Aetherial and Dark Matter Discussions

a reply to: blackcrowe

What follows relates to my struggles with publishing, as well as some of my experiences as a reviewer. It is relevant to my response to blackcrowe, as will be seen. I'll submit this in two posts, as it gets a bit long. I may have related some of these stories on other threads, but it doesn't hurt to tell the stories again in a perhaps different way.

When I've published my important works I would almost always go to the Physical Review first. Sometimes I'd get comments that would help strengthen my work; other times not. I'd always be rejected, but never on valid grounds. It is not just my opinion that the grounds for rejection were vacuous. In the first case of my absolute theory, all the physicists at the SSC agreed that the reviews were garbage. The paper was rejected solely on the basis that special relativity did not contain a length contraction. I appealed, and the appellate judge agreed with the reviewer. How do you combat such nonsense? The only place I could publish was Physics Essays. Every other journal simply judges whether things are "right" or "wrong" and everyone knows Einstein's Relativity was the greatest and most correct theory ever, so clearly anything questioning it must be rejected immediately. And, of course, the vast majority of the time such papers are indeed wrong. But if we are to make progress you really need to actually think about the arguments in each case and see WHY you are rejecting that vast majority. As an author I got "reviews" saying things like "if this is right, everything we know is wrong. Thus this paper must be rejected." or "this paper may have deserved publication in 1903, but not 2003." There was never a pointing to an actual experimental result that disproved what I was proposing, nor a logical error, nor a mathematical mistake. It was all just summary judgement.

Back at the SSC I was able to give my theoretical presentations to the theorists there in a lecture hall with a substantial audience. I could easily have one on one discussions, and had many. Once you get to know someone, you know whether you should take them seriously or not. I easily passed that bar. I was doing the longitudinal dynamics for the beams at the largest accelerator in the world and I wrote the computer program and design manual for that effort. Others used my work in their work. But once the SSC went under I lost that position of respect. Not because I had made some critical mistake, but just because the project was cancelled. And since that time, when I try to publish, at the first sign that "things aren't quite right", the work is rejected. (And "things aren't quite right" if you have no prominent institution named in your byline.) Judgements on whether to allow publication are often made based on what your position is, or whether the reviewer knows you or your reputation, as busy scientists don't have the time to look into every "crackpot" theory. So it has been very difficult to be taken seriously after the SSC.

Well past my time at the SSC I continued to be a reviewer for Physics Essays. I'd often get papers on what looked like a real nutty idea, but always wondered whether the author was a nut, or if the author was an esteemed chair of grandness at some university or national lab. The thing is, with bleeding edge science, you really can't tell. In almost every case I'd find one or several critical flaws. Always the questions I'd ask were: 1) Does the work violate any known experiment? 2) Are there any math errors? 3) Does it contain logical flaws? 4) Is it really new? and 5) Can it be tested? Even if it didn't meet all these criteria, I would let the author know of the problem and ask them to resubmit with improvements. Often, things might be able to be fixed. Other times (such as if it was from a chair of grandness) a better explanation might make the paper understandable to the more general audience, and so that I could understand the point in order to correctly judge whether it should be published or not.

One of the authors I had this back and forth with was Bert Schrieber. He had some ideas that looked to be possibly interesting, but it always seemed off. In his case I got a chance to meet him. There was this band-of-roving-misfits called the Natural Philosophy Association, and J.D. Jackson (Stanford professor, author of the book on electrodynamics) recommended the group to me when I sent him my first aether paper. I too was a misfit, so perhaps this was where I should go! But once there, I realized it really was predominantly of extremely low quality. Lunacy really. There were a few really good scientists and engineers, but most were not. Bert Screiber had a few of us over to his hotel room for some beers. He thought he had an experiment that could disprove electrodynamics. I am ALWAYS up for an experiment, so I wanted to see it. He basically had a see-through plastic beach ball with some bits of torn paper inside. When he rubbed it on his hair, the paper would stick to the inside of the plastic. And since there should be no field on the inside of a conducting sphere, he believe he had disproved electrodynamic theory! Of course, I let him know that the plastic was not a conductor, and quickly explained how localized static charge could explain his experiment. After another beer, I explained to him what the curl was. This was before you could look it up on the internet. He was very happy to learn these things and we left friends. No one could explain to him what a curl was before.

