🚀 go-pugleaf

In sci.physics.relativity, robert j. kolker
<nowhere@nowhere.net>
 wrote
on Thu, 28 Oct 2004 08:00:41 -0400
<2uc5beF29pepvU1@uni-berlin.de>:
>
>
> The Ghost In The Machine wrote:
>> Ah, good.  Chalk up another one for the GRians. :-)  Not that
>> it matters all that much; we've observed gravitational lensing
>> (or at least what we think is such) as well, which presumably
>> can also be used to verify GR, although there are some issues
>> on how one properly determines the mass of the object bending
>> the light.
>
> Later more technically sophisticate experiments have corroberated GTR 
> predictions on light bending. What more do you require?

Me?  Not much.  But the trools [sic] here seem to think that there's
something missing, and try to prove Newtonian ideans by rather
dubious and/or questionable methods -- witness for instance
the notion that somehow double-star orbits prove the ballistic
theory of light with variable speed, when supernovae provide much
stronger evidence of light's constancy of speed.

Nor is it clear that a OWLS is really necessary.  The round-trip
time of an airliner with a constant head/tailwind is
d/(v+w) + d/(v-w) = 2vd/(v^2 - w^2) > 2d/v , in Newtonian space.
The round-trip time of an airliner in a crabwind is
2d*sqrt(1 + w^2/v^2)/v .  Should be easy to detect that "aether wind"
using MMX...but no one ever has, except maybe one set of results out
of a few dozen -- and no one's been able to verify those results.
(I would forget the name, but he's mentioned in _Fads and Fallacies
In The Name Of Science_ by Martin Gardner.)

Not that this is proof of GR or SR, mind you.  GR and SR cannot
be proven -- merely disproven.  But the evidence is ridiculously
strong; the best we can do is supplant relativity with something
that is "upwardly compatible", and I for one have no idea what
that theory would be, except that it's not Newtonian. :-)

> GTR has not yet 
> been falsified by a vetted and reproduced experiment. Not once. GTR has 
> been put to the test many times since 1960 when better methods of 
> observation became available. That is 45 years and no falsification.

45?  I would have thought it was older than that, but I'd have
to look.

>
> Bob Kolker
>
>


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