Ed Lake's web page

Comments for Sunday, August 20, 2017, thru Saturday, August 26, 2017:

August 21, 2017 - On the Google discussion forum where I've been arguing about time, light and relativity, someone mentioned a book titled "How to Teach Relativity to your Dog" by Chad Orzel. Curious, I looked it up and did a search through it for the word "dilation." I got 29 results. Ah! I love references that mention time dilation, and in a physics-related book the only use of the word "dilation" is generally in the term "time dilation." The book is described as being discussions between a scientist and his German shepherd dog named Emmy.

I clicked on one mention of "dilation" and found that Chapter 3 of the book is titled "Time Slows When You are Chasing Bunnies: Relativistic Time Dilation." Then I found this on the bottom of page 50 and into page 51 (Emmy is the first speaker in the discussion below):

     “Right. So if we go really fast on the walk, my clock goes all slow, and when we get back, I’ll be younger than the puppy.”
     “Well, no. For one thing, the effect only works on clocks that are moving relative to you. You would see a light clock at the house ticking slow, but SteelyKid would see your clock running slow.”
     “Yeah, but she’s just a puppy and is easily fooled. My clock is the one that’s really moving.”
     “No, she’d be right. As long as you’re moving relative to her, any measurement she makes will show your clock running slow, and any measurement you do will show her clock running slow. There is no absolute frame of reference, just relative motion.”
     “Wait, we each see the other’s clock running slow?”
     “As long as you’re moving at constant speed relative to one another, yes. And you’re both right.”
     “So how do we decide which of us is younger?”
     “Well, in a real experiment, the process of speeding up and slowing down makes your frame of reference distinguishable from hers, so if you take off from the house, accelerate up to very fast speed, then decelerate and return to the house, your clock will end up showing less elapsed time than hers, but—”
     “I knew it! Let’s go, so I can be younger than the puppy!”
     “But, ‘fast’ in this context means ‘at a speed comparable to the speed of light.’ Even at our current—exceedingly brisk—walking pace, we’re not going more than a few meters per second. Which means you would need to walk for a billion years to gain one second on SteelyKid.”
     Emmy stops dead. “A billion years?”
     “A billion years.”
     “That’s a long time.” She thinks for a minute. “I’m good with that. I like long walks.” She takes off again and just about pulls me off balance.

Damn! First the author says that time dilation is reciprocal, and that if I am moving relative to you, you will see my clock running slow and I will see your clock running slow. That is NONSENSE. There IS an "absolute frame of reference." It is the point outside of the visible universe where the Big Bang occured. However, then he starts talking about a "real experiment" where one experimenter travels at close to the speed of light and actually does experience time dilation that is NOT reciprocal. But, he says it is because reality requires speeding up and slowing down. Therefore, the observer who speeds up and slows down would know that he or she was the one who was really moving.

So, if you can prove that you are moving, then you are really moving, and if you cannot prove that you are moving, then you are NOT really moving? Or does it depend upon your scientific philosophy?

Unfortunately, the discussion between the scientist and his dog then changes subjects, and there is no explanation of how knowing or being able to prove something changes reality. But, there's a lot more to the book and there are at least two other books in the series, one about teaching physics and the other about teaching Quantum Physics. The question is where should I put this book in my reading queue? I think it will go somewhere in the middle. So, I'll only need to read about a hundred other books first.

August 20, 2017 - Groan! Once again I have absolutely nothing prepared for today's Sunday comment. So, if I want to continue my practice of writing a new comment every Sunday, I'll have to write something from scratch. Here goes.

For the past few days, I've been arguing on Google's Science, Physics and Relativity discussion forum. I started by posting responses to some comments by Pentcho Valev, who endlessly rants against "Einsteinians," but what Valev posts has little to do with the followers of Albert Einstein. His comments are really about the same things I write comment about on this web site: How mathematicians have distorted Einstein's theories. But, he posts so often and never responds to other people's comments, that few pay much attention to him, other than to tell him he is wasting his time. (I read his posts because he fills them with quotes and links that Valev thinks support his position, and some of the links are VERY interesting and totally disprove his position.) On Friday, after my two posts to threads started by Valev went nowhere, I started a new thread titled "Pentcho Valev's biggest misunderstanding." As of this morning, there are 67 posts in the thread from 8 different authors.

As is typical on that forum, some of the posts are nothing but personal attacks and mindless statements of opinion. However, there have also been some very interesting discussions of different points of view about physics. And that is what I'm looking for. I need to discuss some of my understandings about Einstein's theories to see if I understand them correctly or not. If some jerk just tells me I'm wrong, that doesn't help at all. I need to know where and how I am wrong -- IF I am truly wrong. And that requires a discussion, not just statements of opinions.

An "opinion argument" goes something like this:

Person-A: Einstein's Second Postulate is not what you claim it to be.
Person-B: Yes, it is.
Person-A. No, it is not.
Person-B: Yes, it is.
Person-A. No, it is not.
Person-B: Yes, it is.
Person-A: No it is not.

This "argument of opinions" generally ends with Person-B launching personal insults at Person-A, which causes Person-A to leave the discussion, which causes Person-B to declare that he won the argument because Person-A could not come up with any further arguments.

I try to start discussions about facts and evidence, but too often they go like this:

I present facts and evidence supporting a theory.
Person-B: That means nothing.
I present more facts and evidence.
Person-B: That means nothing.
I present still more facts and evidence.
Person-B: That means nothing.
I ask WHY it means nothing.
Person-B: You are just too stupid to understand.

So, I leave the discussion and Person-B declares his ideas won out because I ran out of arguments against them.

The "worthwhile" discussions never seem to resolve any conflicts, but framing the questions and responses sometimes cause me to see things more clearly. In a discussion yesterday, I could almost see into Einstein's mind to figure out how he came up with Time Dilation by imagining length contraction. He got the right answers, but he got them using a wrong idea that Time Dilation relates to motion and distance instead of to motion and particle spin (my theory). I can see it clearly, but how do I convince anyone else?

Without realizing it, I presented my case against "length contraction" in my paper about Time Dilation. I thought I merely showed how Time Dilation works. I thought it was how most scientists understood Time Dilation to work. At the time I wrote the paper, I had no idea that Einstein figured out Time Dilation by imagining length contraction. I didn't even wonder how he came up with the idea. I just wondered why scientists who were measuring Time Dilation didn't discuss the implications of Time Dilation. If a scientist atop a mountain routinely measures time running faster than a scientist at the bottom of the mountain, how could anyone claim that Time Dilation is reciprocal??? How could they claim the scientist atop the mountain could somehow also see his clock running slow compared to the clock next to the scientist at the bottom of the mountain? It never happens. It cannot happen! Yet mathematicians claim it is how Time Dilation works, so it MUST happen. And they argue that the scientists who did the experiments must have done them improperly. And they've been doing that for more than a CENTURY! How can that be?

This morning I see the Google thread has three new personal attacks posted after I signed off yesterday, two from "Odd Bodkin" and one from "David (Kronos Prime) Fuller." However, there is also a new post from "rotchm" that is mostly just statements of opinion. But, "rotchm" also included some comments about wordage and how I do not use certain words and phrases the way he uses them, and therefore he wants me to change to his wordage style so that he can understand me. "Closing speed" is an example.

The problem is: I do not understand what the difference is between the words I use and the words he uses, so I cannot make the change. I cannot use his words if I know they mean something different to him than they do to me. But that is a good basis for discussion, so I'll respond as soon as I finish this comment.

For the past 16 years, I've been saving the statistics for my web sites every day. I rarely use the statistics, but I save them in case I might need them. This morning I noticed that the statistics no longer save properly. The saved file is unreadable. The last valid save was for August 15. At the moment, I have no clue what caused the problem or how to solve it.

And that is the end of this Sunday comment.

Comments for Sunday, August 13, 2017, thru Saturday, August 19, 2017:

August 17, 2017 - Late yesterday afternoon, I finished reading Lee Smolin's book "Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe.

I started it on Aug. 13, so it took me 4 days to read the 364 page book. I not only read it during breakfast and lunch, but also whenever I could find a block of time in the morning or afternoon. I made it a higher priority than doing research.

It was a very interesting book, and since I was reading it on my small laptop instead on on my Kindle, I highlighted interesting passages in colors. If the passage was merely worth noting, I highlighted it in yellow. If the passage was really interesting and worth remembering and quoting, I highlighted it in red. If I viewed the passage as unbelievable, incomprehensible or just plain absurd, I highlighted it in green. There wasn't much green highlighting in the first part of the book, but there was a lot in the second half.

Here are two paragraphs from the 19-page Preface that I highlighted in yellow:

I used to believe in the essential unreality of time. Indeed, I went into physics because as an adolescent I yearned to exchange the timebound, human world, which I saw as ugly and inhospitable, for a world of pure, timeless truth. Later in life, I discovered that it was pretty nice to be human and the need for transcendent escape faded.
More to the point, I no longer believe that time is unreal. In fact, I have swung to the opposite view: Not only is time real, but nothing we know or experience gets closer to the heart of nature than the reality of time.

Here's a paragraph from the Preface that I highlighted in red:

Scientists think in time when we conceive of our task as the invention of novel ideas to describe newly discovered phenomena, and of novel mathematical structures to express them. If we think outside time, we believe these ideas somehow existed before we invented them. If we think in time, we see no reason to presume that.

