On May 9, 2004, at 9:25 AM, michael ibison wrote:

1. Hal says PV is a contender for metric engineering.
2. Prove it. Start with the 2 problems I suggest that are obviously relevant to the issue of metric engineering. I am doing it for GR. Now you show how to do it for PV. Then we can compare. Capische?

Mike: I’ll let Hal handle that claim. I was not addressing that; the purpose of my note was to clarify the differences between de Felice GR and PV.

The main issue is Hal's claims about metric engineering in Nick Cook's book from Jane's, in March 1 2004 Aviation Week W. Austin's article "To The Stars" in STAIF and similar venues that influence big money decisions in Aerospace and Pentagon. Hal's claims based entirely on fringe HRP ZPE and PV ideas are way out of the mainstream, but are presented as inside the mainstream and my challenges based much closer to mainstream theory and observed facts go ignored. Indeed, I just had a STAIF person question me on well-known empirical results "space is flat" (in large-scale 3D FRW k = 0 inflation confirmed by NASA WMAP ) and "dark matter in the Galactic Halo." This aerospace engineer has not kept up with what's well known in modern astronomy and cosmology - yet Hal's PV has no trouble getting into those STAIF sessions - so much for "peer review"!


JS: Also you should explain to Hal how he got his analogy wrong

i.e. PV covers GR like Maxwell covers Kirchoff

MI: That analogy isn’t so bad.


JS: Then you do not understand either.

Kirchoff is a limiting case of Maxwell.

GR is a limiting case of PV at least in the SSS example.

MI: That’s not how I understood Hal’s analogy. I believe he meant it in the sense of an approximation, not as a limiting case.

JS: What's the difference?

MI: On the issue of a limiting case, one can regard an exponential e^x as a limiting case of 1+x+x^2/2 just as easily as the other way around. Either tends to the other as x->0. And from the position that GR is correct, one must take the view that PV is a limiting case of GR.

JS: No, I say you are wrong in your logic here.

Hal says K = e^2GM/c^2r holds in the limit

2GM/c^2r -> infinity

i.e. strong field case!

Hal says NO event horizons physically.

That contradicts GR and ALL of modern black hole physics.

PV and GR only agree in the weak field case

2GM/c^2r -> zero

Therefore, Hal's real claim, if done conceptually consistently is that GR is wrong, i.e. it is only approximately correct in the weak field limit and that PV is the correct strong field theory with NO event horizons!
Therefore, PV covers GR just as GR covers SR, with global SR as limiting case of GR as curvature field -> 0.

JS: PV is the covering theory of GR there. GR emerges from PV only in weak field limit of PV.

MI: That is not correct. See above.

JS: Your argument above is wrong. It makes no sense to me at all.
The decisive factor is Hal claims NO BLACK HOLE EVENT HORIZONS - this is a physical claim about the strong field region beyond the math you cited in isolation as a conceptual fragment. The physical heuristic picture is a vital part of PV. If it were confirmed by experiment, it would mean PV is the more general theory! That is, PV is to GR as Maxwell is to Kirchoff. Now I studied this sort of stuff with Max Black at Cornell. You are thinking too narrowly looking at only the formal part forgetting about the informal language in Bohm's sense - the physical interpretation is an essential part of the physical theory.


Hal says no event horizon.

MI: That is a strong field consequence of PV, and therefore outside the domain of the ‘limiting case’ comparison above.

JS: No point arguing further. You do not understand what I mean by a "covering theory" or the "more general theory." Hal claims for PV a larger domain of empirical validity than for GR and that is what is important here. According to Hal:

PV domain of validity = weak field + strong field

GR domain of validity = weak field

Think of a Venn diagram in set theory logic.

The GR Venn diagram lies inside the PV Venn diagram according to Hal's professing of the meaning of PV relative to GR.

QED



Hal's clear error in making the analogy was to compare PV with Kirchoff, when it should be compared with Maxwell.

This seems elementary and obvious to my mind. I am surprised that you do not get it?

MI: Hopefully the above sorts this out.

JS: No, with all respect Mike, I perceive your thinking here on this particular issue as muddled. Hal's even more so.

Also make clear exactly how PV treats:

1. Local principle of equivalence in sense of MTW
 

MI: The fact that gravitational action on matter & EM can be cast in terms of a metric seems to be sufficient for this.


JS: Where does Hal do that explicitly? I know he writes

goo = K^-1 etc.

But he is never clear really how literally he means that.

I never see him write anything like

gu'v'(P) = Xu'^u(P)Xv'^v(P)guv(P)

at fixed event P

MI: I think we are talking about two different things here. I answered your question about local equivalence by pointing out that PV is a metric theory.


JS: As I recall from earlier e-mails with Hal and Zielinski, Hal waffles on that issue. He eschews tensors (hence metric theory) on Saturdays, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and pays pious lip service to it on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays! :-)
Indeed, my rejection of his Tables I & II is that besides being epistemologically obscure in terms of an operational theory of what it means to measure anything in PV, it is inconsistent with the equivalence principle and leads to wrong concepts like changing m for warp drive, a serious confusion that permeates Nick Cook's book "The Hunt for Zero Point" based on his discussions with Hal in Austin.

Digression into politics:
Indeed all the engineers at NASA BPP have bought into this serious conceptual delusion that I compare in analogy to Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz's belief that Saddam was actively working with Usama Bin Laden and had operational WMD that posed an imminent threat to US National Security. See Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies" for a real eye opener on how false information leads to disaster! Our entire foreign policy since 911 has been based on ideological fantasies of a small group of neocon fanatics out of touch with the facts. Pardon my digression - but I know some of them.

