Ed Lake's web page

Comments for Sunday August 18, 2019, thru Saturday, August 24, 2019:

August 21, 2019 - Something has been nagging at me for a long time, but I've generally just pushed it aside to work on more pressing matters. This morning I awoke thinking about that subject once again. The subject is the "redshift" behind the Big Bang Theory. According to a NASA web page on the subject,

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

Radar guns appear to demonstrate that the last sentence above is not quite true. In reality, the farther a galaxy is from earth, the faster the earth is receding from that galaxy. So, the universe is expanding, which means most galaxies are moving away from each other. Or to put it more accurately, the universe is expanding, so galaxies are moving away from a point where they were once all together.

In Example 1 in the illustration below, some other galaxy (B) is moving away from the earth, which is located in the Milky Way galaxy (A). The movement for redshift calculations is typically measured as B moving way from A.

In reality, however, as shown in Example 2 above, both A and B are moving away from a point where they were once together. That point is the point of the Big Bang. However, there is no way to measure the distance to the point of the Big Bang, because while A and B are moving apart, they are also both moving in some other direction (say upward) away from where the Big Bang actually occurred.

Here's another quote from that NASA site:

So to determine an object's distance, we only need to know its velocity. Velocity is measurable thanks to the Doppler shift. By taking the spectrum of a distant object, such as a galaxy, astronomers can see a shift in the lines of its spectrum and from this shift determine its velocity. Putting this velocity into the Hubble equation, they determine the distance. Note that this method of determining distances is based on observation (the shift in the spectrum) and on a theory (Hubble's Law). If the theory is not correct, the distances determined in this way are all nonsense. Most astronomers believe that Hubble's Law does, however, hold true for a large range of distances in the universe.

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

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

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

Which brings us back to Einstein's Second Postulate:

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

That means we would not see any blueshifting if Andromeda was moving toward the earth and the earth was stationary. But, of course, the earth is not stationary. Because Andromeda is seen as blueshifted, the earth must be moving toward Andromeda. But the amount of blueshifting does NOT tell us the closing speed between Earth and Andromeda. It only tells us how fast we are moving toward the point in space where Andromeda was located when it emitted the light we just received.

According to one web site:

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

The result was a little bit surprising.

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

Hmm. 300 kps equals 1,080,000 kph. However, according to another web site:

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

So, when you calculate the speed that Andromeda is approaching us by using blueshift calculations, the speed you get is roughly double the speed of Andromeda toward us as measured by other methods:

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

So, measuring distances by the red and blueshifting of light works for the redshift of the universe, but not for anything that is blueshifted. Blueshifted light will typically be just the speed of receiver toward the source (c+v) and any movement of the source toward the receiver does not blueshift the light. Just as with radar guns.

Hmm. It took me all morning to write this. I hope it is correct.

August 20, 2019 - I changed my mind about buying that used radar gun for $300. Researching the company, I found that they are located just 244 miles from where I live. That means, according to Google Maps, I could drive down there in 3 hours and 45 minutes. And I could ask to test the gun first before buying it. But, if I spend ten minutes testing the gun, and if it works the way I need it to work, then I no longer have any reason to buy the gun. I'm only interested in verifying that it works the way I need it to work (and the way the manufacturer said it "should" work).

I also found that that particular model of hand-held radar gun doesn't have batteries in the handle. It only works by plugging its power cord into the cigarette lighter socket of a car. That's not a major problem, but it means I cannot use it inside the back of a truck. I can only use it in a car.

Yesterday afternoon, I wrote a long email to the manufacturer, explaining the situation in detail. This morning I received a response back that said,

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

So, again I have to wait. Hopefully, while waiting, I'll get a response to some of the four snail mail letters I sent out last week.

Added Note: When I returned home from doing chores this afternoon, there was a message on my answering machine. It was from a woman at Kustom Signals, Inc., in Lenexa, Kansas, responding to the snail mail letter I'd sent to them last week. She informed me that Kustom Signals only sells radar guns to police, government and military organizations. I'd asked them about their Falcon and Talon hand-held models, saying that I hoped to get scientists interested in buying such guns to demonstrate Einstein's theories.

Too bad I didn't think to mention that I hoped scientists at NASA, the NIST and various national laboratories would also want to buy such guns. But I doubt it would have gotten a different response.

Previously on this web page , I wrote comments about Kustom Signals' dash mounted Golden Eagle system, which logically must do some of the things I need a radar gun to do. So, I'm fairly sure Kustoms Signals has the right kind of guns, but, at the moment, I don't see any way I can get them to say so or identify which guns best meet my criteria.

August 19, 2019 - I'm seriously thinking about spending $300 to buy that used radar gun I mentioned in my August 16 comment. During the past few days I spent that much to buy a backup computer, plus I bought a second MP3 player and a new "Bluetooth" speaker for about $75. The new MP3 player and the speaker are atop the stereo system in my office as shown in the picture below. The system is on a table behind me as I work on my computer. I play cassettes all day long. There are two shelves containing about 200 audio cassettes under the stereo system.

The sudden purchases where prompted by the fact that the stereo system suddenly stopped working a few days ago. I was in the middle of doing other things and I didn't have time to figure out what was wrong. (Later, by plugging headphones into the stereo system, I determined that the system and the cassette player work fine, there is just something wrong with the connection to the speakers which are on the other side of the room.) At first I just got out my "old" MP3 player and its speaker and used them to play the music I find I need to be in the background as I work on my computer. But that MP3 player is filled with audio books and podcasts, so there wasn't much room left for music. So, I bought the new one

For a long time I've been contemplating copying all my cassettes to MP3 files, but that would take about 300 hours. I've also contemplated copying my music CDs to MP3 files. (My CD player is part of my other stereo system in my front room.) That would probably take about 150 hours. Right now, the new MP3 player just contains about 10 hours of jazz albums I downloaded for free from the Internet (99.9% of which are new and not something I already had).

The point of all this is that it broke my train of thought. And it made me realize I can probably afford to spend $300 for a used radar gun. It seems crazy, but it appears that no one else in this world is interested in demonstrating that a simple "basic" radar gun can show that nearly all college physics text books are wrong in the way they explain Special Relativity and particularly Einstein's Second Postulate. I just need to make a decision to buy the gun. That could take hours, days or months.

August 18, 2019 - Yesterday morning, I sat down at my computer to start writing today's comment, which I thought might be about the apparent fact that no one cares if colleges are teaching nonsense about Special Relativity, but then I got a notification from Microsoft that I needed to do an update to Windows 10. I needed some time to think, anyway, so I shut down everything in my computer and allowed the update to take place. Uh oh. After about 10 minutes, it was only about 1% finished. I didn't feel like just sitting and staring at the computer, so I got out my MP3 player and continued listening to the unabridged 8-hour 7-minute version of Emma Larkin's "Finding George Orwell in Burma" that I'd started the day before.

The Windows 10 update took over 3 hours! By the time I was able to get back on my computer, it was lunch time, and also time for me to run some errands. That quashed any idea I had about writing today's comment. And, when evening rolled around, I felt I should finish the audio book, since I had less than three hours left. I finished it at about 8 p.m.

Wow! I had expected it to be just a travel book about Burma. I wasn't sure how George Orwell fitted into the picture. As it turned out, it is a totally fascinating travel book about Burma, but it isn't just a travel book about Burma. George Orwell was the author of the novels 1984 and Animal Farm, both of which I read many many years ago. And Orwell lived and worked as a police officer in Burma for many years, when the country was run by the British and the locals were just a problem the British had to deal with. 1984 and Animal Farm are, more or less, about about life in Burma back in the first half of the 20th century. And life in Burma today is still about living under one of the most cruel and corrupt governments in the world, certainly the most cruel and corrupt in Asia. Only a few countries in sub-Saharan Africa are worse. The author says this about her first visit to Burma in 1995:

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

The fact that the author is a woman makes things even more intriguing. It's hard to imagine a woman prowling around alone in such a country, but since she was able to speak Burmese, and since the police had her under surveillance most of the time, she was probably more safe there than in a lot of better run countries. She was tracing George Orwell's life there, which allowed her to get into places which would ordinarily be off-limits to foreigners.

