Quantum physics describes a world in which nothing has a stable existence: an atom or an electron may be a wave or a particle, depending on how you look at it; cats are both alive and dead. This is great for popular culture, which has made “quantum” a buzzword for cool, geek mystification. But it’s terrible for those of us who want to understand the world we live in, for there seems to be no easy answer to the simple question, “What is a rock?”

What is so crazily fabulous about this is that waves and particles are quite different. A particle always has a definite position, localized somewhere in space. Its motion traces out a path through space, what we call its trajectory. Moreover, according to Newtonian physics, at each moment a particle also has a definite velocity and, consequently, a definite momentum. A wave is almost the opposite. It is delocalized; it spreads out as it travels, occupying all the space available to it.

But now we are learning that waves and particles are different sides of a duality, that is, different ways of visualizing one reality. A single reality with a dual nature: a duality of waves and particles.

Smolin thinks the small-scale approach to physics is inherently incomplete. Current versions of quantum field theory do a fine job explaining how individual particles or small systems of particles behave, but they fail to take into account what is needed to have a sensible theory of the cosmos as a whole. They don’t explain why reality is like this, and not like something else. In Smolin’s terms, quantum mechanics is merely “a theory of subsystems of the universe”.

A more fruitful path forward, he suggests, is to consider the universe as a single enormous system, and to build a new kind of theory that can apply to the whole thing. And we already have a theory that provides a framework for that approach: general relativity.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century a theory called quantum mechanics was developed to explain quantum physics. This theory has been, ever since its inception, the golden child of science. It is the basis of our understanding of atoms, radiation, and so much else, from the elementary particles and basic forces to the behavior of materials. It also has been, for just as long, a troubled child. From the beginning, its inventors were deeply split over what to make of it. Some expressed shock and misgivings, even outrage. Others declared it a revolutionary new kind of science, which shattered the metaphysical assumptions about nature and our relationship to it that previous generations had thought essential for the success of science.

In these chapters I hope to convince you that the conceptual problems and raging disagreements that have bedeviled quantum mechanics since its inception are unsolved and unsolvable, for the simple reason that the theory is wrong. It is highly successful, but incomplete.

The company conducts open-source investigations and provides research and strategic advice for businesses, law firms and investors, as well as for political inquiries, such as opposition research. The "GPS" initialism is derived from "Global research, Political analysis, Strategic insight".

Christopher Steele was back on his heels when he first met Simpson in 2010, at a noisy Italian restaurant called Franco’s in the tony London neighborhood of St. James. The year before, Steele had retired after two decades of government service and set out with a fellow MI6 colleague, Christopher Burrows, to create Orbis, a private consulting firm specializing in the collection of intelligence from a network of sources around the world.

Steele’s official government biography described him as a Foreign Office diplomat. But it was well known (at least in investigative circles) that his real employer was the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service—better known as MI6. He’d had prestigious postings in Moscow and Paris and, as head of the Russia desk at HQ, was considered one of Britain’s foremost Russia hands by a shrinking circle of Kremlinologists in the United States and the U.K. who had done battle with the Soviets during the Cold War.

Trump’s reputation as a savvy billionaire was further belied by his creation of Trump University, a for-profit, unaccredited real estate training school that had drawn a raft of lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny before it shut down in 2010 after five years of operation. The school was an obvious scam. Why would a supposed mega-billionaire set up a fake university to con a few thousand strivers out of their meager life savings? There were really only two possible explanations, neither of them comforting: Either Trump wasn’t nearly as rich as he claimed to be and needed the money, or he was a pathological cheat who could not resist preying on the weak.

The more Fusion dug into Trump, the more he appeared to fit the textbook definition of a charlatan. Here was a supposed business genius whose career was littered with bankruptcies and failures. A purported multibillionaire who was almost certainly worth a fraction of what he claimed. A supposed self-made entrepreneur whose wealth actually sprang from an accident of birth. An immigrant basher who employed countless immigrants—and was even married to one. A “Buy American” proponent whose own clothing line was made in Mexico. A proud straight-talker with a long history of prevarication and outright fabrications—including under oath.

Trump, who had claimed in his presidential candidate forms that all of his projects were fabulously successful and incredibly valuable, insisted in his tax lawsuits that his properties barely made any profits and were practically worthless.

