Mail Archive

Ether

• Subject: Ether
• From: Ray T
• Date: Wed Jun 14 18:25:50 1995
• Message-Id: id517

Dear Ray,


>I have been learning about WWW.  There are some wonderful tools
>out there for getting information about anything that one wants to
>know.  The "Search Engines" can also be fed with your own documents
>so that other people will find your WWW pages when they look up
>particular subjects.  Have you made use of these?

The WWW is a truly wonderful thing. The pity is it is full of mundane
information... There's not so much on it about Krishna. But the search engines are
amazing. I have listed my pages with some of them and I get a few people writing
me letters as a result. My information is a little esoteric and off-beat to most
people so I can't expect a huge response but there are certainly some people out
there reading my pages and sending me letters.

With my service provider the cost of setting up the WWW pages is very small. I'm
only paying $5/month for what I have up now. They give you 100K free and charge
1c/month for each Kb above that so it's very cheep.

I think you should put your papers on it too. You can index them carefully with
the search engines and you can also post announcements into the related news-
groups announcing a "New WWW site" or a "New astronomical page" or whatever you
want.

>So people have a choice of years amoung three things.
>1. The Seasons.
>2. The Star patterns
>3. Cycles other than the seasons.
>We choose 1 for our year.

It's interesting that in the Vedic time they didn't seem to use solar calendars.
They used lunar ones. The lunar calender is much nicer if you just want to be able
to find out the day by looking in the sky. They divided each month into two
fortnights, the bright-moon fortnight from the full moon to half moon and the
dark-moon fortnight from the half-moon to the dark-moon. They had 12 months a year
and added an extra month each 3 or 4 years to keep the months in step with the
seasons [the solar year]

>
>> By the way, in your opinion is it possible the universe is not
>> expanding? Do the red-shifts actually prove it is expanding? And
>> could we be in the center of the universe?
>
>There are many qualifications needed to any answer to that question.
>The simple answer is that I don't think of the universe as expanding.
>However it all depends on how "length" and "time" are defined.
>We have natural feelings about these, but we don't live long enough

>to experience the changes associated with space expanding (if it is).
>
>Perhaps a parallel.  At one time people believed that the sun went
>round the earth.  It is still possible to make calculations based on
>that assumption and get the correct answers (according to relativity).
>There were (contrary to modern opinion) very good reasons for that
>belief, namely that the stars showed no sign of movement (paralax)
>due to our orbiting the sun.  Only in the 19th century (sorry this
>date is based on christian timetables!) were telescopes accurate
>enough to measure the paralax of stars (due to their large distances).

They can accurately measure the parallax of the stars then? Does this clearly rule
out an earth-centered universe? (because then there would be no parallax
presumably)

>Nowadays it makes sense to see the earth as moving around the sun,
>although we think of the sun as moving a little about the common
>centre of gravity.  This view is considered better because the
>pattern of movements of all things is simpler in that way.
>
>The similar situation exists (in a more complicated way) with the
>scale of the universe and time.  It is as if we were at a time where
>the idea of the earth's movement was proposed, but its motion
>could'nt be detected.

I had this discussion in another place at another time... They talk about the
corilous psuedo-force and Faulcolts (sp?) Pendulum. That seems to be the standard
proof that we are rotating. But they very loudly deny that the corilous force has
any effect on water going down plug-holes though. They say it is much too weak.
The direction the water spins out of the bath is due to the initial motion of the
water... Initially I thought there was a tendency for water to go down clockwise
here and anti-clockwise in the northern hemisphere. But they say not. It is
random. What do you think?

Just for fun I tried to argue that the earth was flat, in the center of the
universe and not rotating and that their pendulums were rotating because the
universe was rotating over the top of our heads... But there are many problems
with this model! The only thing I couldn't come up with an explaination for is the
South Pole! [the North Pole was the center of my flat-earth surrounded by all the
continents then surrounded by the ocean then surrounded by an icy mountainous
region [the South "Pole" which is not a "pole" any more!] How can you have a point
in the sky in the Northern Hemisphere around which all the stars rotate and
another point in the sky in the Southern Hemisphere with different stars rotating
around it. That was the thing that really stumped me...

>Modern science recognises the idea of
>different frames of reference and allows us to see which ones have
>the simplest rules.  Simplest is considered best, and known as
>Occams razor.  The trouble is that in cosmology and physics under
>extreme circumstances (such as the early universe if there was a Big
>Bang) are known to have some problems and even apparant paradoxes.
>In my view the paradoxes all result from our inconsistent use of
>words and concepts, but the fact is there are some things that are
>very difficult to get to grips with.
>
>What all this means is that it is possible to define "space" and
>"time" in more than one way, and to have an infinite past in one
>case with a non-expanding universe, or a finite past with an
>expanding universe.  This may sound daft, but remember that we are
>talking about non-subjective time.  Subjective time may have been
>entirely different, or non-existent if there were no subjects.
>
>Gosh!  I just realised that this is my second long winded introduction.

Very interesting though..

>Anyway, my view is that the simplest rules result like this.
>
>* The universe is not expanding (may be finite or infinite).
>

>* Energy that started as one very large wave is gradually moving to
>  smaller and smaller waves all the time.  It is possible that there
>  is a reverse process, but I have no evidence for this.
>
>* The redshift is an optical illusion.  Because of the energy change
>  of waves above, each wave reamins of constant size but its frequency
>  gradually changes.  So we see distant galaxies as they were long
>  ago and they had different frequency atomic processes.  It is not
>  light that redshifts but matter that blueshifts.

I don't really understand this. Perhaps you could try to clarify it a bit more.
The way they talk about the red-shift is quite convincing... But in your system
would the red-shift be related to the distance of the stars or not. (The Vedic
description seems to predict a MUCH smaller universe than the one the astronomers
talk about!)

>
>* The speed of light is different at different places and different
>  times due to the changes in the waves.  In effect the speed of light
>  depends on the tension of space which varies according to the
>  energy of the waves (this is a direct parallel with the speed of
>  sound in matter).

This sounds like a very convincing [but radical] argument to me. But if sound is
just light moving through air and thus slowed down how is it that light is also
moving in the same air at the speed of light. Does the speed of light change in
water? How would that impact your ideas?

>
>* Space is Euclidean (not bent like in relativity) and time absolute.

How is it bent in relativity ( I don't understand) and how is Euclidean space
different?

>
>Now it is debatable whether this is simpler than the standard theory.
>It could be transposed to the standard theory by the right definitions.
>However what is for sure is that I can calculate quite a few things
>that the standard theory can't, and they can do a couple of things that
>I can't (although someone else might be able to using my theory).
>
>In particular these things relate to the redshift and suchlike, so
>they are the things that you are concerned with.  I enclose a paper
>on the redshift explanation which wasn't included in those that I
>originally sent.

I have read the paper and some things are coming a little clearer but it's a new
world to me! Looking forward to your reply.

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