Experts debate how many journals falsely claim to engage in peer review. Cabells, an analytics firm in Texas, has compiled a blacklist of those which it believes are guilty. According to Kathleen Berryman, who is in charge of this list, the firm employs 65 criteria to determine whether a journal should go on it—though she is reluctant to go into details. Cabells’ list now totals around 8,700 journals, up from a bit over 4,000 a year ago. Another list, which grew to around 12,000 journals, was compiled until recently by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado. Using Mr Beall’s list, Bo-Christer Björk, an information scientist at the Hanken School of Economics, in Helsinki, estimates that the number of articles published in questionable journals has ballooned from about 53,000 a year in 2010 to more than 400,000 today. He estimates that 6% of academic papers by researchers in America appear in such journals.

A detailed analysis of the behavior of the Earth clocks from the point of view of the spaceship reference frame establishes that the Earth clocks indeed do also run slow as long as the spaceship is moving with uniform velocity, but that the Earth clocks run fast when the spaceship is undergoing its acceleration to turn around at Proxima Centauri. The time that the Earth clocks gain during the accelerated portions of the trip more than compensates for the time they lose during the other portions of the trip. This confirms that Stella will be younger than Terra, even from the point of view of the spaceship reference frame.  

Since the circuitry in a radar gun only processes the difference of the frequencies of the retained and reflected signals, the exact same result would be shown whether a target vehicle is moving toward or away from the police radar gun. 

I have always had certain misfeelings about thought experiments, because how you can do an experiment solely in your mind.  

Thought experiments can not be used to learn anything about the world, only to gain insight into the laws of physics as you understand them.  Einstein's though experiments about the train allow you to understand the implications of the assumption that the speed of light is a constant for all observers, even observers moving wrt each other. These "experiments" prove nothing by themselves except what the assumptions imply.  You still have to do real world experiments to verify that the real world gives the same results as the thought experiment.  If they do not, then there is a faulty assumption somewhere.  The value of the thought experiment is to understand the implications of an hypothesis (i.e. assumption).

With a few seconds left, the auxiliary power units start. The beast that terrified you out on the launchpad? Now that beast is waking up. At six seconds you feel the rumble of the main engines lighting. The whole stack lurches forward for a moment. Then at zero it tilts back upright again and that’s when the solid rocket boosters light and that’s when you go. There’s no question that you’re moving. It’s not like Oh, did we leave yet? No. It’s bang! and you’re gone. You’re going 100 miles an hour before you clear the tower. You accelerate from 0 to 17,500 miles an hour in eight and a half minutes.

In space, sunlight is nothing like sunlight as you know it. It’s pure whiteness. It’s perfect white light. It’s the whitest white you’ve ever seen. I felt like I had Superman vision. The colors were intense and vibrant—the gleaming white body of the shuttle; the metallic gold of the Mylar sheets and the thermal blankets; the red, white, and blue of the American flag on my shoulder. Everything was bright and rich and beautiful. Everything had a clarity and a crispness to it. It was like I was seeing things in their purest form, like I was seeing true color for the first time.

When night comes in space, you feel it before you see it. The temperature swing from 200 degrees Fahrenheit to −200 degrees Fahrenheit occurs in an instant. The amazing thing is that your suit protects you from that; the temperature inside stays within a tolerable range, and you have a temperature control valve you can adjust to warm up or cool down as needed. So the 400-degree swing isn’t harsh, but you definitely still notice it. The best I can describe it is like when you’re in the ocean on a warm summer’s day and a cold current rushes past and it gets you down in your bones.

At night, without the sun, space becomes this magical place. In space, stars don’t twinkle. Because there’s no atmosphere to fog your view, they’re like perfect pinpoints of light. Stars are different colors, too, not just white. They’re blue, red, purple, green, yellow. And there are billions of them. The constellations look like constellations. You can make out the shapes and see what early astronomers were getting at with their descriptions.

