Mr. Judd;

So the success of the GPS system is all just a politically correct delusion? I'm sure that will be of great comfort to the next set of people in a building targeted by a GPS guided cruise missile.

"Geo"

Regarding Einstein's equation, watch out: you may get Eagar, Guinn, et al back on your case. :•)

Regarding Magueijo and soup and nuts, we engineering-types like to think that science is souper although scien*tists* may be nuts.

Heh heh. Some loon stands up and says, 'J'accuse!' and Orrin signs right up.

Newton, at least, was hardly opposed to Creation. He spent almost all his time (he left 5 million words on the subject) analyzing the Bible, concluding that the Trinity is unacceptable. But he certainly believed in a God of Creation.

He just didn't understand everything about it, as he frankly admitted.

Einstein wasn't either.

old maltese:

heck, no one thinks the spped of light is constant anymore.

Once more into the breach of Lysenkoism.

OJ:

If you are such an expert on E=mc^2, perhaps you can tell us precisely what it means.

That way we can know for sure whether it is bunk.

Jeff:

c is bunk.

Don't get yourself upset when OJ posts on scientific matters. It's only a matter of time before he treats us to conclusive proof that the sun revolves around the earth and that disease is caused by an imbalance in the humours, not by bacteria or viruses.

OJ:

I wasn't aware that the meaning of the equation was at all dependent upon the specific value of any of the variables.

That is why I was hoping your detailed explanation of the equation could enlighten me as to why you have concluded the equation is bunk.

The constant isn't.

Bart:

The Universe revolves around the Earth.

What's amusing is that OJ is contradicting a position he's taken earlier concerning Intelligent Design and the apparent fine tuning of various parameters to physical law to support life. c is, of course, one of the most fundamental of those because its value cascades in to so many others. But if it can vary across the observable Universe without obvious effects then that makes the fine tuning not particularly important and knocking down one of OJ's most compelling ID arguments.

OJ:

Let me try this again. Please explain to me what the equation means. Then, having done that, explain how a change in c makes the equation bunk.

I sure can't figure it out, so I'm hoping your expertise can enlighten me.

There is no "c".

AOG:

I don't believe in Intelligent Design nor that the speed of light matters one little bit to anyone or anything.

Mr. Judd;

Everything electrical intimately involves the speed of light. Even the operation of the electrical power grid depends on knowing it quite precisely (because speed of light delays are large enough to affect the phase relationships of power from different electrical plants). Therefore the speed of light matters to all of that technology and the people who design it.

This is the real reason scientists find the idea of a varying speed of light difficult to believe. Not because of ideology or politics, but because it is so fundamental that if it varies, almost everything else does as well (including, for instance, the nuclear reactions that sustain stars).

But I accept that you don't believe any of that.

AOG:

That's just math--we make it up. But we can also slow light down in a lab. "c" is an imaginary number not a reflection of reality.

AOG:

I understand his not believing in the "c" may frustrate you, but considering it is Orrin, I think you should be happy he seems to have caved on the "m".

OJ:

According to Einstein, what does E=mc^2 mean?

Because that bears very much upon "nor that the speed of light matters one little bit to anyone or anything."

My guess is you don't have a clue; I'm quite happy to be proven wrong, though.

Mass and energy are the same thing, provided only that the speed of light be constant. It's not.

I'll buy that. Perhaps more exactly, Energy is directly proportional to Mass, and the constant of proportionality is c.

In other words, the amount of energy a given mass represents is dependent upon c. Changing the value of c does not invalidate the equation in the least.

I don't have anywhere near the mathematical sophistication to say what would happen should c become, say, one tenth what it is now, but I'll bet the change would matter a great deal to anyone around at the time.

And it would also impact your eagerness to use nuclear weapons, because they wouldn't work.

Jeff:

The equation is just an equation. You can always make equations work. The constant isn't constant. That means Relativity doesn't work.

Varying the speed of light in a laboratory says nothing about c, which states the speed of light in a vacuum.

Heck, I can stop light cold by holding up a sheet of black paper -- at least for a while, say several million years. Says nothing about the origin of the Universe, though.

Not constant there either.

Relativity is much more than just the equation, and relativity doesn't rely on a specific value for c.

But since you are putting so much faith in the article linked to, and are such an expert on relativity, perhaps there is another problem you could clear up for me. From the linked article:

"The mystery here is that light can have travelled no more than 380,000 light years by that epoch, yet different patches of the sky shown in the snapshot might be millions of light years apart."

How can that be?

Jeff:

Not this article, but prior ones which this simply confirms:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/014896.html

http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/003533.html

http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/001418.html

I don't know anything about relativity except that it requires that c be constant. It's not.

