Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore.

This is an email from Dr. Stephen Hatfill to Peter Navarro dated May of last year, so right before Memorial Day. He writes, quote: I`ve been working on tracking down some Israeli data indicating that this coronavirus thing may have now essentially run its eight-week course in most of the United States. Genetic bottlenecking of the virus may be underway now.

Again, that`s May 2020, Dr. Hatfill advising the White House COVID response, even though nobody knows that he is, telling his White House supervisor, ah, this whole thing is almost over looks like we`re about to be done.

In another email that same month, Dr. Hatfill forwards Peter Navarro at the White House headlines from a yet to be released study on hydroxychloroquine, a study that had not come out yet, a study Dr. Hatfill said would prove once and for all that hydroxychloroquine will greatly improve survival for COVID patients.

Look how he ends his e-mail, quote, if Fauci and Steven Hahn, head of the FDA, had done their jobs, 30,000 less people would have died. They have blood on their hands. What he means there is 30,000 Americans died because Dr. Fauci and Dr. Hahn didn`t support the widespread of hydroxychloroquine, which is the solution to COVID crisis in America.

hydroxychloroquine if it was available.  Fortunately, we'll probably never know.

Meanwhile, I received a response to an email I sent to the only used-book store within 30 miles of where I live.  (I remember when there was a used-book store just down the street to the east of where I live, and another to the north.)  I sent them an email about wanting to sell over 500 books from my library, including a set of 37 Time-Life books about WWII.  I included 3 pictures of books on my bookshelves.  Here's the Time-Life pic:



Their response was:

I have most of those books and a few sets of the T-L WWII. So i think I will pass.

Groan.  It appears that the supply of used books far exceeds the demand.  So, I'm going to give most of my collection to Goodwill, and I may give some of it to my local public library - the Time-Life WWII series being one example.  I also have an 8½ pound copy of The Official Military Atlas of the Civil War that I'll give to the library.  And maybe my copy of the 1922 Montgomery Ward catalogue.  And The Times Atlas of China.   

I've started putting books into plastic bags to take to Goodwill, maybe 10 or 12 books per bag.  I began with my books about writing, particularly screenwriting.  Then I discovered that there were more books behind some of the books that you can see on the shelves.  Some of them were screenplays in book form, including the screenplay for the 1952 movie Macao, a movie I've probably seen a dozen times. Here are the back and front covers: 



I set that one aside.  I'm not ready to get rid of it just yet.

Yesterday afternoon, I took 6 bags of books to Goodwill.  I wonder what they'll think when the open the bags and find that nearly every book is about writing and screenwriting.

A new question:  I also have to remove the pieces of paper I used as bookmarks.  One book had an IBM card as a bookmark.  Is that a "collectors item?"  And how about a book of coupons from the Super-8 motel in Dubuque, Iowa?  There are no expiration dates on the coupons.  I think I stayed in that motel in September of 1992 when I visited a few riverboat casinos on the Mississippi.
     

 

September 20, 2021 -  As I stated in previous comments, I need to promote my sci-fi novel Time Work if I want people to buy it. One way of doing that is to mention it on the Science Fiction Facebook group, which has 70,910 members.  But before they'll let you promote your own book on that forum, you first must start either 25 or 50 threads about other topics.  (I can't find the message which informed me of that, so I'm not sure what the exact number is.)

Anyway, yesterday I started a thread about the Canadian TV series from 1996 titled "Lexx," stating that I thought it was the worst TV series I ever paid good money to watch on DVD.  To my surprise, the thread really took off, getting about 120 posts in the first three hours, plus lots of "likes" and "hahas."  As of this moment, the thread contains 253 comments and 258 "likes" and "hahas."  (I think a "haha" might be the opposite of a "like," since there is no available emoji for "dislike," and the "angry" and "sad" emojis don't really imply "dislike.")  The comments are mostly from people who either agree with me or disagree.  About 15% are from people who never heard of the series.

This morning I tried starting another thread.  I used this image:

 

I'm still waiting to see if it gets approved.  The post about Lexx got approved in less than a minute.  It's been over an hour since I tried the new one.  

In a day or two I'll start another thread about the sci-fi novel FlashForward, which I wrote about here on July 30.  I hope I only have to do 25.  I don't know if I can do 50.  I need to find that message which informed me of the limit.  But I'm not sure how to do that, since it was probably via Facebook in some way.  Sigh.

