Ed Lake's web page

Comments for Sunday, Sept. 17, 2017, thru Saturday, Sept. 23, 2017:

September 22, 2017 - This morning I received an email informing me that my paper "Relativity: The Theory vs The Principle" is now available on ViXra.org at this link: http://vixra.org/abs/1709.0317

So, of course, I immediately created a new thread on the Google Science, Physics & Relativity discussion forum to see what others might have to say about it.

This morning I also received an email from journal #8 turning down my paper on Time Dilation because the "paper does not contain enough new results to warrant refereeing." So, once again they say nothing about the validity of what is said in the paper. It seems they are not interested in new ways to view old results from old experiments, they are only interested in NEW results from new experiments. Which means, of course, they wouldn't be interested in the paper I just put on vixra.org, either, since that paper is also about viewing old test results in a new and correct way.

That will probably be my last attempt to get a scientific paper published. I have ideas for at least two more papers I want to write, and then I probably just put them all into a self-published book.

September 21, 2017 - At about 10:05 a.m. this morning, I submitted my latest scientific paper "Relativity: The Theory vs The Principle" to vixra.org. If my past experience holds true, it should be available on-line later today. If so, I'll modify this comment to add the link.

The paper hits some of the same points I hit in my paper about Einstein's Second Postulate, except that this new paper examines the misunderstandings and confusion about Einstein's Second Postulate, and tries to explain where all the misunderstandings and confusion come from. It seems it can be explained as a simple understanding of a word: principle.

Here's one definition of the word "principle" from an on-line dictionary that I didn't use in the paper:

a fundamental, primary, or general law or truth from which others are derived:the principles of modern physics.

And what is a "theory"? A "theory" can be an argument that a "fundamental, primary or general law from which others are derived" is totally wrong or just an illusion. In his 1905 paper, Einstein first calls the "Principle of Relativity" a "conjecture," a word which is defined as "the formation or expression of an opinion or theory without sufficient evidence for proof." That seems very different from a "principle." And it often seems that mathematicians argue that a "principle" is "a basic truth that explains or controls how something happens or works," and therefore no one can challenge or argue with a "basic truth."

The paper is just a "first draft." I'm a long way from being totally satisfied with it. But, I need to take a break from it, and I want to see what the folks on the Google Science, Physics & Relativity discussion forum have to say about it.

I don't know if I'll ever try to get it published. Mostly I wrote it just to clarify my own thoughts on how the whole "crisis in physics" got started. And I wanted to write about some things Einstein wrote in his 1905 Special Relativity paper that seem to leave no room for dispute over what Einstein "really meant."

September 20, 2017 - When I checked the status of my paper on Time Dilation this morning, the status had changed. The web site run by the physics journal that has the paper had been showing the status as "Under Review" since August 2nd. As of this morning, the status is "Awaiting ED Decision."

I assume that "ED" stands for either "Editor" or "Editorial Director." And what kind of decision are they waiting for? I have to assume it is a decision on whether to (1) ask me for revisions to make it more suitable for printing in their journal, or (2) to publish it as is, or (3) to reject the paper. I'll just have to wait to find out. Presumably, I won't have to wait very much longer.

This morning, a new post to Google's Science, Physics & Relativity discussion forum contained a phrase I suddenly realized I've been seeing a lot lately: "the crisis in physics." So, I did a Google search for "crisis in physics." One article near the top of the list was from National Public Radio (NPR) titled "Has Physics Gotten Something Really Important Really Wrong?" It's a VERY interesting article from June 2016 about a book by Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin that had just been published. The article says:

Smolin and Unger believe this crisis is real — and it's acute. They pull no punches in their sense that the lack of empirical data has led the field astray. As they put it:

"Science is corrupted when it abandons the discipline of empirical validation or dis-confirmation. It is also weakened when it mistakes its assumptions for facts and its ready-made philosophy for the way things are."

Thus, the goal of The Singular Universe and The Reality of Time is to take a giant philosophical step back and see if a new and more promising direction can be found. For the two thinkers, such a new direction can be spelled out in three bold claims about the world.

Their "three bold claims about the world" are:

1. There is only one universe.
2. Time is real.
3. Mathematics is selectively real.

Those are also my "bold claims," although I'd rephrase them to this:

1. The "visible universe" is just part of "the Big Bang Universe."
2. Time and Time Dilation are real.
3. Mathematics is just a tool, not holy writ.

Browsing through their book, however, it seems to be more of a philosophy book than a science or physics book. I could be wrong, though. The authors seem to argue their theories, which are not the same as my theories. Chapter 5, which is by Unger, is titled "The Mutability of the Laws of Nature." But, instead of being about how our defined laws of nature change as we learn more about how Nature works, it seems to be an argument that the laws of nature could have been different when the universe was younger. That may be true, but who cares? How do you prove such a thing? Right now, I only care if the "defined laws of nature" as we currently view them are correct. Or is there something we do not yet understand - like how Time works? Have we defined the laws of nature correctly?

Some seem to believe that we do not define the laws of nature, we discover them. And once discovered, they are immutable. But we know from our history that laws we once thought were "immutable" were actually mutable, because we misunderstood things when we created and defined the laws.

And that happens to be the theme of the paper I'm currently working on. It's close to being a good first draft. I just need to stop being distracted by things I find while doing research. It took me about two hours to write this comment. Those are two hours I could have spent working on my paper.

September 18, 2017 - Hmm. Each morning I browse though the topics on the Google Science, Physics and Relativity discussion forum to see if anything interesting is being discussed. This morning, I noticed a post containing a link to a YouTube video by Neil deGrass Tyson from which the poster, Pentcho Valev, partially transcribed some statements by Tyson:

"One of the towering great achievements of the human mind in our understanding of the universe is Einstein's theories of relativity. It makes only two assumptions: That the speed of light in a vacuum is constant no matter who is doing the measurement and no matter in what direction you are moving or how fast. You always get the same measurement for the speed of light. That's Assumption 1 which by the way the experiment has shown to be true. Assumption 2: The laws of physics are the same for all observers in uniform motion relative to one another. Those are the only two tenets that you have to buy into."

Here's a screen capture I made from a point early in the video:

Neil deGrass Tyson
giving wrong information

The image shows the same claim as "assumption #1" in the transcription, just phrased slightly differently. It's the "Mathematicians' All Observers Theory" in its simplest form. I knew from watching Tyson on TV that that was how he understood things, but I didn't have a good link to such a statement. Now I do. (Nevertheless, I'm a fan of Tyson. He's correct about most things. He just goes off the track when talking about time dilation and the speed of light.)

In my Sunday comment yesterday, I mentioned that I had already browsed through the book of lectures by Richard Feynman that was #5 on the list of "5 Highly Recommended Physics Textbooks," and I made no further comment on that book. Then, after I'd finished posting my Sunday comment, I browsed through volume1 of Feynman's 3 volumes of lectures to see if I should have included something from it. (Volumes 2 & 3 are mostly on topics of little interest to me.) The problem is, Feynman doesn't provide any short quotes I can use to show he agrees with Einstein and I, and he disagrees with the mathematicians. If I want to show what he thinks about the mathematicians' absurd argument that "all motion is relative," I have to copy a fairly large section from Section 16-2:

To continue our discussion of the Lorentz transformation and relativistic effects, we consider a famous so-called “paradox” of Peter and Paul, who are supposed to be twins, born at the same time. When they are old enough to drive a space ship, Paul flies away at very high speed. Because Peter, who is left on the ground, sees Paul going so fast, all of Paul’s clocks appear to go slower, his heart beats go slower, his thoughts go slower, everything goes slower, from Peter’s point of view. Of course, Paul notices nothing unusual, but if he travels around and about for a while and then comes back, he will be younger than Peter, the man on the ground! That is actually right; it is one of the consequences of the theory of relativity which has been clearly demonstrated. Just as the mu-mesons last longer when they are moving, so also will Paul last longer when he is moving. This is called a “paradox” only by the people who believe that the principle of relativity means that all motion is relative; they say, “Heh, heh, heh, from the point of view of Paul, can’t we say that Peter was moving and should therefore appear to age more slowly? By symmetry, the only possible result is that both should be the same age when they meet.” But in order for them to come back together and make the comparison, Paul must either stop at the end of the trip and make a comparison of clocks or, more simply, he has to come back, and the one who comes back must be the man who was moving, and he knows this, because he had to turn around. When he turned around, all kinds of unusual things happened in his space ship—the rockets went off, things jammed up against one wall, and so on—while Peter felt nothing.

So the way to state the rule is to say that the man who has felt the accelerations, who has seen things fall against the walls, and so on, is the one who would be the younger; that is the difference between them in an “absolute” sense, and it is certainly correct.

There's an even longer quote in section 15-4 about Time Dilation which the mathematicians also claim isn't real because "all motion is relative." And there's a long quote in section 15-6 about two observers seeing light travel at different rates, but there aren't any small quotable pieces of it that mean anything without the providing whole long quote. Sigh.

September 17, 2017 - I spent most of my computer time last week quaworking on a new paper about the The Principle of Relativity versus The Theory of Relativity. The new paper contains some variations on some of the same arguments I used in my paper about Einstein's Second Postulate. And it used some of the same references. So, last week I decided to see if I could find some new references.

It occurred to me that I didn't know how the college physic text books I used as references were ranked. Are college physics text books ranked? I did a Google search for "the best college physics textbook." One physics website has a list of "5 Highly Recommended Physics Textbooks." The 5th book on the list is a book of lectures by Richard Feynman, which I already had. And I'd browsed through 3 different editions of #3 on the list, but I hadn't examined the others on the list:

#1. University Physics with Modern Physics by Young, Freedman & Lewis Ford

#2. Physics for Scientists and Engineers with Modern Physics by Douglas C. Giancoli

#3. Fundamentals of Physics by David Halliday, Robert Resnick and Jearl Walker

#4. Physics for Scientists and Engineers: A Strategic Approach by Randall D. Knight

#5. The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman

Browsing through the #1 book on the list, which is 1,551 pages followed by many more pages of appendixes, tables and indexes, I found some very quotable information in Chapter 37, which begins on page 1268. On page 1269 it says:

Einstein's first postulate, called the principle of relativity, states: The laws of physics are the same in every inertial frame of reference. If the laws differed, the difference would distinguish one inertial frame from the others or make one frame somehow more "correct" than another.

Hmm. That sentence I highlighted in red shows that the book is off on the wrong track. The laws are the same in all inertial frames, BUT when you compare results between frames, the results you get from the same laws can be different - primarily due to different rates of Time Dilation.

Later on that same page the authors distort Einstein's Second Postulate this way:

Einstein's second postulate states: The speed of light in a vacuum is the same in all inertial frames of reference and is independent of the motion of the source.

No, that's not exactly true, and it's definitely not what Einstein's second postulate states. The speed of light in a vacuum will be measured to be the same in every inertial frame where it is created, but it may not be measured to be the same when measured in a different frame from the frame where it was created or emitted. Only when the two frames are stationary relative to each other will the speed of light sent from each frame to the other be measured to be the same.

