This is no help at all. I need provocative biology questions, not this physics crap.
But hey, if any physics professors want to hand this off to their students, go ahead, give ’em a laugh.
The prominent Pagan publication called New Scientist states that the “axis of evil” imprinted on the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is “posing a threat to standard cosmology.” (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19425994.000-axis-of-evil-a-cause-for-cosmic-concern.html ) The article continues: “According to the standard model, the universe is isotropic, or much the same everywhere. However, in 2005, Kate Land and João Magueijo of Imperial College London noticed a curious pattern in the map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) created by NASA’s WMAP satellite. It seemed to show that some hot and cold spots in the CMB are not distributed randomly, as expected, but are aligned along what Magueijo dubbed the axis of evil.”
The Pagans say concerning the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation ( http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327245.900-13-more-things-axis-of-evil.htm#.Uqeo0lNi30R ) “WHAT would you do if you found a mysterious and controversial pattern in the radiation”: “In 2005, Kate Land and João Magueijo at Imperial College London faced just such a conundrum. What they did next was a PR master stroke: they called their discovery the cosmic “axis of evil.” Now why is it called evil? The Pagans answer the question: “The apparent alignment is “evil” because it undermines what we thought we knew about the… universe. Modern cosmology is built on the assumption that the universe is essentially the same in whichever direction we look. If the cosmic radiation has a preferred direction, that assumption may have to go – along with our best theories about cosmic history.” The Pagans then admitted that they are terrorized by the ‘axis of evil’ by saying: “The European Space Agency’s recently launched Planck space telescope might settle the issue when it makes the most sensitive maps yet of the CMB. Until then, the axis of evil continues to terrorise us.”
PS. Results from the WMAP satellite (early 2000s) indicated that when looking at large scales of the universe, the CMB could be partitioned into “hot” and “cold” sections- and this partitioning is aligned with our ecliptic plane and equinoxes. This partitioning and alignment resulted in an axis through the universe which “scientists” dubbed “the axis of evil”- because of the damage it does to their myths. This axis passes right through our tiny portion of the universe. Laurence Krauss commented in 2005:“ But when you look at [the cosmic microwave background] map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That’s crazy. We’re looking out at the whole universe. There’s no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.” (http://www.edge.org/conversation/the-energy-of-empty-space-that-isn-39t-zero )
Most “scientists” brushed the scientific observation off as a fluke of some type, and many myth-theories were created to explain it away. Many awaited the Planck mission. The Planck satellite was looked upon as a referee for these unexpected (and unwelcome) results. The Planck satellite used different sensor technology and an improved scanning pattern to map the CMB. In March 2013, Planck reported back and in fact verified the presence of the signal in even higher definition than before! There is Absolutely No Salvation Outside the Catholic Church see www.vaticancatholic.com Geocentrism is absolutely irrefutable.
He followed up with another message an hour later.
Heliocentrism is a myth There is Absolutely No salvation Outside the Church visit www.vaticancatholic.com According to the evolutionist myth called heliocentrism the earth revolves around the sun traveling at speeds of 65,000+ miles is each hour which equates to approximately 20 miles per second while spinning on its axis 2,000 miles per hour. Science disproved heliocentricism centuries ago and decades ago and continues to do so.
Remember: Every experiment designed to measure the speed of the earth through space has always returned a speed of zero just as the Bible claimed all along. All the MMX experiments and related experiments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries showed prima facie evidence that the Earth wasn’t moving around the sun – and this continued to be the case with every repeat of an MMX-type experiment from 1881 to 1932 when the last one was done. That is science. That is irrefutable. Michelson did the experiment again and again and again because he was absolutely devastated by the results. He did it again with a man named Dayton C. Miller in 1904. Dayton Miller decided to go on his own track and was so devastated that the earth was Geocentric that he did 100,000 experiments with even more sophisticated and sensitive equipment– compared to 36 MMX experiments done by Michelson-Morley: and he got the same results. Dayton earned a doctorate in science from Princeton University in 1890, was president of the American Physical Society during 1925-1926, chairman of the National Research Council’s Division of Physical Sciences from 1927 to 1930, and president of the Acoustical Society of America from 1913 to 1933.The Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment (1925) which is a Sagnac and Morley Michelson (MMX) experiment in one: debunked relativity and heliocentrism. The Sagnac experiment scientifically demonstrated ‘Absolute Motion.’ It debunked Einstein’s “relative motion” myth with his myths of “general and special relativity.” The Sagnac experiment absolutely devastates ‘relativity’ mythology.
