Einstein was both general relativity’s progenitor and quantum theory’s greatest critic. History may show whether neither, one or both of his sets of ideas were right. In the meantime, the nature of space and time seems as good a place to start as any to begin sorting out what’s what. Physics works by the minimisation of mysteries, and their current multiplication suggests that whatever we’ve got wrong, it is something pretty fundamental.

   

Matter appeared within the first second after the big bang. Matter is the stuff that energy pushes around.

All forms of life require mechanisms to interpret local information (such as the presence of different chemicals or local temperatures and acidity levels) so they can respond appropriately (Should I hug it or eat it or run?). The philosopher Daniel Dennett writes: “Animals are not just herbivores or carnivores. They are… informavores.”  In fact, all living organisms are informavores. They all consume information, and the mechanisms they use for reading and responding to local information—whether they are eyes and tentacles or muscles and brains—account for much of the complexity of living organisms.

Despite the profound differences between Tyrannosaurus rex and an E. coli bacterium, in important respects, life is remarkably unified. All organisms alive today are related genetically. And they share many genetic gadgets, particularly those that, like subroutines in computer software, handle basic housekeeping tasks. In cells, these tasks include jobs such as breaking down food molecules for their energy or their chemical components or moving energy and atoms around. This is why, if you zoom down to the level of cells, it’s hard to distinguish between a human being and an amoeba. 

In March 1968, just before he was assassinated, Robert Kennedy described the limitations of an economy devoted to never-ending growth in gross national product: The Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.… It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.… Yet the GNP does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or… the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.… It measures everything, in short, except that which makes
life worthwhile.

First you have to notice that, in their experiment, the clock comparison was made AFTER the flight!!! Again each flown clock run at their building tick rate during the flight, ie 1 second per second. The difference in the readings after the flight was due to the flown clocks following a different path through spacetime (compared with the path through spacetime of the stationary clock, which also run at its building tick rate, ie 1 second per second.

You have been told before that atomic clocks perform a similar function to the function an odometer perform in our cars.

Clocks measure elapsed time along a spacetime path <==> Odometers measure elapsed distance along a space path.

So if you have two identical cars with identical odometers and make the two cars go from Chicago to New York, but following different highways, comparing the odometers readings will show different distances even if the two odometers measure 1 km/km.

The trajectories of the flown atomic clocks in the Hafele-Keating experiment were clearly different from the trajectory of the clock at US Naval Observatory.

According to the present invention a beam of
microwaves or radio waves of ultra high frequen-
cy is directed along the path of movement of the
vehicle in the roadway toward the vehicle from
a test station adjacent to the roadway, and a
small part of such microwaves reflected from
the vehicle are received back at the test station,
The reflected waves are mixed with the trans-
mitted waves by the apparatus in accordance with
the invention to provide a beat frequency which
is directly proportional to the speed of the vehicle
along its path. As a speed meter this beat fre-
quency is applied to a frequency meter calibrated
to provide a direct reading of Speed.

The frequency of the beat frequency
components depends upon the Doppler shifts caused by the
relative speeds between the patrol car and the various
objects painted by the radar which cause radar returns.

The illustration above suggests that you can simply measure distances between waves, you don't need to "beat" the waves together.  And when you argue with the mathematicians, they cannot comprehend any way light can hit an object at c+v, where v is the velocity of the target, because they believe light must travel at c for all observers.  With the waves depicted above, each wave hits at c, but the target gets closer and closer.  But, radar guns do not work that way.  According to NASA, a radar gun can theoretically measure the speed of a target with a single photon.  The emitted photon hits the target at c+v which causes the target to emit a new photon back to the gun that oscillates faster than the original photon.  A comparison is then made inside the gun between emitted photons and the returned photon.  The difference in oscillating frequencies (i.e., the "beat frequency") is equivalent to the speed of the target.

I'm going to have to study these patents further to see what they might contain that would be of value in arguments with mathematician-physicists.

Meanwhile, the arguments on the sci.physics.relativity forum continue to rage.  Yesterday, "Paparios" argued that the length of a second does not change when you are traveling very fast.  He wanted evidence of my claim that it does.  So, I provided a link to my web page of Time Dilation Experments.  This morning, amid a heap of other arguments from other people, Paparios wrote to me:

You do not have the slightest idea of what time dilation is. For your
information, Time dilation is a difference in the elapsed time measured by two clocks, either due to them having a velocity relative to each other, or by there being a gravitational potential difference between their locations.

You see the duration of a second DOES NOT change depending upon your speed!!!  What changes is the elapsed measure of the moving clock (see the twin paradox at https://www.cpp.edu/~ajm/materials/twinparadox.html). Both the stationary clock and the moving clock are identical clocks and they both tick at 1 second
per second, period!