September 19, 2021 -  The arguments on

  At the moment, I do not foresee any further arguments on that forum.  I don't have any more science papers in the works, and I'm not sure whether or not I can gather enough will-power together to convert my existing papers into a book.

I had been thinking about writing a paper where I convert Einstein's 1905 Special Relativity paper into plain English, but it would definitely be a lot of work, and I'm not sure it's worth the effort.  The same with a paper about using a pulsar to as a clock to measure time dilation.  I think that is a terrific idea, but when I discussed it on the sci.physics.relativity forum they just endlessly argued about how you cannot move at a right angle to a pulsar because there can be no such right angle, since the movement would either be a tiny part of a circle around the pulsar or a straight line away from that circle.  I did write a paper about it back in 2015, but it's now buried under revisions that turned into different papers.

So, if I'm not going to write a paper or a book, what should I do next - other than reading books and listening to podcasts?  I don't have any other major mysteries to analyze and solve.

I should probably try to promote my sci-fi novel Time Work.  But I have to do that without spending any money, otherwise I'd probably spend more than I'd earn in sales.  I can mention it on the Science Fiction Facebook group, but only after I start 25 (or is it 50?) discussion threads about other topics.  I think I've started only a half dozen or so in the past 7 months.  I've been too busy with my science papers.  But, a couple days ago I did start a new thread using this image: 



A lot of people knew the answer, and a lot of people "liked" my post.  I can probably come up with a couple dozen more "discussion starters" like that if I put my mind to it.  Then I'd be able to discuss and promote my book.

I also need to get on Amazon and change the description for Time Work.  For some forgotten reason I just provided two sentences:

Time travel may not let you change the past, but it can be a handy tool if you want to change the future.

Time Work is a science-fiction novel about a unique form of time travel.

And again, I want to reiterate that just because it is an academic
institution hosting the website does NOT mean that the content is written by a professional physicist.

Photons MUST oscillate BECAUSE they cannot have a "frequency" or a "wavelength" if they do not oscillate.

But the received frequency depends on the relative motion of the target (Doppler effect). Also, photons move at c, meaning their time dilation is infinite, they don't even experience time (zero time experienced from source to target) so they simply CAN'T oscillate!

Hmm. That's an interesting belief. Obviously it is not true, since radar guns demonstrate that photons DO oscillate.

The belief seems to be that photons cannot oscillate because time stops when traveling at the speed of light, therefore nothing can CHANGE while traveling at the speed of light. CHANGES INVOLVE TIME.

A photon's fields oscillate up and down while moving. They cannot oscillate forward and back, since going forward would mean going faster than the speed of light. Going up and down, however, has no effect on the speed of the photon or the speed of light.

A photon travels at the speed of light. It cannot travel slower or faster. It experiences no "time" and can travel forever. The up and down motion of its fields have no effect on its speed.

A photon does NOT EXPERIENCE TIME, therefore its oscillations DO NOT INVOLVE TIME. All photons travel at c regardless of their oscillation rates. ONLY photons can travel at c. Therefore, the rules that apply to ordinary matter do not apply to photons.

There might be some better way to explain it, but I'll have to see what the arguments are first.

A man wrote a letter to the IRS saying, “I have been unable to sleep knowing that I have cheated on my income tax. I have understated my taxable income and have enclosed a check for $150. If I still can’t sleep, I will send the rest.”

Pat: Mike, I’m calling you from the freeway on my new cell phone.
Mike: Be careful, Pat. They just said on the radio that there’s a nut driving the wrong way on the freeway.
Pat: One nut? Hell, there are hundreds of them!

     The lookout on a battleship spies a light ahead off the starboard bow. The captain tells him to signal the other vessel, “Advise you change course twenty degrees immediately!”
     The answer comes back, “Advise you change course twenty degrees immediately!”
     The captain is furious. He signals, “I am a captain. We are on a collision course. Alter your course twenty degrees now!”
     The answer comes back, “I am a seaman second class, and I strongly urge you to alter your course twenty degrees.”
     Now the captain is beside himself with rage. He signals, “I am a battleship!”
     The answer comes back, “I am a lighthouse.”

Without logic, reason is useless. With it, you can win arguments and alienate multitudes.

