Where are the Proofs for Newton’s Law of Gravitation and Coulomb’s Law?
World-leading authority on LED lighting technology, Dr Nisa Khan, explains in this keynote article that consensus science still does not understand why LEDs and lasers follow Lambert’s Cosine Law instead of the inverse square law. Her findings have massive implications for industry.
Dr Khan writes:
Newton’s Law of Gravitation and Coulomb’s Laws are both known as the ‘Inverse Square Law’. We have known these laws for centuries as stated here:
Newton’s Law of Gravity:
where F is the force of gravity between two masses, m1 and m2, r is the distance between the two masses, and G is the gravitational constant.
Coulomb’s Law:
where F is the electrostatic force of attraction or repulsion between two point charges, q1 and q2, r is the distance between the two point charges, and K is the Coulomb constant.
Here all variables are scalar quantities.
Neither Newton nor Hooke not Coulomb nor Descartes or any other European ever proved or derived these laws analytically, i.e., mathematically derived them from other more basic laws. They are now accepted as general physical laws derived from empirical observations.1,2
This is very odd to say the least and I find it very surprising why so many notable physicists or other scientists never challenged that these laws simply could not have been proven empirically.
Simply because one cannot experimentally demonstrate these laws given the masses and charges in these laws are dimensionless point masses and charges. Has anyone ever created a point mass or a point charge in real life to measure their properties? What does a point mass or a point charge look like? Did Lord Cavendish leave a prototype or a photo of the dimensionless point masses he and his colleagues used to demonstrate Newton’s Law empirically?
Because most credible scientists and mathematicians of the past and present do not deny that a dimensionless point mass or point charge can neither be accurately drawn on paper, or simulated using computational methods, or be physically created or sculpted in 3D space, it is impossible to empirically demonstrate the inverse square laws as stated above!
So when do the inverse square laws hold and when do they not? IES (Illuminating Engineering Society) publicly invalidated me when I said that flat LED light sources do not follow the inverse square law for their intensity drop off in space as one goes further away from the LED light source. This invalidation still remains at IES website3 and if they take it down, it can be found in my LinkedIn articles at these sites:4,5,6
IES requested me via their then Director of Education, Tom Butters, to do an interview with Mark Lien (https://www.ies.org/contributor/mark-lien/ ) to talk about my book and LED lighting. I accepted and the podcast was recorded live in April 2017.
After the podcast going on the air in June 2017, IES told me in July 2017 that I had a choice between taking the podcast off the air or accept that there will be disparaging remarks towards me from IES. I told IES that I choose the latter but that I need an opportunity to write rebuttals against their erroneous invalidation of what I said.
My rebuttals used to exist along with my podcast and IES’s disparaging remarks towards me. Now they no longer do. But my LinkedIn posts still have them and I have provided these links in the references of this article.
As of now, my podcast can be found at https://www.ies.org/education/educational-podcasts/forces-of-change-podcast/ and IES’ invalidation of what I said still exists at this site.
One such invalidation is that IES’s Scientific Advisory Board boldly came out in public to say that my claims about 1/r2 intensity fall off is my opinion and not scientifically proven as if IES has scientifically proven that LEDs obey the inverse square law relationship!
