September 2020 Archive for ed-lake.com

Archive for ed-lake.com
September 2020

Comments for Sunday, September 27, 2020, thru Wed., Sept. 30, 2020:

September 29, 2020 - While eating lunch yesterday, I finished reading another library book on my Kindle. The book was "Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society," edited by Bill Bryson.

I'm a fan of Bill Bryson, and when I borrowed the book I probably just assumed it was written by Bryson. In reality, it is a collection of 21 separate articles by 21 different authors, only one of which was written by Bryson, the Introduction. Here's a quote from page 3 of the Introduction:

The Royal Society (it became royal with the granting of a charter by Charles II in 1662) invented scientific publishing and peer review. It made English the primary language of scientific discourse, in place of Latin. It systematised experimentation. It promoted – indeed, insisted upon – clarity of expression in place of high-flown rhetoric. It brought together the best thinking from all over the world. It created modern science.

Looking through my notes, I was somewhat surprised how many of the quotes from the book relate to mathematics. For example, here's a quote from page 69, which is part of an article by Margaret Wertheim:

In the fifth century BCE Pythagoras posited that the structure of the world was determined by mathematics: ‘All is number’, he famously declared.

and from that same page,

A small band of medieval thinkers took Pythagorean precepts and transformed them into a Christian context, giving rise to the then-novel idea that God had created the material world according to mathematical rules. Among God’s primary tools was Euclidean geometry and in 1267 the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon argued in a treatise to Pope Clement IV that artists ought to follow their Creator and construct images accordingly with geometric relationships. Bacon called the new style ‘geometric figuring’ and he proposed that the Church encourage painters to adopt it as a matter of principle.

I probably copied those quotes because they highlight that mathematics seems to have become a religion preached by a lot of today's physicists.

I have 21 pages of quotes from the book, and at least half of them are about mathematics and mathematicians. Here's another from page 95, which is part of an article by Neal Stephenson:

Even the hardest of hard sciences is replete with assumptions that may fairly be classified as metaphysical. Almost all mathematicians, for example, presume that they are discovering, rather than creating, mathematical truths.

I think he's saying that mathematicians presume that their math is gospel, but in reality it is just something they have computed that they believe is gospel. Some unknown factor could turn it into total nonsense.

Another quote from an article by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein:

A priori mathematics, according to Galileo, does not entirely obviate the need for observation (only the most extreme of rationalists, Spinoza and Leibniz, were to argue the expendability, at least in principle, of all empirical knowledge, claiming that all could be a priori deduced from first principles); but mathematics does allow us to deduce unobservable properties and thus to penetrate into the structure of nature.

Here's another quote from that same article:

Unlike Galileo or Descartes, Newton distinguishes between mathematical truth and physical truth (echoing the intuition in Boyle’s complaint against the rationalists). That the resistance of bodies is in the ratio of the velocity, ‘is more a mathematical hypothesis than a physical one’, he says in Principia II, 9, and makes similar statements in connection with his discussion of fluids (Principia, II, 62). A mathematical truth that has not been made manifest in experience has not advanced to a physical truth. And experience must be experimentally manipulated in order for the mathematical truth to be made manifest in it.

Another:

To paraphrase Immanuel Kant (who was three years old when Newton died in 1727): Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.

Those quotes basically agree with how I view math. Without experimentation the math cannot be accepted as gospel.

Here's another quote from an article by John D. Barrow:

This reflection on the symmetries behind the laws of Nature also tells us why mathematics is so useful in practice. Mathematics is simply the catalogue of all possible patterns. Some of those patterns are especially attractive and are studied or used for decoration, others are patterns in time or in chains of logic. Some are described solely in abstract terms, while others can be drawn on paper or carved in stone. Viewed in this way, it is inevitable that the world is described by mathematics. We could not exist in a universe in which there was neither pattern nor order.

In other words, math is essential to science and physics because experience tells us that the universe works according to mathematical rules. The problem is: You can't just perform computations and assume the result is gospel. It may be that your computations leave out some as yet undiscovered factor which changes everything. It is by experiment that we find the unknown factor, and it is by math that the unknown factor is clarified.

It was a worthwhile book, even if all it did was confirm things I already knew.

September 28, 2020 - I just submitted a new version of my paper "Relativity vs Quantum Mechanics Experiments" to vixra.org. Version #2 is now available at this link: https://vixra.org/pdf/2009.0124v2.pdf It only contains one major change. In the second paragraph I now provide a definition for "Identical." It says, "(“Identical” in this context means that the two radar gun must transmit at frequencies that are the same or that have no more than a 500 Hertz difference.)"

Of course, it contains a typo. I typed "gun" when I meant to type "guns." But I'm not going to create a version #3 to correct that minor error.

As a result of the arguments I've been involved in for the past week, I have a kazillion other things I wanted to put into the paper, but I think I'll just put them into a new paper which I have tentatively titled "The Physics of Radar Guns." I'm going to take my time writing it, and it will include a LOT of illustrations, so I probably won't be finished with it until weeks from now - maybe months, since it is going to be a very long paper.

Meanwhile, as of this moment, there have been only 58 unique views of my latest paper. I thought it would knock everyone's socks off, but evidently they just don't agree with it, so they mostly just ignore it and do not tell others about it. Without "word of mouth," it will just be seen by people who happen to stumble upon it for one reason or another. I've "advertised" it by talking about it on a couple forums, but that is why I got the 58 views. Otherwise it would probably be just 3 or 4.

I keep a spreadsheet of the number of views for my various papers. The most popular is definitely "Simplifying Einstein's Thought Experiments," which has had 1,087 views in the past 2 years and 3 months. It had 2 views yesterday, while my latest paper had none. Maybe I should have titled my latest paper "Simplifying Relativity vs Quantum Mechanics." And maybe my next paper should be "Simplifying the Physics of Radar Guns." Hmm. That's an idea.

Plus, of course, people have lots of other things to think about these days. I keep wanting to write something about Trump, about Covid-19 or about the upcoming election, but what could I say that hasn't been said by countless others? Is this country so screwed up that its people would elect Trump for another term? The polls say no, but the polls also say that Trump is leading in states like Florida and North Carolina. Groan. How can that be?

September 27, 2020 - I've been doing a lot of research, and yesterday I looked at the HowStuffWorks web site to see if they explain how radar guns work. They have a section on How Radar Works. It was very disappointing because it begins by explaining how sound waves work when they produce echoes. Then it implies that radar waves work the same way - with waves. At the very bottom of the page there is this information about police radars:

When a police radar shoots out a pulse, it echoes off of all sorts of objects -- fences, bridges, mountains, buildings. The easiest way to remove all of this sort of clutter is to filter it out by recognizing that it is not Doppler-shifted. A police radar looks only for Doppler-shifted signals, and because the radar beam is tightly focused it hits only one car.