But that story about Bert Screiber is quite relevant both to my attempt to get a serious look at my own work and in my reply to blackcrowe. When I read Bert's submissions, they weren't that bad. They would have a few things I couldn't quite understand, but was this the work of a novice? Or was it just something that wasn't explained well? It can be hard to tell from just looking at a paper. So you send it back with questions, and the whole process takes a long, long time. If we can chat, whether in a hotel room or my cube back at the SSC, we get resolution quickly on whether the person is serious or a novice. And that is why I have trouble now. I have no one to talk to. I can only write. Most reviewers of papers won't take the time when they see my work, as they assume it is from some nut. And again, most works on the subject ARE from some nut. It is a real problem.

As for blackcrowe - are you a professor in an endowed chair somewhere? Or a graduate student in physics? Or a novice? It is hard for me to know for sure. I do know that I can't fully tell. One thing that would indicate the latter is more likely is that you don't seem to follow my argument that we are thinking about things radically differently. A professor should understand that easily. For instance, if I cut a block of wood into a sphere, or I cut it into a cube, the wood itself is still wood. That is what, essentially, my analysis of the aether is doing. I cut an imaginary sphere around it, or a cube, depending upon which geometry makes the math easier for a specific analysis. But the aether is still the aether. It is a substance. In the same way wood is a substance. Your spheres and lines and points just aren't relevant to that sort of analysis. Now I have seen high end physics theories where it is relevant, and that is why I still wish you luck, because gains can be made that way. But it isn't at all how I am looking at things, and it won't help my efforts now.

Generally I spend Saturdays - all day, 15 hours worth, working on my aether paper. But today I had time to write this rather long response. Why? Because I finally got to the end of draft one of the core portion of the master document! I calculated both light bending and the effects on the perihelion advances from the same underlying causes. That was the last thing I felt had to be done to complete the core work. Now it's on to cleaning it up, the careful checking, adding the references, and adding some very important commentary throughout. And then I may need to reduce the master document into something smaller and more fit for publication. But it was a milestone achieved today, so I took time out for this rather long response. Of course, since my draft hasn't all been checked yet, there may still be some error lurking that sets me back months. But as of now things look real good.

a reply to: delbertlarson

Thanks for your replies.

I am not a scientist. My career was in highways construction. I now work in a factory.

You asked the questions. I tried to help answer them.

My answers don't fit with your model. And that's fine.

Your last paragraph looks encouraging.

Good luck.

a reply to: blackcrowe

Thanks. You have actually been helpful, and I had already quite long ago marked This Link for reference. That link, and the main link to Arbitrageur's 400 page thread, are presently referenced as examples of the ATS discussions that have proven helpful to me.

I hadn't planned to look into gravity at all when I started this version of the aether paper. My original goal was simply to complete an aetherial basis for electromagnetism. I had already derived Maxwell's Equations (ME), but there were a couple of problems. First, the ME derivation involved negative mass, a concept I never liked. And second, I had not derived the Lorentz Force Equations (LFE). To my knowledge, no one had ever even appreciated the need to derive the LFE. Maxwell through Lorentz had known of the need to derive the ME from an aetherial footing, and there was quite a bit of effort on that front without success. But when Einstein came around that whole effort stopped. And the LFE only got established at about the same time relativity did, so I don't know that it was ever realized that an aether model should account for both ME and LFE. But I knew it, and so that was my original goal.

I knew of course that gravity should likely also come out of an aether model. But it was on ATS that I had discussions to learn more about dark matter and dark energy. My thought prior to the ATS discussions was that all of astrophysics was severely limited by the inability to do controlled experiments by varying conditions in a lab, and also by the fact that we occupy an infinitesimal amount of the universe. So with those limits I had never looked into dark matter, and didn't even know about dark energy at all. Being on ATS was very helpful, because I could ask a few questions and get pointed in the right directions to do some remedial research. You played a helpful role in the discussions.

My career was in highways construction.

I, too, worked road construction. In my case it was for about five summers while working my way through college. I worked as a scientist for about 25 years. After the SSC died I was lead accelerator physicist on an ion beam accelerator. But after that I was going to have to move my family if I wanted to stay "in science" and so I moved into IT for a more stable life as I raised my kids. I have also continued science work with a small company on a part time basis and do a lot of theoretical research on my own.

