June 2017 Archive for ed-lake.com

Archive for ed-lake.com
June 2019

Comments for Sunday June 23, 2019, thru Sunday, June 30, 2019:

June 30, 2019 - After making about a dozen minor changes to the latest version (version #4) of my paper on Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories this morning, I submitted it to Vixra.org at 11:09 AM. It should be available on-line tomorrow morning. If so, I'll write a comment to that effect.

Since the theory described in the paper can be easily confirmed by experiment, I'm hoping someone will do so. I don't have the $1,195 needed to buy a Genesis GHD (Genesis Hand-held Directional), nor the $995 needed to buy a Genesis VPD (Vehicle Processing Directional), nor even $845 to buy a Decatur Scout radar gun. And, even if I did buy one of them, I seriously doubt that anyone would accept that I used the gun to prove my own theory. They will only accept validating results if they come from someone else. And, if other people want to help validate the theory, I say, "The more the merrier."

The revised paper suggests that any of those three radar guns made by Decatur Electronics, Inc., can be used in such an experiment. The primary basis I have for picking those three guns is because their user's manuals say the guns will not "work" if the guns are moving. I interpret that as meaning the guns will not show relative speeds as most other guns do, the three guns will show actual speeds. While "complex" radar guns will show a highway sign to be moving at 60 mph (it's relative speed) if the gun is pointed at the sign from a vehicle traveling at 60 mph, "basic" radar guns do not "work" that way. They will show the highway sign to be stationary, with an "actual" speed of zero.

All three of the guns have "directional" capability. That means there is a button on the gun that will tell you if the 60 mph reading the gun shows means the target is moving toward the gun or away from the gun. According to my paper, that also means that a gun used inside a truck can tell which way the truck moving at 60 mph. Point the gun at the front wall and the gun will tell you the wall is moving at 60 mph away from the gun. Point the gun at the rear wall, and the gun will tell you that the rear wall is moving at 60 mph toward the gun.

My revised paper also mentions the "cosine effect," which means that if you point the gun directly at the side wall of the moving truck, it will give no reading, but if you point it at an angle to the side wall, you will get what this diagram shows:

So, if you point the gun at a 70 degree angle to the interior side wall of a truck traveling at 100 mph, the gun will show the speed of the truck as 35 mph. That isn't anything specific to a "basic" radar gun, all radar guns will do that if used from a stationary position outside while pointed at traffic in the opposite lane.

The question that I'm asking myself right now is: What do I do next? When the paper is available, should I mention it on the sci.physics.relativity forum? Yes, I will probably do that. I'm not interested in arguing opinions with anyone there, but it might be interesting to see what kind of reaction it gets.

I'll probably also submit it to Academia.edu and delete the version they currently have.

What else? Should I mention it on other forums, like the Astrophysics and Physics Facebook group? It's a moderated group, but I'm a member, so I might give it a try. I might also start a new thread about it on my own blog.

Then what? I might try getting some well-known scientist to read it and give me his opinion. I might even try submitting it to Science or Nature. Science magazine will almost certainly just reply with a form letter saying "this is not the sort of work that we publish and we are thus not considering it for publication," but Nature might put it into their system to see what others have to say before they reject it. They did that with the version I sent them a year ago.

I could work on the Radar Guns and Wave Theory paper I had been thinking about, but now I think Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories says all I have to say about radar guns and wave theory. Since it explains how the theory can be confirmed via experiments, it is probably the most important paper I've written.

I could also spend some time revising other papers. Or maybe I'll just read another Janet Evanovich Stephanie Plum novel, then another, then another.

June 28, 2019 - Yesterday evening, I finished listening to the 11-hour 50-minute audio book version of "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" by Yuval Noah Harari.

When I borrowed the audio book from my local library and started listening to it on my MP3 player, I was mostly just thinking about how much I enjoyed Harari's previous book Sapiens. I expected 21 Lessons to be mostly a philosophy book, and it is that. But Harari also mentions Donald Trump fairly often in the book as Harari examines current events in order to project what those events likely mean for the future. Here's an example:

Unable to conduct a reality check, the mind latches on to catastrophic scenarios. Like a person imagining that a bad headache signifies a terminal brain tumor, many liberals fear that Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump portend the end of human civilisation.

And another example:

Whereas the major movements of the twentieth century all had a vision for the entire human species – be it global domination, revolution or liberation – Donald Trump offers no such thing. Just the opposite. His main message is that it’s not America’s job to formulate and promote any global vision. Similarly, the British Brexiteers barely have a plan for the future of the Disunited Kingdom – the future of Europe and of the world is far beyond their horizon. Most people who voted for Trump and Brexit didn’t reject the liberal package in its entirety – they lost faith mainly in its globalising part. They still believe in democracy, free markets, human rights and social responsibility, but they think these fine ideas can stop at the border. Indeed, they believe that in order to preserve liberty and prosperity in Yorkshire or Kentucky, it is best to build a wall on the border, and adopt illiberal policies towards foreigners.

It was a very enjoyable book, but it also showed me that is not a good idea to be listening to or reading more than one book about a given subject at the same time. Somehow I found myself absorbing three books on similar subjects. The book I'm currently listening to on CDs when driving also gets into some of the same subjects as Harari does his book, and the book I'm reading on my Kindle during breakfast and lunch also mentions Donald Trump and the kind of thinking that put him into office. The books all generally agree that Trump is a disaster for America, but they do not fully agree on what lessons are to be learned from having elected a sleazy con-man liar like Trump to be our President.

So, this morning I spent some time sorting through the audio books I have available to make sure the next one I listen to on my MP3 player is not about politics or Trump.

Meanwhile, on the sci.physics.relativity UseNet discussion forum, Paparios is still reading my posts here and commenting about them there. In a post he wrote last night he repeatedly argued that I "missed to put this text in context" when I wrote about the way some manufacturers of radar guns use photons bounced off of the gun's radome for comparison to photons returned from the target, instead of using photons created by the LO (Local Oscillator). "As a consequence your conclusion is completely wrong" Paparios declares. Well, if I am wrong he'll be able to someday say, "I told you so." (I expect he'll be saying that whether I'm right or wrong.) But, until then, I'll be revising my paper on Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories with the hope of putting the new version on-line next week.

June 27, 2019 - I've finished reading Chapter 16 of Principles of Modern Radar: Radar Applications at least three times. I probably highlighted about a fourth of it, in different colors to represent differences in importance and accuracy. The two most important passages are this one from the bottom of page 762:

The S-5 is a homodyne radar system and requires a sample of the transmitted signal to serve as the LO. The radome is not totally transparent to the transmitted energy by design. Some of the transmitted energy is reflected back to the receiver side of the reflector. This transmitted energy serves as the LO that mixes with the returned Doppler-shifted signal.

and this one from the bottom of page 765 and the top of page 766:

The signal isolation between ports 1 and 2 can be as high as 50 dB if the turnstile junction is well designed for the exact frequency of operation. As a result, the LO signal required for homodyne operation is almost nonexistent, given the very low-level direct leakage from port 1 to port 2. Kustom [Signals, Inc.] developed a plastic radome that fit over the end of the horn to purposely reflect a small amount of RF power back into port 2 and create an LO reference signal at the required mixing level.

The acronym "LO" stands for Local Oscillator. It is a device inside a radar gun that creates the photons that the gun compares to the return photons to get the "beat frequency" that is equal to the speed of the target. The photons from the Local Oscillator oscillate at the same frequency as the photons the gun emits, and are therefore perfect for comparison purposes.

What the above passages say is that in some radar guns the LO is purposely not used, and, instead by design, the gun uses photons that bounce off the "radome," which is the cover over the transmitter/receiver. On a regular weather or military radar unit the radome looks like this:

On the front of a radar gun a radome looks like this:

What this means is that the radar gun emits photons that bounce off the specially made radome at the front of the gun and return to the radar as the comparison photons. That is the same as if the gun had no radome but was inside a laboratory on a train and pointed at the front or back wall. If the wall (or radome) is moving relative to the ground outside, the gun will measure that movement and it becomes the speed of the gun. And when the gun measures the speed of a real target, the speed of the real target will be compared to the speed of the gun.

So, if the gun is moving at 60 mph and the target is a stationary highway sign, the gun will add its speed, 60 mph, to the speed of the highway sign (zero) and will compute the sign's speed as 60 mph. And if a target vehicle is going 80 mph, its speed relative to the gun is 20 mph, so the gun will add 20 mph to the gun's 60 mph speed and give a target speed of 80 mph. If the target is going 60 mph, the gun will show "no reading," since it only shows relative speeds over 10 mph.

This means that if the gun does NOT have a radome that reflects photons back into the receiver, the gun is what I call a "basic" radar gun that, when used from a patrol car traveling at 60 mph, will give "no reading" for a highway sign, and will show 60 mph if it is pointed at the back of a truck that is traveling at 60 mph.

And it probably means that the three Decatur radar guns that do not "work" when the guns are moving are most likely radar guns with radomes that do NOT reflect photons. So, they are what I have been calling "basic radar guns."

I'll be revising my paper on Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories to include this information, but I'll continue to look for experimental confirmation.

June 26, 2019 - While I've stopped arguing on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum, the person who calls himself "Paparios" is still arguing his beliefs there in the same screwball way as before, only now he is responding to what I have posted on this web site.