Here is what IES said in their Disclaimer associated with the podcast in which I speak with Mark Lien:
Nisa Khan is a passionate proponent that the industry as a whole doesn’t understand the manner which LEDs generate light and a strong advocate that we need to view LEDs in a different manner. Nisa took some time to be interviewed by our podcast series host Mark Lien to discuss her book “Understanding LED Illumination” and to explain what she purports the industry is missing. Join us for an energizing discussion.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:
The IES supports the open discussion of ideas and opinions. When new theories challenge accepted science and practice, they are either confirmed with greater validity or found out to be false. This open discussion pushes science and by extension society forward for the better.In the following podcast, author Nisa Khan makes many claims that are not supported by the IES, nor can they be scientifically substantiated. While the IES supports free expression of ideas and opinions, we also have an obligation to inform our listeners of factual inaccuracies when they occur. These inaccuracies consist of, but are not limited to the following;
- LEDs don’t follow 1/r2 intensity
- Only high power LEDs are used in lighting
- The industry only cares about efficacy (not cost per lumen, which helps you to make a decent profit)
- Optics don’t change the distribution of an LED, although you can change the distribution of a discharge lamp or incandescent with optics
- Complex 3D analytical geometry is required to understand light distributions
- LEDs are not point light sources (regardless of distance)
- A point source emits light equally in all directions over 4pi steradians
- Putting a few hundred mA into an LED designed for a few μA turns it into a laser
We therefore, caution the listeners of this podcast to take into consideration the numerous errors noted above as you assess the new theories being advocated. These are not matters of opinion, but of scientific accuracy.
Aside from the last point where they erroneously paraphrased what I said, all of my other descriptions are scientifically valid and the physics, optics, and lighting industries are now only beginning to admit that I am right after all.
Still, there is no open, honest or wide support of my work from the mainstream academic and industry circles. A few scientific professionals, as can be seen in my conversations with Dr. Neil Haigh (physicist, UK), Martin Lopez (Ph.D. student, researcher, mechanical engineer, Mexico) and Paul Hart (chemist, USA)6 support me in saying that LED or flat radiation sources are not point sources and they do not obey the 1/r2 intensity fall off, otherwise known as the inverse square law.
However, as evident in their comments6, they do not understand why LEDs obey a cosine law and what that means for a near and far field intensity distribution. They attempt to support what Newton did by saying that Newton derived the gravitation law by using the surface of a sphere because force fields from point sources are distributed over a spherical surface or that a symmetry argument can be applied.
Even if such claims can be made now, Newton simply could not have derived that the surface of sphere is 4pπr² even if he knew of this result from some other source – just like many people today know this to be as a fact; but few can derive it from scratch with arguments of their own without pointing to what is written in certain books or websites.
Neither Newton nor any other scientist from today’s mainstream academia demonstrated any connection between a dimensionless point source and spherical symmetry. This is also obvious when I faced repeated rejections from peer-reviewers all claiming that an LED or a flat wireless antenna should be analyzed by means of a dimensionless point source and that my analysis was not acceptable!7,8
Furthermore, my interaction with more than a dozen peer-reviewers from the optics, lighting, physics and electrical engineering academic and research communities around the world over the course of 5 long years (2017 through 2021) prove that the vast majority of the scientists and engineers today are not proficient in solving general physics problems involving arbitrarily-shaped objects bearing finite mass or charge properties that are associated with their various shapes and sizes.
Worse yet, these mainstream physicists, lighting and optical scientists, and electrical engineers are not even able to understand that arbitrarily-shaped objects cannot be represented with any generic dimensionless points
This pertains no matter how far away one situates himself to observe or measure any physical properties relating to arbitrarily-shaped objects; such as gravitational force fields present on another arbitrarily-shaped object or what the light intensity distribution is over someone’s eyeball from a blue semiconductor laser or a white LED lamp made from several flat LED chips on a flat common substrate or board.
These are clearly demonstrated in my rebuttals against the many erroneous peer-reviews I received over the course of those 5 years.7,8
Simply put, mainstream scientific communities never solved a finite physics problem analytically until my papers!9,10 They can perhaps simulate a finite physics problem involving gravity or charge with good accuracies using computational methods; however, most if not all, do not understand why particular computed results are obtained from these finite structures because they cannot get a sense of the physics involved without being able to think through any existing analytic formulas and solutions that can reveal the basic physics interactions for the entire system in 3D space.
A brute-force, empirical approach incorporating some carful iteration can offer some valid trends that can be expressed into an equation involving some “constants” along with variable parameters. But one must be very careful in this technique as well if they do not realize what is really being measured in typical measurement procedures by means of typical detectors and what cannot be measured just because of natural constraints.
