Relativity in question

Dr. Edward Dowdye is a laser optics engineer and former NASA physicist who argues the case for classical mechanics in attempting to explain observational quandaries that had hitherto remained the province of abstract theories like Einstein's Relativity. In his presentation this year, Dr. Dowdye tackled one of the most widely touted predictions of General Relativity (GRT), namely the bending of light paths by massive objects. He presented compelling empirical evidence that the direct relationship between light and gravitation in vacuum space does not exist. Crucially, he pointed out that when GRT was conceived, plasma was unknown, and the limb of the Sun was considered to be a boundary between the photosphere and the vacuum of space. Dr. Dowdye takes account of what is now known to be a plasma atmosphere surrounding the Sun to considerable altitude and applies Gauss's law of gravitation and conventional optics to the problem. Dr. Dowdye is the originator of the Extinction Shift Principle, which challenges General and Special Relativity, and is an electrical engineer, formerly of NASA, with degrees in mathematics and physics. www.extinctionshift.com

I have my proof I needed... light is not bend by massive objects but delayed, it slows down...
which is consistent with a wave propagating in space. it has a hight and is not a point ( photon) like said.
so one "side" is closer to the mass and slows down what actually causes the bending in propagation direction

a reply to: KrzYma

How does that explain this picture?
(Hint: It doesn't, meaning his idea is flawed)

Abell 1689

That gravitational bending is taking place far from the stars, in fact it's a galaxy cluster doing the bending in that photo, not a star, so his argument falls apart in that photo.

Abell 1689 is a galaxy cluster in the constellation Virgo nearly 2.2 billion light years away. It is one of the biggest and most massive galaxy clusters known and acts as a gravitational lens, distorting the images of galaxies that lie behind it. It has the largest system of gravitational arcs ever found.

a reply to: KrzYma

The predictions of general relativity, in particular gravitational lensing, are confirmed by much more than starlight angular aberration during the 1919 eclipse.

Gravitational lensing has been observed thousands of times in galactic clusters and agrees quantitatively with standard theory.

In GR, it is not simple to assign the results to be "space bending" vs "time slowing down" as a binary one or the other, because the effect is a deformation in space-time combined. It is possible that the discussed description is just an alternate way of representing the same physics. If it predicts different physics, that's a different story and requires serious experimental confirmation. (So far, Einstein is undefeated against all experimental challenges).

For instance, there is the property of gravitational redshift which has been measured in an extraordinary precise experiment on earth. If you point a monochromatic light beam 'up' against gravity there is a redshift, i.e. looking down the laser woudl be slightly (and I mean a very tiny amount) redder than pointing it sideways at a constant gravitational potential. Now, is that because 'space' is deformed and so the wavelength of the electromagnetic field is stretched? Or is it time that's deformed so that things are going slower in the oscillation of the wave? You can't really say one or the other or it's both depending on how you look at it.

Physics makes predictions about experiments, but it isn't necessarily supposed to be simple for humans to describe in language.

There are a surprising number of different formulations of general relativity quite conceptually distinct from the classic Einstein method but presumably giving the same physical result in the appropriate limit.

Some are fairly simple, in some regimes (only some), gravitation can be formulated to be analogous (not the same, a mathematical analogy) to optics in a refractive medium.

Other formulations are more theoretically intense and sophisticated, and may be considered as alternatives which may be easier to unify with particle field theories. Some problems may be easier to solve in one formulation than another.

This same thing happened with classical mechanics. Conceptually Newton's vector sum of forces seems pretty different from a minimization of action in a Lagrangian or a Hamiltonian energy formulation. But the end result (what happens to stuff) turns out to be the same.

I don't have a lot of great, genius science points, Krzyma, but I will say in the lensing, we only see it from one angle, anyway, when it's more than one dimension. If you looked at a spiral from one angle, it appears to be a line moving up and down, doesn't it? When you see it multidimensionally, only then is one able to distinguish it's circles, moving upwards, spiralling. I know it's a simplistic example, but still makes a point.

The science explanations of relativity of what's been observed thus far in space, is not wrong, just based on our limited view. And it may be, that it's our explanation for what we have been given to see, after all, at this point.
tetra

a reply to: mbkennel

Now, is that because 'space' is deformed and so the wavelength of the electromagnetic field is stretched? Or is it time that's deformed so that things are going slower in the oscillation of the wave? You can't really say one or the other or it's both depending on how you look at it.

not really !
you are talking about the emission time,
if time is slower the oscillation is slower so like you said longer wavelength. red shift
I talk about a wave passing by a big mass.
slowing down approaching, passing by and accelerating again, no red shift at all

if you measure length it is some constant quanta added together and counted over this length to measure.
if space itself is "stretch", there is no way to measure it, as your scale stretches to.

measuring time is measuring things happen in constant rate, like the time for an atom to oscillate.
and if its in a gravitational attraction of a mass, its oscillation get stretch, so it needs more time, is less energetic, emits more in red spectrum. But the time you are measuring at this stage is not delayed for you as observer.
otherwise there would be no red shift for you.

lol, everyone wants to find fault in Einsteins work because it makes them feel like they are more intelligent than him.

originally posted by: PhoenixOD
lol, everyone wants to find fault in Einsteins work because it makes them feel like they are more intelligent than him.

