April 16, 2021 - Hmm.  When I woke up this morning, my subconscious mind presented me with the solution to a problem I hadn't realized existed.  It relates to the thought experiment where a pulsar is used to measure time dilation.  Here's the illustration I used in the thought experiment described in my May 31, 2015, paper "Time Dilation Re-Visualized":



The pulsar rotates, sending a beam of light out like a lighthouse, hitting the earth once per second.  Using that beam as a clock that can be seen from both the earth and from a space ship traveling at 99.5% of the speed of light toward Alpha Centauri, because a second will be 10 times longer on the space ship, it will see the pulsar pulsing 10 times per second.

Yet, in the sci.physics.relativity UseNet/Google Discussion thread I started about this topic on March 16 someone named "Mitchell Raemisch" kept posting messages saying the clock would run slow and therefore be inaccurate.  When I asked several times what he meant, getting no answer, people on the forum told me "Mitchell Raemisch" was actually a robot.  I thought that was interesting, but it was also time for me to stop responding to posts in the thread, so I did.  Then, this morning, I realized the "robot" was right - sort of.

The pulsar rotates counter-clockwise once per Earth second.  The space ship heading to Alpha Centauri is moving at a right angle to the light from the pulsar.  That means that every revolution of the pulsar the light will hit the moving space ship a very tiny fraction of a second later than on the previous revolution.  If the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri is one degree of revolution for the pulsar, and if the pulsar flashes 31,536,000 times during the ten year experiment, during the entire trip from Earth to Alpha Centauri, the pulsar clock will run about a billionth of a second slow.  But on the return trip from Alpha Centauri back to Earth, the pulsar clock will run about a billionth of a second fast.  So, it has absolutely no effect on the experiment.  However, if you are a mathematician, it might be a serious problem to incorporate that change in clock times into an equation. 

This morning I posted a message to "Mitchell Raemisch," addressing him as "Mr. Robot," and thanking him for bringing the issue to my attention.  Then "Odds Bodkin" immediately responded, advising me that "Mitchell Raemisch" is NOT a robot, he's a "homeless drifter, living in the Pacific Northwest, sometimes in other people’s unlocked cars."  Either way, I'm glad he brought the issue to my attention.  And I stated so in the 706th message in the thread.

April 15, 2021 - Two days ago, while working on my new book, tentatively titled "Logical Relativity," I began working on a chapter about Einstein's Second Postulate.  I did some research and found a couple dozen different versions of that Postulate in textbooks and science books, some of them referring to "the constancy of the speed of light."  Then I started studying what Einstein wrote about "the constancy of the speed of light." BOOM!  It blew my mind!  What Einstein wrote didn't stun me, it was my analysis of what he wrote and the implications I hadn't thought about before.

I immediately stopped working on the book and copied everything I had written in that chapter into science paper format, titling the paper "Analyzing 'Constancy of the Speed of Light'."  Yesterday evening it seemed like I was about 80% finished with the paper, but, when I woke this morning, my mind was racing on about things I hadn't previously thought about.  So, I'm probably more like 50% done.  But I still hope to have it on-line sometime next week.

One idea that never occurred to me before relates to the pulsar experiment, where one twin travels at extremely high speeds to Alpha Centauri while the other twin stays at home on earth, and they use a pulsar as a clock to measure time in both locations.  If you are moving toward a star at high speeds, the photons from that star are going to hit you the same way photons from a radar gun hit an oncoming car -- at c+v.  And when the car receives those photons, it receives them as if they were oscillating at a higher rate.  Atoms in the car then emit NEW photons that have the higher oscillation rate back to the radar gun.  The gun measures the difference in oscillation rates between what it emitted and what it received back and computes the speed of the car.

Now, suppose that instead of moving at earth traffic speeds, you are in a space ship heading for Alpha Centauri at speeds approaching the speed of light.  Alpha Centauri is now the "radar gun" emitting photons at you. It is emitting photons in the visible light range, but as you increase speed toward Alpha Centauri, the photons will start hitting you as if they had shorter and shorter wavelengths and higher and higher energy levels. 


As you can see in the chart above, very quickly the visible light photons will hit you as if they were ultra-violet light photons.  Then as if they were X-ray photons.  Then as if they were stronger and stronger Gamma ray photons.

I haven't done the math, but if you travel toward Alpha Centauri at 298,290 kilometers per second, which is the speed you need to reach in order to make 1 second on your space ship equal to 10 seconds back on Earth, your space ship is going to be hit with ever-increasing numbers of extremely energetic Gamma ray photons that will blast apart every atom in your space ship.

