CNA has reported that a statue of Galileo is to be erected in the Vatican gardens. It is good to see that the head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has commented that it is appropriate for such a statue to be erected in the Vatican because Galileo was one of the founders of the Lincean Academy. This body has had a rather chequered history but it is not unreasonable for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to claim a link with it.I rather like this idea: it fits in well with Pope Benedict's approach to the secularists. Of course, people will still bash on ignorantly about the Galileo affair but now they will have a new and inconvenient obstacle to the perpetuation of this portion of the black legend. Dramatic documentaries will have to include a new clip with the soundtrack probably something along the lines of "Surprisingly, in the Vatican Gardens, there is actually a statue of the man who was [tortured, persecuted ... fill in the blanks] by the Catholic Church." The plan for the statue is particularly apt in the wake of the controversy with La Sapienza university and the seeming inability of a number of lecturers there to understand that quoting a point of view on a subject does not commit the speaker to espousing that point of view - especially when it is quoted to illustrate a contrast with another point of view. (The problem, of course, is that if somebody does not understand that, they are unlikely to understand anyone explaining it to them.)
The Galileo affair is a great subject for bringing up inconvenient facts that escape the attention of most media presentations. Initially in Rome, the theory of Copernicus was given much positive encouragement: he asked permission (which was granted) to dedicate his De Revolutionibus to Pope Paul III. Luther, in the meantime, described Copernicus as an imbecile who wanted to turn the art of astronomy head over heels.
It is true that many Catholics at the time rejected the Copernican theory. But it is not often pointed out that so did the forerunner of the "enlightenment", Francis Bacon, who described the theory in his Novum Organum as a fictitious idea, an invention of which rational men should rid themselves, and "utterly false". One of Bacon's reasons for opposing Galileo was perfectly just: Galileo had offered the tides as irrefutable proof of the rotation of the earth and Bacon knew that the data possessed even then did not justify Galileo's conclusion.
The proof of the heliocentric thesis had to wait until Newton's discovery of the laws of gravitation which established that because of the difference in mass, the earth could not but rotate around the sun. The stellar parallax that had to be observed was only demonstrated in 1837 by Bessel.
Another example of the confusion of the time is Galileo's polemic Il Saggiatore in which he attacked the theories of the Jesuit Orazio Grassi who maintained that comets were fiery celestial bodies. Galileo answered with withering scorn and in most people's eyes won the debate, arguing that comets were optical illusions.
Nevertheless, Galileo was undoubtedly a genius and contributed greatly to the progress of the natural sciences. As Pope Pius XII said in a 1939 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he was one of the "most audacious heroes of research … not afraid of the stumbling blocks and the risks on the way, nor fearful of the funereal monuments." We should simply be aware that the naive idea of the Galileo affair as one of the Church versus science and rationality was never more than a convenient building block in the black legend.Galileo also invented the eponymous thermometer. I think I might ask my good friend and colleague, Fr Stephen Dingley, whether he can organise a group of PhD scientists to issue a collective apology on behalf of their colleagues around the world for Galileo's giving inspiration to the lava lamp.
15 comments:
In a recent blog of mine you will find a note on a recent new book on Galileo. It is an attack on the Church and is not about his views on movement of the earth but on his views on Transubstation. Years ago I read a book that gives substantial evidence that although the 2nd trial was not on this topic it was introduced because G doubted the question of the accidents remaining after Transubstantion. The 2nd trial was rather to shut him up as he was getting rather too prominent in affairs on which he was not a specialist. There is plenty of evidence that he thought rather too highly of himself. The Pope of the time was quite friendly to him.
Excellent post, Fr Tim. I don't think you blogged it at the time, but a few months ago there was another classic example of British media spin concerning the revamped Vatican Observatory. Contrast the Independent's spin on it with the real story here. Meanwhile. it's interesting that our own secular government seem to care rather less about this particular field of scientific endeavour.
Many thanks for those links, Edmund. The nonsense in the Indie is breathtaking.
Did he really look like Wurzel Gummidge?
On my blog you will find some articles on another book concerning Galileo: Galileo was Wrong (Vols. I and II) by RObert Sungenis and Robert Bennett. It is in support of the CHurch, and not truly against Galileo, as in the end he changed his view back to accepting geocentrism.
