This is where you misunderestimate us. The lyndon's and Jerry's of the world think that we are unreceptive to new ideas, that we are clinging to our "mainstream science" theories with religious intensity, and that is why we treat their theories as bunk.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I, for one, would love to see a different view of gravity postulated which better explains how the universe works. Maybe it would explain the observed rotation of galaxies. Maybe it would explain the Pioneer's. Maybe it would shed new light on black holes. That would be the coolest thing ever.

But the theories discussed on this thread are not it. Jerry doesn't have a theory. He cannot explain how to prove his theory. He cannot demonstrate how his theory better explains any observed phenomena. His predictions are non-specific, and the few that were specific were wrong.

Yes. I'd like to reiterate that we do not dismiss these (lyndon, luni, jerry) theories out of hand. I think we've given a quantitative critique of these and it seems they cannot handle such constructive criticism.
I really do mean constructive gang, as we'd love to help in anything that appears to have the slightest shred of merit.
However, disconnected vuage statements that have little to no bearing on the purposed 'upheaval' to current physics without justification just will not work.
Keep at it, one day it may pay off...

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Feynman
>~~~~<
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

I don't think 'burning witches' was ever considered 'science' at all. And from what age are you writing, time traveller? BB is mainstream science and is popular.

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Knowledge is a curse, but ignorance is worse

The statistical gyrations necessary in the renormalization processes are not constraining.
No, in fact I am going to change it to answer Omicron’s points. Stubbornly clinging to a theory that is not supported by facts in evidence has zero scientific merit.

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jwj

It's ok not to know.

Do you mean, you finally accept that you were wrong and that the orbital mechanics used to get Huygens to Titan was accurate and correct?

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papageno


"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

Don't forget anthropology, the roots of this thread are deeply ingrained in philosophy. To even pretend to be a cosmologist requires a very broad background. I don't claim to be an expert in any of these fields, (including astronomy). But I can read and comprehend, ask questions and draw conclusions.



...not if the parachute became entangled in the transmitter...

Unfortunately the 1st proponent of continental drift died before his theories were seriously investigated, and turned out to be correct. If Einstein would not have pew poowed the evidence as coincidental and immaterial, the supportive data may have been collected in his lifetime.

The jury is still out on Bode's law, which is more or less what you described, and also Luny's ratios - they may both be coincidental, but until someone has a good explanation for why the Earth is emitting gamma rays, Luny, Bode, and Jerry are still in the running. (if you check out the gravity behaving badly thread, I did predict that the rotation of planets would cause radiation...or was that this or some other thread?)
Let me tell you another story,

When the Challenger exploded, about a minute after launch, it was close to two weeks before the public had a clue what had happened. But the engineers knew, or thought that they knew, almost immediately. A near-miss had occurred on a shuttle flight one year earlier: The O-rings had charred, and there was clear evidence of an out-gassing leak when the shuttle launched that quickly sealed itself.

It wasn’t long before an enquiry was launched, with no one other than Richard Feynman as the chairman. Everyone old enough to have watched the inquiry should remember Feynman dipping pieces of O-ring into something very cold, and everyone is satisfied this is the root cause of the Challenger, right? Wrong. The answer is only half right.

Why did the leak seal itself, and stay sealed in the earlier flight, but not the later one? Just behind the O-rings there was a second level of defense, a material usually used as a vacuum putty, but shuttle engineers were using it like fix-a-flat: This putty would flow into any gaps in the O-rings, providing a secondary seal. Why didn’t it work the second time? Because during that year, an asbestos-filled putty had been replaced by a non-asbestos filled putty. The stress capacity of the non-fiborous putty under pressure was not nearly as great the asbestos filled putty.

So why wasn’t this second failure included in the Feynmen report? Lies? Conspiracy? Cover up? None of the above. Nobody ask the right questions. The engineers fixed the problem, just like the o rings, but nobody stepped forward and said, “Ah, we goofed up two or three more times”.