Ronald R. Hatch is a recipient of the Johannes Kepler Award from the Institute of Navigation because he was the most significant contributor to the advancement of satellite navigation. He has over 30 years experience in designing navigation systems and has been consulted by government agencies and companies. He authored Escape from Einstein – a work which debunks the relativity myth and other related myths. He brought up the issue of the GPS programming and what NASA does with the old experiments that disprove Einstein’s special myth of relativity and also heliocentrism. Ronald R. Hatch the Director of Navigation Systems engineering and founder of NavCom Technology, Inc had to go and investigate line by line how NASA was constructing the computer data or computer programs- rather- for the positioning satellites. What he found was that NASA -without telling people– preprogrammed the computers of the global positioning satellites to include the Sagnac effect. Sagnac did his experiment in 1913 and established and demonstrated that since motion is absolute – that means it is not relative. It was a very phenomenal experiment because it proved motion was absolute. Believers in Einsteinian mythology cannot get away from this and that is why they have to preprogram their computers for the Sagnac effect of absolute motion without telling anybody – and then they say that the global positioning satellites are working by the special “theory” of relativity. The global positioning satellites disprove the special “theory” of relativity because if those computer programs of the GPS were not preprogrammed for the Sagnac effect – in other words if they were not adjusted for the fact that there was absolute motion – then the GPS wouldn’t work.Now what they have found between GPS satellites in space – is that they worked in foursomes. They have 3 up in space at any one time and they have the ground station. When a signal is sent from one in-orbit GPS into another GPS in orbit to get the triangulation that is needed: the light beam that goes from west to east travels 50 nanoseconds slower than the light beam traveling from east to west. That may not seem much but if you add up 50 nanoseconds for every beam that is sank from one satellite to another: in a day’s period the typical GPS would be off by 15 miles. They have a certain parameter that they have to fit into and so they have to measure these things in nanoseconds- it’s a pretty intricate calculation- but that’s what they discovered. Now why is that the case? If light always travels at c as Einstein told us then why are these GPS beams coming back at different times – 50 nanoseconds worth? Therefore the GPS has just falsified the special “theory” of relativity. In other words the global positioning satellites are just one big Michelson-Morley experiment or its one big Sagnac Experiment –and they thus adjust the computers based on what Sagnac found in 1913. That’s the story for you. That should make headlines but you won’t find it in headlines of course because the aura around special and general relativity is so great – not only to answer Michelson-Morley experiments but is the absolute foundational basis for all of Pagan cosmology today. Everything you hear about: the big bag, and the expansion, and dark matter, and dark energy, and inflation and all these terms you hear are for one reason only: because everything has to be fit into the tensor equations of Albert Einstein g= 8PiT – that’s the reason why. That all comes from general relativity which is the next step. Special relativity was invented in 1905 to answer the amazing Michelson-Morley experiments – in order to keep the earth moving around the sun and then we begin to see flaws in special relativity and one of the major flaws of course is it doesn’t deal with gravity. If special relativity dealt with uniform motion – that is motion that’s going the same all the time or you are standing still – that’s called an inertial frame. What happens when you are accelerating however, or what happens when you are decelerating, what happens when you meet up with inertial forces like centrifugal force, or Coriolis force, Euler force: well things change. Now you have to have a whole new “theory” and that’s why Einstein had to develop the general “theory” of relativity because he had to answer gravity and inertial forces. Where do these things come from? Well general relativity proposes to give us an answer and it says space is warped, and time is warped by matter, and all kinds of things like that- these are totally unproven too- but that’s just the “theory.” That’s why it’s still called the “theory” of general relativity because none of this has been proven. It has been debunked. There is Absolutely No Salvation Outside the Catholic Church see www.vaticancatholic.com
Man, Catholics. They’re still plaguing my inbox.