The first two sentences are basically true for a stationary gun, but they are wrong when the radar gun is moving. The last sentence is false, since even at 100 feet the beam of the radar is going to be much larger than any car, so it is going to hit all sorts of things. Their page on Radar Detectors has a better description, but it still uses waves and not photons.

Meanwhile, the discussions I've been having on vixra.org have been very productive. Explaining things to other people and answering their questions helps me to understand things better. Now I understand what the college professors were probably talking about when they argued that no two radar guns transmit at the same frequency.

If the manual says that a hand-held radar gun transmits at 35 Gigahertz (GHz), that means the photons it emits oscillate at 35 billion times per second, or at 35,000,000,000 Hertz (Hz). For those who believe that radar guns emit waves, that means the gun emits 35 billion waves per second, and it gets back even more than that. Yet, this is how those waves are visualized on one college web site:

Beat Frequency at 70 mph

Does it look to anyone like the radar transmitter in the police patrol car is emitting 35,000,000,000 waves per second?

If photons oscillating 35 million times per second hit a car that is approaching at 70 mph, according to that college web site those photons hit the car is if they were oscillating at 35,000,007,291.6666 times per second. (It's like a motor boat heading into waves and hitting the waves faster than the waves are actually traveling.) Rounding off the reflected frequency, atoms in the car then emit NEW photons that oscillate 35,000,007,292 times per second. The radar gun receives those returning photons and compares their oscillation speed to the photons it emitted, and gets a "beat frequency" of 7,292 Hz. That oscillation speed converts to 70 mph.

The question then is: Are two identical radar guns so precise that they do not even vary by a few Hertz? The fact that they will both show the same speed if pointed at the same tuning fork doesn't necessarily mean "Yes," because if Gun-A transmits at 35,000,240,000 Hz, the photons that return from the 70 mph target fork will oscillate at 35,000,247,292 Hz, and the gun will still measure the difference as 7,292 Hz and 70 mph as the speed for the target tuning fork.

Of course, it doesn't help matters that two mathematicians cannot even seem to get the same answers. A different web shows this for the "Doppler Shift" as opposed to the "Beat Frequency":

So, is the Doppler Shift/Beat Frequency 7,307 Hz or 7,292 Hz? Two different mathematicians probably rounded off numbers in different ways to get their different answers.

Either way, the problem that causes for my proposed experiment is that if you point a gun that transmits at 35,000,240,000 Hz at a gun that transmits at 35,000,000,000 Hz, the receiver gun will measure a speed of 2,369 mph. And typical radar guns do not show any speeds greater than 200 mph (or lower than 10 mph). I think that may be what the college professor was trying to tell me, but he explained it in terms of waves and phases, which meant nothing to me.

Groan! It looks like I'm going to have to create a version #2 of my paper "Relativity vs Quantum Mechanics Experiments" to show the experiment as purely hypothetical, unless you have two truly identical radar guns that emit photons that oscillate at the same exact frequency, or a frequency which is virtually the same but varies by only a few Hertz. The current paper says the radar guns must be "identical," and I even underlined the word, but that could be interpreted to merely mean the same make and model.

I was preparing to buy two Bushnell Velocity radar guns from Walmart for $109 apiece, plus $5.90 tax. Now that seems like a bad idea. If the guns are pointed at each other in a truck and give no reading, there is no way to know why that happened. It almost certainly happened because the two guns transmitted at very different frequencies, but everyone will claim it is because the experiment is invalid. To verify what I had deduced for myself, I asked the people on the RDForum, and I was told:

No radar guns are that exactly tuned, nor are they that stable in frequency. Even if you aligned two guns yourself so they were exactly on the same frequencies, the next time you pulled the triggers they would be off frequency from each other. For a K band gun a speed of 200 MPH is only a Doppler shift of 14.4 kHz. My K band guns all drift much more than that in just a few seconds of operation.

So, I need to modify my paper to clarify things.

The experiment in my paper is still valid as an hypothesis. It may just require someone with the ability to fine tune emission frequencies to perform the test. After all, when Einstein proposed his Theory of Special Relativity in 1905, there was no way to test for time dilation. That had to wait for the invention of atomic clocks. It seems what is needed to perform my proposed experiment are two radar guns that are just as precise as atomic clocks. That's all. :-(

Comments for Sunday, September 20, 2020, thru Sat., Sept. 26, 2020:

September 24, 2020 - The debate on vixra.org is still very interesting to me. The debate shows me how mathematicians think, and that enables me to develop new and better ways to argue with them. I see now that I probably should have used illustrations like the two shown below in my new paper about Relativity vs Quantum Mechanics Experiments.

Radar gun experiment frames

The illustrations show two different "reference frames," an inside and an outside reference frame. According to mathematicians, the two people in Figure 1 are stationary - even though the truck is moving at 30 mph. They are in a "reference frame" where no point moves relative to any other point. Therefore, everything is stationary, and it is not possible to detect any motion, even though the two people undoubtedly know they are moving. To mathematicians, if you cannot detect motion relative to some object, there is no motion, and it evidently doesn't matter what you happen to "know" to be "real."

That, of course, is ridiculous. According to Einstein, you should measure motion relative to the speed of light, which is what a radar gun does, and then you can detect the motion of the truck. You can understand reality and Special Relativity.

Figure 2 shows the operator of Gun-B standing on the ground as the truck passes by at 30 mph. In Figure 1, the photons emitted by Gun-A travel at the speed of light, c, and hit Gun-B at c-v because Gun-B is moving away from the oncoming photons, and thus v is measured as the speed of the truck. In Figure 2, the photons emitted by Gun-A travel at c and hit Gun-B at c because Gun-B is not moving relative to the local speed of light. However, Gun-B will measure the speed of the truck as 30 mph because other photons it emitted will hit the outside of the truck at c+v where v is the speed of the outside of the truck. Evidently, according to mathematicians, that should be impossible because it means the inside of the truck is stationary and the outside is moving.

Unfortunately, what the arguments are showing is that no logic or common sense is going to cause a mathematician to change his mind about what his math shows.

September 23, 2020 - Hmm. I had expected to create a discussion on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum about my latest paper, but as of this morning there are still just the two comments I mentioned in my Monday comment. I'm not sure if they are just ignoring me or if most of the "regulars" with whom I had previous discussions have moved elsewhere.

And it seems the moderator on the Physics and Astrophysics Facebook group didn't think my post was worth allowing on that group.

So, instead of having discussions in the "normal" places, the key discussion seems to be on vixra.org. Someone named Miguel Rios joined the discussion that was previously only between "Mikko" and me. And as of this moment, there have been 49 comments posted there, some of them fairly interesting.

What I like most about such discussions is that answering questions causes me to think about things in different ways. And the more I think about the experiment in my latest paper, Relativity vs Quantum Mechanics Experiments, the more I think I might be able to do a two-radar-gun experiment myself for less than $300. It might be worth spending $300 just to find out.

