Zero gravity still had NASA spooked. “The big bugaboo was weightlessness,” said John Glenn in a 1967 Associated Press interview. “Many ophthalmologists thought the eye would change its shape and that this would change the vision, so that maybe the man in space would not be able to see at all.” That is why, if you’d looked inside Glenn’s capsule, you’d have seen a scaled-down version of the classic Snellen eye chart taped to the instrument panel. Glenn had been given instructions to read the chart every twenty minutes. A color blindness test and a device to measure astigmatism were also on board. I used to hear about Glenn’s historic flight and think, “Man, what was that like—being the first NASA astronaut to orbit the Earth?” Now I know. It was like visiting the eye doctor.

Once a set of clothes becomes saturated and oil starts to build up on the skin, what’s the end point? Does uncleansed skin grow ever greasier as the days pass? It does not. According to the Soviet research, the skin halts its production of sebum * after five to seven days of not bathing and not changing one’s increasingly well-greased clothing. Only when the person changes his shirt or takes a shower do the sebaceous glands get back to work. Skin seems happiest with a five-day buildup of oils.

What the hell? If an emitter emits a single photon, that photon has a specific frequency in the emitter's inertial reference frame. If we move to any other inertial reference frame, the single photon will be Doppler shifted in frequency. The shift depends on the difference in velocity between the two inertial reference frames. So yes, there is a Doppler shift when a photon from a moving emitter hits a stationary target, because we had to change reference frames from that of the emitter to that of the target.

It is a property of our Universe that no inertial reference frame is special and no experimental result depends on which inertial reference frame you're in. Experimental results depend only on the differences in velocity, not absolute velocities. 

     SRT is completely erroneous since it is based on the wrong kind of transformations: they have lost the scale factor characterizing  the Doppler effect .
     First, Lorentz considered a more general form of transformations (with a scale factor), but then he, and also Poincare and Einstein equated it 1 without  proper grounds. Their form was artificially narrowed, the formulas became incorrect. This led to a logical contradiction of the theory, to unsolvable paradoxes.
     Accordingly, GRT is also incorrect. 

The classical Marconi radio used a modulation technique known today as “Amplitude Modulation” or just AM. In AM, the
amplitude of the carrier changes in accordance with the input analog signal, while the frequency of the carrier remains the same.

In Frequency Modulation (FM), the frequency of the carrier changes in accordance with the input modulation signal as shown in Fig. 1.2 [5]. Notice that in FM, only the frequency changes while the amplitude remains the same.

"It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do."

With all of this remarkable information at hand, in 1905 Einstein came up with two astonishing postulates. First, the effects of the laws of physics should look the same to every observer in uniform motion (motion at a constant speed in a constant direction, without turning), and second, the velocity of light through empty space should be the same as witnessed by every observer in uniform motion.

Einstein based his second postulate on the fact that Maxwell’s equations predicted that in empty space, electromagnetic waves would propagate at 300,000 kilometers per second. If you were “at rest,” light should pass you at that speed. If you saw a light beam pass you at any other speed, that would constitute evidence that you were not “at rest.” (In fact, Michelson and Morley had hoped to use this effect to prove the Earth was not “at rest,” but they failed.) Einstein thought that all observers in uniform motion should be able to consider themselves “at rest” and should therefore always see light beams passing them at 300,000 kilometers per second. Einstein’s second postulate meant that an observer traveling at high velocity and performing the Michelson-Morley experiment must always fail to get a result.

How long is the human spaceflight program likely to continue? In my May 27, 1993, Nature paper I noted that the program was only 32 years old; and I predicted with 95 percent confidence that it would last at least another 10 months but less than another 1,250 years. Since my paper’s publication, the human spaceflight program has lasted longer than the 10 month predicted minimum, proving half of my prediction correct already.

In 1989, President Bush promised to send humans to Mars by 2019.

Time travel is a project for supercivilizations. Time travel to the future requires a civilization already accustomed to interstellar travel. Time travel to the past could be attempted by supercivilizations commanding the energy resources of an entire galaxy.

December 30, 2021 - When I was changing clothes in the men's locker room at the gym on Tuesday, I overheard two guys talking, and one of them said to the other, "No, I'm not vaccinated against Covid-19.  If you get the vaccination, you can still get Covid-19, so what's the point in getting vaccinated?"

