🚀 go-pugleaf

On Dec 11, 1:33 am, Pentcho Valev wrote:
>
>< Martin Rees: "Over the past week, two stories in the press have suggested that scientists have been very wrong about some very big issues. First, a new paper seemed to suggest that dark energy -- the mysterious force that makes up three quarters of the universe, and is pushing the galaxies further apart -- might not even exist."

  Since a force is a net pressure, there is only one kind of force.
Therefore there is nothing mysterious about it; nor, since energy is
the ability to do work, is there any such thing as "dark energy".

>< http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3322462/Did-Einstein-...
"Did Einstein get all his sums right?.....Last week, an American probe
began an 18-month mission to put Einstein's prediction to the test, 90
years after he unveiled his ideas in Berlin.>

  Which prediction are they testing?

>< Gravity Probe B was blasted into space from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on a Boeing Delta 2 rocket and will orbit the Earth for more than a year.
 The $700 million joint mission between Nasa and Stanford University,
conceived in 1958, uses four of the most perfect spheres ever created
inside the world's largest Thermos flask to detect minute distortions
in the fabric of the universe..... >

 "Space-time" is a concept invented by Ninkowski in 1907.  Other than
as a concept, it doesn't exist. What is "the fabric of the universe"?

>< Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, said: "The project's a technical triumph, and a triumph of the persistence and lobbying power of Stanford University. But its gestation has been grotesquely prolonged, and the cost overruns have been equally gross. I recall hearing a talk about the project from Francis Everitt (principal investigator) when I was still a student and it was already well advanced. "Back in the 1960s the evidence for Einstein's theory was meager; just two tests, with 10 per cent precision. But relativity is now confirmed by several tests, with precision of one part in 10,000. >

  The Lorentz Equations have been confirmed, but since they disagree
with the relativity theory, every such confirmation proves that
Einstein's theory is false.

>< It's still, in principle, good to have new and different tests. But the level of confidence in Einstein's theory is now so high that an announcement of the expected result will 'fork no lightening'. "Moreover, if there's an unexpected result, I suspect most people will suspect an error in this very challenging experiment rather than immediately abandon Einstein: There's now so much evidence corroborating Einstein, that a high burden of proof is required before he'll be usurped by any rival theory. "So the most exciting if un-alluring outcome of Gravity Probe B would be a request by Stanford University for another huge sum of money to repeat it."

  As written elsewhere, Since ignorance is bliss {= MOOLAH = $$$$$$
$^39} it would be folly to be wise.

 As Pentcho Valev wrote:
>< The only reason behind Dark Energy: http://www.physorg.com/news179508040.html
 "More than a dozen ground-based Dark Energy projects are proposed or
under way, and at least four space-based missions, each of the order
of a billion dollars, are at the design concept stage." >

  See? !!

>< Sometimes the correct solution to the problem is hinted at in Einsteiniana but then no billions, not even millions, come and Einsteinians promise not to hint anymore: >

 "Vo ig no rinse is bli$$ tis folly 2 b vyze".

>< http://www.sciscoop.com/story/2008/10/30/41323/484
 "Does the apparently constant speed of light change over the vast
stretches of the universe? >

 Yes; but by so small an amount as to be unmeasurable.

>< Would our understanding of black holes, ancient supernovae, dark matter, dark energy, the origins of the universe and its ultimate fate be different if the speed of light were not constant? >

  Yes and no.  No, because we don't understand those things at all.
Yes, because once we understand WHY the speed of light ISN"T constant
ANYWHERE, we will also understand all those things in a radically
different way than as of now.

>< Couldn't it be that the supposed vacuum of space is acting as an interstellar medium to lower the speed of light like some cosmic swimming pool? >

Yes.

>< If so, wouldn't a stick plunged into the pool appear bent as the light is refracted and won't that affect all our observations about the universe.

 Yes; but by so small an amount as to be unnoticeable.

 >< I asked theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind, author of The
Black Hole War, recently reviewed in Science Books to explain this
apparent anomaly....."You are entirely right," he told me, "there are
all sorts of effects on the propagation of light that astronomers and
astrophysicists must account for. The point of course is that they
(not me) do take these effects into account and correct for them." "In
a way this work is very heroic but unheralded," adds Susskind, "An
immense amount of extremely brilliant analysis has gone into the
detailed corrections that are needed to eliminate these 'spurious'
effects so that people like me can just say 'light travels with the
speed of light.' So, there you have it. My concern about cosmic
swimming pools and bent sticks does indeed apply, but physicists have
taken the deviations into account so that other physicists, such as
Susskind, who once proved Stephen Hawking wrong, can battle their way
to a better understanding of the universe.">

  They DON'T WANT a "better understanding"; they want to blissfully
maintain the illusion of being ignorant!!

glird