COSMOLOGY AND GRAVITATION PARADOXES
Tuesday, August 29, 2000
Little did I know.
Anyway, I have moved the original exchange here, along with some other comments.
- The speed of propogation of gravity
- A COPY of my VIEW notes on this.
- Don. McArthur on references
- Mr. Schwartz objects to Mr. Dobbins
- And now Mr. Homan from Brandeis
Steve R. Hastings [steveha@animal.blarg.net]
This is totally fascinating.
Conclusion: The speed of gravity is at least 2x10^10c
http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/gravityspeed.html
--
Steve R. Hastings "Vita est"
steve@hastings.org http://www.blarg.net/~steveha
Fascinating is an understatement; this is the clearest exposition of the problem I have ever seen. Thanks. Whether one accepts the explanation is another matter; but the problem is there.
==
The main problem we have seen with both General Relativity and Lorentzian Relativity, apart from those which Tom Van Flandern, author of the so-called ‘paper’ at
http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/gravityspeed.html
brought up and then disposed of in summary fashion, is the definition of the ‘local frame’. Using nebulous terms like ‘mean gravity field’ doesn’t make this problem go away; the main contention of Special Relativity in this area is that there -is no- local frame of reference which has any significance in determining the values for propagation of light, aberration of light, and probably gravitation, as well. While SR is obviously incomplete for the reasons cited by Mr. Van Flandern, it is -known- to be incomplete by mainstream researchers, and much work on gravitational propagation (or whether gravity does indeed propagate, as we understand the term in light of De Broglie) is currently underway. The Lorenzian advocates haven’t been able to explain their definition of ‘locality’ in any meaningful way, to the best of my knowledge.
There is abundant literature on SR dealing with the seeming inconsistencies which Van Flandern brings up in his ‘paper’, and then mentions in passing as being "non-trivial". They are forbiddingly described as non-trivial, perhaps, because he is ultimately advocating a common-sense approach to cosmology, requiring no special knowledge of mathematics nor original experimentation to generate grand, sweeping hypotheses on how the universe works. His message seems to be that mainstream cosmological researchers are pointy-headed acolytes who either purposely or through accidental oversight have made things out to be far more complex than they really are, and that the ‘truth’ of the matter is readily discernible by Everyman, if only he had all the facts laid out for him in plain English. No mathematics required.
Things aren’t that simple, however, and given the content of Mr. Van Flandern’s Web site, it seems to me that his intent is to use pseudoscientific hucksterism in order to hawk his sensationalistic books. He claims a PhD from Yale; I do not know whether or not he does indeed possess a doctorate, but his modus operandi is to make startling claims about the nature of the universe intended to spark interest in the layman, and then to proceed in buttressing his claims using carefully-selected rhetoric calculated to stroke the ego of the reader, employing just enough scientific jargon and showing a few complicated-looking equations to make it all seem plausible to the non-specialist.
This is not science - it is sensationalism masquerading as science. While Dr. Beckmann had some interesting things to say on relativity and the nature of gravity, his theories were not experimentally validated at the time of his death nor have they been since, and he did not describe them as being validated, only as areas for further investigation. His work is being prostituted by advocates of pseudocosmology who cite him as a reference in constructing their own half-baked "theories of everything".
There is a whole coven of these pseudocosmologists, and they routinely cite one another’s works as references in order to give themselves the color of respectability, in much the same fashion as do so-called "creation scientists" in their own various publications. Claims of lost, misunderstood (by all but the claimants, naturally), or suppressed scientifc discoveries by Huygens, Faraday, Tesla, and even Leonardo da Vinci are also favorite hobbyhorses of theirs.
Scrutiny of Mr. Van Flandern’s Web site -
http://www.metaresearch.org/ - provides abundant evidence of his sensationalistic bent. There is his supposed ‘proof’ of the artificiality so-called "face" at Cydonia; his disputation of the Big Bang hypothesis (while there is still some contention about the Big Bang, there’s no original scientific work in evidence by Mr. Van Flandern, just the by-now-familiar assertions wrapped in jargon), his assertion that observed quasars are much nearer than is generally accepted (this is extrapolated from his rejection of the Big Bang theory), of the fact that life on Mars was really found by the original Viking landers but that the data were suppressed or misinterpreted, and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.Informed skepticism is crucial to the advancement of scientific knowledge. However, it is an insult to the memory of Dr. Beckmann for his work to be shanghaied by people such as Mr. Van Flandern. Van Flandern and his ilk are more sophisticated and subtle than the Roswell fanatics, yet ultimately exhibit much the same characteristics of pseudoscientific rhetoric, condescension towards mainstream researchers, and paranoia for which their more obviously loony UFO-obsessed intellectual cousins are infamous.