Some comments about how schools are run were of particular interest to me. One conversation she had with a school teacher hit home:

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

And everyone gets a passing grade, since if a teacher fails too many students, he will be arrested and thrown in jail for failing to do his job. It made me think of the physics students in this country who are told that they must believe what they are taught, even though it makes no sense, otherwise they will receive a failing grade. Their text books say that physics doesn't have to make sense because some things in physics are contrary to "common sense." But, if something doesn't make sense to you, then you do not understand it. But no one seems to care.

Burma not only has a corrupt government, it also has many different ethnic groups fighting with one another. It was a dictatorship before the British arrived to colonize the country. Then it became a dictatorship again under General Ne Win.

I could go on and on, but suffice to say it was a fascinating book.

Comments for Sunday August 11, 2019, thru Saturday, August 17, 2019:

August 16, 2019 - Yesterday I received an email from the radar gun manufacturer who had written to me on August 13 to say that he'd have his techie contact me when the techie returned from a road trip. The techie didn't write, but his boss did, saying that his techie said that the model I asked about "should be able to do what you are asking," and they had a used gun of that model available for $300.

I responded that the word "should" was a problem. I needed to know that the gun will be able to do what I need it to do, and that I was attempting to get someone else to buy such a gun. That was the last I heard from them.

I found it interesting that the techie would not write to me. It's the same situation I had with the radar gun manufacturer to stated that one radar gun model they make does do what I need. The boss was going to have their techie contact me, but the techie never did. I'm not sure what the problem is, but I have to assume they do not want to discuss Einstein's theories with me. They may have had a lot of contact with mathematicians arguing that their guns cannot possibly work they way the company claims they work. Or, the techies know their guns do not work the way virtually every college text book says they must work.

I'm still waiting for responses to the snail mail letters I sent to other radar gun manufacturers last weekend. And this afternoon I'll send out a snail mail letter to the radar gun manufacturer who did not respond to my email.

August 14, 2019 - While driving around doing errands this afternoon, I finished listening to CD #12 of the 12 CD set for "Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist" by Richard Dawkins.

I think I chose it over many other audio books to burn onto CDs because, at the time, I had just 12 blank CDs left and it was the only book on my waiting-to-hear list that consisted of exactly 12 CDs. That's probably not the best reason for choosing a book, but it was not a total disappointment. I got it because it's a "science book," and there are many parts of the book that are very interesting, plus it hits home on some political subjects. Here is a small part of what Amazon wrote about it:

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

"Elected officials" could refer specifically to Donald Trump. The book does mention Trump once by name (on page 310 of the paperback edition):

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

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

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

I don't know that Trump ever flaunted his ignorance. He mostly just unwittingly displays his ignorance while claiming to be smarter than everyone else.

What bothered me most about the book was Richard Dawkins' endless attacks on people who disagree with The Theory of Evolution and those who believe in God. The word "evolution" is used 353 times in the book. And Dawkins once wrote a whole book titled "The God Delusion." Amazon says this about Dawkins in their page about "The God Delusion":

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

I'm certainly not a religious person, but it really gets tedious when someone rants endlessly about the damage religions have done in this world.

To my surprise, when I finished listening to "Science in the Soul" and put in the first CD for the next book on my listening list (another science book), the book began with this:

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

I don't know how much of the book will be about religion, but it's only 5 CDs long, and I have no other books currently burned onto CDs. I just noticed that the book has an "Afterward" by Richard Dawkins! I'm going to have to learn to sample audio books more thoroughly before I burn them onto CDs!

August 13, 2019 - I received an email this morning from one of the two radar gun manufacturers to whom I sent emails on Saturday. But all the email said was that their techie was on the road at the moment, and he would respond when he returned on Thursday or Friday.

Meanwhile, yesterday afternoon I finished listening to the 8-hour 46-minute unabridged audio book version of "Only Human" by Sylvain Neuvel.

As I stated yesterday, "Only Human" is the third and final book in "The Themis Files" series. Here's how Amazon describes the start of the series:

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

You can't tell from that description, but the books are very funny - in a "dark humor" sort of way. They are also unusual because they are written as a series of reports, transcripts, recordings and other ways of recording dialog. That means that the books are mostly dialog. And it is dialog between very intelligent people with lots of wryly humorous infighting between them. Plus, the aliens from the planet Esat Ekt cannot pronounce the letter L, and they use base-8 mathematics.

The key point, which is gradually learned through the series, is that the aliens didn't mean to harm anyone. They believe in what was called "The Prime Directive" on the Star Trek series, i.e., Do NOT interfere with the civilizations of planets that have not yet achieved interplanetary travel.

The problem is that, when the aliens visited earth 3,000 years ago, they mingled with the people of that time, and since they were very similar to earthlings (just with less body hair), they were able to produce offspring. It took them 3,000 years to realized that that was "interfering." So, in book 2 they sent back their robots to correct the situation by wiping out everyone who had some of the aliens' DNA, which was about 99 out of every 100 humans. When humans started fighting back by using a robot that had been left behind 3,000 years ago, the aliens realized they had screwed up again and stopped attacking. Then it became a matter of figuring out what to do next.

Meanwhile, humans started hunting down people who have large amounts of alien DNA and segregating them, imprisoning them. And humans who had access to damaged robots that were left behind started repairing them and using them to fight old enemies who were of a different color or who believed in a different religion. And everybody is fighting with everybody. In other words, earth was back to "normal," only worse. But some intelligent people begin working with the aliens to try to reduce the infighting. "Only Human" was first published in 2018, which makes you wonder how much the author was thinking about Donald Trump's world when he wrote the book.

It's a terrific science-fiction series which may be made into a movie. I hope so.

August 12, 2019 - Saturday afternoon, I posted a comment to the Astrophysics and Physics group on the Facebook. It was basically the same message about radar guns that I posted here yesterday. About 5 hours later, it was accepted by the moderators and appeared on the group. The reaction was somewhat surprising. Here is a screen capture of the beginning of the thread as of this morning (I held the cursor over the "like" emoji so that the list of names would appear):

As you can see, I got 64 "likes" and no negative emojis. Amid the comments, however, there were posts from three mathematicians who disagreed with what I wrote. One just kept repeating "Photons are waves" without explaining further, another just cited some mathematics page about how waves work and wrote nothing further, and the third just posted a one word message: "Wrong."

I'd really like to see some mathematician explain (without using mathematics) how a radar gun using waves can tell which waves came from the front of the car and which came from the pavement, from trees, from highway signs, and from other parts of the car.

Meanwhile, yesterday afternoon I finished listening to the 9-hour, 8-minute audio book version of "Waking Gods" by Sylvain Neuvel.

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

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

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

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

radar guns emitting waves

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

What the illustration does NOT show is key to understanding radar guns:

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

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

If the only way to tell one wave from another is the wave's frequency, how can you tell a wave's frequency if the return waves are mixed with a million other waves of different frequencies?

It cannot be done with waves if all electromagnetic waves are identical and the only difference between them is their frequency.

It is a simple matter with photons. First of all, the gun uses a frequency that is uncommon and unlike any known natural frequency. The gun emits photons that oscillate at 24.125 GHz. It then switches to receive mode, and the receiver ignores all photons entering the gun that do not oscillate between 24.125001 and 24.124999 GHz. That gets rid of all the light photons. The gun then ignores photons that are the same frequency as the photons that were emitted, which gets rid of stationary objects like highway signs and trees. The gun just works with the photons that oscillate at rates that are significantly different from the emitted photons. The photons that bounced off the bumper of the target car will oscillate at the same rate as the photons that bounced off of the metal surrounding the windshield.

The gun can show the fastest object within range, or it can count photons and use the strongest signals returning from more than one object within range.

