Ed Lake's web page

Comments for Sunday, December 15, 2019, thru Saturday, Dec. 21, 2019:

December 15, 2019 - While I'm not currently arguing with anyone on the sci.physics.relativity UseNet forum, I still check it every day to see what others might be talking about that would be of interest to me. On Friday, someone started a new argument thread titled "Feynman on mathematical modeling vs understanding physics." The first post to the thread included a quote from one of Professor Richard Feynman's lectures that I don't recall ever seeing before:

Mathematicians, or people who have very mathematical minds, are often led astray when “studying” physics because they lose sight of the physics. They say: “Look, these differential equations — the Maxwell equations—are all there is to electrodynamics; it is admitted by the physicists that there is nothing which is not contained in the equations. The equations are complicated, but after all they are only mathematical equations and if I understand them mathematically inside out, I will understand the physics inside out.” Only it doesn’t work that way. Mathematicians who study physics with that point of view—and there have been many of them—usually make little contribution to physics and, in fact, little to mathematics. They fail because the actual physical situations in the real world are so complicated that it is necessary to have a much broader understanding of the equations.

The lecture is titled "Differential Calculus of Vector Fields" which probably explains why I never paid much attention to it before. But now I see it contains a lot of very interesting information. Here's another key quote:

What it means really to understand an equation—that is, in more than a strictly mathematical sense—was described by Dirac. He said: “I understand what an equation means if I have a way of figuring out the characteristics of its solution without actually solving it.” So if we have a way of knowing what should happen in given circumstances without actually solving the equations, then we “understand” the equations, as applied to these circumstances. A physical understanding is a completely unmathematical, imprecise, and inexact thing, but absolutely necessary for a physicist.

That's the way I generally look at physics. I begin by visualizing how things must work in order to get the results we see. Since I do not believe in ghosts and goblins, and I believe in the "laws of nature," I assume things will work out mathematically, but I don't do the math. Measuring speeds relative to the speed of light to calculate time dilation, for example. If I need to do the math, I use an on-line calculator. I fully accept the mathematical results, but, inexplicably, mathematicians do not. Or, if they do, they add some additional reasoning to the answer that changes everything. They simply do not accept that time slows down for moving objects, and the faster the object moves, the slower times passes for that object. To mathematicians, time ticks at the same rate everywhere. And they refuse to even discuss the physics behind the calculations. They fantasize ways the same mathematical results can be obtained without slowing down time. Since experiments mean nothing to them, the fact that their fantasies cannot be confirmed experimentally is your problem, not theirs.

My very first scientific paper was titled "Time Dilation Re-Visualized." I uploaded it to vixra.org on May 31, 2015. Almost a year later, on February 22, 2016, I created a new paper titled "What is Time?" which explored an idea from the first paper in greater detail. For some reason I cannot fathom, physicists do not seem to address the question of "What is Time?" Or, if they do, they confuse time with memory or with events. Things become much much much simpler if "time" is viewed simply as the process by which things age and decay and pulsate. Time Dilation slows down those processes and everything resulting from them. The fact that we have memories which allow us to record events doesn't change how time works. Discussions about "The Arrow of Time" and whether we can travel backwards in time are interesting science-fiction subjects, but they have nothing to do with reality. Time dilation allows the slowing down of time for a specific object, but only that object is affected. The rest of the universe continues to work "normally." Things would be so much simpler if that simple fact was better and more widely understood. The same with light. A kazillion complications are eliminated when you stop thinking of light as waves and realize it is just a photon with oscillating electric and magnetic fields.

The only time you need mathematics is when you need to design an experiment to confirm an idea that you have already worked out logically. Hafele and Keating, as an example, logically determined how time dilation would work if they flew atomic clocks in different directions around the world. However, simply doing the experiments would have produced nothing but arguments. By doing calculations ahead of time, showing what the result of the experiments were expected to be, and then doing the experiment to produce the expected results, you may not eliminate all arguments, but you have given true scientists and physicists a lot to think about and support, while putting the inevitable grumbling nay-Sayers on the defensive.

While I haven't been posting to the sci.physics.relativity UseNet forum, I have been occasionally posting to the Astrophysics and Physics Facebook group. The problem there is that discussions never last very long. If you make a good point, you might get one or two people indicating that they "like" what you wrote, but it's rare to see a discussion go on for more than 2 or 3 posts between individuals. A conversation I joined three days ago is a good example. On December 11, Winstón Wólf asked "At What Speed is the Universe Expanding?" I replied,

My guess is that it is expanding at different rates. The farther you are from the point of the Big Bang, the faster you are moving away from that point. The closer you are to the point of the Big Bang, the slower everything around you is expanding. And, meanwhile, everything that is equidistant from the point of the Big Bang is moving apart even slower.

I included a link to a Nature magazine article that asked the same question. Then this conversation began:

Michal Karsznia: is cosmological constant a phenomenom answering this question? Universe expand everywhere equally. If what you are saying was t true, we could determine where center is. As we all know this is not the case. Scientifically speaking i am correct when i say each one of you reading this, is the actual center of the universe

Ed Lake: I would say that what we can measure in the OBSERVABLE universe could be very different if we could see the entire Big Bang universe.

Michal Karsznia: that is of course true as well. But i am still pretty sure that given all of observable universe we could determine that majority of its mass is slightly repelling from certain point in space. We do not see any evidence of it happening. Tho its interesting, we can see clearly that galaxies near end are influenced by much bigger clusters actually outside of visible universe

Ed Lake: I keep wondering if the blue shifted group of about 100 galaxies around Andromeda is moving toward us or are those galaxies just ahead of us as we all expand with the Big Bang. Why are all the blue shifted galaxies in the same general area? What is in the opposite direction from those blue shifted galaxies?

Daniel P. Leo: there is no origin point of expansion... All points have all ways existed since the big bang... All points are expanding from each other

Ed Lake: That is something that only makes sense to mathematicians. In reality, the Big Bang theory SAYS that everything was once in the same place and expanded outward from there. So, the Big Bang STARTED at some location in space. WHILE expanding, of course, everything is also moving away from everything else.

Daniel P. Leo: from my understanding essentially all points existed at the origin, and all points are expanding away from each other... space is expanding and as all space is the origin there is no center to the expansion. So there really isn't an origin point in space so much as an origin in time

Ed Lake: But that is totally MATHEMATICAL reasoning. It is about POINTS which do not exist. In reality, all the MATERIAL in the universe MUST have existed in some form prior to the Big Bang. Many people figure that form must have been some kind of super-hot, super-dense sphere. So, there would be NO space between the material in that sphere.

Then, for some reason, the pressure became too great and the sphere began expanding. It took 500 million years for the material in that original sphere to condense into the first stars and for the lights to turn on.

The material in that sphere must have expanded into "space." To argue that there was no space to expand into makes NO SENSE.

And that was evidently the end of the discussion, since no one has posted anything since then (20 hours ago as of this moment). But the discussion was still on my mind when I awoke this morning. All I could think about was the fact that mathematicians see imaginary "points" instead of physical objects. The universe began with a "point" they call a "singularity," not with a highly compressed body of some basic material like quarks. Then, through a mysterious process generally known as "magic," the "point" produced a second "point." And, when it did, it also magically created space between the two "points." Then more "points" were magically produced with more "space" between them.

To ask what is outside of the "points" is to ask a meaningless question. There is nothing outside of the points. What is the difference between "space" and "nothing"? The answer is probably "Space is space and nothing is nothing." It's just as was written in the book "The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics" by Gary Zukav. When you talk with mathematicians, you are talking with a believer in mysticism. Only math is real, all else is just an illusion. There are no "objects," there are only "points" to use in an equation.

So, the collection of "points" known as Ed Lake is going to end this collection of "points" known as a comment, and he's going to sit down on a collection of "points" known as a couch, and he's going to finish listening to a collection of "points" known as an "audio book." He's doing it to make a "point" that: Life is meant to be enjoyed, not calculated.

Comments for Sunday, December 8, 2019, thru Saturday, Dec. 14, 2019:

December 12, 2019 - Yesterday afternoon, while unable to decide whether to work on my sci-fi novel or a scientific paper, I sat down on my couch and finished reading a library book on my Kindle. The book was "Lights, Camera ... Travel!" by Alec Baldwin, Brooke Shields and a bunch of other movie and TV people.

The book is a collection of about 34 brief essays written by people in the entertainment business about strange and exotic places they have visited. Most of the trips were made as part of doing their work, but not all of them. The 310 day trip described by Anthony Edwards (from the TV series "ER") was just a family vacation. He bought a plane, hired two pilots and two teachers to teach his kids while they were traveling, and they flew to just about every exotic location you can think of, from Machu Piccu to the Taj Mahal, crossing the equator 6 times. And each time they crossed the equator, the pilot would say,

"Ladies and gentlemen, please sit down as we are approaching the equator. We must be prepared for the bump." The kids’ eyes would get a little wider and sure enough the plane would bounce up and down (lightly). There would be a little cheer and then he would look back at us with a big grin and comment on the mysteries of nature.

Brook Shield's trip was a magazine shoot that required her to travel to the Arctic and build an igloo. Others went to places a different as Angkor Wat in Cambodia is from Whitby, England. Thailand, India, Romania, Turkey and many other places were also visited. Alec Baldwin's essay is about living in the Los Angeles area while he was a struggling actor looking for work.

