The Force

Flint2020 wrote: I would disagree about relativity. It has no experimental backing. The whole point of it is that everything is relative, therefore you cant detect the motion of the earth or the sun. Since it's relative you cant tell which one is moving. It's why they cant explain light, they say it's a particle but all Particles and physical things move through a medium. But they believed space was a vacuum. So if it's a vacuum with no medium there's no explanation what light is traveling through from trillions of miles away. Einstein never invented anything it's all theory. It's like the people of today making up dark matter and dark energy, their models dont make sense so they make stuff up to try to explain how stuff they dont understand works. I just find Einstein's theories to be flawed. I dont have the quote in front of me but tesla said he could light a ring of light around the entire world. And we all know about the tower he wanted to build to distribute wireless energy or electricity but the bankers stopped funding him so he couldn't build it.

I'm not sure you can use something Tesla said he could do but never did as an explanation as to why you believe something, but then dismiss scientists who have evidence of things like dark matter. Things are not made up, they are theories to explain, which may change but are close fits at the time. Why should your opinion have more sway than Einstein's? What knowledge and study have you done to disprove his theories?

The problem with theories and opinions is a lot of people take them as fact Einstien's theories are just that, as you say, theories which means they could be entirely correct but they could also be wrong meaning that if you base things purely off theories, your foundation for your beliefs could be entirely wrong which is something religion as a whole is flawed for in my opinion. Without solid proof of something you don't know if it exists or not, it is entirely a belief which we all know. Whatever you believe is absolutely fine however problems will come about when you dismiss another point of view or belief because you don't agree/ believe in it. I do think the talk of Tesla and what not has kind of sidetracked the thread from what you originally posted about.

Flint2020 wrote: I would disagree about relativity. It has no experimental backing.

Some people take offense to me using that word, that's fine by me, since the only other ways of putting it are more vulgar yet. What you just said, with all due respect, sir, is nonsense. Even a quick Google search returns a Wikipedia article with not just a list of (universally successful, one has to add) tests of special relativity alone, but also a list so long that it is split into different sections for readability. There is a second, even longer article listing successful tests of general relativity, sporting a whopping 114 citations. I'm sorry, but this is not a matter of opinion or interpretation.

Here, I'll be generous. I'll forego reading either article mentioned above and come back with arguments off the top of my head only. I'll even limit myself to predictions, too, thus eliminating tests of the premises, like the invariance of the speed of light in a vacuum between different reference frames:

• For special relativity: The speed of light. Aside from being constant for all observers it is also a hard limit on how fast any particle can travel locally, with non-zero mass particles being strictly limited to speeds below it. But this is not all special relativity predicts about fast particles. Ontop of that alone being a prediction confirmed by or consistent with every relevant experiment conducted, the theory also predicts exactly by how much a particle accelerates as it is being given ever more energy to do so. There is no reason why in principle this formula has to be accurate if it were just presented to us in its final form. The theory allows us however to deduce it from first principles, and despite that deduction being a purely mental exercise, experiments universally confirm it, lending credence to the theory.
• For special and general relativity: Time dilation. Two clocks calibrated to run at identical rates desynchronize if one is put, say, in orbit around the earth, or even in motion relative to the other. This works as well for literal man-made clocks as it does for chemical processes with known progression rates or radioactive materials with known decay rates. Not only do we not have an alternative theory to explain this, but - again, from first principles - we can derive exact mathematical expressions describing just how much time is dilated between relatively moving reference frames (special relativity) and how it progresses differently at locations with different spacetime curvatures (general relativity). A combination of both effects has to be accounted and compensated for on the clocks of navigational satellites that would fail to return accurate information to GPS dependent devices otherwise.
• For general relativity: Gravitational lensing. Light travels in what appear to be straight lines, refracting only when passing through regions with differential optical density or through an interface between regions of different densities. Yet, even passing through vacuum, the proximity of a path to a concentration of mass appears to bend the path. Photons have no mass, so they cannot be attracted to other masses via a gravitational force in the traditional sense, yet this happens anyway and we have literally hundreds of recordings of this effect at this point. Not only does general relativity predict it in principle as an artifact of curvature, but, again, it provides us with an easily falsifiable but experimentally only ever confirmed formula to compute just how much of a deflection to expect for a given mass and impact parameter.

It's why they cant explain light, they say it's a particle but all Particles and physical things move through a medium.

