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RE: Tidal bulge, Bohr atom & other myths

Hi all and David Bowman again-
Hmmm, David, I still dunno. You write:
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Jack U. wrote:
Hi all and David Bowman-
Hmmm, I dunno, David. Suppose that the photon did have a small
mass while still being the lightest particle in nature. What would special
relativity look like then? What kind of argument would lead us to the
Lorentz transformation? We would, of course, discover the constant "c"
by balancing energy-momentum and mass differences for unstable nuclei.

My point was that if the photon did have a small mass then that is not
sufficient to invalidate special relativity. Nature would still have a "speed
limit of causation" c and no informative influence could propagate faster than
this speed...
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But how would we know that "c" represents a limiting speed? To
say that a photon mass "is not sufficient to invalidate special relativity"
does not respond to the deeper question, "Is special relativity a
consequence of the facts that (1)there is a limiting speed at which signals
can be transmitted [I carefully stipulated that the photon mass is the
smallest of all - no massless neutrinos] and (2) signals actually can be
transmitted at that speed?"
The Landau/Lifshitz derivation starts (Sec 1-2) with a definition
of "intervals". They then go on to say (p.4 of the 1951 edition) "we
now express the invariance of the velocity of light in mathematical form",
having introduced (in modern language) ct as a "4th dimension". They
then proceed to obtain the Lorentz transformation in a very conventional
way by requiring the the "interval" between 2 events is an invariant.
So it seems to me that your answer is on a different logical
plane than the question that I posed. I thought that my question invited
some speculation on the interconnectedness of everything, and that a
universe with no massless particles would be much different from one
with just a few patches placed on E&M, as you have described.
Your appeal to gravity waves as the carrier of signals at the
ultimate velocity is intriguing. Maybe someone can dream up a question
that probes the necessity for special relativity in this context.
Regards,
"I scored the next great triumph for science myself,
to wit, how the milk gets into the cow. Both of us
had marveled over that mystery a long time. We had
followed the cows around for years - that is, in the
daytime - but had never caught them drinking fluid of
that color."
Mark Twain, Extract from Eve's
Autobiography
Jack