That's a view I've encountered many times in other areas.  If you aren't 100% certain, then you don't know.  All the "experts" are just guessing!  When you do not have 100% certainty, you are taking a risk.  If there is a 1 in a million chance that my child is going to get sick from getting a shot, then I'm not going to take that chance.  That belief is usually coupled with a second belief: If my child gets Covid-19, it's the fault of the stupid scientists who don't know how to stop the disease.  

I've been arguing with some mathematicians on the RDForum for the past few days.  You'd think that mathematicians would understand "playing the odds," but they also seem to believe what they want to believe.  The only difference between the guys on the RDForum versus the people on the sci.physics.relativity forum is that on the RDForum they tend to agree with each other, and they'll join together to argue with an outsider, while on the sci.physics.relativity forum they endlessly argue with each other, and an outsider is just someone new to disagree with.     

The RDForum, of course, is just discussions about radar guns, and they have a common interest: beating and avoiding speeding tickets.  On the sci.physics.relativity forum, the arguments are about science of all kinds, and their only common interest is that each one wants to prove that they are right and everyone else in the world is wrong.

I haven't argued on the sci.physics.relativity forum since mid-November, and I've decided to end my discussions on the RDForum.  I'm going to try to focus on the paper I've been writing.  I could make a New Year's Resolution to focus on my paper and stop arguing on forums, but the odds are that I'll break the resolution just because making the resolution would cause me to constantly think about it, instead of just thinking about the paper I'm writing.

On Christmas Day, my brother-in-law called me and we talked a bit about the papers I've worked on.  He wondered: How can I be so interested in Relativity and Time Dilation, things that most people never give a thought about?  The answer is: It involves a conflict that has been going on for over a hundred years!  That makes it a puzzle and a mystery. Solving puzzles is fun!  Solving mysteries is fun!  And it's even more fun if you are an analyst who loves digging into the causes of conflicts and problems.

Some day, though, I'll have done all I can do with ending the conflicts over Relativity.  Then what will be my next obsession?  Time will tell.  

December 27, 2021 - Yesterday, I started a discussion on the RDForum about "The Einstein Radar Gun Experiment" I had just devised.  It was a discussion about this illustration of the experiment:


The illustration was designed to demonstrate Einstein’s Second Postulate: “light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body.”  It also clearly and undeniably shows that the version of Einstein's Second Postulate used in most college physics textbooks is WRONG.

The experiment involves two police cars with radar guns.  Car #1 is moving down the road at 60 miles per hour and Car #2 is parked at the side of the road. Standing at the side of the road ahead of them is Albert Einstein wearing a shiny badge and buckle.  When Car #1 is exactly side by side with Car #2, men in both cars fire their radar guns at Einstein.  Even though one car is moving and the other car is stationary, the photons from both guns travel at the speed of light, c, and they hit Einstein at c.

Einstein’s shiny badge and buckle send new photons back to the radar guns.  The new photons also travel at c back to the two cars and the radar guns.

The question then is: What speeds will the radar guns display?

We know what the results will be:  The radar gun in Car #2 will show no speed.  The radar gun in Car #1 will show a speed of 60 mph.

The next question then is:  What does the 60 mph speed represent?  Clearly it is NOT Einstein’s speed.  So, it can only be the speed of Car #1 and the radar gun in it.  The returning photons hit the gun in Car #2 at c, and they hit the gun in Car #1 at c+v, where v is the speed of Car #1.  That causes the gun in Car #1 to show a speed of 60 mph when the photons it emitted are compared to the returned photons.

To my surprise, no one on the RDForum had any serious disagreement with the experiment.  The forum is a place where people discuss ways to beat speeding tickets in court and/or ways to speed while avoiding getting a ticket in the first place by using radar detectors.  They are real experts on radar guns.

I thought about going back and revising my paper "Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories" to include this experiment, but the more I thought about it, the more it became clear that I need to put it in a totally new paper tentatively titled "Radar Guns and Special Relativity."  Everything I plan to write would be totally new, and there's no point in creating a version #11 of that previous paper.  The new paper would just focus on how radar guns can demonstrate and resolve century-long disputes over Einstein's Special Relativity and its Second Postulate. It also means I need to set aside the paper I was working on, "Waves of Photons, a.k.a. 'Radio'."  The newer paper is a thousand times more important.  

