Re: Stationary Earth

by **strangelove** Wed Jan 25, 2012 6:29 pm

Map reveals strange cosmos

By Dr David Whitehouse
BBC News Online science editor

The best map yet of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation - the so-called echo of the Big Bang - shows the Universe may not be the same in all directions.

The image has been produced from data collected by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (Map), which was launched in 2001.

"It is a photo of the most distant thing we can see; our best photo yet," said Dr Max Tegmark, of the University of Pennsylvania, US, who processed the image.

Dr Tegmark and colleagues present the CMB as a sphere: "The entire observable Universe is inside this sphere, with us at the centre of it."

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Having produced the cleanest map of the CMB yet, Dr Tegmark displayed it in an unusual manner. Instead of a flat projection on a computer screen, he showed the data as ripples on a sphere - "after all the CMB comes from a sphere", he says.

"Space continues outside the sphere but this opaque glowing wall of hydrogen plasma hides it from our view. If we could only see another 380,000 light-years we would be able to see the beginning of the Universe," he told BBC News Online.

Looking for evidence

And he added: "We found something very bizarre; there is some extra, so far unexplained structure in the CMB.

"We had expected that the microwave background would be truly isotropic, with no preferred direction in space but that may not be the case."

Looking at the symmetry of the CMB - measures technically called its octopole and quadrupole components - the researchers uncovered a curious pattern.

They had expected to see no pattern at all but what they saw was anything but random.

"The octopole and quadrupole components are arranged in a straight line across the sky, along a kind of cosmic equator. That's weird.

"We don't think this is due to foreground contamination," Dr Tegmark said. "It could be telling us something about the shape of space on the largest scales. We did not expect this and we cannot yet explain it."

SOURCE: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2814947.stm

by **strangelove** Wed Jan 25, 2012 6:41 pm

"If the low multipole behavior is caused by our universe having T 1 compact topology with one dimension small relative to the horizon scale, then the large scale power would be suppressed in this particular spatial direction as illustrated in Figure 1. Another possibility is hyperspherical topology corresponding to a closed universe."

- The significance of the largest scale CMB fluctuations in WMAP

Ang´elica de Oliveira-Costa1, Max Tegmark1, Matias Zaldarriaga2 & Andrew Hamilton3
1Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104,

by **strangelove** Wed Jan 25, 2012 6:59 pm

“Studies of the cosmic background radiation have confirmed the isotropy of the radiation, or its complete uniformity in all directions. If the universe possesses a center, we must be very close to it…otherwise, excessive observable anisotropy in the radiation intensity would be produced, and we would detect more radiation from one direction than from the opposite direction.”

- Joseph Silk of the University of California, "The Big Bang: The Creation and Evolution of the Universe", p. 53 (W. H. Freeman, 1980).

by **strangelove** Wed Jan 25, 2012 7:10 pm

"It is shown that the cosmological interpretation of the red shift in the spectra of quasars leads to yet another paradoxical result: namely, that the Earth is the center of the Universe."

“The Earth is indeed the center of the Universe. The arrangement of quasars on certain spherical shells is only with respect to the Earth. These shells would disappear if viewed from another galaxy or quasar. This means that the cosmological principle will have to go. Also it implies that a coordinate system fixed to the Earth will be a preferred frame of reference in the Universe. Consequently, both the Special and General Theory of Relativity must be abandoned for cosmological purposes.”

- Y. P. Varshni, “The Red Shift Hypothesis for Quasars: Is the Earth the Center of the Universe?” Astrophysics and Space Science 43 (1): 3 (1976).

by **strangelove** Wed Jan 25, 2012 7:32 pm

The uniform distribution of burst arrival directions tells us that the distribution of gamma-ray-burst sources in space is a sphere or spherical shell, with us at the center (some other extremely contrived and implausible distributions are also possible). But Copernicus taught us that we are not in a special preferred position in the universe; Earth is not at the center of the solar system, the Sun is not at the center of the galaxy, and so forth. There is no reason to believe we are at the center of the distribution of gamma-ray bursts. If our instruments are sensitive enough to detect bursts at the edge of the spatial distribution, then they should not be isotropic on the sky, contrary to observation; if our instruments are less sensitive, then the N ∝ S-3/2 law should hold, also contrary to observation. That is the Copernican dilemma. To this day, after the detection of several thousand bursts, and despite earnest efforts to show the contrary, no deviation from a uniform random distribution (isotropy) in the directions of gamma-ray bursts on the sky has ever been convincingly demonstrated.”