Meanwhile, of course, if there are any mathematicians aboard your ship, they will all be arguing that it doesn't matter how fast you go, the light photons from Alpha Centauri will still only hit you at c, never at c+v, which is their screwball interpretation of "the constancy of the speed of light."  

April 12, 2021 - I've finally managed to get started on my book "Logical Relativity."  It's currently 7 pages long, all of which require a lot of revising.  I decided to begin with the conflict over Einstein's Second Postulate.  All other problems and conflicts I plan to write about seem to stem from there. 

I suppose I should be spending my time promoting my sci-fi novel, "Time Work," but I just cannot resist working on "Logical Relativity."  I didn't write "Time Work" to make money, and I certainly do not expect "Logical Relativity" to be a "runaway bestseller."  I'll probably be lucky if it sells 10 copies.  I write because I like writing.  That's why I have this web site, too.  The biggest problem I have is: Which should I work on?  You cannot write two different things at once.  So, to write this comment I had to stop working on "Logical Relativity" for awhile.  And I think I've done enough to qualify as a "comment," so now I'll get back to work on "Logical Relativity."

April 11, 2021 - I finally managed to stop arguing on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum.  But that doesn't mean the arguments have ended.  As of this morn

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

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

3) light is propagated in vacant space, with a velocity c which is independent of the nature of motion of the emitting body.    

1) Light propagates through empty space with a definite speed c independent of the speed of the source or observer.

2) The speed of light in free space has the same value for all observers, regardless of their state of motion.

3) The speed of light in vacuum has the same value, c = 3.00 x 10⁸ m/s in all inertial frames, regardless of the velocity of the observer or the velocity of the source emitting the light.”

And just as there is no center of the surface of the Earth, there is no center of the expanding universe. Any observer, located anywhere in our universe, will observe the same recession of galaxies that Hubble discovered.
          When I’m explaining this idea in a classroom or in a public lecture, it’s usually around this time that someone asks, “But what is space expanding into?” Most people picture expanding space as a process of space growing into, or gradually taking up, some other region of space—like the volume of an inflating balloon. But this misses the point of what we mean when we say “space.” Space can’t expand into other space. When we say that space is expanding, we mean all of space, not just some of it. There is nothing for space to grow or expand into. If there were, we would call that thing space. The space of our universe is getting larger, but without moving into anything else. 

To me, that is just mumbo jumbo obfuscation. When looking at things logically, there is absolutely no reason why the Big Bang universe cannot be expanding into an "infinite universe" that we can also call "space."  I illustrated that concept in a drawing I created about a year ago:

This view of the universe, which I describe in detail in my paper "Logical vs Mathematical Universes" is perfectly logical, but mathematicians simply cannot cope with it.  They cannot cope with an "infinite universe" because there is no way to measure where it ends.  If they cannot measure it, then it cannot exist!

This will go into my book somewhere, as will a discussion of using a pulsar as a clock to measure time dilation, and a detailed description of the crazy arguments about which Second Postulate is the one Einstein used and why the version used in many many textbooks is wrong.

My biggest problem right now just seems to be: where to start?  What do I write about first?  I'm leaning toward writing about measuring time dilation with a pulsar first.  It's a good "lead in" that won't scare people off, as a lengthy analysis of all the different versions of Einstein's Second Postulate might.  That analysis might cause mathematicians to rise up and view me as a warlock or sorcerer.  

If photons are emitted at 299,792.458 kilometers PER SECOND in a stationary system, and 299,792.458 kilometers PER SECOND in a moving system, the photons from the stationary system will travel FASTER than photons from the moving system, BECAUSE A SECOND IS SHORTER IN THE STATIONARY SYSTEM.

Einstein didn't spell things out in his 1905 paper the way I just did.

In fact, not just his 1905 paper, but Einstein didn't spell things out the way just just did EVER. Not once, in any of his papers or books. That should tell you something.

It tells me that YOU need to do more research. Here is what Einstein said in his book "Autobiographical Notes," which is also part of a book titled "Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist" by Paul Arthur Schilpp. It's on page 61:

"The speed of light c: is one of the quantities which occurs as 'universal constant' in physical equations. If, however, one introduces as unit of time - instead of the second - the time in which light travels 1 cm, c no longer occurs in the equations. In this sense one could say that the constant c is only an apparently universal constant."

So, c is a "universal constant" ONLY in the sense that light always travels at c. However, c is NOT a universal constant when you understand that c varies depending upon the length of a second at the point of emission.  

