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The Suppression of Inconvenient Facts in Physics
"Textbooks present science as a noble search for truth, in which
progress depends on questioning established ideas. But for many
scientists, this is a cruel myth. They know from bitter experience
that disagreeing with the dominant view is dangerous - especially
when that view is backed by powerful interest groups. Call it
suppression of intellectual dissent. The usual pattern is that
someone does research or speaks out in a way that threatens a
powerful interest group, typically a government, industry or
professional body. As a result, representatives of that group attack
the critic's ideas or the critic personally-by censoring writing,
blocking publications, denying appointments or promotions,
withdrawing research grants, taking legal actions, harassing,
blacklisting, spreading rumors." [1]
Introduction
Science is in a state of crisis. Where free inquiry, natural
curiosity and open-minded discussion and consideration of new ideas
should reign, a new orthodoxy has emerged. This 'new inquisition',
as it has been called by Robert Anton Wilson[2] consists not of
cardinals and popes, but of the editors and reviewers of scientific
journals, of leading authorities and self-appointed "skeptics", and
last but not least of corporations and governments that have a
vested interest in keeping the status quo, and it is just as
effective in suppressing unorthodox ideas as the original. The
scientists in the editorial boards of journals who decide which
research is fit to be published, and which is not, the scientists at
the patent office who decide what feats nature allows human
technology to perform, and which ones it does not, and the
scientists in governmental agencies who decide what proposals to
fund, and not to fund, either truly believe that they are in
complete knowledge of all the fundamental laws of nature, or they
purposely suppress certain discoveries that threaten the scientific
prestige of individuals or institutions, or economic interests.
Research that indicates that an accepted theory is incomplete,
severely flawed, or completely mistaken, will be rejected on the
grounds that it "contradicts the laws of nature", and therefore has
to be the result of sloppiness or fraud. At the heart of this
argument is the incorrect notion that theory overrides evidence
In true science, theory always surrenders to the primacy of
evidence. If observations are made that, after careful verification
and theoretical analysis, are found to be inconsistent with a
theory, than that theory has to go - no matter how aesthetically
pleasing it is, or how prestigious its supporters are, or how many
billions of dollars a certain industry has bet on it.
But in current mainstream science, the opposite occurs with
disturbing regularity. Anomalous evidence is first ignored, then
ridiculed, and if that fails, its author attacked. Scientific
conferences will not admit it to be presented, scientific journals
will refuse to publish it, and fellow scientists know better than to
express solidarity with an unorthodox colleague. In today's
scientific world, the cards are just stacked too heavily against
true scientific breakthroughs. Too many careers are at stake, too
many vested interests are involved for any truly revolutionary
advancement in science to take place any more. All too often,
scientific truth is determined by the authority of experts and
textbooks, not by logic and reason.
Referring to the fin de siecle "end of science" mentality and the
scientific revolutions following it, Robert G. Jahn writes in 20th
and 21st Century Science: Reflections and Projections[3]:
"As we enter the 21st century, science seems poised to execute a
similar evolutionary cycle of advancement of their comprehension and
relevance. We are opening with a steadily growing backlog of
demonstrable physical, biological and psychological anomalies (..)
most of which seem incontrovertibly correlated with properties and
processes of the human mind, in ways for which our preceding 20th
century scientific paradigm has no rational explanations. (..)
Thus, at the dawn of the 21st century, we again find an elite,
smugly contented scientific establishment, but one now endowed with
far more public authority and respect than that of the prior
version. A veritable priesthood of high science controls major
segments of public and private policy and expenditure for research,
development, construction, production, education and publication
throughout the world, and enjoys a cultural trust and reverence that
extends far beyond its true merit. It is an establishment that is
largely consumed with refinements and deployments of mid-20th
century science, rather than with creative advancement of
fundamental understanding of the most profound and seminal aspects
of its trade. Even more seriously, it is an establishment that
persists in frenetically sweeping legitimate genres of new anomalous
phenomena under its intellectual carpet, thereby denying its own
well-documented heritage that anomalies are the most precious raw
material from which future science is formed."
In his debut editorial as editor-in-chief of the Journal of
Scientific Exploration, Henry H. Bauer gives a similarly bleak
assessment of the state of modern science[4]:
"Mainstream orthodoxy routinely resists novelties that later become
accepted. Throughout the 20th century there are examples: Bretz's
Spokane flood, McClintock's recognition of "jumping genes",
Mitchell's insights into biological energy mechanisms, Woese's
Archaea, and McCully's homocysteine. Only late in the 20th century
did science reluctantly grant that acupuncture can have some
analgesic effect, that ball lightning exists, that the kraken is not
myth but the real giant squid, that it is not foolish to look for
intelligent life outside the Earth, that 5000-year-old megaliths
incorporate substantial knowledge of astronomy, that human beings
inhabited the Americas long before the days of the Clovis culture,
and that living systems can sense not only electrical but also
magnetic fields. Indeed, it may well be that the suppression of
unorthodox views in science is on the increase rather than in
decline. In Prometheus Bound (1994), John Ziman has outlined how
science changed during the 20th century: traditionally (since
perhaps the 17th century) a relatively disinterested knowledge-
seeking activity, science progressively became handmaiden to
industry and government, and its direction of research is
increasingly influenced by vested interests and self-interested
bureaucracies, including bureaucracies supposedly established to
promote good science such as the National Academies, the National
Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.
Parkinson's Law, it may be, applies to science as to other human
activities: no sooner has an organization become successfully
established than it is by that token already an obsolescent
nuisance."
In many cases of anomalous evidence that inconveniences
establishment science, simple denial of publication suffices to
suppress the anomaly. Sometimes, however, renegade scientists manage
to capture the attention of the general public, pleading their case
to a larger audience that has no vested interest in the validity of
the established theories. When that happens, and significant
interests are at stake, the scientific establishment will turn
nasty, resorting to misrepresentation or outright falsification of
evidence.
The Cold Fusion Scandal
Such misrepresentation and falsification of evidence happened after
Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischman[5] announced in March 1989 that
they had achieved fusion by electrochemical means. Several
influential US laboratories (Caltech[6], MIT[7], Yale/Brookhaven[8])
reported negative results on Cold Fusion that were based on shoddy
experimental work and a misunderstanding of the Pons-Fleischmann
claims[9]. They gave a hostile hot fusion establishment the excuse
it needed to conclude that the claims made by were bogus. In
November 1989, a DOE panel concluded the same after a shallow mock
investigation of only seven months.[10]
Eugene F. Mallove, who was the Chief Science Writer at the MIT News
Office at the time and now publishes Infinite Energy, a journal
dedicated to covering potential new energy sources ignored by
mainstream science, played a part in exposing the MIT report as
mistaken, possibly fraudulent[11], and resigned in protest over it
in 1991. He writes in Ten Years That Shook Physics[12]
"The 1989 reports of MIT[7], Caltech[6], and Harwell have each been
analyzed by other scientists and these analyses have been published
(see references, page 34 in IE Issue No. 24). Each of the widely
cited 1989 'null' experiments has been found to be deeply flawed in
experimental protocols, data evaluation, and presentation. Each, in
fact, contained some evidence of excess heat as claimed by
Fleischmann and Pons. There is evidence that the MIT data was
deliberately altered to erase an indication of excess heat. The
altered data was published officially by MIT, and it was included in
reports to a government agency under the official seal of MIT. The
experiment was paid for out of federal government funds. This report
had a dramatic impact on the perception of many scientists and
journalists.