I'm not sure I can recommend the book, but if you are interested in travel literature (and I am) it is certainly different from most such books.

December 11, 2019 - Groan! I'm in one of my periods of indecision. Should I work on self-publishing my sci-fi novel, or should I work on my unfinished scientific papers? So, I'm doing neither. I awoke this morning thinking I should find scientists on-line who share my understanding that light consists of photons and that light photons will hit an observer at c + or - v, where v is the speed of the observer. The best way to do that is the research scientific papers about light. But, what I did instead this morning was to respond to several posts to the Astrophysics and Physics Facebook group.

The first answer I posted was to the question "At what speed is the universe expanding?" I posted a link to a Nature magazine article titled "How fast is the universe expanding? Cosmologists just got more confused," and then I stated that "My guess is that it is expanding at different rates. The farther you are from the point of the Big Bang, the faster you are moving away from that point. The closer you are to the point of the Big Bang, the slower everything around you is expanding. And, meanwhile, everything that is equidistant from the point of the Big Bang is moving apart even slower." The first response was that that opinion conflicts with the "cosmological constant." I ignored that response and just brought up the question of why all 100 blue-shifted galaxies are in the same general area in the sky.

Then I responded to another question where someone wanted to know what you would see if you went to the edge of the universe and looked outward. I responded by telling him it would be different if you went to the edge of the "observable universe" or to the edge of the Big Bang universe. At the first location you'd just see more stars and galaxies. At the second you'd probably just see darkness.

The final question I answered was "Why does time stop when an object reaches the speed of light?" My response was:

Time works like a percentage of the speed of light. If a stationary object can be found in the universe, that object is moving at zero percent of the speed of light and a "second" has its maximum value. If an object moves at 100 percent of the speed of light, time is stopped and a second has its minimum value of zero. Anywhere in between, you can use this calculator: https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1224059993

Responding to those questions and writing this comment about it has consumed my entire morning and brought me to lunch time. Now I just need to find a way to waste time all afternoon.

December 9, 2019 - Yesterday evening, I got tired of watching TV and decided to listen to some podcasts I had on my MP3 player instead. First I listened to a Sean Carroll interview with a science fiction writer named Cory Doctorow on Carroll's "Mindscape" podcast. It was a 1 hour 14 minute interview that stunned me more than once as they discussed big corporations taking over everything. This morning I checked the Mindscape web site and verified my recollection that it includes transcripts of the interviews. Here's the first revelation by Cory Doctorow that stunned me:

So there’s one company that makes all the eyewear you’ve ever heard of. It’s called Luxottica. They bought every single eyewear brand. First they bought all the major retailers, Sunglass Hut and Sears Optical and Target Optical and LensCrafters, and then they refuse to carry any eyewear brand that wouldn’t sell to them until they drove them to their knees and picked them up for pennies. And literally, if you’ve got any of the major eyewear brands, it’s Luxottica, and if you bought from any of the major retailers, it’s Luxottica, and if your lenses came from SLR, which is the largest lens manufacturer in the world, they came from Luxottica, and if your eye insurer is EyeMed, which is the largest insurer in America, it’s also Luxottica. And they’ve raised prices a 1000% in 10 years.

I researched Luxottica on the Internet and my findings somewhat confirmed what was said on the podcast. I'd never heard of Luxottica before last night.

Here's another comment from the podcast:

But there used to be 30 wrestling leagues, and now there’s one, and it’s owned by this billionaire, Trump donor, called Vince McMahon. He reclassified all the wrestlers as contractors, took away their health care, they’re dropping down in their 50s, and GoFundMe is full of famous wrestlers begging their fans for money to pay their medical bills. So if you’re a wrestling fan, you’re with the eyewear people.

I'd never heard about that, either. Another comment:

Now, there are three talent agencies left in Hollywood, and all of the screenwriters fired all of their agents because the talent agencies are now all owned by private equity funds, and those private equity funds have decided that to increase their return on investment that the agencies are gonna start doing what’s called packaging, where they package a writer and a director and a whatever and they collect a fee from the studio for that package, and in exchange they agree to take less money for each of their clients. And so every screenwriter in Hollywood is there for you to fight for wrestlers and eyewear.

That's something else I never heard of, or, if I had, it wasn't described that way. I had an agent in Hollywood years ago, and he tried selling some of my screenplays. So, this hits home. When I researched the topic, I found it was generally true. I found a New Yorker article from June of this year titled "Hollywood Writers Attempt Life without Agents." I also found a New York Times article on the same subject. It isn't a "strike." The writers fired their agents. And, I have no idea what the current situation is.

After the Cory Doctorow podcast ended, I started listening to Sean Carroll's podcast interview with Physics Professor Katie Mack. I only listened to about twenty minutes of the interview before it was bedtime and I turned off my MP3 player. But those 20 minutes contained a lot of interesting points, interesting to me because they agree with what I've been saying. Here's one quote from Professor Mack:

So if you talk to somebody on the street, and say, “What was the Big Bang?” People will say, “Well, it was an explosion where the universe started as a single point and then exploded out and that was the Big Bang.” And if you talk to a physicist usually what we’re talking about is something really different called the Hot Big Bang, where what we’re talking about is just simply the fact that the universe was hotter and denser and smaller in the past. And that just comes from the fact that the universe is expanding now and cooling and so if we go back in time we can dial that back and we see that the universe was hotter and denser and more compressed in some way. And that is completely incontrovertible, like that…

and here is some of the conversation that followed:

Mack: Yeah, the fact that the universe was hotter and denser and in some sense smaller in the past, and we can actually see it. And one of the things I think is kind of neat is the TV show, The Big Bang Theory, the beginning of the theme song is actually a really nice encapsulation of the Big Bang Theory. The whole universe was in a hot dense state nearly 14 billion years ago expansion started, just stop there that’s the Big Bang theory, that’s it.

Carroll: It’s exactly right, it didn’t use the word explode…

Mack: Nope.

Carroll: It didn’t say there was a point.

Mack: No, didn’t say there was a point, no singularity, and there may have been a singularity, it’s possible that before that fiery state that the universe was infinitely dense. It’s possible that we get back to that point, but there’s that fiery state was… We see the part that was about 380,000 years after the beginning. In the 380,000 years a lot happened and we don’t know at the very beginning of that if there was a singularity, we think probably there was this rapid expansion, inflation and what happened before that super rapid expansion in the first billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, we don’t really know.

I do not like the mathematicians' fantasies about a "singularity." My personal thinking has been that before the Big Bang there was an incredibly dense body of matter of unknown size that did not "explode." Something happened that caused it to decompress. All the compressed particles in that incredibly dense body decompressed. So, it was more like opening a "snake in a can" toy.

The compressed sub-atomic particles simply decompressed. There was no "explosion," just countless "snakes" pushing against one another to escape the "can." An explosion requires some separate force to hurl things outward. Decompression is just about each object expanding by itself, pushing against other objects, causing the topmost particles in a compressed mass to travel faster than the particles that were lower down in the compressed mass. Then later, gravity began collecting the particles into clusters which became bigger and bigger until stars formed and the lights of the universe were turned on. That's as far back in time that we can see when we look out into space -- back to the point where the lights turned on.

It kind of makes me want to get back to work on my paper about The Big Bang and Einstein's Second Postulate. But maybe I'll just read a book instead. Or listen to the rest of that podcast. I dunno.

December 8, 2019 - I'm still thinking a lot about radar guns and Einstein's Second Postulate. I've got two uncompleted papers that I would really like to complete. But, as I've said countless times, one of the papers really requires that I get access to a "Type-1" radar gun like the Stalker II SDR. And I'm not going to pay $1,600 to buy one just so I can spend 15 minutes confirming how it works.

I keep thinking about how illogical most descriptions of the inner workings of radar guns are. The descriptions make things horrendously complex that, in reality, are truly very simple - once you understand that they are not impossible. The key example is how a radar gun measures its own speed. I say it is a simple matter for a radar gun to internally measure its own speed relative to the speed of light by bouncing photons off of something embedded in the gun's radome.

radar gun with internal measurement of
speed

Most people, however, think this is impossible. Even though the gun is moving, and photons emitted at the back end have to catch up with the front end, most people believe you cannot measure the gun's speed unless the front end (the radome) actually moves away from the back end. So, they believe the gun actually measures two speeds from two "targets" and, even when moving, the radar gun somehow magically knows which "target" is the ground and which "target" is a speeding car. How? They don't say. The subject is avoided.

The image above (from the video HERE) shows the radar gun measuring its own speed and showing it as 31 miles per hour in the display window on the right.

The image below (from the same video) shows the same radar gun measuring a target's speed as 67 mph and showing it in the display window on the left.

radar gun showing target speed

How does the gun know if it is moving or not? It's a simple matter if the gun can measure its own speed internally, but how is it done when the gun can only measure the speed of external objects? How does the gun know where to put the measured speed? Does it go in the window on the right or on the left?

