Medium entrainment considered as flow

Hi Bart,

Sorry if it seems like I'm giving you a hard time. I'm really trying to help. But you are still using the wrong label for what is happening. (When I finally figure out how to explain this properly, a light bulb will go off in your mind and you will say "OHHHHH".)

(Please re-read my recent detailed comments about this in the Requiem for Relativity thread. But here is a summary)

When we look at light from a distant object, we either see it where it is, or we see it with an angular displacement from where it is.

There are a number (at least four) of phemnomena that can contribute to this angular displacement.

<b>lead angle</b> (caused at the source by aiming ahead of the target. If you spew light waves in all directions, then you don't have to know where to aim. It happens automatically.)
<b>medium drift</b> (caused in transit by transverse and/or longitudinal motion of the medium)
<b>medium drag</b> (caused in transit by friction with the medium)
<b>aberation</b> (caused at the observer by the observers transverse motion relative to a straight line between observer and source)

edit1******
actually that is wrong. it should be

the observer's transverse velocity relative to the direction of the incomming beam.
/edit1*****

AngularDisp = LeadAngle + DriftAngle + DragAngle + AberrationAngle

(And here is another example.)

Remember, I am looking at this from the more general perspecive of the physicist. Astronomers seem to be not used to thinking in terms of any phenomenon other than aberration[1] when talking about angular displacement. So they say aberration when they are actually talking about angular displacement, which <u>can</u> be caused by aberation but can also happen even when there is no aberration present.

<b>[Bart] "Light crossing the boundary of medium particles with different relative speed is causing the aberration of light."</b>

If there is a light carrying medium, and if there is a flow boundary in that medium that light from a Jovian moon crosses on its way here, then that light will most likely be displaced as it crosses the boundary. When the light arrives here that displacement will cause the moon to appear to be in the "wrong" place.

However, at the time the light beam sufferes this displacement it has not been observed. That separate event will not happen for many minutes.

And if Earth happens to be at a point in its orbit where it is moving either straight toward Jupiter or straight away from it, then the observer's transverse speed relative to the light beam from the moon is zero. Which means that the aberation angle for that particular observation will be zero.

But the moon is still in the wrong place.
edit2*****
change moon to star
/edit2****

Because even though aberation was zero, drift was not.

LB

[1]
We have no way to even guess what the lead angle was, but it does not matter as long as the source radiates in all directions. One of the beams will be just right.

Mainstream astronomers do not believe there is a medium, and if they are right then there can be no drift or drag contributions to angular displacement. Even if they are not right, they still do not include a term for them in their calculations.

Aberration angle is something they can actually measure. So in their minds, the drift angle and the aberration angle are one and the same.

<b>[Michiel] "2) The medium is entrained by mass in such a way that the velocity of the medium is constant and non-zero at the surface of the mass."</b>

And roughly a century of observaional evidence says that if there is a medium, it cannot have a velocity at the surface of Earth.

At least - not a steady velocity.

MMX type experiments have been done hundreds of thousands of times. If there were a medium out there that resembled the "classical aether" of the mid to late 1800s, or this "inward flowing aether" that you mention above, these MMX experiments would easily detect our movement through this medium. Or its movement through us. The difference in the speed of light for beams moving across the flow versus beams moving with or against the flow would be about 64 meters per second.

Since the very first MMX, no such difference has ever been observed.

But ...

These MMX experiments also rarely produce a result of zero. The actual results appear to vary unpredictably and are frequently in the range of 4 to 8 meters per second. Since no one believes in a light carrying medium, and since the non-zero results from MMX are "random" and much smaller than "expected", they are written off to equipment errors and ignored. Another gold mine?

<b>[Bart] "... a very special event in the sense that planetary aberration exceeded the value of stellar aberration ..."</b>

(replace "planetary aberration" with "planetary displacement angle" and stellar aberration" with "stellar displacement angle".)

Remember, aberration happens at the point of observation and depends only on the ratio of the transverse speed of the observer vs the speed of the incomming light beam or particle. If abberration were the only thing that could cause an observational displacement angle, it should not be possible for this to have happened.

To a main stream astronomer things like medium drag or medium drift don't exist. so when they see two objects with differing displacement angles, they can only scratch their heads.

To those willing to consider other ideas, it can be seen that the light from the background star could have been displaced by drift or drag numerous times during its trip to Earth. Never by very much, but then the observed difference was not very large either. By the time it got here the light beam was already out of postion.