It is ironic that each of these negative results were themselves the
product of the kind of low quality work of which Fleischmann and
Pons were accused. The difference was that the reports said what the
hot fusion community wanted to hear. This was the legacy of the 1989
ERAB report, but that legacy must now be reversed-and it will be,
however long that takes.
Almost two years after they were concocted, Prof. Ronald R. Parker
of MIT's Plasma Fusion Laboratory publicly stated that the MIT PFC
cold fusion calorimetry data were 'worthless' (June 7, 1991). In the
same period (August 30, 1991) after I had challenged this data,
Parker stated that 'MIT scientists stand by their conclusions.'
Which is it?"
A detailed chronology of this scientific coverup can be found in the
same issue.
Most people, including physicists continue to be unaware that low-
energy nuclear reactions (LENR) are real, and have been verified in
hundreds of experiments throughout the 1990s.
In February 2002, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center of the
United State Navy in San Diego released a 310 page report titled
Thermal and Nuclear Aspects of the Pd/D2O System [13] that discusses
the overwhelming experimental evidence that the cold fusion effect
indeed exists. Dr. Frank E. Gordon, the head of the center's
Navigation and Applied Sciences Department, writes in the foreword:
"We do not know if 'Cold Fusion' will be the answer to future energy
needs, but we do know the existence of Cold Fusion phenomenon
through repeated observations by scientists throughout the world. It
is time that this phenomenon be investigated so that we can reap
whatever benefits accrue from additional scientific understanding.
It is time for government funding organizations to invest in this
research."
A March 2003 New Scientist article[14] quotes Robert Nowak, an
electrochemist and a programme manager in chemistry at the Office of
Naval Research on the suppression efforts that the Navy research had
to overcome:
"From the beginning, the idea was to keep things modest. 'We put
less than $1 million a year into the programme,' Nowak says. 'Above
that level, the red flags go up.' Saalfeld and Nowak never gave the
programme its own line in the ONR's budget, but allotted money to it
from miscellaneous funds. 'We were to keep working and we were
allowed to publish our results, but we weren't supposed to say a lot
about it,' Miles recalls. 'Some people were worried that word would
get out and it would jeopardise the navy labs' funding from Congress
for other research. We didn't even call it 'cold fusion'. We called
it 'anomalous effects in deuterated systems'.
' That was still not enough to keep the sceptics off their
backs. 'Fairly prominent individuals within the physics community
voiced threats,' Nowak admits. 'They said that they were aware that
federal funds were going into cold fusion research and they were
going to do what they could to stop it."'
That "cold fusion" continues to be ignored by the scientific
establishment, and, to add insult to injury, is being used
synonymously with "bad science", usually in such expressions as "the
cold fusion debacle", constitutes one of the greatest scientific
scandals in human history, and a human tragedy. While wars over oil
are being fought, a potential source of energy that could solve
humanity's energy problems for all eternity is being ignored by all
but a small community of researchers. At the same time, the dead-
end "hot fusion" program continues to receive billions of dollars in
public funds. If there is a scandal associated with cold fusion,
this is it.
So addicted is the plasma fusion community to federal research funds
that even innovative concepts for hot fusion that threaten to lead
to practical fusion energy soon and to a corresponding gigantic
embarrassment for the hot fusion establishments are viciously
suppressed. A recent example are the suppression efforts aimed at
Focus Fusion. Plasma physicists Eric J. Lerner, Dr. Bruce Freeman
and Dr. Hank Oona used an innovative design to achieve hydrogen-
boron fusion, which, unlike the deuterium-tritium reaction the hot
fusion mainstream is trying to create, creates no lethal neutrons.
Yet (or therefore?) the discovery met with stiff resistance from the
hot fusion establishment. A 2002 press release of the Focus Fusion
Society describes the suppressive efforts of the hot fusion
establishment:
"On May 23rd Dr. Richard Seimon, Fusion Energy Science Program
Manager at Los Alamos demanded Dr. Hank Oona, one of the physicist
involved in the experiment, dissociate himself from comparisons that
showed the new results to be superior in key respects to those of
the tokamak and to remove his name from the paper describing the
results. The tokamak, a much larger and more expensive device, has
been the centerpiece of the US fusion effort for 25 years. Seimon
did not disputing the data or the achievement of high temperatures.
He objected to the comparisons with the tokamak, arguing that it was
biased against the tokamak. In addition, Seimon pressured Dr. Bruce
Freeman, another co-author of the paper, to advocate the removal of
all tokamak comparisons from the paper. "Both of my colleagues in
this research have been threatened with losing their jobs if they
don't distance themselves from the comparisons with the tokamak,"
says Lerner who is lead author on the paper. "Both of them had
carefully reviewed and approved the paper originally and had
endorsed its conclusions. For them to be forced to recant under
threat of firing is outrageous. It undermines the very basis of
scientific discourse if researchers are not allowed by their
institutions to speak honestly to each other."[15]
If the claims about Focus Fusion pan out, it could be the cheap,
clean, inexhaustible source of energy that the hot fusion
establishment has been promising the world for half a century, but
failed to deliver.
Tansmutation
If a new class of nuclear reactions can take place under low energy
conditions, then it is reasonable to expect even transmutations of
heavy elements. But to conventional chemistry and physics, the claim
of heavy elemental transmutations occurring in "chemical" systems,
apparently validating the ancient proto-science of alchemy,
constitutes an even greater provocation than cold fusion.
John Bockris, a distinguished professor of chemistry at Texas A&M
and one of the world's leading electrochemists, had to learn this
lesson in the early years of the cold fusion scandal. He
successfully replicated the Pons and Fleischmann experiment in 1989
and discovered bursts of tritium production.
He then became one of the principal targets of a smear campaign
against cold fusion research by science journalist Gary Taubes.
Taubes was writing a book on Cold Fusion and had already made up his
mind that cold fusion was "pathological science". He spent time with
Bockris and his students at Texas A&M, posing as a disinterested
seeker of the truth. There, he got the idea that Nigel Packham, one
of Bockris' graduate students had "spiked" the cold fusion cell with
tritium. The allegation was utterly baseless, but Taubes was out for
blood and needed to have his scandal. He got Science to publish his
allegations in June 1990[17]. Bockris called the editor and asked
for the right to publish a detailed response, but his request was
denied. Eventually, he managed to get a one-column letter published
denying the allegations. Publication of Taubes' paranoid delusions
in Science gave them wide credence and circulation.
A fair-minded Nov 1998 article in Wired[20] sets the record
straight:
"'We thought Taubes was genuine at first,' Bockris told me recently,
speaking in a clipped, precise British accent that he acquired
before he moved to the United States in 1953. 'We exposed our lab
books to him, and told him our results. But then he said to Packham,
my grad student, 'I've turned off the tape, now you can tell me -
it's a fraud, isn't it? If you confess to me now, I won't be hard on
you, you'll be able to pursue your career."
(
Taubes has been shown Bockris's statement. He prefers not to
comment.)
According to Bockris, 'A postdoctoral student named Kainthla, and a
technician named Velev, both detected tritium and heat after we took
Packham off the work because of the controversy. Since then,
numerous people have obtained comparable results. In 1994, I counted
140 papers reporting tritium in low-temperature fusion experiments.
One of them was by Fritz Will, the president of The Electrochemical
Society, who has an impeccable reputation."
Still, Taubes's report in the June 1990 Science magazine clearly
suggested that Packham might have added tritium to fake his results.
This reassured many people that cold fusion had been bogus all
along. Packham received his PhD, but only on condition that all
references to cold fusion be removed from the body of his thesis.
Today he works for NASA, developing astronaut life-support
systems. "I don't know why Gary Taubes wrote what he did," he
says. "Certainly I did not add any tritium in my experiment."