Early in the study of special relativity students learn about the phenomenon of time dilation, i.e., that "moving clocks run slow." Those who have properly appreciated the fact that all motion is relative and who have properly appreciated that clocks measure the passage of physical (including biological) time, ought necessarily to experience some mental discomfort at this result. After all when two observers pass each other, the prediction is that both will find the other's clocks to run slower than their own. This might well seem to be impossible on its face and, therefore, to invalidate the entire theory.

Ken Shito

The Doppler effect is a function of the relative speed, not the closing speed. The relative speed between the source and the receiver being ZERO, there is NO Doppler effect. You are dumber than a sack of rocks.

Does the operation manual says that if the gun is in a moving truck and if you point the gun at the rear panel you will not get frequency shift?

It says if you point it at ANYTHING that is not moving relative to the gun, then you will get a zero reading.

Does it say that the gun inside the trailer of a moving truck and is point at the back panel of a moving truck you will not get frequency shift?

Maybe it would help to explain that while the distance between the radar gun and the wall of the moving truck does not change, BOTH the gun and the wall of the truck MOVE while the photons are traveling from the gun to the wall.  While the photons are moving toward the front wall, the front wall is moving away from where the photons were emitted, so the photons have to travel further to reach the wall than they would if the gun and wall were stationary.

The photons also hit the wall with less force, since the wall is moving away. As a result, when the atoms in the wall emit return photons, those photons have less energy than the photons emitted by the gun.

When the return photons reach the gun, the gun RECEIVES the photons as energy. The gun compares the energy of the photons it emitted to the energy of the return photons and gets the speed of the wall.

The Doppler Shift is a function of the CLOSING speed, not the relative speed.  The relative speed between the gun and the wall may be zero when both are moving at the same speed in the same direction, but the Doppler Shift results from the photon hitting a MOVING wall.

Ed, let's assume that you can throw a ball @60 mph. Let's also assume that you are in the back of a large box truck, which is traveling down a long straight and level road @ 60 mph. Do you really think that if you threw the ball towards the front wall of that truck that the ball would never get there? Heck, if your thinking was correct the ball would never even leave your hand! What would happen if the truck was going 80 mph, would the ball just smack you in the face? THINK, man, think!

I assure you, Ed, that we could play catch in the back of that truck and have no clue about the truck's speed, or even if it was moving or not, ignoring vibrations..

Correct.  That is because rubber balls work different from photons.
Rubber balls have MASS, photons do not.  Different laws of electrodynamics work with an object that has MASS than with a photon that has NO mass.

Are you claiming that the wall of the truck will NOT move while the
photon moves?

While the radar gun and the wall are not moving, relative to each other, in that frame of reference (the one attached to the truck), the photons ARE MOVING at speed c (according to the second postulate).

You are confusing this with the view an observer on the ground would have of those photons!! 

"you cannot use logic to prove much of anything in science."

Move? Relative to what? Relative to the ground! I keep asking you what makes the reference frame of the ground special, you deny doing so yet you keep doing so! This is in violation of the First Postulate, there are no preferred reference frames, and this includes the earth's surface.

In reality, the truck body is inertial, so all physics in the moving truck work exactly the same as in the parked truck.  In the reference frame of the inertially moving truck, the gun is stationary, the front wall is stationary and the back wall is stationary.  The radar gun will measure a speed of 0 (or no reading).

While you can set the gun to be used in a stationary mode, once you start moving you will be interpreting returned reflected frequencies from mailboxes, signs, parked cars, even the ground as targets moving toward you so you would see targets registering.  The software inside the gun is assuming the gun is stationary so it sees reflected shifted frequencies as targets.

If you were to set the gun into moving mode, the stationary objects would be filtered out of the reflected frequencies based on the speed of the gun vehicle (via large ground return or VSS or CAN), but aiming at the back of the moving truck would be interpreted as a moving target since it is not altering the reflected frequency like the ground.  However, the gun will not show the target because it would be too close to the speed of the gun vehicle speed.

 

We introduced the first digital readout radar, the industry's first moving radar, and the first hand-held option.

Kustom Signals produced the first moving radar called the MR-7.  The radar was similar to their TR-6 stationary radar with a computer unit (often called a counting unit in the 1970s) and a separate antenna.

An “inertial frame of reference” in classical physics and special relativity possesses the property that in this frame of reference a body with zero net force acting upon it does not accelerate; that is, such a body is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line.

A “non-inertial frame of reference” is a frame of reference that is undergoing acceleration with respect to an inertial frame. An accelerometer at rest in a non-inertial frame will, in general, detect a non-zero acceleration. While the laws of motion are the same in all inertial frames, in non-inertial frames, they vary from frame to frame depending on the acceleration.

If you put the truck in space, in orbit around the sun (at the same orbital radius and speed as the earth), will the gun read 67000 mph?