So:
P1) Things you don’t understand exist
P2) You think you understand things that probably don’t exist
C) Those things you do understand must exist
I see why Anselm was so popular…
Ed has been “conversing” (after a fashion) with this guy for a while, sending him one line follow up questions to one of these emails and getting back another pile of nonsense.
It’s funny, but in a very sad way.
Refer him to Phil Plait and Sean Carroll (the astrophysicist).
this is why I wish the god-botherers would shut the f*** up already about gays and women’s issues and spend some time helping those in their circles who are afflicted with obvious problems.
but then again, they’d probably read that letter and say, “and?”
Matt Wykoff, yeah. Probably not entirely fair to blame him on Catholicism, seeing as how he has excommunicated the Church (see: Sedevacantism).
See also this post from October! Same guy from “vaticancatholic.com”, I think. I visited his site once. Oh my. I actually thought I had followed a link there from that earlier PZ post but don’t see it in that one.
Does anyone know what drugs the author is on? I’d really like to try them next time I go motorcycle racing.
Astonishing. Really amazing article.
Anyone nowadays who believes a centrifugal force exists can safely be ignored when it comes to matters of classical mechanics and relativity.
Come to think of it, anyone nowadays who believes ‘There is Absolutely No Salvation Outside the Catholic Church’…
I had an eight year dose of Catholicism, I’ll pass. Besides, that Jesus person tried to choke me to death when in wafer form.
So anomalous muon flux is the work of the Devil. I knew it all along.
Refers to scientific publications as “pagan”? This one’s old school.
What? Huh. It looks like this Catholic wand of Wafer to Flesh is out of charges….
I know it’s pointless to engage on the facts here, but isn’t this crank arguing both that the Earth isn’t moving and that it is? Too deep for me.
I think I can add a little to this, but I am a mere bio nerd who reads stuff about cosmology. So someone else should step in to correct me.
What this weirdo seems to be referring to is a very slight blip in the temperature distribution of the cosmic microwave background. This feature includes a cold spot that is larger than the others. There might also be a larger warm spot that lines with that (on the opposite side of the spherical map? Not sure. The jargon is too jargony for me).
Anyway, the position of this anomaly does align with the ecliptic plane, but not perfectly. It is off by several degrees.
This could just be a random thing. Since the several cold and warm spots differ in size, there are bound to be some larger than the rest. It could also just be an error in massaging the imagery, since the CMB image is hugely massaged as it is. The CMB pattern only appears after the image is corrected for the very very tiny red shift and blue shift as our planet travels through space, for gosh sakes!
One speculation I had been hearing about is that if the anomaly is real, it might signify that our bubble universe bumped into another bubble universe in a larger multiverse. That there might be a multiverse is something that freaks out the religious types since our universe is supposed to be special b/c we are special.
Don’t forget the inanity at http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com.
And I forget the place, some guy has a web page where he solves all the major conundrums in Physics, like the value of the fine-structure constant. Funny he hasn’t gotten a passel of Nobel Prizes for that.
And that other guy that proves Einstein wrong and rederives things based on some fuzzy constant Z he discovered.
Do they have Internet access in those “homes”?
Substantive responses to someone who doesn’t really deserve them:
-I think the real reason it was called the Axis of Evil was because it was discovered during the Bush administration, and scientists were making fun.
-The idea that the aether everywhere is motionless with respect to the Earth is inconsistent with aberration of light (stars appear to move slightly depending on the motion of the earth, similar to the way rain appears to change direction when you run through it).
-The Sagnac experiment does not show that motion is absolute, it shows that rotation is absolute. Which even kids know, if they’ve ever played with those spinny things on playgrounds.
