Cranks Emails - 3 - Or William C. Mitchell Knows Nothing About Cosmology/Astronomy

Yesterday I asked for some more examples of crank emails, this morning I found about 15 in my inbox, a big shout out to CMB for sending his collection. In particular one stood out, it is an author attempting to hawk his Anti Big Bang book called - Bye Bye Big Bang - Hello Reality, or as I would have called it Bye Bye Scholarly Study - Hello Page After Page Of Embarrasingly Poor Arguments. NOTE: I haven't changed anything except to tidy up the lines a bit, all those strange symbols were in the original email. Oh and I removed the links to the book at Amazon because they don't fit on the page, the spelling mistakes are all the original authors. If this is a Google search then welcome, let's just have a quick look at how little William C. Mitchell knows about Cosmology, and research, and writing legibly.

Subject: COSMOLOGY

If you aren't interested in cosmology, please don't read any further. I
don't want to annoy anyone.

BIG BANG FRAUD © 2004 William C. Mitchell
The following is a review of some of the many items that are part of an
elaborate fraud that is perpetrated by the Big Bang cosmology establishment.

Some Necessary Background Information.
The solutions to Einstein's Special Relativity equations, as solved by Alexander Friedmann, provided for three possible cosmological ”cases” on which Big Bang Theory (BBT) is based. Those cases are: a “closed“ universe having positively curved space that would eventually collapse; a “flat” universe having uncurved Euclidean space that would expand forever; or an “open” universe having negatively curved space that also would expand forever, but at a slowly increasing rate. (Before Friedmann's work, I don’t believe that Einstein had ever given any consideration to negatively curved space.)

The Velocity of Matter in Space.
The velocity of matter departing from us in space, that is calculated by an equation [V/c = (Z+1)2 -1)/(Z+1)2 +1)], that is derived from the Einstein-Lorentz transformations, results in a rate of expansion that reaches c for large redshifts. However, that is incompatible with the Friedmann closed, flat or open universe cases mentioned above; and it is also incompatible with a universe of relatively slowly increasing expansion that has recently gained considerable acceptance. Regardless of those incompatibilities, that equation continues to be used to determine the velocity of matter in space as a function of redshift.

Lets look at this claim, that cosmologists use the above equation to "determine the velocity of matter in space as a function of redshift", this is of course rubbish, we don't need to know the velocities of objects, we can measure it using spectroscopy. We use the measured velocities to determine the physical distance to the object, using Hubble's Law.

The second claim appears to be claiming that it is impossible for objects to appear to recede at greater than the speed of light, this is down to Mitchell's utter lack of understanding of the expansion of the Universe. It is entirely possible for space to appear to expand faster than the speed of light, individual regions of space expand at a fixed rate, so that if you look over a long enough distance the individual expansions add up to produce an expansion that is faster than light. There is absolutely no problem with reconciling faster than light expansion of space with General Relativity.

The third claim is either a misstatement or a flat out lie, he is essentially claiming that when working out distances to objects in the distant Universe cosmologists neglect the effect of the extra expansion due to Dark Energy. This very easily disproven, many people use Ned Wrights handy Cosmology calculator to convert between things like redshift, physical distance, comoving distance etc, this program can be found here. Try it out, you input the value of the Hubble Constant, the fraction of the energy of the Universe that is in matter (both luminous and dark), the redshift to the object you want to know the distance to, and, drum roll, the fraction of the energy of the Universe that is due to Dark Energy. Try changing the value of the DE while leaving everything else the same, what happens? that's right all of the calculated numbers change. So there you have it cosmologists do include the effect of Dark Energy.

Some More Background Information.
Hubble time, which is the time that the BB would have occurred if the universe had a fixed rate of expansion at the Hubble rate (the Hubble constant) ever since the BB. The consensus of working astronomers seems to be that rate should be about 65 km/sec/MPc, but, because it appears to make the BB universe older, BBers prefer a value of about 50 km/sec/MPc (equal to about 15 km/sec/MLYs) putting the Hubble Time at about 20 billion years,

This book is now quite out of date so I will forgive most of this, even though it is all wrong now, the currently accepted value of the Hubble Constant is around 72 km/s /Mpc, on its own this would infer an age of the Universe that was too short, when compared to the ages of stars. Clearly you can't have stars older than the Universe. However when you include the effects of Dark Energy and Dark Matter, and do the full calculation you get and age of the Universe that is between 13 and 14 Billion Years (Gyr), more than old enough to accommodate even the oldest objects in the Universe.

The Age of the Universe.
The age of the BB universe is based on the “flat” universe case that became important as a result of Inflation Theory. According to that theory, the age of that flat universe is equal to 2/3 of the Hubble time, or about 13.3 billion years. Lately, that approximate age is most often presented as the true BB universe age.
A very much “open” universe of accelerating expansion, has recently become the favored new theory of many BBer. However, the age of the universe that is presented in the media is still based on the flat universe case of inflation theory; that is, at 2/3 of the 20 billion year Hubble time.

As my two previous points have explained this is simply wrong, use the cosmology calculator you will see that changing the value of any of the parameters, including the Dark Energy gives a different age for the Universe, (its the part that says: "It is now XXX Gyr since the Big Bang.").

The Size of the Universe.
Using the above erroneously derived age of the universe, and based on no factual data, BBers have also erroneously assumed that the expansion of the outer edge of the universe has expanded at the speed of light. That allows them to determine its radius, in billions of light years, to be equal to its age in billions of years, or about 13.3 BLYs.
(A plot of the Friedmann's solutions to Einstein’s SR equations would show that, although the rate of expansion of a fixed rate universe would ever be at c, the initial rate of expansion of a flat rate BB universe would be higher, perhaps at about 2c; and the initial rate of expansion of a closed BB universe would be even higher, perhaps at about 3c or more; and the initial rate of expansion of the newly popular BB universe of accelerating expansion might be as low as 1/2c, or even lower.)

This whole statement is garbage, even the wikipedia article gets the facts right on this. The fact that space/time is curved and that the Universe is expanding means that the radius of the observable Universe is not simply just the speed of light divided by the age of the Universe. The actual observable Universe calculated using all of the parameters in the cosmology calculator is about 46 Billion Light years in radius, you can see this in the cosmology calculator if you put a very high redshift, say 2000, this corresponds to a time only 65 thousand years after the Big Bang, now look at the Comoving radial distance, this is how far light can have travelled from 65 thousand years after the Big Bang till now. Again Mitchell reveals he understands nothing about Cosmology, certainly not anything to do with the implications of an expanding Universe in General Relativity.

The Distance to Matter in Space.
Based on that erroneously derived present size of the universe, BBers have concluded that the distance to remote matter in space is proportional to its erroneously derived departing velocity.
Although many BBers still believe that, in accordance with inflation theory, the radius of the universe is many times larger than 13.3 BRYs, they continue to report the distance to high redshift matter in space in accordance with the above; and although many of them have recently accepted the very open universe of accelerating expansion, they continue to report the distance to matter in the same manner.
Thus the distance of matter in space and its velocity as determined by BBers are, not only erroneous, but inconsistent with any currently accepted variety of BB.

I'm not really sure what he means here, but as it is entirely based on his erroneous premises, it can clearly be seen to be nonsense.

Resulting Media Reports.
By the use of such fallacious logic, the distances and departing speeds of matter in the space of the universe, as determined and disseminated by the comological establishment, all that is read, seen or heard in the media, and accepted by all the world regarding those figures, is based on those compounded errors.

