Alternative Cosmology continued

[Z-Man]

Split from the Double Slit Experiment thread so that can keep focused on QM. Moderators: By necessity, the weblinks here also contain religious material or point to sites where such is one click away. It shall not be part of the discussion. Remove the links if you must.

(On Einstein and him dropping 'finite' light speed)

Ops... for some reason I said 'finite' when I actually meant 'constant'. My fault.

Oh. In that case: What? When did that happen? You may be confusing measured speed of light (which is always constant according to Relativity) and coordinate speed of light, which varies just as much as you like, just like it is a different numerical value in m/s than in inches/year.

Sure. Frankly, if you're genuinely interested, I think you should just read the book I mentioned, Sungenis' Galileo Was Wrong. That's my starting point on the subject, and since you know the physics much better than I do, you may even figure out some sensible objections on that aspect.

Thanks for the lead, I was hoping you could point me somewhere *halfway* sensible. I won't buy the book, though. I read much of the website and listened to the recent podcast on Tim Langdell's (kidding!) Edge Podcast linked from there and I really don't want to support him. My critique follows, harking back to some of the things we already touched. No particular order.

This guy's improvement suggestions (written about the Galileo Was Wrong conference) 3, 4 and 5 get my full support. They apply to all the material I reviewed. I could not say it better, and if I tried, I definitely would be less constructive.

Common pattern: It is either always this choice, or geocentrism. If dark matter does not exist, geocentrism must be true. If something odd happens in the CMB, geocentrism must be true. Anything that cannot be currently explained by mainstream science, geocentrism must be true. If I fail to brush my teeth this morning, that can only mean geocentrism is true.

Another common pattern: If an established scientists says something against Geocentrism or simply talks about the mainstream model, he is either blinded by ideology or pursuing a hidden agenda, trying to pull wool over your eyes, making you complacent with the status quo, etc.. If an established scientists says that it cannot be ruled out Earth is at a special place in the universe, BAM! There is your proof! They all know it! They are hiding the truth!

Nowhere is this more obnoxious than with Einstein's equivalence principle. We have been there before. Yes, Einstein says an Earth centered frame is just as valid as any other reference frame. Sungenis concludes from that that Einstein (Einstein! And NASA, too!) confirmed the Geocentric model as valid. And therefore, Sungenis is right. And therefore, mainstream science is wrong (this is implied in the material I reviewed, not spoken out, and the whole argument I have not seen written out, but issued on the podcast).

No. That leap of logic does not work. Einstein speaks of General Relativity here, or more specifically, one of the Equivalence Principles. If you use that to argue for your case, you have to accept it with all consequences. You have to accept that other coordinate systems are, a priori, just as valid as an earth centric one. And you have to accept GR or a similar theory, or you will not get equivalence to rotating frames. Essentially, if you make this argument and claim it is significant, the discussion is over.

Right. On to quotes from the website. I am a little unclear on which equations of motion he accepts; the site at one point says neither GR nor Newton don't explain the observed universe, but in the Podcast, he explicitly references Newton. So I assume he applies Newton's laws and roll with it.

It’s not just the stars and sun that create the barycenter of the universe. The main ingredient in determining the barycenter is the ether, a substance that modern science now admits exists. It is much more massive than all the celestial objects in the universe.

So Dark Matter is bad because it is an unconfirmed substance making up 96% of the universe (he says so, too), but this is OK? How? And he needs it on the solar system level already, which means it's much, much more dense than Dark Matter would be.

Hence, when we calculate the miniscule effect of the sidereal year as opposed to the solar year, it will not cause the barycenter (the earth) to move, but it will most likely cause a wobble in the celestial revolutions, and this would answer to the cyclical precession (or gyroscopic) patterns we observe (e.g., 19 years, 26000 years), and might also answer why the plane of the sun’s orbit shifts 46 degrees every sixth months.

The last bit. He is saying, cryptically, that this model does not currently have a good explanation for the seasons. He hopes he has the right idea, that's all. Seasons are the second or third most important effect of celestial dynamics (after the day and night cycle, possibly tied with tides). The standard solar system model can explain them to a fourth grader. This is a big deal.