I was a computer programmer for many years, before becoming an analyst and a programming manager. How would I program the gun to determine its own speed? Do I program the gun to assume that the ground is the biggest "target" that sends back the most photons? Would that be true if the gun was pointed at the back of a truck that was 40 feet away? The calculator HERE says that at 40 feet, with a beam width of 12 degrees, most photons will hit the back of the truck within a circle that is just 8 feet wide. And a 53 foot long semi-truck is 8½ feet wide. Would the gun put the truck's speed on the "patrol speed" display? If not, why not?

Things would be simplified so much if I could just borrow a "Type-1" radar gun for a half hour! And then I could complete my paper about radar gun experiments.

The other unfinished paper is about the Big Bang and Einstein's Second Postulate. There's nothing preventing me from working on and completing that paper -- except that I want to finish the experiment paper first. Sigh.

Meanwhile, on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum, I saw someone who calls himself "Starmaker" had started a new thread titled "Who Built the Pyramids?" Curious, I read the first comment and found it was about a Fox News Story titled "Pyramid-shaped 427-foot asteroid set to whiz past Earth." The Starmaker's comment included this statement:

I don't know who built the pyramids but it had to be from outer space. Martians maybe...

Huh? The first comment was followed by a discussion that made even less sense. So, I posted a comment advising them that the pyramids were make from stone blocks extracted from a quarry not far away. Asteroid's are not made from stone blocks.

They ignored my comment and continued exchanging posts that made no sense. I did a bit more research and found that the asteroid was NOT "pyramid-shaped." It was "pyramid-size," which meant it was probably boulder shaped and just happened to be about 420 feet in diameter, which is the height of the Great Pyramid. I posted another comment advising them of what I'd found. They just ignored it and continued their nonsensical ramblings. I gave up.

Meanwhile, I've finished converting my sci-fi novel into 5½ inch by 8½ inch book format. And I corrected all the typos I could find. The next step is to read it one more time to correct some of the problems I have with how the book describes locations. A lot of the book happens in a truck that travels from Chicago to Washington DC, and it's important to know where the truck is in relation to other people who are also moving toward Washington. The way it is written now is too confusing, I think. I use highway numbers too much instead of .... instead of .... whatever I can use instead of highway numbers.

Yesterday, I decided I wanted to have a 5½ inch by 8½ inch "Trade" novel that I could use as a guide for formatting and printing my own sci-fi novel. So, I visited a nearby store that sells used books and bought a sci-fi fantasy novel that looked interesting for 99 cents. When I got home I realized it uses smaller print than I plan to use, but that's not critical.

Then I also noticed that it is autographed by the author! Not only that, but there was a somewhat intimate inscription with the signature. I didn't recognize the author's name.

When I checked the publisher, I found it was published by Anomalos Publishing in Crane, Missouri. I had never heard of them. So, of course, I had to do some research. I found they were mentioned in a lot of places, but I couldn't find a web site for them. The Better Business Bureau's web site says Anomalos Publishing has been in business for 20 years, but they have no other information about them. Bizarrely, they show a link http://www.anomalospublishing.com/ which leads to a Japanese site about web site design.

Groan! I don't really need another mystery to wonder about. But, I couldn't stop there. Later, I did a Google search for the name of the book, and I found it was well-reviewed on Amazon.com and had spawned 2 sequels. However, Amazon says the book was published by CreateSpace, which is Amazon's self-publishing company. So, I've got another mystery. Where was it actually published? And why should I even care?

Comments for Sunday, December 1, 2019, thru Saturday, Dec. 7, 2019:

December 6, 2019 - Yesterday, I converted the manuscript for the first of my sci-fi novels into 5.5 x 8.5 book format. I'd thought about revising it while converting it, but the conversion process is somewhat complicated, so it just seemed easier to convert everything first. That way, it's just a routine that you repeat over and over until you are done. It took 2 or 3 minutes per chapter for the 35 chapters. In manuscript form (double spaced on 8½ x 11 typing paper) the book consisted of 305 pages. In book form (single spaced) it's 198 pages, not including the title page, the copyrights page etc. It's 65,588 words, well over the 60,000 words required to be called a "novel" instead of a "novella."

The problem is that I'm still thinking a lot about radar guns. I keep looking for critical experiments I can perform with the radar gun I have, without spending a lot of money. A tuning fork test is one such possibility. I don't own any tuning forks, but I keep wondering what I could use instead of a tuning fork. A floor fan is something like a tuning fork. It's an object that moves while stationary. There is no doubt that the radar gun is measuring the speed of the fan blades, but I could easily find five hundred mathematicians who will argue that a radar gun does not measure the vibration speeds of the tines of a tuning fork. They argue that the radar guns somehow listen to the audio frequency of the tuning fork.

What could I wave back and forth in front of a radar gun at over 10 mph?   What about a spinning basket ball at the end of a string? Hmm. I don't own a basket ball. Most of all, I want something I can measure while in my car. I want to measure something that is spinning or vibrating in order to obtain the "target speed," and I want to see how the "patrol speed" combines with the "target speed" when the gun is in my car and moving. Hmm.

December 4, 2019 - Yesterday, when I decided I should try type-setting while revising the first of my sci-fi novels in preparation for self-publishing, I looked at the paperback novels I have on my bookshelves to see what size they are. Most paperback novels I have are 4.25 inches wide by 6.87 inches tall. That format is known as the "mass market paperback" or "pocket book" format. My unread Janet Evanovich and Kathy Reichs paperbacks are all in that format. But the Lee Child "Jack Reacher" novels I have are all 4.25 by 7.5 inches, which doesn't seem to be a standard size anywhere. More importantly, my research indicates you cannot self-publish in the "pocket book" size, at least not without paying a lot of extra fees. The smallest size used in self-publishing is evidently 5 inches wide by 8 inches tall, which is known as the "digest" format in regular "trade" paperback publishing. I have lots of books in that size in my library, but they are all non-fiction. I'll have to browse around my local Barnes & Noble to see what size they actually use for paperback novels, besides the "pocket book" format. And, do they use white paper or the cream-colored paper used in "pocket books"?

It's also weird how much conflicting information about book sizes you can find on the Internet.

My research also reminded me that when I self-publish I have to pay copyright costs, and I have to pay for the ISBN number and UPC scanner code that go on the back of the book. I was somewhat stunned to see that paperback novels sell for $7.99 these days. I buy all my paperbacks used for about an eighth of that price.

And, since I'm not going to pay for any advertising, there is a very good chance that my book may cost me money instead of making money. And there's a small chance that I may change my mind about the whole thing. I've certainly done that with a lot of scientific papers. But, right now my first task is to set things up in 5x8 format. I'm writing here as a way of avoiding that chore.

Added note: After spending the rest of the morning trying to set up my book in 5x8 format, I went over to Barnes & Noble with a tape measure. They have racks and tables full of paperback novels, and by far the most popular size seems to be 5.5 x 8.5, with some slightly taller. When I placed one book atop another, it seemed like each title was cut to a slightly different size than all others. I saw only one novel that was 5x8. So, this morning's work was mostly wasted time. In addition, Microsoft Word has 5.5 x 8.5 as a standard size. For some reason, the call it the "Statement" size.

I also stopped at a used book store and picked up a paperback "pocket book" copy of Andy Weir's sci-fi novel "The Martian" for 99 cents. (It's 4.25 x 7.5 inches, like the Jack Reacher novels I have.) I've had a copy from the library in my Kindle for about a year, but when reading novels I much prefer to read from a paper copy. And "The Martian" is a novel I really want to read.

December 3, 2019 - Yesterday, I finished reading another sci-fi novel, but I can't display the cover here because I haven't yet designed a cover for it. The book was the one I had finished writing in April 2014, and was then unable to find an agent to represent it. Then, thinking it would be easier to find an agent if I had two or three books in a series, I began writing a sequel. I finished writing the sequel in February of 2015. That must also have been about the time I started getting into the subject if time dilation, since it was on April 15, 2015, that I created a blog page titled "Time Dilation Explained." And my two sci-fi novels mostly just faded into memory.

From time to time I began thinking about self-publishing the two sci-fi novels. Now that I seem to be stalled in my science projects until I can find some way to access and perform experiments with a Stalker II SDR radar gun, I'm thinking once again about self-publishing my sci-fi novel. The first step was to re-read the "final" version of the first book.

I still think it's a great book, and the beginning is terrific, but I definitely need to simplify things in the last third of the book. It has events happening in different parts of Washington, DC, and just using the different street names to identify the locations is confusing. I'm not sure how to fix it, but I'll try to think of something. Before I get to that part of the book, I have to type-set the first part of the book and correct a few typos. And then I'll have to remember and research how self-publishing works. The last time I did it was in 2012.

Meanwhile, I awoke this morning thinking I need to revise the Radar Guns vs Wave Theory paper that I just revised yesterday. For some reason, in yesterday's revision I used a picture of the floor fan without using any picture of the radar gun. So, I modified the image to include the shot of me pointing my TS-3 radar gun at the floor fan, and a side angle shot of the fan itself. The new version (#3) of the paper might appear later today, or it might appear tomorrow morning.

December 2, 2019 - Yesterday afternoon, I submitted the revised version of my paper on Radar Guns vs Wave Theory to vixra.org, and this morning I received an email advising me that it is now online as version #2. The new version contains details about the floor fan experiment I mentioned in previous posts here. The changes are on page 4.