The only errors we have seen so far have been yours, to paraphrase a favourite film of mine, "you are a poor scientist Mr Mitchell".

More Background Information.
The so-called “Age Paradox” has plagued BBT since day one. Some stars are known by astronomers to be considerably older than the reputed age of the BB universe; and far worse than that, a number of astronomers have estimated that it might have taken more than 100 billion years for the formation of the giant galactic structures that are observed in space.
That is not a “paradox,” but a disastrous problem that BBers have struggled for decades to overcome, meanwhile attempting to hide it, or dismiss it as a trivial, soon to be solved problem.

There is no age paradox its all a load of bullshit, mostly spread by Creationists who think that if they can disprove BBT then more people will believe the world is 6000 years old. I will state this clearly so it can be understood by anyone, including hopefully the incompetent like Mr Mitchell. There are no known objects in the Universe that have measured ages greater than the age of the Universe within the errors of the measurement. I work on the study of Globular Cluster systems, cranks often claim that the ages of GCs are older than the Universe, they are wrong, correctly determining the ages of these systems is difficult and requires a lot of telescope time, usually you don't get enough to do it very accurately, so what you do is try to measure many at once, when you do this equal numbers appear to be younger or older than their actual ages, this makes some of the objects which are actually 10-12Gyr old appear to be 15 Gyr old. This is simply to do with signal-to-noise, statistics and fitting of templates to determine ages. Similarly with objects like white dwarfs, or certain low mass stars which we know could continue to shine for 100 Billion years, yet we never see any of them that are older than 13 Gyr, why is this? Because there are none older than 13Gyr.

The point he makes about galaxy structures would actually appear to be true if you don't actually think about the issues for a moment. Lets face it what crank actually wants to do some thinking and then some difficult maths? For one, the early Universe was much more dense than it is now, as gravity acts as an inverse square of the distance between mass this means that if the Universe was half the size the average force of gravity between clumps of matter would be 4 times larger. Clearly earlier in the Universe it was much easier for gravity to pull matter together to from stars/galaxies/clusters of galaxies. A second point is that the simulations he talks about do not include the effects of dark matter, which contains many times as much mass as luminous matter, adding this in means you can easily form large structures in as little as a few Gyr. If you don't believe me here is a picture of a simulation showing exactly that. Every dot in the image is a huge clump of dark matter (and stars).

Solutions to the Big Bang Age Problem.
A recent new scheme to help BBers solve their age-old age paradox is the invention of “dark energy” or “quintessence.” They have decided that those imaginary entities cause the rate of expansion of the universe to be accelerating. The universe would therefore have expanded more slowly in the past. It would therefore be older than previously thought, thus helping to solve their age problem. (Incidentally, some Bbers of long ago had proposed a universe of accelerating expansion, but their schemes failed to survive.)

Not much to say here, he provides no proof that the cosmological constant or quintessence is impossible, mostly because it is far beyond his intellect to grapple with the maths I'm sure.

The Two Biggest Frauds of All:
The Big Bang creation of the universe was “out of nothing.” Until Inflation theory came along in the early 1980s, BBers believed that, before the Big Bang, there was no matter, no energy, no time, no space.
An equally ridiculous solution to that fraud was the ”inflation” resulting from a “vacuum fluctuation” of the energy of empty space as the source of the Big Bang. Somehow the space and energy, that hadn’t perviously existed, was now said to have been there all the time, and it contained unimaginable amounts of energy.

This is a vacuous and also incorrect statement. The BBT makes no real claims about what happens before the BB in fact it makes no real claims at present about what happened in the very smallest fraction of a second after the BB, why? Because when the matter reaches the incredibly high energies found just after the BB the laws of physics break down, we cannot use the laws we have now to explain all the way back. We know that the laws of physics break down because gravity is not yet reconciled with quantum mechanics and until we have a quantum theory of gravity we can't know what happens earlier with any certainty. Does this matter? Not really, the theory as a whole does not depend on the mechanism, as long as some process can produce the initial expansion and then the inflationary phase everything is fine.

The above are just a few of the items of fraud that continue to be disseminated. However, leading BB cosmologists are well aware of those; and many more problems and inconsistencies of BBT. While attempting to appear unconcerned, minimize their importance, or avoid mention of them, they struggle to invent new schemes to circumvent them; while making big money as professors, lecturers, TV personalities, and authors of articles and books with intriguing new titles. However, most of the innovations they produce (like inflation and acceleration), that are intended to solve BBT problems, produce only new problems.
Meanwhile, those intelligent and educated establishment folks choose to ignore the problems of BBT, and to perpetrate the fraud that continues to be disseminated in the media.

I'd love to know who makes big money from being an astronomer, I certainly don't know of any rich astronomers. If I wanted to be rich the easiest way would be to take up televangelism, or to write a really poor book about how scientists are frauds and the BBT is wrong and then try and sell it to the wingnut creationists. I mean you wouldn't even need to do any hard work then right? No need to check facts, or test theories, you know those people will believe anything as long as it makes BBT or evolution look bad.

If you would like to gain a thorough understanding of Big Bang Theory and its many flaws; and then learn the truth about cosmology based, not on wild ideas and fantasies, but on vast amounts of astronomical data, true science, logic and common sense, you must read my book, BYE BYE BIG BANG - Hello Reality.
This inexpensive, 446 page, paperback - that includes a bibliography, 5 appendixes, and name and subject indexes - can be found in most large US city and large US university libraries; or order it from your book dealer (at $19.95 - available to them from THE DISTRIBUTORS*), or click on:

Best wishes,
William C. (Bill) Mitchell
Carson City, Nevada, USA

*Conact Patty Walsh at THE DISTRIBUTORS, 702 S. Michigan, South Bend, Indiana
46601, USA. Email: pwalsh01@ameritech.net, Telephone: 574-232-8500

In conclusion I can't help but feel terribly embarrassed for the poor guy, it really is that bad, he hasn't even checked the simplest of his arguments, I would expect better from a high school essay. There are plenty of problems with the BBT, none of which are major, if there weren't there wouldn't be anything left for Astronomers to do, but he has decided to attack problems that don't exist. Very sad. I think we can see from the short email that reading the book is probably going to be pointless. If he can fit that many distortions, lies, out of date data into just that few lines how many will the book have?

All For Naught

I note that i_am_nil has posted a particularly short-but-sweet rational critique of the whole Astronaut stalker story. Check it out here.

Crank Emails - 2

Further to my previous post. I was wondering if anyone else has any examples of crank emails, or even actual letters, most science departments seem to have a collection somewhere. I'm specifically interested in ones propounding new scientific theories (I'm not that interested in quack medicines). If you do could you please send me a copy, or a scan, I'm thinking of building an archive, and also of perhaps causing a bit of mayhem. You can find an email that will work in my profile. Thanks.

Crank Emails

As a member of a recognised Astronomy department I occasionally get emails directly from cranks, I'm not sure what they're after really, presumably they just want someone with some modicum of credibility to agree with their theory. One such example hit my inbox today, here is the entire contents of the email.

Attachment contains:

Page 1 Initial Mass Displacements

Page 2 Universal Mass

Page 3 Solar System Plane Distances

Page 4 Galactic Mass



Frank Hatch

P.O. Box 50355

Eugene, Oregon 97405

U.S.A.

