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The Funny Thing About Gravity... (Astrophysics)
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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I wrote:
all we know from identifying free electrons as particles of a certain sort is that negative charges are quantised. They do not necessarily exist in the structure of atoms.

Actually, I think we know that electrons can not exist in the structures of atoms.

-- Atoms are not made of protons, neutrons and electrons.

-- However, protons, neutrons and electrons are made from atoms.

Experiments have shown that particles exhibit wave properties -- most famously in the electron microscope. (Annoyingly, they obey the Relativistic equations regarding mass and momentum.) And the wavelength or frequency of the waves is determined by the momentum of the particles.

Large momentum ~ small wavelength, high frequency.
Small momentum ~ long wavelength, low frequency.


Even whole atoms and molecules have been shown to have wave-particle duality. One such is fullerine, a ball of 60 carbon atoms: that's 720 protons and neutrons (plus electrons). So the question is what has the momentum that determines the wavelength & frequency?

Each particle's momentum is its own mass times the velocity of the molecule. (And the sum of all these together is the momentum of the whole molecule.) They all weigh the same, so they all have the same wavelength. So do we get 720 waves, all with the wavelength for one proton or neutron?

No. We get one wave with a tiny wavelength corresponding to the large mass, 720 protons & neutrons combined.

This is not what you get if you add 720 longer waves together. The de Broglie waves prove that each atom or molecule has a unique mass and can not be treated as a cluster of still-distinct atoms or subatomic particles. The mass (and presumably the charge and the energy) must become coherent when particles are bonded together, even by ordinary chemical bonds, not just exotic nuclear bonds.

Similarly, protons neutrons and electrons can't be made of quarks.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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In a book called On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies (that was published as Copernicus lay on his deathbed), Copernicus proposed that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the Solar System.
--- The Heliocentric System


We've all read statements like that thousands of times. This is the story we've all received: That Copernicus placed the Sun at the center of the universe. The name of the theory even is derived from this vary idea; referred to as it is as the "Heliocentric" universe -- meaning Sun-centered.

Yet, if you read what Copernicus actually wrote, as I have done this morning, you discover -- shockingly -- he said something quite different. You discover that he did not move the Sun to the center of the Solar System. In the truest sense, he moved it closer to the center. He correctly recognized that the Sun itself was offset from the focus of the planetary spheres of orbit.

Copernicus writes (emphasis added),

The earth has three motions. First, it revolves annually in a great circle about the sun in the order of the signs, always describing equal arcs in equal times; the distance from the center of the circle to the center of the sun is one twenty-fifth of the radius of the circle.
-- Hypotheses for the Heavenly Motions


Using modern distance calculations, Copernicus placed the center of the universe about 4 million miles from the center of the Sun. Translating to modern terms and understanding, that is where he located the center of gravity (or barrycenter) for the solar system as a whole.

He was off by -- as I understand it -- by about three million miles. Nevertheless, he correctly understood that the Sun was not at the center but was contained within a centralized solar sphere (all heavenly bodies were modeled as points on revolving spheres). It was the sphere of the sun that was at the center of the universe.

That said, Copernicus did not realize that the sun itself was in orbit around the center-point of the Solar System. He believed its position was fixed in place, permanently offset in such a way that a line drawn from it through the center of the universe "is invariably directed toward a point of the firmament [the fixed stars] about ten degrees west of the more brilliant of the two bright stars in the head of Gemini...."
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Yes, I used to make money out of proposition-bets that Coppernickers wasn't a heliocentrist (it's all in Koestler as usual).
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Mick Harper wrote:
Yes, I used to make money out of proposition-bets that Coppernickers wasn't a heliocentrist (it's all in Koestler as usual).


So you were aware of this before?
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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For about thirty years. It's in The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler but, as I recall, my interest was via The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn.

I am glad you wrote this up though because the last time I pushed the thought, my opponent was so vehement that C was indeed a full-blown heliocentrist that I found time had eroded my confidence, and so I 'looked it up', found I was 'wrong', and have kept quiet ever since. I was v surprised to 'discover' I had made such a fundamental error in the first place. And relieved now of course.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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I will never be able to read all the books I need to read. This one, however, is clearly on the top of the list. I will order it today.

