General theory of relativity a pseudoscience?

[Taoist Texts]

4 minutes ago, Stosh said:

at the edge of established fact

which is...?

[Stosh]

Gravity as it may be measured , I figure , will be greatest at a point somewhere at or above the surface of the mass because of the directional proximity of the mass. 

[Stosh]

16 minutes ago, Taoist Texts said:

which is...?

.. the intellectual point where the paradigms do not extrapolate out to. ...( presuming the mass is a sphere in un-distorted space.)  

Edited October 19, 2018 by Stosh

[Apech]

49 minutes ago, Taoist Texts said:

er, no) Your link contains 2 posts with answers

Does gravity slow the speed that light travels?

1. So I suppose the only accurate answer to your question is: it depends.

2. Not really. 

 

These are non-answers. Now i am asking a very simple, yes or no question:

 

Does the light from a star travel at c speed in the interstellar vacuum as measured by an observer on earth?

 

Yes it does.

No it does not.

 

 

 

The it depends refers to the choice of frame of reference for measurement.

[Zhongyongdaoist]

On 10/18/2018 at 5:32 AM, Taoist Texts said:

Oh it is very simple: GRT is a fantasy. If something is not observed in our human experience then its a fantasy, or pseudoscience if you will. None of GRT's predictions are observable (nor in practice nor in principle) , therefore it is  a pseudoscience. (Emphasis added, ZYD)

 

For a person who is always touting his achievements in Neidan Taoist Texts you have a surprisingly three dimensional and sense based perspective on science.
 

Quote

 

The early results from Gravity Probe B, one of Nasa's most complicated satellites, confirmed yesterday 'to a precision of better than 1 per cent' the assertion Einstein made 90 years ago - that an object such as the Earth does indeed distort the fabric of space and time.  (Einstein was right: space and time bend, The Guardian) (Emphasis added, ZYD)

 

 

I'm sorry to quote something from the popular press, but it was quickest to hand and also spot on in terms of its relevance.  It is both contemporary and brings out the point which I wish to make, which is that "gravity" as an effect of mass has no direct effect on light, its speed or direction, which is one of the unstated premises of such arguments cited by Taoist Texts such as this:

 

7 hours ago, Taoist Texts said:

er, no) Your link contains 2 posts with answers

Does gravity slow the speed that light travels?

1. So I suppose the only accurate answer to your question is: it depends.

2. Not really. 

 

These are non-answers. Now i am asking a very simple, yes or no question:

 

Does the light from a star travel at c speed in the interstellar vacuum as measured by an observer on earth?

 

Yes it does.

No it does not.

 

In general relativity it is space-time that bends, not the path of light, and the "beam" of light should it wish to comment on its path would say, "I didn't notice anything strange", and be quite flummoxed when presented with evidence to the contrary.

 

Science proceeds from what is "observed in our human experience" to what can be deduced from and confirmed by experiment and further observation, and measurements and "meter readings" are part of that human experience.  As a person who has spent time studying the historical development of electromagnetic theory, and seen how both Quantum Mechanics and Relativity are related to a full interpretation of Maxwell's equation's including both advanced and retarded waves, an aspect of the theory half of which Nineteenth Century physics swept under the carpet, a deficiency which Wheeler and Feynman attempted to rectify in their early Absorber Theory, I have a "synoptic" view of the matter, and I have a view far more similar to Tetrode and the Kaluza-Klein models,  but also working in the direction of an information based approach, which would unify a Kaluza-Klein viewpoint with the Transactional Interpretation.  I don't have the purely technical and mathematical skill to work this out in detail, but on a conceptual level something like this makes sense to me, based on my reading of Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century history of Science.

 

Unfortunately this is all that I can contribute to this topic at this time.

 

ZYD

 

 

Edit: Corrected some spacing problems, which may have been due to gravitational distortion.

 

Edit: Corrected the "light beams" comment to "I didn't notice anything strange" from "a thing strange".

[thelerner]

12 hours ago, Taoist Texts said:

right, right

Editor In Chief Of World’s Best Known Medical Journal: Half Of All The Literature Is False

"Science has taken a turn towards Darkness"

 

So you found an article about Medical Journals and thus throwing out modern science? That article means you no longer have to believe experts, even there safety warning? 

For things like General Theory or shape of the earth it doesn't matter, other then your kids will undoubtedly never go for higher degrees  in anything cause all higher learning is a lie, cause that article you found.  For some safety things like germ theory, vaccines you do put yourself and your neighbors at risk. 

