Suppression of Inconvenient Facts in Physics - 2

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Suppression of Inconvenient Facts in Physics - 2

After 11 months of investigation, Bockris was exonerated again in May 1995. But the official investigation is only part of the story. An article in Infinite Energy (19) which describes the entire affair in full details suggests a psychological explanation for the unscientific conduct of Bockris' colleagues:

One of the most difficult aspects of the treatment to which Bockris was subjected was social ostracism, starting with Dean Kemp's accusation and not even ending with the second exoneration. There were about sixty-five professors in the large Chemistry Department at Texas A&M. Most ignored Bockris for much of the two-year period in which the University, egged-on by ring-leaders in the Department, acted against him. After the first complete exoneration, two professors did congratulate him, but he was isolated. Bockris' wife Lilli felt it perhaps more than he, because she had a number of faculty wives whom she had known as friends. When she met them now in the supermarket, instead of having the usual kindly chat, they turned their backs on her. Lilli recalls that the year she spent in Vienna after the Nazis took over seemed to her less unpleasant and threatening than the isolation and nastiness which she felt in College Station, Texas from 1993 through 1995.

One would have thought that after all that had been done, everything would be settled now. This was not the attitude of many of Bockris' colleagues. The motivating force for the antipathy may be the subconscious fear that the discoveries of the Bockris group might eventually be proved and recognized. Then his original contributions would be rated as discoveries of great magnitude. There were at least two professors in the Chemistry Department who had made it known that that they expected to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry some day. The possibility that it might go instead to a colleague whose work they so much denigrated must have been an unwelcome thought. (They did not have the attitude of physicist Richard Feynman, who was displeased by the artificial focus on one person's accomplishment that the Nobel Prize system encouraged.)

Having failed in the three official investigations that had been carried out against Bockris, they decided that all they could do would be to persuade the head of the department to have Bockris shunned—as in an excommunication for religious heresy. No one was supposed to speak with the errant Bockris. For a long time, absorbed in his work as ever, he didn't understand that shunning was underway. Most of the colleagues had been ignoring him anyway since the inquiries had begun in 1993. He did notice, however, that whenever he wanted to talk to the Head of the Department, perhaps once every few months, he came to his office and did not invite Bockris to come to his. Of course, he was more than twenty years younger than Bockris, but later Bockris realized that this was an example of the shunning. The Head did not want anyone to see that he was talking collegially with Bockris!

Bockris' colleagues in the physical chemistry division took no notice of the shunning order, which might have gone around unofficially. In practice, the shunning made no effective difference to how Bockris carried out his work, though it was a very considerable act of spite. It proved once again that at least in the Chemistry Department at Texas A&M University, research results which do not agree with existing theory are not tolerated."

The Wired article suspects financial motives behind the scientific establishment's anti-scientific witch hunt: (17)

Financial factors may have played a part in the fierce animosity exhibited toward cold fusion experiments. When a congressional subcommittee suggested that $25 million could be diverted from hot fusion research to cold fusion, naturally the hot fusion scientists were outraged."

Today, the evidence that transmutation of heavy elements can occur in electrochemical systems has become fairly strong. Yasuhiro Iwamura, Mitsuru Sakano and Takehiko Itoh of the Mitsubishi Advanced Technology Research Center have shown reproducible transmutation of Cesium (Z=55) into Praseodymium (Z=59) and Strontium (Z=38) into Molybdenum (Z=42) in a deuterium-palladium system. Their results were published in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics. (20)

These results have been independently replicated by Higashiyama et al at Osaka University and were presented at the Tenth International Conference on Cold Fusion in Cambridge, Massachusetts in August 2003. (21)

At www.lenr-canr.org  the interested reader can find a comprehensive collection of papers on Low Energy Nuclear Reactions.