What we have said, the same thing Newton has said about the Earth is: The Earth, being the center of mass, will not move because Newton's whole theory says the center of mass does not move.

That is not at all what Newton's laws say. The center of mass of a system is an abstract position, not necessarily tied to an object. And it can move. What is true in Newtonian mechanics is that if no external forces act on the system, its center of mass will move uniformly at constant speed. It's not just a simple error committed in the haste of an interview. From the questions again, same page as before:

1) Is it correct to say that the Earth being in the Universe’s center means that the Earth is at the Universe’s barycenter, that is, that the Earth doesn’t experience a gravitational force at all? I understand that this is a requirement for the Earth to “restâ€Â.

R. Sungenis: Yes, this would be the most likely scenario.

The question uses the correct formulation; in a Newtonian universe, the Earth could be at the center of mass. But: No, it does not work like that. Just because an object is at the center of mass now and in rest relative to it does not automatically make it stay there. Take this simple fictional arrangement (units do not matter):

"Earth" at x = 0, mass 1; "Moon" at x = -4, mass 1/2; "Sun" at x = +1, mass 2.

The center of mass in this case is at "Earth". But because gravity drops with distance squared, the "Sun" pulls it twice as hard as the "Moon" and it will drift towards the "Sun". In the real world, even if you take his massive ether into account, we'd still have the Sun tugging us around, after all, its disturbance would need to be strong enough to catch the other planets in its orbit.

And in GR, the barycenter of a system is not definable. Especially not that of the whole universe. It's the curvature that prevents this, not homogeneity.

Still on the same page, about Michelson-Moreley:

They were only categorized as “null†because they were expecting 30km/s for a revolving Earth. I show in GWW that the results are very close to what we would expect if an ether tied to the universe was rotating around a fixed earth.

Well, he is confusing error bars with measurement results, and by now, MM type experiments have become much more precise and the measured speeds are still zero. If Sungenis was right about the rotating ether, modern experiments would be able to pick it up.

Third, we're not talking about the late 19th or early 20th century. We're talking about the issue today, and modern geocentrists do have a valid model.

I can see that.

Zero? What are we talking about then? In the very least, I gave you two. A newtonian universe with a stationary Earth

Well, Newtonian mechanics are sufficiently shown to be inadequate in the laboratory and to precisely describe the solar system. They certainly can't handle the whole universe.

and a relativistic anisotropic universe with Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi metrics and Earth in the center.

That metric is intrinsically isotropic (independent on direction), so you probably mean inhomogeneous (in the r-dependencies). That could at least fit observations. Problem is, nature breaks symmetries in certain orders. And isotropy goes down before homogeneity. Water vapour is, on average, homogeneous and isotropic. Ice is still homogenous, but the crystal structure breaks isotropy. (Liquid water is weird, already partially breaking isotropy.) So you will have a hard time finding a natural mechanism that can explain this structure that breaks symmetries in the wrong order. And you'll still be left with galaxies rotating too fast to hold together.

Where is the proof that Earth is moving?

That's not what mainstream science says. It says you can not measure any absolute speed or the speed relative to some ether. Burden of proof is on you to first find a way to measure such speeds and test it on, oh, I suppose a plane would be enough. Yes, it's a shame nobody has done such a thing yet. I'd do it, but I don't think they let me carry a microwave cavity resonator in my hand luggage.

Where is the proof that time itself is affected by movement?

There are plenty. Keep one atomic clock at home, let another take a world round trip by plane. Look at muon decay in accelerators or with the naturally occurring ones created by cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere. The Moessbauer effect. I'll just point you to the relevant Wikipedia section for the references.

Where is the proof that physical dimensions are affected by movement?

That is quite difficult to test directly and without a shadow of a doubt. You'd need to get two large objects moving relative to each other at high speeds and one would need to measure the length of the other, preferably without using lasers. The time dilation experiments and various properties of particle beams in accelerators are considered indirect evidence, but you'd be right in pointing out that assumes Lorentz-Invariance is already fully confirmed. Gravitational length contractions are confirmed, though; they contribute to gravity lensing and perihelion precession.

Where is the proof that redshifts are doppler effects?

