Sunset for ‘Santilli IsoRedShift’

Blog 20140604

From a physicist in France:

Can you tell me what do you think of the argument of Santilli who says, “measurements confirm that, in the transition from the Zenith to the horizon, sunlight experiences a shift of 100 nm toward the red for all frequencies without any appreciable relative motion between the sun, the atmosphere and the observer”? He also says that this confirms the absence of universal expansion.

[Anon:

At the Progressive Science Institute, we have concluded, like Hubble,[1] that the cosmic redshift does not mean that the universe is expanding and that the Big Bang Theory is false. So, we are always on the lookout for evidence that would prove or disprove the hypothetical expansion. Thanks so much for the link to the paper of Ahmar and others (2013),^[2] which provides yet another seemingly independent “confirmation” of Santilli’s hypothesis that the redshift of sunlight at dawn and dusk proves that the cosmic redshift is not due to the Doppler Effect.

Before reviewing the paper, please let me explain my tardiness. I have always refrained from commenting on Santilli’s work. This is partly because it is so hard to understand and partly because the abstracts seldom pass our BS meter (i.e., adherence to "The Ten Assumptions of Science"). And like most regressive physicists, Santilli tends to misuse elementary physical concepts such as momentum, force, energy, spacetime, time, etc. His work is replete with long sentences containing so many often ill-defined concepts that it makes one’s head spin:

“We finally outline the intriguing features of the emerging new cosmologies (including biological structures, as it should be for all cosmologies), such as: universal invariance (rather than covariance) under a symmetry isomorphic to the  Poincare group and its isodual; equal distributions of matter and antimatter in the universe (as a limit case); continuous creation; no need for the missing mass; significantly reduced dimensions; possibility of experimental identification of matter and antimatter in the universe; and identically null total characteristics of time, energy, linear and angular momentum, charge, etc.”[3] (88 words!)

Obviously, I am not necessarily opposed to long words and occasional long sentences that combine complicated ideas, but I find nearly all of his stuff to be a difficult slog. It is almost like reading Darwin[4] or suffering the “deepities” of Chopra[5].

Best I can figure out is that Santilli, like so many opposed to regressive physics, is trying to bring some sense to the field. That is a big job. After discovering that the “emperor wears no clothes,” one has to contend with an immense library containing data that needs a new interpretation. Unfortunately, like many of the others, Santilli has not given up on relativity altogether. His abstract on string theory gives some sense of this.[6] At PSI, we would never bother to consider string theory as anything more than mathematics having nothing to do with reality. We certainly would not try to “improve” it. As I said, it is hard to understand Santilli much of the time:  

“We propose three novel reformulations of string theories for {\it matter} of progressively increasing complexity via the novel iso-, geno- and hyper-mathematics of hadronic mechanics, which resolve the current inconsistencies, while offering new intriguing possibilities, such as: an axiomatically consistent and invariant formulation on curved manifolds, the reduction of macroscopic irreversibility to the most primitive level of vibrations of the universal substratum (ether), or the treatment of multi-valued biological structures.”[7]

It is almost as if he really does not want to get his ideas across. Here he uses “continuous creation” (false); “significantly reduced dimensions” (Yep, better be all the way to three); “possibility of experimental identification of matter and antimatter in the universe” (False, that will never happen. Defined literally, there is no such thing as antimatter).

Now on to your question about the redshift at sunset hypothesis… The Ahmar paper presents some new “confirmatory” work along with a rehash of Santilli’s original 2009 experiment. That experiment supposedly proved his hypothesis that the sun is red at sunset, not because of Rayleigh scattering (preferential absorption of the blue end of the spectrum), but because of the redshift. If true, this claim would mean instant death to the Big Bang Theory, as he says. It would have made headlines. Well, at least it would have been cited by someone outside Santilli’s group.

Unfortunately, the Ahmar paper contradicts the carefully obtained data in the classic paper by Pound and Rebka (1960),[8] which clearly showed a blueshift for EM moving toward Earth and a redshift away from Earth. The experiment was confirmed many times. Relativists, such as Pound and Rebka, consider the data as support for Einstein’s corpuscular theory of light and his prediction that gravitation would increase light’s frequency. Light from massive cosmic bodies also undergoes this so-called “gravitational redshift.” The upshot is that light from the sun is redshifted—until it reaches Earth, whereupon it is blueshifted. Ahmar and others as well as Santilli himself seem to be unaware of that publication, which is critical for understanding what happens when light encounters baryonic matter.