And here's a passage from the Preface that I highlighted in green:

To rebel against the precariousness of life, to reject uncertainty, to adopt a zero tolerance to risk, to imagine that life can be organized to completely eliminate danger, is to think outside time.

Here's another passage from the Preface that I highlighted in red:

As we move on to more sophisticated subjects, readers are advised, if confused, to do what scientists learn to do, which is to skim or skip ahead to a point where the text becomes clearer to them.

Is that what scientists do? It's what I do. There were lots of places in Feynman's book "QED" which I skimmed over because they were unclear to me or not of particular interest to me. I've met people who cannot understand doing things that way. If they come to a sentence that they do not understand, they stop and study it and re-read until they do understand. But, they also read just one book for every fifty I read.

Even though he seems to often think like a mathematician, Lee Smolin has a problem with mathematicians that is similar to the problem I have. Here's a red highlighted quote from later in the book:

Should we simply recognize mathematics for the religious activity it is? Or should we be concerned when the most rational of our thinkers, the mathematicians, speak of what they do as if it were the route to transcendence from the bounds of human life?

Another from later in the book:

Mathematics, then, entered science as an expression of a belief in the timeless perfection of the heavens. Useful as mathematics has turned out to be, the postulation of timeless mathematical laws is never completely innocent, for it always carries a trace of the metaphysical fantasy of transcendence from our earthly world to one of perfect forms.

Here are a couple more paragraphs I highlighted in red:

In my view, the best way to explain quantum mechanics is to start by talking about what science is for. Many of us think the purpose of science is to describe how nature really is — to give a picture of the world that we can believe would be true, even were we not here to see it. If you think of science that way, you’ll be disappointed by quantum mechanics, because it gives no picture of what is going on in an individual experiment.
Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum theory, argued that those who were disappointed in this way had the wrong idea of what science is for. The problem is not the theory but what we expect a theory to do for us. Bohr proclaimed that the purpose of a scientific theory is not to describe nature but to give us rules for manipulating objects in the world and a language we can use to communicate the results.

Dr. Smolin starts to lose me when he begins to talk about Natural Laws changing with time instead of humans learning more about how Nature works and thereby gradually revising the "laws" as we previously viewed them to be. Then he says on page 123 in another green highlighted passage:

The theory in which laws evolve is called cosmological natural selection, which I developed in the late 1980s and published in 1992. In that paper, I made a few predictions, which could have been falsified in the two decades since but have not been. This of course doesn’t prove the theory is correct, but at least I showed that a theory of evolving laws can explain and predict real features of our world.

And in a passage highlighted in dark green on page 124:

The basic hypothesis of cosmological natural selection is that universes reproduce by the creation of new universes inside black holes. Our universe is thus a descendant of another universe, born in one of its black holes, and every black hole in our universe is the seed of a new universe. This is a scenario within which we can apply the principles of natural selection.

I could go on and on, but that was the first time I'd ever read anything about "cosmological natural selection" and the idea that universes go through a process of "natural selection" where badly formed universes die away and the universes that are able to reproduce themselves more readily thrive. Dr. Smolin says on page 125:

The fitness of a universe is then a measure of how many black holes it spawns.

But he also seems to argue or imply that the "fitness of a universe" is additionally determined by how hospitable it is for human life.

Lee Smolin has very impressive credentials that will cause virtually everyone to take his point of view over mine, so there's no point in me going into any more details of the book. I recommend the book highly, since it showed me some points of view that no other book I've read even hinted at. There's a lot in it that I consider to be just plain CRAZY, but maybe I just haven't traveled in the right circles and haven't heard all the supporting detail. Time may tell.

This morning, when I checked to see what was being discussed on Google's Science, Physics and Relativity discussion forum, I found a long rant by Pentcho Valev about Einstein's Second Postulate. So, I'm going to assume that there was another Pentcho Valev thread somewhere that mentioned my paper about Einstein's Second Postulate and generated those "views" that I mentioned in yesterday's comment. Unable to resist, I responded to Pentcho's comment, telling him how he was misunderstanding everything. So, now I have to wait to see how he responds.

August 16, 2017 - Wow! It's been an unusually busy morning.

First, I received an email advising me that the plan to interview me for a new TV series of 6 episodes about the anthrax attacks of 2001 is still an active plan, although no date has yet been set for the actual interview. Indications, however, are that it could happen sometime within the next month or so.

Then I received an email from the FBI scientist whose new book about the anthrax attacks I recently proof-read. The book had been scheduled for release in October of this year, but now the release date has been pushed to April 8, 2018. And, by pure coincidence, that could very well be around the time the TV series about the case is aired (assuming it is developed into a full 6-part series). I have no idea how long such projects take, but it is becoming clear to me that it takes much longer than I had previously thought.

Then I saw news stories that new satellite images have been found which show what might be wreckage of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, which vanished in March of 2014. According to a CNN story:

Newly-discovered satellite photos may have given scientists a fresh clue as to the location of Malaysian Airlines 370, one of the world's most famous aviation mysteries.

The four satellite photos, shot less than a month after MH370 disappeared in 2014, show 70 objects drifting on the ocean in the vicinity of the predicted crash zone, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said Wednesday.

I read through a bunch of news articles before I found a pdf file with the satellite images and an analysis of the images. The newspapers just showed the original satellite pictures, which do not seem to contain anything but scattered cumulus clouds over an empty ocean. The spectra analysis, however, shows different colors for different types of materials, easily distinguishing clouds and water from metal and plastic. Here's a sample:

The image on the left is the basic satellite photo. The image on the right is that same photo enhanced to show different kinds of materials based upon their spectra (how they reflect light). The yellow is man-made material.

I tracked the mystery of MH370 for a long time after the plane disappeared, because it was another excellent example some people looking at the facts and evidence while others just have opinions and beliefs, which quickly turn into conspiracy theories. I mentioned it in comments on this web site in every month of 2015, after starting to write about it on my old site shortly after MH370 disappeared. It still interests me very much, because I'd like to see how the conspiracy theorists will continue to argue their beliefs even after the mystery is solved (which I feel certain will eventually happen).

Also this morning, when looking at my web site visitor logs this morning I saw a major attack on my web site had taken place yesterday evening. Between 6:03 p.m. and 6:06 p.m., someone in Putian, China, attempted a couple hundred posts of malicious crap to my web site. Fortunately, my web site host's security software blocked all of them.

Lastly, when I checked the number of "unique" views of my scientific papers on Vixra.org, I found that there were TEN new "unique" views of my paper on Einstein's Second Postulate during the past 24 hours. At first I couldn't believe my eyes. The total had jumped from 128 to 138, which looked like it could be a typo, but I couldn't imagine how the totals could be typed by some error-prone human instead of being computer generated after a computer program count. So, the number was real. Ten people who have never read my paper before read it yesterday! But why? And who? There hasn't been even one "unique" view since July 22. (A "unique" view is a view by someone who has never viewed the paper before (as determined by his IP address). I can access the paper a hundred times today and not change the number at all, because the only time I changed the number was the first time I viewed it.) And there haven't been 10 "unique" views in a single day since I last mentioned it on the Google Science, Physics and Relativity discussion forum in late April and early May. I checked and couldn't find any re-starting of those threads. So, it's another mystery I'll be thinking about today.

August 14, 2017 - Yesterday afternoon, I finished reading Richard Feynman's 1985 book "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter" on my Kindle.

As with so many other books I've read on my Kindle, I thought I was only 80% done, but when I clicked to go the the next page, the next page turned out the be the beginning on the Index. So, I was done. Also, the book is only 152 pages long, not including the Index and front matter.

Here's an interesting quote from page 23 of the printed edition:

For many years after Newton, partial reflection by two surfaces was happily explained by a theory of waves, but when experiments were made with very weak light hitting photomultipliers, the wave theory collapsed: as the light got dimmer and dimmer, the photomultipliers kept making full-sized clicks—there were just fewer of them. Light behaved as particles.

And here's a related quote from page 36:

The first important feature about light is that it appears to be particles: when very weak monochromatic light (light of one color) hits a detector, the detector makes equally loud clicks less and less often as the light gets dimmer.

He's saying that if light was a wave, dim light would have to consist of the same number of waves, they would just be smaller waves with lower crests and shallower troughs. However, experiments show that that isn't true. Dim light consists of particles which are always the same size, but with dim light there are just fewer particles. Throughout the book Feynman argues against any "wave theory" of light, contrary to what is taught in virtually every physics class today.

A lot of the book involves details of how certain aspects of light are calculated, which wasn't of any interest to me. If I find someday that I need to know such things, I can always go back and read the book again - particularly the parts I skimmed over the first time. The book is a "classic," so there's no point in me giving my opinion of it, other than to say it was definitely worth reading.

Back on July 13 I wrote that I had begun reading David Bohm's book "The Special Theory of Relativity." I gave up on that book about half way through. It was advertised as being devoid of mathematics, but that was false advertising since I found it to be crammed with mathematics that you have to understand if you want to understand the rest of the book. And the book wasn't interesting enough to hold my interest, much less to make me want to study the mathematics. That's when I started reading "QED."