In yesterday's comment I mentioned what the Radar Technology Encyclopedia says about Einstein's Second Postulate and how it fully agrees with what I and Einstein said. I then wrote:

It then explains how light (and all electromagnetic radiation) consists of photons, not waves.

In this post to the sci.physics.relativity forum, Paparios copied and pasted what I wrote and then he stated:

Unfortunately, you failed to copy the paragraph that follows your cite, which nicely clarifies what we have been discussing:

"With the advent of quantum mechanics, electromagnetic radiant energy is seen to be created, destroyed, and transported in discrete quanta or photons rather than through a continuous transfer of energy implied by electromagnetic waves in the classical representation of electrodynamics. Because the energy transported by large numbers of photons is, on the average, equivalent to the energy transferred in a classical electromagnetic wave, for macroscopic applications, including radar and communications, Maxwell’s field equations are accurate and extremely useful tools."

Note that Paparios simply says the paragraph "nicely clarifies what we have been discussing," but he doesn't saw WHAT it actually clarifies. That's one of the reasons I stopped posting comments there. Paparios constantly posts links and says, in effect, "Here is confirmation of my beliefs." And he expects me to hunt through the information at the link to find the "confirmation" of his beliefs.

In this case, however, I had thought about quoting that same paragraph in order to explain what the paragraph is saying. I just didn't do it because I didn't have the time yesterday. It is saying that energy is created, destroyed(?) and transported in the form of individual photons, not waves. However if you look at the "average" amount of energy being transferred, you can view energy as "classical" waves and use Maxwell's field equations effectively.

In other words, although the math works for energy as waves, you are working with averages, not with individual quanta (a.k.a. "photons"). It says what I had been saying on the forum, that light consists of photons, not waves, even though the math for waves can also be made to work. Paparios was arguing that light consists of waves, and photons are just imaginary nonsense.

In that same post on sci.physics.relativity, Paparios next quoted what I wrote about Chapter 16 in the book Principles of Modern Radar, and he stated:

The book is for sure very useful in this discussion, particularly read section 16.9.1 in page764 and see figure 16-13, which reads:

"Turnstile Junction Used as a Duplexer for Simultaneous Transmit and Receive [GPRC]."

AGAIN, he seems to be claiming the book somehow supports his beliefs, this time his belief that radar guns transmit and receive at the same time, but he doesn't explain HOW it does so. He quotes from a caption to an illustration, but fails to see that the actual text says something very different:

While the TR-6 operated only in the stationary mode, it incorporated several technological breakthroughs. Kustom developed a simple, inexpensive, but very effective, duplexer that provided high signal isolation between the transmitter and receiver, and very good detection range performance. The TR-6 duplexer was a turnstile junction that allowed simultaneous transmit while receiving.

and

In the case of the turnstile junction used in the MR-7/MR-9, transmit power is applied to port 1. One half of the transmitted power goes into the circular waveguide port and is transmitted as a circularly polarized wave toward the target vehicle. Half of the remaining power divides equally between ports 3 and 4, with no power going to the receiver diode detector/mixer on port 2.

So, it appears to be saying the gun transmits half of its emitted energy to the target and then captures the other half within the gun. And while it is capturing that second half within the gun, it is receiving return energy from the target. So, it doesn't actually transmit to the target at the same time it is receiving from the target, it just doesn't have to turn the power off when receiving. Evidently that allows the gun to switch between send and receive more quickly. There is no "power up" and "power down" operation.

I still haven't found the time to study that chapter to see what else it says that could be of value. It is near the top of my to-do list.

Meanwhile, I sent an email to a small company that makes radar guns, asking if there was a copy of the user manual on-line anywhere. They replied,

User manuals are only provided to current customers.

That seems to be the case for some other manufacturers, too. And they only answer technical questions from "current customers." So, I'm still hunting.

June 25, 2019 - Now that I'm no longer involved in lengthy arguments on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum, the idea of writing a scientific paper about Radar Guns and Wave Theory seems far less important. Clearly, it is much more important for me to find confirmation of the way I describe how radar guns work in my paper on Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories. To do that I need to determine which guns "don't work" when the radar gun is moving, and I need to verify exactly what "don't work" means. In yesterday's comment I mentioned 3 radar guns that, according to their user's manuals, "don't work" when the gun is moving:

1. Decatur Genesis VP Directional
2. Decatur Genesis GHD
3. Decatur Scout

The web site HERE indicates that there are a lot more "stationary only" police radar guns made by Decatur Electronics Inc. that should work (and "not work") the same way. Plus, there are other radar guns made by Applied Concepts Inc., Kustom Electronics Inc. and nearly a dozen other companies that might have user manuals available on-line for examination. And they might have email addresses where I could ask questions.

I might even revise my Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories paper to list the radar guns which should work the way I describe in the paper. People who have access to such radar guns might then experiment with them and advise me of the results.

Meanwhile, in my research I came across two interesting books:

The Radar Technology Encyclopedia confirms my interpretation Einstein's Second Postulate on page 468:

Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, introduced in 1905,
showed that all the experimental results could be explained
within the context of his theory; there was no need of the
aether. Light, Einstein held, and all electromagnetic radiation,
travels in space at a constant speed of approximately 3 x 10^₈
m/s, independent of the speed of the source.

It then explains how light (and all electromagnetic radiation) consists of photons, not waves.   I should definitely use it as a reference in the next version of my paper on Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories.

Principles of Modern Radar: Radar Applications has an entire chapter on police radar guns that begins on page 749 and ends with a list of papers for "further reading" on page 778. I just need to find the time to dig through it to see if it contains anything that can help resolve arguments. It looks like it could be very helpful, and would probably also be a good reference to use in my paper.

June 24, 2019 - Yesterday, I ended my participation in the most recent discussion I had started on the sci.physics.relativity UseNet group. It had turned into a total waste of time. The people I was arguing with were simply playing the same games that Donald Trump plays. They were turning every attempt to discuss facts into an opinion versus opinion argument. They were also claiming I said things I never said in order to put me on the defensive. They were posting links which they claimed supported their arguments, but didn't say where in the link it did such a thing, forcing me to hunt for support for their arguments. They were claiming that NASA was lying or incompetent when I provided links to NASA sites that supported my arguments. And they repeatedly claimed that Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein didn't know what they were talking about when they stated that light consists of particles, not waves. And on and on and on.

The final argument was that all ten of those links I provided yesterday showing that radar guns do not transmit and receive at the same time proved nothing, since they were mainly about large, powerful radar devices, not low-power radar devices like radar guns. They claimed that low-power radars work different from high-power radars. And since none of the links mentioned photons, they claimed that meant that radars emit waves, not photons.

After I posted my last message to the thread, I did some research and found Patent #US5525996, which is for "Police Traffic Radar for Calculating and Simultaneously Displaying Fastest Target Speed." It uses the illustration below to describe how the duplexer works, only it says it will use the term "turnstile" instead of "duplexer."   A "turnstile" normally allows one person or object at a time to pass through a barrier. Is that what is meant? Or was the inventor thinking of a "revolving door" which usually allows people to enter a building at the same time others are leaving the building. The illustration seems to show "signals" being transmitted and received at the same time.

The patent says on page 47 of the pdf file:

Referring to FIG. 2, there is shown a block diagram of the
antenna unit such as antenna unit 10. A conventional micro
wave horn 20 having a conventional corrective lens 22 emits
coherent microwave energy toward moving and non-moving
objects in the scene in front of the antenna. Some of the
microwave energy bounces off the moving and non-moving
objects in the scene and returns as microwave energy 24.
This energy is collected and concentrated in horn 20 and fed
to a turnstile duplexer 26 (hereafter turnstile). The function
of the turnstile 26 is to provide isolation between the
transmitted and received microwave energy. Turnstiles are
known and are described in Montgomery et al., PRIN
CIPLES OF MICROWAVE CIRCUITS TK6553. M637
which is hereby incorporated by reference. Basically, the
turnstile is designed to allow the transmitter and receiver
circuitry to share the same antenna.

Note that the patent uses the term "microwave energy" instead of "microwaves" or just "waves." Unfortunately, it doesn't use the term "photons" at all. So, the only illustration of "microwave energy" in the entire patent is the two jagged arrows (#24) which could be photons but definitely are not continuous waves.

There's no point in showing this patent (and other patents for other radar gun components) to the people on sci.physics.relativity, since they will just argue that the phrase "provide isolation between the transmitted and received energy" does not mean that the radar gun cannot transmit and receive at the same time. And that means they will want me to somehow prove it does mean that. So, it becomes just another idiotic opinion versus opinion argument.

Meanwhile, yesterday I also found user manuals for a couple more radar guns. The Genesis VP Directional police radar user's manual says this on page 16:

Q. Will my radar work while my vehicle is moving?
A. No, the Genesis-VPD radar gun is a stationary only models, so
your motor vehicle should be parked. You need to hold the radar
steady while operating it.

And the user's manual for the Genesis GHD & Scout police radar guns says this on page 33:

Q. Will my radar work while my vehicle is moving?
A. No, the GHD and SCOUT radar guns are a stationary only models,
so your vehicle should be parked. You need to hold the radar
steady while operating it.