I ask you to please keep this in mind when posting links to Mr. Van Flandern’s site, or to any sites which he recommends. I have no personal axe to grind with these people; I am simply opposed in principle to their ‘X-Files’ mentality, and feel that they prey upon the uninformed for material gain, and to the derogation of legitmate scientific inquiry.
In my opinion, it is an outrage that such as they would claim a true scientist like Dr. Beckmann as a reference for their "work"; I don’t think he would have given them the time of day. As you were a friend of his, I thought you should be aware of what these people are doing in his name.
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Roland Dobbins <
rdobbins@hawaii.rr.com> // 808.351.6110 voiceNull, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane and empty of meaning for all time.
-- Pope Innocent X, on the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648
I was wondering how long this would take. Thank you.
Van Flandern nevertheless does exposit fairly clearly the paradox: if gravity has a propagation speed, then it is either very much larger than c or everything else has difficulties. These don't go away. Nor does the question Ernst Mach asked about the 'fixed stars' and the general inertial frame of reference. I don't anywhere claim to be comfortable with cosmological mathematics and the Einstein Tensor is a bit beyond me; but I suspect that we haven't yet and never will exhaust the oddities of this universe.
It is probably naive to ask, but how does the universe know that you are sitting on a piano stool spinning rather than that you are staying still and the universe is spinning around you? I have never got a real answer that, at least not one that satisfied me, which is probably a larger confession of ignorance on my part than any flaws in the physics equations. But I have asked it of some pretty high powered people, and either I didn't understand what they said, or it amounted to "Oh come on now..."
I haven't seen any of the Cydonia materials and you clearly are more familiar with these people than I am. I have now taken the trouble to drill upwards to the "Dolphin" host site, and I fear this isn't quite what I thought it was. Thanks for pointing it out. The paper certainly lays out the speed of gravity problem well, and I confess I didn't read much beyond that. But then I never really understood what Petr Beckmann was saying either. I fear some questions are well beyond my understanding, and knowing enough to have a sane opinion about them would take more time than I have left.
===
>It is probably naive to ask, but how does the universe know that you are
sitting on a piano stool spinning rather than that you are staying still and the universe is spinning around you?
Under Special Relativity, there are two short and somewhat trite answers to this question:
1. It doesn’t matter, because everything is relative. Both are simultaneously true. It depends upon your inertial frame of reference, which SR does not consider a positive actor on things as the Lorentzian advocates believe, but rather a convenient term we use so as to be able to communicate meaningfully. It’s sort of like choosing your viewpoint in writing; you can write using first-person, third-person, or third-person omniscient depending upon the effect you wish to achieve and how great an overall scope you wish to present to your readers for their consideration at any given moment, and still tell the same basic story, albeit from differing points of view and with different emphases. The author’s choice of tense and the publisher’s typographical format may also be applied to this analogy, as we’re talking about space, time, and spacetime, which are three distinct concepts under SR.
2. The universe doesn’t much care whether you are rotating, anyway - it cares about any angular momentum you exhibit, or any angular momentum you impart, whether to microbes on your skin or to a cat you’re swinging on a tether. From your viewpoint, the rotation itself doesn’t matter much, either, but rather the -apparent- angular momentum exhibited by the room as it for all practical purposes spins around you, causing you to lose your lunch. Inertia explains the disturbing inner-ear effects.
If you want something with more detail, give me a bit, and I’ll see what I can come up with . . .
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Roland Dobbins <
rdobbins@hawaii.rr.com> // 808.351.6110 voiceNull, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane and empty of meaning for all time.
