Alan Robinson

Well I just googled relativity thought experiments, and one of the first sites that came up was this; http://aether.lbl.go...xperiment1.html If you read the introduction you will find assumption 2 is the constancy of the speed of light. Basta. No mention of vacuums. What a very poor mode of expression for a supposed pedagogue. Experiment 1 involves a world where we all walk about in a pure vacuum. If that isn't metaphysical, then I sure don't know what is. I can't be bothered to go through the other thought experiments, because that website seems reminiscent of the others I have seen on the same subject.......a fantasy world with boxes in which a light pulse bounces backwards and forwards supposedly acting as a clock. Anyway, never mind what I think, here are a couple of people who really have a complaint to make about special relativity.... http://www.wbabin.ne...nce/mueller.pdf It can be a bit prolix - like me - so maybe you would like to go straight to page 18 where begins the extensive list of errors the writers claim were made by Einstein and relativists in the meantime . I particularly like the following critcisms of Einstein and his followers, which are epistemological; - They derive assertions out of negations - Einstein lacked consistency when desribing time dilation, sometimes putting the same things are, and sometimes appear to be. - They claim while almost everything is relative, the speed of light is not, yet never proved it so. - They claim that theories of relativity uniquely explain certain observations, as though there never will be other valid explanations - They ridicule common sense, though fail to explain how their metaphysical speculations are in any way superior. And now we have this latest suspicion about particles going faster than light. Hmmm. I think I'll keep an open mind.

The speed of light is not constant and never was. Light travels at different speeds through different materials. http://en.wikipedia...._speed_of_light The problem that has arisen in this thread is caused by poor teaching. As soon as physics in the classroom comes to relativity, teachers start warbling about the constant. What they in fact mean is the believed maximum speed of light. But as I wrote about A level maths, teaching is often very poor, and students are required to cram rather than understand. Thus so many people entertain the idea that light always travels at one single speed; it doesn't. That's why Einstein proposed that time passes at different rates accoring to who is doing the looking, so to speak. According to him, if Pottyprof approaches a light source at the speed of light, time is standing still for Pottyprof. In my view this is not physics, but metaphysics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics

Er, not Wikipedia at least. For them in is just a fundamental property, meaning that nobody knows. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_charge

At the risk of repeating myself, my view is that much modern physics is not physics at all, but metaphysics.

I confess having learned relativity in robot fashion a long time ago, but I also confess I never believed a word of it. The whole business is messy. First the Michaelson Morley experiment, and the speed of light is constant on Earth. Then, it is only constant in a vacuum. There was no explained connection between the speed of light being constant, and colour in refracted rays. Relativity and Quantum Theory cannot agree on gravity. Now we have this. It was enough for me when I was fed that tripe about thought experiments, and clocks moving at close to the speed of light. I mean, who but a fool can think that time and the position of a clock's hands are the same thing?

That's what I'd call incomplete combustion.

Mine's only 4 years old, and the way underwriters treat people nowadays, I'll probably get nowt if I receive a direct hit. Mind you, I'll be inside if it hits, so it'll be curtains anyway.

According to the Danish meteorological Institute, the latest edition of The Times Atlas shows the Greenland icecap having reduced in area by 15% since 1999, for which there is no scientific evidence. The most conspicuous difference between the 1999 and 2011 editions concerns Greenland’s east coast, which is now wrongly shown to be free if ice. DMI suspects the Times cartographers have used satellite photographs to establish the extent of the ice. “Greenland’s coast certainly does look dark on satellite photos, but that does not mean the ice is gone. In fact, the darkness is due to dirt, dust and volcanic ash, particularly so in southeast Greenland.” Though the Times Atlas has it wrong, the ice is reducing. It is thought that between 2003 and 2008 something between 168*10**9 and 268*10**9 tonnes of ice has disappeared. http://www.dmi.dk/dm...sisen_for_lille

Yep. Here is TanMan himself.

In The Netherlands the saying goes "God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland". I am sure from a civil engineering business perspective the Dutch would jump at the chance to reclaim the entire North Sea. But I'd say doing so would alter their climate considerably. Their winters can be bad enough as it is, but suddenly they would be as far from the sea as Slovakia is now, and that means deeper cold. Anyway, there would be hue and cry from the rest of the Dutch, because what is The Netherlands without its ports? Imagine that country without the port of Rotterdam; its econonomy would be zilch. The Belgians would be entirely in favour of shutting down Rotterdam, it would benefit Antwerpen. Maybe a compromise would be to fill in just the southern section between Dover, Vlissingen, Hellevoetsluis and Cromer. That is after all the shallow bit, easy to fill in, and would leave Rotterdam open for business as usual. How would we name the new land? Galloper Heights? No Mike, the more I ponder your proposal, the less feasible it becomes. The main obstacle is French intervention. Filling in the southern North Sea would make the Mitterand Monument between Folkestone and Cocquelles look a real white elephant. Heat trace lines wrapped round the pipe if necessary - powered by photovoltaic cells of course. At 10 GPa though, it is possible the pipe contents would be fluid without heating, though I have no data about such extreme conditions.

