lodestar

As I said, most of the analogies with computers simply don't work. It's not nearly as simple as you imagine. A computer program is information, beyond the physical medium where it's stored, but information only exists as a cognitive phenomenon. What's a cognitive phenomenon and how it relates to the physical realm? You're back to the same problem. No. Computers also need an operator. This is the same 'homunculus argument' problem that appears when you try to explain vision by analogy with a camera. It might help understand parts of it for practical purposes, but it doesn't work at the conceptual level. That statement is contradictory. If there is nothing that is non-physical, then everything is necessarily only the sum of its physical parts. If the physical parts together add something beyond their sum, that something is necessarily non-physical.

Buddy... any simulation is a reduction. Neurobiologists might have worked out pretty well how many known chemical interactions happen in the nervous system, but obviously, that's eons away from actually solving the many binding problems. There are many more fundamental philosophical issues to be solved before empirical knowledge of brain functions can actually answer anything.

Could you copy all the currently quantifiable properties of a living brain into a sufficiently large computer? Sure, why not? It only depends on how much information you can measure. But copying all the currently quantifiable properties of a living brain isn't copying the brain itself, nor whatever phenomena arise from it. How could you tell if it would have thoughts or not if we can't even tell for sure anyone else besides ourselves is thinking? Curiously, the prevailing model of brain function always follow the dominant technology of the time. Future scientists will be as amused by our expectations to reduce the brain functions to an electronic computer as much as we are amused by 18th century scientists who had similar expectations with hydraulic systems.

My logic? I'm not arguing on how the speculated properties of Dark matter fit the observations. Of course it does, that's what it was made for. I'm arguing that Dark matter is an ad hoc hypothesis used as a fudge factor to preserve another ad hoc hypothesis that was used as a fudge factor to preserve even another ad hoc hypothesis that was again used as a fudge factor to preserve an assumption that is taken on purely ideological grounds. While one can argue that neutrinos also were an ad hoc hypothesis, they weren't used as fudge factors to preserve another ad hoc hypothesis like that. That's my logic, and your analogy obviously fails. Needless to say, there's actual physical evidence for neutrinos, and none for Dark Matter, despite decades looking for it. Fairly certain? Until at least a single particle is actually detected, the degree of certainty for Dark Matter only goes as far as the degree of certainty for the Cosmological Principle itself goes, which is nowhere, since it is a fundamental dogma. The certainty of it depends only on your willingness to believe in it. The choice is ideological, not scientific. It all boils down to which one you are more willing to swallow: Dark Matter or scrapping the Cosmological Principle? http://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.1443.pdf

No problem. TheGatesofLogic = Logic Gates... that makes sense.

Read the Wang and Hatch article mentioned above, and the article they answer to, Ashby's Relativity and the Global Positioning System. It's not nearly as simple as you think it is. http://www.worldnpa.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_3053.pdf http://courses.washington.edu/ega/more_papers/GPS_relativity.pdf

I guess the gates of logic just closed. You say I can't argue something if I don't have an argument, yet, you're the one appealing to authority without presenting any counter-argument to what I said? It's funny how often that happens. Someone questions me on something related to relativity, I give an answer, and instead of a counter-argument pointing to whatever they think is wrong with my answer, they enter the defensive mode and start saying relativity is the most proven theory, there's no evidence against it, bla, bla bla. Please, to use your own statement, I can't argue something if you don't have an argument. What's your argument? Even assuming all what you said is true and indeed it is the most extensively tested theory in all of history and there's no evidence against it, how is that a counter-argument to what I said?

