We’ve all heard of the claim of “settled science” when it comes to global warming/climate change, and we’ve all heard of the “Big Bang Theory”, and I’m not just talking about the popular TV show. The scientific theory goes all the way back to 1927.
This is an artist’s concept of the metric expansion of space, where space (including hypothetical non-observable portions of the universe) is represented at each time by the circular sections. Note on the left the dramatic expansion (not to scale) occurring in the inflationary epoch, and at the center the expansion acceleration. The scheme is decorated with WMAP images on the left and with the representation of stars at the appropriate level of development. Credit: NASA
The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the birth of the universe. It states that at some moment all of space was contained in a single point from which the Universe has been expanding ever since. Modern measurements place this moment at approximately 13.8 billion years ago, which is thus considered the age of the universe. After the initial expansion, the Universe cooled sufficiently to allow the formation of subatomic particles, and later simple atoms. Giant clouds of these primordial elements later coalesced through gravity to form stars and galaxies. The Big Bang theory does not provide any explanation for the initial conditions of the Universe; rather, it describes and explains the general evolution of the Universe going forward from that point on. (Source: Wikipedia)
Now, it seems there’s a challenge to this ‘settled’ science, and a new quantum equation predicts the universe has no beginning.
(Phys.org) —The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.
The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a “Big Bang” did the universe officially begin.
Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately after—not at or before—the singularity.
“The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there,” Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told Phys.org.
This guy says that energy is not conserved. He makes a logical argument.
I thought I knew very little about cosmology. Now I think I know nothing. Or less than nothing, because what I thought I knew turns out to be wrong.
[I]n fact true? Facts in philosophy are truth-valued, but not in science. That distinction is sufficient to account for the failures of the Vienna Circle and Charles Spearman to bring the successes of science into philosophy and psychology, respectively.
The parallels in science, ostensibly the topic here, are these.
(a) Science is a mapping on facts to facts, where facts are observations reduced by measurements and compared to standards. Scientific facts are quantities, not truth values. As models grow from conjectures through hypotheses and theories to laws, they mature. Theories make at least one novel prediction validated by measurements within a specified accuracy. Laws are theories complete in all implications.
(b) Science is the objective branch of knowledge, and scientific knowledge is contained in models of the Real World. Scientific knowledge is devoid of subjective notions, including belief, explanation, description, doubt.
The names of scientific models may be subjective, and the scientist can believe whatever he wants. He may doubt peer review/AGW/the Big Bang/eggs explains science/climate/the origin of the Universe/heart attacks, or believe that he’ll have another beer describes his thirst, but for openers, whichever of these notions is not measured and compared to standards are, either way, not scientific facts, and so, just for openers, are outside science.
Science is a tough master.
And something about which you display a considerable amount of ignorance.
As models grow from conjectures through hypotheses and theories to laws, they mature. Theories make at least one novel prediction validated by measurements within a specified accuracy. Laws are theories complete in all implications.
As an example, Newton’s laws were never theories. Theories are explanations of phenomena and frequently invoke laws.
Newton’s law of universal gravitation states that any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the two bodies. Newton wrote that he had no explanation for this; “I brook me no hypotheses”. Currently, there are two gravitational theories, Einstein’s General Relativity and the Quantum Theory of gravity and neither are precursors to Newton’s law.
Theories are subject to change and do so with some frequency in the history of science. Newton had a theory about light for example, that it consisted of corpuscles and had a drawn out battle with Huygens whose theory was that light was a wave. Snell’s Law describing the relationship between the angles of incidence and refraction when light transits the boundary between two different isotropic media, such as water, glass, or air, takes no account of whether light is a particle, wave, sub-miniature Elvis impersonators or anything else for that matter.
Incidentally, the law of refraction was first accurately described by Ibn Sahl in of Baghdad, in his manuscript On Burning Mirrors and Lenses in 984 CE, so really we ought to be calling it Ibn Sahl’s Law.
Git’s several errors and his insult arise from his confusion over the vocabulary of science.
He took exception to my account by conflating models and theories. To do so, he introduced MODELS of gravity as his example. To support my observation about the evolution of models, he might have gone much further – including the early models of Aristotle, Galileo, and Kepler before Newton, then adding Einstein and the dark model of the Quantum Theory of gravity.
Then he might have recognized that Newton’s model is called the Newton’s theory of gravitation. It is not yet called a law, but it reasonably could be. Git confuses that theory with Newton’s Laws, which are threefold, and are models of mechanics, and do not include universal gravitation.
Git’s reference to Einstein’s model is to his General THEORY of Relativity, still a theory because of other problems, including with gravity in the arms of spiral galaxies. As far as gravity is concerned, GR has been validated as a local improvement over Newton. But far from invalidating Newton’s gravitation, GR just limits that theory to non-relativistic domains. Space flight and the motion of bodies within the solar system are accurately predicted using Newton’s classical mechanics, and could not be measurably improved with relativity.
His reference to the Quantum Theory of gravity is to String Theory, the puffed-up conjecture that gravity can be modeled from quantum mechanics. Physicists have advanced this model to open the applicability of Quantum Theory, not to perfect the model of gravity.
Git says, Currently, there are two gravitational theories, Einstein’s General Relativity and the Quantum Theory of gravity and neither are precursors to Newton’s law. Instead, two gravitational models have currency as more than conjectures: the one included in General Relativity, and Newton’s theory, the former for cosmology and the latter for mechanics under Newton’s Laws.
In the interests of the proper use of language, we might consider these from Dictionary.com without further comment: Pompous: characterized by an ostentatious display of dignity or importance Git : a foolish or contemptible person.
In the interests of the proper use of language, we might consider these from Dictionary.com without further comment:
Pompous: characterized by an ostentatious display of dignity or importance
Git : a foolish or contemptible person.
You don’t really believe I didn’t know that when I chose the handle? Words fail me :-))))))))
Git’s Ref [1]: Posted by the Ministry School Online. Is that where Git git’s his science?
Git’s Ref [2]: The Wikipedia article titled Newton’s law of universal gravitation is a good example of the limitations of Wikipedia. It doesn’t distinguish between theories and laws. Under the title of his Newton’s law, it refers to Newton’s theory of gravitation, Newton’s Theory of Gravitation, Newton’s Theory (2), and this: What Newton did was to show how the inverse-square law of attraction had many necessary mathematical connections with observable features of the motions of bodies in the solar system; and that they were related in such a way that the observational evidence and the mathematical demonstrations, taken together, gave reason to believe that the inverse square law was not just approximately true but exactly true (to the accuracy achievable in Newton’s time and for about two centuries afterwards – and with some loose ends of points that could not yet be certainly examined, where the implications of the theory had not yet been adequately identified or calculated).
This paragraph directly supports my claim, which confused Git, that models progress. In Newton’s case, the article shows its advancement from a conjecture to a hypothesis and thence to a theory. In spite of the title and Wikipedia’s lack of rigor, Newton’s model of gravity has yet to become a law, and in fact may never achieve that status.
The same source, Wikipedia, under the article Gravitation has a section titled Newton’s theory of gravitation with an italicized cross-reference to Newton’s law of universal gravitation.
The lesson for the Gits of the blogosphere is that Wikipedia is an excellent starting point for research, and a very poor stopping point. It’s the Internet sorted and cross-indexed.
Git’s Ref [3] The web page Newton’s Law of Gravity Calculator is but a name randomly assigned to a formula. It is a page on the blog of the Astronomy Education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A little digging showed it to be the work of research associate professor David M. Lee, PhD, U.NE. Neither the web page nor other work found for Lee discusses models, theories, or laws to illuminate the discussion here.
Git’s Ref [4] This is a discussion as advertised, but written for children. It is the work of Robert Krampf who posts as the Happy Scientist. Krampf’s bio says he studied geology in college and always loved science.
For Git’s consumption, Krampf writes, The problem you are running into is with the scientific definition of the terms. That causes confusion in many areas of science where the scientific term means something different from the way it is used in everyday language. In the language of science, laws and theories are very different things.
Krampf’s right about that, and it supports my problems with Wikipedia. But then Krampf, too, gets lost in the weeds. He never mentions models or conjectures, at least on the referent page.
Git’s Ref [5] What Is This Thing Called Science? is almost 40 years old, a best seller early in the evolution of academic science into Post Modern Science and AGW. Couldn’t resist punctuating the title: What Is This Thing Called, Science?
The author is Brit Alan Chalmers, holder of a PhD in engineering (a hopeful sign) and now professor in philosophy and history. Perhaps he knows a thing or two about epistemology. Perhaps Git could actually cite something from that tome that support his model of science.
To Chalmers credit, he begins his model of science with a discussion of the meaning of facts, and he offers an extensive criticism of Popper and his student, Feyerabend. The online preview contains a names index, but not a subject index. A search of the book uncovered 21 references to induction, but only 9 references to deduction, and no references to Cause & Effect by which Francis Bacon replaced the childish induction of Aristotle with deduction to create Modern Science. Bacon is never mentioned in the book. That two-pronged omission is fatal to understanding scientific models.
Given the definition of pompous and git, P.G. added, You don’t really believe I didn’t know that when I chose [my] handle? Words fail me :-))))))))
My post seemed a good place to remind readers of the origin of Pompous Git so that they can see how P.G. strives in his posts to live up to it. P.G. got this much right: words do fail him.
Alan Robertson
February 11, 2015 8:13 pm
Scarcely more than a century ago, mankind did not know or understand that what we could see of our Milky Way was not the universe and that other galaxies existed. Now we know that there are mini- galaxies orbiting this galaxy and mini galaxies spinning within this galaxy and that our galaxy is on a collision course to crash into another galaxy.. We have found 100 million galaxies appearing to be strung along filaments, so to speak and explained with terms of “we think” and “we believe” about something we can’t observe and can ‘t explain in a manner which fits with what we previously thought we understood about the physical world. We are left filled with awe at what we’ve found and perhaps even dread, when it begins to sink in how little we know. Cosmology is humble pie.
Staring through my six inch Newtonian sends shivers down my spine. And it’s not merely because of the cold.
Dr. Strangelove
February 11, 2015 8:59 pm
1. There is no interstellar medium where electromagnetic waves propagate. Michelson-Morley experiment disproved the existence of ether.
2. There is no experiment that disproved the special theory of relativity. Its basic premise is valid – light in a vacuum travels at constant speed irrespective of the observer’s motion.
3. There is no experiment that proved electromagnetic field alters the speed of light.
These are not absolute truths but it requires empirical evidence to disprove them. If and when that happens, we can revise our current theories such as Big Bang, dark matter and dark energy. The theories are not perfect. They cannot explain everything. But IMO the alternative theories explain less not more.
Albert A. Michelson, Edward W. Morley, “On the Relative Motion of the Earth and the Luminiferous Ether”, American Journal of Science, Third Series, Vol. XXXIV (203), Nov. 1887):
..the relative velocity of the earth and the ether is probably less than one-sixth the earth’s orbital velocity, and certainly less than one-fourth. … The experiment will therefore be repeated at intervals of three months, and thus all uncertainty will be avoided.
So no, Michelson and Moreley certainly didn’t believe their experiment “disproved the existence of ether”. Science fiction?
Pompous Git still bloviating and spouting learned rubbish? It doesn’t matter what Michelson and/ or Morley thought. The experiment they did was set out to prove ether and it was the first valid experiment to disprove it. Since then there have been many other experiments far more accurate to conclusively do so. But you are still stuck in ether – the cosmological equivalent of a tree-hugger. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment#Subsequent_experiments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment#Recent_experiments
You didn’t answer my question about your quote about an event horizon, “i.e. a boundary in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer” – where you had plagiarised it from? Was it Wikipedia? From here that is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon ?
And then you say Wiki-bloodypedia. Tut-tut. Rubbishing the source you plagiarise from is like biting the hand that feeds you. Your attempts to don the wisdom of others is transparent. Like the emperor’s clothes you can be seen naked underneath as the Pompous Git.
Richard, I was responding to the claim “Michelson-Morley experiment disproved the existence of ether”. It didn’t and I quoted from their paper the relevant section. The full paper is here: https://www.aip.org/history/gap/PDF/michelson.pdf
There is no doubt that later experiments did dispose of the ether, but the original experiment did no such thing; Michelson and Morley said so and that it was necessary for the experiment to be repeated to determine the relative velocity of Earth and ether. If you know of a different version of the paper I referenced, then point us to it. You will be making history!
As it happens The Git did not “plagiarise” the concept of event horizons from the wiki-bloody-pedia. If my words are the same, it’s highly likely that I remembered them. I use the wiki-bloody-pedia with great caution. Until recently, it had Flowerdale in northern Tasmania as producing 95% of Australia’s cotton. Needless to say, cotton is incapable of being grown outdoors anywhere in Tasmania.
If you believe that event horizons do not exist, then give us a source. Why do you persist in disparaging posters instead of contributing substantively to the discussion? Is it because you are a Richard?
