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Comments for Sunday, May
22, 2022, thru Sat., May 28, 2022:
May 25,
2022 -
I'm beginning to regret
that I started reading Lee
Smolin's latest book, "Einstein’s
Unfinished Revolution:
The Search for What
Lies Beyond the
Quantum."
He poses a lot of
questions, with no
indication that he is
going to provide any
answers anywhere.
One of the questions that
Quantum Mechanics poses
that always puts my teeth
on edge is: "Is a photon a
particle or a wave?"
The question should be
"How can a photon
act like both a
particle and a wave?"
Obviously a photon has both
properties. So, it's
just a matter of
visualizing how that is
possible. People
have been writing about
the answer for
years. A photon is a
particle that consists of
oscillating electric and
magnetic fields.
Those oscillating fields
give the photon its
wave-like
properties. I
visualize a photon this
way:
And when
it is coming toward you, the oscillating
fields would appear this way:
But, so far, Prof. Smolin's book
just discusses the question, without any hint
that he is going to mention or propose an
answer. Here's a quote from the book:
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?”
Another quote from the book:
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.
Photons
spread out, but a single photon does
not! Prof. Smolin
seems to mix up masses of light photons
spreading out as they move away from the
emitter with individual photons
which cannot spread out. Generally,
when discussing light, you do
not see "waves of photons." You see
individual photons as they arrive. The
more photons you see, the brighter and
clearer the image you see. But radio
signals are transmitted as "waves" of
photons. The artificial differences in
the wave patterns are transformed into
different sounds by the receiver.
But, so far, Prof. Smolin gives no
indication he is going to resolve any of the
Quantum Mechanics mysteries, other than why
Quantum Mechanics only works when describing
atoms and particles we are made from and
does not work when describing the Universe
around us.
I really hate reading about unsolved
mysteries when we know the mystery results
from not having enough information - or from
not knowing how to put the information we
have together correctly. I want to read
about how such mysteries were
solved.
May 25, 2022 -
Yesterday, as I've done many
many times before, I did a
Google search for "Relativity
vs Quantum Mechanics," and
I found a long list of articles
about the conflict. It
seems, however, that each
article is a different view on
the subject, some siding with
Quantum Mechanics, others trying
to be neutral.
One of the first articles on the
list was from the November 4,
2015, issue of the British
newspaper The Guardian,
titled "Relativity
versus quantum mechanics:
the battle for the universe."
It's a fairly long article, but
definitely worth reading.
About half way through the
article it mentions
Lee Smolin.
Professor Smolin teaches physics
at the University of Waterloo in
Ontario, Canada, and he's the
author of several books.
I've encountered his name many
many times while doing research,
and it seemed we tended to agree
on most things. Here is
some of what the article says
about him (with my
highlighting):
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.
I also checked to see what
books he had written, and I found that his
most recent book is titled "Einstein’s
Unfinished Revolution: The Search for
What Lies Beyond the Quantum."
I browsed through it and found it was
definitely a book I wanted to read.
So, I obtained a Kindle copy and began to
read it. I underlined passage after
passage. I'm only about 8% done
reading it, but here are two quotes from
early in the book:
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.
and
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.
And the reason it is
incomplete, as I see it, is because it
involves looking down into the atomic
structure of things, where only objects
exist, with space between objects, and the
mathematics involves how one object
interacts with another. As Prof.
Smolin says, "quantum
mechanics is merely 'a theory of
subsystems of the universe.'”
Yes, Quantum Mechanics may work just
fine when looking down at the
sub-atomic world, but the problem is
not that the sub-atomic world is just
a sub-system of the universe, the
problem is that when
you look upwards into outer space and the
entire universe, you encounter infinity.
And Quantum Mechanics cannot cope with
infinity. "Quantum" is defined as "a
specific amount or quantity."
"Infinite" is defined as "limitless or
endless in space, extent, or size;
impossible to measure or calculate."
That is the crux of the problem. "Crux" is
defined as "the decisive or most important
point at issue." Quantum Mechanics
cannot deal with a fundamental fact about
the universe: it is apparently
infinite.
May 24, 2022
- I've finally managed to get
back to work on my latest book, now tentatively
titled "Logical Relativity."
I now say "tentatively" because when I
started working on the third draft on
Sunday, I also started to think that
maybe it should have a different
title.