I would elaborate this in my future video lectures at my Thinkific site: https://dr-nisa-s-site.thinkific.com
Due to the challenges explained here that physicists must have encountered around validating or justifying the inverse square laws in the last few centuries, perhaps then it seemed helpful to use the inverse square laws as a good approximation for some cases as long as certain physical conditions for a given scenario or system are satisfied.
Perhaps the more careful scientists just ensured that those certain physical conditions were not to be violated by writing standards and regulations around gravitational, electric and electromagnetic systems so that no major havoc could be had. But the question still remains: “Are we to accept the inverse square laws as European axiomatic science or empirical science?
I’ll let the current historians find extra truth about where the Europeans may have learned about the inverse square laws for both gravity and electrostatics.
Regardless, we must now recognize that credible evidence is now available on the facts that ancient scientists and mathematicians from Bharatvarsha (now known as the Indian Subcontinent) knew about zero, infinity, infinitesimal, and calculus11, 12 well before the Middle-Easterners and the Europeans.
As such it is false that Newton and Leibniz were the first to invent or adopt calculus. So if Newton did not adopt calculus and it seems reasonable to conclude that he neither understood nor was he versed in calculus in non-Cartesian coordinate system, Newton or Coulomb simply could not have mathematically or analytically derive the inverse square laws!
I have to now be amused by the fact that Hooke blamed Newton that the inverse square law existed somewhere before Newton claimed he discovered it; while both Newton and Hooke credited Descartes for helping them to arrive at the inverse square law for gravitation all the while the famous Descartes could only analyze physical phenomena in Cartesian Coordinates and not spherical or other curved coordinate system!
Should I laugh or cry?
The readers can read my heated conversations with several people in LinkedIn about Newton’s and Coulombs Laws.6 While some of them now admits that a flat radiator like an LED does not follow the 1/r2 intensity drop off as one moves farther away from the radiation source, they still do not understand why LEDs and lasers follow Lambert’s Cosine Law instead of the inverse square law; and still there seems to be no admission by anyone that while Lambert’s Cosine Law is valid, even Lambert did not prove his own law and in fact, I did!10
It is also a concern that most mainstream scientists seem to think they can magically find the far-field behavior while absolutely not having any idea what the near-field behavior is from any finite, analytical equations. This is not even the case for objects that can be reasonably approximated as point sources from far away.
There is a good argument for certain objects only that a far-field point source approximation is reasonable, which doesn’t apply for flat radiators whatsoever. Why not? And why would one know a far-field intensity distribution for a flat radiator when they have no clue what its near-field intensity distribution is? This is another blunder in logic from mainstream physicists!
While I’ll elaborate on this blunder in my upcoming video lectures in Thinkific, I’ll leave the readers with this generalized equation for a flat radiator that I derived that gives the intensity distribution at any point in 3D space:10
{From Reference [10]:
Figure 9. The propagation of antenna surface intensity distribution, Y 20, along the propagation axis, z. The surface intensity distributions at z = 0, z1, and z2 are calculated using our derived formula and shown here as 3D surface plots using the colormap scale shown on the right. This figure shows the geometric relation between and, which must be distinguished carefully. The beam directivity is shown in orange dotted lines. The peak values of the paraboloids at z1 and z2 drop to 50% and 25% respectively of the maximum peak value at z=0. }
References:
[1] Isaac Newton: “In [experimental] philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena and afterwards rendered general by induction“: “Principia“, Book 3, General Scholium, at p.392 in Volume 2 of Andrew Motte’s English translation published 1729.