You mean cosmic redshifts? How could there be a direct proof of that? And like I said, only two sources of redshift are known. Doppler/relativistic and gravity, and Doppler is the only one that works consistently.

Where is the proof for Dark Matter?

Well, There is the DAMA detector picking up a signal; it's unconfirmed by other detectors, though, and it's not uncommon that seasonal effects later turn out to be purely terrestrial in origin. Indirectly, via its gravity on galactic and larger scales. We'll have to wait for a conclusive direct proof, it may never come. There once was a similar case. A little energy and momentum was missing from beta decays. The preposterous suggestion of one W. Pauli? It is carried away by an invisible ghost particle. Imagine that!

Regarding ad hoc/post hoc hypotheses: well, in Astrophysics, most need to be post hoc. There are only half a handful that materialized without previous observation, it's just the nature of a field where you can make no controlled experiments. And absurdity does not matter. Every major breakthrough was absurd.

if you were scrutinizing everything with the same dedication and requiring the same degree of proof you're requiring from me, you'd probably be at a loss.

Dunno how it is across the pond, but around here, it is very much encouraged to ask scrutinizing questions during lectures, seminars and even back at school. And so we did. I'd say 'poor guys', but they enjoyed it, I think.

Rotating universe:

Now you're just guessing. Not only I can do that and get correct and meaningful results, that's exactly how Thirring did it. In order to find a model for centrifugal and coriolis force, he decided to start from a model of an spheric hollow universe spinning with the Earth at the center, and see what forces would appear in a purely newtonian universe.

Ah, that. That's not what you described at all. It's post-Newtonian approximation: Newtonian physics with first order relativistic corrections. Yes, that works and gives meaningful results if you mind the limitations.

When he did it, he realized, with surprise, that the centrifugal force does have an axial component.

As a matter of act, he realized that's what was missing in order to explain centrifugal force from a newtonian point of view: to consider the mass of the whole universe acting on the spinning object. That's why Newton couldn't explain centrifugal and coriolis force, because he always considered only isolated systems. It only appears when you add the mass of the universe revolving around, and it appears with an axial component. The conclusion is on page 721 of his paper. http://www.itp.kit.edu/~ertl/Hauptseminar/papers/lense-thierring-papers-translated.pdf

After realizing that, Thirring tried to fit the discovery in General Relativity, concluding that if the equator of the sphere is spinning faster, it has more relativistic mass and adds some pull towards it. Curiously, Thirring himself tries to explain the previous undetectability of this axial component by saying his model is certainly not physical, but obviously, that's precisely the model defended by geocentrists.

Now that contains a lot of flowery interpretation! No, his explanation for the extra term was correct. Modify the mass distribution and it vanishes. Sadly, the only full article I could find is behind a high paywall. But do calculate the gravitational pull of a massive ring near its center in lowest approximation and Newton's laws: you'll find it has just the same form as the centrifugal term in formula 22; + C x in x direction, + C y in y direction, -2C z in z direction with some constant C.

No, I just realized that since you presented this objection, you're thinking of redshifts as function of velocity, but that obviously can't be the case in an Earth-centered Newtonian universe.

Nope, I am assuming it's the gravity field associated with the centrifugal force, like you told me to. Still the wrong sign for the z-direction: the gravity field would be "uphill" in both z-directions away from us and produce a blue shift.

How do you explain the radial pressure an object suffers in a centrifuge or the tug on a rope with a weight spinning on one end in a Newtonian system isolated from the universe?

In Newtonian physics, there is absolute space. So it's easy there: the objects are accelerated relative to absolute space. In GR, it's complicated. You need to define "isolated from the universe". Do you mean "sufficiently far away from all other matter so that no interaction has ever happened", or somewhat equivalently "In an otherwise matterless universe"? In that case, GR cowardly refules to give an answer that would satisfy you. The predictions of GR do not only depend on the matter distribution and movement, but also on initial and boundary conditions on the metric (boundary conditions do not imply that there is a boundary; they can be and usually are asymptotic). The Thierring paper mentions that. For universes with not much mass in them, those conditions determine pretty much alone which reference frames are inertial and which are not. Non-inertial frames will show the 'imaginary' coriolis, centrifugal and gravitational forces. In the non-rotating and non-accelerating ones, Newton's laws apply in good approximation for slow movements. So you're back at Newton with absolute space replaced by inertial reference frames determined by the boundary conditions.