But for Bockris, the worst was yet to come. In 1991, he was
approached by a self-taught inventor without formal scientific
credentials from Tennessee named Joe Champion who claimed that he
had discovered a process that could perform heavy element
transmutation. Bockris eventually brought Champion to Texas A&M as a
consultant and started experiments to replicate the claimed results.
In 1993, the local media got wind of the research and made it widely
known that medieval alchemy was being performed at the university!
This lead to a second, even nastier scientific witch hunt against
Bockris. 23 distinguished professors at Texas A&M signed a petition
to the provost asking that Bockris be stripped of his title, and 11
full professors in the chemistry department wrote a letter asking
that Bockris be removed from the department. The petition stated[18]
"For a trained scientist to claim, or support anyone else's claim to
have transmuted elements is difficult for us to believe and is no
more acceptable than to claim to have invented a gravity shield,
revived the dead or to be mining green cheese on the moon. We
believe that Bockris' recent activities have made the terms 'Texas
A&M' and 'Aggie' objects of derisive laughter throughout the
world..."
Bockris was subsequently investigated for fraud, based on charges
that he was trying to defraud investors with false claims of being
able to manufacture gold. He was "completely exonerated" only one
week after a hearing in which he had been allowed to present his
research and defend himself in January 1994.
The professors in the department of chemistry who had initiated the
investigation, lead by distinguished professor Frank A. Cotton, were
disappointed at this outcome. So they secretly formed a committee to
start yet another investigation. Bockris learned of the existence of
this "Ad Hoc Committee" only when information of its existence was
leaked to the press in June 1994. In classical totalitarian fashion,
he was subsequently denied the right to defend himself before the
committee and even to know what the charges were. He later learned
that he was being investigated because his results
were "impossible".
After 11 months of investigation, Bockris was exonerated again in
May 1995. But the official investigation is only part of the story.
An article in Infinite Energy[19] which describes the entire affair
in full details suggests a psychological explanation for the
unscientific conduct of Bockris' colleagues.
"One of the most difficult aspects of the treatment to which Bockris
was subjected was social ostracism, starting with Dean Kemp's
accusation and not even ending with the second exoneration. There
were about sixty-five professors in the large Chemistry Department
at Texas A&M. Most ignored Bockris for much of the two-year period
in which the University, egged-on by ring-leaders in the Department,
acted against him. After the first complete exoneration, two
professors did congratulate him, but he was isolated. Bockris' wife
Lilli felt it perhaps more than he, because she had a number of
faculty wives whom she had known as friends. When she met them now
in the supermarket, instead of having the usual kindly chat, they
turned their backs on her. Lilli recalls that the year she spent in
Vienna after the Nazis took over seemed to her less unpleasant and
threatening than the isolation and nastiness which she felt in
College Station, Texas from 1993 through 1995.
One would have thought that after all that had been done, everything
would be settled now. This was not the attitude of many of Bockris'
colleagues. The motivating force for the antipathy may be the
subconscious fear that the discoveries of the Bockris group might
eventually be proved and recognized. Then his original contributions
would be rated as discoveries of great magnitude. There were at
least two professors in the Chemistry Department who had made it
known that that they expected to receive the Nobel Prize in
Chemistry some day. The possibility that it might go instead to a
colleague whose work they so much denigrated must have been an
unwelcome thought. (They did not have the attitude of physicist
Richard Feynman, who was displeased by the artificial focus on one
person's accomplishment that the Nobel Prize system encouraged.)
Having failed in the three official investigations that had been
carried out against Bockris, they decided that all they could do
would be to persuade the head of the department to have Bockris
shunned—as in an excommunication for religious heresy. No one was
supposed to speak with the errant Bockris. For a long time, absorbed
in his work as ever, he didn't understand that shunning was
underway. Most of the colleagues had been ignoring him anyway since
the inquiries had begun in 1993. He did notice, however, that
whenever he wanted to talk to the Head of the Department, perhaps
once every few months, he came to his office and did not invite
Bockris to come to his. Of course, he was more than twenty years
younger than Bockris, but later Bockris realized that this was an
example of the shunning. The Head did not want anyone to see that he
was talking collegially with Bockris!
Bockris' colleagues in the physical chemistry division took no
notice of the shunning order, which might have gone around
unofficially. In practice, the shunning made no effective difference
to how Bockris carried out his work, though it was a very
considerable act of spite. It proved once again that at least in the
Chemistry Department at Texas A&M University, research results which
do not agree with existing theory are not tolerated."
The Wired article suspects financial motives behind the scientific
establishment's anti-scientific witch hunt:
"Financial factors may have played a part in the fierce animosity
exhibited toward cold fusion experiments. When a congressional
subcommittee suggested that $25 million could be diverted from hot
fusion research to cold fusion, naturally the hot fusion scientists
were outraged."[20]
Today, the evidence that transmutation of heavy elements can occur
in electrochemical systems has become fairly strong. Yasuhiro
Iwamura, Mitsuru Sakano and Takehiko Itoh of the Mitsubishi Advanced
Technology Research Center have shown reproducible transmutation of
Cesium (Z=55) into Praseodymium (Z=59) and Strontium (Z=38) into
Molybdenum (Z=42) in a deuterium-palladium system. Their results
were published in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics.[21]
These results were recently independently replicated by Higashiyama
et al at Osaka University and presented at the Tenth International
Conference on Cold Fusion in Cambridge, Massachusetts 24 - 29 August
2003[22].
At www.lenr-canr.org the interested reader can find a comprehensive
collection of papers on Low Energy Nuclear Reactions.
Reasons to doubt the validity of Relativity Theory
Einstein's special theory of relativity, published in 1905, is one
of the foundational theories of modern physics. It states that the
vacuum speed of light is the same for all observers in initial (non-
accelerated) reference frames, and that time and space coordinates
combine in a peculiar way when measured from different inertial
systems. Exactly how this happens is described by a set of equations
called the Lorentz Transformation.
Strictly speaking, special relativity theory does not apply to
anything in the physical universe, since gravitational fields,
however minute, are always present. It took Einstein about 10 years
to incorporate gravity and acceleration into his theory, and the
result is known as general relativity. It describes gravity not as a
force, but as curvature of spacetime caused by mass. According to
general relativity, there can be no such thing as a gravity shield.
Despite the consensus of a majority of physicists that special
relativity is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is a well-
reasoned experimental and theoretical case against its validity. But
relativity dissidents are routinely censored from presenting their
ideas at conferences or having them published in the scientific
literature. John E. Chappell, Jr., the late director of the Natural
Philosophy Alliance (an organization of relativity critics), relates
the following suppression experience:
"There has been a particularly vicious attitude towards critics of
Einsteinian relativity at U.C. Berkeley ever since. I ran into it in
1985, when I read a paper arguing for absolute simultaneity at that
year's International Congress on the History of Science. After I
finished, the Danish chairman made some courteous remarks about
dissidents he had learned about in Scandinavia, and then turned to
the audience for questions. The first speaker was one of a group of
about 4 young physics students in the back. He launched immediately
into a horrible tirade of verbal abuse, accusing me of being
entirely wrong in my analysis, a simplification of the Melbourne
Evans analysis-'Evans is wrong; you are wrong,' he shouted. He
accused me of being way out of line to present my 'faulty' arguments
on his prestigious campus. When I started to ask him 'Then how would
you explain...', he loudly interrupted me with 'I don't have to
explain anything.' The rest of the audience felt so disturbed by all
this, that the question session was essentially destroyed."[23]
Such reactions are not uncommon. To even begin to criticize
Einsteins's theory of special relativity has become a scientific
heresy of the highest order. The prevailing attitude of the physical
establishment is that anyone who doubts the validity of
this "bedrock of modern physics" is insane, and that trying to
refute it is a symptom of "psychosis"[24].
