20110930

Redshift of Galaxy Clusters

With regard to the redshift recently found by Wojtak et al., Fred Frees writes:

Can you elaborate why this is "confirmation" of relativity? How could these results be "predicted"?

What explanation of the last "confirmation" explains the satellite's gyroscopes not pointing in the same direction? Is this just a case of seeing what they want to see?

Fred:

This is simply a follow up proof of the commonly known gravitational redshift that was first demonstrated in the Pound and Rebka (1960) experiment at Harvard.  Light from any celestial object becomes redshifted slightly due to the presence of what astronomers now call a “gravity well.”  Actually, Pound and Rebka was a subtle falsification of Special Relativity Theory (SRT), as shown by the wording of the title.  Photons, of course, are not supposed to have “weight” or mass according to SRT.  Pound and Rebka never ventured a guess as to what the “weight” of a photon was and essentially did not address the promise in the title.  Of course, if one objectifies light, as Einstein did (Borchardt, 2011), then the resulting corpuscles (photons) must be affected by gravity as he claimed.  Ignoring the “massless” contradiction, Pound and Rebka claimed that the result was a confirmation of General Relativity Theory (GRT), although I understand that others were able to use regular math to explain the result.  The conventional explanation is that photons moving away from a massive source lose energy, becoming redshifted in the process.  Photons moving toward a massive source gain energy, becoming blueshifted in the process.  I predict that the next “confirmation” will involve galaxy super clusters. 

If you consider light properly, as motion, then you have a problem explaining the Pound and Rebka results via conventional theory.  Steve and I recently solved this problem in our soon-to-be published book “Universal Cycle Theory” (Puetz and Borchardt, 2011).  The solution involves neither SRT nor GRT, both of which we consider invalid due to their inherent objectification of motion.

I have not analyzed the results of Gravity Probe B (the gyroscope satellite experiment) yet, but I have not seen a “confirmation” of either SRT or GRT that did not have trouble with data collection or interpretation.  You have to realize that when you spend $700 million on an experiment, there are tremendous pressures to come up with a result appealing to those who footed the bill.  

References

Borchardt, G. (2011). "Einstein's most important philosophical error (http://www.worldsci.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_5991.pdf)." Proceedings of the Natural Philosophy Alliance.

Pound, R. V. and G. A. Rebka (1960). "Apparent Weight of Photons." Physical Review Letters 4(7): 337-341.

Puetz, S. J. and G. Borchardt (2011). Universal cycle theory: Neomechanics of the hierarchically infinite universe (in preparation). Denver, OutskirtsPress.com.

Wojtak, R., S. H. Hansen, et al. (2011). "Gravitational redshift of galaxies in clusters as predicted by general relativity." Nature 477(7366): 567-569.

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