 

April 4, 2021 - Every morning when I turn on my computer, one of the first things I do is check Amazon's web site to see if I sold any books in the past 24 hours.  This morning the chart showed I sold a paperback book.  Here's what the chart looks like, but you'll have to click on it and on "view image" to see a larger, more easily readable version:



What it shows is that in the past month I sold 2 copies of "A Crime Unlike Any Other," one copy of "Clipper" and one copy of "Analyzing the Anthrax Attacks: The First Three Years".  The copy of "A Crime Unlike Any Other" that I sold yesterday was in paperback format.  The one sold on March 15 was a Kindle copy, and so was the copy of "Analyzing the Anthrax Attacks" that I sold on March 9.  I only have "Clipper" in Kindle format, so, of course, it was a Kindle book, too.

The last time I sold a copy of my newest book, "Time Work," was on March 3, over a month ago.  I can explain the lack of sales for that book: I haven't been promoting it.  Almost no one knows about it.  But, I haven't been promoting any of my books, so how do I explain the sales of "A Crime Unlike Any Other"?  I think it may be because the conspiracy theorists are still arguing about the anthrax attacks of 2001, we're nearing the 20-year anniversary of the attacks, and there is at least one new TV show about it in the works.  So, people are looking for information about the attacks.  Almost any search will take them to my anthaxinvestigation web site where my book is advertised.  I can't explain the sale of "Clipper," nor the sale of "Analyzing the Anthrax Attacks: The First Three Years."  Even more odd is the fact that that book about the early days of the anthrax investigation was paid for in Indian Rupees.

I really need to try to promote "Time Work."  I really want to know what people think of it.  If I can get people to buy it, maybe they will also write a review for Amazon's site.

But, it seems like the only thing I can think about these days is the arguments I'm having on the sci.physics.relativity forum.  There are now 538 messages in the thread I started on March 16 about "Using a Pulsar to Measure Time Dilation."  That probably isn't a record, but it's more messages than there are in any other discussion thread accessed by anyone so far this year, and it's undoubtedly more than 20 times the average number of messages in a typical thread.

I'm looking for a way to end the thread.  It seems I now have two experiments which can end countless arguments about time dilation and special relativity.  The Pulsar experiment is one, and the truck experiment is the other.  I can't get anyone to discuss the Pulsar experiment - anyone except the "robot" that evidently cannot understand how a pulsar can be used as a clock.  But virtually everyone on the sci.physics.relativity forum argues that my truck experiment will not work.  They simply cannot believe that it is possible to measure the speed of a truck from inside the close back of the truck.  My experiments with radar guns, and my research into how radar guns work, tells me that there is no doubt that my proposed experiment will work.  I just don't have the resources to perform the experiment.  I can only hope that someone who reads that thread will be able to acquire the necessary equipment to do the experiment.

Meanwhile, I want to start working on a paper titled "Two argument-ending experiments," or something like that.  The two experiments would put an end to at least a hundred different arguments about physics, relativity and time dilation.  One person on the sci.physics.relativity forum keeps saying that I'd win the Nobel Prize if the truck experiment works.  I tend to think that there are countless scientists who already know it would work, but they just don't want to get into arguments with mathematicians about it.  Or, there may be no way to precisely control radar gun emission frequencies.  But, if that were true, I would think someone would have stated so by now.

It's all very fascinating stuff for me.  I apologize if it is of no interest at all to most readers of this web site. 

April 2, 2021 - Yesterday afternoon, while driving home from the gym, I finished listening to CD #7 of the 7-CD, 8-hour, 49 minute audio book version of "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain" by David Eagleman.

The first thing we learn from studying our own [brain] circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs. The conscious you—the I that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning—is the smallest bit of what’s transpiring in your brain. Although we are dependent on the functioning of the brain for our inner lives, it runs its own show. Most of its operations are above the security clearance of the conscious mind.

Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.

Brains are in the business of gathering information and steering behavior appropriately. It doesn’t matter whether consciousness is involved in the decision making. And most of the time, it’s not. Whether we’re talking about dilated eyes, jealousy, attraction, the love of fatty foods, or the great idea you had last week, consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain. Our brains run mostly on autopilot, and the conscious mind has little access to the giant and mysterious factory that runs below it.

You see evidence of this when your foot gets halfway to the brake before you consciously realize that a red Toyota is backing out of a driveway on the road ahead of you. You see it when you notice your name spoken in a conversation across the room that you thought you weren’t listening to, when you find someone attractive without knowing why, or when your nervous system gives you a “hunch” about which choice you should make.