On the next page the authors use illustrations to show how an outside observer will see light traveling at the same speed as the emitter saw it. And the authors conclude:

This result contradicts our elementary notion of relative velocities, and it may not appear to agree with common sense. But "common sense" is intuition based on everyday experience, and this does not usually include measurements of the speed of light.

In other words, you have to accept it as true if you want to pass the course, regardless of whether it makes any sense or not. And, presumably, if the student argues that it isn't what Einstein wrote, he'll be told that it may not be what Einstein wrote, but you must believe that it is what Einstein meant.

I printed out most of Chapter 37. I haven't had time to read all of it yet.

Browsing through textbook #2 on the list, which is over 1,300 pages, I found these versions of Einstein's First and Second postulates on page 957:

First postulate (the relativity principle): The laws of physics have the same form in all inertial reference frames.

The first postulate can also be stated as: There is no experiment you can do in an inertial reference frame to tell if you are at rest or moving uniformly at constant velocity.

The second postulate is consistent with the first:

Second postulate (constancy of the speed of light): Light propagates through empty space with a definite speed c independent of the speed of the source or observer.

These two postulates form the foundation of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. It is called “special” to distinguish it from his later “general theory of relativity,” which deals with noninertial (accelerating) reference frames (Chapter 44). The special theory, which is what we discuss here, deals only with inertial frames.

Then it says,

The second postulate may seem hard to accept, for it seems to violate common sense. First of all, we have to think of light traveling through empty space. Giving up the ether is not too hard, however, since it had never been detected. But the second postulate also tells us that the speed of light in vacuum is always the same, 3.00 X 10⁸m/s, no matter what the speed of the observer or the source. Thus, a person traveling toward or away from a source of light will measure the same speed for that light as someone at rest with respect to the source. This conflicts with our everyday experience: we would expect to have to add in the velocity of the observer. On the other hand, perhaps we can’t expect our everyday experience to be helpful when dealing with the high velocity of light.

I also browsed through textbook #4 on the list above. It's over 1,300 pages. On page 1027 there is an illustration that I'd very much like to show here, but I'm afraid of violating some copyright. There's no problem quoting text, but using images is a different situation.

The illustration shows a woman, Amy, on the left shining a flashlight at Cathy who is in the middle of the illustration on bicycle peddling fast toward Bill, who is on the right shining another flashlight at Cathy. The following text goes with that illustration:

All experimenters, regardless of how they move with respect to each other, find that all light waves, regardless of the source, travel in their
reference frame with the same speed c. If Cathy's velocity toward Bill and away from Amy is v = 0.9c, Cathy finds, by making measurements in her reference frame, that the light from Bill approaches her at speed c, not at c + v = 1.9c. And the light from Amy, which left Amy at speed c, catches up from behind at c relative to Cathy, not the c - v = 0.1c you would have expected.

Although this prediction goes against all shreds of common sense, the experimental evidence for it is strong. Laboratory experiments are difficult because even the highest laboratory speed is insignificant in comparison to c.

The evidence is "strong," but "experiments are difficult"??? In reality, all the experiments say it is NONSENSE. But, of course, the student must nevertheless accept it as true if he or she wants to pass the course, regardless of whether it makes any sense or not. And, presumably, if the student argues that it isn't what Einstein wrote, he or she will be told that it may not be what Einstein wrote, but you must believe that it is what Einstein meant.

It reminded me of some news articles I read recently about the problems colleges and universities are having with hiring physics teachers. Click HERE, HERE and HERE. Who wants to teach dogma that conflicts with common sense? And are the teachers willing to teach dogma the kind of teachers we need and want?

How did schools and universities get into this idiotic situation? The paper I'm writing suggests that it is simply that they don't seem to know the difference between a principle and a theory. Dictionaries define a principle as "a fundamental truth or law." The on-line Cambridge Dictionary has this definition: "a basic truth that explains or controls how something happens or works."

If something is a "basic truth" or a "fundamental truth" or a "law," it appears that the authors of physics books feel that it cannot be questioned. Unfortunately, that means they do not understand the meaning of the word "theory." That same Cambridge Dictionary has this definition of "theory": "something suggested as a reasonable explanation for facts, a condition, or an event, esp. a systematic or scientific explanation."

In other words, a theory can be a challenge to or a questioning of a principle.

Einstein's Theory of Relativity is a "systematic or scientific explanation" for why Galileo's Principle of Relativity is an illusion. It is a challenge to and a questioning of Galileo's "principle." The "principle" is in need of an modification or overhaul to make it a more "reasonable explanation for facts."

It's really not that difficult to understand. All you need to do is get rid of most of the math and look at things logically. And they should probably stop putting discussions of Relativity near the end of books that are over a thousand pages in length. Who wants to challenge the idiotic dogma being taught by professor when you are near the end of a course?

As I stated above, I have browsed three different editions of textbook #3 on the list. On page 1254 of the 8th edition it says these are the "postulates of the special theory of relativity":

1. The principle of relativity: The laws of physics must be the same in all inertial reference frames.

2. The constancy of the speed of light: The speed of light in vacuum has the same value, c = 3.00 X 10⁸ m/s, in all inertial frames, regardless of the velocity of the observer or the velocity of the source emitting the light.

And it has the following paragraph of explanation:

The first postulate asserts that all the laws of physics—those dealing with mechanics, electricity and magnetism, optics, thermodynamics, and so on — are the same in all reference frames moving with constant velocity relative to one another. This postulate is a sweeping generalization of the principle of Galilean relativity, which refers only to the laws of mechanics. From an experimental point of view, Einstein’s principle of relativity means that any kind of experiment (measuring the speed of light, for example) performed in a laboratory at rest must give the same result when performed in a laboratory moving at a constant velocity past the first one. Hence, no preferred inertial reference frame exists, and it is impossible to detect absolute motion.

That last sentence is, of course, just an opinion or interpretation by the authors. It is not anything stated by Einstein.

On page 1023 of the 9th edition and on page 1117 of the 10th edition it says this about Einstein's Second Postulate:

2. The Speed of Light Postulate: The speed of light in vacuum has the same value c in all directions and in all inertial reference frames.

We can also phrase this postulate to say that there is in nature an ultimate speed c, the same in all directions and in all inertial reference frames. Light happens to travel at this ultimate speed.

Note that this is VERY different from what was in the 8th edition. It says nothing about the velocity of the observer. And it says nothing about any "preferred inertial reference frame."

It appears that the authors decided for some reason to omit some of their personal interpretations in the newer versions of their text book. Hopefully, there are others writing physics text books who are also finding reason to more closely examine what Einstein actually said and wrote and to leave out their own personal interpretations and beliefs.

Comments for Sunday, Sept. 10, 2017, thru Saturday, Sept. 16, 2017:

September 14, 2017 - For the record, while driving home from doing some chores yesterday afternoon, I finished listening to CD #16 of the 16-CD set for "The Daily Show (the AudioBook): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests."

It was a very enjoyable listening experience. I probably watched every single episode of "The Daily Show" during the nearly 17 years Jon Stewart was host. The audio book is narrated by a team of actors, not the original cast members, celebrities and politicians who made the actual statements. It is like a reading of a transcript of an week-long discussion between Jon and the people who worked on "The Daily Show," plus many of the people he interviewed over the years. And it is also sort of a history book of many of the events that happened in the years, from sometime in 2000 to sometime in 2016. 9/11 happened in their second year. George W. Bush seemed like the most bumbling, ignorant President the country had every seen, until Donald Trump became the all time champ. The book explains how "The Daily Show" influenced politics, changed late-night TV, and also changed the way regular news shows operated. I highly recommend the book. And the audio book was perfect for listening while driving.

September 13, 2017 - This morning I received an email advising me of a different way to look up IP (Internet Protocol) addresses to find the location of the computer assigned that address. Somewhere in some previous comment on this web site I had mentioned that I used http://www.ip2location.com/ to look up locations for IP addresses. The email said:

While it does the job overall, I found another tool to be a far better alternative. I thought other users might also appreciate it if you update your page.

The emailer suggested https://www.vpnmentor.com/tools/ipinfo/ as the "far better alternative."

So, I tried using both methods to look up the same IP address. The first IP address I tried produced New York City as the IP location via both methods. But the second IP address I tried (81.82.189.116) produced different results. Ip2location said the IP was located in Antwerp, Belgium. Vpnmentor said the IP was located in Brussels, Belgium. Hmm. Unfortunately, I had no way to determine which was correct. So, I had to find a way.

I suspected that Antwerp was right, and Vpnmentor was just providing the capitals of foreign IP addresses, not the actual city were the IP was located. I tried looking up IP 5.70.17.75. Ip2location gave me Humberstone, England. Vpnmentor gave me London, England, about 110 miles from Humberstone. Again vpnmentory had given me the country's capitol. So, I tried a few other foreign IP addresses, but they didn't follow that pattern. Some gave me different cities via the different methods, some gave me the same cities.

So, I tried my own IP address. Ip2location gave me my home town. Vpnmentor gave me "Delafield (Cushing Park Business Center), Wisconsin," which Google Maps says is 53.5 miles away from where I'm actually located. That was enough to show me that I was using the better IP locator package.

But, I wanted a bit more proof. So, I tried IP 131.111.185.12, which I knew from their web site HERE was Cambridge University in Coton, England. And that is what Ip2location gave me. However, Vpnmentor inexplicably gave me Bedford, Tennessee. To make certain, I examined the source code for an email I once received from Stephen Hawking's staff, and I found the IP address used to send the email: 131.111.8.131. Ip2location shows the location of that IP address as Cambridge University. Vpnmentor shows it as Bedford, TN.

Case closed. http://www.ip2location.com/ is far better.

September 11, 2017 - Hmm. It appears that the editor of the journal (#8) that has my paper on Time Dilation was on vacation or out ill last week. This morning after I did my morning routines, I pondered whether to send journal #8 another email or not. I finally sent them an email asking about the status of my paper, and I addressed the email to "editor" instead of the specific editor who initially acknowledged receipt of my paper back on August 2.

Then I read some of Einstein's book The Evolution of Physics for awhile. The part I was reading was about things that do not particularly interest me, so decided to do some research about light waves and particles for awhile. Then, just before I shut down to go to lunch, I received a response from Journal #8.

The response stated that they had received my paper, that it was "under peer review," and that they would inform me of a "final decision" as soon as possible.

OKAY! So, they have reviewers who are actually reading it, and I should be getting some peer reviewer thoughts about the paper sometime soon. I suppose, the "final decision" might turn out to be that they do not want to publish it, but they should provide reasons why.

In the afternoon, after lunch and after I did some chores, I turned on my computer once again and found I had another email from the same editor at Journal #8. At first I thought they might have made their "final decision." But, no, it was a response to the email I sent them last week. So, the editor was catching up on work not done last week. The email said basically the same thing as the first email, just phrased differently.

