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Comments for Sunday,
August 14, 2022, thru Sat., Aug. 20, 2022:
August
15, 2022 -
Yesterday afternoon, I finished
reading another book on my
Kindle. The book was "Thank
You for Your Servitude" by
Mark Liebovich.
It's another
book about Donald Trump and his
presidency. It's also probably the
last book I'll read on that subject, since I
now know more about Trump than I want to
know. It's like reading a book about
crap. How many books do you want to
read on that subject? I only
read it because it on the top 10 bestseller
list for awhile, and a lot of the reviews
said it was "a very funny book." It
was definitely funny in parts, but you soon
get tired of humor about crap. It's
currently #24 on USA
Today's list of bestsellers.
Here's a quote from the book:
From the start,
Trump’s main trick was not to convince
anyone that he was pure but rather to
convince people that everyone else was
dirty. Everybody lied and cheated at golf,
on their spouses, and on their taxes.
Trump was just better at being dirty,
proving how smart and savvy he was. Only
losers got hung up on the unspoken rules
of the capital.
Another:
Were Republican
leaders so unwilling to condemn Trump
because their voters supported him so
vigorously, or did these voters support
Trump so vigorously because so few
Republican leaders ever dared condemn his
actions? Chicken, egg; egg, chicken.
And another quote from near
the end of the book:
Biden’s
inauguration included no mention of Donald
Trump, the newly departed and deplatformed
commander in chief who skipped town early
in the morning with yet another unpleasant
distinction to his name: he was the first
president in 152 years to refuse to attend
the swearing-in of his successor. It was
probably for the best.
While the book was well
written and funny in parts, I can only
recommend it if you know nothing about Trump
and want to learn something about him.
In that case, you might really enjoy the
book a lot.
Meanwhile, the price of gas at the station
down the street from me jumped another
15 cents today. It's now $3.899 per
gallon, up from $3.749 per gallon. On August 11 it
was $3.599 per gallon. That's an increase of
30 cents in 4 days!
August 14, 2022 -
I seem to have lost interest in finishing my
book about "Logical Relativity."
I don't know if that loss of interest is
just temporary or permanent. My latest
paper, "Analyzing
the Invariant Speed of Light,"
basically summarizes the first 11 chapters
of the book, and the rest of the book is
just an analysis of all the screwball
beliefs that are presented in physics
textbooks. Here's the table of
contents as it exists right now:
Introduction
Page 1
Chapter 1
- What Einstein
Knew
Page 3
Chapter 2
- Stationary Points in
Space Page 6
Chapter
3
- What is
Light?
Page
11
Chapter 4
- c+v
and c-v
Page 20
Chapter 5
- Radar
Guns and
Relativity
Page 29
Chapter
6 -
Time
Dilation
Page 44
Chapter
7 - The
Twin
Paradox
Page 58
Chapter 8
- What is
Time?
Page 65
Chapter 9
- The Variable Speed of
Light Page 69
Chapter
10 - Inertial
Systems
Page 71 Chapter
11 - General
Relativity
Page 76
Chapter 12 - The Edge of
Reality
Page 81
Chapter
13 - The Big
Bang
Page 84
Chapter 14 - Mathematics
vs
Reality
Page 94
Chapter 15 - The Textbook
Problem
Page 101
Chapter 16 - Our
Conflicted
World
Page 119
Chapter 17 - Physics' Most
Sacred Belief Page 125
Chapter 18 -
Conclusion
Page
About the
Author
Page
Analyzing
the screwball beliefs that are presented in
physics textbooks could result in a single
sentence: The books were written by humans, and
it is extremely rare to find two humans who
fully agree about everything.
Today's political arguments fully verify that.
I briefly considered the idea of writing another
paper, tentatively titled "Analyzing
Wave-Particle Duality," but arguments on
that topic on the
sci.physics.relativity forum went
nowhere. We just weren't speaking the same
language. Here's part of an argument we
had yesterday about "wave-particle duality":
Me:
Having TWO DIFFERENT MATHEMATICAL MODELS for
how light works, and sometimes using one model
and sometimes using the other MEANS YOU HAVE A
PROBLEM!!!!
Volney: No, it means that that
model sometimes has light behaving like
particles and sometimes like waves. A
more modern BETTER model, such as QED/QFT
resolves this, but using older models is often
simpler.
Me: In SCIENCE they work to
SOLVE PROBLEMS.
Volney: By creating better (but
never perfect) models.
Me: Mathematicians evidently
prefer to LIVE WITH THE PROBLEM.
Volney: What problem?
Mathematicians are interested in abstract
concepts like numbers, not physics.
Me: Experiments show how light
works.
Volney: Yes, and experiments
disagree with many of your beliefs.
Me: WHICH EXPERIMENTS disagree
with what I've written?
I'm waiting on a response
to that last question.
Meanwhile, I wonder what Trump's supporters
will do if the FBI throws Trump in jail for
obstruction
of justice and violations of the Espionage
Act.
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Comments for Sunday,
August 7, 2022, thru Sat., Aug. 13, 2022:
August
12, 2022 - Wow!