Discussions I had with that college professor last week made me concerned that if the two radar guns were too close together when pointed at each other, they might damage some sensitive internal component. But yesterday I watched a YouTube video where a Bushnell Velocity radar gun is pointed at the tiny speaker on the side of a laptop computer while music is being played. The title of the video is "Can Speed Radar Measure Music?"

The gun is so close to the speaker that it should be almost the same as if the gun was pointed directly at another radar gun just an inch away. Virtually all of the emitted photons will be returning to the radar gun's receiver. Of course, when one gun is pointed at another, you get at least twice that amount, but it still seems that the gun will handle it. Plus, I was also reminded yesterday that the intensity of the beam is adjustable on police radar guns. When you measure the speed of the tines on a tuning fork, the gun is typically put in "test" mode. But, it appears from what is said at the 2 minute mark in another video, that "test mode" is just "maximum intensity," which means that the gun is emitting more photons than it does at lower "intensities." It means it also gives the gun longer range. The more photons you emit, the more likely some will find their way back to the gun.

I should also mention that yesterday I created a new discussion thread on my blog. The thread is titled "Experiments to resolve the conflict between Relativity and Quantum Mechanics." There were no posts to it overnight, probably because no one is aware that it exists. My mentioning it here will inform readers of this web site where they can anonymously comment on what I've written without sending me emails. I just hope they give themselves a name. It gets very confusing when you are arguing with 15 different people who all call themselves "Anonymous."

Hmm. I just noticed that Miguel Rios just posted two more messages on vixra.org. So, this is the end of today's comment.

September 21, 2020 - Ah. So, today I can start asking questions about my paper "Relativity vs Quantum Mechanics Experiments" without people wondering about the date on the paper. It's dated today.

The first thing I did today was argue some more with "Mikko" on vixra.org but it was just more of the same. He has beliefs about how radar guns work, and he argues those beliefs. That's an opinion versus opinion argument, which is just a waste of time. If my paper is wrong, I need someone to explain in detail where it is wrong. It isn't wrong simply because it disagrees with some college textbook or because it disagrees with Quantum Mechanics. It states that it disagrees with textbooks and with Quantum Mechanics. It agrees with Special Relativity. The experiments described in the paper show that Special Relativity works and Quantum Mechanics does NOT work in radar guns.

The next thing I did was send emails to Professor Brian Cox, whose views on physics mostly agree with mine, and who might be interested in an experiment which matches Relativity against Quantum Mechanics. I don't know if there will be any response, but I had to give it a try. I've got a bunch of his books, and I've listened to nearly every episode of his podcast.

The next thing I did was post a comment to the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum. I just explained the paper and gave the link. As of this moment, there have been only two replies. One is from some anti-vaxer, ranting about how vaccines are destroying our whole species. The second was from "Odd Bodkin" who just wrote that I didn't know what I was talking about and that a comment about Relativity versus Quantum Mechanics is "off topic" because its about Quantum Mechanics, not Relativity. That's also an example of his logic. He's on my "Do Not Reply" list, but I might suspend the list while this topic is being discussed. Most people who post to that forum read it in the evenings, so tomorrow morning there should be more comments.

The next thing I did was post a comment to the Physics and Astrophysics Facebook group. The group is moderated, so I'll have to wait to see if it gets past the moderator.

Tomorrow we'll see what happens, and I'll try contacting some others. I just hope that someone cares about this topic. It's been argued for over a hundred years, and people may just not care anymore.

September 20, 2020 - The day after I put my new paper "Relativity vs Quantum Mechanics Experiments" on Vixra.org, someone who calls himself "Mikko" posted a comment on that site about the paper. He posts comments after all of my papers, criticizing every one of them because they disagree with his beliefs. One part of his new comment was:

In the introduction an experiment with two radar guns is proposed. Although the experiment is in principle doable, it cannot be done as proposed. The accuracy and stability of the frequency of any real radar gun is insufficient to produce any speed value when one radar gun receives the signal from the other -- the difference would be outside of the range of measurable speeds.

That's the same thing a college professor recently told me. But it's just a statement without any explanation or reasoning to support it. It makes no sense.

Before using his radar gun, a police officer is required to test it to make certain it is working properly and is transmitting at the correct frequency. He does that test with a tuning fork that comes with the radar gun when it is purchased. Identical tuning forks are supplied with the same police radar gun model, and if you lose the tuning fork, you can buy a new one. If identical radar guns do not transmit at the same frequency, how can the tuning fork test work? Plus, when you do the tuning fork test, you first put the radar gun in "test mode." It appears that in test mode, the gun only tests for one specific frequency. For my TS-3 it is the frequency associated with a speed of 45 mph.

Another part of "Mikko's" comment was:

The article claims that all radar guns perform two measurements but that is not true. First radar guns performed only one measurement. Moving mode was possible only after an invention of a method to perform two measurements at the same time (U.S. patent 3,118,139). Still many radar guns work as the old models as the design is simpler and less expensive and sufficient for many users. Even those that can perform two measurements have a stationary mode where they work as the old models. The reason is that the measurement method used in typical radar guns does not work on low speeds so in the moving mode no measurement is possible unless the radar gun really is moving sufficiently fast.

Did "old models" of radar guns like the one shown in the illustration below perform only one measurement?

Traffic radar in 1947

It might seem so to a mathematician who believes zero is something a machine can understand, but when you ask a former computer programmer like myself, the first question he'll ask is "How can you measure a speed if you have nothing to measure the speed against?"

The radar system in the image above shows a old fashioned radar transmitter measuring the speed of the oncoming car. But what is that speed relative to? What is the car's speed measured against? Obviously, it must be measured relative to the ground. When there is no oncoming car in the beam of the radar, the gun still gets back lots and lots of photons from the ground and those trees, and possibly the telephone pole, and the meter on the fender of the patrol car shows zero as the speed of those objects. So, the gun must perform two measurements, it measures the speed of the ground as zero and it measures the speed of the oncoming car relative to that zero measurement.

U.S. patent 3,118,139 wasn't about doing two measurements, it was about doing a measurement of one moving vehicle from another moving vehicle. If the radar in the illustration above was put atop a patrol car that was moving at 40 mph, it would measure the ground as traveling at 40 mph just as my TS-3 radar gun does when I point it at the ground through my windshield. And if an approaching car traveling at 50 mph comes into view, the old radar and my TS-3 will both show a speed of 90 mph. Both guns are "stationary only" models and they are assuming that "stationary" means 40 mph - or whatever the speed of the radar across the ground is measured to be. It is only zero when the gun is stationary. When the gun is stationary relative to the ground, the photons it emits toward the ground will be measured to be identical to the photons that return from the ground. The difference (or "beat frequency") is measured to be zero.