So, I'll continue waiting. And I won't be sending them any more emails until around October 2, if I haven't heard from them by then.

September 10, 2017 - I keep accumulating facts and evidence which show that the way physics is taught in colleges and universities these days is totally wrong - specifically the so-called "Mathematicians' All Observers Theory," which I addressed in my paper about Einstein's Second Postulate. Selected from many examples, here is how Einstein's Second Postulate is presented on page 888 of the 9th edition of College Physics by Raymond A. Serway and Chris Vuille:

The speed of light in a vacuum has the same value, c = 2.997 924 58 x 108 m/s, in all inertial reference frames, regardless of the velocity of the observer or the velocity of the source emitting the light.

And here's how it is described on page 91 of the eleventh edition of a college text book titled "Foundations of Astronomy" by Michael Seeds and Dana Backman:

Second postulate: The speed of light is a constant and will be the same for all observers independent of their motion relative to the light source.

Of course, that is NOT Einstein's Second Postulate. And no matter how many different college text books show the Second Postulate that way, it is not what Einstein said or wrote or meant. Here is 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.

Einstein makes it very clear that only the emitter of the light (or an observer who is stationary relative to the emitter) will see the light traveling at c. Einstein says absolutely nothing about what some other observer will see. In fact, his whole point is that they may not measure the light as arriving at c.

In his 1905 paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies which introduced his Theory of Special Relativity to the world, Einstein described how to determine if someone else is stationary relative to you. Basically, if two entities consider themselves to both be stationary, they can confirm it by each sending a light signal to the other at exactly the same time. If the light signals take exactly the same amount of time to go in both directions, then the two entities are not only stationary relative to each other, but their clocks are also synchronous.

Here is how Einstein put it:

If at the point A of space there is a clock, an observer at A can determine the time values of events in the immediate proximity of A by finding the positions of the hands which are simultaneous with these events. If there is at the point B of space another clock in all respects resembling the one at A, it is possible for an observer at B to determine the time values of events in the immediate neighbourhood of B. But it is not possible without further assumption to compare, in respect of time, an event at A with an event at B. We have so far defined only an “A time” and a “B time.” We have not defined a common “time” for A and B, for the latter cannot be defined at all unless we establish by definition that the “time” required by light to travel from A to B equals the “time” it requires to travel from B to A.

And later on the same page, he continues:

We assume that this definition of synchronism is free from contradictions, and possible for any number of points; and that the following relations are universally valid:—

1. If the clock at B synchronizes with the clock at A, the clock at A synchronizes with the clock at B.

2. If the clock at A synchronizes with the clock at B and also with the clock at C, the clocks at B and C also synchronize with each other.

Thus with the help of certain imaginary physical experiments we have settled what is to be understood by synchronous stationary clocks located at different places, and have evidently obtained a definition of “simultaneous,” or “synchronous,” and of “time.” The “time” of an event is that which is given simultaneously with the event by a stationary clock located at the place of the event, this clock being synchronous, and indeed synchronous for all time determinations, with a specified stationary clock.

Although Einstein didn't do it in his paper, the test for being synchronous and stationary can be easily illustrated like so:

A---------->----------B
Equals
A----------<----------B

At a pre-selected instant in time, A sends a light signal to B and B sends an identical light signal to A. They then compare their readings. If they sent and received the signals at exactly the same time, they are stationary relative to each other, and their clocks are synchronized. If the readings differ, they are not stationary relative to one another.

It would have been nice if Einstein had described why and how the movement of one entity would cause the speed of light to differ. But he didn't. For example, he could have written: If A is moving toward stationary B, and they simultaneously send out light signals, the results will look like this for the signal sent by A:

A---------->----------B

The movement by A did not affect the light signal it emitted to reach stationary B. This is because of 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 emitting body is A, and movement by A will not change the speed of the light it emits. It will always be c (just as his Second Postulate stated).

However, the reverse is not true. When light is emitted from stationary B toward moving A, it can be depicted like this:

A-A2------<----------B

B sent the light signal when A was at Location-A, but because A was moving toward the oncoming light signal, A encountered the signal at Location-A2. The light traveled at c, but because A was moving toward B, A encountered the signal as if light had traveled at c+v, where v is the speed of A toward B. And, of course, the situation where A is moving away from B will look like this:

A2-A----------<----------B

The light traveled at c, but because A was moving away from B, A encountered the signal at Location-A2, as if it had traveled at c-v, where v is the speed of A away from B.

So, A and B would know they are not experiencing a common or synchronous time. They may not know who is moving, but they know someone is moving relative to the other.

This is totally in agreement with Einstein's Second Postulate, but it is in total disagreement with the "Mathematicians' All Observers Theory." When moving A is the observer receiving the light emitted by stationary B, he will never receive it arriving at c. A's motion will always affect the speed of light he receives from an emitter that is not "stationary" relative to him. So, "all observers" will NOT observe the same speed of light.

The only question is: Why can't the mathematicians and the math cult see this? How can they argue their beliefs while claiming their beliefs are in agreement with Einstein? Einstein was making it clear that he disagreed with the mathematicians. How can physics teachers all over the world teach something that is wrong while at the same time falsely claiming it is what Einstein stated? It is virtually the opposite of what Einstein stated!

In 1925, Einstein wrote a book "Relativity: The Special and General Theory," in which he seems to have attempted to make mathematicians understand that they were not saying the same things he was saying. But the book was filled with mathematics and was horrendously complicated, with plenty of ways for people to misinterpret things if they want to. Plus, the original was in German, which meant that it had to go through a translator to get a version in English. That also complicated the situation for those who read the book in English.

Then, in 1938, Einstein co-wrote "The Evolution of Physics" with Leopold Infeld. It was written in English, with Infeld doing the editing. It was virtually devoid of mathematics, and it was published by Cambridge University Press.

On page 166 it says something the mathematicians do not seem able to comprehend (Einstein and Infeld used the abbreviation "c.s." to mean "coordinate systems." I've replaced "c.s." with "coordinate systems" in brackets because the full spelling helps make things clearer for everyone.):

Let us consider the case of two [coordinate systems] starting from a known position and moving uniformly, one relative to the other, with a known velocity. One who prefers concrete pictures can safely think of a ship or a train moving relative to the earth. The laws of mechanics can be confirmed experimentally with the same degree of accuracy, on the earth or in a train or on a ship moving uniformly. But some difficulty arises if the observers of two systems begin to discuss observations of the same event from the point of view of their different [coordinate sytems]. Each would like to translate the other’s observations into his own language.

The two observers of two systems get the same results to experiments done in their own coordinate systems (frames of reference), but if they compare or discuss those results, they will find they actually were not the same. Usually it is because the length of a second is longer in the coordinate system that is moving, so anything involving time will have a different rate of measurement in one coordinate system versus the other.

On page 175, Einstein and Infeld describe a thought experiment which really had my mind working overtime. They begin two pages earlier by describing the experiment using sound waves instead of light photons. On page 175 they start talking about the same experiment using light. But they complicate the situation by having an "ether" surround everything. So, their explanation spends a lot of time disproving the notion of an "ether" surrounding everything. Like so many explanations in physics, they do not just explain what is actually happening, they spend a lot of time explaining what is NOT happening that was once thought to be happening.

It is not until page 186 that they describe how things really work:

Our new assumptions are:

(1) The velocity of light in vacuo is the same in all [coordinate systems] moving uniformly, relative to each other.

(2) All laws of nature are the same in all [coordinate systems] moving uniformly, relative to each other.

The relativity theory begins with these two assumptions.

So, taking those assumptions back to their thought experiment, we have a situation where there are observers in two different coordinate systems that are NOT "moving uniformly, relative to each other." So, light will NOT be seen to travel at the same speeds in both coordinate systems.

The experiment involves having a man in a rapidly moving room (like on a space ship) that has a transparent side so that an observer in a stationary position somewhere can theoretically look into the room.

The guy in the fast moving room turns on a light bulb in the center of the room. He observes the light from the bulb illuminate the front wall and the rear wall at the same time. The guy who is stationary, however, does not see that. He sees the light illuminate the rear wall first, and then the front wall.

Why?

It is because of something I described in detail in my paper about Einstein's Second Postulate. When the guy in the space ship turns on the light, the light travels at c toward both walls. However, because the forward wall is moving away from the point of emission at v (the velocity of the ship), the light photons take longer to get to the wall. The photons arrive at the wall at c-v. The atoms in the wall then send back new photons to the observer standing in the center of the room. And because the observer is moving toward the point where the new photons were emitted, his eye receives the photons traveling at c+v. The c-v speed of the original photons going in one direction and the c+v speed of the new photons going in the other direction mean that the speed of the ship is canceled out: c+v-v = c.

The reverse holds true with the rear wall. The original photons reached the rear wall at c+v and the new photons were returned at c-v. So the observer on the ship sees everything as happening normally. He turned on the light bulb, and the front wall was illuminated at the same time as the rear wall.

But the outside observer saw something very different. He was stationary and not moving with the ship. So, he saw the photons hit the front wall at c-v and the rear wall at c+v. The new photons emitted by those walls traveled at c to reach his eyes. The rear wall was illuminated first, then the front wall.

I can only wonder what the math cult would say about this. It's virtually a certainty that they will heatedly disagree, and they will argue that all movement is reciprocal and all observers see the same speed of light. But, would they also argue that Einstein was wrong? Or would they argue that I was misinterpreting what Einstein clearly wrote?

I've got to finish reading The Evolution of Physics, and I've got to do more work on some new papers before I start arguing with the math cult again.

Busy busy busy.

Comments for Friday, Sept. 1, 2017, thru Saturday, Sept. 9, 2017:

September 8, 2017 - Hmm. I just stumbled across something very interesting that is going to change my immediate plans.

I've been finding it difficult to get through some of the physics books I've been trying to read, not because they are difficult to read, but because they either go off into promoting the "same for all observers" theory of light, or because they go off into areas of physics that are not currently of any interest to me.

This morning, after finishing my daily chores, I tried to get back to working on a paper I've been writing about "length contraction." I found it slow going, and I decided to see if there was some book in my personal library that I should be reading to help the describe and explain what I want to describe and explain about Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity - and length contraction. So, I began browsing through my personal library.

I came across a book titled "A Primer of Special Relativity" by P.L. Sardesai, and even though it was very heavy into mathematics, there were some parts that seemed very interesting. But it was difficult to find those parts. They were few and far between, separated by long sections of heavy mathematics. Then I noticed a book reference on page 5 that was even more interesting:

Einstein A. and Infeld L.: The Evolution of Physics (Simon and Schuster New York)

It was a 1936 book by Einstein that I didn't have in my collection? I thought I had them all! I did a quick Internet search and found a free pdf copy. Holy cow!!! It's virtually devoid of mathematical equations! Skimming through it, I couldn't find a single equation! And when I did a search for the word "observer" to see what it might say about the mathematician's "same for all observers" theory of light, I found the word "observer" first appears on page 161 of the 335 page pdf file. And from that point on it seemed to have a great deal to say about the subject of how different observers observe the speed of light.

