Einstein in Alice Wonderland

This a follow up of the previous post.

The mathematician Lewis Carroll anticipated Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity SR (1905) in his famous Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) filled with "space contraction" and "time dilation" as core themes of the book. Very amusing and mind boggling! Einstein must have read the book in his youth, although he did not read much, since the connections cannot be accidental. 

In a further discussion with chatGPT representing mainstream professional physicists view, the following is made clear:

• A matter-only world is a Newton world to be Galilean invariant. 
• Adding light changes this matter-only world to be instead Lorentz invariant, even if there is no interaction between light and matter.
• Adding light to a matter-only world "reveals the true spacetime structure" to be Lorentzian and not Galilean as only an approximation of Lorentzian. 

This is really a very Grand Plan for the world and it is important to see what the basis is. We thus recall the form of a Galilean transformation and a Lorentz transformation between two space-time coordinates $(x,t)$ and $(x^\prime ,t^\prime )$ in two inertial systems moving with speed $v$ with respect to each other, assuming  speed of light = 1:

• Galilean: $x^\prime = x-vt$ and $t^\prime =t$.
• Lorentz: $x^\prime = \gamma (x-vt)$ and $t^\prime =\gamma (t-vx)$ with $\gamma =\frac{1}{\sqrt{1-v^2}}$.

We see two very simple linear transformations so simple that even Alice would understand the mathematics. We see the "time dilation" aspect of Lorentz in the dependence in the primed time coordinate $t^\prime =\gamma (t-vx)$ on the space coordinate $x$. In short, a Lorentz transformation mixes space and time, which a Galilean does not. 

The idea carried by modern physics is now that a Lorentz transformation reveals the "true nature of spacetime," which thus is not that of a Galilean transformation. 

But is this credible? How can a simple linear transformation reveal the true nature of a spacetime without physics? 

A Galilean transformation expresses that measurement of velocity depends on chosen coordinate system in a specific simple way, while Nature does not use any coordinate system at all. Physicists are thus free to chose coordinate system as they like and Nature will not protest.

Lorentz clearly stated that a Lorentz transformation has no physical meaning. But a Galilean transformation can be given direct physical meaning in the form of meter sticks moving with constant velocity keeping their length and clocks unaffected by such motion. 

But this kind of argumentation is dismissed by a modern physicist because it questions Wonderland Science. The Lorentz transformation in all its simplicity is claimed to reveal the "true nature of spacetime" and there is nothing more to say. Discussion closed. Forget what Lorentz said!

SR was from the beginning met with neglect or skepticism and in the motivation for the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics to Einstein the Nobel Committee explicitly expressed that the Prize was given to Einstein despite his SR physics never done before or after. In the 1920s quantum mechanics took over with a Galilean invariant Schrödinger equation (1925) followed by a Lorentz invariant Dirac equation (1928), which took over the scene when Schrödinger left the field quickly thereafter. Dirac's equation gave SR respectability, while Einstein was removed from the scene by Bohr. 

Today SR is kept like a toy model with amusing properties, but is no longer subject to scientific study. But the idea of spacetime with time mixed into space is alive in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity GR also believed to reveal the "true nature of space time" now as "curved spacetime". But no Nobel Prize to GR either. Maybe the true nature of space and time is not revealed in a coordinate transformation…