Update: You can read all the ways I’m wrong about the text below over at this discussion here. This was a fun thought experiment, and I’ve left it as-is. Please take the following as being %100 wrong.
I don’t believe that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is an accurate understanding of the mechanics of gravity. Of course the formulas for predicting behaviours are accurate, and have been proven time after time. But there’s a difference between establishing formulas for behaviour prediction, and understanding what’s going on in the back. You can come up with the right mathematical relationships for the wrong reasons. That’s what I believe Einstein’s theory to be: the right math for the wrong reasons.
Einstein believed that time was flexible, affected by gravity.
I believe that time doesn’t exist, other than a human abstraction to quantify the fourth dimension (dimensions themselves being an abstraction.) A clock doesn’t actually measure time itself – time isn’t a particle or thing you can detect. What your common watch is at it’s heart an oscillating crystal which we’ve associated a given number of oscillations to mean a unit we’ve given to quantify a fourth dimension, a second. This behaviour is constant relative to other observed phenomena over this fourth dimension, so we can use it as a means to establish differences between points in time. Like other dimensions, time would have no start or end, and it only has meaning when presented relative to something else. For this last point, think about it this way: if I say it is currently 12:45pm, we know that that’s relative to the start of the day, the day being relative to the month, the month to the year, and the year to a historical event. Remove these established points which we use to derive meaning from time, and time itself becomes immeasurable. Even when we say something happened 4.7 billion years ago, we need another point with which to compare it with (present time in this case.) Same with cartesian coordinates – without a center point to anchor coordinates (commonly (0,0)), coordinates lose meaning.
Time as an abstraction is thus static, no more flexible than the meaning of the number “one.” When you see the clocks of GPS satellites skew due to the effects of gravity, Einstein would argue that you’re witnessing the variability of time itself – relative to us, the satellite’s clocks would run slower. Relative to the satellite, we on Earth would be faster. Within the frame of reference of each, time would be the same. This would be due to the effects of gravity bending spacetime, he would argue, the effects which would be stronger for us Earthlings than the bodies further away from this mass that is our planet (assuming no other bodies existed.) This is because the force of gravity is proportional to the distance between both bodies.
I would argue that time itself is the same for both (being static), but that the effects in the current static four dimensions due to the difference in gravity alone accounts for the alterations we see in the output of these clocks.
I also believe photons to have a mass, and that the bending of light paths we see (gravitational lens) are not due to the warping of spacetime, but simply due to the gravitational pull on the photons by bodies in space. With the Einsteinian spacetime explanation, the light always travelled in a straight path relative to its frame of reference, but the space through which it travelled was curved due to gravity. With my explanation, light travelled was travelling in a path curved due to the pull of gravity. It would be “aware” of the curve in it’s path, if you will.
Current accepted theory would dictate that photons are massless. I disagree. With my theory, we can predict the mass of a photon. You can estimate the mass of the star that bends light, you know the positioning of the source relative to this planet, you know the speed at which light was travelling, and you know how much its path was bent to reach you. You can thus determine what the mass of the individual photons must have been for it to have been altered to that extent.
Of course, all of this would be much easier if we knew what gravity was. We still don’t. We can predict with great certainty its forces. We can measure it’s effects on bodies with incredible precision. But we have yet to understand what gravity itself is.
