Bibliographic record
Abstract
As part of his special theory of relativity, Einstein introduced two definitions of the word “simultaneity”—the coordinated-clocks definition in his famous 1905 paper and the mid-point definition in his 1916 book. Einstein never discussed the relation between these two definitions. Neither has anyone else, to my knowledge. I show that these definitions are not equivalent because they have different scopes of applicability, but that they are equivalent wherever both apply. My proof of this partial equivalence is a corollary of my proof that both of Einstein’s definitions clash with the natural ticking of monochromatic light, which I call an electromagnetic wave clock. Einstein disparaged the idea of absolute simultaneity, but the reasons he gave were not good ones. He suggested that the idea originated in a confusion between happening simultaneously and being seen simultaneously. This thesis is dubious. It is also irrelevant, because an idea that originates in a confusion need not be a confused idea. He suggested that there could be no experimental test for absolute simultaneity. I refute this suggestion by describing an experimental test for absolute simultaneity, which I call the melt-mark test. The empirical credentials of Einstein’s definitions are not superior to those of absolute simultaneity. Einstein writes as if he can banish the idea of absolute “simultaneity” by merely giving the word “simultaneity” a new meaning. But many words have multiple meanings; Einstein merely made simultaneity such a word. The meanings of “simultaneity” that there is reason to disparage are Einstein’s definitions, because they clash with the electromagnetic wave clock. None of these points is properly appreciated by today’s physics community, where Einstein’s assertions about simultaneity continue to enjoy broad acclaim. Physical theories that employ the idea of absolute simultaneity are often wrongly rejected because they do.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".