Water, one kilometer into the air huh? Well, with a little insignificant rounding off, a pressure gauge at the bottom of the pipe (assuming the only pump is at the surface) will show 10 GPa when the pipe is full and the pump is stopped. That is some high pressure, and some fancy pipe that is to dangle underneath a balloon. And the goal is 20 km? They'll need 20 balloons harnessed together at 1 km stages, each with a booster pump. That means electric cables going up too, also to power the red aviation warning lights. It'll all have to be very stout stuff to anchor the thing down and withstand the drag of jet stream winds when they pass by too, none of your flimsy aeorplane technology stuff. Or maybe they expect lot to blow away every month or so, and have a plan to fly after it and tow it back where it belongs? This all sounds like a pipe dream to me, or someone has mistaken Arthur C Clarke novels for sound engineering.

Thanks for the link ESS, it explained so much I couldn't glean from the stratosphere watch thread on this forum. Put in simple terms too! No jargon. We tried to have a debate on that under Climate and Science, namely the climate science thread. It fizzled out due to lack of interest I think, or maybe the opinions stated ran contrary to the yay and nay camps in GW.

I'll not touch upon the moral aspect of tampering with the atmosphere without worldwide consensus, but maybe some chemistry boffin can help me here. We have had several decades of increasing regulation to prevent diesel engines pumping NOx and SOx into the atmosphere. It causes acid rain. Are these people serious?

As mentioned a few days ago, here is a 2009 paper from Universidad de Alcalá, Madrid, looking into the difficulties of conservative science and restrictive publishers encountered by a good number of Nobel Laureates; http://www2.uah.es/jmc/ai56.pdf Quote, I review and discuss instances in which 19 future Nobel Laureates encountered resistance on the part of the scientific community towards their discoveries, and instances in which 24 future Nobel Laureates encountered resistance on the part of scientific journal editors or referees to manuscripts that dealt with discoveries that later would earn them the Nobel Prize. I recognize the value of peer reviewing where research is, well, somewhat routine, but we should guard against thinking of peer reviewing as a panacea; it has its drawbacks, and according to this paper, they can actually raise eyebrows. While I am at it, I might as well also add this link. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29630 Published in 1901, it is a damning essay on at best mediocre education, which it seems to me has perhaps worsened these last hundred years. The author states very early on that To begin with, the dearth of great men is so remarkable that it scarcely needs comment. People are constantly expressing the fear that the age of intellectual giants has passed away altogether. This is particularly obvious in political life. Since the days of Gladstone and Disraeli, Parliamentary debate has sunk to the most hopeless level of mediocrity. The traditions of men such as Pitt, Fox, Palmerston, Peel, and others, sound at the present day almost like ancient mythology. Maybe this is not the right thread for this, and moderators will relocate it somewhere more appropriate.

Early autumn? Nah. I saw Orion this morning, just where it is supposed to be.

What I missed in this thread was Alvar Lidell reading the shipping forecast. The best I could find was this....

That was concerning peer reviewing Pete. I just had a very amusing chat with my son who is deeply involved in this whole academic industry. He surprised me by saying that a very large proportion of Nobel Prize winning research these last 50 years was initially rejected by the peer review system. I shall soon have a paper discussing this and will bring it out here. Otherwise, my lad is of the opinion that the peer review system right now is all about conservative back-slapping; and that is the best he had to say of it. Perhaps we should shift over to the New Research thread to discuss this in due course.

The reason is that the big publishers have rounded up the journals with the highest academic impact factors, in which publication is essential for researchers trying to secure grants and advance their careers(16). You bet publication is essential. I've used the expression beauty contest on this forum several times in several connexions. In this particular case it applies to World University rankings. http://www.timeshigh...rsity-rankings/ Wales 123098 asked me the other day why Sweden and Finland's education systems with their "friskoler" are the best in the world, and I replied I don't know how such things can be determined. Yet here we have The Times putting Europe's top three universities as British, and furthermore five British in the top ten. This is all about money. Universities are rather big business. The bigger their prestige, the bigger their earnings. A major factor in these rankings and prestige is the publication of papers in the journals Monbiot complains of, and I know for a fact that universities over here (Denmark) spend considerable sums training prospective researchers in how to have articles accepted for publication. No wonder, because state funding of the individual universities rises and falls proportionally with the numbers of publications they achieve. Consequently, research topics are carefully chosen for their public attractiveness, which smacks to me of fashion and flavour of the month. Without our snobbery, this whole situation might never have arisen. Notice that The Times uses the expression higher education. Why not specialist education, or further education? We are delighted when our children attain prestige of studying at one of the better universities, which are preferably not red brick. We are prepared to pay very considerable sums for this distinction, just as many of us are prepared to pay considerable sums to our professional institutions, in return for which we receive a magazine and are permitted to put a string of letters after our name. I might add that many years ago, I personally declined participating in a an academic fancy-dress parade through an English city because I knew perfectly well many of the local population felt uncomfortable with this flaunting of status. There existed a them and us relationship - on both sides, with the scholars enjoying their social status, and the ordinary working people feeling resentment and blaming the country club, the class system, Tories, freemasonry, and all manner of other excuses for their own lesser status. Payment is part and parcel of the university industry. Sadly, despite the many transactions, the end product seems to me treading water rather than making significant headway - in broad terms - extending our knowledge. There we have it. The aim of education ought to be imparting knowledge. It seems to me that the general public have lost sight of this, and education has become big business.

