I don’t know how many young people have been right by the track when a train went by tooting its horn. When I was a kid and the train came by we would make a pulling motion over our heads and the engineer would reach up for the cord and toot his whistle for us, long and loud.
As the train moved toward us the whistle was very high. The train was moving, so the waves came to us faster and sounded higher. After it passed us the whistle had a lower pitch. It was kind of a “WHEE-ooooooh” sound.
People noticed this before Einstein was born, and it was called relativity.
Einstein developed the Theory of SPECIAL Relativity. Just as sound differs with the point of view of the person standing still, so things are different between things traveling at or near the speed of light and things standing still.
Einstein made some excellent observations on this basis, but like all theorists, he tried to explain EVERYTHING with it and he ran into what I call The Bob Problem:
It doesn’t WORK.
Einstein insisted that the speed of light was the fastest anything could travel. So it takes eight minutes for light to reach us from the sun.
So far, so good.
But then he said that the speed of light was the fastest ANY force could travel.
Huh-oh!
Actually, gravity moves MUCH faster than the speed of light. We have not been able to measure the speed of gravity, it may be infinite. But we do know that a gravity shift from the sun has an instant effect here on earth while light is coming toward us at light speed.
Einstein therefore inserted a cheat factor to take care of that inconvenience. He said gravity was a curve in space. I am not going into the details here, but it doesn’t really make any sense. He just needed it and put it in.
Like all theorists who outlive their time, Einstein died a scientific reactionary. The last part of his life was spent fighting quantum physics, which is fully accepted today because it WORKS.
But this whole business of light speed is something we will have to deal with. You have watched satellite broadcasts on cable television, and the people talking sound a little retarded. A question is asked and there is a noticable delay in the reply.
With short wave radio we didn’t have that problem. If you are in Baghdad and I am here, the radio waves travel the six thousand miles between us directly. At the speed of light it takes the signal one thirteenth of a second to get to Baghdad, so there is no noticable delay.
But the satellite is 43,000 miles up. So the signal has to go all the way up there and back, some 86,000 miles, which takes half a second at light speed. That means the question and answer gap is a full second. In the give and take we are used to on the news, that is a very noticable delay.
What else moves faster than light?
This is not a practical matter right now. I suppose that when it comes to the speed of light we are about where Ben Franklin was in the matter of electricity. He tried and tried to think of some way electricity might actually be practical, but finally stated flatly that he couldn’t even imagine one.
By the way, the terms current, positive and negative and battery were all invented personally by Franklin.
So what I am saying here is just fascinating to me the way electricity was to Franklin. But they may become practical. I understand that some uses have been found for electricity since Franklin’s time.
So what is faster than light? Gravity is, but using gravity for anything practical is as weird an idea as using electricity was to Franklin.
What about ESP? It take years to contact anyone in another star system at light speed. But if I were in ESP contact with someone there, would the contact be light-speed or instantaneous?
This sounds like science fiction, right?
Do you happen to know who invented the entire satellite communications system we use today, every day, cable TV and all?
It was invented in a science fiction story written in 1947 by Arthur C. Clark. At the time no one could imagine it could have the slightest use outside of science fiction.
So let’s let Ben Franklin have the last word on this.
He was doing one of his experiments and some Practical Man asked him, “But of what USE is this?”
Franklin replied, “Of what use is a newborn baby?”
#1 by Elizabeth on 11/07/2005 - 2:11 pm
Philadelphia kicks off the Ben Franklin tercentenary this coming
January.
Franklin wasn’t born there. He was born in Bahstun.
I haven’t heard anything about them observing his 300th
birthday….
#2 by Mark on 11/07/2005 - 2:32 pm
Bob, when you were a kid and chatting with Mr. Franklin, why didn’t you tell him that in order to make electricity practical for everyday use some sort of gizmo — like a lightbulb or electric chair — would have to be invented first? Or didn’t that cross your mind back then?
#3 by Bob on 11/07/2005 - 3:46 pm
Mark,
I liked ole Ben.
But when he asked me to join him in flying a kite in the middle of a thunder storm, I decided he was not the kind of guy I wanted to pal around with.
#4 by Antonio Fini on 11/08/2005 - 2:08 am
The problem with using gravity waves for anything practical is we don’t know how to make them, short of getting together a lump of planet sized matter.
But maybe that’s just a mental block reinforced by Einstein’s old testament physics. Einstein figured the space time continuum, that stuff you and I call reality, must have some kind of distinct physical structure like a finely woven net. So a really big chunk of matter, like a planet, would make a warp in the net, perceived by us humans as gravity.
This is a bit like the pre Newtonian concept of the “ether” an invisible stuff which was supposed to pervade the whole universe and whose reality no one could contradict because the church said a vacuum can’t exist. After all, a vacuum would be a place devoid of God’s presense.