In common use for traffic speed control is a Doppler radar gun. The basic principle of operation of these guns is that the radar signal reflected from a moving vehicle is shifted in frequency by an amount directly proportional to the speed of the vehicle relative to the radar gun. Intrinsically one sees that such a radar gun is a frequency measuring device.  The typical way of calibrating these radar guns is to place in front of the gun a vibrating tuning fork which produces a reflected signal to which the radar responds as though it were a moving vehicle.  There exists a well-known relationship between this signal and the speed of the vehicle provided the radar frequency is known.

Suppose, for example, that a radar instrument which was designed for 10525 MHz had a microwave oscillator which was detuned (outside the FCC allocation) to 12000 MHz; then that radar instrument would measure a vehicle which was actually traveling 50 mph as traveling 57 mph even though a 50 mph tuning fork made for that gun would cause it to read 50 mph.  Similarly, if a 50 mph tuning fork made for a 21150 MHz type radar gun were used to calibrate a properly functioning 10525 MHz type radar gun it would cause the latter to read 115 mph! 

By the way, the test tuning fork just excites the delta frequency sensor in the speed gun at the delta frequency corresponding to the reference speed for a given transmitter frequency.  So, a tuning fork doesn't really test the transmitter calibration at all, it just tests the delta frequency receiver calibration, meaning the part of the gun that detects the difference between the transmitted and received frequencies.

In much of the literature, the frequency error is referred to as delta-f (delta means a small difference).

Any X band tuning fork will work on any X band radar.  Any K band fork will work on any K band radar.  Ka band forks are specific to the manufacturer of radar.  This is because all 4 manufacturers have different Ka band operating frequencies.

All X band radars use same X band tuning forks.  All K band radars use same K band tuning forks.  Ka band forks are different for each radar manufacturer (i.e. Stalker, MPH, Kustom, Decatur)

In 1905, at the age of 26, Albert Einstein published a paper* on the electrodynamics of moving bodies. In this paper, he postulated that absolute motion cannot be detected by any experiment. That is, there is no ether.  Earth can be considered to be at rest and the velocity of light will be the same in any direction. His theory of special relativity can be derived from two postulates. Simply stated, these postulates are as follows:

Postulate 1: Absolute uniform motion cannot be detected.

Postulate 2: The speed of light is independent of the motion of the source.

The introduction of a “luminiferous ether” will prove to be superfluous inasmuch as the view here to be developed will not
require an “absolutely stationary space” provided with special properties

Postulate 2 (alternate): Every observer measures the same value for the speed of light.

This result contradicts our intuitive ideas about relative velocities. If a car moves at 50 km/h away from an observer and another car moves at 80 km/h in the same direction, the velocity of the second car relative to the first car is 30 km/h. This result is easily measured and conforms to our intuition. However, according to Einstein’s postulates, if a light beam is moving in the direction of the cars, observers in both cars will measure the same speed for the light beam. Our intuitive ideas about the combination of velocities are approximations that hold only when the speeds are very small compared with the speed of light. Even in an airplane moving with the speed of sound, to measure the speed of light accurately enough to distinguish the difference between the results c and c+v where v is the speed of the plane, would require a measurement with six-digit accuracy.

Suppose, for example, that a radar instrument which was designed for 10525 MHz had a microwave oscillator which was detuned (outside the FCC allocation) to 12000 MHz; then that radar instrument would measure a vehicle which was actually traveling 50 mph as traveling 57 mph even though a 50 mph tuning fork made for that gun would cause it to read 50 mph.

 

 

Some of the available FCC allocated frequencies for law enforcement radar include 10525 MHz and 24150 MHz; the vast majority of current radar guns use the 10525 MHz allocation.  Suppose, for example, that a radar instrument which was designed for 10525 MHz had a microwave oscillator which was detuned (outside the FCC allocation) to 12000 MHz; then that radar instrument would measure a vehicle which was actually traveling 50 mph as traveling 57 mph even though a 50 mph tuning fork made for that gun would cause it to read 50 mph. Similarly, if a 50 mph tuning fork made for a 24150 MHz type radar gun were used to calibrate a properly functioning 10525 MHz type radar gun it would cause the latter to read 115 mph!