Pompous Git, contrary to what you assert, if the words are the same it is highly likely you plagiarised them and you should not disparage the sources you plagiarise from, As I said it amounts to biting the hand that feeds you and is the mark of an ingrate. I do not mean to disparage you, You do that to yourself without much assistance from me.
Re: The Michelson-Morley experiment (PS its Morley not Moreley) you display a profound ignorance of science and the scientific method. You claim that the experiment did not disprove the existence of aether because (you claim) Michelson and Morley did not believe that it disproved it. Firstly this claim of yours dubious and is founded on them saying the experiment should be repeated.
If you had cared to read the very next paragraph of what you had quoted they write “It appears, from all that precedes, reasonably certain that if there be any relative motion between the earth and the luminiferous ether, it must be small; quite small enough entirely to refute Fresnel’s explanation of aberration.”
Secondly the experiment produced a NULL Result, which means it did not support the hypothesis of the experiment – that aether existed. Michelson or Morley’s beliefs were irrelevant to outcome of the experiment.. Michelson was surprised by the result and did indeed repeat the experiments with greater accuracy and continued to find the Null result.
I never said that event horizons do not exist. Your powers of comprehension are abysmal. Your bloated opinion of yourself rests solely on your ability to quote, plagiarise and name-drop with little or no innate ability or understanding. The event horizon of a Black hole is the boundary at which the escape velocity equals the speed of light, which is far more comprehensible than your palgiarised quote from “wiki-bloody-pedia”. People who are puffed up egotists wouldn’t recognise sarcasm or satire if it came and bit them on the bum.
Richard, I owe you an apology. It would appear that The Git plagiarised the phrase “In general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer” from an essay written by Jonathan Sturm in 2006. At that time, the wiki-bloody-pedia used the phrase: “An event horizon is a boundary in spacetime at which the escape velocity required for a given mass has reached the speed of light, making escape impossible” which makes it unlikely that either The Git or Jonathan Sturm plagiarised the phrase from there.
Meanwhile, either The Git has apologised to Jonathan Sturm, or vice versa. He/they [delete whichever is inapplicable] drank a toast of unoaked chardonnay to aging memory banks. We also discussed the question Who Am I? And If So, How Many?
Secondly the experiment produced a NULL Result, which means it did not support the hypothesis of the experiment – that aether existed. Michelson or Morley’s beliefs were irrelevant to outcome of the experiment.. Michelson was surprised by the result and did indeed repeat the experiments with greater accuracy and continued to find the Null result.
While you believe “”…the relative velocity of the earth and the ether is probably less than one-sixth the earth’s orbital velocity, and certainly less than one-fourth. … ” is “NULL” I still contend that it was a small positive and not null. You further state:
Michelson was surprised by the result and did indeed repeat the experiments with greater accuracy and continued to find the Null result.
In Measurement of the Velocity of Light in a Partial Vacuum, Contributions from the Mount Wilson Observatory 1935, vol. 522, p261, Michelson, Pease and Pearson wrote:
The simple mean of all the readings for the velocity of light is 299,774 km/sec. in vacuo. Since the values fluctuate somewhat with the time, this mean may differ slightly from what would be obtained if observations were made continuously over an extended period. Series of measures 1-13 and 26-54, made from February 20 to July 14, 1931, gave 299,775 km/sec. Series 14-25, made from March 25 to April 3, 1931, gave 299,746 km/sec. The fact that these mean results differed from each other and from the value 299,796 km/sec. obtained on Mount Wilson necessitated additional readings.
Further readings made from March 3 to August 4, 1932, gave a mean value of 299,775 km/sec. If, however, the readings be divided into two groups with an equal number of individual determinations of the velocity, series 55-110 give a value of 299,780 km/sec, while series 111-158 give 299,771 km/sec.
Readings were resumed in December, 1932, giving a mean high value of 299,785 km/sec, which dropped to a mean of 299,765 km/sec. on January 15 and rose again to the earlier value on February 28. The mean velocity for the 75 series was 299,775 km/sec. Attempts to explain these variations in velocity as a result of instrumental effects have not thus far been successful. [Emphasis The Git’s]
IOW, Michelson et al were still finding evidence, small in magnitude, but definitely not null for the ether in the mid-1930s when you claim they were doing the opposite. Quite how noticing this makes The Git “the cosmological equivalent of a tree-hugger” escapes me. Presumably you would have The Git being an adherent of caloric theory when writing about that long past episode in science.
Git
Let me first clarify we are talking about “luminiferous ether”, the alleged hypothetical medium through which light travelled in space.
You wrote “So no, Michelson and Moreley certainly didn’t believe their experiment “disproved the existence of ether”. Science fiction?” This could be read to mean, in absence of clarification, you are questioning that it is science fiction and you also believe what you allegedly say Michelson and Morley believed. And that is the interpretation I took.
An experiment is interpreted on the basis of its results and not on the basis of anyone’s beliefs, even if they be those of the author(s).
You again repeated “There is no doubt that later experiments did dispose of the ether, but the original experiment did no such thing; Michelson and Morley said so …”
Here there needs to be some clarification. It did not “dispose of ether”, because people continued to believe in it and perhaps, as you allege, Michelson and Morley too, but that is not what we are talking about. It did scientifically because it gave a Null result. A Null result is where the result does not support the hypothesis. It did not detect the expected velocity of light relative to the hypothesised ether.
“IOW, Michelson et al were still finding evidence, small in magnitude, but definitely not null for the ether in the mid-1930s when you claim they were doing the opposite.”
I never claimed “they were doing the opposite.” They were doing experiments with greater accuracy to try and prove their postulate – ether – and repeatedly coming up with a null result.
“Michelson et al were still finding evidence, small in magnitude, but definitely not null” – you need to do some reading about null results. It involves statistics. Your statement is meaningless.
Mac the Knife
February 11, 2015 10:27 pm
482 comments on this thread…. and not one from sir harry shaman!
This has been a most enjoyable and interesting discussion of the improbable universe we live in!
Thank You, Anthony… and all contributors!
Mervyn
February 11, 2015 11:39 pm
Unfortunately, humans will never resolve the origins of time, existence and matter… for it is something beyond the capability of the human condition to grasp, which is why it is easier to say there is a God. Even if humans began understanding, it would cause the human brain to go into information overload and suffer a mental breakdown. In reality, humans err on the side of denial.
Just as a spider in Alice Springs, Australia, will never comprehend the inner workings of the International space station, humans will never understand “how it all began”, if indeed it ever began at all for us, in our human dimension. Heck, most people won’t even believe in the dimension of the spirit world despite great spiritualists that have been amongst us like the great Doris Stokes! It’s too complex for humans and that’s where the state of denial sets in. Denial is the brains mechanism to prevent information over load from trying to make sense of what the brain is conditioned not to make sense of.
Peterg
February 12, 2015 12:21 am
I am not a physicist, however I understand that something very like the big bang is supported by compelling observations.
There is the red shift, only explainable by the expansion rate of the universe. So space is observably expanding.
There is the fact that the mass density of the universe is identical in all directions. If we look X billion light years in one direction, and -X billion light years in another direction, and see identical properties, then X billion years ago these systems must have been close together so some event could make their properties uniform. I believe this is explained in inflation by having the speed of light increase by vast factors if mass density is increased.
So for me, observationally, the fundamental facts of the big bang with something like inflation are well established. (These points are well known and I would have read them in a popular science book.) Alternatives would have to explain these observations.
You are saying that the mass density is the same in all directions, so it must have come from a big bang.
A thought or two, when a bang occurs you end up with nothing in the middle, ask astronomers what is in the middle. It is dense and impeniterable, rather dense.
Billy Graham said it best’ God said let there [be] light and Bang there it was”
Unmentionable
February 12, 2015 10:14 am
Just to flagrantly point-out that ‘settled science’ is an everlasting myth that’s been with us in one form or another, same concept just different words, for as long as people unfortunately labelled ‘scientists’, or worse still, philosophers, mistakenly convinced themselves they had some definite material clues about what basic phenomena are and how they actually work. Human capacity will apparently always be rendered sterile and dormant via this enduring feature of a popular tyrannical flapdoodle of flabbergasting proportions being powered by a self-assured astounding indefiniteness, parading around as an advanced but subtle and elucidating material insight about which definitive things can be safely and most assuredly written and reverently uttered.
This time is different! Every self-respecting flapdoodle says that, but the best flapdoodles believe themselves be self-evidently quite inescapable, and only the unhinged would spurn or seek to repudiate them.
Flapdoodles however cross-breed with strange flapdoodles, from alternate whereabouts, which produces many sterile, hybrid intellectually-disabled flapdoodles, that tend to form gregarious aggregations that have came to be called ‘Disciplines’.
Disciplines are thus best understood as a super concretions of particularly dull and insoluble flapdoodles, that are sometimes even superficially congruent. The primary function of a super flapdoodle is to lead everyone astray for a minimum of several decades, whereupon a superior flapdoodle emerges and is applied liberally like a fashionable wallpaper for the eyes.
Then it’s off to the races once more, for several decades of tyrannical flapdoodle expounding and application of its Holy texts.
But this time is different – one flapdoodle to rule them all!
goggleboy
February 12, 2015 10:15 am
I have noticed that all popularised TV shows about the Big Bang show it as a real explosion complete with noise and flames , mostly red and orange and lumps flying about. But surely there was no fire and so on, and obviously no sound , and didn’t the light appear at least 300,000 years later, according to the theory?
so light was not there at all at “creation”, and please let’s not muddle this theory with ancient jewish or Sumerian mythology, it doesn’t help. It will be very difficult to dislodge the popular belief in Big Bang and of course, black holes, as the whole lot has been now thoroughly Disneyfied and is accepted as real by the vast majority. along with the ideas that dinosaurs were nice friendly animals like hippos, most kids are taught that you can travel through “wormholes”
Dr. S:
“The galaxies are not moving at all, hence no infinite mass. It is space that is stretching… ….
The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy will one day collide ”
Two galaxies should not collide if galaxies are moving apart due to space expansion.
Andromeda is 2.2 million light years away, it should be mowing away and not towards Milky Way, and so excluding possibility of their collision.
Is this one of the exceptions to the rule?
Is the gravitational attraction of two galaxies overriding force of the BB expansion?
Do we have galaxies moving in all direction?
Or is it that the BB theory is not working as it is suppose to?
“Is the gravitational attraction of two galaxies overriding force of the BB expansion?”
“Locally” apparently yes. Andromeda is a “local galaxy”
“The Big Bang is not an explosion of matter moving outward to fill an empty universe. Instead, space itself expands with time everywhere and increases the physical distance between two comoving points. Because the FLRW metric assumes a uniform distribution of mass and energy, it applies to our universe only on large scales—local concentrations of matter such as our galaxy are gravitationally bound and as such do not experience the large-scale expansion of space.[37]” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang#Expansion_of_space
This is the source given: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310808
The Andromeda and the Milky Way are both members of the so-called Local Group [of about 20 galaxies] that are bound to each other by gravity [like the planets and the Sun in the solar system]. The members of the group move around [like the planets] the center of gravity of the group. The local group itself is gravitationally bound to the local super cluster, moving at 627 km/sec relative to the CMB. The expansion is only strong enough to overcome gravity on the scale of galaxy clusters [tens of millions of light years]. None of this is controversial in any way.
Lief, I know wife was not meant to be easy, but I fail to see that being due to gravity 😉
[Thus, are you implying the general case in physics of “wife becomes easier” with gravity? Or just “more funner” without gravity? .mod]
Are you a flat Earther
It is easier to believe in a flat Earth, rather than the absolute nonsense peddled by the Electric Universe cult. but I fail to see that being due to gravity
That you fail to see something does not mean that the thing is false.
jmorepuss [It’s] “You can’t teach AN old dog new tricks” I just thought I’d correct your English. It will come handy when you write your paper with your new tricks and collect the subsequent Nobel Prize that will inevitably be conferred on you.
May the (electrical) force be with you.
Mathematical Masturbation. The real problem here is that physics profession has turned into a welfare scam. In the early part of the 20th century, physicists invented all kinds of new cool stuff like nuclear weapons, transistors, and lasers.
The Government was so impressed it put them on the payroll. Problem is that the well ran dry twenty or thirty years ago. Physicists try to look busy these days so the honey will keep flowing.
Sadly, they busy themselves with stuff like this. It is not nor will it ever be science as there can be no access to the times and conditions they are describing, and therefor no experiment. And experiment is what differentiates science from mathematical masturbation.
Tell the physicists they are done, turn out the lights, and send them home. Their 2 weeks of severance pay will be in the mail. They will be eligible for standard unemployment, but they best start their job searches asap.
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
3-5 minutes of a google search reveals that anybody and everybody alive in about 1902, could in fact, be the originator of this well known quote.
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”
Is this not attributed to Lord Kelvin more then 100 yerars ago? And how wrong was it? It is as wrong now…
Energy levels are discrete, with quantum being the smallest amount, which can not be altered.
