Ripples in space-time? Are physicists on drugs?
The lack of attention regarding basic scientific assumptions
When I launched my website, NoMoreFakeNews, 22 years ago, I could have created a branch office—called NO MORE FAKE SCIENCE.
For 22 years (actually much longer), I’ve been debunking fake medical science.
Here, in this piece, I’m making a brief visit to modern physics. I’ve long had doubts about what these self-appointed geniuses are up to.
Their propaganda is very good; no doubt about that.
But I prefer to take my science fiction from AE Van Vogt, and my magic fantasy from Roger Zelazny.
What I object to in modern physics is the lack of attention to basic assumptions. I’ll go into that in a minute.
But first, here is a heraldic announcement of the discovery of “ripples in space-time.”
Modern physics seems to delight in these counter-intuitive realities.
Science.org, December 22, 2016:
Ripples in spacetime: Science's 2016 Breakthrough of the Year; The discovery of gravitational waves ended a 40-year quest—and began a new field of study
The discovery of ripples in spacetime—gravitational waves—shook the scientific world this year. It fulfilled a prediction made 100 years ago by Albert Einstein and capped a 40-year quest to spot the infinitesimal ripples…
In 1915, Einstein explained that gravity arises because massive bodies warp space and time, or spacetime, causing free-falling objects to follow curved paths such as the arc of a thrown ball or the elliptical orbit of a planet around its sun. Einstein then calculated that a barbell-shaped distribution of mass whirling end-to-end like a baton should radiate ripples in spacetime that zip along at light speed—gravitational waves. On 11 February, physicists working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)—twin instruments in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana—announced that they had seen just what Einstein predicted: a burst of waves created as two black holes spiraled into each other 1.3 billion light-years away.
In 1972, Rainer Weiss, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, set out a scheme to detect them with L-shaped optical instruments called interferometers, sowing the seed for LIGO.
Each LIGO interferometer has two 4-kilometer-long arms with mirrors at either end, housed in a giant vacuum chamber. By bouncing laser light between the mirrors, physicists can compare the arms' lengths to within 1/10,000 the width of a proton. A passing gravitational wave would generally stretch the arms by different amounts, and that’s what the LIGO team spotted. The tight fit between that first signal and computer modeling validated Einstein’s theory of gravity, known as general relativity, as never before.
If you say so. Yeah. Sure. Uh-huh.