Smooth Spacetime is Only a First Approximation

Terry will address how the dependence of local spacetime on system shapes breaks the traditional concept of universal spacetime.
About this Event

Summary:

In his 1907 derivation of equations for translating coordinates between inertial frames, Einstein asserted that “… we want to choose as the starting point of time in both systems the moment at which the coordinate starting points coincide; then the linear transformation equations sought are homogeneous.”
Unfortunately, real-world physics does not permit such shared assignments of origins.
The problem is that forcing the origins of inertial frames to coincide assigns non-existent, causality-violating histories to objects that have undergone acceleration. For over a century, this has mostly not been a problem because Einstein’s four transformation equations give good results if the accelerated objects have point-like lengths compared to their surrounding frames, such as particles in accelerators or galaxies moving within clusters.The correction is to add the length of the accelerated system to Einstein’s equation, but the consequences of this seemingly minor addition are far-reaching.
In this talk, Terry will address how the dependence of local spacetime on system shapes breaks the traditional concept of universal spacetime.
Speaker: Terry Bollinger
Terry Bollinger is a computer scientist with a BS, MS, and Professional Degrees from the Missouri University of Science and Technology. He views physics as a debugging problem in which failures to resolve an issue often indicate not a lack of creative thinking but reliance on a blatantly false assumption in a paper from decades ago. Folks know him best for keeping the US Department of Defense from banning open-source software, which would have seriously undermined national defense and the open-source software industry. He has also helped find and insert new technologies into the federal government and define and obtain federal funding for robotics and AI research.