[This is a thread I’m posting to help develop material for my college-level, free-of-charge, unaccredited online buffet style course on ID/Creation.]
As I pondered the various 12 YEC cosmology models and the fact that at least 11 of them must be wrong as a matter of principle, I got interested in building up ideas by starting again from the basics.
In the process, I began suspecting some of the postulates of Einstein’s Special Relativity (SR) may need amendment in light of the fact that the Lorentz transformation at the heart of Einstein’s SR do not mandate Einstein’s SR but admit other possible interpretations. In fact Larmor predicted time dilation before Einstein, but also said time in the ultimate sense time must be absolute.
I don’t know exactly what Lorentz thought, but Lorentz’s equations predicted time dilation even before Einstein.
As I pondered the issue more, the Lorentz transformation may not not rule out an absolute frame of reference, and in fact many of the relativity transformations in classical and Einsteinian physics could be more or less convenience approximations but which could have experimental issues where convenience transformations will not give accurate results since they are transformations of convenience that are only valid approximations under certain conditions.
But before going further, I just want to post how I think I might teach on the basics and I solicit corrections of my understanding of the basics.
My understanding is that Einstein’s SR began with Einstein’s careful study of Maxwell’s of electromagnetic theory. The speed of light is a property of space:
This velocity is independent of the reference frame whether moving or “stationary”. If the speed is detected to be the same in all moving inertial (un-accelerated frames), then this will result in paradoxes which Einstein’s SR attempted to resolve, and which are encapsulated in the Lorentz’s transformations:
t'= \gamma (t-\frac{vx}{c^2})
x' = \gamma(x-vt)
y'=y
z'=z
where
\gamma = \frac {1}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}
The Lorentz transformation can be derived by assuming the speed of light is constant in all reference frames and Maxwell’s approximations of classical Electro Dynamics:
I will attempt to post my version of the derivation of the Lorentz transformation from Maxwell’s equations in subsequent comments and then post why I think the derivation leads to an opening for alternate cosmologies including YCC/YEC cosmologies. This derivation has already been done in a variety of ways, but I’ll express it in the way that I understand it without resorting to tensor notation which I’m not yet very comfortable with.
From this I will post my criticisms of Einsteinian SR based on the Lorentz transformation which is ironically at the heart of Einsteinian SR.
As an aside, here is a 1927 picture of Lorentz with Einstein (Lorentz is seated a Einstein’s immediate right, our left):
This picture was from the famous Solvay conference.
Talk about a meeting of GIANTS! WOW!
I hope to provide my version of a well-known derivation of the Lorentz transformation from Maxwell’s equations in the process of this thread since I wish to present it in my class to show that it emerges naturally from the approximations of Maxwell’s equations under certain additional assumptions. It will also be a good exercise to helping re-learn and understand the issues.