December 26, 2021 - While eating breakfast this morning, I finished reading another library book on my Kindle.  The book was "How to Think Like Sherlock: Improve Your Powers of Observation, Memory and Deduction" by Daniel Smith.

Holmes even stated: ‘Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.’ If there were gaps in his thinking, talking over his deductions with Watson was a sure way to expose them.

To paraphrase our d.school founder and inspiration David Kelley: ‘If you keep making the same mistakes again and again, you aren’t learning anything. If you keep making new and different mistakes, that means you are doing new things and learning new things.’

Sometimes it is easier to accept bullshit than to fight it. Preferring bullshit over the truth is especially likely to occur when the bullshit aligns with our views of the world or the way we want or hope things to be. We like what we like—and sometimes what we like doesn’t correspond with the truth or the available evidence. It is not uncommon for people to prefer to believe the bullshit that global warming is a hoax than to accept the facts that icebergs are melting, floods and droughts are increasing, the Amazon rain forest is disappearing, and dangerous methane gases are bubbling up from the ocean floor all because global temperatures are rising.

In February 2017, just two days before the 2017 NBA All-Star Game, superstar Kyrie Irving made some interesting claims in a podcast that ended up receiving more attention than the game. He stated:

This is not even a conspiracy theory. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat.… What I’ve been taught is that the Earth is round. But if you really think about it from a landscape of the way we travel, the way we move and the fact that—can you really think of us rotating around the Sun and all planets aligned, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what’s going on with these planets [finger quotation marks on planets]? Because everything that they send—or that they want to say they’re sending—doesn’t come back.… There is no concrete information except for the information that they’re giving us. They’re particularly putting you in the direction of what to believe and what not to believe. The truth is right there, you just got to go searching for it.

Kyrie isn’t the only one. When online surveyor YouGov conducted a survey asking over 8,000 US adults, “Do you believe that the Earth is round or flat?,” only 84% of respondents felt certain that the Earth is round. A total of 5% expressed doubts, 2% affirmed a flat Earth, and 7% weren’t sure.3 Even more, over 226,000 Facebook followers of the Flat Earth Society dispute the Earth’s curvature by promoting the false belief that the Earth is flat.

President Trump’s character-building and -assassination tactics are simple to employ because they are not based on genuine evidence. When Trump liked particular people, he promoted their character and said positive things about them with the very best of words. But when President Trump no longer liked these same people and fired them because they opposed his policies or methods, he had not-so-nice things to say about them.

Deepak was trained in internal medicine and endocrinology, but claims to be an authority on “perfect health” and transcendental meditation. He gained popularity in 1993 after being interviewed about his self-help books on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Deepak believes that a person can attain perfect health and become free from disease, pain, and aging. He speaks of the “quantum mechanical body” and how it is composed not of matter but of energy and information. Deepak believes that one’s state of mind can prevent chronic disease because “human aging is fluid and changeable; it can speed up, slow down, stop for a time, and even reverse itself.”

My ideal bullshit detector is Lieutenant Frank Columbo, played by Peter Falk in the 1970s television series Columbo. He was a homicide detective and famous for solving complicated “whodunit” murder mysteries by asking suspects “just one more question.” The last question would always be the one that cracked the case. If you analyze empirical research on critical-thinking skills, you will find many commonalities between the ideal critical thinker and Columbo.

   

December 23, 2021 - Yesterday and this morning I received emails from two different people advising me of an interesting article on vice.com titled "People Got Sick at a Conspiracy Conference. They’re Sure It’s Anthrax."

Conspiracy conference?  Actually, it was some kind of "tour event" called "ReAwaken America."  Speakers on the tour included disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump adviser Roger Stone, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and Eric Trump, the son of former President Donald Trump.  3,500 people attended when the tour event took place in Dallas, Texas, on  December 9, 10, and 11.

The poster below is from their Grand Rapids, Michigan, event in August:



During the Dallas conference, just over a dozen unvaccinated people spent a lot of time together in a "confined space," and they all developed symptoms associated with Covid-19: coughing, fever and shortness of breath.  Then, of course, since they are Right Wing conspiracy theorists, they created a theory that they were attacked with anthrax.  After all, the alternative would be to acknowledge that they made a stupid mistake when they didn't get vaccinated. 