Meanwhile, someone recently asked me if I could recommend a book about time dilation. I tried to find one, but I couldn't. All I could recommend was my web page about time dilation experiments and the scientific papers those experiments produced. This morning I did a Google search for books about time dilation, and it provided me with a web page that lists 8 science fiction books involving time dilation.

It seems that if someone were to write a non-fiction book about time dilation, a million mathematicians would write reviews arguing that the book is nonsense.

I just hope my new paper persuades someone to do the truck experiment described in the paper. Numerous time dilation experiments have had absolutely no effect on mathematicians, but a lot of experiments which show that radar guns can measure the velocity of a moving truck from inside the truck will be more difficult to ignore or explain away. Mathematicians will argue that a malfunctioning clock gave incorrect readings that fostered the illusion that time dilation is real, and they will argue that no one actually measured the difference in how time passes while it was passing. It is all measured after the test. The radar gun experiment is different. With the radar gun experiment you can increase and decrease the speed of the truck, and the guns will show the changes in speed as they happen.

Then you can do radar gun experiments with tuning forks. Mathematicians claim that radar guns cannot measure the speed at which a tuning fork vibrates. They claim that the gun somehow listens to the tone the tuning fork emits and measures that. How does a gun that measures electromagnetic energy switch to listening to sound waves? When I ask them, they just repeat their claims. They cannot explain anything. And when they do explain, it is in math and physics jargon that I cannot decipher. How can it be that complex? Why can't they explain anything in plain English? The page at the link also says,

Also, to produce a maximum arm speed of 50 mph at the relevant frequency of (say) 4480 Hz would require the arm to swing a distance of 78 mm, whereas a typical tuning fork of this size has a maximum arm displacement of only about 0.02 mm, so the maximum speed of the arms of such a tuning fork is less than 0.1 mph, orders of magnitude less than the speed that corresponds to the induced simulated beat frequency.

That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, since it is saying that the "arm" is swinging at a given speed. In reality, the arm is fixed to the base and the tip of a tine is swinging vastly faster than at the base. The radar gun only shows the FASTEST speed for what it is measuring.

In the video below, a lawyer explains how radar gun tuning forks work, and starting at around the 5-minute mark, he hits the two forks together to get them to begin vibrating. And he sometimes holds both forks edge-on in front of the radar gun. I can see how that would get a speed measurement if the gun was emitting photons at the tines, but how can it work if it is receiving sound vibrations from the tines? How do you measure the frequency of waves when you are receiving waves from two different sources at the same time?

I'm open to explanations, but dumping a load of complex mathematics on me won't change my mind. Nor will claims that I'm just too stupid to understand. Nor will arguments that I need to take more physics courses, since it as the nonsense taught in a physics course that got me into investigating the hundred-year-old conflict between Quantum Mechanics and Einstein's Relativity in the first place.

Comments for Sunday, September 13, 2020, thru Sat., Sept. 19, 2020:

September 18, 2020 - Since I'm not doing much of anything right now except waiting for Monday, when I plan to start notifying people about my new paper "Relativity vs Quantum Mechanics Experiments," and because it has been sunny for the past couple days, I've been doing a lot of reading. Yesterday afternoon, I finished reading "Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump" by Michael Cohen.

Michael Cohen just finished writing the book last month, and I was lucky enough to be able to borrow a library copy for my Kindle on the day it was released, ten days ago on September 8. It's really a very well-written book. It reads like a crime novel, with Cohen telling his story in first person - I did this, then I did that. Here's a passage from early in the book:

For more than a decade, I was Trump’s first call every morning and his last call every night. I was in and out of Trump’s office on the 26th floor of the Trump Tower as many as fifty times a day, tending to his every demand. Our cell phones had the same address books, our contacts so entwined, overlapping, and intimate that part of my job was to deal with the endless queries and requests, however large or small, from Trump’s countless rich and famous acquaintances. I called any and all of the people he spoke to, most often on his behalf as his attorney and emissary, and everyone knew that when I spoke to them, it was as good as if they were talking directly to Trump. Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did. In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did, because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.

The book is currently #1 on The New York Times Nonfiction Bestseller List.

Michael Cohen was a multimillionaire New York lawyer when Trump hired him, but Cohen had made most of his money by buying and selling New York City taxi medallions, which were selling for as much as a million dollars apiece before Uber ride-share taxis entered the picture. Trump hired Cohen to shut down one of Trump's companies and to get rid the person who was running it. It was done unannounced and by force, with tough guys walking the president of the company to the door, then confiscating all documents and firing all employees. Here's how Cohen describes his job:

I was beginning to understand what Trump wanted from me. He didn’t want me to be like his other lawyers, measuring the merits of a situation and providing advice based on sound legal reasoning. He had lawyers who could provide that kind of guidance. He didn’t need me to be a lawyer when he was in the right. He needed a lawyer for when he was in the wrong: when he was trying to go around the law, or offer a twisted or tortured interpretation to an agreement that could be used to screw the other side.

and

He wanted a lawyer who would fight when the cause was clearly racist and illegal.

It's a fascinating book about a sleazy con-man (Trump) who surrounds himself with sleazy henchmen and proceeds to do as he wants, and if you don't like it, he'll sue you into bankruptcy. It includes details of one situation after another, from Trump's false conspiracy theory that President Obama wasn't an American citizen to paying off porn star Stormy Daniels, from the total scam known as "Trump University" to faking popularity polls. The book depicts Trump as a total vicious creep, with Cohen willfully participating in everything because it made him feel superior to be associated with Trump - particularly when Trump started running for President. No one, least of all Trump, expected that Trump would actually win the election. It was just a game to become more famous and to make more money.

I could go on and on, but I'll jump to the end of the book when suddenly out of nowhere, on April 9, 2018, the FBI raided Cohen's home and hauled him off to jail. According to Cohen,

It turned out that the businessman managing my taxi medallions, Evgeny “Gene” Freidman, had defrauded hundreds of medallion owners, as well as the city of New York, for more than $20 million. He was facing serious prison time, but he didn’t do a day behind bars because he’d talked to the FBI and testified against me.

And, of course, from then on Trump practically denied ever knowing Cohen. There's probably more to it that Cohen doesn't mention, but it's also clear that Trump and his henchman Bill Barr wanted to intimidate Cohen and to stop him from writing his book. So, Cohen wrote his book in jail.

It's a fascinating story and well told. I highly recommend the book.

And I also think Cohen's final warning is worth paying attention to:

Please remember what I testified to Congress, the second time: There is a serious danger that Donald Trump will not leave office easily, and there is a real chance of not having a peaceful transition. When he jokes about running again in 2024 and gets a crowd of thousands to chant “Trump 2024,” he’s not joking. Trump never jokes. You now have all the information you need to decide for yourself in November.

