🚀 go-pugleaf

In sci.physics, Dan Bloomquist
<public21@lakeweb.com>
 wrote
on Sat, 08 Mar 2008 06:26:55 GMT
<PkqAj.5745$7d1.92@news01.roc.ny>:
> Androcles wrote:
>> "Dan Bloomquist" <public21@lakeweb.com> wrote in message 
>> news:18hAj.5718$7d1.2157@news01.roc.ny...
>> 
>> | And the underlying mechanism is understood to
>> | be receding galaxies.
>> 
>> Naive nonsense.
>
> Once a crank, always a crank. How you doing cranky?
>
> You have quite the track record...
>
> http://users.telenet.be/vdmoortel/dirk/Physics/ImmortalFumbles.html

Yes he does, and I think Dirk gave up out of sheer frustration on
cataloging all of them. ;-)

>
> >   http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/geoopt/optpic/brokpen.jpg
>
> Retard. Does it hurt?

The only thing that appears to pain him is the fact that
SR has been widely accepted in the world of physics (or,
as he might put it, pushed on the world by a cynical
military-industrial-scientific complex) for over half a
century (I'd say century but SR was vehemently opposed by
the scientists when it first came out in the early 1900's
-- until the experimental data weighed in).

Regrettably, actual data validating SR is a little hard to
come by, and some experiments are easily misinterpreted --
he routinely touts Sagnac as disproving SR, for example.
(Short answer: it doesn't, really.)

He does have a point in that all we can see is from our
vantage point.  That pencil is "broken" only in the sense
that it's getting wet; were we to change our vantage point,
the view would change (note, for instance, the part visible
below, in the glass proper, hinting at a second pencil
somehow inserted out of view, were this not just all a
refractive effect).

And of course the world is generally Newtonian anyway,
until one gets into satellite speeds.  The peace officer
reporting on an accident will use 120 mph relative speed,
not 119.99999999999903942 mph, in the case of two cars
barrelling into each other at 60 mph relative to the
roadway, were he to need to compose velocities at all
(more likely he'll just say "60 mph eastbound hits car
going 60 mph westbound" or some such).  Throwing a 5
ounce baseball 90 mph (0.14 kg, 40 m/s) will result
in KE = 1/2(0.14)(40^2) = 112 J, not (gamma-1)*mc^2
=  112.0000000000009969 J, in an introductory physics
textbook.  A plane such as the now-retired SR-71 Blackbird
flying 671 mph (300 m/s) and weighing 50,000 kg [*] would
have KE 2250 MJ, not 2250.00000000169 MJ, in a blurb
needing to mention such.

And yet, the discrepancies remain.  A 107 MeV [+] muon
lasting 2.2 microseconds when created at rest or low
velocities somehow makes it from the upper atmosphere
to sea level, can be measured to have 2 GeV of energy
with Earthly detectors, and can be estimated to lose at
most about 3 additional GeV by ionizing the air in a 9
km uniformly pressured slice (the 9 km is the Earth's
"scale height" and is an approximation that can be useful
in problems such as these when one doesn't want to deal
with the complexities of variable pressure with height).
A 5 GeV muon in Newtonian theory (moving about 6.84 c)
can only move about 4.5 km before decaying.

While this is plausible in itself, this does lead to
some height/flux curves which don't match what's actually
measured.  SR purportedly gives a far better fit, by giving
a 5 GeV muon a gamma of 46.73 or a v of 0.99977 c.

(I've not seen the curves, myself.  Presumably they're out
there.  I should note that Androcles in one post disputed
the 107 MeV value of a muon at rest; this doesn't exactly
help his creds any.)

Were c' = c+v, as one poster put it, a supernova would
look quite a bit different as well, especially one from
another galaxy.  I could go on, but you probably got the
point long ago, and I'm hoping (I'm an optimist!) that
certain others will get it at some point (you know who
you are :-P).

[*] empty weight is 30,600 kg, but we'd want to give
the pilot some fuel up there! ;-)

[+] for whatever reason, the actual mass of particles is
rarely given; rather, the masses are given using their
energy equivalent, E = mc^2.

-- 
#191, ewill3@earthlink.net
"Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of
elderberries!" - Monty Python and the Holy Grail

-- 
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