-- Pope Innocent X, on the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648
Yes, precisely. In which case if I'm standing still the distant universes are rotating at speeds something above the speed of light, no? With consequently colossal amounts of angular momentum. Which presents a slight problem. Or if that is impossible, then we can tell which of us is doing the rotating, which gives a frame of reference. And that does present some difficulties. This is of course Ernst Mach's question, and one I haven't yet seen answered to my satisfaction; which may merely be a reflection of my lack of study of the problem. It's not something that has great impact on my life, since I didn't choose to go into cosmology in any serious way.
But I have noticed that there are some odd paradoxes in the modern view of the universe. Not that they were not there in the old-fashioned view…
===
I ought to know better than to say anything about relativity. It's one of those areas where classical logic doesn't seem to apply, and I don't seem to have the mental tools to accept paradoxes as normal things. I also start with the premise that people who claim to know what they are talking about have at least tried to make sense of what they say. That latter is I fear a real problem: there are people with odd intellectual axes to grind, and I guess the cosmology question attracts a lot of them. Most are easy to spot since they haven't paid the least attention to what's already known. Others are a bit more plausible.
Years ago I wrote an essay that I delivered as the C. P. Snow Memorial Lecture in Ithaca, later incorporated into some of my other writings: the essence was that novelists need only be plausible. We don't have to prove anything, merely make you believe it, at least for the duration of a story. Lawyers want evidence: they do want to "prove" something, but only in order to win a case. Since the law is adversarial, lawyers can and do select their facts, presenting only those most favorable to their own side of the matter, and if forced to present facts against their own view they can and do minimize their importance.
Scientists aren't supposed to do that. Scientists are supposed to look for data, which is to say, to incorporate all the facts into their case. Of course many scientists do act like lawyers, and a few act like novelists; if they are lucky they were on the right side of the issue, so their anti-scientific behavior never comes out, and no apparent harm was done to the scientific process. If they were wrong, though, they can and do steer whole generations down the wrong path, wasting a lot of talent and resources.
As to journalists, I come from a tradition that says journalists are more like scientists than lawyers: while one may have passionate views, one is still required to be more devoted to the truth than to one's own opinions. I am not sure that view holds with some modern journalists, and worse, with some modern science writers and reporters.
All this is brought about by an exchange of letters on which I don't have any expertise: someone showed me an URL to a site that detailed a paradox I've long known but seldom thought about, on the propagation speed of gravity. (I've even used the device of "the unknown speed of gravity wave propagation" in novels, where all I have to do is get you to believe it for a few minutes.) The exposition at that URL seemed clear as far as I followed it, and I put up the link without much comment as something to look at that might be important.
One of my polymath readers has his objections, strongly felt. The exchange is given above; but it did get me to thinking about my own obligations here, and the Internet in general.
The Internet is often thought of as a source of lies, and it can be that; but it's also a source of real information. How does one tell the difference? Two ways, of course: first, if a source talks nonsense as if it were truth in areas you're familiar with, you're certainly justified in a great deal of skepticism about what's said in areas you are not familiar with; and second, do the sources seem to care about truth? Anyone can be wrong, and most will be wrong once in a while, either through mistake or genuine error; but those dedicated to truth will correct this.
Anyway, I leave relativity to experts, and if I really need to sound as if I know what I am talking about for a story, I have a number of physicist friends I can ask; for casual conversation I go back to what Dick Feynman once told me about the slit-interferometer experiment: "Sometimes things just don't make sense, and that's just the way it is. Live with it. More tea?"
Things that don't make sense can be a lot of fun, if you can apply logic to all the parts that aren't just plain illogical…
===
Not being a cosmologist myself, but I have read of recent experiments in quantum effects and properties that solidly supports the idea that certain forms of "information" are indeed propagated across the universe instantaneously. There appears to be an underlying "bookkeeping" system employed by the universe that acts without reference to time or distance.
Such being the case, and seeing as how no one has been able to comfortably fit gravity in unified theories, I wouldn’t be too surprised to find out that gravity actually belongs in the quantum realm, with all its peculiarities.
It’s all there for our eternal stimulation and speculation!
Donald W. McArthur
***********************************
If I ever marry it will be
on the sudden impulse, as a
man shoots himself.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The assumption of an absolute frame of reference is of course precisely what Relativity denies, as I understand it. Of course God is the "unmoved mover", i.e. an absolute frame of reference, but that says nothing about science, as God need not reveal His frame of reference to us, at least not in this world.