Put differently: GR is not fully Machian. In a fully Machian universe, neither the object in the centrifuge nor the spinning weight would be experiencing any forces.

Second, since cosmogonical issues are beyond the scope of science

I beg to differ very vehemently here.

I get it. I don't have the knowledge to object to that in good conscience, but I can see three conceptual problems with your argument. First, you say the big problem is that the data is not normalized against anything, but that's false, the data is normalized in many different ways in the three studies I mentioned, and that's even pointed as the source of the issue by some.

The first paper explicitly disregards the issue:

The broad structure introduced by the low-redshift source selection process is expected to produce mainly long-period components in the power spectrum.

"mainly" is correct, but it also produces enough short-period components.

Second, if the periodicity is an effect of the analysis method, why it doesn't also appear in studies that claim there's no periodicity but use the same method, like the Schneider et al. study?

The Schneider study does not use FFT of the raw data. The precise method by which they exclude a periodicity is not given. I suppose they just correct the selection effects, find a reasonably smooth curve and call it a day.

Third, that seems too fundamental to be overlooked by people who were looking for a solution to the problem for decades. If the problem is a fundamental error in the analysis method, I'd expect most studies to agree on the results, and then some study reveal that embarrassing error. That's not what happens. While there's disagreement on the normalization and filtering, there's no disagreement on the method. Can you point me to any study with the same conclusion you present here, that the whole issue for decades is just the result of bad statistics?

The subject has not received as much attention as you would like. I don't think such a study exist. And if you are trying to argue the entire Physics and Astronomy community has been making systematic mistakes for a century, you do not get to appeal to the authority of a few. They simply made a mistake. Why the critics did not notice it, I don't know, I have to suspect the subtle properties of the Fourier transform are not well known among astrophysicists, they simply don't do frequency analysis that often. Bell et al, they were looking for evidence for their unconventional ideas, and it's as easy to make mistakes with statistics as it is to lie with them. And when they found something, they did not look to hard for mistakes.

For those reading along and not wanting to read too much: Bell's hypothesis is that quasars are not faraway objects, they are rather close and are ejected from active galaxies. Their high redshifts would not come from their distance, but from some intrinsic mechanism. Early in their life, they start out with high intrinsic redshift and low brightness, and as they age, the redshift decreases and brightness increases. I suppose that intrinsic redshift would be quantized. How that would lead to an overall effect on the total redshift distribution, I don't know. It should just be smeared out by the regular cosmic redshift.

Edited February 16, 2014 by Z-Man
Direct podcast link removed.

[sal_vager]

Carry on, just try to stay on topic

[lodestar]

Oh. In that case: What? When did that happen? You may be confusing measured speed of light (which is always constant according to Relativity) and coordinate speed of light, which varies just as much as you like, just like it is a different numerical value in m/s than in inches/year.

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.

Thanks for the lead, I was hoping you could point me somewhere *halfway* sensible. I won't buy the book, though. I read much of the website and listened to the recent podcast on Tim Langdell's (kidding!) Edge Podcast linked from there and I really don't want to support him. My critique follows, harking back to some of the things we already touched. No particular order.

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.

Well, Newtonian mechanics are sufficiently shown to be inadequate in the laboratory and to precisely describe the solar system. They certainly can't handle the whole universe.

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.

That metric is intrinsically isotropic (independent on direction), so you probably mean inhomogeneous (in the r-dependencies).

Correct.

That could at least fit observations. Problem is, nature breaks symmetries in certain orders. And isotropy goes down before homogeneity. Water vapour is, on average, homogeneous and isotropic. Ice is still homogenous, but the crystal structure breaks isotropy. (Liquid water is weird, already partially breaking isotropy.) So you will have a hard time finding a natural mechanism that can explain this structure that breaks symmetries in the wrong order. And you'll still be left with galaxies rotating too fast to hold together.

