Requiem for Relativity

As Barbarossa shepherds J:S, so the outer planets once shepherded E:M & V:E?


Above, I've attributed the J:S=5:2 orbital resonance discrepancy, to shepherding by Barbarossa. Two other planetary orbital small-integer near-resonances, originally could have been shepherded by one and the same planet near Jupiter's orbit.

The Venus:Earth=5:3 orbital near-resonance, has two resonance points which progress around the ecliptic in 16.40 yr (my data are from an astronomy text published c. 1980). The Earth:Mars=2:1 near-resonance, progresses in 15.81 yr. In the early solar system, these might have been exactly synchronous and shepherded by a planet with period ~16 yr.

Jupiter's period is ~12 yr, but if Saturn once was Jupiter's moon, their period, assuming no gain or loss of energy, would have been ~14 yr. Including Uranus & Neptune in the menage would give ~15 yr. If other members, adding to a few Earth masses, eventually became Edgeworth-Kuiper objects or left the solar system, the result could be exact.

Hi Joe, I suppose that this will depend to some extent on how we see the planets forming in the first place. I still like the ideas of Lytleton, that Mercury spins out of a proto Venus, Mars from a proto Earth and Saturn from a proto Jupiter. The most popular view now seems to be that of cataclysmic collisions between proto planets.

On the question of Aether drift, may I ask you a question, as you are much better at maths than I am? Weve got a speed of gravity that is much much greater than the speed of light. We can write it as 1 - h it struck me that it would be a rather interesting cubic equation (1 - h)^3 but I dont want to do it, as cubic equations are horrible animals. [][xx(]Can I get away with saying that this is the distance per second but look at it as the distance over two seconds? That way I can say Ive got very nearly a cube of eight units, minus a very very small amount. So roots of 2, and
(-1+ sqrt (-3)) and (-1- sqrt (-3)) or tidied up a bit (-1 + 1.7321i) and (-1 - 1.7321i)

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Stoat</i>
<br />...cubic equation (1 - h)^3 ...<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

When I took undergraduate statistical mechanics from Dr. Wendell Furry at Harvard, my classmates told me that Furry had testified in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. I went to Widener Library and looked up his testimony down in the dungeonlike "stacks". As I read Furry's testimony, Furry seemed to have no fear of them at all, had refused compliance or contradicted them with utter impunity. Of course anyone else is invited to read Furry's public-record testimony and disagree with my assessment if they wish.

That was when I realized that maybe McCarthyism was only some kind of show or sham, that McCarthy might have been a mere dupe. A lot of Hollywood actors moaned and groaned about McCarthyism for decades, when really, being asked to appear in front of the Committee, made them heroes of the Left and was the best thing that ever happened to some of those mediocrities. "Oh, his career was ruined, he 'had to' go back to France and make movies there instead for a few years."

I say, "asked to appear", because, contrary to what some lawyers say, Congress isn't a court and has no power to subpoena anybody. That's called "separation of powers". Bills of attainder, i.e., laws saying, "Enacted by Congress: Joe Keller is a communist/ failed to tell us what he should have told us/ whatever/ and shall be punished" are explicitly prohibited by the Constitution. There's no such thing as "contempt of Congress" unless one is an officer of the Executive Branch obligated to enforce their laws. The only way to punish anybody lawfully in the U.S., is to take them to court. If Congress wants me to testify about Communism or anything else, they can sue me.

Thanks to Furry, I understand the concept of "units" as well as "tensors". "Units" and "tensors" are basically the same thing. In both cases, some numerical equations must hold true no matter what the "units of measurement" or "transformation of coordinates". For example, if I say, "beta = 1/sqrt(1-v^2)", that's not a tensor equation; it holds true only in units of measurement for which c=1. On the other hand, if I say, "beta=1/sqrt(1-(v/c)^2)", that's a tensor equation, or put another way, "the units cancel". It holds true no matter what my units of measurement are.

"Units" can be a guide to which equations might or might not be universally true. Einstein used this concept a lot when he sought tensor equations describing gravity. It seems to me that this concept might find application in Mr. Turner's work as it progresses.

(duplicate posted to "Planetary Science...Origin of Solar System...Is the Sun a Binary?" thread, because the search feature currently misses most of my posts, and I want to ensure that I and others can find this one)