Shortly after I finished reading Feynman's "QED," I started reading Lee Smolin's book "Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe." Here's a quote from page xii in the Preface:

I used to believe in the essential unreality of time. Indeed, I went into physics because as an adolescent I yearned to exchange the time- bound, human world, which I saw as ugly and inhospitable, for a world of pure, timeless truth. Later in life, I discovered that it was pretty nice to be human and the need for transcendent escape faded. More to the point, I no longer believe that time is unreal. In fact, I have swung to the opposite view: Not only is time real, but nothing we know or experience gets closer to the heart of nature than the reality of time.

That seems to fit with my thinking, but I'll have to read a lot more to see if Prof. Smolin goes off in some direction where I have no interest in following.

August 13, 2017 - The status of my scientific paper on Time Dilation hasn't changed. It's still "Under Review." I suppose I should feel good about that, but I don't want to get my hopes up. Here's how long it took to get results for my previous 7 attempts to get that paper published:

Nature – 1 day. Rejected.

Science – 3 days. Rejected.

Physics Essays – 5½ months. Withdrawn on May 20, 2017

Journal 4 – 25 days. Rejected.

Journal 5 – 1 day. Rejected.

Journal 6 – 3 days. Rejected.

Journal 7 – 2 days. Rejected.

Journal 8 – Submitted on August 2, 2017.

So, except for Physics Essays, which wanted to publish it, but only if I paid them $508 to offset printing costs, and Journal #4 which inexplicably took 25 days to respond, the typical response time is 3 days or less.

Although it probably just requires understanding one simple step, I still haven't figured out how to use the LaTeX "natbib" package Journal #8 requires for typesetting their articles. But, I realized I could turn off that requirement and typeset everything else according to their standards, and I did so. So, I've got an article that looks like it has been typeset according to their standards, but if you look at the LaTeX source code you'll see that I turned off their "natbib" package. I don't know if I should send them that version or not. If they are attempting to make a decision based upon the unformatted .docx version, why complicate the situation? The decision should be based upon whether or not the science in the article is valid, not on the format of the article.

And, as I continue with my research, I find what the paper contains is not only solid and valid science, it seems more and more important. I was reading some scientific papers the other day, and one of them used the book, Astronomy: A Physical Perspective by Marc L. Kutner as a reference. I obtained a copy of the book and examined the reference. It says this on page 127 (using the author's italics):

Another way of stating Einstein’s postulate is that There is no experiment we can perform to tell us which inertial frame is moving and which is at rest. There is no ‘preferred’ inertial frame. All we can
talk about is the relative motion of two inertial frames.

My paper says that is not true. There is a "preferred inertial frame," but it is outside of the visible universe.

The book also says this on page 128 (which is the start of a chapter about Time Dilation), again using the author's italics, but with my highlighting in red:

The significance of this result is that the time interval measured in the frame in which the clock is moving is greater than that measured in the frame in which the clock is at rest. Suppose we have two identical clocks. If we keep one at rest (with respect to us) and let the other one move, the moving clock appears to run slow. It is important to realize that the situation is perfectly symmetric. If there is an observer traveling with each clock, each observer sees the other clock running slow. This effect is called time dilation.

The sentence in red is the total nonsense that got me started at arguing with people about time dilation in the first place. It is only "true" in a fictional mathematical universe. It is not true in our real universe. The reality of Time Dilation is easy to demonstrate and has been demonstrated countless times via experiments. I describe some of them in my paper. Everyone knows about Hafele-Keating and the NIST paper and how GPS satellites work. So, how can anyone believe what it says on page 128 of Astronomy: A Physical Perspective and in so many other "scientific" papers and books?

I could go on and on and on, but I should put my efforts into writing other papers, which, if I can't get published, I can self-publish in book form someday. I keep finding books and papers about the insane situation physics is in today, but none of the books and papers looks at the problem from the right angle. They all just argue that physics is now a mathematical game where nothing can be experimentally proved or disproved, the prime example being String Theory. I haven't yet read Lee Smolin's book "The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next," but I understand he attacks String Theory as not even being a "scientific" theory. The scientists attacking the current state of physics generally do not talk about mathematical arguments that are currently being taught in schools but which can be (and have been) totally debunked via simple experiments. The other day, I found another scientist's arguments. Click HERE for an article about a Portuguese cosmologist and professor in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London named Joao Magueijo. The article contains this:

Magueijo was scathing about string theory, describing it as ‘like intellectual masturbation.’ He doesn’t like string theory for sociological reasons, his main objection being that it is completely disconnected from experiment, making it hard, or impossible, to confirm or disprove.

I looked around for a free copy of his book Faster Than The Speed Of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation, but the only free version I could find was in Spanish. Plus, it seems to use the term "time dilation" only once, and in an unimportant way.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for something to happen with that proposed TV interview about the anthrax investigation. I'll have to contact the reporter later this week to see if the project is still active or if they abandoned it for some reason. I thought for sure they'd have quickly contacted the retired FBI agent whose book I recently proof-read, but they haven't.

Also meanwhile, I've been reading Richard Feynman's book "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter." While the book contains a lot of mathematics that is over my head, it's still readable. What it is telling me is that mathematicians are content with not knowing what is really going on in the universe if they can just calculate probabilities for how often things happen. They can compute that 4% of the light hitting a glass window will reflect and 96% will go through the window, but they don't have a clue as to why things happen that way. And no one seems to care. But that is nearly all I can think about: If light particles look and move the way I think they look and move, why would 4% reflect off a pane of glass while 96% go through?

The rest of the time I'm wondering about how people who voted for Donald Trump can still support him. I think I know the answer to that, too, but how can I prove it? And would anyone listen? Does anyone care?

The universe we live in is truly endlessly fascinating.

Comments for Sunday, August 6, 2017, thru Saturday, August 12, 2017:

August 10, 2017 - It's been 5 days since I submitted my paper on Time Dilation to physics journal #8. It's still "Under Review." I just went through their web site looking for some information on how long I'm supposed to wait before contacting them. I couldn't find anything. So, since it is a monthly journal, I'm going to assume I should wait at least a month, until September 6 before contacting them. While waiting, I might try type-setting the paper into their LaTeX format without the "natbib" package that I cannot get to work.

I haven't heard any more from the group that is putting together a TV series about the anthrax attacks of 2001. I assume that they are busy contacting other people they would want to appear in the series, and they'll send me a list of "talking points" when they have a better feel for what they're going to want to ask me.

Last night I watched the second episode of "Manhunt: Unabomber," which I'd recorded on Tuesday evening when it aired on the Discovery Channel. It was all about "linguistic forensics," which was just a new idea in 1995, but it reminded me how "microbial forensics" had to be developed to help solve the anthrax case. It was interesting enough for me to I set my Digital Video Recorder (DVR) to record next Tuesday's episode.

I also set my DVR to record some episodes of "Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath" next Tuesday from the A&E Network. Leah Remini was on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" on Monday night taking about her show. I watched Colbert's show from my DVR early Tuesday evening, and then I set my DVR to record Remini's shows later that same evening. A&E aired episodes 5 & 6 from Season 1 and the first episode from Season 2. Wow! The two episodes from the first season that I had time to watch were truly fascinating. Here's how the Internet Movie DataBase describes the series:

A series featuring stories from former members of the Church of Scientology whose lives have been affected by the Church's harmful practices. Along with a team of former high-ranking Scientology insiders who understand the inner workings and policies of the organization, Leah gives the victims a chance to be heard.

This morning, as I was writing this comment, I did a Google search for "Leah Remini" and was shown two paid advertisements from the Church of Scientology attacking Remini's show. Click HERE and HERE. Plus, I found an article from Rolling Stone titled "Leah Remini Wants Federal Investigation Into Scientology," an article from The International Business Times titled "Leah Remini Wants To Expose Criminal Activities Of Church of Scientology," an article dated 2 days ago from The Hollywood Reporter titled "Leah Remini Doubles Down on Anti-Scientology Crusade: I Want a Federal Investigation," and many others.

I knew about The Church of Scientology, of course, and I knew how it was founded by a science fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard. I knew that Tom Cruise and John Travolta were Scientology members. But, I had no idea that this crusade by Leah Remini was underway. And there were a lot of other things about the Church of Scientology that I didn't know before watching Remini's show, particularly how they buy land and buildings with the millions they get in donations from their wealthy members, because letting the monies accumulate in a bank will result in earning interest, which is evidently taxable even for a "recognized religion."

I still have the first episode of Season 2 of Remini's series on my DVR. Instead of watching it last night, I watched a movie "The Book Thief." It was a very good movie about life in Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945. In some ways, it reminded me of life as led by Scientologists today, according to Leah Remini. Only Scientology is happening now, it's not a history lesson.

August 8, 2017 - Another day, another mystery. On August 6, I put a page on this web site that shows the log entries for a known hacker's attempt to post a bunch of WordPress files into this site. Yesterday morning, when I checked my web site logs for August 6, I found that I was the only person to access that web page all day. Apparently no one who reads this web site was interested enough to look at that web page. And, of course, no one else would know about it.

This morning, when I viewed the log files for August 7 and found that Google's search engine robot accessed that page at 4:25 a.m., and Microsoft's Bing search engine robot accessed it at 12:52 p.m.