(Emphasis added)
But… but… that’s not even how GPS positioning works! They don’t pass signals between satellites to give a location. A location focuses on several satellites and finds the differences between them.
Imagine a GPS satellite and 2 points on earth east and west forming an equilateral triangle. The satellite is about 20,000 Kilometres from earth’s surface. With the earth having an orbital velocity of about 30 km/sec, and the signal latency of the satellite signal being 1/15th of a second (300,000/20,000) the earth has moved about 2 km in that 1/15th second. The signal from the satellite has to go about 2 km further to get to the western point and is about 2 km closer to the eastern point. There are of course other considerations such as the rotational speed of the earth which would accentuate the effect rather than diminish it. The orbital speed of the GPS satellite would be negligible and be either positive or negative depending on if it is travelling in an eastern or western orbit. At an orbital velocity of about 30,000 km/sec, the satellite would travel just over 1/2 km/sec so the increased distance that the signal would have to go to the western point is 2 + or – 1/2 km. Equally decreased distance for the eastern point.
This is a very simplified calculation which would definitely get you killed if your GPS followed these calculations. For illustrative purposes only.
One more thing. The Axis of Evil is a pattern in the CMB anisotropy (which is the variation in the CMB in different directions). But what you should know is that the anisotropy is very small (1 part in 100,000) and by far the biggest effect we see is actually due to… the motion of the earth relative to the CMB. This motion is called the earth’s “peculiar velocity”, and it’s about 370 km/s.
We’ve already discovered that the universe has a privileged reference frame (that of the CMB), and the Earth isn’t it.
A couple of substantive points in respond to the ravings of a lunatic:
1)If Earth were stationary and the Universe turned around it, how would spacecraft orbiting at the L1 and L2 Lagrange points be stable? Not to mention that distant galaxies must be moving REALLY fast to make it around in 24 hours.
2)The inhomogeneity of the CMB is not at all inconvenient–in fact it is essential to explain why galaxies formed.
3)Relativity made the luminiferous an anachronism.
4)Even the Catlicks accept Heliocentrism.
I hope this guy can find some meds–maybe start with lithium.
Ack, that should read “about 30,000 km/hr, the satellite would travel just over 1/2 km in 1/15 th sec”
And I even proof read it. Of course the worst proof reader is the author who knows what was intended, not necessarily conveyed.
So, so many things wrong with a stationary Earth.
Have this guy explain parallax. Stars above the poles travel in very nearly circles over the course of a year when viewed against the background. Stars over the equator (or actually on the plane of the Earth’s orbit) travel in very nearly straight lines. Those in between travel in ellipses, the closer they are to the equator the more eccentric they are. And the size of the movements vary from around one arc second to imperceptible.
The Earth’s yearly movement explains parallax very well. Perfectly in fact.
And don’t get me on the speeds distant galaxies would have to be traveling to circle the Earth once a day.
Vaticancatholic.com? Looks like you’ve just been contacted either by the sedevacantist group Most Holy Family Monastery, or a fan of them. They’re some of the most insane radical Christians I’ve seen on the web, and their videos are so crazy at first I thought they had to be parodists. Anything you receive from this group is definitely going to be unhinged. I’m surprised these e-mails didn’t blame Freemasons or Vatican II for corrupting science, since those are some of MHFM’s favorite targets to attack.
arids@21, Daniel@24
Please lay off the armchair diagnosis, and the identification of religious irrationality with psychiatric illness. See here.
If you’re rotating, clearly there’s a centripetal force (otherwise you wouldn’t be rotating). The centrifugal force is equal and opposite. In some calculations it’s handier to use than the centripetal force.
Catholic dogma is weird, but more self-consistent (if you take angels as axiomatic) than the word salad this poor person has concocted. I wonder what particular affliction leads to this confusion.