Dear Fr Tim,
Excellent post, as ever.
There is only one paragraph that I would hesitate over.
You say this:
"The proof of the heliocentric thesis had to wait until Newton's discovery of the laws of gravitation which established that because of the difference in mass, the earth could not but rotate around the sun. The stellar parallax that had to be observed was only demonstrated in 1837 by Bessel."
Hoyle does not seem to agree with you. He says that the Copernican view is as good as any but no better (The Intelligent Universe, p.17).
If Newton had "proved" Copernicus right, then there would have been no need for the line of astronomers thereafter to seek to find proof of the Copernican hypothesis.
This was particularly so after the failure of Airey's experiment filtering light through a water-filled telescope and an ordinary telescope which, on the contrary, seemed to disprove Copernicus.
The Mitchelson-Morley result of the 19th century gave a similar surprising disproof.
To overcome the problem Fitzgerald contraction and Lorentzian relativity came to the "rescue" and thereafter Einstein proposed his comprehensive Special Relativity Theory (SR).
However, Georges Sagnac's experiment of 1913 put a spoke in the wheels of SR by disproving it experimentally. No-one gainsaid Sagnac's result. It was quietly ignored as inconvenient.
However, the search for truth is not so easily suppressed. It is an embarrassing fact, known by the scientists involved, that the Global Positioning System (GPS) works only if one ignores SR and makes no adjustments for it. If you make the adjustments that Einstein's theory requires, the GPS fails completely (not just occasionally!).
One of the assumptions of SR is that the speed of light in a vacuum is a natural limit beyond which speed no force can propagate but this is, in turn, contradicted by the observable fact that gravity propagates virtually instantaneously.
As Tom van Flandern has noted in the prestigious journal, Physics Letters A ("Gravity: What the Experiments Say"), if the limit were the speed of light then the earth would be twice as far away from the Sun every 1200 years - and it plainly isn't.
Ironically, then, Newton's discovery of the laws of gravity has not tended to prove Copernicus right but rather the opposite.
In layman's terms, this means that we cannot yet say with any certainty which planet is going round which and no hypothesis can yet claim to stand successfully unchallenged.
However, the media tell us otherwise and most people simply believe the media. But, as you rightly point out, the media are all too often more interested in agendas rather than the truth.
The late Dr Piotr Beckman, a specialist on gravity who remained a supporter of the Copernican view whilst recognising the problems, even went so far as to say SR "is dead but it will take a long time to bury it".
However, the dogma of the media "chatterati" or "commentariat", as some wag called it, has decreed the opposite and woe betide anyone who dares to challenge them.
It's a little bit like the issue over the old rite of mass. The received view for 40 years has been that it was abrogated and those who said otherwise were just "nutters".
Now we find - and that from the most authoritative source - that it was "never abrogated" at all. The so-called "nutters" were right after all and the received view was simply wrong!
In matters of science, where there is no room for dogma, no final "court" and no final magisterial authority, the received wisdom is even more vulnerable to disproof. But Galileo is treated as a kind of Delphic Oracle above and beyond any kind of challenge. The result is that the real truth, whatever it may be, about the motion of the planets will, for the time being, remain obscured by popularist dogma rather than real science.
A generation that slavishly follows the media and fashion is unlikely to see the point but Catholics should be able to do better and be more interested in the truth, shouldn't they?
Tribunus
However, the search for truth is not so easily suppressed. It is an embarrassing fact, known by the scientists involved, that the Global Positioning System (GPS) works only if one ignores SR and makes no adjustments for it. If you make the adjustments that Einstein's theory requires, the GPS fails completely (not just occasionally!).
This is an old favourite of geocentrism fans, but it's not true - it's actually the other way round. The atomic clocks on GPS satellites, which are accurate to within about 1 nanosecond, have to be slowed down relative to their counterparts on the ground to compensate for relativistic effects. Special Relativity predicts that because of the satellites' speed relative to the earth (about 14,000 km/h), their clocks will lose about 7,000 nanoseconds per day. And General Relativity predicts that, because the satellites are further away from the centre of the Earth's gravitational field, their clocks will additionally gain about 45,000 nanoseconds per day.
