Dilation Field Theory Dialogues -- Part One: Vocals
The heat wave broke (at least here in Wisconsin) and once again Celestial Mechanic comes out of the woodwork long enough to order up some doughnuts, brew up some coffee, and invite his two friends (who are now grad students), Virginia and Jimmy K. over to ponder over an ATM physics paper.
Jimmy K.: "What have you got for us this time?"
Celestial Mechanic: "Coffee, doughnuts, the usual. Oh, and a paper by Piotr Ogonowski who wants to raise time dilation to the status of a field."
Virginia: "The interesting thing about this paper is that the author actually ventures to write a Langrangian. Most ATM authors have never heard of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian dynamics. Of course his Lagrangian is all wrong."
CM: "True, true. Lately I have been thinking a lot about Langrangians in the context of celestial mechanics and the arguments (not proof!) for the plausibility of the ones that we use. I'll have more to say on that later. Let's start critiquing his paper from the beginning, at the abstract."
V: "Well, the very first sentence is completely wrong on several counts. Ogonowski writes:
In this paper I show that time dilation may be treated as a field ...
V: "... which is wrong because the time dilation measured at a point is a function of velocity (the SR, special relativity part) and the gravitational potential (the GR, general relativity part). It is more sensible to treat velocity as a field, for example a rotating body in orbit. The individual particles of the body have different velocities that can be analyzed into orbital and rotational components. I won't comment on the rest of the sentence."
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