The memo went on to recount a bizarre episode that allegedly took place in the presidential suite of Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton hotel in 2013. Steele’s sources said that Trump’s hatred of the Obamas ran so deep that he had asked “a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him,” to defile the bed in which the Obamas had slept years earlier. The report said Russian intelligence had it on videotape for potential use as a tool of blackmail. Steele would later point out that one of his sources was a hotel staffer who had been on duty at the time.

It was a report that appeared to be written by some kind of investigator, but it was sloppy and unformatted; it looked like a reporter’s raw notes. Its findings, however, were explosive: They echoed Steele’s own reporting that the Russian FSB spy service had tapes of Trump having sex with prostitutes in Moscow.

Ed Lake discontinued his use of American On-Line and Prodigy and signed up with a local on-line service provider, Wisconsin Net.  He can now be e-mailed at his new address: [a wi dot net address that is apparently still valid].

Ed said, "One of the first things I did was to send an e-mail message to the film critic, Roger Ebert, to advise him that I didn't agree with his negative review of 'Independence Day', and Roger Ebert e-mailed me right back saying, in effect, that he didn't give a shit.  So, I knew my e-mail worked!"

NASA is partnering with private companies to get astronauts and cargo back and forth from the International Space Station, and NASA will now focus on long-range spaceflight. The same story we’ve been hearing all along, yet the Space Launch System is still underfunded and unpopular with many spaceflight advocates. In a best-case scenario, SLS won’t get astronauts back into space before 2021, and won’t get us any farther than we’ve already been until 2025 or later. This is tough to get excited about, especially when so many in Congress are eager to make a name for themselves by killing this relatively unambitious plan altogether.   

only twenty-three years after railroads replaced the wagon trains, the Wright brothers flew their first plane at Kitty Hawk. Only fifty-nine years after that, John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. Seven years later, Neil and Buzz walked on the moon. Some of us do math in our heads, dismayed. How long will it be until we can add another leap?  

as long as spaceflight is run by a government agency, any American child can reasonably dream of flying in space one day. For many of them, that dream will shape their early lives in important and beneficial ways. If spaceflight belongs to private companies, space travel will be a privilege of the incredibly wealthy, and space-obsessed children will have no particular motivation to do their algebra homework or serve in the military, knowing that their only hope of earning a seat lies in getting rich.

since the beginning, it has been part of NASA’s mandate to make its projects available to the American public. This means that everything—images, films, discoveries, transcripts of crew chatter—belongs to all of us. Not so with SpaceX. As a private company, SpaceX can keep private whatever they want, and they do. Some of my online space friends have been indignant to learn that they can’t download specs and diagrams for Dragon and Falcon, as we have always been able to do for shuttle and other NASA spacecraft—the SpaceX designs are industry secrets. NASA makes moon rocks available to scientists all over the world for the asking, and they have let scientists send experiments to space on their spacecraft for very negotiable fees, often negotiated down to nothing. SpaceX is under no obligation to do anything of the kind, and I don’t expect they will.

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

1.  "Special Relativity" by A. P. French.
2.  "Special Relativity" by Benjamin Crowell.
3.  "Special Relativity" by Carl Ramirez
4.  "Special Relativity" by N. M. J. Woodhouse
5.  "Special Relativity" by T. M. Helliwell.
6.  "Special Relativity" by Valerio Faraoni.
7.  "Special Relativity - A First Encounter: 100 years since Einstein" by Domenico Giulini.
8.  "Special Relativity and Motions Faster than Light" by Moses Fayngold.
9.  "Special Relativity in General Frames: From Particles to Astrophysics" by Éric Gourgoulhon
10. "Special Theory of Relativity" by C. W. Kilmister.

The speed of light in empty space always has the same value c.

The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted c, is the same to all inertial observers, is the same in all directions, and does not depend on the velocity of the object emitting the light. Formally: the speed of light in free space is a constant in all inertial frames of reference.

Light travelling with speed c in one frame should have speed c + u in a frame moving towards the source of the light with speed u.  Thus it should be possible for light to travel with any speed. Light that travels with speed c in a frame in which its source is at rest should have some other speed in a moving frame; so Galilean invariance would imply dependence of the
velocity of light on the motion of the source.