How often do we see small errors in the location of some stars? But not others.
Do these erros persist?
Do they repeat?
Or do they go away and not repeat?
Does an error move from one star to another that is visually near-by?

Bart,

Have you received any feedback from the community of astronomers re your paper arguing for a medium-drift-effect in certain occultation observations? Specifically I'm wondering if anyone is objecting because of a strict adhearance to the technical definition of aberration.

Your paper does use the word aberration in places where you are clearly talking about medium drift. You will have an up hill battle just trying to get them to consider the possibiilty of a medium. Falling into a word/definition pothole won't make it any easier.

I'm not suggesting that you need to try to re-educate the astronomy community. But you need to personally understand the physical naure of what you are observing, so that you can search for wording to avoid any sort of knee-jerk rejection due to miscommunication.

The fact that no one truely has a good understanding of the physical nature of the medium we are talking about does not make your job any easier. I have some ideas[1] (based on TVF's theories) that seem to be internally consistant, but it would help to have other minds looking at observational evidence and evaluating that evidence in light of these ideas. And evaluating these ideas in light of the evidence.

If I'm right about the basic physical nature of the medium, observations such as the one you discuss in your paper should become easier to understand and explain. And the details of such an observation should allow me to fine tune my ideas. Hopefully this process will converge to an explanation that holds up in the face of future observations.


LB

[1]<ul><li>The medium is entrained by massive objects.</li>
<li>This entrainment must be static within and near each mass.</li>
<li>Entrainment beyond a ceratin distance ought to change from static to dynamic<ul>
<li>How far out?</li></ul>
<li>Still farther out, entrainment ought to cease. Beyond this distance there should be only the "background" medium (which ought be entrained by and move with the next larger gravitational structure).</li><ul>
<li>How far out?</li>
<li>Is the entrained medium near a planet/moon system large enough to exclude all background medium from the star it orbits?</li>
<li>Is the entrained medium near a star/planet system large enough to exclude all background medium from the galaxy it orbits?</li><ul>
<li>Joe Keller has suggested that there is obsevational evidence for an optical and/or radio anomaly at about 50 to 60 AU from Sol. Pinning this down could be a big help.</li></ul></ul>
<li>For a planet, entrainment near the orbital plane of its moons ought to be more consistent, and extend farther, than it does well above or below that plane.</li>
<li>For a star, entrainment near the orbital plane of its planets ought to be more consistent, and extend farther, than it does well above or below that plane.</li>
<li>For a galaxy ...</li>
</li></ul>
And so on.

One more thing Bart,

Tom was an astronomer. For most of his career, he was a main stream astronomer.

He learned in school that the anglular adjustment he had to make on his telescope to center a star was called the "aberration angle". And that is the word he used in his early writing.

Later in life, after he decided to leave the main stream, he began thinking in terms of light as a wave propagaing through a medium filled space, rather than as a particle moving through empty space-time. This leads immediately to considerations of medium drift, and he began to write about it.

But, more often than not, he continued to use the word "aberration angle" even when he meant "angular displacement caused by medium drift".

Old habits die hard. No one is perfect. I'm sure if you look, you will even find places where I have been inconsistent.

(Yeah I know - it <b>IS</b> hard to believe. But it is true. At least, I suspect it is true.)

LB

<b>[Michiel "Curved space-time is more of a mathematical construction than a deep physics explanation, in my opinion."</b>

This is more or less my impression as well. Many modern physicists (the character Sheldon Cooper in the TV series <i>The Big Bang Theory</i> is a stereotype of them) push things even farther, saying that physics is only concerned with producing equations that describe and predict. Once that is achieved, physics has no deeper interest in the issue. In particular, they have a tendency to scoff at the very concept of experimental verification. And to look down their noses at individuals who practice experimentation. But this is a tendency, not a necessity. Even Sheldon Cooper will cite experimental results when it suits him.

I'm not sure just how prevalent this idea is, and I know that many other modern physicists spend time trying to find out "why". But to me physics has <u>always been, first and foremost,</u> about answering the "why" and the "how" questions. They are frequently HARD to answer. And our first few attempts frequently turn out to be wrong. Remember Ptolemy? Or earth-air-fire-water? Or flat-earth?

We use math (the be-all and end-all of the Sheldon Coopers of the world) as a "mere" tool to help find those answers. Sometimes it actually helps.