I've included his address because he so obviously wants people to get in touch regarding his theory, so go ahead knock yourselves out, be polite though, he's probably nuts. He lives in Oregon and thinks about the Bible and the end of the world, which probably means he lives in the middle of a forest in a bunker packed with automatic weapons, worrying about the UN invading.

What goes through my mind when reading an email like that one above is something along these lines, "hmm new mail", "the words look like their scientific but they don't seem to mean anything when put together", "hmm", "do any professional scientists send unsolicited emails extolling their new theories?", "Er no", "CRANK ALERT, CRANK ALERT, CODE RED, CODE RED".

When you read the attached pdf (which can be found here) you'll see it contains some of the most incomprehensible numerology you will ever come across, something about this being a FINAL WARNING that the Earth/Hell is about to fall into null space, whatever the hell that is. It is mixed liberally with the usual quotes from the Bible, making it seem even more ridiculous. Oh and this is the second final warning I have got from Frank Hatch, I think traditionally this one is meant to have red paper or something. Next time I guess he'll send the bailiffs round.

Note: Its not all bad, Jim2 regards receiving his copy of this, his first crank email as something of a rite of passage for a young astronomer. Well done Jim2, today you are a man.

Vista vs Mac OSX, In Cartoon Form

Click For Big.

Its funny because its true. I know that plenty of people have it in for Macs and I'll probably get a snide comment or two for this, but to hell with it. Everyone in Astronomy uses Macs so at least I won't get any grief at work.

Oh then there's this:

If you're after a bit of balance how about this:


See them all, and more over at joy of tech. Damn I wish I could draw, and also was funny.

Hubble Heritage

Click for VERY Big.

Thanks to the BadAstronomer I have found out about a cool new HST image from the Hubble Heritage site, what's even better is that two of the people that worked on the project to get the data work along the corridor, hence I am actually better informed than the BadAstronomer for the first time. The picture released by Hubble Heritage shows a cluster of Galaxies called Abell S0740. There are two versions of the image one without annotations and one showing zoomed regions of interest. See them both here.

This data is of particular interest because of what was found in the inner regions of the large elliptical galaxy at the centre of the cluster, when examined carefully it was discovered (by Russell Smith, here's the paper to prove it) that there were 3 gravitational arcs within the galaxy, you can see them in the inset in the top right of the image above. These arcs are the result of the light from a background galaxy being bent by the gravity of the large foreground elliptical galaxy, this has the effect of making several images of the same galaxy which are brighter and larger than they would usually be, making it possible to see galaxies further away. The gravitational arcs in this galaxy are the closest known example of strong lensing by an individual galaxy, as opposed to lensing by a cluster of galaxies.

The reason these lenses are so interesting is that when the position and brightness of the lenses are combined with the distance to the actual background galaxy (which can be worked out from its redshift) it becomes possible to measure precisely the amount of mass in the lensing galaxy within the radius of the arcs, with little or no assumptions. By looking at the way brightness of the lensing galaxy it is then possible (assuming that brightness is related to the amount of stars) to work out fraction of the mass in the lensing galaxy that is from normal matter and the fraction from dark matter. But wait that's not all.

By using the mass determined with the observed brightness of the lensing galaxy and the measured motion of stars in the galaxy (measured from spectroscopy) it becomes possible to work out exactly how the stars in the galaxy move as well, allowing a determination of parameters that can be used to constrain models of how galaxies form. Essentially these lenses could allow determinations of all the physical parameters of the lensing galaxy at accuracies previously unheard of.

Great you say, lets do it, but this is where things get difficult, it turns out that the arcs are so narrow that with current technology is actually impossible to get enough signal from them to determine a redshift, bugger. Basically they are so narrow that you add much more lensing galaxy light then you do lensed galaxy light. If STIS on the HST is ever repaired it may be possible, but if not it could be 10 years before its feasible. Note: if you happen to be someone sitting on a TAC (telescope allocation committee) and I, R. Smith or J. Lucey have a proposal to do what I've just claimed is impossible, I was wrong, we can do it, please give us the time.

Another thing I like about this work is shown in the other inset, a whole bunch of globular clusters. I study globulars, and when observing them from the ground it becomes very difficult to observe them at distances probably around 30-50Mpc away, these ones are located at 142Mpc, makes me even more annoyed that ACS has broken down, there will be no more new data like this for at least two years.

Planet Earth Calling Dr Walt Brown

As I am presently working up a "final" refutation of Autodynamics I thought it would be a good idea to look around for similar examples of woolly thinking, poor science or downright fabrications. It turns out the web is full of such nuts, who knew?

One in particular stands out for having many of the best qualities a crank should have, including (but not limited to) a preconceived opinion of what the answer should be based on some non-scientific reasoning, in this case a religious belief. Second a whole roster of pretty impressive qualifications, non of which have anything to do with the topic under study, here the guy is an engineer (aren't they always?) but somehow thinks that this qualifies him to discuss the intricacies of stellar evolution or even biological evolution. Dur, well stars are just like big light bulbs right?

Step forward Dr Walt Brown of the Center for Scientific Creation, successful engineer, lousy astronomer/geologist/biologist/thermodynamicist. His website which can be found here, is so painfully wrong, twists facts so badly, uses data so out of date, that it nearly makes my eyes bleed, that and the crap colour scheme. I'm sorry but all those qualifications and income from a bunch of wingnut funds should have got something prettier to look at. If you hadn't guessed from the name, its mainly aimed at "proving" that the Earth and the Universe is 6000 years old, eurgh, I mean for Gods sake, we have archaeological evidence of cities from further back than this, even before getting onto the f*%£ing dinosaurs. To be fair I don't think this site is designed to convince anyone, merely to quiet the questions raised by the already brainwashed, no one with any kind of ability for rational thought could really be taken in. It does however seem a frighteningly small step between this and a demand that this crap be taught in science lessons for "balance".

The only thing that niggles me and prevents me from going into full ass kicking mode is that someone else has done it, probably better than I could. Sigh. Check out the story over here at the angry astronomer. Oh and also at pharyngula. I leave a full dissection of all the Dr Walts rubbish as an exercise for the reader, its not really difficult to see where the problems are, but should anyone have any questions feel free to ask away.

La Lune

I've recently come across another cool website, this one is a click-able map of the moon. You can find it at inconstantmoon.com what makes this site better than say, Google moon, is simply the huge amount of data at your finger tips. As well as the usual, click-able and zoom-able maps, with overlays of craters and Apollo landing sites there are things like the map above, which shows the amount of TiO2 in the moons surface, others show the thickness of the crust or the gravitational anomalies. Unfortunately no magnetic data yet, so its not possible to search for any magnetic anomalies, especially in the Tycho region (note for non sci-fi buffs read 2001).

To have a play around click on atlas, then just press buttons on the side bar to the right.

Mega Science

The UKs latest large piece of Scientific hardware is now up and working. The Diamond synchroton will be used to probe the nature of materials on the smallest scales, allowing new insights into how materials behave on the atomic level, as well as probing the structures of biological samples. Hopefully leading to better smart materials and new pharmaceuticals. The BBC has a reasonably good story covering the main talking points over here.

A synchrotron works by accelerating electrons to near the speed of light, confining them with magnetic fields they are forced around and around a circular ring. As they travel round the synchrotron the electrons emit electro-magnetic radiation in the X-ray and gamma ray region of the spectrum. At speeds close to the speed of light strange things begin to happen, one of which is that the light emitted is affected by Special Relativity and is boosted in wavelength by relativistic effects, another is that the radiation pattern becomes highly collimated. Because of these two effects synchrotrons are the brightest known sources of X-rays. Just another real life example of how an abstract physical concept has real world application.