So, that's what I'm going to be doing for most of the rest of the day, reading The Evolution of Physics by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld.

September 7, 2017 - I still haven't heard anything from the journal that has my paper on Time Dilation. I'm wondering if I made a mistake in addressing my email inquiring about the status of my paper to the specific editor who acknowledged receipt of the paper back on August 2. If that editor is ill or on vacation, my email will likely just sit waiting for that editor to return.

I have no choice but to wait a week and try again next Monday. The status of my paper on their web site remains at "Under review."

There's no way to tell if the delay in responding is a "good sign," even though in theory the only "bad sign" is if the paper is rejected immediately. I just don't know what to make of it.

I've been keeping busy by working on a new paper. However, I'll save details about that paper for my Sunday comment. It started out like it would be a breeze to get through and finish, but this afternoon I began working on the key point of the paper, and I came to a screeching halt as things became wildly complicated. I need to think things over to get back my ideas on how to simplify the matter. I think much better and more clearly in the mornings. Maybe tomorrow morning I'll wake up with everything laid out simply and clearly and just waiting for me to type it into the paper. Maybe.

September 6, 2017 - I finally got fed up with the endless bickering over word definitions and how things must be phrased on a thread on Google's Science, Physics and Relativity discussion forum, and I decided to stop posting there for awhile. The thread is titled "Pentcho Valev's biggest misunderstanding." Here are the statistics as of this morning:

I started that thread on August 18, which was just under three weeks ago. Now it has 507 posts in the thread, about a third of which consist just of name calling and personal attacks against me for arguing something that conflicts with the beliefs of mathematicians. (The thread titled "A question to Ed Lake" just asked a question that had been asked and answered several times in the thread I created: Doesn't the Lunar Laser Ranging experiment show that the speed of light is seen by ALL observers to arrive at c and not at c+v or c-v? The answer is "no.")

A couple days ago I described arguing with mathematicians as being like arguing with people from some other planet. But, now I'm thinking it is more like arguing with people who belong to some cult. I've been watching the A&E series about Scientology, and there are many similarities. If you disagree with the cult, you are an enemy of the cult. The cult recites memorized slogans and terms and cannot discuss anything except in those memorized slogans and terms. Common sense says that the beliefs of the cult are just plain wrong, but they cannot even comprehend that there can be any other way of viewing things. They are doing great harm, but they believe everything they are doing is good.

I suppose one reason I got fed up with arguing with members of the "math cult" is that I'm still waiting to learn the status of my paper about Time Dilation. I haven't received any response to my Labor Day email asking about the paper's status. The web site run by the journal that has the paper still says it is "Under review." That makes it difficult to focus on other things, but I'll give it a try.

Yesterday, there were also four attacks on this web site, with hackers attempting to post things to the site that do not belong on the site. Most of them have to do with WordPress problems. I still have dozens of different computers around he world trying every day to access (GET) a non-existent WordPress wp-login.php file from my web site. And immediately following each GET is a valid GET for the main page of this site. It throws off my statistics, showing that I have a lot more visitors to this site than I really do. Those visits were by some computer bug, not by any human. It seems to be a real problem for WordPress web sites, but I'm not a WordPress web site. I don't have anything to do with WordPress. It's another annoyance that keeps me from focusing on writing new papers.

Meanwhile, NASA's "Astronomy picture of the day" web site has a beautiful photo of the recent solar eclipse:

It was even more interesting to me because I'd recently been arguing with members of the math cult about whether such a picture represents a "real" comparison of the diameters of the sun and moon to the height of the man, or if it is just an "illusion" that the man's height seems about half the diameter of the sun and the moon. The math cult doesn't have any words to describe such a situation other than to say it is totally valid and "correct" from the "frame of reference" of the camera. And they believe there is supposed to be some other "frame of reference" from the other side of the sun where the diameter of the sun and moon would be viewed as half the height of the man.

I really need to get to work on one of my new scientific papers. I can't do that while writing this comment, so this is the end of today's comment.

September 4, 2017 - Yesterday, I learned a very enlightening lesson about how mathematicians view science. An individual in Norway named Paul B. Anderson posted a message to the thread I've been watching on Google's Science, Physics and Relativity discussion forum, and the message contained a bunch of interesting links. Several of the links went to unpublished articles by Mr. Anderson. One titled "An illustration of mutual time dilation" really attracted my attention. I don't know how long the link will continue to work, but right now you can access the article by clicking HERE.

The article begins with this:

The scenario
. Let's have two clocks which are synchronized according to Einstein's procedure in each of two inertial frames of reference.
. Let the clocks be a proper distance d from each other in their respective frames.
. Let the frames move with the relative speed v.

Note that in Part One of "the"scenario" he has two synchronized clocks in two frames of reference. Part Two just says the two clocks are some distance apart. But then Part Three says the two clocks are now moving at some speed away from or toward each other (i.e., at a speed "relative" to each other).

What that showed me is that he inexplicably jumped from having two clocks that were STATIONARY in their frames of reference to having the two clocks MOVING relative to each other. And then he proceeds to argue that because the two clocks are moving relative to each other, Time Dilation will be "mutual" or "reciprocal" because there is no way to tell who is actually moving faster than the other. Clock-A could be moving away from stationary Clock-B at 10,000 kph, or Clock-B could be moving away from stationary Clock-A at 10,000 kph, or Clock-A and Clock-B could both be moving away from each other at 5,000 kph.

That's the way mathematicians appear to view things. In observation #1 the clocks are stationary, and in observation #2 the clocks are moving. And there is no way to tell which clock is moving or how fast. HOW the clocks got from being stationary to being moving is not part of the problem and is of no concern to the mathematicians.

In reality (and in SCIENCE), of course, HOW the clocks got to be moving is the key to everything. But science is very much about CAUSE and EFFECT, which the mathematicians consider to be meaningless, worthless and just part of some philosophy.

If you CAUSE one of the clocks to move, you KNOW that that clock is moving and the other is still stationary. And you know the "relative" speed is actually one clock's speed away from the other. Therefore the clock that is moving will experience Time Dilation and the clock that is stationary will not. It's as simple as that. Yet, it seems incomprehensible to mathematicians. They can only view situation A and situation B, they cannot think about how one situation developed into the other.

Talking with mathematicians is like talking with people from some other planet. I have one mathematician arguing over and over that time differences between two clocks can only be viewed as 12:02 p.m. < (is less than) 12:05 p.m., there can be no way of knowing HOW two clocks that were once synchronous turned into having one clock show that less time has passed than another clock. And they don't care!

It's really fascinating to me. It's like visiting another world.

BTW, I just sent an email to Journal #8 which has had my paper on Time Dilation for one month and two days. (The journal is not published in the United States, so Labor Day shouldn't be a holiday for them.) I asked them the status of the paper. Now I'm waiting for a response. I don't think they'll respond by saying, "Oh, yes! We threw that paper in the garbage a month ago. I forgot to notify you. Sorry about that." But I am very curious as to what they might actually say.

September 3, 2017 - I've got a busy day ahead of me. I see three very long posts, each with many multi-part questions waiting for me on the thread I've been watching on Google's Science, Physics and Relativity discussion forum. One batch of questions is from "danco," another is from "rotchm" and the third batch is from "Paul B. Anderson" whose email address indicates he is in Norway.

Yesterday's arguments pointed something out to me that I may not have fully realized before: When mathematicians argue that Time Dilation does not cause time to "run slow," and that Time Dilation only causes measured moments of time to be farther apart (an argument I find hilarious), they are probably thinking of Time as being nothing more than a "concept." And, a concept cannot "run slow." Interestingly, that is the argument I use in my paper on Time Dilation to argue that Time cannot be just a "concept." If I can cause time to "run slower" for an object by simply lowering the object to be closer to the center of the earth, or by moving it faster through space, then Time cannot be just a concept. It must be a property of matter.

My paper on Time Dilation, by the way, has been at journal #8 for one full month as of yesterday. Journal #8's rules say I should not ask about the status of the paper until they've had it for at least a month. So, tomorrow or Tuesday I'll be sending them an email asking about its status. All their web page has said for the past month is that it is "Under Review." I don't expect them to publish it, but the fact that they have had it for a month and haven't rejected it is cause for some very very very very very cautious optimism.

The subject matter in my paper on Einstein's Second Postulate was hot topic in yesterday's arguments on the Google forum. This morning I awoke realizing I need to do some immediate research. In Internet arguments I had long ago about Einstein's Second Postulate and the fact that light can be measured by an outside observer to be c+v or c-v, where v is the speed of the observer, caused some people to refer to the Sagnac effect and the Michelson-Gale experiment as supporting their side of the argument. So, I researched those experiments and realized they supported my side of the argument. And, I used them in my paper about the Second Postulate. But this morning as I was laying in bed waiting for it to be time to get up, I realized (1) that I never bothered to try to understand how people who believe light is measured to travel a c by ALL OBSERVERS could have interpreted the experiments as supporting their views. Nor (2) do I have at my fingertips explanations for exactly what the experiments by Georges Sagnac and Albert Michelson and Henry Gale proved.

I remember that Georges Sagnac set up this 1913 experiment to prove the existence of the aether that Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity had discarded. And I remember that in 1925 Michelson and Gale basically just repeated the Sagnac experiment on a much grander scale, using the spin of the earth instead of a spinning disk. But I'm not prepared to argue exactly how the original purpose of those experiments relate to Einstein's Second Postulate. I know I'm right, because I laid out the experiments step by step in my Second Postulate paper. However, yesterday I made the mistake of citing the Wikipedia article about Michelson-Gale as a reference, and the article doesn't really say anything about Einstein's Second Postulate. Nor does the Wikipedia article on the Sagnac effect. Neither articles even uses the word "postulate." So, it appears Sagnac and Michelson-Gale set out to confirm something, which they evidently did confirm, and while doing so they also confirmed my (and Einstein's) version of the Second Postulate. But, I do not have anything to cite as proof of that - other than what is in my Second Postulate paper.

Sigh. I often wonder if anyone reading this web site cares about these matters, or if they just check this web site every day or a few times a week to see if I might have written something new about the anthrax attacks of 2001, which is clearly the only thing that some of the regular readers of this web site care about. I've moved on, and I find Time Dilation and arguments over the speed of light to be a thousand times more fascinating than arguments over the anthrax attacks ever were. And the reason I write down all these details is so that I can refer to them and remember them if I need to do so in the future. I have no idea if anyone else can find them interesting.

And that is today's comment. Now I'll do a bit of research and then get to work on responding to all the questions waiting for me on the Google forum.

September 2, 2017 - I've got a few minutes before I will be shutting down my computer for the night, after a long day of arguing with mathematicians on the thread I've been watching on Google's Science, Physics and Relativity discussion forum. So, I might as well write a comment.

I keep trying to change the arguments to be about something that can be resolved, and I'm getting nowhere.