I once argued this situation with the evangelistic mathematicians who hang out on the sci.physics.relativity UseNet forum. They angrily claimed that photons do not oscillate and that radar guns do emit waves. When I tried to explain the situation above, they they just buried me in mathematical equations and ranted that I do not understand anything. Since they cannot accept that photons oscillate, without realizing it they argued that radar guns work like lidar guns: A wave is emitted at the speed of light, and that wave returns at the speed of light. The time it took to make the round trip at the speed of light tells you the distance to the target. The gun then emits another wave and gets another distance to the target. The amount of time it took the target to travel the distance between the two measured distances gives the speed of the target. But they cannot explain how the gun can tell one wave from another. They didn't even seem to understand the question. It appears that, when everything is converted to mathematical equations, the problems with reality simply go away.

Comments for Sunday August 4, 2019, thru Saturday, August 10, 2019:

August 8, 2019 - Now that I have confirmed that "basic" radar guns work as described in my paper "Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories," I need to find some way to get others to buy "basic" radar guns and do the actual experiments. But, clearly they won't believe me if I just name one model radar gun. They'll claim I just misunderstood something. Or they might get out their torches and pitchforks and go on a rampage to lynch the witches and sorcerers who claim they can perform black magic to challenge what the evangelistic mathematicians believe to be sacred and inviolate.

One way to avoid that is to identify different guns by different manufacturers which all confirm what I wrote. So, I'm preparing snail-mail letters to other manufacturers who didn't respond to my emails. (I don't see any hope of making contact via a phone call. They'll just assume I am someone looking for a way to beat a speeding ticket.) Meanwhile, maybe some of the 468 people who have "viewed" my paper about radar guns will decide to find a "basic" radar gun and perform the experiment for themselves.

Since I'm now 99.9% certain that my paper is correct, my focus is now on how to do the experiments - or how to get someone else to do the experiments. If a college professor makes headlines by disproving what is in most college physics textbooks, would that end his career or boost his career? The officials at his college would have to admit that what they've been teaching for about a century is total nonsense.

It's a lot to think about.

August 6, 2019 - Yesterday morning, the general manager of a major radar gun manufacturing company called me. It was in response to an email I'd sent the company via one of those fill-in-the-boxes windows which do not provide their email address and do not provide you with a copy of the email you sent. The email I'd sent asked if they had a radar gun which would do the following:

1. Give "no reading" (i.e., a speed of less than 10 mph) if the radar gun was in a vehicle traveling at 60 mph and the gun was pointed at the road ahead, or at parked cars or highway signs.

2. Give a reading of "60 mph" when the gun is in a vehicle moving at 60 mph and the gun is pointed at the back of a truck that is directly ahead and is also traveling at 60 mph.

The connection was bad. Evidently the general manager (GM) was using a cell phone in a bad location. But, he told me they had such a gun, and he gave me the email address of one of their senior engineers if I had any further questions. Of course, I immediately composed an email to the engineer and sent it off.

As of 10:30 this morning I hadn't heard from the engineer, so I called the GM on his office land-line number. I was concerned that there may have been some misunderstanding due to the bad connection, so we spent about 20 minutes going through everything again in detail. I explained the implications behind the two questions I had asked. If the gun does both things, then the gun must also give a 60 mph reading if it is inside the truck and the radar gun is pointed at the front wall while the truck travels at 60 mph.

The GM realized that was true, and he started talking about how he was going to perform such an experiment to verify it. He gave me the model number of the least expensive radar gun they sold that had this capability. Cost: $1,600. We talked about how the two conditions I'd asked about related to Einstein's theories, and he again suggested I contact the senior engineer. So, as soon as we hung up, I sent another email to the engineer.

Prior to today's phone conversation I was 99% certain I was right about what I wrote in my paper Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories. Now I am 99.9% certain. While I'm waiting to see if that engineer is going to contact me, I'm going to compose letters to the general managers of four other major radar gun manufacturers to see if they have radar guns that do the same thing. (I'm certain they do, but I need the model numbers.) When I have at least 3 makes of guns that verify my theory, I'll then write a paper naming them. And if no police radar gun manufacturer is interested in making an inexpensive gun that scientists can use to demonstrate Einstein's theories, I may suggest to Bushnell that they produce a simpler version of their "Velocity Speed Gun" that does what the other guns do. They might even call it The "SR Verifier" or the "SR Demonstrator." SR stands for "Special Relativity," of course.

Meanwhile, yesterday evening I finished listening to the 3-hour 11-minute unabridged audio book version of Janet Evanovich's "Visions of Sugar Plums."

They call it a "novel," but is basically a "novella," which means it is less than 60,000 words. It is Evanovich's first "between the numbers" book, fitting between "Hard Eight," which I finished reading in paperback form on June 18 and "To The Nines," which I finished reading in paperback form on July 19.

It a funny fantasy in which bounty hunter Stephanie Plum hunts for bail jumper Sandy Claws, and along the way she encounters elves and mysterious characters with unearthly powers. It may not have been the right time of the year for it, but it was still a good way to spend 3 hours and 11 minutes while trying to avoid thinking about radar guns. However, I much prefer her "numbered" novels.

August 5, 2019 - Yesterday afternoon, feeling tired from doing seemingly endless research, I sat down on my couch and finished reading a book on my Kindle. The book was "Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time" by Mark Adams.

I'd started it around July 8, so it took me almost a month to read it in sessions lasting about 15 minutes during breakfast and lunch (except for the final session).

Needless to say, it's a travel book. It describes the author's relatively recent visits to Machu Picchu and the visits by Yale Professor Hiram Bingham III one hundred years earlier, in 1911 and 1915. Bingham is often considered to be the inspiration behind the fictional Indiana Jones.

Hiram Bingham III

The book generally alternates between a chapter describing Professor Bingham's adventures, and then a chapter describing the author's attempts to repeat what Bingham did. It is very interesting, but reading it on a Kindle isn't recommended, since I kept wanting to see maps and pictures. If there were maps at the beginning of the book (as there are in the paper editions), I don't remember them, and I had no way of knowing that all the pictures were at the end of the book. You cannot easily flip from one part of a book to another on my Kindle.

I've traveled a lot in my time, and I'd always considered Machu Picchu to be one of the places I'd like to visit, but I never visited Mexico or anywhere in Central America, much less any place in South America. And this book made me think it was probably fortunate that I never tried to visit Peru and Machu Picchu. There are so many people visiting Machu Picchu these days, and the area is so small and delicate, that you have to make reservations many months in advance. Plus, I spent most of the time wandering around alone in Japan and Thailand, and during my trips to Hong Kong, England, France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy and Luxembourg, I'm not sure I'd want to do that anywhere in Peru. But, even without having easy access to maps and pictures, Turn Right at Machu Picchu was a very interesting and enjoyable book.

August 4, 2019 - A few days ago, while researching which papers and books use Einstein's actual 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”) instead of the distorted versions that appear in most textbooks, I came across http://www.neoclassicalrelativity.org/ which defines itself this way:

The Neo-classical Theory of Relativity (NCTR) uses concepts of Classical Mechanics and Classical Electromagnetism to describe the relativity of inertial motion better than it is described in the Special Theory of Relativity (STR) conceived by Albert Einstein in 1905.

The Neo-classical Theory of Relativity reveals the conceptual errors of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and also explains why the STR doesn’t have a valid experimental basis.

It's a web site created by a mathematician to promote an extremely convoluted argument that Einstein was wrong. However, the author essentially argues the same things I argue when I argue that Einstein was right and it is mathematicians who have distorted Einstein's ideas for the past 100 years and more.

In my paper about pulsars, I mentioned that there are four groups of people who are arguing about Einstein's theories. The first group accepts Einstein's Second Postulate just the way it is written, and they argue against those who do not. (I'm in that group.) The second group consists of evangelistic mathematicians who argue that Einstein didn't mean what he wrote, he meant to agree with what the mathematicians believe about the Second Postulate. The third group just accepts what the textbooks say and they argue that it is not possible for all the textbooks to be wrong. And then there is the fourth group, about which I wrote:

The view held by the fourth group is that Einstein was wrong when he claimed that the speed of light is a constant and will be the same for all observers independent of their motion relative to the light source. People in this group also never compared what Einstein wrote to what college textbooks claim he wrote. They just accepted that he wrote what the textbooks say he wrote, and they argue that it cannot be right because it doesn’t agree with what they see happening in the world.