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 not what mainstream science says. It says you can not measure any absolute speed or the speed relative to some ether. Burden of proof is on you to first find a way to measure such speeds and test it on, oh, I suppose a plane would be enough.

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.

Yes, it's a shame nobody has done such a thing yet. I'd do it, but I don't think they let me carry a microwave cavity resonator in my hand luggage.

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.

There are plenty. Keep one atomic clock at home, let another take a world round trip by plane. Look at muon decay in accelerators or with the naturally occurring ones created by cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere. The Moessbauer effect. I'll just point you to the relevant Wikipedia section for the references.

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.

You mean cosmic redshifts? How could there be a direct proof of that? And like I said, only two sources of redshift are known. Doppler/relativistic and gravity, and Doppler is the only one that works consistently.

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.

Regarding ad hoc/post hoc hypotheses: well, in Astrophysics, most need to be post hoc. There are only half a handful that materialized without previous observation, it's just the nature of a field where you can make no controlled experiments. And absurdity does not matter. Every major breakthrough was absurd.

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.

Ah, that. That's not what you described at all. It's post-Newtonian approximation: Newtonian physics with first order relativistic corrections. Yes, that works and gives meaningful results if you mind the limitations.

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.

Nope, I am assuming it's the gravity field associated with the centrifugal force, like you told me to. Still the wrong sign for the z-direction: the gravity field would be "uphill" in both z-directions away from us and produce a blue shift.

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 beg to differ very vehemently here.

I'm curious about your argument on that. Metaphysics is within the scope of science?

Why the critics did not notice it, I don't know, I have to suspect the subtle properties of the Fourier transform are not well known among astrophysicists, they simply don't do frequency analysis that often.

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.

[TheGatesofLogic]

you don't need an absolute clock to test relativity, because you know, it's RELATIVE. For instance, suppose two arbitrary particles are moving towards one another at a constant velocity. Which particle is moving faster? You can't give an absolute answer because the observer would base its observation on its own velocity relative to the system of the two particles, thusly there can only ever be non- absolute measurements unless you choose to observe one of the particles as if it were stationary. the same applies here with time, where we treat one of the clocks as absolute and measure the change with respect to a second clock.

[rkman]

"Alternative Cosmology"

It is as much an alternative to cosmology as creationism is an alternative to evolution. Sungenis is not even a physicist.

[lodestar]

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.

[SargeRho]

What is more plausible? That objects lightyears away are moving faster than light, or that Earth is moving? So far, all experiments trying to demonstrate the existence of the Ether/Aether failed. The burden of proof is hence on you.

Countless experiments and observations confirm Relativity, none so far even suggest the existence of the Aether. Geocentism is useful when you want to locate things in the Sky. Beyond that, it's useless, since it's wrong.

You also cannot use geocentrism to get to other bodies exept for the Moon. How then did Curiosity get to Mars, along with all the other probes to Mars, Venus, Mercury, etc.?

Also, "Alternative Cosmology" is as much Cosmology as Alternative Medicine is Medicine: None at all.

Edited February 18, 2014 by SargeRho

[Roastduck]

You also cannot use geocentrism to get to other bodies exept for the Moon. How then did Curiosity get to Mars, along with all the other probes to Mars, Venus, Mercury, etc.?

Solution: Everyone at NASA secretly believes in geocentrism, and they found a way to navigate a geocentric universe and just haven't told anyone

[SargeRho]

That wouldn't explain independent observations.

[Roastduck]

I was being sarcastic.

[SargeRho]

I know.

Also, lodestar: Dark Matter is by no means magical, or unobservable. It only interacts gravitationally with baryonic matter, but not through the other forces. Hence why it can only be detected through its influence on the environment. (Read: Galaxies spin too damn fast for the gravity of their visible matter to hold them together). It's hypocritical of you to use the word "magical" as the laws of physics seem to magically not apply to Earth in your view.

[lodestar]

What is more plausible? That objects light years away are moving faster than light, or that Earth is moving?

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.

So far, all experiments trying to demonstrate the existence of the Ether/Aether failed. The burden of proof is hence on you. Countless experiments and observations confirm Relativity, none so far even suggest the existence of the Aether.

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.

