Re: Tom Van Flandern and Newtonian Gravity

From: Mike (eleatis_at_yahoo.gr)
Date: 08/15/04 

Date: 15 Aug 2004 10:09:45 -0700

antispam@nospam-me.com (Gerald Lasser) wrote in message news:<411e3dda.2015991718@news.gte.net>...

This post was very illuminating and one of the few really good
postings in these ng's.

[snip]

>
> I think you coined the expression "retarded partial derivative"
> yourself, so only you know what it means (if anything),

That's a term he has invented to attck Kopeikin's work. I'm not sure
about the validity of Kopeikin's work but neither the invented term
did anything to disprove it.

>
>
> Okay. It is insane because the proposition in question has nothing to
> do with the direction of causality. The "force potential" is DEFINED
> in terms of the force, and vice versa; they are just two different
> ways of talking about (describing) the same thing. No assumption is
> made as to one of them "causing" the other. If you wish, you can work
> entirely in terms of the forces, without ever mentioning the
> potentials; it is entirely a matter of convenience. Your statements
> are the equivalent of saying something like "We have a meeting every
> Wednesday, but we never have a meeting on the day that comes between
> Tuesday and Thursday", i.e., your statements are logically self-
> contradictory. I call them insane, because I have no doubt the
> self-contradictory nature of your statements has been explained to you
> many times before, but you persist in repeating them. This is
> insantiy.

I think you may be waisting your time here. Van Flandern is stuck with
preconceived ideas about causal connections. He does not understand
that what he claims to be causal connections cannot be proven as such
and are only correlations at best.

>
> >Of course, if a charge moves, the force it exerts changes. But you said
> >nothing about the propagation delay in that change.
>
> False. I explicitly stated the propagation delay is D/c.
>
> That does not support your opinion, just as the absence of aberration
> in the electromagnetic force between uniformly moving charges does not
> support your position. The directions (not to mention the magnitudes)
> of all the forces to which moving charges are subjected in such
> situations are entirely in accord with the predictions of electro-
> dynamics. The details of how this happens, while constantly
> preserving both momentum and finite propagation speed (which, after
> all, was Maxwell's whole motive for formulating electro- magnetism as
> he did), is actually quite interesting, but in order to discuss it
> meaningfully you would first need to get past all your elementary
> misconceptions - which you seem dis-inclined to do.

Talking to deaf ears. Van Flandern does not understand that was also
Einstein's motive for SR and extending Maxwell's work to the
Electrodynamics of moving bodies. As you pointed out about the static
nature of Coulomb force law, the same holds for Newton's Law because
it is also derived from Poisson's equation. It is simply insane to
call for infinite propagation speeds for a law that applies only to
static situations, since, because nothing changes in such situations,
it appears that assumed (wrongly) changes take place instantly.

Van Flandern does not understand that an inverse square law if a
geometric and static force law derived by Newton's solely based on
geometrical considerations. In order to arrive at a valid relativistic
dynamics one must consider the distribution of mass-energy and the
curvature of spacetime. Van Flander's material flux model of pushing
gravity based on FTL gravitons having a finite mass reduces to a
static inverse square force law which is equivalent to the weak-field
limit solution of GR equations.

It remains for Van Flander to answer the question I keep posing to him
but he always avoids:

Are ficticious centrifugal forces needed in local non-inertial
reference frames to apply his model real? If so, how? If not, can he
provide a reason as to why all phenomena do not have the same
explanation in ann moving reference frames in his model? If he
cannot, I claim his model calls for magic, not GR.

He won't answer this, I bet my two cents on that.

Mike

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