June 14, 2018 - I spent much of this morning watching astronauts replace and fix things on the International Space Station.  It was a live link at this YouTube address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwMDvPCGeE0  Because it is "live," there's no telling what you might see if you click on that link.  The space walk repair job I'm watching as I write this only has about an hour left to go.  It's can be pretty spectacular when you view it in "full screen" mode on a large computer screen - or my big screen TV.   It can also be very tedious if you listen to the dialog exchange between Houston and the astronauts as they got through all the steps involved in attaching "TMA3" to "A7YS."   Here's a screen capture:



Much of the time the view is from a camera attached to the astronaut's helmet.  Here's a sample of that taken after the astronaut closed that cover:



Meanwhile, I also found an interesting web page titled "What exactly is a photon? Definition, properties, facts."  Here's an interesting part from it:

On 14 December 1900, Max Planck demonstrated that heat radiation was emitted and absorbed in discrete packets of energy — quanta.  Later, Albert Einstein showed in 1905 that this also applied to light. Einstein used the term Lichtquant, or quantum of light. Now, at the dawn of the 20th-century, a new revolution in physics would once again hinge on the nature of light. This time, it’s not about whether light is a corpuscle or wave. It’s whether it’s both or not.

Tuners work using a principle called resonance. That is, tuners resonate at, and amplify, one particular frequency and ignore all the other frequencies in the air. It is easy to create a resonator with a capacitor and an inductor (check out How Oscillators Work to see how inductors and capacitors work together to create a tuner).

The wavelength of the emitted light (which determines its color) depends on how much energy is released, which depends on the particular position of the electron. Consequently, different sorts of atoms will release different sorts of light photons. In other words, the color of the light is determined by what kind of atom is excited.

In summary, relative motion will occur only when the solid object and the RADAR are not moving in the same direction, at the same speed. It will occur if

a. The RADAR is stationary and the object moves;
b. The object is stationary and the RADAR moves; or
c. If they both are moving, as long as they move at different speeds or in different directions so that the distance between them changes.

In each case, the Doppler Principle says that the transmitted signal and the reflected signal will have different frequencies if there is relative motion between the RADAR and the object.  

1.  The gun is moving at 60 mph and the target is stationary.
2.  The gun is moving at 60 mph following a target moving at 60 mph.

The police officer I talked with back on May 21 answered the first question.  If the gun is moving at 60 mph and the target is stationary, the gun will show "no reading," which is equivalent to showing a speed of zero.  It makes perfect sense if you understand that no matter how fast the radar gun is moving it cannot send out light photons faster than c (the speed of light).  So, if the gun is stationary and is pointed at a stationary target, it will show zero.  And if the gun is moving and is pointed at a stationary target, it will also show zero, because the light emitted by the gun does not travel faster when the gun moves.  It travels at the same speed as when the gun is stationary.

However, that makes no sense to mathematicians who insist that motion is relative (which they seem to interpret as also meaning "reciprocal") and therefore if the gun is moving at 60 mph relative to a parked car, the parked car is also moving at 60 mph relative to the radar gun.  If that seems preposterous (and it is), the mathematicians explain that in the moving radar gun's "frame of reference" it is stationary and the parked car is moving at 60 mph, while in the parked car's "frame of reference" the parked car is stationary and the radar is moving at 60 mph. 



I did research to find out how the radar gun issue first came up.  It came up in a May 19 argument on Google's sci.physics.relativity discussion forum where I argued that photons from the radar gun hit the oncoming target at c+v, where c is the speed of light and v is the velocity of the target.  Atoms in the target absorb the photons and emit new photons back toward the gun that oscillate at a shorter (higher and more energetic) frequency than the original photons.  Below is the reply argument from "danco":

No, the light pulses propagate at c (in both directions) in the rest frame of the gun, and the round trip distance each successive pulse must travel is less because the on-coming car is getting closer.  As a result, the reflected pulses arrive back at the emitter at a higher frequency than they were emitted.  This gives the result that the velocity of the car (relative to the gun) is (we-wr)/(we+wr), where we is the emitted frequency and wr is the received frequency.  We get the same result if we work in the rest frame of the on-coming car, in which the speed of light is also c.