September 17, 2020 - For the past few days I have been working on a new paper titled "Relativity vs Quantum Mechanics Experiments." It is similar to version 9 of my paper "Radar Gun and Einstein's Theories," except that it addresses the same issue from a very different angle, and it is just 5 pages long, instead of 17, and one of those five pages is mostly references. In other words, it is a lot easier to read and understand.

Based upon the discussion I had with some college physics professors on September 14 and 15, the paper goes straight to the issue of how those professors (and countless others) believe radar guns work according to Quantum Mechanics, and how I hypothesize that radar guns work according to Special Relativity. And how NASA agrees with me.

I planned to submit the paper to vixra.org this coming Monday. But the paper looked so mind-blowing that I decided to submit it yesterday afternoon. This morning it became available at this link: https://vixra.org/pdf/2009.0124v1.pdf

And, of course, I awoke this morning realizing the paper contained an error. I had forgotten to change the date on the paper. It still shows Monday's date, September 21, the date I had planned to make it available. Then I had to decide whether to change the date to September 17 on the version I submitted to academia.edu this morning. I decided against it, since it might be assumed that the academia.edu version is an earlier version of what is on vixra.org.

Instead, what I'll do is just sit tight until Monday to see what happens. Then on Monday, if no one has sent me undeniable proof that I am wrong (and if I haven't see any "error of my ways"), I'll start contacting people to suggest they perform the experiment. I'll probably start with the people on the sci.physics.relativity forum and the RDForum. Then I'll start contacting everyone else I can think of who might have an interest in determining whether an experiment comparing Quantum Mechanics to Special Relativity would work as described or not.

The paper is titled "Relativity vs Quantum Mechanics Experiments" because it suggests that there might be simpler ways to do the experiment. Instead of using a 53-foot trailer truck, there might be some way to put two radar guns inside a box that is just 6 feet long or so. You can record what the radar guns show on a smart phone, or you can build things so that the back ends of the radar guns protrude outside of the box. Of course, you still need a vehicle that can transport a box that is 6 feet long, and you probably need a driver and some witnesses.

Then there is the idea of building a totally new device that is based upon the principles in the experiment. The device might be the size of a lunch box. And if the range of measurement is increased, you might even be able to take it to the International Space Station and measure the speed the ISS is traveling. But, that wouldn't be an "experiment," so I didn't mention it in the paper. Before doing that, all the truck experiments would have to prove the hypothesis is correct, and then the "lunch box speedometer" would be a "tool," not an "experiment."

The college physics professors claimed that my experiment probably wouldn't work because no two supposedly "identical" radar guns actually transmit at the same frequency. Then they described how "phases" are inherently unstable. But that is a Quantum Mechanics wave-theory belief. As I see it, even if there is a slight difference in photon oscillation frequencies that a tuning fork test cannot measure, that just means that the difference will appear as a speed that is added to or subtracted from the speed the radar guns measure for the truck. So instead of measuring 30 mph, the gun might measure 31 mph or 29 mph.

And, as I stated in my September 14, comment, if anyone sees an error in the paper, I'm hoping they will explain the error in plain English. Calling me names, demanding that I read more college text books, and simply declaring an opinion that I am wrong won't do anything but cause me to yawn.

September 15, 2020 - Yesterday, I sent an email to the four college physics professors I've been communicating with on the topic of radar guns. I told them about the truck experiment described in version 9 of my paper "Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories." The response later that afternoon from the leader of the group was pure Quantum Mechanics. He didn't even address my version based upon Special Relativity, he just described how Quantum Mechanics works with radar guns. It looked like it might just be a response to what I wrote him, and he didn't actually look at my paper. (I provided a link, but lots of people are afraid of clicking on links.)

So, this morning I wrote them another email, this time explaining in detail how radar guns work with Relativity, and how the experiment should work just fine, even though Quantum Mechanics says it would not work.

Writing that email made it clear that I need to write another paper, a paper that specifically addresses the difference between how radar guns are imagined to work with Quantum Mechanics and how radar guns actually work with Special Relativity. I've begun work on that paper and hope to have it on-line by next Monday. Here's the abstract:

The conflict between Quantum Mechanics and Relativity has raged for about a hundred years and is interpreted in at least a hundred different ways. It appears, however, that a simple experiment involving radar guns can demonstrate which theory is valid in our visible universe and which theory is best relegated to the invisible universe of subatomic particles.

I'm anxiously awaiting the next email from those physics professors. I suppose it is possible that they might convincingly explain how my experiment will not work - even according to Special Relativity - but I'll believe that when I see it.

September 14, 2020 - Okay, version 9 of my paper "Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories" is now on-line at this link: https://vixra.org/pdf/1806.0027v9.pdf

It contains a totally new way of measuring the speed of a truck from inside the truck. All you need is two identical radar guns, instead of just one gun of some special kind as previous versions of the paper said. One of the two guns is positioned at the rear of the truck with the gun pointed at the other gun, and the other gun is at the front of the truck pointed at the first gun. Here's the illustration I used in the paper:
Radar gun experiment inside a
truck

What this should do is cause each gun to show a "patrol speed" of zero for the far wall, but the gun should also show a "target speed" that is the speed of the truck. The photons emitted by Gun-B in the illustration travel through the truck at the speed of light, c, and will hit Gun-A at c+v where v is the speed of the truck (and Gun-A) toward the oncoming photons. That gives a "target speed."

Meanwhile, photons from Gun-A that hit the receding front wall will hit at c-v. New photons emitted by the front wall will return to Gun-A and hit the receiver at c+v. This means the gun computes c+v-v=c, which converts to no measured patrol speed. (Moving mode guns assume that the slower speed is the speed of the ground, i.e., the patrol speed.)

A "stationary only" gun like my TS-3 would show 40 mph if that is the speed of the truck. It only shows one number, adding together the "patrol speed" and the "target speed." 0+40=40.

A radar gun with "moving mode" would show 0 in the "patrol speed" display and
40 in the "target speed" display.

Of course, as soon as I submitted the paper to vixra.org I noticed an error in the paper. On page 16, I quote Einstein's First Postulate and use a reference number of 20. I should have used reference #1. But it's not a serious enough problem to fix and create another new version of the paper.

This morning, I put another copy of the paper on Academia.edu at this link: https://www.academia.edu/44085471/Radar_Guns_and_Einsteins_Theories

It has the correct reference number.

After doing that, I composed and sent an email to four physics professors who seemed interested in my views about radar guns. I asked their opinion of the paper. I'm hoping at least one of them will reply. They may not want to get involved with anything "controversial," and a science paper that describes an experiment that will show most college physics textbooks to be wrong is definitely something "controversial."

And, of course, if anyone sees an error in the paper, I'm hoping they will explain the error in plain English. Calling me names, demanding that I read more college text books, and simply declaring an opinion that I am wrong won't do anything but cause me to yawn.