I’ve got a degree in spatial science, so I’ve learned a thing or two about GPS. I’m always annoyed when people get the whole concept wrong. The satellites, as previously stated, do not need to communicate with each other. They have very precise clocks on board, a schedule of their orbit, and they broadcast their current time. The GPS receiver in your hand does the math to triangulate your position based on the tiny differences in how long it takes those signals to reach you. (It’s called a receiver for a reason. Don’t get me started on the people who think they transmit their location to the satellites for the Illuminati to spy you.) The delay between the satellite’s time establishes your distance from that satellite, represented by a sphere. You need a minimum of 4 satellites since the intersection of four spheres is a single point.
As for relativity (apparently both special and general are involved), as I understand it, the satellites are in a high orbit and thus moving fast relative to the Earth’s surface. This means that time is slightly slower for the satellites, and the developers had to compensate for this, since their time needs to match up with the time on the receivers. If they didn’t, GPS receivers everywhere would lose accuracy and become worthless. It’d be a ridiculously long time before they synced back up, and it wouldn’t last.
Rich@8
I’ve had other physicists argue to me that centrifugal forces *do* exist. That is, they do in rotating frames of reference. IMO that’s being a bit pedantic though :)
If anyone wants to see a ton more in the style in the post, go here:
http://www.geocentricity.com/
especially the section “The Biblical Astronomer quarterly magazine”.
Some of it is surprisingly sophisticated, eg this one:
http://www.geocentricity.com/ba1/no066/vdkamp.html
Of course if the Earth was perfectly stationary it would be a perfect sphere, but it isn’t.
Old news.
In all fairness, I have to point out that most Catholics aren’t nuts. Misguided, maybe, but not nuts. While not a Catholic myself ( I threw off that mantle long ago) I still have friends who are perfectly reasonable, kind, generous, loving people, with the odd habit of going to sit in a cold church and participate in a bunch of old rituals on Sunday morning.
*sigh* These people sadden me. Special Relativity handles accelerations. It’s challenging, but it does work.
I like that phrase “these are totally unproven too.” Makes you wonder if the author should be in either a sanatorium or a drug abuse study. I’ve tried arguing with this sort person a few times and it just doesn’t work: you can’t demonstrate “truth” to someone who has no standard by which to measure it. It’s a losing prospect. The entire argument ends up being so much hot air where the loudest person “wins”. This person’s “it’s totally unproven” makes you just want to clap your hand to your forehead and say “Dude, good thing you don’t actually need to understand how they work in order to operate your lungs and heart.”
As someone who did work for many years on instruments flown with the GPS satellites; there are a lot more than 4 up there at any time.
viggen111 @32:
I just toss something like this at them, and ask them to come up with a better explanation, or shut the fuck up.
Sources of the precession of perihelion for Mercury
Amount (arcsec/Julian century) Cause
531.63 ±0.69 Gravitational tugs of the other planets
0.0254 Oblateness of the Sun (quadrupole moment)
42.98 ±0.04 General relativity
574.64±0.69 Total
574.10±0.65 Observed
10 seconds formatting completely wasted.
re viggen111 @32:
Oh? Prove it!
Seriously, I thought that was exactly why it’s called the Special Theory, i.e. it only covers the special case of uniform motion, acceleration is verboten. Einstein spent years to broaden S.R. to cover the general situation of letting velocity change (acceleration :== dv/dt) Really, I’m curious how to include acceleration in S.R. My physiks is relatively [pun intended] weak.
What saddens me is the trope: “It’s just a THEORY! No proof, just a theory.”
stevem @36: Nah, you can handle accelerating frames in SR (e.g. twin ‘paradox’). John Baez is good at writing/gathering fairly good explanations of physics topics.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/acceleration.html
Re 37:
<warning: detour>
I thought the twin paradox was explicitly due to S.R. not addressing the issue of acceleration. [i.e. the problem ignored acceleration; naughty, naughty] Because of the twin paradox, Einstein went back to the “drawing board” and developed the G.T.o.R. But that is just my “weak” understanding. I luv to talk fysiks more than biologgy, but this is a biologgy space, so no more fysiks here. :-(
<EOM>
stevem, no, SR demonstrates the non-paradoxicality. For every interval of time Δt in the ‘stationary’ frame, the space traveller experiences a delta time of (square root of (1 – (v/c)^2)) times Δt, where v is the magnitude of the traveller’s velocity in the stationary frame of reference. Since the value in the outer brackets is always less than or equal to unity, the net result is that space traveller ages less. No GR required.