Relative to what? You don't have any other reference to that but Earth. The relative error is computed based on the assumption that the same experiment will give the same results anywhere else. That's the point. Nope. I'm complaining to the cartographers that they can't say the Earth actually is flat just because that's the only way they can make a map that works. Well... send that to him. From my experience, he's always very cordial and answer questions very quickly. All alternative hypotheses assumed a moving Earth. The hypotheses where Earth isn't moving were excluded a priori on ideological grounds. All papers back then made that clear. The ether was never falsified, proof of that is how Einstein put it back into the picture in the General Relativity after realizing he couldn't part with it. On the appendix of Galileo Was Wrong, Robert Bennett spends 150 pages exposing how to this day there are more experiments giving results inconsistent with Special Relativity than with ether. Why people defending relativity love to talk about hypothetical results of thought experiments as if they were actually real? That's really an interesting pattern. I don't know what happens with an MM-experiment in a moving frame. I'm not aware of any. You want to talk about hypothetical results while there are around at least a dozen different major interferometric experiments done that give results inconsistent with Special and General Relativity? To say that's a better option is merely playing semantics, like the other guy who was saying "the universe 'simply' came into being". That alternative is even less parsimonious than the others, since it basically involves reinventing all physics. That's not an assumption. The center of mass of a gyroscope doesn't move. Those forces do have an effect on anything that's not materially attached to the center. They can resolve themselves in many effects on the surface, coriolis, centrifugal, euler, seasons, tides, tectonic movements, etc. As a curiosity, that's how I got interested in Geocentrism. Back in 2011, after some crackpots claimed we were given warning of the 2010 Haiti earthquake by the alignment of a recently discovered approaching comet, just for the fun of it I crossed data from the US Geological Survey database with the orbits of many known comets in the JPL Horizons system, accounting for their distance and angle of alignment with the Earth and the Sun. I found many similar alignments correlated with earthquakes and took note, but the comet they were talking about really nailed it. The earthquake happened almost in the same day when the angle of alignment was closest to 180º. As scaring as that can be, this method predicted the 2011 Japan earthquake within less than a week, on the next alignment. Coincidence, probably. I had even forgot it by the time it happened, but after it happened, I realized many people found a similar correlation, and that was fueling all kinds of catastrophisms and conspiracy theories, turbo-charged by the whole 2012 mayan calendary thing. If the correlation had any truth to it, on the next alignment the effects indeed would be catastrophic, much more than what happened in Japan. An old physics colleague who actually knew about geocentrism told me that would make some sense in the geocentric model, since it basically follows the machian principle on these matters, and that's how I got interested in it. As I said, I have an interest in scientific imposture, and heard about geocentrists claims before, but up to that point I never investigated it more seriously because I imagined they were claiming there was some conspiracy hiding everything, like flat-earthers. No matter how much my rational side kept saying that was just a funny coincidence, I can't tell you how relieved my lizard brain was when I read on the news that the comet was disintegrated by a coronal mass ejection months before the predicted next alignment. Actually, the ideological issue at the root of the problem is the oldest there is: purpose vs. chance. Biblical creation vs. epicurean casualism. All existent myths follow that model, and these modern ideological disputes, be it creationists vs. evolutionists, big-bang/relativists vs. geocentrists, etc, don't have as much to do with science as they have to do with the fact that the modern western world is so impoverished of other forms of expression that it can no longer talk of myths other than by framing them in the form of a scientific hypothesis. It's weird when you realize, for instance, that the role science fiction has since it began is precisely to translate the same old myths humanity always had to a scientific jargon. Strange times... So, yes... you're guilty as charged. But back to the topic, that's essentially the same previous objection, and you also used it regarding something in the conference or podcast. As I said, it's answered by the book... the cd-rom even has some animations explaining it. If you don't want to read the book, it's also answered by Martin Selbrede in the article below. Basically, not only Earth is not moving besides all those forces, they are precisely the reason why it doesn't move. It is often objected that if geocentricity were true, and the rotating heavens were dragging Foucault pendula and weather systems around, why doesn't that force pull on the earth itself and drag it along, causing it to eventually rotate in sync with the heavens? It appears that this straightforward application of torque to the earth should cause it to rotate in sum, but this turns out to be an oversimplification. As the heavens rotate, and the firmament rotates on an axis through the earth's poles, each firmament Al particle (the ones comprising the ultradense lattice) also rotates with the same angular velocity. Ironically, this is precisely the reason the earth can't be moved. In MT&W's Gravitation, pg. 1119- 1120, we are invited to ponder the following scenario: “Consider a rotating, solid sphere immersed in a viscous fluid. As it rotates, the sphere will drag the fluid along with it. At various points in the fluid, set down little rods, and watch how the fluid rotates as it flows past. Near the poles the fluid will clearly rotate the rods in the same direction as the sphere rotates. But near the equator, because the fluid is dragged more rapidly at small radii than at large, the end of a rod closest to the sphere is dragged by the fluid more rapidly than the far end of the rod. Consequently, the rod rotates in the direction opposite to the rotation of the sphere. This analogy can be made mathematically rigorous.