On Tue, 4 Nov 97 anduril@cix.compulink.co.uk (Tony Hollick) Wrote:
>try reading Imre Lakatos, [...] read Pais' book, [...] See Popper
>read E. Gerjuoy
Try reading David Deutsch, read Hofstadter's book, See Pagles,
read R. Smullyan.
>Your mistake is in the focus on (mythical) 'observers' rather than on
>objective reality.
Because observation is not important to your theory there is no way to
disprove it, so it's not science.
>>Me:
>>Galilean or even Newtonian physics is wrong.
>Name six 'experiments' -- I dare you!!!
1) The 2 slit interference experiment.
2) Heat up an iron bar, it glows with a blackbody spectrum, the electrons do
not spiral into the nucleus.
3) The quantum well LASER in your CD player.
4) The Michelson Morley experiment.
5) Gravitational redshift.
6) The detection of gravity waves by Taylor and Hulse for which they won the
Nobel Prize in 1995.
Just curious but is there anything special about the number 6?
>>Me:
>>Aspect proved experimentally that Bell's inequality is violated and
>>that means weird quantum effects that move instantly and do not
>>weaken with distance do exist, but as these effects can carry
>>neither energy nor information I don't see the relevance to the
>Big Bang or General Relativity.
>You fail to understand the problem, then. Once you say that two
>events are absolutely (not relativistically) simultaneous, you have
>'position space.' Special and General Relativity _cannot survive_
>the loss of relativististic simultaneity.
You can't use these weird quantum effects to make your clock and define time
because you could find a relationship between any two instances in time with
them, and that means there would be only one instant in time, and that means
your clock and time itself become useless concepts.
>>Me:
>>There are only 2 things known to science that can produce a redshift:
>> 1) The Doppler effect.
>> 2) Gravity. (an effect discovered by Einstein by the way)
>Never seen a sunset? Filters? etc. etc. etc... >:-}
All a red filter does is absorb blue light and transmit the red, it does not
shift spectral lines. Do you really think that intergalactic gas can produce
a redshift from X rays to radio waves if the gas is red? Do I really need to
explain this?
>Philosophy has priority -- physics used to be known as 'natural
>philosophy', remember?
Some fields of knowledge are so little understood that we don't even know the
correct questions to ask, so we can't yet use the full scientific method on
them. It does no good to tell me not to think about such problems because
they aren't scientific enough, I can't ignore them, the problems are just too
interesting. Physics was once like that, so was Astronomy, and that's why
they were then part of Philosophy, but no more, they have graduated to a
science.
We just don't know how to use the full scientific method very well on some
things, not yet, so we do the best we can, it's called philosophy.
>in 1970, the American astronomer Robert Henry Dicke suggested a
>(partial, 10%) classical cause for the anomaly as due to the
oblateness of the Sun (a flattening at the poles caused by rotation)
Dicke claimed to have found a very flatten sun, a difference in the diameter
of 1 part in 2500, and that was 250 times larger than anybody else had ever
found. If true this would indeed be disastrous for Einstein but his results
are not generally accepted today because nobody has been able to repeat them.
>The other planets affect Mercury's rotation.
That obviously must be included in the calculation and it is.
>Light-pressure from sunlight acts on the planets.
Yes but that's very small and easily calculated.
>Most significantly; the sun's magnetic force transfers the Sun's
>angular momentum to Mercury;
An even smaller effect. The sun may have most of the mass in the solar system
but the planets have most of the angular momentum.
>general relativity predicts an additional 45" +/-5 per century
>precession advance
General relativity predicts 42.98, the observed value is 43.11 +- .21
>If I assert that -- in a gravitational field -- the frequency of a
>quartz clock slows, due to gravitational force modifying the
>structure of the quartz molecules and the electron orbits, that's
>not the same as saying 'time itself slows down.'
Why not? I say time is what a clock measures, you say time is ... that is to
say, according to your theory time is ..., ah, ... sorry, I'm stumped.
>You say 'time slows': I say the clock slows.
If this thing you call "time" is not a measure of how particles of matter and
energy interact, such as the particles in my clock my body my brain or my
world, then why should I be the slightest bit interest in it?
You think the logical positivists were foolish because they refuse to say
things, like atoms, exist because they couldn't directly see them. I think
your criticism is valid, but then you do something just as bad, you refuse to
say a thing, like time dilation, exists even though you can directly see it.
Let me hear your own ideas about this, please don't tell me to read yet
another philosopher's book.
>The 'cosmic soup' scatters the starlight, and gravitational
>accretion reconstitutes the photons back into stars again.
What the hell?!
>It's a true 'steady-state' system. Perpetuum Mobile -- there's 'no
>way out of the system.'
Sounds dreadful. I thought a static universe gave you the creeps.
>No 'entropic heat-death' in this, our Relational Mechanics Universe,
thank you! Strike the Second Law of Thermodynamics...
Why would you want to strike the Second Law of Thermodynamics? All it says is
that entropy always increases, nothing pessimistic in that, it would only be
so if the total amount of information was constant. We'd be in very bad
shape if Entropy did not increase, that's the very definition of the heat
death of the Universe, but as long as entropy ALWAYS increases infinite life
is possible.
I know I haven't addressed all the points you raised, but life is too short
to get into a theology debate about what the measurements unmeasurable
photons must have, UFO's, assassination conspiracies theories, water powered
cars or the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
John K Clark johnkc@well.com
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