My answers don't fit with your model. And that's fine.

Honestly, I don't know that for certain. Your answers come from a different way of thinking, so I myself don't wish to dwell on it. But I encourage you to do so. As I mentioned already, your thinking appears to be closer to "the mathematical way" to do physics. As for my way of thinking, my first paper on The Aether is an example of "the physical way". Your work, to me, is somewhat reminiscent of what is done with group theory. In that example of the different approaches, a bunch of particles were found that similar characteristics. To me, those similarities meant there likely exist some underlying particles (Physical Things) that lead to the observed similarities. In other minds (the group theorist minds) it makes more sense that the characteristics arise from some mathematical basis. The math can sometimes become geometrical. You might want to study group theory and see what you find there. As mentioned in an earlier post, there are many ways to make progress.

One thing that would help my efforts enormously is if citations started appearing in the reviewed literature. The ABC Preon Model now has a few. So if you could write a paper on how you feel there is some geometric support of any of my works that would be great. Be advised however that as of now I myself don't follow the connection, so I might not be the best one to give feedback. Again, study of some group theory may help, as it might be more in line with your thinking and if you can make connections between your concepts and the group theory concepts it would enhance your chances of getting published. Also helping have been your periodic responses on my threads, as it keeps them alive. Otherwise, there is no discussion at all. Silence kills ideas. So thanks again.

a reply to: delbertlarson

Thanks again Delbert.

My reason for being here is purely obsessional.

I have nothing to gain from this. Nothing to lose.

It really doesn't matter to me one way or the other.

There is nothing i can do about it though. I have no control over it.

I try to kick it. Try not to get involved. But always do. And i must have been a real pain in the arse. Sorry for that.

I will look into group theory. Thanks.

As for your last paragraph. I will see if i can add something. It will probably take some time. But, it's a good idea.

Now stop wasting time with lengthy replies to me. And finish your model.

All the best.

Time for an update.

When I last spent time posting here a milestone was passed. The analysis from the rest frame of the aether was complete in a first draft, along with calculations assuming the solar system was at rest with respect to that aether. Maxwell's Equations, the Lorentz Force Equation, Newtonian Gravity, Dark Matter, Perihelion Advance, and Light Bending were all derived in a unified theory.

Now another milestone has now been passed. The draft write-up now includes moving frames, as well as solar system calculations assuming the aether is at rest with respect to the cosmic microwave background. The problems were 1) the sun will become oblate due to its Lorentz contraction as it moves through the aether; and 2) the gravitational potential will become oblate due to the gravitational flow force postulated to be the cause for the factor of two observation of light bending. Once one has an oblate source, and not a perfect sphere, the analysis gets considerably more complex. But it is done now. Everything still aligns with experimental data.

Next is a look into black holes and Shapiro time delay. In the aether theory mass reduces the internal tension, which causes an aetherial expansion. For small disturbances, this leads to Newtonian gravity. At large masses the aetherial disturbance will act to reduce the gravitational pull. This will have the result that there will be no singularities. Rather, there will be a finite size object of large mass. The next effort is to better understand and quantify this issue. The small change in tension that leads to Newtonian gravity may also cause a small effect on light speed, and that could lead to Shapiro time delay, so that also needs investigation.

In the aether theory, light is shown to be aetherial waves with positive aether moving one way and negative aether moving the other way. Gravitational waves are aetherial waves with both types of aether moving together, and that is all that needs to be said about that in this paper. So once black holes and Shapiro time delay are done, all necessary topics will have been treated. However, then comes the careful checking and summary write up.

Unfortunately, this continues to go slowly. As part of the above effort a problem was found in one of the fundamental derivations, and that is now being corrected. There of course may be other issues that come up during further review and checking. It is not possible to get a hard estimate of when this will be complete. As a guess, it will be months. I hope ATS is still around then.

I check this thread from time to time, and there hasn't been an update on any sale for quite some time. Does anyone know anything about any recent news on that front?

My hope is that once the present time passes (and the election is over) ads will return to sites with commentary and perhaps ATS can survive into the future. At least until the next election.

Looking into the Shapiro time delay (discussed in the previous post) led to the discovery of a significant problem in the aether paper.