†Now reverse the situation. If we want to cause the sphere to rotate clockwise, we would need to turn the rods at the poles clockwise, and the ones at the equators counterclockwise. (Consider the equator as a big gear, and the firmament Al particles as small gears that engage it. It is intuitively obvious that the small gears must always turn in contrary motion to the large one at the equator.) This picture is clear then: to turn the sphere, the rotation of the particles (MT&W's “rods†and this author's “gearsâ€Â) at the poles must be the opposite of that at the equator. However, in the case of a rotating firmament, all the particles are rotating in the same direction, with the angular velocity common to the entire firmament. The equatorial inertial drag is in the opposite direction as that acting near the poles. Using calculus, one integrates the effect from the center of the Earth outward in infinitesimal shells, showing that the Earth is in fact locked in place, the resulting inertial shear being distributed throughout the Earth's internal volume. It could be demonstrated that were the Earth to be pushed out of its “station keeping†position, the uneven force distribution would return it to its equilibrium state. Intriguingly, the significance of these internal forces on seismic stress, plate tectonics, and the earth's magnetic field may prove central, if so be that these postulates survive the inevitable peer review to come. http://www.geocentricity.com/ba1/no071/selbrede.html Being a jerk doesn't make one wrong. I think Einstein was one of the greatest jerks who ever lived, considering how many ideas he stole without giving due credit, and even mocked that by saying the often quoted "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources". Yet, I don't say he's wrong because I think that. You can easily falsify an observation? Man... that's the weirdest petitio principii I've ever seen. If he's saying the radar data from the surface of Venus matches a c + v "newtonian light speed" and the JPL confirms that by adding the Earth's motion and doing the same for signal transit time in solar system probes, you're talking about falsifying it by looking at distant binaries? If the constant c is invalidated in our own backyard, how can you falsify that by distant observations that rely on constant c itself to be interpreted as observational facts? If the constant c is invalidated in the Solar System, you have to find an alternative explanation for the phenomena of apparent constant c somewhere else, Ritzian theory, Dingle's objections, whatever, but you can't say that invalidates the observation made here. Yep... after ten years, after he was fired for "disgracing his team", etc. Schechtman was just lucky that Pauling died first. Sure, that's fine as long as you take the another ad hoc hypothesis of relativity of simultaneity to solve the problem of B and C running slower than each other at the same time. So far we have four ad hoc hypothesis piling up to solve each other, and you can get rid of all them if you assume the ECI is an actual absolute frame. Apparent time dilation can be accounted for in the ether theory. Actual time dilation can't. I'm not thinking of any specific, because frankly, no matter what problems they come up with, I doubt it's worse than Dark Matter. Are you saying the assumption that the universe has a particular ammount of matter isn't violated by the observation that there's only 5% of that visible matter? How is that? If you believe in that, well... assume that I have a billion dollars. The observation that my bank account only has a few bucks doesn't violate that assumption. I just need much more money. All the equations still work just fine and are even testable when you add my daughter's Monopoly bills to my balance (she draws a few extra zeroes on the 100 dollar bills for excitement). I have a very nice bridge for sale, by the way... Sorry, but that's precisely what it is. The lack of something can't be evidence that this something actually exists and just can't be observed. It's as simple as that. I can use that as an ad hoc hypothesis for anything, from dark matter to leprechaums. The lack of something is evidence that the assumptions that led to that expectation are wrong. The whole point of this discussion is precisely that the insistence on this is due to ideological motivation. Can you deny in good conscience that if the MM experiment or Hubble's observations could have been performed at the time of the Galileo trial, we wouldn't be having this discussion now? I said "Cosmogony", not "Cosmology". Well.. I didn't quote the article for that, I quote it for their statement that the JPL software was using a Solar Barycentric corrected with the ECI and c constant to the ECI for navigation and signal transit time. That is not a thought experiment. That's a fact. Anyway, how can that be a mistake if that's precisely the point of the experiment? How is that a mistake if GPS works fine with pre-launch synchronization and no further adjustment, as long as the master clock is in the ECI? As a matter of fact, when they use the satellite inter-tracking for syncing in orbit they have to take the Sagnac Effect into account, and that shouldn't be necessary if SR is valid. Ashby's original article goes through a lot of wordplay to circumvent that fact. Curiously, when we do what you say is a mistake, everything just works and for some strange coincidence, works with the ECI. When we do what you say it should be done to correct the mistake, it only works if we add a further correction that wasn't supposed to be needed. Thinking about this, there's one MM experiment in a moving frame, the GPS satellite network itself. I realized Howard Hayden already pointed that, and Robert Bennett considers this on the Galileo Was Wrong book. Unfortunately, I can't find Hayden's article in full, and you won't read Galileo Was Wrong, so... Basically, he says the latest satellites with inter-tracking are a pretty good implementation of the hypothetical huge interferometer floating around the whole Earth proposed by Michelson himself. As I said above, they can be synchronized with respect to each other using the inter-tracking, assuming each pair would be in its own frame, but you shouldn't have any Sagnac effect in that. We actually do have, which is consistent with the Sagnac effect being due to any motion relative to the ECI. Second, if you take the whole network to be a huge interferometer detecting the Earth's motion around the Sun, we should have to correct the clocks for the gradient of the Sun's gravitational potential, but we don't. It just works. One interesting fact I just noticed is that GPS raw pseudo-ranges show an 'unexplained' 12-hour sidereal period correlated with the Sun direction, and that reminded me of a 1983 experiment that recorded 'unexplained' ground pulsations also with the same 12-hour sidereal period. Weird...