Geocentism is useful when you want to locate things in the Sky. Beyond that, it's useless, since it's wrong. You also cannot use geocentrism to get to other bodies exept for the Moon. How then did Curiosity get to Mars, along with all the other probes to Mars, Venus, Mercury, etc.?

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.

Also, "Alternative Cosmology" is as much Cosmology as Alternative Medicine is Medicine: None at all.

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.

[SargeRho]

1: It's been shown that it takes infinite or near infinite energy to accelerate an object with a non-zero rest mass to the speed of light, thanks to accelerators like the LHC. The energy it takes matches exactly the predictions made by Relativity, confirming it.

2: Yes, absolutely. It has yet to be shown that such a thing as the Aether exists. Earth is most certainly moving. Every observation that can be done in the regard shows this.

3: I am aware, roughly, of the model. They propose that Earth is the center of the Universe. This proposition is demonstrably wrong.

4: "Alternative" Anything has the tendency to be disproven mumbo-jumbo.

[TheGatesofLogic]

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.

Wrong, I was not saying that this reasoning is the proof, but rather that it is a valid method of experimentally gathering data to support it as proof. Your logical deduction is flawed. When the test was performed, and it HAS been performed MANY times, the data corresponded exactly to the function of relativity as described. If it was not relativity that caused this then it was something with indistinguishable properties from relativity, which may have additional properties but does not infringe upon the original, in which case it is the same as relativity but MIGHT have extra things attached, regardless relativity is then regarded to be true in this respect. What relativity does, above all other things, is state that the laws of physics are EXACTLY THE SAME regardless of your reference frame, and NO ONE HAS EVER PROVEN THIS WRONG, meanwhile the effects of relativity have been proven correct.

[lodestar]

Solution: Everyone at NASA secretly believes in geocentrism, and they found a way to navigate a geocentric universe and just haven't told anyone

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...

[lodestar]

Wrong, I was not saying that this reasoning is the proof, but rather that it is a valid method of experimentally gathering data to support it as proof.

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.

What relativity does, above all other things, is state that the laws of physics are EXACTLY THE SAME regardless of your reference frame, and NO ONE HAS EVER PROVEN THIS WRONG, meanwhile the effects of relativity have been proven correct.

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.

Edited February 18, 2014 by lodestar

[lodestar]

1: It's been shown that it takes infinite or near infinite energy to accelerate an object with a non-zero rest mass to the speed of light, thanks to accelerators like the LHC. The energy it takes matches exactly the predictions made by Relativity, confirming it.

2: Yes, absolutely. It has yet to be shown that such a thing as the Aether exists. Earth is most certainly moving. Every observation that can be done in the regard shows this.

3: I am aware, roughly, of the model. They propose that Earth is the center of the Universe. This proposition is demonstrably wrong.

4: "Alternative" Anything has the tendency to be disproven mumbo-jumbo.

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

[lodestar]

I know.

Also, lodestar: Dark Matter is by no means magical, or unobservable. It only interacts gravitationally with baryonic matter, but not through the other forces. Hence why it can only be detected through its influence on the environment. (Read: Galaxies spin too damn fast for the gravity of their visible matter to hold them together). It's hypocritical of you to use the word "magical" as the laws of physics seem to magically not apply to Earth in your view.

This one too. Please, read the previous topic.

[Z-Man]

Sheesh, people. The thread title is meant to be diplomatic.

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.

Close enough, though. Relative errors doing experiments on Earth's surface are of the order gL/c², L being the length scale of the experiment, and even less if your experiment is on a horizontal plane.

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.

This analogy is about 100% accurate: You are complaining to cartographers that they cannot make flat maps of the Earth that have a fixed length scale. You are calling them out for not making the meridians be parallel, and that if you go at a constant angle to them, you are not going in a straight line. Here as in GR, the distinction between coordinates and actually significant measurements is required to be able to handle curvature.

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.

Whaaa? I don't get to point out when he tries to disprove the Big Bang by taking a formula from the model, plugging in nonsense values and getting out nonsense?

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!

The alternative hypotheses trying to explain the null result were even more ad hoc, trying to save models that had always lacked direct evidence, and were falsified.