ESA principles told us the A channel was not switched on when they were tired and confused, and before anyone had time to conduct a rigorous review of the software. Nobody is going to step up to the plate and volunteer “we screwed up twice”, unless we keep asking the right questions.

Edit: Gamma ray source

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jwj

It's ok not to know.

Didn't channel A and B use both the same antenna? (maybe someone with a better knowledge of Huygens comm system could clarify that). So a malfunction of the antenna would affect all the data, not only one channel. And I think both transmitters were inside Huygens, I don't see how the parachute could affect them...

They're not coincidental, simply these are the facts. And every good theory should explain them. But your (and Lunatik) approach is different: you try to fit the facts in your theory.

Maybe, maybe not; collecting some data depends not only on the good willing of some people but also on the technical resources available. So when the data has become available and proven to be right the theory has been accepted. The problem is that the data provided by Huygens and Cassini confirmed Newton theory, not yours. Even the fact that Cassini has reached Saturn proved Newton to be right.

Now, it seems that you believe that for scientists the mainstream theories are a kind of religion and peoples like Einstein are demi-gods and nobody dare to contest what they are saying. Although is true that some scientists had (and still have) a great influence outside their field, I recall you that Einstein was against some aspects in the quantum theory, but the rest of scientific comunity has accepted this theory as the best suited to the observed phenomena at that time.

I think the main negative point in your theory is not the theory itself, but the way you're claiming that Einstein and Newton are wrong. Of course Newton is wrong; we all know that there are things that his theory fails to explain. The same for GR. All these theories are approximations having a certain degree of precision, but the fact that, above this error threshold, those theories are correct is proven every second: your computer, the satellites communications, your car, your watch...all are based on these old mainstream theories. It is important to know the limits of our theories, but to accept a new one takes more than just saying "the old ones are wrong". We already know they're wrong. :wink:


Please tell me which one of the two possibilities above you choose.


Source, please? I'm not aware of this one so I'd like to see some articles about it.



So you're saying that maybe it was another error in Huygens software? How is this support you're theory?
If not and you're saying that some unknown effect is to blame for channel A loss, then why cover it, since this could be itself a bigger discovery than the entire Huygens mission?
[/b]

Well, that probably explains why this thread has spun on for 57 pages! #-o Despite the fact that Huygens made it through 4 interplanetary flybys, and numerous flybys of Saturnian moons before landing in one piece and functioning long enough to send back a treasure-trove of data and pictures.

No evidence for Titan being significantly more massive than we thought, no clean evidence for any new gravitational theory. I say no clean evidence because all 57 of these pages have been turning on things that happened in an atmosphere that we have never really experienced until now. The shear unpredictability of atmospheric effects precludes us from saying anything detailed about deviations from Newtonian gravity, let alone general relativistic theories.

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

Ahm, the scientific method, scientific theory, scientific research, all fall under the greater umbrella of anthropology and philosophy.

While it is true that it is difficult to seperate atmospheric effects from other forces, the peculiarities associated with Huygens descent cannot, at this time, be written of as atmospheric. For example, if the optical density was 40 rather than 20, it could be reasonable to assume there is a high amount of dust and/or organic vapors in the atmosphere. However, an optical density of less than two means the expected amount of scattering, due to the expected density of the nitrogen layers, was much less than the physical model predicted.

I am only aware of two phenomenon that could have resulted in this occurrence: Either the upper atmosphere is much less dense than predicted relative to density near the surface, and therefore the gravitational pull hold the atmosphere more tightly, or there is some type of Fressnel lensing focusing and gathering light - not likely.

Anyone else care to explain this?

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jwj

It's ok not to know.

It is my understanding there are two circularly polarized antenna - I don’t think the parachute covering one of them would decimate the sound, but it was one of the concerns raised during the design.

I’ve tried to make some predictions, but the only reason for having a theory in the first place is because the observed data do not match other people’s predictions.

Add somewhere between a two hundred year and a twenty month time delay and yes, we hope the new theory is better than the old one. But the fact that a new theory is more consistent with the data does not make it correct, not even more correct than the old theory - it could be worse, and I think General Relativity is worse: it is misleading.