Yesterday, the price of
gas at the station down
the street from me dropped
14 cents, from $3.739 per
gallon to $3.599 per
gallon. And today it
jumped 15
cents, to $3.749 per
gallon. It really
makes you wonder what
could cause such a
swing. It can't be
because the gas station
owner paid more today than
yesterday. I doubt
that they fill their
underground tanks more
than once or twice a
month. Maybe it was
to make a point? But
what point? Or was
yesterday's drop some kind
of mistake? I'll
probably never find out.
August 11, 2022 - Hmm.
The discussion I started
yesterday on the
alt.physics.relativity
forum about my new
paper "Analyzing
the Invariant Speed of
Light" seems
to have attracted some Russian
hackers.
Here's part of what
someone named "Chang
Salucci" posted:
anyway, since the gay
actor, no party/politician puppet, cocaine
zelenske wants Crimea, a Rusian
territory, as a military base (actually
wanted already from 2014) I guess
the Russians have choices, other then to
regain Odessa, formally also a
Romanian territory, then kick out the nazi
uKranoids
from the Black Sea. Then re_part the
fictitious uKraine among Poland, Hungary, Romania,
Belarus and Russia,
And "Jody De santis" posted
this (censored by me):
but you don't understand
the cocaine zelenske is cocaine. You like
want the
proofs, but you don't want the proofs. The
entire parliaments standing up, in standing ovation,
to the images of the cocaine zelenske,
ordering stuff and money from them.
What a f**king shame. This alone puts down
the entire
capitalist western europe. What a shame,
what a disgrace, what a f**king idiots put in
charge to destroy own countries and s**t
on the face of their own people.
NaZilensky's Downward
Spiral Continues
And "Cole Battaglia" posted
this:
What an idiot. Frogeting
two atmic bombs over his country.
And "Dick's DriveIn" posted
this:
He West can't stop Putin.
I have no idea what caused
them to suddenly start posting propaganda to
a discussion I had started. And why only
to my thread? I can find no such posts
in other threads.
Life is full of mysteries. My new
paper is about solving a mystery that has
bugged me for years. Finding that
solution makes me want to just sit down and
start reading a novel - or maybe listen to
some podcasts. I'm not out to convince
anyone of anything. I was just trying
to understand some things that just didn't
quite make sense. And I think I now
finally understand them.
Meanwhile, the price of gas at
the station down the street from
me just dropped 14
cents to
$3.599 per gallon.
August 10, 2022 - My new
18-page paper "Analyzing the
Invariant Speed of Light"
is now on line at this link: https://vixra.org/pdf/2208.0052v1.pdf
Of course, about 2 minutes after
submitting it, I noticed a
typo. In the second to
last paragraph on page 8, I
typed "photo" when I meant to
type "photon." Hopefully
that will be the only error that
people will find in the
paper.
Although it officially has no
"views" yet, it somehow already
has one comment. And, I
think it may be the first
positive response I've ever
received for one of my
papers. The comment says,
At first I wanted to
pre-judge your paper. But then some of
your insights really electrified me,
because I had seen them exactly in my
experiments.
That comment was followed by
a link to papers written by the guy who
wrote the comment. Unfortunately, his
papers are all filled with mathematics and
are virtually incomprehensible to me.
I don't even understand the titles
for most of them.
When I saw the paper was on-line, I started
a
thread about it on Google's alt.physics.relativity
discussion forum. On that forum
they seem to believe that if you can't find
anything nasty to say about
someone's comment, you shouldn't say
anything at all. So, if I get no
responses that will be a good thing.
The paper has me a bit anxious. It
shows that I made errors in some of my other
papers. I suppose I should start
correcting those papers, but I'm going to
wait. It's like my new paper sums up
everything, and I have nothing more that I
want to write papers about. I just
want to find out if I'm correct or not. Then
I might get back to work on my book, which
covers a lot of the same territory but also
shows how nearly every college physics
textbook has some screwball
misinterpretation of Relativity.
However, in today's world where everyone
seems to disagree with everyone else, that
seems normal.
August 8, 2022 - This morning I
printed out my new 18-page paper "Analyzing
the Invariant Speed of Light."
It's got a date of August 10, 2022, on
it. So, unless I discover
something terribly wrong with the
paper, I'll submit it to vixra.org on
Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the price of a gallon of
gas at the station down the street
just dropped another 6 cents to $3.739 per gallon.
August 7, 2022 -
Yesterday, when I checked the discussions on
Google's
sci.physics.relativity forum as part
of my regular morning routine, I saw that
"Mikko" had restarted a
thread that I had started on Nov. 1, 2019,
and which had ended on Nov. 11, 2019.
The thread was titled "A
List of 8 Variable Speed of Light
Experiments." I started the
thread to announce that the day before, on
October 31, 2019, I had created a web page
describing those 8 experiments.
"Mikko" had read my August 5 comment on this
site about overhauling my
web page about "Variable speed of
light experiments." So, he
posted this message to that discussion
thread from 2019:
The
author has now revised the page and
retracted the claim that the experiments
support variable speed of light. The
descriptions of the experiments
and their relation to the author's
claims are not better than
they were.
