On May 9, 2004, at 9:44 PM, michael ibison wrote:

Look, if your position is simply that anything that is not isomorphic with GR is wrong then you are entitled to that opinion.

JS: Yes, I think experiment has shown that within the same domain of empirical testing that PV as given by Hal purports to describe. I think Hal's version of PV as published to this date is rightly considered as a false theory or a wrong theory. Therefore, it should not be puffed up in pop articles like Nick Cook's book or Willam Austin's Aviation Week article, or at STAIF meetings and similar venues as a plausible viable theory for the next generations of aerospace advanced flight systems that use "metric engineering" in the sense of George Trimble's "G-Engine" (see Nick Cook's book "The Hunt for Zero Point" with the panache of Jane's Defence Weekly giving it credibility in the corridors of defense planning). That is my large purpose here - not some small pedantic detail of academia. Remember Churchill in the 1930's arguing for the Spitfire.

MI: If in addition you believe that such theories are not worthy of discussion or investigation then let us come to a close on this topic. Please say which is the case.


JS: I certainly think your paper should have been published. That is another form of vile censorship like we see with what is happening on the Cornell archive. It is important to publish papers on wrong theories so that we can appreciate the correct ones that survive this Darwinian process of natural selection of continually filtering out noise from the signal - error correcting.


On May 9, 2004, at 9:38 PM, michael ibison wrote:

Jack, I am not addressing Hal’s claims about PV, I am leaving that up to him The waters are getting unnecessarily muddied because you are not making this distinction. Please ask him about his claims.


I have. He refuses to answer them adequately.


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

JS: 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.

JS: 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
…
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.

 


What I said above is relevant. I did not bring up event horizons in this discussion. That issue is only relevant if there is a discussion of PV holding in the strong field limit.


That's what I am talking about and more. Let's not whittle down the focus so narrowly that it becomes irrelevant to the key issue:

Is PV a viable model for metric engineering? ALL relevant things considered.



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 …

Again, this conversation will go nowhere if you cannot distinguish between what I said in the last 2 emails with conversations you have had with Hal.


Your focus here is too narrow as explained above.



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.

No, as I explained in earlier messages. The issue is which is the correct theory PV or GR? This means, which has the larger domain of validity? That will be settled by the strong field case, assuming that PV and GR give the same weak field results, which also may not be so.

In any case, the theory with the larger domain of empirical validity covers the remaining one. Maxwell covers Kirchoff etc.


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



Again, same point.


 


Look, I joined in this discussion because of possible misconceptions about de Felice versus PV. I am not getting drawn into a conversation that you and Hal are having about which is the covering theory.


I don't care about some minor pedantic detail. My interest is in blowing the whistle on inaccurate information in influential media on metric engineering that can cause bad decisions down the line like we see now in our bungled Iraqi policy based on false intelligence and the neocon's waging the dog in the Pentagon's OSP and at MI6 in Charing Cross and at 10 Downing set up by Wolfowitz. Of course that is much more serious than the present issue here. I am looking at the Big Picture here in context of Nick Cook's book from Jane's Defence Weekly and William Austin's article in March 1, 2004 Aviation Week and similar pieces.

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: Well that was not the reason given. It was that PV predicts the wrong decay rate for binary pulsars.

JS: Which you said in your paper. So then they should have published it?

MI: But in any case, I am not trying to sell PV. My write up of it was for the benefit of setting the record straight on its predictions. If that means the theory has shortcomings, I think that is a useful story to tell, and that science should be informed. The editors (after much thought) thought otherwise.

JS: I agree with you 100% there.

MI: You appear to mistake my motives

JS: No, not at all.

MI: and my understanding of PV’s status.


JS: Yes, on the covering issue Maxwell -> Kirchoff analogy.


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!

 


MI: Anyone can write an action that is Lorentz invariant and has fields that allegedly describe the action of gravity. GCT invariance may or may not be a necessary property required to accurately describe nature. But nonetheless, such actions exist, can be explored, and can be tested. If they are wrong, then let nature decide. GCT invariance is not a religion.


JS: Sure. But nature has already decided. It's a done deal. There is plenty of evidence for GCT. As Wheeler said "GR is battle tested." That's why I said PV is not viable in 2004 for that reason alone.



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.

MI: 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.

JS: You cannot limit physics to weak gravity fields on a globally flat space-time back ground. Again you need GCT to compare measurements of same processes by local observers in arbitrary motion not only in geodesic "inertial" motion with "geodesics" limited to the globally flat background metric of say quantum field theory.

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: Lorentz transformations cannot describe transformations to arbitrary frames. That's why Einstein had to invoke GCT after ten years of hard work from 1905 to 1915. You cannot have a viable theory of gravity based only on the 10 parameter Poincare group used in quantum field theory of the standard model of particle physics. You need to locally gauge the 4-parameter translation sub-group of Poincare group and that gives you GCT!

If you also, go beyond Einstein 1915, and locally gauge the 6-parameter Lorentz group you get the torsion field coupled to spinning matter and also maybe to some vacuum modes?

You may even want to locally gauge the entire 15 parameter conformal group, which I think is what Tony Smith is doing?

 
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: Yes, but it is a wrong answer. Lorentz group only connects a special class of globally flat space-time timelike geodesic observers and does not begin to answer the physical operational question I posed to you.


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.

 
MI: You don’t understand what I am saying. I am not making a claim about PV being right or wrong, only how it describes gravity and how it transforms. It may be wrong, but that is what it does, K is a scalar field and gets transformed accordingly. Bob and Alice use the same physics in both frames. It is not GR Jack. It is a scalar field, like temperature.


JS: You do not appear to understand the question I asked. You are stretching the domain of validity of the 6-parameter Lorentz group to a region of physical procedures where it cannot go. To answer my physical question you need to locally gauge the 4-parameter translation group to get GCT. Only GCT is equipped to answer the question. It took Einstein 10 years to realize that, although he did not use the modern idea of local gauge invariance with local compensating fields that lead effectively to pseudo-Riemannian geometry with tensor fields and GCT as the local symmetry group replacing the rigid translation group of Fourier transforms. Indeed, I think GCT has a natural CWT (Continuous Wavelet Transform) description - I am working on that idea, where the scale s of the adaptive windows of the CWT for zoom in and zoom out are enslaved to the local radii of curvature of the Riemann-Christoffel curvature tensor. This is in response to Wheeler's remark in "Geometrodynamics" that you cannot use Fourier transforms in GR.
He said that in the 1950's before the Gabor transform leading to modern ideas of wavelet transforms that should also replace the Schwinger-Feynman Green's function/Propagators in momentum space to do quantum field theory on a curved space-time background that emerges Sakharov style NOT out of the random ZPE (spin 1 and spin 1/2 PV), but out of the vacuum coherence missing in all the mainstream ideas.

 

On May 9, 2004, at 1:42 PM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:

clarification

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. From the position of GR one must take the view that PV is fundamentally wrong as a strong field theory!