On a slightly less facetious note, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Frank Wilczek has suggested that string theorists have invented a new way of doing physics, reminiscent of a novel way of playing darts. First, one throws the dart against a blank wall, and then one goes to the wall and draws a bull’s-eye around where the dart landed.

“light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body.”

Finally, I found that the Milky Way moves through space within the cluster of galaxies it is a member of, and this cluster in turn moves through space towards yet another larger cluster of galaxies off in the direction of the constellation Virgo.    

There are in all about 100 known galaxies with blueshifts out of the billions of galaxies in the observable universe. Most of these blue-shifted galaxies are in our own local group, and are all bound to each other. Most are also dwarf galaxies which you've probably never heard of, although the Andromeda Galaxy, M31, is in there.

A long time ago I created this image of how the observable universe relates to the Big Bang universe:


I think I may use a modified version of this image in my new paper.  I may modify it to include a couple dots between the x that marks the location of the earth and the upper right edge of the small circle that represents the observable universe.  Those dots would represent Andromeda and other galaxies that appear blue-shifted from Earth. 

But first I need to a lot more research.  There's a web page HERE that says the above idea won't work because the Big Bang would create a "shell" of galaxies.  But that seems wrong to me, since I visualize the Big Bang unleashing and spraying out a cloud of elementary particles, with the first particles traveling faster than later particles, like a expanding spring opening up.  When those particles merged and created objects, that might also create a "shell," but the "shell" could be very thick, possibly as thick as the radius of the shell.  I.e., it would look just like the image above.           
 

In 1929, Edwin Hubble announced that almost all galaxies appeared to be moving away from us. In fact, he found that the universe was expanding - with all of the galaxies moving away from each other. This phenomenon was observed as a redshift of a galaxy's spectrum. This redshift appeared to be larger for faint, presumably further, galaxies. Hence, the farther a galaxy, the faster it is receding from Earth.

If both Galaxy A and Galaxy B are moving at a million miles per hour (v) away from the point of the Big Bang, they are moving at 2 million mph (2v) away from each other.  And light arriving on earth from Galaxy B will arrive at c-2v as the earth moves away from the point where the light as emitted at c.  That means the light will be redshifted, and it will be redshifted at the same amount as measured as if B was moving away from A.  So, either way you do the calculations for the redshift, you will get the same result.

But, what about the Andromeda Galaxy, which appears blueshifted to us.  We know that the galaxies in the universe are not all moving away from each other, because we can see colliding galaxies.  They may look like the image below.


 
The problem is that light from a galaxy that is getting closer cannot be measured as c+2v.  There is no relationship to the Big Bang.  So, are we moving toward Andromeda, or is Andromeda moving toward the Milky Way?   Or both?

Which brings us back to Einstein's Second Postulate:

light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body.

The story starts in the early 1900s, when astronomer Vesto Slipher measured the radial velocity of Andromeda — in other words, he calculated the speed at which the galaxy was moving toward or away from Earth. Slipher did this by looking for a telltale stretching or compression in the light from Andromeda arriving at Earth: Light from objects that are moving away from us is slightly stretched, or red-shifted. Light from objects moving toward us is blue-shifted, or compressed.

The result was a little bit surprising.

“We may conclude that the Andromeda Nebula is approaching the solar system with a velocity of about 300 kilometers per second,” Slipher wrote in the Lowell Observatory Bulletin in 1913

Astronomers have long known that the Milky Way and Andromeda, which is also known as M31, are barrelling toward one another at a speed of about 250,000 mph (400,000 kph).

In 2003, astronomers calculated that Andromeda is 2.57 million light-years away. And in 2004, astronomers redid Hubble’s Cepheid variable calculations, and determined that Andromeda was 2.51 million light-years. Another group used a different technique in 2005 to calculate that Andromeda was 2.52 million light-years away. And yet another technique in 2005 put it at 2.56 million light-years away. And so, the agreed distance of 2.54 million light-years is an average of the distances measured so far.

I will give this information to our tech and have him contact you…he is traveling now wont be back til Friday.

During the three weeks I spent wandering through postcard-perfect scenes of bustling markets, glittering pagodas and faded British hill stations I found it hard to believe I was travelling through a country that has one of the worst records for human-rights abuse in the world. To me, this is the most staggering thing about Burma: that the oppression of an entire nation of some 50 million people can be completely hidden from view. A vast network of Military Intelligence spies and their informers ensures that no one can do or say anything that might threaten the regime. The Burmese media—books, magazines, movies and music—are controlled by a strict censorship board and government propaganda is churned out not only through newspapers and television, but also in schools and universities. These methods of reality-control are kept firmly in place by the invisible, though ever present, threat of torture and imprisonment.