[2] The Michell–Cavendish Experiment, Laurent Hodges (Wikipedia referenced this as of December 22, 2022)
[3] IES Podcast site (mentions my podcast link is in site that can be found by scrolling down)
https://www.ies.org/education/educational-podcasts/forces-of-change-podcast/
[4] My LI article on IES Podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mark-lien-interviews-dr-nisa-khan-podcast-conducted-ies-m-nisa-khan
[5] My LI article on IES Podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ies-podcast-dr-nisa-khan-why-scientific-board-members-m-nisa-khan/
[6] My LI article on Newton https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7008872472716472320/
[7] My ResearchGate Project on LED headlights (peer-review rebuttal articles included in this project)
[8] My ResearchGate Project on wireless paper (peer-review rebuttal articles included in this project)
[9] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8879542
[10] https://principia-scientific.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/khan-paper.pdf
[11] Professor C. K. Raju’s talk and MIT Talk: Calculus – the real story (2015)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaodCGDjqzs
[12] Personal communication with Professor C. K. Raju,
[“The date for Aryabhata that I use is 499 CE. See attached pages from the book of Shukla and Sharma. Best, CKR] who provided the 2 pages (Appendix I) from the book of Shukla and Sharma.
APPENDIX I
About the author: Dr Nisa Khan, Senior Member, IEEE is an Independent Research and Development of Advanced Science, Engineering and Mathematics. Dr Khan is the author of, “Understanding LED Illumination” (CRC Press, 2013) – a widely used university textbook around the world in the field of laser and LED engineering and solid-state lighting. She was on the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories (now Nokia Bell Labs) conducting pioneering work on 40-Gb/s optoelectronic and integrated photonic devices. Her current PSI paper is Novel Derivations and Validation of Near-field Electromagnetic Spatial Power Density Distribution and Propagation Functions for Flat Antennas
ADDENDUM (December 27, 2022). Paul Hart, oilfield, refinery, and petrochemicals engineer with over 60 patents, engaged Nisa Khan in a LinkedIn debate on the above. We post it below to assist further understanding:
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VOWG
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Not to worry there will soon be no industry anywhere as the caveman existence is what has been decided upon.
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Herb Rose
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The inverse square formula can be shown to be false with magnets. I’ve written a article in PSI describing the experiment. The experiment gives the expected results but the problem is in determining the strength of a single magnet. In my experiment I determined it by graphing the weight a magnet could lift as it approached a steel block. After determining the strength of two magnets one of them (attached to an aluminum weight) was placed on the scale and then the lifting force between the magnets was determined at varying distances. The results of this test showed that the force between the two magnets wasn’t very different than the force of one magnet.
The problem was that the test of strength for one magnet was actually measuring the force of two magnets, the permanent magnet being tested and an induced magnet in the steel weight. I then built a model of a magnet using two magnets mounted on a brass threaded rod with a gap between them. In the gap there was a steel washer at the bottom of the top magnet. the model was suspended over a weighted permanent magnet on the scale. The reading of the lifting strength of the model was noted as the steel washer was lowered from the bottom of the top magnet to the top of the bottom magnet. The results showed that the distance between magnets is not from the center of one magnet to the center of the the other magnet but from one magnet to the equilibrium point between the two magnetic fields. The strength of a magnet decreases with distance, not distance squared, so the strength of a single magnet is not decreasing as the approximate cube of distance. The correct formula is the strength of the magnet being formed (M3) by the combinin fields of the two magnets is M3 = M1/d1 + M2/d2. With two equal magnets, where the equilibrium point will remain midway between the magnets, the formula is M3 = (M1 + M2)/d. This formula also is in agreement with the results of the experiment.
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Joe
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Great work Herb!
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Ken Hughes
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Although the gravitational inverse square law works in practice, it is not a fundamental law of nature, i.e. not reflective of the causality for gravitation, (Like F = ma for the causality for acceleration). Laws of nature invariably have the cause on one side of the equation and the effect on the other side, (like F – ma).
If you combine Newton’s law with the Schwarzschild equation for time rate against distance from a mass, you end up with the real law of gravitation ;-
g = c^2/2r (1 – t^2)
Meaning gravitation, (the effect) is proportional to Time Dilation, (1 – t^2), the cause.
THIS is the fundamental law of gravitation, NOT Newton. The inverse square law is merely a reflection of the way the energy (loss) in spherical space, diminishes with distance. i.e. time speeds up again the further away you get.