Looking over the 82 comments
that were in the thread when it ended, I see
some arguments that make more sense today,
but mostly what I see is that we just
weren't speaking the same language.
That observation was verified after I posted
this comment yesterday to that discussion
thread from 2019:
I'm working on a paper
that will explain everything in detail.
Yes, I was wrong. The experimenters all
claimed that light can be received at c+v
and c-v where v is the
speed of an observer moving toward or away
from the oncoming photons. I accepted what
the experiments claimed. Now I see that
the experimenters misinterpreted their own
data. They didn't understand how kinetic
energy can be added to a photon. I didn't,
either, until recently.
When I finish my new paper
in a week or so, I'll start a new thread
about it.
That comment caused "Mikko"
to respond with this (including all of his
typos):
I does not make sense to
say that light is received at c+v or c-v
or c. Light, like anthing else, only has a
speed between two events, as the speed is
the ration of the distance to the diration
of those two events. Reception is a single
event so does not have a distance nor a
duration.
and
The experiments presented
on the page
http://www.ed-lake.com/Variable-Speed-of-Light-Experiments.html
don't observe the enrgy of the photon.
They measure the time of flight or
difference between two times of flight.
It's a good example of how
we do not speak the same language. I think
he's talking about how Lidar guns
work. Lidar guns make two quick
measurements of the distance between the
stationary gun and a moving target, and then
the gun computes how fast the target must be
moving in order to travel the difference in
distance between the two measurements.
None of the 8 experiments does anything like
that.
My new paper "Analyzing the Invariant
Speed of Light" examines things step
by step with illustrations.
When I finish it (hopefully some time next
week), I'll put it on vixra.org
and on academia.edu.
Then I'll start a thread on the
sci.physics.relativity forum to discuss
it.
I admit that I was wrong in some previous
arguments on that forum. It might be
the first time anyone has admitted such a
thing on that forum.
I'll
probably also make corrections to some of my
17 previous papers.
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Comments for Monday,
August 1, 2022, thru Sat., Aug. 6, 2022:
August 5, 2022 - Yesterday, I
overhauled my
web page about "Variable speed
of light experiments."
The experiments supposedly show
that light can arrive at c+v
or c-v where c
is the speed of light and v
is the speed of the observer
moving toward or away from the
oncoming light photons.
However, after studying the
subject for months, it now seems
clear to me that I was wrong
in accepting what the
experiments claimed. The
speed of light is
"invariant" in that it is always
emitted and received at
the speed of 299,792,458 meters
per second. But,
because the length of a
second varies
due to Time Dilation, the length
of a second is different
virtually everywhere.
The experiments, however, have
little to do with the speed of
light. The experiments
only demonstrate the Doppler
Effect as it applies to
light photons. Unlike the
Doppler Effect for sound
waves, which can be caused
by a moving emitter or
receiver, there is no Doppler
Effect with light that is caused
by a moving emitter.
There is only a Doppler Effect
caused by a moving receiver.
A moving receiver will add
energy to an oncoming photon if
the receiver is moving toward
the photon, and a moving
receiver will subtract energy
from a oncoming photon if the
receiver is moving away from the
photon.
I'm still working to explain
this in great detail in my new
paper "Analyzing the
Invariant Speed of Light."
Every time I think I'm nearing
completion, I realize there is
some additional point that needs
explaining - or some existing
point that needs additional
explaining.
But, I think I'm getting close
to completing it.
Meanwhile, the price of regular gas at
the station down the street from me
just dropped another 5 cents to $3.799
per gallon.
August 3, 2022 - As I was driving
around doing errands today, I saw that
the price of gas had dropped another 8
cents at the gas station just down the
street from where I live. It's
now $3.849 per gallon. So,
if I had waited a few days before
filling up, I could have saved myself
90 cents or so.
That's no big deal, of course, but
when you see Republican ads on TV
every day bitching about how my state
governor caused the price of gas to
soar, you can't help but notice any
change in gas prices.
Meanwhile, I realized I have to once
again overhaul my new paper "Analyzing
the Invariant Speed of Light."
I need to discuss the "Doppler Effect"
early in the paper, since it plays a
big role in how light works when the observer
is moving. With sound, they
usually only describe how the Doppler
Effect works when the emitter
is moving (usually an approaching
train horn or a police car siren or an
ambulance siren). But the sound
Doppler effect can also be heard when
you are on a train and pass by a
crossing where a bell seems to rings
fast as you approach and then slower
when you move away from the
crossing. With light, it appears
there is no Doppler effect when you
are stationary and a light source is
coming at you. But I think a lot of
mathematicians will argue with that,
because they see all motion as
relative, i.e., if I am moving away
from you, you are also moving away
from me. Nope. That's not
how things work in our universe.
August 1, 2022 -
Yesterday, I put 7.38 gallons of gas in my
car at $3.929 per gallon. Total cost
$28.94. I was going to take a picture
of the receipt and show it here, but, of
course, the gas pump ate the receipt,
grinding it up instead of dispensing
it. I had to scramble to write
everything down before the pump's display
reset.