That explains it all. You think I was arrogant, you can't stand that, and now you want to expose me for that? Fine. Then just say that to me as the civilized human being I assume you are, and I'll even agree with you that I was arrogant at some points. I was arrogant because some members were patronizing me, trying to ridicularize what I said without any substantial argument and ostracize me for disagreeing, and I believe arrogance is an adequate answer in that situation. I wasn't arrogant with Z-Man or Right, for instance, who not only made the discussion very productive, but were serious about it, without hysterical reactions. There's no need to turn this into a personal matter or distort what I said to present me as something I'm not. If you still have any issues left, just say it and we settle it. If you have questions you'd like an answer for, being aggressive or disrespectful when you ask them isn't the best approach. By the way, if you have questions regarding the geocentrism issue, ask in the other topic Z-Man created for that. If you have questions regarding the QM issue, ask here.

Let's see what I actually said: So, as I just answered above, I'm not saying solving the problem it's easy. I'm saying it becomes easy once you understand the root of the problem. That's the hard part. You don't know many serious philosophers then. Leibniz, Lavelle, Guénon, etc. We could probably enumerate all the traditionalists here. Not only I answered that, but you even replied to my answer itself, without objecting to it in any way, just ranting on other unrelated issues. You do have a short memory... http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/67713-Making-Earth-the-Center-of-the-Solar-System?p=942816&viewfull=1#post942816 You really have memory issues. I gave you names and quotes after you asked me for "Any quote, or even better, any explaination, by a real physicist saying that a geocentric system solves such problems is also welcome": http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/67713-Making-Earth-the-Center-of-the-Solar-System?p=942990&viewfull=1#post942990 Not only you don't remember that I did the "quote-mining" because you asked for it, you obviously remember wrong, because there's nothing philosophical about them. You mean, like the Galileo Was Wrong book I already recommended twice? Well... I provided the links above to make that task easier for everyone. Right isn't saying the same thing I'm saying, as it's obvious from my last response to him. He's still taking the materialism-determinism-mechanicism issue to be merely ideological, while the whole point here is that quantum phenomena presents empirical evidence against it. Seriously, this topic is no longer productive, and from the last posts, it seems you have something personal to settle with me, considering your insistence on distorting what I said. I won't contribute with that. Goodbye.

Now you're just inventing things. I never said the whole world is too dumb to resolve the problem. Quite the opposite. I said precisely that you can't reason your way out of it, because you tend to reason in the very same terms that lead to the the problem. It's a cultural phenomenon, not an intellectual shortcoming. I said more than once that one usually needs some sort of cathartic experience to understand the root of it, because that's my own personal experience and of other people I know. I never said it's easy. I said "once you realize the root of the problem, the solution is simple". That's not the same as saying it's easy. I never claimed to have that knowledge. Again, quite the opposite. I said precisely that in those issues being debated here, no one can claim knowledge of actual observational facts of the universe besides what we can see from the very same geocentric frame that's in question, and those facts support many possible views, including the geocentric and big-bang/relativistic. I never claimed to have knowledge of relativity, beyond the elementary needed to support the claim above, which isn't much. As a matter of fact, I said more than once that I actually dropped physics when I realized my real interest was philosophy. I never claimed the Earth is the center of the universe. I said more than once that I'm not a geocentrist, and not a relativist either. What I said is that this is also a valid interpretation of the few observational facts that we have, and they don't require as many nonsensical assumptions as the mainstream alternative. That's a lie. Not only I went out of my way to answer everything pertinent to the topic, I mentioned several sources. I can remember now the mentions to Wolfgang Smith's Quantum Enigma and The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology, Hubble's Observational Approach to Cosmology, Einstein and Infeld, Robert Sungenis' Galileo Was Wrong, Ludwik Kostro's Einstein and the Ether, the articles on quasar redshift quantization, and many others. I don't expect you to believe in anything. Either you do or you don't. I could have simply ignored you when it was clear you don't understand the issue, but I even tried to explain to you many times. If you actually understood what I'm saying, you wouldn't feel the need to lie about my previous posts like you're doing now. If you disagree with me or my presence here makes you uncomfortable, just say so and we can try to find an arrangement other than the moderators closing the topic like they did before. What you just did is simply dishonest.

