Professor Paul Davies obscurely defends Einstein's 1920 'ether and relativity' lecture
In 1995, physicist Professor Paul Davies - who won the Templeton Prize for religion (I think it was $1,000,000), wrote on pp54-57 of his book 'About Time':
'Whenever I read dissenting views of time, I cannot help thinking of Herbert Dingle... who wrote ... Relativity for All, published in 1922. He became Professor ... at University College London... In his later years, Dingle began seriously to doubt Einstein's concept ... Dingle ... wrote papers for journals pointing out Einstein's errors and had them rejected ... In October 1971, J.C. Hafele [used atomic clocks to defend Einstein] ... You can't get much closer to Dingle's 'everyday' language than that.'
Now, let's check out J.C. Hafele.
J. C. Hafele is ANTI-HORSES***. Hafele writes in Science vol. 177 (1972) pp 166-8 that he uses G. Builder (1958) as analysis for the atomic clocks.
G. Builder (1958) is an article called 'ETHER AND RELATIVITY' in Australian Journal of Physics, v11, 1958, p279, which states:
'... we conclude that the relative retardation of clocks... does indeed compel us to recognise the CAUSAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ABSOLUTE velocities.'
Just to remind ourselves of what Einstein and his verifier Sir Arthur Eddington wrote on this:
‘The Michelson-Morley experiment has thus failed to detect our motion through the aether, because the effect looked for – the delay of one of the light waves – is exactly compensated by an automatic contraction of the matter forming the apparatus…. The great stumbing-block for a philosophy which denies absolute space is the experimental detection of absolute rotation.’ – A.S. Eddington, Space Time and Gravitation, Cambridge, 1921, pp. 20, 152.
So the contraction of the Michelson-Morley instrument made it fail to detect absolute motion. This is why special relativity needs replacement with a causal general relativity:
‘According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable.’ – Albert Einstein, Leyden university lecture ‘Ether and Relativity’, 1920. (A. Einstein, Sidelights on Relativity, Dover, 1952, p. 23.)
‘… with the new theory of electrodynamics [vacuum filled with virtual particles] we are rather forced to have an aether.’ – P.A.M. Dirac, ‘Is There an Aether?,’ Nature, v168, 1951, p906. (If you have a kid playing with magnets, how do you explain the pull and push forces felt through space? As ‘magic’?)
‘Children lose interest … because a natural interest in the world around them has been replaced by an unnatural acceptance of the soundness of certain views, the correctness of particular opinions and the validity of specific claims.’ – Dr David Lewis, You can teach your child intelligence, Book Club Associates, London, 1982, p. 258.
More at http://nigelcook0.tripod.com/
posted by nige @ 3:08 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Hi folks!
I hate this topic, as I respect Einstein's general relativity that replaces his restricted or 'special' relativity. Actually the only relativity is that between inertial and gravitational motion, general relativity. Special relativity uses fewer assumptions than general relativity and is consequently not applicable unless you have a situation of non-accelerating motion, i.e., SPECIAL RELATIVITY IS A FLAT EARTH THEORY.
You need a flat earth or 'non-curved space' for special relativity to work. Because the earth is curved, special/restricted relativity cannot be used except as an approximation. It is just a dogma really. Einstein himself slipped up when he wrote that a clock at the earth's equator, because of the earth's spin, runs more slowly than one at the pole.
I reality, this is known to be WRONG. The error is usually attributed to the fact that circular motion vaguely needs general relativity, not restricted. In fact, we can explain the physics here: time dilation does not do this, because a clock at the equator will spend 50% of the time speeded up (when the rotational motion adds to the absolute motion of the eath) and the other 50% of the time slowed down (when the rotation subtracts from the absolute motion of the earth in space).
Hence, a clock on any object on a circular path will undergo no NET variation regardless of the speed of rotation, or whether there is any rotation at all.