One of my favorite sayings is: If at first you do not succeed, try a different method. So, today, instead of arguing about mathematics and mathematicians' points of view, I tried to change the arguments to be about experiments. But, it hasn't had much results. The mathematicians argue that there are experiments which verify their claims, but they do not cite or name any such experiments. They just claim there are "experiments" that are so common that no one bothers to write them down or even call them "experiments." They are everyday events. But their descriptions of these "everyday events" are just more claims about how mathematicians view the universe to work.

I went out on a limb and stated that there is NO experiment which will show Time Dilation to be reciprocal. As it says in my paper about Time Dilation, if a scientist atop a mountain measures his time as running faster than time as measured by another scientist at the bottom of the mountain, the scientist at the bottom of the mountain will agree. He will not and cannot claim that his time runs faster than the time measured at the top of the mountain. And here is no way that any mathematicians can create a REAL situation where time will run faster at the bottom of the mountain.

I can't even get the mathematicians to agree that that time can run "faster" or "slower." They will just argue that clocks will be show a different time now than they will one hour from now, but that doesn't mean time "flows." And, if time doesn't "flow," it cannot go faster or slower. It's just 4:14 p.m. right now, and ten minutes from now it will be 4:24 p.m. Period. There was no "flow" of time between the two observations. There are just two separate observations.

Sigh.

I've been making copies of the conversations for a long time. They could make a good addition to a book about the difference between how mathematicians view Relativity and how Einstein and I view Relativity.

Comments for Sunday, August 27, 2017, thru Thursday, August 31, 2017:

August 31, 2017 - The conversation I've been having with "danco" wasn't continued this morning. Overnight, there were no new posts from him in the thread I've been watching on Google's Science, Physics and Relativity discussion forum. So, after responding to an uninteresting post from someone else, I checked some other threads on the forum. I found a new thread (from the hundreds) started by "Pentcho Valev" with a new bunch of interesting links. The thread has links to three YouTube videos where famous science writers discuss the question "What is Time?", which just happens to be the title of a paper of mine that is getting a lot views lately. So, I began to wonder if Pentcho has another forum somewhere, probably in another language, where he discusses my papers and provides links to them. I did a Google search for "Pentcho Valev" and got 30,000 results.

The first link of interest was to 8 papers written by Pentcho Valev between April 2004 and March 2008 for The General Science Journal, which seems to publish anything anyone will pay for them to publish. I noticed a recent paper (not by Pentcho) titled "Twin Paradox is Wrong." That would make it about Time Dilation, which always interests me, so I checked it out. I went only as far as the Abstract which reads as follows:

Regarding the time, since is fix, compartment and vacuumed, twin paradox show that both brothers has the same age after on of them is going into space. It must be taken in advance that the time is absolute, compartmented and also every each planet has its own spaces: atmospehric and extraatmospheric. First of all, we must define what does mean „outer” and then we can understand the time in and out of planet.

I stopped reading there, since the typos and misspellings and bad English didn't make me want to read further.

I couldn't find any forum where Pentcho was discussing my papers. But I watched all three of the YouTube videos he linked to in his recent post, and I found them very interesting. The first link was to a talk with Carlo Rovelli, a well-known science author:

I found it interesting in that it seemed to make Time a lot more complicated that it really seems to be (according to my paper).

The second link was to a talk with Sean Carroll, another well-known science author, as well as being a cosmologist and a physics professor:

I got the same impressions from that video as from the first.

The third link was to a talk with Max Tegmark, a name that was new to me, but who is evidently a Swedish-American cosmologist:

And, of course, I basically got the same impressions from that video as from the first two: They are making things a lot more complicated than they need to be.

It seems they are bogged down in philosophy and in theories from history, and they therefore need to explain how today's thinking differs from past thinking. My paper just looks at what seems to be happening now, and how Time seems to work. Those three authors say nothing that changes what I'm saying. They're just looking at things from a very different point of view.

Anyway, I just thought I'd write a comment about it so I can find those videos again if I ever need them. (That's basically why I started writing about things on my web sites, so that I could keep a record of interesting things I found.)

After posting the first version of this comment, I did a Google search for "Pentcho Valev" and "Ed Lake." That led to another forum where Pentcho Valev is posting his theories, and it included some comments about me, but the comments weren't from Pentcho, they were from someone using the Internet name "Anonymous" who refers to me as "stupid Ed Lake." And there were no links to my papers.

August 30, 2017 - Hmm. This morning and this afternoon I was involved in a discussion with someone who was capable of explaining his point of view about Relativity. As a result, I learned a very interesting lesson. I'm not sure what the guy's real name is, but it he uses a screen name that begins with "danco."

We had been arguing about how, in physics, many people believe there is no way to tell if Object-A was moving and Object-B was stationary or if Object-A was stationary and Object-B was moving. Since I was tired of arguing about "frames of reference," I thought I might get a more meaningful discussion going if we argued about who was moving FASTEST, rather than who was moving and who was stationary or "at rest." Danco argued that it was entirely possible for someone sitting on the Sun to see that a police officer standing next to a telephone pole in Walla Walla, Washington, pointing a Lidar gun at an oncoming car would be moving FASTER than the oncoming car traveling at 90 mph up Jones Street toward him. I disagreed.

Then he explained to me that if the Earth is spinning at 500 mph around its axis in Walla Walla, and if the speeding car was traveling westward on Jones Street at 90 mph, it would be moving against the spinning of the Earth, and it would thus be moving at 410 miles per hour through space while the cop and the telephone pole would be moving at 500 mph through space. Hmm. That hit me directly in a major point of interest: Time Dilation. Danco cited the Hafele-Keating experiment where Hafele and Keating flew westward on one of their trips, and time passed faster than when they flew eastward with the rotation of the Earth. It seemed like a great way to show that Time Dilation is relative to the stationary point in the Big Bang Universe where the Big Bang occurred.

Of course, you could not argue in court that the telephone pole was moving faster than your car was, but you could argue it in a physics class. I would call it the "academic point of view." And mine would be the "practical point of view" or the "every day point of view."

Interesting stuff.

It was also interesting that David (Kronos Prime) Fuller, who is on my "Do Not Respond" list, responded to my agreement with danco by posting five of the filthiest personal attacks I've ever seen on that forum. They were in Spanish, so I had to translate them to see how filthy they were. I have no clue as to what upset him.

August 29, 2017 - Wow! Some of the arguments I've been having on Google's Science, Physics & Relativity discussion forum have been really interesting lately. And, I've been spending almost all of my computer time responding to questions being asked, while basically just ignoring posts from the 6 people on my "Do Not Respond" list.

I also came up with a tentative title for a paper about the Big Bang Universe versus the Visible Universe: "Our Two Universes." I don't know if I'll ever write the paper or use that title, but now I've written it down so that I won't forget it.

Also, "my ears are burning" because I think someone somewhere is talking about my scientific papers on Vixra.org. Yesterday, 3 people looked at my paper about "What is Time?" No one else has looked at it since last Thursday. It can't be just a coincidence that 3 people looked at it in one day if there has been nothing said or written about that paper in months. Two people also looked at my paper on Time Dilation, and one looked at my paper on Einstein's Second Postulate. It is fairly rare to have people read three different papers of mine in one day. (I still have no idea what caused TEN people to read my Second Postulate paper on August 15.)

Adding to the situation, those people are evidently people who have never read my papers before. Vixra.org describes them as "unique-IP downloads," which means Vixra is keeping track of IP addresses, and that means that people using 153 different computers in 153 different locations had read my "What is Time?" paper as of last Thursday, and then 3 more people using 3 other computers read that paper yesterday. In theory, all 153 of the others could also have read the paper again yesterday and the numbers wouldn't change.

I really need to bring the discussions on Google to an end so that I can get to work on writing new papers. But, it's really difficult to do when the discussions are so interesting to me.

August 27, 2017 - The arguments on Google's Science, Physics & Relativity discussion forum have mostly degenerated into people calling me names and ranting personal insults. I've been adding person after person to my "Do Not Respond" list, which is now an actual list on a Postit note stuck to the side of my computer screen. It's a list of people who never respond intelligently but always respond with insults and personal attacks, so there is no point in responding to anything they write. Previously, it was just a mental list, but I think I may have forgotten some of the people that I had on that mental list when I didn't post to the forum for a couple months.

Some of the discussions I've been having are very educational, not so much as result of any new information from people posting there, but as a result of me having to think through responses and explanations I wrote. As a result, I've started on a new scientific paper tentatively titled "The Theory of Relativity versus The Theory of Reciprocality." Since it is largely about Einstein's First Postulate, I was thinking of just expanding my paper on Einstein's Second Postulate to incorporate the new information. But, I think I need to write it as a separate paper first. Then I can see if the two papers can be merged. Time will tell if I will actually try submitting the paper somewhere.

In a discussion on Friday, a couple people called me names and verbally attacked me because I stated that the Big Bang started at a point in space outside of our visible universe. They angrily claimed that the Big Bang did not originate at any "point." I responded by citing from 4 different web pages (from a choice of many) which discuss the Big Bang starting at a point. Here they are:

"About 15 billion years ago a tremendous explosion started the expansion of the universe. This explosion is known as the Big Bang. At the point of this event all of the matter and energy of space was contained at ONE POINT."

Source: http://umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm

"In 1927, an astronomer named Georges Lemaître had a big idea. He said that a very long time ago, the universe started as just a SINGLE POINT. He said the universe stretched and expanded to get as big as it is now, and that it could keep on stretching."

Source: https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/big-bang/en/

"Although space may have been concentrated into a SINGLE POINT at the Big Bang, it is equally possible that space was infinite at the Big Bang. In both scenarios the space was completely filled with matter which began to expand."

Source: "http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/bigbang.html

"The most important concept to get across when talking about the big bang is expansion. Many people think that the big bang is about a moment in which all the matter and energy in the universe was concentrated in a tiny POINT. Then this POINT exploded, shooting matter across space, and the universe was born. In fact, the big bang explains the expansion of space itself, which in turn means everything contained within space is spreading apart from everything else."

Source: http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/astronomy-terms/big-bang-theory1.htm

"The big bang theory describes the creation of everything in the universe. According to this theory, all the matter in the universe came into existence at the same time during an event known as the big bang, which happened about 13.7 billion years ago.

"At that time, all matter was compacted into a SINGLE POINT with infinite density and intense heat called a singularity."

Source: http://why-sci.com/big-bang/

However, while looking for those sources on the Internet, I found other sources which stated that the Big Bang did not start at any "point." Example:

The Big Bang did not happen at a point. Instead it happened everywhere in the universe at the same time. Consequences of this include:

The universe doesn't have a centre: the Big Bang didn't happen at a point so there is no central point in the universe that it is expanding from.

Depending upon what you search for, the "universe with no center" theory can appear to be the current prevailing theory. And it appears to be another theory concocted by mathematicians, since that link above also includes this:

The universe didn't shrink down to a point at the Big Bang, it's just that the spacing between any two randomly selected spacetime points shrank down to zero.