 

How far do you take the All science is lie paradigm.  What fields don't you trust now?   Definitely not medicine I take it.  Your hit by a car or get a bad virus, you definitely wouldn't go to those quacks.. better to bleed and not rely on anti-biotics, surgery, clean instruments..

 

 

[Taoist Texts]

47 minutes ago, thelerner said:

you definitely wouldn't go to those quacks.. better to bleed and not rely on anti-biotics, surgery, clean instruments..

i will. i like clean. i am also a gambler.

 

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated roughly 1.7 million hospital-associated infections, from all types of microorganisms, including bacteria and fungi combined, cause or contribute to 99,000 deaths each year.^[2] In Europe, where hospital surveys have been conducted, the category of gram-negative infections are estimated to account for two-thirds of the 25,000 deaths each year.

[Taoist Texts]

2 hours ago, Zhongyongdaoist said:

  "gravity" as an effect of mass has no direct effect on light, its speed or direction

but, but...  thats how  GRT is proved: by observing how the gravity of the sun changes the direction of the starlight. 

[ilumairen]

6 hours ago, Taoist Texts said:

 

 

Ah, the ultimate disputation technique: "A random link+go-educate-yourself". Well played guys, well played.

 

 

I like the whole educate yourself idea, and have happily read numerous articles shared in such a manner. (Although to be honest, they weren't always directed at me.)

[Zhongyongdaoist]

1 hour ago, Taoist Texts said:

4 hours ago, Zhongyongdaoist said:

  "gravity" as an effect of mass has no direct effect on light, its speed or direction (Emphasis added, ZYD)

but, but...  thats how  GRT is proved: by observing how the gravity of the sun changes the direction of the starlight.

 

Apparently you are also incapable of distinguishing between a direct and an indirect effect:

 

2 hours ago, Zhongyongdaoist said:

In general relativity it is space-time that bends, not the path of light, and the "beam" of light should it wish to comment on its path would say, "I didn't notice anything strange", and be quite flummoxed when presented with evidence to the contrary. (Emphasis added, ZYD)

 

As far as the "light" is concerned it went in a perfectly straight line.  All of this goes back to the every day experience of the "Bent Stick" where a stick when partially submerged in water seems to be bent, but in point of fact is not.  This "optical illusion" was noticed in antiquity and was was eventually formulated as the "principle of least time" by Fermat and was considered very important by Leibniz.  In the early Eighteenth Century it was generalized as the "principle of least action" by Maupertuis and in the late Eighteenth Century was used to reformulate Newtonian Mechanics in the form of integrals instead of differential equations.  Maxwell's original equations were in this form as Quaternions, which of course implied four dimensional solutions, and the later Nineteenth Century rebelled against them because of there implied teleology as I noted here:

 

On 12/10/2013 at 10:22 AM, Zhongyongdaoist said:

The Principle of Least Time was generalized in the early Eighteenth Century by Maupertuis as the 'Principle of Least Action'. Two hundred years later George Fitzgerald was to express his dismay with the Principle of Least Action to his friend Oliver Heaviside, complaining that it seemed to make the present depend on future states, which of course implies that the past depends on the present, but Fitzgerald did not mention that. Maybe it hadn't occurred to him. Max Planck was to make observations about photons seeming to possess knowledge and make calculations. In the 1970s Arthur Young was to take these observations and write The Reflexive Universe, a very suggestive book, though perhaps a little too much influenced by the Mahatma Letters and the Cappadocian Fathers and not enough influenced by Plotinus for my taste.

 

It is this implied teleology that is represented by the two solutions to Maxwell's equations which result from the advanced and retarded waves as the two solutions of Maxwell's equations one of which, the advanced, was ignored by Nineteenth Century physics.

 

The whole problem as you are understanding it derives from thinking that light is a "beam", or a particle such as a "photon" which passes through a "space" in a particular "time", which are "common sense" notions that are not supported by either the experimental evidence or the mathematics used to model it, if you want to toss all of that out because you don't understand it, fine, but be honest about it, and don't assume that people who actually understand the science think in terms of light "being bent", it is space--time that is bent according to the scientific understanding of the matter, for all intents and purposes thinking of it as a beam of light which is bent is just a simplification offered to the general public so that they can get some idea, even if a misleading one, about what is going on, it is NOT what the science is talking about.  Unfortunately there is not an agreed upon interpretation of exactly what is going on at present, but the criticisms that you have mentioned are not based on the actual science, but upon simplifications offered up for popular consumption, they are in a sense pseudo-science, but General Relativity is not.

