Possible proof to RFC's physics

Oh, dear!

Should I disabuse him...

Let's just say that science has a lot in common with sausage-making: you really don't want to watch either being done

dscott8 wrote:This is what I love about science. It never stops looking for evidence, never assumes it knows everything, never clings to an outmoded theory when new facts contradict it. There's always something more out there. For a scientists, every day is Christmas morning.

templehawk wrote:http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html?emc=edit_na_20160211&nl=bna&nlid=55385787&te=1&_r=0

From the story:

A team of physicists who can now count themselves as astronomers announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prophecy of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago.

What's astounding to my ears, as well as LIGO's, are the incredible advances in detection methods.

The sounds coming over the horizon promise much more music to our ears, with a current price tag of well over a half billion dollars.

dscott8 wrote:This is what I love about science. It never stops looking for evidence, never assumes it knows everything, never clings to an outmoded theory when new facts contradict it. There's always something more out there. For a scientists, every day is Christmas morning.

That is the ideal to which all scientists should aspire certainly. However we are only human and therefore their are plenty of "science fundamentalists" who will try to tell you everything has been mostly worked out and only a few additional details are left to be solved.

Actually most of our understanding of science is based on assumptions that certain things are a certain way (the fundamental constants or "dimensionless physical constants" if you want to be picky; things like the speed of light, vacuum permittivity, Planck's constant, and the gravitational constant). Some would say that if these things were not constant, they wouldn't be able to do the sums. However the mindset these days at least seems to be that the finding or proving of other alternatives is now far more interesting than trying to prove older theories right. As an old science teacher once told me "sometimes the best answer is a more interesting question."

However science is the best way of thinking we have that prevents us from believing things simply because we want/prefer them to be true.

Case in point: in another thread on this subject [which may actually be over on Baen's Bar; i've lost track of it for the moment] one poster makes the didactic statement that no form of FTL is possible without simultaneously travelling in time. As an article posted today on arxiv [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.04188.pdf and the references therein] points out, that is in fact true only if you postulate Lorentz invariance - which relativity respects. By dumping that, it is possible to create quantum theories of gravity in which waves propagate faster than c - and which need only the standard 4 dimensions GR itself uses, which is why people study them. Turning the inviolability of c into a sacred cow by enshrining Lorentz invariance therefore requires jumping through a whole bunch of other hoops to explain the universe.

Ummm... I should perhaps mention, before anybody gets their hopes up, that that article uses a trivial analysis of the LIGO results to set a very conservative upper bound for the speed of gravity of 1.7c. The value in that is that unlike the tighter constraints previously published it's independent of what model you use for gravitation.

Valen123456 wrote:

dscott8 wrote:This is what I love about science. It never stops looking for evidence, never assumes it knows everything, never clings to an outmoded theory when new facts contradict it. There's always something more out there. For a scientists, every day is Christmas morning.

That is the ideal to which all scientists should aspire certainly. However we are only human and therefore their are plenty of "science fundamentalists" who will try to tell you everything has been mostly worked out and only a few additional details are left to be solved.

Actually most of our understanding of science is based on assumptions that certain things are a certain way (the fundamental constants or "dimensionless physical constants" if you want to be picky; things like the speed of light, vacuum permittivity, Planck's constant, and the gravitational constant). Some would say that if these things were not constant, they wouldn't be able to do the sums. However the mindset these days at least seems to be that the finding or proving of other alternatives is now far more interesting than trying to prove older theories right. As an old science teacher once told me "sometimes the best answer is a more interesting question."

However science is the best way of thinking we have that prevents us from believing things simply because we want/prefer them to be true.

dscott8 wrote:This is what I love about science. It never stops looking for evidence, never assumes it knows everything, never clings to an outmoded theory when new facts contradict it. There's always something more out there. For a scientists, every day is Christmas morning.

Thinking of science as being a process of better approximations of theory to reality, facts should change the theories. However, historically, this does not happen instantly. Most scientists try to find ways of making small modifications to accepted theories. Think of the epicycles which were put into planetary orbits before Kepler's work was accepted.

BTW, some scientists are concerned about the quality of modern published papers, and are testing this. One sent out a paper for peer review with ten deliberate errors in it: the most that any reviewer detected was TWO. Others are testing to see whether published experiments and/or observations can be replicated, and are finding that about half of those which should be repeatable aren't. Their conclusion is that the push to publish is causing many to settle for mediocre results, and that journals tend to prefer new things over checking the accuracy of older ones.