The GPS system is currently accurate to within about 10m, and to do this, the satellite clocks must be accurate to within about 30 nanoseconds. So engineers at the US Department of Defense, who built the NAVSTAR GPS system, had to take both these relativistic effects into account when building the satellites: their clocks are calibrated to run faster, to the tune of 38,000 nanoseconds per day (45 minus 7 = 38). If you were to ignore special relativity, the GPS system would be out by about 2 km per day; if you were to ignore general relativity, it would be out by about 12 km per day. If you were to ignore both, the system would be wrong by about 10 km per day (because the time dilation effects of special and general relativity are opposed in this case). We could negate much of the special relativistic effect by putting the satellites in geostationary orbit, but then we'd need many more satellites than the 24 that are currently up there for the system to work. We can't do anything about the general relativistic effect however, because the further you are from the Earth, the weaker its gravitational field! In other words, the GPS system can only work if both special and general relativity are accounted for.
Sagnac's experiment does not offer any kind of "disproof" of relativity, as it describes a complementary effect. In fact, the GPS satellites have to be adjusted for Sagnac distortion as well, although the effect is much smaller than that due to special or general relativity. If the Sagnac effect is ignored, the GPS system would be out by a few tens of metres a day, along the dimension of the Earth's latitude. Other technologies, such as the guidance systems for commercial airliners, have to account for Sagnac effects, but not relativistic effects, since airliners don't travel fast enough or high up enough for time dilation due to special and general relativity to be significant as far as the guidance system is concerned. So Sagnac's experiment has certainly not been "ignored" as "inconvenient" - it's put to use every time you take a flight!
Actually, all this has very little to do with Galileo, heliocentrism, or geocentrism. We would still need to take all these effects into account (although to a different extent) even if the earth was stationary, or if the sun ceased to exist. For more information, see the following peer-reviewed studies:
Lämmerzahl, C. (2006) Relativity and technology Ann. der Phys. 15:1-2 "...emphasis is laid on the fact that relativity, either special or general, already enters a status of an applied technology in daily life. Examples are presented from positioning, metrology, earth sciences, and material sciences."
Rovelli, C (2002) GPS observables in general relativity Phys. Rev. D 65: 044017-1 - 044017-6 "...the Global Positioning System (GPS) [was] the first technological
application of general relativity, or the first large scale technology that needs to take GR effects into account."
Wolf & Petit (1997) Satellite test of special relativity using the global positioning system Phys. Rev. A 56: 4405 - 4409
their clocks are calibrated to run faster, to the tune of 38,000 nanoseconds per day
Clarification: before launch, the satellite clocks are calibrated for the fact that time runs faster in orbit due to relativistic effects. So before takeoff the satellite clocks lose about 38,000 nanoseconds per day. Once the satellites are in orbit, their clocks will therefore run at the same speed as their counterparts on Earth.
As someone who has studied the Galileo case I was drawn out of my privacy by the news that Rome was to erect a statue to Galileo as a way of celebrating the International Year of Astronomy in 2009. I searched for some comment on the subject to see what is being said. What I found is that this idea has triggered yet another round of abuse aimed at the Mystical Body of Christ, and so soon after the La Sapienza affair.
Now I have viewed this forum and I like it. I entered other sites only to find them full of 'blogging atheists' with one line smart-Alec retorts and an ignorance that is brought on by their rejection of the divine. Here I see debate among Catholics and would like to join in.
First I should like to comment on the article that is the basis of this forum. Is it written by a priest Fr Tim? If it were permitted I should then like to comment on things written by contributors.
For many years now I have been reading such articles. They represent four hundred years of minimising, apologising and obscurantism in the wake of the Galileo affair. For fifteen years I have been compiling the truth in a book not yet published and intend to do so next year. Were it not for the fact that the ultimate appeasement to Galileo is about to happen, I would not have come out public.
Before we proceed, I hope I am among Catholics who believe the Church is Christ and is divinely guided by the Holy Ghost. If we believe this then the Galileo case - as it is presented in history - should present a problem. In essence, the Church defined and declared that the Scriptures reveal we live in a geocentric universe, both physically and spiritually. The Church teaches that God - who cannot deceive nor be deceived - can be known by His creation. Our senses see a geocentric world and thereby presented man with 'proof' of the existence of God and that the universe was made for His glory through the COMPREHENSION of man.