The first draft of the book began with
a lengthy introduction about how I got
interested in the subject of
Relativity. Then when I started
the second draft I realized that I
needed to open with information about
Relativity, not with information about
me. And I started with a chapter
about "Stationary Points in
Space."
Then on Sunday I realized that I
needed to provide the reader with a
lot of additional information before
discussing "Stationary Points in
Space," and when I started the third
draft I decided I needed to open with
a chapter titled "What Einstein Knew,"
which would describe what scientists
knew to be facts in 1905, when
Einstein developed his Theory of
Special Relativity. For example,
they knew that light did not travel at
an infinite speed, it traveled at
about 300,000 kilometers per
second. And they had just
learned that there was no
"luminiferous ether" that filled the
universe and conveniently provided
mathematicians with something
stationary to measure all other speeds
against. They also knew that the
earth was rotating at 1,040 miles per
hour at the equator and significantly
less than that in Berlin and London, yet
measurements of the speed of
light always resulted in the
same answer in all
locations. And Einstein
knew that Quantum Mechanics was
being developed.
Einstein's 1905 paper started
the battles between proponents
of Quantum Mechanics and
Relativity, battles which have
now raged for over 115 years.
And I'm wondering if I shouldn't
get into those battles at the
front of the book instead of
waiting until after I've
thoroughly explained
Relativity. The subject of
"Stationary Points in Space"
exposes the point of
conflict. To Quantum
Mechanics mathematicians, there
can be no "stationary points
in space." But if
you want to understand
Relativity, you have to
understand "stationary points in
space," since it is what
Einstein's Second Postulate is
all about. And that is
evidently why so few college
physics textbooks provide
students with Einstein's actual
Second Postulate. Instead,
they provide a phony
Second Postulate that is
compatible with Quantum
Mechanics and claim that it is
what Einstein meant.
So, this morning I woke up
thinking I need to research the
conflict between Quantum
Mechanics and Relativity to see
exactly how it is described in
books and papers. My
recollection is that it is
generally described as a
mathematical problem: no one has
developed an equation
that fully incorporates both
theories. The reason seems
obvious: Quantum Mechanics was
developed to describe the
actions of atoms and sub-atomic
particles. It's about quantifiable
objects. When you
get into the subject of the
universe, you encounter
something that is not
quantifiable: infinity.
The Big Bang Universe is
apparently expanding into an
infinite universe that appears
empty or mostly empty.
Quantum Mechanics cannot deal
with that, and thus we have a
conflict.
So, I have to decide if I want
to get into describing that
conflict at the start of my book
or at the end. I'm
beginning to think I need to get
into it at the beginning.
And that would mean several new
chapters at the start of the
book before I get into what I've
already written.
Sigh. But changing
the order of things is a fairly
common problem when writing
books.
May 22, 2022
- Ah! I've finally
completed week my 3-week project to get my
computer files and my apartment cleaned up
and organized.
So, now I can get back to work on my new
book "Logical Relativity."
But, during lunch on Friday, I also finished
reading another book on my Kindle. So,
I first need to write a comment about
it.
The book was "Crime
In Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier
and the Fusion GPS Investigation of
Donald Trump" by Glenn Simpson
and Peter Fritsch.
The book made me realize that there were a
lot of things about politics that I knew
very little about. It never occurred
to me that a company like "Fusion GPS"
would or could exist. According to Wikipedia,
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".
The company was founded in
2011 by Glenn R. Simpson, a former
investigative reporter and journalist for Roll
Call and The Wall Street
Journal, and Peter Fritsch, a former Wall
Street Journal senior editor.
They are also the authors of the book.
Fusion GPS, the company they founded, is
usually called "a consulting firm."
That's a term I've often heard mentioned,
but I never thought to research what it
actually meant. I assumed it was some
kind of law firm where you "consulted" with
lawyer to find out if you had a valid legal
case against someone, or if someone had a
valid legal case against you. Instead,
"consulting firms" are more like
intelligence agencies, collecting
information about suspicious activities and
controversial subjects. And customers
will then pay them to access the information
they collected. A key character in the
book is Christopher Steele, who also
co-created such a company. Here's a
quote from the book:
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.
Another quote about
Christopher Steele:
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.
Here are three quotes from
the book which show some of what Steele
found when researching Donald Trump.
One:
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.
Two:
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.
Three:
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.
During Steele's research and
investigations, he had also come across
mentions of the infamous "pee tapes."
He advised GPS Fusion about them in a
memo. The books says,
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.
And another source GPS
Fusion found provided similar information:
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.