The quantum of energy carried by a photon is the product of the Planck’s constant and the frequency. For a red shift to take place, frequency has to be reduced, i.e. the photon has to loose some of it energy.
– If a photon has a single quantum of energy, it can not be decreased : red shift can not take place.
– If a photon carries number of quanta of energy, some can be ‘exchanged’ through collisions in the interstellar space, less energy = reduced frequency = red shift; longer the path more quanta lost, larger the red shift.
– If such ‘exchange’ can not take place, and Doppler reduces frequency (i.e. energy of the photon) the quanta of photons energy can not be destroyed, photons lost energy quanta = heating interstellar space
– if so the background radiation (3 or 4K) is not leftover of the Big Bang, the universe is kept warm by the red shift (?!).
If a photon has a single quantum of energy, it can not be decreased : red shift can not take place.
sure it can, it just has smaller quantum.
Please try to avoid embarrassing yourself by babbling about what you do not understand.
And BTW, the ordinary Doppler effect shows that red shift can occur. But the expansion of the universe does not show us a Doppler effect; instead it is stretching of space having nothing to do with motion away from us. Galaxies to first approximation do not move, no matter how far away they are.
I’m not too embarrassed to ask questions.
What is first approximation? Is that a particular distance below which you believe expansion does not occur? Is that described somewhere in literature?
Because galaxies move around within the local cluster [the Sun – and the Milky Way – is falling towards the Virgo Cluster at 627 km/sec due to the gravity of the mass of the cluster], that movement is not part of the expansion of the Universe, so you have to be further out where the expansion speed is greater than this ‘proper motion’ of the Milky Way. This is discussed in hundreds of papers, e.g. the paper about the Planck results I referred to earlier.
Asking is the first step towards knowing. There is good set of lectures [among many] that you can work through to get an understanding of the fundamentals of modern cosmology: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/
Leif,
I want to thank you for this link. I recommend it as an overview to anyone interested in the current theories in cosmology. Easy to understand, and interesting.
You are welcome. If you and others wish to pursue some of the details, go for cos02, cos03, …, cos17
jmorpuss
February 12, 2015 5:52 pm
Leif
It’s a bit hard to prove the Doppler affect from a car traveling at the same speed alongside the car that your using for the experiment. The sun is traveling at near 500,000 mph in a direction tethered to something .
You are a bit incoherent. In any event the red shift we observe due to the expansion of the Universe is not a Doppler shift at all, but instead a stretching of space and of the wavelength of the light embedded in it.
Tom In Indy
February 12, 2015 5:56 pm
If space is expanding like a ball of dough rising, and planets, galaxies, etc are the raisins in the dough, why don’t the raisins expand at the same rate as the dough? At what point in the primordial sausage did space become space and matter become matter. At the most primitive level, everything is a particle correct? So all particles are expanding? Or is it, just some particles are expanding?
For the tenth time: the nuclear force, the electromagnetic forces, and gravity are all much stronger than the expansion ‘force’ at distances less than several million light years, so nearby systems of particles do not expand. Only when you get up the a scale of clusters of galaxies does the expansion become important [and measurable].
One way is to measure the red shift, z. Another, independent, way is to look at the light curves of supernovae: time runs slower by a factor of (1+z), so the light curves vary with the red shift [and distance].
Were all particles expanding during the period of inflation? Or just the space particles? Why did inflation stop, but space continued to expand at an increasing rate? It seems that if the other forces were strong enough to stop inflation, then space should be expanding at a decreasing rate. It’s almost as if space has an inherent nature to expand as rapidly as possible. Prior to the end of inflation, there was no speed limit. At the end of the inflation, the speed of light becomes the speed limit, and space is accelerating toward that limit.
“Now, it seems there’s a challenge to this ‘settled’ science, and a new quantum equation predicts the universe has no beginning.”
Around 200 years ago James Hutton a Scottish doctor, farmer, and businessman, stated that the Earth has no beginning, which was taken in those days as meaning the Universe has no beginning,
Hutton is credited with being the founder of geochemistry, geophysics and geology. Lyell wrote the world’s first geology textbook based on deciphering Hutton’s turgid prose.
Vuk: “If a photon has a single quantum of energy, it can not be decreased : red shift can not take place.”
Dr. S. : “sure it can, it just has smaller quantum.”
So we make it up as we go along.
There is no smaller or bigger quantum, a quantum of energy is the smallest amount of energy that there is.
There is no ‘extra’ energy. If the wave is stretched to twice its length its energy per unit length is half, but since it occupies twice the length, the energy is the same. You say that Doppler shift is impossible [ignoring the fact that the cosmological red shift is not a Doppler shift]. At solar observatories we measure Doppler shifts all the time. Here is a typical measurement at WSO http://wso.stanford.edu/daily/current/scan.12019.gif
The lower left shows the Doppler shifts over the solar disk, red shifted [although shown in blue, positive change of wavelength] on the right-hand side of the Sun which is moving away from us, and blue shifted [shown in red, negative change] on the left-hand side of the Sun which is moving toward us.
So, please stop the nonsense.
Another fudge of physics laws, make new ones up as you go along.
jmorpuss
February 12, 2015 11:30 pm
I see the formation of the universe a bit like a forest fire . As the fire intensifies it sends out embers and small spot fires start and can grow into bigger fires , from little things big things grow if there’s enough potential energy stored. We live in a see of electrons. About 1800 electrons = 1 proton, electric potential creates separation (fission) while protons and neutrons try to create mass (fusion) . Just remember electrons move around solids. Coulombs Law states likeness repels and opposites attract
more nonsense: there are very nearly the same number of electrons and protons. The mass of a proton is 1836 times the mass of a single electron, but the number of the two species are very nearly the same [taking Helium to contain two protons].
Leif But most of the protons and neutrons have already formed mass and squeezed out excess electron to create space. That’s why there’s more space then mass.
Dr. Svalgaard recommends paper: http://star-www.st-and.ac.uk/~kdh1/cos/cos01.pdf
concluding:
Our “Crazy” Universe
~4% Normal Matter
~22% “Dark Matter”
~74% “Dark Energy”
You and anyone else is welcome to such crazy universe, I’ll stick to the one that still has some sanity left in it.
I am disappointed and a little amazed at vukcevic. I thought he was a physicist, yet asked the most elementary questions of the BB expansion and when explained in quite a simple and understandable way by Wikipedia (for once) and subsequently by you fails or refuses to grasp it. (Easily understandable to even a non-physicist like me.)
Basically he is saying if I cant see it I wont believe it. That would eliminate microbes, molecules, atoms,black holes etc. and many counter-intuitive things like the constant speed of light in a vacuum from his belief system.
His attitude is more that of a denier than a sceptic.
A New Light-Speed Anisotropy Experiment: Absolute Motion and Gravitational Waves Detected
Reginald T. Cahill
School of Chemistry, Physics and Earth Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide 5001, Australia
E-mail: Reg.Cahill@flinders.edu.au; http://www.scieng.flinders.edu.au/cpes/people/cahill_r/
Data from a new experiment measuring the anisotropy of the one-way speed of
EM waves in a coaxial cable, gives the speed of light as 300,000±400±20km/s in
a measured direction RA=5.5±2 hrs, Dec=70±10◦S, is shown to be in excellent
agreement with the results from seven previous anisotropy experiments, particularly
those of Miller (1925/26), and even those of Michelson and Morley (1887). The Miller
gas-mode interferometer results, and those from the RF coaxial cable experiments
of Torr and Kolen (1983), De Witte (1991) and the new experiment all reveal the
presence of gravitational waves, as indicated by the last ± variations above, but
of a kind different from those supposedly predicted by General Relativity. Miller
repeated the Michelson-Morley 1887 gas-mode interferometer experiment and again
detected the anisotropy of the speed of light, primarily in the years 1925/1926
atop Mt.Wilson, California. The understanding of the operation of the Michelson
interferometer in gas-mode was only achieved in 2002 and involved a calibration
for the interferometer that necessarily involved Special Relativity effects and the
refractive index of the gas in the light paths. The results demonstrate the reality of
the Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction as an observer independent relativistic effect. A
common misunderstanding is that the anisotropy of the speed of light is necessarily in
conflict with Special Relativity and Lorentz symmetry — this is explained. All eight
experiments and theory show that we have both anisotropy of the speed of light and
relativistic effects, and that a dynamical 3-space exists — that absolute motion through
that space has been repeatedly observed since 1887. These developments completely
change fundamental physics and our understanding of reality. “Modern” vacuum-mode
Michelson interferometers, particularly the long baseline terrestrial versions, are, by
design flaw, incapable of detecting the anisotropy effect and the gravitational waves.
It would seem that there are many experiments replicating the Michelson-Morley light speed anisotropy that Dayton Miller refined back in the 1920s. Always more to learn 🙂
Paper here (not paywalled): http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2006/PP-07-15.PDF
yes, these things crop up from time to time, but are never compelling and thus not generally accepted. Physicists are a VERY conservative lot and a ‘finding’ has to be solid, reproducible, and not contrary to a large body of other experiments.
There is nothing wrong with understanding that theoretical physics is just that, theoretical. At the same time, there is nothing wrong with theory that accounts for observation. The effects of dark matter are quite observable in many ways (gravitational lensing, rotation of galaxies, movement of galaxy clusters) and not overly complex from my limited understanding. It is simply matter that interacts gravitationally, just as normal matter does, but does not observably interact electromagnetically. While this may make particle physicists shiver, it seems easy to grasp as a laymen. Dark energy, on the other hand, is more limited in what it explains observationally, increasing redshift with distance. Redshift is not hard to observe or measure but distance is another story. The math seems to work but those mathematicians can whip up anything you want. It is still the best theory I have heard to explain observation.
In my hunt for the elusive “large body” of M-M replications producing a null result, I came across this:
Michelson-Morley Experiments Revisited: Systematic Errors, Consistency Among Different
Experiments, and Compatibility with Absolute Space
Héctor A. Múnera
….1. Introduction
To the best of our knowledge, the only empirical evidence against the existence of absolute space ( = ether in this paper) is the null interpretation given to the interferometry experiment carried out by Michelson in 1881[1], repeated with experimental and theoretical improvements by Michelson and Morley (M-M) in 1887 [2]. A hundred and ten years later, there is still controversy: some people argue that results were non-null and try to derive implications thereof [3], while others strongly maintain that results were null, and dismiss evidence to the contrary as experimental artifact [4].
To avoid second-hand interpretations, we revisited the original literature on M-M. It was found that a systematic application of standard statistical tests to the values originally reported does not support the null interpretation. Furthermore, two systematic errors were identified, one of them new to the best of our knowledge. Systematic error 1 (SE1) pertains to data reduction, while systematic error 2 (SE2) belongs to the theory. After removing SE1, speeds become larger than reported, hence closer to Miller’s results. The SE2 implies that fringe-shifts during an experimental sessions present strong variations due to
changes in magnitude and direction of the projection of velocity on the plane of the interferometer.
The implications are two-fold: (a) data reduction cannot be done averaging fringe-shifts during a given session, and (b) the phase angle must be included in all equations.
Section 2 begins with a brief summary of the theory behind the experiment, leading to identification of SE1 and SE2. It continues with a critical review of the class of M-M experiments to show that (1) all experiments were qualitatively compatible with absolute space, and (2) the results never were null, neither in the original version [2] nor in the subsequent repetitions [5-15]. Section 3 contains our contribution to the controversy. Firstly, we remove SE1 from Illingworth’s inter-session data [13]. And, secondly, we apply Illingworth’s method to the M-M experiment [2], to Miller’s measurements on Sept. 23, 1925 [7], and to his own observations on July 9, 1927 [13]. It is found that at a 90% confidence level, all experiments were non-null. The intra-session averages based on velocity exactly correspond to the range of variation of the projection of orbital speed at the moment and location of the observations. Section 4 closes the paper. Except for consistency with absolute space, we do not mention any other implication for our findings.
[Emphasis mine]
So where is this “large body of other experiments”? Not being rude; just very curious. And have a distinct preference for primary sources having long ago learnt that secondary sources cannot be relied upon.
Einstein didn’t know about the M-M experiment when he formulated special relativity [he didn’t need it] and all the tests of relativity have come out in favor of relativity. Those are ‘all the other experiments’.
Nevertheless we report here experimental evidence that absolute motion is detectable in laboratory experiments, such as those done by Michelson and Morley and the others, but that this requires a re-analysis of the operation of their interferometer, as reported herein. This analysis leads to a speed which agrees with that found from the NASA COBE satellite observations on
analysing the dipole anisotropy of the Cosmic Background Radiation. Together these results show
that absolute motion has been detected.
Or is it that if theory is contradicted by data, then the data is faulty? Ah well…
The COBE result is correct. What is wrong is to take that result as support for absolute motion. What COBE shows is that the solar system [+Milky Way and Local Group] is moving towards the center of the local super cluster we are sitting in at 627 km/sec. This has nothing to do with absolute motion, but is simply the solar system\’s proper motion caused by moving in the gravitational field of the super cluster.
