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Originally Posted by Tassel
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Originally Posted by Jerry
We do not have ranging data - Signals sent from Earth and repeated back to us from Haley's comet - this is the only way to unambiguously measure distance to the level of accuracy achieved by the Pioneer probes...
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This statement is false. If an astronomer can get Halley in the eyepiece of a telescope when it's at the edge of the solar system, that astronomer knows precisely where Halley is.
We're not just talking about distance anyway, we're talking about location. But even if it was just distance, we wouldn't need to measure it with the accuracy of the Pioneer probes to show that yours and Lunatik's hypotheses are false, since you both predict a huge change in G versus the predicted value. |
The trick to knowing exactly where Haley's comet is not the result of exacting gravimetric predictions, but knowing the current position, and precisely where the comet was a minute, an hour, a day ago, a week ago, a month ago, and a year ago. The rate of change in every vector can then be calculated, and it's position in the sky tomorrow can be predicted and plotted without even using the laws of gravity - especially if it is a long ways from the sun, where daily and even weekly changes in velocity and acceleration are minicule.
The actual orbit can then be plotted, and compared with the predicted orbit based upon Keplar's laws. But it is never exactly where it should be, as the solar wind, the perturbations of the planets and any other gases, asteroids, comets - even magnetic field effects cause biases that lead to uncertanties that are of a much higher order than what Lunatik or I predict.
We have only know the position of Haley's comet with great accuracy for about 20 years - since it's total orbital period is >70 years, we don't even know the exact orbit, and even if we did, and it turned out to be consistent with a varying force of gravity, the variance would be written- off as unknown Keplar belt objects, or possibly Dark Energy, which should be lurking out there somewhere.
The Pioneer anomaly is on the order of 1x10^-9 m/sec^2. When the entire orbit of Haley's comet is known, perhaps in another 30 years, we may be able to determine the location and velocity with enough accuracy to verify the Pioneer anomaly, but don't hold your breath.
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Originally Posted by Jerry
and even these measurements are ambiguous if, as I have hypothesised, the speed of light is increasing with increasing distance from the sun.
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It's obvious that you like to use your ambiguous ad hoc undefined variable speed of light to patch any gaping hole in your "hypothesis", but what does the speed of light have to do with the location of Halley's comet? It's either in the predicted location or it's not. It doesn't matter how long the light took to get from there to here. If it wasn't precisely where it was supposed to be in its orbit, it would be impossible to find. Try again.
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Not!
The speed of light is a fundamental, in fact one of the critical observations. I am hypothesizing that Einstein was wrong when he attributed the results of the Michelson Morley experiment as time dilation.
Assuming each and every massive objects causes chaotic perturbations in the composite electromagnetic field surrounding it, and that when a photon approaches an object, it is slowed in proportion to the velocity of the object relative to the photon is a reasonable alternative to adjusting time. A necessary extension of this hypothesis, is that massive objects like the sun slow and bend the path of light so much it appears to distort both space and time.
The polarization of light by the gravity of clusters of galaxies is a well known phenomenon that can be predicted using the same calculations used to vary the speed of light in transparent mediums of different densities. The proposal that gravity is electromagnetic has been on the table for as long as GR, but it has been shot down largely because the Planck constant and Wien limits do not allow an electromagnetic field strength with a great enough cross section. I can find no hard reason for the assumption that Planck's constant is absolute, only that it defines the radiation limits of what we term baryonic matter.
Since we cannot, using GR derived limits on inverse Compton scattering, explain the energy or penetration powers of cosmic rays, it is not not the province of GR theoriest to declare the Wien and ZKG limits absolute.
Now a theory can be developed that explains the 'bending of time and space' near the sun in terms of electronic field effects. I am not the first person to explain the 'Zero Point Field' in these terms, but I might be the first to conclude that the field does not exist independent of matter, and that it attenuates with increasing distance from massive objects like the sun, and this effect changes the mean path through space of everything.
Getting back to Haley's comet and the pioneer probes, if the speed of light is increasing with increasing distance from the Earth, the time-of-flight used in ranging studies underestimates the true distance. This means that even the measured accelerations of the Pioneer probes towards the sun are wrong and that the probes may actually be accelerating away from us.