My previous fill-up on June 30 cost $4.789 per gallon. The
fill-up before that, on May 26, cost $4.489 per gallon. Since I
only put gas in my tank about once a month,
and then it's only about a half tankful, I
suppose I don't really have much cause for
complaining.
I'd like to complain about problems with my
newest paper, however, I'm really
having a hard time deciphering
the Michelson-Gale experiment.
According to Wikipedia,
the experiment showed that -
The measured shift was 230
parts in 1000, with an accuracy of 5 parts
in 1000. The predicted shift was 237 parts
in 1000. According to Michelson/Gale, the
experiment is compatible with both the
idea of a stationary ether and special
relativity.
I read and re-read the
papers that Michelson and Gale wrote, but
they don't clarify anything. The
purpose of my paper is to describe the
experiment in plain English. In "plain
English," I think "230 parts in 1000" should
somehow translate to some rotation speed of
the earth at the location of the experiment,
which took place in Clearing, Illinois, on
the southwest side of Chicago. But so
far I cannot find anyplace that says
anything like that. I can't find any
place that says that is wrong, either.
It seems I need to do more research.
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Comments for Sunday, July
24, 2022, thru Sun., July 31, 2022:
July
31, 2022 - The price of regular gas at the station just down the
street from me
dropped
another 7
cents
yesterday.
It's now $3.929 per gallon. I'll probably fill my tank this afternoon.
Meanwhile,
I've been
working every
day on my new
paper which is
still
tentatively
titled "Analyzing
the Invariant
Speed of Light,"
and I think
I'm nearing
the point
where I'll
have a good
first draft.
It also looks
like the paper
will show that
I made errors
in several of
my other
papers.
And I will definitely
need to
overhaul my
web page on
"Variable
Speed of Light
Experiments."
NONE
of the
experiments
listed on that
page show that
the speed of
light is not
always
299,792,458
meters per
second (also
known by its
mathematical
symbol c).
The
experiments
just show that
kinetic
energy can
be added to
the energy of
a photon when
that photon
hits a moving
object.
In all the
arguing I've
done about
"the variable
speed of
light," I
don't think anyone
ever pointed
out my
error.
They just
argued
incorrect
theories of
their own,
usually that
there is no
such thing as
Time
Dilation.
Or they would
simply claim
that light is
always sent
and received
at c,
but they would
never offer
any evidence
to support
that
claim. One
of the authors
of the papers
showing that
the speed of
light is
"variable,"
wrote this:
It is troubling that
there are no unambiguous, positive
experimental results in the photon sector
to support the local Lorentz invariance of
c.
He's right. There are
no such experiments. There are only
experiments which supposedly show the variance
of c. But, my new paper will
explain that those experiments show no such
thing.
I'd better end this comment here, since I
may seem like a raving madman to
99.99999999999999% of the people on earth.
July 29, 2022 -
Monday through
Thursday, and
sometimes on Friday
I use my DVR to
record a bunch of
different late night
talk shows: Stephen
Colbert's "The
Late Show,"
Seth Meyers' "Late
Night," Trevor
Noah's "The Daily
Show," Jimmy
Kimmel's "Jimmy
Kimmel Live,"
Samantha Bee's "Full
Frontal" and
sometimes Jimmy
Fallon's "The
Tonight Show"
when he has
interesting
guests. Then I
watch those shows
the next evening,
skipping over the
commercials, the
music guests and
anything else that
doesn't seem
interesting to me.
I'm sometimes
surprised when they
talk about news
stories that I
didn't see on the
news shows I
watch. Last
night there was a
good example on "The
Daily Show."
Trevor Noah talked
about how some
counties in Oregon
want to secede from
Oregon and become
part of Idaho.
Huh?
Checking the
Internet this
morning, I found
lots of news
stories about
it. There are even
some counties in
Washington State and
California that want
to become part of
"greater Idaho."

There are 9 counties
in Oregon which have
already voted to
become part of
Idaho, and 2 more
which plan to vote
that way.
It's all about
politics, of
course. Idaho
is conservative, and
conservative
Republican counties
in Oregon want to
secede from the
liberal parts of
Oregon and become
part of conservative
Idaho.
Fortunately, it
cannot be done via a
simple vote by a
county. It
requires approval
from the United
States Congress,
plus the state
governments of Idaho
and Oregon.
That could be a
problem since the
counties that want
to join Idaho are
mostly rural and
have only 9% of
Oregon's population
while having 62% of
Oregon's land.
Meanwhile, even
though I can skip
over the commercials
on the evening talk
shows, I watch the
evening news
directly and
therefore cannot
skip over their
commercials.
And right now most
of the commercials
are about different
candidates for
Wisconsin governor,
the U.S. Senate and
congress. And
the Republicans seem
to be running some
of the nastiest
people I've ever
seen. They not
only use lies to
attack the
Democrats, they seem
to be even more
vicious when they
attack each other.
That sometimes seems
to be the only "good
news" on TV.
Republicans are
attacking each
other.
July 27, 2022 - Hmm.