Git “[I] have a distinct preference for primary sources having long ago learnt that secondary sources cannot be relied upon.” Your mistake is to assume that the paper you quote and believe as gospel is a “primary source”. Where has it been published? Who peer reviewed it? Is it based on any experiment the author has carried out himself?
The guy says “To the best of our knowledge, the only empirical evidence against the existence of absolute space ( = ether in this paper) is the null interpretation given to the interferometry experiment carried out by Michelson in 1881[1], repeated with experimental and theoretical improvements by Michelson and Morley (M-M) in 1887 [2].”
If that’s the best of his knowledge he is pretty ignorant. And if he thinks that that those primitive experiments overturns Einsteins theories he should carry out fresh experiments instead of “revisiting” those ancient experiments.
The primary sources are the experiments carried out. I gave you the Wikipedia link. The data from the experiments have been tabulated. Look at the Fringe shifts expected and the Fringe shifts measured and experimental resolution. Many more experiments were carried out with accuracies several orders of magnitude better than Michelson-Morleys. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment#Subsequent_experiments
@ur momisugly lief
Héctor A. Múnera’s reanalysis appears to show the same result as COBE. Why would I accept one, but not the other if they are measuring the same thing? @ur momisugly Richard
Your mistake is to assume that the paper you quote and believe as gospel is a “primary source”. Where has it been published? Who peer reviewed it? Is it based on any experiment the author has carried out himself?
Where did I state that I “believe as gospel” any paper, anytime? The paper is illuminating in that it picks up on the error of avaeraging averages. Standard stuff in climastrology I know, but unlikely to have been deliberate in the eight M-M type experiments he reanalyses. Look up Simpson’s Paradox for an excellent example of what can go wrong when you naively average averages.
Reanalysis is quite respectable, though as my fellow Tasmanians Garth Paltridge and Mike Pook discovered, if your paper doesn’t directly support CAGW, then it’s a long hard slog finding a journal that will accept your work. Read Garth’s The Climate Caper for the full story. Their paper: http://www.drroyspencer.com/Paltridge-NCEP-vapor-2009.pdf
Einstein had a few words of wisdom on peer review. His own 1905 papers were pal reviewed (the publishers were his friends) and he said that if he had been a peer reviewer of them, he would have recommended against publication.
If that’s the best of his knowledge he is pretty ignorant. And if he thinks that that those primitive experiments overturns Einsteins theories he should carry out fresh experiments instead of “revisiting” those ancient experiments.
I have no problem accepting Einstein’s opinions regarding the ether. First he accepted its existence, then he denied it existed, then he said the ether existed, but it wasn’t the same ether. Finally, he said that the existence of the lumeniferous ether was irrelevant to GR. And I agree with him.
If you think these experiments were primitive, then you show your ignorance. Dayton Miller in particular was a very careful experimenter.
After reanalyzing Miller’s original data using modern techniques of quantitative error analysis, Roberts found Miller’s apparent signals to be statistically insignificant.
This in 2012 long after Millers original data had been destroyed. The other experiments referred to that were not in Múnera’s reanalysis were in vacuo rather than air, or helium in Illingworth’s replication.
A modern test of the null-result can be found here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.1284v1.pdf
“In conclusion, we have set a limit on an anisotropy of the speed of light at a level of ∆c/c ∼ 1 × 10^−17, which allows us to confirm the validity of Lorentz invariance in electrodynamics at the 10^−17 level”
That is good enough for me.
Pompous Git “If you think these experiments were primitive, then you show your ignorance. Dayton Miller in particular was a very careful experimenter.”
So was Galileo. Science and technology have moved on since their times though. They simply didnt have the instruments to produce the accuracies of the 21st century.There were no “lasers, masers, cryogenic optical resonators, etc.” in those days.
Why are you delving into accuracies which puts the limit of Vether to around 4 km/s when today the variation of the speed of light has been limited to 10^-17 ?
Pompous Git “Héctor A. Múnera’s reanalysis appears to show the same result as COBE. Why would I accept one, but not the other if they are measuring the same thing?”
Measuring the same thing according to who? Héctor A. Múnera? Firstly if you take any crude set of numbers we can get them to agree with another set of numbers but simple division or multiplication.. Secondly he claims “we report here experimental evidence that absolute motion is detectable in laboratory experiments, such as those done by Michelson and Morley and the others, but that this requires a re-analysis of the operation of their interferometer, as reported herein. This analysis leads to a speed which agrees with that found from the NASA COBE satellite observations on analysing the dipole anisotropy of the Cosmic Background Radiation. Together these results show that absolute motion has been detected.” Surely this should be ringing alarm bells in any half sensible persons mind.
“absolute motion has been detected”! Einsteins theories have been debunked! and NASA and everybody else keeps quiet about it? The only person to notice it is this Héctor A. Múnera’ because he has manipulated figures from an experiment carried out a over a century ago to agree with some figure from COBE which he says is the same thing and why would you not accept it? Well go figure.
Thanks for that Lief; I don’t doubt that those experiments are generating the expected data. It’s anomalous data that interests me here. My curiosity in this area dates back to ca. 2000 when, having been told that the Michelson-Morley experiment confirmed SR I discovered that said experiment predated SR by 8 years. And after reading it, I experienced what EM Smith calls a “dig-here” moment. I’m still digging and attempts at locating Múnera’s paper reporting on his own replication of the M-M experiment without having to pay have failed so far. Might have to pop into UTas this week.
Hey, ho… and Mrs Git won two firsts and a second in the St Ayles Skiff World Championships this weekend. Not bad for a 64 year old 🙂
Richard, I learnt long ago not to take my betters’ word for things, mainly because I discovered that no matter their credentials, they were not always correct. E.g. I was chastised in secondary school for believing that uranium transmutes to lead when anyone with a proper education, i.e. the teacher, knew that elements could never transmute into other elements, and therefore I was wrong.
Another example. When I commenced farming organically 32 years ago, the ag scientists I talked to told me that the results I was getting were “impossible”. A decade ago I was offered the opportunity to undertake a PhD in that discipline without having to complete a degree course. What had been scientifically “impossible” two decades before had become mainstream knowledge. So yes, things change.
It is entirely possible that Múnera, Miller, Michelson et alia all fudged their results, but I don’t know that. Nor can I think of a rational reason why they would. Given sufficient opportunity, I will investigate and come to my own opinion independently. You may believe that your bullying will somehow persuade me to share your opinion, but it has the opposite effect to that which you desire. The Git has no need to recruit others to share his opinions; he is sufficient unto himeslf . Now how arrogant is that? 🙂
Git the phrase is elders and betters. I have learned something today. I had assumed that you were a bit younger than me. Now I’ve discovered by powers of deduction that you are well over 2 decades older than me. Had I known earlier I would have been a bit more respectful…….
Congratulations Richard! It’s a great day when you learn something 🙂
For your elucidation, I turn 64 years old in a couple of months. However, I do not deserve any respect for that; it’s happenstance.
So was Galileo. Science and technology have moved on since their times though. They simply didnt have the instruments to produce the accuracies of the 21st century.
Funny you should mention Galileo. George Smoot in Wrinkles in Time mentions Galileo’s falling balls experiment. When he visited Pisa and saw the tower in the moonlight, he knew that we historians were wrong and that the usual account must be true.
The usual account is of course that Galileo dropped two balls of the same size and differing weights from the top of the tower, both reaching the ground simultaneously to the utter consternation of the “Aristotelians”.
The account we historians prefer is the one Galileo wrote. He doesn’t state where the experiment took place, but the height is given. It’s some 90 metres higher than the tower at Pisa, so when Newton wrote of standing on the shoulders of giants, this must have been almost literally true. Galileo’s account also has him observing the fall of the balls, so in Smoot’s account he must have raced very fast after dropping the balls to be able to do so. And what did Galileo observe?
At first, the wooden ball fell quicker than the iron ball. Then the iron ball caught up with the wooden ball and overtook it reaching the ground well ahead. Galileo also gives a first class explanation for this divergence from the results of his replication of Nicole Oresme’s 14thC thought experiment wherein both balls must necessarily fall at the same rate else Aristotle’s Law of Contradiction be broken.
One can learn a lot from reading the original account instead of relying on being moonstruck 🙂
Odd. I have long been told – by the many-but-always-modern-academia-trained “history revisionists” I so often question! – that Galileo’s experiments were NOT dropping balls (from the Tower of Pisa, or any other tower or church or watchtower) but were rolling balls down a long inclined plane!
Were his writing explicit about “dropping” the different weight balls?
Because, over short distances in the quiet of an ancient city night, dropping balls onto to cobblestones yields two very, very distinct “tones” as the wood and the iron balls hit. Thus, regardless of distance (to any reasonable height of course) you do not need to be at the bottom to know which hit first.
Further, if “I” were the older and wiser and more decrepit (compared to my youthful and exuberant young and agile apprentice) “I” would tell my youth and agile and strong apprentice to carry the weighted balls UP to the top of the tower and drop them. Of course, “I” (being the older and wiser and more important and more credible witness) would need to be at the “smart end of the measuring tape” and stay at the bottom of the stairs to record the results each time. Numerous drops will, of course, be required. Thus, to ensure consistent results between each dropped pair of heavy weights, “I” need to record the results the same way each time, and the youthful and exuberant apprentice would need to precisely duplicate the timing and location of each dropped pair of very heavy weights.
We will thus duplicate his experiment, and take the youthful and exuberant and mobile (and did I mention youthful?) Janice Moore (who has youthful long legs and unsullied knees and hips) with us to Pisa and duplicate Galileo’s experiment. She can climb the stairs numerous times carrying the numerous heavily weighted (did I mention we shall not tell her they were heavy globes of weighted metal and wood) whilst you and I stay below and do the difficult work of observation.
And the QA of the local coffee shops.
@ur momisugly RACookPE1978
As I wrote, we do not know the location, Galileo doesn’t tell us. The height is such that it must have been a cliff (no buildings of that height at that time) and there are several candidate locations. We don’t know whether there were any replications. We do know that it was an assistant who dropped the balls. It’s not a particularly difficult experiment to replicate. Find a large ball bearing and a child’s hollow plastic ball of similar diameter. Perform the experiment on a windless day else the plastic ball might travel too far sideways. Ensure that nobody’s head or any other body parts are between the ball bearing and the ground and that you are high enough for friction to slow the lighter ball quickly enough.
Galileo certainly did most of his experimentation on friction using inclined planes. It’s not at all clear whether all of these experiments were physical, some may well have been thought experiments. Galileo described one such in Discourses on Two New Sciences. This was the last of his published works and certainly the best (IMHO) though uncharacteristically for Galileo, quite subdued.
More about Galileo here: https://thepompousgit.wordpress.com/2015/02/16/a-modern-fairy-tale/
Does that mean we cannot get a Big Government grant to go travel to Italy for three months to research these problems near the Tower of Pisa with our youthful and exuberant stair climber (er, research apprentice) ?
@ur momisugly RACookPE1978
Alas, The Git would love to travel to Italy; he has a grandson living there. But his arthritis makes sitting in aircraft seats for any length of time, agonising. To add insult to injury, his last trip to visit grandkids and daughter in New Zealand saw him succumb to pneumonia two days later. The passenger in front, a young Asian girl, had spent the entire flight from Sydney to Wellington kneeling on her seat and coughing at The Git. It took many months to recover. I shall content myself with memories of chinotto, fabulous pasta dishes, cheeses, salami and ripe peaches that I consumed when there in 1960 🙂
Git “I do not deserve any respect…” maybe you’re right.
“It is entirely possible that Múnera, Miller, Michelson et alia all fudged their results, but I don’t know that. Nor can I think of a rational reason why they would.”
You just don’t get it. No one has suggested that Miller, Michelson et al fudged their results. Dont you understand “Why are you delving into accuracies which puts the limit of Vether to around 4 km/s when today the variation of the speed of light has been limited to 10^-17 ?” That is 10^12 times more accurate, a trillion times more accurate than Miller, Michelson et al
“…Lief; I don’t doubt that those experiments are generating the expected data. It’s anomalous data that interests me here.”
Anomalous data? Have you any idea what are you talking about? This is like saying I know someone has confirmed those timings with caesium atomic clock, but Galileo, who was a careful experimenter, had an “anomalous” result when he timed it with his pulse.
Not a very smart thing to say.
Listen closely you anonymous Richard. What The Git does with his time is for him to decide, not you. In all likelihood, he will find a flaw in the Múnera reanalysis. OTOH, he may not. In either case The Git will find the exercise entertaining and something a little different to write about. No doubt you are of the opinion The Git should be acting his age and watching Days of Our Wives or The Rest of the Useless on TV or playing bingo with all the other pathetic geriatric old farts. Why don’t you pursue Flinders University for employing Reg Cahill or International Center for Physics (CIF, Centro Internacional de Física) for employing Héctor A. Múnera? While they consume taxpayer dollars, though unlikely to be yours, The Git is retired and privately funded. That means he decides what he’s going to do next. Not anonymous Richards like your rude self.