- Jonathan I. Katz, The Biggest Bangs: The Mystery of Gamma-Ray Bursts, The Most Violent Explosions in the Universe, pp. 84, 90-91 (Oxford University Press, 2002).

by **strangelove** Wed Jan 25, 2012 7:40 pm

After the Michelson-Morley experiment:

“The problem which now faced science was considerable. For there seemed to be only three alternatives. The first was that the Earth was standing still, which meant scuttling the whole Copernican theory and was unthinkable. The second was that the ether was carried along by the earth in its passage through space…The third solution was that the ether simply did not exist, which to many nineteenth century scientists was equivalent to scrapping current views of light, electricity, and magnetism, and starting again.”

- Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, pp. 109-110, (World Publishing Co., 1971).

by **strangelove** Wed Jan 25, 2012 7:42 pm

“Always the speed of light was precisely the same…Thus, failure [of Michelson-Morley] to observe different speeds of light at different times of the year suggested that the Earth must be ‘at rest’…It was therefore the ‘preferred’ frame for measuring absolute motion in space. Yet we have known since Galileo that the Earth is not the center of the universe. Why should it be at rest in space?”

- Adolf Baker, Modern Physics & Antiphysics, pp. 53-54 (Addison-Wesley, 1972).

by **strangelove** Wed Jan 25, 2012 8:13 pm

“It is both amusing and instructive to speculate on what might have happened if such an experiment [Michelson-Morley] could have been performed in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries when men were debating the rival merits of the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems. The result would surely have been interpreted as conclusive evidence for the immobility of the Earth, and therefore as a triumphant vindication of the Ptolemaic system and irrefutable falsification of the Copernican hypothesis. The moral of this historical fantasy is that it is often dangerous to believe in the absolute verification or falsification of a scientific hypothesis. All judgments of this type are necessarily made in some historical context which may be drastically modified by the changing perspective of human knowledge.”

- G. J. Whitrow, The Structure and Evolution of the Universe, p. 79 (Harper, 1959).

by **strangelove** Wed Jan 25, 2012 9:12 pm

"Dark Energy is problematic. No one really knows what it is. We can make an educated guess, and use quantum theory to estimate how much of it there might be, but then we overshoot by an astounding factor of 10120. That is grounds enough, says George Ellis…to take a hard look at our assumptions about the universe and our place in it. “If we analyse the supernova data by assuming the Copernican principle is correct and get out something unphysical, I think we should start questioning the Copernican principle…. Whatever our theoretical predilections, they will in the end have to give way to the observational evidence.”

So what would it mean if…the outcome were that the Copernican principle is wrong? It would certainly require a seismic reassessment of what we know about the universe….If the Copernican Principle fails, all that goes [with] that [the Big Bang] goes out the window too….Cosmology would be back at the drawing board. If we are in a void, answering how we came to be in such a privileged spot in the universe would be even trickier."

- Marcus Chown, “Is the Earth at the Heart of a Giant Cosmic Void? New Scientist, Nov. 12, 2008, pp. 32‐35.

by **strangelove** Wed Jan 25, 2012 9:39 pm

"Although dark energy may seem a bit contrived to some, the Oxford theorists are proposing an even more outrageous alternative. They point out that it's possible that we simply live in a very special place in the universe - specifically, we're in a huge void where the density of matter is particularly low. The suggestion flies in the face of the Copernican Principle, which is one of the most useful and widely held tenets in physics.

Copernicus was among the first scientists to argue that we're not in a special place in the universe, and that any theory that suggests that we're special is most likely wrong. The principle led directly to the replacement of the Earth-centered concept of the solar system with the more elegant sun-centered model.

Dark energy may seem like a stretch, but it's consistent with the venerable Copernican Principle. The proposal that we live in a special place in the universe, on the other hand, is likely to shock many scientists."

- Dark Energy: Is It Merely An Illusion? ScienceDaily (Sep. 26, 2008)

SOURCE: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080926184749.htm

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 4:02 pm

“A widespread idea in cosmology is that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic above a certain scale. This hypothesis, usually called the cosmological principle, is thought to be a generalization of the Copernican principle that “the Earth is not in a central, specially favored position”. The assumption is that any observer at any place at the same epoch would see essentially the same picture of the large scale distribution of galaxies in the universe.