I also submitted a revision to my paper on Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories, and it too is now on-line as version #7. Those changes are on page 10. In the previous version I had accepted what I was told about the TS-3 radar gun, and in the revised version I explain that actual experiments demonstrated that what I was told was not true. So, all I have to verify that the Stalker II SDR is a Type-1 radar gun is what I was told in detailed discussions with people at Applied Concepts, Inc. And I am hunting for some way to verify that (or debunk it) with actual experiments, without spending $1,600 to buy such a gun.

What I also need to do is work on other things, since I cannot just keep writing about how I still haven't been able to borrow a Stalker II SDR gun.

December 1, 2019 - I'm still mulling over the best way and the best place to perform two different moving radar gun experiments: (1) I want to measure the speed of a vehicle that is moving away from me in the opposite direction, and (2) I want to measure the speed of a vehicle that is approaching me from behind.

The problems are (1) I don't want to frighten anyone by pointing some strange device at them, and (2) both experiments require me to point the gun behind me as I move, which means I have to read the gun's display in my side rear-view mirror, or I have to do quick over-my-shoulder readings and then bring the gun back inside to view the display. And (3), the experiments aren't critical, their sole purpose is to allow me to be certain of how a Type-2S radar gun works while moving backwards, so that I do not have to make any assumptions.

The problems with measuring the speed of vehicles moving away from me in the opposite direction are reduced if there is a road-divider between their lane of traffic and mine. But, then you get the problem of how wide is the divider? Will the gun give a good reading if the center divider is very wide? That also causes a cosine effect. And, I should probably do the readings when there is no one directly behind me in my lane, since they might be startled by what I'm doing.

How do I get readings of cars approaching me from behind without scaring the drivers? I have to stick my arm and the gun out the side window.

I've gone out twice to do the experiments, but both times I couldn't find a location and situation where it was totally safe. I also need to have a location with a long distance between stop signs, long enough for cars to reach good speeds.

Yesterday, I awoke realizing I should revise my paper on "Radar Guns vs Wave Theory" to include the radar gun experiments I performed with my floor fan. It only took about an hour to make the addition of a new section in the middle of the paper. Everything else remains the same. I'll submit the revised paper later today, which means it should be on-line tomorrow, December 2, the date I now use on the paper. If waves from a radar gun look like those shown below, how can they get through the wire mesh covering the spinning blades on a floor fan?

radar gun using waves

I described the problem in my November 14 comment, so I won't repeat it here. What I'm doing is putting the experiment in revision to a previous paper, instead of waiting to put it in a new paper about Radar Gun Relativity Experiments. That new paper is awaiting the "over my shoulder" experiments described earlier in this comment, and getting those experiments done isn't helped by the fact that winter is approaching, which complicates opening a side window to get radar gun readings. How does the gun work when it is below freezing outside?

I also keep thinking about "the Double Doppler" effect, as I call it. In the illustration above, only the red car is moving. But what if the police car was also moving? The Doppler Effect supposedly results from the waves hitting the oncoming car with a higher frequency because the red car is moving closer between each wave. If the patrol car is also moving, that means you have a "Double Doppler Effect," because the patrol car will move closer to the red car between each wave the radar gun receives back from the red car.

Mathematicians would probably declare, "Of course! That is why the radar gun gives a 'closing speed' which is the two speeds added together!"

But what about the "patrol speed?" Supposedly, the radar gun is also bouncing waves off of the ground and getting back the patrol car's speed, which it adds to the oncoming car's speed to get the "closing speed." The Double Doppler effect says you'll get the "closing speed" without using the patrol speed. How does the gun know it isn't supposed to use the "patrol speed" in this situation?

The answer once again, of course, is that radar guns emit photons, not waves. And because Einstein's Second Postulate says that the speed of the emitter does not change the speed of the light that is emitted, the only readings the gun can perform are to measure its own speed (internally) and the target's speed (externally). There can be no "Double Doppler Effect."

All this discussion about radar guns could be greatly simplified, of course, if I could just get my hands on a "Type-1" radar gun like the Stalker II SDR. If I am right in my understandings, virtually everything a Type-1 radar gun does is considered to be "impossible" by mathematicians. And what it does is the same thing Type-2S and Type-2M radar guns do internally instead of measuring patrol speeds by bouncing waves off of the ground externally. But, if you are in a vehicle and point a Type-2 radar gun at the ground ahead, how can you prove that the gun is NOT bouncing waves off of the ground to get the speed the gun is displaying? And how can you prove that the gun is measuring its own speed internally, if that is considered to be "totally impossible" by all the people you are trying to convince?

I realize I'm probably endlessly repeating myself. I've been moaning and groaning about these issues for months and months. Maybe it's time to take a break and focus on something else.

Comments for Sunday, November 24, 2019, thru Saturday, Nov. 30, 2019:

November 29, 2019 - Yesterday morning, I thought I might want to spend some time listening to some recent science podcasts, so I downloaded a few into my MP3 player. One seemed particularly interesting to me. It was the October 17 podcast from BBC Radio 4's series "In Our Time," and the subject was the H.G. Wells' novel "The Time Machine." I started listening to the discussion, and I found it to be very interesting, so interesting that I checked my local library to see if they had a copy. They had both the Kindle version and the audio book version, and both were available for immediate downloading. I chose the unabridged audio book version and was surprised to find that it was less than 4 hours long. (The novel is actually a "novella" and is only 125 pages.)

Last night, I listened to the entire audio book version of "The Time Machine" by H. G. Wells.

It was a terrific book! I've probably seen the 1960 Rod Taylor movie 3 or 4 times over the years, and I have the 2002 Guy Pierce version on DVD, which means I've seen it at least twice, but there are vast differences between the movies and the book. The first thing that amazed me was how "modern" it seemed. The book begins with a scientific discussion about the "Fourth Dimension," and how the "time dimension" differs from the three dimension of space. There was almost nothing that reminded me that the book was published in 1895. When the book mentioned telephones and Communism, it was a bit jarring, but telephones have been around since 1877, and Karl Marx began preaching Communism in the 1840s.

The book is also interesting because it takes awhile for the time traveler (he has no name in the book) to realize what is going on when he visits the year 802701, over eight hundred thousand years in the future. He begins with a lot of assumptions about the childlike Eloi and the ape-like Morlocks that turn out to be false. As in the movies, his time machine is stolen by the Morlocks, and much of the story is about his efforts to get it back. Before he returns to 1895, he goes further into the future, to about 30 million years from now, when all life on earth has been destroyed by the expanding sun. That's something that wasn't in either movie.

Listening to The Time Machine was time well-spent. I really enjoyed it.

November 28, 2019 - I wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving!

November 26, 2019 - This morning I found myself just sitting around and staring at my computer, trying to decide if I should go out and do some more radar gun experiments or not. Then I decided that it would break up my entire morning routine if I went out in the morning to do experiments, and I just cannot make myself do that. I only do outdoor experiments in the afternoon.

So, looking for something else to do, I finished reading a library book on my Kindle. The book is "The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics" by Gary Zukav.

It's a 416 page book in paperback format. On my Kindle, which doesn't show page numbers, it only shows a number that represents what percent of the book I have completed. The book seemed to go on forever, finally finishing at the 77% point, where it started showing references. I'd highlighted 47 pages of "notes," more than any other book I've ever read on my Kindle. In fact, when I went to make a copy of the notes, I found that I'd been wasting time highlighting things for days. There's a limit to the number of "clippings" you can do for a book. I suspect it is some kind of safeguard to make certain people do not just copy the entire book. So, at some point all that Kindle did was record this message over and over and over:

The book was very interesting in parts. That is why I highlighted so many things to copy as my notes. But toward the end, when it got deep into interactions between subatomic particles, it really got tedious.

The title of the book is a bit misleading, since it certainly doesn't seem like the title for a physics book. The title is about how Quantum Mechanics resembles Buddhism in some ways, since Quantum Mechanics is not always about what is "real" and is often just about what is perceived. It's the third physics book I've read that digs into that idea or "fact." (Is that "fact" real or just what is "perceived?") I expect it will also be my last. I think I know all I want to know about Quantum Mechanics.

Here's one of my clippings or notes from the book:

The importance of nonsense hardly can be overstated. The more clearly we experience something as “nonsense,” the more clearly we are experiencing the boundaries of our own self-imposed cognitive structures. “Nonsense” is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality. There is no such thing as “nonsense” apart from a judgmental intellect which calls it that. True artists and true physicists know that nonsense is only that which, viewed from our present point of view, is unintelligible.

Another:

In general, physicists do not deal in nonsense. Most of them spend their professional lives thinking along well-established lines of thought. Those scientists who establish the established lines of thought, however, are those who do not fear to venture boldly into nonsense, into that which any fool could have told them is clearly not so. This is the mark of the creative mind; in fact, this is the creative process.

I used those quotes in a comment I wrote on the sci.physics.relativity forum where they kept telling me that my understanding of Einstein's theories was just "nonsense."