And I return to Dick Feynman. Sometimes you just have to live with it. Have some more tea?
===
Erich Schwarz [schwarz@cubsps.bio.columbia.edu]
Dr. Pournelle,
Can Mr. Dobbins actually refute any of the empirical points made by Van Flandern in his paper on the speed of gravitation? Or is putting ‘paper’ in quotes, expressing faux-disbelief in Mr. Van Flandern’s CV (which includes 20 years of astronomy and work on GPS), and tarring Van Flandern’s gravitation arguments through guilt by association with less credible arguments Van Flandern makes elsewhere, to be taken as adequate rebuttals?
I am unconvinced that there is an ironclad line between "trustworthy scientist" and "kook". It is true that the professionalization of science has mostly driven out eccentrics from science. It’s also true that the most important technological innovation in molecular biology in this generation was by Kary Mullis [1], who is probably not the sort of Ph.D. Mr. Dobbins would approve of either.
How about just writing a direct rebuttal of Van Flandern’s argument? True, that would involve WORK, but it’d be less snide.
- Erich Schwarz
[1] Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction. This completely overhauled molecular biology and earned Mullis a well-deserved Nobel Prize. Other than that achievement, Mullis is, in my opinion, a crank whose views on AIDS and HIV are positively pernicious. But this has *no* relevance to his actual achievement.
It is certainly the case that there's no firm line between "trustworthy scientist" and "kook" and many have been both. In this particular case I have no idea; as I said, van Flandern's paper seemed a clear exposition of a problem I have known about for a long time. Unfortunately, it also goes well beyond my ability to judge how serious it is; at least not without a lot more work than I care to put into a question where there aren't any answers.
The late G. Harry Stine died convinced that the Dean Drive worked. Harry was certainly a serious engineer -- he would have been dismayed at being called a scientist -- but he also took seriously some claims for psychic phenomena that I find absurd. Which didn't stop his being a good friend and someone I would turn to for engineering, and for that matter scientific, advice. As to the Dean Drive, which certainly would violate most of what we think we know about physics, Robert Forward put it about as well as anyone: when you see one that works, let me know. Until then, I decline to pay much attention to theory on how it might work. Bring a result.
Erich Schwarz [schwarz@cubsps.bio.columbia.edu]
Subject: Oh, by the way, about that Van Flandern "'paper'"...
...it’s been published:
Van Flandern, T. (1998). The speed of gravity—What the experiments say. Phys. Lett. A, vol. 250, issue 1-3 (12/21/98), pp. 1-11.
Does a ‘paper’ graduate to just being a paper when it’s peer-reviewed and published in a mainstream physics journal? Please advise.
--Erich Schwarz
Interesting. I think I am going to let you two fight this out, without me…
==
On your question as to how the Universe would know the difference between you spinning on your piano stool and the Universe as a whole spinning with you sitting still. My answer is rather simple: hold your arm out in front of you and let go of a tennis ball. If the ball stays in front of you (no gravity), the Universe is spinning. If the ball flies away from you on a tangent to your rotation, you are spinning. This test (or a similar one) is possible because a rotating frame is not an inertial one. The ball will follow a straight path in the inertial frame, so you immediately know which frame is which.
On the postulate that the force of gravity travels much, much faster than the speed of light: My reaction is "so what?". General Relativity already explains all of the issues raised by Mr. Van Flandern. No mention of gravity speed is made in GR; the way GR is constructed, none is necessary. (Gravitational waves travel at c, of course, but that is a different issue.) Postulating and examining a speed for the force of gravity may be interesting, but I don’t understand the fuss. Mr Van Flandern says himself that this postulate changes nothing in the current predictions made by General Relativity. To me, this seems like postulating an additional property of gravity that does nothing but comfort our classically trained perceptions, perhaps that was his point? Hummm....
- Dan Homan
Dan Homan, Graduate Student - Brandeis Astrophysics Group
e-mail:
dch@quasar.astro.brandeis.eduWeb:
http://www.astro.brandeis.edu/BRAG/people/dch.htmlIf it's that simple why does the question remain? Incidentally, if the propagation speed of gravity is faster, doesn't that allow transmission of information at faster than light speed, which has some severe effects on causality in the relativistic scheme?