The price of gas at the
station down the street
dropped another 10
cents. The price of
regular is now $3.999 per
gallon. I suspect it
will stay at that price
for awhile, but I could be
wrong. I still have
more than half a tankful,
so I can still wait awhile
to fill up.
I watched both of the
shows about Malaysia
Flight MH370 on the
History Channel last
night. I set my VCR
to record the shows, and
while the VCR was
recording the 1-hour
episode and the first 35
minutes of the 2-hour
episode, I listened to a
podcast in which
theoretical physicist Lawrence
M. Krauss interviewed
Woody Allen for an
hour and 47 minutes.
It was an
interesting discussion
about acting and
writing. I found the
discussion about writing
to be particularly
interesting because they
compared writing science
papers versus writing
fiction. When
writing science papers,
you start out just laying
down known information
without really knowing
where the paper will
end. When writing
fiction, you start with
creating an the ending and
then you write what is
needed to reach that
ending.
I've done both, but I
never really thought about
the difference in how the
writing is done.
Right now I'm doing
another revision of a
paper tentatively titled "Analyzing
the Invariant Speed of
Light." I've
never written the
conclusion for the paper
because I keep revising
the order in which I need
to describe known facts so
that I can reach a
conclusion.
When I started watching
the new 2-hour show about
flight MH370, I'd recorded
about 35 minutes of it,
and therefore I was able
to fast-forward past
nearly all of the 37
minutes of commercials,
finishing when the show
finished at about 9
p.m. Then I watched
the 1 hour show,
fast-forwarding past the
commercials.
There wasn't anything both
interesting and
new in the two
shows. There were
lots of new interviews
with relatives of the
passengers who went
missing when MH370 went
missing in March of 2014,
but there wasn't anything
particularly interesting
in them. What I
found interesting was that
the new 2-hour show didn't
even mention the satellite
data that indicated MH370
ended up somewhere in the
Indian Ocean. And
the 1-hour episode ended
with a conspiracy theory
that Russians hijacked
MH370 and flew it to
Afghanistan and then into
Russia. There was no
explanation for why
the Russians would do
that. It was all the
conspiracy theories
about MH370 that got me
interested. The
facts clearly show that
MH370 ended up in the
Indian ocean about about
2,000 miles west of Perth,
Australia. But, if
facts mean nothing to you,
there's plenty of material
for creating dozens of
conspiracy theories, each
dumber than the
next.
One point made clear in
both shows was that the
Malaysian government isn't
going to spend any more
money trying to locate the
plane. If some new
evidence shows up
indicating exactly where
the plane went down,
someone else is going to
have to pay to verify it.
There's a good article about
MH370 from Singapore's Straits
Times HERE.
It contains a whole section
about the many theories that try
to explain what "actually"
happened to MH370.
July 26, 2022 - While eating
breakfast this morning, I
finished reading another book on
my Kindle. The book was "Battling
the Big Lie: How Fox,
Facebook, and the MAGA Media
Are Destroying America"
by Dan Pfeiffer.
I've got 16 pages of notes from the
book. Here's a sample from page xii of
the Introduction:
People like to say that
Democrats and Republicans now live in two
separate realities, but that is incorrect.
Democrats live in the real world, and
Republicans live in a deeply delusional
alternative ecosystem. The insurrection
and the subsequent rewriting of history
are proof that the Republicans have
mastered a form of politics that depends
on disinformation and propaganda. They
have built a megaphone that drowns out the
truth and any and all dissenting views.
And here's another quote
from page xiii of the Introduction:
Over a period of decades,
the Republican Party built up a massive
propaganda and disinformation apparatus
that allows them to dominate politics
despite representing a shrinking share of
the electorate. This “MAGA megaphone” is
embodied by Fox News and powered by
Facebook and gives the GOP the power to
bend reality.
For several decades I've
considered Fox News to be nothing more than
a Republican propaganda outlet. It's
on one of the TVs at my gym, on a wall right
in front of me when I do my 20 minutes on a
stationary bicycle. There's another TV
attached to the bicycle, and I can change
the channel on that one to watch CNN, which
I can also do while on the treadmill.
So, I can, in effect, watch both CNN and Fox
at the same time. It can be
interesting to see how Fox News twists
things and ignores news that make
Republicans look bad.
One thing that surprised me in the book was
the repeated mention of Facebook as
being part of the Republican
"megaphone." On June 6, 2016, I
created a Facebook page titled "Time
and Time Dilation." But I soon
got bored with it, and I rarely post
anything there. However, I belong to
other Facebook groups, like Astrophysics
and Cosmology, Science
Fiction, and Ancient
History and Mystery, that I check
nearly every day. No one has ever
pitched any Right Wing propaganda at me on
those forums. In fact, it says on some
of them that talking politics is forbidden
and will get you tossed off the forum.
Apparently, however, there are many Facebook
groups I've never seen which do nothing but
discuss Right Wing and MAGA politics.
Here's a quote about Facebook:
No matter his original
intent, Mark Zuckerberg had built a
pro-Trump platform. No matter what they
tell themselves, the people working for
Facebook are working to push Trumpism.