But, what do they mean when they say that the gun does not "work" when in a moving vehicle? I seriously doubt that it means the gun turns itself off if it detects it is moving. It is much more likely that it means that if the gun is moving it will not show results that can be used in court. Unfortunately, it appears that the only way to find out is to call them. But, since I'm not about to pay $900 for a radar gun just to prove how it works, I can't claim to be a customer. Interestingly, both of those guns are used by the Pennsylvania State Patrol.

But I don't think there is any chance of me getting any information from the Pennsylvania State Police about using those radar guns while moving. I think I need to find out why they are only allowed to use radar guns that "work" only when stationary. Since it is a "law" of some kind, there should be some explanation somewhere for why the law was passed. But, how likely is it that the law was passed to avoid discussions of Einstein's Second Postulate? Not very.

June 23, 2019 - It looks more and more like I need to write another scientific paper. As I stated in previous comments, this one would be about Radar Guns and Wave Theory. The arguments I've been having on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum are just plain crazy. When I quoted Richard Feyman's statement that electromagnetic energy consists of particles, not waves, Paparios responded:

You should be aware that Feynman was not an engineer nor a radar specialist, so your quote is totally irrelevant to the subject.

Huh?

The people on the forum all endlessly and repeatedly argue that a radar gun transmits and receives radio waves at the same time. And Paparios inexplicably posted TWO links which clearly show that radar guns do NOT transmit and receive at the same time, and he claimed the articles support his beliefs. (Click on links ONE and TWO to access that information.) The articles explain that there is a electronic device called a "duplexer" which switches between transmit and receive.

Using "radar gun" and "duplexer" as a Google search argument, I found eight additional sources which say that radar guns CANNOT transmit and receive at the same time. Click on THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, EIGHT, NINE, and TEN to access those eight sites. And there are many many more.

Link four says:

Duplexer is a microwave switch, which connects the Antenna to the transmitter section for transmission of the signal. Therefore, the Radar cannot receive the signal during transmission time.

Similarly, it connects the Antenna to the receiver section for the reception of the signal. The Radar cannot transmit the signal during reception time. In this way, Duplexer isolates both transmitter and receiver sections.

Link six says:

While the antenna is transmitting, it cannot receive—and vice-versa.

Link seven says:

The antenna rapidly switches back and forth between transmitting and receiving by means of a duplexer.

Link eight says:

an antenna cannot receive whilst emitting, and vice-versa. A piece of hardware known as a duplexer switches the antenna between these two roles.

Yesterday, I posted all eight links and the quotes from them, and yet Paparios this morning asked:

Do you have any reference stating that the radar gun switches the output and the input?

What does that mean? I'll have to ask. Switches the output and input??? I have references which say there are controls that prevent radars from transmitting directly into the receiver. That would blow all the circuits. A radar transmits a very POWERFUL signal. It gets back very weak signals, because most of what was transmitted went off in other directions and never returns to the radar. If you transmitted directly into the receiver .... kablooey!

Yesterday, I finally told them that I wasn't going to argue any other subjects until this one subject was fully discussed. The fact that a radar cannot transmit and receive at the same time shows a lot of their other claims to be nonsense. It clearly says that a radar gun cannot emit a continuous wave for as long as the trigger is pulled. When the trigger is pulled, the gun immediately shows the speed of the target. It couldn't do that if it was only transmitting and not receiving. So, the gun must be switching back and forth between transmit and receive. Link number eight above says,

usually, antennas emit radio waves for a few thousandths of a second, then wait for reflections for up to several seconds at a time before transmitting again. This is because an antenna cannot receive whilst emitting, and vice-versa.

That particular quote isn't about radar guns specifically. There is no need to "wait for reflections for up to several seconds" with a radar gun, because the target will always be less than three miles away (2 miles is about the maximum range for a radar gun), and because the photons from the gun can travel to a target 3 miles away and back again in less than 1/31,000th of a second. Most of the time that is required for the gun to show the target's speed is spent in waiting for the electronics in the gun to perform their functions.

Clearly the best way to argue this matter is to write a paper about Radar Guns and Wave Theory where I can use illustrations to show that the illustration below is nonsense:

radar gun
transmitting waves

It shows waves being transmitted from the police radar transmitter while waves are coming back from the moving car. So, the gun must be transmitting and receiving at the same time.

Plus, aren't waves supposed to flow around an obstacle as shown in the diagrams below?

So, wave theory says that sometimes light (and all electromagnetic energy) acts like a wave, and sometimes it acts like a particle. And wave theory evidently also says that waves sometimes reflect back from and obstacle and sometimes flow around an obstacle. It seems to me you have to be NUTS to believe wave theory.

Comments for Sunday June 16, 2019, thru Saturday, June 22, 2019:

June 21, 2019 - I'm still trying to get sensible answers from the people on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum. One person who calls himself "Paparios" argued at length that this image showed how radar waves work:

But when I explained to him that such waves would just measure the closest car as moving the fastest, he suddenly switched to this illustration of radar waves:

And, when I asked him what the gaps between the pulses consisted of, his response was "Nothing...no transmission." So, his pulses look a lot like photons.

Overnight, Paparios posted a message that really shows how he thinks. He and others on the forum have been repeatedly arguing that radar guns transmit and receive at the same time. I've been arguing that they do NOT transmit and receive at the same time. This morning, Paparios provided a link to Wikipedia's page about duplexers, which Paparios somehow believed supported his beliefs. The page has an illustration which clearly shows a duplexer switches between transmitting and receiving and cannot possibly do both at the same time.

And the text of the Wikipedia page says:

"A duplexer is an electronic device that allows bi-directional (duplex) communication over a single path. In radar and radio communications systems, it isolates the receiver from the transmitter while permitting them to share a common antenna. Most radio repeater systems include a duplexer. Duplexers can be based on frequency (often a waveguide filter), polarization (such as an orthomode transducer), or timing (as is typical in radar).^[1]"

And footnote #1 says:

"Rinehart, Ronald E. (1991). Radar for Meteorologists. University of North Dakota. Radar engineers have added the automatic switch (also called a duplexer) in the ... As soon as the transmitter stops sending a signal, the duplexer switches so that the receiver is now connected to the antenna."

So, Paparios just shot down his own argument. And that was just the most bizarre of of his comments. Other comments he wrote also shot down other beliefs he has been arguing. I'd like to frame the whole message and my whole response. I've never seen a post that clarified so many arguments at once. The discussion has made me think about writing another paper titled "Radar Guns and Wave Theory." Right now, it appears that it can be easily shown that wave theory is totally illogical when it comes to describing how radar guns work.

Meanwhile, yesterday afternoon I finished listening to another audio book on my MP3 player. It was Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West by Tom Clavin.

I'd been listening to it off and on for a few weeks, listening to several other audio books in their entirety during pauses in listening to Dodge City. That doesn't mean the book isn't interesting. It just means it is easy to pause and do something else without losing track of what was going on.

What was most interesting to me was how young Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, all their brothers, and Doc Holiday were, compared to the way they are depicted in movies by middle-aged actors like Burt Lancaster, Gary Cooper and Kirk Douglas. They were buffalo hunters and stage coach drivers when they were in their late teens. Wyatt was born in 1848. He became assistant city marshal of Dodge City when he was 30. Doc Holiday died at the ripe old age of 36 in 1887. The Gunfight at the OK Corral happened in 1881. Bat Masterson was born in 1853, making him 5 years younger than Wyatt. In 1877, when he was 24 years old, he became "under-sheriff" of Dodge City. Later in life, Bat became friends with Theodore Roosevelt and wrote a sports column for a New York newspaper for many years before he died in New York in 1929. In this later years, Wyatt Earp was friends with movie stars Tom Mix and William S. Hart, and he also died in 1929. The Earp brothers and the Masterson brothers had many wives and during the course of their lives they encountered folk like Jesse and Frank James, Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Cody, The Dalton Gang, etc. Interesting stuff.

June 20, 2019 - Ah! There were six new "unique IP downloads" of my revised paper on Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories in the past 24 hours. But I still need to think about different ways to "advertise" the paper in order to get more people to read it. I'm thinking of contacting some scientists who have helped me in the past, and maybe others like Bill Nye, Sean Carroll and Neil deGrass Tyson. I'm also thinking about mentioning the paper on Facebook groups where I am a member. (I haven't even mentioned it on my own group yet.) The hope is that someone will offer or decide to test the theory.

Meanwhile, as I was pulling into my garage yesterday afternoon after doing some grocery shopping, I finished listening to CD #7 of the 7-CD audio book set for "In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination" by Margaret Atwood.

While it might seem like it is the 4th book I've read in the past week, actually it is just the 4th book I've finished in the past week. I started listening to In Other Worlds on May 20. So, it took almost exactly one month to get through it while driving to and fro around town. (I'll be finishing another audio book tomorrow.)

In Other Worlds is about imagining other worlds and other cultures. Here is how Amazon describes the book:

At a time when the borders between literary genres are increasingly porous, Margaret Atwood maps the richly fertile crosscurrents of speculative and science fiction, slipstream, utopias and dystopias, and fantasy, and muses on their roots in the age-old human impulse to imagine new worlds. She shares the evolution of her personal fascination with this branch of literature, from her days as a child inventing a race of flying superhero rabbits, to her graduate study of the Victorian ancestors of SF to her appreciations of such influential writers as Marge Piercy, Rider Haggard, Ursula K. LeGuin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Aldous Huxley, and Jonathan Swift. As humorous and charming as it is insightful and provocative, In Other Worlds brilliantly illuminates “the wilder storms on the wilder seas of invention.”