Oh and in case your wondering (in light of many recent posts), no, Autodynamics cannot explain the light given off by a synchrotron, in fact it can't even match the observed motion of electrons around the synchrotron, oops.

Online Games - Part 2

As if the last batch wouldn't cause major losses of productivity here are a few more games worth at least 5 minutes "contemplation". Without further ado, onto the list:


The Adventures of Fancy Pants Man - Simple platformer along the lines of sonic the hedgehog, pretty cool looking.



Novel Concepts TD - Not sure what the real name of this one is, its really simple, you have to kill a horde of "creeps" using cannon, towers etc. It looks easy but is incredibly difficult to master, just check out the forum, there are actually loads of people in there discussing strategy ffs. Despite this I like it.


Word Shoot - Fancy some education while you kill the rampaging hordes? No me neither, but here you go anyway, basically you have to type words as fast as you can. The words corresponding to enemies approaching, if you get the word right you kill them. Improved my touch typing in about 3 minutes.

AD Update

As it now seems that I am persona non grata over at the AD discussion board (my messages are blocked, not even any replies by email now) I think its about time I wrapped things up. To this end I'm working on a large post, listing the problems with AD that I and others, JPS, ibaDaiRon etc have spotted. Where possible I'm going to let the ADherents talk for themselves. I'm hoping that eventually the post will make it to the top of the Google search list for Autodynamics, so when it appears any help you out there can give would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks.

Note: I have just seen the latest from DdH over at the discussion board:

Where does the rage from the AD bashers come from?

I really wonder. If we are so crazy, then no one should waste their
time coming here to be dragon slayers.

If anyone has a good explanation, I'd love here it. I'd don't understand why these people wouldn't feel stupid or embarrassed.

Anyways, I will start banning these guys now that we know they have some real emotional issues. From the blogs, we know thaty have a fixaction on bashing AD (for no good reason other than being disfunctional), they have no interest in learning it, and they can't even grasp the simple concepts of physics let alone AD.

They are simpletons who are trying to find the golden sword to kill AD. These days it's the velocity sum.

I have already started rejecting their messages. Some are in the stage of "AD people are uncivil and therefore ruin any chance of having outside people study AD". Boy, that's NOT a new one.

Next is to ban them.

Get a life people! Do something good for human kind. Stop being so disfunctional.

-David

Unfortunately as DdH is not one to hear any dissenting opinions I can't respond to that on the message board, the sole purpose of which appears to be to hold a series of ass-kissing and toadying responses to DdH. So here is my response, I know he'll get to it in a day or so.

The reason I have taken an interest Dave, is because I'm a good old rational scientist, I believe that the best theory is the one that closest matches reality, using this as a yardstick AD is complete rubbish, the more people that have that explained to them the better. No one wants to end up like Carezani, wasting over 60 years and enduring many hardships because they didn't understand something, unfortunately there are plenty of people with too little knowledge of science and mathematics that your mumbo jumbo could confuse.

This is science not religion, all theories are not equal, just because you get prissy when someone points out problems with your theory is not going to stop anyone objectively examining it. There is no rage here, the word that best sums up my feelings towards your group is pity, you have gone too far to accept that you were wrong and will now waste the rest of your lives on a pointless pursuit, no amount of evidence, no logic or mathematics can now dissuade you from this path. Its such a waste. My only aim is to point out the obvious problems so that others do not waste their own time, I think the facts speak for themselves, people can decide for themselves once they have seen them. I am fairly sure what the outcome will be.

Oh and by the way, thanks for your continued patronage of this blog.

Cool Sky Map

I came across this cool bit of astronomy software the other day. There seems to be two versions about sky-map.org and wikisky.org. They seem to be identical. They allow you to slide around the night sky with or without constellations and to search for your favourite night sky objects (like NGC galaxies), so far, so like any other planetarium software. The cool thing with this software is that it also has the SDSS imaging survey built in. So you can switch to SDSS mode and look at the actual images produced by the Sloan survey. Unfortunately the SDSS doesn't cover the whole sky so many of my favourites aren't in it.

This is really only the start, we have been talking about software like this at work for awhile now, the ultimate (wet) dream for astronomers would be software like this that started in planetarium view but over layed survey areas from the various surveys, or even little symbols to show where the HST had been pointed at an object (The first steps have been made to do this in the Astro Photo section, check it out). You would then be able to click on the little links to take you directly to the data, it would make life much simpler than searching dozens of archives to find out if what you would like to do has already been done, saving time and money for eveyone, plus it would make a great toy for everyone to enjoy.

Give it a go, there's probably plenty of weird things to be seen in the SDSS images.

The Universe, All Of It On Your Screen

Here is an image that the ICCmofos had on their door a while back, showing distances to objects stretching from the Core of the Earth to the edge of the observable Universe. Using a logarithmic scale it shows the distances to objects such as Earth orbiting satellites, the planets, nearby stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, SDSS galaxies and the Cosmic Microwave Background. It is very cool in a very nerdy way. Unfortunately I can't seem to track down who made it right now.

Of particular note are the SDSS galaxies shown at the top of the page as blue dots, the filamentary structure of the Universe on large scales is immediately obvious. I still think it is pretty amazing that we're smart enough as a species to measure such things and then are able to plot the distances to anything in the Universe on only 3-4 sheets of A4.

Addictive Online Games

Thanks to the wonder that is stumble upon I have been coming across more and more fun but distracting online games. Give them a try at your peril, they are a major time sink.

Virus 2 - Simple board like game where you have to make your virus take over the whole board.

Tetris - The Daddy of them all. Needs no introduction.

Puki - Kill a rampaging horde of what appears to be toddlers, using a laser gun. Strangely reminiscent of a "philosophical/hypothetical" question raised by CMB, "how many 5 year olds could you kill, if they kept coming at you and you had to?".

Matter - Simple block arranging pattern matching game. Think along the lines of the challenges on the Krypton Factor, if you know what that is. My best so far is 1080 (Update: 1131) points.

Dots - Connect dots to make squares, make more squares than the computer.

More From The ADherents

So DdH has replied to my post on the discussion board, with an email, he apparently doesn't want the members of the board to see it. Here it is, with my response below.

Yes or no to the question: are you SINCERELY interested in learning about AD?

Thanks,

-David

My response:

Yes I am sincerely interested in learning about AD, that however does not mean that I believe it is correct.

What you actually mean is if you let me back in will I stop being a naughty boy and asking impertinent questions, right? The answer to that is categorically no. That is not how science works, all theories are fair game, if AD cannot withstand the rough and tumble of experiment and investigation then it doesn't deserve any further work.

I'm guessing this ends my participation in the group, its good to see others are continuing in a similar vein though.

Mispronounced Domain Names

A list of 5 of my favourite (to date) mispronounced domain names:

1. Therapistfinder.com - Er, need to find a therapist?
2. Whorepresents.com - Find out the agent for a particular performer.
3. Cummingfirst.com - Cumming First United Methodist Church.
4. Scatissues.com - The website of SCA tissues.
5. Penisland.com - Sells pens.

Does anyone else have any good ones?