@ur momisugly RACookPE1978
I think I may have found the ideal location for replicating the Galilean Pisa experiment. The Shot Tower at Taroona near where The Git lives. If we can sell the idea to Tourism Tasmania, then there might well be government funding available. If it ran in tandem with The taste of Tasmania Festival, the organiser of that is a personal friend [nudge, nudge, wink, wink] and notorious gourmet chef who enjoys The Git’s culinary output as much as he enjoys Paul’s. http://www.panoramio.com/photo/61516690
Nice thing about The Shot Tower is the balls will not be subject to wind drift since it would all happen indoors. And my recollection from when a friend had a recording studio there is that there are many dimly lit parts for jolly japes with the “youthful and exuberant stair climber (er, research apprentice).”
jmorpuss
February 13, 2015 12:47 am
Leif here’s the helium atom surrounded by a cloud of electrons. The helium atom would not exist without this cloud. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom
Every particle is both a particle and a wave… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_de_Broglie
” In his 1924 PhD thesis he postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter has wave properties. This concept is known as the de Broglie hypothesis, an example of wave-particle duality, and forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics.
electrons are very light compared to protons, so if you imagine putting a proton in an electric field and an electron in the same electric field, the electron will be accelerated 1000x more (same charge, 1/1000th the mass). This means that when there is a charge imbalance and either proton or electron flow could alleviate it, the electrons will flow way before the protons are impelled to move.
jmorpuss
February 13, 2015 1:05 am
As uranium decays to lead it forms radon gas which holds good electric potential http://www.chemicalelements.com/elements/rn.html I read somewhere that Radon is responsible for 25% of lung cancers
electrons are very light compared to protons, so if you imagine putting a proton in an electric field and an electron in the same electric field, the electron will be accelerated 1000x more (same charge, 1/1000th the mass). This means that when there is a charge imbalance and either proton or electron flow could alleviate it, the electrons will flow way before the protons are impelled to move.
Don’t believe all you read. If I’m not mistaken, the radon study was another of those “Stuff the rats til they die, then declare it toxic for humans” kinds of studies. They studied miners whose exposure to radon was high and measurable (without controlling for smokers), then extrapolated downward on the theory that “If high exposure for a short time is bad, then low exposure over a long time is just as bad.” Nonsense, of course.
This guy says that energy is not conserved. He makes a logical argument.
I thought I knew very little about cosmology. Now I think I know nothing. Or less than nothing, because what I thought I knew turns out to be wrong.
Surprise, Choelesterol is OK now too!
Important thing in philosophy is discovering what you believed to be true is not in fact true. IOW, you know less and less.
Or…..each answer creates many new questions.
[I]n fact true? Facts in philosophy are truth-valued, but not in science. That distinction is sufficient to account for the failures of the Vienna Circle and Charles Spearman to bring the successes of science into philosophy and psychology, respectively.
The parallels in science, ostensibly the topic here, are these.
(a) Science is a mapping on facts to facts, where facts are observations reduced by measurements and compared to standards. Scientific facts are quantities, not truth values. As models grow from conjectures through hypotheses and theories to laws, they mature. Theories make at least one novel prediction validated by measurements within a specified accuracy. Laws are theories complete in all implications.
(b) Science is the objective branch of knowledge, and scientific knowledge is contained in models of the Real World. Scientific knowledge is devoid of subjective notions, including belief, explanation, description, doubt.
The names of scientific models may be subjective, and the scientist can believe whatever he wants. He may doubt peer review/AGW/the Big Bang/eggs explains science/climate/the origin of the Universe/heart attacks, or believe that he’ll have another beer describes his thirst, but for openers, whichever of these notions is not measured and compared to standards are, either way, not scientific facts, and so, just for openers, are outside science.
Science is a tough master.
And something about which you display a considerable amount of ignorance.
As an example, Newton’s laws were never theories. Theories are explanations of phenomena and frequently invoke laws.
Newton’s law of universal gravitation states that any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the two bodies. Newton wrote that he had no explanation for this; “I brook me no hypotheses”. Currently, there are two gravitational theories, Einstein’s General Relativity and the Quantum Theory of gravity and neither are precursors to Newton’s law.
Theories are subject to change and do so with some frequency in the history of science. Newton had a theory about light for example, that it consisted of corpuscles and had a drawn out battle with Huygens whose theory was that light was a wave. Snell’s Law describing the relationship between the angles of incidence and refraction when light transits the boundary between two different isotropic media, such as water, glass, or air, takes no account of whether light is a particle, wave, sub-miniature Elvis impersonators or anything else for that matter.
Incidentally, the law of refraction was first accurately described by Ibn Sahl in of Baghdad, in his manuscript On Burning Mirrors and Lenses in 984 CE, so really we ought to be calling it Ibn Sahl’s Law.
Git’s several errors and his insult arise from his confusion over the vocabulary of science.
He took exception to my account by conflating models and theories. To do so, he introduced MODELS of gravity as his example. To support my observation about the evolution of models, he might have gone much further – including the early models of Aristotle, Galileo, and Kepler before Newton, then adding Einstein and the dark model of the Quantum Theory of gravity.
Then he might have recognized that Newton’s model is called the Newton’s theory of gravitation. It is not yet called a law, but it reasonably could be. Git confuses that theory with Newton’s Laws, which are threefold, and are models of mechanics, and do not include universal gravitation.
Git’s reference to Einstein’s model is to his General THEORY of Relativity, still a theory because of other problems, including with gravity in the arms of spiral galaxies. As far as gravity is concerned, GR has been validated as a local improvement over Newton. But far from invalidating Newton’s gravitation, GR just limits that theory to non-relativistic domains. Space flight and the motion of bodies within the solar system are accurately predicted using Newton’s classical mechanics, and could not be measurably improved with relativity.
His reference to the Quantum Theory of gravity is to String Theory, the puffed-up conjecture that gravity can be modeled from quantum mechanics. Physicists have advanced this model to open the applicability of Quantum Theory, not to perfect the model of gravity.
Git says, Currently, there are two gravitational theories, Einstein’s General Relativity and the Quantum Theory of gravity and neither are precursors to Newton’s law. Instead, two gravitational models have currency as more than conjectures: the one included in General Relativity, and Newton’s theory, the former for cosmology and the latter for mechanics under Newton’s Laws.
In the interests of the proper use of language, we might consider these from Dictionary.com without further comment:
Pompous: characterized by an ostentatious display of dignity or importance
Git : a foolish or contemptible person.
Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation:
http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/circles/Lesson-3/Newton-s-Law-of-Universal-Gravitation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation
http://astro.unl.edu/classaction/animations/renaissance/gravcalc.html
And an explanation of the difference between theory and law:
http://thehappyscientist.com/study-unit/when-does-theory-become-law
Happy reading 🙂 And I strongly recommend What is This Thing Called Science? by Alan Chalmers, and it’s not because he’s a Fellow Australian 😉
Damn! Forgot the close blockquote again! What a worthless and foolish person this Git is!
Git’s Ref [1]: Posted by the Ministry School Online. Is that where Git git’s his science?
Git’s Ref [2]: The Wikipedia article titled Newton’s law of universal gravitation is a good example of the limitations of Wikipedia. It doesn’t distinguish between theories and laws. Under the title of his Newton’s law, it refers to Newton’s theory of gravitation, Newton’s Theory of Gravitation, Newton’s Theory (2), and this:
What Newton did was to show how the inverse-square law of attraction had many necessary mathematical connections with observable features of the motions of bodies in the solar system; and that they were related in such a way that the observational evidence and the mathematical demonstrations, taken together, gave reason to believe that the inverse square law was not just approximately true but exactly true (to the accuracy achievable in Newton’s time and for about two centuries afterwards – and with some loose ends of points that could not yet be certainly examined, where the implications of the theory had not yet been adequately identified or calculated).
This paragraph directly supports my claim, which confused Git, that models progress. In Newton’s case, the article shows its advancement from a conjecture to a hypothesis and thence to a theory. In spite of the title and Wikipedia’s lack of rigor, Newton’s model of gravity has yet to become a law, and in fact may never achieve that status.
The same source, Wikipedia, under the article Gravitation has a section titled Newton’s theory of gravitation with an italicized cross-reference to Newton’s law of universal gravitation.
The lesson for the Gits of the blogosphere is that Wikipedia is an excellent starting point for research, and a very poor stopping point. It’s the Internet sorted and cross-indexed.
Git’s Ref [3] The web page Newton’s Law of Gravity Calculator is but a name randomly assigned to a formula. It is a page on the blog of the Astronomy Education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A little digging showed it to be the work of research associate professor David M. Lee, PhD, U.NE. Neither the web page nor other work found for Lee discusses models, theories, or laws to illuminate the discussion here.
Git’s Ref [4] This is a discussion as advertised, but written for children. It is the work of Robert Krampf who posts as the Happy Scientist. Krampf’s bio says he studied geology in college and always loved science.
For Git’s consumption, Krampf writes,
The problem you are running into is with the scientific definition of the terms. That causes confusion in many areas of science where the scientific term means something different from the way it is used in everyday language. In the language of science, laws and theories are very different things.
Krampf’s right about that, and it supports my problems with Wikipedia. But then Krampf, too, gets lost in the weeds. He never mentions models or conjectures, at least on the referent page.
Git’s Ref [5] What Is This Thing Called Science? is almost 40 years old, a best seller early in the evolution of academic science into Post Modern Science and AGW. Couldn’t resist punctuating the title: What Is This Thing Called, Science?
The author is Brit Alan Chalmers, holder of a PhD in engineering (a hopeful sign) and now professor in philosophy and history. Perhaps he knows a thing or two about epistemology. Perhaps Git could actually cite something from that tome that support his model of science.
To Chalmers credit, he begins his model of science with a discussion of the meaning of facts, and he offers an extensive criticism of Popper and his student, Feyerabend. The online preview contains a names index, but not a subject index. A search of the book uncovered 21 references to induction, but only 9 references to deduction, and no references to Cause & Effect by which Francis Bacon replaced the childish induction of Aristotle with deduction to create Modern Science. Bacon is never mentioned in the book. That two-pronged omission is fatal to understanding scientific models.
Given the definition of pompous and git, P.G. added,
You don’t really believe I didn’t know that when I chose [my] handle? Words fail me :-))))))))
My post seemed a good place to remind readers of the origin of Pompous Git so that they can see how P.G. strives in his posts to live up to it. P.G. got this much right: words do fail him.
Scarcely more than a century ago, mankind did not know or understand that what we could see of our Milky Way was not the universe and that other galaxies existed. Now we know that there are mini- galaxies orbiting this galaxy and mini galaxies spinning within this galaxy and that our galaxy is on a collision course to crash into another galaxy.. We have found 100 million galaxies appearing to be strung along filaments, so to speak and explained with terms of “we think” and “we believe” about something we can’t observe and can ‘t explain in a manner which fits with what we previously thought we understood about the physical world. We are left filled with awe at what we’ve found and perhaps even dread, when it begins to sink in how little we know. Cosmology is humble pie.
Staring through my six inch Newtonian sends shivers down my spine. And it’s not merely because of the cold.
1. There is no interstellar medium where electromagnetic waves propagate. Michelson-Morley experiment disproved the existence of ether.
2. There is no experiment that disproved the special theory of relativity. Its basic premise is valid – light in a vacuum travels at constant speed irrespective of the observer’s motion.
3. There is no experiment that proved electromagnetic field alters the speed of light.
These are not absolute truths but it requires empirical evidence to disprove them. If and when that happens, we can revise our current theories such as Big Bang, dark matter and dark energy. The theories are not perfect. They cannot explain everything. But IMO the alternative theories explain less not more.
Albert A. Michelson, Edward W. Morley, “On the Relative Motion of the Earth and the Luminiferous Ether”, American Journal of Science, Third Series, Vol. XXXIV (203), Nov. 1887):
So no, Michelson and Moreley certainly didn’t believe their experiment “disproved the existence of ether”. Science fiction?
Pompous Git still bloviating and spouting learned rubbish? It doesn’t matter what Michelson and/ or Morley thought. The experiment they did was set out to prove ether and it was the first valid experiment to disprove it. Since then there have been many other experiments far more accurate to conclusively do so. But you are still stuck in ether – the cosmological equivalent of a tree-hugger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment#Subsequent_experiments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment#Recent_experiments
You didn’t answer my question about your quote about an event horizon, “i.e. a boundary in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer” – where you had plagiarised it from? Was it Wikipedia? From here that is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon ?
And then you say Wiki-bloodypedia. Tut-tut. Rubbishing the source you plagiarise from is like biting the hand that feeds you. Your attempts to don the wisdom of others is transparent. Like the emperor’s clothes you can be seen naked underneath as the Pompous Git.