Caltech Professor David L. Goodstein states in a video-tape lecture
"There are theories in science, which are so well verified by
experience that they become promoted to the status of fact. One
example is the Special Theory of Relativity-it's still called a
theory for historical reasons, but it is in reality a simple,
engineering fact, routinely used in the design of giant machines,
like nuclear particle accelerators, which always work perfectly.
Another example of that sort of thing is the theory of evolution.
These are called theories, but they are in reality among the best
established facts in all of human knowledge."[25]
Isaac Asimov has stated that "no physicist who is even marginally
sane doubts the validity of SR."[26]
An article on relativity dissidents[28] quotes relativist Clifford
Will of Washington University expressing a similar sentiment:
"SR has been confirmed by experiment so many times that it borders
on crackpot to say there is something wrong with it. Experiments
have been done to test SR explicitly. The world's particle
accelerators would not work if SR wasn't in effect. The global
positioning system would not work if special relativity didn't work
the way we thought it did."
Unfortunately for the progress of physics, when opinions like these
reach a critical mass, they become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Dissent is no longer respected, or even tolerated. Evidence to the
contrary can no longer be communicated, for the journals will refuse
to publish it[24]. Mathematically and logically, the notion that a
theory that has made many correct predictions must necessarily be
true is untenable. Scientific models can produce arbitrarily many,
arbitrarily good predictions and still be flawed, as the historical
example of the Ptolemaic (geocentric) model of the solar system
shows. It does not matter how many observations are consistent with
a theory if there is only one observation that is not. Ironically,
relativity itself should have driven this point home to physicists
long ago.
For centuries, Newtonian physics had led science to one triumph
after another in explaining the inner workings of the natural world,
and at the end of the 19th century, no physicist who was "even
marginally sane" doubted its validity. After all, hadn't the
validity of Newtonian physics "been confirmed by experiment so many
times" that it would have "bordered on crackpot to say there is
something wrong with it"? Didn't the operation of the world's steam
engines prove the validity of Newtonian physics? And yet, Newtonian
physics loses its validity at speeds approaching the speed of light.
In hindsight, it is obvious why the discrepancy was never caught.
Due to the enormity of the speed of light c, effects of the order of
(v/c) only manifest themselves in highly sophisticated experiments.
Similarly, even modern technology cannot easily distinguish between
relativity and competing theories that agree with relativity at
first order of (v/c) but disagree at higher order. One such
competing theory is Ronald Hatch's Modified Lorentz Ether Theory[27]
Hatch, a former president of the Institute of Navigation and current
Director of Navigation Systems Engineering of NavCom Technologies,
is one of the world's foremost experts on the GPS. Concerning the
question of whether the operation of the GPS proves the validity of
SR, he has come to conclusions diametrically opposite from Clifford
Will's. In Relativity and GPS[29,30], he argues that the observed
effect of velocity on the GPS clocks flat out contradicts the
predictions of special relativity.
Hatch's proposed alternative to special and general relativity
theory, Modified Lorentz Ether Gauge Theory (MLET), agrees with
General Relativity at first order but corrects many astronomical
anomalies that GRT cannot account for without ad-hoc assumptions,
such as the anomalous rotation of galaxies and certain anomalies in
planetary orbits. In addition, the force of gravity is self-limiting
in MLET, which eliminates point singularities (black holes), one of
the major shortcomings of GRT. One of the testable predictions of
Hatch's theory is that LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational
Wave Observatory, will fail to detect any sign of gravity waves.
A suppression story surrounding the historical roots of relativity.
Relativity textbooks all contain the story of how the Michelson-
Morley experiment[31] supposedly proved the non-existence of a light-
carrying medium, the ether. In this experiment, light rays are sent
on round trips in different directions and then reunited, resulting
in an interference pattern. If an ether "wind" caused the speed of
light to be direction-dependent, then rotation of the experimental
apparatus would result in a shift of this pattern. But such a shift
was never detected, proving the isotropy (direction-independence) of
the speed of light, or so the story goes.
But physical reality is more complicated then the foundational myth
of relativity would have us believe. An examination of historical
papers on the subject indicates that relativists have rewritten
history. The M-M experiment of 1887 found only a fraction of the
effect size predicted by the stationary ether hypothesis, thus
clearly disproving it, but the effect was emphatically not "null"
within the accuracy of the experiment.
Dayton C. Miller reviews the evidence in The Ether-Drift Experiments
and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth [32] and
concludes that
"The brief series of observations was sufficient to show that the
effect did not have the anticipated magnitude. However, and this
fact must be emphasized, the indicated effect was not zero; the
sensitivity of the apparatus was such that the conclusion, published
in 1887, stated that the observed relative motion of the earth and
ether did not exceed one-fourth of the Earth's orbital velocity.
This is quite different from a null effect now so frequently imputed
to this experiment by the writers on Relativity."
Miller then discusses the original M-M data and shows that there is
a systematic effect indicating a speed of the Earth relative to the
Ether of 8.8 km/s for the noon observations and 8.0 km/s for the
evening observations.
Relativity skeptics like Miller believed that the ether may be
entrained ("dragged along") by the earth. To test that hypothesis,
Miller endeavored to replicate the M-M experiment (which had been
performed in a basement in Cleveland) at greater altitude on Mount
Wilson, where presumably there would be a stronger ether drift.
After years of careful experimentation, Miller indeed found a
systematic deviation from the null result predicted by SR which
greatly embarrassed Einstein and his followers. Einstein tried to
explain it away as an artifact of temperature variation, but Miller
had taken great care to avoid precisely that kind of error. Miller
told the Cleveland Plain Dealer on January 27, 1926,
"The trouble with Professor Einstein is that he knows nothing about
my results. ... He ought to give me credit for knowing that
temperature differences would affect the results. He wrote to me in
November suggesting this. I am not so simple as to make no allowance
for temperature."
But the tide of scientific opinion had turned against the ether and
in favor of Einstein. The 1919 solar eclipse observations led by Sir
Arthur Eddington that allegedly confirmed general relativity's
prediction of the deflection of starlight by a gravitational field
was so ambivalent and poorly performed that it was scientifically
worthless[33], but thanks to Eddington's authority, it was accepted
as a resounding confirmation. Some of the stars had moved in the
direction predicted by Einstein, but not as much, or too much,
others had even moved in the opposite direction. Confirmation was
obtained by the "scientific" device of discarding the data that
didn't fit the prediction, and retaining the data that did.
The "confirmation" was triumphantly announced by Eddington at a
joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical
Society to an audience that had not actually seen the data first
hand. In the judgement of an eye witness, the meeting resembled a
coronation ceremony rather than a scientific conference.[34]
Because of this scientific fraud, Einstein became a world celebrity
overnight, surrounded by an aura of scientific infallibility.
Miller's results, which suggested that in order to detect
anisotropies in the speed of light, the interferometer needed to be
surrounded by as little matter as possible, and located at a high
altitude, were ignored in subsequent tests of the isotropy of the
speed of light, such as the Brillet-Hall experiment[35], and
recently, the Müller experiment[36].
After Miller's death, one of his students, Robert S. Shankland, gave
the physics establishment the final excuse it needed to forget
Miller's work for good[37]. Shankland simply revived the old
criticism of temperature variations, against which Miller had always
successfully defended himself during his lifetime, to reach the
conclusion that Miller's results must be invalid. Some relativity
skeptics believe that that conclusion was preordained by Shankland's
manifest devotion to Einstein which is evident in his writing
[38,39].