By the way, Catt spoke to Dingle by telephone before he died. Dingle actually wrote several books about relativity and Einstein but fell out with him about 1949 when Dingle contributed an article to a volume about Einstein which Einstein publically sneered at. Although Dingle gave the BBC eulogy on Einstein when he (Einstein died), and did it nicely, he afterwards found himself a laughing stock because Einstein's published sneers at Dingle's article were picked up and quoted. Perhaps this inspired Dingle to step outside the box and get himself written off as a crackpot.
The late Dr W.A. Scott-Murray wrote a whole series called the 'Heretics Guide to Modern Physics' for Wireless World (renamed Electronics and Wireless World in 1984, and now called just Electronics World):
1. Theories and Miracles, June 82
2. Electromagnetic Analogy, Aug 82
3. Impact of the Photon, Oct 82
4. More Realistic Duality? Dec 82
5. Quantisation and Quantisation Jan 83
6. Waves of Improbability, Feb 83
7. Limit of Indeterminacy, Mar 83
8. Haziness and its Applications Apr 83
9. Doctrines of Copenhagen, May 83
10. Judgement and Prognosis, Jun 83
Notice that Dr Scott-Murray, BSc, PhD chickened out of any discussion of RELATIVITY or EINSTEIN in this series!
Eventually, in the May 1984 issue, pp69-72, he came up with an article called 'The roots of relativity: Dr Murray avoided criticising relativity in his recent Heretic's Guide series, but here he makes good that omission':
'It was a grand cover-up operation, and the people [like Davies] who pulled it off were acclaimed as heroes ... Maybe someday we shall come to wonder if their success was really worth the troubles it has caused.'
I want to mention Walter Babin, who has an internet site on this topic. Some of the material on it is not too good (like some old papers of mine), but the general message is that people like asking questions and trying to make progress despite barriers, and this in a way reminds me of Einstein's own advice to people with new ideas, be they inventors or scientists: 'be stubborn'.
Good advice!
Dr David Bohm was too chicken to defend the ether and tried to get into mathematically-based hidden variable theories. He made some progress, like his brownian motion type derivation of Schroedinger's equation, but he always tended to get tied up in infinite potentials...
One of the better things about Bohm's work was his political insights linked subversively to ether theory:
'It is proposed ... that the widespread and pervasive distinctions between people ... have one of the key factors of their origin in a kind of thought that treats things as inherently divided, disconnected, and 'broken up' into yet smaller constituent parts. Each part is considerd to be essentially independent and self-existent.
'When man thinks of himself in this way, he will inevitably tend to defend the needs of his own 'Ego' against those of the others ... but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.'
- Dr David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Ark Paperbacks, London and New York, 1983, p.xi. He was professor of theoretical physics at Birkbeck College, London.
'Crimestop' is 'the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments ...'
- George Orwell, "1984", 1949.
According to Homer, 'The Iliad' (800 BC):
'All the unmeasured aether flames with light.'
(Pope, 1718 translation, xvi.361)
Sir Oliver Lodge, a close friend of Oliver Heaviside, writes about STRING THEORY (it seems) on p307 of his book 'My Philosophy; Representing My Views on the Many Functions of the Ether of Space' (Ernest Benn, London, 1933):
'Why not bring theology more prominently into science? For a very good reason. It would be shirking the isue, it would be jumping all the intermediate steps. ... The mechanism seems to run of itself: that is what perfect mechanism often seems to do ... The business of the scientific enquirer is to ferret out the details of the mechanism, whether it be chemical mechanism or any other ...'
Oliver Heaviside tells us on p133 of v1 of 'Electromagnetic Theory' 1893:
'I was once told, as a good joke upon a mathematician, that the poor man went mad and mistook his symbols for realities; as M for the moon and S for the sun.'
Curiously, the only time I have ever seen this is in Feynman's book 'Character of Physical Law', BBC, London, 1965, where he discusses the LeSage mechanism of gravity before dismissing it (neglecting the FitzGerald contraction as evidence for ether resistance): Feynman I think used the symbols S for the sun and M for the moon...
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