Now here is the essence of the Galileo case. It was Galileo who challenged the Church's traditional interpretation of the Bible. As Pope Urban VIII said, this heresy (that the universe is heliocentric) is 'the most dangerous heresy that outs the Catholic faith in danger'.
If what Galileo persisted on it would mean that the Church could not interpret the Scriptures, the same Church that claims to be the infallible interpreter of Scripture. Now this idea would make the Church's divine claim redundant. The idea that since the Apostles, ignorance of natural science, prohibited them and the Church Fathers from being able to interpret the Bible IN ALL ITS PARTS.
Ok, that is the first consideration. Now consider the rest of the story. The Holy Office that conducted the definition and declaration was the Holy Office, a special Inquisition set up by the Church to examine matters of the severest HERESIES. It had the POPE as its Prefect. Why? Because then any definition and declaration that came from this body would be PAPAL, of the highest AUTHORITY. They defined and declared heliocentricism to be FORMALLY heretical. Now consider the credibility of an institution that could do this IN ERROR.
We then come to the Galileo trial that I will presume we know about. If the Church's position was UNREASONABLE and UNFAIR (as 67 professors of La Sapienza university opined and Pope Benedict XVI is said to have agreed with them) then we belong to a FLAWED Church.
Now consider the above carefully before we go on. As Catholics we MUST believe that all this cannot be. So it is a time to investigate further. What St Augustine also said, 'When a dogma contradicts a scientific postulation, it (the scientific proposal) must be examined and (IF OUR FAITH IS TRUE) it will be shown to be PREMATURE (that is, not actually true.
Now friends of Christ, with Him in our midst, let us do so and ask him to guide us.
Unbelievably, we find from the investigations of Christians, that there has never been a falsification of geocentrism. Indeed it is impossible, given the nature of space we cannot establish with certainty if the earth is fixed or if the sun is fixed. But God KNOWS and He revealed it is geocentric, the Church defined it as a MATTER OF FAITH. So, there never was a falsification of geocentrism and therefore no proof of Heliocentrism. Why therefore did Pope Benedict XIV and Pius VII commit their infamous U-turn in 1741 and 1820 with all its inferences?
Now examine the proofs for Heliocentrism. All of these can be explained in a geocentric way, but who claims they are proof for geocentrism? Now examine the universal gravity of Newton and it will be found to be no more than 'laws' invented to accommodate a heliocentric scenario.
Two more empirical tests followed, the Airy test and the M&M test, both resulting in data that showed the earth DOES NOT MOVE. So, how did they get the earth moving again? They conjured up a genius EINSTEIN whose science is pseudo-physics when examined objectively.
Now we are ready to see the articles presented on this site for what they really are.
If any want me to go on and present my case against the subject of Galileo's statue I will. However, I find that intellectual pride is now far more potent than the search for TRUTH.
You people are privileged to be some of the first to read of the COUNTER-REVOLUTION, but do you have enough faith?
God bless you all
Edmund - thank you very much for your contribution as ever.
Redmond - this is not a forum, it is a blog. I write the posts, other comment. Thank you for joining in.
For the record, Edmund, I am not a Geocentrist but rather a sceptic about all current hypotheses. I await better evidence.
So your beginning "this is an old favourite of geocentrists" is wide of the mark if aimed at me.
Let me respond to Redmond, first, who really does seem to be a Geocentrist.
In essence, the Church defined and declared that the Scriptures reveal we live in a geocentric universe, both physically and spiritually.
No, you will struggle to find any such definition by a pope or a Council.
They defined and declared heliocentricism to be FORMALLY heretical.
No, you will struggle to find any such definition by a pope or a Council.
Thus, if heliocentrism turns out to be the best hypothesis then it does not appear to contradict any clear and well-defined dogma of the Church.
However, I do agree that it certainly does challenge the general consensus which obtained among churchmen for most of the Church's history which might be good ground to give us pause.
Now to Edmund.
If you re-read what I wrote you will see that I did not say that Sagnac interference is ignored but rather his disproof of SR. The two are not the same.
Indeed, the fact that GPS and air-travel have to make adjustments for Sagnac interference should make physicists all the more willing to accept the other consequences of his experiment. Sagnac devised his experiment precisely in order to challenge Einstein and he succeeded but now, although his result is used practically, the consequence of it in relation to SR is, exactly as I said, quietly ignored as inconvenient.