Combined with tons of
information about Trump's connections to
Russian criminals and American mafia types,
mostly for purposes of money laundering,
it's amazing that Trump hasn't been thrown
in jail countless times. But then you
have to realize that this is also politics,
which means that Republicans will simply
dismiss it all as "nonsense" made up by
Democrats to attack Trump.
I've got 20 pages of notes from the
book. But, what they all boil down to
is that the "pee tapes" and sex tapes have
never been shown in court. So, all we
know about them is what consulting firms
like GPS Fusion have found. The same
with most of Trump's criminal connections
and the very likely possibility that Putin
is blackmailing Trump in some way. So,
as the book's title say, it is a "crime in
progress," awaiting the time when solid
evidence will be presented in court.
"Crime in Progress" is a very
interesting book, and I can certainly
recommend it.
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Comments for Sunday, May
15, 2022, thru Sat., May 21, 2022:
May 15, 2022
- Okay, I've now completed week
#2 of my 3-week effort to get my computer
files and my apartment cleaned up and
organized.
Of course, I spent most of last week just
sitting in a chair and wondering what to do
next. Occasionally, I'd move some
books around on my bookshelves, trying to
decide which I should bag up and give to
Goodwill. Last week I didn't give away
any books, but I bagged up a few empty
3-ring binders. I also found I have
nearly a dozen 3-ring binders filled with
stuff about the anthrax attacks of 2001, and
in one binder I found copies of an
unpublished "newspaper" called "Ed Lake's
News" that I started creating in June of
1996 and continued with for about a
year. My scanner doesn't seem
compatible with any of my current computers,
so I had to use my camera to take the photo
below. (It says "Volume 2, Issue 1" at
the top of the page, but I can't find any
Volume 1.)

Evidently, I created the "newspaper" as a
way of playing around with a new computer, a
new color printer, and some new graphics
software I'd just bought. And I was
pondering the idea of somehow connecting to
the Internet. The only way I could
connect to the Internet at that time was to
use a computer in the library at a nearby
university.
At that time I had about 30 years of
experience working with business computers,
programming them and designing systems for
them. But the idea of having a
computer at home was a very new
idea. And so was the idea of
connecting to other computers around the
world via the Internet.
Looking at the main article, I see that it
says I spent "thousands" of dollars on a new
computer. I couldn't believe that was
true, but then I found an article in the
next issue of the newspaper that says I
paid $2,207.09 for a Packard Bell
computer, another $367.84 for a color
monitor, and $420.39 for a Lexmark color
printer. Wow!!!
I also had to buy an 8-foot long table to
put the stuff on. The table is the
only thing I still have from those days.
In the third issue of the "newspaper" I have
an article about connecting to the
Internet. Some of the ways would
require long-distance calls, which would be
prohibitively expensive. Other ways
were very very slow. In issue after
issue I examined different ways to connect,
I try them out for awhile, and I found them
all to be too expensive - except for briefly
accessing email accounts and certain
discussion forums.
Meanwhile, as all that was going on, I was
writing screenplays and submitting them to
agents and to contests.
I didn't "publish" the newspaper anywhere
except for producing one copy via my color
printer for myself. Between June of
1996 and December of 1997 I probably
produced only about 20 issues, some only 1
page long. But they show my thinking
at the time. And they show me as
bumbling around. The headline in the
image above is "Ed Lake Goes
Berserk!!! Buys New Computer!!!"
The headlines and stories in the other
issues were along that same line. A
headline dated August 1, 1996, says "ED LAKE
ACCESSES INTERNET CIA FILES." The
story is about me finding a CIA file about
Poland. Another headline in that same
issue is "Ed Lake Gets New E-Mail
Address!" The first two paragraphs
are:
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!"
According to one
source I found, the Internet began
operating for the general public on April
30, 1993. Another
source says the same thing. So,
it was only 3 years later that I was
prowling around and getting written about in
newspapers and magazines for exposing fake
photos I was finding on the Internet.
It was just a bit over a quarter-century
ago.
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Comments for Sunday, May
8, 2022, thru Sat., May 14, 2022:
May 11, 2022 - While
driving around doing some chores
this afternoon, I finished
listening to CD #18 in the 18-CD
audio book version of "Mike
Nichols: A Life" by
Mark Harris.
I "borrowed" the audio book from my local
library on April 14, 2021, back in the days
when you could "borrow" a book when it
became available and read (or listen to) it
when you found the time.
