🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mar 21, 4:21 pm, Tom Roberts <tjroberts...@sbcglobal.net> wrote in
sci.physics.relativity:
> Albertito wrote:
> > Minkowski spacetime is incomplete for describing
> > the inertial motion of particles. We need to define a
> > spacetime through three complex coordinates, [...]
>
> How do you propose to MEASURE those complex values when watching the
> motion of an automobile down the street?
>
> Clearly one cannot do so. The world we inhabit can be modeled quite
> accurately as a 4-d REAL Lorentzian manifold.

And special relativity "would remain unaffected" even if "light in
vacuum does not travel at the invariant speed of the Lorentz
transform"? You and Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond are perhaps the two
silliest Einsteinians Roberts Roberts, even sillier than string
theorists:

http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.physics.relativity/browse_frm/thread/8034dc146100e32c
Tom Roberts, Feb 1 2006: "If it is ultimately discovered that the
photon has a nonzero mass (i.e. light in vacuum does not travel at the
invariant speed of the Lorentz transform), SR would be unaffected but
both Maxwell's equations and QED would be refuted (or rather, their
domains of applicability would be reduced)."

http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/chronogeometrie.pdf
Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond: "D'autre part, nous savons aujourd'hui que
l'invariance de la vitesse de la lumiere est une consequence de la
nullite de la masse du photon. Mais, empiriquement, cette masse, aussi
faible soit son actuelle borne superieure experimentale, ne peut et ne
pourra jamais etre consideree avec certitude comme rigoureusement
nulle. Il se pourrait meme que de futures mesures mettent en evidence
une masse infime, mais non-nulle, du photon ; la lumiere alors n'irait
plus a la "vitesse de la lumiere", ou, plus precisement, la vitesse de
la lumiere, desormais variable, ne s'identifierait plus a la vitesse
limite invariante. Les procedures operationnelles mises en jeu par le
"second postulat" deviendraient caduques ipso facto. La theorie elle-
meme en serait-elle invalidee ? Heureusement, il n'en est rien ; mais,
pour s'en assurer, il convient de la refonder sur des bases plus
solides, et d'ailleurs plus economiques. En verite, le "premier
postulat" suffit, a la condition de l'exploiter a fond."

http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/onemorederivation.pdf
Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond: "This is the point of view from wich I intend
to criticize the overemphasized role of the speed of light in the
foundations of the special relativity, and to propose an approach to
these foundations that dispenses with the hypothesis of the invariance
of c....We believe that special relativity at the present time stands
as a universal theory discribing the structure of a common space-time
arena in which all fundamental processes take place....The evidence of
the nonzero mass of the photon would not, as such, shake in any way
the validity of the special relativity. It would, however, nullify all
its derivations which are based on the invariance of the photon
velocity."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com