Then, between 1:41 p.m. and the end of the day, 22 people from all around the world accessed that page and only that page, i,e., they went directly to it, they didn't find it by accessing my main web page first, the page you are now reading. Plus, a hacker in Kansas City that I've blocked from accessing anything on my site tried THREE TIMES to get to that page and to my main page. His attempts, of course, were blocked.

The mystery is: What were they looking for? It appears they all did a Google or Bing search for something and found my new web page. I must have spent two hours trying to figure out what they're looking for, but the log provides no clues. My new web page does illustrate a known problem, however: it shows a fake Goggle robot (Googlebot) attempting to POST to my site. And that seems to be the subject of a lot of discussions and web pages on the Internet.

August 6, 2017 - Hmm. Yesterday, I checked the status of the submission of my scientific paper on Time Dilation and found the physics journal's status page for my paper had a link to a copyrights form. There were no instructions, but it seemed like they were waiting for me to fill out the form. I evidently failed to fill it out or neglected to check some box during the original submission process. So, I filled it out. I don't know what it means, but I'm assuming that some associate editor is just making sure everything is kosher before turning my paper over to the editor who will acutally decide if my paper gets rejected immediately or if it goes into the review process. The whole web site seems designed for people who are familiar with submitting to that journal, and therefore do not have any questions about how anything is done. I had to guess what the copyrights link was for.

While I still have very little hope that the paper will be published, the fact that it hasn't already been rejected caused me to once again try to figure out how the references are handled in the LaTeX type-setting package that the journal uses. How do they link a reference number like shown in red in this sentence

Einstein's 1905 paper^₁₂ says yada yada yada.

to the 12th reference in the Reference Section?:

¹² A. Einstein, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, Annals of Physics, 322(10): 891-921, 1905

You can't just type it that way. The journal requires that you use the "natbib" style package for references. I haven't figured out how to use that package and, as a result, I keep getting this error message:

./main.aux:43: Package natbib Error: Bibliography not compatible with author-ye ar citations.
(natbib) Press <return> to continue in numerical citation style.
See the natbib package documentation for explanation. Type H <return> for immediate help. ...
l.43 ...mand\NAT@force@numbers{}\NAT@force@numbers

Typing H and hitting <return> does nothing but type an H into the paper and shift to a new line. I looked up "natbib" via Google and found a web page about natbib citation styles. But it appears there is something else that I need to know first, since I can make no sense of what that web page says. There are places where you can download examples of a natbib bibliography, but every one of the those places requires registering and getting a password, etc. I hate to do that only to find out it wasn't what I was looking for and explains nothing.

What's extra frustrating about all this is that I'm working with a "template" on Overleaf.com that is supposedly already set up for the journal's requirements, including the natbib package. But I still get that error message!

So, until I can think of something else to do, I'm just going to sit and wait to see what happens to the paper the way I submitted it. If they reject the paper, then I won't have to learn how to use the natbib package.

Meanwhile, this morning a hacker in Los Angeles attempted to post a bunch of crap to my web site. All of it was blocked by my host's security software, except for one POST of my entire main page that seems to have worked. But, it was evidently a post of the page as it currently exists, since I can see nothing wrong with my main page. Here is what part of that post looks like on my log file:

162.209.168.23 - - [05/Aug/2017:12:59:51 -0500] "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 343404 "http://www.ed-lake.com/"

I highlighted the 200 status code in the entry because that status code supposedly means that the action was successful.

When I lookup IP address 162.209.168.23 I find that Los Angeles is where the computer that accessed my site is supposedly located. However, that IP address also supposedly belongs to an ISP (Internet Service Provider) called "futing," which doesn't seem to exist, and a domain called cloudradium.com, which doesn't seem to exist as a web site, but the domain name belongs to Cloudradium L.L.C. in the city of Chengdushi, Sichuansheng Province, China.

This morning, I blocked that IP address from ever accessing my web site again, and I saved the section of my log file which shows their valid and rejected posts. Click HERE to view it. The page at that link also shows two attempts to access (i.e., "GET") a non-existent wp-login.php file on my web site, each followed by a valid GET for my web site's main page. The IP addresses for those entries are:

46.26.156.15 - Santander, Spain
178.165.130.222 - Vienna, Austria

I tried asking techies at my web site host about it, but they couldn't seem to figure out what I was talking about. I might try again later today by showing them the section of my web site log file. There's a web page that describes the problem HERE, and it is followed by 235 comments, the first one dated April 11, 2013, and the last one dated July 13, 2017. The page begins with this comment:

There have now been several large scale WordPress wp-login.php brute force attacks, coming from a large amount of compromised IP addresses spread across the world since April 2013.

A large botnet of around 90,000 compromised servers has been attempting to break into WordPress websites by continually trying to guess the username and password to get into the WordPress admin dashboard.

All I'm adding to the conversation with my comment here is the fact that they aren't just trying to break into WordPress websites, they are trying to break into my web site, too, and probably thousands of others which are not WordPress websites.

While they haven't done any harm to my web site, it seems odd that no one (but me) has taken any action to end the problem by identifying who actually has IP address 162.209.168.23. I don't see how what they are doing can be legal.

Also meanwhile, I'm waiting for the people running that TV project about the anthrax attacks of 2001 to contact me again with a list of "talking points" they plan to use when they interview me. And, I definitely need to clean up my apartment before they arrive.

Busy busy busy.

Comments for Tuesday, August 1, 2017, thru Saturday, August 5, 2017:

August 4, 2017 - A few days ago and yesterday, hackers were somehow successful in posting to this web site. But it seemed like they were just practicing, since they didn't appear to do any harm. But, those two hacking events convinced me it was time for me to set up blocking software to prevent identified hackers from even looking at this web site. So, I set up what is called a ".htaccess" file to block a bunch of IP addresses used by hackers. A typical IP address for a known hacker looks like this:

50.62.161.234

Each of the four numbers separated by periods can run from 0 to 255, and if I know a hacker uses a lot of numbers from 50.62.000.000 to 50.62.255.255, I can assume that he owns the whole block of numbers. I had ten such hackers, so I blocked ten times 256 times 256 or 655,360 IP addresses. They don't try to hack me every day, so I'll have to wait and see how well the blocking worked.

Anyway, that got me to thinking about also blocking the attempts access a file named "wp-login.php" which does not exist on this web site. It's a file used by WordPress web sites. That's what the "wp" stands for. On Aug. 1, there were 72 unsuccessful attempts to access that file, on Aug. 2 there were 51 attempts and on Aug. 3 there were 63 attempts. Each is followed by a successful access to my main web page, which means they get logged as regular visitors. But it is all the result of some WordPress web site somewhere having been infected with a virus that sends out these attempts to do the same thing to other WordPress web sites.

So, I did some research. I found that on September 5, 2015, there were 46,856 attempts to POST a wp-login.php file to my site. All failed. Then on August 10, 2016, there were three more failed POST attempts. But, the next day the attempts to access that non-existent file began. And I've been getting 50 to 75 failed attempts each day, each immediately followed by a successful access to my sites main page. Then I examined the logs and found every single one of those accesses in the past three days was from a different IP address. So, there's no way to block them. According to one web site (HERE), the hackers have got 90,000 random IP addresses that would need to be blocked.

I just thought I'd mention this because it is how I spent most of the day today. Plus, some day I might need to remember what I did on this day, and now I have a record of what I did.

One more thing: Every day I access a WordPress web site used by a True Believer about the anthrax case: caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/. I can't see how my accessing that site can cause hackers to try to post wp.login.php files to my web site, but I'm going to stop accessing that site for a few weeks to see what happens.

ADDED NOTE: It occurred to me that there's no way that anyone or any computer at that WordPress web site can connect a visit from me to my web site, since I do not use an ed-lake.com email address. However, they CAN connect the fact that I linked to their site from this web site. If anyone clicks on that link above, the WordPress software will almost certainly record this web site as a "referrer." And that establishes a link that a virus can use to attack my web site. But the damage was done a year ago, and I've probably made dozens of comments where I link to that WordPress web site. I don't see any benefit to deleting the links. So, as long at nothing more serious happens than just getting some automated visitors, I'll just leave things as they are.

August 3, 2017 - I just got off the phone having talked for about 20 minutes with a reporter and a director working on a TV documentary series about the anthrax attacks of 2001. They're still in the fact-gathering and planning stages of the project, which probably won't air until late this year or sometime next year. But I think they'll be scheduling me as one of their first interviews, probably for sometime later this month. It all sounds very interesting, and it might be helped along by a book about the case that is coming out this fall, probably in October.

They told me they got my name from a reporter they know, who was very complimentary. Of all the reporters I know, that reporter would have been one of the last ones I would have thought of to give me a glowing recommendation.

So, now I'm going to get back to work on my scientific papers, while also doing a little housecleaning to get ready for the TV interview.

August 2, 2017 (B) - After spending nearly all day trying to figure out how to add references to my paper in the LaTeX format used by journal #8, I finally gave up and submitted it in .docx format using WORD 2012. In the automated submission process, they asked if the manuscript was formatted according to all of their rules.   I responded "No," and that didn't cause it to be rejected. In one of the last few steps, they asked me for the names of 2 people to use as reviewers for the paper. It was a requirement for submission. I personally know of no one who could be a reviewer, so I gave them the names of two very famous scientists for whom I have email addresses. That worked, too. I have virtually NO hope that the journal will accept the paper, but I just had to give it a try.