Interestingly, the author of the book is not a physicist. Near the beginning of the book the author writes:

My first exposure to quantum physics occurred a few years ago when a friend invited me to an afternoon conference at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, California. At that time, I had no connections with the scientific community, so I went to see what physicists were like. To my great surprise, I discovered that (1) I understood everything that they said, and (2) their discussion sounded very much like a theological discussion. I scarcely could believe what I had discovered. Physics was not the sterile, boring discipline that I had assumed it to be. It was a rich, profound venture which had become inseparable from philosophy. Incredibly, no one but physicists seemed to be aware of this remarkable development.

That's what I've said many times. Only I've focused on the fact that they seem be view mathematics as the "Word of God," and they cannot conceive of any way their mathematics can be wrong.

Here's another quote from early in the book that again seems to perfectly describe my dealings with the mathematicians on the sci.physics.relativity forum:

Many times my physicist friends have attempted to explain a concept to me and, in their exasperation, have tried one explanation after another, each one of which sounded (to me) abstract, difficult to grasp, and generally abstruse. When I could comprehend, at last, what they were trying to communicate, inevitably I was surprised to discover that the idea itself was actually quite simple. Conversely, I often have tried to explain a concept in terms which seemed (to me) laudably lucid, but which, to my exasperation, seemed hopelessly vague, ambiguous, and lacking in precision to my physicist friends.

That's why I wrote my papers. My papers simplify what the mathematicians have not only made incredibly complicated but also distorted and misinterpreted.

But the quote below is probably the one that I seem to have stated (in different words) to the folks on the sci.physics.relativity forum at least a hundred times:

The fact is that physics is not mathematics. Physics, in essence, is simple wonder at the way things are and a divine (some call it compulsive) interest in how that is so. Mathematics is the tool of physics. Stripped of mathematics, physics becomes pure enchantment.

I could go on and on. And I cannot help but wonder what great quotes I lost when my Kindle stopped recording what I was underlining.

November 24, 2019 - Yesterday afternoon, while driving around doing chores, I finished listening to CD #5 in the 5 CD set for the audio book version of "You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President" by "Donald J. Trump" (actually it's written by Alec Baldwin and Kurt Anderson).

I'd "borrowed" it from my local library awhile back, when it suddenly became available, and until I accessed the cover picture above from Amazon's web site, I didn't even know that it was an actual book. I thought it was just an "audio book," and I expected it to be a 6 hour comedy bit by Alec Baldwin, doing what he does on Saturday Night Live. It definitely began that way, but the book also provided actual facts that seemed totally new to me. The facts began on page 1, with this information about events that took place in January 1989:

I was in my thirties, and I'd just met one of my future wives, Marla Maples, who was twenty-one, maybe twenty-two, and at that time a nine-plus in the looks department, to be perfectly frank. I was in Palm Beach, my wife Ivana was doing her thing, and I drove my Rolls- Royce over to The Breakers hotel to visit the legendary genius Roy Cohn, my extremely tough lawyer and personal friend. Roy kept a suite at The Breakers, which had recently refused to let me buy two penthouses and combine them, the morons, because they'd now be so valuable as historic residences. In the dozen years I'd known Roy, he had taught me about the importance of maintaining a strong, great suntan all year long, but I remember that day he was very pale, I guess he was sick by then. AIDS, sad.

That partial paragraph is filled with odd facts. Examples: #1. Roy Cohn was Trump's personal lawyer. (I just knew Cohn was Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel during the Army–McCarthy hearings in 1954.) #2. Cohn lived at The Breakers. #3. Cohn died of AIDS. And (#4) Trump wanted to buy and combine two penthouses at the Breakers Hotel?

That part of the book and many other parts, tell me the authors must have done a lot of actual research. That doesn't mean the book is serious, it is a satire, and it is very funny in parts, but mostly it is just amusing and interesting. For example, it has Trump talking about getting a hole-in-one just about every time plays golf. The term "hole-in-one" appears on 14 different pages in the paperback book, and undoubtedly multiple times on some of those pages.

Alec Baldwin does his Saturday Night Live Trump impression all through the first CD and 2/3rds of the second CD, pretending to be Trump reading his own book about his first year in office. Then someone else takes over, just reading, not doing any impression of Trump. Then in the middle of the 4th CD, a third person takes over. And about 20 minutes before the 5th and final CD ends, Alec Baldwin takes over once again to complete the book.

I can recommend the book, since it is both funny and educational. The only problem, of course, is that you need to be able to figure out when the book is a satire and when the book is talking about actual facts.

As soon as CD #5 ended, I ejected it and inserted CD #1 of another audio book, a serious book about cyber crimes that I "borrowed" about a year ago. And I'm pondering which audio book to put into the queue to start after that. I have a LOT of interesting books in my listening queue.

Meanwhile, I'm still working on a new paper about Radar Gun Relativity Experiments. I did a new experiment yesterday. I used my radar gun to measure the "speed of the ground" behind me as I drove down an empty street. As expected, it showed my car's speed as being the same as if the gun was pointed ahead of the car.

My TS-3 radar gun's display has no way to distinguish between positive and negative numbers. I wanted to measure the speed of cars in the opposite lane when the gun is pointed at their back ends, but unlike pointing a radar gun through the windshield to measure the speeds of oncoming traffic, if I wanted to measure the speeds of cars going in the opposite direction behind me, I would have to stick the gun out the side window. I used the side rear-view mirror to see the gun's display when I was just reading my speed on an empty street. But I was a bit concerned about doing that in traffic, so I didn't. I need to figure out a way to do it in a way that won't startle or scare other drivers.

I sometimes assume the reading I would get would be the same as when the moving gun is pointed forward at the oncoming cars, i.e., patrol speed plus target speed. At other times I really wonder if it will be the same, or if one speed will be positive and the other negative.

Wondering about that made me realize something about "wave theory": Wave theory only works if the emitter is stationary.

radar gun wave theory

If you use the distance between waves to measure the speed of a target, that distance between waves will also be shortened by movement of the emitter.

So, if you are traveling toward a target at 40 mph, and the target is coming toward you at 40 mph, the gun will display 80 mph as the target speed without measuring any "ground speed." But, supposedly, the gun is also measuring its own speed by bouncing waves off of the ground. How does the gun know it shouldn't add the ground speed to the target speed in that situation? If it did, it would get 120 mph. (Answer: radar guns emit photons, not waves.)

LIDAR guns measure distances. But they only measure the distance to the target that is seen in the gun's gun-sight. And, since you have to look through the sight to view the target, you can't really use a LIDAR gun while moving, not without becoming a "reckless driver" yourself.

If the gun is in a moving patrol car and is pointed at an oncoming vehicle by a second officer in the passenger seat, the gun will show the "closing speed." And the passenger would then have to check the patrol car's speedometer and subtract that speed from the speed measured by the gun in order to figure out what the target's speed actually is.

I keep learning new ways to look at things, and when I do I often feel that I need to modify the beginning of my paper to include that material. That means I am constantly adding and revising.

This morning I stumbled upon a test that is given to police radar gun operators in New Jersey. The PDF file also includes the answers. I have no interest in taking the test, but I am very interested in seeing what the examiners say is the correct answer to each question. Here's the 3rd question on the test:

3. In X-Band traffic Radar, for every one mile per hour that a target vehicle is traveling, the reflected signal will be changed in which one of the following ways:

a. the speed of the reflected signal will be increased by one mile per hour.
b. the speed of the reflected signal will be increased 31.4 miles per hour.
c. the reflected signal will be shifted 5,280 waves per second.
d. the frequency of the reflected signal will be shifted 31.4 waves per second
e. None of the above

The provided answer is D, "the frequency of the reflected signal will be shifted 31.4 waves per second."

X band radar guns emit waves at 10.5Ghz. That is 10.5 billion waves per second. If the target is stationary, the return waves will also return at 10.5 billion per second. So, the question is about the frequency change if the target is not stationary. I looked for a calculator to help me verify that number. I found one HERE. If I plunk in a radar frequency of 10.5 Ghz and a target speed of 1 mph, it gives me a Doppler shift of 31 Hz, which means 31 waves per second. So, if you know what the X-Band frequency is, you probably also know enough to pick D as the correct answer.

If I spend as much time checking each answer in the test as I did with question #3, I should be done sometime in January. Groan.

Comments for Sunday, November 17, 2019, thru Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019:

November 21, 2019 - I haven't been posting comments here for the past few days because I've been trying to focus on a new paper I'm writing about radar gun experiments. It's been slow-going, since there are a lot of details that I don't think anyone has ever written about before. I certainly haven't.

This morning, my writing came to a screeching halt when I asked myself a question that had never come up before: If I'm riding along on an empty road and my radar gun reads 50 mph when I point it at the road ahead, is 50 mph a positive number or a negative number? Am I moving toward the ground, or is the ground moving toward me? Which is negative, and which is positive?

Thinking about it for a minute or two, I decided it must be a positive number, since the gun will add together my speed of 40 mph with the 40 mph speed of oncoming traffic to produce a reading of 80 mph.

That poses the question of why is it a positive number? According to all the mathematicians I've been arguing with, all movement is reciprocal. So, from my point of view, I am moving toward the ground, and from the ground's "point of view," the ground is moving toward me. It seems like one speed should be positive and the other should be negative.

When I am traveling at 50 mph following behind a truck that is going 50 mph, the gun reads the speed of the truck as zero. The truck's speed is negative, my speed is positive. But, if I am right up against the bumper of the truck, the gun cannot be reading the speed of the ground. The only thing it can read is the speed of the truck. How does the gun measure the ground's speed if the ground is not within the radar beam?

