Talk:Anisotropic synchrony convention

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My vacation in the Large Magellanic Cloud

I am coming up with this thought experiment to help CatWatcher and others better understand special relativity.

I have always wanted to take a trip to the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is some 168,000 light years from the Earth. So, let us suppose there exists a spaceship with (near) infinite thrust (and some way of compensating for the the inertia created by said thrust -- humor me here). I get in this spaceship and travel to the Large Magellanic Cloud in one second. Let us further suppose that I carry a pocket watch, and that the Earth continually transmits, using a high power laser which I can observe from the LMC (my vacation destination) a timestamp.

Now, once there, I get to enjoy a spectacular view of the Milky Way Galaxy and I'm sure the planet I'm on has a lot of other tourist destinations for me to enjoy. It didn't take me any time to get there: When I look at my watch, only one second passed for me getting to the LMC destination, and the timestamp being transmitted from Earth agrees with the time on my watch.

Now, you could argue that it took some 168,000 years for me to go on my journey, but in special relativity, only one second has passed for me. The planet Earth I am observing from the LMC is the very same planet Earth I observed when I left, just a second before. Obama is still president of the US, all the calendars I am looking at on Earth still say 2014, and so on (yes, it would take an incredible telescope to even see the earth from that far away, but, again, humor me). Of course, I'm curious why no one on Earth is replying to my emails and Facebook posts (let's ignore that TCP requires 2-way communication to establish a connection in this thought experiment), but that's only a minor detail for me, since I can see how they are doing and they are fine. (TCP/IP can be adapted for high latency connections, like carrier pigeons, or IGNs [Intergalactic Networks], and IPv6 provides enough addresses for at least two or three galaxies, though NAT might be needed between clusters. --JoeYec :) Time only speeds on Earth up from my point of reference once I get on my super-fast spaceship again and return to Earth. When that happens, my watch says that only another second has passed. However, the time stamp from that laser all of the sudden speeds up and 336,000 years pass on Earth while only one second passes for me. The Earth I return to is the Earth of 336,000 years in the future (from Earth's frame of reference), but, from my point of view, those 336,000 years only pass when returning to Earth.

The point being, as long as I'm travelling away from the Earth at near the speed of light, Earth and I are still, from my frame of reference, moving forward in time at the same rate. It's only when I try to return to Earth that I observe time dilation on Earth.

Samiam (talk) 22:37, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Likewise, let us suppose that our vacation spot in the LMC is sending, via laser, a timestamp to Earth and we look at that timestamp while travelling there. The LMC timestamp will quickly move 336,000 years in to the future as we travel there in one second. In the conventional everyday understanding of the universe (which is just a convention, nothing more) 168,000 years passed because that's how long it takes to get there, and another 168,000 years passed because we were observing the LMC of 168,000 years ago when we began our journey. But, since everything is relative, it's just as valid -- if needlessly convoluted for most calculations -- for us to think we're looking at the LMC of right now (even though it's really far away), and that it takes 336,000 years of their time to get there, even though only one second passes for us (and only one second passes for Earth from our point of view, as I detail above, even though any communication I send from the LMC won't be seen by Earth for 336,000 years after I send it).

Yes, this is weird, but if things weren't this way, we would observe different speeds of light depending on the speed and direction we were travelling. But we don't observe that because there are no absolute frames of references. It's almost Zen-like in its simplicity, but really unintuitive at the same time (if you add all of the natural numbers together, 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 and so on, the sum of every natural number in Physics is -1/12. But I'll save that bit of unintuitive math for another day). Samiam (talk) 03:28, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

I still think you guys are confusing the speed of light and the speed of conventional objects. ^talk 15:08, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

I'll also just add a quick note that the little sum quirk (the -1/12 thing) is just another choice of convention. Specifically, it falls out of using zeta function regularization to handle divergent sums. There are many such regularization methods, some of which are useful, and some of which are not. I can't tell from your statement whether that's what you were going for when you brought it up, but I felt it potentially worth mentioning. - Grant (talk) 15:21, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

There may be some technical confusions, but I don't think the central part of the refutation of the ASC in the article (1. Lisle's universe is one where, when looked at in the "normal" way, objects 13.5 billions years away were created 13.5 billion years ago, with objects closer to Earth created more recently 2. Lisle's universe is one where everyone else would be looking at darkness where Earth and the Milky Way should be) is affected by any misunderstanding we have.

