the light we make here? If not, why doesn't light escape a black hole?

Yes, light is affected by gravity, but not in its speed. General Relativity (our best guess as to how the Universe works) gives two effects of gravity on light. It can bend light (which includes effects such as gravitational lensing), and it can change the energy of light. But it changes the energy by shifting the frequency of the light (gravitational redshift) not by changing light speed. Gravity bends light by warping space so that what the light beam sees as "straight" is not straight to an outside observer. The speed of light is still constant.

Dr. Eric Christian

Yet, I believe NASA is wrong. The only way we have ever been able to make light bend here on Earth is to slow it down. Check out this quote from Einstein (it’s my signature too)….

"The results of the special relativity hold only so long as we are able to disregard the influence of gravitational fields on the phenomena".

Yeap, Einstein himself admitted gravity cause problems Special relativity. Here’s the scoop in a nut shell. Gravity causes a change in time and length which is one's frames of reference (just a speed does), and an observer does have the capability to be in one frames of reference (gravity field) and observer events that are going on in another frame of reference (gravity field). When this happens and an observer in gravity field "A" is measure events in gravity field "B" his measuring devices are time dilated and length contracted within his own frame of reference. Yet, he is measuring events in another frame of reference, thus a problem when the event you are measuring is the speed of light. Measuring in this manner you could measure light in a vacuum at something slower then "c".

This is old idea, but it always overlooked by most people, however it’s starting to get into the lime-light lately. Anyway you can get some info on this theory here...

www.speed-light.info...





[edit on 2-8-2007 by ebe51]

The effects of gravity on time or the perception thereof has made me wonder many times in the past, how completely different out perception of the universe and space could be if we were able to do research outside of the gravitational influence of our sun and earth.

Being in a "0G" environment orbiting our planet is, imho, not truly being in a 0G environment. Every where we go in space, we'll have some sort of gravitational effect enacted on us, inside a solar system this effect being the most localized.

The whole reason why gallaxy's exist is because the super massive at the center of our galaxy, over 30000 light years away, is slowly but surely pulling us towards the center of our galaxy.

But still, having just the gravitational effects of the galaxy enacted on us, instead of galaxy + solar system, could give us a completely different perspective compared to being in our gravitational environment.

We think we know the laws of physics, but in all honesty, we have no clue as to what a non solar environment would be like, our only perspective on how gravity works and what effects it has is on our local scale and from observations we make in distant star formations and such.

We don't know if the times we put on the age of the universe are anywhere near correct since we only have a minute understanding of the real effects of a gravitational environment on time, we can't even start to phatom the scope of actual physical stellar drift and we are no where near understanding what time or gravity really are.

We can observe star A that is 300 lightyears away was at coordinates bla and bla 300 years ago, but, we don't really know yet where that star actually is right now, trough longterm observations we can callculate the relative trajectory of the star, but we have no clue what might have happend over the past 300 years, that might change that trajectory, even if its slight.

It takes us the time it takes light to get to us, to know that a star has gone super nova, so if a star goes supernova, thats near enough to us to cause us damage, we'll only know about it when the light and the effects accompanied by it already reach us.

I can go on and on about how we are way to focussed on our local perspective on time, when imho our narrow and close minded comprehension is the main thing thats holding us back from really understanding what the heck is going on around us.

The speed of light in a VACUUM is constant. Light, just any other wave, can be slowed down to being frozen.

And light can not be accelerated.