It looks to contain much of what should be in my own work.

Now... why the confusion regarding Copernicus' Heliocentrism? Likely, this stems from Copernicus himself, for in the same essay Copernicus lists as one of his seven basic "assumptions" the following point (point 3) (emphasis added).

All of the spheres [the planetary orbits] revolve about the sun as their midpoint, and therefore the sun is the center of the universe.


Why the contradiction?

First. The existence of this statement does not negate the implications of Copernicus' actual theory. Regardless of Copernicus' statement at the beginning of his essay, when he ultimately comes to construct his model of the universe, he does not remain true to this claim but offsets from its mid-point the position of the sun by 4% of distance from the Earth to the center of the solar system.

That said, the key point is to recognize that these "assumptions" are Copernicus' starting points -- what he inherited from suggestions made by Pythagoreans and others. He also refers to them as "axioms". These are principles then that he will attempt to apply, accepting aforehand that the translation of axiom to practical reality may require some exceptions -- and these exceptions he identifies within the model he explains in later pages.

Is Copernicus a Heliocentrist? Obviously not, as I have shown. But to my way of thinking, he is more than a Heliocentrist.

Placing the sun at the center of the solar system is an abstraction of the operation of gravity but, in truth, the Sun is but one body moving in a vast network of gravitational interactions. In a sense, Copernicus foresaw the deprecation not of the Earth's importance but of the Sun's!

(Though let's not get too excited -- Copernicus still made the Sun a special body by modeling it as motionless)

On the subject of the Earth's importance however, Copernicus was nowhere near the radical that later doctrine has made of him. I'll address that in my next post.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Our understanding of the history of science has been grossly distorted by a single event: The publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. The conflict that then ensued between Church and Biology (I absolutely refuse to credit evolutionists with a monopoly on the scientific brand) became the template by which the relationship between the two institutions was understood from the beginning of time. This, I suspect, was a willful distortion of the facts (though I've yet to put my case together). Evolutionists expanded the battlefield to enlist the aid of respected forebears from other disciplines in a larger war against organized religion.

This was not a war for which figures like Copernicus and Galileo would have volunteered.

Copernicus, for example, is said to have run afoul of the Church for dethroning the Earth from its central place in the heavens. Yet, if we read Copernicus, while he repositions the sphere of the Earth relative the spheres of other bodies and the sun itself, he hardly makes of it something less fundamental to the structure of the universe. Copernicus altered only the relative arrangement of the universe. He didn't lower the status of Earth to that of just one planet among many, as is the popular presentation.

In fact, in one fundamental sense, he explicitly left the Earth at the center of the universe. Among his assumptions remains the idea that the Earth itself is the center of gravity for the universe as a whole. So while Earth moves about the Sun, the Sun and all the other planets are somehow suspended apart from the constant downward pull of gravity which remains focused upon the Earth.

Was it true that the Church was hostile even to this model? I have no doubt. However the reasons for this hostility, I suspect, had nothing to do with liturgy.

The real battle of the Copernican revolutionaries was against other scientists -- not against the Church. Where victory against the Copernicans couldn't be assured on the basis of the facts, it was sought via institutional authority. It was scientists -- scientists -- who enlisted the aid of the Church in a secular matter, luring it into making pronouncements in areas in which it had no direct interest.

In a sense, science as an enterprise laid a trap for the Church by seducing it into the controversy and then leaving it discredited when the side it supported ultimately lost the fight. The reputation of science itself, by the same means, escaped the confrontation unscathed: The actions of the church gave cover to those scientists who had fought for the alternative, earth-centered model. Their role was forgotten. The Church was made scapegoat for their sins.

This version of events though was not set in stone until the Darwin controversy. It was at that point that the Copernican revolution was recast exclusively as a fight between Church and Science. Forgotten was the fact that scientists were on both sides of that battle: Indeed that scientists were the primary combatants and used both church and state to win by politics what could not be won on the scientific merits.

The story of Copernicus is the story of the corruption of scientists and the perversion of civil institutions -- church, government and media -- by scientists to defend their favourite theories and to destroy their opponents.