This one too. Please, read the previous topic.

Seriously, just read the previous topic. You're not saying anything new here.

But to support it you still need the same assumption. The 'ground' clock isn't in a real inertial frame, since you assume the Earth is moving, so in order to make that comparison, it has to pass through the ECI anyway. When you do that, the data also corresponds exactly to an universe where the ECI is the absolute frame. In order to call that a 'proof', you depend on the initial assumption that there are no absolute reference frames to exclude this possibility. it's the same petitio principii. Buddy, no need to use caps. First of all, that's an ad hoc hypothesis, and nobody is obligated to prove an ad hoc hypothesis wrong in order to reject it. If that were a requirement, I could make any ridiculous claim, come up with an ad hoc hypothesis to preserve it from counter evidence, and require you to prove that wrong. Second, Nobody here is saying Relativity is wrong, although I personally believe it is nonsense. What's being said is that relativity is not the only answer that fits observed phenomena, and I bet that even among the most radical relativists, you'll have a hard time finding one who disagrees with that.

Buddy... your attempt at sarcasm couldn't have backfired in a worst way. NASA uses whatever system is more convenient, since they know orbital mechanics better than you or me and know they are equivalent. Not only the JPL does use the ECI for near-Earth navigation, but they also use the ECI for corrections of the solar barycentric frame used for interplanetary navigation, not to mention how they use c as constant to the ECI frame and not relative to the transceivers for signal transit time. http://www.worldnpa.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_3053.pdf I don't know if they secretly believe in geocentrism, but certainly, they don't doubt it enough to risk their jobs on it...

First, that's not an antithesis at all. Both are equally plausible. Second, you're committing the same petitio principii the other guy above did, since the assumption that nothing can move faster than light is needed for the ad hoc hypothesis used to circumvent the lack of Earth's observable motion. Not at all. First, the problem isn't that the experiments failed, but that they failed to show any relative movement between Earth and the ether. The conclusion that Earth isn't really moving is excluded a priori. Second, the physical properties attributed to the space itself by the General Relativity don't make it much different from the ether in the first place. It's just playing semantics. This has already been discussed on the previous topic that lead to this one, there's no need to repeat it. Read Ludwik Kostro's Einstein and the Ether. You're obviously not aware of the model proposed by modern geocentrists and imagines they are talking about the ptolemaic model. Your participation on the topic would be more constructive if you read the previous topic, since you're not aware of the scope here. What the modern geocentrists propose is simply that the ECI frame is an actual absolute frame. I didn't choose the topic's title, but if what you're saying were the truth, no evolution of knowledge would be possible. All knowledge begins as an alternative to the currently accepted knowledge.

You're assuming the conclusion you are trying to prove as a premise itself. I can give an absolute answer if there's an absolute frame of reference. You're starting from the assumption that there's no absolute frame of reference and everything is necessarily moving to prove that very same assumption.

Pragmatism is an heuristic, not logic. When you throw out the part of the question you can't answer as irrelevant, any answer is fine. That's a nice trick. I tried to do that on my exams once, saying the question I didn't knew the answer to was irrelevant. The teacher didn't buy it. It's not about being defensive. If a person doesn't have the absolutely minimum philosophical background, he/she won't understand the issue here and will struggle with it, trying to make it fit the premises of the scientific method. Have you read the whole topic? The point here is precisely how quantum phenomena are empirical evidence that the materialist-reductionist-mechanicist premises are wrong. If I am trying to explain that, it's obvious that someone who can't even contemplate the possibility that a being is something else beyond the sum of its parts won't ever understand it. Obviously, when someone goes a step beyond and confuses the premises of materialism with reality itself, he can't conceive a reality without that, and any attempt to explain this is a waste of time. I'm not trying to convince anyone that materialism is wrong, although that's pretty easy to do when you throw away the root fallacy of separating the cogniscent subject and cognizable object. I'm just saying that as long as you think materialism is the reality itself, you won't understand what I'm talking about. The jury is still out because they are judging from the same root fallacy I mentioned above.

