From: Ashish Sirohi

To: (Individuals emails of Large Author group of  IceCube paper on Lorentz Violation)  

Cc: analysis@icecube.wisc.edu, giulia.pacchioni@nature.com, m.skipper@nature.com, hthorp@aaas.org, newseditors@newscientist.com, feedback@physorg.com, kostelec@indiana.edu, john.baez@ucr.edu

Sent: March 25, 2023

Subject: Factually Wrong Statements regarding Lorentz Violation in IceCube Paper and Blog

To: IceCube Paper Authors (with CC to a few others).

Dear Researchers,

I refer to the 2018 paper by IceCube Collaboration, Neutrino Interferometry for High-Precision Tests of Lorentz Symmetry with IceCube, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-018-0172-2 or https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.03434.pdf, and the related blog, https://blogs.nature.com/onyourwavelength/2018/07/17/beyond-einstein-with-neutrinos or https://physicscommunity.nature.com/posts/beyond-einstein-with-neutrinos

The blog opens by pointing to the popularity of a John Baez website, with approval. John Baez is a special relativity worshipper who is particularly notorious for disseminating false experimental information regarding special relativity.

The nature of special relativity dogma is that people love to declare and disseminate, without objective or independent research, that “Einstein was clearly right.” The IceCube blog further informs regarding “Lorentz violation”: “His theory of space-time has withstood many, many tests, to very high precision.”

The IceCube paper informs: “Very small violations of Lorentz symmetry, or Lorentz violation (LV), are allowed in many ultrahigh-energy theories, including string theory, non-commutative field theory and supersymmetry. The discovery of LV could be the first indication of such new physics. … Worldwide efforts are therefore underway to search for evidence of LV. The standard-model extension (SME) is an effective-field-theory framework to systematically study LV. The SME includes all possible types of LV … So far, all searches have obtained null results.”

What is Lorentz violation? Special Relativity has the two postulates and the Lorentz transformations. Lorentz violation has been more focused on testing the postulates than it has on the Lorentz transformations, though it covers violation of either. The IceCube paper has 10 citations to papers by Alan Kostelecký. The IceCube blog mentions the “IU Center for Space-Time Symmetries.” That page, https://iucss.sitehost.iu.edu, includes the Lorentz transformations. Kostelecký and his group purport to cover all possible violations, including measurements of time dilation of special relativity’s Lorentz transformations. So, in this communication, I take the term Lorentz violation to include all possible violations of special relativity – of its postulates or its equations. And this usage is consistent with citations in the IceCube paper and blog. I concentrate on violations of the time dilation equation of the Lorentz transformations.

Statements in the IceCube paper and blog regarding there having been no Lorenz violation are factually wrong.

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Let us look at the commendably honest time dilation failure coverage of the two science publications that, breaking from the way of physics today, are known for boldly and objectively reporting results that authorities may not want disseminated.

New Scientist reported in an article titled Time waits for no quasar – even though it should [Marcus Chown, “Time waits for no quasar – even though it should,” NewScientist.com (April 7, 2010), https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627554-200-time-waits-for-no-quasar-even-though-it-should]:

Using observations of nearly 900 quasars made over periods of up to 28 years, Hawkins compared patterns in the light between quasars about 6 billion light years from us with those at 10 billion light years away.

All quasars are broadly similar … So one would expect that a brightness variation on the scale of, say, a month in the closer group would be stretched to two months in the more distant group.

[Article quotes Hawkins:] “To my amazement, the [light signatures] were exactly the same … There was no time dilation in the more distant objects.”

Phys.org [Lisa Zyga, “Discovery that quasars don’t show time dilation mystifies astronomers,” Phys.org (April 9, 2010), https://phys.org/news/2010-04-discovery-quasars-dont-dilation-mystifies.html] noted:

“This quasar conundrum doesn’t seem to have an obvious explanation.”

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Let us look at the John Baez matter of crackpots and special relativity, and the factual basis regarding his claims. He has a list of experimental data to showcase that special relativity has passed all tests.