Richard, I was responding to the claim “Michelson-Morley experiment disproved the existence of ether”. It didn’t and I quoted from their paper the relevant section. The full paper is here:
https://www.aip.org/history/gap/PDF/michelson.pdf
There is no doubt that later experiments did dispose of the ether, but the original experiment did no such thing; Michelson and Morley said so and that it was necessary for the experiment to be repeated to determine the relative velocity of Earth and ether. If you know of a different version of the paper I referenced, then point us to it. You will be making history!
As it happens The Git did not “plagiarise” the concept of event horizons from the wiki-bloody-pedia. If my words are the same, it’s highly likely that I remembered them. I use the wiki-bloody-pedia with great caution. Until recently, it had Flowerdale in northern Tasmania as producing 95% of Australia’s cotton. Needless to say, cotton is incapable of being grown outdoors anywhere in Tasmania.
If you believe that event horizons do not exist, then give us a source. Why do you persist in disparaging posters instead of contributing substantively to the discussion? Is it because you are a Richard?
Pompous Git, contrary to what you assert, if the words are the same it is highly likely you plagiarised them and you should not disparage the sources you plagiarise from, As I said it amounts to biting the hand that feeds you and is the mark of an ingrate. I do not mean to disparage you, You do that to yourself without much assistance from me.
Re: The Michelson-Morley experiment (PS its Morley not Moreley) you display a profound ignorance of science and the scientific method. You claim that the experiment did not disprove the existence of aether because (you claim) Michelson and Morley did not believe that it disproved it. Firstly this claim of yours dubious and is founded on them saying the experiment should be repeated.
If you had cared to read the very next paragraph of what you had quoted they write “It appears, from all that precedes, reasonably certain that if there be any relative motion between the earth and the luminiferous ether, it must be small; quite small enough entirely to refute Fresnel’s explanation of aberration.”
Secondly the experiment produced a NULL Result, which means it did not support the hypothesis of the experiment – that aether existed. Michelson or Morley’s beliefs were irrelevant to outcome of the experiment.. Michelson was surprised by the result and did indeed repeat the experiments with greater accuracy and continued to find the Null result.
I never said that event horizons do not exist. Your powers of comprehension are abysmal. Your bloated opinion of yourself rests solely on your ability to quote, plagiarise and name-drop with little or no innate ability or understanding. The event horizon of a Black hole is the boundary at which the escape velocity equals the speed of light, which is far more comprehensible than your palgiarised quote from “wiki-bloody-pedia”. People who are puffed up egotists wouldn’t recognise sarcasm or satire if it came and bit them on the bum.
Don’t lecture me about plagiarism, you who hide behind anonymity.
My work:
http://www.sturmsoft.com/Writing/FarmFert/farmfert01.htm
The latest plagiarist:
http://www.ecogrowth.com.au/farmfert1.html
That’s 30,000 words, word for word, completely unacknowledged.
Richard, I owe you an apology. It would appear that The Git plagiarised the phrase “In general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer” from an essay written by Jonathan Sturm in 2006. At that time, the wiki-bloody-pedia used the phrase: “An event horizon is a boundary in spacetime at which the escape velocity required for a given mass has reached the speed of light, making escape impossible” which makes it unlikely that either The Git or Jonathan Sturm plagiarised the phrase from there.
Meanwhile, either The Git has apologised to Jonathan Sturm, or vice versa. He/they [delete whichever is inapplicable] drank a toast of unoaked chardonnay to aging memory banks. We also discussed the question Who Am I? And If So, How Many?
Maybe I was being a bit unfair with that plagiarism thing. I take that back.
[Noted. Thank you. .mod]
Richard wrote:
While you believe “”…the relative velocity of the earth and the ether is probably less than one-sixth the earth’s orbital velocity, and certainly less than one-fourth. … ” is “NULL” I still contend that it was a small positive and not null. You further state:
In Measurement of the Velocity of Light in a Partial Vacuum, Contributions from the Mount Wilson Observatory 1935, vol. 522, p261, Michelson, Pease and Pearson wrote:
IOW, Michelson et al were still finding evidence, small in magnitude, but definitely not null for the ether in the mid-1930s when you claim they were doing the opposite. Quite how noticing this makes The Git “the cosmological equivalent of a tree-hugger” escapes me. Presumably you would have The Git being an adherent of caloric theory when writing about that long past episode in science.
Richard, thank you for taking back the accusation of plagiarism.
Git
Let me first clarify we are talking about “luminiferous ether”, the alleged hypothetical medium through which light travelled in space.
You wrote “So no, Michelson and Moreley certainly didn’t believe their experiment “disproved the existence of ether”. Science fiction?” This could be read to mean, in absence of clarification, you are questioning that it is science fiction and you also believe what you allegedly say Michelson and Morley believed. And that is the interpretation I took.
An experiment is interpreted on the basis of its results and not on the basis of anyone’s beliefs, even if they be those of the author(s).
You again repeated “There is no doubt that later experiments did dispose of the ether, but the original experiment did no such thing; Michelson and Morley said so …”
Here there needs to be some clarification. It did not “dispose of ether”, because people continued to believe in it and perhaps, as you allege, Michelson and Morley too, but that is not what we are talking about. It did scientifically because it gave a Null result. A Null result is where the result does not support the hypothesis. It did not detect the expected velocity of light relative to the hypothesised ether.
“IOW, Michelson et al were still finding evidence, small in magnitude, but definitely not null for the ether in the mid-1930s when you claim they were doing the opposite.”
I never claimed “they were doing the opposite.” They were doing experiments with greater accuracy to try and prove their postulate – ether – and repeatedly coming up with a null result.
“Michelson et al were still finding evidence, small in magnitude, but definitely not null” – you need to do some reading about null results. It involves statistics. Your statement is meaningless.
482 comments on this thread…. and not one from sir harry shaman!
This has been a most enjoyable and interesting discussion of the improbable universe we live in!
Thank You, Anthony… and all contributors!
Unfortunately, humans will never resolve the origins of time, existence and matter… for it is something beyond the capability of the human condition to grasp, which is why it is easier to say there is a God. Even if humans began understanding, it would cause the human brain to go into information overload and suffer a mental breakdown. In reality, humans err on the side of denial.
Just as a spider in Alice Springs, Australia, will never comprehend the inner workings of the International space station, humans will never understand “how it all began”, if indeed it ever began at all for us, in our human dimension. Heck, most people won’t even believe in the dimension of the spirit world despite great spiritualists that have been amongst us like the great Doris Stokes! It’s too complex for humans and that’s where the state of denial sets in. Denial is the brains mechanism to prevent information over load from trying to make sense of what the brain is conditioned not to make sense of.
I am not a physicist, however I understand that something very like the big bang is supported by compelling observations.
There is the red shift, only explainable by the expansion rate of the universe. So space is observably expanding.
There is the fact that the mass density of the universe is identical in all directions. If we look X billion light years in one direction, and -X billion light years in another direction, and see identical properties, then X billion years ago these systems must have been close together so some event could make their properties uniform. I believe this is explained in inflation by having the speed of light increase by vast factors if mass density is increased.
So for me, observationally, the fundamental facts of the big bang with something like inflation are well established. (These points are well known and I would have read them in a popular science book.) Alternatives would have to explain these observations.
The universe is not isotropic. Example:
http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/mpa/research/current_research/hl2005-9/hl2005-9-en.html
You are saying that the mass density is the same in all directions, so it must have come from a big bang.
A thought or two, when a bang occurs you end up with nothing in the middle, ask astronomers what is in the middle. It is dense and impeniterable, rather dense.
the standard answer to “where is the hole in the middle” is that the SPACE expands and not the objects flying away.
One thing that’s settled about the big bang theory is that the show sucks.
…or as Mark Twain defined life, “one damm thing after another.”
There must be a universe where it doesn’t suck.
And finally
Michio Kaku on The Universe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NbBjNiw4tk&feature=player_detailpage#t=16
Billy Graham said it best’ God said let there [be] light and Bang there it was”
Just to flagrantly point-out that ‘settled science’ is an everlasting myth that’s been with us in one form or another, same concept just different words, for as long as people unfortunately labelled ‘scientists’, or worse still, philosophers, mistakenly convinced themselves they had some definite material clues about what basic phenomena are and how they actually work. Human capacity will apparently always be rendered sterile and dormant via this enduring feature of a popular tyrannical flapdoodle of flabbergasting proportions being powered by a self-assured astounding indefiniteness, parading around as an advanced but subtle and elucidating material insight about which definitive things can be safely and most assuredly written and reverently uttered.
This time is different! Every self-respecting flapdoodle says that, but the best flapdoodles believe themselves be self-evidently quite inescapable, and only the unhinged would spurn or seek to repudiate them.
Flapdoodles however cross-breed with strange flapdoodles, from alternate whereabouts, which produces many sterile, hybrid intellectually-disabled flapdoodles, that tend to form gregarious aggregations that have came to be called ‘Disciplines’.
Disciplines are thus best understood as a super concretions of particularly dull and insoluble flapdoodles, that are sometimes even superficially congruent. The primary function of a super flapdoodle is to lead everyone astray for a minimum of several decades, whereupon a superior flapdoodle emerges and is applied liberally like a fashionable wallpaper for the eyes.
Then it’s off to the races once more, for several decades of tyrannical flapdoodle expounding and application of its Holy texts.
But this time is different – one flapdoodle to rule them all!
I have noticed that all popularised TV shows about the Big Bang show it as a real explosion complete with noise and flames , mostly red and orange and lumps flying about. But surely there was no fire and so on, and obviously no sound , and didn’t the light appear at least 300,000 years later, according to the theory?
so light was not there at all at “creation”, and please let’s not muddle this theory with ancient jewish or Sumerian mythology, it doesn’t help. It will be very difficult to dislodge the popular belief in Big Bang and of course, black holes, as the whole lot has been now thoroughly Disneyfied and is accepted as real by the vast majority. along with the ideas that dinosaurs were nice friendly animals like hippos, most kids are taught that you can travel through “wormholes”
“But surely there was no fire and so on, and obviously no sound … ”
I take it yer just not into mainstream science fiction then?
yeah, he probably thinks there’ll be no warp drives either. Or Klingon babes.
Or Intergalactic Gargleblasters [sigh]
A.K.T Assis has some great wok on (real) classical physics…
http://www.ifi.unicamp.br/~assis/papers.htm
He has specifically looked at the history of CMB predictions and measurements…
http://www.ifi.unicamp.br/~assis/Apeiron-V2-p79-84(1995).pdf
http://www.ifi.unicamp.br/~assis/Astrophys-Space-Sci-V227-p13-24(1995).pdf
Dr. S:
“The galaxies are not moving at all, hence no infinite mass. It is space that is stretching… ….
The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy will one day collide ”
Two galaxies should not collide if galaxies are moving apart due to space expansion.
Andromeda is 2.2 million light years away, it should be mowing away and not towards Milky Way, and so excluding possibility of their collision.
Is this one of the exceptions to the rule?
Is the gravitational attraction of two galaxies overriding force of the BB expansion?
Do we have galaxies moving in all direction?
Or is it that the BB theory is not working as it is suppose to?
“Is the gravitational attraction of two galaxies overriding force of the BB expansion?”
“Locally” apparently yes. Andromeda is a “local galaxy”
“The Big Bang is not an explosion of matter moving outward to fill an empty universe. Instead, space itself expands with time everywhere and increases the physical distance between two comoving points. Because the FLRW metric assumes a uniform distribution of mass and energy, it applies to our universe only on large scales—local concentrations of matter such as our galaxy are gravitationally bound and as such do not experience the large-scale expansion of space.[37]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang#Expansion_of_space
This is the source given:
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310808
The Andromeda and the Milky Way are both members of the so-called Local Group [of about 20 galaxies] that are bound to each other by gravity [like the planets and the Sun in the solar system]. The members of the group move around [like the planets] the center of gravity of the group. The local group itself is gravitationally bound to the local super cluster, moving at 627 km/sec relative to the CMB. The expansion is only strong enough to overcome gravity on the scale of galaxy clusters [tens of millions of light years]. None of this is controversial in any way.
So the only objects in the sky to ultimately appear to go dark because of acceleration of expansion rate would be outside the local super cluster?
it would seem so, however, most of the smaller galaxies will be gobbled up by a few monster [elliptic] galaxies, so they will disappear too.
Replace gravity with electromagnetism http://www.electricuniverse.info/Introduction
Gravity theory is holding science back .
nonsense. In the end everything is due to gravity.
Just goes to show , You can’t teach a old dog new tricks.
Are you a flat Earther Leif http://wiki.tfes.org/Universal_Acceleration
Lief, I know wife was not meant to be easy, but I fail to see that being due to gravity 😉
[Thus, are you implying the general case in physics of “wife becomes easier” with gravity? Or just “more funner” without gravity? .mod]
There is no such thing as gravity. The world just sucks.
Are you a flat Earther
It is easier to believe in a flat Earth, rather than the absolute nonsense peddled by the Electric Universe cult.
but I fail to see that being due to gravity
That you fail to see something does not mean that the thing is false.
@ur momisugly mod
The strongest force in the universe is the wife force.