Just as with short sellers in investments, people whose worldviews are not commonly accepted are valuable because they are more likely to turn up problems between theory and fact. This is with the proviso that they stick to facts, and not just contrary theories. Short sellers, and these, are often disliked and disparaged by non-evidential methods


PS. It has been pointed out that while earlier methods of measuring light speed do not have as high a resolution as modern ones, if you graph them with appropriate probable accuracy bands and find the center, they show a disturbing and consistent tendency for earlier ones to report a higher speed. This continued while time was measured by astronomical observations, but stopped when the atomic clock became the reference. Can anyone suggest why this change

Another, with much higher accuracy, is measurements of planetary magnetic fields. Russell Humphrey's theory predicted correctly the fields of Uranus and Neptune, before the spacecraft measured them, and predicts decreasing magnetic fields for all of them. The earth's has decreased by about 10% in the century and a half it has been measured, the two Mercury flybys found the predicted 4% in 30 years. Both fit the Humphrey predictions.

DDHv wrote:Another, with much higher accuracy, is measurements of planetary magnetic fields. Russell Humphrey's theory predicted correctly the fields of Uranus and Neptune, before the spacecraft measured them, and predicts decreasing magnetic fields for all of them. The earth's has decreased by about 10% in the century and a half it has been measured, the two Mercury flybys found the predicted 4% in 30 years. Both fit the Humphrey predictions.

I remember a TV show that looked at rock on the ocean floor, it showed that every few million years the magnetic poles swapped ends.

With a 10% decrease in a century, I wonder if the earth is getting ready for another swap and in another Melania or two we need to get new compasses because the south magnetic pole is in Alaska and the north magnetic pole is in Antarctica.

There is a saying that science advances one funeral at a time. This unfortunately is not something that the evidence disproves.

darrell wrote:

DDHv wrote:Another, with much higher accuracy, is measurements of planetary magnetic fields. Russell Humphrey's theory predicted correctly the fields of Uranus and Neptune, before the spacecraft measured them, and predicts decreasing magnetic fields for all of them. The earth's has decreased by about 10% in the century and a half it has been measured, the two Mercury flybys found the predicted 4% in 30 years. Both fit the Humphrey predictions.

I remember a TV show that looked at rock on the ocean floor, it showed that every few million years the magnetic poles swapped ends.

With a 10% decrease in a century, I wonder if the earth is getting ready for another swap and in another Melania or two we need to get new compasses because the south magnetic pole is in Alaska and the north magnetic pole is in Antarctica.

That is, I believe the current thought. However, I remember seeing something recently to the effect that it may be measurement error or something. Also, there's a lot of question about what really causes the Earth's magnetic field. It's not as well understood as they'd like.

JohnRoth wrote:

darrell wrote:
I remember a TV show that looked at rock on the ocean floor, it showed that every few million years the magnetic poles swapped ends.

With a 10% decrease in a century, I wonder if the earth is getting ready for another swap and in another Melania or two we need to get new compasses because the south magnetic pole is in Alaska and the north magnetic pole is in Antarctica.

That is, I believe the current thought. However, I remember seeing something recently to the effect that it may be measurement error or something. Also, there's a lot of question about what really causes the Earth's magnetic field. It's not as well understood as they'd like.

With the recent upsurge in major earthquakes the past two weeks, it's very possible the Earth is trying to do something right now, maybe even the possible magnetic field flip.

I'm not much of a geologist but something is happening and I don't particularly like how many nuclear related 'accidents' are happening in response to the greater seismic activity

JohnRoth wrote:

darrell wrote:
I remember a TV show that looked at rock on the ocean floor, it showed that every few million years the magnetic poles swapped ends.

With a 10% decrease in a century, I wonder if the earth is getting ready for another swap and in another Melania or two we need to get new compasses because the south magnetic pole is in Alaska and the north magnetic pole is in Antarctica.

That is, I believe the current thought. However, I remember seeing something recently to the effect that it may be measurement error or something. Also, there's a lot of question about what really causes the Earth's magnetic field. It's not as well understood as they'd like.

Somtaaw wrote:With the recent upsurge in major earthquakes the past two weeks, it's very possible the Earth is trying to do something right now, maybe even the possible magnetic field flip.

I'm not much of a geologist but something is happening and I don't particularly like how many nuclear related 'accidents' are happening in response to the greater seismic activity

Could be. On the other hand, it could simply be a result of fracking.