Vachtra wrote:If scientists are trying to disprove what they think then why do people still believe in time dilation?
The classic example of how this works (moving parallel lines with the a signal bouncing between them) does not show time dilating but rather shows that the medium through which the signal moves is not moving along with the instrument used to measure the dilation. This does show that the speed of light didn't change since the light took longer to catch up with the instrument. Or do you think air is the medium of light?
What people keep confusing is that the signal is not time. It's only a signal being used to try to measure time.
Time dilation is simply the name (do you have a better one?) given to the observation that an object accelerated up to a fast speed (relative to observer) then decelerated will have it's clocks (and everything else!) slowed by a constant now. Special Relativity provides a nice and simple model for this and other phenomena.
To be honest physics cares very little for interpretations, who cares whether you ascribe to Copenhagen or Many Worlds? Theories are all about the hard math and predictions, what particular metaphors you use to understand these concepts are quite simply irrelevant. Calling one metaphor correct and another incorrect is Not Even Wrong!
I didn't take any relativity course at university, but did you know the dependency list for Mathematics for General Relativity at MIT is: Differential Equations, Single Variable Calculus, Multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra, Electromagnetism II, Physics III
General Relativity is a lot more complicated than pop sci would have you believe.
Even MIT's Special (not General) Relativity lecture notes say "Many of you may think you know it all from books, other courses, ect. Don't get lulled into a false sense of security! This may be your first real departure from intuitive physics."
Interestingly it also says this:
"_________ <-
(your theory here)
* Think for yourself.
* Question authority.
* Don't dismiss ideas just because they sound weird."
Oh and the cat isn't alive and dead, he's alive OR dead. The first is rediculous where the second is uncertianty.
Saying the state is either a|0> or b|1> gives different results mathematically to saying the state is a|0>+b|1>. Experiments have determined that the former is wrong and the latter is the case.
The best
metaphor for this in terms understandable to the layman is NOT "the cat is either alive or dead", it's "the cat is alive and dead".
Our common sense is excellent (unsurpassed even by our best AIs and algorithms) in the domain it was built for (whether by evolution or deity), which is at the metre, second-to-decade and second per metre scale. The further we got from this domain the more likely it was that we'd encounter something unintuitive and eventually we did (several such things in fact).
In fact, we eventually encountered things that our imagination simply couldn't model, every attempt to visualize or use metaphors just failed to encapsulate the entirety of the model (and thus failed to anticipate the observed results) and in the end what was actually used was purely mathematical constructs.
Vachtra wrote:It has been stated that you can't go faster than the speed of light. If time dilation exists then you could in fact not go faster than approximately 70% the speed of light since at this point you would feel you were going, due to time dilation, almost at the speed of light.
If a passenger then jumps out of said plane he would have time dilation relative to the plane which is relative to the earth. This would only increase dilations by compounding them. Even after the person landed on the ground his dilation would be from the point he accelerated from the plane.
Until this point I still considered it possible you did, in fact, understand the subject matter and there had just been a repeated series of miscommunications...
These quotes are just wrong and show a complete lack of understanding of what Special Relativity actually says. You seem to have no understanding of what a reference frame actually is. Acceleration
matters and changes reference frames. Reference frames do not necessarily agree about other reference frames.
You're attacking a strawman because you don't understand relativity. This can be corrected fairly easily, there are textbooks on Special Relativity and
MIT's Open Courseware has lecture notes and handouts available for free (you can go through them in less than a day, though it wouldn't be enough to let you take the exam).
I'll steal this bit of advice from Stuart Armstrong (the one that isn't a footballer):
"Brilliant people have tried and failed to disprove these theories for generations. No matter how brilliant I think myself, it would be unlikely for me to have found a
simple proof where everyone else had failed."
Don't give in to the temptation to join the ranks of the cranks.