With respect, you are in danger of making the same mistake.
In Sagnac’s experiment, a light source S emits light to a beam splitter C. Some of the light traverses a path SCDEFC and is reflected to a photographic plate O; some goes the other way SCFEDCO. The apparatus can rotate with an angular velocity w. A light source, an interferometer at C and a photographic plate at O are fixed to the disc. When the disc rotates, there is a fringe shift at the interferometer, proving that the two signals take different times to circumnavigate the disc.
Sagnac derived the difference in time, dt, as:
dt = 4Aw/ c2
where A is the area enclosed by the light path, w the angular velocity, and c the speed of light.
That time difference is calculated from the viewpoint of an observer stationary in the laboratory. But, it equals precisely the actual fringe shift detected at the interferometer upon the spinning disc.
How can this be?
There is only one possibility; the time measured aboard the spinning disc and measured in the laboratory are identical. If the light travelled at a speed of c relative to the disc, no fringe shift would occur. The test records that the light has completed one revolution of the disc at speeds of c±v in opposing directions. The light speed relative to the laboratory, is c. Other than reflection off mirrors on the disc, the rotation of the disc had no effect on the light.
The accuracy of Sagnac’s test was 1:100. Macek and Davis, using lasers, achieved an accuracy of 1 in 10^12. Bilger et al, used a fixed ring-laser and achieved 1 in 10^20.
The Sagnac effect is far larger than the effect forecast by SR. In the Pogany (1926) Sagnac test, where v was about 20 m/s, this ratio is 30,000,000. Post agrees that the dilation factor of SR is v/c smaller than the Sagnac effect. Dufour and Prunier further refined the result in 1942.
Einstein did not address the contradiction to his theory in the Mitchelson-Gale test even though he visited the team working on this problem in 1921 and he does not appear ever to have referred to the Sagnac test at all.
On a disc of huge radius a short light path approaches a straight line. It follows that an observer aboard an object which is travelling in a straight line at constant speed ±v, relative to the laboratory would, if it could be measured, record the speed of light, relative to oneself, as c - or + v. That observer would record "time" as the very same as observers in the laboratory.
Thus it is not "time" that changes, as claimed by SR, but the speed of the light that changes, relative to the observer aboard the object moving at uniform relative speed.
Crash goes the primary assumption of SR.
Some authors, e.g. Post, say that the Sagnac effect can exist as well as the SR effect. This cannot be so, because the Sagnac effect proves that light does not travel at the same speed relative to observers in uniform relative motion . The Sagnac effect is in direct contradiction of SR.
Kelly, who was not a Geocentrist, proposed, as a result, a new theory. He said Light, generated upon the Earth, travels with the Earth on its orbit around the Sun, but does not adapt to the spin of the Earth upon its axis (Kelly, A G. (1996) A New Theory on the Behaviour of Light. IIE Monograph series.).
Thus the result of challenging SR is not necessarily to revert to Geocentrism.
Just as striking are the conclusions of Tom van Flandern which I notice you do not even attempt to challenge though they are a major embarrassment to SR.
Van Flandern is also not a Geocentrist. He concluded that laboratory, solar system, and astrophysical experiments for the “speed of gravity” yield a lower limit of 2x10^10c. This was largely because of the observable fact that the earth was not gradually moving out of orbit which a gravity speed of c would entail. This was, then, a direct challenge to the speed of light assumed by SR. Van Flandern concluded that Lorentzian relativity seemed better to describe nature than special relativity (Van Flandern, T. (1998) The Speed of Gravity: What the Experiments Say. Physics Letters A. 250:1111).
Indeed, he might have gone further and challenged relativity as a whole.
Dr Christoph von Mettenhem, former lead pupil of Karl Popper, demonstrates in a further climacteric paper the nature of Einstein’s logical mistake.
He shows that the mathematical formulae of special relativity are inadequate to establish the relativity of time. They are, however, logically consistent, and can therefore be employed to refute the original hypothesis that the velocity of light in a vacuum will be constant and cannot be influenced by the velocity of the source from which the light is coming (Von Mettenheim, C. (1998) Popper versus Einstein. Mohr-Sieback.).
Enthusiastic PhD students can sometimes be too zealous to endorse and defend the current scientific fashion and establishment since, by definition, such tend to reflect the views of the very professors whom they, as students, are taught by and tend to be guided by.
