Look, cikljamas is exploring conspiracy theories. It's his interest and hobby. But, most notably, he's stated he's seeking the truth, and from what I've seen, I believe him.
This website is founded on the greatest conspiracy theory going, so he's come to the right place!
Stash, I disagree that sending one email request to a guy on a work email, constitutes harassment by any definition you can find. He was polite and honest, and I will be surprised if professor Smith doesn't at least respond to him.
I see this as a wonderful opportunity to employ critical thinking to dissolve a little conspiracy theory. When finished, if cikljamas is still truth seeking regarding other bigger conspiracy theories, I'll happily assist in his search for the truth.
Because he has manners.
Harassing some guy on the internet who has been listed on some crazy conspiracy meme spread around is not what you do if you have manners.
I disagree with you heavily here, it is harassing, you think cikljamas is the only one to bother this guy?
Also, once again I point out that cikljamas has denied and refused to accept every piece of evidence presented to him on this subject. There is an entire page on Snopes devoted to this, plus all our arguments here, and he still believes a meme. What good is a childhood picture going to be? I can tell you his response right now if he got a childhood picture back, "Well his handlers at NASA just fabricated that!"
What you are saying doesn't add up, at all, just as well as anything else you spout out through your psychotic, lying mouth. Why would i discard prof. Smith's picture (taken in 80') as a fabrication made "by his handlers at NASA," since i didn't discard prof. Resnik's picture (taken in 80') as a fabrication handled "by her handlers at NASA?" Did i?
@ Rabinoz, READ AND LEARN :
But as we have seen earlier, Fresnel’s theory is discounted by Airy’s“failure,” which leaves only Fitzgerald’s theory. But as Clark shows, initially it was not well received:
For some years this explanation appeared to be little more than a plausible trick. ‘I have been rather laughed at for my view over here,’ Fitzgerald wrote to
Lorentz from Dublin in 1894. - Einstein: The Life and Times, p. 111.
But when
Fitzgerald learned of
Lorentz’s support for the hypothesis,
he suddenly changed his tune and wrote these words:
My dear Sir, I have been preaching and lecturing on the doctrine that Michelson’s experiment proves, and is one of the only ways of proving,that the length of a body depends on how it is moving through the ether…Now that I hear you as an advocate and authority I shall beg into jeer at others for holding any other view. - Holton,Thematic Origins, p. 331 ..... WOULDN'T IT BE HILARIOUS IF IT WEREN'T SO PATHETIC???...
Jesus also told them a parable:
“Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit? Luke 6:39
Obviously, Fitzgerald was “laughed at” because his solution seemed all too convenient. As physicist
Dennis Sciama notes about similar acts of desperation in science:
No one would take this theory seriously, of course. One reason for this,no doubt, would be the obviously ad hoc and, indeed, ludicrous appearance of the theory. But the fundamental reason for objecting to the theory is that the demons cannot be observed except through the very phenomenon they were invented to explain. The introduction of the demon thus adds nothing to what we know already. - Dennis Sciama, The Unity of the Universe, 1961, p. 103
Although Fitzgerald was “laughed at” for proposing his contraction theory,he probably would have been scorned or put in a straight jacket if he had proposed that the Earth was standing still in space. By now, Copernicanism was so much a part of the fabric of life that any ad hoc explanation of the Michelson-Morley experiment would probably have been accepted if people knew the alternative was believing in a motionless Earth. But the alternative was never told to them, for Fitzgerald, et al ., did not want the common man even thinking about that possibility. In fact, once he received Lorentz’s agreement, Fitzgerald considered the contraction hypothesis as scientific dogma, and he decided to do the“laughing” at others who disagreed with him.
All that was needed now was to package Fitzgerald’s idea in scientific garb and mathematical equations and it would instantly attain an air of prestige and intelligence.The completely ad hoc nature of the contraction hypothesis is made obvious by the diametrically opposed views of Fitzgerald and Lorentz. Herbert Dingle astutely pointed out that, although Fitzgerald’s proposal has been commonly reported as a contraction of the longitudinal arm of the interferometer (the arm pointing toward the direction of the Earth’s movement), Fitzgerald originally proposed that the width, not the length, of the longitudinal arm increased, and that the length of the transverse arm also increased (the arm at a right angle to the movement of the Earth).
At other points
Lorentz admitted he was uncertain. In 1904 he stated:
It need hardly be said that the present theory is put forward
with all due reserve. Though it seems to me that it can account for all well-established facts, it leads to some consequences that cannot as yet be put to the test of experiment.
