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The Axes of Evil are East of Eden II

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Jack Sarfatti

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Feb 27, 2005, 6:16:37 PM2/27/05
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The Axes of Evil are East of Eden

A physicist in Flinders, Australia named Reg Cahill claims he detects
the absolute velocity of the Earth when a Michelson-Morley
interferometer is rotated by a right angle provided that the light
signals in the two interfering light paths pass through a gas whose
index of refraction is not equal to 1. The effect will not occur in
vacuum or solid state only in gas. We do not know if Cahill is making an
error or not, but suppose he turns out to be correct? What would it
mean? The theory of everything rests only on the intimate tango dance
two battle-tested ideas – each a kind of broken symmetry:

1. Local gauge invariance restoring a dynamical broken symmetry of a
source with a force field.
2. “More is different” spontaneous broken symmetry (SBS) in the vacuum
state of virtual quanta and in the ground state of real quanta leaving
the symmetry of the dynamics intact not broken.

The pre-Einsteinian Galilean relativity symmetry of Newton’s 17th
Century particle mechanics automatically guaranteed absolute
simultaneity with an aether or vacuum medium of what Newton called
“absolute rest”. This is easy to prove like a theorem in Euclid’s
geometry. Imagine a non-rotating uniformly moving “inertial frame”
(GIF). By definition, no external forces are acting on this platform of
detectors. The inertial frame falls freely weightless in what is called
a “geodesic” path. Suppose the velocity vector of light in vacuum is
measured by Alice in this frame to be the venerable c, whose magnitude
speed c = 186,000 miles per second in a given direction in space. Now
imagine Bob whizzing by Alice with a relative uniform velocity vector v.
What is the speed of the same light signal that Bob measures in his
inertial frame? According to the Galilean symmetry group that light
velocity vector will either be c + v if Bob moves opposite to the light
signal, or will be c – v if Bob tries to outrace the light signal in the
same direction. In what frame then will we see the speed c? Clearly,
only in the frame where v = 0! That is, the Galilean symmetry or
relativity automatically demands the frame of absolute rest as a
corollary not as an independent postulate! Indeed, that was the key idea
of Michelson at Case Institute in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1880s. He
aligned one arm of his horizontal interferometer in the direction
Earth’s motion where c’ = c +/- v and the other at right angles where c’
= c still in the horizontal plane. Michelson expected to see the pattern
of light fringes where the two beams come together shift when he rotated
his interferometer by a right angle 90 degrees about the perpendicular
axis to the horizontal plane that depended on the ratio (v/c)2. In fact,
he did not see any such shift beyond his expected errors. In other
words, absolute velocity v could not be detected! Fitzgerald, in Dublin,
explained this unexpected result by saying that the length L of the
interferometer path in the same direction as the Earth’s absolute
velocity shrunk to L’ = L[1 – (1/2)(v/c)2]1/2. In contrast, the length
of the other path at right angles to the first in the horizon tal plane
stayed the same. This adhoc mechanical aether conjecture would explain
the data. Poincare and Lorentz further developed this idea before 1905
when Einstein published his “On The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”,
which did not take much notice of Michelson’s interferometer anomaly.
Einstein was concerned with the fact that Maxwell’s electromagnetic
field equations did not preserve their form under the Galilean
relativity inertial frame transformations and this resulted in further
anomalies when say a bar magnet and a coil were in motion relative to
each other. You get one thing when the magnet is at absolute rest and
another when the coil is at absolute rest. Such a split is not ever
observed. This caused Einstein at age 26, an outcast from the
university to replace the Galilean frame shift with something else that
we now call the “Lorentz boost”. These new transformations changed time
as well as space, but left the “space-time interval” ds invariant, i.e.
unchanging for all relatively uniformly moving observers like Alice and
Bob. Newton’s point particle mechanical equations changed in structure
in order to be consistent with Maxwell’s field equation’s form not
changing in the frame shift. However, since the speed of light in vacuum
was a fixed point invariant, there was, it appeared no way to measure v
the absolute speed. No way Jose, until Cahill and another guy Consoli
from Catania, Sicily came along in 2005 100 years later. On the other
hand, Einstein’s 1905 Special Relativity (SR) does not say that absolute
velocity violates the laws of physics. It only says that if some new
measurement like Cahill’s measures it, then absolute velocity must be
appended like Euclid’s 5th Parallel Postulate and is not a theorem as it
is in Galilean relativity! Along comes SBS of the vacuum to save the
day giving a general theory of “preferred frames” that does not violate
the symmetries of the laws of physics!

