Innovative Astronomy Research (Meta Articles)

[ckaricai]

Originally posted to eTLE by John

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Greetings all!

 

Since there is evidently interest in matters scientific and astronomical, and with a willingness to look at fringe science among Michael Students, I thought I would provide links to a number of articles on innovative astronomy research gathered at Meta Research. Who is Meta Research? As they describe their organization:

 

“Something has gone wrong in the field of astronomy. Many widely held beliefs fly in the face of observational evidence. Theories go through such contortions to resolve inconsistencies that the ideas can no longer be explained in simple language. Alternative ideas are often rejected out of hand simply because they challenge the status quo. The result ... many of  today's theories are unnecessarily complex.

 

Meta Research is dedicated to bringing some common sense back to this field. Here we challenge ideas that have consistently failed to make successful predictions, examine new paradigms, and advocate the ideas found to be most worthy of further consideration and testing."

 

Whether or not I agreed with (or even understood!) all the points in the individual articles, I found them to be interesting reading back in the day -- admittedly I'm no expert in the field (I'm just an interested layman.)  I hope some of you might enjoy the articles as well.

 

So without further ado:

 

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Cosmology

 

Physics Has Its Principles (updated 3/30/2008)

 

http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/PhysicsHasItsPrinciples.asp

 

Excerpt: “Abstract. Physicists and mathematicians have fundamentally different approaches to describing reality. The essential difference is that physicists adhere to certain logical principles, any violation of which would amount to a miracle; whereas the equations of mathematics generally are oblivious to physical constraints. This leads to drastically different views of what is, and what is not, possible for cosmology and the reality we live in. Physics that adheres to these logical principles is known as "deep reality physics".”

 

Did the Universe Have a Beginning (~1994)

 

http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/DidTheUniverseHaveABeginning.asp

 

Excerpt: “The big bang theory postulates that the entire universe originated in a cosmic explosion about 15 billion years ago. Such an idea had no serious constituency until Edwin Hubble discovered the redshift of galaxy light in the 1920s, which seemed to imply an expanding universe. However, our ability to test cosmological theories has vastly improved with modern telescopes covering all wavelengths, some of them in orbit. Despite the widespread acceptance of the big bang theory as a working model for interpreting new findings, not a single important prediction of the theory has yet been confirmed, and substantial evidence has accumulated against it. Here, we examine the evidence for the most fundamental postulate of the big bang, the expansion of the universe. We conclude that the evidence does not support the theory; and that it is time to stop patching up the theory to keep it viable, and to consider fundamentally new working models for the origin and nature of the universe in better agreement with the observations.”

 

The Top 30 Problems with the Big Bang (6-13-2002)

 

http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/BB-top-30.asp

 

Excerpt: “Abstract. Earlier, we presented a simple list of the top ten problems with the Big Bang. Since that publication, we have had many requests for citations and additional details, which we provide here. We also respond to a few rebuttal arguments to the earlier list. Then we supplement the list based on the last four years of developments – with another 20 problems for the theory."

 

Gravity

 

The Speed of Gravity What the Experiments Say (2-4-2006)

 

http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity.asp

 

Excerpt: “Introduction: The most amazing thing I was taught as a graduate student of celestial mechanics at Yale in the 1960s was that all gravitational interactions between bodies in all dynamical systems had to be taken as instantaneous. This seemed unacceptable on two counts. In the first place, it seemed to be a form of “action at a distance”. Perhaps no one has so elegantly expressed the objection to such a concept better than Sir Isaac Newton: “That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to the other, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.” But mediation requires propagation, and finite bodies should be incapable of propagation at infinite speeds since that would require infinite energy. So instantaneous gravity seemed to have an element of magic to it.

 

The second objection was that we had all been taught that Einstein’s special relativity (SR), an experimentally well-established theory, proved that nothing could propagate in forward time at a speed greater than that of light in a vacuum. Indeed, as astronomers we were taught to calculate orbits using instantaneous forces; then extract the position of some body along its orbit at a time of interest, and calculate where that position would appear as seen from Earth by allowing for the finite propagation speed of light from there to here. It seemed incongruous to allow for the finite speed of light from the body to the Earth, but to take the effect of Earth’s gravity on that same body as propagating from here to there instantaneously. Yet that was the required procedure to get the correct answers.”

 

The Speed of Gravity Repeal the Speed Limit (8-12-2000)

 

http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/gravity/speed_limit.asp

 

Excerpt: ”Short abstract. General relativity has a geometric and a field interpretation. If angular momentum conservation is invoked in the geometric interpretation to explain experiments, the causality principle is violated. Meanwhile, the field interpretation avoids this problem by allowing faster-than-light propagation in forward time. Lightspeed is not a universal speed limit.”

 

Primer on Lorentzian Relativity (5-1-2006)

 

http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/gravity/LR.asp

 

Excerpt: “Abstract. As the relativity of motion is taught today, Einstein’s special relativity has been observationally confirmed so often that there is no longer reason to doubt it. However, the chief competitor theory known as Lorentzian relativity has passed those same observational tests. Whether surpassing the speed of light in classical physics will be routinely possible or not depends critically on which of these models is correct. Recent experimental evidence for faster-than-light force propagation is fully consistent with Lorentzian relativity, but is a test that special relativity cannot pass.”

 

What the Global Positioning System Tells Us About the Twin’s Paradox (9-9-2002)

 

http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/gravity/gps-twins.asp

 

Excerpt: “Abstract. In the GPS, all atomic clocks in all reference frames (in orbit and on the ground) are set once and stay synchronized. We can use this same trick to place a GPS-type clock aboard the spacecraft of a traveling twin. That clock will stay synchronized with Earth clocks, allowing a clear resolution of the twin's paradox in special relativity - why the traveler expects to come back younger, and why the stay-at-home twin is not entitled to the same expectation.”

 

The Meta Cycle (~2002)

 

http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/gravity/meta_cycle.asp

 

Excerpt: “Abstract. The following is a slightly updated excerpt from [Tom Van Flandern’s] reply to Victor Slabinski's "Notes on Gravitation in the Meta Model" as originally published in the Meta Research Bulletin. Some of this material has already been incorporated into our respective chapters in the book Pushing Gravity; but some has not. This article should be considered a supplement to those who have read these two chapters in the book.”

 

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If you have enjoyed these articles and want to read more – feel free to peruse the other offerings available on the Meta Research Website (http://metaresearch.org/home.asp).

 

As always, be good, have fun, and play nice!

 

John

This post was edited by John at October 7, 2014 4:28 PM EDT