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Alternative Cosmology Offers FTL
Transport
Tom van Flandern, an astronomer formerly of the
Naval Observatory, now a full-time heretic, offers a full stem-to-stern
housecleaning of cosmology at his website, http://www.metaresearch.org which is
absolutely essential reading for folks into astrophysics.
Astronomy has gone into an inflationary phase, so
to speak, in the past 3-5 years, due to order of magnitude increases in the new
observational capabilities made available to our species recently: planetary
probes, orbiting EUV, Xray, and gamma ray observatories, the Hubble, VLBI radio
networks, vastly larger dirtside optical telescopes, adaptive optics, etc. We
see the universe lots better than we used to, and it's a very confusing place.
Seems hardly a week goes by without some new observation "challenging" the basis
of standard theories, requiring a paradigm shift. Big Bang cosmology is in a
heap of trouble, for it can hardly keep up with all the adjustments it has to
make to keep itself from looking like an elaborate fantasy. New cosmologies wait
hungrily in the wings, watching for signs of weakness.
Van Flandern (in papers published in Astrophysics
Journal and Physical Review Letters) offers his "Meta Model" cosmology which
mercilessly cuts the standard interpretations off at the knees. He favors a
quasi-steady-state cosmology, differing from the MOND (Modified Newtonian
Dynamics) model by hypothesizing a characteristic path length (~2 kiloparsec)
for gravity, beyond which its attraction decays, completely avoiding any
requirement for dark matter supplements to explain galactic motions. There are
lots of observations he can explain this way that assorted flavors of Big Bang
theory are having a very awkward time with. But that's not the funny part. Space
theories aren't sexy without bangs of some sort, so he has a solar system
dynamics reminiscent of Velikovsky or Donelly bashing their planets around,
except van Flandern has his planets popping spontaneously without waiting for
cosmic billiards impacts. Planetary cores are hot and pressurized; cooling
induces phase changes, which can suddenly change the size they need for
lebensraum, and a planetary crust ain't gonna hold it in. Hot superfluids get
into cold vacuum, and lo, they vaporize, whereas, big time. He calls this his
"Exploded Planets Hypothesis", but that's not the funny part
either.
The funny part is about his relativity theory: to
replace GTR (General Theory of Relativity) as an explanation for gravity, his
groundwork involves adopting Lorentzian Relativity (LR) instead of Einstein's
Special Theory of Relativity (STR). LR, it turns out, is practically
indistinguishable from STR within the framework of tests which have been
conducted to date, actually fitting more comfortably with the data in many cases
with moving clocks (like GPS satellites are). The atomic clocks in GPS
satellites are precompensated for relativistic effects before launch, so when in
orbit they keep perfect synchrony with each other and with ground clocks,
although in Einstein's theory this would be forbidden! Lorentz relativity allows
Earth's gravity well to establish a preferred "local" coordinate system, which
Einstein would disallow; the clocks work, when STR says they couldn't. But the
feature of all this mathematizing which should be of most interest to starship
designers, such as me and thee, is that Lorentzian relativity has absolutely no
requirement that the speed of light establish a maximum velocity.
There have been a spate of recent experiments in
physics labs which have shown "superluminal" transmission of signals, actual
information, transferred faster than C. Phase velocity, group velocity, signal
velocity, all the speed limits have apparently been broken by quantum tunneling.
These results are in contradiction to Einstein's STR but are taken in stride by
LR. See van Flandern's web site for the details, but it looks to me like we have
some rethinking to do as starship designers. He never mentions the possibility
there, of accelerating matter to superluminal velocity, but I just did. To my
mind, the quandry that it's supposed to take "infinite" energy to accelerate a
mass to lightspeed, because its mass would increase to "infinity", may be
another delusion like other supposed "infinitudes" have proved to be.
Philosophically, I am prejudiced against all forms of unlimited quantitative
growth curves in nature, because I honestly don't believe in them. So let's find
out, shall we?
Johnny Thunderbird
http://fly.to/heavylight
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