Special Relativity Theory: Beyond Criticism

Einstein's special theory of relativity, published in 1905, is one of the foundational theories of modern physics. It states that the vacuum speed of light is the same for all observers in inertial (non-accelerated) reference frames, and that time and space coordinates combine in a peculiar way when measured from different inertial systems. Exactly how this happens is described by a set of equations called the Lorentz Transformation.

Strictly speaking, special relativity theory does not apply to anything in the physical universe, since gravitational fields, however minute, are always present. It took Einstein about 10 years to incorporate gravity and acceleration into his theory, and the result is known as general relativity. It describes gravity not as a force, but as curvature of space-time caused by mass. According to general relativity, there can be no such thing as a gravity shield.

Despite the consensus of a majority of physicists that special relativity is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, and general relativity proven at least with a high degree of confidence, there are reasonable arguments and pieces of evidence against these theories. But relativity dissidents are routinely censored from presenting their ideas at conferences or having them published in the scientific literature. John E. Chappell, Jr., the late director of the Natural Philosophy Alliance (an organization of relativity critics), relates the following suppression story: (22)

One of the most recent [suppression stories] comes from a new NPA member who, when doing graduate work in physics around 1960, heard the following story from his advisor: While working for his Ph.D. in physics at the University of California in Berkeley in the late 1920s, this advisor had learned that all physics departments in the U.C. system were being purged of all critics of Einsteinian relativity. Those who refused to change their minds were ordered to resign, and those who would not were fired, on slanderous charges of anti-Semitism. The main cited motivation for this unspeakably unethical procedure was to present a united front before grant-giving agencies, the better to obtain maximal funds. This story does not surprise me. There has been a particularly vicious attitude towards critics of Einsteinian relativity at U.C. Berkeley ever since. I ran into it in 1985, when I read a paper arguing for absolute simultaneity at that year's International Congress on the History of Science. After I finished, the Danish chairman made some courteous remarks about dissidents he had learned about in Scandinavia, and then turned to the audience for questions. The first speaker was one of a group of about 4 young physics students in the back. He launched immediately into a horrible tirade of verbal abuse, accusing me of being entirely wrong in my analysis, a simplification of the Melbourne Evans analysis-'Evans is wrong; you are wrong,' he shouted. He accused me of being way out of line to present my 'faulty' arguments on his prestigious campus. When I started to ask him 'Then how would you explain...', he loudly interrupted me with 'I don't have to explain anything.' The rest of the audience felt so disturbed by all this, that the question session was essentially destroyed."

Such reactions are not uncommon. To even begin to criticize Einstein's theory of special relativity has become a scientific heresy of the highest order. The prevailing attitude of the physical establishment is that anyone who doubts the validity of this "bedrock of modern physics" is insane, and that trying to refute it is a symptom of "psychosis"(23).

Caltech Professor David L. Goodstein states in a video-tape lecture: (24)

There are theories in science, which are so well verified by experience that they become promoted to the status of fact. One example is the Special Theory of Relativity -- it's still called a theory for historical reasons, but it is in reality a simple, engineering fact, routinely used in the design of giant machines, like nuclear particle accelerators, which always work perfectly. Another example of that sort of thing is the theory of evolution. These are called theories, but they are in reality among the best established facts in all of human knowledge."

Isaac Asimov has stated that "no physicist who is even marginally sane doubts the validity of SR." (25)

An article on relativity dissidents (26) quotes relativist Clifford Will of Washington University expressing a similar sentiment:

SR has been confirmed by experiment so many times that it borders on crackpot to say there is something wrong with it. Experiments have been done to test SR explicitly. The world's particle accelerators would not work if SR wasn't in effect. The global positioning system would not work if special relativity didn't work the way we thought it did.

