Lord Monckton writes at WND:
I mean, come off it: If the science of Catastrophology were that clear, why would it need 10,000 pages of turgid, inspissate, self-contradictory, self-serving waffle to justify it?
Einstein’s paper on relativity, “Zur Elektrodynamik Bewegeter Körper,” was just 30 pages long, and that changed the world. Remember what the men of ancient Athens said. Mega biblion, mega kakon: “The bigger the book, the badder.”
Besides, a reviewed paper by a talented researcher, Monckton of Brenchley, published just last month by the World Federation of Scientists, demonstrated that it was 10-100 times costlier to try to make global warming go away today than to let it happen at the predicted rate and pay the predicted cost of adapting to its predicted consequences the day after tomorrow.
Ben, Doppler effect is an illusion at the receiver caused by relative motion. In the transmitter’s frame of reference, the clock continues to run at the same rate — at least in theory, if we discount the possibility that it may run differently depending on where it is . I agree that in an experiment involving the continuous remote sampling of a travelling clock, the sum of all Doppler deviations of a signal emitted from a closed trajectory and received in a point should be zero. But that is not the kind of experiment that was used to support the idea of time dilation. The experiment was: take the clock off the surface of the planet, let it fly, note the deviation when it lands. Assign some of the deviation to velocity via the Lorentz transformation; the rest to altitude via GR. That was a lousy experiment, as far as I am concerned. It did not control for a lot of factors, and I don’t even know how robust was the deviation reported (where are the raw data?). Doing it right is on my bucket list.
Regarding the fundamental properties of caesium, they are only as fundamental as we declare them to be. Everything varies. Given that the hydrogen standard is significantly more stable, we can now study the variations in the rate of the caesium clock and attempt to understand what causes these variations (but recall that all of our metrology is still caesium-based).
No, no two clocks are in perfect sync. Again, perfection may be a matter of opinion, or of the kind of variance statistic used to gauge the deviations, but the important thing to note is this: all motion must have a cause, and it is good to forget about statistics and filtering when we ponder the causes of deviations. Not that we need to that, but it may be interesting. Please peruse the data presented in this book:
http://ptep-online.com/index_files/books_files/shnoll2012.pdf
It is a rough read due to a rather naive translation, but it opens up an entirely new perspective on how things vary in space in time. I was close to the man who started and still continues to do this work, and can comment on it separately.
What fields? I don’t know. To me, a field is just a spatial variation of the causes of motion. I don’t know how many different causes there are; suspect more than one. I wish I knew better, but let’s just say that there is a pile of evidence that we don’t exist in a gravity-only universe. The orbits of planets, “dark energy” and “cosmic background radiation” are staring at us, but we are officially not allowed to interpret them in any sort of natural way.
Regarding the conspiracy to hide things in theoretical physics — yes, I believe the conspiracy exists, has existed for a long time but worsened recently under the influence of the public funding of science, I suppose. It is not a secret: just look at how they shout down people with opposing ideas, those who dare to point out an error, or even those who simply want to present new data, and it just so happens that new data causes consternation to physicists more often than it makes them happy. I don’t think physics would be that way if physicists were simply a club of equals with a common interest. In reality, it is a rigid hierarchy with a lot at stake to the hierarchs and their tendency to suppress dissent is only natural. I maintain that real science can only be pursued by people who are insensitive to prestige, importance, recognition, rewards, consensus, authority, goals, objectives, and other societal things. As soon as any of those factors becomes significant, there will be fact-hiding, cheating, sweeping errors under the carpet, illusionism, magic, and outright suppression of dissent. Calling it “conspiracy” is a bit bland — it is more profound than that.
And finally — regarding magic — as things stand, theoretical physics is the most magical branch of science. It simply adores everything non-physical. Everything “virtual” and “intrinsic”. It loves and perpetuates paradoxes. It loves crazy ideas like time being a thing, renormalisation and borrowing from the vacuum. On and on ad nauseam.
Gene, Doppler affect and trajectory are a zero-sum game when the clocks are brought back together. If you travel in a circle back around, all distance vectors cancel by definition (because your are in the same place), so your only effect is to change in time over the path. Or are you saying that the fundamental properties of cesium are not so fundamental despite the fact that if they are synchronized and do not move, they stay in perfect synch?
You claim that the difference in time is due to “field variations”. What fields are you talking about? To be true you require:
A: a conspiracy to hide something in theoretical physics, a field which is noted for throwing anything and everything under the bus and has done so several times in the past century.
B: The failures to be off just the right amount and in the right direction to allow for interplanetary navigation based on general relativity
C: The properties of cesium to magically change in orbit and atmospheric flight remarkably close to the predicted time dialation effect.
This is a demi-magical explanation because it requires too many things to be off in just the right direction to hide effects. Sorry, not buying it.
Gregg, one thing at a time, please. The argument leading to the gyromagnetic ratio of electrons is extremely complex and I can’t give you an immediate response. I’ll keep poking around, at leisure, but I expect it to be wrong simply because it starts with bizarre non-physical assumptions, and I won’t be surprised if the most accurate prediction ever turns out to be a tautology.