However, according to a Fourier analysis by Hartnett & Hirano, the galaxy number count N from redshift z data (N–z relation) indicates that galaxies have preferred periodic redshift spacings.........A natural interpretation is that concentric spherical shells of higher galaxy number densities surround us, with their individual centers situated at our location.”

- Professor Shigeo Hirano, "Observational tests for oscillating expansion rate of the Universe" Physical Review D, 2010.

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 4:15 pm

“.....we shall interpret the Copernican principle as stating that the universe is approximately spherically symmetric about every point (since it is approximately spherically symmetric around us).”

-Hawking, S.W. and Ellis, G.F.R., The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 134, 1973. Their reference is to: Bondi, H., Cosmology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1960.

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 4:24 pm

“The departures from uniformity are positive; the numbers of nebulae increase faster than the volume of space through which they are scattered. Thus the density of the nebulae distribution increases outwards, symmetrically in all directions, leaving the observer in a unique position. Such a favoured position, of course, is intolerable; moreover, it represents a discrepancy with the theory, because the theory postulates homogeneity. Therefore, in order to restore homogeneity, and to escape the horror of a unique position, the departures from uniformity, which are introduced by the recession factors, must be compensated by the second term representing effects of spatial curvature.”

-E. Hubble The Observational Approach to Cosmology, 1937, p.58

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 4:33 pm

“....there is visible evidence in the raw data for an apparent concentric shell structure centered on the observer.”

“A Fourier analysis on galaxy number counts from redshift data of both the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey indicates that galaxies have preferred periodic redshift spacings of Δz=0.0102, 0.0246, and 0.0448 in the SDSS and strong agreement with the results from the 2dF GRS. The redshift spacings are confirmed by the mass density fluctuations, the power spectrum P(z)and N calculations.....”

“The Great Wall is shown in the second and third quadrants as indicated. In those two quadrants it is evident to the eye that there is general concentric structure with a spacing of about 75 h ^-1 Mpc.”

- J.G. Hartnett K. Hirano Sep 2008 "Galaxy redshift abundance periodicity from Fourier analysis of number counts N(z) using SDSS and 2dFGRS galaxy surveys” published in "Astrophysics and Space Science" journal.

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 4:51 pm

…we have seen, Leibniz and Mach emphasized that the Ptolemaic geocentric system and the Copernican heliocentric system are equally valid and correct….the Copernican world view, which is usually seen as being proved to be true by Galileo and Newton….the gravitational attraction between the sun and the planets, the earth and other planets do not fall into the sun because they have an acceleration relative to the fixed stars. The distant matter in the universe exerts a force, –mgamf, on accelerated planets, keeping them in their annual orbits.

In the Ptolemaic system, the earth is considered to be at rest and without rotation in the center of the universe, while the sun, other planets and fixed stars rotate around the earth. In relational mechanics this rotation of distant matter yields the force ..... Now the gravitational attraction of the sun is balanced by a real gravitational centrifugal force due to the annual rotation of distant masses around the earth (with a component having a period of one year). In this way the earth can remain at rest and at an essentially constant distance from the sun. The diurnal rotation of distant masses around the earth (with a period of one day) yields a real gravitational centrifugal force flattening the earth at the poles. Foucault’s pendulum is explained by a real Coriolis force acting on moving masses over the earth’s surface .....The effect of this force will be to keep the plane of oscillation of the pendulum rotating together with the fixed stars.

- Andre K. T. Assis, (professor of physics at the University of Campinas - UNICAMP, in Brazil) Relational Mechanics, pp. 190-191

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 4:54 pm

“mass there [in the stars] governs inertia here [on earth]”

- Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, three of the most famous physicists
in the world today, in their 1973 book "Gravitation".

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 6:52 pm

“General Relativity has passed every solar-system test with flying colors. Yet so have alternative theories”

- Physicist Clifford Will - “The Confrontation Between Gravitation Theory and Experiment,” General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey, ed., Stephen W. Hawking, 1979, p. 62

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 6:58 pm

Regarding the M-M Experiment:

"The easiest explanation was that the earth was fixed in the ether and that everything else in the universe moved with respect to the earth and the ether….Such an idea was not considered seriously, since it would mean in effect that our earth occupied the omnipotent position in the universe, with all the other heavenly bodies paying homage by moving around it."