September 13, 2020 - My plan is still to upload the revised version of my paper "Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories" to vixra.org later today, so that it will be on-line as version #9 tomorrow morning. However, this morning I awoke with the realization that I need to make some more changes. While writing the paper and designing the experiment that would show that a radar gun can measure the speed of a truck from inside the truck, I was just thinking about "stationary only" radar guns like my TS-3 and the Bushnell Velocity. I awoke this morning realizing that "moving mode" radar guns should be able to do things more clearly and undeniably. I'll find out for sure as I modify the paper and go step by step through exactly what would happen and exactly what a "moving mode" radar gun would measure.

At 17 pages, the paper is currently 3 pages longer than version #8, even though it seemed like I was deleting more material than I was adding. I suspect the additional changes will add another page.

I have been exchanging emails with some scientists who I will ask to check my logic after I finish the revised paper and put it on-line. I'm hoping they will also attempt to perform the experiments described in my paper, since they almost certainly have the means to do it. The folks on the RDForum might also have the ability to perform the "moving mode" radar experiment.

There's no point in deleting old versions of the paper. The purpose of the paper was to explain how radar guns demonstrate Einstein's theories, particularly his Second Postulate in his Theory of Special Relativity. I uploaded the first version of the paper on June 4, 2018, more than two years ago. It had the same error that version #8 has, it assumes that a moving radar gun will both transmit and receive photons at the speed of light. It can't.

Here's the abstract from that first version:

Abstract: Radar guns provide an excellent and inexpensive means of explaining and demonstrating some of Einstein’s theories in a very simple and undeniable way. Specifically, radar guns demonstrate how the speed of the emitter cannot add to the speed of the light being emitted, but the speed of light can be combined with the speed of the receiver. In practice, this appears to conflict with a basic tenet of mathematicians who believe that motion is reciprocal, and therefore radar guns must show that motion is reciprocal. A step by step analysis of how radar guns work shatters that basic tenet.

A moving gun does transmit photons at c regardless of the speed of the gun, and those photons will be received by an oncoming target at c+v, where v is the speed of the target, but I failed to realize that the returning photons will also be received at c+v where v is the speed of the moving radar gun toward the target.

Of course, all the people who disagreed with me were also wrong. As the abstract (and the paper) says, mostly they believe that "all motion is reciprocal." Therefore light is always transmitted and received at c, regardless of any motion by the emitter or receiver. That is generally what they argued, if they bothered to explain their beliefs at all. Mostly they just stated their opinion that I was wrong without any attempt to explain where I was wrong.

No doubt they will also argue that the latest version of the paper is also wrong. And they won't explain where it is wrong, except when they explain that all motion is reciprocal, so light is always received at c regardless of any motion by the receiver or emitter. Mostly they'll just argue that I need to take some college physics courses to understand how the universe and radar guns really work.

The problem, of course, is that I took a college physics course about six years ago, and it was clear to me that the professor didn't understand Einstein's Second Postulate. That is what got me started on writing science papers.

And six years of doing research has just confirmed that original observation.

I'm hoping that the college physics professors who have been exchanging emails with me agree. We agree on lots of things, but I won't bring up the experiment described in the new version of my Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories paper until after I finish it and put it on vixra.org. If I wait for their approval, the paper may never get uploaded.

And now it's time to finish this comment and get to work on that latest revision.

Comments for Sunday, September 6, 2020, thru Sat., Sept. 12, 2020:

September 11, 2020 - Groan! Yesterday afternoon, I thought I had version 9 of my paper on Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories all finished. It looked good, a real scientific breakthrough, and I was planning to have it on-line on Monday morning. Then, last night, as I was getting ready to get into bed, I suddenly realized something. The simple way of demonstrating my idea depended upon a one-way mirror working the same way for radar photons as it does for visible light photons. It does, but the human eye works different than a radar gun.

one-way
mirror

A one-way mirror works because the light is brighter on one side of the mirror than the other. On the bright side you see just your reflection. On the dark side you see through the glass into the bright side. If you reverse the lighting, the mirror side will turn transparent and the formerly transparent side will become a mirror. That is because only about half of the mirror is covered with reflective aluminum particles. There are as many gaps between the particles as there are particles. That means, if you point a radar gun at a one-way mirror, about half the photons will go through the mirror and half will bounce off the mirror. That is no good for my experiment.

Fortunately, I have a second way of doing the experiment. It's just a lot more complicated, and probably more expensive. Now I'm wondering if there isn't a third way. And maybe I should let the reader of the paper find a fourth and fifth and sixth way. The science is solid, it's just a question of how to do the experiment to confirm it.

So, I'll have to do some more heavy modifications to the paper. But I still hope to have it on-line on vixra.org on Monday morning.

September 9, 2020 - Yesterday morning, after I had finished writing and posting my September 8 comment, I decided I needed to make certain I wasn't making another false assumption about how radar guns work. So, I turned off my computer, dug out my TS-3 radar gun, took a floor fan out of a closet and a mirror out of another closet, and I verified that the TS-3 could read the speed of the fan blades when it was pointed at the refection of the fan in the mirror. No problem. It worked fine.

After I put everything away again, I returned to my computer. When I turned it on, I was asked if it was okay for Windows to do an update. They'd asked me the day before and I told them to do it at night, but apparently they hadn't done it. So, I keyed in the okay to do the update. BIG mistake. It took over three hours!

When it took well over 10 minutes to go from 0% complete to 1% complete, I decided to listen to my MP3 player while waiting. About two and a half hours later, I finished listening to another audio book. It was the unabridged 13-hour 38-minute version Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi."

I'd obtained a copy from my library months ago, put it in my MP3 player, and I'd been listening to it off and on since then. It's a very enjoyable book, well read by Grover Gardner, who speaks as you might expect Mark Twain to speak, adding to the enjoyment.

The book has 60 chapters and begins with a lot of facts about the Mississippi River, then gets into Samuel Clement's (Mark Twain's) work on riverboats and his desire to become a pilot. He describes all the dangers of working on river boats, from exploding boilers to collisions with other boats, from hitting sunken trees to navigating in near total darkness when you only have your memory of landmarks to go by. And, of course, the river is constantly changing. One year a landmark farm house is on the bank of the river, and the next year that same farmhouse is a quarter mile back from the river. One year there is a big S-curve at a certain location, and the next year the river has cut through the curve and it's now a straight line. And there are floods, of course, with people still living in houses that have 3 feet of water in them, and feed has to be brought to farm animals that are standing in 3 feet of water. Here's a passage I found about that:

Looking out of the half of the window left above water was Mrs. Ellis, who is in feeble health, whilst at the door were her seven children, the oldest not fourteen years. One side of the house was given up to the work animals, some twelve head, besides hogs. In the next room the family lived, the water coming within two inches of the bedrail. The stove was below water, and the cooking was done on a fire on top of it. The house threatened to give way at any moment: one end of it was sinking, and, in fact, the building looked a mere shell. As the boat rounded to, Mr. Ellis came out in a dugout, and General York told him that he had come to his relief; that the Times-Democrat boat was at his service, and would remove his family at once to the hills, and on Monday a flat would take out his stock, as, until that time, they would be busy. Notwithstanding the deplorable situation himself and family were in, Mr. Ellis did not want to leave. He said he thought he would wait until Monday, and take the risk of his house falling. The children around the door looked perfectly contented, seeming to care little for the danger they were in.

