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…

Patrice Ayme

Relativity Enables To Colonize The Milky Way…

…Relatively Easily…Warning: The following requires knowledge and acceptance of the so-called “Twin Paradox” in Relativity (which used to be controversial).

By slowing down time, Relativity makes feasible, and rapid, the conquest of the galaxy. As usual in tech, the question of the availability of huge energy is paramount. 

When a body is accelerated to speed v, its PROPER TIME slows down by a factor of square root of (1 – vv/cc). Proper time theory, also known as local time, was discovered by Lorentz and Henri Poincaré in the nineteenth century and it is the conceptual core of Relativity (named and conceptualized by Henri Poincaré, mostly misattributed to Einstein’s abtract of 1905).

As v approaches c, then, the time inside the moving spaceship tends to go to zero. As seen from Earth, whatever happens inside the spaceship comes to a standstill. 

If one could accelerate to roughly (99/100) c, c being the speed of light, the time inside the spaceship would be roughly 10% of the time on Earth.

Indeed the crucial Relativity TIME AMPLIFIER is γ= 1/ square root (1- vv/cc) = 1/square root (1/100) = 10

So say the spaceship is going to Proxima Centauri b, the Earth sized planet in the habitable zone in the closest star to the Sun . To simplify, say th spaceship does not brake but just flies by. From Earth’s perspective, light taking 4.3 years to get there, the spaceship would take less than 5 years… from Earth’s perspective, Earth time. But, inside the ship only 6 months would have elapsed… that’s “PROPER TIME” In other words, a colonization crew could get there and colonize. Now if the ship had flown ten years, it would have gone around 80 light years…

In a thousand years, one could cover 8,000 light years….:  Consider that

Now it’s likely that, within relatively soon, hibernation techniques  will be mastered.

The problem with the preceding is the huge amount of energy needed to accelerate at .99 c is gigantic, of the order of the largest thermonuclear explosion so far… for one single kilogram… Another difficulty is that empty space is not really empty, and there would be some difficulty hitting a relativistic blizzard of various particles, let alone outright objects… To accelerate a large million ton ship at .99c is feasible, acceleration-wise (.1g would do it), but the enrgy would be of the order of say 10% of the sun output for twenty minutes. How to store that? Antimatter. Antimatter battery!

Ions could be deflected by ultra strong magnetic fields… Then the starship could be made very… aerodynamic, so to speak…

In any case the fact remains: with foreseeable tech, the galaxy could be colonized quickly (on a geological time scale). So the fact we see no activity between stars means that we are alone… Because either advanced life is very rare, or space Putins are all too frequent… Or both…

The Fermi Paradox, in light of Relativity is acute

Patrice Ayme .  

Finding inhabitable planets ripe for colonization is definitively a possibility, thanks to Relativity.

P/S: Some administrator of several sites on “Space” and “Science”, not knowing Relativity at all, and confusing proper time and Earth time, accused me of “fucking nonsense” for the preceding essay. He claimed that I pretended (which I did not) that it was possible to go faster than the speed of light. Then he banned, cancelled me, and cut off communications all at the same time, unilaterally while I was sleeping. That’s how people behave nowadays. Like cretinous fascist exterminators propelled by their hating ignorance.