The trick to refuting the ASC hand waving is to keep it simple. YEC: "The ASC allows SN1987A to have happened in the last 6,000 years" Reply: "Lisle's ASC-based universe requires that God created the star that became SN1987A as a 12 million year old star just 6,000 years ago" Samiam (talk) 16:54, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

That said, Lisle is fine with the Omphalos hypothesis for everything other than light already in transit. As such, I doubt he would disagree with your reply there. - Grant (talk) 16:59, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

If you want to keep it simple, then last I checked that was in the article saying that Lisle's underlying logic of "the Bible is right, therefore 'normal physics' is wrong, 'my physics' is right because the Bible is right, 'my physics' is right therefore the Bible is right, QED". Not that Lisle isn't well-known for his grasp of spherical logic. ^{Don't click here} 09:45, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Femto photography

Maybe someone with a physics background will tell me all the things wrong with this, but I'll put it out there anyway. As I see it, one alternate means of measuring the speed of an object is to use a camera, point it at a wall with alternating colors of a known width, and time the object as it passes by said wall, and then with distance and time known, you can calculate speed. You might say "light is way too fast to measure it's speed that way". But what if you had a fast enough camera? There as a TED talks video where Ramesh Raskar, an engineer working at MIT was presenting a video taken by a "Femto photographic camera" that could take pictures at a Trillion frames a second. In said video, he demonstrated said camera's speed by recording laser light as it passed through a bottle filled with water. I'd say that the very existence of said video likely debunks the idea that light moves faster in one direction than in another, since you'd have to know the speed of what you are wanting to photograph in order to set the frame rate, but I would prefer an expert opinion before trying to add anything. If you are interested in seeing the video...Femto Photography, TED talks [User_Talk:Red Comet|Don't click here]] 09:45, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

No, this wouldn't work. The issue is that we still need to choose some synchronization convention for both the camera and the light source. Even if the camera were just to run constantly, knowing its speed still requires defining the time at its location. Otherwise, what does "frames per second" even mean? The issue comes down to the fact that simultaneity isn't well defined for spatially separated events. It's widely believed that this isn't even a problem that can be solved, and that the one-way speed of light is simply undefined. - Grant (talk) 23:12, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

Addendum/summary (because I kind of forgot to connect my comment to what you posted in the first place :P): There are many ways to show that Lisle's proposed solutions don't work, but experiments attempting to measure the one-way speed of light aren't actually of much value in doing so due to the clock synchronization issue. - Grant (talk) 23:19, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

(Somebody, please list a few of those "many ways to show that Lisle's proposed solutions don't work." Since there are so many, please explain the best ones that are based on reality. Also, why is there no mention anywhere of the obvious, though inconsequential error in Lisle's paper? Have all you super-smart evolutionists not noticed it? Do you not really understand relativity?-- JoeYec)

I'm not sure why synchronicity would matter with this set up. You are using the wall as a measuring stick and you can observe how long it takes the light to pass over a known distance with the camera. You can measure the speed of a baseball thrown from a pitching machine in this same way. You don't have to know when the machine threw the baseball because the camera is directly observing the baseball in transit. It's the same with this Femto camera and the light. I can see your point with how to measure time with regards to the camera though. But I do wonder if that matters either, if you can set up the camera to run at a given frame rate and don't move it (the problem with the 2 clock method) should relativity even crop up? And I put this foreword because this seems to be the hardest area for YECs to BS their way through, and I wanted to see if I could help pave over the one gap they hide in in this topic. And it doesn't seem like too hard of an experiment to conduct.Red Comet (talk) 00:10, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

As long as the camera and the light source are spatially separated, then yes, relativity will crop up. I recommend checking the Wikipedia article on the one-way speed of light to get an idea of why measuring the one-way speed of light is not only not "too hard of an experiment to conduct," but possibly also an impossible experiment to conduct. There are also already things that pave over this one gap: specifically, if ASC were the convention that properly represented reality, other measurements we took would come out quite differently. In that sense it's similar to choosing a frame of reference in which the Sun rotates around the Earth. You can do it, but then when we took a measurement of Mars' rotation, we would see additional terms show up in the equations representing this change of reference frame. When we measure experimentally, we don't see the effects of the additional terms, so we can conclude that this isn't really what's happening. - Grant (talk) 00:31, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

One thing I also want to make explicit (in case it's something you overlooked) is that light is required for the camera to "see" anything. At some point, light leaves the laser and travels to the camera in order for the camera to register it. CCD cameras then convert said light into electrons and measure the current to determine whether an event occurred. At some point, light is travelling to the camera, and to make any statement about what we're seeing with said light, we need to make some assumption about exactly how that light is travelling to the camera. The only way around this would be to find a way for the light emitted from the beam to travel instantaneously to the camera lens, which of course would violate special relativity. - Grant (talk) 00:46, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Also, check out this link for some examples of why this is actually a really hard problem: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/measuring-one-way-speed-of-light.750191/ - Grant (talk) 00:51, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Gravitational lens?