Would u say that Generally or
Specially,, relatively speaking?


i think its special,

That abell photo does not prove anything, Besides this video phoo phoos GR completely


a reply to: Arbitrageur

a reply to: Nochzwei
It proved Dowdye is wrong. How could light from those those distant galaxies get so distorted if what Dowdye said in the screencap I posted was true?

Here is a transcript of the video you posted, and I searched the transcript for the word "relativity" and got zero matches.
projectcamelot.org...
I don't know how it's supposed to debunk relativity without even mentioning it.

The distortion of light is an assumption and not necessarily true and causes of distortion if present is not necessarily due to gravitational lensing.
In the Gordon novell video he is talking about negating time to negate gravity, which is contrary to GR
a reply to: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
How does that explain this picture?

How can such a smart guy like yourself respond to Dowdye's arguments with that?

Did you watch the presentation?

So you're saying that, because we occasionally see ring like objects in space, that proves Einstein's theory of relativity must be right, even though we don't see ring like distortions around the zillions of places the theory predicts they should be?

That's like a middle school argument, and they are the only people you're fooling with it.

"There's just no way it could be anything else!"

originally posted by: AnarchoCapitalist
How can such a smart guy like yourself respond to Dowdye's arguments with that?

Did you watch the presentation?

I watched the whole thing.

So you're saying that, because we occasionally see ring like objects in space, that proves Einstein's theory of relativity must be right, even though we don't see ring like distortions around the zillions of places the theory predicts they should be?

I didn't say it proved Einstein right, I said it proved Dowdye wrong, and it does.

The photo is consistent with Einstein's theory but I think you need more than one picture to prove Einstein's theory, and even then no theory is ever proven 100% in science.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
I didn't say it proved Einstein right, I said it proved Dowdye wrong, and it does.
...
The photo is consistent with Einstein's theory but I think you need more than one picture to prove Einstein's theory, and even then no theory is ever proven 100% in science.

From the wiki entry on falsifiability:

The classical view of the philosophy of science is that it is the goal of science to prove hypotheses like "All swans are white" or to induce them from observational data. Popper argued that this would require the inference of a general rule from a number of individual cases, which is inadmissible in deductive logic. However, if one finds one single black swan, deductive logic admits the conclusion that the statement that all swans are white is false. Falsificationism thus strives for questioning, for falsification, of hypotheses instead of proving them.

That means if we see "gravitational lenses" in some places, but we don't see a gravitational lens where the theory predicts one should be, then the entire theory is wrong.

I'm sure you already know this, so I'm not sure why you keep going back to that image of yours, acting as if the observance of a ring system in space makes everything all hunky-dory.

There's other reasons why that ring system you keep pointing to could exist besides gravity bending nothing.

Ya know what?

Let's talk about Abell 1689.

Are you familiar with something called the "shock injection problem?" The entire cluster you keep pointing at is surrounded by a 100 million degree plasma emitting high intensity x-rays. Those temperatures cannot be accounted for with gravitation and hydrodynamic shock theory.

Wiki notes that,

A mystery of first order Fermi processes is the injection problem. In the environment of a shock, only particles with energies that exceed the thermal energy by much (a factor of a few at least) can cross the shock and 'enter the game' of acceleration. It is presently unclear what mechanism causes the particles to initially have energies sufficiently high to do so.

Do you think that 100 million degree plasma might have something to do with the observed "lensing?" I bet it does, because relativistic plasma refracts light.

So, now we have observations of no lensing where Einstein's theory predicts there should be lensing, observations of impossibly hot plasma surrounding an entire galaxy cluster, and we know that the super-hot plasma surrounding that cluster is capable of refracting light.

I'm sure none of this matters to you though.

I mean think about this, the Sun, which is supposedly a gigantic thermo-nuclear furnace, only gets up to a million K. So how the hell does all of that plasma surrounding a galaxy cluster, which is not the product of a nuclear furnace, get up to 100 million K?

Of course, I know the answer.

If I'm right, we should see the same effects around other clusters that exhibit relativistic plasma halos, while they should be absent around clusters lacking such halos.

Abell 2744 exhibits asymmetric circular refraction around the hottest points of the halo.

en.wikipedia.org...

Abell 2151, which does not have an x-ray halo, does not.

en.wikipedia.org...

Anyone care to place a wager?

The same is true for Abell 2218, another so-called "lensing" galaxy cluster.

cds.cern.ch...