I didn't take notes, and that passage doesn't really represent the book. There are a lot of funny things in the book, and a lot if interesting history. I imagine people have been recommending it for over a century, and I can do the same.

I listened to a couple podcasts after finishing the book, while still waiting for my computer to complete the update. When the new version of Windows was finally fully installed, I checked my library to see what was happening there. I was notified that a Kindle copy of Michael Cohen's book "Disloyal" had been automatically borrowed and was just waiting for me to download it into my Kindle. That was somewhat of a surprise. I thought I was #7 on a wait list, but somehow I got a copy on the first day of release.

This morning, at breakfast, I switched over from the science book I'd been reading and started on "Disloyal." Busy busy busy.

September 8, 2020 - I spent that last couple days trying to understand the implications of the false assumption I made years ago about how the receiver in a radar gun works. I've also been working on a major overhaul of my paper on "Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories." When I finish the overhaul, it will become version #9. For awhile I was afraid that I'd have to scrap the idea of doing a radar gun experiment that measures the speed of a box truck from inside the truck. But after thinking about it very carefully, I realized there are still two slightly more complicated ways of doing it. And neither way requires a "Type-1" or "basic" radar gun, which I'm now pretty sure do not exist. Almost any "stationary only" gun should work - including my TS-3. But it still requires a truck, helpers and some new equipment, so it's not anything I can afford to do. I'll just describe the two experiments in my paper and leave them to others to verify or debunk.

Meanwhile yesterday, I learned what the Kustom Signals procedure involving bouncing photons off of the radome was all about.

Radar gun bounceback

I thought it was a way of measuring the speed of the gun. But that thought was based upon my false assumption that radar guns could receive and interpret photons arriving at c+v as if they were arriving at c. In reality, when the gun is in a vehicle that is moving, the gun's transmitter emits photons that travel to the radome at the speed of light, c, and hit the radome at c-v, where v is the speed of the radome away from the oncoming photons. Atoms in the radome absorb those photons and then emit new photons (with a slower oscillation rate) back into the radar gun. The new photons travel at c but hit the oncoming receiver at c+v, where v is the speed of the receiver moving toward the oncoming photons. The result is that the photons received back from the radome have the same oscillation rate as the photons the gun originally emitted: c+v-v=c.

After communicating with the Georgia Tech professors who wrote the book where the procedure for bouncing photons of the radome was mentioned and described, I then very carefully studied chapter 16 of their book "Principles of Modern Radar - Volume 3." It turned out that the procedure simply provides the gun with more emitted photons to use for comparison when photons that bounce off the target are returned. Photons bouncing off the radome are received together with the photons bouncing off the target and off the ground, and the differences in oscillation rates provides the means to measure the speed of the target and the speed of the gun (not the speed of the ground).

I'll explain it all in great detail in my revised paper, which I hope to have ready in a week or less.

September 6, 2020 - Groan! Yesterday, as I was digging through radar gun patents for the umpteenth time, I suddenly realized something. A year or two ago, while studying how radar guns work, I made an assumption about how the receiver in the gun works. I remember trying to research it to verify exactly how it works, but I couldn't find anything that helped. Eventually, I just gave up and assumed it worked in a way that it seemed it must work. Now it appears I made a false assumption.

The realization doesn't make the mathematicians and naysayers right. You could say it makes them doubly wrong, but it also significantly changes my thinking. So, it now seems that radar guns do not work as the mathematicians claim, nor entirely as I've been arguing, but in a third way - a much simpler way.

The realization came as I was studying Patent #3,118,139, which was issued to Gerald Durstewitz of Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, on January 14, 1964. It appears to be the first patent for a radar gun that can be used while moving, and a lot of other radar gun patents use it as a reference. It seems I neglected to pay sufficient attention because the radar "gun" looks silly by today's standards. The transmitter (#14 below) sits on the roof of the patrol car, and there are two receivers (#15 & #16) attached to the front bumper.
radar gun patent

Somehow I convinced myself that the inventor made a false assumption about how the receivers worked, particularly receiver #15. But it now seems I was the one making the false assumption. Somehow I thought that the returning signal would be received by a "tuner" in the receiver just as it would if the patrol car was stationary. Now it seems clear that, if the patrol car is moving forward, the signal bouncing off the ground will arrive at c+v where c is the speed of light and v is the speed of the patrol car (NOT the speed of the ground). Airplanes use the same technique to measure their "ground speed."

In addition, yesterday and this morning I received emails from a couple college professors who have written a book about radar guns and how they work. They appear to merely confirm things I already knew, but I'll have to dig through their technical language to make sure I'm not making another false assumption.

I stated in a previous comment that I wasn't going to write any more comments about radar guns. But, if I didn't write this one, I wouldn't have anything to write about this morning. Plus, I need to get this comment written so that I can study Durstewitz's patent further and go through the steps one by one to make sure I've actually figured things out correctly. I'm doing a major overhaul to my paper "Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories." I'll do the step-by-step analysis there.

Comments for Tuesday, September 1, 2020, thru Sat., Sept. 5, 2020:

September 3, 2020 - Hmm. Yesterday evening, at about 6:30 p.m., I went for a walk to get some exercise. My walk, as usual, was through the parking lots of two strip malls, with a shift to walking on sidewalks at the far end of the stroll. When I walked past Dick's Sporting Goods I was somewhat surprised to see that they had removed the boards that they had placed over their windows on August 26. So, evidently the panic is over. It makes me wonder what it feels like to be the only person around who panicked over something that happened 10 miles away. (This afternoon I drove around to check on the stores in other strip malls that had also been boarded up, a Kohl's department store, a Rainbow dress shop, and a Rent-It-Now place. To my surprise, they still are.)

There's a Barnes & Noble book store next to Dick's. On my way back from my turnaround point, a Kroger's grocery store, I stopped in Barnes & Noble. It was just a brief visit to glance over what new books they had in their non-fiction best seller shelves. I spotted what looked like an interesting book. The title was "Arguing with Zombies." That title seemed to somewhat fit with what I wrote about on this web site yesterday.

So, when I returned home, I researched "Arguing with Zombies." It's mostly about the economic crisis of 2008 that was created by George W. Bush, but it does get into discussing Donald J. Trump and how he is doing many of the same things. And arguing with supporters of either one of them is like "arguing with zombies" who just stare at you and don't hear a word you say.