Margaret Atwood softly narrates about two thirds of the book in what is almost a droning monotone, but it's still interesting - if you are interested in science fiction and writing, and especially science fiction writing. I've got two science fiction novels that I've completed, and I'm still trying do decide what to do with them. The chances of getting an agent interested is virtually nil (agents won't even talk with anyone over 65, unless they are famous), and you can't get a publisher interested in a novel without first getting an agent interested. Atwood's book wasn't much help on that, but it was still very interesting - to me.

June 19, 2019 - Hmm. Once again there was just one new "unique IP download" of my revised paper on Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories in the past 24 hours. And I even tried posting a comment about the paper to a different UseNet forum. I posted a comment to the sci.logic forum, because it seemed to have a lot of people discussing a lot of things. But no one posted a response, and only 6 people viewed my comment in the past 24 hours.

Meanwhile, on sci.physics.relativity, there have been 23 posts and 69 views in the past 48 hours. And some are very interesting. For example, someone who calls himself "Paparios" wrote (in part):

a) Let the radar gun transmit a series of pulses (30 pulses/second) to the target (an approaching car moving at 30 meters/second).
b) Let each pulse departs the radar gun at speed c and let L be the distance of the target when the pulse departs.
c) That first pulse will arrive to the target WHEN that target has already moved a little bit closer to the gun (the distance between the radar gun and the target is reducing by 30 meters each second).
d) This means the target is not receiving the pulses at 30 pulses/second but the target is receiving the pulses at 30.000006 pulses/second.
e) This change in frequency will generate a Doppler frequency of 6000 Hz (as shown by the calculator in http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Sound/radar.html

So you see that nowhere there is a target receiving the pulses at speed c+v.

Wow! He doesn't seem to realize it, but he's arguing that the closer a target gets to the radar gun the faster the target will be measured as moving. I explained that to him, and awaited a response. In his response he said something else totally bizarre (since he claims to be a physicist):

Radar guns use electromagnetic waves on the order of 20-30 GHz, which are radio waves and not light waves.

And I responded:

And you evidently do not understand that ALL electromagnetic waves (and photons) work the same way. They only differ in their frequency and energy.

"the only difference between radio waves, visible light and gamma rays is the energy of the photons. Radio waves have photons with the lowest energies. Microwaves have a little more energy than radio waves. Infrared has still more, followed by visible, ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays."
Source: NASA at https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/toolbox/emspectrum2.html

Another person argued that a verified theory is still just a theory and nothing can be "proved" in physics. I agreed and told him that, just because a verified theory is still just a theory, that doesn't mean we shouldn't even try to understand how the universe works.

"Sylvia Else" wrote this:

You want the experiment done - you pay for it.

To which I replied,

I'll pay for it if I have to. But if someone else already HAS the radar
guns and can use them at no expense to VERIFY the theory, then why should I spend the money?

Plus, if I buy a radar gun and it confirms my theory, who will believe me? If someone ELSE verifies what I have said, then it becomes much more difficult to dispute.

Besides, there are other aspects of the theory that are still under
investigation. For example, what is different about a "complex" radar
gun when it is in "test mode" versus when "test mode" is turned off?

That question opens of other questions about what does a "complex" radar gun measure when you put a vibrating tuning fork in front of it? And WHY must you put the gun in "test mode" when doing that?

Those last two questions were on my mind when I awoke this morning. The only answer I can see is that you have to turn the "complex" gun into a "basic" gun so that it can measure the speed of the fastest moving tine on the vibrating tuning fork. Otherwise, a "complex" radar gun will give "no reading" because it is getting too many different signals and the fastest signal is also the weakest signal. The software in the gun will reject all that as being "errors" IF the gun is not in "test mode."

Oh yes, one other person wrote:

Why do you waste your life away on those "papers"?

And I responded,

Is thoroughly enjoying yourself by solving great mysteries a "waste of time"?

This is ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING STUFF!!!!!

And so it is.

June 18, 2019 - There was only one new "unique IP download" of my revised paper on Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories in the past 24 hours. But, for all I know there may have been a couple dozen downloads by people who have read earlier versions of the paper. Those wouldn't be "unique IP downloads." What I probably need to do is advertise it. I usually do that by posting a comment on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum. I didn't do that until about lunchtime today. I'm advertising it here, of course, but regular readers of this web site wouldn't likely be "unique IP downloads" either.

I keep thinking about the idea of using a "complex" radar gun while it is in "test mode." But, if I cannot find any official source that describes what happens when you use a "basic" radar gun in a way that is contrary to instructions (i.e., while moving), I see no hope for finding an official source describing what happens when you are in a moving vehicle and point a "complex" radar gun at a stationary target while in "test mode." But it certainly opens up a lot of possibilities for people who have access to radar guns to create interesting YouTube videos.

Meanwhile, yesterday afternoon I finished reading the paperback version of "Hard Eight" by Janet Evanovich. It is the 8th book in what is now a 25 book series about "bounty hunter" (a.k.a. bail jumper catcher) Stephanie Plum.

Doing a Google search to find out when I last read a Stephanie Plum novel, I find I finished "Seven Up" on December 19, 2105. Hmm. I think that is a typo. I finished "Hot Six" on October 12, 2015. And I finished "High Five" on August 21, 2015.

Hard Eight was very funny and enjoyable, but not quite as satisfying as the other Stephanie Plum novels I've read. In this book, the main case isn't about catching some bail jumper. It is about preventing an elderly woman from losing her home, a home which she put up as bond in her daughter's child custody case. The daughter ran off with her daughter in violation of the bond agreement, so Stephanie Plum has to find the granddaughter and bring her back. The father is a criminal of sorts and there are other much worse criminals who also want the daughter and granddaughter found for some mysterious reason.

My
fiction book reading backlog -paper books

My
fiction book reading backlog -paper books

My fiction reading list in paper form includes a bunch of other Stephanie Plum novels, as shown above (click on it or click HERE to see a larger version). I think it's been years since I last read a novel in paper form. I've been focused on science problems during the day, and I mostly read paper novels when I can do so by natural light, instead of by artificial light. I'm looking forward to reading To the Nines and the other Stephanie Plum novels. But, I might first listen to some more Fox & O'Hare detective novels, which are also by Janet Evanovich. It all depends on how much free time I can foresee having during daylight hours.

June 17, 2019 - The new version of my paper on Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories is now available at this link: http://vixra.org/pdf/1806.0027v3.pdf. I submitted it yesterday afternoon and received an email this morning informing me that it was on-line as of 7:11 a.m.

Of course, at about that same time this morning I was laying in bed thinking there was something that I maybe should have included in the paper. It occurred to me that running a "complex" radar gun in "test mode" might cause the radar gun to work like a "basic" radar gun as it measures the speed of the fastest moving tine on a tuning fork. If so, then it wouldn't be necessary to find a "basic" radar gun in order to confirm what is claimed in my paper. A "complex" radar gun in test mode might do just as well. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, as I was eating lunch yesterday, I finished reading another book on my Kindle. It was Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence by James R. Clapper.

"When he stepped down in January 2017 as the fourth United States director of national intelligence, James Clapper had been President Obama's senior intelligence adviser for six and a half years, longer than his three predecessors combined. He led the U.S. intelligence community through a period that included the raid on Osama bin Laden, the Benghazi attack, the leaks of Edward Snowden, and Russia's influence operation during the 2016 U.S. election campaign."

The book was very interesting an informative, even though it seemed like most paragraphs were over a page long. There is very little dialog in the book. The book goes into great detail about Russia's meddling in the 2016 election to help get Trump elected. The book explains the difference between simply promoting one candidate over another (which America sometimes does in other country's elections in order to help stop some crazy dictator from getting into office) and spreading lies, distortions and misinformation to get people to vote the way you want them to vote - as Russia did during our 2016 Presidential election.

The key point of the book, however, seems to be the necessity of telling "truth to power." In other words, you have to explain the situation to your boss as the facts say it is, especially when talking to the President of the United States. James Clapper worked under Kennedy, Bush 2 and Obama, and those Presidents all understood the necessity of telling things they way they are. Trump doesn't like it. Clapper wrote in his book:

In the period of just a few months, our president had attacked Congress that wouldn’t pass legislation at his will, the judiciary that dared to rule against his travel ban, the “dishonest media,” the “Nazi” Intelligence Community, the FBI investigating his campaign, and anyone who said no to him. Beyond that, he had disparaged minority Americans and mocked those with disabilities. At the close of his first week in office, the Economist Intelligence Unit updated its Democracy Index to indicate that the United States no longer qualified as a full-fledged democracy. For the first time, because of an “erosion of public trust in political institutions,” our democratic status was listed as “flawed.”

and

I don’t believe our democracy can function for long on lies, particularly when inconvenient and difficult facts spoken by the practitioners of truth are dismissed as “fake news.” I know that the Intelligence Community cannot serve our nation if facts are negotiable. Just in the past few years, I’ve seen our country become so polarized because people live in separate realities in which everyone has his or her own set of facts—some of which are lies knowingly distributed by a foreign adversary. This was not something I could idly stand by and watch happen to the country I love.