The author of "The Neo-classical Theory of Relativity" appears to be in this fourth group. It also appears that the author has put all of his five papers on vixra.org and on academia.edu. And it seems he hasn't written any new papers since February of 2017, which (probably coincidentally) is about the same time I started posting my papers. (The only paper I've made a sincere attempt to decipher is his first one, titled "The Neo-classical Theory of Relativity.")

It's also interesting to view the comments after his papers to see how he is attacked by other mathematicians the same way I have been attacked.

While searching for others who are in the fourth group, I came across a bunch of papers by Gocho V. Sharlanova. One particular paper caught my eye. It is titled "The Speed of Light Postulate - Awareness of the Physical Reality." English isn't Sharlanova's first language, and the article seemed nearly undecipherable, but it repeatedly mentioned "the Miller's experiment" as being a famous experiment to measure the speed of light. So, I researched "The Miller's Experiment" and found a paper by Tom Roberts, with whom I've often argued on the sci.physics.relativity forum. The Roberts paper, available on arxiv.org, is titled "An Explanation of Dayton Miller’s Anomalous 'Ether Drift' Result." It begins with this:

Dayton C. Miller’s 1933 article in this journal reviewed the results of his voluminous measurements obtained from his “ether drift” interferometer, and proclaimed to the world that he had determined “the absolute motion of the earth”. This claim has been embraced by some, rejected by many, and remains controversial today.

Huh? I had never heard of Dayton C. Miller, much less any claim that he had measured "the absolute motion of the earth." Anything about "absolute motion" is attacked by mathematicians and is of great interest to me! A quick Google search found that the 1934 Nature article by Prof. Dayton C. Miller of the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio, is available at https://www.nature.com/articles/133162a0.pdf and it is extremely interesting. It says,

For the first time, in 1925 and 1926, I made observations at Mount Wilson of such extent and completeness that they were sufficient for the determination of the absolute motion of the earth.

and

The absolute motion of the earth may be presumed to be the resultant of two independent component motions. One of these is the orbital motion around the sun, which is known both as to magnitude and direction. For the purposes of this study, the velocity of the orbital motion is taken as 30 kilometres per second, and the direction changes continuously through the year, at all times being tangential to the orbit. The second component is the cosmical motion of the sun and the solar system. Presumably this is constant in both direction and magnitude, but neither the direction nor magnitude is known; the determination of these quantities is the particular object of this experiment.

and

The orbital velocity of the earth being known, 30 kilometres per second, the cosmical velocity of the solar system, determined from the proportional variations in the observed effects, is found to be 208 kilometres per second.

Hmm. Some time ago, I read an article in Scientific American that mentioned the earth's speeds in various directions. It said our solar system "whirls around the center of our galaxy at some 220 kilometers per second." Did they get that number from doing what Dayton Miller did? In addition, another article I read quoted from a different Scientific American article:

"These measurements, confirmed by the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite in 1989 and 1990, suggest that our galaxy and its neighbors, the so-called Local Group, are moving at 600 kilometers per second (1.34 million miles per hour) in the direction of the constellation Hydra."

If all motion is relative, as mathematicians believe, and if mathematicians believe it is equally valid to say that the constellation Hydra is moving toward the Milky Way galaxy at 600 kilometers per second, then how do they explain blue shifting and red shifting? This morning, I did a search through arxiv.org to see what other papers mention Dayton Miller. I found only one. It's by someone at an Australian University and is titled "Absolute Motion and Gravitational Effects." It says this in the abstract:

An analysis of various experiments demonstrates that absolute motion relative to space has been observed experimentally by Michelson and Morley, Miller, Illingworth, Torr and Kolen, and by DeWitte. The Dayton Miller and Roland DeWitte data also reveal the in-flow of space into matter which manifests as gravity.

"Absolute motion relative to space" makes no sense to me, but it seems to make sense to mathematicians who inexplicably cannot imagine "absolute motion relative to the speed of light," which is Einstein's theory and makes perfect sense to me. The abstract also shows that the author belongs in group four when it says,

The Einstein assumptions leading to the Special and General Theory of Relativity are shown to be falsified by the extensive experimental data. Contrary to the Einstein assumptions absolute motion is consistent with relativistic effects, which are caused by actual dynamical effects of absolute motion through the quantum foam, so that it is Lorentzian relativity that is seen to be essentially correct.

Ah! Mathematicians are fantasizing a "quantum foam" to replace the "aether" they previously believed filled the universe! That way they can ignore the reality of "absolute motion" being relative to the speed of light, which is Einstein's theory. A search through arxiv.org for the term "quantum foam" finds 53 papers that use the term, but none also mention the aether (or ether).

I still have a lot of papers to go through, but it might be interesting to see what other arguments the mathematicians in group four have to counter the arguments from their fellow mathematicians in group two.

It now seems more clear than ever that finding a radar gun that can demonstrate Einstein's theories is certainly still the best way to move forward. I wonder how the evangelistic mathematicians would argue against countless people routinely using radar guns to demonstrate something that the mathematicians believe is totally impossible.

Comments for Thursday August 1, 2019, thru Saturday, August 3, 2019:

August 2, 2019 - Yesterday, I tried contacting four different radar gun manufacturers via emails (mostly "fill in the boxes" type emails). I told them I was looking for a radar gun to do scientific experiments, and I asked which models of their guns do not bounce photons off of the gun's radome and thus would give "no reading" if the gun was pointed at the ground ahead from a car going 60 mph. Only one manufacturer responded and told me, "I think you need to find another way to fight your speeding ticket." He clearly misunderstood me and seemed to think I was arguing that a radar gun cannot measure its own speed by bouncing photons off of its radome. I sent an email back to him to try to correct his misunderstanding, but I've received no reply.

It appears that mathematicians may be a plague on radar gun manufacturers, too, and the manufacturers have set up barriers to prevent mathematicians from submitting arguments via emails challenging what the radar guns indicated when they got a traffic ticket. I'm going to have to try contacting the manufacturers by regular mail. Phone calls would only be a last resort, since phone calls require the right time and the right person.

Meanwhile, I'm really enjoying the discussions I'm having on Facebook. There are still plenty of mathematicians trying to dominate the discussions, but you know the others are there, too, because they "like" what you write. Yesterday, I tried starting a new discussion on the Astrophysics and Physics Facebook group, and my post was approved by a moderator at about 9 p.m. last night. When I checked the group this morning, I found that 93 people had reacted to what I had posted.

Then, as I was putting together the above image, more people kept responding, so the numbers kept changing every time I did a screen capture. As of this moment 100 people have responded. 19+48=67 people "liked" what I posted, 19+9=28 people laughed at what I posted, and 5 "loved" what I posted.

I'm not sure what the "18 shares" (as of this moment) indicate, but those would almost certainly indicate positive responses. None of the 7 comments were negative. They were mostly thoughts about why Einstein said, “Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself anymore.”

August 1, 2019 - Last night I finished listening to the 6-hour 23-minute unabridged audio book version of The Glass Key, by Dashiell Hammett.

I wasn't really paying full attention, unfortunately. I kept thinking about Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories and how I might get access to a collection of radar guns or get some information from someone who has such a collection (like a radar gun manufacturer). I came up with some ideas, but I need to find the time to pursue them.

So far, 177 people have viewed my Radar Guns paper on vixra.org and 277 people have viewed it on academia.edu. I've had only one email from a reader. I'm hoping that some reader will have access to a "basic" radar gun and will be curious enough to perform the experiments - and let me know what the results were.

Yesterday I also did a search through Google Scholar for the exact quote "light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body." There were "only" 160 results. But it could take me a month to study just the papers and books which appear might be of interest (one turned out to be a paper of mine). I downloaded about a dozen that definitely need further study.