During the exposition there are many places where things are assumed small enough so that effects higher than first order can be neglected. That is, of course, a standard treatment in many physical models. Well, when trying to get numbers for the Shapiro time delay it turned out one of the "small" constants actually evaluated to unity. That blew up an entire portion of the analysis. The problem had ramifications all the way back to equation 2. (There are over 1000 equations.)

I have arrived at another underpinning that appears able to replace the problematic one. It brings with it some new and interesting effects. Significant progress is being made on the E&M portion. Once that is done it will be back to gravity and a check on the Shapiro time delay. If Shapiro does not work out, there could be more to understand. And the full checking could again unearth some new issue. This has been tough to get through, but progress continues. Albeit far slower than I'd like.

My previous post here mentioned that an error was found and a start of an investigation of a new approach to fix that error. In the last three months, the new approach did improve the electromagnetism derivation. So there has been some progress. However while the new approach did also address the earlier error (which was in the gravitational derivations) a new problem has appeared. Work continues.

I am glad to see that ATS is still around! I saw that the thread discussing its sale was closed. Does anyone know more about the fate of ATS? I suppose recent events may mean that no one has a clue right now.

originally posted by: delbertlarson
I am glad to see that ATS is still around! I saw that the thread discussing its sale was closed. Does anyone know more about the fate of ATS? I suppose recent events may mean that no one has a clue right now.

They found a buyer who may be taking ownership of the site today or the next few days. Here's a post from 6 days ago saying transfer to the new owner should happen within the coming week, and tomorrow will be one week.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Everything I know about the new owner is in that thread, which isn't much.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Thanks for the update.

Time for an aetherial update.

The aether work continues and the earlier errors have now been eliminated by changes to the postulates. Of course, finding the postulates is one of the goals. Experiment is telling us certain observational truths. Truths such as Maxwell's Equations, the Lorentz Force Equation, Newtonian gravity, gravitational red shifts, perihelion advances, distant stellar orbits indicating some additional matter, gravitational light bending and the Shapiro Effect. Before "modern physics" the old approach was to propose simple postulates of a physical world believed to underlie observational truths. Mathematical derivations were then done to see if the postulates matched the observational truths. If not, the postulates needed to be rejected and new ones put in their place. That old process is what is underway for the aether model.

The Shapiro effect has not yet been calculated. If it goes well a draft of the paper may be done as early as May. After the first draft, the estimate is at least three months of checking, as this is a long work. Close to 200 pages, double spaced. So optimistically a publishable draft could be done in the fall of 2021.

Of course if the Shapiro calculation goes badly, or if an error is found during checking, then there is no telling how long it will take to finish this. Especially difficult are sign errors. I've hit two in the last year, and they generally indicate a severe misunderstanding and require some new insight. Generally they take months to understand, and then a complete rewrite of everything may even be required.

Also of note is that black holes are considered out of scope for the present work. Black holes may be large aetherial disturbances and the present work looks at small disturbances.

So that's where things are now. The plan is to update here again in three months. With good luck, the checking will have been underway by then.

-

I saw the video by Harry Cliff posted by Arbitrageur. It was like "old home week". Almost the entire thing reminded me of what I was learning about and working on over 35 years ago. It is rather stunning, and rather depressing, how little fundamental physics has advanced in that time. Dr. Cliff does indeed present the Standard Model quite well. He does miss pointing out color however. When you add color, there are three times more particles than the nice simple depiction. It's more honest to include color in the graph of elemental particles, and maybe the antiparticles should be shown too.

The thing that is always striking to me is how sure the presenters of this stuff are. Yes, I know, the present physics community does admit that there may be something they don't yet know. But the certainty, faith really, in the underlying standard model is quite strong. And yes, I know, the Standard Model does map to all the data. The problem is it has something over 150 terms in its fundamental equation (THE Lagrangian) and something like 90 parameters that are used to fit to that data. So how hard exactly is it to fit all the data to all those terms and parameters? Well, pretty hard actually. There is a lot of data. But my point is, when you've got that many fitted parameters, and that many terms, why don't more physicists come to the conclusion that things are actually very, very wrong? Yes there is an admission that dark matter and dark energy have no good understanding, and while I did not see Dr. Cliff mention the cosmological constant problem that too is admitted as an issue. But the total ugliness of the standard model is usually not confronted head on.

