Parody on the speed of a snail

Parody on the speed of a snail

We continue our excursion into the speed formula, starting off in only one inertial frame being our real world of the here and the now, being planet earth, also known as Cubic Land, during travels hitchhiking the Universe.

This is a parody, not at all aimed as a sleight on any scientist or scientific work - a body of knowledge I revere - but rather in a first step as the basis of the argument I will use as we hitchhike the Universe.

 

Our experimental model.

The sketch below shows our vantage point where Snellie, the snail, is going to race against Time in what is by now well known in literature as “The Great Snail Race”, but this time she is not going back to the injured Gary, but will be finishing the race – at least we hope so if she does not get too tired and the distance does not reach infinity. I start of with L3 as a finite distance, but I may well increase the distance to infinity in stead of meters.

The setup is this:

In the figure above the plane frame ABCD is a billboard, presently still opaque, because we do not want to see other inertial frames behind it. We only wish to experience our own inertial frame. In time this plane frame will become transparent as we explore movement behind it in other inertial frames. ABE is a horizontal plane on which the race will be run.

Snellie, our snail, will be runnig the gauntlet from A to E, a line oblique to the billboard. In this she will be timed by another female snail observer at Point E in the sketch.

Snails can only see two dimensions, so Snellie will only be able to see the XY plane and the oberserver E will only be able to see the YZ plane. The observer E will look at point A on the left side of the billboard where Snellie will start and press the stopwatch start button when she starts. The next event will occur when our observer E sees Snellie pass the right vertical post of the billboard at point B, when she will press the stop button of the stopwatch.

 

Notes on our assumptions and principles.

We specially selected a female observer at E, as it is well known in scientific circles that all male observers’ observations of female objects are subjective and affect the outcome of the experiment, because they will give some indeterminable and unknown advantages to female snails. We need impartiality.

We have done scientific tests on the speed of snails and they all gave exactly the same answer being one millimeter per second. We therefore know that this speed is fixed in this race.

We also know that the distance L1 which she will travel, as observed by our observer at vantage point E, is exactly two millimeters – the distance between A and B, as we have measured it with the latest laser equipment. The only variable in the experiment will be time.

Why are we choosing a snail in our experiment? The answer is twofold.

Firstly we are starting out from basic principles and working our way up from the speed of liquid waves to the speed of sound waves and then up to the speed of light waves, so we do not want to start with fast objects. Snails are known to be some of the slowest moving creatures on the face of the earth. It is conceded that some other animate objects moving over the face of the earth are even slower with speeds in microns per millennium, but that would not suit the timeframe of our experiment.

Secondly we want to eliminate any relativity effects. The speed of light is 3 x 10¹¹ times the speed of the snail, so that would eliminate any relativity effects.

To be consistent I n all our next experiments, we will take the width of our billboard as the distance our moving object will move in two seconds – in this case two millimeters.

 

Executing the experiment.

We ask Snellie, now at point A, to start moving, and our observer presses the stopwatch’s start button and expects to press the stop button in exactly two seconds, but to our surprise and chagrin, she only arrives at point E after sixty seconds.

 

Results of our experiment.

For all of us working on this project, it is a new discovery that we still do not completely know how to interpret. There is a ten second aberration in our time calculations.

We know that we are looking from a three-dimensional viewpoint which would of course differ from a two-dimensional viewpoint, we know that we should use vector algebra for calculating this distance and we know the distance L3 is exactly fifty millimeters.

We are quite sure of the speed we determined for Snellie of one millimeter per second and of the distance we calculated as fifty millimeters. So the only other thing that we can adjust is the time. Our fifty seconds has become sixty seconds and we call this time dilation.

The only possible explanation we can think of causing this time dilation in this case is the following:

In studying close-ups of the movement of Snellie, we discovered a hereto unknown phenomenon. Snails cannot breathe when they move with their noses in the sand and need to stop every so often, lift their heads to take a few deep breaths. The number of breaths they take depend on how long they were in a state of asphyxiation. The quantity can either be -13.6 eV or -3.4 eV if they inhale hydrogen and something different for other gases. That depends on their energy level when they start to inhale.

So we decided to subtract these short rest periods from the actual time and use a discrete quantum function as our time scale. This works well and explains the discrepency.

We feel that we have made a new discovery and we publish our unexpected and probably weird findings in all the reputable journals of the planet and tell our readers that God plays dice.

If there were snails on our project team with PhD’s, which we tried to source but could not find, they would not have discovered this error. For them, all things appear to be flat and they cannot see depth – or deep into things.

We thus learned from the experiment that there is a problem if we are working with domains which have different dimensions of space and different discrete quantum time functions. We cannot make an observation in Flatland and think it applies to Cubic land – or to stretch the argument - we in Cubic Land cannot make valid observations in Multi-dimensional Land, or even in other inertial frames, without making allowance for this.

And that brings us to Gödel’s two incompleteness theorems – and by extension - its validity in physics: The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e., an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.