I've got 26 pages of passages I highlighted in the book, but the last one is probably the best one:

We have elected someone as president of the United States whose first instincts are to twist and distort truth to his advantage, to generate financial benefit to himself and his family, and, in so doing, to demean the values this country has traditionally stood for. He has set a new low bar for ethics and morality. He has caused damage to our societal and political fabric that will be difficult and will require time to repair. And, close to my heart, he has besmirched the Intelligence Community and the FBI—pillars of our country—and deliberately incited many Americans to lose faith and confidence in them. While he does this, he pointedly refuses to acknowledge the profound threat posed by Russia, inexplicably trusting the denials by Putin about their meddling in our political process over the considered judgments by his own Intelligence Community.

I probably enjoyed the book because I can see Clapper's point of view.

June 16, 2019 - I spent most of yesterday working on the overhaul of my paper about Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories, and it looks like I should be able to upload it to vixra.org tomorrow, which should mean it will be publicly available the next day.

I'm beginning to think that, for some people, discussing the physics of radar guns is like discussing a conspiracy theory. No one wants to argue about things that have not been satisfactorily proven one way or the other to all parties. NASA has a web page titled "How Do Police Radars Really Work?" that describes in detail how radar gun can emit a single photon, and when compared with the return photon, the gun can determine the speed of the target. But if countless mathematicians do not believe what NASA says or even that photons exist, who wants to get in the middle of such a disagreement?

Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman may have clearly stated that light consists of photons, not waves, and there may be a mountain of evidence to confirm their statements, but if countless mathematicians still believe and will argue that light consists of waves, who wants to get in the middle of such a disagreement?

I don't particularly want to get in the middle of that, but I have, of course. The problem is that finding new evidence which cannot be denied is no easy task, and it is made even more difficult when no one seems willing to provide details about how radar guns work. So, I'm just bumbling around, trying new research ideas while continuing work on an overhaul of my paper about Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories.

When reading about police radar guns you also get the distinct impression that more and more police departments are switching to lidar guns. Lidar guns are not only more accurate than radar guns, they will not get you into any arguments about the Doppler Effect, since lidar does not utilize the Doppler Effect. Also, many mathematicians even seem to accept that a lidar gun sends out just one "wave" at a time, waiting for that "wave" to return before sending another. With radar guns they insist the the gun sends a continuous stream of waves and receives back a continuous series of waves at the same time.

I'd read somewhere that the State of Pennsylvania does not allow local police departments to use radar guns. Only the State Police can use them. Checking on it, I found a web site that says,

The only law enforcement agency in Pennsylvania that is allowed to operate police radar guns is the State Police and only when in stationary mode.

Hmm. I'll have to do some more research to see if I can find why they can only use radar guns in "stationary mode." That same web page says:

State procurement records over the past 5-years indicate that the following police radar guns are used by both state and local police agencies.

Decatur Genesis K-band
Kustom Signals Falcon HR K-band
Kustom Signals KR10 K-band

At the web page HERE I found the picture shown below. The radar gun the officer is holding is a Decatur Genesis K-band.

PA State Police Officer with radar gun

There is a power cord running from the bottom of the gun to a cigarette lighter adapter plug within the car. You cannot see much of it because it is hidden behind the officer's hand.

The multi-part Kustom Signals KR10, shown below, consists of a dash-mounted radar measuring unit with an emitter that gets mounted somehow on the outside of the squad car, or perhaps placed on the dash next to the measuring unit. There's also a button the officer pushes to turn the radar on and off.

The Falcon HR, shown below, can also be used as a hand-held device. You just remove it from its dash-mount. I tried to get information about it from Kustom Signals, but they didn't respond to my emails.

So, the research led to nothing of value, just more questions. Sigh.

Comments for Sunday June 9, 2019, thru Saturday, June 15, 2019:

June 14, 2019 - I've finally gotten back to work on the overhaul of my paper about Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories. I spent most of yesterday afternoon on it, and I'm hoping to have a new version on-line next week.

Meanwhile, yesterday evening I finished listening to the audio book version of Memory Man by David Baldacci.

The audio book is 13 hours and 17 minutes long, and it took me 3 days (actually 3 evenings) to listen to it. Although some of the crimes in the book were a little too grim for me, and I didn't quite buy the culprits' motivation, it was still a very enjoyable book, and I already have the next book in the series in my MP3 player. There are evidently 5 books in the series.

They are about a detective named Amos Decker who was injured while playing football for the NFL, and the injury resulted in him having a photographic memory. So, he spends a lot of time going through his mental "DVR" playing back things he saw to see how the pieces fit together. Unfortunately, that photographic memory won't allow him to forget the images of finding his wife, daughter and brother brutally murdered. And those are just the first crimes committed by the killer Amos Decker must track down. The second is a school shooting, which seems unrelated, except that it happened at the high school Amos Decker once attended.

The book is a "page turner" that keeps you interested, maybe even more so if there are no actual pages to turn.

June 13, 2019 - I think the discussions on sci.physics.relativity have finally come to an end. There haven't been any new posts in the past 24 hours, and I'm not in the mood to post anything new.

Now I just have to get back to work on the overhaul of my Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories paper. I've been spending my days researching radar guns looking for something - anything - that would provide information on what make and model of police radar guns will show "actual" speeds instead of "relative" speeds when the gun is inside a patrol car going 60 mph and the gun is pointed at a tree. The "actual" speed of the tree is, of course, zero. The "relative" speed is 60 mph. The Bushnell Speedster sports radar gun will show the "relative" speed of 60 mph. But I still haven't been able to find anything about which make and model of radar guns gives "actual" speeds. The people on sci.physics.relativity, of course, argue that it is impossible for any radar gun to give "actual" speeds, since any "actual" speed would involve the speed that the earth rotates, the speed that the earth moves around the sun, the speed that the sun moves around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, etc.

I've sent emails to a couple radar gun manufacturers, to some people on the Internet who seem knowledgeable about radar guns, and I left a message with my local police department asking about what make and model radar gun they use, but so far I've gotten no responses.

Meanwhile, the other day I realized that a warning notice had vanished from my two blogs, Debating the Anthrax Attacks of 2001 and My Thoughts on the Changing World. This message had been displayed on the "stats" page since February whenever I checked the statistics for either blog:

Following the announcement of Google+ API deprecation scheduled for March 2019, a number of changes will be made to Blogger’s Google+ integration on 4 February 2019.

Google+ widgets: Support for the “+1 Button”, “Google+ Followers” and “Google+ Badge” widgets in Layout will no longer be available. All instances of these widgets will be removed from your blog.

+1 buttons: The +1/G+ buttons and Google+ share links below blog posts and in the navigation bar will be removed.

Please note that if you have a custom template that includes Google+ features, you may need to update your template. Please contact your template supplier for advice.

Google+ Comments: Support for Google+ comments will be turned down, and all blogs using Google+ comments will be reverted back to using Blogger comments. Unfortunately, comments posted as Google+ comments cannot be migrated to Blogger and will no longer appear on your blog.

And on March 30, I received an email from Google that began with this:

You’ve received this email because you have content in Google+ for your personal (consumer) account or a Google+ page you manage.

This is a reminder that on April 2, 2019 we’re shutting down consumer Google+ and will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts. Photos and videos from Google+ in your Album Archive and your Google+ pages will also be deleted.

Downloading your Google+ content may take time, so get started before March 31, 2019.

So, I made copies of both blogs and I've been waiting for the blogs to disappear. They're still there. And some time in the past couple weeks the warning notice vanished. The warning notice and the email were mostly gibberish to me, so I can't even be certain that they were referring to my blogs. I saw that they used the term Google+ all through the warning. I didn't even now what Google+ was, and I never bothered to research it. Checking on it this morning, I found that Wikipedia says,

Google+ was an Internet-based social network owned and operated by Google. The network was launched on June 28, 2011 in the attempt to challenge other social networks and for a time linked other Google products like Blogger and YouTube. The service, Google's fourth foray into social networking, experienced strong growth in its initial years, although usage statistics varied, depending on how the service was defined. Three Google executives oversaw the service, which underwent substantial changes that led to a redesign in November 2015.
Due to low user engagement and disclosed software design flaws that potentially allowed outside developers access to personal information of its users,^[4] the Google+ developer API was discontinued on March 7, 2019 and Google+ was shut down for business use and consumers on April 2, 2019.

Ah! Google+ was shut down, but blogspot.com is still working. So, if I wanted to, I could create a page on my blog about radar guns and Einstein's theories. Hmm.

June 11, 2019 - When I checked the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum this morning to see if there were any responses to my posting of the link to the NASA web page that describes a radar gun emitting a single photon to get the speed of a vehicle, there were only two responses worthy of mention. The post from Paparios stated:

First note that h=6.63x10^-34 joule-sec, then the energy of ONE photon is almost 0 (the actual value at 1 Hz is 6.62606957 × 10^−34 joules, which is the reason a radar signal needs zillions of photons to even get a few photons back to the receiver.

The article is poorly written (for instance n is not defined

I was kind of surprised to see that Paparios seemed to accept the idea that a radar gun emits photons. But complaining that the "The article is poorly written" will likely allow him to ignore what the article says.