Medical Madness

Every once in a while a story comes along and you have to check that its not April Fools day, this is one such example from the BBC. The President of the Gambia and his health minister claim to have a cure for AIDS that works in 3 days and is a secret blend of medicinal herbs. There are very few details except that they claim that patients taking their potion have put on weight and their physical condition has improved. One patient, university lecturer Ousman Sowe had this to say:

I've noticed I've increased weight substantially over the last 10 days. I am no longer suffering from constipation, but we have yet to receive result of the tests.

I have 100% confidence in the president and I'm taking the medication with all confidence.

Sounds convincing to me, don't get me wrong it would be great if a bunch of herbs could cure a disease modern science is still years away from destroying, but I just don't buy it. To me it sounds exactly what you would expect from the placebo effect, this guy believes that the President can cure him so he feels better. This is exactly the reason why medicines are tested using the double blind technique, where neither the patient or the doctor involved knows if the real medicine or a placebo is being given. A quote from the President himself makes me even more skeptical.

I am not a witch doctor and in fact you cannot have a witch doctor. You are either a witch or a doctor.

So it would appear that while the President doesn't believe in witch doctors, he does believe that witches are real. Wow, I thought the US had it bad with their choice of leader.

Scientific Independence

More examples of White House interference in Science are beginning to appear now that the Democrats are in charge of congress. In particular it appears that the WH has been changing the wording of reports and ordering scientists not to use the words global warming in their talks or papers. For the full story click here. The White House's response, that it is only trying to provide balance to the debate is utter nonsense, there is no debate amongst anyone who has looked at the issue seriously, global warming is happening and it is being caused by humans. The only people who seem to disagree all seem to be in the paid employment of Exxon or some other oil company, like the quote says "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon him not understanding it".

Also potentially worrying is that the New York Times reported last week the WH is planning to place appointed officials in US government institutions to "supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries". What this actually means is that political appointees are going to decide policy in organisations such as the Environmental Protection Agency, so you will get another round of Bush appointing industry insiders to watch over their own industries. Just wait for the dirtier skies, polluted water and soaring profits for energy companies as all of the last two decades of legislation are undone. It amazes me that a President held in contempt by a majority of his population, whose ideas have been dramatically rejected in a recent election, can still have the balls to go about another huge power grab.

Dirty Windows

The inescapable backlash against Vista has begun, even the BBC has pitched in with this article about just what you agree too when you install Vista. Most worrying to my mind are two statements in the agreement:

"this agreement only gives you some rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights"

and

"you may not work around any technical limitations in the software"

Hmm, so they (Microsoft) actually reserve all rights for anything you do on your machine with Vista, and if the software has any problems (which of course it is loaded with them) you are not allowed to come up with any work arounds to deal with the problem.

I'll stick with my Mac thanks.

Scientific Debate?

So there has been plenty of action on the AD discussion board of late. So the background is that I had posted a point that AD couldn't possibly predict the motion of charged particles at velocities near the speed of light, the kind of thing done every day in particle accelerators, now the choice of magnetic field and accelerating electric field used is well known, even if you didn't have SR you could work it out by trial and error. My point was that as we know SR matches the observations perfectly then reasonably AD should too, I also enquired about the fact that with the neutrino gone all of particle physics breaks down, as do all of the conservation laws of particle physics, here is my post:

Thanks Will that was my next question as well. :)

As Will has pointed out the existence of the neutrino is not proven by one single experiment or one single interaction. The existence of the neutrino is an unavoidable consequence of the standard model of particle physics, it doesn't just carry off energy in the reactions that you deride, but also spin and lepton number, all of which must be conserved during reactions. Even if there hadn't been a problem with reconciling energy and momentum in reactions it still would have been postulated to account for the apparent non conservation of these quantities.

So how does AD deal with the requirement to conserve quantities such as these in reactions without the existence of the neutrino?

DdH replied with this:

Take a look at Nucleus-Nucleus Collision at:

http://www.autodynamics.org/main/index.php
?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_p\
age&PAGE_id=20&MMN_position=27:17

There you will find an explanation of particle collisions without the neutrino using AD while still conserving energy and momentum.

A question to your statement which I have heard for many years now:

Where does the idea that "spin and lepton number must be conserved during reactions" come from?

First, you have to agree and prove that all of those leptons and properties of leptons truly exist before you can conserve them. If the neutrino doesn't exist, then either the leptons count is wrong, the properties of leptons are wrong, or the equations themselves are wrong. The AD answer is the equation is wrong and the lepton count is therefore wrong.

Since particle accelerators are calibrated using SR, they are using the wrong equations and force the creation of leptons. Use AD, the neutrino is not needed and all particle interactions are explainable without the neutrino.

Please read the above article.

-David

The link of course does not answer my question. I then replied with this:

I think we have got onto two different topics here.

First the cyclotron, or particle accelerator issue. I'm assuming you agree that we do know how high the magnetic field and electric field has to be to keep electrons confined, these values have to change as the electron increases in velocity (and the theoretical values take into account the SR mass increase). These numbers can be gotten experimentally by trial and error if needs be. So what I think your saying is that for SR to be wrong but still precisely predict exactly what is observed there needs to be some other processes going on that exactly balances the "error" in SR to make it match the observed values of magnetic field and electric field. Though of course in this picture the exact opposite must be true for AD, it cannot predict the values, as the fixed m/e ratio shows, therefore there must be some unobserved phenomena going on which included would make AD match the observations. Its getting awfully contrived by this point isn't it?

The second issue I believe is similar, you are saying that not only is SR/GR wrong but so is particle physics/QM, but for some reason these theories when combined manage to reproduce the observations to the most mind shattering levels of accuracy. You are saying that lepton number is not a real conserved quantity or is not understood, but again because SR predicts exactly the right numbers, it must be that the choice of magnetic and electric fields are are producing some new particle or phenomena that makes SR exactly reproduce the observations.

You must really not be keen on the money being spent on CERN right? Billions and billions being spent and as far as you're concerned the machine itself is masking the true process. Do you have an experiment that could show the difference?

You can see why this is to put it mildly just a little hard to swallow. Physics is one big discipline, it really is impossible to change one area without altering others, as we see here.

Thanks

To which DdH had this to say:

Dear Mark:

I do have to give you an award for showing your true colors:

"most mind shattering levels of accuracy"

Could you quantify that scientifically? To me, that statement gives you away as an obvious dragon slayer here in our egroup. I don't even believe ANY experiment can say that and never will be able to say that. Things can look pretty darn good but "mind shattering"?, that is for people like my brother who is a writer of fiction. Only emotion and love or hate can generate such a statement as your's above, not scientific thought or discipline. You are in love with Einstein!

Did you read the article and study what is there? It looks like you didn't even click on it. "Reply" is not the link. Try the link this time.

You ask a question, we answer and have a paper on it, and you ignore it completely. What a way to study and learn AD!

We don't need a lesson in what the establishment says about accelerators. Carezani knows it better than the physicists themselves. That is why he wrote the article in reference. That is why we have this egroup. Not to repeat the mantras and mistakes of SR and GR, but to find their problems, correct them, and go on to a great future instead of a brick wall and endless tweaking in dead-ends.

Randall Meyer in his interview on our Science Watchdogs podcast said it best: "You can tweak any theory to do anything you want." SR and GR and the big bang and black holes and the grand daddy of them all neutrinos - they are all theories that literally have been tweaked to death.

