Originally posted by Metal Brain
Do you have anything to contribute or are you just going to guess about what I am thinking and not thinking? If you think you can read minds why don't you make a lot of money playing poker?

I don't read minds. I read your words and draw my own conclusions from them.

Originally posted by FabianFnas
I don't read minds. I read your words and draw my own conclusions from them.

So far all you have done is poo poo on anything I say without being specific about anything. You just seem to be trolling without anything to contribute.

Originally posted by Metal Brain
So far all you have done is poo poo on anything I say without being specific about anything. You just seem to be trolling without anything to contribute.

Au contraire, my friend.

I don't say anything about what you say, but how you say it, and how you use rhetorics.

You are just over-sensitive.

Originally posted by Metal Brain
Yes, time dilation results from motion. If you have been following my post you already know I was aware of that. Being at the equator instead of the north pole results in more motion. You overlooked the motion of the earth's orbit around the sun. That also contributes to time dilation. The sun moves though the galaxy so that would be a factor as well. Te ...[text shortened]... onal and motion at the same time. I would expect that. How does that establish cause and effect?

The difficulty calculations tends to increase with the number of things one takes into account. The Earth isn't spherically symmetric but the corrections from that are tiny and would render the calculation insanely difficult. It rotates, so I could have used the Kerr metric, but it's use would increase the complexity of the calculation without changing the answer much.

The point I was making was that just by looking at clocks one cannot make deductions about whether time dilation is due to relative motion or to gravity. We could pick a third distant observer and choose a velocity for them so that their clock was running at the same rate as the observer at the North pole. Knowing only the readings on the clocks we can't distinguish them from the Earth bound observer.

What this means is that if time dilation caused gravity any object moving at high enough speed would create a strong gravitational field in a frame dependent manner. The paradigm is that the laws of physics are the same in any inertial reference frame, having gravity depend on time dilation would break Lorentz invariance. If you are going to distinguish between types of time dilation, and it's hard to see how to do this, then there is also the problem that the Ricci curvature tensor has ten independent components and time dilation is a scalar quantity, so you'd be missing dynamics.

Originally posted by DeepThought
The difficulty calculations tends to increase with the number of things one takes into account. The Earth isn't spherically symmetric but the corrections from that are tiny and would render the calculation insanely difficult. It rotates, so I could have used the Kerr metric, but it's use would increase the complexity of the calculation without changing ...[text shortened]... ten independent components and time dilation is a scalar quantity, so you'd be missing dynamics.

That is a better explanation. Thanks.

Originally posted by Metal Brain
That is a better explanation. Thanks.

I think DeepThought knows what he's talking about. We can trust him.

Originally posted by FabianFnas
I think DeepThought knows what he's talking about. We can trust him.

General trust of the experts/semi-experts that know a lot more about various things than he does is one thing he doesn't have. But, for the life of me, I just simply cannot understand why. He just seems to automatically assume that he must know better and his opinion on it couldn't possibly be wrong and, yet, it usually is.

Originally posted by humy
General trust of the experts/semi-experts that know a lot more about various things than he does is one thing he doesn't have. But, for the life of me, I just simply cannot understand why. He just seems to automatically assume that he must know better and his opinion on it couldn't possibly be wrong and, yet, it usually is.

It's a mistake to unquestioningly believe experts. The problem is that knowing when to distrust expert opinion requires the kind of meta-cognitive ability that comes with being an expert in the field in question...