It will be the same with Coulomb’s law, since all actions at a distance are caused by time rate “curvature”.
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Robert Beatty
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Hi Ken,
If you use. g = c^2/2r (1 – t^2) can you eliminate the Mercury anomaly?
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James
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Simple equations like F=ma are approximations, not because false, but because F and m are never exactly constant. Same with gravity; no real mass is a point, and no distance is certain and fixed. One wonders how Mars shots navigate, with variable mass due to fuel burn, forces due to drag, pressure of light etc? And how are comet orbits caculated when we don’t even know their mass? Bayes?
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Herb Rose
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Hi James,
With gravity the mass of the orbiting object is irrelevant. Any object orbiting at the same distance from an object will have the same velocity. Gravity is a function of energy (Kepler’s law, dv^2 = c) and objects will equalize (attain stasis) with the energy source.
The reason they crashed the first satellites attempting to land on Mars had nothing to do with the alleged mix up with metric and English units. A 100 lb satellite and a 100kg satellite will accelerate at the same rate when approaching the planet. The problem was a result of using Newton’s formula to determine the mass of Mars and the rate of acceleration.
Herb
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James
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You’re correct of course when there’s only gravity forces, my sloppy thinking. But when thrusters are used to alter the orbit, the mass of the mission does come into play, so it has to be known accurately. Of course moons and planets are also bombarded by other forces too, not only gravity, but unless we meet a large asteroid said forces can probably be ignored.
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VOWG
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Jump off a tall building you will experience gravity first hand, math will not be needed.
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Koen Vogel
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I would resist the temptation to compare your LED work with Newton’s law of gravity and Coulomb’s law. A mass – e.g. a sphere – can be analytically shown to behave as a point source, despite the fact that no one can draw one in reality. Same for electric charge. Your LED work is clearly something different than gravity or electric force, and it may be completely inappropriate to reduce sources to a point. This can be analytically proven, one way or another. IES have done you the favour of disseminating your work to a larger audience, and giving you an itemised accounting of where “consensus” science disagrees with you. Your theories are now in the marketplace of ideas, and if they explain reality better, then they will – in time – be adopted by others. All that is required is a better theory and persistence.
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Dr. Nisa Khan
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I would urge you to read my paper here very carefully. Newton didn’t prove Newton’s Law of Gravitation. He couldn’t have – as I said because he didn’t do the experiment as no point masses can be created. Cavendish did – but he too did not use a point mass. A general mass of an object is not spherical – and spherical objects can behave like point sources if one goes very far away; still it is not exact and cannot be. Newton couldn’t have derived that 4pir^2 is the surface area of a sphere and neither could Hooke or Descartes. I explain the reason in this paper here. I have dealt with many peer-reviewers who are at prestigious universities and research organizations and they too have no idea how to derive the surface of sphere with their own arguments; they can only take the result or a half-baked derivation from a book or Wikipedia. This is a HUGE issue for the scientific and physics community. IES indeed do me a favor – it revealed its ignorance and so did CIE. Even NASA scientists are NOT aware of how to do a finite problem analytically either near field or far field and that is because they fail to understand jus what it is that is different about a point source and a non-point source. Finally, I can analytically prove the inverse square laws and I can analytically prove the Lambert’s Cosine Law, which Lambert didn’t even prove. So ask yourself why the ‘saint’ scientists knew some laws without analytically proving them! That is now going to take all credibility from European physics/science/mathematics sooner rather than later. So yes – thanks IES and thanks to the clueless peer-reviewers. Lastly, I don’t want to be compared with Newton. I am far more capable of much better physics and mathematics than Newton was. I am also far more ethical.
Dr. Nisa Khan
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Dr. Nisa Khan
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Koen Vogel,
https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/indians-predated-newton-discovery-by-250-years/
The cat is out of the bag. While Dr. Joseph from the University of Manchester did the research, only I and most likely Professor C. K. Raju know just what Newton and other European scientists didn’t learn from the Vedic scientists and their books and papers when it comes to calculus and physics. The deficiency still exists today and it is a dire situation. As far as I know only Professor Raju and I can teach physics and calculus properly from the ground up. But with the way the world still is, we shall watch sadly what is still being claimed, denied, distorted and hidden. Good luck to all of us!
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Dr Wilson Sy
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I have been censored once already, but I’ll try again.
To start with, nothing is ever strictly proved in science! Any logical proof has to have assumptions, which are never proved.
Newton’s inverse square of gravitation is mathematically consistent with empirical observations of planetary motion as encaptulated by Kepler’s laws. That is, Newton’s “law of gravitation” cannot used to derive Kepler’s laws.
No one can “prove” that the velocity of light is a universal constant. It is simple a fact of observation which has never been falsified. It has become a fundamenatal assumption of the theory of relativity.
In general relativity, where space-time is curved by gravity, which is locally Euclidean and well approximated in the lowest order by Newtonian gravitation with inverse square law.
Fundamental laws of nature are not proved, but are shown to be logically consistent with all important empirical observations.
Your work on LED optics and Lambert’s Cosine Law are not not necessarily in conflict with Newtonian gravitation. The connection with spherical geometry is tenuous at best.
(It was flagged as spam and your e-mail didn’t work then either) SUNMOD
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Dr Wilson Sy
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Newton’s “law of gravitation” CAN BE used to derive Kepler’s laws.
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Howdy
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“To start with, nothing is ever strictly proved in science! Any logical proof has to have assumptions, which are never proved.”
Dr Wilson Sy, I see two answers to that statement:
1) I hear a rumour of a device that can do a particular task chemically, by using electricity in a certain way. I build said device, the outcome of which is success and the achievement of the goal.
Are you telling me the experiment was done without true knowledge of what took place, or that luck is involved?
2) You are stating science is untrustworthy and some sort of best guess.
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Dr Wilson Sy
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Howdy, If your device works (verified by others), then fine it works, and your explanation why it works may well be right, particularly if your explanation (new and unknown before) does not violate any fundamental laws. If it does, then your ideas have to be weighed against all other ideas associated with the fundamental laws. It is possible to build something which works without correctly or fully understanding why it works. For example, the steam engine was invented long before the development of thermodynamics.
Herb Rose
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Hi Dr. Sy,
The red, blue, and purple shift of spectrums coming from distant stars is an observation that refutes a constant speed of light. If it is due to a Doppler effect, from the motion of the stars, then relativity is wrong because the motion of a source of light can in no way effect the light, according to Einstein. If the light changes in transit it cannot be going at the speed of light where there is no time and must therefore have mass.
General relativity is repudiated by the very evidence accepted as proof of its correctness. If time is slowed by either greater velocity or greater gravity then the atomic clocks on satellites should continually go faster with increasing altitude since both the gravitational field the satellites are in and the velocity of the satellites decrease. This is not what the data shows..
Things may not be able to be proved but also they can never be disproved to those whose beliefs will not accept any contrary data but will accept any supportive argument and data no matter how flawed.
Herb.
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Dr Wilson Sy
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Whenever an observation is claimed to violate a fundamental law, there are usually several possibilities:
The observation is an error, because it cannot be accurately replicated by others.
The observation is correct, but does not really violate the fundamental law due to misunderstanding.
The observation is correct, but violate some other laws and overturns or questions all other similar observations upon that law is based.
The observation is correct and conflicts with and challenges the fundamental law, which needs to be modified or extended, but rarely completely discarded for a new paradigm.
The classic example is Newton’s law of gravitation which held sway for over two centuries. The law was unable to explain the advance of the perihelion of mercury, which was explained by general relativity.
Newtonian gravitation was not “wrong”, because it explained (in Prinicipia Mathematica) all available observations encapulated by Kepler’s laws, at his time. On the earth, Newtonian gravitation is indistinguishable from general relativity, except for some extremely sensitive experiments.