That establishment, however, can be very hostile to dissenters and is often far more ruthless to them than the Church whom some inaccurately persist in caricaturing as suppressive of science.
When once he began to challenge SR, Prof Herbert Dingle found his colleagues very hostile even after he had reached the heights of Professor of Natural Philosophy at Imperial College and President of the Royal Astronomical Society.
However, he was persistent.
In 1972 he wrote: "a proof that Einstein's special theory of relativity is false has been advanced; and ignored, evaded, suppressed and, indeed, treated in every possible way except that of answering it, by the whole scientific world" (Dingle, H. (1972) Science at the Crossroads. London: Martin Brian & O'Keeffe. Ch. 6.).
The M-M result and Airey’s experiment not only failed to substantiate the heliocentric hypothesis – they positively rebutted it. This was something of an embarrassment.
Relativity and Fitzgerald Contraction came conveniently to the rescue, followed by Einstein’s SR. Now SR is a theory in trouble but this need not necessarily mean a return to Geocentrism.
Lorentz first devised relativity and it is his hypothesis that may again enjoy most favoured status.
Alternatively, various ether theories may be re-visited. Either way, one sees why Hoyle felt he had to say that the heliocentric system was as good as any but no better.
Certainly what needs to be avoided is the kind of shallow thinking and cheap jibes that characterise some discussion of the issues in the media and even some scientific circles. There is no room for dogma in science even if that dogma is as popular as SR.
Catholics, too, must take care not assume that scientific hypotheses are like dogmas. Otherwise they might find themselves in the same predicament as some Catholic scientists who consider that the currently fashionable polyphyletist hypothesis of human origins is to be preferred, though it is but an hypothesis, to the plainly infallible teaching of the Church that obliges us to accept monogenism if we are to remain Catholics (see e.g. Pope Leo XIII. (1880) Arcanum.; Pope Pius XII. (1950) Humani Generis).).
Some Catholics, it seems, still prefer passing scientific fashion to the judgment of the infallible Magisterium.
Since you are, as the internet reveals, a Catholic biochemist, you will appreciate the importance of avoiding such a pitfall. It is a point which Copernicus well understood but Galileo, seemingly, did not.
Tribunus.
Dear Father,
I do hope that my reply is not going to be censored out. Is it?
Tribunus
No
Excellent. Thank you!
Let me now return to your GPS point which I simplified for the layman in my first email but which, since now challenged, requires more explanation.
Like many another, you Edmund, consider the GPS a proof for the applicability of SR and GR. It is claimed that without the relativistic corrections (which amount to 38 microseconds/day – or as you rather redundantly put it, 38,000 nanoseconds/day) the error in the determination of the position would accumulate quickly to values much larger then the observed accuracy – some 10km/day, you claim.
However, in reality the positions are actually not obtained by comparing the time signal received from the satellite with the receiver time, but by observing the difference between the time signals obtained from a number of different satellites.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Global_positioning_system.
Consider for simplicity a one-dimensional problem where the receiver is located somewhere on the line connecting the two transmitters. In this case the signal from transmitter 1 reaches the receiver at time
t1=t0+x1/c
and the signal from transmitter 2 reaches the receiver at time
t2=t0+x2/c
where t0 is the time the signal is being sent out (assuming both transmitter clocks are synchronized), x1 is the distance of the receiver from transmitter 1, x2 the distance of the receiver from transmitter2, and c the speed of light.
Now if one subtracts the two equations one gets
x1-x2=c*[t1-t2]
One knows therefore the position of the receiver just by comparing the time signals from the two transmitters (the receiver clock is thus irrelevant).
If one assumes now that the transmitter clocks are running fast or slow by a relative factor (1+e), one has instead:
x1-x2=c*[(1+e)*t1 -(1+e)*t2] = c*(1+e)*(t1-t2)
which means that the position will simply be wrong by a relative factor e, but there is obviously no accumulation as the transmitter clocks run at the same rate relatively to each other.
Now the quoted value of 38 microseconds/day due (allegedly) to SR corresponds to e=4.4*10^-10. As the satellites are at a distance of around 20000 km (=2*10^9 cm), the positional error due to SR should actually only be 4.4*10^-10 * 2*10^9 cm = 0.8cm.
