Mathematics and the realized world

Dear all,

What is your opinion about the following point?

The second postulate of special relativity is "light is always propagated with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body."

This is in perfect agreement with Maxwell's equations and with any propagation of waves in a medium. Thus, if one works with Maxwell's equations, this postulate is not needed.

However, the transformations invented by Voigt in 1887 and adopted by Lorentz impose implicitly the speed of propagation of electromagnetic waves to be constant (absolute) for all observers.

What is your choice?:

1) Speed of light is independent of the speed of the source, only

2) Speed of light is constant for all observers

3) "The velocity of light is not independent of the velocity of the source, the velocity of light is not constant for all observers.", Daniele Sasso

Please explain. Thank you very much.

No gravitational wave was measured yet, no graviton was detected accordingly. On the other hand no space- time curvature was observable. There is no successful experiment to validate the current theories. What is the nature of the mysterious gravity? What is the velocity of this effect ?

Recently I asked a question related to QCD and in response reliability of QCD itself was challenged by many researchers.

It left me with the question, what exactly is fundamental in physics. Can we rely entirely on the two equations given by Einstien? If not then what can we say as fundamental in physics?

My answer is no. The reason is that we can never perform any measurement whose result is an irrational number. In this sense, perfect geometrical entities, such as spheres, squares, circles, etc... do not exist in nature. Therefore, so curvilinear trajectories, or even smooth manifolds, don't exist either. Does this means that spacetime is fundamentally discrete? Is nature solving problems only numerically (i.e., using finite difference schemes) ?

It is commonly believed that the concept of electron spin was first introduced by A.H. Compton (1920) when he studied magnetism. "May I then conclude that the electron itself, spinning like a tiny gyroscope, is probably the ultimate magnetic particle?"[1][2]; Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit (1926) thought so too [4], but did not know it at the time of their first paper (1925) [3]. However, Thomas (1927) considered Abraham (1903) as the first to propose the concept of spinning electron [5]. Compton did not mention Abraham in his paper "The magnetic electron" [2], probably because Abraham did not talk about the relationship between spin and magnetism [0]. In fact, it is Abraham's spin calculations that Uhlenbeck cites in his paper [4].

Gerlach, W. and O. Stern (1921-1922) did the famous experiment* on the existence of spin magnetic moments of electrons (even though this was not realized at the time [6]) and published several articles on it [7].

Pauli (1925) proposed the existence of a possible " two-valuedness " property of the electron [8], implying the spin property; Kronig (1925) proposed the concept of the spin of the electron to explain the magnetic moment before Uhlenbeck, G. E. and S. Goudsmit, which was strongly rejected by Pauli [9]. Uhlenbeck, G. E. and S. Goudsmit (1925) formally proposed the concept of spin[3], and after the English version was published[4], Kronig (1926), under the same title and in the same journals, questioned whether the speed of rotation of an electron with internal structure is superluminal**[10]. Later came the Thomas paper giving a beautiful explanation of the factor of 2 for spin-orbit coupling[11]. Since then, physics has considered spin as an intrinsic property that can be used to explain the anomalous Seeman effect.

The current state of physics is in many ways the situation: "When we do something in physics, after a while, there is a tendency to forget the overall meaning of what we are working on. The long range perspective fades into the background, and we may become blind to important a priori questions."[11]. With this in mind, C. N. Yang briefly reviewed how spin became a part of physics. For spin, he summarized several important issues: The concept of spin is both an intriguing and extremely difficult one. Fundamentally it is related to three aspects of physics. The first is the classical concept of rotation; the second is the quantization of angular momentum; the third is special relativity. All of these played essential roles in the early understanding of the concept of spin, but that was not so clearly appreciated at the time [11].

Speaking about the understanding of spin, Thomas said [5]: "I think we must look towards the general relativity theory for an adequate solution of the problem of the "structure of the electron" ; if indeed this phrase has any meaning at all and if it can be possible to do more than to say how an electron behaves in an external field. Yang said too: "And most important, we do not yet have a general relativistic theory of the spinning electron. I for one suspect that the spin and general relativity are deeply entangled in a subtle way that we do not now understand [11]. I believe that all unified theories must take this into account.

What exactly is spin, F. J. Belinfante argued that it is a circular energy flow [12][15] and that spin is related to the structure of the internal wave field of the electron. A comparison between calculations of angular momentum in the Dirac and electromagnetic fields shows that the spin of the electron is entirely analogous to the angular momentum carried by a classical circularly polarized wave [13]. The electron is a photon with toroidal topology [16]. At the earliest, A. Lorentz also used to think so based on experimental analysis. etc.

1) Is the spin of an electron really spin? If spin has classical meaning, what should be rotating and obeying the Special Relativity?

2) What should be the structure of the electron that can cause spin quantization and can be not proportional to charge and mass?

3) If spin must be associated with General Relativity, must we consider the relationship between the energy flow of the spin and the gravitational field energy?