That is (sort of) how lidar guns work.  It is not how radar guns work.  But, so far, nothing I've been able to show to the mathematicians has changed their minds.  And I've been researching radar guns for at least 3 weeks.  I have found at least a dozen papers (and one short book) on the subject, yet not one of them answers those two questions I asked at the top of this comment.  Instead, you have to try to interpret what is written to see if it contradicts what I say, or if it says what I say but in a much more convoluted way.  When you have to do that, it's not something you can quote and use in an argument.  The counter-argument will always be that I didn't interpret the paper correctly.

It's also frustrating that no one comments on my papers via emails (except for the two that resulted from my post to sci.physics.research.  I tried sending an email to my local sheriff's department, but they just suggested I try emailing radar gun manufacturers.  I tried that once and got no response.  I suspect that if I get a response it will be that I should purchase one of their radar guns and test it myself to see how it works.

I could try asking questions on some Facebook groups, but I've never had much success there.  Mostly Facebook users just click on "like" and never answer any complicated questions.  Only the mathematicians on Facebook seem to give opinions.  This morning I joined the Niel de Grasse Tyson Facebook group.  But, I'm not sure if it is a group Tyson started, or if it is a group his fans started to talk about him.  One thing I am sure of, however, is that I like this flat earth illustration that I found there this morning:


I've also been thinking of creating some cartoons, like the one about Relativity near the top of this comment, in order to start discussions about Relativity on Facebook.  The trick on Facebook is to grab people's attention.  Cartoons are good at doing that.  They don't have to be funny, just eye-catching.

On Friday and Saturday I revised my paper on "Simplifying Einstein's Thought Experiments" to include as a new Experiment #11 the same thought experiment I have in "Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories."  The current version of the Simplifying paper includes several things that I say are wrong in the latest version of Radar Guns.  They are things that mathematicians would agree with, but I didn't realize were wrong until I started examining how radar guns work.  (When I wrote the Simplifying paper I thought that you couldn't tell if you were moving if you were inside a closed "frame of reference."  But, since then I've realized that, by using a radar gun, you can tell if you are moving.)

The new version of Simplifying Einstein's Thought Experiments that I plan to submit later today will correct those errors.   Or, maybe I should say the repairs will put my two most recent papers in agreement, right or wrong.

You would have thought that someone would have pointed out to me that the two papers do not agree on some key points.  But no one has done so.  So, either no one is really reading them, or no one wants to risk getting into an argument. 

It is a count of the number of times the PDF document has been downloaded for reading. In order to not count multiple reads by the same user we look at the IP address and only count once for each unique IP. Downloads of different versions of a paper are added together to give a single number. The method is not perfect because many people have dynamic IP addresses that change when they reconnect to the network, and some IP addresses are shared. However it is the best approximation possible to the total number of people who have read the document. It should never be regarded as exact.

Light is what allows us to understand the world we live in. Our language reflects this: after groping in the dark, we see the light and understanding dawns.

Yet light is one of those things that we don't tend to understand. If you were to zoom in on a ray of light, what would you see? Sure, light travels incredibly fast, but what is it that's doing the travelling? Many of us would struggle to explain.

It doesn't have to be that way. Light certainly has puzzled the greatest minds for centuries, but landmark discoveries made over the last 150 years have robbed light of its mystery. We actually know, more or less, what it is.

Einstein realised that the photoelectric effect was easier to understand by thinking of light in terms of Planck's quanta.