 

I do want to say that most people, including some scientists, who criticize Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have no idea of the conundrums which research into electromagnetism had presented to physics in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century and the enormous amount of clever research and thought that went into solving problems such as black-body radiation and those presented by spectroscopy.  One can get an idea by wading through E. T. Whittaker's two volume work, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity (2nd edition) as I did, after doing so it will become clear how difficult the problems were and how unsatisfactory all other approaches were to solving these issues.  Relativity and Quantum Mechanics emerged as legitimate, and successful models of the physics because nothing else worked.  They were accepted because they worked in theory and practice, however much they may offend commonsense and the older notions of physics.

 

I could write pages more on this, but I think the fundamental point is that what has been proposed so far as being problems with General Relativity, it is more an attack on popular misconceptions about the science and not the science itself, and as such it misses the mark completely, and really is not worth any more of my time.

 

ZYD

[Marblehead]

Well, at least I am convinced that gravity can change the path of light.

 

I am also convinced that Earth has greater gravity than does our Moon and Mars as well.

 

Therefore, in my mind the greater mass an object has the greater its gravity will be.

 

I am not convinced yet that I can fly as fast as the speed of light.

 

[thelerner]

5 hours ago, Taoist Texts said:

i will. i like clean. i am also a gambler.

 

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated roughly 1.7 million hospital-associated infections, from all types of microorganisms, including bacteria and fungi combined, cause or contribute to 99,000 deaths each year.^[2] In Europe, where hospital surveys have been conducted, the category of gram-negative infections are estimated to account for two-thirds of the 25,000 deaths each year.

Seems silly to gamble with your life when some bets are sure things.  Like if you're bleeding badly from an accident going to an emergency room where they help 10's of millions a year.  Or take an anti-biotic that has saved 100's of millions of people and see if you can avoid getting an infection. 

 

If you only focus on one side of the equation, then you lose perspective.  You have no idea how many people are saved.  If you don't want to go into hospital long term that's fine, but for many ailment Western medicine is excellent.  You throw out the baby with the bath water and risk death for no reason.

 

This gets back to the General Theory question.  If a person spent years studying and had a thoughtful argument that could convince others of an error, then it'd be listened to.  In modern times, with no knowledge of a subject people dismiss experts and use the internet to search out minority opinions that back up there impressions. 

 

You'd rather die, then be treated at a hospital or emergency even for a procedure thats very safe because you found a fact and misinterpret it.  Its not that the fact is wrong, but you interpret it as a trip to a medical facility means death, when the great majority will be helped, indeed without it, die quickly. 

 

addon>

You have a point, but imo, don't have perspective.  By there very nature hospitals house dozens of very sick people with doctors, nurses and visitors who are going in and out.   They increasingly realize the importance of cleanliness but to get business done, there is that in and out.  So, if you can avoid long term stay, that's a good thing.  There are indeed diseases you can catch there and most there have much lowered immunity.

 

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't go there after an accident, ie bleeding, or if you have infection, antibiotics are indeed a wonder drug.  They will save your life and indeed, modern medicine is responsible for our current longevity, course antibiotics and better infant care mean quite alot.  

 

That there are bogus writings in medical journals doesn't show that 100 years of proof and examination by 4 generations of scientists that General of Theory is wrong.  It may well be supplanted, hopefully it will be, but when it is, it'll be supplanted by a better theory that creates better models.  In that case we'd still owe much to Einstein because he asked the right questions, ones that moved science forward.

 

And this isn't just theory, its having the math, and it gets monstrously complicated E=MC2 is an unusual simplistic anomaly, most of this stuff takes up pages and pages.   The math has to work out, and that's hard, genius level hard. 

Edited October 19, 2018 by thelerner

[ilumairen]

14 minutes ago, thelerner said:

Seems silly to gamble with your life when some bets are sure things.  Like if you're bleeding badly from an accident going to an emergency room where they help 10's of millions a year.  Or take an anti-biotic that has saved 100's of millions of people and see if you can avoid getting an infection. 

 

If you only focus on one side of the equation, then you lose perspective.  You have no idea how many people are saved.  If you don't want to go into hospital long term that's fine, but for many ailment Western medicine is excellent.  You throw out the baby with the bath water and risk death for no reason.