Our nonrelativistic interpretation of Pound-Rebka explains the effect as a result of simple refraction (Puetz and Borchardt, 2011)[9]. We assumed that light is a wave in the aether and that the active aether medium is diluted by aether complexes (baryonic matter). That is why light has 75% the velocity in water as it does in vacuum. EM moving toward Earth has an ever-decreasing velocity simply because the density of baryonic matter in the atmosphere increases toward Earth due to gravitation.[10] This is critical: A slowdown in the speed of light means that the same number of cycles would cover less distance, producing shorter, not longer wavelengths than in vacuum. The shortening is an inverse function of the index of refraction. For instance, sodium light at 589 nm in air has a wavelength of 589 nm/1.33 = 442 nm in water. For the atmosphere, it is 589 nm/1.000277 = 588.84 nm. During refraction, monochromatic light frequency (color) does not change. Red laser light entering water remains red. You can do that experiment in your kitchen sink.

Like other versions of the isoredshift paper, Ahmar reprints the figure from Santilli’s 2009 initial experiment as figure 4. This never repeated experiment purportedly shows that horizontal laser light in air at 2,000 psi produced “a frequency shift toward the red of approximately 0.5 nm.” In any case, frequency is not measured in nm. In Fig. 4, the labels on the x axis are too small to read—these quibbles are examples of inexcusable mistakes. Nonetheless, light encountering baryonic matter will always have a decreased velocity and wavelength, as it does in water and any other material that has a refractive index. The refractive index of air at 2,000 psi is not given by Ahmar and others, and certainly should have been mentioned. In any case, anything but a complete vacuum would have produced a decrease in wavelength rather than an increase as claimed by Santilli.

Well, I think I will stop my review here and just cite this web page for a detailed review of the “Santilli IsoRedShift”:

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=259610

I do not necessarily agree with all of it, but it is a nice example of what we mean by “peer review” in science. A review like this done in an internet forum may or may not be entirely correct, but it surely would have saved Santilli’s group a lot of embarrassment, had it been done prior to publication.

A couple of these folks seem to know what they are talking about, at least with respect to the details of Santilli’s experiments and the numerous technical errors similar to the one I pointed out above. The upshot of the whole critique is that the work is so shoddy and uncontrolled that it proves nothing—sort of like the infamous Hafele-Keating experiment,[11] which got published in Science, no less. A proper experiment would have used spectral lines from the sun like the ones from distant galaxies, which Ahmar shows in figure 12:

A satisfactory test of the Santilli IsoRedShift theory would involve similarly precise spectra taken at the Sun’s zenith. The redshift of absorption lines from the Sun would then gradually increase for spectra taken as the relative position of the sun approached the horizon at sunset. As the reviewer mentioned, Santilli’s attempt to do this did not work.

In conclusion, it looks like we will have to look elsewhere for the cause of the cosmic redshift. I included my speculations in a blog entry—all reviews are welcome. It also looks like Pound-Rebka and our nonrelativistic interpretation of it remain standing. At least we can learn a valuable lesson from Santilli: Never name a theory after yourself. It might just be proven a complete failure.]

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[1] Hubble, Edwin, 1936, Effects of Red Shifts on the Distribution of Nebulae: Astrophysical Journal, v. 84, no. 12, p. 517-554.

Hubble, Edwin, 1947, The 200-inch telescope and some problems it may solve: Publications of the astronomical society of the Pacific, v. 59, no. 349, p. 153-167.

[2] Ahmar, H., Amato, G., Kadeisvili, J. V., Manuel, J., West, G., and Zogorodnia, O., 2013, Additional experimental confirmations of Santilli's IsoRedShift and the consequential expected absence of the universe expansion: Journal of Computational Methods in Science and Engineering, v. 13, no. 3, p. 321-357.

[3] Santilli, Ruggero Maria, 1999, Problematic aspects of string theories and their possible resolution ( http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/9901013 ).

[4] Darwin, Charles, 1859, The origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life (6 ed.): New York, New American Library, 479 p.

[5] Deepak Chopra is a “new-age” indeterminist well known for combining perfectly good words into meaningless phrases that might sound good to the gullible. The word “deepities” refers to that type of language. There is even a deepity generator on the Web:  http://www.wisdomofchopra.com/ . Here is another that generates whole pages of new-age deepities: http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/ .

[6]Santilli, Ruggero Maria, 1999, Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Pound, R. V., and Rebka, G. A., 1960, Apparent Weight of Photons: Physical Review Letters, v. 4, no. 7, p. 337-341.

[9] Puetz, Stephen J., and Borchardt, Glenn, 2011, Universal cycle theory: Neomechanics of the hierarchically infinite universe: Denver, Outskirts Press ( www.universalcycletheory.com ), 626 p.

[10] Pound-Rebka reduced this effect when they replaced the atmospheric gases with helium gas.     
      

[11] Hafele, J. C., and Keating, Richard E., 1972a, Around-the-World Atomic Clocks: Predicted Relativistic Time Gains: Science, v. 177, no. 4044, p. 166-168.

Hafele, J. C., and Keating, Richard E., 1972b, Around-the-World Atomic Clocks: Observed Relativistic Time Gains: Science, v. 177, no. 4044, p. 168-170.