To salvage the application of the Michelson interferometer for gravitational wave measurements, the LIGO team has resorted to all sorts of ways to avoid the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUB). Things like Standard Quantum Limit (SQL), Quantum Non-Demolition (QND) experiments, and "back-action" are completely meaningless. All this is the result of confusion between the wave-particle duality of quanta.
To avoid the negative consequences of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Relations (HUP), LIGO borrows from Braginsky et. al. to introduce what is supposed to be novel developments like the Standard Quantum Limit (SQL) and Quantum Non-Demolition (QND) experiments that supposedly beat the HUP. Yet, we know that HUP stands in the "defense" of quantum mechanics, to use a colorful expression borrowed from Feynman.
My new book,
Seeing Gravity
will be in all the bookstalls early next year, being published by World Scientific Publishing Company.
Metallic conductors like the 4 km long steel tubes of the LIGO interferometer are naturals for the attraction of electromagnetic disturbances. Back in 1893 FitzGerald noticed that the upper atmosphere was a good conductor of electricity. With a depth of 100 km, the cavity formed from what is now known as the ionosphere and the earth facilitates the establishment of very long wavelength electrodynamic oscillations having a period of roughly 0.1 sec.
In the December 12 1936 issue of Nature, Ludwik Silberstein publishes a letter entitled "Minimal lines and geodesics within matter: A fundamental difficulty of Einstein's theory." The issue Silberstein address was that Einstein equates geometry $G$ with a material tensor $T$ so that one should know what the other is talking about. Otherwise, you would be equating apples and oranges. Now according to Einstein's generalization of the Minkowski indefinite metric, $$ds^2=g_{\nu\mu}dx^{\nu}dx^{\mu}$$ its vanishing should still represent "light-lines".
A "black" hole by definition is black to anyone observing it from the outside. But, is it "black" inside? The same gravitational potential exists whether "inside" or "outside". Then what distinguishes "inside" from "outside"? It was shown by Luneburg [Luneburg, The Mathematical Theory of Optics, p. 172.] that light rays acted upon by a Coulomb potential cannot penetrate into regions greater than a fourth of the inverse of the absolute value of the total energy.
Everyone thinks of Kepler's laws as being static with the period of orbital motion enters into his third and not time increments. That is, it is the period that is proportional to the area to the power $3/2$, and not the time increments themselves. Yet, time does enter into his law, and there are two different time depending on which focus is used as a reference. We will show that Kepler's laws are fully compatible with the laws of geometrical optics.
In our last blog we derived the speed of gravity from the observational period and variation in the period of the binary pulsar PSR 1913+16 that was discovered by Taylor and Hulse.
It is known [Needham, Am. Math. Monthly 100 (1993) 119-137] that there are only three pairs of integer exponents for dual force laws $$[1,-2]\hspace{25pt}[-5,5]\hspace{25pt}[-4,-7].$$ $[\tilde{a},a]$ stands for pair of exponents in the force laws $$\frac{d^2z}{dt^2}=-z|z|^{\tilde{a}-1},$$ and $$\frac{d^2w}{d\tau^2}=-w|w|^{a-1},$$ where $z$ and $w$ are related by the conformal transform, $$w=z^{\alpha},$$ where $\alpha=(\tilde{a}+3)/2$, and $(\tilde{a}+3)(a+3)=4$.
Newton was well-aware of the fact that an inverse cubic orbit implies a bound orbit reaches the origin "by an infinite number of spiral revolutions..." This he first mentioned to Hooke in a letter addressed to him on the 13th of December 1679. General relativity, basing itself on the outer Schwarzschild solution, claims that "naked" singularities, like the inverse cubic law, don't exist. But, has anyone ever asked to what central force law the Schwarzschild metric corresponds?