I see no point in further arguments with mathematicians, particularly the evangelistic mathematicians on sci.physics.relativity. I need to see how "basic" radar guns work. If they work the way I say they work, the mathematicians claim that would be impossible. It would certainly be a way to either end the arguments or get the mathematicians to change to some different argument. They are 100% certain in what they believe. I am only 99% certain about my understanding. But I am looking for experimental evidence to verify or change my understanding. They aren't. They do not feel it is possible for them to be wrong.

Oh yes, The Glass Key wasn't the best Dashiell Hammett novel I've read (or listened to), but it was interesting. Collars that you button onto your shirt were in style in 1930 when the book was written. They're mentioned at least twice in the book. They allowed you to replace a stained collar without replacing the entire shirt. It's one of the things that "dates" the book and takes you back to a different era.

Comments for Sunday July 28, 2019, thru Wednesday, July 31, 2019:

July 30, 2019 - This morning the vixra.org statistics say that 12 people have viewed my Pulsars and Special Relativity paper since I uploaded it two days ago. And in that same time there were 3 new readers of my Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories paper. I had hoped for larger numbers, but, for all I know, those could be terrific numbers.

Meanwhile, on academia.edu., in the past 24 hours there were three new readers of the Radar Guns paper and no new readers of the Pulsars paper. Nothing earth shattering in that.

The arguments on sci.physics.relativity intensified overnight, but it was nearly all just personal attacks. Even the comment that I thought yesterday was "positive" was stated to have been "negative." It demonstrates that we do not speak the same language.

The most interesting thing to happen in the past 24 hours that relates to my papers is the response on Facebook when I wrote about my Pulsar paper. I posted a comment about it yesterday afternoon, and this morning there were 40 reactions:

As you can see, 31 people "liked" what I wrote, 4 "loved" it, and 5 laughed at it. And, of course, the people who posted comments were mostly people who disagreed with what I wrote. If anyone who liked the paper had posted a positive comment, they would probably be viciously attacked just as they would on the sci.physic.relativity group.

That appears to be why the mathematicians are writing the textbooks. No one wants to argue with them. It is like arguing with True Believers. No amount of arguing is going to change their closed minds. They not only believe they are right, they are out to convert the world to their beliefs.

July 29, 2019 - I'm not sure what I was expecting to happen overnight, after I posted my newest paper Pulsars and Special Relativity to both vixra.org and academia.edu yesterday morning, and then mentioned it on sci.physics.relativity, but it wasn't what happened.

First, the number of views of the paper for the past 24 hours on vixra.org was zero. However, at the same time on that same site, there was a viewer comment about the paper. The viewer claimed that I failed to point out that Einstein's First Postulate states that the speed of light must be the same in all frames. That is pointed out in the paper, of course, but my point here is that that viewer must have read the paper, yet the site says there were zero viewers. There were no viewers for any of my other papers, either. Perhaps vixra.org doesn't always run their viewer count update program on Sundays. I'll have to wait to see what the numbers look like tomorrow. As of now, the total number of views for all versions of all of my papers on vixra.org is 2,280. They do not provide that total, and it's the first time I'm manually calculated it.

Secondly, there were only four responses to the comment I posted about the Pulsar paper on the sci.physics.relativity forum. Three were just the usual personal attacks. Example from the troll named "Dono":

Crackpot shit, as usual

I expected a lot more personal attacks and at least two or three mathematical challenges to the statements in the paper. Moreover, one post from Paul B. Anderson seemed positive instead of negative:

This statement in the paper says it all:
"This practice of measuring pulsar pulse rates from
the center of the solar system indirectly confirms
that light arrives at c+v and c-v rates at earth
observatories, since, if the speed of light was
the same for all observers, thus making the pulsar
pulse rate the same for all observers, there would
be no need to convert everything to barycenter counts.
You’d get the same rate regardless of where you were
in earth’s orbit around the sun."

'nuff said!

Lastly, the number of views of the Pulsar paper on academia.edu wasn't what I expected. There were 9 views in the past 24 hours, which isn't bad, but it's less than what I expected. At the same time, however, the number of views of my Radar Gun paper jumped from 254 to 271 overnight. That means there were 17 new readers - 6 of them at 8:57 a.m. this morning and 4 at 8:58 a.m., all from the same university, just as if some professor instructed his students to turn on their laptops and access my paper so they could discuss it. Most of the other views were from Finland. Here is what the overall statistics look like:

So, I am in the top 2% of authors on the site with 627 total views of all of my papers, and my Radar Guns paper is in the top 1%. I do consider that to be, by far, my most important paper. I just wish someone would borrow a "basic" radar gun, do the recommended experiments and show the results on YouTube! Or, better yet, I wish I could think of some way I could do that!

BTW, I just found this illustration of a pulsar:

July 28, 2019 - Yesterday afternoon, I submitted my new paper Pulsars and Special Relativity to vixra.org. I received an email this morning advising me it is now on-line at this link: http://vixra.org/pdf/1907.0548v1.pdf

This morning I also placed that same paper on academia.edu. The paper is now available there at this link: https://www.academia.edu/39951190/Pulsars_and_Special_Relativity

The new paper addresses some of the same issues as my paper Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories, but, unlike that paper, this paper is about how astronomers routinely confirm that light is emitted at c and will arrive at an observer at c+v if the observer is moving toward the emitter at v, and light will arrive at c-v if the observer is moving away from the emitter at v. To mathematicians, that is totally impossible because it requires a "preferred frame of reference," which they believe does not exist. But Einstein said it does exist. He said the speed of light is such a "preferred frame of reference." Since nothing can go faster than the speed of light, all motion can be measured relative to the speed of light.

I've argued endlessly with the mathematicians on the sci.physics.relativity UseNet group about this, but we never discussed the main topic of my new paper: pulsars. I'm curious to see how they will rationalize away the undeniable fact that light from a pulsar is measured to arrive at c+v if the earth is moving toward the pulsar as the earth orbits the sun, and light from that same pulsar is measured to arrive at c-v if the earth is moving away from the pulsar. There is no way to measure the one-way speed of light from the pulsar, of course, but a pulsar sends out pulses at regularly spaced intervals. And those intervals are shorter if the earth is moving toward the pulsar, and the intervals are longer if the earth is moving away from the pulsar. So, while we still cannot measure the one-way speed of light, we can measure differences in the one-way speed of light. And, according to mathematicians, there can be no differences.

I remembered writing about this before, and when I researched it I found that I'd mentioned the subject in my April 5, 2018 comment. Then, a couple days ago, I went searching through Google images for something that I could use or modify that would show a pulsar being viewed from Earth at different times of the year. This was the only image I could find:

It turned out to be from page 16 of the first version of my paper about Einstein's Second Postulate. For some reason I'd cut it out of later versions, probably because what I wrote about it didn't mention pulses arriving at c+v and c-v. Instead, I used estimated differences in pulse timings (+ 30 kps and - 30 kps). The image is now on page 5 of my Pulsar paper.

It will be interesting to see how many views the new paper gets on both sites, but particularly on academia.edu where I can see which countries the views are coming from. And the information is updated throughout the day. Here is what the site shows for the first 3 views during the first 30 minutes that it was on-line:

Pulsar paper views in first 30 minutes

So, the first viewer was at some university in Seattle, the second was someone in Burnaby, British Columbia, which is next to Vancouver, and the third was in Nottingham, Maryland, which is 11 miles northeast of Donald Trump's favorite city: Baltimore. It will be interesting to see what the first day numbers are.

I also started a discussion about the paper on sci.physics.relativity.

And I've also been thinking about my Radar Guns paper. I'm hoping someone who read the paper has access to different kinds of radar guns, because it seems that even "complex" radar guns might give interesting readings if used inside a moving truck (or car or train). I'm really hoping that some individual who read the paper is a child or friend or relative of a police officer and can persuade the officer to demonstrate a radar gun under the conditions defined in my paper.

One radar gun manufacturer told me that the reason their radar gun didn't "work" while moving was because it would add together the target speed and the gun's speed. So, if the gun was moving at 50 mph toward a car approaching at 70 mph, the gun would display the target speed as 120 mph. But what would it show if it was pointed at the rear wall of a box truck going 50 mph? Would it show the speed of the gun: 50 mph? Would it show the speed of the target: 50 mph? Or would it show the combined speed of 100 mph? Any of those answers would be interesting, since mathematicians claim the gun must show a speed of zero.