- James A. Coleman, Relativity for the Layman, p. 37

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 7:00 pm

The Michelson-Morley experiment confronted scientists with an embarrassing alternative. On the one hand they could scrap the ether theory which had explained so many things about electricity, magnetism, and light. Or if they insisted on retaining the ether they had to abandon the still more venerable Copernican theory that the earth is in motion. To many physicists it seemed almost easier to believe that the earth stood still than that waves – light waves, electromagnetic waves – could exist without a medium to sustain them. It was a serious dilemma and one that split scientific thought for a quarter century. Many new hypotheses were advanced and rejected. The experiment was tried again by Morley and by others, with the same conclusion; the apparent velocity of the earth through the ether was zero.

- Scientific historian Lincoln Barnett, "The Universe and Dr.Einstein", p. 44

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 7:07 pm

It is ironic that Einstein’s most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise was that no such medium existed…. Einstein… utterly rejected the idea of ether and inferred from its nonexistence that the equations of electromagnetism had to be relative. But this same thought process led in the end to the very ether he had first rejected, albeit one with some special properties that ordinary elastic matter does not have. The word “ether” has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum.

In the early days of relativity the conviction that light must be waves of something ran so strong that Einstein was widely dismissed. Even when Michelson and Morley demonstrated that the earth’s orbital motion through the ether could not be detected, opponents argued that the earth must be dragging an envelope of ether along with it because relativity was lunacy and could not possibly be right…. Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that such matter must have relativistic symmetry.

It turns out that such matter exists. About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with “stuff” that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo."

- Robert B. Laughlin (1993 Nobel laureate in physics), "A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down", 2005, pp. 120-121).

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 7:10 pm

“In the second place our result shows that, according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity and to which we have already frequently referred, cannot claim any unlimited validity”

- Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, authorized translation by Robert W. Lawson, 1961, p. 85).

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 7:11 pm

“According to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there would not only be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense”

- Albert Einstein, “Geometry and Experience,” in Sidelights on Relativity, 1983, p. 30

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 7:16 pm

“In the GPS, the Sagnac effect can produce discrepancies amounting to hundreds of nanoseconds....A Sagnac correction is needed to account for the diurnal motion of each receiver during signal propagation. In fact, one can use the GPS to observe the Sagnac effect."

- Neil Ashby, “Relativity and the Global Positioning System,” Physics Today, May 2002, p. 5

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 7:49 pm

"It is often said that Tycho’s model implies the absence of parallax, and that Copernicus’ requires parallax. However, it would not be a major conceptual change to have the stars orbit the sun (like the planets) for Tycho, which would give the same yearly shifts in their apparent positions as parallax gives. Thus if parallax were observed, a flexible Tychonean could adjust the theory to account for it, without undue complexity. What if parallax were not observed? For Copernicus, one only requires that the stars be far enough away for the parallax to be unmeasurable. Therefore the presence or absence of parallax doesn’t force the choice of one type of model over the other. If different stars were to show different amounts of parallax, that would rule out the possibility of them all being on one sphere, but still not really decide between Tycho and Copernicus.

In fact, if we don’t worry about the distant stars, these two models describe identical relative motions of all the objects in the solar system. So the role of observation is not as direct as you might have guessed. There is no bare observation that can distinguish whether Tycho (taken broadly) or Copernicus (taken broadly) is right."

- University of Illinois, Physics 319, Spring 2004, Lecture 03, p. 8

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 8:45 pm

“The bulge of the Earth’s equator may be attributed indifferently to the Earth’s rotation or to the outward pull of the centrifugal force introduced when the Earth is regarded as non-rotating”

- Arthur Eddington, "Space, Time and Gravitation: An Outline of the General Relativity Theory", 1923, pp. 24, 41

by **strangelove** Fri Jan 27, 2012 8:55 pm

“Less than 50 years after the birth of what we are pleased to call ‘modern cosmology,’ when so few empirical facts are passably well established, when so many different over-simplified models of the universe are still competing for attention, is it, may we ask, really credible to claim, or even reasonable to hope, that we are presently close to a definitive solution of the cosmological problem?…Unfortunately, a study of the history of cosmology reveals disturbing parallelisms between modern cosmology and medieval scholasticism; often the borderline between sophistication and sophistry, between numeration and numerology, seems very precarious indeed. Above all I am concerned by an apparent loss of contact withempirical evidence and observational facts, and, worse, by a deliberate refusal on the part of some theorists to accept such results when they appear to be in conflict with some of the present oversimplified and therefore intellectually appealing theories of the universe…doctrines that frequently seem to be more concerned with the fictitious properties of ideal (and therefore nonexistent) universes than with the actual world revealed by observations.”

