Is science on the right track
Web Master -
Relativity
Now here’s a subject that gets people going. It’s a bit like the Emperor’s new clothes. People pretend they understand it so that they can seem clever to other people. It is a classic case of mathematicians building reality from equations and getting it wrong. Originally, Einstein was fascinated by how things travelling at very high speeds would appear from different viewpoints. This was fine, and he could create equations to explain it. Unfortunately, what appeared to be happening gradually became what actually was happening. This was where it all went wrong, and again, the Chinese whispers began, each false premise building on the previous one until a dogma was built up which no-
General Relativity
Understanding the real world entails creating an analogue of the real world that our minds can visualize. Sometimes, we can do this and it seems to work. However, that doesn’t mean that the Analogue actually is the same as the real world. When Einstein talks about curved space, it doesn’t actually mean that space is physically curved, but is just a way of visualizing the situation. When he came up with this viewpoint, and his equations gave the correct answers, everyone said that Newton was wrong. This is not necessarily the case. When Newtonian calculations are carried out concerning planets revolving around the Sun, some simplifications are used. This always seemed to me a bit of a cheat when I did Applied Maths at school. It was much easier to consider that a moving mass was very small, in fact no more than a point through which its momentum would act. Mostly this was all right. However, I wondered just what difference it made to a planetary system. So I created a computer model of the planet Mercury revolving around the sun using solely the Newtonian mechanics originally proposed, including the inverse square law of gravitational force, assuming a point for both the Sun and Mercury. I adjusted the velocity at the aphelion to give the correct perihelion then measured the angle through which the perihelion moved over a period of 100 terrestrial years. This turned out to be zero +/-
I then replaced the Sun with a point mass at its centre equal to half the sun’s mass, and distributed the other half of the mass between twelve equally spaced points around the centre. Getting the radius for these points was a bit tricky as the sun is not uniformly dense, most of its mass being at the centre. Then, each time I calculated the gravitational pull on the planet, it was done 13 times, once for the central core giving half the force, and once for each of the orbital points giving one 24th of the force each. The force from each of these would be slightly different as the distance is different, especially for the nearest and furthest points on the Sun’s surface.
Although this will not be an accurate simulation of the real situation, it is nearer to the actual than the single point source. When the system was set in motion, we got a precession rate of 43 arc seconds for a period of 100 terrestrial years, which is close to the observed figure.
Now here we have a system that uses only Newtonian mechanics to do the calculations, but it does give the right answers. See the diagram.
I then adjusted the distances, etc., to match the orbit of Venus, and then Earth, and did the same tests. These both gave results inside the errors of measurement of the actual orbits. You will also see that the amount of precession decreases the further the planet is from the Sun. This is because the further from the Sun that you are, the smaller the sun appears and the closer it approximates to a point mass.
This is enough to convince me that Newton was basically correct and that it was only the use of point mass that gave the wrong result. So, if Newton isn’t wrong, then Einstein must be, or at least with his visualization of the situation even though his maths gives the correct result. It’s as I have said before, ‘You can use Maths to evaluate things in the real world, but you can’t work backwards and use the maths to tell you the physical structure of the real world.
But this is only one aspect of General Relativity. To illustrate the effect of a large mass, such as the sun, on the fabric of space, when visiting friends, he got them all to hold a tablecloth horizontally stretched between them all. Then he took a melon and dropped it into the middle causing it to pull the tablecloth down at the centre. This he explained as the distortion of the space fabric itself. Well, the illustration is Okay, but the explanation is a bit misleading. However, you could say that the properties of space close to the object become changed. But what are these properties? As there is nothing there it is difficult to imagine it to have properties. However, there are two properties concerning the propagation of electromagnetic waves. These are the permitivity and permeability of free space, and both of these parameters define the speed of light, or any other electro-
Now we know that the permitivity of transparent materials, such as glass, is very high compared with that of free space, which makes glass very useful in making lenses due to the fact that if light enters a block of glass at an angle, it is bent by an angle depending upon the permitivity of the medium. That is why, when trying to spear fish in a pond, you have to aim below where you think the fish is to allow for the bending of the rays.
The point I am trying to make is that the presence of matter increases the permitivity which, in turn reduces the speed of light through the material. V = 1/sqrt(eu) where e is the permitivity and u is the permeability of the medium.
So, to get back to the sun, Einstein postulated that as space was warped around the sun, light would be bent and he had a way of illustration this, but he would need a total eclipse of the sun to do it. What he did was to photograph a group of stars in a part of the sky where the eclipse would take place, and then photograph it again during the eclipse and then compare the two photos. If the light got bent around the sun, the stars close to the position of the sun would be in a different position from their position in the photo without the sun. When this turned out to be true, everyone turned their allegiance to Einstein and assumed that there were problems with Newton’s theories. Unfortunately, when Einstein talked about the distortion of space, he actually used the term ‘The Space-
Now if you forget about space-
Satellites
With the advent of GPS positioning, it has been necessary to set the frequency of the satellite transmitters very accurately. However, the is a practical problem. If the transmitters are set up on the ground and set to the required frequency, when they are put in orbit the frequency is found to have shifted slightly, so they have to be slightly offset when set up on the ground so that they are correct in orbit.
Now the relativists say that time runs at a different speed up there and use a complicated equation to calculate the frequency offset required. This actually gives the right answer so they assume that their thinking is correct. However, the same result will be achieved using the change in permitivity which is a more practical explanation.
It could be said that it doesn’t matter that the explanation is wrong as long as e get the right answer. However, the thinking will have repercussions when taken to further levels, especially when we deal with particles travelling at close to light speed. This is discussed further in the Speed of Light section.