To mathematicians, of course, the answer is that radar guns emit waves and measure distances between waves. They do not measure speeds of c+v or c-v, radar guns just measure differences in distances between emitted waves and returned waves. But how does wave theory work when the radar gun and the target are moving together at the same speed? Do mathematicians believe the waves are the same distance apart when transmitted and when received back? Why would they be?

Groan! I think there's something illogical very in all this. I'm hoping that I can come up with an experiment that will show how illogical it is - whatever it is.

November 18, 2019 - For the past 24 hours, since writing yesterday's comment, I've been mulling over "Fictitious Forces," specifically "centrifugal force." I certainly wouldn't call it that. I thought for awhile that "illusions" might be a better term, but that doesn't really fit either, and mathematicians really hate the word "illusion." They argue that if you can see it, it's real, it cannot be an "illusion." I would argue that if you can feel the force, it can't be an "illusion."

The "illusion" is which way the force is being experienced. If you are in a rotating space station like that shown in the movie "2001 A Space Odyssey," the "artificial gravity" you feel and experience is not working like real gravity.

You aren't being pulled down by gravity, or pushed down by centrifugal force, you are being pushed upward by the floor and centripetal force. To understand what's happening, you first have to understand Issac Newton's First Law of Motion:

Every object in a state of uniform motion will remain in that state of motion unless an external force acts on it.

Newton's first law wants you to go in a straight line when you move, but you are going in circles in a spinning space station. The "external force" preventing you from moving in a straight line is exerted by the floor. You want to go straight, but the floor keeps forcing you upward as you move. The upward-moving floor forces you to move in a circle instead of in a straight line. So, the floor is creating the "illusion" of gravity. It feels the same as if gravity was pulling you downward, but in reality the floor is pushing you upward. The "illusion" is the direction of the force. The speed at which the space station spins is also a factor. If the station wasn't spinning, you would experience the kind of inertia that astronauts do on the International Space Station, and you would float around.

I can visualize starting out by floating, and then they fire rockets to get the space station to start spinning. Initially, that force pushes you up against a wall. The rockets continue until the constant changing of direction causes the centripetal force to be a greater force pushing against you that that exerted by the rockets moving the wall. So, you are being pushed slightly against a wall, but the floor is pushing more strongly to move you upward. Then, when the centripetal force equals 1G or whatever is most comfortable, the rockets turn off and you are no longer being pushed against the wall, you are only being pushed upward by the floor keeping you from moving in a straight line. It's just like being on earth, except that you are walking on the inside of a rotating ring, instead of on the top of the ground.

I think a space station is a better way to describe centripetal force than a merry-go-round. With a merry-go-round you have gravity pulling you toward the ground in addition to the forces you experience on a space station. People may be more familiar with a merry-go-round, but a space station makes things simpler - and everyone is familiar with space stations that do not rotate.

A lab centrifuge starts out with the tubes hanging downward, due to gravity. Then, as the centrifuge speed up, the tubes lift until they are pointed straight outward, and the heaviest substances sink to the bottom because they are the heaviest and therefore they feel that change in direction more acutely. They are the substances that most want to go in a straight line.

It's interesting, but it's nothing worth spending any more time on. I've got much more important scientific issues to think about.

November 17, 2019 - The arguments I was having on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum were becoming a waste of time, so I ended my participation yesterday afternoon, telling the others that I'd return when I had completed writing a scientific paper about "Inertial and Non-Inertial Systems." Of course, when I turned on my computer this morning and checked that forum, I found that one of the participants was still arguing the same things, and a couple others were still just hurling insults at me.

The final disagreement was over what constitutes an "inertial system." The people on that forum appear to be in general agreement with this definition as provided by "Paparios" in his latest post:

An inertial frame of reference in classical physics and special relativity possesses the property that in this frame of reference a body with ZERO NET FORCE acting upon it does not accelerate; that is, such a body is at rest or moving at a constant velocity.

I don't particularly like that definition, but it fits both what I consider to be an "inertial system" and what they consider it be an inertial system. I consider an "inertial system" to be a system that is moving purely by inertia with no outside forces acting upon it. The word "inertia" is generally defined the same way I define it:

a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force

As I see it, that only happens in outer space, where a ship or any kind of object can coast at a constant speed (i.e., uniform motion) forever. Some force set the object in motion, like firing rockets or like a supernova, and the object will then continue in "uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force."

That is NOT, however, how the mathematician-physicists see things. In my final discussion with another poster (who may be Michael Moroney using a different login ID to get around the fact that he is on my "Do Not Reply list"), the disagreement was made clear. We were talking about whether a truck moving at a constant speed on a road on earth is a "inertial system." I said it wasn't:

Me: It takes FORCE to move a truck.

Him: It takes net force to change a truck's speed, but it takes zero net force for a truck to remain in uniform motion. This is grade school physics.

Me: It takes MORE FORCE to move a truck faster.

Him: It takes no net force at all for a truck to move at any speed. A truck will continue to move at its current speed, regardless of that speed, as long as zero net force is applied to it. You're just getting confused because you are (amazingly) unacquainted with the basics of high school physics. When objects encounter other objects, such as air, they exert mutual forces on each other. The force provided by an engine through the drive shaft and wheels is equal and opposite to the forces exerted by other objects. Net force is required to change the speed of an object, but not to maintain any speed. The physics inside a sealed container depends only on the net force applied, i.e., the acceleration.

Me: Friction does not negate the force. Friction just determines how much force must be applied for the truck to reach a given speed.

Him: Friction is a force, just like other forces. The total net force on a uniformly moving object is zero. It doesn't matter what combination of individual forces are applied, as long as they add up to zero.

The problem is that their definition of an "inertial system" ignores the fact that Einstein showed that acceleration is equivalent to gravity. A moving truck traveling at a constant speed on earth cannot be an "inertial system" because it is constantly subjected to the force of gravity. And gravity is equal to acceleration, so any object on earth is in an "accelerating system" whether or not it is moving.

And that is why a Type-1 radar gun can measure its own speed inside a moving truck. The truck is NOT in a true "inertial system."

Yesterday, I started work on my paper about inertial systems by doing some research. I wanted to see if textbooks actually say that a moving vehicle that moves at a constant speed under power is an "inertial system" where things work the same way as an "inertial system" in space. How can they if one system experiences gravity and the other doesn't?

I have 59 college physics textbooks in my digital collection in my computer. But, that includes different editions of the same book, which brings the number down to about 47. Then I have 425 science/physics books, some of which may also be textbooks. I just didn't identify them as such. Is "Understanding Physics: Light, Magnetism and Electricity" by Issac Asimov considered to be a "textbook," or is it just a book about physics?

I browsed through the spreadsheet where I keep track of my digital books and picked the 9th edition of "College Physics" by Raymond A. Serway & Chris Vuille as a place to start. (The 10th edition seems to be a total rewrite.) I did a search for the word "inertial." I found this paragraph about Einstein's postulates on page 888:

The first postulate asserts that all the laws of physics are the same in all reference frames moving with constant velocity relative to each other. This postulate is a sweeping generalization of the principle of Galilean relativity, which refers only to the laws of mechanics. From an experimental point of view, Einstein’s principle of relativity means that any kind of experiment—mechanical, thermal, optical, or electrical—performed in a laboratory at rest must give the same result when performed in a laboratory moving at a constant speed past the first one. Hence, no preferred inertial reference frame exists, and it is impossible to detect absolute motion.

It looks to me like that explanation is geared to fit the absurd belief that "it is impossible to detect absolute motion," which is what Type-1 radar guns can do (and so can all other types of radar guns, but they do not clearly show it).

Looking back through earlier uses of the word "inertial" in the textbook, I found this on page 214:

Fictitious Forces??? Centrifugal force is fictitious??? I didn't recall ever reading that before. I immediately recalled the space station in "2001 a Space Odyssey" where people were walking on the inside of a rotating station where artificial gravity was produce by centrifugal force.

And also the situation where one of the astronauts was jogging in the rotating part of their space ship.

2001 A space odyssey centrfuge
jogging track

2001 A space odyssey centrfuge
jogging track

Those centrifuges were producing artificial gravity. There's nothing "fictitious" about artificial gravity! The absence of a centripetal force to offset the centrifugal force doesn't make the centrifugal force "fictitious" as the textbook says. I did a Google search for the term "inertial systems" and found a Wikipedia page titled "Inertial Frame of Reference" and it uses the term "fictitious force" 22 times! And they even have an web page article titled "Fictitious Force."

Then I remembered the anthrax attacks of 2001. So, we're supposed to believe that microbiologists use a "fictional force" when they use centrifuges to separate anthrax spores from growth and nutrient debris? Really?

Groan! The situation is worse than I thought! And that makes me think that the paper I had begun writing about "Radar Gun Relativity Experiments" is more important than a paper about "Inertial and Non-Inertial Systems," and I really really need to find some way to get experiments done with a Type-1 radar gun.