That version of events was white-washed in the service of the evolutionists who changed the story to make religion the eternal enemy of man. This understanding continues to give cover to ongoing corruption in science today. The Copernican revolution, correctly understood, would have set us on guard against the Global Warming zealots and ten-fold other modern examples of gross corruption within academic science, but because school children are never taught what total jerks scientists have constantly proven to be, they grow up to never question the men in the white coats.

As I suppose is as it has always been -- for it was that trust in the institutional scientific consensus that was exploited to persuade the Church to voice an opinion on that original celestial matter and that has been used ever since to corrupt governments and much of civil society whenever the need has arisen.
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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Everything's becoming more science-based these days, like history and archaeology. Do you distinguish science from other areas of knowledge?
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Grant



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Everything's becoming more science-based these days, like history and archaeology.


Is it, or do these disciplines just attach the word science to increase their credibility?

Someone once said that true sciences don't attach the word science to their name, only bogus ones do, eg economic science; social science; christian science; scientology, the list goes on.
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Brian Ambrose



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Dan said:
We get one wave with a tiny wavelength corresponding to the large mass, 720 protons & neutrons combined.


This seems to be analogous to sound (and any wave process). Music coming from a loudspeaker is composed of thousands of different frequencies, yet the air does not carry each of these individually - there is only one, very complex combined sound wave - that is, the air molecule carrying the sound (or if you prefer, the loudspeaker cone relaying the sound) is only in one place at any instant of time. It seems reasonable to infer that matter exists as a complex waveform (in some sort of universal medium) which can only be expressed as a function of time.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Hmmm, not sure that we can avoid the metaphysics here, but... maybe it's only because there is a medium that the wave can only have one height at any point at any time.

Although the flat bits where waves interfere are still the sum of two values... and a tone really does behave as the sum of a bunch of harmonics (at different frequencies), as filters show by letting some harmonics through, but not others. Don't all the harmonics exist at once? Is the height of the wave (the value of the function, the position of the cone) all there is of the wave, or it is just one of I-don't-know-how-many parameters?

Whether this has any bearing on particles-as-waves is to be determined, I suppose.

But the problem remains that one very short wavelength does not result from adding a lot of identical long wavelengths together: particles, atoms and molecules behave as if they are each one thing and one thing only.

Unless... it turns out it's a stream of particles that has wave properties and a single particle being wave-like is nonsense {Although they talk about a single particle interfering with itself in Young slits, don't they? Must be Higg's weird Uncle Boson.}... or someone comes up with a phase relationship that sums N waves into one wave with N times the frequency.

Cohesion-and-no-structure inside the particle/atom/molecule is appealing in a thumb-your-nose-at-quark-theory/come-on-you-S-Matrix-theory kind of way, but there dunnarf seem to be a lot of structure to particles/atoms/molecules!

Anyone know what the amplitude of a light wave is?
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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If you think about compression waves in air, what does the amplitude or the frequency at a point even mean? "The particles in this area are close together... and in this region they are far apart."

Do we mathematically model the wave? Or is the wave the mathematical model?

Does the same answer apply to the mediumless waves that all material media are made of?
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Hatty wrote:
Everything's becoming more science-based these days, like history and archaeology. Do you distinguish science from other areas of knowledge?


I can't see how "science" constitutes an "area" of knowledge. Science is a method of investigation. Our work in AE is a refinement of that method. One of the implications is that it may enable wider application of that method -- to more areas of study.
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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DPCrisp wrote:
at the very least it models how gravity might work by wave action in an aether-based universe.

Gravity as a kind of inward pressure...?


Yes, that's one of many strange things about gravity. It's widely assumed that gravity is a pull. But the equations work just as well if it is a push.

Is that because in an inverse square law, the direction of the vector is lost when squared?
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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Mick Harper wrote:
... The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler ....


Gosh, I'm glad you've mentioned that, I've got a copy in the attic somewhere, and had forgotten it. It's a very fine book, well worth reading to at least be reminded of how the Business of Science is conducted. i.e. Science may be rational, but Scientists are not necessarily rational as well.
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