The motivation for GR was bringing gravity into the mix.
BTW, PZ said in the OP that the topic is ‘this physics crap’, so…
re 40:
I read Baez’s site and saw there is a way to _force_ acceleration into S.R. but GR designs it in. As for the twin paradox, is that it is a paradox that if all velocity is relative (no absolute velocity) then when A goes and B stays, A can say that B goes and A stays. When they get back together they both say the other one should be younger, but A is younger than B, to everyone’s eye. Thus the paradox. Only if you add in acceleration, that A underwent and B did not, that A and B become distinguishable. Even doing Baez’s tricks to use acceleration in SR, I think you still get the paradox, GR rules out the paradox cuz it is a more complete model, not just for the ‘special’ case of velocity A relative to velocity B (even when looked at as dV’s for dT’s).
while the OP allows Fysiks for this topic, I’ll bow out for now.
Re Bronze Dog @ #27
Actually, it’s more complicated then that. Special Relativity says that clocks in orbit around the earth run slightly slower then clocks on the earth. However, General Relativity says that clocks in orbit run slightly faster due to the fact that there are no net accelerations on an orbiting satellite, while the gravitational acceleration on the Earth’s surface causes clocks there to run slightly slower then on the satellite. The first is time dilation due to speed differences. The second is time dilation due to acceleration differences. Depending on the orbit of the satellite, clocks therein may run slower or faster then clocks on the earth.
stevem @41:
No, the concept of inertial frames of reference holds in SR. If A goes and comes back, and B is in an inertial frame, A has departed from an inertial frame. Non-symmetric. No paradox.
To expand on colnago80’s above post, here are some numbers for those who care (and
all viewers of any science related websites *should* care).
Since all of the 24 GPS satellites orbit at about 14,000 km/hour (~12 hour orbital period)
Special Relativity indicates that the atomic clocks on the satellites run about 7 uS (micro-
Seconds) per day slower than ground based atomic clocks. However, General Relativity
indicates that the Satellite atomic clocks will run about 45 uS per day faster than ground
based atomic clocks since the former are farther from a large mass (i.e. less space-time
curvature caused by the Earth’s gravitational mass).
The difference between these results in Satellite atomic clocks running about 38 uS per
day faster than ground based atomic clocks. For determining accurate positioning GPS
atomic clocks need to have Nano-second accuracies. If all of the relativistic clock rate
differences were not compensated for, the GPS satellite system would be literally quite
worthless for determining accurate three dimensional positions relative to the surface
of the Earth since GPS location errors would accumulate at a rate of approximately 10
km per day. In other words, measuring the position of your (stationary) house every
Tuesday would result in a 70 km per week of apparent movement. Also note that this
apparent movement would be in three dimensions and not confined to the surface of
the Earth.
Creationist claims that GPS satellites disprove Relativity are, of course, completely
counterfactual, which is the norm for that class of “anthropoid rabble” (coined by H.L.
Mencken). There is a nearly endless stream of creationists who still dispute that label;
simply do a web search of “anthropoid rabble”.
You certainly can’t expect much from an email that starts with “The prominent Pagan publication…”.
I think Wolfgang Pauli’s caustic putdown of a singularly ill-conceived paper is appropriate for this steaming pile of shit: It isn’t even wrong.
re 43:
[emphasis added – stevem]
Agreed! That is the key to the “paradox”. The recognition that the problem statement actually sets up a situation outside of the model (the “theory”) and doing so produces a result that seems contradictory. That is, let me re-iterate my previous comment: If velocity is purely relative then A’s velocity relative to A is zero while B’s velocity (relative to A) is very high. aaand according to this THEORY, the same can be said for A relative to B, so according to this THEORY, both A and B will think the other one moved very fast and should have been time contracted, BUT you also say that there is some magical way to say A moved and B did not so A will be younger than B, that is the paradox: two different answers from the same THEORY. QED…. But Einstein realized it was not enough to just say, “the difference between A and B was that A accelerated”, he decided it was necessary to include acceleration as an integrated part of the theory. That Special Relatively left it out, and it wasn’t enough to just use acceleration as a “hidden variable”, without the equations to include it explicitly.