I wasn't totally sure I wanted to listen to
it, since I didn't really know that much
about Mike Nichols, other than that he was
once part of the terrific comedy team of "Nichols
and May." But that was
enough to make me want to check it out.
The book, however, is not about the comedy
team. The team is barely mentioned,
although Elaine
May is frequently mentioned separately
in the book as an actress, writer, director
and friend of Mike Nichols. The book,
however, is primarily about Mike Nichols'
career as a stage and movie director and
producer. And it seems he was one of
the greatest, even though, like virtually
every actor, director and producer, he did
have an occasional flop. His first try
at movie directing was in 1966 with "Who's
Afraid of Virginia Wolf," which
won 5 Oscars. His last picture was "Charlie
Wilson's War" in 2007.
While reading the book, I viewed some of the
movies he directed, like "Regarding
Henry" and "Working
Girl," which I have on
DVDs. I also have "The
Graduate," "Closer,"
"Catch
22" and some others, but I
didn't have the time to watch those.
(I last watched them about 10 years ago.)
I started by just burning onto CDs the first
8 of the 18 MP3 files that comprise the
audio book. Then I burned 5 more,
because I'd gotten interested. Then I
burned the last 5 when I was sure I wanted
to hear it through to the end. Nichols
died in 2014. He was born to Jewish
parents in Berlin in 1931 as Igor Mikhail
Peschkowsky and immigrated to the U.S.
before WWII. And, according to
his biographer, "He had a childhood reaction
to a vaccine that resulted in the loss of
all of his hair and his inability to grow
hair." I would never have guessed
that. I also didn't know that Mike
Nichols was married to broadcast journalist
Diane Sawyer for the last 24 years of his
life. She was his 4th wife.
All in all, I can recommend the book.
It was listed as one of the top 10 books of
2021 by NPR, People and Time.
May 9, 2022
- Shortly after lunch yesterday,
I finished reading another book on my
Kindle. The book was "Leaving
Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of
American Spaceflight" by
Margaret Lazarus Dean.
The book was published in May of 2015 and
basically concludes around October of 2012
with the first flight of the SpaceX Dragon
spacecraft, about a year after the last
space shuttle flight, which was done by the
space shuttle Atlantis in mid-July
2011.
The author is an associate professor of
English at the University of Tennessee at
Knoxville, and she's also a writer, having
previously written a science fiction novel
in 2007. That means she's not a
scientist, and the book has a lot of
extraneous detail that is better suited for
a novel. She is, however, a fan of the
space shuttle program and witnessed many
launches, plus the final return of Atlantis.
The problem I had with the book is all the
details about driving from Knoxville to
Cocoa Beach, Florida, finding hotel or motel
rooms, finding a good place to eat, standing
in the crowds watching the launches and how
people jockey for better views and bring
their kids to see the launches. And
when the author managed to get press
credentials because of her sci-fi novel, her
Facebook page, and her friendship with a
NASA employee, she got to see a lot of
things that weren't open to the general
public.
While it's an interesting book, it is also
filled with the author's personal beliefs
and opinions about women's rights, author
Norman Mailer, and America's space program.
Here's a quote from the book:
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.
Getting astronauts into
space via the SLS system has been delayed
until August of 2022. I haven't been
paying much attention to the SLS, and I find
that the various Mars Rover missions are
totally fascinating, so I'm not sure if I
should be as concerned as the book's author
is or not. Here's a pessimistic quote:
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?
Here's another downbeat
quote about using private companies to do
our missions into space:
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.
And another:
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.
She's probably right.
It gives the reader a lot to think about,
but if you pick up her book thinking it will
be an enjoyable read about astronauts and
space flights, you will be disappointed to
read so much about the negative aspects of
letting private companies lead the way into
space.
I can still recommend the book, even though
it can be a depressing read. While
depressing, it is also eye-opening.
But these days, "eye-opening" can be just
another way of saying "alarming" and "sad."
May 8, 2022
- Sigh. I've finished
week #1 of my 3-week cleanup project.
I've taken several bags of books to
Goodwill, I've gone through my computer to
see what files I should get rid of, I've
backed up the things I know I need to keep,
and I put them onto a flashdrive which I put
in my safe deposit box, and I've done a lot
of general housecleaning around my
apartment. But there are also a lot of
things I postponed to do in weeks 2 and 3.
Going through my computer files, I found a
lot of stuff from my days working on the
anthrax case that I'd forgotten about.