Comments for Sunday July 21, 2019, thru Saturday, July 27, 2019:

July 25, 2019 - I haven't posted any comments here for a couple days because I've been extremely busy writing a new science paper about how mathematicians misread and misquote Einstein. It won't be as controversial as Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories, but it will fully support that paper. It will be about actual proof that light arrives at a moving observer's location at c+v and c-v, where v is the speed of the observer toward or away from the source of the light. I don't want to say too much about it right now, because I might want to change my mind about something. But, if all goes well, the paper should be on the academia.edu website on Sunday morning. And it may or may not also be on vixra.org. The difference is that when I put something on academia.edu, I put it there. It's there as soon as I upload it. With vixra.org, I have to submit the paper to them so they will put on the site (usually the next day).

Meanwhile, my papers are still getting quite a few readers on both sites. But something else seems to be going on, too. Yesterday and this morning, the daily statistics for this web site showed a slight increase, as seen on the graph below.

The yellow bars show 211 visits on July 23 and 209 visits on July 24. The previous high was 178 visits on July 3.

I would like to think that discussion of my scientific papers is causing the slightly higher number of visitors, but it seems more likely that something else is going on. Here are the July statistics for my anthraxinvestigation.com web site:

July 2019 visitors to
anthraxinvestigation.com

I don't need the white arrow to point out the 1,864 visits the site got yesterday, or the 975 visits the day before. Prior to July 23, the average number of daily visitors to the site was 442. Yesterday, it got more than 4 times that number. And I have no solid reason why. I can only assume there is some very popular TV program going on that is causing people to look up the anthrax case on-line. And it seems that the program is being broadcast in Germany, since other statistics indicate the surge is almost entirely from German web sites. The slight surge in visits to ed-lake.com is probably from people who followed the link in the final December 31, 2014 comment on my anthraxinvestigation.com web site.

I wish I could spend more time investigating it, but I need to get back to work on my new paper.

July 22, 2019 - Hmm. It looks like each morning I'm going to be checking the locations of the readers of my papers on Academia.edu whenever there are new readers overnight. There were 7 new readers of my Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories paper in the past 24 hours. One was in Ontario, Canada, and the other six were in the Ukraine, two in Kiev and four in Kharkiv. The Ukrainians all evidently attend the same university, since the blurred name of the university takes 3 lines and the blurring is identical on all six names.

Meanwhile, I've had an idea for a new paper. It would be similar to Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories, only it would be about a different way to demonstrate that light arrives at c+v when the observer is moving toward the source of the light and at c-v when the observer is moving toward the source of the light. I thought I had already mentioned it in some paper, but I just did a search through all of them for a key word, and none of my papers contain that key word. It appears I only wrote about it on this web site, and the last time I wrote about it was last year.

I'm curious as to what the mathematicians on sci.physics.relativity would think about it. I wonder how they could possibly deny what it clearly demonstrates.

July 21, 2019 - I'm still getting a lot of new readers of my papers, particularly my radar guns paper, and particularly on Academia.edu. Here is what some of this morning's Academia.edu statistics look like:

The number I record on a spreadsheet each morning is the one that currently says "513 Total Views." It's the number of views for all the papers I have on Academia.edu. That number was 282 on July 1. I'm not sure what "top 2%" means, but I presume it means that my papers are getting a lot more readers than most others on Academia.edu. I held the cursor over the "34" in "34 Readers" when I did the screen capture in order to show how doing that causes a pop-up for an "Academia Premium Feature," which means I would have to pay money if I want to see who is bookmarking my papers.

According to Wikipedia, "Academia.edu is a commercial social networking website for academics. The platform can be used to share papers, monitor their impact, and follow the research in a particular field. It was launched in September 2008, with 39 million unique visitors per month as of January 2019 and over 21 million uploaded texts."

So, of the 21 million papers on Academia.edu, mine are in the top 2%?

You can put your papers on the site for free, but if you want to know more than what is shown on the screen-capture above (and on some other free pages), you have to become a "Premium Member," which involves paying a fee. That means someone would be making money off of showing my papers. That upsets a lot of academics, but if it helps get people to read my papers, it's okay with me. I've been putting my papers on Academia.edu since November 10, 2016.

Of course, it also means I constantly get emails from academia.edu with bits of information intended to persuade me to become a Premium Member in order to get more information. An email I received yesterday (July 20) informed me:

Dear Ed,

Someone in the department of Istituto di Nanotecnologia at Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) read your paper this week.

It's telling me that someone in the Institute of Nanotechnology at the Italian National Research Council read my paper about radar guns this week. If I become a Premium Member, I'll find out who it was.

I don't know if it is a coincidence or not, but on the 19th I received an email from a scientist in Italy who wrote that he had read my paper about Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories and:

It is matching my intuitive understanding of light velocity in a medium and so independent from excitation source but not from receiver.
I didn't know it was also the original idea of Einstein and now I think you are right in saying that his conception has been misunderstood and distorted.

He then asked if I had actually performed the experiment described in my paper. I replied that I hadn't, because a basic radar gun costs about $1,000 and, even if I did buy such a gun and performed the experiment, no one would believe it. So, I am looking for someone else to perform the experiment (while I continue to research radar guns to determine which gun would be best to use in experiments).

This morning I noticed that "top 2%" is a link. So, I clicked it and found that it shows me (for free) the locations of people who have been reading my papers. Here are the most recent:

Who's been reading my papers on
Academia.edu

Who's been reading my papers on
Academia.edu

I underlined in red two readers from Italy, one of whom is located at a university whose name takes 2 lines, and that reader has a "Role" at the university. (If I become a Premium Member, presumably the blurred out names will be made visible.) The other Italian reader is from a province in Sicily.

Meanwhile, this is what part of this morning's statistics from vixra.org look like:

So, even though the vixra.org address is the one I've been using when posting to sci.physics.relativity and on this site, my radar guns paper has only received 160 unique-IP downloads there while getting 186 views on Academia.edu. AND, it appears that academia.edu has a lot of viewers at colleges and universities, while I have no idea where the vixra.org readers are located. Hmm. Live and learn.

Comments for Sunday July 14, 2019, thru Saturday, July 20, 2019:

July 19, 2019 - Since I'm mostly just sitting around trying to think of ways to get access to "basic" radar guns to test (or to get someone else to test them), I've also had time to do some reading. This morning, just before lunch, I finished reading the paperback version of Janet Evanovich's very funny Stephanie Plum novel "To The Nines."

It was another thoroughly enjoyable book in the series. (I'm reading them in order.) While Fugitive Apprehension Agent Stephanie Plum doesn't get any of her cars blown up in this book, she does get shot (but not seriously). I don't remember that ever happening before. The book might be called a "screwball comedy," except that Stephanie has a serial killer taunting her. And a lot of people get killed in the book. While Stephanie captures at least two regular bail bond jumpers in the book, the main story is about someone who appears to be about to jump an unusual kind of bail. Stephanie's brother, the owner of the bail bonding company, made national news by posted bond guaranteeing that a man from India who entered the country on a visa would leave before his visa expired. Then, a week before the man was due to leave, he disappeared. So Stephanie Plum has to find him. Most of the humor comes from Stephanie's interactions with her family, her cop boyfriend, her screwball New Jersey neighbors, and some hard as nails regular bounty hunters. I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series.

July 18, 2018 - I just did something I've been meaning to do for weeks: I created a new web page for this site titled Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories. And I added it to the "notes about scientific topics discussed on this web site" that I mention in a box near the top of this web page. So, to get to the new page, if you do not know the direct link, you first have to first go to the "notes" page and then click on the link there that takes you to the "Radar Guns" page.

July 17, 2019 - The mathematicians on the sci.physics.relativity discussion group are still arguing about something I wrote on July 13. I wrote:

A speed that is a PERCENTAGE OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT IS a speed that is RELATIVE TO THE SPEED OF LIGHT.