I can’t think of a more vital time for rethinking. As the coronavirus pandemic unfolded, many leaders around the world were slow to rethink their assumptions—first that the virus wouldn’t affect their countries, next that it would be no deadlier than the flu, and then that it could only be transmitted by people with visible symptoms. The cost in human life is still being tallied.

As we think and talk, we often slip into the mindsets of three different professions: preachers, prosecutors, and politicians. In each of these modes, we take on a particular identity and use a distinct set of tools. We go into preacher mode when our sacred beliefs are in jeopardy: we deliver sermons to protect and promote our ideals. We enter prosecutor mode when we recognize flaws in other people’s reasoning: we marshal arguments to prove them wrong and win our case. We shift into politician mode when we’re seeking to win over an audience: we campaign and lobby for the approval of our constituents. The risk is that we become so wrapped up in preaching that we’re right, prosecuting others who are wrong, and politicking for support that we don’t bother to rethink our own views.

Scientific thinking favors humility over pride, doubt over certainty, curiosity over closure. When we shift out of scientist mode, the rethinking cycle breaks down, giving way to an overconfidence cycle. If we’re preaching, we can’t see gaps in our knowledge: we believe we’ve already found the truth.

In the hierarchy of disagreement created by computer scientist Paul Graham, the highest form of argument is refuting the central point, and the lowest is name-calling.

A truck is a PROPELLED SYSTEM, even when it is moving at a constant speed. It is NOT an "inertial system" and if used as a "frame of reference" it will give unexpected results.

Wrong. If it is moving at a constant speed it is inertial BY DEFINITION. Since it is inertial, it can be used as an inertial frame of reference. "Propelled system" is bogus, since the propulsion exists ONLY to overcome air resistance and friction.

a frame of reference in which a body remains at rest or moves with constant linear velocity unless acted upon by forces: any frame of reference that moves with constant velocity relative to an inertial system is itself an inertial system.

Strictly speaking, Newton's laws of motion are valid only in a coordinate system at rest with respect to the “fixed” stars. ... A coordinate system attached to the Earth is not an inertial reference frame because the Earth rotates and is accelerated with respect to the Sun.

I was just watching a program on TV. The program was talking about Ron Mallett. Ron Mallett is working on time travel like in your book. What a strange coincidence.

Ed, do you realize that "Raemsch" is not a real person? Its a troll/bot.
Everyone here knows this, since its so obvious.

Nothing I've seen indicates that it is a robot. And if it IS a robot,
then arguing with it could be interesting. Can you educate a robot?
It might be interesting to find out.

But not here. There are sites for that and this NG is not such a site/place.

There’s no such thing as absolute time. No matter where you are, how fast you’re moving, or how strong the gravitational field is around you, any clock you have on you will always record time as passing at the same rate: one second per second. For any solitary observer, time simply flows.

But if you have two different clocks, you can compare how time flows under different conditions. If one clock remains stationary while the other travels quickly, the fast-moving clock will experience a smaller amount of time passing than the stationary clock: that’s the rule of time dilation in special relativity.

On Tuesday, March 16, I started a new discussion thread titled "Using a pulsar as a clock to measure Time Dilation."  As of yesterday morning, it had 133 messages in the thread.  And since most messages were addressed to me, that means 45 of the messages (about 34%) are my replies. A lot of my time was also spent making a copy of the entire discussion.

In my March 16 comment on this web site, I wrote about starting that thread, but I failed to show the illustration I used in my paper and on my web page that was the basis for the discussion.  Here's that illustration:



The "thought experiment" described in the paper uses a pulsar instead of man-made clocks to measure time dilation as a space ship from Earth travels at 95% of the speed of light toward Alpha Centauri and back.  Because of time dilation, the trip takes only one year for the people on the space ship, but it takes ten years for the people waiting back on Earth.  And people on the space ship can see that time is slowing down for them, because they will count the pulses from the pulsar as increasing to ten times the number they counted per second when they were on earth.

As is usual in arguments on the sci.physics.relativity forum, very few comments actually addressed the "thought experiment" I wanted to discuss.  Most were quibbles over words, statements of personal beliefs and personal attacks against me.  The first response that wasn't a personal attack stated:

A pulsar's rotation will slow its time and give it more energy.
By moving in space there will be the same... more time slow and energy.
Neutron stars are end state matter not a BH.

Why is everyone trying to find fault with the experiment instead of discussing what the experiment demonstrates? It demonstrates that time dilation can be discussed without any need for Traveler and Homebody being able to see each other's clocks during the experiment while they are BILLIONS of miles apart.  It demonstrates that time dilation can be discussed without any concern for the speed of light affecting how clocks are viewed when going toward the light source and away from the light source. It demonstrates that time dilation is NOT reciprocal. It demonstrates that you can have a time dilation experiment without endless arguments over what is viewed in each "frame of reference."