One of these, James DeMeo, Ph.D., has undertaken a detailed review
of Miller's work and Shankland's critique[40] that comes to the
conclusion that the Shankland team
"with some degree of consultation with Einstein, decided
that 'Miller must be wrong' and then set about to see what they
could find in his archive that would support that conclusion."
It must be noted, however, that Miller's determination of the
velocity of the Earth relative to the ether is incompatible with
modern observations. Miller found that the solar system is moving at
a speed of 208 kilometers per second towards a point in the Great
Magellanic Cloud in the constellation Doradus, in contradiction to
modern measurements discussed below.
Even if the alleged null result of the M-M experiment is accepted,
the isotropy of the speed of light does not necessarily follow. M.
Psimopoulos and T. Theocharis, two physicists at Imperial College,
London, point out in a letter to Nature[41] that the M-M experiment
has only been performed in terrestrial laboratories, where the
gravitational field and the magnetosphere of the Earth and other
ambient factors are always present, and must therefore be repeated
in space before its conclusions can be accepted as universal. They
note that
"all sorts of experiments have already been conducted in space. But
the few experiments which might have truly tested the perhaps most
fundamental and controversial hypotheses in twentieth century
physics- Einstein's postulates - have curiously not been done."
Silvertooth's Experiment
In a 1986 letter to Nature[42] Ernest W. Silvertooth reported that
he constructed an interferometer capable of detecting the absolute
motion of the Earth with respect to the ether. In Experimental
detection of the ether[43] and Motion through the Ether[44],
Silvertooth reported that on the particular day of his measurements,
the Earth moved at 378 km/s towards the constellation Leo. If
relativity is correct, than this result should be complete garbage.
Silvertooth published his findings before NASA launched COBE, the
first satellite to accurately measure the cosmic microwave
background (CMB). Due to Doppler shift, there is a slight anisotropy
in the spectrum of the CMB. Based on precise measurements of this
anisotropy, it was determined that, relative to the CMB, the
heliocentric frame moves at 390 km/s towards Leo. Given the earth's
orbital speed of 30 km/s, this is a very good agreement with
Silvertooth's measurement. In a refined experiment[45], Silvertooth
and Whitney confirmed the earlier result and found a speed of v =
378 km/s.
A citation search through ISI Web of Science[47] reveals no
references to any of Silvertooth's papers in the mainstream
scientific literature. An online document[46] briefly mentions and
dismisses it on the grounds that both the experiment and the
theoretical analysis are flawed, but given how well Silvertooth's
result agrees with the independently determined motion of the Earth
through the CMB, error seems to be an insufficient explanation.
Unless Silvertooth committed outright fraud by simply making a lucky
guess as to the Earth's velocity relative to the CMB and then
ascribing this guess to an imaginary experiment, the inescapable
conclusion would be that translation can be measured by purely
electromagnetic means and that Einstein's theory of special
relativity is falsified.
Is the Speed of Light in Interplanetary Space a Constant?
The late physicist Bryan G. Wallace discovered in 1961 that radar
distance measurements of the surface of the planet Venus did not
confirm the constancy of the speed of light. There were systematic
variations in the radar data containing diurnal, lunar and synodic
components. Attempting to get his results published in Physical
Review Letters, he encountered great resistance from referees, and
eventually settled for a lesser journal[48].
In a letter to Physics Today[49] Wallace summarizes his findings as
follows:
"The 1961 interplanetary radar contact with Venus presented the
first opportunity to overcome technological limitations and perform
direct experiments of Einstein's second postulate of a constant
light speed of c in space. When the radar calculations were based on
the postulate, the observed-computed residuals ranged to over 3
milliseconds of the expected error of 10 microseconds from the best
[general relativity] fit the Lincoln Lab could generate, a variation
range of over 30,000%. An analysis of the data showed a component
that was relativistic in a c+v Galilean sense. "
Let's do a quick reality check here. If the speed of light in
interplanetary space is non constant, how could NASA not have
noticed in its robotic exploration of the solar system? Wallace
makes the scandalous claim that NASA has noticed, and has been using
equations with non-relativistic components to calculate signal
transit times in the solar system all along:
"At the December 1974 AAS Dynamical Astronomy Meeting, E. M.
Standish Jr of JPL reported that significant unexplained systematic
variations existed in all the interplanetary data, and that they are
forced to use empirical correction factors that have no theoretical
foundation."[50]
In a 1973 paper[51], Wallace describes how the Lincoln Lab
introduced averaging to suppress the anomalous radar results and
refused to release the raw data to him, stonewalling his
investigation.
"The apparent improvement in the residuals for later years was due
to the fact that the Lab interpolated the 1964 [Venus] data to 12:00
UT and the 1967 data to one observation a day from 2:12 UT to 2:21
UT. The observing time for the 1961 data ranged from 00:33 UT to
23:40 UT. The involved radar astronomers are publicly claiming
nearly complete agreement between their recent radar analysis and
general relativity, but my investigation reveals otherwise. At the
Fourth Texas Symposium of Relativistic Astrophysics, I.I. Shapiro of
the Lincoln Lab promised to send me any data I wanted. I read in an
article published by the lab that they had data for the same
observing dates covering a wide range of daily observing times from
both the MIT and USSR radar stations. I wrote Shapiro requesting
this data 2/13/69; his letters of 2/28/69 and 3/12/69 ignored my
request. I made an issue of this in my letter to him of 3/20/69, and
in his reply of 3/27/69 he stated, 'Unfortunately the data do not
exist in the form in which you wanted them and hence, I cannot honor
your request.'
Shapiro later sent me data that were completely worthless for making
an objective test of the relative velocity of light in space. The
data were from two MIT radar stations in Massachusetts. The
separation between them was only 0.2' of longitude and 20.6" of
latitude and the observations had been interpolated to 2:12 UT to
2:21 UT with only one observation per day. It seems obvious that the
Lab eliminated the variations by interpolating the data for each day
to the one observing time for that day that agreed with the general
relativity prediction. One could use the same method to prove that a
stopped clock keeps perfect time."
A subsequent letter submitted to Physics Today on July 9, 1984 was
denied publication. Wallace reproduced this letter in the chapter
Publication Politics of his online book The Farce of Physics[52]. In
it, he wrote
"The speed of light is c+v
During a current literature search, I requested and received a
reprint of a paper [T. D. Moyer, Celes. Mech., 23, 33(1981)]
published by Theodore D. Moyer of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The
paper reports the methods used to obtain accurate values of range
observables for radio and radar signals in the solar system. The
paper's (A6) equation and the accompanying information that calls
for evaluating the position vectors at the signal reception time is
nearly equivalent to the Galilean c+v equation (2) in my paper RADAR
TESTING OF THE RELATIVE VELOCITY OF LIGHT IN SPACE. [B. G. Wallace,
Spectros. Lett., 2, 361(1969)] The additional terms in the (A6)
equation correct for the effects of the troposphere and charged
particles, as well as the general relativity effects of gravity and
velocity time dilation.
The fact that the radio astronomers have been reluctant to
acknowledge the full theoretical implications of their work is
probably related to the unfortunate things that tend to happen to
physicists that are rash enough to challenge Einstein's sacred
second postulate. Over twenty-three years have gone by since the
original Venus radar experiments clearly showed that the speed of
light in space was not constant, and still the average scientist is
not aware of this fact! This demonstrates why it is important for
the APS to bring true scientific freedom to the PR journal's
editorial policy."