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The Baez list is endorsed and hosted by Baez at his university faculty account page, and written by two of his fellow relativity worshippers – all three turned out to be experts at providing experimental misinformation regarding relativity. This list does select two observations of quasars that they find useful but these are not about time dilation; their cherry-picking suppressed the quasar time dilation failure. The Baez list seemingly stopped being updated after 2007, but journal-published quasars time dilation violations of special relativity go back to 2001 [M. R. S. Hawkins, “Time Dilation and Quasar Variability,” Astrophys. J. 553 L97 (2001), http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/320683/fulltext/].  The Baez list has been heavily relied upon by physics professionals. We sent our paper to Baez along with the quasar citation, and also informed him of our putting a negative note about the list on our website. But, of course, the experimental list remains unchanged. It is a sad state of affairs that so many pages about relativity (and these include published books and academic articles) give the Baez link [http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/experiments.html], and continue to help the most prolific physics crackpot, John Baez, spread misinformation. … Baez has often used above deceitful or incompetent experimental list to advance the relativity-worshiping cause and to dismiss all who would challenge special relativity as being “crackpots.”

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[Other] science news publications did not cover quasar time dilation failure either, and we believe physics authorities they consulted about the experiment would have played a role in stopping them from such reporting. History must particularly examine the contribution of major science reporting publications such as Nature and Science in keeping the professional world believing in relativity. … Science reports in an article titled Time Slows When You’re on the Fly – New experiment confirms Einstein’s prediction of time dilation to unprecedented precision, “Any theories that move beyond special relativity would have” “this very tight margin” and adds how this means trouble for the “poor crackpot” holding doubts about time dilation [Elizabeth Quill, “Time Slows When You’re on the Fly,” Science (November 13, 2007), https://www.science.org/content/article/time-slows-when-youre-fly]. Nature Physics reports in an article titled Special relativity – Ticking clocks: “This principle has been subject to numerous experimental tests, but no sign of violation has yet been spotted … in experiments measuring time dilation” [I. Georgescu, “Ticking clocks,” Nature Phys 13, 529 (2017), https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys4169]

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While physics genuinely tries to pursue truth and objective science, when it comes to special relativity physics is a truth evading church.

You have to diversify your sources of knowledge if you want to know objective experimental and other truth regarding Lorentz violations because, as shown above, many sources in the media and physics research want to suppress and evade these truths. The universe – it seems from the emerging zero time dilation in certain cosmic clocks – does not respect the dictate of Church of Physics authorities that any new physics needs to have the Lorentz transformations as a limiting case. Relativity-worshippers are fighting back by ignoring these experimental facts and pervading physics with statements that there has been no Lorentz violation. The experimental reality is that there has been no violation whatsoever when it comes to the postulates (and IceCube is among the long list of those who provides such confirmation); on the other hand, nature is not even limiting down to the Lorentz transformations and experimentalists (including the IceCube group) writing about Lorentz violation ignore these dramatic violations! If one is interested in the pursuit of truth then one must examine the matter of special relativity experimental and theoretical problems on one’s own.

The above paragraphs enclosed within a pair of “—-” are quoted verbatim from my book. I give one more quote:

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Beyond quasars, experimental failures of the time dilation equation of relativity’s Lorentz transformations have now begun piling up across space in gamma-ray bursts and even supernovae explosions; supernovae were thought to obey relativity’s time dilation but it is now being realized that this was possibly because of potential bias that caused a methodology whose aim seems to have been to prove relativity right. Thus there are possibly conflicting telescopic observations regarding celestial bodies and time dilation. (Related citations are in our paper … p. 11).

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How can it be that the Lorentz transformations are failing confirmation while the postulates continue to hold perfectly? If you want to know the reason, do read the attached paper.

The book mentioned above is Toppling Relativity: My Struggle With the Church of Physics and Other Evaders of Truth, published December 2022, https://www.amazon.com/Toppling-Relativity-Struggle-Physics-Evaders-ebook/dp/B0BQWX8CD8 . See https://churchofphysics.org for chapter excerpts.

I do not have anything to say regarding testing on Lorentz violation within the neutrino sector; the above is only about the broader Lorentz violation statements made by IceCube. However, it is most important to have the foundations correct, in my view.

Please feel free to write back with any comments.

Thanks and regards,

Ashish Sirohi

Attachment: Paper – Space is Discrete for Mass and Continuous for Light

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