He told me that he currently had more students than he could handle, and taught seven or eight hour-long classes a day. ‘Our education system is absolutely going to the dogs,’ he said. ‘It’s just getting worse and worse.’ He moved some cross-word puzzles aside and dusted down a chair for me to sit on. ‘They no longer teach anything in the schools,’ he continued. ‘The pupils simply learn their lessons by heart. Everything is memorized, even subjects like mathematics. Students do not understand why seven multiplied by three is twenty-one: they just remember it.  If you ask them to do a sum that is not in the multiplication tables they have learned they will not be able to answer you.’ He leaned over and glared at me over his thick glasses. ‘This is not what you or I would call an education,’ he said.

Elected officials have opened the floodgates to prejudices that have for half a century been unacceptable or at least undercover. In a passionate introduction, Dawkins calls on us to insist that reason take center stage and that gut feelings, even when they don’t represent the stirred dark waters of xenophobia, misogyny, or other blind prejudice, should stay out of the voting booth.

Who then would rally against reason? The following statements will sound all too familiar.

‘I don’t trust educated intellectuals, elitists who know more than I do. I’d prefer to vote for somebody like me, rather than somebody who is actually qualified to be President.’

What other than this mentality accounts for the popularity of Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush – politicians who flaunt their ignorance as a vote-winning virtue? You want your airline pilot to be educated in aeronautics and navigation. You want your surgeon to be learned in anatomy. Yet when you vote for a President to lead a great country, you prefer somebody who is ignorant and proud of it, someone you’d enjoy having a drink with, rather than somebody qualified for high office?

A preeminent scientist -- and the world's most prominent atheist -- asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 9/11.

In the interests of full disclosure right at the outset I must admit that I am not sympathetic to the conviction that creation requires a creator, which is the basis for all the the world's religions.

Brilliant scientist Rose Franklin has devoted her adult life to solving the mystery she accidentally stumbled upon as a child: a huge metal hand buried beneath the ground outside Deadwood, South Dakota. The discovery set in motion a cataclysmic chain of events with geopolitical ramifications. Rose and the Earth Defense Corps raced to master the enigmatic technology, as giant robots suddenly descended on Earth’s most populous cities, killing one hundred million people in the process. Though Rose and her team were able to fend off the attack, their victory was short-lived. The mysterious invaders retreated, disappearing from the shattered planet . . . but they took the scientist and her crew with them.

"Waking Gods" is the second of three books in "The Themis Files" series, the first of which I finished on July 1.  (I wasn't able to borrow #2 until August 8.)  As soon as I finished #2, I immediately started on #3, which I'll finish sometime today, since I only have about 2 hours and 20 minutes left to go.  The first book was about the discovery of a hand from a 200-foot tall, female-shaped robot, which was deliberately buried about 3,000 years ago.  When humans find all the parts, we assemble them and name it "Themis" after a female Greek god.  The second book is about an "attack" by similar but male-shaped alien robots that wipe out about ten major cities around the world, killing about two hundred million people, before one of the main characters in the books figures out a way to fight back using the original robot.  They manage to badly damage one of the male-shaped robots, and the rest just vanish.  I'll wait until I finish #3 before saying anything further.

August 11, 2019 - On Friday, I sent off a snail-mail letter to a major radar gun manufacturer.  I used that letter as a model to send out letters to two other radar gun manufacturers on Saturday.  I also sent emails to 2 lesser-known radar gun manufacturers yesterday.  The goal is still to find as many guns as I can which do what mathematicians consider to be impossible.  I've found one manufacturer who makes such guns, I'm hoping that some of the other five also have such guns - even if they are guns which do not run on batteries and have to be plugged into the cigarette lighter socket.  (You wouldn't be able to use such a gun inside a the rear of a truck, but you could still point it at the back of a truck going 60 mph from a car going 60 mph and get a reading of 60 mph.)

Meanwhile, last week as I was trying to figure out who else I could talk with about this, I remembered that, years ago, when I was tracking the investigation of the 2001 anthrax letters, I had exchanged emails with a scientist at a major U.S. scientific organization.  We'd last exchanged emails in 2014.  On Thursday, I sent off an email to him, and he immediately responded.  Since then we've exchanged several friendly emails about my paper "Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories," which he has read and passed on to others at his organization.

The discussions reminded me of something I'd argued about with mathematicians but didn't include in my paper.  It's an argument explaining why the wave theory cannot work with radar guns, even though that is the typical way radar guns are shown in illustrations. 



What a radar gun actually does is emit photons that oscillate at 24125000000 Hz, and in the situation illustrated above it gets back photons that oscillate at 24125004308.035 Hz.  The gun then compares the oscillation frequency of the photons it emitted to the oscillation frequency of the photons that returned and it computes the target's speed as 60 mph. 

1.  The illustration does NOT show waves that bounced off highway signs, trees, stones on the ground and off of different parts of the car.

2.  The illustration does NOT show light waves from the sun that bounce off of everything else that is visible in the area.