But that's precisely the point. Is there any situation in reality where the speed of light is measured in an actual vacuum in free-fall? Obviously not. Even if there was, wouldn't that contradict the freedom to choose the SR inertial frame anyway? You can call that 'coordinate speed of light' if you want, and make up the math to rescue you, but it doesn't change the fact it was a surreptitiously way to scrap the constancy of light from GR, pretty much like attributing physical properties to the vacuum was a surreptitiously way to get the ether back after scrapping it in SR. Well... first of all, I already made this clear in the previous topic, but it's probably lost or forgotten in all of this, so let's make it clear again. I'm not here defending geocentrism. My main interest isn't Physics. My interest is Philosophy, and as I said before, I have a particular interest in scientific imposture because I figured in many cases they happen due to bad philosophy, not necessarily dishonesty. I recommended the book because it's easier for you to read it and figure out your objections, than we debate it indirectly here, since you know the physics much better than I do, and my main interest isn't the physics anyway. To leave no room for misinterpretation, that was my educated way to say that we reached a point where it might be more productive for you to read the book by yourself than debate its contents with me. Second, my interest in geocentrism only goes where the arguments used for it show some degree of imposture in mainstream science. Scientifically, I don't agree with geocentrists any more than I agree with mainstream. I'd even accept your sarcastic remark that anything that fails in mainstream science is taken by them to mean that geocentrism is true, because I see no difference between that and how scientists use all sort of tricks to workaround ideologically unacceptable observations. The issue for me, which is how this relates to the QM topic, is whether someone is taking their metaphysical and epistemological assumptions as reality itself. As far as I'm concerned, both sides of the issue do that, but only mainstream scientists do it and at the same time claim that philosophy is dead, or that only science can give an accurate description of reality, or even that modern science is solely evidence-based and lacks any ideological motivation in its assumptions. Finally, all your objections related to the 2010 conference and the review on it are answered by the book, and this is no hyperbole. I'm not saying they are correct, I'm not saying I can validate all of them, I'm just saying they are answered, I read them, and for my purposes, it was more than enough. If you don't want to read it, fine, but you can't refuse to read it and expect me to defend the conference, or the author, or whatever else from your critique here, when it's already answered by the book itself. I will reserve the right to answer only objections to what I said. Even assuming that's truth, neither can any other. The point isn't that an Earth-centered model based purely on Newtonian mechanics gives precise descriptions, but that the assumptions needed to get it working aren't more implausible than any other, and some argue are much more parsimonious. Correct. I think you missed the point. Sungenis doesn't claim the exact same structure you'd have with the newtonian universe would fit the GR universe with the LTB metrics, but simply that it would allow an Earth centered in the LTB sphere, that also fits the observations, and there's no argument for or against one or the other. Sure, you'd still need Dark Matter, but that's not the point in this case. If I remember correctly, I don't have the book at hand now, I think his point was to explain to someone how you can have a center in the GR universe. That's nonsense. Mainstream science says that as an ad hoc hypothesis to preserve the assumption that Earth is moving after experiments couldn't detect the movement! How the burden of proof lies on me, to counter an ad hoc hypothesis used to preserve an assumption? If no observations could detect movement, how the burden of proof is on who is saying the Earth actually isn't moving, and not on who is saying that due to some magical property of space, the Earth actually is moving, but it looks like it's not moving? That's like mainstream science claiming pigs can fly, and then I say nobody ever observed a pig flying, and mainstream science then claims pigs only fly when nobody is watching and the burden of proof to counter that is on me. All attempts made so far to measure that movement show no significant relative speed. Possible conclusions: 1. Assuming Earth is really moving, assume it drags a pocket of ether with it, and we can only detect some residual movement. 2. Assuming Earth is really moving, assume the movement causes the ether to compress the Earth, shortening it's length by almost the exact amount needed to make the experiment to show no relative movement. 3. Assuming Earth is really moving, assume the movement causes the space itself to change its dimensions by almost the exact amount needed to make the experiment show no relative movement. 4. The Earth isn't really moving. How can someone claim Occam's razor favors option 3 and not 4 is beyond me. I'd have no problem if scientists admitted in public that they don't like option 4 for ideological reasons, but very few do that, and in very, very obscure ways. I don't think performing the experiment would be a problem. I actually don't think they'd let you publish it in any respectable journal if you found results contradicting the mainstream. It's not hard at all to find scientists who were victims of character assassination, ostracized, fired, etc, because they insisted on publishing results against the mainstream assumptions. When they eventually publish independently, it's even easier to label them as crackpots and conspiracy theorists. Since it bears on this topic, read Bryan Wallace's The Farce of Physics (it's short and freely available, by the way, so you don't have to 'support' him). He always faced some resistance as a critic of relativity, but when he tried to publish his study on how the JPL was using c+v and not just c for analysis of signal transit time in the solar system with better results, not a single journal accepted his article, even after confirmation by other physicists. Another good example is Halton Arp. Even if you believe evidence later proved he was wrong, there's no way to deny that he was dismissed and ostracized on ideological grounds. Mainstream scientists were just lucky that time. I have a large collection of similar cases in other fields. One interesting case is recent Nobel prize in Chemistry Dan Schechtman. For over a decade he was ridicularized and ostracized because of his findings on quasicrystals, mainly by Linus Pauling. He only gained some acceptance and eventually received the desired recognition after Pauling died. I always wondered what would have happened if Schechtman died first. As Max Planck used to say, science advances one funeral at a time. No, there aren't, because you don't have an 'absolute' clock to compare with. You can only do all those comparisons by taking the 'absolute' reference in any of those experiments to be the Earth's center in the ECI, so the point is moot. First, only two sources of redshift are known to work with the assumption that Earth is moving. If you're not taking that, there are dozens of explanations proposed over the years, beginning with Hubble himself. Second, I wouldn't say 95% missing when the source of redshift is assumed to be Doppler can be called "working consistently". Third, you can say Doppler works consistently with the other assumptions, including the assumption that 95% of the universe is made of make-believe matter with the magical property that it can't be observed directly. That doesn't add much. Consistency with other assumptions of the same interpretation isn't an argument in favor of that interpretation over others, it's the basic requirement. The problem isn't merely being ad hoc, but being an ad hoc hypothesis used to salvage a theory from an observation that violates an assumption. That's nonsense. We assume something precisely because we don't know yet. It's a promisory note we take in order to advance our practical knowledge now, with the compromise of scrapping it in the future if it proves wrong. To figure an ad hoc hypothesis to circumvent data that invalidates the assumption instead of getting rid of the assumption is dishonesty, plain and simple. That's more physics than I can handle. From my reading of his paper, I understood it how I explained. If he actually added relativistic corrections, it's not at all what I thought. Even that isn't really the case. I did some research on the issue following your objection, and from what I could find, redshifts being due to centrifugal force is just an educated guess at this point. Sungenis says he's doing some research on the issue. According to him, the CF model predicts there would be little or no redshift on or near the north/south pole, and even the blueshift in many cases. I'm curious about your argument on that. Metaphysics is within the scope of science? The problem you describe doesn't seem to be very subtle. I accept your argument for now since I can't say much on the issue, but I agree that it invalidates the study if it's correct. I still think it's strange that such a fundamental error was overlooked by critics, even if there were just a few, and there's nothing published that mentions it. Regarding the biased researcher argument, that goes both ways. Sure, scientists looking for evidence for unconventional ideas might make mistakes and overlook them, in good faith or not, but scientists looking for evidence for mainstream ideas also do the same. We're all humans after all, and humans hate being wrong.