The book looks interesting. I checked my local library, and they have three Kindle versions, but the wait time is still about six months. I already have ten books "On Hold," which is the maximum allowed. So, I put it on my "Wish List," where I can keep track of it and move it to the "Hold" list when a space opens up.

Having dozens of books waiting around to be read (or listened to) is definitely better than having nothing to read (or listen to). I also have dozens of podcasts I want to listen to, maybe hundreds, since I seem to keep learning about podcasts I never knew existed. Last night I just sat in my chair for nearly an hour just trying to decide what to listen to next. I ended up watching the first 3 episodes of "Wanted: Dead or Alive," starring Steve McQueen, from my DVD collection. My records show I hadn't watched them in over 10 years. So, my backlog isn't just things I haven't yet read or listened to, it also contains a lot of movies and TV shows I haven't seen in more than a decade, which means I barely remember them, making them almost like new (even if they are in black and white).

September 2, 2020 - The other day, I exchanged emails with someone who told me he had discussed my radar gun questions with some experts he knew, and those experts disagreed with me. That was no surprise, of course, since I've been arguing with "experts" for years, and I've found that it is very difficult to get a discussion going with those experts who agree with me. They simply assume you want to argue about something, and they know from experience that there is no reason to argue with someone whose mind cannot be changed. And, if we agree, then you must just want to talk. What scientist has time to talk with strangers? Answer: The kind of scientist who likes to endlessly argue in order to show that he is right and everyone else is wrong.

Prowling around the Internet this morning, I found a Wired Magazine article titled "Physicists Can’t Agree on What Science Even Means Anymore" which explains part of the problem. The Wired article refers to a Scientific American article which focuses on endless disputes over the Big Bang.

To me, it's like the endless battles between Republicans and Democrats. There is no hope that there will ever be a total "meeting of the minds" because, as I see it, Republicans tend to think emotionally while Democrats try to think logically. How else can anyone explain electing someone like Trump to be President. They couldn't have been thinking logically. He's a con-man and a crook!!!!!!! So, they must have been thinking emotionally - which means there weren't thinking at all, they were simply reacting. They saw things they didn't like and they voted for the guy who was screaming that he also didn't like those things.

The dispute in science (or physics) is very similar. It is between scientists who think logically and physicists who think mathematically. The biggest difference is that, while everyone is totally and painfully aware of the endless battles between Republicans and Democrats, few people outside of "the scientific community" seem to be aware of the fact that physicists have been heatedly arguing over basic principles of science for over a hundred years!

That's what got me interested. I'm an analyst. When I see a dispute, I analyze the facts to try to figure out which side is right and which side is wrong. I found that the main arguments were are about Einstein's Second Postulate, from which countless other arguments have spawned. Mathematicians simply cannot accept that "light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body." They cannot accept any idea that does not include some "quanta" (or object) as a basis for doing math. And if the "quanta" (or object) is the emitter, then c must change when the motion of the emitting body changes. So, the mathematicians argue that Einstein didn't mean what he wrote (some college text books even state that, while most just rewrite Einstein's Second Postulate to fit what mathematicians believe and claim it is Einstein's).

As an analyst, I try to resolve the dispute. I tell them, "Just look at the facts!" But, just like Republicans have said many times, the mathematician physicists also have their own facts. They often don't even know what those facts are, they just know that "true facts" cannot disagree with what they believe. That would mean they are wrong, and that is emotionally totally unacceptable.

Being wrong is routine for scientists. An article titled "How Science Is Learning to Admit Mistakes" puts it this way:

Why should we trust science? If you ask scientists, it’s because science is based on a careful study of the outside world—not guesses, hunches, philosophizing, or rumors—and because science is a self-correcting system, continually revising theories and updating facts to reflect new evidence.

When the British Royal Society was founded in 1660, its mission was to “improve natural knowledge” and its motto was nullius in verba — Latin for “take nobody’s word for it.” In the Society’s view, it was wrong to accept any claim based simply on the authority of who said it—the church, the king, the ancient philosophers. Their principle was “to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.”

This idealized vision of science has been with us ever since: claims are true or false because of what experiments say, not what a particular person says.

When you only look for evidence that supports your beliefs, you are not a scientist. You could be a mathematician. And you might be a Republican. Either way, the only reason for arguing with someone who can never admit to being wrong is to see things from a different perspective. That may help in developing better arguments, which is always better than just mindlessly reciting dogma.

September 1, 2020 - Yesterday, I found a very interesting web site titled "The History of the Radar Gun." It appears to have started out to be about sports radar guns, but the author ended up researching a lot of other things. For example, he found that the first arrest for speeding involved an Electrobat taxi driver on May 21, 1899, in New York City. This is what an Electrobat taxi looked like:

The Electrobat was traveling at the reckless speed of 12 miles per hour down Lexington Avenue where the speed limit was 8 miles per hour. The driver, Jacob German, was thrown in jail. (This was before the invention of the speeding ticket.) There were about 60 Electrobat taxis in use at that time. Electrobats apparently went extinct around 1910. It may have been because Ford's "Model T" came out in 1908, and its top speed was about 45 mph.

Radar began being used by police around 1947, but it was stationary only radar that has to be set up next to the road:

Traffic radar in 1947

None of the companies producing traffic radars back then is still in business today. The oldest radar gun company around today is Decatur Electronics of Decatur, Illinois. It evidently started in business around 1955 as Muniquip, which is short for Municipal Equipment. It became Decatur Electronics in 1966 and went bankrupt around 1989, which brought in new owners who restarted the company.

Kustom Signals of Lenexa, Kansas was evidently founded in 1965, and

In 1969, Kustom produced the first digital display radar, the TR-6. The TR-6 was also the first radar to use a solid-state electronic Gunn Oscillator rather than the Klystron tube of previous units. This was a single window stationary unit operating on the X-band.

They claim:

We introduced the first digital readout radar, the industry's first moving radar, and the first hand-held option.

Kustom Signals' "first moving radar" still appears to have resulted from Patent #3,936,824 issued on Feb. 3, 1976. Another radar gun company was founded by an ex-Kustom employee: CMI of Minturn, CO. It was formed in 1970. MPH was founded in 1976 and later took over all of CMI's radar gun operations. Applied Concepts, currently the world's largest radar gun manufacturer, was also founded in 1970 but evidently didn't produce its first radar gun, the Stalker, until 1990.

Searching around, I found another web page which describes how Kustom, MPG and CMI began.

What all this tells me is that everyone knew everyone else in the radar gun business, and there doesn't seem to be any other patents for moving radar guns besides the ones I've already found. None of those mention the radome, much less bouncing photons off of the radome. Exactly how moving radar guns work is cryptically explained. I think that may be because any simple explanation would be argued to be "impossible." So, I'm going to try to stop writing about radar guns on this web site until I have something solid and verifiable to say. Evidently all I have been doing is confusing people. Sorry about that.

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