- Gerard de Vaucouleurs, University of Texas, formulater of de Vaucouleurs modified Hubble sequence, awarded the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship by the American Astronomical Society in 1988. He was awarded the Prix Jules Janssen of the French Astronomical Society in the same year.

by **strangelove** Sat Jan 28, 2012 9:22 pm

"E. Hubble has shown that the observational data which he has obtained do not agree satisfactorily with the homogeneous relativistic cosmological models [Big Bang models]….the homogeneous models give an unrealistic picture of the physical universe. Perhaps this should not be too surprising, since Tolman [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 20, 169, 1934] has shown that, subject to certain simplifying conditions, a homogeneous model is unstable under perturbations in density. Any local tendency to expand would be emphasized by further expansion. Likewise, any local tendency to contract would be followed by further contraction. Thus if a homogeneous model is disturbed, it becomes nonhomogeneous”

- Guy C. Omer, Jr., “A Nonhomogeneous Cosmological Model,” Journal of the American Astronomical Society, vol. 109, 1949, pp. 165-166. See also W. B. Bonnor, “The Instability of the Einstein Universe”

by **strangelove** Thu Feb 02, 2012 8:50 pm

What does non-rotating mean? What is the frame of reference in which centrifugal
and Coriolis forces vanish, the frame where Newton's laws work? Observationally,
we find that this Newtonian or inertial frame is one in which the distant
galaxies are not rotating. But if we removed everything in the universe
except the earth, how would we know if the earth were turning or not?
How would the pendulum know whether to precess or not? Or, to put the
question formally, is it just a coincidence that the frame in which
the distant galaxies do not rotate is an inertial frame? Ernst Mach
thought not, and speculated that the distant stars must somehow affect
inertia (Mach's Principle), but no-one has yet come up with a successful
and elegant theory. The recent cosmological hypothesis of the inflationary
universe offers hope of a different resolution: if the universe expanded
exceedingly rapidly in its early phase, any initial rotation will have
slowed down correspondingly and so the distant objects have almost
no rotation.

- UNSW Sydney School of Physics website

LINK: http://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au/jw/foucault_pendulum.html#cosmos

by **strangelove** Thu Feb 02, 2012 8:58 pm

Earth rotates about 1000 mph (1680 kph) on its axis. At 66,000 mph it fully orbits the sun once a year. With Earth & other planets in tow, the sun orbits our Milky Way galaxy at 483,000 mph, completing the orbit every 230 million years. Somehow the pendulum ignores these "local" motions and aligns with its original orientation. How can this be? Nobody understands why it swings relative to the universe as a whole, but that seems to be the case.

- Mind shadows blogsite.

http://spiritrambler.blogspot.com/

...

by **strangelove** Thu Feb 02, 2012 9:03 pm

The Foucault Pendulum (support wire iron ball) is attached to the top of the central dome of the Queen Victoria Building (QVB) . The QVB is attached to the Planet Earth, which rotates on its own axis about once every 24 hours. The Earth also goes around the Sun, once every year. The Sun, in turn, goes around the centre of our galaxy, The Milky Way, once every 300 million years. These are all local motions.

The Foucault Pendulum somehow ignores all these local motions! The Foucault Pendulum somehow stays lined up in its original orientation with the Rest of The Universe.

~

How does the Foucault Pendulum "know" to ignore local motions, and line itself up with the distant stars? Some very reputable physicists say that we really don't know.

Perhaps it's a case of Newton's First Law of Motion:- "A body will try to keep on doing whatever it's doing, unless acted upon by an external force." So a body that is motionless will not move, unless an external force tries to push it. And a body that is moving will keep on moving, unless an external force tries to stop it.

This desire of a body to keep on doing whatever it's doing, is called inertia. Nobody really understands what inertia is. The traditional explanations involve some circular reasoning. The reasoning goes like this. A body will keep on doing whatever it's doing is because it has inertia. And inertia is the tendency of a body to keep on doing whatever it's doing. But why does it keep on doing what it's doing? Because it has inertia. But what is inertia? The tendency of a body to keep on doing whatever it's doing. And so on.

- University of Sydney, School of Physics website

LINK: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~jfellow/FOUCAULT/fpqvb.html

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