And every time I see a presentation like this it does cause momentary doubt in the ABC Preon Model. The certainty that the standard model is correct is shared by a large community of very intelligent scientists. But I always come back to the point of view that the simplicity of the ABC Preon Model, coupled with the fact that it dovetails into the quark/lepton modeling, should win the day.

When I saw the rumblings of a new discovery, I just assumed they probably found another preon signature. Over the past 30 years, that is what they've been finding, in my opinion. The top and the Higgs both fit the ABC Preon Model quite well. But instead, after watching the video, I came away with a question as to why they actually haven't seen more preon evidence by now. In my most recent ABC publication I listed numerous predictions. I am a bit surprised more of them have not been found. My present guess is that the new results are just buried in background. I do recall that finding both the top and the Higgs were very, very difficult and so I am guessing that might be the problem.

In any event, thanks for posting that video.

originally posted by: delbertlarson
The Shapiro effect has not yet been calculated. If it goes well a draft of the paper may be done as early as May. After the first draft, the estimate is at least three months of checking, as this is a long work. Close to 200 pages, double spaced. So optimistically a publishable draft could be done in the fall of 2021.

Wow, that's a substantial paper, good luck, hope it works out.

I saw the video by Harry Cliff posted by Arbitrageur. It was like "old home week". Almost the entire thing reminded me of what I was learning about and working on over 35 years ago. It is rather stunning, and rather depressing, how little fundamental physics has advanced in that time.

I don't remember posting it in this thread, but I assume this is the video you're referring to:

Beyond the Higgs: What's Next for the LHC? - with Harry Cliff

Dr. Cliff does indeed present the Standard Model quite well. He does miss pointing out color however. When you add color, there are three times more particles than the nice simple depiction. It's more honest to include color in the graph of elemental particles, and maybe the antiparticles should be shown too.

If Dr Cliff was presenting to a room full of other PhD physicists, first he wouldn't be giving the same talk giving them the basics they already knew, and second, yes it would be technically more accurate since he could assume they already know certain things based on their credentials. So any time you teach or make a presentation to an audience, you are faced with certain choices in how much detail to present. If you present too much detail to a novice audience, maybe you meet a goal of technical accuracy, but fail at the larger goal of engaging the interest of the audience by keeping the presentation simple enough for them to understand.

Therefore in teaching university courses in physics, it's common for instructors to give over-simplified and technically "wrong" presentations to 1st and 2nd year students, when they still lack the background to understand the more complicated and more accurate explanations. Then when teaching 3rd and 4th year students, who by then have more background to understand the more technically correct detail, the professors actually teach things differently than the over-simplified format that was presented to the 1st and 2nd year students. It's not an accident, it's by design. So I think we need to consider the audience Dr Cliff was speaking to and if overwhelming them with too much detail to gain more accuracy would be productive, or counter-productive. I would suggest the latter would be the case given his audience.

The thing that is always striking to me is how sure the presenters of this stuff are. Yes, I know, the present physics community does admit that there may be something they don't yet know.

Part of his presentation was talking about how the periodic table of the elements developed when we could see patterns occurring in the properties of elements, but we didn't understand at all how or why those patterns were occurring, before we understood electron orbitals and such. He says we've got a similar thing going on with the standard model now, that we can see patterns in the three particle generations like electron, muon, and tau, but we don't really understand why, so our understanding of the standard model is sort of like the understanding of the periodic table before we understood electron orbitals, we are missing big pieces of the puzzle. Speaking of muons, they have been in the news lately as offering evidence of a problem with the standard model.

There is a lot of data. But my point is, when you've got that many fitted parameters, and that many terms, why don't more physicists come to the conclusion that things are actually very, very wrong? Yes there is an admission that dark matter and dark energy have no good understanding, and while I did not see Dr. Cliff mention the cosmological constant problem that too is admitted as an issue.

You've probably read enough of my 400 page thread to hear me promote the George Box quote that "All models are wrong, some are useful". I can't speak for all physicists but many I'm sure subscribe to this concept that we are using models, which probably don't describe nature perfectly, and we would like to find better models if we can but finding a "perfect" model may be unattainable. So Newton's model was useful for centuries before we found out it was "wrong" in some extreme cases, and even now that we know it's "wrong" in those cases, we still find the model useful in the majority of potential applications which don't involve those extremes.