Unfortunately for the progress of physics, when opinions like these reach a critical mass, they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dissent is no longer respected, or even tolerated. Evidence to the contrary can no longer be communicated, for journals will refuse to publish it (23). Mathematically and logically, the notion that a theory that has made many correct predictions or leads to engineering applications must necessarily be true is untenable. Wrong models can make correct predictions. Scientific models may produce arbitrarily many, arbitrarily good predictions and still be flawed, as the historical example of the Ptolemaic (geocentric) model of the solar system shows. It does not matter how many observations are consistent with a theory if there is only one observation that is not. Ironically, relativity theory itself teaches us this lesson.

For centuries, Newtonian physics had led science to one triumph after another in explaining the inner workings of the natural world, and at the end of the 19th century, no physicist who was "even marginally sane" doubted its validity. After all, hadn't the validity of Newtonian physics "been confirmed by experiment so many times" that it would have "bordered on crackpot to say there is something wrong with it"? Didn't the operation of the world's steam engines prove its validity? And yet, Newtonian physics loses its validity at speeds approaching the speed of light. In hindsight, it is obvious why the discrepancy was never caught. Due to the enormity of the speed of light c, effects of the order of (v/c) only manifest themselves in highly sophisticated experiments. Similarly, even modern technology cannot easily distinguish between relativity and competing theories that agree with relativity at first order of (v/c) but disagree at higher order. One such competing theory is Ronald Hatch's Modified Lorentz Aether Theory (27).

Hatch, a former president of the Institute of Navigation and current Director of Navigation Systems Engineering of NavCom Technologies, is an expert on the GPS. Concerning the question of whether the operation of the GPS proves the validity of SR, he has come to conclusions diametrically opposite from Clifford Will's. In Relativity and GPS (28), (29), he argues that the observed effect of velocity on the GPS clocks flat out contradicts the predictions of special relativity.

Hatch's proposed alternative to special and general relativity theory, Modified Lorentz Aether Gauge Theory (MLET), agrees with General Relativity at first order but corrects many astronomical anomalies that GRT cannot account for without ad-hoc assumptions, such as the anomalous rotation of galaxies and certain anomalies in planetary orbits. In addition, the force of gravity is self-limiting in MLET, which eliminates point singularities (black holes), one of the major shortcomings of GRT. One of the testable predictions of Hatch's theory is that LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, will fail to detect gravity waves. As of July 2007, this prediction stands. (30)

The myth of the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment.

Relativity textbooks all contain the story of how the Michelson-Morley experiment (28) supposedly proved the non-existence of a light-carrying medium, the aether. In this experiment, light rays are sent on round trips in different directions and then reunited, resulting in an interference pattern. If an aether "wind" caused the speed of light to be direction-dependent, then rotation of the experimental apparatus would result in a shift of this pattern. But such a shift was never detected, proving the isotropy (direction-independence) of the speed of light, or so the story goes.

But physical reality is more complicated than the foundational myth of relativity would have us believe. An examination of historical papers on the subject indicates that relativists have rewritten history. The M-M experiment of 1887 found only a fraction of the effect size predicted by the stationary aether hypothesis, thus clearly disproving it, but the effect was emphatically not "null" within the accuracy of the experiment.
In a 1933 paper, The Aether-Drift Experiments and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth (31), physicist Dayton C. Miller reviewed the evidence and concluded that

The brief series of observations was sufficient to show that the effect did not have the anticipated magnitude. However, and this fact must be emphasized, the indicated effect was not zero; the sensitivity of the apparatus was such that the conclusion, published in 1887, stated that the observed relative motion of the earth and aether did not exceed one-fourth of the Earth's orbital velocity. This is quite different from a null effect now so frequently imputed to this experiment by the writers on Relativity.