<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">["Nemesis", previous page] This leaves an object that is massive but emits very little electromagnetic radiation.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Dr. Van Flandern response: That is rather contradictory. Massive implies hot, and hot implies radiating abundantly.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">["Nemesis"] Possible candidates could be a brown dwarf, or a collapsed object like a neutron star, a supernova remnant. I favor the latter possibility myself.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Dr. TVF: Doesn't that require that the Sun had a companion that went supernova? That would have wiped out the planets and changed the Sun drastically from a normal G-type star.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">["Nemesis"] The best way to detect it may be through occultation of background stars. This latter method may be the only way to pick up a collapsed object, or maybe gravitational lensing of background objects.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Dr. TVF: The gravitational lensing should indeed be strong and evident. But the whole sky has been surveyed many times, which is how we get proper motions of stars. And region where gravitational lensing was going on would distort all the proper motions in that vicinity. No such region has been seen. So no dark companion with significant gravity exists. (par.) There is now yet another direct test for this, one that I also mentioned to Cruttenden. Pulsar timings allow us to detect any unknown accelerations of the Sun's motion through space, because they would displace the Earth a bit closer to pulsars in some direction, but farther away from pulsars in the opposite direction. So the arrival times of pulsar signals would be changed by a certain predictable pattern across the sky. This has long been known as a test for the possible existence of undiscovered planets of significant mass. No such displacement signal is seen, meaning the Sun is not undergoing any significant acceleration from an unknown cause. -|Tom|-


Joe Keller's comment:

A more detailed version of the following information, was posted piecemeal, subsequent to the above 2006 post by Dr. Van Flandern, by me on the "Requiem for Relativity" thread.

The last statement, about pulsar timing, especially refers to the Oct. 2005 article of Zakamska & Tremaine of Princeton, which to my knowledge has not been superseded in accuracy. They claimed only the ability to detect a Jupiter at 200 AU (or a solar mass at 200*sqrt(1000)=6000AU=0.1 light year). These authors mixed nonparametric and parametric statistics, which might have caused them to overestimate the sensitivity of their test. Also, my own investigation has revealed that millisecond pulsars (commonly a kiloparsec distant, and who knows what is really happening in the vast intervening space?) show a median Pdot/P which happens to equal the Hubble constant. This peculiar and unexplained coincidence of Pdot/P with the so-called "Hubble expansion", casts doubt on the simple model of acceleration which underlies Zakamska and Tremaine's conclusion.

Regarding gravitational lensing, Gaudi & Bloom, Astrophysical Journal 635:711+, Dec. 2005, state in their abstract:

"...Gaia (launch date 2011). A Jupiter-mass object at 2000 AU is detectable by Gaia over the whole sky above 5 sigma, with even stronger constraints if it lies near the ecliptic plane. ..."

Until now I've omitted microlensing from my Barbarossa discussion, because I saw this article. Here is a claim that sometime after 2011, a planned satellite better than Hipparcos *will be* able to detect a Jupiter at 2000AU. Surely Gaia will exceed Hipparcos not only in accuracy but in the number of stars observed; and Hipparcos exceeded ground-based astrometry in accuracy. I haven't yet found any article claiming that Hipparcos has ruled out a companion of any mass at any distance in any part of the sky (if anyone knows of one, please tell me!).

Good point about the supernova remnant, Dr. Van Flandern!

Regarding mass and temperature, the state of the art (1990s) calculation in the mainstream literature, is that a 4.6 billion yr old brown dwarf is roughly the same temperature whether it is slightly above or slightly below the critical mass for (brief) nuclear reaction ignition. The present temperature of the brown dwarf is very sensitive to the (very small) theoretical thermal conductivity of the degenerate matter. However, in 4.6 billion years, there's a lot that can go wrong with a theoretical model of bulk physical properties, untestable in the lab. Unexpected mechanisms of convection might occur; or, gravitational energy might be deposited mainly on the surface, not the interior, to begin with, depending on the mechanism of accretion.

Dr. Van Flandern, I'd like to work for Mr. Cruttenden!

Joe, in that original thread I remember commenting I wasn't so certain a supernova explosion hundreds or thousands of AUs from the sun would have had such a drastic effect. This would have been very early in the solar system's history, with no life yet (it would certainly have an adverse effect now!) Far from "wiping out" the planets it my have stabilized the young solar system by sweeping it clear of dust and gas. I don't know enough about stellar evolution to comment on it affecting the sun's evolution from a normal G-star.

More about gravitational lensing

An Astronomical Almanac says a star in quadrature with the sun, has its position altered gravitationally 0.004". So, starlight grazing Barbarossa (~0.01 solar masses) at 1AU distance (equivalent to ~15' at 200AU) has its position altered 2*0.004"*0.01 = 80 microarcsec. Grazing Barbarossa at 1 solar radius (equivalent to ~5" at 200AU) would give the famous 1.8" * 0.01 = 18 milliarcsec. The former is equivalent to stellar parallax at 12kpc, but the latter is equivalent to parallax at 50pc, and could be measured from the ground, though it would be more difficult than a parallax, because only one night's observation would be obtainable.

Alas, only 2*5/200000*360/40000 = 0.5/10^6 of the sky is within 5" of Barbarossa's entire track, which would be only 0.5 star in the "million star" 11th mag printed catalog, or 0.05 Hipparcos star. Only ~ 0.5/10^6/2780 = 0.2/10^9 of the sky would pass within 5" of Barbarossa *each year*, which would be only 0.2 star in the USNO-B 21st mag billion star catalog. Only rarely would stars as bright as Barbarossa itself, pass near enough Barbarossa to measure gravitational refraction with ground telescopes; and, then, why not look at Barbarossa itself instead?