Supporting evidence comes from Ronald Hatch who finds that the NASA
equations for interplanetary navigation follow his MLET theory
rather than special relativity:
"The experimental evidence is almost overwhelming in support of the
MLET view. There is a large disjoint between the SRT theorists and
the experimentalists. The SRT theorists continue to claim that the
speed of light is automatically the velocity c and isotropic with
respect to the moving observer or experiment. But the SRT
experimentalists do what is necessary to explain and make sense of
the measurements. The equations for tracking and navigating the
interplanetary probes developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL) for NASA clearly follow the MLET template."[27]
Mr. Wallace died on April 19, 1997, his findings ignored and thus
neither confirmed nor refuted by the physics establishment. The
question remains: Is the speed of light in interplanetary space
subject to systematic variations in time?
It is therefore imperative that systematic, high precision speed of
light experiments be performed in earth orbit and interplanetary
space. No such experiments have been carried out yet - why test a
theory that you already know is correct? - but majority opinion has
been changing lately. Attempts to reconcile general relativity with
quantum theory have been a notable failure, and physicists have come
to suspect that a unified field theory must involve "small"
violations of special and general relativity. Müller et al. state
"Special relativity (SR) underlies all accepted theories of nature
at the fundamental level. Therefore, it has been and must be tested
with ever increasing precision to provide a firm basis for its
future application. Such tests are also motivated by the efforts to
unify gravity with the other forces of nature, one of the
outstanding open challenges in modern science. In fact, many
currently discussed models of quantum gravity do violate the
principles of SR."[36]
This has finally created a renewed interest in testing both
relativity theories experimentally to high precision. German
physicists are currently designing the OPTIS mission[53], a
satellite carrying ultra-high precision experiments to test key
assumptions and predictions of relativity; among them, the isotropy
and constancy of the speed of light. As expected, the OPTIS mission
objective is to confirm special and general relativity, or at most
to find weak violations:
"New unifying theories (e.g. the String-Theory) predict small
deviations from the Special and General Relativity. If such
deviations could be found (e.g. an unisotropy of the speed of light)
the way to a new understanding of the time and space structure of
the universe would be open."[54]
The motivation to conduct such experiments in Earth orbit is solely
due to technological considerations and has nothing to do with the
dissident argument that space-based tests of special relativity
might produce radically different results than ground-based ones.
But if Miller and other relativity critics are right, OPTIS may find
much more than small deviations. The mission is still in the
planning stages and no launch date has been set, but results could
be available between 2005 and 2007.
Superluminal Signals
There is some evidence for the existence of superluminal signals in
nature, which contradicts the special relativistic idea that such
signals violate causality and are therefore impossible.
W. A. Rodrigues, Jr. and others have constructed formal solutions of
the main relativistic wave equations traveling at arbitrary speeds 0
£ v < ¥[55]. They call these solutions undistorted progressive waves
(UPWs). These formal solutions have infinite energy and can
therefore not exist in reality; however; numerical simulations and
experiments with sound waves suggest that so-called finite aperture
approximations to these waves can be generated[56]. Such has been
done; however, in all the finite aperture approximations
experimentally produced, only the peaks move superluminally; the
wave fronts move at c, excluding the possibility of superluminal
signaling[57]. In Finite energy superluminal solutions of Maxwell
equations[58], de Oliveira and Rodrigues show that genuinely
superluminal, finite-energy vacuum solutions of Maxwell's equations
exist, which, unfortunately, cannot be produced by a finite antenna.
The authors state, however, that
"even if the new superluminal solutions cannot be produced by
physical devices, the only possible reason for their non existence
in our universe is that of a possible violation of the principle of
relativity."
Von Flandern has shown in a series of papers that the force of
gravity must act in exactly the same fashion it is calculated by
astronomers, that is, near-instantaneously. Otherwise, angular
momentum would no longer be conserved and planetary orbits would be
unstable. In The Speed of Gravity - What the Experiments Say[59] he
writes
"Standard experimental techniques exist to determine the propagation
speed of forces. When we apply these techniques to gravity, they all
yield propagation speeds too great to measure, substantially faster
than lightspeed. This is because gravity, in contrast to light, has
no detectable aberration or propagation delay for its action, even
for cases (such as binary pulsars) where sources of gravity
accelerate significantly during the light time from source to target
By contrast, the finite propagation speed of light causes radiation
pressure forces to have a non-radial component causing orbits to
decay (the "Poynting-Robertson effect"); but gravity has no
counterpart force proportional to v/c to first order.
General relativity (GR) explains these features by suggesting that
gravitation (unlike electromagnetic forces) is a pure geometric
effect of curved space-time, not a force of nature that propagates.
Gravitational radiation, which surely does propagate at lightspeed
but is a fifth order effect in v/c, is too small to play a role in
explaining this difference in behavior between gravity and ordinary
forces of nature. Problems with the causality principle also exist
for GR in this connection, such as explaining how the external
fields between binary black holes manage to continually update
without benefit of communication with the masses hidden behind event
horizons. These causality problems would be solved without any
change to the mathematical formalism of GR, but only to its
interpretation, if gravity is once again taken to be a propagating
force of nature in flat spacetime with the propagation speed
indicated by observational evidence and experiments: not less than 2
·1010 c.
Such a change of perspective requires no change in the assumed
character of gravitational radiation or its lightspeed propagation.
Although faster-than-light force propagation speeds do violate
Einstein special relativity (SR), they are in accord with Lorentzian
relativity, which has never been experimentally distinguished from
SR-at least, not if favor of SR. Indeed, far from upsetting much of
current physics, the main changes induced by this new perspective
are beneficial to areas where physics has been struggling, such as
explaining experimental evidence for non-locality in quantum
physics, the dark matter issue in cosmology, and the possible
unification of forces. Recognition of a faster-than-lightspeed
propagation of gravity, as indicated by all existing experimental
evidence, may be the key to taking conventional physics to the next
plateau."
In a 2002 paper[60] Van Flandern and Vigier extend these results and
conclude that the alleged Einstein "general speed limit" of c must
be invalid.
It must be understood that if the existence of instantaneous signals
(rather than "just" superluminal ones) were confirmed, this would
instantly invalidate special relativity, which is founded on the
impossibility of synchronizing two distant clocks by means of an
instantaneous signal.
A suppression story concerning a flaw in quantum theory
D.L. Hotson shares the following suppression story in Dirac's
Equation and the Sea of Negative Energy[61] (talking about himself
in the third person):
"(..) Unfortunately, he could not resist asking awkward questions.
His professors taught that conservation of mass-energy is the never-
violated, rock-solid foundation of all physics. In 'pair-
production', a photon of at least 1.022 MeV 'creates' an electron-
positron pair, each with 0.511 MeV of rest energy, with any excess
being the momentum of the 'created' pair. So supposedly the
conservation books balance.
But the 'created' electron and positron both have spin (angular
momentum) energy of h/4p. By any assumption as to the size of
electron or positron, this is far more energy than that supplied by
the photon at 'creation'.
'Isn't angular momentum energy?' he asked a professor.
'Of course it is. This half-integer spin angular momentum is the
energy needed by the electron to set up a stable standing wave
around the proton. Thus it is responsible for the Pauli exclusion
principle, hence for the extension and stability of all matter. You
could say it is the sole cause of the periodic table of elements.'
'Then where does all this energy come from? How can the 'created'
electron have something like sixteen times more energy than the
photon that supposedly 'created' it? Isn't this a huge violation of
your never-violated rock-solid foundation of physics?'
'We regard spin angular momentum as an 'inherent property' of
electron and positron, not as a violation of conservation.'