 

This gets back to the General Theory question.  If a person spent years studying and had a thoughtful argument that could convince others of an error, then it'd be listened to.  In modern times, with no knowledge of a subject people dismiss experts and use the internet to search out minority opinions that back up there impressions. 

 

You'd rather die, then be treated at a hospital or emergency even for a procedure thats very safe because you found a fact and misinterpret it.  Its not that the fact is wrong, but you interpret it as a trip to a medical facility means death, when the great majority will be helped, indeed without it, die quickly. 

 

This came to mind: 

https://msu.edu/~jdowell/miner.html

 

Body Ritual among the Nacirema.

[Stosh]

Herb is in a space ship with a tinted window that always faces the sun. If he turns a knob to the left on his control panel to slow time shipboard ,does it get darker or lighter in the ship?

[Taoist Texts]

7 hours ago, Marblehead said:

Well, at least I am convinced that gravity can change the path of light.

Interestingly it is one of the proofs why GRT is bogus: because there is no need for it to explain the lensing.

Deflection of light by the Sun

Henry Cavendish in 1784 (in an unpublished manuscript) and Johann Georg von Soldner in 1801 (published in 1804) had pointed out that Newtonian gravity predicts that starlight will bend around a massive object.^[15][16]

 

The GRT plagiarized an idea discovered a 100 years before and used it to position itself as a globalist religion.

 

[Taoist Texts]

5 hours ago, thelerner said:

to search out minority opinions

[silent thunder]

Fun conversation!  My interest when topics of this nature come up always seem to lean toward the properties of light lately.  Gravity just has... well, no real gravity for me lately.

 

I was pretty tweaked when I learned some time ago from multiple sources that the measured speed of light, long touted as a constant, like... the constant, actually measures variably.  Is this due to a limitation in the instrumentation based on our own perspective oriented limitations that are built into any tools we design, or an actual feature of the nature of light itself... this fascinates me no end.

 

That and the seeming fact that where vision is concerned, we're always viewing the past is another property of light that peaks my interest.  Since there is always a bit of time that it takes (however slight) for light to reach our sensory organs from whatever it rebounds off of, which then must be first transduced by said organs to electrical signals before those are interpreted as what we see...  We are always literally seeing the past.

 

This always strikes me when I'm out at night walking and staring up as our night sky is a veritable visual story of the light of the past.  Some stars we see no longer exist as we see them now but have long died out, or burst and the signal flashes of their dying have yet to reach us. 

 

One astronomer Larry Molnar and his team claim through observation of increased orbital rates of a binary star, that they have already collapsed in collision and the light of said collision will reach us in a few years... interesting stuff for sure, since the estimate is only a few years off, so confirmation is eminent in this case.

 

Also intriguing to me, is the notion that we only ever see with our eyes the colors that objects are technically not... since our eyes collect only the frequencies of light that bounce off of objects, not the frequencies that are absorbed by them... so technically we only ever see the colors that things are not often comes to mind for whatever reason.

 

Fun stuff, good convo... thanks all.

[Michael Sternbach]

BTW, the curving of space by gravity has interesting implications such as the creation of a photon sphere around ultracompact stellar bodies like certain neutron stars and, most of all, black holes.

 

Quoting the respective Wikipedia article:

 

 

Quote

As photons approach the event horizon of a black hole, those with the appropriate energy avoid being pulled into the black hole by traveling in a nearly tangential direction known as an exit cone. A photon on the boundary of this cone does not possess the energy to escape the gravity well of the black hole. Instead, it orbits the black hole. These orbits are rarely stable in the long term. The photon sphere is located farther from the center of a black hole than the event horizon. Within a photon sphere, it is possible to imagine a photon that begins at the back of your head, orbiting the black hole, only then to be intercepted by your eyes, allowing you to see the back of your head.

 

Edited October 20, 2018 by Michael Sternbach

[thelerner]

10 hours ago, Taoist Texts said:

Is that quip justification for not believing experts in a field, ones who've deeply studied the subject and instead rely on your gut instinct and prejudgements?    Statements that use the word Always are often suspect, imo.  

 

When dealing with complex issues it takes more then surface judgements, you need to study data, available science and gain perspective instead of trying to rationalize ones position. 

[Zhongyongdaoist]

11 hours ago, Taoist Texts said:

19 hours ago, Marblehead said:

Well, at least I am convinced that gravity can change the path of light.

Interestingly it is one of the proofs why GRT is bogus: because there is no need for it to explain the lensing.