The first clear demonstration of the wave nature of light was provided in 1801 by Thomas Young (1773–1829), who showed that under appropriate conditions, light exhibits interference behavior. Light waves emitted by a single source and traveling along two different paths can arrive at some point and combine and cancel each other by destructive interference.

In 1905, Einstein published a paper that formulated the theory of light quanta (“particles”) and explained the photoelectric effect. He reached the conclusion that light was composed of corpuscles, or discontinuous quanta of energy. These corpuscles or quanta are now called photons to emphasize their particle-like nature.

So in the final analysis, is light a wave or a particle? The answer is neither and both: light has a number of physical properties, some associated with waves and others with particles.

In 1801, Thomas Young experimentally proved that light is a wave, contrary to what most other scientists then thought. He did so by demonstrating that light undergoes interference, as do water waves, sound waves, and waves of all other types.

The electromagnetic waves emitted by a television station all have the same polarization, but the electromagnetic waves emitted by any common source of light (such as the Sun or a bulb) are polarized randomly, or unpolarized (the two terms mean the same thing).

          In 1905, Einstein proposed that electromagnetic radiation (or simply light) is quantized and exists in elementary amounts (quanta) that we now call photons.  This proposal should seem strange to you because we have just spent several chapters discussing the classical idea that light is a sinusoidal wave ...
          The concept of a light quantum, or a photon, turns out to be far more subtle and mysterious than Einstein imagined. Indeed, it is still very poorly understood.

Such a double-slit experiment was first performed by Thomas Young in 1801, using sunlight instead of a laser beam. It provided the first definitive evidence that light is a wave.

Unpolarized light consists of waves polarized in all possible directions.

The idea that light is quantized is now widely understood and accepted. But at the time of Einstein's paper, it was a truly revolutionary idea. Though we have used the photon model before, it is worthwhile to look at the theoretical underpinnings in more detail. In his 1905 paper, Einstein framed three postulates about light quanta and their interaction with matter:

1. Light of frequency f consists of discrete quanta, each of energy E = hf.  Each photon travels at the speed of light c.

2. Light quanta are emitted or absorbed on an all-or-nothing basis. A substance can emit l or 2 or 3 quanta, but not 1.5. Similarly, an electron in a metal cannot absorb half a quantum but only an integer number.

3. A light quantum, when absorbed by a metal, delivers its entire energy to one electron.

While controversy is a common occurrence, physicists expect to be able to design experiments that can differentiate one model from another - to decide whether light is a wave or a particle. Conflicts are resolved so that one model replaces another. For the first time, conflicting models could not be resolved. When physicists performed diffraction and interference experiments, light behaved like a wave. When they performed experiments on the photoelectric effect, light behaved like a particle. What was worse was that electrons behaved in much the same way.

It appears definitive—and there is no question that the double-slit experiment does demonstrate the interference of light, as countless others have subsequently shown. But did Young actually perform it? Or was it only a ‘thought’ experiment, like Einstein’s notion of trying to catch up with a light ray? At least one current historian of science, John Worrall, thinks the latter was the case: Young’s double-slit experiment was an intuition of the truth, not a real experiment.Worrall bases his view on the following undoubted facts: Young does not explicitly state that he did the experiment; Young provides no numerical data; Young says nothing about the light source he used and the other experimental conditions; and Young never again refers to the experiment.

Additionally, the experiment that Young did describe in detail with numerical data is almost never mentioned by physicists.  It was a "pinhole" experiment that Young described in the paper he read before the Royal Society on November 24, 1803.  It involved sunlight reflected off of a mirror and directed toward a pinhole in a screen behind which was a darkened room.  Below is an illustration I created to show how that experiment worked.
 


Thomas Young wrote:

"I brought into the sunbeam a slip of card, about one-thirtieth of an inch in breadth, and observed its shadow, either on the wall, or on other cards held at different distances. Besides the fringes of colours on each side of the shadow, the shadow itself was divided by similar parallel fringes, of smaller dimensions, differing in number, according to the distance at which the shadow was observed, but leaving the middle of the shadow always white."

This experiment does most (or all) of what the Double-Slit experiment does, only there are no "slits" in this experiment, there is just a beam of light moving past and around a thin card placed edgewise into light coming from a pinhole.  Plus, the light is sunlight, not laser light of a specific frequency, and the experiment is performed in air, not in a vacuum.  Nevertheless, the result is very similar to what is seen in the Double-Slit experiment.  There are multiple bright lines on the wall which indicate that light somehow goes around the card as visualized in the illustration below.