That is pure mathematician gibberish. It's talking about the Big Bang as if it was a mathematical equation, and thus reciprocal, which means you can view the Big Bang as a "Big Crunch" where everything shrank instead of expanded. The math works either way, so who cares what really happened?

I've always viewed things this way:

The Visible Universe within the Big Bang
Universe

But, when arguing about anything on the Google forums, you quickly learn that there are a lot of people who see things differently. Not only that, they are totally certain that their own version is right, and they will insult and attack anyone who disagrees with them. It's all reminiscent of my discussions about the anthrax attacks of 2001. Everyone had their own theory and they'd insult and attack anyone who had a different theory. They would never discuss the facts and evidence.

When I turned on my computer this morning, I found 11 messages from 9 different people waiting in the thread I started a few days ago. Nearly all the messages were addressed to me. Only 3 were from 2 people on my "Do Not Respond" list.

None are about the Visible Universe within the Big Bang Universe. They are all about how police Lidar guns work. Yesterday I stated that we should focus on that question, since it shows that when the stationary Lidar gun emits pulses of light traveling at c (the speed of light), the oncoming speeding car encounters those pulses arriving at c+v, where v is the speed of the car. Mathematicians cannot accept that anything or anyone can encounter light traveling at a speed greater than c. Here is one of this morning's responses:

Each car is at rest in an inertial coordinate system, which is a system of space and time coordinates in terms of which Newton's equations of motion are valid in the low speed limit. Knowing that the speed of a pulse of light is c in terms of one system of inertial coordinates (say, the system in which the police car is at rest), what is the speed of that pulse in terms of another system of inertial coordinates (say, the system in which the target car is at rest)?

The answer depends on how inertial coordinate systems are related to each other. If energy did not have inertia, then they would be related by a Galilean transformation, and the speed in the target system would be c+v, but energy actually DOES have inertia (E = mc^2), so inertial coordinates are related by Lorentz transformations, and hence the speed is c in terms of every system of inertial coordinates.

In other words, in the fantasy universe of mathematicians, there is no way to tell who is moving. Everything is "relative," which they interpret to mean that everything is reciprocal. There's no way to tell if the police car with the Lidar gun is moving or if the speeding car traveling toward the Lidar gun is moving. There's also no way to tell (mathematically) if a car crashed into a wall, or if the wall crashed into the car. Or, to put it another way: All movement is an illusion.

So, my task for the rest of this morning, and probably much of this afternoon is to try to explain to them that we live in a REAL universe where we CAN tell who is moving. I have no hope of persuading anyone of anything, but I might learn something new in the process of trying.

Comments for Sunday, August 20, 2017, thru Saturday, August 26, 2017:

August 24, 2017 - Hmm. The thread I created several days ago on Google's Science, Physics & Relativity discussion forum suddenly turned VERY interesting.

A couple days ago in that thread, I quoted E. M. Forster as follows: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” I was talking about the value of writing down what you are thinking. It helps you clarify your thoughts. It's one of the values of writing scientific papers, since you have to write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite until what you have on paper truly reflects your thinking and understanding. And, sometimes when you are writing down a response to some comment from someone else, you figure out what that other person is thinking.

That happened this morning. I think I suddenly realized why mathematicians love their mathematical models even though they clearly do not reflect reality.

We were discussing the paper "Lunar Laser Ranging Test of the Invariance of c" by Daniel M. Gezari. I argued that Gezari was right in his calculations because he was using this as a model:

E-A-B--------------------------M

E represents the Earth at the moment a pulse of light is sent from an observatory on the Earth to a reflector on the moon (M). While the pulse travels to M the Earth spins on its axis and moves the observatory to position A. The reflector on the moon then sends the pulse back toward the Earth. While the pulse is traveling through space back toward A, the observatory moves to position B. So, due to the movement of the observatory, the light traveled from E to M and back to B (NOT to E), which means that the movement of the observatory (v) resulted in the speed of light (c) being measured to be c+v. Perfectly logical.

The mathematicians inexplicably cannot cope with that. They require that the Earth be stationary and that the Moon be moving. (It has something to do with the way they play around with "frames of reference.") And they require that the speed of light be c for ALL OBSERVERS. That made me realize that they use a model that looks like this:

E---------------------------M---Z

According to their mathematical models, the imaginary stationary observatory on Earth emits a pulse of light toward the moon while the moon is at position Z. While the light travels toward position Z, the moon moves from position Z to position M. The pulse hits the reflector at position M and is sent back to E. The result is the speed of light being calculated at c, because the movement from Z to M took place before the pulse arrived and had no effect on the experiment, nor did any movement of the moon after the pulse was sent back.

This caused my jaw to drop. It's like a Nobel Prize discovery! It caused all sorts of pieces to fall together to the point where I now think I fully understand how mathematicians think. But, I suspect that all the mathematicians will just ignore whatever I say or write and just continue arguing that their mathematical models are correct. Sigh!

August 23, 2017 - I'm still waiting to see whether the physics journal that has my paper on Time Dilation will want to publish it or not. Their rules say that I have to wait a month after submission before I can ask them what's going on. The month will be up the day after Labor Day. According to their web site, the status of my paper is still "Under Review."

And, as far as I know, the TV interview I'm supposed to do about the anthrax attacks of 2001 is still "on." I don't know when it is going to happen, but I'm now assuming it won't be until sometime after Labor Day.

Meanwhile, the arguments on Google's Science, Physics and Relativity discussion forum that have occupied most of my time for the past week or so seems to be coming to an end. Although I've tried to get some intelligent discussions going, the responses I've been getting have once again degenerated into nothing but mindless declarations of opinions and personal attacks.

It's still an interesting place to check out from time to time. The other day, "Pentcho Valev" posted another interesting link as part of one of his screwball rants. The link was to a web site run by the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Click HERE to view the page that attracted my interest.

The page begins with these questions:

How weird is the invariance of the speed of light? Is the principle of Special Relativity really counter-intuitive?

Then it shows an excellent animated illustration of a flying saucer traveling toward an observer who is standing still and watching the saucer approach while measuring the speed of the light coming from the saucer's headlights. I can't show the animation, but I can show what the illustration looks like. Here it is:

The red dashes in front of the flying saucer are the photons from the saucer's headlights. They travel slightly faster than the saucer as the saucer moves toward the observer. As I see it, there is nothing really "counter-intuitive" about what is going on in the illustration. Once you understand that the emitter (the flying saucer) cannot cause light to travel faster than c (the maximum speed of light), everything is pretty straightforward.

Under the illustration is this (sort of) answer to the questions asked:

It depends on how one expresses it, and to whose intuition one appeals. For example, it does seem counter-intuitive that the speed of light does not depend on the motion of the observer. In our animation, Zoe turns on the headlights of her space ship. She measures the speed of light from her headlights as c with respect to her. Jasper sees her travelling towards him at (let's say) v. He measures the speed of light from her headlights as c. No, not c+v, but just c. Surely this is counter-intuitive? Maybe even crazy? Surely relative speeds add up?

I highlighted in red the passage that bothered me. Jasper (the observer) is not moving. Einstein stated that the speed of light does not depend upon the motion of the emitter. Why mention the observer? Zoe's ship is moving, and since the ship is the emitter of the light, the light travels away from Zoe slower than it approaches Jasper. I agreed with virtually everything on the page except that one clause.

At the end of the web page, it says this:

How can Jasper and Zoe's 'speedometers' both get the same value of the speed of light? Just looking at it, I can see that the red dot is approaching Jasper faster than it is leaving Zoe. How do they get the same answer?

The answer is time dilation. We are looking at this animation from Jasper's frame of reference and, according to Jasper, time runs slowly for Zoe. Zoe's clocks, including the timing mechanism of her 'speedometer', run slowly. So Zoe records the same value for the speed of light.

That's right. I fully agree! But Jasper is standing still. Of course, we all know he is really moving around the earth as it spins on its axis, and he is moving around the sun as the earth moves in its orbit, but relative to the flying saucer he is virtually standing still. Any movement due to the earth's movement is irrelevant. So, why complicate the problem by suggesting he's moving?

I decided to ask the people who run the web site. I sent them an email suggesting it was a mistake to have Jasper as a "moving observer," and I received the following reply:

Thanks for writing, Ed.
No mistake.
I’m busy. End of correspondance.

That's the same answer I get from local college physics professors -- if they respond at all, most don't.

And discussions on Google's forum just end up with opinions and personal attacks. Here's one response I got when I told them I was fed up:

I guess that, as usual, every wise person here will try to make you realize that you're wrong on the basics, and that you will stubbornly persist in your incompetence, ignorance and arrogance.

Yes, I will stubbornly persist until I can find someone who can explain to me where I am wrong, or until I figure out for myself that I'm wrong. Or maybe I'll somehow convince others that I'm right. Until then, I'll be getting back to working scientific papers, instead of arguing with people who cannot explain anything and can do nothing other state opinions and launch personal attacks.

August 21, 2017 - On the Google discussion forum where I've been arguing about time, light and relativity, someone mentioned a book titled "How to Teach Relativity to your Dog" by Chad Orzel. Curious, I looked it up and did a search through it for the word "dilation." I got 29 results. Ah! I love references that mention time dilation, and in a physics-related book the only use of the word "dilation" is generally in the term "time dilation." The book is described as being discussions between a scientist and his German shepherd dog named Emmy.

I clicked on one mention of "dilation" and found that Chapter 3 of the book is titled "Time Slows When You are Chasing Bunnies: Relativistic Time Dilation." Then I found this on the bottom of page 50 and into page 51 (Emmy is the first speaker in the discussion below):

     “Right. So if we go really fast on the walk, my clock goes all slow, and when we get back, I’ll be younger than the puppy.”
     “Well, no. For one thing, the effect only works on clocks that are moving relative to you. You would see a light clock at the house ticking slow, but SteelyKid would see your clock running slow.”
     “Yeah, but she’s just a puppy and is easily fooled. My clock is the one that’s really moving.”
     “No, she’d be right. As long as you’re moving relative to her, any measurement she makes will show your clock running slow, and any measurement you do will show her clock running slow. There is no absolute frame of reference, just relative motion.”
     “Wait, we each see the other’s clock running slow?”
     “As long as you’re moving at constant speed relative to one another, yes. And you’re both right.”
     “So how do we decide which of us is younger?”
     “Well, in a real experiment, the process of speeding up and slowing down makes your frame of reference distinguishable from hers, so if you take off from the house, accelerate up to very fast speed, then decelerate and return to the house, your clock will end up showing less elapsed time than hers, but—”
     “I knew it! Let’s go, so I can be younger than the puppy!”
     “But, ‘fast’ in this context means ‘at a speed comparable to the speed of light.’ Even at our current—exceedingly brisk—walking pace, we’re not going more than a few meters per second. Which means you would need to walk for a billion years to gain one second on SteelyKid.”
     Emmy stops dead. “A billion years?”
     “A billion years.”
     “That’s a long time.” She thinks for a minute. “I’m good with that. I like long walks.” She takes off again and just about pulls me off balance.