Without Facebook, there is no Trump.
Without Facebook, there is no January 6
insurrection. And if Trump is reelected
president in 2024, it will be because of
Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg's "original
intent" was apparently just to avoid
appearing biased, so he wouldn't delete
anything that might make him look
"biased." But, in the real world, when
you post something that generates wild and
lengthy arguments, you are generating money
for Zuckerberg, since he charges advertisers
according to how many times their ads are
viewed, and heated arguments generate lots
of views, whether anyone actually looks at
the ads or not. Looking at the Science
Fiction page, I see NO ads at
all. The same with the other
groups I regularly visit. If I click
on the "Marketplace" icon I see lots of ads,
but until just now I've never clicked on
that icon. And I've never visited any
of the
top 50 Facebook pages.
Dan
Pfeiffer, the author of the book, was
Barack Obama's communication director when
Obama was President, and he is now a co-host
of the Pod
Save America podcast, which I have on
my
list of "interesting podcasts," but I
only recall sampling a few episodes to see
if they appeared interesting.
In sum, it was a very interesting book, and
I can certainly recommend it.
July 25, 2022
- Aha! When I drove to
the gym today, the price of gas at the station
less than a block from where I
live was
still the same as yesterday. But
when I returned home from the gym, the
price of gas had dropped another 10
cents to $4.099. And, of course, I
still do not yet need to fill
up. I still have more than half
a tank full. Will the price drop
to below $4 before I need to fill
up? I certainly hope so.
But I certainly wouldn't bet on it.
July 24, 2022 -
Hmm. Yesterday, the price of gas at
the station less than a block from where I
live dropped another 20 cents to $4.159. I still had more than half
a tank full, so there was no reason for me
to fill up. I wondered, though, if the
price would go up or down before I need to
fill up. I found out today. The
price skyrocketed up 4 cents to $4.199! But, I certainly
can't assume it is the start of a
trend. I'll just have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, I read that the History Channel
is going to have a new 2-hour program about
Malaysia
Airlines flight MH370 this coming
Tuesday at 8 PM
Eastern Time. It looks like it could
be interesting. And it also appears
that, at 7 PM ET, they are rerunning episode
7 of season 3 of "History's Greatest
Mysteries," which was also
about Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
While it's an interesting mystery, I've only
set my DVR to only record the new 2-hour
presentation. It is supposed to have a
lot of new material collected from foreign
TV sources. It's supposed to be a 3
part series of 50-minute episodes, but the
History Channel is evidently merging them
into one 2-hour program
I've also decided to set my new book aside
and instead work on a new science
paper. The paper is tentatively titled
"Analyzing the Invariant Speed of Light." It addresses the
issue that caused me to get bogged down on
my book. I've been working on an
outline for the new paper, but there's a
part that I still have to thoroughly
research and study.
In "Situation #1 in the illustration below,
we have a police officer pointing a radar
gun at an oncoming car. The photons
emitted by the gun have a specific
oscillation frequency as they travel to the
target, and they have a shorter oscillation
frequency (more oscillations per second)
when they return from the target. The
difference in oscillation frequencies allows
the gun to compute the speed of the target
to be 100 mph.
In "Situation #2," the radar gun is pointed
at a different target that is moving at a 90
degree angle to the radar gun. In that
situation, the gun emits photons with the
same oscillation frequency as in "Situation
#1," but the photons that return to the gun
are no different from the photons the gun
originally emitted, so the gun computes no
speed for the target.
Since both cars are moving faster than the
stationary radar gun, Time Dilation should
be (and evidently is) involved in
both cases. But the energy
that is measured by the oscillation
frequencies of the photons plays a bigger
role. In "Situation #2" above, the car
is moving at 100 mph, which means that a
second is longer for the car than for the
gun. So the target receives photons
that have more oscillations per
second than what was transmitted by the
gun. But when the target sends photons
back to the radar gun, because the gun is
moving slower than the target, the gun
receives photons that have fewer
oscillations per second than what the target
emitted. The result is that the gun
gets back photons that are identical to the
photons it emitted.
What is different about the two situations
that causes the radar gun to perform totally
differently? It appears to be the
"cosine effect." If the target was
moving at a 45 degree angle, instead of 90
or zero, the gun would show a speed of 70
mph. A 50 degree angle would show a
speed of 64 mph. A 60 degree angle to
the target would how a speed of 50
mph. 80 degrees shows 17 mph. I
need to figure out how to explain why
the angle at which the photon's
oscillating electric and magnetic fields hit
the target makes such a difference.
It's easy to describe logically and
visually, but I need to find a way to
explain it so that mathematicians
cannot dispute it.
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Comments for Sunday, July
17, 2022, thru Sat., July 23, 2022:
July 20,
2022 - A
couple days ago, when I
sat down at my computer to
burn CDs for another audio
book, I ran into a problem
I had never encountered
before. The first
MP3 file in the set was 82
minutes long. You
can only put 80 minutes
onto a CD. The
CD-burning software won't
even let you start
to burn a file if it is
too long.
The solution was obvious:
I needed to cut 2 minutes
off of the MP3 file.