Which leads to- it’s either god’s will,or the wife’s fault.
(blameless innocent)
jmorepuss [It’s] “You can’t teach AN old dog new tricks” I just thought I’d correct your English. It will come handy when you write your paper with your new tricks and collect the subsequent Nobel Prize that will inevitably be conferred on you.
May the (electrical) force be with you.
Accept my wife, dear God.
Thanks for the correction Richard
Mathematical Masturbation. The real problem here is that physics profession has turned into a welfare scam. In the early part of the 20th century, physicists invented all kinds of new cool stuff like nuclear weapons, transistors, and lasers.
The Government was so impressed it put them on the payroll. Problem is that the well ran dry twenty or thirty years ago. Physicists try to look busy these days so the honey will keep flowing.
Sadly, they busy themselves with stuff like this. It is not nor will it ever be science as there can be no access to the times and conditions they are describing, and therefor no experiment. And experiment is what differentiates science from mathematical masturbation.
Tell the physicists they are done, turn out the lights, and send them home. Their 2 weeks of severance pay will be in the mail. They will be eligible for standard unemployment, but they best start their job searches asap.
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
3-5 minutes of a google search reveals that anybody and everybody alive in about 1902, could in fact, be the originator of this well known quote.
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”
Is this not attributed to Lord Kelvin more then 100 yerars ago? And how wrong was it? It is as wrong now…
Energy levels are discrete, with quantum being the smallest amount, which can not be altered.
The quantum of energy carried by a photon is the product of the Planck’s constant and the frequency. For a red shift to take place, frequency has to be reduced, i.e. the photon has to loose some of it energy.
– If a photon has a single quantum of energy, it can not be decreased : red shift can not take place.
– If a photon carries number of quanta of energy, some can be ‘exchanged’ through collisions in the interstellar space, less energy = reduced frequency = red shift; longer the path more quanta lost, larger the red shift.
– If such ‘exchange’ can not take place, and Doppler reduces frequency (i.e. energy of the photon) the quanta of photons energy can not be destroyed, photons lost energy quanta = heating interstellar space
– if so the background radiation (3 or 4K) is not leftover of the Big Bang, the universe is kept warm by the red shift (?!).
If a photon has a single quantum of energy, it can not be decreased : red shift can not take place.
sure it can, it just has smaller quantum.
Please try to avoid embarrassing yourself by babbling about what you do not understand.
And BTW, the ordinary Doppler effect shows that red shift can occur. But the expansion of the universe does not show us a Doppler effect; instead it is stretching of space having nothing to do with motion away from us. Galaxies to first approximation do not move, no matter how far away they are.
I’m not too embarrassed to ask questions.
What is first approximation? Is that a particular distance below which you believe expansion does not occur? Is that described somewhere in literature?
Because galaxies move around within the local cluster [the Sun – and the Milky Way – is falling towards the Virgo Cluster at 627 km/sec due to the gravity of the mass of the cluster], that movement is not part of the expansion of the Universe, so you have to be further out where the expansion speed is greater than this ‘proper motion’ of the Milky Way. This is discussed in hundreds of papers, e.g. the paper about the Planck results I referred to earlier.
Asking is the first step towards knowing. There is good set of lectures [among many] that you can work through to get an understanding of the fundamentals of modern cosmology: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/
Leif,
I want to thank you for this link. I recommend it as an overview to anyone interested in the current theories in cosmology. Easy to understand, and interesting.
You are welcome. If you and others wish to pursue some of the details, go for cos02, cos03, …, cos17
Leif
It’s a bit hard to prove the Doppler affect from a car traveling at the same speed alongside the car that your using for the experiment. The sun is traveling at near 500,000 mph in a direction tethered to something .
You are a bit incoherent. In any event the red shift we observe due to the expansion of the Universe is not a Doppler shift at all, but instead a stretching of space and of the wavelength of the light embedded in it.
If space is expanding like a ball of dough rising, and planets, galaxies, etc are the raisins in the dough, why don’t the raisins expand at the same rate as the dough? At what point in the primordial sausage did space become space and matter become matter. At the most primitive level, everything is a particle correct? So all particles are expanding? Or is it, just some particles are expanding?
For the tenth time: the nuclear force, the electromagnetic forces, and gravity are all much stronger than the expansion ‘force’ at distances less than several million light years, so nearby systems of particles do not expand. Only when you get up the a scale of clusters of galaxies does the expansion become important [and measurable].
Measurable how ?
Red shift ?, just different rates thru the “void” ?
One way is to measure the red shift, z. Another, independent, way is to look at the light curves of supernovae: time runs slower by a factor of (1+z), so the light curves vary with the red shift [and distance].
I still can’t wrap my head around the time thing.
So, no use trying to explain it to me right now, it would take too much of it.
Were all particles expanding during the period of inflation? Or just the space particles? Why did inflation stop, but space continued to expand at an increasing rate? It seems that if the other forces were strong enough to stop inflation, then space should be expanding at a decreasing rate. It’s almost as if space has an inherent nature to expand as rapidly as possible. Prior to the end of inflation, there was no speed limit. At the end of the inflation, the speed of light becomes the speed limit, and space is accelerating toward that limit.
No, Tom, that is not how it worked. Early on there were no particles. And there is no speed limit for the expansion of space.
“Now, it seems there’s a challenge to this ‘settled’ science, and a new quantum equation predicts the universe has no beginning.”
Around 200 years ago James Hutton a Scottish doctor, farmer, and businessman, stated that the Earth has no beginning, which was taken in those days as meaning the Universe has no beginning,
Hutton is credited with being the founder of geochemistry, geophysics and geology. Lyell wrote the world’s first geology textbook based on deciphering Hutton’s turgid prose.
Vuk: “If a photon has a single quantum of energy, it can not be decreased : red shift can not take place.”
Dr. S. : “sure it can, it just has smaller quantum.”
So we make it up as we go along.
There is no smaller or bigger quantum, a quantum of energy is the smallest amount of energy that there is.
Of course not. A photon with half the frequency has half the energy. Please stop your nonsense as you are wasting bandwidth here.
And what happened to the extra energy; gone into background radiation ?
But that is prerogative of the ‘BingBong’ theory
There is no ‘extra’ energy. If the wave is stretched to twice its length its energy per unit length is half, but since it occupies twice the length, the energy is the same. You say that Doppler shift is impossible [ignoring the fact that the cosmological red shift is not a Doppler shift]. At solar observatories we measure Doppler shifts all the time. Here is a typical measurement at WSO http://wso.stanford.edu/daily/current/scan.12019.gif
The lower left shows the Doppler shifts over the solar disk, red shifted [although shown in blue, positive change of wavelength] on the right-hand side of the Sun which is moving away from us, and blue shifted [shown in red, negative change] on the left-hand side of the Sun which is moving toward us.
So, please stop the nonsense.
Another fudge of physics laws, make new ones up as you go along.
I see the formation of the universe a bit like a forest fire . As the fire intensifies it sends out embers and small spot fires start and can grow into bigger fires , from little things big things grow if there’s enough potential energy stored. We live in a see of electrons. About 1800 electrons = 1 proton, electric potential creates separation (fission) while protons and neutrons try to create mass (fusion) . Just remember electrons move around solids. Coulombs Law states likeness repels and opposites attract
more nonsense: there are very nearly the same number of electrons and protons. The mass of a proton is 1836 times the mass of a single electron, but the number of the two species are very nearly the same [taking Helium to contain two protons].
Leif But most of the protons and neutrons have already formed mass and squeezed out excess electron to create space. That’s why there’s more space then mass.
No, that is not how it works. I could recommend some reading for you, but won’t as you are not likely to even look at it, let alone read it.
Dr. Svalgaard recommends paper: http://star-www.st-and.ac.uk/~kdh1/cos/cos01.pdf
concluding:
Our “Crazy” Universe
~4% Normal Matter
~22% “Dark Matter”
~74% “Dark Energy”
You and anyone else is welcome to such crazy universe, I’ll stick to the one that still has some sanity left in it.
Ignorance is no shame, but willful ignorance is an abomination.
+100
I am disappointed and a little amazed at vukcevic. I thought he was a physicist, yet asked the most elementary questions of the BB expansion and when explained in quite a simple and understandable way by Wikipedia (for once) and subsequently by you fails or refuses to grasp it. (Easily understandable to even a non-physicist like me.)
Basically he is saying if I cant see it I wont believe it. That would eliminate microbes, molecules, atoms,black holes etc. and many counter-intuitive things like the constant speed of light in a vacuum from his belief system.
His attitude is more that of a denier than a sceptic.
He suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
I wonder what Reg Cahill is suffering from:
It would seem that there are many experiments replicating the Michelson-Morley light speed anisotropy that Dayton Miller refined back in the 1920s. Always more to learn 🙂
Paper here (not paywalled): http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2006/PP-07-15.PDF
yes, these things crop up from time to time, but are never compelling and thus not generally accepted. Physicists are a VERY conservative lot and a ‘finding’ has to be solid, reproducible, and not contrary to a large body of other experiments.
There is nothing wrong with understanding that theoretical physics is just that, theoretical. At the same time, there is nothing wrong with theory that accounts for observation. The effects of dark matter are quite observable in many ways (gravitational lensing, rotation of galaxies, movement of galaxy clusters) and not overly complex from my limited understanding. It is simply matter that interacts gravitationally, just as normal matter does, but does not observably interact electromagnetically. While this may make particle physicists shiver, it seems easy to grasp as a laymen. Dark energy, on the other hand, is more limited in what it explains observationally, increasing redshift with distance. Redshift is not hard to observe or measure but distance is another story. The math seems to work but those mathematicians can whip up anything you want. It is still the best theory I have heard to explain observation.
In my hunt for the elusive “large body” of M-M replications producing a null result, I came across this:
[Emphasis mine]
So where is this “large body of other experiments”? Not being rude; just very curious. And have a distinct preference for primary sources having long ago learnt that secondary sources cannot be relied upon.
Einstein didn’t know about the M-M experiment when he formulated special relativity [he didn’t need it] and all the tests of relativity have come out in favor of relativity. Those are ‘all the other experiments’.
So you dismiss the COBE result?
Or is it that if theory is contradicted by data, then the data is faulty? Ah well…
The COBE result is correct. What is wrong is to take that result as support for absolute motion. What COBE shows is that the solar system [+Milky Way and Local Group] is moving towards the center of the local super cluster we are sitting in at 627 km/sec. This has nothing to do with absolute motion, but is simply the solar system\’s proper motion caused by moving in the gravitational field of the super cluster.
Git “[I] have a distinct preference for primary sources having long ago learnt that secondary sources cannot be relied upon.” Your mistake is to assume that the paper you quote and believe as gospel is a “primary source”. Where has it been published? Who peer reviewed it? Is it based on any experiment the author has carried out himself?
The guy says “To the best of our knowledge, the only empirical evidence against the existence of absolute space ( = ether in this paper) is the null interpretation given to the interferometry experiment carried out by Michelson in 1881[1], repeated with experimental and theoretical improvements by Michelson and Morley (M-M) in 1887 [2].”
If that’s the best of his knowledge he is pretty ignorant. And if he thinks that that those primitive experiments overturns Einsteins theories he should carry out fresh experiments instead of “revisiting” those ancient experiments.
The primary sources are the experiments carried out. I gave you the Wikipedia link. The data from the experiments have been tabulated. Look at the Fringe shifts expected and the Fringe shifts measured and experimental resolution. Many more experiments were carried out with accuracies several orders of magnitude better than Michelson-Morleys.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment#Subsequent_experiments
@ur momisugly lief
Héctor A. Múnera’s reanalysis appears to show the same result as COBE. Why would I accept one, but not the other if they are measuring the same thing?
@ur momisugly Richard
Where did I state that I “believe as gospel” any paper, anytime? The paper is illuminating in that it picks up on the error of avaeraging averages. Standard stuff in climastrology I know, but unlikely to have been deliberate in the eight M-M type experiments he reanalyses. Look up Simpson’s Paradox for an excellent example of what can go wrong when you naively average averages.
Reanalysis is quite respectable, though as my fellow Tasmanians Garth Paltridge and Mike Pook discovered, if your paper doesn’t directly support CAGW, then it’s a long hard slog finding a journal that will accept your work. Read Garth’s The Climate Caper for the full story. Their paper:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Paltridge-NCEP-vapor-2009.pdf
Einstein had a few words of wisdom on peer review. His own 1905 papers were pal reviewed (the publishers were his friends) and he said that if he had been a peer reviewer of them, he would have recommended against publication.
I have no problem accepting Einstein’s opinions regarding the ether. First he accepted its existence, then he denied it existed, then he said the ether existed, but it wasn’t the same ether. Finally, he said that the existence of the lumeniferous ether was irrelevant to GR. And I agree with him.
If you think these experiments were primitive, then you show your ignorance. Dayton Miller in particular was a very careful experimenter.
The COBE data just shows the movement of the Solar System relative to the CMB and not that absolute space exits.