I'm also thinking it might be my LAST try. From here on I may just put my papers on ViXra.org and forget about trying to get them published. If I someday decide I can turn them into a book somehow, I may do that. I'm going to continue researching, but it will be mostly for my own enjoyment. Or, I might change my mind and try submitting again next week. Time will tell.

August 2, 2017 (A) - Last night I watched what I think was the first two episodes of an 8 episode TV series titled "Manhunt: Unabomber" on the Discovery Channel. Or maybe it was episode 1 of a 7-episode series. Either way, it was a two hour show, and the rest of the shows are one hour. It continues next Tuesday.

I'd already set my DVR to record it when I got into a discussion about it with a former FBI agent on Monday evening. I wasn't particularly looking forward to it. I was just curious. I don't recall ever paying much attention to the Unabomber case at the time it was happening, but it was definitely a BIG deal with the FBI.

I wasn't really expecting it to be a dramatized show, either. And I was somewhat disappointed when it turned out that that is what it was. But it was interesting enough to hold my attention for the entire two hours and for me to set my DVR to record next Tuesday's episode. I'm not sure how FBI agents would view the show, since it somewhat depicted them as bureaucrats who had a fixed way of doing things and no tolerance for someone who wanted to use a new approach. On the other hand, they also showed that that was at a point in time when the FBI had already tried dozens of "new approaches" and none had accomplished anything toward identifying the "Unabomer" who had been "terrorizing America" for many years.

It was interesting when they started talking about the Unabomber's handwriting and writing style, and the kinds of words he used, since I recall having a lot of arguments with people (including a few "experts") over such things on the anthrax letters and envelopes.

The hero of the show is a profiler. I recall contacting several profilers during the anthrax investigation. My impression was that each profiler had developed a different profile for the anthrax killer. And none matched the profile I had developed.

I think what bothered me most about the Unabomber show was the way they kept switching back in forth in time to tell what was happening in 1995 and then in 1978 and then in some other year in between. Unless I'm really focused and paying attention, I hate that way of story-telling, since it usually requires the viewer to remember what was going on the last time they switched to 1990 or 1982 or whatever.

According to the Discovery Channel's schedule, the first part will air again on Friday evening, on Saturday morning and on Sunday evening.

August 1, 2017 - By a weird coincidence, as I was driving home from the gym this afternoon, I was listening to CD #4 in the 10 CD set of the audio book version of "The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests," and they started talking about the anthrax attacks of 2001. They had just finished talking about 9/11, but I hadn't expected them to talk about the anthrax attacks, too. It was extra weird because I was thinking about the anthrax attacks at that moment, and the TV interview about the investigation that I may be doing sometime soon. The first stage of the process is for me to talk on the phone with the reporter and the director later this week. I've done TV interviews before, but this is the first time I've been asked to have a three-way discussion with the reporter and the director beforehand.

It really has me unable to focus on anything else. This morning, I tried working on submitting my paper about Time Dilation to journal #8, but I reached a spot where I couldn't figure out how they wanted me to typeset reference information using the LaTeX typesetting software. It seems they want the reference information done in a way I've never done it before. It's probably pretty simple, but this time I just couldn't focus. Maybe tomorrow. I may just need to find some sample manuscripts from that particular journal to see what the links between sentences in the text and references in the reference section look like.

They also accept manuscripts in .docx format, which would ordinarily be a lot simpler, but their instructions inexplicably say they want people to use WORD 2007, and I'm using WORD 2013.

Sigh.

Comments for Sunday, July 30, 2017, thru Monday, July 31, 2017:

July 31, 2017 - Hmm. I awoke this morning thinking I might try submitting my paper on Time Dilation to another physics journal, but then I checked my emails and found I'd received a request for me to do a TV interview about the anthrax attacks of 2001. It was totally out of the blue, and I had to wonder if it had something to do with the new book about the case that I recently proof-read. The email indicated that they were interested because of the book I wrote in 2012. An attachment to the email showed the project to be very comprehensive and a lot more than just a segment on a news show. I suppose I'll learn more as we work out the details via phone calls, which should take place within a few days.

Meanwhile, I'm finding it very difficult to focus on studying all the rules involved in submitting my paper about Time Dilation to journal #8.

July 30, 2017 - It's another one of those Sundays when I have absolutely nothing ready to use as my Sunday comment. So, I'll have to "wing it" once again.

I keep wanting to write something about President Trump and how unbelievably ignorant he is. You can ask yourself, What did he hope to accomplish by suggesting to the police forces of America that they stop being so nice to people they arrest. Trump indicated he thought it was silly for cops to put their hands on a person's head to make sure the person they are putting into a squad car doesn't bump their head against the frame of the door. Trump doesn't seem to understand that that procedure was instituted after countless people had their heads slammed against the doorframe and successfully sued for police brutality. Trump also seems to want to go back to the days when we were constantly sitting with our finger on the button ready to launch a nuclear war. And then there's his talk to the Boy Scouts of America where he not only talked politics to children, he also told the Scouts that the government was a "cesspool" or "sewer." However, I've already written about how I believe Trump thinks emotionally, not logically. All he's been doing just confirms that over and over and over and over again.

And there isn't anything I can write that hasn't been said much better by Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Samantha Bee and others with TV shows. They point out Trump's craziness and his errors almost every night, and on Thursday nights we have The President Show on Comedy Central, which is a half hour parody of Donald Trump that really hits the target.

I also keep wanting to write about all the scam phone calls and emails I keep getting. Every day I get emails about $50 gift certificates available to me from Macy's, Amazon, Sam's Club and Walgreens, but none of the emails are from any of those companies. Presumably, if I open any of them, I'll get some kind of computer virus or other problem. In addition, every day I get dozens of attempts to access a file in my computer that I do not have: wp-login.php. It's evidently the result of about ninety thousand computers around the world having been attacked with a virus that makes those attempts to get to such a file in other peoples computers. There are ways to stop it, but who's got the time to go through the steps? It's just crazy to have people trying to scam you several times a day every day.

And, of course, I have been writing about my research to figure out how the world of physics could get so screwed up that physics teachers are teaching absolute nonsense. I've written some unpublished papers on the subject, and, of course, I've written about it on this web site again and again. There's a lot more I could write about, but first I need to do my research to make certain what I'm saying is scientifically correct. It is really and truly fascinating.

And now that I've finished my Sunday comment, I can get back to work trying to figure out how Albert Einstein discovered the reality of Time Dilation. He evidently arrived at the right conclusion via an incorrect route. He considered Time to be somehow related to distance (or length). No one has ever found any way to confirm that. And it is in direct conflict with my assertion that Time is an effect of particle spin. But, I need to fully understand Einstein's thought processes in coming up with his conclusions before I can say he was wrong. So, I'm reading parts of his book Relativity: The Special and General Theory over and over and over and over in an attempt to understand his thought processes.

When you are suggesting Albert Einstein was wrong about something, you had better provide a mountain of undeniable evidence. Otherwise you'll just be another nut case who believes Einstein was wrong because you cannot make any sense of what Einstein wrote or claimed, and you think you have a better idea.

Comments for Sunday, July 23, 2017, thru Saturday, July 29, 2017:

July 28, 2017 - Groan! I'm constantly getting sidetracked. But, it isn't really "getting sidetracked," it's research. I must have spent HOURS yesterday trying to track down the source of this quote supposedly from Albert Einstein:

“Time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it.”

I found many places repeating the quote, but I couldn't find any book or paper or lecture or letter where Einstein actually said or wrote those words. They're important, because my my paper on Time Dilation says, “The Time Dilation experiments indicate that Time is an effect resulting from some property of matter.” And that is in direct conflict with what Einstein supposedly wrote. So, if Einstein really said those words, I probably need to explain why I contradict them in my paper. As a result, I'm doing more research.

This morning, I read a couple posts on the Google Science, Physics and Relativity forum that were VERY interesting. They contained lots of very interesting links, and one of them was to a book by Richard Feynman titled "QED: The strange theory of light and matter," which has this on page 15:

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

I found an .epub version, so it is going on my list of books I need to read. And finding that book caused me to locate an .epub version of "Six Not-So-Easy Pieces," which was also written by Dr. Feynman and appears to contain a lot of very interesting topics.

Another post on that Google forum led to a quote by Stephen Hawking, from his book "A Brief History of Time", Chapter 3:

"Now imagine a source of light at a constant distance from us, such as a star, emitting waves of light at a constant wavelength. Obviously the wavelength of the waves we receive will be the same as the wavelength at which they are emitted (the gravitational field of the galaxy will not be large enough to have a significant effect). Suppose now that the source starts moving toward us. When the source emits the next wave crest it will be nearer to us, so the distance between wave crests will be smaller than when the star was stationary."