For example, I found that I have
several CDs I received from the FBI after I
filed Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA)
requests to get pictures and documents from
them. I also found the software CDs
for Final Draft, the program I used
to write screenplays a quarter century
ago. But they're for Windows 95, and I
don't have any reason to even try to install
the program on my current computer.
I also looked through some non-textbooks
about Special Relativity to see if they
contained a correct version of
Einstein's Second Postulate. The vast
majority of college physics textbooks
contain an incorrect version, but it
seemed to me that if some author wrote a
book about Special Relativity that was meant
for the general public, he'd have to
use the correct version of
Einstein's Second Postulate. If he
didn't, editors, reviewers and readers would
point out the error. Wouldn't
they?
On the first page of his 1905 paper "On
the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies",
Einstein clearly states his second
postulate as:
light is always propagated
in empty space with a definite
velocity c which is independent
of the state of motion of the
emitting body.
So I searched through these
10 books that I hadn't classified as
"textbooks" to see if they have correct
versions of Einstein's Second Postulate:
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.
#1 has this incorrect
version of Einstein's Second Postulate on
page 72:
The speed of light in
empty space always has the same value c.
#2
correctly quotes Einstein on page 48.
#3 has this incorrect
version of Einstein's Second Postulate
around page 7:
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.
#4 never uses the word
"postulate." It contains this on page
22 (with my highlighting in red):
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.
#5 has a somewhat okay
second postulate on page 29:
The velocity of light does
not depend upon the velocity of its
source.
But it also has this
nonsense on page 31:
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.
And it has this nonsense on
page 32:
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.
#6 has this incorrect
version of Einstein's Second
Postulate on page 14:
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.
#7 quotes Einstein's Second
Postulate correctly on page 41, but it has
this nonsense on page 3:
the velocity of light
measured by an observer is independent of
the state of motion of
either the source or the observer.
#8 has no version of
Einstein's Second Postulate but discusses
the Sagnac experiment on page 133, and says
that the speed of light seems different
under some circumstances (with my
highlighting):
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.”
#9 has this nonsense on page
121:
The velocity of light as
measured by any observer at a point of his
worldline has a norm always equal to the
constant c.
#10 quotes Einstein
correctly on page 188, but it is very
difficult to find anything else about the
Second Postulate in the rest of the book.
So, while just 3 of the 10 books contained
an "incorrect" version of Einstein's Second
Postulate, only 3 have correct versions,
1 is somewhat correct, 2 do not mention
Einstein's Second Postulate at all,
and the remaining 1 and some of the others
require a lot of deciphering
to understand. What this exercise
tells me is that I need to get back to work
on my book "Logical Relativity" as
soon as I can. It explains Relativity
in very simple and easy-to-understand
terms. However, it has also become
more clear than ever before that the main
reason I'm writing my book is to clarify my
thinking about a subject that countless
others have already tried to explain in
their own terms based upon their own
beliefs. I can't hope to change any
minds, but maybe I can generate some
interesting discussions.
|
Comments for Sunday, May
1, 2022, thru Sat., May 7, 2022:
May 1, 2022 - Groan!
I'm really getting bogged down! For
the next three weeks, I may be writing fewer
comments here, because I'll be busy on other
things which have a higher priority
and need to be done before mid-May.
Plus, that recent discussion I had on the sci.physics.relativity
forum about "Stationary
Points in Space" posed some questions
I needed to research.
That discussion is still going on. For
what may be the first time ever, there are
people on that forum who are supporting
things I've said.
Last Wednesday, I had a couple arguments
with someone who calls himself "Odds
Bodkin." In the first argument, I had
quoted a passage to him from the textbook "University Physics with
Modern Physics - 14th ed." by Hugh D. Young
& Roger A. Freedman, which I said was
ranked #3 among the top physics
textbooks. Odds Bodkin then claimed:
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?
Whereupon I responded by
providing him with links to 3 websites which
rank physics textbooks and include that
book. I wrote:
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.
Odds Bodkin's response was a
rant that those were "blog" sites and just
one person's opinion, and they didn't mean
anything. So, of course, I asked him
to provide a list of the top ten physics
textbooks. And, of course, he just
ignored my request.
As part of another argument, he
claimed that all college textbooks
disagree with me about
everything. I responded that there
were some that agreed with me on certain
things. I told him that I had a
collection of over 100 college textbooks,
but at that moment I didn't have the time to
hunt through them to find the ones that
agreed with me.