The velocity of light does not depend upon the velocity of its source.

Sound obeys Einstein's second postulate in only one special frame of reference, in which the observer is at rest in the air.

The crucial difference between sound and light is then immediately clear. Since there is no ether (which would correspond to the air in the case of sound), light has to obey the second postulate in all inertial frames. Without the ether there is no preferred frame to be chosen above any other. The velocity of light cannot depend on the source velocity regardless of the reference frame of the observer.

Therefore the velocity of light is independent of the observer's motion. It is the same in every inertial frame of reference. This is a revolutionary idea, unprecedented before Einstein. It took considerable nerve to write down postulates that had as a consequence that light always goes at the same velocity no matter how fast the observer is moving.

Constancy of the speed of light: The speed of light in vacuo has the same value c ≈ 3 · 108 m/s in all inertial frames, regardless of the velocity of the observer or the source.

the velocity of light measured by an observer is independent of
the state of motion of either the source or the observer.

Now, I did perform the experiment and I see that when there is no rotation, the photons that were emitted simultaneously in the two opposite directions return simultaneously. I accordingly
interpret this as another confirmation of Einstein’s postulate about the constancy of the speed of light. However, when I repeat the experiment during rotation of the disk, the photons do not return simultaneously. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that the speed of light in a rotating system is different in different directions. And this must be true not only for the average speed, but also for local speed in any location.”

The velocity of light as measured by any observer at a point of his worldline has a norm always equal to the constant c.

It might amuse you that Young and Freedman is not one of the top 3 physics textbooks by ANY measure. Whatever gave you the idea that it was?

It's number 3 on this list:
https://thecollegeapplication.com/best-physics-textbooks-for-college-today/
It's number 7 on this list:
https://bestbookshub.com/best-physics-texbooks/
It's number 1 on this list:
https://bestgamingpro.com/best-physics-textbooks/

When I combined the various lists, it seems to fit in position #3. 

A hundred TEXTBOOKS? I’d like a listing of the first 30 please.
Note that Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos is not a textbook. Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is not a textbook.

OK, so let’s have a small moment of truth-telling here, Ed. You have provided a listing of 70 books, but you fell short of claiming that these are actually in your possession. I would have doubts without a link to a photo of your bookshelf showing all of these. I can explain why I have doubts. About 40 of the titles you list below are first-year introductory physics books. None of those are available in PDF except illegally or at costs close to print books, and they do not render at all well on Kindle (and in fact are not available as official Kindle editions). You also cite multiple editions of the same textbook, which is a lot to pay for essentially the same content (what changes from edition to edition is mostly the end-of-chapter problems and worked examples, which you do not care about). The average storefront (online or bricks-and-mortar store) price for each those introductory books ranges from $100 to $125. This means that if indeed you had those 40 first-year textbooks on your shelf, you’d have spent $4000 - $5000 on them, since the onset of your interest in physics a couple years ago.

It turns out that I have 152 books in .pdf format, 11 books in .epub format (which my computer can read to me, if I want), and 2 books in .mobi format which I can theoretically read on my Kindle. I also see that only 31 of the 152 books in .pdf format are non-searchable (I'll explain later why that is important).

Kindle-native ebooks are trade books, usually, not textbooks. Free PDFs are usually crap books self-published and posted for attention by loons.

I have no doubt he has lots of books that he can listen to in audio format. For obvious reasons, those will not be physics textbooks.

There are a few legal sites to look for books and articles. One of them is archive.org, which has books for download or borrowing. Using the search word "relativity" there are 26,548 books and articles listed (for instance see https://ia903103.us.archive.org/13/items/arxiv-1601.04996/1601.04996.pdf for Lectures on General Theory of Relativity from Emil T. Akhmedov).

Of course, there are some russian sites that have everything, like the book Gravitation in http://xdel.ru/downloads/lgbooks/Misner%20C.W.%2C%20Thorne%20K.S.%2C%20Wheeler%20J.A.%20Gravitation%20%28Freeman%2C%201973%29%28K%29%28T%29%281304s%29_PGr_.pdf

Here is one of many sites

https://www.pdfdrive.com/search?q=instructor%27s+solution+manual&pagecount=&pubyear=&searchin=&em=

By which you are just acknowledging that you select some parts of those books, which you believe, in your uninformed opinion, support your beliefs.