Last night, the mathematician named "Tom" wrote:

No, it isn't. This is physics, and the word "relative" has a very
specific meaning, which is not this.

Is 1/2 somehow "relative to 1" or "relative to 2" or "relative to 3" or
... -- your assertion simply does not make sense.

At best this is a PUN on "relative", which destroys your attempts to use it in place of "relative to the inertial frame in which the radar gun is at rest" -- that is a QUITE DIFFERENT meaning of "relative" than the wishy-washy one you made up (and which nobody else ever uses).

        If "relative to the speed of light" were correct, why do
        you suppose that no physicist ever uses it???? (I suppose
        that some idiots and crackpots might use it.)

So, this morning I decided to find out if physicists use the term "relative to the speed of light." I began by doing a Google search for that exact term. I was informed that the term is used over 5 million times on the Internet, but the vast majority are just the same material used in different places. Looking through the links, I found a Wikipedia web page that says,

β in special relativity is the velocity, v, of an object relative to the speed of light, c: β = v/c. ... β is dimensionless and equal to the velocity in natural units. Any expression which involves v, like the Lorentz factor, can be rewritten using β instead.

So, in physics, the Beta symbol (β) means "the velocity of an object relative to the speed of light"! It appears that physicists commonly use the term (and the Beta symbol) but mathematicians like Tom may not.

On the physicsclassroom.com web site I found this:

One indicator of the optical density of a material is the index of refraction value of the material. Index of refraction values (represented by the symbol n) are numerical index values that are expressed relative to the speed of light in a vacuum. The index of refraction value of a material is a number that indicates the number of times slower that a light wave would be in that material than it is in a vacuum.

So, there is another symbol (n) which also has the meaning "relative to the speed of light."

Searching further, I found a scientific paper titled "The Beta Ratio in Special Relativity." This is the first sentence in the Abstract:

The Beta ratio in special relativity [1] is commonly expressed as β = v/c where v is the velocity between two bodies, and c is the speed of light.

Reference [1], of course is Einstein's 1905 paper about Special Relativity.

There were a lot more mentions of the term, but I next did a search for "relative to the speed of light" using Google Scholar and got 1,620 results. One arxiv.org paper titled "Measurement of the Group Velocity of Light in Sea Water at the ANTARES Site" seems to have nearly a hundred authors and contains this sentence on page 4:

In this, β is the velocity of the particle relative to the speed of light in vacuum.

And, of course, there are 1,619 more documents using the term.

Could it be that mathematicians just use the symbols without any understanding of what the symbols actually mean? That's the only way Tom's statement makes sense.

July 16, 2019 - Yesterday's discovery of a bunch of jokes about mathematicians spurred me on to look for more. While an Internet search found a lot of mediocre jokes, I also found two quotations that are worth repeating:

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there. - Charles R Darwin

The Goethe quote seems to be everywhere on the Internet, but no one provides a source for it, i.e., they do not name a document written by Goethe that contains the quote.

The Darwin quote also seems to be everywhere on the Internet with no one providing a source for it. One web page said it was quoted in a book titled "PI in the Sky: Counting, Thinking, and Being" by John D. Barrow, but the book just uses the Darwin quote to start a chapter and doesn't state where it came from. However, the book has another interesting quote right after the Darwin quote:

I knew a mathematician who said, "I do not know as much as God, but I know as much as God did at my age." - Milton Shulman

PI in the Sky looks like a very interesting book, but when will I ever find time to read it?

The quote I found yesterday which said, "physicists tell mathematician jokes" spurred me on to search for physicists vs mathematician references. I found a web page titled "Even physicists are 'afraid' of mathematics." It says,

Physicists avoid highly mathematical work despite being trained in advanced mathematics, new research suggests.

The study, published in the New Journal of Physics, shows that physicists pay less attention to theories that are crammed with mathematical details. This suggests there are real and widespread barriers to communicating mathematical work, and that this is not because of poor training in mathematical skills, or because there is a social stigma about doing well in mathematics.

One can see from all the jokes about mathematicians where the "social stigma" comes from. Those who do well in mathematics seem unable to discuss anything except in mathematical terms, and they view anyone who attempts to discuss physics without using mathematics as being of inferior intellect and in need of additional schooling in mathematics.

That is probably typified by a guy named "Tom" on the sci.physics.relativity UseNet group who yesterday responded to some comments of mine from days before:

Me: I have repeatedly stated that a radar gun measures speeds relative to the local speed of light.

Tom: But that is impossible. No radar gun, or anything else, does that.

Me: That is EXACTLY what DOPPLER radar guns do.

Tom: Only in your personal FANTASY world.

In the real world, the one in which such radar guns exist, they emit a radar wave [@] of frequency f1, and receive a reflected wave from the target with frequency f2. They determine the target's speed RELATIVE TO THE RADAR GUN by heterodyning the two signals to get f2-f1 and applying the formula for Doppler shift. The speed of light has nothing to do with it [#]. The ground also has nothing to do with it (unless something fixed to the ground is the target).

[@] Yes, WAVE. Your attempts to describe this in terms of "photons" are ludicrous.

[#] The Doppler-shift formula depends on c, the symmetry speed of relativity. This is different from, but numerically equal to, the (vacuum) speed of light.

If I quote a NASA source where a single photon is used to explain how a police radar gun works, Tom just says they are "dumbing down" what really happens, because ordinary people are just too dumb to comprehend reality. And since the "dumbing down" version says just the opposite of what is know to Tom to be true, NASA is actually LYING.

If I quote Richard Feynman, who said,

"I want to emphasize that light comes in this form - particles. It is very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you who have gone to school, where you were probably told something about light behaving like waves. I'm telling you the way it does behave - like particles."

Tom will just laugh and argue that Feynman wasn't talking about radar, or Feynman clearly knew nothing about radar, because radar emits waves, not photons. And it becomes another opinion versus opinion argument which only ends when the non-mathematician gets tired of arguing with the mathematician.

I really really need to find some way to get others to perform experiments with radar guns. Solid experiments may not change the minds of any mathematicians, but it should relegate their beliefs to be something to write jokes about.

July 15, 2019 - After I finished writing and posting yesterday's "Sunday comment," I felt like just relaxing and reading a book. But, at the same time, my mind was still looking for ways to get someone to use a "basic" radar gun to demonstrate that such a gun measures motion relative to the speed of light, which is interpreted to mean relative to the gun or to a target. I cannot read a book if my mind is on other things, but I could try listening to an audio book, since the audio book will continue to play whether I'm paying attention or not. So that is what I did. I listened to the 5-hour 58-minute unabridged audio book version of Dashiell Hammett's crime novel "The Thin Man."

The story takes place in 1933, during Prohibition. So, it begins in a "speakeasy." I have the 1934 William Powell-Myrna Loy movie on DVD, and I've probably watched it and TV showings of it at least 6 or 7 times, probably more. I recall the movie also begins in a drinking establishment, but since Prohibition ended in 1933, I remember it as being a very elegant night club, not a "speakeasy." The book also mentions the Lindbergh kidnapping, which happened in 1932. I'm certain that wasn't mentioned in the movie, but I'll watch it again in a day or two just to make certain. (My records show the last time I watched it was on May 6, 2017.)

I recalled reading a Dashiell Hammett novel some time ago and writing a comment about it. Checking on it, I found that it was "Red Harvest," which I finished on January 24, 2016.

Anyway, I finished listening to The Thin Man around 9:30 last night. The fact that my mind kept drifting to scientific problems wasn't helped by the fact that the book has a LOT of different characters. You really need to pay attention if you want to remember who all the characters are and how they inter-relate. It's easier when you see the names in print. Just hearing a name doesn't usually make it memorable, at least not for me.

So, while the book wasn't exactly fascinating and absorbing, it was occasionally funny and a good way to pass the time. This morning I put Return of the Thin Man into my MP3 player. (I'm third in line waiting to borrow the one audio book copy of The Maltese Falcon that my library has available.)