Since light consists of photons, not waves, the photons that do not actually hit the leading edge of the card somehow move around the card and enter what should be the solid shadow of the card.  And it appears that the photons that pass closest to the card change their trajectory the most when those photons pass the far end of the card.  The result is a series of white stripes on the wall with dark stripes in between.  In other words, the result is just like the Double-Slit experiment but without any slits.  And when Young blocked the light from going around one side of the card (similar to blocking light from one slit),

"all the fringes which had before been observed in the shadow on the wall immediately disappeared, although the light inflected on the other side was allowed to retain its course, and although this light must have undergone any modification that the proximity of the other edge of the slip of card might have been capable of occasioning."

In an Atomic clock? How many Cs atoms are watched?

and how could the changing atomic be counted?
by what macro machine?

As I understand it, what they do is shoot a photon at a Cesium atom,
the Cesium atom immediately gets rid of that energy by emitting a
new photon, the atomic clock collects that photon and sends another
photon to Cesium atom, which is again rejected.

The clock counts how many times PER SECOND the Cesium atom
rejects the photons sent to it. The answer is: 9,192,631,770.
A second is 1/86,400th of an Earth day, and a Cesium atomic clock
ticks 9,192,631,770 times during that period of time.

Okay, so they shoot microwaves (a.k.a. "photons") at cesium atoms.
The microwaves oscillate AROUND 9,192,631,770 times per second.
The cesium atoms will change their energy state IF they are hit by
microwaves that oscillate EXACTLY 9,192,631,770 times per second.
The clock then fine-tunes the oscillation rate of the microwaves it
emits until it gets the highest percentage of atoms to change their energy states. When that happens, the clock KNOWS it is emitting photons that oscillate 9,192,631,770 times per second. And as long as it continues do that, it can COUNT 9,192,631,770 TICKS per second. 

As I understand it, what they do is shoot a photon at a Cesium atom, the Cesium atom immediately gets rid of that energy by emitting a

How do they see that Cs atom?

They do not need to see or target a specific atom. They shoot microwave photons at a STREAM of cesium atoms. They then measure the percentage of atoms in that stream that changed their energy states because they were hit by the microwave photons. The greater the percentage that changed their energy states, the more certain the clock is that it is emitting photons that oscillate 9,192,631,770 times per second. Cesium atoms won't change their energy state UNLESS they are hit by photons that oscillate 9,192,631,770 times per second.

"They do not need to see or target a specific atom."

Then why would they need to be used you moron?

They don't target a specific atom, they target a specific TYPE of atom.
They target a TYPE of atom that ONLY changes its energy state IF it is hit by a photon that oscillates 9,192,631,770 times per second.  That is what the cesium atom does.

When you shoot a stream of photons at a cloud of atoms, you are
bound to hit some of the atoms. You just need to build a device that
enables you to hit as many atoms as possible.

photons do not oscillate

To understand photons, I suggest consulting an actual text book on quantum electrodynamics.

Photons do not oscillate.

What this thought experiment does is eliminate all arguments that people on earth will see my clock running slow while I will see the clocks on earth as running slow. We both used the SAME clock, and that clock ticked 10 times faster for me than for people on the "stationary" planets.

Use a distant pulsar at rest in the same inertial frame as the rocket ship, and you'll get the opposite result. 

At first I smoked Lucky Strikes with no filter, but whatever brand I started smoking they kept taking off the market. Now I just hope Camel stays in business—fingers crossed. I’m not blind to the health risks, and I sure as hell don’t encourage kids today to smoke. But I’ve told my doctors that I’ve made it this far in life by smoking, and the damage has been done. They don’t stop trying to tell me what I should do, and I don’t stop ignoring them. And it works out fine.

On April 1, 1992, they published a list of the top 22 check-bouncers, and probably hoped that would be the end of it. But we fought for full disclosure, and finally, some two weeks later, the list of all members who had bounced checks at the House bank was released. Hardly anybody was spared. Speaker Foley was on the list, as was number-two Democrat Gephardt. Nineteen different committee chairmen had overdrafts on their accounts. Democratic representative Gerry Sikorski of Minnesota was one of the worst check-bouncers, having written nearly seven hundred bad checks from his account. He tried to pawn off the blame on his wife—a real classy move. Plenty of House Republicans were on the list too, including two rising stars: Newt Gingrich of Georgia and Vin Weber of Minnesota. Weber chose not to run for reelection, but Newt stuck it out. The hapless Buz Lukens, who had held my seat in Ohio’s 8th District before resigning over an improper relationship with a minor, was sent back to jail—this time for bribery—as a result of the House bank investigation.