Um... Maybe you should look up why the aether was ever proposed to begin with. I think you are misunderstanding even the position you are defending. Even back in the days of Galilei and Copernicus nobody was suggesting that particles needed a medium to travel. Quite the opposite. Particles were the thing that could travel without a medium. Waves on the other hand typically travelled through media, like the mechanical oscillations travel along a string, ripples along a water surface, or sound waves through the air. The only reason an aether was suggested as a medium for light was because that was an intuitive leap to make given how many other wave-like properties light has. The idea that particles need a medium to travel through is not one common either within ancient natural philosophy (as far as I know), nor pre-relativistic classical physics, nor relativity, nor quantum physics. Frankly, this is the first time I'm hearing about it and I'd be surprised if Tesla held to it.

Einstein never invented anything it's all theory.

Therefore what? All of modern navigation depends on it. That's just relativity, mind you. Digital cameras depend on the photoelectric effect he described. That also happens to be one of the most pressing experiments that resulted in quantum theory, something that is used in all modern electronics. Sticking with quantum stuff, we have laser technology in part thanks to his contribution of our understanding how light interacts with atoms. What else "all theory" did Einstein do? Well, how about his contribution to statistical mechanics, a reformulation of classical thermodynamics (before he turned to quantum statistics one model of which still bears his name today) that allows us to understand chaotic systems and heat?

It's like the people of today making up dark matter and dark energy, their models dont make sense so they make stuff up to try to explain how stuff they dont understand works. I just find Einstein's theories to be flawed.

Actually, I'll agree with you here. A lot of frontier science is speculative. Not as hand-wavey as it may sound when put as you did, but yes, there are things out there we have no choice but to make educated guesses about and see which guesses survive experimental tests. And that's okay. It is okay to not know everything. It is okay to not be correct about everything. Relativity may be older, but it is already far from very intuitive when read only in fine sound bytes without any of the rigorous maths and well-established observations that went into it. From a lay man's point of view it can sound as outlandish as any wild speculation about the nature of dark matter. It is not, however. Technologies that use it are ubiquitous. Tthe researchers you refer to are trying to get a grasp on something nobody actually has a demonstrable understanding of. What you do, on the other hand - and this may not at all be on purpose, I understand that - is saying "nuh-uh!" to things we do have a very firm grasp on.

RobHowdle wrote: The problem with theories and opinions is a lot of people take them as fact Einstien's theories are just that, as you say, theories which means they could be entirely correct but they could also be wrong

Except we wouldn't call them theories if they were anything like idle opinions. They are called theories because they survived not only opposition among fellow experts of the day, but - more importantly - rigorous testing. They made numerous non-trivial and specific falsifiable predictions about possible observations and experimental outcomes and every time there was an opportunity to falsify them they were instead vindicated. Could they be inaccurate on some scales? Who knows. But they are not on the scales so far tested and since they are the simplest models to account for the scales they were designed for, even if we do eventually find a theory that is more general, i.e. accurate for an even wider parameter space, we will still have every reason to use relativity on the scales to which we apply it today just as we still use Newtonian mechanics when discussing slow motion along short distances.


And though I am perhaps a primary culprit in this, I agree that we may do well separating the discussion about experiences with/of what some might call the Force from the discussion about Tesla's wide-ranging rejection of ever growing mountains of evidence that failed to match his personal preferences.

I've felt lots of bizarre things (and seen and heard), but I don't associate anything to the Force unless it has some tether to reality which makes it practical. I'm not saying other things are not of the Force (actually I view everything of the Force but that is another story), but that if they happen to be a subjective experience then I continue to define them by their apparent mechanisms of action to isolate what might be the factors which define the experience as unique or new, so that it might be replicated or understood. For me, the things I tend to associate it as being without any other label (and meeting the other attributes which define it) seem to just be any awareness in the absence of data sources. Not just because it helps me focus on connecting to the inner and outer domains of my existence but because when it happens its often really useful. The issue here then is where is ones threshold of involving imagination, because if you spend 100 minutes imagining things that might happen and then for 1 minute its accurate.... it might be random luck. For me I try to exclude anything which could fairly be imagined, in a sort of balance of timeliness and detail complexity to assess the chance of it being imagined. Then all ya gotta do is find a nice way to implement a method, which to me really aligns with the core aspects of the hinted themes in the relationship between the Force and the Jedi (war fighting aside).

Jungarian synchronicity perhaps? :silly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity