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It doesn't matter whether he is or not, though I've been on the physics newsgroups many times and never saw any evidence of him opposing and confounding undergrads. What matter is whether his arguments are reasonable or not, since from what I can tell, he's made every possible appeal for people to learn the material and check the sources for themselves. |
I modified the article not removing the claims, but minimazing its importance (in my years of BS in physics, MS in Astronomy and PhD in Astronomy, never heard of this competing theories, except, I think to remember, as an historic thing). That doesn't by itself mean that it can not be correct, but it is far far away from mainstream science. --AN
I don't think he agrees with you that those changes are transmitted by gravitational waves, nor electromagnetic waves.
I have left in the bit about a supernova, even though he argues they are irrelevant to this issue since the matter distribution from the explosion is symmetric.
Oh, we also need to decide if the link should be to [gravitational wave]? or [gravity wave]?. The article uses both, and they are presumably the same thing.
They're supposed to work the same. As for the general acceptance of Flandern's work, it didn't take long to find that at one point he was a poster on sci.physics.relativity - many people who disagree with relativity are - and like most of them did not much impress the various people there who actually know what they are talking about. The first thing that came up is [this dejanews article] and you are welcome to agree or to disagree with it, but all in all I think the evidence establishes the Flandern does not have any credibility with workers in the field, and his material has not been peer-reviewed. Permission to remove discussion of his material, from special relativity at least? --Josh Grosse
http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/gravityspeed.html
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/9909087.
You can find tonnes more with a bit of searching: for example the Salon.com article
http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2000/07/06/einstein/index.html
or Chris Hillman's excellent rebuttal
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/RelWWW/wrong.html#speed.
Frankly the idea of even having an article on the speed of gravity is a bit silly, at best it deserves a minor mention in a full article on general relativity. -M. Nobes
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Well, the question comes down to: Is the speed of gravity c (as a limit), or instantaneous? That should be easy enough to determine experimentally, yet nobody has, that I know of.
Carlip expounding on Van Flandern I'll read, he's a genuine practictioner of this stuff.
Hillman, OTOH, is suspected to be a simulacrum constructed for the purpose of opposing and confounding the undergrads. He's purportedly been graduated from U.W. for something like three years now, hasn't announced gainful employment, which is a nasty state of affairs for most PhD's. If he doesn't announce something -- like a Job -- in the next year or two, I'm going to have to conclude that the 'computer construct' thesis is correct, and that Chris Hillman doesn't -- in human terms -- exist.
-- Stranger
It doesn't matter whether he is or not, though I've been on the physics newsgroups many times and never saw any evidence of him opposing and confounding undergrads. What matter is whether his arguments are reasonable or not, since from what I can tell, he's made every possible appeal for people to learn the material and check the sources for themselves.