'But if it's real energy, where does it come from?' (..)
'Inherent property' means we don't talk about it, and you won't
either if you want to pass this course.'
Later, Mr. Hotson was taken aside and told that his 'attitude' was
disrupting the class, and that further, with his 'attitude', there
was no chance in hell of his completing a graduate program in
physics, so 'save your money'. He ended up at the Sorbonne studying
French literature and later became a professional land surveyor."
The Big Bang Scandal
Big Bang Cosmology, which is built on general relativity theory, is
forced to use a number of adjustable parameters and ad-hoc
assumptions to agree with observation, such as inflation, the
assumption that most of the mass of the universe must consist
of 'dark matter', a kind of matter that cannot be detected, but
nevertheless must exist, for the sole reason that big bang theory
requires it, and now the latest fad, "dark energy".
Two of the three vaunted "predictions" of big bang theory - the
light element abundances and the temperature of the microwave
background are actually retrodictions meaning that big bang theory
failed to predict them quantitatively correctly and was then
adjusted after the data came in to fit the observational evidence
[67].
The third, the Hubble expansion, is entirely a figment of the
imagination, as veteran astronomer Halton Arp has pointed out for
decades. There are ample examples of high-redshift quasars that are
physically connected to low-redshift galaxies, and there is evidence
that red shift is quantized. But astronomy has failed to self-
correct, and the only acknowledgement Arp received from the
scientific establishment was to be largely (though not completely
[62]) banned from publication in scientific journals or from
speaking at conferences, and to be denied telescope time. He gives
details in Quasars, Redshifts, and Controversies[63]
"[Around 1980] I had tried to make a customary tennis date with an
old and valued Caltech friend who had been a longtime opponent on
the subject of Quasars. He was embarrassed and evasive. On the
following day, the six-person allocation committee, of which he was
a member, sent me an unsigned letter stating that my research was
judged to be without value and that they intended to refuse
allocation of further observing time. (..) A number of directors of
other observatories as well as other well-known astronomers
communicated to the director of my observatory strongly supporting
my research and opposing the action of the allocation committee. I
challenged members of the committee to debate the actual scientific
facts. But none of this prevented the inevitable last act. My
observations on the 200-inch telescope at Palomar terminated in
1983, and at Las Campanas in 1984. "
Arp found scientific asylum at the Max Planck Institut für
Astrophysik in Munich, Germany, where he was allowed to continue his
work. But the suppression continued. In Seeing Red: Redshifts,
Cosmology and Academic Science, Arp relates the following story[64]:
"'Just another isolated case'. Your eye slid over that phrase
because you wanted to see whether the referee was going to recommend
publication. The answer was: not for the Astrophysical Journal
Letters. The message behind the smooth, assured phrase was
clear: 'No matter how conclusive the evidence, we have the power to
minimize and suppress it.' What was the observation this time? Just
two X-ray sources unmistakably paired across a galaxy well known for
its eruptive activity. The paper reported that these compact sources
of high-energy emission were both quasars, stellar-appearing objects
of much higher redshift than the central galaxy, NGC4258. Obviously,
they had originated from the galaxy, in contradiction to all
official rules. Slyly, the referee remarked that 'because there was
no known cause for such intrinsic, excessive redshifts the author
should include a brief outline of a theory to explain them.'
My mind flashed back through 30 years of evidence, ignored by people
who were sure of their theoretical assumptions. Anger was my only
honest option- but stronger than that provoked by worse 'peer
reviews' because this was not even my paper. I did not have to stop
and worry that my response was ruled by wounded personal ego. How
did this latest skirmish begin? Several years earlier an X-ray
astronomer had come into my office with a map of the field around
NGC4258. There were two conspicuous X-ray sources paired across the
nucleus of the galaxy. He asked if I knew where he could get a good
photograph of the field, so he could check whether there were any
optical objects that could be identified with the X-ray sources. I
was very pleased to be able to swivel my chair around to the
bookshelves in back of me and pull out one of the best prints in
existence of that particular field. I had taken it with the Kitt
Peak National Observatory, 4-meter telescope about a dozen years
previously. (..)
Wolfgang Pietsch quickly found a small pointing correction to the
satellite positions and established that his X-ray pair coincided
with blue stellar objects at about 20th apparent magnitude. At that
instant I knew that the objects were almost certainly quasars, and
once again experienced that euphoria that comes at the moment when
you see a long way into a different future. In view of the obvious
nature of these objects I felt Pietsch showed courage and scientific
integrity in publishing the comment: 'If the connection of these
sources with the galaxy is real, they may be bipolar ejecta from the
nucleus.'
Arp then describes how establishment obstruction delayed the
necessary confirmatory observation for two years.
"Then the dance of evasion began. It was necessary to obtain optical
spectra of the blue stellar candidates to confirm that they were
quasars and ascertain their redshifts. A small amount of time was
requested on the appropriate European telescope. It was turned down.
Pietsch's eyes avoided mine when he said 'I guess I did not explain
it clearly enough'. The Director of the world's largest telescope in
the US requested a brief observation to get the redshifts. It was
not done. The Director of the X-ray Institute requested
confirmation. It was not done. Finally, after nearly two years, E.
Margaret Burbidge with the relatively small 3-meter reflector on
Mount Hamilton, on a winter night, against the night sky glow from
San Jose, recorded the spectra of both quasars. It was fortunate
that mandatory retirement had been abolished in the US, because by
this time, Margaret had over 50 years of observing experience. Of
course, the referee report from which I quoted was directed against
her paper, which reported this important new observation. In her
firm, but lady-like English way, Margaret withdrew her paper from
the Astrophysical Journal Letters and submitted it to the European
journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters".
Arp concludes and generalizes,
"What was particularly appalling about this series of events was
that Margaret Burbidge was someone who had given long and
distinguished service to the scientific community. Professor at the
University of California, Director of the Royal Greenwich
Observatory and President of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science among other contributions. It seems it was
permissible to let her fly anywhere in the world doing onerous
administrative tasks, but her scientific accomplishments were not to
be accorded elementary scientific respect and fair treatment.
Some would argue that this is a special case, owing to the climate
of opinion where the offices of the Astrophysical Journal Letters
are located. But, as events in the following chapters make clear,
the problem is pervasive throughout astronomy, and, contrary to its
projected image, endemic throughout most of current science.
Scientists, particularly at the most prestigious institutions,
regularly suppress and ridicule findings which contradict their
current theories and assumptions."
G. Burbidge gives the following devastating summary of the anti-
scientific conduct of the astrophysical establishment:[66]
"The existence of a class of objects which have redshifts not
largely due to the cosmic expansion was not predicted either in the
hot big bang cosmology or in QSSC. How is this phenomenon dealt with
in each hypothesis? As far as that big bang model is concerned its
supporters are in complete denial. They never mention the
observational evidence, do not allow observers who would like to
report such evidence any opportunity to do this in cosmology
conferences, argue against its publication, and if forced to comment
on the data, simply argue that they are wrong."
Thomas Van Flandern's recent paper The Top 30 Problems with the Big
Bang[67] gives an overview of problems with Big Bang cosmology and
concludes,
"The Big Bang (..) no longer makes testable predictions wherein
proponents agree that a failure would falsify the hypothesis.
Instead, the theory is continually amended to account for all new,
unexpected discoveries. Indeed, many young scientists now think of
this as a normal process in science! They forget, or were never
taught, that a model has value only when it can predict new things
that differentiate the model from chance and from other models
before the new things are discovered. Explanations of new things are
supposed to flow from the basic theory itself with, at most, an
adjustable parameter or two, and not from add-on bits of new theory.