Why would I want to do that? What reason do I have to act dishonestly? It's not like there's some great gain from winning an argument here. If you want to believe my motivation is to deceive and frustrate you for my personal amusement, it's up to you. All I say is that the more you believe in that, the further you will be from actually understanding what the problem is. I'll try to explain again, for the last time. If you still think I'm just being dishonest after this, well... it's up to you. I understand what you're saying, and I'm not ignoring it, it's just not what I'm talking about. You can call it sound, or perception of sound, or quajibo, or XPTO or anything else. Even if we take all possible definitions of sound in physics, in neuroscience, in musical theory, all those definitions together don't exist by themselves without a cognitive phenomenon that we call sound. So, what you're saying is that what you call 'sound' is the physical component and what you call 'perception of sound' is the neurological or psychological component? Fine. Great. But no matter in how many components you break it up, there's one cognitive phenomenon above all the reduced components that you can't break up in parts without compromising its own existence. The physical component doesn't exist alone. The cognitive component doesn't exist alone. All those exist merely as abstract reductions of some phenomenon. That phenomenon is what I'm calling sound. You don't want to call it sound, fine. It's not important how you call it, what's important is that it's not confused with one of its reductions in a particular field. You say I'm confusing 'perception of sound' with the 'sound' itself, but what I keep saying and you don't understand is that the perception of sound is a reduction of the cognitive phenomenon 'sound' to its perceptible properties, pretty much like saying sound is 'pressure waves' is a reduction of the phenomenon sound to its physically measurable properties, and saying sound is an effect in our nervous system is a reduction of the phenomenon sound to the properties observed in an MRI scanning the brain of someone experiencing sound. No matter how detailed are your reductions of those phenomena to specific fields, they are not what the phenomenon is in essence. No matter how detailed are those reductions, if you show them to a person who never experienced sound, that person won't have the same cognitive experience you or I have. It doesn't matter how you call it, what matters is that beyond all reductions, there's a cognitive phenomenon that can't be reduced to any of that or even all together. That's what the phenomenon actually is as we conceive it, or as we call it, its essence. I didn't started a huge argument on the meaning of sound. As I said above, the meaning of 'sound' doesn't matter at all. The issue isn't what 'sound' means, the issue is that you don't confuse something with its quantifiable properties. You can't understand the thomist interpretation of QM I'm talking about here if you make that confusion.