How the burden of proof lies on me, to counter an ad hoc hypothesis used to preserve an assumption?

Because obviously, there is no way to prove it is impossible to measure absolute velocity. So I do a MM-Experiment in a moving frame, still getting no velocity. But! You say: Of course it gave a null result! Matter is held together by electric forces, of course it shrinks as it moves. You are not measuring true length and therefore not true velocity. And what do I do then? Yes, supporters of a hypothesis should make every effort to disprove it themselves, but that has now already sufficiently been done.

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.

No. It's

3. The speed of light is the same for every inertial frame. The rest follows.

4. The Earth is not moving and not accelerating despite the fact it is under constant forces from the Sun, Moon and other stars in the Milky Way.

If the assumption that Earth is not balanced on top of a hairpin and kept there in spite of being in a gravity whirlpool is an ideology for you, I happily plead guilty as charged.

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.

Ugh. It takes some skill to make oneself look like a jerk in his autobiographical material.

The letter supplied the motivation for my campaign to discredit the quark theorists.

Not 'quark theory', Quark Theorists. Now, I don't want to be a moral judge here and claim he got what he deserved, but it's quite tempting. For the science side, the papers are not readily available, but c+v (at least the variation where that's the speed for the whole runtime) is easily falsified by looking at distant binary stars. The light of one star as it approaches earth would overtake the light emitted when it moves away, causing double images (works for spectroscopic binary stars, too). And I believe that was already known back then.

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.

Don't know enough about Arp. As for Schechtman vs Pauling, IIRC, the community at large sided with Schechtman once his experiments were repeated, I remember reading about quasicrystals and Penrose tilings in popular science magazines. I'm not making excuses for Pauling. Bullies do exist in all walks of life, it seems.

On time dilation experiments:

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.

I thought you'd say that. A peculiar property of the time dilation equation in special relativity is that if you have three inertial reference frames A (Earth), B and C and the prediction is wrong for B looking at the clocks in C, then the prediction must be also wrong for A looking at B or C. So testing against one reference frame is fine. And in fact tests were done with planes circling the earth in opposite directions, comparing the clocks to one another (to eliminate graviry effects, mostly).

On time dilation experiments:

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.

None of the ones I am aware of work. They can't explain why distant, redshifted supernovae also appear to be happening in slow motion. You need apparent time dilation for that. The other explanations you're thinking off are all of the 'light loses energy on the way' type, yes? They'll also blur distant objects and spectral lines.

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.

No assumption is violated by the observation that the visible matter is not enough to hold the universe together alone. We just need (much) more mass. All the equations we had before still are supposed to hold and are testable with dark matter. This is not a "Fairies exist!" "Oh, how come we don't see them?" "Because they're invisible!" situation. Please stop treating it as such.

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.

Yep. If he figures out how to work around that with even just a mathematically sensible model, hat off to him.

I'm curious about your argument on that. Metaphysics is within the scope of science?

Metaphysics? We're probably using different definitions for "Cosmology". For me, it's the science of the behavior of the universe at the largest observable scales, extrapolated as far back and forward in time as we dare. Its status as science suffers from lack of experiments and lack of the ability to check predictions, yes, but you can still observe and match with your models.

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.

To be fair, there are those two visible dips in the high Z range (said to be selection effects, lots of Quasars there had to be disregarded because they look too much like regular stars) that certainly contribute to the Fourier transform.

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.

Certainly!

http://www.worldnpa.org/pdf/abstract...racts_3053.pdf

The mistake they are making, assuming they wanted to do a thought experiment under the assumption that SR is correct, is that the clock synchronization they are making is wrong. They need to sync the clocks when the ship is already moving. Or live with the complication of separately accelerated clocks. Which is hard!

[TheGatesofLogic]

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.

So the most extensively tested theory in all of history that has yet to incur any evidence against it is nonsense because? You can't argue something if you don't have an arguement. Please tell me.

[lodestar]

Close enough, though. Relative errors doing experiments on Earth's surface are of the order gL/c², L being the length scale of the experiment, and even less if your experiment is on a horizontal plane.

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.

This analogy is about 100% accurate: You are complaining to cartographers that they cannot make flat maps of the Earth that have a fixed length scale.