Comments for Sunday, November 10, 2019, thru Saturday, Nov. 16, 2019:

November 15, 2019 - Another groan!, but also a Wow! My subconscious awoke me again this morning with a new realization. This time it woke me at 3:30 a.m., but I managed to get some sleep after my conscious mind finished thinking things through. Suddenly I feel I need to write another new paper, before I write the new paper about my radar gun experiments. The new new paper will probably be titled "Inertial and Non-Inertial Systems."

I recall reading a college textbook that stated that there are two types of systems, inertial systems and accelerating systems, in which Relativity experiments can be performed. I remember arguing with someone that the train in Einstein's thought experiments was neither an inertial system nor an accelerating system. It wasn't "inertial" because it was moving under power, an engine was pulling the car in which the experiments were being performed, and it wasn't "accelerating" because the engine was pulling the train at a constant speed.

The arguments I got from the mathematicians on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum was that a train that is under power and is moving at a constant speed is "inertial." And they believe that Einstein's FIRST Postulate says that all experiments work the same way in all inertial systems. They specifically argue that the length of a second cannot be different in one inertial system versus another because that would violate Einstein's First Postulate: "the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good."

It wouldn't, of course. A variable length of a second will produce different results in different "inertial systems" and "frames of reference," but no law of electrodynamics and optics would be broken, and all equations of mechanics would still hold good. 1+1=2 is just as valid as 1+3=4.

What I woke up thinking about this morning was gravity. Suppose you have a true inertial system in a space ship coasting through space at 100,000 mph and a second system which mathematicians consider to also be "inertial," a train moving across a desert at a constant speed of 60 mph. Virtually every experiment performed in those two "inertial" systems will produce different results. The simplest experiment to perform to confirm that is dropping a ball to the floor from a height of 6 feet. In the space ship, when you release the ball, the ball will remain where it is. It will NOT fall. There is no gravity to pull it downward. On the train, the ball will fall to the floor. The ball is affected by a significantly different amount of gravity on the train. The results of those two experiments couldn't be more different, yet according to mathematicians they are both performed in an "inertial system" and cannot produce different results without violating Einstein's FIRST Postulate.

As I now see it, an "inertial system" can only exist in space, and there are several different "non-inertial systems" in which us Earthlings can perform experiments, including an "accelerating system," which all will produce different results.

I just need to find the time to write it all down in the form of a scientific paper.

November 14, 2019 - Groan! At about 4:30 this morning, my subconscious mind woke up my conscious mind to ask a question: If radar guns emit waves that look like this:

radar gun wave theory

what would happen if you tried to measure the speed of the whirling blades of a floor fan through the wire grid that surrounds the moving parts of the fan?

My floor fan used in radar gun tests

It's not a problem with photons. Photons are extremely small, they travel at the speed of light to a blade, and before the blade can change position, atoms in the fan blade almost instantly emit NEW photons back to the gun. The difference in the oscillation rates of the photon's energy fields sent-versus-received determine the speed of the blade. Since even different parts of the tips of the blades move a different speeds, the gun measures the fastest speed. Photons that hit the metal wire grid measure the grid to be stationary.

How would that work with waves? First you have the problem of the wire grid. If microwaves were like the waves shown above (or like water waves), the waves are going to break into a kazillion tiny waves like the double slit experiment with hundreds of slits. The double slit experiment:

And then the kazillion small waves hit different parts of the rotating fan blades. And, according to wave theory, when the waves somehow make it back to the radar gun, the gun has to measure the distance BETWEEN the return waves to compare it to the distance BETWEEN the emitted waves.

It's easy to see how my subconscious mind found this to be puzzling. I just wish it would have let me fall back to sleep again. When I got up, I asked the folks on the sci.physics.relativity forum how waves work with my fan experiments. So far, no answers.

I also did some more experiments, measuring the speed of the tips of the rotating blades when the fan is running at low, medium and high speeds. The reading at low speed is about 20 mph, at medium it is about 32 mph, and at high speed it is about 43 mph. Again, that is easy to understand when discussing photons, but it seems almost unimaginable when discussing waves.

November 13, 2019 - Yesterday, I did my first indoor experiments with my radar gun. But, before I get into that, I want to describe another kind of "experiment." It involves how I ordered the adapter that allows me to use my TS-3 radar gun indoors. As stated in yesterday's comment, I ordered it from Amazon where it costs $13.99. However, Amazon charges shipping fees for all orders under $25. Plus, I had $11.33 worth of accrued points for using my Discover card when buying other things elsewhere, like gas for my car. So, the adapter would actually cost me only $2.66 plus shipping. I didn't know what the shipping costs would be, but I tend to want to avoid them if I can.

So, I took the opportunity to buy some DVD movies that I'd been hunting for, movies I'd seen a few years ago, and I hoped would eventually go on sale somewhere for around $5 so I could buy a copy for my movie collection. I ordered 4 movies from Amazon, one of which cost more than $5 and put the total order cost over the $25 minimum and gave me free shipping. I was advised that there would be two packages from two different shipping points, one package containing the adapter and one DVD, the other package containing 3 DVDs.

Then came the "experiment." Amazon advised me that I had a choice of delivering the packages to my apartment building or to a pickup point at the "Meineke Car Care Center" about a block away. The weather was bad and it was forecasted to get worse, which made me worry about the postman leaving the packages outside if I wasn't at home at the time of delivery. So, on an impulse I told them to ship it to the Meineke muffler shop. Then, that afternoon as I headed for the gym, I stopped by the muffler shop to see how the delivery would work. I expected to pick up the packages inside somewhere, but it turned out that there is a rack of lockers against an outside wall, and that was where the packages would be delivered. I had never seen an Amazon locker before, or if I did, I didn't realize what it was. I was curious as to how it worked.

The packages arrived while I was at the gym on Monday. I got the notifications via emails and drove over to the muffler shop. The notifications included 6 digit codes you have to enter to open a locker. The packages were inside the lockers, safe and dry. Easy peasy. The locker "experiment" was successful.

And yesterday I did my first indoor experiments with my TS-3 radar gun. I set up a pedestal floor fan outside the closet where it had been stored for the winter, and, from the side of the fan, I pointed the radar gun at the rotating blades.

Me doing radar guns tests with my
floor fan

As expected, the gun showed the speed of the rotating blades. If I held the gun perfectly steady while pointed at the tips of the rotating blades as the fan was operating at its highest speed, the gun would show a max speed of 43 mph when the blades were rotating away from the gun. When the gun is pointed at about the midway point between the tip and the base of the blades it shows about 20 to 25 mph. When pointed at the base of the blades, the speed was between 11 and 15 mph, but, of course, at that point the tips of the blades would be moving past the gun vertically, so there would be a cosine effect. And the beam was wide enough to get speeds that were not zero. Yawn.

It was all as expected. Nothing unusual. I did the experiment several times to be certain. The most interesting result was that the highest speed when the blades were rotating away from the gun was 43 mph, and the highest speed could measure for when the blades were moving toward the gun was about 30 mph. I attributed that to the fact that when the blades were moving away from the gun, the gun "saw" a lot of the flat part of the blades, while when the blades were moving toward the gun the gun was just seeing the edge of the blades. I went around to the other side of the fan and repeated the experiment. Yes, the highest speeds were measured when the blades were moving toward the gun and the gun could "see" the flat side of the fan blades.

Then, when I was about ready to shut down the experiment, it suddenly occurred to me that I needed to do experiments when the gun was in TEST mode. So, I again pointed the gun at the rotating tips of the fan blades and pressed the TEST button. The gun showed "60 mph," the "internal calibration speed" it is supposed to show. But I had expected the fan to act like a tuning fork. It didn't. The gun acted as if the fan wasn't there. It just showed "60 mph" when I pressed the TEST button while holding the trigger. And when I took my finger off the test button the gun showed nothing until I released the trigger and pulled it again. Then it would read the fan blade speeds.

Hmm. So it evidently needs an actual tuning fork to do the tuning fork test. And, when you look at tuning fork tests on YouTube videos, NONE of them ever show a test result that isn't exactly what the tuning fork is supposed to produce. It was like the test is to get an exact match on speed - or nothing at all.

According to the web site HERE, the TS-3 is supplied with a 35 mph tuning fork. I didn't get a tuning fork with my used radar gun.

Then I was done with experiments for the day. That evening I watched one of the DVD movies I had bought, and, when it was bed time, I went to sleep. Then, at about 6:45 a.m. this morning, as I lay in bed, thinking about radar experiments while waiting for it to be time to get up, a terrific idea suddenly occurred to me. I needed to do another experiment. Unfortunately, it was another experiment that I had no way of doing without help and without the expenditure of more money than I am willing to spend. It would involve performing the same tests I had just performed, but doing it inside a moving truck.

However, I think I need to describe the experiment in a scientific paper, not here. I also need to think it through very carefully.

November 12, 2019 - Groan! I'm really feeling overwhelmed. I'm getting so much information that needs to be sorted out, that I can't easily keep track of it all. And it takes a lot of time to think things through. Yesterday was a case in point. On the sci.physics.relativity forum, Paparios advised me of a YouTube Video HERE which shows a guy who seems to be a lawyer explaining how tuning forks work with a dual Type-2M radar gun which when in a patrol car has one gun pointed forward and a second gun pointed behind the patrol car. I probably watched the demonstration five times, but I could get nothing useful from it. There is a much better tuning fork video HERE. The problem is that both videos use a Type-2M radar system, which isn't what I have. All my questions relate to how Type-2S radar guns work as compared to Type-1 guns.

