You mean NASA is wrong?

Post #131,423 by orion 12/18/03 4:23:10 PM 12/18/03 4:24:31 PM Reply	You mean NASA is wrong? That was one of the links I cited. If NASA is wrong, we are wasting our tax dollars supporting them. :) All I have done is uncover theories and evidence that has shown you something different or shows your thinking is wrong. You are not making one bit of sense to me. Square 1 might as well be a barrel of fish, the way you explain it. I gave you Newton's formulas and you call me wrong? I was willing to work with them. I suppose now you are going to say that Newton is wrong, and that gravity does not work that way? I asked you to cite your sources, and you've given me nothing. I've asked you to provide proof and answer my questions, and yet you are unable to. I have cited my sources, why can't you cite yours? *"Lady I only speak two languages, English and Bad English!" - Corbin Dallas "The Fifth Element"* Edited by orion Dec. 18, 2003, 04:24:31 PM EST Expand All History
Post #131,431 by deSitter 12/18/03 5:51:39 PM Reply	What is sacred about NASA? They publish sensations to generate funding, just like the universities do. Why did you put up Newtonian gravity? That comes out of the Einstein theory as a low-order approximation. If you don't make an effort to understand this most basic fact, what progress can you make with the rest? -drl
Post #131,449 by orion 12/18/03 8:16:30 PM Reply	Newtonian gravity I posted it as a back to basics sort of thing because I learned it in High School Phsysics. In order to learn the more complex things, we need to start out simple and work our way up. No way can I go from High School Physics to Graduate Level Physics without learning the steps that got us that far. It is like me trying to teach Accountants how to program in Visual BASIC so they can write billing formulas, and then all I do is show them the completed EXE or DLL file and then do a memory dump of it. Then I call them all lazy because they don't understand what I am talking about. Then one of them brings up a few Internet links on VB, and I call them stupid for doing so. Then one of them gets a book on Microsoft BASIC for 8-bit computers to learn the Syntax, and I tell them it is the wrong way to learn. I tell them if they don't make the effort to learn the most basic facts about the language, what progress can they make with the rest? See how wrong I am in that example, and maybe you can see how wrong you are in this example. *"Lady I only speak two languages, English and Bad English!" - Corbin Dallas "The Fifth Element"*
Post #131,451 by deSitter 12/18/03 8:44:05 PM Reply	Re: Newtonian gravity Ok, well I'm telling you now, the Newtonian theory is the same as the Einstein one when c->infinity and fields are very weak. The Einstein theory has a 10-component thing called the "metric", and in the low-order limit the only one that is important after a lot of simplification is the g44 term, which amounts to the Newtonian potential. This in fact was the first thing Einstein did to show that his new theory would reproduce the results of the old one - and that's the key point - all the spacecraft ever launched have reached their destinations with Newtonian gravity, because in interplanetary space, where the gravitational field is very weak, and because the ships are going very slowly compared to light, you can replace the complicated 10 functions in the metric to the single Newtonian gravitational potential. All real theories of physics have this nesting quality - the old theory is not "overthrown" or "invalidated", it gets incorporated as a low-order limit of the new theory in case certain things happen. Sorry, I assumed you knew the general outline of the theory of gravity. -drl
Post #131,906 by orion 12/22/03 5:34:51 PM Reply	As I said before I only have High School level Physics knowledge. Not college level. We hardly touched any of Einstien's work except for E=MC^2. I'd like to learn more, but you are mostly going over my head and not making sense to me. *"Lady I only speak two languages, English and Bad English!" - Corbin Dallas "The Fifth Element"*
Post #132,715 by ben_tilly 12/30/03 1:49:09 AM Reply	Hopefully at your level Newton's theory may not be true, but it has to be at least a good approximation. If it wasn't then it wouldn't have stood up to observation for so many centuries. Therefore any viable replacement must explain not only previous facts, but also why Newton's theory seemed to hold. In the case of Einstein's theory, in the case of weak gravitational fields and things moving much slower than the speed of light, most of the factors in the theory become very small and drop out. What is left over is Newton's theory. And, of course, the measurements which tested Newton's theory were things in our Solar System, which are in relatively small gravitational fields, and which move slowly (compared to light). An example of how close Newton's theories are is that the orbit of Mercury turns out to precess an extra 43 arc-seconds a century. That is a third of a percent of the way around a circle. In a century. Just to give a sense of how science has to work, even decades after there was apparently general consensus on the measurement and its meaning, it was still open to further clarification. See [link\|http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/mercury_orbit.html\|http://math.ucr.edu/...ercury_orbit.html] which talks about the measurement of the Sun's oblateness and how that might affect this result. Cheers, Ben "good ideas and bad code build communities, the other three combinations do not" - [link\|http://archives.real-time.com/pipermail/cocoon-devel/2000-October/003023.html\|Stefano Mazzocchi]