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.

Whaaa? I don't get to point out when he tries to disprove the Big Bang by taking a formula from the model, plugging in nonsense values and getting out nonsense?

Well... send that to him. From my experience, he's always very cordial and answer questions very quickly.

The alternative hypotheses trying to explain the null result were even more ad hoc, trying to save models that had always lacked direct evidence, and were falsified.

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.

Because obviously, there is no way to prove it is impossible to measure absolute velocity. So I do a MM-Experiment in a moving frame, still getting no velocity. But! You say: Of course it gave a null result! Matter is held together by electric forces, of course it shrinks as it moves. You are not measuring true length and therefore not true velocity. And what do I do then? Yes, supporters of a hypothesis should make every effort to disprove it themselves, but that has now already sufficiently been done.

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?

3. The speed of light is the same for every inertial frame. The rest follows.

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.

4. The Earth is not moving and not accelerating despite the fact it is under constant forces from the Sun, Moon and other stars in the Milky Way.

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.

If the assumption that Earth is not balanced on top of a hairpin and kept there in spite of being in a gravity whirlpool is an ideology for you, I happily plead guilty as charged.

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

Ugh. It takes some skill to make oneself look like a jerk in his autobiographical material.

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.

For the science side, the papers are not readily available, but c+v (at least the variation where that's the speed for the whole runtime) is easily falsified by looking at distant binary stars.

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.

Don't know enough about Arp. As for Schechtman vs Pauling, IIRC, the community at large sided with Schechtman once his experiments were repeated,

Yep... after ten years, after he was fired for "disgracing his team", etc. Schechtman was just lucky that Pauling died first.

I thought you'd say that. A peculiar property of the time dilation equation in special relativity is that if you have three inertial reference frames A (Earth), B and C and the prediction is wrong for B looking at the clocks in C, then the prediction must be also wrong for A looking at B or C. So testing against one reference frame is fine. And in fact tests were done with planes circling the earth in opposite directions, comparing the clocks to one another (to eliminate graviry effects, mostly).

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.

None of the ones I am aware of work. They can't explain why distant, redshifted supernovae also appear to be happening in slow motion. You need apparent time dilation for that.

Apparent time dilation can be accounted for in the ether theory. Actual time dilation can't.

The other explanations you're thinking off are all of the 'light loses energy on the way' type, yes? They'll also blur distant objects and spectral lines.

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.

No assumption is violated by the observation that the visible matter is not enough to hold the universe together alone. We just need (much) more mass. All the equations we had before still are supposed to hold and are testable with 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...

This is not a "Fairies exist!" "Oh, how come we don't see them?" "Because they're invisible!" situation. Please stop treating it as such.

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?

Metaphysics? We're probably using different definitions for "Cosmology".

I said "Cosmogony", not "Cosmology".

The mistake they are making, assuming they wanted to do a thought experiment under the assumption that SR is correct, is that the clock synchronization they are making is wrong. They need to sync the clocks when the ship is already moving. Or live with the complication of separately accelerated clocks. Which is hard!

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...

Edited February 20, 2014 by lodestar

[lodestar]

So the most extensively tested theory in all of history that has yet to incur any evidence against it is nonsense because? You can't argue something if you don't have an arguement. Please tell me.

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?

[SargeRho]

About GPS clocks: They can be set on the ground precisely because Einstein's formulas are accurate. You can precisely calculate the relativistic effects the sattelites will be experiencing in their orbital positions.

[lodestar]

About GPS clocks: They can be set on the ground precisely because Einstein's formulas are accurate. You can precisely calculate the relativistic effects the sattelites will be experiencing in their orbital positions.

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

[TheGatesofLogic]

I apologize, i've been considerably more hostile than i had any reason to be, and i am still shaking my head at some of my stupid attacks on your beliefs. This doesn't change my view in any way mind you, except with regards to how i approach the argument.

Also, the name TheGatesofLogic doesn't actually have anything to do with logic in the classical sense but refers to an interest i had in digital binary as a kid.

I am having a difficult time trying to assess your arguments in a way that does not open itself to logical criticism. I'll continue thinking on the matter.