The ferromagnet below its Curie temperature has a preferred orientation
frame in a finite 3D space domain in its macro-quantum SBS ground state.
Similarly, what Cahill may be seeing would be a preferred orientation
frame in a finite 4D space-time domain in the macro-quantum SBS vacuum
containing the Earth’s orbit. It might be the same or different at the
orbits of Mars and Venus et-al. That is, the existence of such a
preferred frame of “rapidity” is a contingent “frozen accident” of
history from the amplification of a random micro-quantum zero point
vacuum fluctuation in the pre-> post inflation phase transition that
created the Big Bang. Similarly, for the anomalous weak spatially
uniform radial gravity tug pointing back to the Sun

ag = - cH(t) ~ 10-7 cm/sec2

H(t) = R(t)dR(t)/dt

ds2 = -(cdt)2 + R(t)2[dx2 + dy2 + dz2]

seen in both the NASA Pioneer 10 & 11 space probes suddenly starting
only beyond Jupiter’s orbit out 20 AU. This is exactly what is expected
for a contingent frozen accident of history called the “hedgehog
topological defect” in the Higgs Ocean macro-quantum coherent
“multi-layered multi-colored” cosmic superconducting vacuum field out of
which Einstein’s gravity with both dark energy and dark matter emerge
completing Andrei Sakharov’s 1967 conjecture.

But we are not yet done because some physicists looking at WMAP
anomalies think they see the “Axis of Evil” that is a preferred axis in
space of the universe as if it were a giant “ferromagnet”. They don’t
know about Cahill’s similar preferred axis in space-time! As if that is
not enough, still other physicists think they see multiple images in the
WMAP data suggesting that our space is finite and closed in a giant
dodecahedron! It’s too soon to know if any of these people are correct
or are charging wind mills. However, all of these allegations are
simply explained in principle by only two great battle-tested ideas
cited above. i.e.,

3. Local gauge invariance restoring a dynamical broken symmetry of a
source with a force field.
4. “More is different” spontaneous broken symmetry (SBS) in the vacuum
state of virtual quanta and in the ground state of real quanta leaving
the symmetry of the dynamics intact not broken.


Tom Roberts

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Feb 28, 2005, 10:47:57 AM2/28/05
to Jack Sarfatti
Jack Sarfatti wrote:
> A physicist in Flinders, Australia named Reg Cahill claims he detects
> the absolute velocity of the Earth when a Michelson-Morley
> interferometer is rotated by a right angle provided that the light
> signals in the two interfering light paths pass through a gas whose
> index of refraction is not equal to 1. The effect will not occur in
> vacuum or solid state only in gas. We do not know if Cahill is making an
> error or not, [...]

For the case of the original Michelson Morley experiment, we _DO_ know he is
making an error. A statistical analysis of their errorbars, made from their
published data, shows unequivocally that their errorbars are significantly
larger than the variations in their data: Their 6-turn averages presented in
http://www.aip.org/history/gap/PDF/michelson.pdf on p340 have non-gaussian
variations with a sigma of 0.057 fringe -- larger than the entire plot on that
page, and roughly a factor of 10 times the visible variations.

[The non-Gaussian shape of the errors implies they have a rather
large systematic error, which of course is blatantly obvious in
their data.]

The Michelson Morley data are fully consistent with SR's prediction of a flat
line. For Cahill's theory they are consistent with any "absolute speed" under
something like 10,000 km/sec. His claim that they made a 10% measurement of that
speed with a value around 300 km/s is ludicrous -- he apparently took as fact
Consoli and Costanzo's wildly incorrect guesses about their resolution.

See http://groups-beta.google.com/group/sci.physics.relativity/msg/01a642d9b61b6968
for an analysis of the resolution of Michelson and Morley's experiment. See also
my followup that corrects a mistake in the original (does not change the
conclusion).

Basically Cahill, Consoli and Costanzo, and others, are seeing what they want to
see in the data. They are interpreting systematic errors as "signal".


Tom Roberts tjro...@lucent.com

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