Damn! First the author says that time dilation is reciprocal, and that if I am moving relative to you, you will see my clock running slow and I will see your clock running slow. That is NONSENSE. There IS an "absolute frame of reference." It is the point outside of the visible universe where the Big Bang occured. However, then he starts talking about a "real experiment" where one experimenter travels at close to the speed of light and actually does experience time dilation that is NOT reciprocal. But, he says it is because reality requires speeding up and slowing down. Therefore, the observer who speeds up and slows down would know that he or she was the one who was really moving.

So, if you can prove that you are moving, then you are really moving, and if you cannot prove that you are moving, then you are NOT really moving? Or does it depend upon your scientific philosophy?

Unfortunately, the discussion between the scientist and his dog then changes subjects, and there is no explanation of how knowing or being able to prove something changes reality. But, there's a lot more to the book and there are at least two other books in the series, one about teaching physics and the other about teaching Quantum Physics. The question is where should I put this book in my reading queue? I think it will go somewhere in the middle. So, I'll only need to read about a hundred other books first.

August 20, 2017 - Groan! Once again I have absolutely nothing prepared for today's Sunday comment. So, if I want to continue my practice of writing a new comment every Sunday, I'll have to write something from scratch. Here goes.

For the past few days, I've been arguing on Google's Science, Physics and Relativity discussion forum. I started by posting responses to some comments by Pentcho Valev, who endlessly rants against "Einsteinians," but what Valev posts has little to do with the followers of Albert Einstein. His comments are really about the same things I write comment about on this web site: How mathematicians have distorted Einstein's theories. But, he posts so often and never responds to other people's comments, that few pay much attention to him, other than to tell him he is wasting his time. (I read his posts because he fills them with quotes and links that Valev thinks support his position, and some of the links are VERY interesting and totally disprove his position.) On Friday, after my two posts to threads started by Valev went nowhere, I started a new thread titled "Pentcho Valev's biggest misunderstanding." As of this morning, there are 67 posts in the thread from 8 different authors.

As is typical on that forum, some of the posts are nothing but personal attacks and mindless statements of opinion. However, there have also been some very interesting discussions of different points of view about physics. And that is what I'm looking for. I need to discuss some of my understandings about Einstein's theories to see if I understand them correctly or not. If some jerk just tells me I'm wrong, that doesn't help at all. I need to know where and how I am wrong -- IF I am truly wrong. And that requires a discussion, not just statements of opinions.

An "opinion argument" goes something like this:

Person-A: Einstein's Second Postulate is not what you claim it to be.
Person-B: Yes, it is.
Person-A. No, it is not.
Person-B: Yes, it is.
Person-A. No, it is not.
Person-B: Yes, it is.
Person-A: No it is not.

This "argument of opinions" generally ends with Person-B launching personal insults at Person-A, which causes Person-A to leave the discussion, which causes Person-B to declare that he won the argument because Person-A could not come up with any further arguments.

I try to start discussions about facts and evidence, but too often they go like this:

I present facts and evidence supporting a theory.
Person-B: That means nothing.
I present more facts and evidence.
Person-B: That means nothing.
I present still more facts and evidence.
Person-B: That means nothing.
I ask WHY it means nothing.
Person-B: You are just too stupid to understand.

So, I leave the discussion and Person-B declares his ideas won out because I ran out of arguments against them.

The "worthwhile" discussions never seem to resolve any conflicts, but framing the questions and responses sometimes cause me to see things more clearly. In a discussion yesterday, I could almost see into Einstein's mind to figure out how he came up with Time Dilation by imagining length contraction. He got the right answers, but he got them using a wrong idea that Time Dilation relates to motion and distance instead of to motion and particle spin (my theory). I can see it clearly, but how do I convince anyone else?

Without realizing it, I presented my case against "length contraction" in my paper about Time Dilation. I thought I merely showed how Time Dilation works. I thought it was how most scientists understood Time Dilation to work. At the time I wrote the paper, I had no idea that Einstein figured out Time Dilation by imagining length contraction. I didn't even wonder how he came up with the idea. I just wondered why scientists who were measuring Time Dilation didn't discuss the implications of Time Dilation. If a scientist atop a mountain routinely measures time running faster than a scientist at the bottom of the mountain, how could anyone claim that Time Dilation is reciprocal??? How could they claim the scientist atop the mountain could somehow also see his clock running slow compared to the clock next to the scientist at the bottom of the mountain? It never happens. It cannot happen! Yet mathematicians claim it is how Time Dilation works, so it MUST happen. And they argue that the scientists who did the experiments must have done them improperly. And they've been doing that for more than a CENTURY! How can that be?

This morning I see the Google thread has three new personal attacks posted after I signed off yesterday, two from "Odd Bodkin" and one from "David (Kronos Prime) Fuller." However, there is also a new post from "rotchm" that is mostly just statements of opinion. But, "rotchm" also included some comments about wordage and how I do not use certain words and phrases the way he uses them, and therefore he wants me to change to his wordage style so that he can understand me. "Closing speed" is an example.

The problem is: I do not understand what the difference is between the words I use and the words he uses, so I cannot make the change. I cannot use his words if I know they mean something different to him than they do to me. But that is a good basis for discussion, so I'll respond as soon as I finish this comment.

For the past 16 years, I've been saving the statistics for my web sites every day. I rarely use the statistics, but I save them in case I might need them. This morning I noticed that the statistics no longer save properly. The saved file is unreadable. The last valid save was for August 15. At the moment, I have no clue what caused the problem or how to solve it.

And that is the end of this Sunday comment.

Comments for Sunday, August 13, 2017, thru Saturday, August 19, 2017:

August 17, 2017 - Late yesterday afternoon, I finished reading Lee Smolin's book "Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe.

I started it on Aug. 13, so it took me 4 days to read the 364 page book. I not only read it during breakfast and lunch, but also whenever I could find a block of time in the morning or afternoon. I made it a higher priority than doing research.

It was a very interesting book, and since I was reading it on my small laptop instead on on my Kindle, I highlighted interesting passages in colors. If the passage was merely worth noting, I highlighted it in yellow. If the passage was really interesting and worth remembering and quoting, I highlighted it in red. If I viewed the passage as unbelievable, incomprehensible or just plain absurd, I highlighted it in green. There wasn't much green highlighting in the first part of the book, but there was a lot in the second half.

Here are two paragraphs from the 19-page Preface that I highlighted in yellow:

I used to believe in the essential unreality of time. Indeed, I went into physics because as an adolescent I yearned to exchange the timebound, human world, which I saw as ugly and inhospitable, for a world of pure, timeless truth. Later in life, I discovered that it was pretty nice to be human and the need for transcendent escape faded.
More to the point, I no longer believe that time is unreal. In fact, I have swung to the opposite view: Not only is time real, but nothing we know or experience gets closer to the heart of nature than the reality of time.

Here's a paragraph from the Preface that I highlighted in red:

Scientists think in time when we conceive of our task as the invention of novel ideas to describe newly discovered phenomena, and of novel mathematical structures to express them. If we think outside time, we believe these ideas somehow existed before we invented them. If we think in time, we see no reason to presume that.

And here's a passage from the Preface that I highlighted in green:

To rebel against the precariousness of life, to reject uncertainty, to adopt a zero tolerance to risk, to imagine that life can be organized to completely eliminate danger, is to think outside time.

Here's another passage from the Preface that I highlighted in red:

As we move on to more sophisticated subjects, readers are advised, if confused, to do what scientists learn to do, which is to skim or skip ahead to a point where the text becomes clearer to them.

Is that what scientists do? It's what I do. There were lots of places in Feynman's book "QED" which I skimmed over because they were unclear to me or not of particular interest to me. I've met people who cannot understand doing things that way. If they come to a sentence that they do not understand, they stop and study it and re-read until they do understand. But, they also read just one book for every fifty I read.

Even though he seems to often think like a mathematician, Lee Smolin has a problem with mathematicians that is similar to the problem I have. Here's a red highlighted quote from later in the book:

Should we simply recognize mathematics for the religious activity it is? Or should we be concerned when the most rational of our thinkers, the mathematicians, speak of what they do as if it were the route to transcendence from the bounds of human life?

Another from later in the book:

Mathematics, then, entered science as an expression of a belief in the timeless perfection of the heavens. Useful as mathematics has turned out to be, the postulation of timeless mathematical laws is never completely innocent, for it always carries a trace of the metaphysical fantasy of transcendence from our earthly world to one of perfect forms.

Here are a couple more paragraphs I highlighted in red:

In my view, the best way to explain quantum mechanics is to start by talking about what science is for. Many of us think the purpose of science is to describe how nature really is — to give a picture of the world that we can believe would be true, even were we not here to see it. If you think of science that way, you’ll be disappointed by quantum mechanics, because it gives no picture of what is going on in an individual experiment.
Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum theory, argued that those who were disappointed in this way had the wrong idea of what science is for. The problem is not the theory but what we expect a theory to do for us. Bohr proclaimed that the purpose of a scientific theory is not to describe nature but to give us rules for manipulating objects in the world and a language we can use to communicate the results.

Dr. Smolin starts to lose me when he begins to talk about Natural Laws changing with time instead of humans learning more about how Nature works and thereby gradually revising the "laws" as we previously viewed them to be. Then he says on page 123 in another green highlighted passage:

The theory in which laws evolve is called cosmological natural selection, which I developed in the late 1980s and published in 1992. In that paper, I made a few predictions, which could have been falsified in the two decades since but have not been. This of course doesn’t prove the theory is correct, but at least I showed that a theory of evolving laws can explain and predict real features of our world.

And in a passage highlighted in dark green on page 124:

The basic hypothesis of cosmological natural selection is that universes reproduce by the creation of new universes inside black holes. Our universe is thus a descendant of another universe, born in one of its black holes, and every black hole in our universe is the seed of a new universe. This is a scenario within which we can apply the principles of natural selection.

I could go on and on, but that was the first time I'd ever read anything about "cosmological natural selection" and the idea that universes go through a process of "natural selection" where badly formed universes die away and the universes that are able to reproduce themselves more readily thrive. Dr. Smolin says on page 125:

The fitness of a universe is then a measure of how many black holes it spawns.

But he also seems to argue or imply that the "fitness of a universe" is additionally determined by how hospitable it is for human life.

Lee Smolin has very impressive credentials that will cause virtually everyone to take his point of view over mine, so there's no point in me going into any more details of the book. I recommend the book highly, since it showed me some points of view that no other book I've read even hinted at. There's a lot in it that I consider to be just plain CRAZY, but maybe I just haven't traveled in the right circles and haven't heard all the supporting detail. Time may tell.