I have a hardcover copy of "A Brief History of Time" in my personal library, but I didn't have a searchable pdf file. So, now I do. And I can use that quote from Prof. Hawking to show that there's an alternative to Hawking's logic. If light consists of particles, as Dr. Feyman says, and if particles are emitted faster than their wave motion can complete one cycle, you have - in effect - overlapping waves. In the paper on waves versus particles that I've been writing, I show how if a star is moving toward us, the frequency of the arriving light particles will be greater than the measurement you would get if you assumed that each wave was followed by another wave. You'd get a frequency where some of the particles moving in wave patterns are slightly overlapping or even side by side. And Prof. Hawking's comment also poses the question: How does the star know it is "nearer to us"? And the question: Doesn't that presuppose that the source is moving relative to something other than us? And the question: Is there a way to tell if he source is moving toward us versus us moving toward the source?

Getting a paper written isn't just a matter of writing down words, it is mostly the process of making sure the words are correct. And that requires research. Groan! Lots of research.

July 26, 2017 - This morning I found an email in my inbox from Journal #7 rejecting my paper on Time Dilation. That was quicker than I expected. Maybe I should have guessed it would happen quickly because of the email I received from them yesterday. They asked why I hadn't attached any "Figure files" to the paper I had submitted. I responded by telling them that my paper had no Figures (illustrations) to attach, it was straight explanatory text.

After sending my response I wondered if I should have mentioned that my paper used logic, not mathematics, therefore I didn't need any illustrations to explain the mathematics. I wondered if they would have taken that as a snippy or sarcastic response. But, it doesn't make any difference now.

Of course, they didn't point out any errors in the paper. They just stated that "it does not meet the journal's acceptance criteria." I guess they didn't consider my research to be "original," and/or they didn't think my total overhaul of current thinking about Time Dilation to be a "significant advance" in understanding physics.

I could just send the paper out to Journal #8 this morning, but I recently came across something while reading David Bohm's book on "The Special Theory of Relativity" that really got my brain to working at high speeds.

A few days ago, while reading Bohm's book in .mobi format on my Kindle during either breakfast or lunch, I came across a description of Einstein's Train-Embankment thought experiment on pages 40 to 43. I didn't want to stop reading at that point in order to study what Bohm wrote, so, after my meal, when I returned to working on my computer, I located a pdf copy of the book and studied those pages more carefully. Then I made a .docx copy of the pages and started highlighting and making notes, trying to fully understand what Bohm was saying.

Back on June 21, I wrote a comment about a different book that mentioned the Train-Embankment experiment. The book was "Spacetime Physics" by Edwin Taylor and John Wheeler. That book says this on page 64:

For the observer standing on the ground, the two lightning bolts strike the front and back of the train at the same time. Therefore for him the distance between the char marks on the track constitutes a valid measure of the length of the train. In contrast, the observer riding on the train measures the front lightning bolt to strike first, the rear bolt later.

But in Bohm's book it says this on page 40:

Now consider an observer O’ on the moving train. Suppose that O’ happens to be opposite to O when O receives the two flashes from A and B. Of course, O’ will also see the two flashes at the same time.

Here's Einstein's diagram of the Train-Embankment experiment from page 25 of his book Relativity: The Special and General Theory:

The situation involves two bolts of lightning simultaneously striking points A and B on the embankment. Observer M, who is stationary on the embankment and equal distance from both points A and B, sees and measures the two bolts of lightning to have struck simultaneously.

For some reason, Bohm changed M to O and M' to O'. But Taylor and Wheeler said that the observer on the train would measure the lightning bolt that hit point A to have hit first. Bohm, however, says that O (M) and O' (M')will both see the flashes from the lightning bolts at the same time.

It took me awhile to realize that, in Einstein's diagram, if lightning struck points A and B simultaneously, both M (the observer on the stationary embankment) and M' (the observer on the fast moving train) would SEE the strikes occurring at the same time. They are side by side, equal distances from points A & B, and light from the lightning bolts travels the same distance for both of them.

HOWEVER, if M' on the train had some capability to measure the speed of light, he would measure the light from A to be traveling at the speed of light (c) minus the speed of the train (v), because the train is moving away from point A. And he would measure the speed of light coming from point B to be traveling at c + v, the speed of light plus the speed of the train.

So, they SEE the light arriving at the same time because they just happen to be positioned right next to each other, but they MEASURE the light to be traveling at different speeds. That is a situation I hadn't realized and thought about before.

Going back and reading what Einstein wrote (translated into English), it seems he was talking about what is observed by M and M' if they were next to each other when the lightning bolts struck, NOT when they see the flashes. In that case, you really have a simultaneity problem. M on the embankment will still see the flashes occur simultaneously, but M' on the train will NOT. M' will first see the flash from B because he is moving toward it, and then he will see the flash from A, because he was moving away from A. Here is what Einstein wrote:

Now in reality (considered with reference to the railway embankment) he [M'] is hastening towards the beam of light coming from B, whilst he is riding on ahead of the beam of light coming from A. Hence the observer will see the beam of light emitted from B earlier than he will see that emitted from A. Observers who take the railway train as their reference-body must therefore come to the conclusion that the lightning flash B took place earlier than the lightning flash A. We thus arrive at the important result:

Events which are simultaneous with reference to the embankment are not simultaneous with respect to the train, and vice versa (relativity of simultaneity). Every reference-body (co-ordinate system) has its own particular time; unless we are told the reference-body to which the statement of time refers, there is no meaning in a statement of the time of an event.

Now before the advent of the theory of relativity it had always tacitly been assumed in physics that the statement of time had an absolute significance, i.e. that it is independent of the state of motion of the body of reference. But we have just seen that this assumption is incompatible with the most natural definition of simultaneity; if we discard this assumption, then the conflict between the law of the propagation of light in vacuo and the principle of relativity disappears.

Wow! That is NOTHING like what David Bohm was writing about in his book. But, it might relate to what I've been looking for to figure out how Einstein decided that time would run slower for the observer on the train. But, I haven't yet figured out how he came to that conclusion.

However, I noticed that Bohm also says this in his book where he has the light from the lightning flashes reaching O and O' at the same time:

In fact, however, all observers must assign the same speed to light, since as we have seen, experiments show this to be the case. Therefore the train observer can no longer agree that the two flashes are simultaneous, because they cover different distances at the same speed.

Whoa! That is totally wrong! What the hell does "assign" mean in that context!! Is that where the mathematicians get derailed (so to speak)? They believe and endlessly argue that all observers would measure the same speed of light. But they wouldn't! In Einstein's example, they would see the light from both sources arriving at the same time because they were purposely positioned right next to each other, but they would not both measure (or "assign") the light to be traveling at the same speed. Not unless they were mathematicians who understand only mathematics and not how the real world works.

As I understand it, Quantum Theorists consider movement to be an "illusion." They argue that the observer on the train and the observer on the embankment both see light traveling at the same speed because M and M' are points in space at points in time, not moving objects. If you just ignore the whole point of Einstein's thought experiment, then they are right.

I still need to figure out what "length contraction" is all about. It is not logical to me that the length of anything is contracting, but that might be a "gedanken" (thought experimental) way of figuring out something about Time Dilation.

I also need to study what Bohm wrote a bit more. He goes into how Time is viewed in the Train/Embankment thought experiment, but it is all very heavy mathematics. I was tricked into reading the book by this comment from a reader as shown on the Amazon.com's web page for Bohm's book:

Because of its centrality to the book, my advice to the reader is to read the appendix first, or at least at a very early stage of the book, because it is there that the substance of the book takes shape and form. The physics concepts are almost incidental to this underlying conceptual theme.

That said, it must be pointed out that this then is a wholly conceptual, rather than a mathematical book on the Special Theory. No mathematics are needed and none are used.

Really!?!?!? To me it seems that Bohm endlessly gets into deep mathematics, although he sometimes might go for a page or two without using mathematical equations. Maybe, to mathematicians, if you do not use math equations in every paragraph, then you use "no mathematics."

While writing this comment this morning I also did some research and found several other sources about the Train/Embankment experiment that I need to read. I also watched a video about it:

The video doesn't help much. It declares that "there can never be agreement on the simultaneity of events."

Perhaps mathematicians can never be in agreement "on the simultaneity of events," but any intelligent human being or scientist looking at the situation in our real world would see that the two lightning strikes were simultaneous from both perspectives IF the two observers both understand what they and the other observer are seeing and measuring. The purpose of Einstein's thought experiment was to get people to understand the two different points of view, NOT to create a mathematics problem where no two observers can ever agree "on the simultaneity of events."

In our real world, we can understand that the two observers have different perspectives. In the fantasy world of mathematicians, there can never be an agreement, so there can never be an understanding.

I could go on and on, but I have some studying to do. And, I'll probably do it before I try submitting my Time Dilation paper to Journal #8. I really need to understand how Einstein figured out the reality of Time Dilation without ever seeing anyone perform any experiment like the ones today's scientists do every day to demonstrate the reality of Time Dilation.

July 25, 2017 - Shortly after receiving the email from the 6th scientific journal to reject my paper on Time Dilation, I began looking for another journal to try. It turned out that I had picked another journal back on June 25, but never went through with the submission process. I don't remember why, but it was probably because of their rules about formatting submissions. While I've used LaTex to format papers before, I couldn't figure out how to format their way using LaTeX. So, yesterday, I decided to submit it in .docx format, which was an available option. But that also requires a lot of very specific formatting.

