Relativistic Length Contraction Busts Helium3

Could it be that matter under a steady acceleration in vacuum would end up exploding? A naive interpretation of Special Relativity would deny this… HOWEVER, I don’t think the situation of length contraction in Relativity is fully settled. I am of course not denying Michelson-Morley, etc. 

Einstein came up with the standard answer regarding length contraction: comoving frame versus non-comoving frame: what’s absolute in Relativity is, and only is, the relative relationship. He wrote in 1911. 

The so-called Bell Paradox gives an inkling of something more serious… The intriguing breaking of the string between two similarly accelerating spaceships was looked at in 1959 (Dewan and Beran, not Bell; their paper seems complete to me). In 1976, Bell claimed most physicists at CERN got the problem wrong when it was presented to them. There is no doubt that the string will break: that comes from the intriguing non simultaneity of time at the extremities of any extended object (from the term (-vx/cc) which appears in moving frame time).

What I observe is a problem at the nuclear level: if one submits a Helium 3 nucleus to a constant acceleration from an electric field, it is in a similar case to that of a couple of spaceships united by a string. Now the string is the strong force and the spaceships are two protons. This nuclear assemblage should split when reaching a certain speed. Whereas that does not destroy the Relativity Principle of Galileo in the strictest sense… it destroys the idea that things stay the same under constant acceleration… whereas a clock slows down under constant acceleration, as it does in a gravitational field (equivalence principle)… the clock never explodes… Or at least so it was thought…. But Helium 3 should explode . Does Relativity then breaks Relativity? Is it possible to detect high speeds in the bowels of the ship, as the He3 explodes? Skeptics may say that the preceding hints that there is an electromagnetic connection from the outside to the bowels of the ship… from the accelerating electrostatic field itself… OK, whatever, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc…

As Poincare pointed out, if it always happen, it’s a law of nature…

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Exposed to the preceding, some have sneered that “dissenting” viewpoints such as the preceding have no value, because all was discovered long ago, and quoting all problems go nowhere. But, first of all, when Relativity was elaborated, nobody had any idea of the structure of Helium3, or even that it existed.

Something else unrelated to Relativity pertaining to the logic of discovery in physics : The basic equation of Quantum Mechanics is something like: variation of wave function relative to time is equal (up to an imaginary constant) to potential energy. But it took thirty years to realize that this would have a physical effect, the Bohm-Aharonov effect… and, related, the importance of Gauge theories

An even more spectacular case is Aristotle getting confused by friction: one had to wait until 1340, 17 centuries later, for Buridan in Paris to realize this, and set up the correct laws of mechanics.

Or one could look at Dark Matter, discovered and labeled this way by the Swiss Zwicky at Caltech… in the 1930s… Most physicists just refused to look at the evidence (which was striking, an order of magnitude). Something similar happened with Dark Energy. Famous physicists were making money and gathering fame with their first three minutes and “Theory Of Everything”… while it was pretty obvious to seriously inquiring minds that all they talked about was 5% of the mass-energy of the universe. 

While translating Newton, the Marquise du Chatelet noticed that Isaac had confused momentum and energy…. She went on to demonstrate E = 1/2 mvv… and infrared energy…

Simplicius: Sorry to interupt your tangents on epistemology. I have a basic question: if you consider proton 1 at the bottom of a tower, and proton 2 on top, and the tower is standing on Earth’s surface. Both Proton 1 and Proton 2 are submitted to one g, then what? Do they separate?

Patrice Ayme: No they don’t. And the tower is irrelevant. The breaking of the strong force was caused by the term (-xv/cc) ((1-vv/cc)^(-1/2))… In the example you give, the founding principle of General Relativity, there is no v, so this term of desynchronization of clocks does not appear…

Could you explain clock synchronization?

PA: I will, it’s crucial. I found a nice little drawing, involving two half mirror and two light clocks, to explain clock synchronization… It’s a conceptual generalization of the well-known light clock picture. In an essay, soon.

Patrice Ayme

Tags: Foundations Of Physics, Helium3 Explosion, Relativistic Length Contraction, Relativity, Relativity Broken