So, if we can admit that all the models we have are wrong, and even the models we think are right may end up like Newtons' model where it's still useful centuries later even though it's known to be wrong, then there is no longer a concept of the model being "right", the more important concept is that the model is "useful". So we know Newtons' model isn't completely right but it's still very useful, even today. That's what many people are really after, useful models. Now if someone can come up with a more useful model that explains observations better, it usually takes some time but if the evidence is good enough for the new model, I think the scientific community would prefer to migrate to the more useful model which makes more accurate predictions or can explain more. But, I think it would still be "wrong" in the George Box context and in the Newtonian model context, even if more useful.

So I think lots of scientists would prefer to use better models if we can find them, the problem is finding the better models, and then convincing the scientific community they are really better. So I'm not averse to the "standard model is analagous to epicycles" argument, but figure out why we don't use the epicycles mode anymore and that should be a clue to what it will take to replace the standard model...meaning someone has to present a convincing better model, not just say the old model is wrong (which George Box would say it definitely is, like all models are, and his argument is very convincing).

In my most recent ABC publication I listed numerous predictions. I am a bit surprised more of them have not been found.

In Dr Cliff's video, he infers that nearly all theoretical physicists have been disappointed by the results of the LHC experiments which do not seem to confirm a wide variety of theoretical ideas, for example supersymmetry proponents expected to see some supersymmetric particles discovered, but they weren't, and there were many other theoretical predictions that didn't show up besides yours.

My present guess is that the new results are just buried in background.

All theoretical physicists could say that for all their personal predictions, and one of them may even be correct about that but which one? It's possible some things are hiding in the noise but you can download the data and see if you can tease something else out of the data if you want, though you might need some decent computing power to do it. It's nice they have made some data available anyway.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I don't remember posting it in this thread, but I assume this is the video you're referring to:

Beyond the Higgs: What's Next for the LHC? - with Harry Cliff

Yup. That was the one.

My point about color and antiparticles is a political one. Once you add those items in, the diagram gets much messier. Such messiness points out that we may now be in a position of enough complexity that there is likely a simple underlying physics. Cliff points it out already, but its even more convincing when you add color.

I largely agree with everything you write about the need to simplify depending upon the audience. Yes, non-experts need a simplified version of things.

You've probably read enough of my 400 page thread to hear me promote the George Box quote

Yes. But the main point for me is that I believe there is an equivalence of the standard model to the old cycles and epicycles of the celestial sphere model. And while useful, it is my view that the latter was wrong. Not just a model that was no longer useful, but wrong. There really weren't any spheres moving around the earth with points of light on them. Likewise, I believe the standard model is wrong. I don't believe quarks exist as individual entities. Whether we call those entities wave packets, disturbances of a field, or particles, I don't think they exist. Instead, I believe that what we call quarks are simply excited energy states of an underlying preonic system.

Likewise, turtles all the way down is wrong. The flat earth is wrong.

So, if we can admit that all the models we have are wrong,

Yes. I believe that even the model I am working on won't be perfect. The point is that as we peel back the onion, we go deeper and deeper in our understanding. But at each layer, the physics in the above layers should still be sound. The stars and planets exist. Brahe, Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo had a sound physics. On the other hand, the celestial spheres and dots of light on those spheres did not exist. In my view quarks do not exist. When we assign a certainty to things that don't really exist we end up getting mired down.

And as for being wrong, I really hope that people will at least read my upcoming work. I am hoping any errors are found so I can address them. Even typos. I'd like to eliminate them. I keep finding errors as I go through. The work is so large, with so much notation, I am afraid even after the checking that some typos will still be there. And there could still be more serious errors. As I have found errors so far, I've been able to eventually come up with a way to save the underlying theme of a two-component solid aether under tension. Perhaps someone will find a more fatal flaw, but I'd like to see an actual discussion. Once I get there. Which I hope comes before too long.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

So, if we can admit that all the models we have are wrong,

On another take, on the above quote, I guess I wouldn't really say Newton was wrong. He was right to within the limits of experiment in his day, and as you say he is still considered correct in many applications. That is different from the celestial spheres being wrong. Yes, if we insist on exactitude we can say that once experiments got better and we learned new things, then the Newtonian expressions needed modification. So in that sense, he was wrong, but only because he wasn't as deep into the onion as we are now. At his layer he was correct. At the layer of epicyles it was not correct even in its day; it just gave the right answers.

That's what many people are really after, useful models.

