January 16, 2010

  • Question 209 – Struggling with question on Geocentrism Part 2

    "Geocentrism says only that the universe rotates around the Earth once per day, and in that rotation it carries the stars with it. Thus, compared to the universe within which they are contained, the stars are not moving at all, save for their minuscule independent movements."  So do you not accept that the stars, or at least some, are as far away from earth as modern science tells us they are?  I don't see how just stating that the universe rotates around the earth once a day and the stars are in it, negates the fact that they would be moving very fast if they are at great distances.  Also, do you believe there is an "ether" thru which light travels?  Believing the Michelson-Morley experiment was flawed by assuming the earth is moving instead of as you believe that it's stationary, would seem to leave the possibility open that an ether still exist.  Hopefully that made sense what I'm asking.
    Chesley

    R. Sungenis: To answer the first question, all motion is relative to the environment that the object is moving. In other words, if the universe is rotating around the earth, then the stars that are contained within the universe are not moving with respect to the universe. And since the universe is the only reference frame that could exist (since there is nothing outside the universe), then the objects that are carried by the universe's rotation are not moving at or above the speed of light.

     

    As for the distance to the stars, it makes little difference whether the stars are close or far away. The same principles will hold. That is why I mentioned the Schwarzchild radius at Saturn in my last email. Anything distance beyond that makes no difference in regards to velocity.

     

    But as for the distance to the stars, you should pick up a copy of GWW. We have a whole section on how the distance to the stars is measured, and it is by no means an exact science.

     

    As for ether, yes, a geocentric universe will usually incorporate ether since the MM experiments give ether as the alternative to Einstein's Special Relativity, even by default. But without any further discussion here, let me give you a section in our book that talks about the ether.

     

    Best to you,

     

    Robert

     

    But Didn’t Science Prove that

    Ether Doesn’t Exist?

     

    Although a little more esoteric to this debate, nevertheless, there is a common objection that often stems from Albert Einstein’s interpretation of the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment. Since the Michelson-Morley experiment assumed the Earth was moving, yet their apparatus could not detect any such movement against what was then understood as “ether,” Einstein concluded that ether did not exist, that is, space is empty; it is a vacuum that does not contain any substance at all. But most scientists today have rejected Einstein’s view and have come to realize that space does, indeed, have substance, and one that reaches to the outer limits of the universe. The days of negating a scientific theory based on its belief in ether are over. As even the Relativist (and 1998 Nobel physics laureate) Robert B. Laughlin admits:

     

    It is ironic that Einstein’s most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise was that no such medium existed…. Einstein… utterly rejected the idea of ether and inferred from its nonexistence that the equations of electromagnetism had to be relative. But this same thought process led in the end to the very ether he had first rejected, albeit one with some special properties that ordinary elastic matter does not have. The word “ether” has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum.

                       

    In the early days of relativity the conviction that light must be waves of something ran so strong that Einstein was widely dismissed. Even when Michelson and Morley demonstrated that the earth’s orbital motion through the ether could not be detected, opponents argued that the earth must be dragging an envelope of ether along with it because relativity was lunacy and could not possibly be right…. Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that such matter must have relativistic symmetry.

     

    And he concludes with this important paragraph:

     

    It turns out that such matter exists. About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with “stuff” that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo.[1]

     

    We cite Laughlin knowing full well that in his frequent use of the word “relativistic” he, nevertheless, believes the Earth revolves around the sun, and most likely has never given any particular consideration to a geocentric universe. In any case, his expertise is valuable for this debate since: (a) ether is a constituent part of the geocentric universe, and (b) despite Relativity’s initial rejection of ether, Laughlin is quite candid that Quantum Mechanics has sufficiently demonstrated ether’s existence to the once skeptical Einstein audience. Unfortunately, Laughlin is not so candid regarding the fact that Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are diametrically opposed to one another. We will cover the issue of ether, Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics in more detail in later chapters.

    Even among Einstein’s supporters the understanding that space is filled with substance was never relinquished. Louis de Broglie (d. 1987), the Nobel laureate famous for his discovery of the electron’s wave in the 1920s, wrote in 1971 that the concept of ether, or as he calls it “the hidden medium,” needed to be revived. Critiquing the model of space proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1926, de Broglie longs for the days of fixed points reminiscent of Descartes’ Cartesian axes and Newton’s absolute space:

     

     

     

     

    Everything becomes clear if the idea that particles always have a position in space through time is brought back…. According to my current thinking, the particle is always located within a physical wave….The movement of the particle is assumed to be the superposition of a regular movement… and of a Brownian movement due to random energy exchanges which take place between the wave and a hidden medium, which acts as a subquantum thermostat. The point of prime importance in this model is that at each moment the particle occupies a well-defined position in space, and this re-establishes the clear meaning which the configuration space had in classical mechanics.”[2]

     

    Even Albert Einstein eventually succumbed to the need for some type of ether. In 1916 he wrote: 

     

    …in 1905 I was of the opinion that it was no longer allowed to speak about the ether in physics. This opinion, however, was too radical, as we will see later when we discuss the general theory of relativity. It does remain allowed, as always, to introduce a medium filling all space and to assume that the electromagnetic fields (and matter as well) are its states…once again “empty” space appears as endowed with physical properties, i.e., no longer as physically empty, as seemed to be the case according to special relativity. One can thus say that the ether is resurrected in the general theory of relativity….Since in the new theory, metric facts can no longer be separated from “true” physical facts, the concepts of “space” and “ether” merge together.[3]