Also yesterday, someone sent me an email about the differences between a "cheap" radar gun like my TS-3, which costs $500 when new, and a Stalker II SDR, which costs $1,600 when new. I don't consider $500 to be cheap, since I could buy a new Bushnell Velocity for less than $100. But his point was that there are other differences in radar guns besides the fact that Type-1's do one measurement and Type-2's do two measurements. I knew that, and I knew the Stalker II SDR can measure target direction, which the TS-3 and Bushnell Velocity cannot do. But those other functions have nothing to do with the experiments I want to perform.

Then someone else sent me an email with a link to a copradar.com web page that has some interesting things on it. The page is titled "Radar Gun Test and Calibration." One type of radar gun test says:

Set radar to Receive Only mode and scan for interference at operation site.

Receive only? My radar gun doesn't seem to have that capability, and I had to wonder what such a capability would enable me to do.

That web page also has a test that says,

The Range Control is actually the receiver sensitivity setting. Long range, most sensitive, may make the radar susceptible to local interference.

Hmm. I hadn't been paying much attention to what the two knobs on my radar gun do, other than that they seem to control the signal strength and the sounds the gun makes to indicate different speeds.

The "VOLUME" knob on the lower left seemed to control the sound volume to indicate different measured speeds. The "SENS" knob on the lower right seemed to do the same thing by controlling the strength of the transmitted signal. But it is the "TEST" button in the middle that makes me most curious. Unfortunately, it is 8 degrees outside right now, and that makes it a problem to do road tests with the window open or the heater turned off. It was snowing for the past few days, which is also a problem when doing tests. So, I didn't do any.

But I did do one thing worthy of note: last Thursday I ordered a power adapter from Amazon for $13.99. The adapter should allow me to use the radar gun in my apartment to measure fan speeds. And it should allow me to experiment with the TEST button and the VOLUME and SENS knobs. The adapter arrived yesterday afternoon. Now I just need to find the time to use it to do various experiments. I spent at least two hours writing this comment this morning, and there are a bunch of posts to the sci.physics.relativity forum that I would like to respond to. Plus, my computer seems to be running very slow, which means I need to reboot it. And in about a half hour it will be lunch time, and then it will be time for me to head to the gym.

There just aren't enough hours in a day!

November 10, 2019 - I spent much of the past week arguing on the Google UseNet sci.physics.relativity discussion forum. But I also took some time to go back and modify my post for November 4 to show that the cosine experiments I did with my radar gun were not as clear-cut as described. And I now know they were mostly just me misunderstanding what I was doing with a radar gun that I didn't really know how to operate. What I was trying to do is still valid, but the TS-3 radar gun (and probably most other Type-2S guns) evidently do not give a reading unless it can perform TWO measurements: (1) the speed of the gun (which it measures internally) and (2) the speed of an external target. When pointed in the air, there are usually no solid external targets in range - except for power lines, birds, and spots on my windshield, which means it usually cannot do measurement #2. Therefore, it displays nothing.

I just noticed that I never gave a detailed description on this web site of the differences between the three types of radar guns. Here they are as described in the paper about my radar gun experiments that I am writing:

Type-1 radar guns do just one measurement. They emit photons to the target and receive photons back from the target. The gun then measures the difference in the oscillation frequencies of the emitted and received photons and computes the speed of the target. Type-1 radar guns are considered to be “stationary only” guns, evidently because they produce controversial results when moving.

Type-2M radar guns do two measurements: (1) They measure the speed of a target and (2) they measure the speed of the gun. They were designed and built to be used while moving. When traveling at 60 miles per hour toward an approaching target that is traveling at 70 miles per hour, the gun will show a “patrol speed” of 60 mph and a “target speed” of 70 mph.

Type-2S radar guns also do those same two measurements. However, Type-2S radar guns are intended to be used only while stationary. When traveling at 60 miles per hour toward an approaching target that is traveling at 70 miles per hour, the gun will show a “relative” speed of 130 mph. The gun has no ability to show two speeds. If you use such a gun while moving, you need to logically figure out for yourself what speed the gun is displaying.

The paper also says this about Type-1 radar guns:

Type-1 radars seem to be relatively few in number. I was able to tentatively identify only one Type-1 radar gun, the fairly popular Stalker II SDR manufactured by Applied Concepts, Inc., in Richardson, Texas. However, there could be others. The Stalker II SDR’s list price is $1,600.

The "controversial" results Type-1 guns give while moving are that, according to people I've talked with who are familiar with the gun, it shows no speed when pointed at the road ahead while moving, and it shows 60 mph when in a car going 60 mph while the gun is pointed at the back of a truck that is also going 60 mph. That is "controversial" because mathematician-physicists claim it is "impossible."

Since I cannot afford the Stalker II SDR, I need to devise an experiment which will demonstrate that the TS-3 and most or all other Type-2S guns (and probably all Type-2M guns) measure their own speed internally.

If a radar gun can measure that it is traveling at 60 mph by bouncing photons off of the semi-transparent radome that covers the front of the gun, then a radar gun that does only one measurement (i.e., a "Type-1" gun) can measure its own speed and the speed of a box truck while inside the back of a box truck. Both are considered equally "impossible" by mathematicians.

In addition, the general belief is that radar guns measure speeds by sending out waves, not photons. And that erroneous belief is fostered and promoted by countless web sites, books, and papers which describe light as waves, even though one of the top physicists of all time, Richard Feyman, stated:

“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."

Albert Einstein, of course, won a Nobel Prize for explaining how light consists of particles, not waves, and that is how and why the photoelectric effect works.

So, any experiment which conclusively demonstrates that radar guns emit photons and cannot possibly emit waves would also be worthwhile. I just need to figure out how to devise such an experiment.

Looking for ideas, I began posting to sci.physics.relativity once again. And I continued reading what the mathematicians there were arguing.

In one post, one of the mathematicians on my "Do Not Reply" list, Michael Moroney, provided his opinion about how tuning forks work:

[A tuning fork] "vibrates which means the speeds of the tines are constantly changing at the frequency of the fork in a sinusoidal fashion. In addition, the max magnitude of the vibration depend on how hard the fork is struck.

Huh? What is the purpose of a tuning fork if the sound it makes due to its vibrations "constantly changes" and are dependent upon "how hard the fork is struck"? The sole purpose of a tuning fork is to consistently give a specific tone for many seconds regardless of how hard it is struck, just as long as it was struck hard enough to produce the tone. (Moroney also bragged once again about how he beat a speeding ticket by arguing with the police officer that holding a vibrating tuning fork stationary in front of a radar gun will not give a valid reading because the tuning fork itself is not moving, it is stationary.)

Interestingly, there is a lot of debate among mathematicians as to whether a radar gun that is pointed at a tuning fork is measuring the speed at which the tines vibrate or is it "listening" to the frequency of the sound the fork makes?
That generated some arguments about how a radar gun listens to sounds, and that caused someone to bring up the subject of air conditioning and heater fans within the dashboard of a car producing false readings on a radar gun. The operator's manual for the GHD and Scout radar guns says this on page 25:

"7.4 Fan Interference
Fan interference is the most common form of interference that you
are likely to experience. It is caused when the radar measures the
speed of the vehicle blower fan. Changing the fan speed causes a
proportional change in the display speed. To correct this, relocate the
radar gun so it does not display spurious speeds or turn off the fan
motor."

I'm going to have to do some experiments to see exactly how and when and why the fan inside a dashboard causes "interference."

That also poses a question about the "TEST" button on my radar gun. The TS-3 instruction manual says this on page 3:

3. Perform the internal test sequence by pressing the TEST button.
The unit should display 60 mph. You will also hear an audio tone
if the volume is turned up because a 60 mph signal is being sent
through the circuitry to perform the unit's internal check. On
release of the TEST button, 8.8.8. should be displayed to verify
display operation.

4. Perform system check with certified tuning fork by striking the
fork until is rings then place it about 2 inches in front of the lens.
Pull the trigger and the unit will read the speed inscribed on the
fork.

Hmm. Will the gun show "60 mph" if I press the TEST button while the gun is pointed straight ahead while moving at 30 mph? I haven't tried that. I definitely will.

Meanwhile, as I'm writing this I'm wondering what would be proved if I put a vibrating tuning fork in front of a radar gun while in a moving car. The gun would have to read the tuning fork as the "target" speed. And it would almost certainly add together that speed with the gun's speed to display the combined speed. If I then raise the gun to point it skyward and to get the cosine effect, as long as the tuning fork is in front of the gun, the target speed should be the tuning fork's speed, but the gun's speed should be the Cosine Effect speed. Shouldn't it? Hmm. If you and I were on an airplane and were playing catch by throwing a ball from Seat 24A to 24D, perpendicular to the aircraft's direction of travel, there is an "effect," since the ball is not traveling in a straight line though space, but it's not the Cosine Effect. Hmm. I have to think about that. Plus, I don't have a tuning fork. There was no tuning fork in the package with the used TS-3 gun I bought on EBay. And I don't know how to do that moving experiment by myself. I'd need a second person to hold the tuning fork in front of the gun. Hmm. That's definitely something worth thinking about.