(..) Perhaps never in the history of science has so much quality
evidence accumulated against a model so widely accepted within a
field. Even the most basic elements of the theory, the expansion of
the universe and the fireball remnant radiation, remain
interpretations with credible alternative explanations. One must
wonder why, in this circumstance, four good alternative models are
not even being comparatively discussed by most astronomers."
One of these models is Quasi-Steady State Cosmology (QSSC) proposed
in 1993 by Hoyle, Burbidge and Narlikar[65,66].
Anti-Gravity
In 1992, Russian scientist Eugene Podkletnov published claims to
have observed partial gravitational shielding above a rotating
superconductor[68]. The scientific establishment reacted with scorn
and dismissed the claims on a-priori grounds[69]:
"Most physicists laughed at Podkletnov's report. Riley Newman, a
professor of physics at UC Irvine who has been involved in gravity
research for 20 years, typified the reaction when he commented, 'I
think it's safe to say gravity shielding is not conceivable.' Like
many scientists, he felt that Podkletnov must have made a mistake,
measuring magnetic fields or air currents instead of genuine weight
reduction.
And yet, few of Podkletnov's critics actually bothered to read his
description of his work. Their reaction was so dismissive, it almost
sounded like prejudice. From their perspective he was an outsider, a
nonmember of the 'gravity establishment.' They couldn't believe that
a major discovery in physics had been made by such a no-status
dilettante fooling around at some obscure lab in Finland."
Podkletnov's claims received major publicity in 1996, when a British
newspaper reported that a followup paper was about to be published
in the British Journal of Physics D. Podkletnov later withdrew the
paper under curious circumstances:
"But Podkletnov has now withdrawn the paper, just weeks before it
was due to appear. His decision follows a bizarre series of
developments triggered by media interest in the device. Earlier this
month Tampere University issued a carefully worded statement denying
all knowledge of the antigravity research. While admitting that it
had been involved in some preliminary experiments done by Podkletnov
in the early 1990s, the university said he was no longer on the
staff.
Suspicions deepened when Vuorinen, the supposed coauthor of the
paper, issued a statement denying that he had ever worked on
antigravity with Podkletnov.
The furore appears to have surprised Podkletnov, who insists that
the claims made in the paper are genuine. But he says the university
is correct in denying the existence of any recent research, as the
paper centers on experiments carried out in 1992.
On the key issue of Vuorinen's denial of involvement in the work,
Podkletnov says that there must have been some confusion over names,
and that another Petri Vuorinen was the true coauthor. Podkletnov
does have an unpaid affiliation with Tampere's Institute of Material
Science. However, inquiries have failed to uncover anyone with a
similar name at the university who admits to working on the
antigravity research.
The controversy also appears to have shocked the Institute of
Physics, which publishes the Journal of Physics D. Three referees
failed to find any major flaw in the paper's claims, which if
confirmed would rate as one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs
in history.
Gravity is the most ubiquitous force in the Universe, and no one has
ever found any way of shielding matter from its effects. The
discovery of a shielding effect would have huge theoretical and
commercial implications.
Faced with Tampere University's statement, and Vuorinen's denial
that he was involved, Richard Palmer, managing editor of the
journal, decided to put the paper on hold pending further inquiries.
Three days later, on 9 September, Podkletnov solved the institute's
dilemma by withdrawing his paper. He gave no reason. But he stands
by his claims: 'This is an important discovery and I don't want it
to disappear,' he told New Scientist.
The paper may now never appear in any physics journal: Podkletnov is
said to have been put under pressure from unknown 'funding agencies'
not to reveal any more, pending patent applications.
Even so, the mystery of the antigravity machine lingers. What is
known is that the paper had passed scrutiny by independent experts
in superconductivity, and had been accepted by a reputable journal.
Tampere University itself concedes that Podkletnov has a good
reputation for research, and refuses to pass judgment on whether the
antigravity machine actually works."[70]
Podkletnov was subsequently thrown out of the university. But
despite the controversy, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in
Alabama decided to investigate his claims[71]. The first attempt at
replication failed, but it had been conducted without sufficient
knowledge of the original experiment[72]. As of 2002, NASA was still
working on a second attempt.
Podkletnov now says that he can generate repulsive force beams.
According to Nick Cook,
"Meanwhile, Mr Podkletnov, now based at the Moscow Chemical
Scientific Research Center, has taken his ideas further. Last year
he published another paper - backed by Giovanni Modanese, an Italian
physicist, detailing work on an 'impulse gravity generator' that is
capable of exerting a repulsive force on all matter.
Using a strong electrical discharge source and a
superconducting 'emitter', the equipment has produced a 'gravity
impulse', Mr Podkletnov says, "that is very short in time and
propagates with great speed (practically instantaneously) along the
line of discharge, passing through different objects without any
observable loss of energy".
The result, he maintains, is a repulsive action on any object the
beam hits, that is proportional to its mass. When fitted to a laser
pointing device, Mr Podkletnov says, his laboratory installation has
already demonstrated its ability to knock over objects more than a
kilometer away. The same installation, he maintains, could hit
objects up to 200km away with the same power."[72]
These claims caught the attention of aerospace company Boeing which
has been reported to be researching antigravity.
W
hether antigravity will ultimately be proven to exist or not, one
thing is already clear: mainstream physics is unwilling to
investigate antigravity claims in good faith. Robert L. Park, the
spokesman of the American Physical Society made a typical comment in
his What's New column in 2002 that illustrates the
unscientific "theory overrides evidence" modus operandi of the
physics establishment:
"Why would Boeing choose to spend millions to test a ridiculous
claim by an obscure Russian physicist that has failed every test and
is a physical impossibility to begin with?"[73]
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
The second law of thermodynamics, in simple language, says that in a
closed physical system, useful energy decays into waste heat, and
you can't win it back. A machine that produces, say, electrical
energy from ambient heat is impossible according to the second law,
and termed a "perpetuum mobile of the second kind".
But the second law is under siege, and it may turn out that this
alleged rock-solid law of nature is only a reflection of the
limitations of 19th and 20th century engineering.
In a paper titled A Solid-State Maxwell Demon[74] D.P. Sheehan and
A.R. Putnam of the departments of Physics and J.H. Wright of the
department of Mathematics and Computer science of the University of
San Diego propose a semiconductor device that would generate useful
energy from the thermal noise of an electronic circuit. The authors
successfully tested their model on a commercial semiconductor
simulator and estimate that the technology necessary to construct a
laboratory model will be available by 2007. In their introduction,
they write:
"Over the last ten years, an unprecedented number of challenges have
been leveled against the absolute status of the second law of
thermodynamics. During this period, roughly 40 papers have appeared
in the general literature, representing more than a dozen distinct
challenges; the publication rate is increasing. Recently, for the
first time, a major scientific press has commissioned a monograph on
the subject and a first international conference has been convened
to examine these challenges."
One would think that given the implications (defeating the
second "law" means nothing less than solving the human energy crisis
permanently), governments, corporations and the scientific
establishment would be interested. But there is very little
interest. The prevailing (circular) reasoning remains that machines
that violate the second law are impossible because they would
contradict the second law[76].
Conclusions
There is widespread belief among physicists and non-physicists alike
that physics has essentially "figured out" the universe. According
to this "end of science" argument[75], all that remains to the great
enterprise of science is to connect a few dots and do some fine-
tuning. But the evidence discussed in this article suggests that
this satisfactory state of affairs is a mere illusion created by the
scientific establishment's habit of suppressing or ignoring
disconfirming evidence, and that some of the most basic tenets of
physics are in need of major revision.
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