The "n" he is referring to is in this statement:

Since the photon energy, E, is equal to hn, where h = Planck's constant = 6.63 X 10^-34 j sec, then

$delta$ E = h $delta$ $frequency$

I'm no mathematician, but clearly n is whatever you multiply Planck's constant by. In this case it would appear to be the photon's oscillation frequency. But Paparios (and other mathematicians on the forum) do not believe that photons oscillate, so that may be where he gets confused.

The other post, from Michael Moroney, stated:

One thing to note is that it never claims the photon is received at a speed of c+v, unlike Ed's claim. At least they got that right.

It seems to be part of some dumbed down 'science & math for kids or laymen' set.

Claiming something is "dumbed down" is a mathematician's way of saying something does not fit their mathematics-based beliefs and therefore must have been deliberately modified to be wrong. When I look at what the article says, I translate this:

Consider a single photon from the police radar. The photon must interact with the approaching car for a finite time while it is being reflected. Call this time, $delta$ t. Let an interaction force, ± f, exist between the photon and the car for the time, $delta$ t. The force exerted by the photon on the car, +f, acts to remove energy from the car. The force exerted by the car on the photon, -f, acts to add energy to the photon. Therefore, we expect the photon frequency to increase.

into this:

When a photon is emitted from a police radar gun, the photon will interact with an atom in the approaching car for a period of time while the photon is being reflected. Call this "reaction time." During the reaction time, the photon will exert a force upon the atom. The force is positive if the car is approaching, and it is negative if the car is moving away from the radar gun. Therefore we can expect the return photon's oscillation frequency to increase if energy is added to the photon.

There is no dispute that the photon travels at the speed of light. The only dispute is whether it hits the approaching car at c or at c+v. How can the photon add to the car's energy when the car is approaching and subtract from the car's energy when the car is moving away if the velocity (v) of the car is not a factor? A couple days ago, I told Mr. Moroney and Paparios that I wasn't going to respond to any more of their posts in that thread, so maybe they'll see the comments I've written above.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for Tom Roberts to respond. If he does, he'll almost certainly also say that the NASA article is "dumbed down," which is his way of saying the article is wrong, and it is therefore either a lie or the people at NASA are just too dumb to understand how police radars and photons actually work.

June 10, 2019 - Yesterday I once again tried to end my latest round of arguments on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum. The latest statistics for the thread show 330 posts and 795 views since I started the thread a little over two weeks ago, on May 24th. The arguments had recently degenerated into nothing more than pointless opinion vs opinion debates, people calling me names, and a lot of inane nitpicking about the meanings and usage of words. But, it was a worthwhile exercise resulting in me learning a lot about how they think.

Then, while doing research this morning, I came across a web page on NASA's web site that I had seen before and forgot about. It is titled "How Do Police Radars Really Work?" Click HERE to view it. It is about using a single photon from a radar gun to measure the speed of an oncoming car. That is what my paper is all about, and the people on the forum endlessly argued radar guns use waves, not photons. So, of course, I had to post the link to the sci.physics.relativity forum to see what they will have to say about it. (I also tried contacting the authors at NASA, but none of their addresses work.)

Meanwhile, yesterday evening I finished listening to another audio book. It was a science fiction novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green.

I'd first heard about the book a month or two ago on The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. So, I put my name on the waiting list at my local library, and the 9-hour 27-minute audio book became available on June 5.

It was a truly enjoyable book. And very funny in parts. I think that is why I put it on the waiting list, because it was said to be funny, and funny books are what I am looking for the most right now.

Here is how Amazon describes the story: "Roaming through New York City at three a.m., twenty-three-year-old April May stumbles across a giant sculpture. Delighted by its appearance and craftsmanship—like a ten-foot-tall Transformer wearing a suit of samurai armor—April and her best friend, Andy, make a video with it, which Andy uploads to YouTube. [She calls the statue "Carl" as she talks with it on the video.] The next day, April wakes up to a viral video and a new life. News quickly spreads that there are Carls in dozens of cities around the world—from Beijing to Buenos Aires—and April, as their first documentarian, finds herself at the center of an intense international media spotlight."

And then things get really weird. It seems that someone is posting coded messages on Wikipedia's article about the statues by leaving out letters in certain words and by jumbling up the reference numbers. April, her friends and others around the Internet world try to decipher the messages. Then April and other people start having strange identical dreams, and as the messages are decoded and the dreams become more complex it becomes clear that the statues are alien.

Then things get really interesting. The President of the US gets involved. Conspiracy Theorists on the Internet start attacking April as being an alien in disguise or as being a dupe being manipulated by the aliens who put the statues in the 64 different cities. Meanwhile, as time passes, April is getting rich from licensing the video she and Andy took of the statue in Manhattan, which was the First Contact between humans and an alien culture. In addition to making more videos and documenting everything on the Internet, she writes a best-selling book about her experiences. She thinks the aliens are friendly. Others don't think anything that is alien can be friendly. And the Conspiracy Theorists (who call themselves "Defenders") try to kill her. Here's a quote from that part of the book:

I shouldn’t have been so surprised when things started escalating. I mean, I knew people hated me. It was a real thing. Being recognized by fans is very different from checking out at the corner store and not knowing if the clerk is a Defender thinking about what a dirty traitor you are. I thought that I could only either run away from that or fight it, so I fought it. Fear is an even better fuel than anger. Also, it is even more destructive. Their constant attacks meant I never had to doubt my message. It must be right, because the people who disagreed with me were sooooo awful.

That section in red is very much like how I feel after arguing with the people on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum who seem to know nothing except mathematics and attack me personally and call me names if I try to discuss science instead of mathematics with them.

Here's a quote I enjoyed about the process of writing a book:

A friend of mine once told me that, no matter how much you proofread, the first time you open the final version of your book, you will find a typo on the very first page you look at. Ugh.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing was a thoroughly enjoyable book, and I can highly recommend it to anyone who likes science fiction.

June 9, 2019 - Last week, on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum, I complained that physicists do not seem to be interested in solving a basic science question: "What is light?" Instead, physicists seem totally content to use a mathematical model for particles when light seems to act like a particle, and they use a mathematical model for waves when light seems to act like waves. And it doesn't seem to bother them at all that the models are incompatible with one another. In response to my complaint, a physicist called "Paparios" posted a link to a Wikipedia article as if the article contained some kind of proof of his beliefs. But he didn't state where in the article to find anything of value. So, I wrote:

That article describes electromagnetic radiation as being EITHER a wave OR a photon. It doesn't decide one way or the other.

And Paparios responded:

Why do you think a decision is required?

I replied:

Because SCIENCE is about how things work. You are saying we do not KNOW how light works, except that it sometimes acts like a particle and it sometimes acts like a wave. That is not science, it is an admission of IGNORANCE.

Before Paparios could respond, an engineer named Michael Moroney wrote:

Wrong. It is an acknowledgement that light is neither a true wave nor true particles. It has properties of both, but is not either one.

While stating that he was disagreeing and that I was wrong, he was in reality agreeing that we are ignorant of how light works.

And then Paparios responded:

First we are not talking about "SCIENCE" but about "Radar Guns". All radars, including radar guns, are electronic devices designed and built by electrical engineers (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar). They have worked quite well and accurate for over 80 years using the good old (and currently still used) classical wave model (Classical Electrodynamics).

Humans, like you or me, are unable to answer questions like "how light works". The reason is quite simple: we are only capable of processing thoughts, which physicists (like Einstein) use to formulate MODELS which try to approximate the way Nature does whatever it does.

A physical MODEL like Classical Mechanics, Classical Electrodynamics, Special Relativity, General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Electrodynamics, etc. represent achievements of our human intellect, but none of them answer "HOW AND WHY NATURE DOES WHAT IT DOES".

Wow! That shows how far apart we are in our thinking. All I am interested in is how Nature does what it does, and Paparios says that "Humans, like you or me, are unable to answer questions like 'how light works'." I am investigating the science and physics of radar guns, while he evidently doesn't consider radar guns to have anything to do with science. In addition, he provided a link to a book titled "Radar Design Principles." Of course, the 724 page book doesn't even contain the word "photon" anywhere. But it does say this on page 445:

The continuous wave (CW) radar is frequently used for detection and tracking of moving targets. In its simplest form a single sinusoid is transmitted, and the received signals are mixed with the transmitted carrier frequency. The existence of moving targets is determined from the beat note or Doppler frequency shift f_d .

Hmm. A "sinusoid" is defined as a single "sine curve" or "sine wave." That seems like a photon to me. There are other places in the book where "sinusoid" is used as if it is a photon. But, claiming that a "sinusoid" is really a photon will just generate more arguments.

The discussions on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum also produced a realization on Thursday and another on Friday that together seemed to solve my biggest problem, which is how to show the mathematicians on that forum that their wave theory of light is ILLOGICAL.

The first realization I had was that radar guns cannot transmit and receive at the same time. As far as I know, no radio transmitter/receiver can transmit and receive at the same time. That is why you always hear cops say "Over" when they are done talking and release the transmit button on their microphone.

The second realization I had was that a cluster of waves will return out of order if the waves hit multiple targets. The waves that hit the closest target will return before waves that hit a more distant target. How can you measure the speed of a target when the waves return out of order? A basic radar gun has no way to separate one target from another. It just displays the speed of the fastest target. And it does it by computing the Doppler Effect on the oscillations of photons.