Hmm. Just now, as I was returning from my kitchen with a fresh cup of coffee, I happened to notice a paperback book in my own library and I wondered what it had to say about mathematicians. It has a lot to say. The first quote worth mentioning is on page 10 and says,

In any academic setting, the scientists get along like a great big happy family' — with lots of bickering. Engineers tell physicist jokes,
physicists tell mathematician jokes, mathematicians tell engineer jokes, and it all goes around and around.

That's interesting. The book turns out to have a lot of mathematician jokes. Another quote from page 15 and 16 says,

A mathematician became captain of the kind of ship that actually sinks on purpose — a submarine. His briefing speech to new sailors went as follows:
“ I have developed a simple method that you would do well to learn.
Every day, count the number of times the submarine has dived since
you boarded. Add to this the number of times it has surfaced. If
the sum you arrive at is not an even number— don’t open the
hatches!”

Here's one from page 50:

“I don’t think my directional signal is working,” a physicist complained to her friend the mathematician. “Would you mind getting out of the car to take a look?”
The mathematician walked over behind the car. “Okay, turn the
blinker on. Yes, it’s working; now it isn’t, now it is, now it isn’t . . .”

This one from page 87 is particularly relevant to the discussions I had with the mathematicians on UseNet:

“And the result follows here quite obviously,” the cyberneticist
Norbert Wiener (1894—1964) once told a class.
One student timidly raised his hand and said, Professor Wiener,
I’m afraid I don’t see it.”
“Very well,” said Wiener, “ Perhaps I can derive it by some other
method.” He gazed into space for a moment, then nodded. “Yes,” he
said, “by a completely different method precisely the same result.”
He beamed at the student.
“But, Professor Wiener, I still don’t understand.”
Wiener looked stern. “Young man, if you can’ t understand such
a simple matter as this, having seen it derived by two quite different
methods, I am afraid you will never be a mathematician!”

I could go on and on, but I'll just quote one more. It's from page 153:

According to Fields Medalist Enrico Bombieri, there are three kinds of mathematicians: those who can count, and those who can’t.

Finding those quotes was an interesting way to spend an hour, but it doesn't really help me solve the problem I have with mathematicians.

July 14, 2019 - Yesterday afternoon, I finally put an end to the arguments on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum, even though the arguments were helping me to understand how the mathematicians there can believe the crazy things they believe. It became clear that they believe what they believe because in college they were told to memorize and accept what they were told or they would flunk the course. They were told to believe it even if it did not make sense. But that also means they do not understand it, they just believe it. To truly understand something, it must make sense to you.

I've been trying to make sense of what the mathematicians believe. The only way it makes sense is if they just believe it because it is what they were taught in school, and they weren't allowed to question it. (Their attitude is also like a bunch of high-school know-it-alls who feel they understand everything about everything and can laugh at anyone who does not "know" what they "know.")

The problem then becomes: How can you convince all these people that they believe nonsense? You probably can't. Most people seem to believe what they want to believe. I spent more than a decade arguing with people who had conspiracy theories or alternative theories about who committed the anthrax mail attacks in 2001. I don't think I ever changed anyone's mind. Facts mean nothing to someone who thinks he knows more than everyone else.

But, experiments are different. There were no experiments which could be performed to show conspiracy theorists they were wrong about the anthrax attacks, but there definitely are experiments which can be performed to verify Einstein's theories. And in the past 100 years a great many such experiments have been performed, mostly to confirm time dilation.

That's why I'm still looking to see radar gun experiments performed to demonstrate that many of the beliefs held by mathematicians are totally wrong.

But who is going to do it? The impression I'm getting is that no one wants to argue with the mathematicians. People will perform experiments, create web sites or write papers that confirm Einstein's theories, but they NEVER seem to mention that they are also showing that many college text books and the mathematicians who wrote them are wrong.

When you point to an experiment that shows the college textbooks are wrong, mathematicians will argue that the experimenters are incompetent or that they were "dumbing down" their findings for the lowly common people who cannot comprehend physics the way mathematicians do. That was the response I got when talking about the NIST time dilation experiment, about using atomic clocks to measure the height of a mountain, about the Hafele-Keating experiment, and about every other time dilation experiment. Those experimenters just performed their experiments and let the world ponder them. They said the experiments confirmed Einstein's theories, but they didn't say anything about who or what the experiments disproved.

If my understandings are correct, what radar gun experiments would disprove is the most cherished belief held by mathematicians, the belief that: All motion is relative, which means that if Frame-A is moving at velocity v relative to Frame-B, Frame-B is also moving at velocity v relative to Frame-A. Neither Frame-A nor Frame-B is a "preferred" frame of reference.

Prior to Einstein, physicist-mathematicians imagined that an invisible aether filled the entire universe, the aether was completely stationary, and thus all other movements in the universe could be measured relative to the stationary aether. And light traveled as waves through the aether, just like waves through water.

Mathematicians accept that Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity showed that there is no stationary aether filling the universe. They interpret that as meaning that there is no way to measure motion in our universe except as being relative to another object, and each object measures its motion relative to the other object. That means there is no preferred frame of reference for motion.

It is the basis for the #1 dumbest belief in physics.

I have been arguing that Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity says that the speed of light can be used as a "preferred" frame of reference. Einstein said it replaced the imaginary aether that mathematicians previously used as a "preferred" frame of reference from which all movements are measured. He even provided a mathematical formula for calculating speeds relative to the speed of light:

The speed of light is 299,792 kilometers per second (kps). Anyone who doesn't want to do the math in his head or on a sheet of paper can compute time dilation by using that formula on a web page HERE. While a person measuring dilated time (t') records the passing of one second as he travels at 99.498833956657% of the speed of light (i.e., 298,290 kilometers per second), a person (t) who is traveling 0% of the speed of light will record the passing of 10 seconds.

Instead of being relative to an object, speeds can be measured as a percentage of the speed of light. Such speeds are obviously also relative to the speed of light.

But the mathematicians cannot accept that. Here is what the troll named "Odd Bodkin" wrote overnight:

Ed Lake wants to think that “relative speed” as a physics term means the fraction of one speed compared to another speed.

Not knowing what any physics term means he feels free to just guess and then insist with high confidence that his blind guess is of course right. And he sees no point in learning what the physics term REALLY means.

And here is what another troll named "rotchm" wrote a few minutes later:

You are misusing, misunderstanding, the meaning of 'relative'. The word 'relative' has many different meanings (did you know that?). You Are totally mixing them up. Its like you are saying that 30 mph cant be relative because your relatives are humans (kin, people, family) and 30 is not a human but a number. You are using the word 'relative' as "my family". That is NOT the meaning of 'relative' as we are using it in physics. You have an EXTREMELY SEVERE reading & comprehension deficiency.

And even though the whole two-week-long discussion (currently consisting of 239 posts) was about using radar guns to measure velocities, this morning "Paparios" argued:

My car speedometer tells me my car is moving at 36 km/hr (10 meters/second) with respect to the ground. That 10 m/s speed is equal to 0.01 km/s and is equal to 3.3333x10^-8c.

Again you are saying that my car moving at 36 km/hr means its speed is being measured relative to the speed of light.

Do you not see the magnitude of your ignorance?

Responding to those three or any one of the others would be an opinion versus opinion argument, which are a total waste of time. It is Einstein, not me, who stated that speeds can be measured as relative to the speed of light. But, the mathematicians won't believe that unless I can provide a direct quote where Einstein wrote IN ENGLISH the exact words "speeds can be measured as relative to the speed of light."

And, even then, they would argue that it may be what Einstein wrote, but it isn't what Einstein meant.

I'm done arguing with those mathematicians. Instead, I'm going to focus on finding some way to demonstrate what a "basic" radar will show when it is used on a moving vehicle and is pointed at a parked car, and what the same gun will show when used inside a moving vehicle and the gun is pointed at the front and rear walls (or dashboard and back seats).

If it is truly a "basic" radar gun and it proves me wrong, then I'll admit it and say nothing more about the subject. If I'm proved right, however, I'll be mentioning every experiment which says I'm right and how those experiments also show that the mathematicians and their text books are wrong.