He suggested that light is carried in tiny quantum packets. Each quantum packs a discrete energy punch that relates to the wavelength: the shorter the wavelength, the denser the energy punch. This would explain why violet light packets, with a relatively short wavelength, carried more energy than red light packets, with a relatively longer one.

It also explained why simply increasing the brightness of the light made less of an impact.

A brighter light source delivers more light packets to the metal, but it doesn't change the amount of energy each light packet contains. Crudely speaking, a single violet light packet could transfer more energy to a single electron than any number of red light packets.

Einstein called these energy packets photons, and these are now recognised as a fundamental particle. Visible light is carried by photons, and so are all the other kinds of electromagnetic radiation like X-rays, microwaves and radio waves. In other words, light is a particle.

At this point physicists decided to end the debate over whether light behaved as a wave or a particle. Both models were so convincing that neither could be rejected.

To the confusion of many non-physicists, the scientists decided that light behaved as both a wave and a particle at the same time. In other words, light is a paradox.

Your posting is inappropriate for sci.physics.research since it is overly speculative.

 

"All of the theoretical work that's been done since the 1970s has not produced a single successful prediction," says Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. "That's a very shocking state of affairs."

This doesn't mean physicists aren't busy; the journals are publishing more research than ever. But Turok says all that research isn't doing much to advance our understanding of the universe — at least not the way physicists did in the last century.

Physicists today "write a lot of papers, build a lot of [theoretical] models, hold a lot of conferences, cite each other — you have all the trappings of science," he says. "But for me, physics is all about making successful predictions. And that's been lacking."

In a new book entitled "Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray," [Sabine] Hossenfelder [a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany] argues that many physicists working today have been led astray by mathematics — seduced by equations that might be "beautiful" or "elegant" but which lack obvious connection to the real world.

"I can't believe what this once-venerable profession has become," she writes. "Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can't explain what was not observed. And they're not even good at that."

When we talked he said he liked the fact that I was an industrial engineer, because it had given me some practical experience with human factors, something that most of the Good Will Hunting geniuses on campus didn't necessarily have .

Learn once for all, is not the speed of light which is measured, it is
impossible. But the beat frequency between the two, which is very low and achievable. This is the whole idea in having a homodyne or a heterodyne setup. You derive the speed of the car reversibly, out of that.

You people know everything about Relativity but nothing about Physics.

Definition of homodyne. : of or relating to the process of detecting a radio wave by the aid of a locally generated current or wave of exactly the same frequency as that of the incoming wave. homodyne reception — see zero beat.  (old, stationary radar gun technology)

Heterodyning is a signal processing technique invented in 1901 by Canadian inventor-engineer Reginald Fessenden that creates new frequencies by combining or mixing two frequencies (new, moving radar gun technology)    

why would you declare that 60 = 0 only for signs that are reflective?  (And what does daytime vs nighttime reading of radar guns have anything to do with the speeds??)

It is not a matter of physics, but technology.

The radar gun does measure the 60.

But then it depends, if it is a simple stationary gun, or a  portable gun used in patrol cars.

The former will just show 60.
The latter will subtract the car speed wrt surface = 60 and will  show 0.

There could be something that would be helpful to know in that gibberish, but I cannot decipher it into anything meaningful.  In what situation does the radar gun "measure the 60"?

However, it seems clear I should be talking about how engineer-physicists think versus how mathematician-physicists think. 

Mathematician-physicists think of light as arriving in the form of waves, so the radar gun receives return waves of a different frequency than what were sent out.  The return waves are just like sound waves coming from a moving body.  They are closer together.  Here is an image from an Arizona University web site showing how sound waves work:

The ambulance emits higher frequency sound waves in the direction it is moving and lower frequency sound waves in the opposite direction.

That same web site then shows this illustration for how light waves work:

Is that true?  It is certainly true for sound waves, since the sound has to travel through the air, and sound is literally created by waves moving through the air.  And those waves impact upon our eardrums, causing us to hear the sounds.  The air is the medium of transmitting the sound waves to our ears.  

