Re: Ranging and Pioneer

rob langley <rhlangley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
Could someone please summarise (for an interested layman) the main points of
contention (especially from the contributions by Charles Francis and Igor
Khavkine) in the thread 'Ranging and Pioneer'?

Charles has now replied and Igor is probably far too busy.
However I'm not sure Charles' explanation is at 'the interested layman'
level. At risk of being savaged by either or both of them (and possibly
by Mr 'Tessel') I'll put my (ignorant) take on it.

There is no question that quantum mechanics (QM) and general relativity
(GR) have been well tested. Unfortunately for fairly obvious reasons
they have only been tested 'locally' and indeed relativity places limits
on how we can properly observe distant events. It is known that GR and
QM are mathematically/conceptually incompatible but unfortunately
observations tend to be overwhelmingly dominated by effects due to one
or the other but not both.

Charles started off trying to assemble a theory that makes QM and GR
compatible, and to this end he noticed that a particular teleparallel
theory (there are many) would do this. Unfortunately, and inevitably,
this means it cannot be quite compatible with either GR or QM. Although
it DOES revert to QM and GR in the appropriate limit, its not quite
consistent with GR.

When Charles discussed a primitive version here it was shot down in
flames for inconsistencies with observations. Charles spent quite a bit
of time trying to remove these, but the more he looked, the worse it
got. About this time we started to correspond. In particular he had a
problem with an 'expansion in time' that gave an anomalous acceleration
which I quickly realised might explain Pioneer (which Charles was
unaware of), and indeed it did. Similarly, redshift measurements must be
re-interpreted to take account of this extra term, which becomes larger
as the observation originates further in the past. The net result was
that the universe becomes twice as old as simple GR predicts, and
removed the need for dark energy and (unreasonable) dark matter.
Similarly galactic rotation curves become, as an observation, modelled
by an effective empirical theory called MOND, although there is no
actual acceleration as MOND assumes and no excessive dark matter is
required.

In essence (as far as I can tell no knowing the maths) local orbits stay
classical (ie work under GR) but light is affected by the stretching of
space in a slightly different way so the doppler/redshift has an extra
term. Thus it is only the interpretation of observation that needs
adjustment. There is no anomalous pioneer acceleration, galaxies do not
actually rotate as disks, dark matter and dark energy are not required
to explain observations and very distant systems that seem 'too old'
have in fact ample time to have evolved to their observed state.

The thing I find strange is that all of these together explain
observations without falling over on internal consistency.

However I am unqualified to assess Charles' maths and proposals. It may
be that he has made one or many errors to obtain these results. The only
way to resolve this is for others (smart, well-informed others) to point
out irreconcilable errors in the mathematical logic so that the
conclusions fail. Unfortunately everyone is far too busy....


--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.



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