Wrong! Completely wrong! The data released to date are much more ambiguous that you suggest. Crater depth, temperature, “Wild oscillations” during descent, optical density, and the peculiar images are more in line with my predictions than the expected data: or as stated by a PI explaining why they were having a difficult time interpreting the data, “Nobody could have predicted this.”

Try writing an astrophysical proposal that is non-supportive of the big bang, and see what kind of funding you can stir up.

You are correct about currently accepted theories in general, but I think general relativity was such a bad turn it has blinded use.

General Relativity has reduced contemporary lectures about the universe to confusing analogies of rising raisin bread and dark stuff with the same physical properties as the Holy Trinity. It is nonsense!

Time dilation is not a property necessary to explain the orbit of Mercury or the displacement of stars viewed near massive objects. These observations can be explained with reasonable extensions of Maxwell’s laws and physical causality associated with the effect matter has on local space.

The heat shield landed very close to Huygens - within a few meters. I don’t know when it was ejected, although it would seem more probable that it was ejected very near the ground, this would completely contradict the ESA timetable of events.

I don’t think they understood what happened to the data, when they announced that channel A was lost. Here is my best guess, but it is just a guess:

Cassini was positioned to receive data from Huygens for ~2.5 hours, then Cassini turned and beamed the data to the earth. Engineers on Earth already knew Huygens had been alive for more than three hours, so they eagerly awaited and anticipate a full data package. (During that interval, Tomasko predicted Twenty full panoramic image sets from a wide range of altitudes should be received. During that period, someone also stated that “We know the Doppler Wind Experiment was a success.”)

Assume for a minute that I am correct, and the entire descent phase took only 20 minutes: So instead of getting two hours of sky, and a half hour of ground data, many of the ‘sky’ indicators - acceleration, radar, sonar, Doppler wind, started displaying zero or constant values much too soon, and the values that were there made little sense. Another possibility, is that only the first half that volume of data was transmitted before Cassini lost contact. (If Huygens fell faster, it may have rotated with the planet, out of range of Cassini, much sooner than expected.)

If you were watching the live broadcast, as I was, you could see the jaws fall as Cassini broadcast a whole bunch of numbers (possibly zeroes) that had engineers staring in disbelief. Confusion. Why was the data package half the size it should have been? The Doppler wind experiment numbers made no sense whatsoever. Could one of the channels have failed? It seemed likely, so that was what was announced.

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jwj

It's ok not to know.

And yes he still hasn't answered my questions how he thinks the probe wouldn't be a melting, smashed hull cratered on the surface of Titan...when we in fact know this is not the case.... :roll:

Give it up Jerry. No one in their right mind thinks you're right.

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"The bread's hollowed out --- the veggies go on forever --- and --- oh my God! --- it's full of meat!" - Maksutov

General relativity is not about "analogies of rising raisin bread" but about the math. You could stand to learn some of it. This is more like the kind of commentary we have gotten from oriel36, cyrek1 and Sam5 on this topic.
And what is this "effect matter has on local space"? What kind of effect can matter have on space? How about altering the metric tensor by which distances and time intervals are measured? Oh, wait a minute, that's general relativity! How about changes to the permittivity and permeability of space, thereby resulting in variable c? Oh, wait a minute, those changes could also be made to the 00-component of the metric tensor. All roads lead to general relativity. My suggestion is that you curl up with a copy of Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler and read until you understand what general relativity is all about.

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

I'm not asking about Mercury near the weak gravity limit. I'm asking specifically about PSR B1913+16 (=J1915+1606).

What extensions, what effects? More generalities.

Here you go Jerry, the data on PSR B1913+16 (=J1915+1606). What does your idea (or even better, use any ideas you can find, just provide the equations) to predict the time of the inspiral, how much precession per year.

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Some try to tell me, thoughts they cannot defend,... - Moody Blues.

The Thread That Wouldn't Die!

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