Odds Bodkin's response was:
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.
So, I provided him with a
list of over 70 textbooks that I have.
His response was (with my highlighting):
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.
By the time he posted that
comment, I had already quit the
thread. But "The Starmaker" responded
to Odds Bodkin with this comment:
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).
To which Odds Bodkin replied
(with my highlighting):
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.
Odds Bodkin continued to
argue that textbooks simply cannot be
in PDF format.
Then Paparios posted this:
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
And "The Starmaker"
responded with this:
Here is one of many sites
https://www.pdfdrive.com/search?q=instructor%27s+solution+manual&pagecount=&pubyear=&searchin=&em=
There are seven more
messages in the thread after that, but none
from Odds Bodkin, of course, and none with
additional links to sites where books are
available in PDF format. They are all
just arguments over words and terminology.
I was tempted to rejoin the discussion and
mention Project
Gutenberg where you can find over
60,000 books for which the copyrights have
expired, including just about everything by
Albert Einstein, Jules Verne and Phillip K.
Dick. But, I had too many other things
to do. One of them turned out to be to
look through www.pdf.com, since I didn't
recall ever visiting that site before.
I ended up downloading several books about
the physics of spaceflight that I didn't
have in my collection. Reading them
will be another thing on my "to-do"
list. I only need about thirty or
forty years to finish the things that are
currently on that list, but, of course, in
thirty or forty years the list will probably
be much much longer with new stuff.
|
Comments for Sunday,
April 24, 2022, thru Sat., April 30, 2022:
April 28, 2022 - I just put an
end to another discussion I
started on the sci.physics.relativity
forum. I started the
discussion about "Stationary
Points in Space" on April
23rd, just before shutting down
my computer for the day.
As of this moment, 11:49 AM on
the 28th, the thread contains
160 messages, with probably
close to a third of them being
my responses to posts to me from
others.
This discussion seemed a lot
more interesting than virtually
every other discussion I've had
on that forum. I didn't
change any minds, of course, but
explaining things helped me to
understand a few things that I
had really never thought about
before.
One of the most bizarre
arguments I had was with several
people who seemingly could not
understand how research is
done. When I research a
subject, I may go through a hundred
books to see what they each have
to say on that subject.
When I described that process to
them, the response from
"Paparios" was:
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, I just look to see if
there are different explanations of things,
and which explanations seem to make the most
sense.
Here is how "Odds Bodkin" responded:
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.
So, you can't do
research on a topic unless you read
every book from cover to cover and
understand everything in every book?
How can anyone be so far
removed from reality?
Years ago, one of the first physics topics I
researched was Einstein's Second
Postulate. It is absolutely clear when
reading Einstein's 1905 paper "On
the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"
what his Second Postulate is. On the
first page he describes it as "another
postulate" following the postulate he just
gave as his first postulate. He then
comments on his two postulates, and he never
uses the word "postulate" again anywhere in
the entire paper.
But in some discussion someone gave
something totally different as "Einstein's
Second Postulate." So, I researched
where he got that version from.
When I researched what physics textbooks had
to say about Einstein's Second Postulate, I
found that it was rare to find any two
textbooks which used the same wording.
Some authors picked a phrase from elsewhere
in the paper and gave that as Einstein's
"second postulate," some authors used their
own wording, and almost NONE used the second
postulate as Einstein gave it. I was
stunned, and I
wrote a paper about it.
Reading each of the books in its entirety
might have given me a better idea of how
each author got his version, but I could do
that later if it became important or
interesting.
Probably the most arguments I had on that
forum during the past few days were about where
the Big Bang occurred. Mostly they
argued that it occurred "everywhere."
But logically that makes no sense. The
universe began as radiation spreading out
from some point. The radiation then
formed particles. Some of those
particles then collected to form into the
Milky Way galaxy, and within that galaxy
some particles formed into the sun and
earth. When people talk about the Big
Bang occurring everywhere, they talk about
how nearly all the galaxies are moving away
from each other. They do not talk
about the time when particles were
collecting together to form those galaxies.
I could go on and on, but probably the most
interesting argument was about how I
shouldn't read books about science
and physics, I should only read textbooks.
That made me wonder about the differences I
have seen between what science books
say versus what physics textbooks
say. Have I ever seen an incorrect
version of Einstein's Second Postulate in a
science book? I don't think
so. And I know I've seen descriptions
of the Big Bang which say it happened
outside of our observable universe. I
just never before thought about comparing
what science book authors say versus
what textbook authors say.
If I can ever find the time, that might be
something interesting to research.
April 25, 2022 - During lunch on
Saturday, I finished reading another
book on my Kindle. The book was
"All
About Me!: My Remarkable Life in
Show Business" by Mel
Brooks:
I started reading it because I was looking
for something humorous to read, after
reading "Ha!" which I thought would be
funnier than it turned out to be.
Reading only during breakfast and lunch, It
took me over a month to read "All About
Me!", and it too wasn't as funny as I had
hoped it would be. There were lots of
parts that were hilarious, and I enjoyed
reading about the making of the movies Mel
Brooks played in, starred in or
directed. In the evenings, if I hadn't
seen them in at least 8 years, I would dig
copies out of my DVD collection, and watch
them, such as "Blazing Saddles,"
"Spaceballs" and "The Producers."
Mel
Brooks was born in 1926. He's still
alive today at age 95. He served in
World War II as a radio man for a field
artillery unit. He was married to Anne
Bancroft for decades. Here's a quote
from the book:
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.
Another:
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.
The book was published in
November of last year, so it even mentions
the Covid pandemic. However, it is
also 480 pages long, which means, for me,
that it got a bit repetitious, particularly
all the "name dropping." He mentions
everyone who he worked with, and he worked
with a lot of people over the decades, many
of them more than once.
But, overall I enjoyed the book and can
recommend it.
April 24, 2022 - I
can't stop thinking about "stationary points
in space." It is just mind-boggling to me
that others haven't mentioned how Einstein's
Second Postulate basically says
that there are stationary points in
space. That postulate is:
light is always propagated
in empty space with a definite velocity c
which is independent of the state of
motion of the emitting body.
If light is emitted at a
"definite velocity" that has nothing to do
with the "motion of the emitting body," what
is that velocity relative to? It seems
clear that it is relative to a "stationary
point in space," since Einstein says that
his theory makes the luminiferous ether
"superfluous," and the imaginary
luminiferous ether was created in order to
give mathematicians something stationary
against which to measure all other motion.
When I posted my paper on "Stationary Points
in Space" to vixra.org,
a guy named "Mikko" responded negatively, as
he does to just about every paper I
write. ("Mikko" is apparently Finnish
for "Michael.") I then responded to
his criticisms, going through his key
comments one by one to show that they were
either wrong or off topic. To my
surprise, an administrator for the site
evidently deleted my response.
That had never happened before.
I really wanted some place to discuss
"Stationary Points in Space," so I tried
creating a thread about it on the
Astrophysics and Physics Facebook
group. Then something happened
that had also never happened
before. My comment simply remained in
limbo, awaiting some administrator to
approve it. Here's what I tried to
post:
As you can see, I tried posting it on April
3, and it has remained there as "pending"
for three weeks.
Yesterday, I tried something else.
There's one place where I can create a
discussion thread and there is no
"administrator" who can delete it or just
sit on it forever without allowing it to be
posted. That place is my own blog "My
Thoughts on the Changing World."
So, I created a new thread there which, of
course, I titled "Stationary
Points in Space."
Because I am the administrator of that blog,
nothing gets posted until I approve
it. Otherwise, it would just be
filled with personal attacks.
I then went back to vixra.org and typed a
response to "Mikko" telling him that if he
wanted to discuss the topic with me, he can
do so on my blog, and I provided the
link. As of this moment, that message
is still there. And Mikko responded on
my blog. But then he argued further on
vixra.org, so I'll copy that argument to my
blog and respond there.
And, since I had never discussed "stationary
points in space" on the
sci.physics.relativity discussion forum,
I started a
thread about it there. This
morning I see there are four new posts
there. But one simply says "no" and
one other is a response to someone
else. Responding to the two others
might prove interesting.
Meanwhile, it was just mind-boggling to me
that I had never read anything
anywhere that mentions how
Einstein's Second Postulate implies that
there are "stationary points in
space." Yesterday, I did a
Google search for "stationary points in
space" and got a whole list of places
where that term is used. But they are
all just theories related to how there can
be a point in space that is stationary
relative to another point in space (even
though neither point is truly "stationary,"
they're just keeping the same distance from
each other). The only exceptions seem
to be links to my paper.
So, now I have to respond to the posts on
sci.physics.relativity and on my blog.