But there is nothing in space to transmit waves of any kind.  There is no ether (or aether) to carry waves.  There is just a vacuum.  In the air, light travels slower as it works its way through all the atoms, but it still does NOT travel as waves.  It travels as individual photons.  And, according to Albert Einstein, (except for time dilation factors) those photons travel at the same speed whether they are emitted from the backside of a moving emitter or from the front side.  The speed of the emitter cannot be added to the speed of light being emitted.  That means that if the emitter is coming toward you or going away from you, the light photons will travel at the same speed.  And because there is no ether (or aether) to create "waves," the second image above is total nonsense.  The individual photons will oscillate at the same wavelength regardless of the direction in which they are emitted.  The only difference an observer in front of the moving observer will see is that the light is brighter, because he is receiving more photons in a shorter period of time than someone located behind the emitter.  I.e., the emitter emits a photon then moves closer then emits another photon then moves closer, etc.  The photons are thus closer together because the emitter was moving toward you.

 

May 27, 2018 - A couple days ago, while reading "Spaceman" by NASA astronaut Michael Massimino on my Kindle, I came across the passage underlined in red below:

Hmm.  That seems to be saying something about mathematician-physicists and how they have no practical experience with "human factors."  While "Good Will Hunting" was a terrific movie (I have it on DVD and have probably watched it at least 3 times), I'd never before thought of it as being about a mathematician-physicist, probably because I wasn't fighting with mathematician-physicists the last time I watched that DVD five years ago.  But, more importantly, the quote seems to say that Michael Massimino and/or the person with whom he was talking saw an important difference between engineering-type physicists and mathematician-type "geniuses."  It's a difference I'm seeing every day.

In my arguments with the mathematician-physicists on the Google forum, I thought about how, due to velocity time dilation, a moving radar gun will use a different length for a second than a stationary speed gun.  But, even if the gun is traveling at 100 mph, it is still a very very small difference in time.  And the difference would be in violator's favor.  Instead of getting a ticket for 100 mph, he'd get a ticket for traveling at something like 99.9999999998 miles per hour. 

Then something else occurred to me.  Not only would the length of a second be different for the moving radar gun, but the speed of light would also be different.  The speed of light when traveling at 100 mph is still 299,792,458 meters PER SECOND, but because the length of a second is longer, the speed of light emitted at that speed is slower.

Radar guns that are built to work while on a moving vehicle send out two radar signals, one to the target vehicle and another to the ground or to nearby stationary objects.  While the photons that are sent toward the ground travel slower and use a longer second, the photons returning from the ground will travel at the correct speed of light because they were emitted from a stationary body.  And a gun that measures speed by measuring the Doppler shift could be sensitive enough to detect that difference in the speed of light.

The problem is: How do I confirm that?  I found a web site run by Chiefs of Police that has a lot of information about radar guns.  But, it says,

Stationary radar is the old standard. An officer sits on the side of the road and watches traffic, waiting for a vehicle moving at high speed. When he sees one, he activates the radar, which measures and displays the vehicle’s speed. The radar will give a tone. If the tone is clear and the displayed speed matches the officer observations, the officer can make the stop.

Moving radar is more complicated because the system must look for two different speeds and compare them to come up with the motorist’s speed. The radar looks for the largest object in its field and assumes this is the background. Then it looks for the second most significant object and assumes this is the target. The radar measures the difference between the target speed and that of the patrol vehicle. The radar’s counting unit uses the following formula:

Target Speed (TS) = Closing Speed (CS) – Patrol Speed (PS)

The radar unit’s display will show two speeds: the target speed and the patrol speed. The officer must make sure the displayed patrol speed matches the speed on his speedometer to determine if the reading is accurate.

So tell us why a moving radar system needs two guns while an ordinary stationary handheld radar only needs one?

Remember, I know the answer, having worked on mobile radar systems...

As early as the ancient Greeks, scientists and philosophers supposed that space was not truly empty. Instead, a mysterious substance filled the cosmos like a vast ocean, suspending the stars and serving as the medium through which light traveled.

