Thursday 19 November 2009

Einstein, relativity and false scientific dogma (1)


SPECIAL RELATIVITY:
CHALLENGING THE DOGMATIC MAGISTERIUM
OF MODERN SECULAR SCIENTISTS

Albert Einstein


In a 1998 article in Physics Letters A, American physicist, Dr Tom Van Flandern, claimed that the speed with which the force of gravity propagates must be at least twenty billion times faster than the speed of light.

For Relativity scientists this is a startlingly controversial claim for it means an end of the current dominance of the Special Theory of Relativity of Albert Einstein, one of whose primary assumptions is that the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant, c, for all observers.

In the Special Theory of Relativity (SR), ordinary Newtonian mechanics are reversed. Ordinarily, if you drive a car, its speed is distance/time, usually measured in miles or kilometres per hour. SR claims, for light, that speed is constant, that time dilates and length contracts in the direction of travel.

This is rather as if, putting it rather crudely, when you put your foot on the accelerator of your car, the car shrinks in length and time slows down.

Put that way, one begins to see why it was that SR was seen as so startlingly and difficult to accept, when first it was advanced.

However, the times were ready for startlingly unusual ideas and men like G B Shaw and Bertrand Russell seized upon the new theory as further evidence that the old world was on the way out and their Brave New World was on the way in.


The late Dr Tom van Flandern


Van Flandern worked in the 1990s as a special consultant to the Global Positioning System (GPS), a set of satellites whose atomic clocks allow ground observers to determine their position to within about a foot. He also shows that the GPS itself is a challenge to SR since it works without so-called relativistic corrections and eventually fails if the corrections are made.

In the 1960s, Professor Herbert Dingle, Professor of Theoretical Physics and Department head at the University of London, after first having supported SR, began to have doubts and wrote of them in his book Science at the Crossroads in 1972. From that time his star declined and eventually he was simply shut out of the scientific establishment who would not brook any challenge to its favourite theory even from someone of the stature of Dingle. The new scientific censorship was moving up a gear.


Albert Einstein's famous E=mc^2 was taken from a published work by a German mathematician 50 years earlier


But Dingle had a point. He cited the so-called "clock paradox". The Relativity Principles stipulates that if one clock A, is moving relative to clock B, then they are both moving relative to each other.

Yet, at the same time, SR tells us that the moving clock runs slower than the non-moving clock. Moreover, if time runs slow for clock A because it is moving, then it will also run slower for clock B, relative to A. This is simply illogical.


Image result for herbert Dingle
Professor Herbert Dingle was Professor of Theoretical Physics and Department head at the University of London, and, after first having supported SR, began to have doubts and wrote sceptically of the theory in his book Science at the Crossroads in 1972. For this he was expelled by the establishment.


Likewise the so-called “twin paradox”, in which twin A travels away from B at enormous speed and returns younger because time has slowed, is illogical since each twin will thereby be younger than the other.

Dingle wrote:

“a proof that Einstein's special theory of relativity is false has been advanced; and ignored, evaded, suppressed and, indeed, treated in every possible way except that of answering it, by the whole scientific world”.

[to be continued]
...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Didn't you hear about the 'Hafele–Keating experiment'?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele-Keating_experiment

Tribunus said...

You are joking, right?

Haven't you heard of Georges Sagnac?

You need to read Al Kelly's paper. He analysed the raw data. Here's what he wrote in his 1996 monograph (paragraph 6) on the behaviour of light waaaaaaay back in 1996:

"Tests that purported to confirm the requirement of Special Relativity, that moving macroscopic clocks run slow, were carried out by Hafele & Keating by flying atomic clocks in opposite directions around the Earth. These tests have been shown to be seriously flawed and to provide no such evidence (Kelly 1995). That paper relied on estimates derived from the graphs published in 1972 by Hafele & Keating. The original test results, contained in an internal report (Hafele, 1971), have now been obtained direct from the United States Naval Observatory (USNO). These confirm that the conclusions in Kelly (1995) are correct. Hafele, in that report, stated that 'Most people (including myself) would be reluctant to agree that the time gained by any one of these clocks is indicative of anything' and 'the difference between theory and measurement is disturbing'. A full analysis of the shortcomings of the tests is given in a separate paper (Kelly, 1996). This shows that a test of an accuracy improvement of two orders of magnitude would be required, before any credence could be placed in the results of such a test".

How about that?

Even Hafele didn't buy the results of his own tests!

Sorry, but that's life in the big world of physics.

Tribunus said...

And before you say it, yeah, I've read what Wikiclaptrap says about the challenges i.e. this:

"The quality of the original results has however been criticized. According to a 1996 re-examination of the data by A. G. Kelly, the final published outcome had to be averaged in a biased way in order to claim such a high precision. Also, Louis Essen, the inventor of the atomic clock, published an article in 1988 in which he discussed the (in his opinion) inadequate accuracy of the experiment. However, neither of these publications are in peer-reviewed sources, and neither casts doubt on the verifications of the result by more precise methods as early as 1976".

Peer-reviewed! See that? When every peer-reviewer is a slave to relativity, do you really think they are going to allow anyone to criticise their pet dogma?

No.

Right.

But this geezer carefully omits to tell you that Kelly was Chairman of the Irish National Grid, an engineer and PhD and published in the IIE which is peer-reviewed by engineers.

But - pah - what would engineers know about the theoretical physics that the high priests of relativity know?

One of these high priests - O'Rafferty - even said of Kelly and Sagnac that no amount of "crummy experiments" would ever be allowed to challenge relativity.

And this clown calls himself a scientist?

Well, it's a point of view.

And note that the actual inventor of the atomic clock doesn't even buy the tests either.

Face it. Relativity is not science. It is quasi-religious dogma but not of the rational sort. More like that of the kind that a witch doctor would envy.