MI: I show that to be the case in my lanl review of PV Cosmology, as does Dicke in his papers. The invariance of the theory under GCTs that I think you are referring to here is not a property of PV.

JS: Well I am glad you admit that. Therefore, the PV theory is dead in the water. It is not acceptable as a viable physical theory because it cannot in principle even address objective physical questions that any good theory must be able to address (even if wrong).

MI: Although one describe the behavior of matter & radiation as if in a curved space-time with metric g_PV, that metric is not a tensor, it does not transform as you have given.

JS: Good we got that straight and that is enough to explain why your PV cosmology paper was rejected by a mainstream journal. PV is not real physics for that reason alone.

MI: g_PV is constructed from a single scalar field, and therefore has just one functional DOF. That field (call it K) transforms as a relativistic scalar field K(x) ->K(Lx) where L is a Lorentz transformation.

JS: Not good enough. You must be able to explain what Alice and Bob in arbitrary timelike relative motion to each other momentarily coincident in neighborhood of event P see for same events in the neighborhood of P at their momentary near collision or crossing. You cannot do that ONLY with the Lorentz group and THAT'S THE POINT!


2. Local general coordinate transformations with local tensors

MI: This is not a property of PV.

JS: Sufficient grounds to reject PV as a viable physical theory in 2004 along with philogiston, epicycles etc.

Exactly, so you just contradicted yourself above in 1 & 2.
No I do not think I have. GCT invariance is not a necessary property of a metric theory and therefore of a weak-equivalence theory. See the above.

MI: Then PV is not an acceptable theory. To some that is automatically true if there is no GCT invariance.

JS: Exactly my point. By your own admission, PV is indefensible by modern standards of minimal requirements for a theory of space-time.

You cannot answer the following question.

Alice and Bob are two local observers momentarily very close to space-time event P, but in arbitrary timelike relative motion to each other. How do they compare there measurements of the same events in the neighborhood of P?

MI: I can. The answer is that the 4-vectors (eg velocities) and 2-tensors (e.g. EM force-tensor) get transformed in the usual way and the K-field gets transformed as a relativistic scalar field. The physics still satisfies weak equivalence in the new frame because one can still describe the behavior of matter and radiation in g-fields through a metric tensor, which still has the PV-mandated form of g=diag{K,-1/K,-1/K ,-1/K}. i.e. g-> diag{K’,-1/K’,-1/K’ ,-1/K’} under a Lorentz transformation, where


K’(x)=K(L^-1(x)).


 
JS: The equation

gu'v'(P) = Xu'^u(P)Xv'^v(P)guv(P)

is the answer to that question in GR.

MI: You say you have no answer in PV. I don’t know what Hal said, but I didn’t say that at all. My answer is given above.

JS: Your answer is wrong because you have not answered my question at all. The use of global Lorentz transformations only works for a privileged class of inertial observers Eve and Ted in relative UNIFORM MOTION to each other in a globally flat 4D space-time free of any gravitation effect. You cannot use the Lorentz transformations to connect the observations of Alice and Bob as defined above. Indeed, this incompleteness in global SR from 1905 is what it took Einstein 10 years to 1915 to correct with GR. What you have above is a fundamentally incomplete description of the physical world. All this was settled by Einstein by 1915 and to claim otherwise is devolution not progress. It's like Usama Bin Ladin wanting to take civilization back to the 11th Century! (Maybe a wee bit too strong, but it makes the point. ;-)) This is, perhaps, the fundamental issue in regard to my refutation of Hal's whole paradigm for metric engineering which is having undue influence in the mass media without any healthy debate on these issues.

JS; This seems to be a fatal flaw in Hal's whole program?

MI: I don’t know what you mean by ‘Hal’s program’. EM origin of mass is of great interest to Hal and me, but neither have published anything decisive. I am quietly optimistic though. Do you have an objection to an EM origin of mass?

JS: Depends what you mean by that. Basically yes. I have objection if you mean HRP origin of rest mass from Lorentz EM RANDOM ZPE drag. At best that will be a tiny effect.

MI: I don’t mean that.

JS: I opt for the NONRANDOM Higgs mechanism of vacuum coherence. Hum. My picture is vacuum coherence gives Einstein's guv field as the smooth ODLRO emergent c-number effective field theory but with G* ~ 10^40G on scale of 1 fermi quickly dropping to Newton's G by the time we get to angstroms. The lepto-quark masses are then from little wormholes exactly as Wheeler proposed in 1950's in "Geometrodynamics" as "Einstein's Vision" "Mass without mass." His "geons" were too big only because his G was too small. You need Bohm's "extra variables" surfing on the the qubit pilot wave to make it work as well. Again this gets back to my point that problems easy in Einstein's orthodox geometrodynamical picture using local tensor fields are hard in the PV dielectric picture? Do you agree?


MI: I don’t feel qualified to answer that question because of lack of experience with GR. But its hard to see how it could be more difficult with PV, since the machinery in PV is essentially the same, but with only one functional degree of freedom in the metric, rather than 10-4=6 in GR.

JS: ?? You just said above no tensors. Also, Hal cannot solve the problem of the guv field of a spinning top. He only hand waves.

MI: I did not say no tensors. Please read the above.

JS: I did and so what did you mean by "This is not a property of PV."

JS: Local general coordinate transformations with local tensors

MI: This is not a property of PV.

JS: You should read Lorentz's book on the electron and the old text of Abraham and Becker.

The basic problem is simple. Never solved until today.

Picture the electron as a sphere of electric charge of radius e^2/mc^2 ~ 1 fermi. …

MI: I will re-read what you say on this when I have more time. I have ideas of my own about electron stability. Must go now …

Michael