The article you so approvingly linked to contained this:

"The mystery here is that light can have travelled no more than 380,000 light years by that epoch, yet different patches of the sky shown in the snapshot might be millions of light years apart."

How can that be? Unless I'm missing something here, that para yanks the credibility right out from underneath the article.

I just recently read a reasonably in-depth book--including actual equations--on Relativity. I could be wrong, and AOG is likely the one to demonstrate it, but I don't remember anything about Relativity requiring c to be constant, only that it be absolute.

Jeff:

That sentence suggests it's not absolute either, thus proving you wrong.

You got that backward, Orrin.

The observation was that the speed of light is constant. Relatively explained the observation.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. That's one of the mottoes of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal.

It applies, also, to the normal.

If you hypothesize that the speed of light is not constant, then you would expect a number of observations to follow. They don't.

Harry;

There are a plethora of observations that the speed of light is not constant nor a limit.

OJ:

The sentence I quoted used the term "light years." That has a specific meaning bounded by the current value for c.

So the sentence suggests no such thing. To preserve the article's credibility, I await your explanation of how that sentence makes sense.

Also, I am at a loss for that plethora of observations that the speed of light is not a limit. Please explain further.

You just cited one.

OJ:

No, really. I simply don't understand. Please explain.

"The mystery here is that light can have travelled no more than 380,000 light years by that epoch, yet different patches of the sky shown in the snapshot might be millions of light years apart."

Here is an excellent synopsis of all the stuff Einstein biffed.

My bad--I misread the sentence. My apologies.

This is the whole ballgame:

"Two consequences followed. The first was that chance plays a fundamental role in the interactions of elementary particles, and therefore in the way the world works. Physics, up to that point in history, had been “deterministic”. Consequence followed cause with no room for uncertainty. But uncertainty is at the core of quantum mechanics. It is there in the form of Werner Heisenberg's famous “uncertainty principle” that it is impossible to measure both the speed and the location of an object with precision. And it is there in the form of Erwin Schrödinger's equally famous cat, which is simultaneously dead and alive because its fate depends on the quantum properties of an object whose state is indeterminate (rather than merely unknown) until it is measured.

The second consequence is that the world is “non-local”. That is to say, quantum interactions occur instantaneously over arbitrarily long distances. What is more, there is no mechanism in quantum mechanics which explains how particles “communicate” to match up their quantum properties in this way. For example, if one particle is spinning in one direction, its partner must spin in the opposite. However, the first particle does not have a definite direction until it is measured (Schrödinger's cat again), so the second particle cannot “know” how to point until a measurement is performed on the first particle, by which time the second particle may be millions of kilometres away. Einstein termed this “spooky action-at-a-distance”."

Nothing exists absent the Observer.

OJ:

"... whose state is indeterminate (rather than merely unknown) until it is measured."

I thought we had cleared up that problem. Something is "measured" anytime a photon hits it.

I didn't realize you worshipped stars. Although, having finally realized it, I don't know how that clears up anything.

Ah, the same mistake Einstein made. Heisenberg and Schroedinger are too radical for materialists to accept them.

Orrin, you need to be really, really careful when you venture into QM. You got it wrong.

The simultaneous solidification of a property such as spin at tachyonic distances is a derived expectation of the equations.

It has never been observed. Probably it cannot be.

It may be the way the world works. But, as numerous posters have mentioned here over the months, the equations are written based on expectations -- the 'cosmological constant' choice.

You've fallen for the Maxwell's Demon fallacy.

The kicker with Maxwell's Demon is that it needs energy to work. Deduct the required energy, and it stops working.

Observations have different qualitative value.

The observations showing c is constant have a much smaller error bar than those that don't.

Harry:

Less wrong equations don't make c constant and observation shows it's not.

OJ:

No, it isn't a mistake. All measurements/observations involve photons.
Look at the Heisenberg equations; photons feature prominently.

... and observation shows it's not.

More correctly, unless you are happy to accept as true that which is not yet proven, " ... some observations show it might not be."

The observation cited above does not constitute proof. I'm not familiar with the the observation, but, it is hard to see how a reduction in c by a factor of roughly 10 (implied, but hard to say) wouldn't leave one heck of a shock wave.

Jeff:

Heisenberg seems a better authority than you or me:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/014309.html

OJ:

I'm certain he is. But nothing therein contradicts my assertion that you confuse the terms observe and measure.

It has been awhile since I studied this in Physics, but IIRC, your reasoning means you worship photons.

Jeff:

No, that's precisely true:

"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. "

It's remarkable that all the most modern physics simply reiterates Creation.