That isn't much of an answer, is it? Specially when the whole point is that once you realize the root of the problem is a faulty set of premises, any magic disappears. Sure, prefixing every statement with "in my opinion" may be more gentle, but that's implicit in any philosophical talk. What any philosophical proposition is saying is "this is according to my personal experience, isn't the same in yours?". Philosophers saved a lot of pen and ink by agreeing on that since Socrates, but if you're not aware of that fact, it looks like they are making peremptory statements all the time. Philosophy exists precisely because we can't communicate most personal truths directly through language. One has to appeal to the same experience in the interlocutor in order to transmit the idea. Most of the time, the main cause of disagreement or misunderstanding in informal talks like this is when one person has some scientific training but lacks the philosophical training, and tends to see everything as a scientific proposition. He understands every statement as a claim the other has to provide proof for, while in fact the other is merely appealing to the same in what he already knows. This misunderstanding is a modern phenomenon. You won't find instances of that before the 17th century. Take for instance this misunderstanding with ZetaX regarding sound. When I say sound is something we hear, that's obviously not a claim I can provide proof for, because it's impossible for me to prove even that there's any other consciousness beyond my own, let alone prove that what I call sound is the same thing someone else calls sound. Obviously, I'm merely appealing to his own personal experience that sound is what he hears. I can't do the same with someone who was born deaf and never experienced sound, hence, that's obviously the irreducible part of what sound is. His objection is that sound actually is pressure waves, and quotes Wikipedia to prove it. In other words, instead of relating what I said to his own personal experience, he's taking it as a scientific claim that needs proof, and immediately finds opposing proof to counter it, not realizing what I'm saying is something he already knows. Curiously, he's acting precisely as someone who was born deaf and couldn't know what sound is besides its reducible parts! A conversation is impossible, because I'm trying to transcend the concept and know what sound really is, he's trying to increase his grasp on the concept he can quantify and provide proof for. This has become kind of pathological in recent years. Take the example of Patricia and Paul Churchland, who say in the future we should eliminate all mental phenomena and describe all mental states based on concepts from neuroscience. We can't say "I feel tired", we can only say "my serotonin levels are low". Obviously, that's merely confusing a personal state that can't be communicated, with the reducible, communicable part that can be verified by someone else.

Well... I don't know if you read the whole topic, but if you do, you'll see the point is precisely that these "fine grained insights" make a difference in Quantum Mechanics. The headaches aren't waiting to happen anymore, they already happened there. Most scientists are banging their heads on the wall for decades precisely because they don't have the training to recognize the problem. I know it can be frustrating, but there's no way to take a pragmatist outlook in this, because that itself is part of the problem. It's what I tried to explain to ZetaX. I don't want to frustrate him any more than he already seems to be, so that's why I made clear there's no point in continuing that discussion. On the other hand, Z-Man obviously got a lot closer to what I mean and isn't struggling with the same issue, so the frustration isn't due to the subject as much as it is due to the willingness of the interlocutor to walk the same mental path.