I was wondering there might be a bit of a problem using ASC to explain gravitational lens when you have actual infinite speed of light in any direction. Maybe almost infinite speed would work but I think the difference can be observed. Can someone look into that? [[User:K61824|]][[User_talk:K61824|]] 21:32, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

This might be a good way to falsify a young universe even under ASC, but for different reasons. As far as I can tell, the speed of light perpendicular to any ray extending from the observer must still be c, otherwise we would see a different speed of light from experiments such as the super-fast camera mentioned above. The motion of light from a gravitationally lensed star or galaxy can be decomposed into motion towards the observer and lateral motion, which still happens at c even under ASC. The Twin Quasar is 8.7 billion light years from Earth. It is lensed by a galaxy directly in front of it at a distance of 3.7 billion light years. The images are separated by 6 arcseconds. To generate each of the two images, light has to travel laterally for sin(3 arcseconds) * (8.7 bln - 3.7 bln) light years, which is 72800 years. Therefore the universe must be at least 10 times older than the biblical chronology even under ASC. --Tweenk (talk) 07:00, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Turns out I was way off mark - ASC calculations are very unintuitive. What actually matters is the time delay between multiple images of the same object, not the difference between apparent and true positions of the object. The longest known time delay is only 417 days, not enough to disprove YEC under ASC. More info on time delays in gravitational lenses. --Tweenk (talk) 08:58, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

How would this work if you are observing from the Moon or Mars?

Would you not be able to see the stars that the earth can see then? [[User:K61824|]][[User_talk:K61824|]] 17:15, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

Gravitational waves and ASC

if the anisotropic synchrony convention is true, then it either does or does not also apply to gravitational waves.

If it does, then the recent discovery of gravitational waves could not have happened, because the "creation event" (whether 6k years or 13.85 bn years ago) would have created such powerful gravitational waves as to swamp the detectors.

If it does not, then the recent discovery of gravitational waves detected an event 1.3 billion years old.

Therefore, either ASC is void - or confirms an old universe.

Thoughts? FimusTauri (talk) 00:53, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, first off, it should be established that gravity waves are not yet accepted fact. (Let's at least wait until one or two repeats of the experiment before assuming that they exist, rather than some other random error, hey?)

This is a really interesting rebuttal, but it doesn't quite work. If the creation event happened 6k years ago, and gravity waves travel instantaneously, then all of the gravity waves would have immediately reached the Earth, much like the light waves. As such, we would have been swamped -- 6k years ago. Nowadays, we would only feel events that are happening right now -- so perhaps, according to the creationist, the event which we evilutionists say was 1.3 billion years old, actually happened just this year. FuzzyCatPotato!™ (talk/stalk) 01:30, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

An interesting, possibly related issue: that one experiment (whatever it was) that found that neutrinos "travelled" slightly faster than the speed of light, but only because the light had to push its way through the entirety of a star, while the neutrinos passed right through. If light always travels instantaneously, did the neutrinos travel faster than instantaneously? Or can light -- which is supposedly instantaneous -- be absorbed and emitted, which would slow it down? Fuzzy. Cat. Potato! (talk/stalk) 01:32, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

This does raise another possibility. Is there a "cosmic graviton background" (like the CMB or the hypothesised neutrino background? I suspect a detector sensitive enough would have to be built in space. FimusTauri (talk) 22:43, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, there is predicted to be a Gravitational Wave Background that may be the target of future detectors. A Cosmic Graviton Background is unlikely to be observable at any time in the foreseeable future, given the impracticalities of merely directly detecting any gravitons at all, from any source.ChrisB (talk) 08:22, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

The superluminal neutrino paper from 2011 was the result of an electrical fault. The neutrinos that arrived prior to light due to traveling through a star were a result of SN1987A, though that is an interesting question. If Lisle had published prior to the 90s, then he could simply say that since neutrinos are massless particles, they travel at c and therefore they would also be covered by the convention (which deals with c itself; that light travels at that speed turns out to not be fundamental). Now that they're known to have nonzero mass, that poses a difficulty I hadn't considered before.ChrisB (talk) 08:22, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

The Impact of Gravitational Waves

I cannot (yet) find a scientific article to back the following up, so am reluctant to add it as an edit. However, I offer the following in the hope that someone can follow it up and maybe add it to the page...