After all, physicists have long known that light moved, either as a beam or a wave. And if light traveled as a wave, like sound, then surely it needed to travel through something. The greatest minds in history thought it to be true, so surely it must have been. Even physics great James Clerk Maxwell, whose equations reveal the speed of light, considered these ethereal ideas.

You were a sensical theory, luminiferous ether. And physicists love when things make sense. But science need not make sense—the universe doesn’t give a damn what human beings think.

Science is a tool to get at the truth, but it is not the truth itself. And though you’re gone, we do not despair. Finding the truth requires new ideas, and it requires luminiferous ethers to disprove. We’ll never know what’s right unless we know everything that’s wrong.

Rest in peace... maybe. Perhaps someday we’ll find that you’ve been hiding in existing theory all along.

All that matters TO THE [RADAR] GUN is the speed of the reflector RELATIVE TO THE GUN, because that is all it can measure (know). This is proven daily by police that use radar guns -- a gun in a car traveling down the highway at 60 MPH will measure a tree to have a speed of 60 MPH.

A whole second radar just to subtract zero? And why don’t we just leave that out?

Because the radar gun compares photon frequencies.  It needs TWO photons to make a comparison.

In a standard radar gun, the gun compares the frequency of the photons it emits to the frequency of the photons it gets back from the target.

In the "two reflections" type of radar gun, the gun compares the frequency of photons returned from the ground to the frequency of photons returned from the target vehicle.

You and your policeman do not know what you are talking about!!!

You see, Edward, radars only "see" metalic stuff, like cars, trains, airplanes and missiles. A tree is made of wood and not of metal, do you understand that?

You are way too dumb to understand any of this....

Is a lidar a radar?

Do you even think before writing your daily nonsense?

As you can see, they are from Chapter 1 (the Introduction), pages 14 and 15, so it will be easy to find them again in the book if I need to do so.  I can use them when people claim that I'm the only one who believes that light consists of photons, not waves.

Since there is no new physics here, I suggest that further comments be mailed to the original poster.

I'm the "original poster."  So, the guy who had responded sent me an email explaining his view in greater detail.  I agreed with him and said I'd modify the illustration.  Here are the before (incorrect) and after (correct) versions:

The complaint was the stone dropped by the observer on the train (OT) would not bounce in the direction of the engine the way I had shown it.  That version implied that the stone was somehow moving faster than OT and the train.  As you can see, the modified version is better, since the stone never moves past OT.  It is still not totally satisfactory, since the stone would be slowing down and wouldn't actually be directly below OT after it had bounced a few times.  But I don't know how to illustrate that without getting another complaint that the stone didn't fall straight down from OT's hand.

But what really interested me in that response was that there was evidently no disagreement with the physics in my paper.  The guy who suggested the change evidently agreed with the paper, and the moderator felt the paper contained nothing new.  That made me really wonder if the scientists and physicists who share my understanding of Relativity try to avoid "social media" because they do not want to endlessly argue with mathematicians as I've been doing.

If there are lots of scientists out there who agree with me, why aren't they protesting against what the colleges and universities are teaching?  Is it because as soon as they open their mouths a hoard of mathematicians will start attacking them and insulting them?  I'm thinking more and more that that is the case.

Meanwhile, I have registered at imgur.com.  It's a place where I can store images and use them on this web site or in posts to various social media forums.  The image above was placed there instead of on my own web site.  Using an image placed on imgur.com instead of on my own site makes things a bit simpler, and it means I'll be using a lot more illustrations here in the future.  

Yesterday, my arguments with the mathematicians really hit one particularly fascinating area.  We were talking mostly about how police radar guns work.  It's an area where I can find a lot of on-line references which totally disagree with the beliefs of the mathematicians.  But, more than that, the discussions seem to have provided me with undeniable arguments to use against the mathematicians.  I just need to do some more research, and I may even try to contact my local police department to ask them some questions - if I can't find the answers on-line.