Your point is?

My point is that by using a pulsar to measure time, you can eliminate 99% of the arguments over how time dilation works when one twin travels to a nearby star and the other twin stays at home on earth.

And it makes clear that TIME is something that can be affected by motion and gravity, so time is not just a concept or idea. It is something PHYSICAL.

I do see a fault in the assumptions you make about your relevance.

Nature succeeds in accelerating extended and massive objects to relativistic velocities. Jets in active galactic nuclei and in galactic superluminal sources and gamma-ray burst fireballs have bulk Lorentz factors from a few to several hundreds. A variety of effects then arises, such as the beaming of the radiation produced, light aberration, time contraction and the Doppler frequency shift. I will emphasize that special relativity applied to real (i.e., extended) observed objects inevitably must take into account the fact that any piece of information is carried by photons. Being created in different parts of the source, they travel different paths to reach the observer, depending on the viewing angle. The object is seen rotated, not contracted, and at small viewing angles time intervals are observed shorter than intrinsic ones.

          Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices. As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us.
          And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle.
          There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior. As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something—feats that modern computers simply do not do. When the hostess at a party offers chocolate cake, you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma: some parts of your brain have evolved to crave the rich energy source of sugar, and other parts care about the negative consequences, such as the health of your heart or the bulge of your love handles. Part of you wants the cake and part of you tries to muster the fortitude to forgo it. The final vote of the parliament determines which party controls your action—that is, whether you put your hand out or up. In the end, you either eat the chocolate cake or you do not, but you cannot do both.
          Because of these internal multitudes, biological creatures can be conflicted.

March 11, 2021 -  Ah!  The copies of my new sci-fi novel, "Time Work," that I ordered back around February 22 arrived yesterday afternoon. 



To my pleasant surprise, they included the changes I made on February 27 as a result of the book being proof-read by "tinkerdan," even though, as of this morning, those changes have not yet appeared in the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon's page for my book.

This morning I took the picture you see above and then put it in on Imgur.com in their public comments section.  I don't know if anyone will pay it any attention, but since it is a self-published book, I need to get all the free advertising I can get.  I also mentioned it on my Time and Time Dilation Facebook group.  It quickly got one "like."  I tried mentioning it on the Science Fiction Facebook group, but first it had to go through their moderators.  To my pleasant surprise, it was approved almost immediately.     

March 10, 2021 -  While eating breakfast this morning, I finished reading another library book on my Kindle.  It was "The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy" by Kliph Nesteroff. 

The Mob essentially created the term “stand-up comic”—according to eighty-six-year-old comedian Dick Curtis. “The Outfit used to manage fighters. A stand-up fighter is a guy that is a puncher. A stand-up guy was a guy who was tough and you could depend on. The Outfit managed fighters and they managed clubs that booked comics, so the term found its way into the lexicon of nightclubs. A guy who just stood there and punched jokes—joke, joke, joke—he was a stand-up comic.”

For a good forty years the Mob controlled American show business. “It was always ‘Outfit’ to us,” says comedian Dick Curtis. “Never the Mob or Cosa Nostra or any of the other names you might have heard. These guys were the Outfit.” From the 1930s through the end of the 1960s every city in America had at least one glamorous supper club, if not four or five, featuring the top headliners in every showbiz genre. Furthermore, it didn’t matter if these clubs were in Cleveland, Portland, Corpus Christi or Baton Rouge—if it was a nightclub, the owners were the Mob. “The clubs were owned by bootleggers and even a few killers,” said actor George Raft, who had worked as a dancer in New York supper clubs. “In my time I knew or met them all. Al Capone, Joe Adonis, Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, Dutch Schultz, Machine Gun Jack McGurn, Lucky Luciano, Vinnie Coll—most of them were around.”

In places it was a very funny book, but mostly it was about how difficult it is to make a living by making people laugh.  I can understand that, since I think every time I've tried to tell a joke to an audience of more than one person, the joke fell flat.  It's interesting to write jokes, however.  And I have occasionally created cartoons.  Here's one, but I'm not sure how funny others will think it is:

I could a vaguely make out what looked like a bank of some kind of large batteries.

FYI: I'm not sure how you are using the word davit in relation to the trucks.

McGinnis then tied the chopper owner to a tie-down davit on the wall near the front of the helicopter.

A few military people in camouflage fatigues were enjoying a meal there.  But, mostly it was just smiling and hungry people in mufti.