Deflection of light by the Sun

Henry Cavendish in 1784 (in an unpublished manuscript) and Johann Georg von Soldner in 1801 (published in 1804) had pointed out that Newtonian gravity predicts that starlight will bend around a massive object.^[15][16]

 

The GRT plagiarized an idea discovered a 100 years before and used it to position itself as a globalist religion. (Emphasis added, ZYD)

 

I would have left this discussion alone, but I am really astonished by this post and its implications for you own thinking, but to address the purely scientific aspects of the matter, Newtonian corpuscularism is an obsolete worldview, one which failed experimental tests and was and is incapable of providing the basis of a coherent worldview, to say nothing of how it was and has been used to attack the spiritual traditions of East and West.  Basically it seems that for reasons that are only implied in your post, you are perfectly willing to dismiss everything that science is because of your position that General Relativity is a "globalist religion" and a revival of the claim about Einstein made by the Nazi and anti-semite, Philipp Lenard, as your use of the term "plagiarized"  strongly implies.  To be honest I really do not want to go where all of this is pointing, I have always begun any of my disagreements with you with the phrase "with all due respect", but based on the implications of the sources and apparent inspiration of the ideas which you are citing, I may never be able to do that again.  I leave it to others to follow through on the sources and implications of what you have said, I am only concerned about the integrity of science, and if your opinions are based on the types of sources which have been implied, then you have no real basis for criticism, based on anything that can be considered legitimately scientific, for that reason I consider the matter closed and will not post further in this thread.

 

ZYD

[Michael Sternbach]

52 minutes ago, thelerner said:

Is that quip justification for not believing experts in a field, ones who've deeply studied the subject and instead rely on your gut instinct and prejudgements?    Statements that use the word Always are often suspect, imo.  

 

When dealing with complex issues it takes more then surface judgements, you need to study data, available science and gain perspective instead of trying to rationalize ones position. 

 

More often than not, generally accepted scientific theories are not 'wrong' as much as they are limited in their applicability. I would not be surprised if GRT and SRT would one day turn out to be a subset of a more universal physics, correct as far as it goes, but limited to a certain scope of phenomena.

 

Historically speaking, few theories stood the test of time without modification and extension. You never know what you don't know yet...

Edited October 20, 2018 by Michael Sternbach

[Taoist Texts]

59 minutes ago, thelerner said:

Statements that use the word Always are often suspect, imo.

hope you  like this one better)

[Taoist Texts]

19 minutes ago, Zhongyongdaoist said:

 Philipp Lenard

Mike Godwin

20 minutes ago, Zhongyongdaoist said:

sources and apparent inspiration of the ideas which you are citing

um....that was a wikipedia quote

24 minutes ago, Zhongyongdaoist said:

I have always begun any of my disagreements with you with the phrase "with all due respect", but ...., I may never be able to do that again. 

i will always, always respect you duly

 

[Michael Sternbach]

Insofar the topic of Einstein's so-called "plagiarism" has been raised, it should be remembered that science is a collective endeavour progressing due to the efforts of many. It is true that bits and pieces of Einstein's models already existed in the literature before him; his ingenuity was in blending them into new coherent theories of far-reaching consequences.

 

It is also true that cricism of Einstein's work - while surely not illegitimate per say - more often than not comes from people with very little understanding of it or who would be in a position to offer valid alternative explanations for the phenomena it addresses. Sadly, such criticism is in fact often politically motivated, the underlying assumption being that Einstein MUST be wrong, as he is seen as a crowd puller of a supposed left-wing conspiracy.

 

While science is practised by mere humans and what is presented as its truths at any particular time is not beyond ideological influences from whatever camp, luckily science does have the objective verification and revisability of any of its theories and stated facts built into its very methodological foundations. And that is far more than what can be said about aforementioned political fomenters... 

Edited October 20, 2018 by Michael Sternbach

[joeblast]

56 minutes ago, Michael Sternbach said:

 

More often than not, generally accepted scientific theories are not 'wrong' as much as they are limited in their applicability. I would not be surprised if GRT and SRT would one day turn out to be a subset of a more universal physics, correct as far as it goes, but limited to a certain scope of phenomena.

 

Historically speaking, few theories stood the test of time without modification and extension. You never know what you don't know yet...

this

 

is anyone under some delusion that GR is somehow not an approximation?

 

same for QM

 

they're pretty damned accurate, but still approximations.  just as newtonian is an approximation of GR (where some important things disappear entirely just using NM)

 

I had to lol at the thieving idea, that was.....right out and funny