Is ASC Moot anyway?

As is made clear from the main article, the reason ASC fails to be (thoroughly) debunked is that the observation of light cannot be conclusively demonstrated to be a one-way phenomenon and the relativistic effects of the motion of the observer cannot be ignored. This is an issue because the observation of light is a one-way process. That is to say, the light is emitted at source and observed at target. The actions of the target have no effect on the physical processes of emission. However, the same is not true of gravity. The recent discovery of gravitational waves affirms the notion that gravity cannot travel faster than light. However, gravitational effects are very much a two-way process. The gravitational pull of the Andromeda Galaxy on the Milky Way, for example, is wholly dependent upon the mass of both bodies. For the transmission of gravity to be asynchronous, the gravitational effect felt by the Milky Way Galaxy would only the mass-component of Andromeda, because the effect of Milky Way on Andromeda is currently only part of the way back. We have numerous observations of bodies that are more than 6,000 light years apart who have a mutual gravitational effect. Not one of these suggests that only one half of the gravitational influence is currently in operation. FimusTauri (talk) 21:30, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Might be interesting to ask Dr Lisle that one ... - David Gerard (talk) 20:28, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

He was asked in 2014, and he replied "presumably God created the universe with the proper and fully functioning curvature at the start, which is today maintained via mass." In other words, God created the complete gravitational potential field of the universe roughly 87 billion years ago, holding it in place supernaturally, then filled it in slowly with mass so as to have all light appear at Earth simultaneously yet without any gravitational wave generation. Thus Andromeda is not falling toward the Milky Way itself, but is rather falling into the gravity well God created 87 billion years ago and thereafter dumped the Milky Way into. Total omphalos. 216.59.105.3 (talk) 14:01, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Do you guys really not get it, or are you setting up and tearing down straw men in order to try to trick less educated or intellectual people into believing in evolution? The ASC is not earth centered. Using the ASC, light travels instantaneously towards any observer anywhere and at c/2 away from the observer, in his, her, or its frame of reference. This can happen simultaneously for two observers looking towards each other, because relativity describes really weird things that happen at the edge cases, where the familiar model of Classical mechanics is not sufficiently accurate. The difference between ESC and ASC is in the placement of some of the weirdness. --JoeYec

GPS, Gravitational waves and Feynman

I'm having a hard time understanding what the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention is all about, especially when there are a number of arguments that can be made against it.

GPS. As you all know, GPS satellites emit radiowaves with timestamps. The receiver tries to find four satellites to calculate the position on the planet. This would be impossible if the one-way speed of light were not C.

Isn't that a counterexample to the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention?

Gravitational waves. LIGO and Virgo make first detection of gravitational waves produced by colliding neutron stars. Discovery marks first cosmic event observed in both gravitational waves and light.

From the LIGO website: "Though the LIGO detectors first picked up the gravitational wave in the United States, Virgo, in Italy, played a key role in the story. Due to its orientation with respect to the source at the time of detection, Virgo recovered a small signal; combined with the signal sizes and timing in the LIGO detectors, this allowed scientists to precisely triangulate the position in the sky. After performing a thorough vetting to make sure the signals were not an artifact of instrumentation, scientists concluded that a gravitational wave came from a relatively small patch in the southern sky."

This would be impossible if the one-way speed of light were not C.

Isn't that a counterexample to the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention?

Feynman

This video is self-explanatory, I think. This would be impossible if the one-way speed of light were not C.

Isn't that a counterexample to the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention?

84.78.242.162 (talk) 16:01, 9 January 2021 (UTC)Hans

FYI: Jason (FimusTauri) sadly died last year from COVID19.

Entanglement at great distance / faster than speed of light behavior

I’m outside the field, but doesn’t ASC help explain how information from entangled particles separated by great distance travels faster than the speed of light? I thought the article was fairly written, thanks for that. ^{— Unsigned, by: 100.7.43.109 / talk / contribs}