Regarding the GPB and the level of doubt that you claim it has surmounted, please read Miles Mathis’s criticism. He has covered a lot of issues here:
http://milesmathis.com/probe.pdf
And what do Luddites have to do with any of this? Those guys protested against cheap replication of their art. I don’t see any relevance. We’re only discussing bad ideas, their origins, and how to improve them. And yes, some of this activity is fun — there is the pleasure of finding things out, as Richard “The Hocus-Pocus” Feynman called it. You see anything wrong with that?
Ben, we’re having this discussion because junk is omnipresent. The fact that a clock is demonstrably affected by the field is not a concrete proof of modern physics. The Hafele–Keating experiment and its modern re-enactments all used variants of the caesium clock. It was picked as a time standard at the time when nothing more stable was known. If you look at the results of these travelling clock experiments (btw, have you seen the raw data?) they do not allow you to make any conclusions about the relationship between velocity and clock speed. All they tell you is that the clock speed is affected by its trajectory. You believe the difference is caused by time dilation, I believe it is caused by field variation, and this kind of experiment does not offer proof one way or another. I think the caesium clock simply slows down in orbit in just the right manner to make the believers in time dilation happy. Have any attempts been made to falsify that belief? Different types of orbits? Flying the clock on a stratoshperic balloon? Flying it in an airplane that returns back where it started? North-south instead of east-west? Using other types of clocks? Studying stationary clocks for deviation patterns?
Here’s an accidental bit of information that demonstrates that not all clocks in a high orbit behave the same. Check out Fig. 19 on p. 190 and description under “Frequency determination” on p. 180:
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a123920.pdf
This figure shows the discrepancy between the theoretical (to wit: GR+SR-predicted) clock speed and the observed value. Note that while the quartz clock was used, the predicted value kept sliding away until the caesium clock locked in. Suddenly, the theory is vindicated, but it needs the right kind of clock. What’s up with that?
Gene, no. Astrophysics aside, time dialation has been directly observed in comparing atomic clocks that have returned from orbit and finding them out of synchronization with their grounded counterparts. With an accurate enough clock, this is directly observable even when flying at airplane altittudes.
Seriously, time dialation is one of the most concretely proved points of modern physics. Why are we even having this discussion?
GPS is most definitely NOT geostationary: http://www(dot)kowoma(dot)de/en/gps/orbits(dot)htm
Additional data on error sources can be found in wikipedia under the heading “Error analysis for the Global Positioning System”
Gene, I think I would quit before your alternative theory madness embarrasses you any further. Einstein’s theory of Relativity has been proven beyond doubt. The most accurate calculation of the anomalous gyromagnetic of the electron by Feynman relies on the truth of Relativity. It is the most accurately predicted number ever in Physics. The latest results of the Gravity Probe B on the frame-dragging predicted by GR has been proven beyond all doubt. No one says that there may not be further improvements in any theory. But Einstein is truly vindicated. I realize that maybe it is fun to be a Luddite but please stay and talk with other Luddites.
Show us exactly how any of Einstein’s theories were applied, and where. We know it can’t be GPS, because none of the alleged effects could have any bearing on it, even if they were real.
http://www.alternativephysics.org/book/GPSmythology.htm
When the GPS satellites were first introduced, the times they produced were inaccurate. They applied Einsteins theories to the programming, and they became accurate. Just another confirmation of his theories, which are still being tested even today. Einstein did indeed change the world – and he was indeed, not the best mathematician.
Also, GPS satellites are geostationary, and do not recede and approach the earth.
Not really, unless you consider screwing up in one place and correcting in another to be a vital calculation. The case in point is time dilation. Einstein believed that all moving objects were time-dilated and people are now taught at school that such dilation is real. You hear things like:
“Because an observer on the ground sees the satellites in motion relative to them, Special Relativity predicts that we should see their clocks ticking more slowly”
(http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html)
That may be a correct statement regarding Einstein’s Special Relativity (because that’s what it states), but the claim of local time dilation is wrong. What our plain-vanilla, common-sense relativity predicts (and we new it since Ole Rømer’s observation of Io’s orbit) is that we should see the satellite clock ticking more slowly when the satellite recedes and faster when it approaches (this is also known as Doppler effect). That’s it. That’s all there is to know to make GPS work. We know that all measurements received from a distance must be transformed.
The transformation Einstein proposed to do that is wrong due to a simple vector addition error he made early on and never corrected. General Relativity with its curved geometry didn’t make things any better; it only helped conceal the error. That does not matter, though, because the GR model of the universe consists of a single mass and is not useful for anything. Because it is non-linear, superposition does not work, and you can’t have even a second mass added to that universe. If anybody tells you GR is used in some practical calculations, challenge him to show you how.
From all I know, GR is only used to generate mathematical fantasies, and is one such fantasy itself.
My understanding is that general relativity calculations are vital to having working GPS devices in our cars. And E=mc sqared has something to do with our nuclear powered naval carriers.
While Lord Monckton’s characterisation of IPCC is very fitting, comparing them to Einstein does not have the effect he apparently sought. What exactly did Einstein change in the world? He was a hack, like most physicists, and he blindly followed authorities, like most physicists. Unlike many, he had doubts, but he was reluctant to talk of them. The result of their musings is mostly a useless but self-perpetuating mess. The only difference I is that their mess is not as globally-political as that made by IPCC, and probably didn’t cost as much, but I don’t know that. Depends on how you assess the damage.
Reblogged this on Mothers Against Wind Turbines and commented:
Climate alarmists don’t want to talk about reality…