But I didn't have any
software to do that.
Fortunately, there is free
editing software
available on the
Internet. I
downloaded the software
and trimmed two minutes
off that first file.
I can always listen to
those two minutes on my
computer when I get to
that point.
That solution also fits
another problem I
have. Some day I'm
going to run out of audio
books to burn onto
CDs. My library no
longer allows you to
"borrow" an entire audio
book over the
Internet. You can
only listen to it while
connected to the
library. So, you can
no longer just "borrow"
audio books and save them
to listen to at some later
time.
I finished listening to my
last 6 audio books on July
18, June 26, May 11,
February 15, January 28
and December 24. The
book I finished on January
18, I listened to in one
day while sitting on
my couch. I didn't
burn that one onto CDs.
The 18-CD book I finished
on May 11 took me 3
months of listening
time while driving.
If I say an average audio
book takes me a month to
listen to, that means I've
got over 3 years of audio
books still in my
listening queue.
Then I'll have to start
burning podcasts
onto CDs. And that
MP3 file editing software
I recently downloaded will
allow me to do that.
But 3 years is a long
time away. And it
would probably be better
to find a way to just
listen to the podcasts on
an MP3 player while
driving, since CDs cost
about 10 cents apiece.
The times are achanging.
Meanwhile, the price of a
gallon of gas at the gas
station just down the
street dropped another 4
cents to $4.359
yesterday.
July 19, 2022 - Groan!
It appears that I'm gradually
beginning to understand
something about Time Dilation
that I should have figured out
long ago. The problem I
have now is: How do I explain
it? It appears that before
I can explain it, I have to
FULLY understand it
myself. And then I'll have
to explain it in terms that will
enable others to understand it.
I'm going to write a brief
description of the problem here
as part of this comment, even
though that is very difficult to
do. I've tried summarizing
the problem in several different
ways, but the results would all
just create confusion, they
wouldn't explain anything. The
key question could be stated
this way: How could all
the experiments
which show light hitting a
moving observer at c+v or c-v
be misleading?
There's nothing wrong with those
experiments. They just
omit one fact that greatly
changes their meaning.
What is that fact? It
appears to be that light is
always observed and seen to
arrive at c.
But how can that be a "fact" if
there is no way to measure the
one-way speed of light?
It also appears that
mathematicians usually interpret
that fact to mean that the speed
of light is "invariant," meaning
it never varies. And they
usually refer to "Lorentz
invariance" which says,
The Lorentz Invariance is
at the heart of special relativity, which
predicts, among other things, that the
speed of light in a vacuum is a constant
186,282 miles (299,791 kilometers) per
second, whatever the situation.
I would remove the words "a
constant," since, while the speed of light
is
"186,282
miles (299,791 kilometers) per second,
whatever the situation," it is definitely not
a "constant," since the length of a
second is different nearly everywhere.
The problem is how to explain that, even
though virtually every emitter emits light
that travels at a different speed
(even though they all emit light
that travels at "186,282 miles
(299,791 kilometers) per
second," how can it be
that that same light is also
observed to arrive
at "186,282
miles (299,791
kilometers) per
second"
regardless of the
speed of the
observer?
All I can say is:
I'm working on it.
July 18, 2022
- Yesterday afternoon, while driving
around doing some shopping, I finished
listening to CD #5 of the 5-CD audio
book version of "The
Origins of Creativity" by
Edward O. Wilson.
I "borrowed" the book from my local library
on November 22, 2020, and it finally came up
in my listening queue. The book was
read (or narrated) by Jonathan Hogan, who
has a very strange voice - or a very
ordinary voice - like some elderly man you
might meet on the street.
While it was an enjoyable book, it was also
a very strange book, and it often seemed to
have very little to do with the origins of
creativity. Mostly it seemed to be
about how we learn from observing others and
by solving problems.
Here's a quote from early in the book:
What, then, is creativity?
It is the innate quest for originality.
The driving force is humanity’s
instinctive love of novelty—the discovery
of new entities and processes, the solving
of old challenges and disclosure of new
ones, the aesthetic surprise of
unanticipated facts and theories, the
pleasure of new faces, the thrill of new
worlds. We judge creativity by the
magnitude of the emotional response it
evokes.
And here's a definition of
"creativity" that I found on-line:
creativity: the ability to
make or otherwise bring into existence
something new, whether a new solution to a
problem, a new method or device, or a new
artistic object or form.
Is solving a problem the
same as being creative? I'd never
looked at it that way before, but I suppose
it could be. The author writes a lot
about ants and other insects and how they
build things, and he's traveled all over the
world studying ants and other insects, plus
monkeys and apes. It's just difficult
for me to connect all these things to the
subject of creativity.
Near the end of the book, the author
suddenly shifts to discussing his favorite
movies, most of which also happen to be my
favorite movies. He discusses movies
about heroes, about tragic heroes, about
monsters, about quests, about pair bonding,
and about other worlds. Here are three
movies he lists as being about heroes:
Alien (1979) and Aliens
(1986). Ripley, played by Sigourney
Weaver, the ultimate feminist warrior,
defeats some of the most terrifying aliens
ever to invade a Hollywood set.
Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). One-armed
World War II veteran thrashes a racist
bully.
Casablanca (1942). In the end, a noble
character shines through Bogart’s bluster
and cynicism.
"Alien" is also listed in
the section about monsters:
Alien (1979). An intense
atmospheric exploration of a newly
discovered planet, and a super-efficient
monster parasite waiting there. With
Aliens and The Thing (2011, remake of the
1982 film by John Carpenter), among the
best science fiction horror movies ever
made.
That paragraph has the one
time I disagree with the author. I
watched the 2011 version of "The Thing" just
last week, when it aired on TCM, and I still
cannot understand why some people like it so
much. To me it is a horror
movie, not a sci-fi movie. And I am
not a fan of horror movies.
But, except for that one point, the book was
okay, and I can recommend it.
July 17, 2022 - I
don't like the way the final chapters of my
book are going. It seems clear I need
to stop using Internet discussions as
evidence of all the damage that is being
done by all the wildly inaccurate college
physics textbooks that are out there.
The textbooks not only disagree with
Einstein's Relativity, they disagree with each
other. It's like every textbook
was written by a person who has his own
personal beliefs about physics, and he
didn't care if his beliefs disagreed with
almost every other textbook author.
His task is to convince students that his
belief is the correct
belief. And the end product is a world
where no two people seem to have the same
view about physics unless they
actually work on physics projects designed
to investigate the universe around us.
And even then they may disagree about
certain things, but they agree that
experiments are the way to resolve
disagreements.
My problem is: If I don't use Internet
discussions to illustrate screwball beliefs
about physics, what else can I use?
Textbooks? Incorrect textbooks are the
cause, not the effect.
One effect is the idiotic arguments on the
Internet. But what are the other
effects? Wasted money? How many
millions have been spent on math-based
projects which can never prove anything,
like projects involving alternate universes
and additional dimensions?
Anyway, I think I need to go back and start
a new version of the book. That
doesn't mean I will start all over again
from scratch. Most of what I've
written will remain in the new
version. I just need add some things
and also see if I can find a better way to
end the book. Right now, here's what the Table of
Contents for my new book looks like:
Introduction
Page 1
Chapter 1
- What Einstein
Knew
Page 3
Chapter 2
- Stationary Points in
Space Page 6
Chapter
3
- What is
Light?
Page
11
Chapter 4
- c+v
and c-v
Page 20
Chapter 5
- Radar
Guns and
Relativity
Page 29
Chapter
6 -
Time
Dilation
Page 44
Chapter
7 - The
Twin
Paradox
Page 58
Chapter 8
- What is
Time?
Page 65
Chapter 9
- The Variable Speed of
Light Page 69
Chapter
10 - Inertial
Systems
Page 71 Chapter
11 - General
Relativity
Page 76
Chapter 12 - The Edge of
Reality
Page 81
Chapter
13 - The Big
Bang
Page 84
Chapter 14 - Mathematics
vs
Reality
Page 94
Chapter 15 - The Textbook
Problem
Page 101
Chapter 16 - Our
Conflicted
World
Page 119
Chapter 17 - Physics' Most
Sacred Belief Page 125
Chapter 18 -
Conclusion
Page
About the
Author
Page
At just 125 pages or so,
it's more like an outline than a book.
I feel I need to add more to chapters 2, 4
and 9. Chapter 17 is actually titled
"The Most Sacred Belief in Physics," but I
couldn't fit that name into the above
format. That "most sacred belief" is
that the speed of light is c in all
reference frames. It's a belief that
has been disproved by many
experiments, and there are NO
experiments which confirm it, yet the
mathematicians I argue with on the Internet
twist everything to make it fit their belief
in the "invariance of c."
And yesterday I remembered that years ago I
had put together a blog page titled "The
10 Dumbest Beliefs in Physics."
The "invariance of c" is #4
on that list. #1 is "All Motion is
Reciprocal." Somehow, I never
specifically addressed that issue in the
book I'm writing, although I certainly
explain in many ways that all motion is NOT
reciprocal. The same with #3 on
the list: "Cause and Effect has no meaning
in Physics." I need to address those
specific issues in the first part of the
book so that I can explain in the second
part of the book how they are Quantum
Mechanics-based beliefs and have nothing to
do with reality.
#7 on that blog list is "It is perfectly
acceptable for physics to be
illogical." I don't recall addressing
that issue in the book, either.
Here's how it is described on my blog
page:
Many many college text
books state that physics may sometimes
appear contrary to "common sense," but
what is "common sense" in the everyday
world may not apply to the world of
physics. It also appears to be a way
for teachers to stop students from arguing
that what is being taught makes no sense.
Everything in Einstein's
Relativity makes perfect sense. Some
may consider Time Dilation to be contrary to
"common sense," but so is a spherical earth
if you've never thought about why ships seem
to disappear and drop behind the horizon
when they get very far away. You just
have to learn a few new things in order to
see how it all fits together and does make
perfect sense.
It's fascinating stuff. I just hope I
can do a good job of explaining it all.
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