Post #132,760 by orion 12/30/03 10:01:16 AM Reply	Now that is what I wanted to see a post that explained something I could understand, and then a link to cite it or back it up. Thanks. *"Lady I only speak two languages, English and Bad English!" - Corbin Dallas "The Fifth Element"*
Post #132,792 by deSitter 12/30/03 1:42:55 PM Reply	"If its on the Internet, it must be true!" And piss on you too. -drl
Post #132,822 by orion 12/30/03 3:12:57 PM Reply	All I wanted was a reference or citation it could have been from a book, that I could check out, or a web site, etc. That is the first thing they teach you in college, to use references and cite them in your papers. Happy New Year to you too. Hope the leg gets better. *"Lady I only speak two languages, English and Bad English!" - Corbin Dallas "The Fifth Element"*
Post #132,825 by deSitter 12/30/03 3:20:53 PM Reply	Bull You wanted an excuse not to think about what I said, because you are lazy and self-indulgent. You are too chicken-shit to flame me directly so you took the first chance to do it sideways. You are a poster child for modern chemical psychiatry and its effectiveness. -drl
Post #132,836 by orion 12/30/03 3:51:11 PM Reply	Why did I think about what Ben said? Maybe because he was able to explain it in a way I could understand it, and provided a reference for me to read to learn more about it. That in itself shows that I am not lazy. I just could not grok what you where posting. *"Lady I only speak two languages, English and Bad English!" - Corbin Dallas "The Fifth Element"*
Post #132,867 by ben_tilly 12/30/03 6:12:38 PM Reply	You are both right Norm is right that the way that I put things had a lot to do with why he understood it. I am confident of this since I thought carefully about how I put things when I said them. Ross is right that if Noem really tried to understand what you said, then he could have reached the same basic understanding a while ago. What this would have taken is a willingness to accept that Ross knows what he is talking about, and the willingness to skim what was said for the sense of it, skipping details that were too advanced. For instance Ross' explanation used the word metric. Norm would have had to ignore that. A little research on his part wouldn't have helped. I challenge anyone to find a simple definition of a metric that anyone with a highschool education should find clear. I know what it is, and I don't think that I can explain it reliably without having feedback on what part of my explanation has and has not registered. Certainly the usual [link\|http://www.npac.syr.edu/projects/bbh/INTRO/section3_3.html\|attempts] at a layman's explanation do little except confuse laymen in possibly amusing ways. A further point of obvious frustration for Ross is Norm's unwillingness to accept the limitations of his own understanding. For instance no number of invocations of the fact that Norm got an A in highschool physics will address the fact that we are talking about material that is well beyond highschool physics. E=mc^2 is all well and dandy, but it isn't anywhere close to the right starting place. And as much as it is tempting to think that science is just free to toss away any theory and reinvent at will, anyone who knows science knows that it does not really work that way. Fiction can casually reinvent basic scientific principles, but science has to base its rules on concrete observations that take real work to understand and aquire. So you are both right. And are both really frustrating each other. Why not take a break? Cheers, Ben "good ideas and bad code build communities, the other three combinations do not" - [link\|http://archives.real-time.com/pipermail/cocoon-devel/2000-October/003023.html\|Stefano Mazzocchi]
Post #132,882 by orion 12/30/03 7:43:07 PM Reply	I agree, end of discussion let's make a New Year's Resolution not to talk about it again. *"Lady I only speak two languages, English and Bad English!" - Corbin Dallas "The Fifth Element"*
Post #131,432 by admin 12/18/03 5:52:47 PM Reply	Newton was wrong. That's what relativity is all about. Newton's equations are useful only as an approximation. Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."

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