That is a tiny figure.
It is far less than the presently claimed accuracy of GPS of a few metres, so the SR/GR effect is, on its own terms, virtually irrelevant.
However, the SR/GR adjustments that are currently being made do make a difference – but an adverse one. If they were correct then the GPS would be very accurate but the truth is the system has an accuracy drift and no matter what adjustments are made to it, the system needs constant adjustment to maintain some sort of accuracy.
The most famous experiment involving time dilation was probably that of Hafele and Keating undertaken in October 1971. The experiment involved the use of atomic clocks. One placed at the United States Naval Observatory (USNO) another four clocks were placed on scheduled aircraft and flown twice around the world, some heading east and the others heading west.
It was predicted from Einsteinian relativity (SR and GR) that the clocks moving in the easterly direction would gain time compared to the clock at the observatory. It is this experiment that is so often used as proof that velocity is responsible for time dilation but in reality it is far from proof. When the raw data was released Kelly obtained it from the USNO and showed that it was averaged in a biased way in order to claim high precision and the inventor of the atomic clock, Louis Essen, himself repudiated the Hafele and Keating experiment accordingly.
These critiques are not argued against but are simply dismissed by some in the current scientific establishment as “not peer-reviewed” and so ignored. However, as Kelly himself found, just like Dingle, the established journals wouldn’t even consider any challenge to the current dogma and so refused to publish. This is more indicative of an increasing lack of respect for true academic freedom and a growing intolerance within the scientific establishment. If the peer-reviewers are themselves unwilling to publish any challenge to the current dogma then their dismissal of such challenges merely for lack of peer review becomes merely self-serving.
Remarkably, Hafele, in his own report, stated that “Most people (including myself) would be reluctant to agree that the time gained by any one of these clocks is indicative of anything” and “the difference between theory and measurement is disturbing” (quoted in: Kelly, A G. (1996) A New Theory on the Behaviour of Light. IIE Monograph series.).
An analysis of the shortcomings of the tests is given in Kelly’s 1996 paper assessing the results (http://www.cartesio-episteme.net/H&KPaper.htm). This shows that a test of an accuracy improvement of two orders of magnitude would be required, before any credence could be placed in the results of such a test.
Later, on the 25th anniversary of the Hafele-Keating experiment, another time dilation experiment was undertaken by the National Physics Laboratory and involved flying a much improved atomic clock from London to Washington and back again and was filmed by the BBC’s Horizon programme.
This, too, has proved controversial. The experiment was undertaken to test if velocity could account for time dilation, so only the height, speed and estimated position were monitored. No data on the aircrafts’ acceleration, nor the forces of acceleration when and if the aircraft experienced any turbulence during the flight, was recorded in either of the experiments. This experiment has never been examined from the point of view of acceleration only. No account has been taken for turbulence during the flight or differences in the acceleration during take-off and landings.
If SR/GR were correct then the GPS would be very accurate but the truth is the system has an accuracy drift and no matter what adjustments are made to it, the system needs constant adjustment to maintain some sort of accuracy. The rate at which adjustments are needed to correct the system for the accuracy drift is increasing and in about ten years or less the GPS will (without further adjustments) become useless, unless the reason for this drift is found.
In short, the current SR and GR relativity adjustments to GPS, if rigorously applied, will make the system fail (albeit not immediately but eventually) and so my original assertion was correct, contrary to what you say, Edmund, however much I may have simplified my description for the layman.
This, however, is not to say that there is no room for some relativistic effects adjustments. Some scientists are now looking at what they call “true” relativity adjustments i.e. not confined to those suggested by those who prefer to stick with SR and GR. And, of course, there may be other explanations.
So I return to my original claim: if you make the adjustments that Einstein's theory requires, the GPS fails. The accuracy drift is gradual and does not rule out “true” relativity adjustments but my statement was, nonetheless, true.
With respect, you are also wrong to imply that it is only Geocentrists who challenge the Einsteinian theory. Others are doing so and in increasing numbers.
I repeat my original caveat: we should take care not simply to dismiss reasoned dissenters from current scientific dogmas as mere “nutters”. To do so is simply unscientific. It is also a bit rich coming, as it so often does, from those who claim to be defenders of Galileo and scientific freedom.
Tribunus
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