With oscillating photons it doesn't matter if photons from the nearest target return before photons from a more distant target. The gun simply shows the speed of the fastest moving object within range. It is up to the operator to know which object or vehicle that was. If he uses his radar gun on a cluster of vehicles it will be because the officer sees that one vehicle is obviously moving faster than the others. And he knows by his visual observations which vehicle that is. His radar gun cannot tell him. It shows the speed of the fastest vehicle, but not which vehicle that is.

Waves are an entirely different situation. Here is an illustration I displayed the other day which shows a radar gun emitting waves and receiving waves back.

Note that it is implying (or stating) that new waves are being emitted at the same time old waves are returning. It also implies that the distance between waves is what determines the target's speed. That is the Doppler Effect for SOUND waves. Sound waves move at 343 meters per second or 767 miles per hour. Light photons move at 299,792,458 meters per second or 186,000 miles per second.

If the Doppler Effect also changes the distance between light waves, and that is how radar guns work, then we need an illustration which shows cars of different speeds approaching the police car and radar gun. Then we can see that the distance between waves coming back will different for each vehicle. The gun won't, of course, be able to tell which car in the bunch is traveling the fastest, but how will does it prevent the return waves from getting mixed together and showing that one car is traveling at 200 mph?

It seems to me that describing radar gun using photons instead of waves would make things much much simpler, but if everyone is intent on maintaining their ignorance about how light (and all electromagnetic radiation) works, it seems it will be a long time before we see illustrations of radar guns emitting photons (other than in my papers).

I really really need to get back to work on the overhaul of my paper about Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories. It explains how photons work in radar guns. But will anyone care, if they are dedicated to remaining ignorant?

Comments for Saturday, June 1, 2019, thru Saturday, June 8, 2019:

June 8, 2019 - In yesterday's comment I failed to mention a problem I had with listening to the audio book version of "The President is Missing." If the title of a book is over 25 characters in length, the part number does not show on the little screen on my ClipSport MP3 player. AND the parts are somehow scrambled.

"The President is Missing" consisted of 11 MP3 files (11 parts). The file name for Part 1 is "The President is Missing - Part 01." The 25 character limit (which includes spaces as characters) just shows "The President is Missing " for all 11 parts, and the parts were actually in this order 6, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 7, 8, 9 ... and so on.

Fortunately, the book consisted of 128 chapters, which meant that nearly every MP3 file began with Dennis Quaid stating a chapter number. All I had to do was make a note every time a chapter number was given. That way I could tell I was in the right MP3 file when I started on a new file.

Last night I started listening to another audio book. It also has a title that is over 25 characters, but this time it has relatively few chapters. So, I ended up listening to chapters 1, 2 and part of 4. I couldn't think of any way to tell if I was in the right chapter except by gut feel that what I'm hearing seems to fit after what I last heard. My gut feeling was wrong.

This morning, I looked at the MP3 files in my computer and made a note of the first few words on each of the files and to what chapter they belonged. So, now I can be sure that I'll be listening to them in the correct order (after I go back and listen to chapter 3).

Checking the Internet to see if others have had the same problem, I found that they have, and the best solution is to edit the file names so that the entire name, including the part number, is less than 25 characters. I had considered that idea, but I was concerned that trimming the file names might cause some other kind of problem. I'll do it next time.

Life didn't used to be this complicated.

June 7, 2019 - Yesterday evening I finished listening to another audio book. It was The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson, a bestseller which was published almost exactly one year ago:

It took me three evenings to listen to the 13 hour audio book. I listened to Chapters 1-33 on Tuesday, Chapters 34-76 on Wednesday, and Chapter 77 through Chapter 128 and the Epilogue last night. The primary narrator was actor Dennis Quaid, supported by several others.

It was an enjoyable book, and well worth the time I spent on it. It is about a potential cyber attack upon the United States, a threat that is so menacing that if it happens it would throw the United States back into the Dark Ages. It would shut down our electric power sources, our banks, out hospitals, our businesses and everything that connects to the Internet. President John Duncan has just three days to stop it from happening.

The only problem I had with the book was the description of the computer virus that the culprits plan to use. As a former computer programmer, the virus didn't seem to work the way any software works that I am aware of. But, the book is a work of fiction, so that wasn't a serious problem for me. Far more interesting to me was a speech given by President Duncan where he describes a political situation that is virtually identical to our current political situation:

Our democracy cannot survive its current downward drift into tribalism, extremism, and seething resentment. Today it’s “us versus them” in America. Politics is little more than blood sport. As a result, our willingness to believe the worst about everyone outside our own bubble is growing, and our ability to solve problems and seize opportunities is shrinking.
We have to do better. We have honest differences. We need vigorous debates. Healthy skepticism is good. It saves us from being too naive or too cynical. But it is impossible to preserve democracy when the well of trust runs completely dry.

We have a real President who views anyone who disagrees with him as an enemy who must either change their ways or be destroyed. That includes other political parties, the media, the FBI and all foreign governments (except perhaps a few dictatorships).

The book contains a lot of fascinating details about the inner workings of the government. And since it was co-written by an ex-President, everything has a solid ring of reality about it. I can definitely recommend the book.

June 6, 2019 - I'm not sure if anyone is reading this web page anymore. My web site statistics show I had a low of 176 visitors and a high of 218 visitors in the first 5 days of this month, but they could nearly all be hackers and robots.

It's been difficult for me to find the time to work on the overhaul of my paper about Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories. I've been doing some research while also arguing on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum. Then I get so mentally exhausted that all I can do is sit back on an easy chair and listen to an audio book novel.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of people reading my scientific papers on vixra.org and academia.edu. So, if I'm losing readers for this web site, I'm gaining readers for my papers. They probably find out about my papers from the discussion forum and (hopefully) by word of mouth.

There's little that is more frustrating than to read a police radar gun web site that seems to refer to basics radar guns as "analog" guns (as opposed to "digital" guns), and then after spending a hour or more searching the Internet I can find no place that identifies what makes or models of radar guns are considered to be "analog" guns. Here's what that sites says about analog guns:

Digital radar guns measure speed based on a 12-inch travel distance of target vehicles, compared to 10 to 15 car lengths used by analog guns.

and

Older, analog radar guns always display the strongest reflected signal. This creates great frustration when you are locked on to an approaching 18-wheeler in a group of oncoming vehicles that includes a speed demon sports car. You see the Mustang going 80 mph, but the radar gun shows 53 mph because it's reading the 18-wheeler.

Right now I am agonizing about contacting my local police department to find out what make and model of hand-held basic radar gun they use. I just hate the idea of getting some cop angry at me for being a pest. Sigh. I just gathered up the nerve to try it, but all I got was answering machines. I don't think I can get any answers that way. Sigh.

June 4, 2019 - Although I tried to end the arguments on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum, I'm still involved in arguments there. And yesterday one of the arguments became very productive. Since none of my previous arguments were getting any results, I tried to explain in a different way how radar guns work. I stated:

The best way to understand how radar guns work is to just follow one single photon to the target and back.

And I proceeded to describe how an oscillating photon leaves the radar gun traveling at c, it hits an approaching car at c+v, which causes the car (traveling at v) to bounce back photons that oscillate at a higher frequency. This morning I remembered seeing a calculator for that. I did a search and found one HERE which looks like this:

I plunked in a transmission frequency of 24.125 GHz, which is the standard frequency for K-Band police radar guns. I then plunked in a speed of 60 mph for the speed of the target vehicle. When I hit ENTER, the above data appeared. It shows that the return photon will oscillate at 24125004308.035713 Hz, and when you subtract the transmitted frequency from the return frequency, you get a "beat frequency" of 4308.035713195801 Hz. (They call it a "beat frequency" because you "beat" the two photons together to get the difference in their oscillation frequencies.)

Unfortunately, the illustration shows waves, not photons. But illustrating the beat frequency concept using photons is difficult. I know because I will need to do it in my revised paper about Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories.

The point is, however, that a photon oscillates at a very high frequency as it moves, but the mathematicians have no mathematical model for such a thing. They only have a mathematical model for particles that travel at the speed of light but do not oscillate, and they have a mathematical model for waves that travel at the speed of light but do not oscillate. And such waves must have a medium and be continuous. The illustration above shows a continuous flow of waves. The wave crests move forward like the compressed air of sound waves. There is no oscillation of the wave itself, the crest just moves from point to point. The oscillation is in the medium. With air as a medium, the oscillation is from compressed air to normal air and back to compressed air again. But light works without any medium. Light can travel in a vacuum, sound cannot.

I could probably explain the problem better if I had more time, but it just occurred to me. The real problem is that mathematicians only understand their mathematical formulas and cannot explain things except as math problems. If I tried to get them to describe in words or images how a light wave moves from a radar gun to a target and back, I doubt they could do it. How can you have a moving crest of a wave without any medium? You can't. That may explain why there are still scientists arguing in scientific papers that the aether or ether must exist. If you do not have a medium you must have a continuous ray, like a rope running from the source to the target, and the wave moves along the rope. The rope, of course, is then the medium.

It all just brings me back to what Richard Feynman said,

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.

Correct. You cannot have waves without a medium. And light can travel in a vacuum where there is no medium.

Somehow, I need to incorporate all this into my radar gun paper.