Abell 2218 using the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer on board the Chandra X-ray Observatory that were taken on October 19, 1999. Using a Raymond-Smith single temperature plasma model corrected for galactic absorption we find a mean cluster temperature of kT = 6.9 kev

6.9 kev is around 110,400,000 K.

originally posted by: AnarchoCapitalist
I'm sure you already know this, so I'm not sure why you keep going back to that image of yours, acting as if the observance of a ring system in space makes everything all hunky-dory.

I never claimed everything was hunky-dory. I claimed that ths statement from Dowdye's presentation is falsified, since he's saying you no longer see bending in areas far enough away from the star:

The image shows areas far from the stars where the light appears to be bent significantly, so Dowdye's claim in the above screenshot is falsified to my satisfaction.

originally posted by: AnarchoCapitalist
Wiki notes that,

A mystery of first order ...

Yes that's in the wiki, but what's the source? The wiki had a note at the top saying the sources are unclear due to lack of inline citations. If it's any of the three sources listed, they are all many decades old dating back to 1949 which is an eternity in cosmology.

However there remain plenty of mysteries in cosmology. We can measure the EM radiation from distant hot gases but profiling the magnetic fields from a distance is difficult without probes to measure the fields like we have in our solar system. Scientists have some ideas on how these mysteries might be solved, but some remain hypothetical without observations to confirm them.

originally posted by: AnarchoCapitalist
Do you think that 100 million degree plasma might have something to do with the observed "lensing?" I bet it does, because relativistic plasma refracts light.

It's an interesting idea, but we not only can tell the hot plasma gas is there, but we have a pretty good idea how much is there, and there's not enough to account for what we see. In addition to the plasma in gas clouds being insufficient to explain observation, even when the other baryonic matter is considered (the stars), it's insufficient to explain the observation, which is why scientists are searching for undiscovered non-baryonic particles, called WIMPs.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
Yes that's in the wiki, but what's the source?

Here's a 2011 paper that talks about it:
arxiv.org...

It is not resolved, however, how a part of particles originally composing a thermal background plasma is embedded in the diffusive shock acceleration which requires pre-existence of nonthermal particles possible to flow freely over the shock. This is the so-called injection problem on the diffusive shock acceleration.

It's an interesting idea, but we not only can tell the hot plasma gas is there, but we have a pretty good idea how much is there, and there's not enough to account for what we see. In addition to the plasma in gas clouds being insufficient to explain observation, even when the other baryonic matter is considered (the stars), it's insufficient to explain the observation, which is why scientists are searching for undiscovered non-baryonic particles, called WIMPs.

99.9% of papers on lensing make absolutely no mention of self-focusing caused by relativistic plasma. If they did, then they would have to go about revising all their "lensing" theories again.

Here's a paper that at least talks about some of the refraction effects that can be caused by plasma:

arxiv.org...

We investigate the influence of plasma presence on relativistic images formed by Schwarzschild black hole lensing. When a gravitating body is surrounded by a plasma, the lensing angle depends on a frequency of the electromagnetic wave due to refraction properties, and the dispersion properties of the light propagation in gravitational field in plasma. The last effect leads to difference, even in uniform plasma, of gravitational deflection angle in plasma from vacuum case.

If they actually looked at the lab data instead of theorizing all the damn time, what they will ultimately find is that ALL refraction of light that is attributed to "gravitational lensing" is actually being caused by relativistic plasma. Since black holes are simply a mathematically fantasy, there is obviously something tangible causing the observed refraction.

It's called relativistic plasma self-focusing. The astrophysicists need to read up on some engineering and optics journals.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

but we not only can tell the hot plasma gas is there, but we have a pretty good idea how much is there, and there's not enough to account for what we see.

sounds like you look at it only from the mass/gravity side, or what do you mean by "not enough" ?

a reply to: KrzYma

Appears to be a very strong case. I am going to look further into this though. Thanks for the thread.

originally posted by: AnarchoCapitalist

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
I didn't say it proved Einstein right, I said it proved Dowdye wrong, and it does.
...
The photo is consistent with Einstein's theory but I think you need more than one picture to prove Einstein's theory, and even then no theory is ever proven 100% in science.

From the wiki entry on falsifiability:

The classical view of the philosophy of science is that it is the goal of science to prove hypotheses like "All swans are white" or to induce them from observational data. Popper argued that this would require the inference of a general rule from a number of individual cases, which is inadmissible in deductive logic. However, if one finds one single black swan, deductive logic admits the conclusion that the statement that all swans are white is false. Falsificationism thus strives for questioning, for falsification, of hypotheses instead of proving them.

That means if we see "gravitational lenses" in some places, but we don't see a gravitational lens where the theory predicts one should be, then the entire theory is wrong.

I'm sure you already know this, so I'm not sure why you keep going back to that image of yours, acting as if the observance of a ring system in space makes everything all hunky-dory.

There's other reasons why that ring system you keep pointing to could exist besides gravity bending nothing.

Excellent. The epitome of deductive falsification. Done and done.