     

    Ludwik Kostro, whose book Einstein and the Ether has revealed the heretofore undisclosed history of ether science in the twentieth century, states the following candid conclusion:

     

    Modern science has its roots in ancient Greek philosophy. This philosophy, as we know, used the word “ether” to designate the particular kind of matter that filled the universe. This term was used throughout the history of philosophy and science, and it was also current at the beginning of this century. A resumption of its use at the dawn of this new century is now a fact. Since, according to the General Theory of Relativity and other modern branches of physics, the space and time of the universe do not constitute a vacuum, but a structured material plenum characterized by different physical quantities, the historical and traditional word “ether” is the most appropriate to express these features of the universe.[4]

     

    Astrophysicist Toivo Jaakkola puts things in perspective:

     

    A few words about the gravitational ether, and the ether concept in general may be in place here. The ether hypothesis was thought to be buried by the Michelson-Morley experiment, but today it is more alive than ever, in the form of the CBR [Cosmic Background Radiation]: experiments capable of finding the ether were not possible in the 1880s, but were possible in the 1960s. In a sense, the electromagnetic ether has always been observed – as the heat of the Sun (since as pointed out, CBR is reprocessed photons)…. All the main cosmological, astrophysical and physical facts: the gravity and Olbers paradoxes, redshift effects and CBR, gravitation and radiation, and the existence of particles can be conceived in the framework of this ether concept.[5]

     

    Lastly, the authors of the book, The Philosophy of Vacuum, state:

     

    Today the vacuum is recognized as a rich physical medium….A general theory of the vacuum is thus a theory of everything, a universal theory. It would be appropriate to call the vacuum “ether” once again.[6]

     

    Later in our treatise we will find that the very ether Louis de Broglie desired offers a solution to the wave/particle conundrum that has hampered modern science since de Broglie first discovered that electrons produce waves. Any particle that moves through a medium will, indeed, create waves. In fact, a return to ether will help solve one of the most mysterious and perplexing problems in Quantum Mechanics today, the phenomenon of “entanglement” – the spooky connection between pairs of photons, electrons or atoms even though they are separated by great distances. Perhaps this was why John Stewart Bell, the inventor of Bell’s Theorem to answer the phenomenon of entanglement, stated in a BBC radio interview: “Yes, the idea that there is an ether…that is a perfectly coherent point of view.”[7]  


    [1] Robert B. Laughlin, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down, 2005, pp. 120-121. The two chapters of Laughlin’s book that deal with these issues are: “The Nuclear Family,” (pp. 99-116 and “The Fabric of Space-Time” (pp. 117-126).

     

    [2] Louis de Broglie, “Waves and Particles,” Physics Bulletin, 22, February 1971, single page. In the same article he adds: “…whereas in my original concept I assumed that the coexistence of waves and particles, perceived by Einstein in 1905 in respect of light in his theory of light quanta, should be extended to all types of particle[s] in the form of the coexistence of a physical wave with a particle incorporated in it. Moreover, Schrödinger’s ψ wave was soon to lose the nature of a physical wave on the day when Max Born put forward the hypothesis that it was a probability, and for that reason should be normalized, which is equivalent to assigning to it an arbitrary amplitude selected by the theorist. Thus, starting from a synthetic idea of the coexistence in physical space of waves and particles, a theory in which there was no longer any wave or particle was arrived at!….But as soon as Schrödinger’s works were published I was struck by the paradox involved, as indeed I had already emphasized in an article which appeared in 1928 [Selected Papers on Wave Mechanics, London: Blackie, p. 130]. For since Schrödinger gave up the idea that particles existed in physical space, they no longer have well defined coordinates and it is difficult to imagine how the configuration space can be constructed with nonexistent coordinates….It may assist in clarifying this point to recall that in classical mechanics particles are treated as a first approximation as material points which have well defined coordinates in physical space at every moment….But this representation, clear and logical though it is, loses all its meaning in a theory in which particles have no spatial position as in current quantum mechanics” (ibid).

     

    [3] Albert Einstein, “Grundgedanken und Methoden der Relativitätstheorie in ihrer Entwicklung dargestellt,” Morgan Manuscript, EA 2070, as cited in Ludwik Kostro, Einstein and the Ether, 2000, p. 2.

     

    [4] Ludwik Kostro, Einstein and the Ether, 2000, pp. 186-187.

     

    [5] “Action-at-a-Distance and Local Action in Gravitation,” in Pushing Gravity, ed., Matthew Edwards, pp. 157-159.

     

    [6] S. Saunders and H. R. Brown, editors, The Philosophy of Vacuum, 1991, p. 251.

     

    [7] Ludwik Kostro, Einstein and the Ether, p. 154, citing M. Jammer’s, “John Stewart Bell and the Debate on Significance of his Contributions to the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics,” in Bell’s Theorem and the Foundations of Modern Physics, eds. A. Van der Merwe, F. Felleri, G. Tarozzi, Singapore, 1992, p. 5; also cited in P. C. W. Davies and J. R. Brown, eds., The Ghost in the Atom, 1986, pp. 49-50.