This is an AD group to help study AD. Not SR. Please study the article sent and come back with questions. The answers are there.

Before you post and repeat what is repeated a 100,000 times a year in the establishment and universities, come back after you read Carezani's papers on Nucleus-Nucleus collision.

I will reject messages that spout off what we already know: that SR works perfectly. If it did, then Carezani would be a mechanical engineer enjoying his grandkids somewhere in Argentina. Believe me, there are times when that would be simpler.

Are you here to learn or slay the mythical dragon? Do you want to learn AD? If you don't believe in AD and it is that wrong, ignore it! You don't do this in the flat-earth society do you? Why us? Normally rage comes from fear. What is the fear people have of Carezani's work? That it could be correct? We teach a real science attitude of questioning the fundamentals, not tweaks upon tweaks to try and save a dying theory. That is what we teach.

Simple question. Are you here to learn about AD. Please don't answer "yes BUT".

Yes or no please. I will reject anything but a yes or no from you in name of this group and all who want to learn about AD and who actually read and study it. One word. If this is not acceptable to you then you may leave. Then, if you DO want to learn about AD, then come back and show that yo have read the article I gave you to read.

Thanks in advance.

And oh yes, of course we hate the billions spent at Cern and around the world on fruitless, useless things. And the public should know we waste this money so we can spend it on better things for the human race. Yes that is important to me - not wasting money. And believe me, that will be in my movie to help motivate the public to all this.

ONE WORD REPLY PLEASE!

-David

P.S. We're not worried about loosing people on this egroup. We're worried about learning and reading here and gaining critical thinkers who study and read before they hit "reply" in this instant information age.

So not knowing if he wanted me to answer his questions or answer yes/no I sent this in response, we'll just have to see what comes of it.

Would you prefer I quantify "most mind shattering levels of accuracy" or answer yes or no? It will be pretty difficult to do that or answer any of your other questions in just one word, especially if the choice is limited to yes or no. I can't even explain whether I read the link in yes or no.

So I think that will be the end of my membership of the AD community. It appears that AD is guilty of exactly the same faults that it claims exist in the real scientific community, lack of openness, unwillingness to debate etc. You will notice that at no point was my question actually answered, how do you explain that AD can't explain the motion of charged particles near the speed of light. Just like in the 6 years the board has been in existence they have not yet managed to explain what the velocity sum equation means, beyond "think more deeply", "buy the book" and "your thinking along the line of SR".

Is There A Doctor In The House?

So as a previous post elaborated I have been in discussion with the ADherents over on the Autodynamics discussion board, its been interesting, DaveDH seems pretty reasonable and is taking the time to explain things, as is someone called Travis, thanks guys. Its a load of nonsense, but at least I can see past all the contradictions to what the actual claims are now, faster than light particles, c not a constant etc etc. I think most people on the board are generally trying to be helpful, which is nice, one in particular though is a little, how shall we say?, unhinged.

Some of the classics from Dr. Lucy Hayes (not sure what she is a Dr of) to date include the following, enjoy.

On the past/future:

I am happy now because you are happy with the actual wrong paradigm.

Happily Carezani thought us that AD is Historically right now but will be historically wrong in the future regarding a new paradigm.

The only difference with SR and GR is that the next Paradigm will start following AD, differently to what happen with AD that not follow from SR-GR. Contrarily, AD jumped over SR and GR starting from Lorentz misconception and following Newton.

Unfortunately, in the future,100, 200 or 300 years from now will be many Mark supporting AD and rejecting the New Paradigm, historically right to be replace historically ........ in ...... the .... future........

Er what was going on there? Think she may have been drifting off at the end. But I think that she was claiming my offspring will one day be ADherents against the next theory. Not likely, whats the point of having kids if you can't brainwash them to hate the things you hate?

Thanks to ibaDaiRon for picking this one up, it was so difficult to read the whole thing it slipped by me.

Probably you have not clear ideas as happen with c, C and Cc because you never bought a book or read a Magazine in the Scientific Library, but of course, is needed know how to read.

This one is probably true, I was always averse to going to the library when I was an undergrad, it was always rammed with pashmina wearing girls called Jemima, or smelly rugby playing blokes called Dobbo or suchlike and they always took up all the desks despite only having 6 hours of lectures a week, get a job.
Right rant over back on track, so I think she is claiming I'm illiterate, but the irony is that its so badly written itself I can't be sure. I'm guessing English is not her native language, I mean I hope it isn't.

On reality:

I am so sorry, dear Mark, but AD is dedicated to Scientific Problems no to fantasies of **current science** regarding the Cosmos or the Einstein's GR fantasies, which have been proven wrong.

We cannot waste our time with those fantastic tales to sustain what Carezani, the Experiments and the observation show wrong.

She hasn't actually come up with any experiments that disprove SR/GR even when I pointed out that "Nobel prizes are worth real money you know".

Disaster

This is what ACS looks like on the ground...

Disaster, the main instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope died on Saturday. The camera, the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) is the most in demand instrument on the telescope. The last call for proposals which only closed on Friday had 747 proposals to use HST, 498 (one of which was mine dammit) of which were to use ACS, thats 67% to you stat lovers. It looks like its not going to be possible to repair the instrument, at least not before the next servicing mission sometime next year, and even then there probably isn't enough time to do much while they are there. This is going to prove to be a huge loss to the astronomical community as no other instrument is capable of the fine resolution over a relatively large field of view that ACS provided. The servicing mission will install a new camera WFPC3, but this just won't be as sensitive as ACS at certain wavelengths (like the ones I'm interested in).

... and this is what it could do when in space.

It looks like we can kiss goodbye to our HST proposal, unless we can come up with a clever way to use one of the other instruments. Hmm, back to work.

Through The Looking Glass

Contact has been made, I'm now a fully signed up member of the Autodynamics Yahoo group. Fear not I haven't been assimilated, or turned to the dark side but it does provide an opportunity to ask some interesting questions. You can see my posts starting here, as you can see I haven't been very original with my screen name. As they already knew who I was, from this very blog, there didn't seem much point in trying to hide my identity. Should I turn up murdered, by a hail of electro-muons (WTF are they supposed to be anyway?), you'll know two things, that they were right after all and that what you don't believe in can still hurt you.

I have only had a few posts so far but have managed to discern certain features already. So far most of the people posting seem very keen to help, in sort of the creepy way you get with religious fanatics, you know what I mean, they offer you loads of free tea and biscuits, you sit there quietly nibbling on a rich tea but all the while you know they're eyeing up your soul, figuring out what it must be worth in the afterlife. Some of the responses are simply mistaken, some confused and some to put it mildly simply bat-shit mad, as in naked man running down the street claiming he can't get the spiders off mad, for example this one.

I have already learned several interesting "facts" about AD, like the fact that in AD E=mc^2 is believed to be true but c can change. So it applies differently to different objects, for electrons/protons c is the speed of light, but if they need to postulate (that's a fancy word for make up) a new particle that can travel faster than light, say the pico-graviton then c can actually be anything, like 27, 100 or the average IQ of and ADherent (50) divided by the number of times electro-muons detected in actual experiments (0) = infinity times the speed of light (Apologies just couldn't resist). Yes I know that's mental, but there you have it. To date I have had ignored the points where AD just doesn't work with what we know about the Universe, things like the existence of neutrinos, in favour of looking for inconsistencies in the theory itself, but I have learned that it isn't so much a theory as a bunch of ad hoc bolt ons, so if you disprove one they just stick another one on, like the non constancy of c as a speed limit. In future I think I may well bring in the selective way they apply their theory, any experiments they can match are good, any they cannot must be wrong etc.