No, that’s a bad program for books. A REALLY bad idea. Books are not like encyclopedias with little independent articles in them. If there is something on page 198, it is implicit that you already understand the material in pages 1-197 and it’s going to USE that implication in presenting what’s on 198. It is IMPOSSIBLE in a book to understand correctly what’s on page 198 unless you already know the stuff in pages 1-197.

If this is how you have modeled your “research”, then it is no wonder you have absolutely no understanding of anything in books and the only things you have absorbed are short web articles you’ve been able to digest as a whole in a sitting.

Later, as the 2000 Year Old Man with Carl Reiner I explained the difference between comedy and tragedy: If I cut my finger, that’s tragedy. Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.

I was on the very first Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on October 1, 1962, along with Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Rudy Vallee, and Tony Bennett. It was the first appearance in a long association with Johnny Carson that really helped me to become a famous comedy name.

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

April 21, 2022 - Hmm.  When I sit at my computer, I have a bunch of 3-ring binders holding screenplays atop a bookcase right in front of me.  For some reason I recently started to wonder if those screenplays, which I wrote back in the 1990s, were typed on a typewriter, or if I wrote them on a computer using Microsoft WORD.  So, this morning I dug into my backup computer files to see if I had a folder for screenplays somewhere.  I turned out I did, but it didn't contain all eleven.



And NONE of them are in a format that is fully compatible with Microsoft WORD, not even the .DOC files. 

Sometimes when I open a .DOC file, it doesn't use my current version of WORD, it gets another version from somewhere and the screenplay is presented in "protected mode," which means I cannot change it or even print it.  I can, however, copy and paste it into WORD as a .DOCX file, but the screenplay will need at least an hour of work to get it into a readable format, and even then it will not be in true screenplay format because WORD doesn't seem to have any way of putting both the screenplay name and the page number at the top of each page.

Other times when I try to open a .DOC file for a different screenplay, I get a "File Conversion" window which seems to indicate that the file was written on a DOS machine and needs to be converted to OS.  I can do all that, but the screenplay would still need at least a day's work to get it into a readable format.

Some files are in .FDR format.  FDR is the format used by "Final Draft," a program used for writing screenplays.  I don't think I have that program anymore.  It was probably on a CD that you had to insert into your computer when you wanted to use it.  But, if I want to start writing screenplays again, I could buy a new copy from Amazon for $40. 

I'm not going to start writing screenplays again.  I had an agent back then, but he was never able to sell any of my screenplays, even though they got some praise at meetings.  I found a note that says Rivers of Iron "placed in the top 10 percent in the 2000 Nicholl Fellowships screenwriting contest run by AMPAS" (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), and Shook "finished in the top 10 percent in the 2000 Austin Film Festival screenwriting contest."  I remember attending the Austin Film Festival in 2000.  While there, I spent some time wandering around Austin, including going to the top of the tower where some crazy guy had recently positioned himself with a rifle to shoot strangers on the street below.

All this reminiscing, of course, is keeping me from working on my latest book. 

April 20, 2022 - Yesterday, I finished a major revision to my paper "Stationary Points in Space" and I uploaded it to vixra.org. I added an illustration, plus a lot of explanatory details and eight "implications."  Here's the illustration I added:

It shows a light source moving from the lower left to the upper right.  I used a light bulb because I wasn't sure of the best way to draw a star or sun.  The bulb emits light for an instant at the mid-way point on its path.  That light is emitted from a "stationary point in space."  As the paper explains, we know it's a stationary point because when we look at a galaxy like Andromeda, we see it where it was located 2,537,000 years ago, not where it is today.  Einstein must have realized that when he developed his Second Postulate:

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

The sixth implication is that, because all light is emitted from stationary points in space, there can be no “red-shifting” or “blue-shifting” due to the emitter’s speed away from or toward an observer on Earth. 

The light will appear to be blue-shifted to a higher frequency if the Earth is moving toward that stationary point in space, and the light will appear to be red-shifted to a lower frequency if the Earth is moving away from that stationary point in space.