It took me the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon to get the paper into the right format. Then came the next part of the process: to go through all the questions they ask. That must have taken me at least an hour. At one point I had to suggest the names of three scientists to critique the paper. I picked the three top living scientists I could think of. There was form after form to read and check. There were very technical legal documents where I had to swear that I didn't steal the ideas in my paper from someone else and didn't copy any tables or charts from anyone else's paper. I kept looking for some hidden clause where they would require a fee to offset publication costs, but all I saw was the option to pay to have the paper made available by "open access." I didn't choose that option.

It was 4:45 in the afternoon when I checked the last box on the last form and my submission was accepted. This morning it is still waiting for an editor to be assigned to it.

Oh, yes, I also spent a few minutes writing a cover letter that briefly explained how I felt my paper fitted their requirements, even though I wasn't reporting on the results of any lab experiments I had done.

I don't know if the paper has any chance of getting published at that journal, but I had to give it a try. It's try #7 for the Time Dilation paper.

July 24, 2017 - I check NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day web site every morning. This morning's picture was particularly interesting. It shows a man in native garb in Kenya watching a solar eclipse.

The "trick" for taking pictures like that is to get very far away from the person on the hill and have a very good telescopic lens on your camera so that the sense of perspective is lost and the differences in distances seem small. This morning, they have two different versions of the same picture. Here's the second version:

Kenya solar eclipse version 2

It's the same picture, except that the upper picture has the sides cropped off. The original probably has a lot more on the sides, top and bottom. The more you can see of what is at the sides of the picture, the more your sense of perspective makes things seem perfectly normal.

Here's another picture from NASA's web site that shows a man walking his dog in front of the rising (or setting) sun:

And below is another picture which shows someone with a telescope standing on a hill in front of the moon. But you probably need to view the full-size version to really see the details of the picture.

astonomer in front of moon

I'm not sure what my point is in showing these pictures. I thought the first one was interesting, and then I remembered I'd saved others that did the same thing to affect the viewer's sense of perspective. So, I decided to show them, too.

While I was writing this comment, I received an email from a highly-ranked scientific journal informing me that they weren't the "appropriate journal" for publication of my paper on Time Dilation, since it didn't present "original" research into basic physics.

So, that was rejection #6, and the third in a row with NO comments about the validity of the logic about Time Dilation presented in the paper.

Unfortunately, I haven't got #7 already lined up in my sights. So, I suppose that is what I'll be doing for the rest of the day: figuring out where to try next.

July 23, 2017 - There's a big difference between a fascination and an obsession. I recall that Time magazine once claimed that I was "obsessed" with the anthrax attacks of 2001. In reality, I was just fascinated by it - for about 12 years. As I saw it, people were arguing opinion against opinion, and very few people were looking at the facts and evidence. I was fascinated by what evidence said, and the scientific aspects of the case added to my fascination. I was also fascinated by the people who were totally obsessed with the case. The difference, as I saw it, was they were absolutely certain they knew who did it, and no amount of evidence to the contrary would ever change their minds. (And none has, since they still argue the same arguments today, after 16 years. Click HERE and HERE for two examples.) I didn't know who did it, but for awhile I saw evidence pointing in a specific direction. In 2005, I wrote and self-published a book about the case. It was titled "Analyzing The Anthrax Attacks - The First Three Years."

Here's part of what the blurb on Amazon.com says about the book:

The book concludes that it is an absolute certainty that the person behind the anthrax attacks of 2001 will be more easily brought to justice if the scientific evidence is carefully examined by more people in the scientific community, instead of simply relying upon rumor, speculation, innuendo and baseless conspiracy theories, as has been the situation to date.

Then, on August 1, 2008, the FBI named someone I'd almost never heard of as the anthrax killer. And shortly thereafter, the FBI provided a mountain of scientific evidence to support their case. I spent much of the next six years arguing with people who didn't believe the evidence and still believed they knew who really did it: the same people they had been claiming did it since the attacks occurred in 2001. Evidence didn't matter. Facts didn't matter. They simply knew who did it. It was emotional thinking, not logical thinking. It was Donald Trump's kind of thinking, where facts and evidence mean nothing if you are totally certain you are right.

It took awhile, but my fascination with these "True Believers" slowly waned. In 2012, I wrote and self-published another book about the case, "A Crime Unlike Any Other: What the Facts Say about Dr. Bruce Edwards Ivins and the Anthrax Attacks of 2001." And I eventually lost interest. On December 31, 2014, I stopped updating my web site about the case. The next day, January 1, 2015, I created the web site you are reading now. In my first comment I wrote,

People who are familiar with my web site about the anthrax attacks of 2001 know that one of my main interests is conspiracy theorists, particularly the psychology of conspiracy theorists.

And I started tracking the conspiracy theories related to the Boston Marathon Bombing and various other crimes. It was interesting, and it kept me somewhat busy, but it wasn't exactly "fascinating."

Meanwhile, starting in late 2013 or very early in 2014, I began arguing about Time Dilation with people on various Internet forums. On March 23, 2014, I created a web page about it on my anthraxinvestigation.com site. The page was titled "Time Dilation - As I Understand It." That slowly developed into a new fascination. About a year later, I started writing "scientific papers" about Time Dilation and how it relates to the speed of light. And I argued and argued and argued with people who refused to look at the facts and evidence.

And that's where I am today. It's not an obsession. It's a fascination. I am totally fascinated with the subject of Time Dilation and how there are many people who seem driven by beliefs instead of logic, who argue that Time Dilation doesn't exist - regardless of all the experiments which have shown that it does exist.

I've read many books and papers on the subject, and I've accumulated dozens more that are waiting for me to find the time to read them. And, of course, I am once again trying to get my paper on the subject published.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to analyze the arguments over whether light is a wave or a particle, arguments that have been raging for centuries. It is easy to see that a lot of the logic used in the arguments is just plain absurd. And I can even show how totally absurd it is. But, it isn't very easy to provide a "correct" answer that can be undeniably demonstrated via experiments.

This morning, I wondered if Einstein ever worked in a lab. I knew he wrote all of his most important papers while working as a clerk in a Swiss Patent Office, but did he ever actually do experiments? Doing a little research, I found a Scientific American article titled "Einstein's Only Known Experiment Rebuilt." It says Einstein once built a device to amplify a voltage. He spent 3 years on it, from 1907 to 1910. It never came to anything. The article concludes with this:

Although the device works, the reconstruction confirms that Einstein made the right choice in remaining a theorist. The charge accumulated in the instrument fluctuates by a small amount, probably because of its mechanical contacts. This variability likely renders it too imprecise for the measurements Einstein desired, reports [Danny] Segers [director of the Museum for the History of Sciences in Ghent, Belgium], whose admiration for the great physicist is undiminished. "The amazing thing for me as a physicist is I did not know Einstein was interested in experimental work," he says. "I'm not going to say Einstein used a screwdriver himself, but he certainly understood very
well how things worked."

Einstein was a theoretical physicist. He was terrific at analyzing statistics and figuring out what they meant. And he was famous for his "gedanken," his "thought experiments" which he performed only in his mind. But he wasn't much good at doing actual lab experiments.

So, today we have people doing lab experiments which they claim prove Einstein wrong, but the experiments do no such thing.

And, I'm sitting here in front of my computer on a Sunday morning trying to figure out how to explain how "the Double-Slit Experiment" doesn't prove what the experimenters claim it proves. But I keep hitting the same wall. Something within the slits seems to be acting as a prism. About the only thing it can be is gravity. In Einstein's Theory of General Relativity he showed that gravity can bend light. It's called "gravitational lensing." If gravity can bend light that is passing millions of miles from a massive gravitational source, doesn't that also mean it can bend light that is passing a few picometers from a small gravitational source? Maybe not, but why not?

I find the subject fascinating, but I'm not obsessed with it. I'd certainly like to find something in some book somewhere that would help me either prove or disprove that hypothesis. I'm just curious, that's all. And, of course, I'd like to write another paper about how college physics teachers are teaching total nonsense. That's a totally fascinating situation. I just do not understand why it isn't equally fascinating to many others. Do they have to become obsessed before they will discuss it? I see many people arguing their scientific obsessions on Internet forums. But, unless they are obsessed, it seems they aren't willing to discuss anything.

Comments for Sunday, July 16, 2017, thru Saturday, July 22, 2017:

July 21, 2017 - I awoke this morning wondering how many scientific journals had rejected my paper on Time Dilation. Doing a little research, I found it was FIVE. The first was Nature magazine, which just said it wasn't their type of article. The second was Science magazine, which also simply said it wasn't their type of article. The third submission was to Physics Essays, which, after two sets of revisions, accepted it for publication and then notified me that there would be a $127 fee per page ($508 total) to offset printing costs. I wasn't expecting to have to pay money to have the paper published, so I withdrew the paper.

After checking to make sure they didn't charge for publishing, I tried another journal in May and another in June. They both rejected it saying it wasn't their type of article.

While I was submitting the paper in May and June, I was also submitting my other paper on Einstein's Second Postulate. which was also getting turned down because it wasn't the type of article those journals published.

Of all my papers, the paper on Time Dilation is by far the most important. So, this morning I submitted it to another journal - a journal that had previously turned down my paper on Einstein's Second Postulate but recommended a journal that might be better suited to the article.