Quantum mechanics within a relativistic dogma is not understandable, but it is still useful. Maybe that is what most others are after.

But I think we should also seek understanding. And I maintain that quantum mechanics can be understood by simply setting SRT aside and returning to an absolutist (Lorentzian) view. The problem is that, in order to gain traction in the physics community, a replacement for GRT is also needed. And that's what I've been working toward for the last four years. It is a rather significant undertaking.

you can download the data and see if you can tease something else out of the data if you want

Thanks for the reminder. If I can ever escape the need to earn a living (and retire from the day job) it would be an excellent use of some of my time. However, first the aether, then fusion. So I don't know if I'll get to the data unless I stay active as long as Hans Bethe did.

-

Thanks for the reply. Always good to hear from you. I enjoyed the 400 pager and was sad to see it end. I still do read the ATS science & tech posts from time to time, and I'll continue to update my aetherial progress every three months or so. It was good to see that a buyer for ATS was announced.

An aether update:

Things got side tracked again. (No surprise, but I do hope the aether model can be finished before another year goes by). The first diversion was that it appeared necessary to add yet another ad hoc definition in order to get the Shapiro time delay to work out. Yet from the lore I've seen, it appears that the Shapiro time delay was predicted by general relativity (GRT) without any tweaking of GRT. So that led me to pause. Could there be some hint in GRT that might explain the Shapiro delay in my work without an additional ad hoc explanation? That meant going through GRT.

I hadn't studied GRT since grad school, nearly 40 years ago now. I started a few times, but each time one of the first lines I read was an assertion something like "we must assume special relativity (SRT) is correct. If special relativity is proven incorrect, then general relativity must be incorrect as well." Since by that time I had come to the conclusion that Bell's Theorem tests had disproven SRT, and that the Lorentz Theory was therefore superior, I would usually quit after I hit that assertion.

But now, since I needed an ad hoc proposal for both light bending and Shapiro, I thought I'd get a refresher on what GRT had to say. So I bought the book by Sean Carroll and began reading through it. Some was familiar, as I believe I recall the Christoffel symbols, Ricci scalar, Riemann tensor and the Levi Civita symbol. I don't recall the "connection", and don't know if that was a new idea in the last 40 years. And I am quite certain that I never was taught that energy conservation was to be abandoned. (See Carroll, page 120.) But in any event, after spending about a month with Carroll's book, I was reminded of how complex GRT is. So my theory isn't any worse on that score.

I begin with the assumption of a two-component aether simultaneously under pressure and tension. Derivations require a flow law of some minor complexity. The aether is normally in a solid state, but if enough energy is put in one can free bits of it. The freed bits are what we know as charge. The freed bits exert a force on the solid aether, and this force I call the delta force. As aether moves against the tension, pressure and delta fields it does work that changes those fields. That gets us to E&M, i.e., the Maxwell and Lorentz Force Equations.

Next, I added an assumption on what energy does to the fields. A gamma force, similar to the delta force, was needed. And then, the gravitational mass had to be assigned to each aether species differently (yet symmetrically). But once that was done, we get Newtonian gravity, perihelion advance, gravitational red shift, dark matter and dark energy. But when light bending was treated, it required an ad hoc flow law. And then Shapiro required an ad hoc inertial mass assignment.

So the question becomes, is the aether model getting so complex that it does nothing? And hence the dive into Sean Carroll's book. And coming out of Sean Carroll's book, the answer is pretty clearly that the aether model is not really that complex. GRT alone is quite complex. And then there's the Lagrangian of the Standard Model. No, a theory with perhaps a dozen physical assignments is a marked improvement on where we are now. I would likely have completed my work in any event, but it is nicer to believe it is also a step forward regarding simplicity.

The second diversion was when my daughter (about to become a college Freshman physics major) asked me about a minus sign. I'd been sloppy, since I had assumed expansion effects of the aether were sufficiently smaller than displacement effects that they'd be negligible. I did intend to return to nail that down, and her question about the minus sign led me to dig into the issue. I also had neglected transverse dimensions when there were radial disturbances (such as the 1/r^2 Coulomb's Law and Newton's law.) It took another six weeks or so, but that is all wrapped up now and it looks good.