Miller showed that there is a systematic effect in the original M-M data indicating a speed of the Earth relative to the Aether of 8.8 km/s for the noon observations and 8.0 km/s for the evening observations. He believed that the aether was entrained ("dragged along") by the earth. To test that hypothesis, Miller endeavored to replicate the M-M experiment (which had been performed in a basement in Cleveland) at greater altitude on Mount Wilson, where presumably there would be a stronger aether drift.
After years of careful experimentation, Miller indeed found a systematic deviation from the null result predicted by special relativity, which greatly embarrassed Einstein and his followers. Einstein tried to explain it away as an artifact of temperature variation, but Miller had taken great care to avoid precisely that kind of error. Miller told the Cleveland Plain Dealer on January 27, 1926,

The trouble with Professor Einstein is that he knows nothing about my results. ... He ought to give me credit for knowing that temperature differences would affect the results. He wrote to me in November suggesting this. I am not so simple as to make no allowance for temperature.

But the tide of scientific opinion had turned against the aether and in favor of Einstein.
The 1919 solar eclipse observations led by Sir Arthur Eddington that allegedly confirmed general relativity's prediction of the deflection of starlight by a gravitational field were not accurate enough to test Einstein’s prediction, and confirmation was obtained by reading the desired result into the data. (32) This "confirmation" was triumphantly announced by Eddington at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society to an audience that had not actually seen the data first hand. In the judgement of an eye witness, the meeting resembled a coronation ceremony rather than a scientific conference (33).

Because of this scientific fraud, Einstein became a world celebrity overnight, surrounded by an aura of scientific infallibility. Miller's results, which suggested that in order to detect anisotropies in the speed of light, the interferometer needed to be surrounded by as little matter as possible, and located at a high altitude, were ignored in subsequent null replications of the experiment, such as the Brillet-Hall experiment (34), and the Müller experiment(35).

After Miller's death, one of his students, Robert S. Shankland, gave the physics establishment the final excuse it needed to forget Miller's work for good (36). Shankland simply revived the old criticism of temperature variations, against which Miller had always successfully defended himself during his lifetime, to reach the conclusion that Miller's results must be invalid. Relativity skeptic James DeMeo, Ph.D., has undertaken a detailed review of Miller's work and Shankland's critique (37) that comes to the conclusion that the Shankland team with some degree of consultation with Einstein, decided that 'Miller must be wrong' and then set about to see what they could find in his archive that would support that conclusion.

A 2003 paper by Reginald T. Cahill and Kirsty Kitto of the School of Chemistry, Physics and Earth Sciences at Flinders University, Adelaide, published in the dissident journal Apeiron (38), argues that the reason why earlier M-M experiments gave small but detectable non-null results, while more recent replications gave clear null results, is that the earlier interferometers were filled with gas, while the modern ones were evacuated. It presents a new unified analysis of M-M type experiments that derives consistent estimates of the absolute speed of the Earth from gas-mode M-M experiments while predicting the observed null result for vacuum-mode experiments.
In a later paper (60), Cahill charges that the evidence for absolute motion is not being considered by mainstream physics not because it is weak, but because it is being censored:

Physics is a science. This means that it must be based on (i) experiments that test its theories, and (ii) that its theories and reports of the analyses of experimental outcomes must be freely reported to the physics community. Regrettably, and much to its detriment, this has ceased to be the case for physics. Physics has been in an era of extreme censorship for a considerable time; Miller was attacked for his major discovery of absolute linear motion in the 1920's, while DeWitte was never permitted to report to physicists the data from his beautiful 1991 coaxial cable experiment. Amazingly these experimenters were unknown to each other, yet their data was is in perfect agreement, for by different techniques they were detecting the same phenomenon, namely the absolute linear motion of the earth through space. All discussions of the experimental detections of absolute motion over the last 100 years are now banned from the mainstream physics publications.

In 2004, Cahill's analysis found a mainstream advocate in Maurizio Consoli, a physicist at the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics. Consoli managed to get this idea published in the mainstream physics journal Physics Letters A (39). A 2005 New Scientist article (40) reports that the quantum optics group at Humbold University, Berlin was interested in performing a gas-mode version of the M-M experiment. At the time of this writing (October 2007), no results have been published, and it is unknown to this writer whether this crucial experiment which could overturn our entire understanding of nature is still being planned.

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