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* It is an unexpectedly interesting story about how their experimental results were found. See the literature [17].

** Such a situation occurs many times in the history of physics, where the questioned and doubted papers are published in the same journal under the same title. For example, the debate between Einstein and Bohr, the EPR papers [18] and [19], the debate between Wilson and Saha on magnetic monopoles [20] and [21], etc.

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Reference：

[0] Abraham, M. (1902). "Principles of the Dynamics of the Electron (Translated by D. H. Delphenich)." Physikalische Zeitschrift 4(1b): 57-62.

[1] Compton, A. H. and O. Rognley (1920). "Is the Atom the Ultimate Magnetic Particle?" Physical Review 16(5): 464-476.

[2] Compton, A. H. (1921). "The magnetic electron." Journal of the Franklin Institute 192(2): 145-155.

[3] Uhlenbeck, G. E., and Samuel Goudsmit. (1925). "Ersetzung der Hypothese vom unmechanischen Zwang durch eine Forderung bezüglich des inneren Verhaltens jedes einzelnen Elektrons." Die Naturwissenschaften 13.47 (1925): 953-954.

[4] Uhlenbeck, G. E. and S. Goudsmit (1926). "Spinning Electrons and the Structure of Spectra." Nature 117(2938): 264-265.

[5] Thomas, L. H. (1927). "The kinematics of an electron with an axis." The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 3(13): 1-22.

[6] Schmidt-Böcking, H., L. Schmidt, H. J. Lüdde, W. Trageser, A. Templeton and T. Sauer (2016). "The Stern-Gerlach experiment revisited." The European Physical Journal H 41(4): 327-364.

[7] Gerlach, W. and O. Stern. (1922). "Der experimentelle Nachweis der Richtungsquantelung im Magnetfeld. " Zeitschrift f¨ur Physik 9: 349-352.

[8] Pauli, W. (1925). "Über den Einfluß der Geschwindigkeitsabhängigkeit der Elektronenmasse auf den Zeemaneffekt." Zeitschrift für Physik 31(1): 373-385.

[9] Stöhr, J. and H. C. Siegmann (2006). "Magnetism"(磁学), 高等教育出版社.

[10] Kronig, R. D. L. (1926). "Spinning Electrons and the Structure of Spectra." Nature 117(2946): 550-550.

[11] Yang, C. N. (1983). "The spin". AIP Conference Proceedings, American Institute of Physics.

[12] Belinfante, F. J. (1940). "On the current and the density of the electric charge, the energy, the linear momentum and the angular momentum of arbitrary fields." Physica 7(5): 449-474.

[13] Ohanian, H. C. (1986). "What is spin?" American Journal of Physics 54(6): 500-505. 电子的自旋与内部波场结构有关。

[14] Parson, A. L. (1915). Smithsonian Misc. Collections.

[15] Pavšič, M., E. Recami, W. A. Rodrigues, G. D. Maccarrone, F. Raciti and G. Salesi (1993). "Spin and electron structure." Physics Letters B 318(3): 481-488.

[16] Williamson, J. and M. Van der Mark (1997). Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology. Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie, Fondation Louis de Broglie.

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[17] Friedrich, B. and D. Herschbach (2003). "Stern and Gerlach: How a bad cigar helped reorient atomic physics." Physics Today 56(12): 53-59.

[18] Bohr, N. (1935). "Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?" Physical review 48(8): 696.

[19] Einstein, A., B. Podolsky and N. Rosen (1935). "Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?" Physical review 47(10): 777.

[20] Wilson, H. (1949). "Note on Dirac's theory of magnetic poles." Physical Review 75(2): 309.

[21] Saha, M. (1949). "Note on Dirac's theory of magnetic poles." Physical Review 75(12): 1968.

My question is: "What are the major and most effective refutations of Albert Einstein's Theories of Relativity?"

The question "Is Any Effective Refutation of Einstein’s Theories of Relativity Possible?" which was asked on April 2, 2018, has been declared closed. Many of the best Answers were probably posted at the beginning, in April of 2018, long before I joined Research Gate on the recommendation of some of my university colleagues. Out of respect for the initiator of the original Question, who states his decision to close his Question, I am posting a very similar question in the interest of accommodating the views of scientists who have not yet had an opportunity to answer the Question, and, possibly, the repeated and updated views of scientists who have already posted on the original Question at Research Gate from April 2, 2018, to December 2019.

We know that our star, the Sun loses about 10^-14 of its mass per year as a result of electromagnetic radiation and particle emission. That reduction in mass should show up as a decreasing gravitational red shift. Same thing should happen to entire galaxies. But isn't it true that the galaxies we observe that are farther from Earth are also the younger we see (because light has taken millions of years more to come to us) and, as a consequence the more massive when we consider entire galaxies? (Because we cannot possibly see them as they are, but as they were millions of years ago.) Shouldn't we expect, correspondingly that the gravitational red shift of an observed galaxy will increase with its distance to Earth?