<Sorry to be so long-winded, this is a fascinating subject for me, and trying to explain it to others helps me clarify it to myself, I’ll try to leave it be now>
re GPS:
yes, two effects have to be corrected by the GPS satellites, time dilation from velocity (S.R only) and also time dilation from gravitation (G.R.!!) This is the dilation that is used to “prove” General Relativity is REAL and not just a “theory” (to use the word like the mundanes who think that “theory” is just a “guess”)
@Nick Gotts #16:
Hah! Good point.
@ealloc #28:
I hadn’t heard that before. Thanks. That’ll give me something to read up on this afternoon!
stevem @47:
You’re misunderstanding the theory. It says there is equivalence between observers at rest in inertial reference frames. There’s nothing magical about saying that A departs from inertial frames over the course of their journey. They actually experience acceleration. You can plot their course through spacetime, and lo! the proper length of their path (the time they experience) is shorter than that experienced by B. SR most definitely does not say that ‘velocity is purely relative’.
Einstein’s own answer (not very well translated) to exactly your argument;
Einstein goes on to explain the same phenomenon in GR language.
re 49:
Well, I did say my fysiks knowledge was (relatively) weak. You got me! I know I need to study it more. I’m glad it is such a fascinating subject. _Studying_ it won’t be a boring task.
…as opposed to http://www.vatican.va.
Aha. ‘Interesting.’
Wooow. That just has to be a Poe.
I mean, yes, I love the use of the words “Pagan”, “evolutionist”, “myth-theories” and just “theory” in the usual Creationist sense and so on (“evolutionist myth called heliocentrism” is particularly bizarre and unconnected), but that over-the-top stuff kind of gives it away, I would say.
I don’t buy it.
@saganite:
Plz don’t misuse “Poe”.
It’s not a Poe if it’s satire.
It’s a Poe if you cannot tell whether it was intended as satire or intended seriously.
In this case, the same words may constitute a Poe if it appeared without source and context. With source and context we can be confident it was intended in a particular way. Since we know whether or not it was intended seriously, it is not a Poe.
Do we actually know this is satire?
PZ seems to take it seriously. “Man, Catholics. They’re still plaguing my inbox.”
“Poe” seems appropriate at this point.
I’m glad I checked back. Thanks, everyone, for the enlightenment on general vs. special relativity and their combined effect on the satellites. It’s also nice to have a solid figure on how quickly the system would lose accuracy without those corrections.
It’s quite obvious to me that this is fully serious delusion. The Dunning/Kruger effect has no trouble leading people as far out to lunch as this kook has gone.
saganite:
PZ has shared several of these ranting emails over the years. This is not the first from a deeply deluded believer. I see no reason to think this counts as a Poe.
“He did it again with a man named Dayton C. Miller in 1904. Dayton Miller decided to go on his own track and was so devastated that the earth was Geocentric that he did 100,000 experiments with even more sophisticated and sensitive equipment”.
Okay, that would require about 15 separate experiments every two days, without missing a day from 1904 until he died early in 1941. According to Wikipedia, Miller was busy doing a lot of other things during that period. Including “Miller spent his entire career teaching physics at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio, as head of the physics department from 1893 until his retirement in 1936”. And he was an amateur flautist.
I don’t remember the bible ever asserting anything about the speed of the earth. The sun stood still in the sky – but there’s no reason even in a true account of a miracle stating the sun “stood still in the sky” requires that the earth wasn’t moving.
The man is arguing for a biblical interpretation of evidence but cannot even lay out any specific portion of the bible that predicts a result.