This morning, when I checked to see what was being discussed on Google's Science, Physics and Relativity discussion forum, I found a long rant by Pentcho Valev about Einstein's Second Postulate. So, I'm going to assume that there was another Pentcho Valev thread somewhere that mentioned my paper about Einstein's Second Postulate and generated those "views" that I mentioned in yesterday's comment. Unable to resist, I responded to Pentcho's comment, telling him how he was misunderstanding everything. So, now I have to wait to see how he responds.

August 16, 2017 - Wow! It's been an unusually busy morning.

First, I received an email advising me that the plan to interview me for a new TV series of 6 episodes about the anthrax attacks of 2001 is still an active plan, although no date has yet been set for the actual interview. Indications, however, are that it could happen sometime within the next month or so.

Then I received an email from the FBI scientist whose new book about the anthrax attacks I recently proof-read. The book had been scheduled for release in October of this year, but now the release date has been pushed to April 8, 2018. And, by pure coincidence, that could very well be around the time the TV series about the case is aired (assuming it is developed into a full 6-part series). I have no idea how long such projects take, but it is becoming clear to me that it takes much longer than I had previously thought.

Then I saw news stories that new satellite images have been found which show what might be wreckage of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, which vanished in March of 2014. According to a CNN story:

Newly-discovered satellite photos may have given scientists a fresh clue as to the location of Malaysian Airlines 370, one of the world's most famous aviation mysteries.

The four satellite photos, shot less than a month after MH370 disappeared in 2014, show 70 objects drifting on the ocean in the vicinity of the predicted crash zone, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said Wednesday.

I read through a bunch of news articles before I found a pdf file with the satellite images and an analysis of the images. The newspapers just showed the original satellite pictures, which do not seem to contain anything but scattered cumulus clouds over an empty ocean. The spectra analysis, however, shows different colors for different types of materials, easily distinguishing clouds and water from metal and plastic. Here's a sample:

The image on the left is the basic satellite photo. The image on the right is that same photo enhanced to show different kinds of materials based upon their spectra (how they reflect light). The yellow is man-made material.

I tracked the mystery of MH370 for a long time after the plane disappeared, because it was another excellent example some people looking at the facts and evidence while others just have opinions and beliefs, which quickly turn into conspiracy theories. I mentioned it in comments on this web site in every month of 2015, after starting to write about it on my old site shortly after MH370 disappeared. It still interests me very much, because I'd like to see how the conspiracy theorists will continue to argue their beliefs even after the mystery is solved (which I feel certain will eventually happen).

Also this morning, when looking at my web site visitor logs this morning I saw a major attack on my web site had taken place yesterday evening. Between 6:03 p.m. and 6:06 p.m., someone in Putian, China, attempted a couple hundred posts of malicious crap to my web site. Fortunately, my web site host's security software blocked all of them.

Lastly, when I checked the number of "unique" views of my scientific papers on Vixra.org, I found that there were TEN new "unique" views of my paper on Einstein's Second Postulate during the past 24 hours. At first I couldn't believe my eyes. The total had jumped from 128 to 138, which looked like it could be a typo, but I couldn't imagine how the totals could be typed by some error-prone human instead of being computer generated after a computer program count. So, the number was real. Ten people who have never read my paper before read it yesterday! But why? And who? There hasn't been even one "unique" view since July 22. (A "unique" view is a view by someone who has never viewed the paper before (as determined by his IP address). I can access the paper a hundred times today and not change the number at all, because the only time I changed the number was the first time I viewed it.) And there haven't been 10 "unique" views in a single day since I last mentioned it on the Google Science, Physics and Relativity discussion forum in late April and early May. I checked and couldn't find any re-starting of those threads. So, it's another mystery I'll be thinking about today.

August 14, 2017 - Yesterday afternoon, I finished reading Richard Feynman's 1985 book "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter" on my Kindle.

As with so many other books I've read on my Kindle, I thought I was only 80% done, but when I clicked to go the the next page, the next page turned out the be the beginning on the Index. So, I was done. Also, the book is only 152 pages long, not including the Index and front matter.

Here's an interesting quote from page 23 of the printed edition:

For many years after Newton, partial reflection by two surfaces was happily explained by a theory of waves, but when experiments were made with very weak light hitting photomultipliers, the wave theory collapsed: as the light got dimmer and dimmer, the photomultipliers kept making full-sized clicks—there were just fewer of them. Light behaved as particles.

And here's a related quote from page 36:

The first important feature about light is that it appears to be particles: when very weak monochromatic light (light of one color) hits a detector, the detector makes equally loud clicks less and less often as the light gets dimmer.

He's saying that if light was a wave, dim light would have to consist of the same number of waves, they would just be smaller waves with lower crests and shallower troughs. However, experiments show that that isn't true. Dim light consists of particles which are always the same size, but with dim light there are just fewer particles. Throughout the book Feynman argues against any "wave theory" of light, contrary to what is taught in virtually every physics class today.

A lot of the book involves details of how certain aspects of light are calculated, which wasn't of any interest to me. If I find someday that I need to know such things, I can always go back and read the book again - particularly the parts I skimmed over the first time. The book is a "classic," so there's no point in me giving my opinion of it, other than to say it was definitely worth reading.

Back on July 13 I wrote that I had begun reading David Bohm's book "The Special Theory of Relativity." I gave up on that book about half way through. It was advertised as being devoid of mathematics, but that was false advertising since I found it to be crammed with mathematics that you have to understand if you want to understand the rest of the book. And the book wasn't interesting enough to hold my interest, much less to make me want to study the mathematics. That's when I started reading "QED."

Shortly after I finished reading Feynman's "QED," I started reading Lee Smolin's book "Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe." Here's a quote from page xii in the Preface:

I used to believe in the essential unreality of time. Indeed, I went into physics because as an adolescent I yearned to exchange the time- bound, human world, which I saw as ugly and inhospitable, for a world of pure, timeless truth. Later in life, I discovered that it was pretty nice to be human and the need for transcendent escape faded. More to the point, I no longer believe that time is unreal. In fact, I have swung to the opposite view: Not only is time real, but nothing we know or experience gets closer to the heart of nature than the reality of time.

That seems to fit with my thinking, but I'll have to read a lot more to see if Prof. Smolin goes off in some direction where I have no interest in following.

August 13, 2017 - The status of my scientific paper on Time Dilation hasn't changed. It's still "Under Review." I suppose I should feel good about that, but I don't want to get my hopes up. Here's how long it took to get results for my previous 7 attempts to get that paper published:

Nature – 1 day. Rejected.

Science – 3 days. Rejected.

Physics Essays – 5½ months. Withdrawn on May 20, 2017

Journal 4 – 25 days. Rejected.

Journal 5 – 1 day. Rejected.

Journal 6 – 3 days. Rejected.

Journal 7 – 2 days. Rejected.

Journal 8 – Submitted on August 2, 2017.

So, except for Physics Essays, which wanted to publish it, but only if I paid them $508 to offset printing costs, and Journal #4 which inexplicably took 25 days to respond, the typical response time is 3 days or less.

Although it probably just requires understanding one simple step, I still haven't figured out how to use the LaTeX "natbib" package Journal #8 requires for typesetting their articles. But, I realized I could turn off that requirement and typeset everything else according to their standards, and I did so. So, I've got an article that looks like it has been typeset according to their standards, but if you look at the LaTeX source code you'll see that I turned off their "natbib" package. I don't know if I should send them that version or not. If they are attempting to make a decision based upon the unformatted .docx version, why complicate the situation? The decision should be based upon whether or not the science in the article is valid, not on the format of the article.

And, as I continue with my research, I find what the paper contains is not only solid and valid science, it seems more and more important. I was reading some scientific papers the other day, and one of them used the book, Astronomy: A Physical Perspective by Marc L. Kutner as a reference. I obtained a copy of the book and examined the reference. It says this on page 127 (using the author's italics):

Another way of stating Einstein’s postulate is that There is no experiment we can perform to tell us which inertial frame is moving and which is at rest. There is no ‘preferred’ inertial frame. All we can
talk about is the relative motion of two inertial frames.

My paper says that is not true. There is a "preferred inertial frame," but it is outside of the visible universe.

The book also says this on page 128 (which is the start of a chapter about Time Dilation), again using the author's italics, but with my highlighting in red:

The significance of this result is that the time interval measured in the frame in which the clock is moving is greater than that measured in the frame in which the clock is at rest. Suppose we have two identical clocks. If we keep one at rest (with respect to us) and let the other one move, the moving clock appears to run slow. It is important to realize that the situation is perfectly symmetric. If there is an observer traveling with each clock, each observer sees the other clock running slow. This effect is called time dilation.

The sentence in red is the total nonsense that got me started at arguing with people about time dilation in the first place. It is only "true" in a fictional mathematical universe. It is not true in our real universe. The reality of Time Dilation is easy to demonstrate and has been demonstrated countless times via experiments. I describe some of them in my paper. Everyone knows about Hafele-Keating and the NIST paper and how GPS satellites work. So, how can anyone believe what it says on page 128 of Astronomy: A Physical Perspective and in so many other "scientific" papers and books?

I could go on and on and on, but I should put my efforts into writing other papers, which, if I can't get published, I can self-publish in book form someday. I keep finding books and papers about the insane situation physics is in today, but none of the books and papers looks at the problem from the right angle. They all just argue that physics is now a mathematical game where nothing can be experimentally proved or disproved, the prime example being String Theory. I haven't yet read Lee Smolin's book "The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next," but I understand he attacks String Theory as not even being a "scientific" theory. The scientists attacking the current state of physics generally do not talk about mathematical arguments that are currently being taught in schools but which can be (and have been) totally debunked via simple experiments. The other day, I found another scientist's arguments. Click HERE for an article about a Portuguese cosmologist and professor in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London named Joao Magueijo. The article contains this:

Magueijo was scathing about string theory, describing it as ‘like intellectual masturbation.’ He doesn’t like string theory for sociological reasons, his main objection being that it is completely disconnected from experiment, making it hard, or impossible, to confirm or disprove.

I looked around for a free copy of his book Faster Than The Speed Of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation, but the only free version I could find was in Spanish. Plus, it seems to use the term "time dilation" only once, and in an unimportant way.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for something to happen with that proposed TV interview about the anthrax investigation. I'll have to contact the reporter later this week to see if the project is still active or if they abandoned it for some reason. I thought for sure they'd have quickly contacted the retired FBI agent whose book I recently proof-read, but they haven't.

Also meanwhile, I've been reading Richard Feynman's book "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter." While the book contains a lot of mathematics that is over my head, it's still readable. What it is telling me is that mathematicians are content with not knowing what is really going on in the universe if they can just calculate probabilities for how often things happen. They can compute that 4% of the light hitting a glass window will reflect and 96% will go through the window, but they don't have a clue as to why things happen that way. And no one seems to care. But that is nearly all I can think about: If light particles look and move the way I think they look and move, why would 4% reflect off a pane of glass while 96% go through?

The rest of the time I'm wondering about how people who voted for Donald Trump can still support him. I think I know the answer to that, too, but how can I prove it? And would anyone listen? Does anyone care?

The universe we live in is truly endlessly fascinating.