Most laws are valid and trustworthy in their domains of application. Apparent contradictions arise from ignoring those domains of application. In this sense, no laws are strictly permanent, because as new and larger domains are created through more extensive and sophisticated observations, existing laws and theories may then need revision or extension.
Scientific progress requires constant challenges of existing laws, but most of such challenges are errors of understanding.
Howdy
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Dr Wilson Sy, you did not address my question.
My experiments are in agreement with others who also built the devices and did the tests. Your earlier claim is that what we did is not proof of concept. So I ask again, why are we wrong?
Herb Rose
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Hi Dr.Sy,
Kepler’s law makes no mention of mass. That was created by Newton to give a source for his force. In fact Kepler’s law states that it is energy (v^2) that is constant and declines with distance from the source.
Newton’s formula was used to determine the mass of the planets with satellites, yet if you use the same formula to determine the mass of the host asteroid in a binary asteroid system you get an impossible number. How is it that, despite the new discovery of binary asteroids, the established masses of the planets are still accepted, even though they were derived from a formula shown to be wrong?
Finding an answer to a question doesn’t mean it is the right answer. As my experiment with magnets showed (at least to me) the distance between objects is not from center to center but to the area of influence (fields) of another object. The planets and moons are in equilibrium with the energy field radiated by the sun/planet. Newton’s first law, an object will continue in a straight line unless a force acts upon it, was wrong. An object will maintain its energy until energy is added to it or lost by it. Nothing in the universe travels in a straight line, not even light.
What evidence is there the connects gravity with mass? How can mass produce both motion and inertia? If inertial mass is equal to gravitational mass, how can it cause movement?
As to Einstein’s mass bending space time, in the illustration if space/time is represented by a plane, how can mass have another dimension? Is it a distortion of a fifth dimension that produces gravity or is the illustration optical trickery?
Herb
Dr Wilson Sy
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“the motion of a source of light can in no way effect the light, according to Einstein” is incorrect – the motion of a source of light can in no way affect the SPEED of light for the observer.
Herb Rose
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Hi Dr.Sy,
Isn’t a change in frequency/wavelength a change in speed?
Herb
Howdy
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Silence is golden. Tells me all I need to know.
Dr Wilson Sy
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Wavelength X frequency = speed, which is a universal constant in vacuum (independent of relative motion)
MC
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Way over my head, but I admire the authors fighting spirit; that’s what we need in all industries.
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T. C. Clark
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You gotta admit that Newton has some spiffy wigs. Fancy wigs!
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Robert Beatty
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I think Paul Hart explains the situation very well, and without getting personal.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi PSI Readers,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are!
When the blazing sun is gone, When he nothing shines upon, Then you show your little light, Twinkle, twinkle, all the night. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are!
Then the traveller in the dark, Thanks you for your tiny spark, He could not see which way to go, If you did not twinkle so. Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
In the dark blue sky you keep,
And often through my curtains peep, For you never shut your eye,
Till the sun is in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
As your bright and tiny spark, Lights the traveller in the dark,— Though I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are!
[Source: Wikipedia]
I ask, because I don’t know, do stars, when viewed by the ‘naked eyes’ of astronauts in space, twinkle? I ask this question because I read that the direct sun can be observed to rise above an eastern horizon earlier than it should according observations seen later in the day. And I read that the explanation of this observation is that the decreasing density, of the atmospheric molecules and atoms, with increasing altitude refracts (bends) the path of the solar radiation.
Do you authors and commenters believe this?
Do you authors and commenters believe the stars twinkle when viewed from the earth’s surface due to random changes of our atmosphere’s density?
I read there is a natural phenomenon of light scattering; which causes three stages of twilight. Could any of you simply explain how there are three twilights?
Finally, there is this word “law”. Could you all, authors and commenters, agree what the definition of a SCIENTIFIC LAW is? Or will you argue (debate) about this too?
Have a good day, Jerry
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