Natural Philosophy Alliance Meets to Challenge Einstein and the Big Bang

Next week, about a hundred dissidents will be meeting at the University of Maryland to discuss the crisis in modern physics.  This will be the 18^th annual meeting of the Natural Philosophy Alliance, which is composed of retired physicists, engineers, and other independent thinkers who are not financially dependent on mainstream physics.  Most simply cannot stomach claims that the universe exploded out of nothing, that there are more than three dimensions, that time dilates, and that we should believe much of the other nonsense promulgated by Einstein and his academic cohorts.  Speakers range from the usual positivists and solipsists to a few univironmental determinists.  There is little censorship of ideas, so everyone gets a chance to propose alternatives for getting out of what I call “Regressive Physics.”  The NPA presents a smorgasbord of the philosophy of science.  There is no party line, although about 80% of the members assume that there must be an ether.  The quality of the papers varies from totally confusing to absolutely brilliant.  This year, Steve Bryant and I are trying for the latter category with the following:

Einstein’s Most Important Philosophical Error

http://www.worldsci.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_5991.pdf

Failure of the Relativistic Hypercone

http://www.worldsci.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_6000.pdf

The Twin Paradox: Why it is Required by Relativity

 http://www.worldsci.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_6001.pdf

The links go to the full versions of the papers.  The first paper has less mathematics than the last two.  If you don't know what time is after that one, then you didn't spend enough time on it.  In the second one, we (mostly Steve) show how Einstein incorrectly substituted length for time in one of his derivations.  After the 3rd paper, no one will have any excuse for taking the "Twin Paradox" seriously again.  All promote PSI’s campaign to consider time as motion. 

Details on the meeting are at: http://conf18.worldnpa.org/

Ethics and the Scientific Worldview

Strictly speaking, the terms “good” and “bad” used to describe ethics are purely subjective and have no place in scientific discourse.  What is good for the fox is bad for the rabbit and vice versa.  Scientists, on the other hand, are often thought to have the highest ethical standards.  Why is that?  Our standards are high for a very practical reason:  our only mistress is truth.  In science, we define truth as the relative agreement with observation and experiment.  Good scientists try to be aware of the truths discovered by their predecessors and followers.  We constantly are looking over our shoulders, making sure that unwarranted subjectivity does not enter our analyses and interpretations.  We are to discover the truth and tell no lies.  Any failure in that department gets around.  Fudging data can result in disbarment from the scientific community.  That gets to the guts of what ethics really are.

Ethics, as I define them, are maps that we use to negotiate the environment.  Ethics tell us what is allowed and what is not allowed—based on historical knowledge.  Most of us could use some help with this.  At the same time, each ethical decision is an experiment performed on an ever-changing environment.  Like all maps, these are humanly derived and not without errors and dead-ends.  Despite the claims of indeterminists, ethics are never absolute, for they are always changing with the changes in the environment.  Thus, under feudalism stoning an adulteress was considered ethical and necessary for enforcing marital loyalty in the community.  Now we do it in more subtle and more complicated ways, although sometimes with a similarly unfortunate result.

Ethics also are used to control human behavior for subjective ends.  In my opinion, those who shout the loudest about ethics should receive the most scrutiny by the rest of us.  Whether scientists, guided by their definition of “truth,” should receive special attention is questionable.  The truth is that ethics are determined by everyone.  Your ethics are as good as mine (unless you have served jail time for actions I deem inappropriate).  Of course, some folks are more influential than others—it is now considered, for instance, to be ethical to lower taxes for the rich and wages for the poor.  Some poor folks may not think that is ethical.  So you see how it works: ethics are purely subjective.  On the other hand, we will see how certain ethical principles work out.  Ethics ultimately involves the age-old political question suited to every economic system: Should we do it together or do it apart?  Every answer to that question amounts to an experiment.  With an environment that increasingly contains more people, what do you think the answer to that question will be in the current period?  You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.

Heat Increases Mass

Bob de Hilster asks:

On page 139 of your book you state that increased heat causes increased mass.

Can you give me a specific reference that explains this?

Thanks for the question Bob.