And a lot of Right Wing leaders circulated the theory. According to an article on Insider.com, 

Joe Oltmann, a far-right influencer with over 60,000 Telegram subscribers who spoke at the conference, wrote on his Telegram channel on Sunday that he was "sick with what could turn out to be an anthrax attack,"

David K. Clements, a far-right influencer with over 142,000 Telegram followers, wrote on his channel Monday that he spoke with Oltmann and that he, Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, and "a dozen other folks that were present in the green room" at the Dallas event were "suffering from symptoms related to an anthrax attack." Clements has shared anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and posts from supporters of QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory movement.

Pulitzer is a right-wing radio show host and influencer who has propagated the baseless theory that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Trump.

 

A contradiction resides deep in the heart of modern society. On the one hand, we inhabit a world increasingly dominated by science and technology, one where the progress of scientific knowledge and technical efficiency seems without end. On the other hand, there also exists a deep-seated opposition to scientific knowledge and to science itself as a form of knowledge. A trend has been gathering momentum in modern culture away from science as a means to think about human affairs and an approach to truth. Although technology and technological forms of rationality have transformed our world, hostility toward science as a method and as a way of comprehending the social and natural world has emerged as an obstacle to a more humane and more democratic society. From religiously motivated arguments against the teaching of evolution in public schools to the denial of climate change, new-ageist espousals of alternative medicine, the regular distortion or dismissal of social-scientific data, outlandish claims about the effects of vaccinations or the fluoridation of water, and widespread basic ignorance about concepts such as “theory” or “evidence,” anti-science viewpoints are becoming more and more manifest in our daily lives. This trend is one that we call here “anti-science,” and it is characterized by more than a skepticism of science as a body of knowledge about the natural world; it is also a hostility toward the very notion that objective truth claims can be defended. 

Hardly anyone will openly defend muddled thinking or disrespect for evidence. Rather, what people do is to surround these confused practices with a fog of verbiage designed to conceal from their listeners—and in most cases, I would imagine, from themselves as well—the true implications of their way of thinking.

Just a little under a decade ago, the internet was being hailed for its democratization of knowledge. Leftists readily rejoiced at the work of hackers seeking to foment chaos for the “lulz,” thinking this exemplified democracy in action. On the contrary, the internet has emerged as an excellent tool for feeding right-wing paranoia, developing its own world of truths, and serving as device for uniting people with fringe beliefs or recruiting people to Far-Right causes. The internet has cultivated a world where wildly popular right-wing provocateurs like Anne Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, and the psychologist Jordan Peterson, climate-change deniers, or the so-called “citizen journalists” of Breitbart News reign freely. Some engage in the dissemination of patently false information, while others, particularly Coulter and Yiannopoulos, simply revel in the pleasures of sophomorically thumbing their nose at authority by tossing around insults.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, so we actually got to see this with the Kelly twins. And the reality is that the astronauts on the International Space Station are experiencing time ever so much slower. And the way you figure out who experiences the change in time is you look to see who experienced the force. And who experienced that acceleration that got them to that faster velocity.  So, in this case, you accelerate yourself up to the International Space Station and to a velocity that keeps you circling the planet instead of falling back. And time slows.

Fraser Cain:  Right. And in that sort of very slightly –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes.

Fraser Cain:  And it’s more complicated because of course the International Space Station and the twin who’s on the ground are in a gravity well. But let’s say you have the one who accelerates up to close to the speed of light. Flies for 10 years, and then returns. And then the twins meet up. So, what you’re saying is that it’s not the speed.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes.

Fraser Cain:  It’s the acceleration that you experience to get yourself up to that speed.

Dr. Pamela Gay: That determines who is the one who is experiencing the time change.

Fraser Cain:  Got it.

Dr. Pamela Gay:  It’s the velocity that you accelerate to that determines how much time slows down.

Fraser Cain: Right. And so, twin No. 1 is sitting on earth. Twin No. 2 gets in a spacecraft. They accelerate – and that’s the key – to close to the speed of light. Compared to the twin who’s just sitting on the planet.

Dr. Pamela Gay:  Yes.