Who knows, maybe when we outgrow Einstein we’ll realize gravity and space-time are the same thing rather than one thing interfering with another. That suggests some interesting possibilities for the generation of humans that gains control over the force of gravity.
#5 by Bruce on 11/08/2005 - 4:22 am
This was a very interesting posting to me because my field is physics. I have a few comments:
1. Ben Franklin found a very practical use for electricity. He would kill turkeys for his dinner table with a good jolt of it.
2. There is some dispute over how much Einstein really contributed to relativity. “A History of Theories of Aether and Electricity” by Sir Edmund Whitaker relegates him to the role of slightly advancing the theory after Lorentz and Poincare developed it. It is arguable that Hamilton is owed priority on the gravitation theory.
3. Quantum theory doesn’t work as well as some people think. To clarify my meaning, it does make very accurate predictions about electrical and nuclear problems, but quantum mechanics in its current form asks “what would physics look like without gravity?” which is a lot like studying human origens when you only dig in Africa. Nobody has been able to arrive at a satisfactory way to explain it all with quantum theory any more than Einstein was able to explain it all with relativity.
4. In all of my studies about gravitation, I have never heard any evidence that supports gravity traveling faster than light (that’s not to say they proved it doesn’t). Part of the motivation for a relativistic theory of gravitation is that the newtonian idea of instantaneous action didn’t explain the motion of mercury. If you have a specific instance in mind of gravitation traveling faster than light, please mention it. It is news to me on a subject upon which I have been quite passionate. What exactly do you mean be a gravitational shift from the sun? The sun is not in the habit of suddenly shifting its mass.
5. That said, you’re right that the standard relativistic model of gravity is flawed. There are several theories that avoid the earlier theory’s flaws and stand a good chance of relating gravitation with other branches of physics. You may be pleased to know that one such theory is the Whitaker theory.
#6 by Bob on 11/08/2005 - 11:47 am
Bruce,
1. Ben Franklin also COOKED a turkey with electrcity. Someone said he should also be given credit for ingventing fried turkey.
3. Please note that a major part of my piece was that Einstein tried to make his theory fit everything and that runs into the Bob Problem:
It doesn’t WORK
Which is exactly what you said here about quantum theory. Newtonian physics, light-speed relativism, quatum theory, all of htem work and give us some answers within their own parameters.
Libertarians are right within their parameters, but then they go nuts and say open borders will work.
Christians are, I think, right about Christ, but then they go nuts and try to prove the Old Testament creation as scientific fact.
4. I am trying to remember the rather obvious experiments that have been done that show gravity from the sun has an instantaneous — or rather an asymptotic near-instantaneous — effect. It was mentioned once in an editorial in Analog, but I can’t even remember the name ofhte editor, with whom I have had some considerable correspondence.
When it hits me, I’ll put it in the blog, though it will sound a bit out of place.
5. I also said in my piece that Franklin’s problem was the same one we have with gravity: we have no way to practically handle it so at this time we just theorize about it.
#7 by Bob on 11/08/2005 - 11:51 am
Antonio,
You said, “But maybe that’s just a mental block reinforced by Einstein’s old testament physics.”
That is exactly what it was. His mantra against quantum theory was,
“God does not play dice with the universe.”
He seriously felt that his theories were OK, but quantum theory contradicted God.
#8 by Peter on 11/08/2005 - 5:16 pm
Bob,
You and Bruce are both right.
There is a growing body of info. online that Einstein’s theory of relativity wasn’t his, that he plagiarized what little he said that appeared novel, and got that wrong, too. For example, he believed in the outmoded superstition of the “aether.”
Einstein was a high school drop out with neither the background nor the laboratory to discover or put together what he claimed. At work, however, he did have access to physicists’ original work. Look online, there are dozens of real physicists that developed a working theory of relativity, including E=mc2, before he published his botched version.
After Einstein became famous, he did hire genuine scientists to do real work for him, while he spent his time promoting himself.
Einstein made only one noteworthy contribution to a science as an “expert:” he said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of life. Thus to him, space travel is impossible.
Einstein’s one contribution is what we cannot do.
#9 by Peter on 11/08/2005 - 5:19 pm
Bob,
I forgot to say that your article is brilliant, especially you emphasis on the speed of gravity, which exposes Einstein.
#10 by Peter on 11/08/2005 - 9:18 pm
Hey, I found this: The speed of gravity is 2×10^10 c
Pretty fast, huh?
Some guy at the U Maryland wrote that on: http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/gravityspeed.html
#11 by Bruce on 11/09/2005 - 8:14 pm
In regards to the paper at http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/gravityspeed.html, that is what I wanted. The author seems to have published this in a viable peer reviewed journal (not that peer review doesn’t have severe flaws) and makes a logical case. However, it does seem to have errors that would not invalidate the main thesis but are nonetheless wrong. I’ll study it a little closer and elaborate later this week.