We all know that if I am in a police car on the side of the road and I aim a radar gun at a car coming toward me at 90 mph, the radar gun will show that car is traveling at 90 mph.  The question then becomes:  If I am in a moving police car traveling at 60 mph and I aim the radar gun at a traffic sign on the side of the road, what speed will the radar gun register for the sign: zero or 60 mph?

The unanimous answer from the mathematicians is 60 mph.  But, as I see it, that can only happen if the speed of light (c) emitted from the radar gun is added to the speed of the police car (v) I'm in.  That way, the outgoing light travels at c+v, it bounces off the stationary highway sign and returns at c.  The gun subtracts c from c+v and gets v, the speed of the police car (or highway sign).  But the speed of the emitter cannot be added to the speed of light.   I.e., a moving emitter cannot send out light that travels at c+v.  Light cannot go faster than c, the local speed of light.  That is a basic rule in Einsteinian physics and has been confirmed in countless experiments. 

Here's an image I created and put on imgur.com in about 10 minutes to illustrate this situation:

But I haven't been able to find a source that says if you are in a moving car and aim a radar gun at a sign next to the road, the speed of the sign will register as zero velocity.  (That is what you would get if the radar gun sends out light at c instead of c+v and gets back a signal traveling at c.  c-c=zero.)  It isn't that the sources say that is wrong, it's that the sources say nothing at all about that situation.  Or they don't spell things out.  For example, one source I found says,

Radar guns measure the relative velocity between the radar gun and the target. If the radar gun is moving, that has to be accounted for in some way. Most modern guns do this by detecting both the return from the target vehicle and the return from the ground or terrain in the vicinity of the target vehicle, and comparing the two to determine the velocity of the target relative to the ground or terrain.

There will be a number of returns in the radar gun’s received signal. The road, terrain, signs, trees, etc. will all be moving at one speed relative to the gun, and will return a signal Doppler-shifted by an amount corresponding to that velocity. Each vehicle that intercepts the beam will have a return with a Doppler shift that reflects its velocity relative to the gun. Most radar guns today will assume that the single largest return is the (presumably stationary) ground and the second largest return is the target vehicle, or vice versa, and report the difference in velocity between the two as the target vehicle speed relative to the ground.

So it is now concluded that YOU LIE, that you intentionally misquote and change the quotes to serve your needs. Totally fraudulent and disgraceful behavior. I will report this to your publishers and the author of that new book (anthrax/fbi thing on your site). We dont need liars like you.

1. Kennedy-Thorndike
2. Michelson-1913
3. Babcock-Bergman
4. Alvager et al
5. Beckman-Mandics
6. Filippas-Fox
7. Bretcher

Cheers, but given your track record, I’ll just read what Einstein himself wrote, have a look at the actual mathematics, and if I need to look elsewhere I’ll trust people like Bertotti who actually worked on the theories with him.

I’ve already seen your work, and I know what quality I can expect from people trying to seek attention with “independent papers”.

... it is essentially useless since the train/bank Gedanken is well understood and has never been misinterpreted by actual scientists. The only people who don't understand it are folks who do not have the math-physics background necessary to do so... like, for example, YOU, Ed...

 

The Earth as it exists today is at the center of the above illustration.  The outer edge of the disk is the universe as it existed 13.8 billion years ago.  The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is the spider-web yellow and pink stuff just inside of the outer edge of the disk.  So, the CMB surrounds us on all sides.

The problem is reconciling the above image to an image of the Big Bang Universe timeline as shown in the image below:


  
In the second image we are located in one of the "present day" galaxies at the far right.  The Cosmic Microwave Background is the green stuff on the left, between "The Dark Age"which is in dark blue, and the pink and yellow stuff that represents the "Age of Inflation," the period when the material from the Big Bang expanded at a much faster rate than today's rate of expansion.

So, the disk version is like sticking a pin in our galaxy on the right in the second image and then spinning the second image around to create the disk version.