One of these is that the result of Michelson’s experiment must remain negative… The experiments of which I have spoken are not the only reason for which a new examination of the problems connected with the motion of the Earth is desirable…in order to explain Michelson’s negative result,the introduction of a new hypothesis has been required…Surely this course of inventing special hypotheses for each new experimental result.
A more recent advocate of Lorentz admits:
Since the first steps of relativity, Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction has been the subject of a debate which is not closed today, and divides physicists in opposite clans. Some of them consider length contraction as a naive opinion, for example Wesley, Phipps, Cornille, Galeczki. Some others consider it as a fundamental process which explains a lot of experimental facts. (LOL) Among them Bell, Selleri, Builder (MORONS), et al. Length contraction had been proposed by Lorentz and Fitzgerald in order to explain the null result of Michelson’s experiment. (Infact, the result was not completely null, but much weaker than expected).Length contraction was never observed. Of course, it cannot be observed directly by an observer in a moving frame, since the standard used to measure it, also contracts. But it could be observed indirectly. This was the objective of different renowned physicists who tried to observe the physical modifications entailed by motion: [e.g.,] variation of the refractive index of a refringent solid(Rayleigh and Brace); influence of the ether wind on a charged condenser (Trouton and Noble); the experiments of Trouton and Rankine and of Chaseand Tomashek on the electrical resistance of moving objects; and finally of Wood, Tomlison and Essen on the frequency of the longitudinal vibration of a rod. But the experiments proved all negative” (“How the Apparent Speed of Light Invariance Follows from Lorentz Contraction,” Joseph Lévy, France,unpublished, pp. 1-2. Lévy has also written: “Hidden Variables in Lorentz Transformation” (P. I. R. T., 1998) and “Some Important Questions Regarding Lorentz-Poincare’s Theory and Einstein’s Relativity” (P. I. R. T., 1996)).
That Lorentz knew the implications of the problem is noted in a personal letter he wrote to Einstein in 1915. As we noted previously (but is well worth repeating), as he began to feel the effects of the centerless universe into which Einstein’s Relativity put the human race, in a moment of seeming desperation
Lorentz appeals to the same entity upon which
Isaac Newton and his “action-at-a-distance” concept found himself depending –
a divine being that could hold it all together.
Lorentz writes:
A “world spirit,” who would permeate the whole system under consideration without being tied to a particular place or “in whom” the system would consist, and for whom it would be possible to “feel” all events directly would obviously immediately single out one of the frames of reference over all others. - Henrick Lorentz to Albert Einstein, January 1915, Robert Schulmann, A. J. Kox,Michael Janssen and József Illy, editors, The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein,Correspondence 1914-1918, Princeton University Press, 1998, Document 43
Obviously, Lorentz is finding it difficult to live in the universe he created for himself. Here he is searching for a ubiquitous entity that can not only sense and coordinate all events instantaneously, but one that can also provide him with an absolute frame of reference. Why?
Because Lorentz knows deep within himself that it can work no other way. A world of relativity ends up in chaos. Without admitting it, Lorentz is asking for precisely what we are providing – God and a fixed Earth.
For the time being, however, his “transformation” equation would spare him any tinge of guilt. This will not be the first time that mere imagination and mathematics come to the rescue to solve scientific enigmas. As
Alfred O’Rahilly opined:
“The mathematicians got their chance and the semi-educated developed their natural gullibility.”Stanislaw Ulam in Adventures of a Mathematician, adds:
I should add here for the benefit of the reader who is not a professional physicist that the last thirty years or so have been a period of kaleidoscopically changing explanations of the increasingly strange world of elementary particles and of fields of force. A number of extremely talented theorists vie with each other in learned and clever attempts to explain and order the constant flow of experimental results which, or so it seems to me, almost perversely cast doubts about the just completed theoretical formulations.Philosopher
Bertrand Russell is a bit more sardonic:
Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that if such and such a proposition is true of anything then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not to discuss whether the first proposition is really true, and not to mention what the anything is, of which it is supposed to be true. Both of these points would belong to applied mathematics…. Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor what we are saying is true. -
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic, 1957, pp. 70-71; Russell was famous for causing the retraction of G. Frege’s two-volume mathematical treatise by pointing out that the then current set theory, formulated by Georg Cantor, led to the absurd conclusion that: “N is a member of N set if, and only if, it is not a member of N set.”