So far its been fun, its forcing me to understand real Physics better, which is good (and useful in my line of work), but I think its also quite interesting to see the dynamics (no pun intended) of the group and how they respond to queries, so far mostly through constant exhortations to buy the book. Which of course I have no intention of doing.

A Short History Of The Dark Side - Part 3

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, a view of the distant Universe, at a time before the influence of Dark Energy began to be felt, we think.

I think its time to finally round off the long running "Dark Side" trilogy, and like all final chapters it has to be bigger better and more exciting. So sorry but this one is pretty long.

When we left off we had been investigating the properties of the mysterious Dark Matter that permeates the Universe, despite being strange (only interacting through the force of gravity) DM is nevertheless a physical entity, in most theories some form of elementary particle. The next constituent of the Dark Universe is much weirder, being some strange form of energy which exerts a negative pressure on the Universe causing it to expand. Now I think many Astronomers are happy to admit that they are not happy about Dark Energy, everyone seems reasonably happy to admit the existence of Dark Matter, it simply turns up too often on too many scales, but the properties of Dark Energy at present are known from only one or two methods and even then not too accurately, making naturally cautious Astronomers worry about conclusions being drawn from them. Nevertheless the history and implications of a Dark Energy dominated Universe are interesting, so lets have a look at them.

Hubble's observation that essentially all galaxies are receding from us with a velocity that is proportional to the distance between the Milky Way and them was a vital discovery that provided the first evidence that the Universe was expanding. Naturally the idea of a finite age for the Universe (revolutionary at the time) intrigued people, what had happened in the past and what would happen in the future? For a long period of time the belief in the astronomical community was that the Universe started in a Big Bang and that over time the force of gravity would begin to counteract the expansion and slow it.


Hubble's original plot showing that distance to a galaxy and recessional velocity (or redshift) are related.

The mathematical formalism that determines the behaviour of the Universal Expansion shows that in this picture there are 3 possibilities for the fate of the Universe:

1. The Universe is not dense enough to halt the expansion and the Universe expands forever.
2. The Universe is exactly dense enough to overcome the expansion when the Universe reaches infinite size. It has the so called "critical density".
3. The Universe is more than dense enough to counteract the expansion and the Universe re-collapses.

Astronomers were therefore keen to determine which of these fates awaited the Universe. To do that they could make use of one of the best standard candles: Type 1a supernovae. In Type 1a supernovae a dense white dwarf that has been accreting matter from a companion suddenly passes over a limiting mass: the Chandrasekhar mass. At this mass the star becomes unstable, undergoes rapid runaway fusion and blows itself apart. Because the Chandrasekhar limit is so precisely defined it means that all Type 1a supernovae have almost exactly the same intrinsic brightness, they also have unique signatures in there spectra that mean they can be separated from other non-uniform SN, hence they can be used as standard candles. Put simply, one supernovae that is observed to be a quarter as bright as another must be twice as far away. To make this technique even more useful these things are bright, as in bright enough to be seen across billions of light years.

In the mid 1990's two groups were using these Type 1a supernovae as standard candles, in attempt to measure how much the expansion of the Universe had slowed since the Big Bang. To do this they combined the physical distance information from the supernovae with the redshift of the galaxy in which the supernovae occurred, this redshift through Hubble's law is also a distance but one that depends on the expansion of the Universe. Hence by plotting one against the other you get a plot of how the expansion of the Universe has changed over time, in essence you are looking for how Hubble's linear relation changes or curves over larger times/distances. When both groups plotted their results they both found the same puzzling result: instead of the rate of the expansion slowing over time it has actually been increasing. Damn it, I'm sure both teams thought as they contemplated all the extra work involved. But very rapidly it probably occurred to them that there's a Nobel prize in it for someone, hence a healthy dose of rivalry between the two teams.

You can see this in the top half of the figure above, which shows the results from the two surveys, what you see is the magnitude of the supernovae (a distance indicator) plotted against its redshift (a measure of the expansion of the Universe). The three lines show three predictions for the constituents of the Universe. Two dashes are for a Universe where the entire critical energy density is made up by mass (matter and dark matter), the three dashes are for a Universe where only 30% of the critical density exists in mass, and the solid line (which is best fit by the data) is for one where the Universe has the critical density, 30% being due to mass and 70% due to dark energy. New data on more and more supernovae at larger and larger distances has all agreed very well with the original results, meaning the Dark Energy has slowly become accepted as just another constituent of the Universe.

So what could be this strange Dark Energy? To date there are two main contenders, A cosmological constant and quintessence.

The cosmological constant can be thought of as a pressure of a vacuum, particle physics in fact predicts that empty space should have vacuum fluctuations that provide exactly the type of negative pressure required, unfortunately the predictions from particle physics for the level of this pressure are out by up to 120 orders of magnitude, often called the most incorrect prediction in history, oops. The problem is how to cancel out most of this pressure but not all of it, to date no one is sure how to do this. The implications of a cosmological constant are that the expansion will necessarily increase without end, as space is what is causing the expansion the more space there is the more expansion there is. Eventually all structures not gravitationally bound will be separated by so much space light will never be able to pass between them, turning the Universe Dark. In other words in a Milky Way in the distant future, all of the galaxies beyond out local group will slip beyond this distance and disappear forever. Not a very cheerful thought, but hey, who said existence had to be cheerful?

Quintessence is thought to be some sort of particle-like excitation with a possibly dynamical nature. In other words it need not be a constant value per area of space as the cosmological constant, it could vary in strength over time and possibly have different strengths in different areas of the Universe. This is similar to the behaviour of the field that is thought to have caused the intense period of expansion in the early Universe known as inflation. Quintessence could even reverse and cause a contraction of the Universe at some point.

So where does that leave us? What is the eventual fate of the Universe? The truth is that we really don't know for sure, our theoretical knowledge of what is causing the accelerating expansion is not good enough to allow us to determine with certainty what the Universe in the very distant future will be like. The best we can do at present is to try to determine if either of the two cases above can be ruled out. The trick to determining which of these two cases is correct (if either is) is to extend the observations of Type 1a SN to higher redshift and track how the speed of expansion changes. There are many studies ongoing to try to do this to higher and higher precision, expect more interesting results in the coming years.

More Gravity Fun - Update

So it looks like the good people over at the Autodynamics discussion group have decided to answer my queries (specifically this one) in the most emphatic way possible; by totally ignoring it. They have posted a response to a previous question without allowing my message to be published. Now maybe this is because they are trying to come up with a solution, but that really shouldn't matter, they should be open about the issues raised and see if any of the other 165 members of the board can come up with a solution.

I'm going to repost the message tomorrow, if it is blocked again I'm going to have to put this down to yet more hypocrisy on their part, after all they are always claiming mainstream science ignores or suppresses alternative views.

Britain On The Web

Whilst searching for pictures for my previous post I came across this little gem: geograph. The aim of the site is simple, to collect at least one photograph of the main geographical features of every 1km x 1km grid square in the UK ordinance survey maps. So far they have over 300,000 images covering almost 150,000 square km of the UK (or about 62% of the surface area of the UK). Whats cool about the site is that you can search by postcode/placename, or by clickable map and find any photograph taken within that area.