The reference to that is in the classic text:

Lewis, G.N., and Randall, M., 1923, Thermodynamics and the free energy of chemical substances: New York, McGraw-Hill, 653 p. (see pages 48-50)

It may not be in the 2^nd edition (probably because of the influence of the Einsteinian Regression): 

Lewis, G.N., and Randall, M., 1961, Thermodynamics (2nd edition of Thermodynamics and the free energy of chemical substances, revised by K.S. Pitzer and Leo Brewer): New York, McGraw-Hill, 723 p.

The transfer of heat motion from supermicrocosms in the macrocosm to the submicrocosms in the microcosm causes mass increase.  This is the reverse of the mass decrease described by E=mc².  In that case, some of the submicrocosmic motion is transferred to the macrocosm via acceleration of ether particles (the supermicrocosms of interest).  As I showed in my E=mc² paper (http://scientificphilosophy.com/Downloads/The%20Physical%20Meaning%20of%20E%20=%20mc2.pdf), this is not the usual disappearance of mass into “pure energy” or matterless motion as taught in modern physics, but the transfer of one kind of the motion of matter into another kind of the motion of matter.

One way of viewing this is to realize that the common definition of mass is the resistance to motion within a gravitational field.  Each submicrocosm within a microcosm has motion described by the momentum equation (P=mv).  Any acceleration of those submicrocosms via cross-boundary impacts increases their motion and results in an increase in the calculation for momentum.  Impacts against the inside walls of the microcosm (a tea kettle, for instance) then occur with what we conceive as increased momenta.  This becomes most obvious when you touch the side of a hot kettle.  Measurements of mass generally use gravitation (F=mg), in which ether particles or some such push against the kettle.  The newly accelerated submicrocosms within the kettle push back harder than when they are cold.  Thus, this increased internal momentum is seen by the measuring device as an increase in mass.  In other words, the number of submicrocosms within the microcosm has not increased, only their activity, since we haven’t added any submicrocosms to the kettle.

All this gets deeply into philosophical questions such as the one about what is matter? The above is guided by the 4^th Assumption of Science, inseparability (Just as there is no motion without matter, so there is no matter without motion).  Thus if matter had no motion, it would disappear.  Since time is the motion of matter, it would be senseless to presume that there could be time without matter.  My definition of matter is “that which contains other matter and is surrounded by other matter.”  This also follows from the 8^th Assumption of Science, infinity (The universe is infinite, both in the microcosmic and macrocosmic directions), which is required to remove the deficiencies of classical mechanics. 

In classical mechanics, we tended to assume that mass is something unchangeable and independent of its environment.  Neomechanics, on the other hand, teaches that mass, like matter, is dependent on its univironment (the matter in motion inside and the matter in motion outside). That is the way the universe is. The outside of a thing is just as important as the insides of a thing. Without infinity the universe would never work. The unchanging finite particles of the atomists and the empty space of Einstein could never make a universe.        

Eleventh Assumption of Science?

From Rick:

Also, after re-reading your list of 10 Assumptions, I thought you might add an assumption about Scaling, e.g., "We see familiar patterns of motion repeat at various scales as we see further into the micro and macro IU".  I'm sure you could do better. I don't mean to be so presumptuous with your thesis.

Thanks Rick.  I always keep my eyes open for the 11^th assumption of science.  Once we thought it was that the universe is 3D, but we could find no suitable indeterministic opposite.  Also, the 3D concept seems well explained by inseparability (Just as there is no motion without matter, so there is no matter without motion), particularly after we define matter as things that have xyz dimensions and location with respect to other things.

Your suggestion is more prescient than you think.  Maybe you picked it up from the NPA paper that Steve Puetz and I gave last year (http://www.worldsci.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_5229.pdf ).  Anyway, we are nearly done with an entire book on the subject (tentative title: “Universal Cycle Theory”).  Nonetheless, the cycle idea does not seem to have a suitable indeterministic opposite.  Also, the concept seems to be a deduction from infinity (The universe is infinite, both in the microcosmic and macrocosmic directions), although one could argue that infinity covers only the material part, but not the motion.  Again, inseparability seems to settle the motion question as well.  As you can see, the hard part about discovering fundamental assumptions is finding their indeterministic opposites.  These have to lead to a “freewill” deduction and many of the ideas that have been dear to the hearts of indeterminists over the centuries.