It could be interesting. I really find
the subject fascinating. I wish there
were others who do also.
|
Comments for Sunday,
April 17, 2022, thru Sat., April 23, 2022:
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.
Like most people, I
interpreted that Second Postulate as meaning
that the speed of the emitter does not add
to the speed of light, thereby debunking the
"Emission Theory" which was widely accepted
in 1905 when Einstein wrote his paper about
Special Relativity. It does indeed say
that, but it also says a lot more. As
the illustration shows, light photons are
emitted at the same speed in all
directions, including back in the
direction from where the emitter came.
If light is emitted at the same speed in all
directions, and if light travels in a
straight line from that point of emission to
your telescope, that is the same as saying
that light must be emitted from a
"stationary point in space." If the
emission point wasn't stationary, the light
couldn't travel in a straight line from
that point, and light could not travel
at the same speed in all directions.
One of the eight implications I describe in
the paper is #6:
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.
As Einstein's Second
Postulate says, the emitter's speed doesn't
affect the speed of light, c.
And that leads to Implication #7:
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.
How can the Earth be moving
away from all those points in space?
The 8th implication is that the universe must
be expanding. That is the only
way we can be moving away from all those
points. When the space between
galaxies is expanding, the Earth and most
galaxies are moving away from each other.
In effect, we are both moving away from some
point somewhere between us. Our motion
and only our motion away from that
point causes the red-shift we observe.
That is confirmed by the "annual Doppler
effect," where we see stars and galaxies as
red-shifted when the Earth in its orbit
around the sun is moving away from those
bodies, and blue-shifted when the Earth is
moving toward those bodies. It also
implies that at some point in the distant
past, all objects were in the same place,
and then there was some kind of "Big Bang"
that caused everything to move away from
everything else.
It still boggles my mind that people will
argue against this. It appears that
the only reason they have for such arguments
is that there is no object
marking those "stationary points in
space." If there is no object
remaining at the point of emission, tracing
a photon of light back to its point of
origin ends up at a point in empty space.
Logically, that must
be where the photon was emitted, but mathematically
there is nothing still there to measure
distances from. That evidently makes
it incomprehensible to most mathematicians.
April 18, 2022 - I'm
once again back to work on
my new book "Logical
Relativity," but
it's slow going. The
Introduction I'd
previously written for the
book was all about how I
got interested in
Einstein's theories about
Relativity. Looking
at that Introduction
again, I began to wonder
"Who cares?" So, I
moved it to the end of the
book and renamed it: "About
the Author."
That meant I had to write
a new
"Introduction."
Yesterday, I did that,
and what I wrote required
that I also write a new
first chapter.
That's where I am now,
writing a chapter about "Stationary
Points in Space,"
using my
paper on that topic
as a starting point.
While I was bumbling
around trying to figure
out the best way to
introduce the idea of
"Stationary Points in
Space," I spent some time
downloading
podcasts. I watched
some late night talk show
last week where Bill Maher
was a guest. On that
show Maher talked about
the new podcast he had
just started.
Curious, the next day I
researched it. It's
called "Club
Random," and the outlet
I found that provides the
easiest way to download
and save the MP3 files
also has a bunch of other
podcasts that I had
never heard of
before. The one that
really caught my eye was "Star
Trek: The Pod Directive."
A podcast about Star
Trek??? I have
every episode of the
original series and "Star
Trek: The Next Generation"
on DVD, plus lots of
episodes of "Star Trek
Voyager." Although I
watched every episode when
they were re-aired on BBC
America a few years ago, I
didn't particularly enjoy
"Star Trek: Deep Space
Nine" or "Star Trek:
Enterprise." And
there were several more
recent Star Trek series
that were on networks I
never paid to
access.
Anyway, I had to download
a few episodes of the Star
Trek: The Pod Directive
podcast just to find out
what they were all
about. They turned
out to be just talk about
various people's favorite
Star Trek TV shows and
movies. One had Ben
Stiller talking
about how much he loved
the shows and watched
nearly every
episode. Another had
John
Hodgman doing the
same thing, only with a
lot more detail.
I'm not sure what I was
expecting, but it wasn't
just a gabfest with people
talking about their
favorite Star Trek
episodes and movies.
The podcast is in its second
year, which
says something, I
suppose. However,
there are a couple
dozen other science
podcasts, history
podcasts and interview
podcasts that I want
to catch up on
first. Many hundreds
of hours of individual
shows. I just need
to find the time.
April 17, 2022 - I wish
everyone a very happy Easter!
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