As you would expect most photographs in a given area tend to focus on the same areas, so the grid square for Durham City is of course dominated by pictures of the castle and cathedral. However there is also an attempt to show the real use of areas as well, so the Durham grid square has pictures of the annual miner parade, London has views of gridlocked cars etc.

The question now is whether or not Google already offers this, and if not how long until it does.

New Links.

I'm planning on periodically adding to the links section on the sidebar to the right, I'm not sure how often this will be, it all depends on how much work I have on. Anyway, here is the first set of new links, all to do with pictures of Science:

The Hubble Heritage site has a very good selection of some of the HST's greatest hits, many will be familiar but there are one or two new ones, and others that have changed slightly since they were first released. See them in all their glory here.

In a similar vein, but looking the other way, here is a link to the US Geological Survey's image gallery, check out the galleries called Earth As Art.

The Earth Science Picture of the Day, is set up along much the same lines as the Astro-Picture of the Day, in particular check out the archives for many spectacular pictures of the Earth and natural phenomena.

The National Geographic also has a picture of the day, the archive found here is again worth a look (its where the picture at the top comes from).

More Gravity Fun

In an attempt to get an explanation of the apparent inconsistency in Autodynamics explained in a previous post I have sent the following message to their discussion board:

Hi All
As you are probably aware I have been looking at your
Autodynamics work, I freely admit that I just don't get
your velocity sum equation, but for now I think a more
obvious problem with Autodynamics is its treatement of
E=mc^2. I wonder if you could clear up my confusion?

In Autodynamics it is stated throughout the website
that E=mc^2 is assumed to be true, it is then used in
the derivation of the Autodynamics kinetic energy
equation, which is used to calculate the Autodynamics
solutions for problems like the Compton effect etc. This
is fine as far as I can tell, E=mc^2 is pretty securely
demonstrated.

The problem is in Autodynamics treatment of gravity,
the pico-graviton is calculated, apparently using
perihelion advance of Mercury, to be a massive particle
travelling at superluminal velocities. This itself is not
a surprise, all theories of push gravity tend to have very
superluminal particles. The problem lies in the fact that
even in Autodynamics, it is impossible for any massive
object to travel faster than the speed of light if E=mc^2
is correct.

So how can you reconcile the fact that to explain gravity
Autodynamics requires E=mc^2 to be false, but to explain
particle phenomena it requires it to be true? You claim
both predictions as significant successes of your theory
but they are mutually exclusive.

I hope you can see that this is an interesting an important
point and try to explain it without too much bluster.

It apparently has to be moderated by the group, so we'll just have to see how open they are about criticism. I'm quite happy to be proven wrong, we shall see.

Banned Books

Thanks to the wonder that is stumbleupon I've just come across this little gem: Forbidden Library (and through it to this one) a list of books previously banned or objected to. I'm pleased to say I have actually read quite a few of them, probably making me a godless pinko subversive in the eyes of many of the type of people that seem to have done most of the objecting.

Along with the obvious choices, 1984, Fahrenheit 451 etc there are some pretty unusual choices, who I wonder would really object to Charlie and The Chocolate Factory because it espouses "a poor philosophy of life", alright both film versions were creepy, but I always remember the book being alright.

I'm thinking of using the list as a sort of "must read" compilation, though I'm not that fussed about reading "The Celluloid Closet", or "Where's Waldo" for that matter.

Fun with Gravity

What is gravity? One of the fundamental questions of physics, a force which affects our every move. Any successful theory seeking to explain the Universe must be able to explain gravity. To date there have been two successful theories of gravity (or gravitation).

The first, Newtons theory of gravity postulates that mass gives off a force that attracts other mass, this force decreases in strength as the inverse of the square of the distance between the two masses, such that

F = G*m1*m2 / r^2

This theory was incredibly successful in predicting the motions of planets, moons and other heavenly bodies, but it lacks a cause, no particle has been found that carries the gravitational force, a problem that Newton himself worried about, never quite being able to reconcile himself to this "action at a distance".

The second theory Einsteins General Relativityhas superseded Newton's theory for an important reason, it better reproduces the observations, especially in those regimes where gravity is strong. Einstein explained gravity as being due to mass curving space and time, so gravity is not a force pulling on a mass, it is a result of mass curving space/time such that what appears to be a straight path is actually curved, the moon follows a straight path but to an observer because of the curvature of space/time it appears to orbit the Earth. Of course this merely shifts the question, its now no longer a question of how gravity transmits force from one mass to another, but how does mass itself influence space/time? It is an active field of physics at present to try to answer this question.

The ADherents to Autodynamics believe that they have come up with a theory that explains the inverse square law of gravity naturally and whats more provides a physical explanation for it. This explanation is actually just a re-tread of a theory that was popular until the turn of the 19th century, the Le Sage theory of gravitation. I'll let the Autodynamics people to explain the theory (in which they use the term pico-graviton instead of Le Sage ultramundane corpuscle):

The Pico-Graviton (PG) is very similar to the concept called the "graviton". The concept of gravitons is that gravity is created by the "shadowing" affect. In affect, celestial bodies partially block the the flux of pico gravitons causing a low pressure area between the bodies. This pushes the bodies together.

The main difference between the pico-graviton and gravitons, is that pico-gravitons are somehow absorbed by mass. Most pico-gravitons push on the mass, but a very very tiny fraction are absorbed.

Now, there are many problems with this theory, as listed on this wikipedia page, go ahead its an interesting read. For now I think what would be more interesting that picking the overall theory apart (as the wiki article effectively does) would be to examine the logical inconsistencies in Autodynamics through this theory of gravitation. On this page the Autodynamics people explain their investigations of their version of the le Sage theory:

Using calculations for perihelion advance, he came up with the following numbers: the pico graviton has the mass of around 1x10-81 kilograms, and travels at around 27 times the speed of light. Another person in the SAA has claimed to find approximately the same values for the properties of the pico-graviton through completely different methods but the calculations have not be confirmed.

So the pico-graviton to explain the observations, must be both massive (as in it has some non-zero mass) and travel at superluminal velocities. Now this is a problem, even for Autodynamics, never mind the real world, on this page when talking about faster than light travel they state:

Autodynamics says that if E=mc^2 is correct, than no mass can accelerate beyond the speed of light. Why? Because in Autodynamics, mass moves by expending energy to push itself forward. According to current equations, all mass, no matter what the size could only result in a single photon going at the speed of light.

So far so good, they correctly point out that if E=mc^2 is true, then faster than light travel is impossible for massive objects even in Autodynamics. So for the pico-graviton to be real, and for it to match the observations, E=mc^2 must be false. Now lets just ignore for the moment the mountains of experimental data that show E=mc^2 to be true, lets just look deeper at the Autodynamics for a second. Specifically here. At the bottom of the page you will notice that the very same E=mc^2 has been used to derive the Autodynamics kinetic energy equations. Those very same kinetic energy equations that are supposed to explain amongst other things: muon decay, Compton effect, and nucleus-nucleus interactions.

So the question is, is E=mc^2 correct and hence the pico-graviton non-existent, or is E=mc^2 false and all of the AD "solutions" to atomic processes incorrect? A perfect example of why in Physics its usually impossible to change one "small" thing, everything is connected tweak one parameter to better fit some observations and you may well make the fit to other observations much worse. There are many other objections to the whole pico-graviton idea (especially the superluminal part), which I may get round to posting if I can sort out the maths.