What remains is that there are a lot of equations, as well as that dozen or so assumption set, and while everything works, the question now is: does it all work consistently? I've defined many physical constants, and they often relate to one another. So I'm gathering all of the equations to see if things are consistent throughout, and then to see if some of the physical constants can be assigned specific values from experimental data.

There is some potential that the consistency check will blow the whole thing up once again. That is what happens when I've missed a crucial fact. Especially pernicious are minus signs. One of those took over a year to understand, and it required another of those input parameters to fix. Should it survive, I expect the first draft shouldn't be too many months away. I still expect my checking to take a few months, but it helps that both my daughter and one of my sons have already done some checking.

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On another matter, did the new ATS owners ever get announced? The page promising an announcement hasn't had an update in months.

a reply to: delbertlarson

Good to see you're still at it.

Look forward to your next update.

a reply to: delbertlarson

A classical field theory isn't enough when we have precise results on quantum optics, matching modern QFT, effects which go beyond Maxwellian electrodynamics.

My question is: what's the point? Electromagnetism & special relativity & QM are so good at explaining the observations.

More recently, the predictive precision of the LIGO results is conclusive evidence to me that Einstein general relativity is correct at large astrophysical mass scales, and moreover because it's black hole collisions its even true in the strongly non-linear regime, a very specific detailed test of particular dynamical phenomena and GR specifically against alternatives.

originally posted by: mbkennel
a reply to: delbertlarson

My question is: what's the point? Electromagnetism & special relativity & QM are so good at explaining the observations.

Thanks for commenting. I recall our fruitful discussions on QM from some years ago.

One could have asked the same question "What's the point?" to Kepler and Copernicus also. Afterall, the complex mathematical theory of that day also answered all known questions. It took practitioners decades to master, and they all agreed it accurately represented nature. So why bother with something else?

But more specifically in the present case, there are many points to the aether effort: 1) While QM and relativity do provide all answers, they are incompatible with each other - unless one abandons realism. It is a "realism, QM, SRT: pick two" situation. If we replace this with "realism, QM, aether" we can keep all three. 2) All the original proponents of QED agreed that QED was foundationally bankrupt due to its need for renormalization. Present proponents believe things are OK, but I share the founders view. 3) The cosmological constant is off by 80-120 orders of magnitude. 4) There is a need for dark matter and dark energy to explain experiments, yet no underlying dark particles have been found. 5) The sheer complexity of the Lagrangian. With 90 free parameters, and an excess of 150 terms, surely we can fit every experiment, but have we really understood things? O just cataloged them? 6) At its heart, relativity is a point-like theory, which leads to singularities. 7) A main overarching goal is achieving an underlying physical model, rather than only a mathematical one. 8) And probably the most important reason of all is that if an aether does exist as being proposed, we may be able to eventually manipulate it in ways heretofore not known possible. (We already manipulate it via telecommunications.) Such manipulations could bring great benefits to mankind.

originally posted by: delbertlarson
And I am quite certain that I never was taught that energy conservation was to be abandoned. (See Carroll, page 120.)

I don't think I would describe it as abandoned, it depends on how you define "energy" and what you mean by "conserved". I don't have Carroll's book so I can't see p120 but he wrote this article about that topic which is readily accessible:

Energy Is Not Conserved

energy and momentum evolve in a precisely specified way in response to the behavior of spacetime around them. If that spacetime is standing completely still, the total energy is constant; if it’s evolving, the energy changes in a completely unambiguous way

So again I don't think "abandoned" is the best characterization of that.

Here's an article by John Baez and Michael Weiss on the subject:
Is Energy Conserved in General Relativity?

In special cases, yes. In general, it depends on what you mean by "energy", and what you mean by "conserved".

But despite Carroll's article saying no it's not conserved, and the Baez/Weiss article saying yes it's conserved in special cases, I don't think the explanations actually disagree with each other so this is a case where over-simplified semantics can be misleading and the details have to be examined.

On another matter, did the new ATS owners ever get announced?

Not to my knowledge. The announcement should have been in the thread you cited but there's no such announcement. I noticed the new owner has done some work to the site the previous owners refused to do, like providing support for https. So now you should see the lock symbol meaning it's harder for an attacker to steal your password, than with the old owners who never implemented https. But I didn't worry too much about that. Worst case, if someone steals my ATS password how bad could it be? But now that it's harder to steal, that's an improvement. The new owner has been working on other improvements too.