Unlike my paper on the Second Postulate, the paper on Time Dilation also seems suitable for some journals on astrophysics. So, I'm going to be submitting it to other journals if the one that currently has it turns it down. I won't be submitting my Second Postulate paper anywhere until after I find out if I can get the Time Dilation paper published. And, hopefully, I will get my paper on the Double-Slit Experiment done before I've run out of journals for the Time Dilation paper.

July 19, 2017 - This afternoon, after running some errands, I sat in my car inside my garage for an extra thirty seconds in order to finish listening to CD #5 in the 5-CD set for the audio book version of "Bossypants" by Tina Fey.

Although it is a very short book, it's basically Tina Fey's autobiography. While I barely managed to get through CD #1, which was about her early life before going to work for Saturday Night Live, I enjoyed listening to most of the rest of the book. She has a very raunchy, self-depreciating sense of humor, and the inside details of working on SNL and 30 Rock were very interesting, particularly the bits where she impersonated vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, including getting her picture on the cover of Life Magazine with Presidential candidate John McCain. She talks a lot about a .pdf file that goes with the audio book, but doesn't come with it when you "borrow" the audio book from your local library via the Internet. However, I found the pdf file is on-line HERE. So, I was able to see what she was talking about.

LIFE cover with Tina Fey and John
McCain

Meanwhile, I've managed to break away from constantly doing research, and I got to work on an almost totally new version of a science paper that I am now calling "Analyzing the Double-Slit Experiment." I'm also considering writing a book tentatively titled "The STUPID Side of Quantum Theory."

I thought things were NUTS when I analyzed how Einstein's Second Postulate is taught in college physics classes, but what they teach about the Double-Slit Experiment goes beyond nuts. It's just plain STUPID. I couldn't understand how it could happen without half the world screaming and yelling about it. Now I see that it's such an obscure subject that 99.999% of the world has never even heard about the Double-Slit Experiment, and the remaining 0.001% mostly just accept what they are taught and don't challenge it for fear of either getting a bad grade (if they are students) or getting fired (if they are teachers or scientists), because the True Believers are in charge.

The True Believers believe that mathematical models rule the universe. And, if something doesn't fit one of their models, it is impossible. No criticism allowed. No challenges allowed. No arguments allowed. Only acceptance is allowed. Once again, it is Religio Mathematica, the religion of mathematics. Their beliefs are INSANE in any world where cause and effect are an important part of science. And their Prophet, Neils Bohr, didn't believe that cause and effect could explain the universe the way mathematics can. Just read Bohr's 1949 paper Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics. (epistemology: the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.)

July 17, 2017 - Yesterday afternoon, I sat down on a couch for about an hour and finished reading "Following The Equator" by Mark Twain.

Looking back through this web site, it appears I started reading it shortly after finishing another Mark Twain travel book, A Tramp Abroad, back on May 1. So, it took me two and a half months to read. But, during that time I read at least two other books. I'm not sure why I started reading it, but it was a fairly enjoyable read. Following the Equator is a book published in 1897, written by Samuel Clements (Mark Twain), describing a trip around the world he did in 1895 while on a lecture tour. He describes visiting Hawaii, various Polynesian Islands, Australia, New Zealand, he wrote chapter after chapter about touring India, then Mauritania and lastly South Africa as it was just after the Boer Wars.

While it was funny in parts, the book was also very grim in its description of life in those times, particularly for natives in the Pacific and South Africa, and virtually everyone in India.

This morning, during breakfast, I started reading a 193 page book, "The Special Theory of Relativity" by David Bohm. I have it in .mobi format on my Kindle. It's not the book I was planning to read, but since it was readable on my Kindle and looked interesting, I started on it. Reading a book on my small laptop while eating breakfast and lunch is not as easy as reading a book on my Kindle. The keyboard on the laptop has to go between my meal and the computer screen, and that puts the screen just beyond the point where my bifocals focus on things to read, and not far enough away for the long range lenses to let me read things comfortably. I have reading glasses for working on the computer, but they're usually in my office, not in the kitchen. It's another area where I just need to get organized.

July 16, 2017 - Groan! Writing a scientific paper about the so-called mysterious "Double-Slit Experiment" is becoming more and more like a creative writing exercise for a book or short story. I keep changing where the "story" begins. Do I start with the "mystery," or do I start with how the "mystery" became a "mystery"? But, I can't explain the "mystery" without first explaining some of the science. And I can' t explain the science without injecting my understanding of the science into the story, and my understanding may be in conflict with how others understand science. So, do I begin by explaining how my understanding differs from their understanding? Can I do that without first explaining the "mystery." And at what point would the reader become frustrated and bored and toss the paper aside?

It seems I need to do something else they teach in creative writing classes: I need to start with a "hook," i.e., something that will grab the reader's attention and make him want to read further. But what hook? It seems like the whole subject is a jumble of "hooks" which will snag some people while repelling others. And, the people who are snagged by the "hook" might quickly break away if the hook doesn't sink in deep enough.

I'm also getting frequently distracted by all the research I'm doing. Yesterday, I came across a YouTube video about "The Mysterious Double-Slit Experiment" narrated by Professor Brian Greene.

That particular version of the video has been on-line since June 15, 2015, and has had only 1,491 views. However, the video wasn't posted by Greene, so I did a search and found that it was originally part of a NOVA program which aired in July 2012. Then I found another version that someone put on YouTube on November 11, 2012, that has had 205,439 views. Then I found yet another version someone else put on YouTube on January 2, 2014, that has had 289,540 views. That's a lot more views, but it's not a "large" number views for a professionally done science video with a relatively famous person. I have to wonder if it is because the video does absolutely nothing to clarify things and only confuses the question about the nature of light. And it very strongly argues that light is a wave, even though almost anyone can easily punch BIG holes in that belief. The discussions following the videos mostly just show confusion and annoyance.

Earlier yesterday morning I found another, vastly more interesting video titled "What is Light?" It touches on the particle versus wave problem in the first minute and calls it "a lie," without really ever explaining why it is "a lie." As I type these words, the video has had 3,101,508 views after being on the Internet since October 15, 2015. It's part of a very interesting series.

It also says at the 2:24 minute mark: "Macroscopically, the moving charge of the electron [or photon?] creates an oscillating magnetic field, which creates an oscillating electric field perpendicular to it. These two fields move themselves through space, transferring energy from one place to another." That first sentence is one that I can stare at for an hour, wondering about what it is actually saying, and getting nowhere. But, being puzzled by something is better than being annoyed by something that is obviously wrong, like the Greene video.

I think one problem I'm having with my paper on the Double-Slit experiment is that I can't easily show who is behind the nonsense. It appears to be Quantum Theorist mathematicians. But they provide no common slogan that I can use the way I used their screwball twisting of Einstein's Second Postulate to argue that "the speed of light is the same for all observers." By doing a Google search for double-slit experiment, I can find countless diagrams similar to this one:

But there seems to be no common phrasing that can be seen to be wrong or a misinterpretation or distortion of Einstein's words. Usually, on this subject, they just ignore Einstein altogether. And I can't use web sites as references in a paper, anyway. I have to search books and scientific papers to see what they say.

Then, this morning, after writing the first version of this comment, I watched a different video about the "Double Slit Experiment."

At the 1:45 minute mark the speaker says the magic words about the interference pattern shown on the right above, "This only happens if light is traveling as a wave." BINGO! That is UNTRUE! That is what has been bugging me since I started digging into this subject!

A quick scan through the college text book "Understanding Physics" by David Cassidy, Gerald Holton and James Rutherford finds this on page 383:

Young’s famous “double-slit experiment” provided convincing evidence that light does have properties that are explainable only in terms of waves.

Something could be causing the thin slits to act as prisms. In Thomas Young's experiment, in addition to the interference pattern, he got a prism effect where light was somehow separated into different colors by going around a thin object. Today's experimenters avoid that "problem" by using coherent light of one color. And, then they do not ask the question: "What happens when the trough of one wave and the crest of another wave hit an atom in the "optical screen" at the same time? That is what an interferometer does. And the screen displays an "interference pattern."

It's not an interference pattern caused by light acting like waves and interfering with one another like waves on a pond. It's an interference pattern caused by light photons arriving at the screen out of sync. The trough of one photon's wave hits an atom at the same time as the crest of another photon's wave.

It appears there is something that is causing the slits to change the trajectory of some photons more than others as they go through the slit. It is probably either gravity or an electrical field inside the slit.

Groan! I cannot be the only person who has questioned if the slits are causing some prism effect that makes them act like an interferometer. I guess I'll have to do more research. I could be totally wrong, but there's no way to find out except by researching it by myself. There's no physics teacher with whom I can discuss the subject. They are only concerned with teaching the "mystery," not with discussing possible solutions to the mystery. And I can't discuss it on the Google Science, Physics and Relativity forum until I have organized my thoughts and completed a first draft of a paper. Groan!

Meanwhile yesterday on my laptop, I started reading a book titled The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics, by Julian Barbour. I'm highlighting many parts of it, which means it contains a lot of material worth noting and remembering - at least in the few pages I've read so far. Will it turn into some nutty theory? Time will tell. But, before I can really start reading it during breakfast and lunch and at every other opportunity, I have to finish the travel book by Mark Twain that I've been reading. I've read 91% of that book.

Busy busy busy.