June 3, 2019 - Two days ago, I wondered what the current best selling fiction books were. When I researched it, I found that #2 on the list was a James Patterson novel The 18th Abduction. It was the one on the list that looked most interesting, and it made me wonder if my local library had it in audio book form. They did, but there was a waiting list. More significantly, I learned that it was the 18th book in a series of novels about "The Women's Murder Club." So, I wouldn't want to read it anyway. I'd want to start with the first book in the series. That turned out to be "1st to Die."

And it turned out that my library had 1st to Die in audio book form and it was available for immediate borrowing. So, I borrowed it, and yesterday afternoon and evening I listened to it - 6 hours and 9 minutes.

At first the book didn't seem particularly interesting. It was about the formation of the "Women's Murder Club" (Lindsay Boxer is a homicide inspector in the San Francisco Police Department, Claire Washburn is a medical examiner, Jill Bernhardt is an assistant D.A., and Cindy Thomas just started working the crime desk of the San Francisco Chronicle). They come together as they try to solve the grizzly murder of a newly-wed couple. Early on it seemed clear to me who the killer was, so it was just a matter of time before the club members figured it out. But then things took a weird turn and the story became a little far-fetched.

While I enjoyed the book, it wasn't really my cup of tea. The murders were too graphic and grizzly. I prefer more humor in my murder mystery novels. So, I won't be reading any more from the series.

But it got my mind off of radar guns for awhile.

June 2, 2019 - I think the arguments about my Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories paper on the sci.physics.relativity forum have come to an end. Some of the discussion was very worthwhile. For one thing, it made me realize exactly what "problem" my paper should address. That problem was also mentioned in the abstract for the paper by Jeremy Fiennes I wrote about yesterday:

The 'constant speed of light' postulate predicts that two inertial observers – for instance twins in spaceships free-floating in outer space – will each see the other's clock running slower than his own.

As far as I know, Einstein never said anything like that. It is the mathematicians' misinterpretation of Einstein's theories. It is also #1 on my list of the ten dumbest beliefs in physics.

In the sci.physics.relativity discussion, relative motion came up in an argument from "RichD" on May 25:

Ed, imagine you're in a space ship, in outer space.
Looking through the front window, you spot an
approaching asteroid. You aim the radar gun at it:

I) You are stationary, the asteroid is moving
    toward you at 90 mph. What does the device read?
    Will a patrol cop cite you for speeding?

II) The asteroid is stationary, you are moving
   forward at 90 mph. What does the device read?
   Will a patrol cop cite you for speeding?

In my response I wrote:

Those situations are FANTASY situations that mathematicians use to argue that all motion is relative.

Einstein said that the speed of light is always emitted at c and cannot
exceed c.

Your FANTASY situations have my spaceship and the asteroid in empty space with no frames of reference to determine who is moving. In reality, of course, both are moving. The only question is: who is moving fastest? That is determined by finding out who is moving closer to the fixed speed of light.

According to my paper, I should be able to point my radar gun at the wall inside my space ship to determine my speed relative to the speed of light. The gun subtracts my speed v from the speed of light c to show my speed.

Knowing my speed, I can then point the gun at the asteroid and get its
speed relative to the speed of light. If it is moving at 90 mph, the
gun will read 90 mph, but won't say whether it is positive or negative.

If the asteroid is stationary relative to me, then we are both moving in
the same direction. If the asteroid is moving relative to me, then the
asteroid is moving at 90 mph in a different direction than I am.

If the asteroid is moving at 200 mph relative to the speed of light,
the gun will show that. That has no effect on how fast I am moving.

I should probably have spent some time thinking about what I just wrote, but I think it is correct.

A basic police radar gun measures a target's speed relative to the local speed of light. (Local c basically means c at the local altitude, since the length of a second varies with altitude.) A photon of a specific wavelength is emitted from the gun at local c, it encounters the target at c+v, the target sends back a new photon which has a slightly shorter wavelength representing the added kinetic energy from the moving target. The new photon travels at local c back to the gun. The gun compares the wavelength of the photon it emitted to the wavelength of the photon it received back and computes the speed of the target to be v. In addition, my research into radar guns now indicates that some models of a basic radar gun can determine the direction the target is moving without losing its other "basic radar" features.

In space, basic radar guns would work the same way as they do on a highway, only "local c" does not involve any altitude because the experiment takes place in "empty space". There aren't even any stars to judge your own direction of movement by.

Space
ships with radar guns passing one another

So, as seen in the cartoon above, the radar gun on the spaceship on the right emits photons which travel at c toward the spaceship on the left. The fact that the radar gun may be moving doesn't change c ("light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body").

Atoms in the outer surface of the spaceship on the left absorb the oncoming photons and emit new photons back toward the gun. The new photons travel at c, but they will have a shorter or longer wavelength depending upon who is moving toward whom. The gun on the spaceship on the right will compute the difference in wavelengths to find the speed of the target and the direction it is moving. If it shows the spaceship on the left is approaching at 200 mph, the gun can then be pointed at a wall inside the right spaceship and the speed of the wall relative to the speed of light can be computed. If the wall turns out to be approaching at 190 mph, that means the left space ship is traveling at 200 mph toward the right and the spaceship on the right is traveling backwards at 190 mph in the same direction (in space, if your engines are turned off, you can be easily moving backwards if you do not orient yourself to the stars). In other words, the spaceship on the left is approaching the spaceship on the right with a "closing speed" of 10 mph.

Of course, that means the radar gun on the spaceship on the left will get a reading 190 mph off of the spaceship on the right, and the gun will indicate the target is moving away from the spaceship on the left. But, checking the speed of the forward wall on the left spaceship, that wall will have a speed of 200 mph away from the gun. So, from the point of view of the spaceship on the left, it is approaching the spaceship on the right at a "closing speed" of 10 mph.

But how do I prove any of this? All I need to do is find a basic radar gun that works the way such a gun was described to me by a police officer about a year ago. I cannot ask my local police department any more questions, since they seem to be very concerned that I am going to cause some kind of political problem for them. I'm going to continue to try contacting the manufacturers of radar guns while at the same time trying to find manuals and other materials on-line that might help.

While hunting, I'm going to overhaul my paper about Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories to describe things the way I understand them, beginning with the "problem" of whether or not all motion is relative. If I can't find an inexpensive way to do a radar gun experiment for myself, I may just recommend that the readers of the paper do so. If I am wrong, they can prove me wrong (as long as they use the correct type of radar gun). If I am right, they may be the first to discover solid evidence that all motion is not relative and the textbooks which say all motion is relative need to be thrown in the trash.

June 1, 2019 - This morning, academia.edu sent me a link to a new 82-page article about "Einstein's Terrible Twins" by Jeremy Fiennes. Browsing through the article, I saw it has a weird version of the second paragraph from Einstein's 1905 Special Theory of Relativity paper:

"The unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the Earth relative to the 'light medium' suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics, as well as those of mechanics, possess no properties corresponding to an absolute rest ^a9. But rather that the same laws of electrodynamics are valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good ^b10. We will raise this conjecture to the status of a 'relativity postulate'. And will introduce another, only apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely that light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c, independent of the state of motion of the emitting body. The introduction of a 'luminiferous aether' will thus prove superfluous."¹¹

That is clearly not the translation I always use, but it says basically the same thing. However, then things really get weird when the article goes on to say,

He later amplified the last bit to:

"Light in vacuo has a definite velocity of propagation, independent of the state of motion of the source or of the observer."¹² (italics ours)

When did Einstein say that?! I looked through the references section for reference #12, which turns out to be a letter Einstein sent to the London Times in 1919. The letter says this on page 2:

The second principle, on which the special theory of relativity rests, is the "principle of the constant velocity of light in vacuo." This principle asserts that light in vacuo always has a definite velocity of propagation (independent of the state of motion of the observer or of the source of the light).

The letter is in English, but Einstein couldn't write in English in 1919. Could the section in red have been added by the translator? That seems unlikely. What seems far more likely is that Einstein was saying that light always propagates through space at c, and the speed of the observer or emitter doesn't change that. In other words, while an observer moving toward the source of the light at speed v might encounter the light at c+v, the light isn't actually moving at c+v, it is moving at c. The speed of the observer doesn't change the speed of light.

But that makes it another opinion versus opinion argument. What did Einstein mean when he wrote the above? It is clearly different from what he wrote in his 1905 paper, but countless mathematicians argue that what he wrote in his 1905 paper isn't what he actually meant to write.

Looking back to the abstract for Jeremy Fiennes' paper, I found it says this:

Einstein's Special Relativity is based on two fundamental assumptions, the so-called 'Einstein postulates'. The 'constant speed of light' postulate predicts that two inertial observers – for instance twins in spaceships free-floating in outer space – will each see the other's clock running slower than his own. The 'relativity' postulate says that both perceptions are equally valid, effectively correct. The logical incoherence of this makes a nonsense of the postulates, and by extension of Special Relativity itself.

So, Fiennes is evidently debunking Einstein's theories. I just do not have the time to figure out exactly what Feinnes is arguing. He appears to be arguing against the mathematicians' interpretations of Einstein's theories while claiming those interpretations are actually Einstein's words. I'm fairly certain that Einstein never said anything like this:

The 'constant speed of light' postulate predicts that two inertial observers – for instance twins in spaceships free-floating in outer space – will each see the other's clock running slower than his own.

That is pure mathematician crap.

I think my radar gun experiment can end the debate once and for all time, but how can I confirm that without spending a lot of money?

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