Then there were all the problems with the House post office — formally known as the Congressional Post Office. Members would buy stamps and charge them to their office account, and then use them as currency in an underground congressional black market. Stamps were being traded for cash. Under federal law, you can’t sell your stamps back to the government, but some members were getting away with it. One way the stamps were “laundered,” so the rumors went, was through late-night poker games where they would play in stamps. Thousands of dollars’ worth of USPS stamps were apparently changing hands. And you couldn’t just buy stamps at the House post office—apparently you could buy cocaine too. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Trump incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November. He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust. It was especially sad to see some members of the House and Senate helping him along—although some of the people involved did not surprise me in the least. The legislative terrorism that I’d witnessed as Speaker had now encouraged actual terrorism. And it pissed me off. I called on Trump to resign, but I knew that wouldn’t be enough. My Republican Party—the party of smaller, fairer, more accountable government and not conspiracy theories—had to take back control from the faction that had grown to include everyone from garden-variety whack jobs to insurrectionists. If the conservative movement in the United States was going to survive, there couldn’t be room for them. Time will tell how successful that mission will be, but I hope to be able to do my part, even in retirement.

§14 The Special Theory of Relativity In order to explain the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, we might propose that nature behaves in a way we would not have anticipated, that the Galilean transformation is incorrect, and that velocities do not add vectorially (at high speeds). Following Einstein, we reason that there is no purpose in postulating the existence of an ether if there is no way to detect it; that is, if no physical experiment can detect the absolute motion of an inertial reference frame. Thus there is no purpose in speaking of a velocity of light except with respect to the observer who measures it. We reason further that no one observer has a special place, superior to all others. The speed of light should have the same numerical value for all observers, so long as they are all resident in inertial frames. We propose, as a fundamental postulate of the relativity theory, that physical law must have the same meaning in all inertial frames. This postulate is called the postulate of covariance of physical law. As a first step in the application of the general principle, let us suppose that the constancy of the speed of light is a physical law; that is, the speed of light is the same in every inertial frame. Then the speed of light is the same in every direction and does not depend on the earth's speed through space or its speed with respect to an undetectable ether.

The speed of light should have the same numerical value for all observers, so long as they are all resident in inertial frames. 

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

That is totally different than what that textbook (and many many other textbooks) says.  According to Einstein, the emitter determines the speed of light, and he said nothing about "inertial frames."  A speeding police car is definitely NOT an "inertial frame," yet a radar gun in the car will emit light at c, and that light will hit and oncoming car at c+v.  So will a radar gun fired from a parked vehicle, which would be an "inertial frame."  But I've found only one NASA web site which explains things that way.  All other web sites and books I've found pretend that radar guns emit waves, instead of photons.



The illustration above is an example.  Supposedly, waves are emitted by a radar gun and when those waves hit an oncoming vehicle they inexplicably bounce off the vehicle as if the waves hit a solid wall.  Do the waves all bounce off the nearest part of the car?  Why?  Wouldn't the waves also bounce off the windshield and other parts?  And wouldn't that result in a mixture of returned waves from different parts of the car? 

Additionally, the instruction manual for the radar gun I own says that the gun has a conical antenna and the "beam width" is 12 degrees.  The illustration above doesn't seem to involve any particular "beam width."  And how can the returning waves from the target have a "beam width"?

Here's an illustration from one of the first radar gun patents which shows the "waves" somehow being kept to a "beam width."
The outbound beam is about 40 degrees wide, and the return beam is about 10 degrees wide.  How?  Why?  The patent doesn't explain.  But, evidently it is just easier to illustrate radar principles by using fictitious waves instead of real photons.  In my papers I use photons when describing how radar guns work.



Hmm.  Another thought: If radars send out waves, how can weather radar systems detect rain?  A web site HERE explains:

Weather radar consists of a rotating dish protected by a large white dome; this dish sends pulses of energy (the radar beam) into the atmosphere to detect objects like rain or hail. If the radar beam encounters an object, some of the radiation will bounce off of it and return to the radar site.