Science estimates the world’s age to be 4.5*10**9 years. We cannot grasp such timescales, and it puts matters into perspective to suppose that the world is just one day old, and right now at this present moment it is midnight at the end of the Earth’s first day. On this scale of things, the Earth came into existence at 00:00, 24 hours ago. Dinosaurs roamed the planet between 22:50 and 23:40, while Leakey’s first ancestral primates arrived on the scene at just one minute to midnight. Written history began just 1/20th of a second before midnight, meaning that we have written accounts describing just one half of one millionth of the world’s total existence, assuming it is 4.5 billion years old as scientists tell us. Palaeontologists believe for over half a million years – 10 seconds on our 24 hour clock - early man made hardly any advances in his use of stone tools, which means that development during any one individual’s lifetime must have been negligible. Some 25,000 generations of stone-age hominids must have lived exactly like each other if we allow that generations are twenty years apart. What happened then about 10,000 years ago, - a fifth of a second before midnight - that led to the extraordinary developments our species has undergone? Seeing how written history goes hardly further back than 2,500 years, we have little way of knowing how well developed humans’ language was 10,000 years ago. Perhaps the picture we have of grunting cave-men behaving like savages is close to the truth, in which case, in contrast to early man, many extant people have very colourful imaginations, and certainly throughout written history, people have dreamed up some quite ridiculous things. Take divination for example. Fiction is little better, and in my youth as I recall it, public libraries in Britain were divided into lending libraries and reference libraries, and the lending library sub-divided into fiction and non-fiction sections. The fiction section of all libraries I visited must have contained at least as many books as the non-fiction and reference libraries together, which suggests to me that approximately half of the books published these last 100 years must have dealt with imagined circumstances, not real. Moreover, there must have been great demand for these invented accounts. Incidentally, I happened to read recently of a study carried out by researching psychologists at Harvard University. Their program involved a very considerable number of people from various backgrounds, and was designed to establish the subject of people's thoughts while occupied with a variety of activities, both physical and intellectual. Their conclusions are that once most people have started upon something, their thoughts tend to wander off onto different matters for nearly half the time spent in the particular activity. It seems to me that in many ways, science and our imaginings are closely connected. If so, maybe we ought to suspend our metaphysical speculations about black holes and big bangs and what the climate was like in the distant past, and instead follow Alexander Pope’s exhortation “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man.”

Please do not think I am promoting Spencer; I am not. My point was about peer reviews, Copernicus and Galileo. My suspicion is that in addition to peak oil, we have peak innovation not only in science, but technology too; and the peak occurred decades ago. What we do now - automating processes and bling telephones - is not innovation. If my suspicion is factual, then it is reasonable to suspect that flock mentality has is a partial cause of scientific decadence. I certainly think that much modern physics research is borderline metaphysics.

No. I was replying to Grey Wolf's comment that peer reviewed science is one of the pillars of modern science. I accept the need to review certain offerings, but I warn against putting scientific judgement alongside jury trial, and pleading to numbers. Clearly the majority are not always right.

I just thought I'd put that my plum tree has decided that's enough for 2011, and the first leaves have begun to drop off. Lovely late summer weather over here.

It is a good job the likes of Copernicus and Galileo didn't simply troop along in the safety of the flock, otherwise we'd all still entertain faulty ideas such as the amount of mass determining how quickly an object falls to the ground.

I see Roy Spencer is in the news again. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14768574 Regarding the peer review process, I can see it is a prudent process where inexperienced but ambitious people seek attention, but for supposedly experienced and established experts (and I do not refer here to Mr Spencer) isn't peer reviewing just an appeal to numbers? It strikes me Churhill's description of democracy applies to peer reviewed science; "It is the worst we have, except all the rest."

There is a thread somewhere else GW about the World Trade Centre and 11th September 2001. Unfortunately it got me going about one of my favourite authors (or authours as he would have spelled it in his publickations) namely Samuel Johnson. As far as the news is concerned, I agree with Johnson. We read the same tripe over and again. Instead of perpetually repeating the same information, these stories should be revealed a little at a time in order to retain the publick interest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idler_%281758%E2%80%931760%29#No_7._Scheme_for_news-writers_.28Johnson.29