@ur momisugly Richard
From your link:
This in 2012 long after Millers original data had been destroyed. The other experiments referred to that were not in Múnera’s reanalysis were in vacuo rather than air, or helium in Illingworth’s replication.
A modern test of the null-result can be found here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.1284v1.pdf
“In conclusion, we have set a limit on an anisotropy of the speed of light at a level of ∆c/c ∼ 1 × 10^−17, which allows us to confirm the validity of Lorentz invariance in electrodynamics at the 10^−17 level”
That is good enough for me.
Pompous Git “If you think these experiments were primitive, then you show your ignorance. Dayton Miller in particular was a very careful experimenter.”
So was Galileo. Science and technology have moved on since their times though. They simply didnt have the instruments to produce the accuracies of the 21st century.There were no “lasers, masers, cryogenic optical resonators, etc.” in those days.
Why are you delving into accuracies which puts the limit of Vether to around 4 km/s when today the variation of the speed of light has been limited to 10^-17 ?
Pompous Git “Héctor A. Múnera’s reanalysis appears to show the same result as COBE. Why would I accept one, but not the other if they are measuring the same thing?”
Measuring the same thing according to who? Héctor A. Múnera? Firstly if you take any crude set of numbers we can get them to agree with another set of numbers but simple division or multiplication.. Secondly he claims “we report here experimental evidence that absolute motion is detectable in laboratory experiments, such as those done by Michelson and Morley and the others, but that this requires a re-analysis of the operation of their interferometer, as reported herein. This analysis leads to a speed which agrees with that found from the NASA COBE satellite observations on analysing the dipole anisotropy of the Cosmic Background Radiation. Together these results show that absolute motion has been detected.” Surely this should be ringing alarm bells in any half sensible persons mind.
“absolute motion has been detected”! Einsteins theories have been debunked! and NASA and everybody else keeps quiet about it? The only person to notice it is this Héctor A. Múnera’ because he has manipulated figures from an experiment carried out a over a century ago to agree with some figure from COBE which he says is the same thing and why would you not accept it? Well go figure.
Thanks for that Lief; I don’t doubt that those experiments are generating the expected data. It’s anomalous data that interests me here. My curiosity in this area dates back to ca. 2000 when, having been told that the Michelson-Morley experiment confirmed SR I discovered that said experiment predated SR by 8 years. And after reading it, I experienced what EM Smith calls a “dig-here” moment. I’m still digging and attempts at locating Múnera’s paper reporting on his own replication of the M-M experiment without having to pay have failed so far. Might have to pop into UTas this week.
Hey, ho… and Mrs Git won two firsts and a second in the St Ayles Skiff World Championships this weekend. Not bad for a 64 year old 🙂
Richard, I learnt long ago not to take my betters’ word for things, mainly because I discovered that no matter their credentials, they were not always correct. E.g. I was chastised in secondary school for believing that uranium transmutes to lead when anyone with a proper education, i.e. the teacher, knew that elements could never transmute into other elements, and therefore I was wrong.
Another example. When I commenced farming organically 32 years ago, the ag scientists I talked to told me that the results I was getting were “impossible”. A decade ago I was offered the opportunity to undertake a PhD in that discipline without having to complete a degree course. What had been scientifically “impossible” two decades before had become mainstream knowledge. So yes, things change.
It is entirely possible that Múnera, Miller, Michelson et alia all fudged their results, but I don’t know that. Nor can I think of a rational reason why they would. Given sufficient opportunity, I will investigate and come to my own opinion independently. You may believe that your bullying will somehow persuade me to share your opinion, but it has the opposite effect to that which you desire. The Git has no need to recruit others to share his opinions; he is sufficient unto himeslf . Now how arrogant is that? 🙂
Git the phrase is elders and betters. I have learned something today. I had assumed that you were a bit younger than me. Now I’ve discovered by powers of deduction that you are well over 2 decades older than me. Had I known earlier I would have been a bit more respectful…….
Congratulations Richard! It’s a great day when you learn something 🙂
For your elucidation, I turn 64 years old in a couple of months. However, I do not deserve any respect for that; it’s happenstance.
Funny you should mention Galileo. George Smoot in Wrinkles in Time mentions Galileo’s falling balls experiment. When he visited Pisa and saw the tower in the moonlight, he knew that we historians were wrong and that the usual account must be true.
The usual account is of course that Galileo dropped two balls of the same size and differing weights from the top of the tower, both reaching the ground simultaneously to the utter consternation of the “Aristotelians”.
The account we historians prefer is the one Galileo wrote. He doesn’t state where the experiment took place, but the height is given. It’s some 90 metres higher than the tower at Pisa, so when Newton wrote of standing on the shoulders of giants, this must have been almost literally true. Galileo’s account also has him observing the fall of the balls, so in Smoot’s account he must have raced very fast after dropping the balls to be able to do so. And what did Galileo observe?
At first, the wooden ball fell quicker than the iron ball. Then the iron ball caught up with the wooden ball and overtook it reaching the ground well ahead. Galileo also gives a first class explanation for this divergence from the results of his replication of Nicole Oresme’s 14thC thought experiment wherein both balls must necessarily fall at the same rate else Aristotle’s Law of Contradiction be broken.
One can learn a lot from reading the original account instead of relying on being moonstruck 🙂
Odd. I have long been told – by the many-but-always-modern-academia-trained “history revisionists” I so often question! – that Galileo’s experiments were NOT dropping balls (from the Tower of Pisa, or any other tower or church or watchtower) but were rolling balls down a long inclined plane!
Were his writing explicit about “dropping” the different weight balls?
Because, over short distances in the quiet of an ancient city night, dropping balls onto to cobblestones yields two very, very distinct “tones” as the wood and the iron balls hit. Thus, regardless of distance (to any reasonable height of course) you do not need to be at the bottom to know which hit first.
Further, if “I” were the older and wiser and more decrepit (compared to my youthful and exuberant young and agile apprentice) “I” would tell my youth and agile and strong apprentice to carry the weighted balls UP to the top of the tower and drop them. Of course, “I” (being the older and wiser and more important and more credible witness) would need to be at the “smart end of the measuring tape” and stay at the bottom of the stairs to record the results each time. Numerous drops will, of course, be required. Thus, to ensure consistent results between each dropped pair of heavy weights, “I” need to record the results the same way each time, and the youthful and exuberant apprentice would need to precisely duplicate the timing and location of each dropped pair of very heavy weights.
We will thus duplicate his experiment, and take the youthful and exuberant and mobile (and did I mention youthful?) Janice Moore (who has youthful long legs and unsullied knees and hips) with us to Pisa and duplicate Galileo’s experiment. She can climb the stairs numerous times carrying the numerous heavily weighted (did I mention we shall not tell her they were heavy globes of weighted metal and wood) whilst you and I stay below and do the difficult work of observation.
And the QA of the local coffee shops.
@ur momisugly RACookPE1978
As I wrote, we do not know the location, Galileo doesn’t tell us. The height is such that it must have been a cliff (no buildings of that height at that time) and there are several candidate locations. We don’t know whether there were any replications. We do know that it was an assistant who dropped the balls. It’s not a particularly difficult experiment to replicate. Find a large ball bearing and a child’s hollow plastic ball of similar diameter. Perform the experiment on a windless day else the plastic ball might travel too far sideways. Ensure that nobody’s head or any other body parts are between the ball bearing and the ground and that you are high enough for friction to slow the lighter ball quickly enough.
Galileo certainly did most of his experimentation on friction using inclined planes. It’s not at all clear whether all of these experiments were physical, some may well have been thought experiments. Galileo described one such in Discourses on Two New Sciences. This was the last of his published works and certainly the best (IMHO) though uncharacteristically for Galileo, quite subdued.
More about Galileo here:
https://thepompousgit.wordpress.com/2015/02/16/a-modern-fairy-tale/
Does that mean we cannot get a Big Government grant to go travel to Italy for three months to research these problems near the Tower of Pisa with our youthful and exuberant stair climber (er, research apprentice) ?
@ur momisugly RACookPE1978
Alas, The Git would love to travel to Italy; he has a grandson living there. But his arthritis makes sitting in aircraft seats for any length of time, agonising. To add insult to injury, his last trip to visit grandkids and daughter in New Zealand saw him succumb to pneumonia two days later. The passenger in front, a young Asian girl, had spent the entire flight from Sydney to Wellington kneeling on her seat and coughing at The Git. It took many months to recover. I shall content myself with memories of chinotto, fabulous pasta dishes, cheeses, salami and ripe peaches that I consumed when there in 1960 🙂
Git “I do not deserve any respect…” maybe you’re right.
“It is entirely possible that Múnera, Miller, Michelson et alia all fudged their results, but I don’t know that. Nor can I think of a rational reason why they would.”
You just don’t get it. No one has suggested that Miller, Michelson et al fudged their results. Dont you understand “Why are you delving into accuracies which puts the limit of Vether to around 4 km/s when today the variation of the speed of light has been limited to 10^-17 ?” That is 10^12 times more accurate, a trillion times more accurate than Miller, Michelson et al
“…Lief; I don’t doubt that those experiments are generating the expected data. It’s anomalous data that interests me here.”
Anomalous data? Have you any idea what are you talking about? This is like saying I know someone has confirmed those timings with caesium atomic clock, but Galileo, who was a careful experimenter, had an “anomalous” result when he timed it with his pulse.
Not a very smart thing to say.
Listen closely you anonymous Richard. What The Git does with his time is for him to decide, not you. In all likelihood, he will find a flaw in the Múnera reanalysis. OTOH, he may not. In either case The Git will find the exercise entertaining and something a little different to write about. No doubt you are of the opinion The Git should be acting his age and watching Days of Our Wives or The Rest of the Useless on TV or playing bingo with all the other pathetic geriatric old farts. Why don’t you pursue Flinders University for employing Reg Cahill or International Center for Physics (CIF, Centro Internacional de Física) for employing Héctor A. Múnera? While they consume taxpayer dollars, though unlikely to be yours, The Git is retired and privately funded. That means he decides what he’s going to do next. Not anonymous Richards like your rude self.
@ur momisugly RACookPE1978
I think I may have found the ideal location for replicating the Galilean Pisa experiment. The Shot Tower at Taroona near where The Git lives. If we can sell the idea to Tourism Tasmania, then there might well be government funding available. If it ran in tandem with The taste of Tasmania Festival, the organiser of that is a personal friend [nudge, nudge, wink, wink] and notorious gourmet chef who enjoys The Git’s culinary output as much as he enjoys Paul’s.
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/61516690
Nice thing about The Shot Tower is the balls will not be subject to wind drift since it would all happen indoors. And my recollection from when a friend had a recording studio there is that there are many dimly lit parts for jolly japes with the “youthful and exuberant stair climber (er, research apprentice).”
Leif here’s the helium atom surrounded by a cloud of electrons. The helium atom would not exist without this cloud. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom
A helium atom has precisely two electrons, one for each of its two protons.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium “Helium is composed of two electrons in atomic orbitals surrounding a nucleus containing two protons”
Here is how to calculate the amount of Helium in the Universe:
http://www.leif.org/research/Helium.pdf
An electron can be looked at as being both a particle and a wave http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron
Every particle is both a particle and a wave…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_de_Broglie
” In his 1924 PhD thesis he postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter has wave properties. This concept is known as the de Broglie hypothesis, an example of wave-particle duality, and forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics.
electrons are very light compared to protons, so if you imagine putting a proton in an electric field and an electron in the same electric field, the electron will be accelerated 1000x more (same charge, 1/1000th the mass). This means that when there is a charge imbalance and either proton or electron flow could alleviate it, the electrons will flow way before the protons are impelled to move.
As uranium decays to lead it forms radon gas which holds good electric potential http://www.chemicalelements.com/elements/rn.html I read somewhere that Radon is responsible for 25% of lung cancers
Where did it say anything about ‘electric potential’?. Your link does say that Radon contains the same number of protons and electrons, namely 86.
And your link is not very good, as it claims the density of Radon is 9.73 g/cc, which is 1000 times too high.
Electricity is the flow of moving electrons. When the electrons flow it is called an electrical current.
http://www.edu.pe.ca/kish/Grassroots/Elect/whatis.htm
A flow of protons is also an electrical current. But so what?
electrons are very light compared to protons, so if you imagine putting a proton in an electric field and an electron in the same electric field, the electron will be accelerated 1000x more (same charge, 1/1000th the mass). This means that when there is a charge imbalance and either proton or electron flow could alleviate it, the electrons will flow way before the protons are impelled to move.
That is precisely why there are no large-scale charge imbalances in the Universe, thus invalidating the Electric Universe.
Don’t believe all you read. If I’m not mistaken, the radon study was another of those “Stuff the rats til they die, then declare it toxic for humans” kinds of studies. They studied miners whose exposure to radon was high and measurable (without controlling for smokers), then extrapolated downward on the theory that “If high exposure for a short time is bad, then low exposure over a long time is just as bad.” Nonsense, of course.